She noticed his intent stare zero in on her mouth. She probed the comers of her mouth with her tongue, checking for ice cream smears. He swallowed hard and seemed to jerk his attention back to the current topic.
“Believe me, I know it’s tough when they’re teenagers, and especially when they first get interested in the opposite sex, but it’s all part of the natural process,” she said. “Every kid goes through it. And they seem to come out the other side pretty much intact. Some of them even grow up. It’s a rite of passage.”
“Yeah,” he said with an odd note of grimness in his voice. “A rite of passage.”
They started back soon after that, the conversation desultory now. The ease and comfort of their silences combined with the mesmerizing rhythm of the road to lull her until her bones felt heavy and her muscles utterly relaxed.
When they continued on the highway past the turnoff to the Westons’ and again past the Circle CR she started getting curious. Only after they had climbed enough S-curves to satisfy a snake for a month did Dax slow almost to a stop and take a sharp turn into what seemed a wall of trees.
“Hang on. It’s a rough road.”
From the jouncing and jolting it wasn’t a road at all, but a boulder field.
“Where are we going, Dax?”
She’d asked the same question some seven hours before, in daylight and on an interstate highway and she’d been worried. Now, in the dead dark and with no idea where she was, she was simply curious.
“I promised a movie. Least I can do is show you something worth seeing.”
Her assurances that she didn’t mind missing the movie died as the pickup left the canopy of trees and the windshield filled with a vista of stars.
“Oh, my.”
“Best view for miles. But it’s better from outside. Wait a minute.”
While she gawked, he turned the truck and backed nearly to the end of the small, level outcropping jutting from the mountain. He led her to the back, helped her step onto the tailgate, then arranged a cushion for them to sit on, with their backs against the cab. Somewhere deep in her mind a voice suggested she should beware this setup, but it sounded very faint against the hum of her comfort with Dax and her pleasure at the view.
Besides, Dax simply sat beside her, making no move to touch her, except that when she tilted her head back to look at the stars directly overhead, he nudged her to use the support of his hard shoulder. If she forgot to move away, if she thought she felt the brush of his mouth across the top of her head, what did it matter?
“This is amazing, Dax. It feels like we’re sitting in the middle of all the stars. I’ve never believed in that stuff about the stars telling our future, but seeing them like this . . . Can you read stars the way you read clouds?”
“Nope. Not other than finding the North Star and some of the constellations. Mostly I get the feeling they know more than we do.”
“Exactly. How did you ever find this place?”
“Riding the cattle up here as a kid one summer, I chased a cow into those trees back there, then followed her out onto this ledge. She stood there quiet as you please, waiting for me to toss a rope. Almost like she’d led me here.”
The final words were so soft, Hannah barely heard them.
“I come here if I need to chew on something. A few years back, I cleared enough trees so the truck can get through, but mostly I ride up here.”
“Alone?”
“Usually. I’ve brought Will a time or two, but that’s all.”
Hannah folded her lips tight. But her mouth wouldn’t stay closed. Something in her had disconnected her mind and manners from her mouth. “Not even your wife?”
“Especially not her.”
Hannah heard echoes of pain, anger and disappointment in his sharp words and still couldn’t deny the ripple of pleasure that went through her. She was the first woman he’d brought here.
Dax cleared his throat. “Guess that sounds harsh.”
“No. I know exactly what you mean, and I can understand why you kept this place to yourself. Everyone needs someplace to get away from tensions, especially if a marriage is in trouble. At least I did. It got draining being around someone so unhappy.”
“She was never happy,” Dax said. Hannah thought he was surprised to hear himself make the statement, but he didn’t stop. “Wasn’t happy when we lived in Denver, wasn’t happy on a ranch, wasn’t happy being pregnant, wasn’t happy being a mother and most of all wasn’t happy with me.”
“Sounds like it didn’t have much to do with you. She didn’t know how to be happy.” She knew the type. She’d married one, too.
Richard had made an avocation of being dissatisfied. With the table in the restaurant. With a job title. With his salary. With her clothing. With the social cachet of their guest list. He said it made him strive for more, better, bigger. She’d believed that at first. By the end she’d recognized his attitude wasn’t a motivator, but a malaise.
“Maybe,” Dax conceded. “But this is a hard life on women. Even women brought up to it like her. Shouldn’t have come back if I wanted the marriage to last. Guess I didn’t want the marriage to last as much as I wanted Will brought up here. Came back when he was about three months. When the first snow flew, so did she. No big surprise.”
Hannah shifted away in order to see his face better, but the brim of his hat dropped shadows over everything but his hard jaw. “But her son . . .?”
“She wasn’t interested. Not when she was here, and not after. Least she never got his hopes up any. Will always knew exactly what to expect from her—nothing.”
“So you had the ranch to run and a baby to care for all on your own. How on earth did you manage?”
“June. Wouldn’t have made it without her.”
Hannah almost smiled at him in the silky light of the stars. Did he think gruffness hid his deep gratitude and great affection for his sister? It only made it more obvious, at least to her.
