West Texas Nights

by Sherryl Woods

“Are you sure you want me to?”

  “I suppose that depends on how dangerously you like to live.” His gaze settled on her mouth, lingered, then rose to meet her eyes. “Or how involved you are with the drummer.”

  “I told you, Paul and I are friends.”

  “Good,” he said succinctly. “That leaves us with deciding how much of a risk-taker you are.”

  “Risk-taker?” she echoed. She was cool, calm, dependable Val. She never took risks unless they were carefully calculated.

  He nodded and lowered his head until his lips were almost touching hers. She held her breath and waited, almost certain she would die if he didn’t close that infinitesimal gap Instead, he pulled back and grinned.

  “Like I said, Val, it’s time to decide just how dangerously you want to live.”

  She had a feeling he was toying with her, pushing her to admit that she had deliberately tried to make him jealous by flirting outrageously with Paul right in front of him. For all she knew, he’d asked Laurie, or even Paul, if there was really anything for him to be jealous about.

  Impulsively, she reached up and threaded her fingers through his hair. “Paul who?”

  She kissed Slade until she felt him tremble, then pulled away, forcing her expression into a deliberately nonchalant mask. “Still up for this, cowboy?”

  As it turned out, Slade was very much up for it...and then some.

  Nine

  Carrying Val off to his bedroom struck Slade as being both the smartest and the dumbest thing he’d ever considered. She was the kind of woman any man would count himself lucky to have in his bed. He knew there was a sizzling passion between them just waiting to explode. He sensed she would be every bit as generous in bed as she was in other ways.

  At the same time, he also knew that he wouldn’t walk away from the experience unscathed. He’d already become addicted to setting off those sparks in her eyes, to seeing her mouth curve into a slow smile. What would happen when he’d experienced the most intimate caresses? When her body had welcomed him?

  Worse, he was taking advantage of her, taking what she offered without being willing to offer her anything in return except what they shared in bed. He was setting himself up for guilt and her up for heartache.

  Knowing that, he actually managed to get himself to halt at the door to his room.

  “You can call it quits now,” he said, his voice husky. “No harm, no foul.”

  “Not a chance, cowboy.”

  The sparkle of anticipation in her eyes was as bright as a star. Gazing into her eyes, he knew there wasn’t a chance in hell he could turn back now. He wanted it all, needed her in ways he’d sworn never to need a woman again. Sex was one thing. This was something else entirely, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise.

  It was barely dusk outside and the room was in shadows. Slade wanted it that way. As desperately as he wanted to see every inch of Val, he was just as desperate to keep her from getting a good look at the scars from the accident. His leg wasn’t a pretty picture. Suzanne had made it clear more than once that the crisscrossing of stitches disgusted her. He had to assume that most women would feel the same.

  As Val’s fingers lightly touched his cheek, his attention snapped back to the here and now, back to a touch so tender it set off longing right along with fireworks. He pushed all thoughts of his ex-wife from his head and concentrated on the woman who could make him weak-kneed with a glance.

  He settled her on the edge of the bed, then sat next to her. When she reached for the buttons on his shirt, he stilled her hand. “Slowly, darlin’. We have all the time in the world.”

  She gave him a faint smile. “I keep thinking you’ll change your mind. You have before. And dinner is on the table.”

  “Dinner can wait.”

  “It’ll be ruined,” she lamented.

  “It can be heated up again. You seem to forget that I was used to ruined before you came along.”

  She touched a hand to his cheek once more. “So this is it then? You’re not going to back out?”

  “Not this time,” he assured her. “Remember something. We’ve never gotten to this point before, and for good reason. I knew once we did, I’d never be able to stop.” He smiled slowly. “Now let’s get back to where we were before I brought you in here.”

  “You mean this?” Val asked, touching his lips with her own in a kiss so light he might have only imagined it.

  “More like this,” he said, taking her mouth with a hungry urgency that had them both quivering with need.

  This time he was the one reaching for buttons, fumbling with them until her blouse was stripped away. Her bra—no more than a tantalizing scrap of lace—followed. His breath caught in his throat at the sight of her.

  “You are...” Words failed him, as they often did when he was struck by her beauty.

  “So are you,” she teased, working her hands under his shirt and skimming nails over his chest, and then lower, until he had to swallow hard and slow their progress.

  “Magnificent,” she whispered, supplying the word that had eluded him.

  He captured her attention with kisses that ventured from lips to neck to breasts and then, as he skimmed her slacks down, to far more intimate places. She gasped and writhed at his increasingly clever caresses.

  “Not yet,” she pleaded, when he clearly had her at the edge. “I...want...you...with...me.” The words came out as a choked cry of need.

  With the room in darkness now, Slade didn’t hesitate. “I will be, darlin’,” he promised, shucking his jeans and entering her just as she reached the peak and tumbled over.

  She was still trembling in the aftermath of that first sweet climax, when he began to move inside her. He saw her eyes widen, then darken with pleasure as he rode her to the top again. He held back, counted to a hundred, blanked out everything in an effort to make the moment when they both shattered together even sweeter.

