by Diana Palmer
Even now, he caught her fingers and moved them gently away from his body. “Flirting with me?” he murmured shortly.
“Who, me?” She wrapped both hands around the snifter. “I don’t have a suicidal bone in my body.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t take you up on it,” he said in a deep, angry tone. “I’ve had two years of practice of keeping my distance.”
She met his cold eyes and felt the words go through her like needles. “You know how I feel….”
He drew an impatient breath. “My God, one bad experience isn’t any excuse for becoming a nun,” he growled.
She stiffened. Her full lower lip pouted at him. “You’re like a bear with a sore head lately, John Durango,” she glowered. “If you’re hungry, take a bit of the hors d’oeuvres; I don’t feel like being nibbled on tonight.”
She turned and started to walk away, but he caught her arm. As usual, the touch of his warm, strong fingers on her bare skin caused her heart to race, her breath to catch. It was a faintly alarming reaction, but she’d never dared wonder why he could cause it when no other man ever had.
“Don’t run from me,” he said at her ear. He was so close that she could feel the heat and power of his big body against the length of her back.
“I don’t know what else to do,” she said miserably. “You’re ice cold with me, you act as if you can’t bear to be around me and draw back every time I touch you….” Her troubled eyes met his. “I thought we were friends.”
His eyes wandered over her face. “We are. Bear with me.”
She saw the rigid lines in his face, the turbulence in his silver eyes, and she relented.
“I care about you,” she said gently. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Something’s bothering you. Can’t you tell me what it is?”
“You, least of all, my dear,” he said curtly. He reached out a careless hand and touched a wispy strand of reddish gold hair that had escaped her high coiffure. “Why do you twist your hair up like that? I hate it.”
“I’m not a gypsy,” she reminded him. “Long hair goes with bare feet, and our hostess would be shocked.”
“Shock her,” he murmured, and the mustache curled for the first time that night. “I dare you.”
“The last time you dared me to do anything, I jumped in the river fully clothed and astounded a carload of tourists,” she reminded him. She laughed softly. “Besides,” she added with a sigh, touching her temple, “I don’t feel like doing shocking things tonight. My head hurts; I’m so tired I can hardly stand, and all I want is to go home and go to sleep.”
“Then why don’t you?” he asked.
“Walk out on my own party when I’ve been here for less than an hour?” she asked. “Now wouldn’t that be polite, and after Elise has gone to so much trouble, too.”
“To hell with diplomacy,” he murmured curtly. His eyes searched her wan face. “I’ll drive you home.”
“And leave your conquest smoldering?” she asked with a pointed glance toward Melody, who was openly glaring at both of them while a man twenty years John’s junior was trying to get her attention. “No thanks. I’ll get Donald to take me.”
It was the wrong thing to say—she saw that at once. His eyes went from silver to slate in seconds. “Like sweet hell you will,” he growled.
Suddenly he bent and swung her easily up into his hard arms, a move so unexpected that she gasped.
“Close your eyes and moan,” he said curtly. His tone was so commanding that she forgot her independence for once and did as he told her. She felt his big arms around her, smelled the soap and cologne that clung to him, felt the warmth and strength of his magnificent body and wondered at the tiny little tremor that worked its way down to her toes.
“Why, John, what’s wrong with Madeline!” she heard Elise exclaim.
“Overwork,” he replied flatly, barely breaking stride. “I’m going to drive her home. I’ll send Josito over in the morning to get her car. Thanks, Elise, enjoyed it. Good night.”
“Uh, good night,” came the stammered reply. “I’ll call her tomorrow and check on her!”
John went straight out the door and Madeline heard him murmur something as someone opened and closed it for him. Then they were outside in the cool night air, and she was grateful for the warmth of his arms in the spring chill. Her wrap was back in the house, but fortunately she’d kept her dangling little purse on her arm.
“You can open your eyes now,” John murmured, a soft, teasing note in his voice.
She did, staring up at him. “You’re terribly strong.” The words slipped out involuntarily and embarrassed her.
He chuckled, an increasingly rare sound these days. “I’m not over the hill, honey,” he reminded her, “and nobody could call me a desk executive.”
That was the truth. He still worked around the ranch to keep fit, and he could outlast most of his cowboys.
She shifted her arms around his neck, feeling him stiffen as her breast brushed closer. “That was a novel idea you had,” she said with a smile. “Nobody could say anything about a woman fainting….” The smile vanished and she gaped up at him. “Oh, my God!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Everyone will think I’m pregnant!” she groaned.
Chapter Two
His shadowy eyes swept down her slender body as he paused by his black Ferrari and opened the door, propping her on a lifted thigh before lowering her inside.
“So?” he asked nonchalantly. “Writers are supposed to be unconventional.”
She glared at him as he went around the front of the sports car and got in beside her. “Who do I spend most of my spare time with?” she asked archly. “They’ll think it’s yours!”
He laughed softly as he started the car. “You can name it after me, too.”
The thought of having John’s child made her feel strange. She gazed at his profile with curiosity, trying to reconcile the way she was feeling with the old comradeship that seemed to be slipping away. What was happening to her?
