Seduction of Saber (Saving the Sinners of Preacher's Bend #3) (5 page)

Two seconds of her life and she’d stunned grown men
into speechlessness. The eldest was the first to recover and hightail it into
the kitchen to get what she asked of him, while the younger picked up her hand
and brushed a tender, brazen kiss to her knuckles.

“You’re a diabetic, aren’t you?” His voice was filled
of deep concern, as a pair of silver-blue eyes drilled into hers for the horrid
truth.

Yes. She was, and it was all Gills’ fault.

Julia could barely nod her head to the man’s question.
Her handsome Sunday morning stranger had inadvertently stalled her insulin
shot, by being on the front porch—and she completely losing her mind at the
mere sight of absolute perfection once inside.

She’d forgotten for one gosh darn minute she had what
others called a disease. To her, it was an inconvenience, but controllable.

For now, she was looking at her diabetes as a
nuisance, more than anything. Then one thing led to another (that brain
lobotomy thing cropping up), and she’d forgotten a shot after her run. She was
a twenty-eight-year old woman…
and she’d forgotten her insulin shot? Again?
Over
a pair of quickly changing silver-blue eyes, tight fitted blue jeans, and one
very,
very
sexy smile?

Hell yes!
She
was human, after all. A lapse in normal brain activity would certainly explain
the female aspect of it…

“Do you need me to give it to you? Or, can you manage
the needle all by yourself?”

He’d do that for her? He would give her the shot of
insulin?

Jeez, Louise! Can I keep him?

“I—I think I can manage,” she struggled saying.

LeRoy returned with a small vial and a sterile
syringe. Both men waited while she did her best to try to sit upright and fill
the syringe with the needed dosage. Without testing her blood sugar level
first, she was going to have to wing it. However, by the reaction her body was
giving her, testing would only tell her what she already knew. She’d waited too
long.

The sweats, the dizziness, those had been the
familiar warning signs of low blood sugar levels. She knew better.

Sexy Man
must
have changed his mind about waiting and easily held her down with two gentle
fingers pressed against her shoulder, asking how much to draw into the syringe.
He then took the vial from her trembling fingers and offered his take on the
situation.

“This is going to hurt me far more than I suspect it
will hurt you, Little Darlin’.”

Ain’t that sweet of him to say.

The nausea rose quickly. Wave after wave hit
her like a ton of bricks.

This was, perhaps, the worst attack she’d had thus
far. Foolish women tend to suffer the most when so damn forgetful.

Barely able to control her tightening stomach, she
watched his hands draw up the needed dosage from the small vial.

“Well, Little Darlin? Where should it go?” He held the
medication in his right hand to look her over, head to toe. His left hand went
to her face and his fingers removed a wayward wisp of her hair, tucking the
tendrils behind her ear.

Julia wished she could crawl in a hole and die; lock
herself in a closet and never come out. Perhaps, never be born at all. However,
she was too sick to argue or crawl anywhere, or wish her birth never to be. She
didn’t hate being alive. Truly, she did not. She just hated being insulin
diabetic. Through no fault of her own, except for a simple hereditary defect of
the gene pool, she’d become one of many.

Besides, he was being very gracious about the whole
thing. Not many men in this world would’ve even considered such a generous
offering of giving the shot to her. Especially if they didn’t know the person
they were giving it too, nor aware of the first name, other than
Little
Darlin
’.

She tugged up the corner of her pink T-shirt, exposing
her midsection to his sight; unbeknownst the bottom of her purple lace bra, as
well. All the previous needle marks were there, right in front of his gaze. It
would’ve taken a cold angry man not to feel pity toward what she had to put
herself through on a daily basis.

She’d tried using the thigh approach, the upper arm.
However, the stomach area seemed to hurt the least.

“Ah, hell, Little Darlin’!” The simplest, purest form
of human compassion filled his silver-blue eyes. “Like I said, this is going to
hurt me very,
very
badly.”