  His body ached with the effort, but it was the kind of torment that men prayed for.

  “Oh, Slade, don’t,” she begged, only to change her mind when he slowed. “No, please, more.”

  He lifted her hips off the bed and drove into her, one last, deep plunge that ripped a moan from low in her throat and had him screaming out her name as skyrockets went off inside him.

  It was a long time before he could catch his breath, longer still before he could think of what to say.

  “Sweet heaven, I think you’ve destroyed me,” he murmured, pressing a kiss to her brow, then collapsing back against the pillows.

  She gave him a smile of purely feminine satisfaction. “Is that so?”

  “You seem pleased about it.”

  “If it means you won’t soon forget about me, I am.”

  “Darlin’, I couldn’t forget about you if I tried. I know that from experience,” he said ruefully. If it had been difficult before, it was going to be downright impossible now that he knew the wonder of being with her like this.

  Maybe he didn’t have to forget about her. Maybe there was an answer that would work for both of them. As Val lay curled contentedly against him, he began to toy with a notion that he had dismissed on more than one occasion before tonight.

  Tonight had changed things. There was no going back. Maybe his solution would take them forward. Now all he had to do was work up the courage to bring it up and hope for the right words to explain it.

  In the meantime, he was stunned to discover that he wanted her again, that once hadn’t been nearly enough. He reached for her, only to have her slip beyond his touch and flip on the light.

  “No,” he said harshly, shoving past her to turn it off again.

  She stilled as if he’d slapped her. “Slade?” Her voice was filled with questions. There was no mistaking the fact that his reaction had hurt her.

  “Sorry. There’s no need
for light.”

  “Why? What are you afraid of?”

  “Who says I’m afraid?”

  “You must be. I know you like looking at me. I could see it in your eyes before. Why won’t you let me see you?”

  He lay back against the pillow, silently cursing her quick mind and his own scars.

  “I’m not going to let it rest until you tell me, so you might as well stop stalling,” she said, as briskly as she might have handled some business associate who wasn’t fulfilling a promise.

  Slade drew in a deep breath. Better to admit the truth and gauge her reaction, especially if he intended to go through with his impulsive plan. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life hiding in the dark, not around a woman like Val. She’d never allow it.

  “There are scars,” he said finally.

  “From the accident?”

  He nodded, then realized she couldn’t see. “Yes,” he said more curtly than he’d intended.

  “You never talk about what happened.”

  “Why talk about it? It’s over with.”

  “Tell me anyway. Annie says it was your wife’s fault and that it robbed you of your career.”

  His daughter’s insight stunned him. “She knows all that?”

  “She says that’s why you don’t like her much, because she reminds you of her mother.”

  He muttered a harsh expletive. “I had no idea she thought that.”

  “Is it true? Does she remind you of her mother?”

  “She looks like her, that’s true enough, but that’s where it ends. Annie’s always been my treasure. From the first moment I laid eyes on her, I was in awe that I could have created something so beautiful.” He sighed. “I guess somewhere in the past year or so, I stopped reminding her of that.”

  “She needs to hear it,” Val said gently.

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  When he fell silent and stayed that way, Val prompted, “You were going to tell me about the accident.”

  He smiled ruefully in the darkness. “Was I now?”

  “Oh, yes,” she insisted.

  “I was back in Wilder’s Glen to see Suzanne and Annie. Suzanne hated it there. It was too small-town for her. She missed being on the road with me, but Annie needed to be settled. She needed to be in school. I didn’t know it at the time, but Suzanne took every opportunity to dump Annie with my parents so she could go chasing around, having the same kind of fun she assumed I was having on the road and denying her.”

  He expected some reaction, but Val remained absolutely silent. Instead, she simply reached for his hand and linked her fingers with his. Oddly, the gesture brought him a measure of peace he rarely felt when he thought back to that tumultuous time.

  “Suzanne wanted to go out,” he said, recalling the argument they’d had about it. “I’d barely walked in the door. I wanted to stay at home, spend some time with my daughter and my wife in private. Still, I could see her point. I thought she’d been trapped at home while I was away, and deserved a break from it. We went out for dinner, even danced a little, though I was aching from the last rodeo.”

  He grimaced at the understatement. He’d grown used to aches and pains over the years, but it had been worse that night. He’d lost his concentration in the ring and been tossed off the back of a bull. It had been a miracle he hadn’t been trampled.

  “We finally left the bar after midnight. I was so exhausted, Suzanne volunteered to drive. She wasn’t drunk. Hadn’t even had a beer, for that matter. On the way home, she started in on me again about being left behind all the time, about being stuck in Wilder’s Glen where my parents could watch her every move. We argued.”

  He could still hear her voice echoing in his head. “It was the same old thing, a fight we’d had a million times before, but she was driving too fast, paying too little attention to the road. There was a sharp curve and she missed it. We slammed head-on into a tree.”

  Val gasped softly.