He drove in silence to the 610 Loop that circled the city, and smoked his cigarette without moving his eyes from the traffic until he turned off at Montrose and wound down the street where Madeline’s small Victorian house was located.
It was an older section of the city, and a number of the houses had been beautifully renovated. Madeline had inherited hers from a great-aunt who’d preserved the little house with the protective instincts of a mother hen. It might be old, but it was well cared for, and Madeline had kept up the tradition; frugally at first, and then lavishly when she began to show a profit with her writing.
“How’s the new book going?” he asked as he pulled into her driveway.
“Slowly,” she murmured. “Did I tell you there’s actually talk of a movie contract on The Grinding Tower if it continues to pick up readers and critical acclaim?” she added with a flash of sweet triumph in her eyes. “I was so excited I could hardly believe it. And I wanted to call and tell you—but we weren’t speaking.”
He cut the Ferrari’s powerful engine and half turned in the bucket seat to study her in the glare of the porch light from Miss Rose’s house next door. Madeline knew Miss Rose kept an eye out for her when she was late getting home at night. “I lost my temper,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to cut you up that way.”
It was the closest he’d ever come to any apology, and she knew it. He wouldn’t have made the effort for most people.
She shrugged gently. “I really wasn’t leading him on, you know,” she murmured. She glanced at him. “Do I have to remind you how I feel about men?”
He searched her flushed face. “It might help if you go over it every fifteen minutes,” he said enigmatically. “Especially if you’re going to wear dresses like that.”
“This old thing?” she teased, fingering the pleats of the dress. “Why it only cost the better part of one little chapter.”
He laughed softly, his face visible in the glow of his cigarette
tip. “Everything is in terms of books with you,” he murmured amusedly. “A car is one book, a dress is a chapter….”
“My car is certainly not worth one book,” she reminded him. “I got it secondhand, it’s great on gas, and I love it.”
“I don’t have any quarrel with making full use of a piece of machinery,” he reminded her, and she suppressed a giggle, thinking of the limits to which he’d push a tractor or a combine.
“Yes, I know,” she mumbled.
His eyes went toward the side of the house where her little yellow Volkswagen was usually parked, and stopped on the huge oak tree beside it. “You need to have that tree taken down,” he said for the tenth time in as many months. “It’s dangerous. One good storm wind will land it right in your living room,” he said, “and I’ll remind you that it’s storm season and we’ve had our share of tornadoes in past years.”
“I will not have Great-Aunt Jessie’s oak tree cut down. Her grandfather planted it, you know,” she said huffily.
“Her grandfather, hell,” he shot back. “She was an orphan!”
She tossed her hair, threatening the elaborate coiffure. “Lies!” she retorted. “I have it on the best authority that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Yankee sea captain and my great-grandmother Surrey!”
He chuckled softly. “How scandalous. Does hot blood run in your family, Miss Vigny?”
She peeked at him through her lashes. “Why, sir, what a scandalous question! Miss Rose would be shocked. She was the one who told me, and she heard it straight from my great-aunt, who was her neighbor for twenty years!”
He finished the cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “I’ll have Josito bring your car home in the morning,” he said. He turned. “Or I can have him fetch you and you can drive it home later.”
“Is that an invitation?” she asked.
He nodded. “We could go riding. We haven’t done that lately.”
She averted her eyes. “I don’t know that I want to go near your stables again. You seem to have the idea that all I want out of life is to seduce your ranch hands one by one.”
“Stop that!” His hand caught her chin and jerked her face around to his blazing eyes. “I don’t want to see men pawing you,” he said curtly. “Especially not my men when they’re drunk!” His eyes ranged over every inch of her soft body, touching it in a way they never had before. His fingers closed on her chin and his eyes were dark and full of secrets. “I don’t want any man…touching you,” he breathed roughly.
She stared up into his eyes helplessly, tracing the craggy face, the straight nose, the bushy mustache over that hard, sensuous mouth. She could feel the sigh of his breath on her face, and she felt tingly all the way to her toes at the feel of his fingers on her soft cheek and chin.
Involuntarily, her own fingers reached out to touch the mustache over that chiseled mouth.
He seemed to flinch just before his hand went up to catch her wrist in a steely grasp, holding it away.
“Don’t do that,” he said harshly. “Can’t you get it into your head that I don’t want you to touch me?”
Her lower lip trembled, but she managed a nervous laugh. “I’ve got the message, Mr. Durango,” she assured him. “Now if you’ll give me back my arm, I’ll gladly go away and let you rush back to your conquest at Elise’s party.”
But he didn’t let go, and his eyes were watchful. “You’ve been flirting hard with me tonight,” he said quietly. “Trying to make my cousin jealous, Satin?”
She felt shocked, and showed it. “I don’t have that kind of relationship with Donald. It’s the same as it is with you—we’re just friends.”
“Is that what you and I are?” he asked in a strange, deep tone.
“Of course,” she managed. He was making her feel strange. Wary. Excited. Her wrist tingled where he gripped it.
“Then it won’t bother you if I take Melody into my bed, will it?” he asked, his eyes intent on her face.
