A corner of his mouth lifted. Then the other corner. Then he showed her his beautiful, straight, sexy teeth and said, “It’s not my only talent, Jilly.”

Oh, yes, she wanted him. She didn’t necessarily want to keep him, but she wanted him. Her cheeks grew so pink, she could feel them burn.

“Oh, right,” she said. “There’s also flying and painting.”

He grew instantly somber. And quiet.

“Uh-oh,” she said. “I think I hit a raw nerve there.”

He chewed and swallowed before he said, “I wasn’t ready to be done flying yet. The accident pretty much forced me out of the Army.”

“What about civilian flying?”

“I wouldn’t pass a physical now,” he said. “But while I’m in Africa, I plan to look around at some of the flying over there. Might be a place to give it a go.” He shrugged. “Maybe they don’t look so closely at things like titanium rods and elbow screws.” He didn’t mention that it might be a bit more than the rods and screws that could keep him from passing a physical in the U.S. There could be a little issue about drugs and depression…

“It’s not just big game that has you running off to Africa,” she thoughtfully observed. “You crave ad venture.”

He shrugged and ate. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “A little action, maybe. Something that demands a little more of me than cleaning the paint off the brushes.”

“Are you bored?”

“Sometimes, yeah.”

“Is that why you’re hanging around my back porch?”

That brought a grin out of him. “I get a kick out of you, that’s all.”

“You sure it’s not because I’m the only single woman within pitching distance?” she asked, lifting a shapely brow.

“That’s not it,” he said. “In fact, you’re not the only single woman around here. There are tons of single women in this area. Maybe not right on this mountain, but I have a car. And I like to eat out.”

“Bet you don’t realize how much we have in common.”

“Enlighten me,” Colin said.

“Well,” Jill began, putting down her fork and blotting her lips with her napkin, “I was also forced out of my job, more or less. It was a major coup for one of my subordinates. I’m sure you’ve seen similar things in the military. Getting rank must be competitive.”

He was speechless for a moment. “You were fired?”

“No, I was replaced. I took a leave. It was down to him or me and I wanted to stand and fight, but my boss, mentor and very good friend recommended I take a little time off rather than resign or face the threat of termination. I hired a lawyer to negotiate my exit.” She tilted her head. “Such is the executive experience.”

“Sounds mystifying to me.”

“Yeah, it probably does. Harry, my mentor and boss, had many philosophies he shared with me over the years. Always have your eye on where you’re going next, train your replacement, know when you’ve reached the peak of your performance level and, probably the one he used when he counseled me, sometimes the needs of the company supersede the needs of the individual employee even if the employee is getting screwed.”

“You call that good advice? Go away quietly when you’re getting screwed?”

“No, Colin—go away successfully. And if I’d been better prepared and taken Harry’s advice, I would have known exactly where I was going next. I didn’t take that advice seriously—I had always toyed with the idea of my own marketing consulting business, but hadn’t devoted any real brainpower to it. I thought I’d take a few weeks to consider my options, but then I got sidetracked.” She smiled.

“How’d you get forced out by a subordinate?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Part of my settlement included a confidentiality agreement.”

“I won’t tell.”

“And neither will I. My old boss, Harry, started several successful companies, taking them all public. He was once forced out as a president and CEO—he never took those things personally. He said you know you’re important when an entire board of directors gives you the boot. His response to that was to get a good exit package and start a new company that was stronger and bigger. If you’re going to swim with the sharks and get the big bucks, your position is always touch-and-go.”

“Well, there’s something we don’t have in common—big bucks.”

“You said you were independently wealthy.”

“Not as independently as you apparently are—I’m a retired Army Warrant Officer. My income was never large and doesn’t seem to have the potential to be, but there’s a check each month and it gets me by.”

“You should rethink that potential thing. I looked up wildlife art… I researched it on the web. Some paintings and prints draw impressive sale prices. So—you can get mad at the crash, come out swinging a paintbrush and do better than you could with the military.”

“The best revenge is to live well?”

“Yeah. And I am—thing is, I didn’t plan this. Even if I can’t make it go, I’m having a lot of fun.” She looked briefly upward. “I didn’t start all this with the idea of fun in mind. I just wanted to garden. And, right now, this feels really good.”

Colin removed the plates from the table and took them to the sink. “That’s what I’m not having as much of out of the cockpit. That felt really good and just painting full-time is a poor substitute,” he tossed off. “You need furniture, Jillian,” he said, while thinking about how nice it would be to sit with her on a sofa for a couple of hours.

She joined him at the kitchen sink. Sometimes their hands briefly touched as they passed plates to each other. “I need a golf cart, some lights and, before too long, I’m going to need a good indoor irrigation system for the greenhouses.”

“Where will you go when you leave here?” he asked.

“Totally up in the air,” she said. “But if I can grow stuff I’ll be in the market for some rural property priced right with the best climate and soil conditions. Anything can be moved, Colin. Plants can even be relocated. Jack promised me six months, but he might be inclined to give me a little more time if things are going well. We’ll see what happens over the summer.”

