Larger Than Life by Alison Kent (read the beginning after the end novel .txt) 📕

and the tattoo on the back of his neck drew her gaze. "I guess the only way to settle this is to go back to the beginning."

Uh-oh. "The beginning?"

He looked over, his eyes found hers. "I'm just going to have to kiss you again."

She looked at him for a long moment, wanting what he offered but knowing that taking it wouldn't come easy. It was daylight, and she wasn't feeling tired and out of sorts and vulnerable the way she had been last night.

And so she hedged. "I'm pretty sure the beginning is where I found you on the side of the road. Are you sure you want to go back that far?"

He considered what she'd said. "A compromise, then?"

"Does that mean you have something in mind? Something that doesn't involve another kiss?" she hurried to add.

"Halfway between here and there."

"The Barn."

He shrugged. "You can put me to work and tell me the story of how you ended up out here."

Presumptuous, wasn't he? "Who said I didn't start out out here?"

"Your neck. It's too white."

"I work indoors."

"Yeah. But Ed told me." He drained his coffee. "Now you can tell me the rest while you pretend you can't wait to kiss me again."

The man was an incorrigible flirt. He was also way too perceptive. She wanted to kiss him more than she wanted to breathe. But she wouldn't. Last night hadn't been real. She wouldn't let it be real. If she could kiss him, touch him, hold him, even sleep with him and do so without involving her emotions, she would.

In a heartbeat. A nanosecond. The blink of an eye.

But he wasn't Ed Hill, a man to whom her only attraction was what he'd been able to do to her body and her ability to totally detach. Mick Savin was more.

The proof lay in that middle-of-the-night slip of her control. Being this close to him, thinking about his mouth, the way he kissed, the way he tasted ... She needed distance now, and needed it in a very bad way.

"What I want and what's going to happen are two different things. So I'll tell you what." She gathered the coffee mugs and the carafe. "I'll clean up in here while you get dressed and see to your dog."

"That's it?" He looked crushed that she'd put an end to their banter.

And so she smiled. "We'll see what happens when we get down to the Barn."

Thirty minutes later, FM sniffing every square inch of grass along the way, Mick walked beside Neva from the house to the barn. Since he'd arrived last night near dusk to be caught up in her drama with the sheriff and the shark, he hadn't spent much time checking out the place.

Judging by the drive in and what fence line he could see, he figured her property to be about ten acres, most of it nothing but yellowed grassland. Her house, two-story, white frame, with a storybook cottage appeal, sat in a clustered copse of pecan trees.

She had flower beds with hardy summer blooms but no grass or yard to speak of. Less upkeep, he supposed, not taming the land into something it wasn't meant to be, blending into her surroundings, hiding out in plain sight. Yeah. That was what it was.

He'd slipped his arm into the sling for the walk to the barn and made sure to walk with Neva on that side. Bound up like he was, he couldn't accidentally touch her. Even so, she still kept her arms crossed protectively in front of her body. He could've sworn she'd enjoyed their kiss as much as he had. Now he wanted to swear that she didn't like herself for liking it. Or just swear because that was the case.

She stayed silent as they walked, and he didn't press for conversation, letting her set the pace of their steps. The barn sat straight ahead. It was twice the size of her house, if not three times as big, and looked like it had been plucked out of a Pennsylvania Dutch pasture and dropped into place.

It had a shingled roof that sloped on a deep curve and was as tall as the structure's first floor. The small parking lot out front was the same gravel as the drive; the sidewalk down the one side he could see was concrete. He wondered if she actually had visitors stop in to shop. As off any beaten path as she was, he didn't see how that was likely.

Neva led him around the far side where the picnic tables sat on the covered patio. "The showroom's in the front, but we can access it through a door in the studio."

"Is that where you're going to put me to work?"

"No. That's where Candy works." Neva stopped, pulled open the windowed door leading inside. "The shipping center is at the rear."

He stepped into the big room that wasn't as spacious as the exterior had led him to believe. He pointed to the back wall. "What's on the other side?"

"Candy's apartment." Neva followed him in and let the door close behind her. "It's about twelve hundred square feet."

Making the two-story barn around five thousand. "What's upstairs?"

"Just. . . stuff." She fluttered a hand. "Storage. Typical attic junk."

An awful big attic for junk, he wanted to say, but stopped when a blowtorch fired off at the front of the room. Neva headed the opposite way, around shelves stacked high with bins of supplies, stools tucked up beneath worktables, unused machine stands, and spools of cord, filament, and chain, to the corner of the room.

The corner of the room had a computer workstation against one wall, a numbered cubbyhole system on the other, both separated from the larger room by a counter set up for the packing and shipping he'd been drafted to do. The stack of unassembled mailing boxes was his first clue.

"Welcome to the nerve center of the Big Brown Barn," Neva said, waving one arm with a flourish.

He could see the log-in screen