A new road snaked over the ridge and on out to the county road two miles beyond. A faint trail led from the lodge to the lakeshore. Other meadow trails were being marked out by the ranch hands. The trails in the surrounding forest required more work. The sound of chainsaws and axes biting into wood rang through the silence, telling of men hard at work clearing paths for dudes who had never been on a horse, much less in a forest that hadn’t changed since Indians once glided through the shadowed silence in search of game.
“Payton was right about one thing,” Tory said. She glanced sideways at Reever, who was standing next to her as they let their horses rest. “This is a beautiful place just to be alive in.”
He smiled and ran his fingertip down her cheek to her lips.
“Yes,” he said.
Her heart stopped, then beat more quickly. In the past two weeks he had been so gentle and loving with her that sometimes it was all she could do not to cry. Never once had he been harsh or impatient with her, no matter what the provocation. It was as if he was trying to erase even the memory of seeing her eyes darken at his cutting words.
He had taught her to ride and had nothing but praise for her grace and quickness while she learned. It was the same when he worked with her in the garden. He had been almost as excited as she was by the exuberant growth of the plants.
A pair of cowboy boots had turned up next to her chair at breakfast a week ago, just as the work gloves once had. All the men denied any knowledge of how the boots got there. This time she believed the men. She had seen Reever’s face as he eased her feet into the polished leather as if the boots were crystal slippers left over from a fabulous ball.
This morning it had been a hat that had appeared without warning, a soft, cream-colored Stetson that fit her perfectly.
She had tried to tell him that she couldn’t let him give her anything else after the boots. He had smiled and stroked her hair and told her that it must have been the tooth fairy because he had never seen the hat before in his life. Then he had brushed her lips lightly with his thumb, stilling her words and caressing her in a single warm touch. She hadn’t been able to prevent the two tears that had spilled down her cheeks, tears that he caught on the edge of his thumb and then brought to his lips.
She had almost told him then. The words had ached in her throat as she loved him silently because he would not allow her to say the words aloud. But they were true just the same.
She loved him until it was an agony and an ecstasy radiating through her silence, through her soul.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Reever said, his voice husky.
“Like what?”
“Like the sun rises and sets in my eyes.”
“But it does,” she said simply. Before Reever could voice the objections darkening his eyes, she smiled and added lightly, “That’s what happens when you face east early in the morning and west late in the day. Even a city girl knows that much, cowboy.”
He hesitated, then smiled, shaking his head. “Some city girl you turned out to be. I can’t believe it—dinner was late last night because you were out in the barn helping a heifer have her first calf. Lord, little one, I’ve seen men turn pale and run rather than help pull a calf. Not you. You lay right down next to me in the straw and pulled for all you were worth. By the time we got back in the house, you were wringing wet and covered with stuff from head to toe.”
“I’d do it again in a minute,” she said, her face softening as she remembered the big-eyed, incredibly long-lashed, wobbly little calf butting at its mother’s belly in an instinctive search for milk. “To walk into a stall where there’s only one cow and to walk out later and leave two cows behind—that’s as close to a miracle as I’ve ever come.” Her face changed as she focused on him again. “Except with you, Reever,” she whispered. “When you make love to me, it’s not just the sun rising and setting in your eyes, it’s the whole world burning.”
For a moment he was very still. He searched her eyes as if trying to see right through to her soul. After a long silence he said, “It’s like that for me. Every time is better than the last until I can hardly wait to wrap myself around you again and wrap you around me until—” He shuddered and his eyes darkened as the familiar wild heat began to sweep through him again. “Oh, God, little one. You’re in me hotter and deeper than my own blood.”
Abruptly he turned and mounted Blackjack. “I’d better see if Jed has managed to gnaw through that big pine yet,” he said, reining around until he could look at Tory. “And I’d better do it now before I pull you down in the grass and love you until you cry and scream and come apart in my arms.”
“Reever,” she said shakily, her breath shortening. “I want that. No. I want you like—like—”
“Hell on fire,” he finished, his voice almost harsh. “I know. It’s the same way I’ve wanted you since the first time I saw you. Close your eyes, little cat.”
“Why?” she asked, closing her eyes.
He bent over in the saddle, lifted her in his powerful arms, and kissed her with a thoroughness that left both of them aching.
“Keep those beautiful green eyes closed,” he said hoarsely. “It’s the only way I’ll be able to leave you.”
Slowly he eased her back onto her feet, took one more quick, biting kiss and spun Blackjack around.
She didn’t open her eyes until the sound of the horse’s hooves had faded. Then she let out a long, tremulous breath and mounted Twinkle Toes. She guided the gentle mare along a path leading to the beach that the hands had cleared along the lake.
“Hi, Dutch. How’s the fire ring doing?”
The wiry cowboy dropped a water-smoothed stone as big as a basketball into the ring he was building. “Slow, Tory. Real slow. Been trying to figure how to do it from the back of a horse.”
She smiled. She had learned that all the hands wanted only the work that could be done from horseback. “Are you going to be here for a while?”
“Yep. Going swimming again?”