“And your mother?”
Without moving, he seemed to pull back from her. Or maybe from her question.
“She helped some. But mostly June. June was here all the time. Sometimes when Henry went out on runs, she’d stay for a week at a time, taking care of Will.” He might have heard the same belligerence in his voice that she detected, as if someone had argued that he possibly owed his mother gratitude, too, because he seemed to collect himself, even as he repeated, “Wouldn’t have made it without June. Or—” His mouth gave a tiny, telltale twitch, though it looked forced to her eyes. “Or without disposable diapers.”
Once again, he’d turned the subject away from his mother. And she let him, because she didn’t like his discomfort. “Disposable diapers?”
“Yes, ma’am. They might not be the best thing for the environment, but I don’t think it’d be great for the environment to have more crazy people roaming around, either, and that’s where I’d have been headed without disposable diapers.”
She asked him questions about Will’s early childhood, and he answered more expansively than usual. She suspected that had a lot to do with the topic. But she wondered if relief to leave the subject of his mother and determination not to return to it also had something to do with his filling in the silence.
One phrase from his earlier comments kept running through her head.
Least she never got his hopes up any . . . There was a clue there. A clue to Dax’s dealings with his own mother.
That was why, when he brought the truck to a stop in front of her cabin, she asked him if he’d like to come in for a cup of coffee. She had a clue, and now she could follow it up.
Chapter Seven
“Make yourself comfortable,” Hannah offered as she dropped her purse on the end table by the couch. “I’ll make the coffee.” And try to think of how to pump you for information without you knowing you’re being pumped.
Instead of sitting, he roved the room, picking up an item here and there. As she kept track of him with glances over her sh
oulder, she noticed he unerringly picked up things that belonged to her personally, a large-scale map of Wyoming, a paperback by John McPhee about the history and geology around southwestern Wyoming. Maybe he knew the cabin well enough to know what she’d added, but she didn’t think so.
He put down the book and picked up a framed picture. “This is Mandy and Ethan?” He hardly made it a question.
“Yes.” With the coffee machine making familiar noises from its spot atop a bookcase, she went to his side to look at the eight-by-ten she’d had blown up from a snapshot of the twins and her. In the comer of it she kept a smaller, older snapshot of the whole family from the Christmas before her parents died.
“You take this with you everywhere?”
“Um-hmm. I like to have them with me.”
“Nice to feel that way about your family.”
“Yes, it is. What do you think of them?” She expected him to say something about what a good looking pair they were. That’s what most people said.
“Mandy looks like she’s happiest with the bit between her teeth.”
Hannah laughed, surprised and oddly pleased. “She wouldn’t care for being likened to a horse, but you’re exactly right. And Ethan?”
He studied the picture a moment longer. “Solid.”
She sighed. “Yes. I’m afraid he didn’t have much choice.”
“He doesn’t look like he minds much.”
“I hope you’re right. I hope he’s having fun in college now. When I went off to college, my mother told me to behave and my father told me to have fun. Now, when I talk to them, I always tell Mandy to behave and tell Ethan to have fun.”
Interesting, but not surprising, that he chose the picture without her parents in it He wasn’t going to open that door to a discussion of his parents.
“I guess your mom and dad must have given you advice when you left home, too, huh?” she asked.
He put the photo down carefully. “Not really.”
He went to the couch and sat. End of discussion. So much for getting him talking about his mother—or his father. But the weave of her disappointment carried another thread, and she realized she would have liked to have known what he thought of her picture.
The coffeemaker emitted a finishing gurgle, giving her a reason to move from where he’d left her standing. When she placed the two mugs on the coffee table before the couch, she found him sitting on the edge of the seat with his elbows on his knees and his hat in his hands, turning it slowly.
She sat beside him, but all the way back against the cushions. They didn’t touch, but if one or the other of them reached out, they could.
“It’s getting late.” He didn’t look at her, didn’t touch the coffee.
“Yes.”
“I better get going.”
“Okay.”
Neither of them moved, except he kept turning his hat, and she watched it, turning between his tough, battered hands.
“I still owe you a movie, Hannah.”
“No movie could have matched those stars, Dax. I had a wonderful time.”
He turned his head to look back at her, his brown eyes as dark and mysterious and overwhelming as the Wyoming night sky.
A rustle of sound reached her. She had only a moment to realize he’d let the hat drop out of his hands to the floor. And then he was kissing her and his hands were in her hair, cupping her head.
She’d missed him. His taste, his touch.
What a strange thought. It had been only five days since he’d kissed and held her. But she had missed him.
She put her hands along each side of his jaw to follow the curved lines that traced from the comers of his nose beyond the comers of his mouth that even now pressed against hers.
His breathing changed, dragging in harder and faster.
He enfolded her, his strong hands open across her back, drawing her tightly against him. Yet, for all his strength, she knew his restraint, too. She felt his tight control in the tenor of his touch and the tautness of his muscles, and it frightened her just a little because it hinted at what could be if he let go . . . when he let go? Did she want that?
