Chapter Two
Tennessee Lisle was maddeningly stern. He was effectively humorless in all social situations she’d ever witnessed. He usually stared at her like she was a bug that ought to be pinned to a wall and studied for deformities, and he stared at her a lot.
He was also quite possibly the hottest and most attractive man that Matilda Stark had ever seen.
Tennessee was a grumpy pillar of the Cowboy Point community.
An obnoxiously good cook, who singlehandedly elevated that diner of his into something special that had tourists lined up around halfway down the street in summer.
The head of his historic family even though he was not wizened and ancient like the only living Stark of the previous generation, Matilda’s uncle Steven.
And, not least, he was an oblivious idiot.
Matilda had been head over heels in love with him for as long as she could remember, a personality flaw on her part that she had spent years attempting to iron out. To no avail.
Probably because she’d never operated an iron in her life.
Tonight she had seized the opportunity presented by a litter of sweet little puppies to approach the problem from a different direction entirely.
She’d assumed that proximity would sort the whole thing out for her, the way it did in the books her sister loved to read and now sold, but she’d miscalculated.
For one thing, having this very up close and personal view of Tennessee Lisle cuddling a helpless little puppy was… not good for her nervous system. Throw in the fire and how close they were sitting and—
Yeah. Call it a miscalculation. Except add on a few more levels of sheer catastrophe to it, and that was about where she’d landed.
She had not expected to find Tennessee in gray sweats and a battered Chris Stapleton T-shirt.
Matilda was not prepared.
It took her a moment to remember that he’d asked her a question.
And it took another moment, but Matilda cleared her throat.
“What would you have me do, Tennessee?” she asked, as if they usually spent a great many hours together, rescuing animals in tandem, which just happened to be an enduring fantasy she’d had for some time.
“The puppies were right here. On your property. It made sense to come to your house.”
It was possible that this was the closest she’d ever really been to him.
Certainly in an unguarded, private space.
They’d had entirely too many pointless conversations over the years, out in public where anyone could hear.
Out on the main road that ran through Cowboy Point, or in one of the businesses, or at various functions over the years.
This was a valley filled with pointless conversations.
Because everyone knew everyone in a small little place like this. That was what Matilda liked about it. She never felt any need to bother with all the pointless small talk because she already knew everything about everyone. It freed up time to do what she wanted instead.
This, she was aware, was not a popular view. It was one of the reasons people around here thought she was a little off. Matilda preferred it that way. It kept her safe from all kinds of tedious social commitments.
Interactions with Tennessee did not fall under that banner.
Most of her family were busy restoring the old lodge that sat on the far side of Cowboy Point, up on the far hill that faced Copper Mountain from the other end of their little valley.
Tennessee had always been friendly with her older brother, Jack, likely because the two of them could teach unyielding stubbornness to the Rocky Mountains themselves.
Matilda had enjoyed a great many years of the typical crush on her older brother’s best friend. But it didn’t go away, and it didn’t change, and it never felt silly no matter how much time passed.
She had decided that it wasn’t a crush anymore. Love didn’t stop being love just because it was unrequited.
But she still wasn’t prepared for the full force of Tennessee’s arctic-blue eyes as he gazed at her. His dark hair was always a little bit longer in winter. Which wasn’t to say it was long. It was just that he kept it more closely cropped in the summer months, and she even knew why.
It was because he spent his days cooking in the family diner connected to the General Store, the two businesses currently representing the historic Lisle empire here in town.
It got hot in the diner in summer, even this high in the mountains.
Sometimes he tied a bandana around his head, and she’d been known to have a flight of fancy or two involving Tennessee as some kind of pirate.
Tonight, with that longish hair, and significant stubble on his perfectly shaped face, she was thinking pirates all over again… even though he was far too uncompromising and strict to be the least bit piratical. Her imagination could not accept that truth.
In the firelight, he looked as if he’d been fashioned from a warm kind of marble and brought to life.
She was actually glad that there were squeaking little puppies between them, allowing her to do something else with her eyes.
Her attention. Her wild reaction to him when he was looking at her like she was some kind of bold telemarketer who had thrust herself through the phone and insinuated herself in his living room.
That this was basically a reasonable summary of what she’d actually done here did not exactly make her more calm.
“Your house is barely ten minutes away.” Tennessee bit that out as if the words themselves irritated him.
Or maybe it was the firelit silence between them that was getting to him, too.
“Look how happy the puppies are.” She hit him with a full blast of the Stark eyes, a very serious gray tonight she hoped, which would allow her to look like a disappointed professor at a moment’s notice.
Like her cousin Sara Jane, the Cowboy Point librarian, she could fell packs of cowboys—including her wild cousins—with a single frown.
It had always come in useful.
Tennessee, however, seemed largely unaffected.
This did not make him less hot.
“This might come as a surprise to you,” he said, and his voice was even lower and darker here than it normally was out there in the light of day, in all that wide-open public space, “but I do not live my life focused on the happiness of puppies.”
She deepened her frown. “That sounds like a shocking indictment of your own life, if you ask me.”
He did not have the trademark Stark eyes or frown, but the scowl he trained on her hit hard just the same. “I did not ask you. Just like I did not ask you to come knock on my door after midnight. And speaking of that, what are you doing roaming around town this late at night anyway?”
She would love to convince herself that he was betraying some deeply held emotion with a question like that. Maybe later, she’d twist it around until it felt that way. But the truth was, Tennessee had a terrible habit of acting like he was everybody’s big brother. Even though she had her own.
“I was obviously out indulging in the wild Tuesday night social life,” she said loftily. “As us single women are known to do. Cowboy Point is nothing if not a hotbed of romantic intrigue.”
He gave her a look that landed somewhere between confused and exasperated. It was a look Matilda knew well.
But somehow, here in his house that smelled like him—pine and sunlight—she didn’t want to hear the sort of cutting remark her cousins liked to make when she said things like that.
She didn’t really care when they did it.
Or when her sister Rosie, who had moved in with her Carey husband and was awash in two sets of twins, rolled her eyes and shook her head with a smile.
That was fine. Usually it made her laugh.
Yet she really didn’t think she could take it tonight. Not from this man. Not from Tennessee.
So she kept talking. “Or, alternatively, I was at work. Do you really think that I’m likely to go out on the town in my scrubs?”
She did not find it exactly flattering that he frowned deeper at that, and then—and only then, she’d been watching him—allowed his gaze to move over her body.
It was worse than she’d thought, she could admit that. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t taken the time to notice. He didn’t want to notice her. If she had to guess, she would probably say that Tennessee was deliberately unaware that she was a fully grown woman.
Much like her brother Jack.
But, of course, Tennessee was not her brother.
Though she was sure that there was something about the way his gaze dragged over her. Something that almost made her left hand pull at the collar of her crewneck shirt like it had suddenly become revealing. As if that little swathe of skin at her neck was too daring for a moment this intimate.
And she was kicking herself for her completely unhelpful and over-the-top imagination, but his eyes lifted and met hers again.
They were still just as blue. But they were different now. There was something gleaming there that felt the same as the heat from the fire against the side of her face.
She found, suddenly, that she couldn’t breathe.
“You shouldn’t be driving up the side of Copper Mountain in the middle of the night in February,” he said, his tone completely devoid of inflection or emotion of any kind. “You know better than that.”
But his tone suggested to Matilda that he was hiding something. Not only because she wanted him to be hiding something, but because she had seen him speak in exactly this same tone to his family members when she knew that he was mad at them.