Tucker's Crossing by Marina Adair Page B

couldn’t help but notice the moisture growing in her friend’s eyes.
    According to Ms. Luella, Silas had been eaten up with guilt over a very brief affair he’d carried on toward the end of his wife’s life. He never forgave himself for the betrayal or Evie for leaving him when she took her life. His anger and guilt compounded at the same rate as his drinking, driving him from devoted dad to cruel drunk in under a year.
    He’d turned the house into a living mausoleum to his late wife, and if the boys so much as moved one of Evie’s old magazines, they were punished. Usually by way of humiliation or downright scare tactics. Apparently he had tossed the boys out a time or two, locking them out of the house for days, one time over the period of a week. Winter conditions notwithstanding.
    Ms. Luella had gone to the authorities over the suspected abuse. Between the lack of physical proof, the boys remaining tight-lipped, and no one else stepping forward there was nothing anyone could do. So she stayed on, trying to act as a buffer between them and Silas. But nothing had prepared her for what happened to Beau.
    Outside, the heat was sweltering with a stickiness that clung to Shelby’s work scrubs and skin. She dropped her bags off at the car and made her way around the barn, wondering how a boy who had grown up in such cruelty could end up so gentle and tender. Although the moment Shelby spotted Cody, pounding a fence post into the ground, his shirt hanging over his toolbox, tender and gentle didn’t sum up the man in front of her.
    His skin was golden from the sun, slick with heat, and as he raised the hammer over his head to bring it down on the wood, she watched the play of muscles on his back. During their time together, her fingers had memorized each and every inch of that body and they suddenly tingled with the need to reacquaint themselves.
    Cody must have sensed her approach because by the time she realized he had stopped working, Shelby looked up to find him watching her, an amused smile on his lips. Great. Just what she needed, him standing there looking—well, like denim-encased sex—and her gaping openly at his half-naked state. Even worse, he knew exactly what she was thinking.
    “Afternoon.” Hooking his thumbs in his belt loops, he dropped his gaze to the glass in her hands and Shelby realized she hadn’t stopped staring yet. Get a grip!
    “Ms. Luella thought you might need something to cool you off.”
    “Did she now?” Cody took the glass, his fingers grazing hers in a way that could only have been purposeful. He tipped the glass to his lips, taking long, deep swallows.
    Swallowing hard herself, Shelby wiped her heat-dampened hands on her scrubs and shifted her attention, and the direction of the conversation, to the fallen fence posts. One, Cody was working on. The other lay on the ground, the fence between the two a twisted mess of sharp and jagged metal. “Did that happen this morning?”
    “I don’t know. Did it?”
    Shelby didn’t like the tone of his voice. “You think I cut it?”
    “Doesn’t matter what I think. A couple of cows got out before someone noticed.”
    “Are they okay?”
    “Yup.” Cody took a step closer. She could smell his scent mingling with the dry soil. “We rounded them up. A few hours more and it could have been a real problem.”
    Shelby risked meeting his gaze. Big mistake. His shirt was back on his body, but it didn’t make him any less attractive. If anything, the undone top buttons beckoned like an untied bow on a present Christmas morning.
    “Thanks.” He set the empty glass down next to his toolbox. Silence ate up the space between them. They might as well have been in a confined room instead of in the middle of thirty thousand acres the way her body was responding.
    She tried to detach herself, pretend this was just a meeting between business associates, but when he wore his jeans—hung low on his hips and long over his worn boots—it made her