by Ann Major
The birds cooed, but Joanne wasn’t thinking about her darling birds. She was trying not to be too obvious as she watched the rough-cut man who stood outside the aviary on the concrete apron—smoking.
She certainly hated cigarettes, but when he’d asked if he could smoke, she’d said okay, as long as he stayed outside.
She didn’t understand her interest in him. A short time ago, she’d loathed him for writing that article. Then he’d left the hospital against doctors’ orders and had gone to Mexico where he’d talked to some mysterious connection of his on Mia’s behalf, and her feelings had changed.
He was brilliant—a genius. But reckless. Thoughtless, too. So thoughtless and self-absorbed.
All this she knew. She loved order and tidiness, and he dressed sloppily, almost like a homeless person. Still, she sort of liked the way his shirt and slacks and silver hair were rumpled. His body was still lean and hard, and the world-weary cynicism in his faded blue eyes intrigued her.
He had suffered as she had, and it showed. She wanted to know why and how. There were lines of bitterness beneath his eyes and beside his mouth. She knew what it was to arrive at a certain age and to be thoroughly disillusioned and brokenhearted by life.
He flipped his burning cigarette onto the ground.
God, did he have to do that? She grimaced when he squashed the butt out with the heel of a worn shoe that badly needed polishing. Nasty habit, she thought, smoking. And yet sometimes there were so few consolations in life.
Who did he think would pick that butt up? He didn’t look rich enough to have servants. Obviously the thought of ever tidying anything never occurred to him.
He was not her type. He’d arrogantly put her child in danger without the slightest regard for that fact. He was a writer, a writer she’d admired. But he was conceited about his writing. He thought it was more important than people’s lives. As a writer he would be forced to spend his life indoors with books and papers, and she was an outdoors person.
So, why had he fascinated her from the moment he’d stepped inside the library? When she’d been so determined to dislike him?
He was brave. Morales had tortured him, had nearly killed him. Even injured with hits out against his life, he’d gone back to Mexico and struck that deal to save Mia.
All day she’d felt his burning blue eyes watching her as intensely as Jack’s used to. Nobody had looked at her in such a way in years. This untidy, indoor man—an intellectual, an arrogant man she could have gladly strangled a few days ago, made her feel excited, and rawly alive…and young.
It was as if during all the long, dull years of her impossible marriage, she’d been waiting for something like this to happen.
So what was she going to do about it?
Nothing. Except talk to him.
For once in her life she was going to be smart when it came to men. The wind stirred through the trees outside the aviary, and still he didn’t come inside. She wondered if he was as nervous as she was. Wing Nut was barking somewhere among the trees a long way off, no doubt chasing a squirrel or a rabbit.
Mia was still gone, maybe lost forever—again. She felt the loss keenly. She should be at the house, waiting for a call. But sometimes it seemed, all she’d ever done was wait.
How could she, at her age, be here with such a man?
Simon would laugh, gloat even, if he knew about this little “incident,” which he wouldn’t. Not ever. Simon was her hairdresser in Corpus Christi, who’d masterminded her new look. He’d talked her into reddening her hair. He’d given her a new haircut and dyed her lashes and recommended the surgeon, who’d given her her recent minilift.
When Terence opened the door, forty of her white darlings, mad with panic, fluttered to the rafters while her own heart beat madly.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “You’ve got a lot of birds.”
“Too many some would say.”
He smiled at her.
“I started with a pair.”
“Sex is the most powerful force in our world.”
The air between them sparked hotter.
Caught off balance, she pretended a calmness she was far from feeling. “Every time I order a new addition to the aviary, Kinky and Sy’rai joke about overpopulation.”
“I’ll bet they love your birds, too. Who wouldn’t?”
“Then you like them?” Why did she care?
Joanne’s pulse raced even faster as Terence stepped closer to her. When he didn’t say yes or no, when he simply kept looking at her as if she were all that mattered to him, she wrung her hands nervously.
She caught the scent of tobacco and found it oddly pleasant on him. Her father had smoked.
“What’s it like, being a reporter?” she finally managed before their silence grew really awkward.
“Like a drug addiction. I write about what I care about. I don’t make much money. Making money is the thing my family does best, so they think I’m a failure. I find myself fighting losing battles. It’s difficult, too…because you sway opinion by what you say or don’t say. Then sometimes it’s difficult because you write about things that can hurt people. Like my story about your daughter. I scared the hell out of you. You’re still scared, and I have to live with that. I’m sorry. If anything happens—”
She held up her hand. “If you hadn’t written it, she’d still be with Morales.”
His blue eyes flashed. “Hold that thought while you endure the hell of waiting.” He swallowed a long breath. “Mostly I’ve been a champion of lost causes. It cost me my wife, and one of my daughters.”
“So you lost a daughter?”
“Kidnapped in Mexico.”
“Because of something you wrote?”
“Maybe. But maybe because my family is so rich.”
“And still you keep on being a reporter?”
“I’m not the type to learn from my mistakes.”
Neither was she, apparently, or she wouldn’t be here right now with him.
“Or maybe you believe in what you do.” She looked away, through the screen walls at the new barn. “I lost that in my own life a long time ago.”
