"Shane, stop flirting with Rebecca." Regan shook her head as she looked down the table. "You're embarrassing her."

"I wasn't flirting. We were having a conversation." His lips curved, his dimple winked. "Weren't we, Rebecca?"

"Of sorts."

"Shane can't keep his eyes, or his hands, off the ladies." Too logy and sluggish to do justice to the meal, Savannah pushed back her half-finished plate. "The smart ones don't take him seriously."

"Good thing Rebecca's one of the smart ones," Devin put in. "I tell you, it's a sad thing to watch the way some women come sniffing around him."

"Yeah, I get real depressed about it." Shane grinned wickedly. "I can hardly hold my head up. Just last week, Louisa Tully brought me out a peach pie. It was demoralizing."

Rafe snorted. "The trouble is, too many of them haven't figured out the way to your heart isn't through your stomach. It's through your— Ow!" He winced, laughing, when Regan kicked him hard under the table. "Mind. I was going to say mind."

"I'm sure you were," Regan said primly.

"Shane's always kissing somebody." Bryan shoveled in the last bite of his third helping, and used his napkin rather than the back of his hand to wipe his mouth only because he caught his mother's eye.

Enjoying herself now, Rebecca leaned forward to smile at the boy. "Is he really?"

"Oh, yeah. At the farm, at the ballpark, right in town, too. Some of them giggle." He rolled his eyes. "Con and I think it's disgusting."

Shane had always thought that fire was best met with fire, and he turned to his nephew. "I hear Jenny Metz is stuck on you."

Bryan flushed from his sauce-smeared chin to the roots of his hair. "She is not." But the humiliation of that, and the primal fear of girls, was enough to shut his mouth firmly.

Jared sent his stepson a sympathetic look and steered the conversation onto safer ground.

From her vantage point, Rebecca saw Shane lean over, murmur something to the hunched-shouldered Bryan that made the boy grin.

The sound of fretful crying sounded through one of the baby monitors almost as soon as the meal was over. After a heated debate, Rebecca started on the dishes. Babies needed to be tended to, as she'd pointed out. Children put to bed. She was better suited to washing dishes than to fulfilling either of those responsibilities. And—and that clinched it-was she a friend or a guest?

While she worked, she could hear voices from the living room and more sounds through the other monitor that stood in the kitchen. Some soft, some deep. Soothing, she mused. A kind of routine that dug roots, honed traditions. She could hear Rafe talking to Nate as he readied him for bed, Regan murmuring to the baby as she nursed him.

Someone—she thought it was Devin's voice—was calmly directing children to pick up the scattered toys. Jared poked his head in once, apologizing for skipping out on kitchen duty, explaining that Savannah was exhausted.

She waved him away.

She was sure that if anyone else had to face a mess like this, the piles of pots, pans, dishes, glasses would be daunting at best, tedious at worst. But for her it was a novel chore, and therefore entertaining.

Shane strolled in, thumbs hooked in his pockets. "Looks like I'd better roll up my sleeves."

"You don't need to pitch in." Rebecca was working the problem of fitting everything into the racks of the dishwasher into a geometric equation. "I've got it."

"Everybody else is tied up with kids or pregnant wives. I'm all you've got." So he did roll up his sleeves. "Are you going to put the dishes in there, or study it all night?"

"I'm working on a system." Fairly satisfied with it, Rebecca began to load. "What are you doing?"

"I'm going to wash the pans."

She paused, her eyes narrowing a bit as she recalculated. "That would be simpler." She caught a whiff of lemon from the soap he squirted into the hot running water. But when she bent over, her bottom bumped his thigh and had her straightening again.

"Close quarters around the sink," he said with an easy grin.

To offset it, she merely walked to the other side of the dishwasher and worked from there. "So, is flirting with women a vocation or an avocation?"

"It's a pleasure."

"Mmm... Isn't it awkward, in a small town, to juggle women?"

"I guess it would be, if you thought of them as rubber balls instead of people."

She nodded as she meticulously arranged dishes. It would be, she mused, interesting and educational to delve into the mind of a ladies' man. "I'll rephrase that. Isn't it awkward to begin or end a relationship in a small town where people appear to know a great deal about other people's business?"

"Not if you do it right. Is this another study, Rebecca?"

She straightened again, battling a flush because it had been just that. "I'm sorry. Really. That's a terrible habit of mine—picking things apart. Just say, 'Butt out, Rebecca.'" . "Butt out, Rebecca."

Because there had been no sting in the order, she laughed and got back to work. "What if I just say I think you have a wonderful and interesting family, and I enjoyed meeting all of them?"

"That would be fine. I'm fond of them myself."

"It shows." She looked up, lips curved. "And it almost makes me think there's more to you than a woman-chasing farm boy. I enjoyed watching all of you together, the interaction, the shorthand conversations, the little signals."

He set a pan into the drainer. "Is that what you were doing when I caught you at dinner? Making observations on the MacKades in their natural milieu?"

Her smile faded a little. "No, actually, I was thinking of something else entirely." Suddenly restless, she picked up a damp cloth and walked away to wipe off the stove. "I do need to talk to you about making arrangements to work at the farm. I realize you have a routine, and a private life. I don't intend to get in your way."

But you will, he thought. He'd suspected it before, but that quick glimpse of sadness in her eyes moments ago had confirmed it. He was a sucker for a woman with secrets and sad stories.

"I told Regan you could come and work there, so I'm stuck with it."