“Sure am.”
Dutch shook his head. “How something as sweet as you don’t melt in all that water is beyond me. Ain’t natural.”
“I think someone I know is angling for peach cobbler again,” she muttered.
He smiled innocently. “Cobbler? You making cobbler tonight? Did I ever tell you that peach is my favorite?”
“Really?” she asked, pretending astonishment.
Dutch chuckled, winked and went back to sorting rocks for the fire ring.
Tory tied Twinks to a handy bush, pulled a rolled-up towel from her saddle bag, and went toward a long tongue of granite that ran out into the lake. There she peeled down to the swimsuit she wore beneath her riding clothes.
Twelve days ago, when Reever had decided it was time to put the finishing touches on “Payton’s Folly,” she had discovered that one of the springs beneath Wolf Lake was hot. That, and the lure of clean, deep water, had been too great to ignore after months of going without. The first time she had gone swimming there had been a line of appreciative cowhands watching her.
While Reever hadn’t wanted her to swim alone, he didn’t figure that she needed every man within fifty miles as a lifeguard. When he couldn’t do the job himself, he had assigned Dutch to beach, fire ring, and lifeguard duty, because Reever knew that the hand’s interest in Tory was strictly avuncular.
The water along the cobbled shoreline was decidedly brisk. The hot spring’s influence didn’t reach that far, and it was too early in the season for the sun to have made much impression on the overall temperature of the lake. Only at the base of the lower cliff was the water warmed by the hidden spring far beneath the surface of the lake.
She entered the water in a long, running dive and then swam toward the cliffs fifty yards away. The color of the water beneath her changed as the bottom dropped steeply away. Close to the cliffs she h
ad no idea how deep the water was. That was one of the things she was going to find out today.
With the ease of someone utterly at home in the water, she jackknifed and dove straight down. The pressure around her built swiftly. Automatically she swallowed, letting her ears adjust. All around her was clear, very blue water. There were no rocks, no dead trees, no obstacles of any kind. She continued down until she was sure that she was beyond thirty feet, then she flip turned and headed back for the shimmering silver surface.
She slung hair out of her face with a casual motion of her head, pulled up her swim goggles and saw that Dutch was watching intently. She waved, swam about twenty feet, pulled her goggles into place and dove again. Methodically she quartered the area beneath the lowest cliff, looking for any surprises that might be hidden by the water.
Not that she expected to find any. Yesterday she had stood on the lower cliff and looked over the water very, very carefully, coming at different times of day to take advantage of different angles of sunlight penetrating the unusually clear water. She had seen nothing to suggest any danger to someone diving from the granite shelf that overhung the deep water.
Nor did Tory find anything dangerous as she physically inspected the area below the base of the cliff. The granite wall was smooth all the way down. It had a pronounced overhang, ensuring that no matter how badly botched a dive might be, there was no way of landing on rock. The water beneath the overhang was deep, clean, and as free of obstructions as a diving pool.
She swam back to shore, pulled on the beach walkers she had carried in her towel, and picked her way along the shoreline as it gradually humped up into the first of a series of cliffs. The way to the top of the lowest cliff that she had found was short and quite safe, for the path didn’t come near the edge of the rock. She stepped out onto the smooth, nearly flat granite platform.
Shivering slightly in the breeze, Tory stood at the knife-edge of the cliff. To her right more granite rose steeply, notching the sky. To her left the granite merged gently with the beach. Below her the lake shimmered and rippled in shades of blue, whispering to her. She knew that the cliff was almost exactly ten meters high. She knew because all her senses had been attuned to that height by thousands and thousands of dives off ten-meter platforms.
It felt...right...standing there, looking down into the lake.
The temptation to dive was almost overwhelming. She had been working her knee for at least an hour every night, often more. Time went quickly as she braced herself against Reever’s powerful arm and exercised while he talked about the ranch and his tangled family history. She had told him about her own family and her years spent around the swim club’s Olympic pools.
And sometimes there was a sweet silence while he watched her with clear gray eyes, smiling gently, approving of her without saying a word.
Yet despite all the exercises, all the care that she had taken not to stress the knee again, she was afraid that it wasn’t as strong as her left knee. There was no way for her to be sure without diving.
For a long time Tory stood on the cliff looking into the depths of Wolf Lake as if it held the answers to her questions about the future. Wind ruffled the water’s surface, making ghostly silver patterns.
Gradually she realized that she was shivering with something more than cold. She turned her back on the sapphire depths and hurried down the trail.
“You sure do like that cliff, don’t you?” Dutch asked, looking up as she walked by dressed in her riding clothes again. “You can see everything from there, can’t you?”
“Almost,” she said quickly, not wanting to talk.
Once back at the lodge, she went to her room and changed into dry clothes. One wing of three bedrooms and the kitchen were the only parts of the lodge and cottages that were completely finished. The rest waited for carpenters and painters who always seemed to be busy elsewhere. Not that Reever complained. He wouldn’t care if the Sundance Retreat never opened. Tory halfway suspected that he was paying the workers not to show up.