She felt her breath catch in her throat. John and that mercenary little blonde in bed together, her blond tresses tangling in the dark hair over his bronzed, bare chest as he brushed his mouth over her smooth young body….
With a faint cry, she drew away from him, her face strangely pale, her eyes wide and shocked.
“You may be off sex, but I’m not,” he said deliberately, and he was watching her like a hawk. “Just because I’ve never touched you, that doesn’t mean I’m a eunuch.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I never thought you were,” she said quietly.
He drew a sharp, impatient breath and she heard the click of his lighter as he lit another cigarette.
“You smoke too much,” she chided gently.
“I do a lot of things too much,” he growled, and his eyes seemed to hate her for an instant.
“Like seducing blondes?” she asked, and could have bitten her tongue for the slip.
“It would take a blowtorch to seduce you.”
She glared at him, her eyes flashing with green sparks. “He hurt me!” she threw at him. “You’re a man. What could you possibly know about a woman’s feelings…?”
“He hurt you because you were a virgin,” he growled. His voice, like his eyes, was bitter. “And because he wanted a body, not the emotions, personality and spirit that went with it. No man who cared about a woman would damage her that way. He left scars that haven’t healed in two years. He crippled you.” He drew on the cigarette roughly. “By God, I should have killed him!”
She blinked at him, at the unfamiliar violence in his deep, lazy drawl. “You didn’t even know his last name,” she reminded him.
“Didn’t I?” One corner of the mustache curled faintly, and there was glittering triumph in his eyes. “It wasn’t hard to find out, honey. All I had to do was call the writer’s club where you met him.”
She froze in her seat, staring at him uncomprehendingly. “You…went to see him?”
He nodded.
“And?” she prompted.
He blinked, smoking his cigarette quietly.
“John!” she said, exasperation in her voice.
He blew out a thick cloud of smoke. “When you fall off a horse,” he said, ignoring her, “the quickest way to get over it is to get right back on again.”
She’d had enough. Her fingers gripped her purse as she reached for the door handle. “I’ve had all the physical involvement I want just now,” she ground out. “Good night!”
“Satin!”
She started at the authority in his deep voice and turned to look at him.
“If I’d planned to proposition you, I would have done it over two years ago,” he said shortly. “Will you stop taking offense at everything I say?”
“I thought it was the other way around,” she muttered. Her wide, hurt eyes sought his and she crushed the little purse in her hands. “Oh, John, what’s happening to us?” she asked miserably. “We’ve been so close, such good friends, and all of a sudden it’s falling apart.” She reached out a hand and drew it back when she realized what she was doing—he couldn’t even bear to let her touch him anymore. “I…I don’t get along with most people,” she said with uncommon solemnity. “I’ve always been a misfit, a little odd. But I…I’ve always been able to talk to you, and you understand me. I don’t want to lose that.”
“You’ll always be my friend, Satin,” he said quietly. “That hasn’t changed. It never will.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that I don’t have a hell of a lot of friends myself, male or female? That blonde tonight is a case in point. She likes expensive baubles and I’m rich. She’ll climb into my bed at the drop of a hat, as long as she can expect something tangible in return.”
“They why encourage her?” she grumbled, surprising herself.
The cigarette, forgotten, smoldered while he looked at her impatiently. “Why does the subject of Melody bother you so much? Does it hurt to realize that most women aren’t frozen from the neck down?”
Her face went bloodred. That was the second time he’d made such a remark about her, and she’d had enough. For a split second, she considered slapping him. Her green eyes glittered, her hand lifted.
“Try it,” he encouraged softly, something new and faintly dangerous in his silver eyes as they caught the movement of her hand. “Come on, honey, try it.”
She almost did. It was the first and only time she’d wanted to strike him, and she was tempted. But he had the look of a man who was anticipating retaliation, and she was uncertain about the form it might take.
Her tense body relaxed. “No, thanks,” she said stiffly. “You’re entitled to your opinion of me. I’m aware that it’s gone down a few notches lately.”
He took a draw from the cigarette and studied her flushed face quietly. “For just a minute, that cool little mask you always wear slipped. You wanted to hit me, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said curtly, averting her eyes.
“Why didn’t you?”
She shifted restlessly. “Because I’ve never imagined that you were the kind of man to turn the other cheek.”
“I wouldn’t have hit you back, if that’s what you mean.” He leaned across to open the door, and she felt the brief, hard pressure of his arm across her soft breasts. She sat like a statue until he moved away, and only then did she realize that she’d stopped breathing for an instant.
“What would you have done?” she asked in a strangely breathless tone.
He studied her through a wisp of smoke, his lips pursed thoughtfully. “What do you think?” he asked in a blatantly sensuous tone.
“I think it’s late,” she said.
“Later than you think, honey. I’ll send Josito for you about seven, okay?”
She searched his eyes, finding questions instead of answers. He made her nervous, he frightened her.
“We’ll take it slow and easy,” he said softly, his eyes giving the words a different, exciting meaning.
Incredibly, she blushed, while he searched her eyes until she thought her frantically beating heart would burst.
