To Trust Her Heart by Carolyn Faulkner Page B

knew, not missing a single detail. She had never been able to get away with anything when she was with him.  He was too damned observant!
    “You’re not going home, Maddie. I told you that last night.”
    She wasn’t about to admit to him that she had only a few, vague but embarrassingly sensual memories about last night.  Maddie let her gaze wander up from those huge feet up his heavy, lightly hairy calves to those huge, muscular thighs, skipping demurely over the very outside of his hips to that flat, rippled stomach and broad, strong chest. The arm that was bulging against the door was practically the size of one of her legs.
    One would think that someone who was as brawny has he was would be slow and cumbersome in his movements, but not him. His appearance at the door was proof enough of his stealthy capabilities. He had been a Navy Seal in one of his many incarnations, and was as tough as they come, slick and sly and silent as a cat when he wanted to be, strong as an ox or two when the call arose, and deadlier than a King cobra.
    But Maddie had rarely seen those parts of his personality, although she knew they always lurked just under the surface, they were always an undertone, but never showed to her expressly.  Even when she’d managed to anger him, which surprisingly wasn’t that easy for her unless she’d screwed up majorly, he’d always been excruciatingly careful of her while creating abstract art with his blazing red palm print on the fair skin of her upturned rear.
    Embarrassed by the turn her thoughts were taking, the visions of her younger self lying over his lap one of those multiple times getting her bottom roasted for whatever infraction she’d committed against the rules according to Ty Everett Scanlon, Maddie decided to try to make a break for it, despite how badly the odds of success were stacked against her.
    She pushed forwards, into him, and it was like trying to move a brick wall. He wasn’t going anywhere, certainly not at her behest. There were very few things or people that could move him if he didn’t want to move. Maddie stole a look up at him, and saw him staring down at her. He wasn’t smiling, he rarely did, but she knew him well enough to note the humor about his eyes. He was having fun watching her try to physically persuade him to move.
    “Excuse me,” she said loudly, knowing full well that even appealing to manners and courtesy were going to get her anywhere with him.
    Annnoyed, and sick of him staring at her as if he could see into her soul, Maddie crossed her arms over her breasts in a self-defense maneuver, and sighed in exasperation.
    His only response was to bring his free hand up to her chin to tilt it up. She watched, mesmerized like a rabbit by a snake, as his lips descended confidently towards hers.
    But Maddie moved back several steps, away from him and his roving hands and lips. “Oh, no, you’re not.”
    His thick eyebrows rose. “I’m not what, little girl?”
    He’d called her that since she could remember, but his use of it now just didn’t seem to fit. She was no longer his little girl, his girlfriend, his wife, his anything. All of that was over quite a long time ago, and she had the divorce papers to prove it. He couldn’t just come waltzing back into her life any time he wanted to and expect that she would fall down at his feet, legs spread in welcome.
    It wasn’t going to happen.
    The problem was that it apparently already had.
    “We’re not going down that road is what. I want you to get the hell out of my way so that I can go home.” He hadn’t moved an inch. “Alone,” she felt it was vitally necessary to add.
    Ty took a deep breath and leaned further against the door frame. “We’ve already been down that road two or three times last night,” he rumbled, “if I recall correctly,” watching first a high pink then a cherry red splash across her fair face, “and no.”
    It was his very calmness, his refusal to meet her very righteous