She shrugged her shoulder. "It's important enough to me that I can't worry overmuch about it making you uncomfortable." When she glanced back at him, her eyes were cool again, faintly mocking. "You'll be out in the field most of the time, won't you? Baling hay, or whatever?"

"Or whatever." Damned if she wasn't pulling his strings, he thought. Both of her. For he was certain there were two women in there, and he had a growing fascination with each one.

Though he hadn't quite finished the pans, he picked up a towel, dried his hands. Maybe it was that slim white neck, he mused. It was just begging to be touched, tasted. Or it could be those odd golden eyes that hinted at all sorts of elusive emotions, even when they shone with confidence. Or maybe it was just his own ego, still ruffled from her mocking response to him that morning.

Whatever it was, he was compelled to test her, and perhaps himself, again.

He moved behind her, quietly. Following impulse, he lowered his head and closed his teeth gently on the sensitive nape of her neck. She jerked, came up hard against him with a shudder that seemed to rack her from head to toe. As surprised as he was pleased, he took her shoulders firmly in his hands and turned her to face him.

"Not so cool this time," he murmured, and crushed her mouth with a kiss of practiced skill and devastating intensity.

She hadn't had time to brace, to think, to defend. His mouth quite simply destroyed her. Her head spun, her knees jellied, her blood went on fast boil. Never in her life had so many sensations battered her at once. The smooth, warm demand of his mouth taking from hers, the hard, confident hands moving over her, the smell of lemon and soap and... man.

Her mind simply couldn't compute it, so her body took over. Some weak, accepting sound purred out of her throat. She couldn't stop it, couldn't stop the trembling or the heat or the sudden and baffling need to let everything she was melt into him. One shock of pleasure sparked another, then another, until there was nothing else.

His first reaction was of arrogant delight. Indifferent to him? Like hell she was. She was hot. She was trembling. She was moaning. The woman he kissed that morning had been cool and amused and mocking. Not this one. This one was...

Deliciously warm. He could have tasted that mouth endlessly, so smooth, so soft, so silky. He eased deeper, aroused by each throaty moan and murmur. His mind went blissfully blank with pleasure when he slid his hands under her sweater and found only Rebecca beneath it.

She quivered, her breath catching in her throat as he skimmed those rough palms over small, firm breasts. His thumbs scraped lightly over her rigid nipples, and he swallowed her gasps, absorbed her shudders.

The arms she'd lifted to twine around his neck went limp, dropped slowly to her sides in a kind of helpless surrender that excited unbearably, even as it warned him.

He eased back, clamping bis hands on the stove at either side of her as he studied her face. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were closed, her breath was coming fast and harsh through lips erotically swollen from his.

He thought she would look just like that on the floor, with him mounting her. The image of that had him gripping the stove until his fingers ached.

Then she opened her eyes, and he saw that they were blind, drugged, and a little bit afraid.

"Well, well, well..." He said it lightly, mockingly, as much in defense as in triumph, as his stomach lurched with need. "I'd say we had a different result this time around."

She couldn't catch her breath, much less form a word. She only shook her head as her body continued to suffer from quick, lethal explosions.

"No theories this time, Doc?" He didn't know why he was angry, but he could feel his temper building. Building, then spiking, as she stood there looking helpless, stunned, and more and more terrified. "Maybe we should try it again."

"No." She got that out. She thought her life might depend on the uttering of that single syllable. "No," she said again. "I think you proved your point."

He didn't know what his point had been—something about amusing himself, a test—but it certainly didn't apply now. Now he wanted her with a ferocity that was totally unprecedented. He believed desire was as natural as breathing, and should cause no more discomfort than the easy exhaling of air.

And yet he ached, fiercely ached.

"You... Let me by," she managed.

"When I'm ready. I'm waiting for your hypothesis—or would it be a conclusion now? I'm curious, Rebecca. How are you going to react the next time I kiss you? And which one of you am I going to find when I take you to bed?"

She didn't know—and wasn't sure she could tell him if she did. She was saved from what she was sure would have been abject humiliation when Rafe swung through the kitchen door.

He stopped, summed up the situation in a glance and scowled at his brother. "For God's sake, Shane."

"Get out."

"It's my damn house," Rafe shot back.

"Then we'll get out." He snagged Rebecca's arm and took two strides before panic gave her the strength to yank away.

"No." It was all she said as she walked past both men and out of the kitchen.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" Rafe demanded. "You had her pinned up against the damn stove. She was white as a sheet. Since when have you gotten off on scaring women?"

"I didn't scare her."

But he realized abruptly that he had, and that for a few moments he hadn't cared that he had. In fact, he been hotly thrilled that he could. That was new for him, and shaming.

"I didn't mean to. It got out of hand." Frustrated, he dragged his unsteady fingers through his hair. "Hell, I got out of hand."

"Maybe you'd better keep your distance until you can handle yourself."

"Yeah, maybe I'd better."

Because he'd been expecting an argument, Rafe's brows drew together. He noted now that Shane was just about as pale as Rebecca had been. "You okay?"

"I don't know." Baffled, Shane shook his head. "She's the damnedest woman," he muttered. "The damnedest woman."

Chapter Five

As she was a meticulous woman, it took Rebecca hours to set her equipment to her specifications. There were sensors, cameras, recorders, computers, monitors. Cassie had been able to give her one of the larger suites for a couple of days, and she tried to be grateful for it. Yet it was confining not to be able to set up a camera or two on the first floor.