She only knew she wanted this. Right now. Right here. The mouth she’d watched all night opened against hers and he claimed hers with his tongue. The chest she’d leaned against to watch the stars was revealed as a texture of hot, muscled flesh when her questing fingers flicked open the snaps on his shirt—and they opened so easily. The hands that had offered polite assistance with a guiding touch to her back or a steadying hold entering the truck now sculpted her body in sensation.
From where he touched, heat flashed to the pit of her stomach, pooled there, gaining strength, then flowing throughout her body.
He stroked gently from her throat, over the hollow at its base, and down into the V of her blouse, dipping into the valley between her breasts. It was a wordless request, an asking of permission. Her body gave its eloquent yes, arching her back, offering him more.
She wasn’t aware of specific movements of buttons opening or material parting, only of the intoxicating expansion of his touch. And then of his kiss.
His lips brushed the swell of her breast above the line of her bra as his thumb brushed her nipple. Then he covered the hardened peak with the moist heat of his mouth and she moaned. The flick of his tongue through the clinging fabric was a bolt to her core.
More . . . more . . . No need to say the words aloud, because he knew. Somehow he knew. Or else he felt the need as strongly as she did. Drawing down the covering of her bra, holding her so carefully in those hard, gentle hands.
He was carrying her down, pressing her to the cushions and aligning his body with hers. She felt his weight and strength against her, fitting to her, promising—
Rattle . . . crash!
They held for an instant, immobile, perhaps the possibility of ignoring the interruption streaming through his mind the way it burst into hers.
He moved. Lifting up without looking at her.
“The coffee.”
Frozen by the rush of air that replaced his heated presence, it took her a long moment to straighten. He was sopping up the dark liquid off the bare wood floor as best he could with the small napkins she’d used as coasters under the mugs, now a jumble of broken pottery on the floor.
She tugged her bra up and drew her blouse closed without taking time to button it, before dashing for paper towels. “We must have both kicked the table when . . .”
When we laid on the couch, a few minutes away from making love.
She lowered her head and sopped up coffee.
She would have made love with this man. She would have taken him inside her body and given a part of herself that went so much deeper even than that most intimate of physical acts. A man she’d known barely a week.
And she didn’t know if she regretted the interruption or not.
Dax just stopped his hand from stroking the tangled hair obscuring Hannah’s downturned face and wished nature had fixed it so a man really could kick himself, because he sure deserved it. What had he been thinking of, treating a woman like Hannah like that? She wanted more than the sex, she wanted the emotions—the love and commitment. The things no woman would get from him. So he had no right.
How could he apologize when she wouldn’t even meet his eyes? Not that he blamed her. Bulls had more finesse than he’d shown in the past few minutes.
He was doing this for Will. He had to remember that. That’s what he’d kept telling himself while they sat looking at the stars and the sweet weight of her head rested against his shoulder and his arm followed the curve of her shoulders. Her hair had felt as silky as the smooth material of her sleeve. Her hair had smelled good, too. A familiar scent he couldn’t name. It swirled around in his mind as he grasped for the name and came up only with Hannah. Something sweet and clean. It made him feel good. And it made him feel hot and hard.
That was damned near a permanent condition. Desire kept tugging at him like an undertow since
Hannah had arrived. Hell, more like a damned riptide in an ocean of confusion.
“I think we got it all,” she said, balling the wet paper towels together and putting them on a cloth towel.
Finally, with both of them sitting back on their feet leaving them knee to knee, she looked up. And she smiled. That smile that added a shallow dimple beside her mouth and crinkled up her eyes.
He wanted to taste that smile again. To feel the curve of her lips against his. To touch his tongue to that indentation.
He wanted to hold that smile in his soul.
And right this moment, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t ever give what a woman like Hannah wanted. It didn’t matter that he’d vowed not to get involved with a woman again. It didn’t even matter that she was supposed to be the perfect stranger who passed through his life, then kept going.
He raised up on his knees before her, cupped her face in his hands and kissed her.
He touched his tongue to her lips and they parted. Still holding her face, he plunged inside her mouth. She met him. He changed the angle of the kiss, deepening it. He drew in the scent of her skin, that sweet, familiar scent, and knew if it were liquid, he would happily drown in it.
Going down once . . .
Still kissing her, he put one hand under her rear end and the other on her back and urged her up. She rose to face him, and he brought them together from knees to shoulders, absorbing the softness of her against him.
Her hands slipped under his shirt, charging the skin of his back. Their tongues met, retreated, rediscovered, and the beat of it set the pulse growing stronger in his groin.
Going down twice . . .
The fabric of her blouse and jumper parted under his hands as if it had been waiting for him. Her skin was warm and smooth, so smooth. He bent his head to take her in his mouth again. So sweet. So blood-burning sweet.
He slid a knee forward, taking the small gap she’d left between her knees for balance, and widening it, pressing through the layers of fabric to the juncture of her thighs. Her hands curled into his back and she gave a little gasp.
The Rancher Meets His Match Page 10
