Page 66 of A Rancher's Heart
He shoved a hand through his hair, the strands sticking up wildly.
“I’m sorry.” The words fell like an avalanche. Crashing, unexpected.
She grabbed a pillow, clutching in front of her like a shield. Her brain wasn’t quite working, bewilderment and sexual frustration swirling.
He was apologizing? God, she didn’t know if that made her more angry or frustrated.
It certainly made her confused.
He stared down for one more moment, his body tight with need, his erection clearly visible. Frustration and desire dogged her, and she opened her mouth to say something, but he snatched his shirt from the ground and fled.
Tamara sat there, stunned, her heart pounding in the silence that followed the click of the door.
She hadn’t expected any of that, and she collapsed to her pillows and let out a long sigh of frustration.
Frustrated, confused and at a total loss.
How on earth could she face him tomorrow?
Caleb crashed into the hallway, somehow closing Tamara’s door and taking a dozen steps before his shaking legs forced him to put his shoulders to the wall. Deep breaths shook him as he fought his desires.
Three more seconds and he would’ve been beyond the point of no return. As a man who prided himself on his control, at that moment there was nothing he wanted more than to go back, jerk open the door and pick up where he’d left off—
The fire burning in her eyes said she wouldn’t stop him. The way she’d gripped his shoulders in passion as they’d kissed…
He dragged a hand over his skin, feeling the welts she’d left with her nails.
Caleb’s head thumped the wall again before he pushed to vertical, shuffling down the hallway. He needed to do something. He needed to doanythingthat would take him away from temptation, because it was clear the two of them had an awful lot of kindling piled up, and it wasn’t safe for them to be in a room alone. Not unless he was going to blow this entire relationship to hell by stripping her and driving into her like a man possessed.
God, what he wouldn’t do to be able to take her.
He stepped five paces farther down the hallway then three paces back, trying to decide where to go. He wasn’t about to drop into his own bed, or hit the shower—in both those circumstances, he’d be taking his unruly hard-on to completion in the saddest and sorriest of ways considering there was a hot-blooded woman down the hall willing and interested. No way would he stroke off while thinking about her.
So he took the only guaranteed boner-killer and shoved open the door to his office. He flicked on the light, prepared to let the chaos in the untended room cool his fires as he pondered once again what a pathetic excuse for—
It was clean.
Shock nearly as strong as the passion he’d just experienced struck, and he crept forward, wondering if he’d stepped through a time machine.
The last time he’d seen the office this tidy, his parents had still been alive.
Bitter grief swamped him, and he clutched the back of the chair to keep from wavering. He was overwrought, emotion churning through him with his brain not fully engaged.
The woman he wanted more than his next breath was interested and yet utterly unavailable.
He closed his eyes, focusing on the mental images of his children. Their sweet smiles the center of his universe. A balancing place.
It took a moment, but when he glanced around again nothing had changed—the room was still strangely neat, and he moved forward with caution.
The side credenza held papers, stacked and in order. A quick glance through showed they were not only separated into bills and statements, they’d been sorted by month, and any he’d scrawled his name on in an attempt to have a way to remember which were paid had a red line under the total.
Around the edge of the room were more piles, neatly placed in folders, and on the desktop itself, his ledgers were out. The ones he still filled in by hand because that was how his mother had done it, and learning how to transfer it all over to a computer had seemed more work than it was worth with the limited time he had.
A trembling moment of displeasure struck. One of his brothers could have snuck into the room and straightened things, but he doubted it. No reason for them to do that now when they hadn’t done it anytime during the previous ten years.
It had to be Tamara’s work.
He wasn’t sure what to think about her looking through the family finances. Having her know what their financial bottom line was made him uncomfortable in ways he couldn’t quite articulate.
