The big teenager turned around.
“Show me how bright you are,” Reever said, coiling the rope again as he spoke. “Make sure that everything of hers is just the way she left it.”
Reever watched Billy walk stiffly back to the fence, stopping only long enough to pick up Tory’s luggage.
While the car peeled away toward town, Reever fastened the lasso to the saddle again and turned to help Tory to her feet. It wasn’t necessary. She was already up and walking toward the fence, favoring her right leg slightly.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Reever asked.
Tory wiped her forehead on her dusty arm. “About two miles an hour,” she said, smiling crookedly, hoping that he wouldn’t hear the faint quaver in her voice.
She was over the worst of it now. She simply felt as if she’d spent an afternoon diving in front of hypercritical judges—tired, used up, unsure of herself, determined not to show any of it. She paused and looked over her shoulder.
“Thanks,” she said. “Those kids really had me going.”
Reever watched in disbelief as she turned away again. He caught up with her in five long strides.
“Where did your car break down?”
“Nowhere. I don’t have one.”
“Aren’t you old enough to drive?”
Her hair flashed in the sun as she spun toward him, hardly believing what she had heard. A single glance told her that he was serious.
“I’ll be twenty-one this summer,” she said tightly.
“Really?” he asked, amusement and relief deepening his voice.
He had hated like hell being aroused by someone who appeared as young as Tory. He had always preferred his partners to be as experienced as he was.
Mentally Tory counted to ten and then to twenty. She didn’t need Reever’s amused glance to remind her that her body wasn’t up to the mark for sexy blonds. Most of the time she didn’t mind. After all, she didn’t want to look like a whacking great milk cow when she dove off the platform.
Yet it irritated her unreasonably to know that a man with the raw masculine appeal of Ethan Reever thought of her as a little girl.
“If you didn’t drive, how did you get to the ranch?” he asked. His tone was deep, almost lazy, and the steely shade of his eyes warmed as he looked from the delicate curve of her neck to her mouth and remembered how the full bow of her lips had looked when they had parted in silent invitation.
“I came in on the mail truck,” she said curtly.
“Where are you meeting Melly for the return trip?”
“Melly?”
“The mail ma’am,” Reever said, grinning.
“Oh. Will she be by later on?”
With a feeling of angry disbelief, he realized that Tory had not only walked the miles from the ranch house to the county road, but that she planned to walk the rest of the way to Massacre Creek as well.
His hand shot out and he grabbed her arm, stopping her right in her tracks.
“Do you have any idea how far it is to town?” he asked curtly.
“What time is it?”
He answered automatically, frowning. “About one o’clock.”
“Then it’s about twelve miles to town from here.”
The look that passed over his face was indescribable. “Are you crazy?”
“No,” she said flatly, meeting his eyes.
What she didn’t say was that she was hungry, thirsty to the point of spitting cotton, and the burning of her raw hands was competing with the throbbing of her knee. But she wouldn’t say a word about any of it. She would quite cheerfully crawl the rest of the way into town rather than whine to the hard-faced cowboy who had taken one look at her, decided she was useless in every possible way, and dismissed her with a contempt that still stung.
“Then you’re a fool,” Reever said roughly. “Or maybe you like swinging your ass down a public highway, just asking for it?”
“Asking!” Tory’s eyes narrowed as her temper flashed. “You arrogant son of a bitch,” she hissed, appalled at herself even as the words escaped her lips. She had taken far worse insults from her coaches, but none of them had been able to set off her temper like Ethan Reever. “I walked down that road because there was no other way for me to get into town.”
“If you had told me—” began Reever.
“When?” she interrupted sweetly. “Before or after you turned down my imagined offer of prostitution?”
He muttered a few savage words under his breath.
She didn’t bother to listen. She simply turned and walked toward the fence, her back as straight as the line of her mouth. She had heard all she wanted to and then some. It was bad enough to be taken advantage of by a carload of foulmouthed jerks. To be accused of asking for that kind of abuse simply because she was too poor to afford her own car made her furious.
“The next bus won’t get to Massacre Creek for three days,” Reever said matter-of-factly, easily catching up to her.
She shrugged. Three days, three hours, three weeks. It didn’t matter because she didn’t have money for a ticket yet. She hoped that the Sunup Café needed a cook or waitress, a dishwasher or someone to clean out the grease trap over the grill. Whatever. She wasn’t fussy about honest work.
Reever watched her from the corner of his eye. For the first time he saw past the fact that she was female, young, and able to arouse his temper and his body with maddening ease. He saw again that her thick blond hair was cut simply and that the sun-streaked effect, like her tan, was natural rather than purchased at an expensive salon or resort. She wore no jewelry—no necklace, no bracelet, not even an inexpensive silver ring. The T-shirt she had on was faded and baggy. The slacks were the same and frayed at the cuffs. Her tennis shoes had more holes than canvas and sported no logo from one of the makers of trendy, expensive sports shoes.
“Wait,” Reever said, catching her arm again. His voice was rough, but his hand was gentle on her arm. He had been poor long enough in his youth to recognize the signs. “I’ll have one of my men drive you into town.”
She stared at him, her surprise plain.