Uncle LeRoy turned his head and groaned like a baby.
He then took the bottle of insulin back to the refrigerator before his nephew
had a chance to stick a needle directly into her stomach muscles.

Sexy Guy
moved down to his knees, stuck her quickly, and did what he had to do with no
questions asked.

When he bent his head and actually kissed the minor
wound he’d inflicted upon her tender flesh, her head and heart suddenly reeled.
She’d never had
that
happen before. Damn! Not after one of her insulin
shots.

She found voice quickly.

“I’m sorry. Thank You. You and LeRoy…Thank you. I
shouldn’t have let it get this far.”

She tugged her T-shirt back in place, hiding the signs
of her diabetes; hide the marks.

“No thanks are ever necessary, Little Darlin’. Just
comes with us Bull Men being really great guys.”

She nodded. “Yes. You are. Great, that is.”

“I should most likely be tellin’ you my name, now with
us kissin’ and all.” The man’s grin was more than openly contagious this time.
“I expect it not proper around these parts if I kept you unaware of my name and
already gained a kiss from these lips.”

He pointed to his mouth as his light teasing had Julia
forgetting all about her rather awful disease—if only for a moment.

Reading her mind, he handed her the glass of orange
juice, then helped her to sit upright to drink.

Julia took in as much as she could of the cool fluid.
She gave the glass back to him as she slumped back on the pillows of the sofa.

Both individually groaned at the same time. One, out
of pure necessity, the other for the pain of another he could do nothing about.
Sexy Guy
then picked up her right hand and felt for her pulse.

“It’s Saber,” he said.

Julia let the feel of his gentle caress sink into her
entire body. God! He had such soft hands. To match an incredibly wonderful man
would remain to be seen. Yet his single word reached her ears at a snail’s
pace, her confusion palpable.

“Saber?” she asked.

“My name. It’s Saber.”

Her gaze darted to his, Julia dragging her sight from
the very tormenting grip on her wrist.

“I have horrible parents,” he added—as if that would
explain a name like
Saber
.

Julia had always thought herself as having terrible
parents. “No. Mine are far worse,” she determined ruefully. Her slightly
overprotective father, especially.

“How so?”

The cowboy was delving into a private life that was
none of his business and for the briefest moment she didn’t care. “For
starters, they produced a very defective daughter.”

He drew his head back, dragging an insolent gaze over
her entire prone body, and inflected his thoughts out loud.

“Ain’t any actual defects that I can see Little Darlin’.
Two arms, two legs, two ears, two eyes. Don’t see a third arm anywhere.”

Julia smiled sweetly at his kind words. “It’s the really
big one that you can’t see that is the only problem here.”

“Controllable,” he announced bluntly.

His hands were now holding hers in a tight grip,
slipped from her wrists. The touch was quite unnerving; as if he dare let her
hands go she’d disappear into thin air.

“Just barely,” she muttered, slipping her fingers out
of his grasp; slowly. Diabetes was more of a nuisance than uncontrollable.

“I’m quite partial to uncontrollable women,” he said.

Julia’s vision slammed into his, catching the devilish
grin on his lips. He looked about as happy as a poor boy, standing in mud, with
a handful of freshly caught frogs.

“Are you always this way so early in the morning?”

“Not always. I’ve been savin’ up my best behavior,
Little Darlin’.” He moved forward to within inches of her, whispering, “I kind
of figured if I can get into your good graces before ten a.m., on a Sunday
mornin’ no less, you will only charge me half price for that single bed of
yours’.”

Julia’s eyes widened to his unscrupulous behavior.
“And how, exactly, do you plan on getting in my good graces by saying something
like
that
?”

Saber pulled back and chuckled. “Shoot my ass off the back
of a horse, woman! If stickin’ a needle into your sweet tempting flesh didn’t
do the trick, then I must be losin’ my touch. Perhaps I should’ve kissed you
here, instead?”

He leaned down quickly and before Julia could react he
gave her one of the best damn kisses she’d ever had. This time, right on her
lips; never mind that brotherly peck she’d received on her flat, needle-poked
stomach.

