The Willful Wife

The disparity between the two men was immediately apparent. One was quite short. The other was very tall. The smaller, slightly rotund cowboy was facing her. His features were craggy. His skin was wrinkled and leathery and tanned to the color of toast. Obviously he had spent a lifetime outdoors in the elements. In Desiree’s estimation he was the older by a good thirty or forty years, and he was also the more animated of the pair.

The second man was in profile. From this angle Desiree put his age as mid-thirties. He could have been younger or older. She decided he was probably older.

Her eyes swept his appearance from the ground up. He was dressed in cowboy boots, faded blue jeans, a Western-style leather coat and a white dress shirt. He had shunned a traditional tie, as had his sidekick, in favor of a bolo, complete with obligatory gold nugget.

Still, it wasn’t the man’s conspicuous bolo or his spit-polished cowboy boots or his pristine white cowboy hat that caught and held Desiree’s attention. It was something far less tangible. It was something in the way he stood there, motionless, quietly assessing the front entrance, the registration desk, the sweeping staircase, in fact, the entire lobby. It was almost as if he had eyes in the back of his head.

That’s when Desiree suddenly realized that he knew she was watching him.

A tingle of awareness tiptoed along her spine. She took in a sustaining breath and discreetly blew it out again. Now she understood why the hotel manager had referred to her visitor as intimidating. The man was more than intimidating. He was dangerous. In fact, he positively reeked of danger. It was tightly held-in-check, controlled danger, but it was danger, nevertheless.

Desiree didn’t doubt for a moment that this was a man who could take care of himself wherever he was, that this was a man who knew who his enemies were and who his friends were, and regarded both with equal suspicion. She found herself wondering where in the world Mathis Hazard had been and what he had been called upon to do.

Mr. Hazard was dangerous for another reason, as well, Desiree acknowledged to herself. With those broad shoulders, muscular arms and that chest, with that lean waistline and long legs, he was dangerous to women.

Even she wasn’t immune, Desiree recognized, although she had never been interested in the “man’s man” type before. Her personal preference in the opposite sex was a well-educated, erudite, witty and socially accomplished escort who would accompany her to concerts and plays, gallery showings and charity events.

Yet she couldn’t help but notice that Mathis Hazard’s hair was luxuriously thick and a rich dark brown in color, that it was a little too long in the back and around his ears, and that it bad a tendency to curl at his nape.

Even in profile she could see that his forehead was high and his dark eyebrows were arched. His nose bordered on the patrician, but a telltale bump on the bridge meant it had been broken at some point in his life. His mouth was taut, the lower lip was fuller than the upper. His chin was square and jutted with determination. His ears were slightly small, nicely shaped and tucked close to his head. His hands were large and masculine, yet graceful.

Then he turned his head—just his head, nothing more, nothing less—and she saw his eyes, dark, intelligent, somewhat mysterious, piercing and definitely predatory.

Desiree Stratford had met many men in her life, from temperamental artists to affluent collectors, from the homeless on the streets of Boston to wealthy philanthropists, from heads of state to leaders of industry, even those who claimed royal blood or who were, indeed, royalty. She had known men with that implacable air of self-confidence, men who wore the mantle of power as though they were born with it, men with a core of inner strength that seemed to defy logic.

This was one of those men.

She was suddenly tempted to turn tail and run just as fast and just as far as she could.

“Don’t let your imagination run away with itself, Desiree Marie Stratford,” she chided herself under her breath.

She was no lily-livered female, no fainthearted damsel in distress. She was a modern woman with her own career, her own money, her own apartment and her own life.

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