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He looked annoyed and unconvinced.
Why had she started this? She could feel something like tears stinging the back of her eyes.
“You have that about-to-faint look again,” he said, coming back to her. “I think you hit your head harder than we realize.”
“I think you’re right,” she said. She ordered herself to stop speaking. But she didn’t.
“IF I HAD a room like this? That is what I would want to fill it with,” the woman said. “The important things. The things that really last. The things that are real. Love. Family.”
Real. Kiernan could tell her a thing or two about the reality of love and family that would wipe that dreamy look off her face. But why? Let her have her illusions.
They were no threat to him.
Or maybe they were, because just for a flicker of a moment he felt a whisper of longing sneak along his spine.
He shook it off. He just wanted to have a look at the bump on her head and send her on her way. He did not want to hear about her sugarplum visions of a wonderful world!
“Nothing lasts,” he told her, his voice a growl.
Stacy went very still. For a moment she looked as if she might argue, but then his words seemed to hit her, like arrows let loose that had found her heart.
To his dismay, for a moment he glimpsed in her face a sorrow he thought matched his own. He was intrigued but had enough good sense not to follow up! Not to encourage her in any way to share her vision with him.
“Follow me,” he said. “I think I’ve got a first-aid kit in my bathroom.”
His bathroom? Didn’t he have a first-aid kit somewhere else? He did, but it was outside and around the back of the house, where the staging area for outdoor excursions was, where he stored the outdoor equipment.
No, it was sensible to take her to the closest first-aid kit, to keep her out of the cold, to not take her through more snow in those ridiculous shoes.
But through his bedroom? Into his bathroom? It occurred to him that he should have sat her down in the kitchen and brought the first-aid kit to her.
He was not thinking with his normal razor-sharp processes, which was understandable. He told himself it had nothing to do with the unexpected arrival of a beautiful woman in his fountain and everything to do with Ivan.
He hesitated at the double doors to his master suite and then flung them open and watched her closely as she preceded him. He saw the room through her eyes, which were wide and awed.
The ceiling soared upward, magnificent and timber framed. But here the floors, instead of being hardwood, were carpeted with a thick, plush pile that their feet sank into. There was a huge bed, the bedding and the abundance of pillows in a dozen shades of gray.
She was blushing as she looked at the bed, which he should have found amusing as all get-out. Instead, he found it reluctantly endearing.
Who blushed anymore?
Something that heightened color in her cheeks, the way she caught her plump lower lip between her teeth, made Kiernan’s mouth go dry, and so he led her hastily through to the bathroom. Again, he saw it through her eyes. A wall of windows opened to the deck and hot tub area.
There was a shower a dozen people could have gotten into, and her blush deepened when she looked at that.
He’d never shared this room with anyone, but let her think what she wanted. It might keep him safe from this niggling awareness of her that was bugging him the way a single gnat could spoil a perfect summer day on the hammock with a book.
She stared at the deep, stand-alone tub and swallowed hard. While the shower might hold dozens, it was more than evident the tub could only comfortably fit two! Her eyes flitted wildly around the room and then stopped and widened.
Her eyes, he noticed, annoyed with himself, were green as the moss that clung to the stones of the hot spring deep in the mountains behind this cottage.
“That is not a fireplace,” she whispered. “In your bathroom?”
“You want it on?” he asked innocently. “Are you cold?”
He was fairly sure it was evident to even her, with her aura of innocence, that a fireplace like that was not about cold but about romance.
And yet he did not like thinking about her in that light. It was evident to him, on a very brief acquaintance, she was not the type of woman who would share his vision of romance.
For him, it was a means to an end, the age-old game of seduction.