Read Online Wolf Creek Widow (Wolf Creek, Arkansas Book 4) by Penny Richards - Free Book Online

man.
    “And you smell like sunshine,” he told her before she could make sense of her emotions.
    The oddly poetic words sounded strange coming from a man who looked as if he’d been hewn from a bold outcropping of Arkansas rock. It wasn’t the sort of thing she expected to hear from a man like Ace Allen.
    And why not? What do you really know about him?
    Nothing but what she’d heard around Wolf Creek, and that wasn’t much. She’d been too busy keeping body and soul together to pay much attention to talk—good or bad.
    She wasn’t aware that her hands still rested on his shoulders until he circled her wrists with his fingers as he had the day before. Lowering her hands, he stood. She realized then that he’d been sitting on the side of the bed.
    “You rest. You must have done too much this morning, or you wouldn’t have fainted.”
    Meg sat up quickly and regretted the hasty action. “It wasn’t the work.” She didn’t want Ace and his mother thinking she was overdoing things. “It was you.”
    Shock molded his features and he leaned toward her. “Me? What did I do?”
    Too late, she realized that once again, she’d done or said the wrong thing. Hadn’t Elton told her time after time that she was the one who made him crazy and caused him to do the things he did?
    “I’m sorry!” she cried, holding up her hands in a futile attempt to keep him away. To her surprise, Ace mimicked her action and took two steps backward, away from her. The simple, nonthreatening action slowed her racing heart.
    She swallowed and forced herself to look up at him. “I’m sorry. It’s just that when I...when I saw you standing there with your hands on the door frame just...looking at me, I just... I saw...”
    Ace didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then, to her surprise, he went to the doorway and stood in the same pose that had caused her such alarm.
    “Look at me, Meg,” he said in that deep voice. “Who do you see?”
    “What?” She frowned, unsure of what he was doing and wondering at the sorrow reflected in his eyes.
    “Who do you see standing here?”
    What did he want from her? she wondered in confusion. “I see you,” she said at last. “Ace Allen.”
    “Exactly. You see the mixed-breed ex-convict who killed two men. I’ll always be sorry for that, but if you never believe anything else about me, you can believe that I would never deliberately harm a hair on your head.”
    His statement was much the same as what he’d said the day before in the woods. It seemed he was determined that she knew he was no threat to her.
    “You’re wrong,” she told him.
    His dark eyebrows snapped together in a frown. “What?”
    “What you said. I didn’t see th-that at all.” She hurried to explain. “Elton used to stand in the doorway like that a lot. For just a moment when I looked up I saw him, not you. I...I’m s-sorry.”
    “I’m not Elton, Meg.”
    His voice held an urgency she didn’t understand. “I know that.”
    “Do you?” he persisted. “Look at me. Do I look like Elton?”
    “No,” she murmured. Elton hadn’t been nearly as tall, and unlike Ace he’d been almost too good-looking to be masculine. She’d once heard him called pretty. No one would ever think of Ace Allen as pretty. Striking, surely. Magnificent, maybe. Pretty, never.
    “No, and I don’t act like him. Can you see that? Do you believe it?”
    Still confused, but knowing somehow that her answer was of utmost importance, she whispered, “Yes.”
    He nodded, and the torment in his eyes faded. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Meg Thomerson. That’s something else you can be certain of, so never think it again.” With that, he turned and left her alone with her thoughts and a lot of questions.
    * * *
    After a lunch of cheese-and-tomato sandwiches that Meg fixed while Ace and Nita finished the laundry, they took up the sheets and tablecloths that had been drying on nearby bushes and replaced them with those they’d