“How?”
“The man I loved died. I married his brother. I settled, you see. And I paid for it. And so did Caesar. So did our children. We lived a lie.”
“Don’t most parents try to keep their secrets?”
“Then it all came out when Caesar made such a fool of himself over Cherry.”
“Ah, the stripper. That must have been hell for you.”
“It’s over now.”
“When we’re young we think we can have it all, but we always pay for our sins, don’t we?” he said.
“And then some.”
When he reached for her, she wasn’t surprised. His hands were smoother than Caesar’s and Jack’s, and oddly she liked that.
She should have moved away. Yet, somehow she couldn’t.
What surprised her was the explosive tumult his kiss caused inside her. The moment his lips touched hers, she was a stranger to herself. She forgot that her duties lay with the family and the ranch. She forgot Mia entirely, and her long-starved body made its own demands. Her mouth clung to his. She opened her lips, wanting to taste him despite the cigarettes.
He was the car wreck that alters ordinary life in a single blinding heartbeat, the telephone call in the middle of the night that destroys a world.
When he’d asked if he could join her, she should have screamed no and fled. He was flagrant temptation, and she was an utter fool.
But she didn’t care. One taste of him, and it was too late. She’d come alive in his arms. She could no more have resisted him than a moth can the flame. She had been bored, crushingly bored with the sameness of her existence for far too long. And too tense from worrying so long about Mia.
She was tired of waking in the dead of night and lying in her bed until dawn, her heart filled with despair, knowing that she was getting older and feeling lonelier. No, it was much better to make love in the su
nshine with her birds cooing in her aviary.
The taste of cigarettes was not as repulsive as she would have imagined. The roughness of his unshaved chin was somehow erotic. The touch of his hands, which were surprisingly big and flexible and powerful as they gripped her or caressed her, aroused and compelled her. When he ripped pins from her hair so that it cascaded about her face and shoulders, her blood began to hum.
She knew she shouldn’t let him pull her skirt up and her panties down in the aviary, that the phone might ring, and that Cole or Lizzy might come. But for the life of her, she couldn’t stop him. Were those her fingers on his zipper?
When he cupped her butt in his hands and opened her legs so he could fit himself to her, she stood perfectly still.
On some level the thinking Joanne Kemble couldn’t be letting this rough, rude man she didn’t even know, a man who’d played God with her child’s life, screw her in her own aviary where anybody could walk up and see them. But she wanted this—him—too badly.
When he plunged inside her, she knew an insane, reckless joy. She was a kid on a circus ride, thrilled beyond belief.
“How very strange this is,” he muttered in a voice that was thick with passion as he drove into her.
“Yes. Yes!”
When he finished a few moments later, he stayed inside her and kissed her feverish brow. For a full five minutes he held her before he pulled her panties up and her dress down. “I’m going now.”
“Slam bam,” she teased.
He didn’t laugh. “Anyone could come and find you. Then you’d really hate me.”
“I don’t know about that.”
He cast a warm glance at her upturned face. “This isn’t over, for me, either, you know.”
His blue eyes seemed to stare straight through her. Caesar had ignored her. With this stranger she felt connected and alive.
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” she confessed, savoring the way the balmy air caressed her face.
“I know. This is new for me, too.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Your choice.”
“Nobody can know about this,” she said.
“All right. You know I think I’d promise you anything.” He kissed her again. “I won’t tell anybody you’re so wicked and wild.” Then he opened the door and was gone.
She leaned back against the wall and began to struggle with her hair. Somehow she had to get back to the house without anybody seeing her.
For another long moment she stayed. She closed her eyes and listened to her birds coo.
Thirteen
A new, red sun burned away the desert haze and glinted off Shanghai’s black hair as he cooked their breakfast. Mia stared at him in anguish, her need for one kind word or one tender glance tearing at her.
Why couldn’t he smile? Just a little smile? What would that cost him? Instead his dark, unshaven jaw was set in a stubborn line, and his hard face was as stern as death.
What had she done that was so wrong? Other than love him?
Why had he come to Mexico and saved her? Why had he been so passionate and tender? Had the sex merely been a wild, lustful act for him?
If only she’d been that lucky.
When he’d stalked out angrily into the dark, she’d lain down on the bed and hugged herself tightly. The familiar nocturnal sounds of cicadas singing and coyotes yelping had terrified her. The blackness had closed in upon her until she’d felt she was suffocating. And still he hadn’t come back. Lying there for what had seemed like hours, she’d never felt more lonely or abandoned.
What had she done to deserve such treatment other than love him?
Only when she’d heard his footsteps on the stairs had she closed her eyes. When he’d come inside, he’d stared at her for such a long time. Why?
His lips against her brow had been sweet and tender, soothing her worst fears. Maybe he didn’t hate her after all. Only now after that kiss, she was more uncertain than ever.
What was going on with him? Did he even know? As she stared at him, the silence between them grew excruciating.
When he kept staring stubbornly into the pot of beans, she finally had had enough. Why did he always get to control everything between them?
“S-so—where did you go that awful, rainy night when my daddy ran you off fifteen years ago?”