  Slade kept his voice dispassionate, even though he could still hear the grinding of the metal, feel the searing pain. “The damage was mostly on the passenger side. My leg was crushed. For a while the doctors thought I’d lose it, but I fought them every step of the way. Eventually it healed, just not well enough for me to go back to the rodeo. Being married to a rodeo star had been enough for Suzanne, enough to compensate for being left behind to raise our daughter. Without that, with me scarred, she saw no reason to stay. As soon as the verdict was in on my future, she took off. She filed for divorce a week later. She didn’t even fight me for custody of Annie. She seemed almost glad to be rid of her.”

  “What a horrible person,” Val said indignantly. “I thought for better or for worse was supposed to mean something.”

  She moved swiftly, too swiftly for him to stop her. Before he could guess her intentions, her hand was on his damaged leg.

  “No,” he said curtly, trying to grab her hand.

  She shook him off, then began to trace his scars with a touch so gentle it took his breath away. His injuries had healed long ago, but not his soul. Val’s touch did that. When her lips brushed over each and every ridge of scar tissue, the protective shield around his heart shattered.

  He knew in that instant that his earlier decision had been a sound one. She was the one woman in the world with whom he could build a future.

  * * *

  “That was a long time coming,” Slade noted when they finally got around to dinner sometime in the middle of the night. Even reheated, the food was a whole lot better than anything he’d ever fixed.

  “Are you referring to our meal?” Val inquired.

  He held back the desire to grin at her testy tone. “You know I’m not.”

  She put down her fork and met his gaze evenly. “What now, Slade? Are we going to talk about what’s next?”

  Leave it to Val to be direct. He decided to see what she was thinking before laying out his own ideas. “You tell me. You seem to be the planner in the room.” He watched her struggle with that for a minute, but Val wasn’t easily caught off guard.

  “I say we give it six months and see how it goes,” she said briskly. “That ought to tell us if this is some sort of a fluke.”

  The response irked him. He’d mentally moved way past a trial run. “Oh, really?” he said irritably. “Six months? And how do we explain our relationship to my daughter during that time? Or do we sneak around the way her mama did? That would certainly keep the excitement alive.”

  “I was under the impression that you didn’t bother to explain much to Annie,” Val said, matching his sarcasm.

  He put a hand to his chest. “Wham! A direct hit.”

  She winced guiltily, then sighed. “Okay, I was being glib. And unfair. You’re right that Annie is at an impressionable age. We can’t carry on right under her nose and get her hopes up. Any suggestions?”

  This was it, Slade thought. The opening he’d been waiting for. He’d made his decision. It was time to put all his cards on the table.

  “She adores you. You and I get along okay.” He watched her expression closely, then added, “Why not just go for broke and get married?”

  Val looked momentarily taken aback, but she recovered quickly. There was very strong evidence from the clatter of her silverware hitting her plate that the fire in her eyes was not sparked by passion.

  “Now there’s a proposal that will make a girl’s heart go pitter-pat,” she said with cool disdain.

  Slade promptly took offense. He’d asked her to marry him, hadn’t he? “If you were expecting hearts and flowers, you picked the wrong guy. I don’t believe in romance or love or happily ever after. I thought you knew that.”

  “Then what are we talking about here?” she demanded with rising indignation. “A mother for Annie? You’ll make the ultimate sacrifice to see to it she has a real home?”

 
He squirmed uncomfortably. “More or less.”

  “And now that you’ve tested the sex and discovered it’s terrific, that’s just a bonus for you?”

  This wasn’t going well. He didn’t have to be hit upside the head with an iron skillet to get that. The idea had popped into his mind weeks ago, sometime between the instant he’d first caught a whiff of her apple pie and the time all-too-recently when he’d lost himself inside her. The latter probably hadn’t been the best time to reach any life-altering decisions.

  “Maybe we should think about it some more,” he suggested.

  Val stood up and tossed her napkin in his face. “No need for that, cowboy. I’ll marry you when hell freezes over.”

  Naturally, the second she flounced out the door, Slade realized that he’d actually done the one thing he’d never expected. He’d gone and fallen in love with the woman.

  Watching her walk out on him left him with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “Well, that went well,” he muttered. If it had gone any better, she’d probably be quitting her job and moving back to Nashville first thing in the morning.

  * * *

  “I think I’ll take that vacation you suggested,” Val said to Laurie in the morning. On the walk back from Slade’s, she’d cursed a blue streak in the night air, then reached a decision. It was time to get away from temptation.

  Her friend’s gaze shot up. “Vacation? Why? I thought things were going better with Slade.”

  “Not so that you’d notice,” she said, reluctant to admit just how far things had gone the night before, and even more reluctant to explain how they’d ended.

  Laurie studied her intently and seemed to come to her own conclusions. “Well, you can’t leave now,” she said emphatically. “The recording sessions start in less than a month. We have to start kicking things into high gear. I need you.”

  “I can do the work in Nashville, then. It’ll be even better. Nick and I can be in closer contact.”

  “You’re my assistant, not Nick’s,” Laurie said firmly. “And I need you here.” Her gaze narrowed. “As your friend, though, I’m asking if that’s going to be a problem.”