High Stakes Bride by Fiona Brand

constructed reality wobbled and shifted. The scene was a practical everyday one, but the emotions it engendered weren’t.
    Dani’s fingers tightened on the plate. She felt as if a set of blinkers had just been ripped off. Injured or not, Carter was tough and fit with a methodical patience that was formidable. She had heard the bare details of what had happened to him in Indonesia, of how he’d survived months in captivity and a potentially lethal wound through skill and sheer endurance, not only engineering his own escape, but tracking the team that had been sent to rescue him until he found them. For years she had tried to slot him into a controllable compartment in her life, but the system hadn’t worked because of two fundamental flaws.
    A , he wasn’t controllable, and B , she was in love with him.
    Abruptly she understood what had happened to her mother when she’d met Galbraith, and every other woman who had ever fallen in love. The emotions were swamping, invasive and utterly logical. She wanted, she needed and she had to have.
    The second she had seen the dark-haired woman in Carter’s house, a primitive female part of her had gone ballistic. The emotions bordered on savage; she had wanted to drag her out by the hair. She couldn’t tolerate the woman in Carter’s house for the simple reason that Carter was hers.
    She had said she was “just his neighbour” but she didn’t want to be “just” anything to Carter. The magnitude of what she wanted was stunning—especially in view of the fact that she had lost him.
    A popping sound jerked her gaze down. Her thumb had punctured the plastic wrap. She loosened her grip and stared at the brownies.
    Aside from having her world tipped upside down, she was definitely going soft in the head. Actually taking Carter chocolate. The next thing she’d be crawling into his bed.
    If there was room.
    Â 
    An hour later, pale and barely composed, Dani was dressed for the clinic in track pants and a T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. As she walked across the front lawn, Carter detached himself from the shaded side of the barn and fell into step beside her.
    Dani controlled the urge to speed up. For the first time in years she wasn’t just aware of Carter, she was suffocatingly aware of herself: the way her pulse jumped up a notch when he was near, the acute sensitivity of her skin.
    She needed time to think—time to adjust. She needed time to form a strategy that would keep her sane and safe. In this case the solution of packing her bags and running didn’t apply. Galbraith Station had her in a stranglehold: like it or not, she had to stay.
    A flicker of movement through the trees drew Dani’s gaze. The dark-haired woman was loading a pack onto the back of Carter’s truck.
    Grimly, she avoided looking at Carter. “You’d better go. Looks like your girlfriend wants to leave.”
    He said something low beneath his breath. “Mia’s not my girlfriend.”
    â€œMia?” Even her name was exotic. Dani felt like banging her head against something hard. Why on earth had she thought finishing with Carter would be some kind of punishment for him? If there had ever been an emotional vacuum in his life it must have lasted all of two seconds. She’d always known there was a queue—now it looked like it was starting at the farm gate.
    Long brown fingers closed around her arm sending a hard jolt of heat through her. “I don’t want Mia, I never have. I want you.”
    Carter’s gaze was steady, focused with a male intensity that sent a raw shiver through her, and not for the first time she recognized the dominant male qualities that should have sent her running.
    It was ironic that after the trauma of her childhood, she should choose a man who was by his own admission dangerous, but maybe that, more than anything else, made sense. After years on the run she was never