“For the love of God,” he snarled. “What the hell kind of man do you think would let you walk down a lonely road rather than help you out?”
Before she could find an answer, he turned and whistled shrilly between his teeth. Blackjack’s ears came up in twin black arcs as the horse trotted over obediently. Reever mounted in a single flowing motion, kicked his boot out of the left stirrup, and looked down at her.
She was watching him with wide green eyes, looking for all the world like a wind-ruffled, curious cat. He shifted the roping rein to his right hand and held out his left to her.
“Come on.”
“Come on where?” she asked, looking up at Reever.
Way, way up. The horse was as big as a mountain, and Reever wasn’t much smaller.
“Get on,” he said impatiently.
“How?”
He stared at her for an instant, not sure that he had heard correctly. With a sound of disgust, swung his right leg in front of him and over the saddle horn, then slid down to land lightly on his feet in front of her.
“City girl,” he muttered. “Useless as teats on a boar hog.”
With no more warning than that, he picked her up and set her down behind the saddle like she weighed less than a shadow. He put his left foot in the stirrup, swung his right leg up and over the saddle horn and settled securely into the saddle in less time than it took for her to realize what was going on. It was obvious that Reever was supremely at home on a horse’s back. Despite his size he had yet to make a move that wasn’t both sure and graceful.
“Hang on,” he said.
Tory tried. She grabbed the smooth, raised back of the western saddle with both hands as Blackjack moved off at
a pace that seemed terrifyingly fast but was actually no more than a sprightly walk. With each unexpected motion her hands slipped more. The task of hanging on wasn’t made any easier by the fact that her blisters had long since broken, leaving her palms raw and oozing a clear fluid mixed with blood. No matter how hard she gripped, her hands kept slipping.
After a few minutes she mastered the rhythm of Blackjack’s walk to the point that every movement didn’t take her by surprise. She began to breathe more easily. The distance to the ground didn’t bother her because she was accustomed to heights, having spent most of her life diving from one kind of platform or another. But she would have felt a lot better if it had been water rather than dirt waiting to catch her when she fell.
Reever sensed Tory’s distress and kept the big horse down to a walk. He could have told her to hang on to him but didn’t. His hands still burned from their brief contact with her. He had expected her to be soft, and she was. She was also surprisingly firm. If there was any city flab on that young body, he hadn’t felt it.
Besides, he was still irritated by her surprise when he had offered to give her a ride into town. If she had decided that he was such a rude bastard that she refused to touch him even to keep her seat, then she could just fall off.
For a long time there was only the muted sound of hoof beats and the occasional wild cry of a soaring hawk. Blackjack chewed resentfully on the bit that held him to a walk. Reever chewed resentfully on everything that had happened since he had looked up and found a girl-woman standing quietly in front of his desk, setting off his temper and his body with a single look from her faintly tilted green eyes.
When he reined Blackjack down the trail to Wolf Creek, the horse shied at nothing more than the shadow of a hawk skimming over the land. Reever moved with the horse like a second skin.
Tory didn’t.
One instant the horse was supporting her bottom and the next instant there was nothing beneath her but air. She grabbed frantically at the saddle, only to feel it sliding out from between her raw palms.
“Reever!”
Even as she called out, he made a lightning movement, turning and scooping her up in one arm. With a strength that shocked her, he put her back into position behind the saddle with nothing more than a shrug of his shoulders.
Blackjack snorted and minced sideways.
Tory gasped and grabbed frantically for the saddle again.
“Damn it,” Reever snarled, “settle down.”
She didn’t know whether he meant her or the horse. She didn’t want to know, either. She bit her lip and tried to guess which way the frisky beast would jump next.
Blackjack snorted, then turned and lipped the stirrup as though to ask why they were standing around in the middle of the trail. At a nudge from Reever’s heels, the big horse began to trot.
Reever didn’t need to turn around to know that Tory was losing her balance again.
“Of all the clumsy—” He bit off a curse. “If you can’t stand the thought of putting your arms around my waist, hang on to my belt.”
She looked at the broad spread of Reever’s shoulders and the powerful back that tapered down to a lean waist. The thought of touching him made both weakness and a curious heat course through her. Tentatively she lifted her right hand, only to realize that if she held on to him as he suggested, she would get blood all over him. Her frantic attempts to hang on to the saddle had finished the work that carrying her suitcase had begun. Her palms were scraped raw.
“I can’t,” she said in a low voice. “I’ll get you—dirty.”
“Dirty?” He snorted. “Honeybunch, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a rancher, not a damned drugstore cowboy. I’m not going to faint at a little dirt.”
Her only answer was a choked sound as Blackjack’s broad, muscular rump skipped sideways. The horse was just trying to balance Tory’s weight more evenly on his back, but she didn’t know that. She only knew that she was falling again.
With an exasperated curse Reever dropped the roping rein, reached behind his back with both hands and jerked her arms around him. When he saw the bright smears of blood across her palms, he knew why she was having so much trouble hanging on to the saddle and why she was afraid of getting him “dirty.”
