of reindeer and green balloons {m}

He chuckled at her retort, his mirth rumbling deep in his chest and his tail waving affably behind him. He liked her quick wit and her sharp tongue; there was something alluring about a feisty, fiery woman who could hold her own among a bunch of obnoxious, classless males. An electric sort of energy hummed through her, almost seeming to vibrate out to the very ends of her whiskers. Atticus felt it too; his heart fluttered, fickle and birdlike, within the cage of his chest and his insides quivered and shook. He felt both cold and hot, terrified and fearless, as though he could rise up and, spartanlike, wrestle the very universe to the ground at his feet if only he could crawl out from under the rock under which he hid.

This beast, this hurricane, this force of nature that was Hawkeye…he stood before her and he was nothing. He was a leaf in the wind, a tattered flag in a gale. He could not possibly hope to rise up and meet her, for she was so much more magnificent than he'd ever be.

And that made him want her all the more, like the cowboy lusts after the wild, fire-eyed mustang. He knows he cannot tame it, yet that knowledge only makes him covet it all the more.

"Trouble," he replied, his dark baritone voice almost a purr, relishing the word as he spoke it. "Is what we do best, I am sure you know. But I have spent much time considering how best I might serve you, my lady." He realized, belatedly, that he could have made a great pun with that.

The knowledge that his brother courted this woman lingered in the back of his mind like a dark cloud, a shadowy specter he tried to ignore. Courting did not mean mated. Not yet.