For a second or two he looked startled, like a wild animal caught without cover. Then he turned away and kept stirring the beans.
“I said where—”
“Lots of places,” he muttered off-handedly. “What difference does it make to you?”
“I guess you don’t know an answer like that is the same as saying nothing.”
“I guess I do. Maybe I prefer silence.” He pierced her with a look.
“Why? Do you have to be so rude to me?”
He sucked in a breath. “You don’t quit, do you, darlin’?”
“That used to be the thing you liked about me the most.”
“Things have changed.” He subjected her to a thorough, intimate appraisal. When she felt his insulting gaze on her breasts, her nipples peaked against the thin fabric of her blouse.
He frowned and turned back to the beans.
“So, back then what was…your favorite thing about me?”
Again he let his dark glance drift from her face, down her body, lingering on her breasts too long. When his gaze returned to her mouth, she bit her lip. Quickly he yanked his eyes away again.
“You were nice to me,” he muttered. “You were a sweet kid.”
“And now that I’m all grown up—”
“The beans are bubbling,” he said.
What was he really thinking? Did he want her again? Did he hate her for that? Himself? For months in Mexico she hadn’t wanted to be touched. Now she craved to have Shanghai’s arms around her. She wanted his kindness again, but if all he would give her was sex, she’d probably settle. But that wasn’t new. That was her curse.
He poured her some beans. Then he slammed the spoon down in the tin bowl, which he handed to her.
“That looks good,” she said. “Thanks for letting me sleep until I woke up…and for building the fire and for cooking and for everything.”
“You’ve got nothing to thank me for. But since you’re so dead set on pestering me with conversation, darlin’—When I left Spur County, I wanted to ranch, of course.”
So now, to avoid her more intimate question about his feelings for her, he would deign to answer her first question.
“But the pay was too low for even a hand like me to live on. If there hadn’t been room and board, I would have starved. I couldn’t save a dime. I felt like I was nothin’ workin’ like that, livin’ day-to-day. I felt even worse than I had back at Black Oaks working our land with Cole and Daddy. But you wouldn’t know how it feels to know you’re nothin’, being a rich Kemble, now would you?”
It was on the tip of her tongue to lash back that that was how she’d felt the whole time she’d been powerless in Tavio’s compound.
“It sounds miserable,” she whispered, her low voice compassionate.
“You Kembles always strutted around like you thought you were better than everybody else, like no matter what we did, we couldn’t measure up.”
“No, that’s not how…That’s not how I ever felt. You have to know that.”
He looked at her again, his stare intense and searching. “Well, one day I collected my pay and hitched a ride to the nearest rodeo, which was in Abilene, Texas. I paid the entry fees, and to my surprise I won more than my investment, so to speak. So, that’s how I got my start rodeoing. After that, I never looked back.”
She winced. She’d thought about him all the time. “What about Cole?”
“I was too wrapped up in surviving to think much about anything else. I pretty much focused on riding well and staying alive.”
“You get hurt much?”
“Sooner or later everybody who rides bulls gets hurt, da
rlin’. At first you think you’re invincible.”
“Did you break bones?”
“A few. I’ve got an injured arm right now. I mainly just ignore it. What hurt worse was burying one of my best friends.”
“What was his name?”
“Hank. He was twenty-six and the best damn bull rider that ever lived.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a few years ago.” He paused. “Five to be exact. Since then I’ve seen a lot of country. I used to tell myself I kept ridin’ for him. Did you know they have dizzying, razor-walled canyons in Utah?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been to Utah.”
“It’s beautiful. The plateaus of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico are mystical. You feel taller, and your shadow’s longer. You think the world is endless. The Painted Desert in Arizona is really somethin’ to see, too.”
“What was your favorite place of all?”
His mouth thinned. “I’m not much of a tourist. I don’t guess I think like that.”
“So—you were all het up to sue Daddy the night you left. You forget all about that?”
He glowered at her, and she almost wished she hadn’t asked that question.
“You goin’ to badger me all mornin’?” he snapped. “Or are you going to eat? Your beans are getting cold.” He grabbed a bowl for himself and spooned himself some.
“About the lawsuit…”
“Okay. I’ll admit I festered a while. For quite a while. I even reassembled some of the old documents. But then rodeoing kind of took me over. You can’t ride bulls or broncs and be halfhearted about it. Otherwise you can’t make a living. You work out and train all the time to stay in shape. When you’re not doing that, you’re on the road, driving nights or sleeping in back seats while your buddies drive. Some years I traveled one hundred thousand miles and rode in more than one hundred rodeos. That’s lots of lonely highways, truck stops, dried-out burritos and crummy motels, when you’re flush—pickup beds when you’re broke. In the beginning it was mostly pickup beds.”
Guilt washed over her that it was her father who’d driven him away from his home.
He must have read her feelings because he smiled sheepishly, and said. “Aw, hell. Don’t feel sorry for me. Your daddy did me a favor. Like I said, I’ve been luckier than most. If I’d stayed in Spur County I’d still be broke. I’m a world champion several times over, and I’ve bought a ranch with my prize money. I’m addin’ to it and stockin’ it with rough stock all the time. Things are looking up for me, darling!”