The second his touch melted into her, she forgot all
about her disease. However, unless dead, there was no way on Earth she’d ever
be able to forget the darting of his tongue; the complete searching for her
soul. Once it was over, she found that her hands had wound themselves around
his neck and it did seem she’d been guiding him closer. Surely, she wouldn’t
have put her hands there without permission?

Ever so slowly, Saber leaned back, removing her death
grip on his neck to wedge distance between their quickly overheating bodies. “Well,
shoot, Little Darlin’!” was all that came out of his mouth.

Ain’t that the truth!
Julia’s head screamed.

“Guess I should’ve asked you your name first before
springing a kiss like that on you.”

She licked her lips and smiled. “It’s Julia. My name
is Julia. Julia Hillard.”

“Julia?” He raised his brow.

She nodded.

“It sure as the devil beats having the name Saber.”

Very quickly, the man’s name rang a bell in her head.
In fact, many bells rang, and all of them quite loud.

Saber? Oh, Sweet Jesus!
Not
the highly
talked about Texan
Eight Second Wonder
, bull rider extraordinaire Saber
Patterson?

The quick mention of his calling himself a bull man
filtered into her fuddled brain. The newspapers mentioned something about
Eight
Seconds
Patterson coming to Preacher’s Bend. He was one of four hundred
hungry, lust-filled, libido-driven, male testosterone-induced rodeo men parked
in permanent overdrive her father should be terribly worried about. He was
early! And…he wanted to stay here, in her great-grandmother’s boarding house, for
the whole week?

Crap
!

“By the strange look on your face, I’d say about a
two-hundred and fifty-watt light bulb just turned on.”

“Sort of,” she sheepishly said, glancing at the shirt
on his chest. She read it over again, just to make certain her eyesight wasn’t
failing her, as well as her hearing.

Saber leaned farther away. His sigh sounded heavy. “Damn,
Little Darlin’. I guess my reputation preceded itself. I was hoping I could
sneak into town without anyone noticin’.”

Julia’s grin was huge. “That would be a little
difficult, if not altogether impossible, with a guy like you.”

**

Saber looked down at what he’d unwittingly thrown onto
his back, only because it was the cleanest shirt of the lot and he’d not the
time to do laundry. The shirt was purely for promotional tactics, nothing more.

He’d come to Preacher’s Bend earlier than all the rest
just to get a real lay of the land; a feel for the place and the people within it.
If he could find out what they expected of him, what they desired as full entertainment
value from him—from all the riders—eventually their little traveling rodeo
would turn into a better success than it was. Men on this particular circuit
lived out their entire existence to ride bulls and broncos, and be paid for it.
Most of the guys wanted this as their only career; little boys who grew into mature
adults while seated on the back of a one-ton raging bull, having started out on
fair circuits riding mangy, smelly sheep.

If Saber could’ve skipped wearing the promotional T-shirt,
he would have. Yet he highly doubted Ms. Hillard would’ve been able to control
her blood pressure if he’d chosen to take the shirt off. Her insulin was dragging
its feet, taking its sweet old time in doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

She’d not even noticed his strong hand circling her
wrist again. Nor his thumb placed on the base of her pulse point. Ms. Hillard’s
head was still stuck on the kiss he’d given her and that’s why he’d done it. The
only
reason he’d kissed her—tongue diving and all.

Diabetes could strike anyone, at any time; some at
birth, some during their golden years. Why it came to this woman at such a
young age, his mind wondered about, but out of propriety he wasn’t going to ask.
It wasn’t his place to know. She didn’t seem the type to sit around, watching
television, while shoveling her face with fats and sugar. The obvious answer
would be genetics when the patient thin and in relatively good health.

He unwisely ignored what it was his brain was trying
hard to tell him
not
to do—let it be, not pry into a life he had no
right to pry into. He might be one of the best
Bull Men
around, but he was
also a doctor.