“For the love of God, don’t you have any sense at all?” he asked harshly, grabbing her hands and looking at them more closely. Ragged circles of broken blisters showed clearly. The tender flesh was smeared with a mixture of dirt and blood. “Why didn’t you say something?”
She made a sound that could have been a laugh or a curse. “Then you could yell at me for whining, right?” she said raggedly, furious that everything she did only made him more angry with her. “Sorry to spoil your rustic entertainment, but I’ve been worked over by men who make you look like the tooth fairy. I don’t whine or beg or ‘swing my ass’ for any man, even you. Especially you.”
Reever’s whole body tightened as he turned and looked over his shoulder at Tory. Her face was dirt streaked, pale beneath the tan, and defiant despite the white lines of fatigue etched around her mouth. Her eyes were a blaze of green fury that was more provocative than any practiced swing of a woman’s hips. Whether she knew it or not, she was crying out to be taken down onto the soft green grass and rolled around until her claws were trimmed and her spitting snarls turned into husky purrs. She would bite and scream at first—and at the end, too. Differently. He knew it, and it made blood gather heavily, hotly, making him bigger with each slamming heartbeat.
“It’s bad enough to be so soft, little girl,” he said in a low voice, “but to be so stupid is dangerous. Don’t push me into doing something we’ll both regret.”
“Me? Pushing you?” she asked, outrage in every syllable. “You—” Her teeth clicked as she snapped her jaw shut.
She badly wanted to describe Reever’s genetic heritage, most personal habits, and certain destination after death, but the only words she could think of had already been used by Billy and his friends. She had no intention of joining their sordid ranks.
“You. Pushing me,” Reever agreed flatly.
Lips still parted over words she wouldn’t speak and quivering to tell him just what she thought of him, she looked straight into his eyes.
It was like diving off a platform as high as the moon. She was falling, twisting, turning, but she wasn’t moving at all, everything around her was spinning, and she was motionless, suspended, held absolutely still within his gray glance as heat exploded through her.
The soft, unconscious sound that came from Tory’s throat made Reever feel like he had walked naked into an electric fence. Every muscle in his big body tightened violently. He dragged at breath, aching. The effort it took to control himself shocked him.
“Stop it,” he said, unable to look away from her wide green eyes.
“Stop...what?” she asked, her voice husky, her expression dazed.
For a long, seething moment he glared at her. Gradually he realized that he had been wrong in his assumption that she was one of Payton’s pretty toys. Tory wasn’t experienced. She didn’t understand what was happening between them, what her soft mouth was promising, what her sweet, wild whimper had revealed. She had gotten to him faster and deeper than any woman he’d ever known.
And the longer Reever was around her, the more he was afraid that she was a virgin.
“You really don’t know, do you?” he said in a low voice, touching the pulse beating rapidly beneath the smooth skin of her throat.
Her only answer was the visible quiver of her lips as she responded to his fingertips caressing her throat. Knowing he shouldn’t, unable to stop himself, Reever bent and brushed his mouth over hers, breathing in her sweetness, tracing her trembling lips with the tip of his tongue, feeling her pulse go wild beneath his fingertip.
Slowly, very slowly, he lifted his mouth from h
ers, feeling like he was pulling off his own skin. Her half-closed eyes were a smoldering green, her breath was uneven, and her mouth followed his like a compass needle following a lodestone.
His breath hissed out in a single savage word as he turned away from her.
“R-Reever?”
“Forget it, honey,” he said roughly. “I’m too experienced for a city innocent like you to cut your teeth on.”
She flinched as though he had slapped her. She wanted to scream at his broad back, to tell him that he was as conceited as he was big, that she wouldn’t touch him if he were the last man in the universe. But his single gentle caress had gone through her like lightning, burning away her breath, burning away her thoughts, burning away inhibitions, freeing a surging wildness that frightened her.
Reever held Blackjack to a slow walk, not wanting Tory to have to throw her arms around his hips in order to stay on because what she would find in his lap would have shocked her to her innocent core. He clenched his teeth at the thought of her slender arms sliding around his waist, her fingers testing the power of his thighs and then finding another kind of male power, testing it with her soft hands, measuring the hunger he had for her.
Blackjack tossed his head and minced sideways against the sudden hard pressure of the bit. With a startled sound Tory grabbed Reever. He felt her fingers inside his waistband like a brand. Raging at his own lack of control, he pulled Blackjack up short and dismounted, knowing that he’d never make it back to the ranch at this rate.
“Is that as clean as it looks?” she asked.
His head snapped up. “What?”
She bit her lip to keep it from trembling, regretting that she had spoken. Everything she did seemed to make him furious. Now his eyes were as cold and savage as a winter storm. She swallowed painfully. The dryness of her mouth was a goad, forcing her to speak against her better judgment.
“The water,” she said huskily. “Is it safe to drink?”
Hard gray eyes glanced toward the creek like it had just popped up out of the ground. “Yes.”
Tory had no stirrup to aid her dismount. Nor did she trust her slippery hands to hang on to the saddle and allow her to ease down to the ground. In the end she did what she had done the first time she had been confronted by a high dive and had become so frightened that she had sat down astride the diving board and refused to move. But she had had to move eventually, just as she had to move now.
Too Hot To Handle Page 3
