Page 49 of Salvation

He combed her hair back with his fingers. “Good.” He nodded. “But I need your help.”

She bit her lip so it wouldn’t tremble and nodded. She knew enough about the Voss clan to know it was a rare moment, indeed, to have one of those proud men trust someone enough to ask for help.

He held both her arms, and she wondered what he’d ask her to do. Jump off a cliff? Confront the ghosts of his past? Move to Montana and marry him? Whatever it was, she was all in.

“There’s a hard part and an easy part,” he said, squeezing her hands tighter.

“Anything,” she said.

Anything?a little voice in her head asked.

She thought it over briefly, then nodded to herself. Yes, she’d vowed not to be careless and lose her heart to a man again. But Todd wasn’t any man, so she could make an exception for him.

“Anything,” she whispered.

Slowly, he brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. His eyes flashed and sparked with a hundred secret wishes, and she wanted to make them all come true.

“Okay, then,” he said, looking over her shoulder. “Can you come now?”

“I have to ask Jess—” she started, then stopped, chagrined to see that Jessica had entered the kitchen.

Jessica looked ridiculously pleased to see the two of them together. “Sure she can. Go.” She shooed them toward the door.

Anna pulled her apron off and slid her fingers around his. “Okay, then. Where are we going?”

“I need your advice on getting a few things,” he murmured, leading her to the car.

He didn’t say much more than that, and though she was dying of curiosity, she held her tongue. Men like Todd were like the mountains in spring — they didn’t thaw overnight, and you sure couldn’t rush them. So she forced herself to be patient and relish the tiny little signals he gave off. His fingers played over hers as they drove, and when he peeked over from time to time, she caught his soft gaze lingering on her hair. Her eyes.

And her lips. His eyes kept darting back to her lips, and even though it wasn’t a hungry,I-can’t-wait-another-minutelook like the ones he’d given her the previous night, it still made her inner animal roar.

She hid a grin. So much for men being the ones to obsess about sex. She was the dirty-minded one.

Todd’s nostrils flared, and for a second, she wondered if she’d emitted some secret signal that gave her away. His hand flexed over hers and his lips moved, but he kept his cool.

“The hardware store?” she asked as he motioned for her to pull the car they’d borrowed into a huge parking lot. Not Mike’s Hardware, but one of those huge megastores. He needed her help here?

He nodded quietly but didn’t say a thing until they entered and wove their way to a section all the way at the back.

“So, what do you think?” he murmured.

His hands were stuck deep in his pockets, and the look on his face was that of a man preparing to slap down his life savings for the biggest purchase of his life. Yet he was pointing to…a kiddie pool?

“It’s kind of small, but I think it would fit on the deck,” he said.

She looked at the tiny blue basin with its starfish design. “I think it’s perfect. Like a tiny lake or something. A little piece of Montana brought right to the baby’s home.”

His mouth fell open as if surprised to find her sharing his vision. But it was written all over his face. The Astroturf was more than an artificial version of grass; it represented a piece of his home. The pool represented the cool, clear creeks that babbled over boulders and rocks, and the awning he found next was the shade of the forest.

“I know it’s not Montana,” he said a little sheepishly once they were back on the deck behind the saloon. It took them a few hours, but they got everything set up. “But it reminds me of home. And Arizona’s okay, but a bear—” he stuttered a little, correcting himself “—a baby needs other things, too.”

He brought in a lounge chair and an end table and a bunch of leafy plants — tall, spiky yuccas and rich green plumeria that provided both shade and privacy, even if they had been a bitch to get up the stairs.

“It’s beautiful. Teddy will have his own mountain meadow. His own summer creek…”

“Now I just need to find a way to plant some berries so he can pick them in the fall,” Todd whispered, scanning their work with an inscrutable look.

Something in her jumped at the echo of words she knew she’d heard before. Were they wordsshe’dsaid before? She couldn’t remember — not with her mind busy picking through so many other memories. Like all the times she’d itched to set up her own backyard play area for a baby she never got to bring home.

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