He turned to her while drying his hands on the dish towel. “I have my plane ticket to Africa already,” he said. “I booked early to get a good price on first class—I’m too damn tall to make that long flight in coach. September 1.”

She smiled at him. “Then we also have that in common—we’ll be making the most of the summer. And, um, Colin? I haven’t told anyone else that I was forced out of my last job. Not that it matters, but a lot of people wouldn’t understand. They’d think I’m just a loser.”

“We’re even again—Luke doesn’t know I have a plane ticket.”

Colin really didn’t get it. Jillian wasn’t his type at all. He had always been drawn to women who looked like they wanted sex, and soon. Women who dressed to draw attention to their br**sts, legs, h*ps or butts. Not slutty-looking women, though he didn’t discriminate—he liked them, too. More like the soccer mom who was wearing her “out to be seen” dress-up clothes that fit nice and snug. Not to mention plenty of accessories and makeup. Colin developed his style with women early in his flying days; he was smooth—flirty and sexy and ultimately successful. He had never had a shortage of female company, that’s for sure. One of his favorite things was to wash lipstick off his favorite organ in the morning-after shower, something that hadn’t happened often enough in the recent past.

But this woman was different. Jillian was a whole new being. Right above some very delicious-looking br**sts was a fresh, wholesome, beautiful face with large dark eyes that burned in his memory for hours and a smile that knocked him out. And in that head? Some very sexy, unbelievable intelligence. Man, she was way too smart for him. When she talked about corporate strategy, she turned him on. When she talked about growing her fancy seeds, she turned him on. When she ate her eggs and croissant, she made him want to tackle her and lower her to the ground and start peeling off her clothes.

He thought about her all morning. After breakfast he took his painting of the buck to a meadow that got a lot of sun and set up the easel. All the while he asked himself if he’d been off the antidepressants just long enough to get good and horny, or if this woman was just about the finest, rarest woman he’d come across in a very long time.

A small herd of deer—doe and fawns and one buck—wandered along the bottom of the foothills and he snapped a few shots with his zoom. Beautiful extended family out there, does nudging the fawns along, buck tall and standing guard. He wondered if he could paint something as detailed and expansive as a herd.

But then his thoughts returned again to Jillian—so pretty, so fresh, so sexy, so smart. He tried to think about other women—he’d run into a couple when visiting art galleries over in the coastal towns, good-looking women who had been happy to give him business cards. There were a couple of women back in Georgia who had kept in touch after his accident. There were even a couple of old girlfriends he could resurrect without much effort. He was far from rich but could easily afford a plane ticket so he could do some visiting if it was a simple matter of getting with a woman. Anything to somehow scratch this itch and put the confusion to rest.

But his brain and his body were completely tuned in to Jillian. She was a kooky little dish, that one, with her recliner and no furniture, her seed cups, getting excited over her golf cart. Then there was something about the way she could read him. I was forced out of my job, too. And now they shared confidences—his plane ticket and her job loss. He couldn’t remember ever doing that before. It was strangely alluring.

Colin wasn’t a religious man at all, but he had a powerful core faith that had strengthened since being pulled out of a Black Hawk wreck he shouldn’t have survived by fellow pilots who risked their own lives by landing and coming to his rescue. So he lectured God that it was a bad idea to put this quality female in his path because he was a little vulnerable and she seemed like a first-class woman who shouldn’t be hurt by an irresponsible wild man like him.

Wild man? That persona was now mostly in the past. He might still have the soul of a wild man, but at the moment he was just a man in need of a woman.

He was pulled out of his thoughts when he heard the sound of horse hooves and turned to see a man riding toward him. His Jeep was still on the road outside the fence, the hatch up in back, so he rested the palette and brush on the ground and waited.

As he got closer, Colin could see the man was Native American with a feather in his cowboy hat and a long braid down his back. Colin didn’t know much about horses but he knew a pretty one when he saw it. This one was incredible; chestnut in color, young and muscular. The man rode right up to him and stopped, not dismounting but stretching out his hand from his position in the saddle. “How you doing?” he said. “I’m Clay Tahoma.”

“Colin Riordan,” he said, shaking the hand. “Am I trespassing? I didn’t see any signs.”

“There should be signs posted on the fence, but it’s no problem for you to paint here—it’s things like target practice, off-season hunting and poaching we dislike. This is a back pasture—it belongs to Dr. Nate Jensen, the vet who owns Jensen Large Animal Clinic. It’s private property, but you’re welcome here as long as it’s unoccupied. It isn’t likely we’d ever leave a difficult horse this far away from the clinic. Just be careful, that’s all. Look around first. Mind the fence. A broken-down fence can be catastrophic for us.” Clay leaned down from his horse to peer at the painting—it was the four-point buck. “Awesome,” he said. “That’s probably not paint by number.”