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glitter of promise in his eyes. “Don’t push me, Teddy,” he warned. “You wouldn’t like the results. I meant what I said about shipping your little butt out of here.”
    Sweetly, she said, “My
pretty
little butt, remember?”
    For a moment, just an instant, she thoughtthat would get a laugh out of him. But then he was gone.
    Teddy leaned back against the wall and hugged her raised knees, frowning. She didn’t think much about her motives, partly because things looked confused in that direction and partly because she knew understanding wouldn’t change anything.
    Firstly, it didn’t matter that she knew next to nothing about him or about what he was doing here. She had always relied on her instincts—they had never yet failed her—and her instincts told her now that Zach was a man she could trust.
    Secondly, Teddy was damned if she’d allow the first man who had ignited her senses to reject her.
    She let the question of motive stop right there.
    What remained, logically, was the question of what she could do about the problem. Obviously, she first had to find out why Zach wasso rabid on the subject of virgins. And she’d have to walk a fine line to keep from interfering with whatever he was doing here so that he wouldn’t send her away.
    So. She had a few days, possibly a week or more, in which to convince a tremendously strong, taciturn man of stubborn disposition, uncertain temper, and powerful desires—who might or might not be doing something on the shady side of legal—that her virtuous state held no dangers at all for him.
    And to aid her cause were the simple facts that he was more or less stuck here, more or less stuck with her, had already admitted in word and deed that he wanted her, and was obviously a highly sexed man who was unaccustomed to living a celibate life.
    Teddy caught herself giggling, and she wondered what her mother would have said if she’d been aware of her daughter’s methodical summation of the problem.
    “Go for it, Teddy.”
    Yes, she decided, that’s what her mother would have said. Their names had changed through marriage over the generations, but Teddy could indeed trace her bloodline back through a long line of women who had been thrifty in almost every way. They tended to love only one man whom they always married—she had no idea about lovers—to produce one child, invariably a girl; to live in one house from marriage until burial; to possess at least one slightly unusual trait or talent—Teddy’s was an instinctive communication with animals—to use their hormones for things other than growing tall—not one had been taller than five-foot-three; to be red-haired, left-handed, myopic, resistant to most illnesses, and always stronger than they looked. Her mother had broken this pattern in only one respect: With great effort she had managed to produce a second daughter.
    The genes handed down all these years from a long-ago and highly improbable mating of a highland Scot and a fiery-eyed Gypsy girl hadremained dominant regardless of the fact that two Englishmen, a Spaniard, an Italian, two Cherokee Indians, a cowboy from Montana, an industrialist from California, a politician from New Hampshire, and half a dozen other hopefuls had all thrown their very best into the genetic pool.
    Teddy’s father—the industrialist from California—had insisted that he’d tried his best but hadn’t managed to bequeath to his daughters his height, his excellent vision, his right-handedness, or his inborn ability to make a decent pot of coffee. And since Teddy was their first offspring, gleefully produced after ten years of trying, and since logically, her parents had expected her to be their solitary one, her father, in a rare burst of loquaciousness, had bequeathed to her instead a grand name which by rights should have been divided between at least three girls. (Jennifer was Jennifer Leigh, so it seemed her father had gotten it partially out of his system with Teddy and was