She hurried into the kitchen and stopped, astonished to find that Reever was there, calmly browning meat for chili on the lodge’s big gas stove.
“If you make the biscuits,” he said, looking up, “we can have supper all ready to go. Then we can sneak away for a ride to that tiny hidden meadow I told you about.”
Her sudden smile made him wonder if he had ever seen anything half so beautiful. He smiled in return, holding out his hand to her, bringing her fingers to his lips. He rubbed his mustache against her inner wrist and traced the lines of her veins with the tip of his tongue.
“Can you make biscuits one-handed?” he asked in a low voice, biting the pad of flesh at the base of her thumb.
Slowly she shook her head.
“Damn.” Reluctantly he released her hand. “Show me how fast you can make biscuits, little cat.”
As soon as her heartbeat settled down, it took her very little time at all to get the rest of the dinner ready.
Hand in hand, she and Reever walked down to the corral, which was little more than a series of ropes strung between pine trees. Twinks was there, but not Blackjack.
“I told Teague that he could use Blackjack,” Reever said casually. “We’ll double up on Twinks. It’s about time you learned how to ride bareback anyway.” He grinned down at her. “Don’t look so worried. That mare is so placid you could hang upside down from her belly and she’d never notice. And you can hang on to me as much as you want.”
He buried his left hand in deep in the mare’s mane and vaulted onto the mare’s back in a single easy movement, making no more fuss about mounting than if he had used a stirrup.
“Close your mouth, city girl. You’ll catch flies,” he teased.
“How did you do that?” she demanded.
“Practice. Strength doesn’t hurt, either.”
“No kidding,” she said dryly. “Any other suggestions?”
“Hold out your left arm. Grab my left arm just above the elbow,” he said, leaning down to her. “Step onto my boot just like it was a stirrup.”
She did—and found herself being lifted through the air and swung into place behind him. The first thing she noticed was the sensation of warmth radiating up from Twinks through her jeans. The second thing was the ripple and play of powerful muscles as the mare shifted her weight.
The third thing was the fact that, short of actually making love, there was no greater physical intimacy possible for a man and a woman than riding double, bareback.
“Ready?” he asked.
“What a question,” she muttered.
He looked over his shoulder, saw her dilating pupils and knew just what was happening to her. The same thing was happening to him. He had been looking forward to this ride for a long time. He smiled slowly, wickedly.
“Wrap your arms around me,” he said. When she did, he twisted in slow motion, rubbing his back sensually across her breasts, caressing her. He heard her breath come in suddenly as her back arched, increasing the sweet pressure of his touch. “Ah, little cat,” he said huskily, “I can feel your nipples asking for me. But I’m going to make you wait. I’m going to make you as wild as my dreams.”
Tory’s breath shivered out as Reever’s big, hard hand traced the length of her thigh nestled so intimately against his. “I’ll get even with you,” she said in a trembling voice. “I swear it.”
“God, honey, I hope so. Hang on.”
A touch of Reever’s heels sent the mare walking out into the sunlight that was slanting down between the erect, fragrant bodies of the pines. After the first few minutes Tory found it surprisingly easy to adjust to being bareback. If anything, the lack of a saddle helped her to find and move to the horse’s rhythms more quickly. Before a mile had gone by, she relaxed completely against Reever and let the warmth of the sun, of the placid horse, and of the man sh
e loved seep into her.
He sensed her adjustment to the new style of riding in the easy, rhythmic swaying of her body against his. Smiling, knowing that he could safely distract her now, he brought one of her hands up to his mouth. Gently he sucked on each finger in turn, biting lightly at the most sensitive flesh, softly devouring her until he heard her whimper deep in her throat. Then his teeth closed less gently on her palm until she shivered and arched against him, clinging to his hard warmth.
With aching sensuality he rubbed her hands over his chest, turning and twisting against her like a cat until her nails found his tiny, hard male nipples and scraped sweetly over them. A groan wedged deep in his throat. He released her fingers, but she didn’t stop caressing him. Her hands moved in the same sensual rhythms of the horse walking, and her body stroked his with each motion.
Tory pressed closer to Reever’s powerful back even as her fingers slid between the snaps of his shirt. At the first hot touch of his flesh, she made a low sound. Slowly her hands tugged in opposite directions, unfastening the snaps on his shirt one by one. Her palms rubbed over him restlessly, hungrily, and her fingers dug softly beneath the thick hair. He moved against her touch, stroking her with his own body while fire pooled hotly, heavily between his thighs. He felt her hand search each ridge and swell of muscle on his chest even as her mouth pressed against his spine. Her teeth tugged at his shirt while her fingers flexed and buried themselves in the warm black thatch of hair curling over his chest.
He let go of the reins he had knotted together and pulled his shirt free of his jeans. Even before he had finished, he felt a hot rain of kisses across his naked back. Then, with a catlike sound of contentment, Tory caressed his skin with her cheek, turning her face from side to side like he was a warm river and she was bathing in him. Her mouth opened and she trembled as she tasted him.
Too Hot To Handle Page 14
