"I'm sorry," Miranda said. "It can't be easy for you."
"It isn't easy for Harden, either," came the surprising reply. Theodora smiled sadly as they reached the house. "That gets me through it." She looked at Miranda with dark, somber eyes. "He's the image of Barry."
"I wish you could make him listen."
"What's the old saying, 'if wishes were horses, beggars could ride'?" Theodora shook her head. "My dear, we're all walking these days."
Later, like a huntress waiting for her prey to appear, Miranda donned the sexy underwear and the incredibly see-through lemon-yellow gown she'd bought, sprayed herself with perfume, and exhibited herself in a seductive position on the bed in the bedroom they'd been sharing. Harden made sure he didn't come in until she was asleep, and he was gone before she woke in the morning. But tonight, she was waiting for him. If what Evan said, as incredible as it seemed, was true, and Harden was innocent, it was going to be delicious to seduce him. She had to make allowances for his pride, of course, so she couldn't admit that she knew. That made it all the more exciting.
It was a long time before the door swung open and her tired, dust-stained husband came in the door. He paused with his Stetson in his hand and gaped at her where she lay on the bed, on her side, one perfect small breast almost bare.
"Hi, cowboy," she said huskily, and smiled at him. "Long day?"
"What the hell are you dudded up for?" he asked curtly.
She eased off the bed and stood up, so that he could get a good view of her creamy body under the gauzy fabric of her gown. She stretched, lifting her breasts so that the already hard tips were pushing against the bodice.
"I bought some new clothes, that's all," she murmured drowsily. "Going to have a shower?"
He muttered something under his breath about having one with ice cubes and slammed the bathroom door behind him.
Miranda laughed softly to herself when she heard the shower running. Now if only she could keep her nerve, if only she could dull his senses so that he couldn't resist her. She pulled the hem of the gown up to her thighs and the strap off one rounded shoulder and lay against the pillows, waiting.
He came out, eventually, with a dark green towel secured around his hips. She looked up at him, her eyes slitted, her lips parted invitingly while his eyes slid over her body with anything but a shy, innocent appraisal. The look was so hot, she writhed under it.
"Is this what it took for your late husband?" he asked, his own eyes narrow and almost insulting. "Did you have to dress up to get him interested?"
Her breath caught. She sat up, righting her gown. "Harden..." she began, ready to explain, despite her intention not to.
"Well, I don't need that kind of stimulation when I'm interested," he said, controlling a fiercely subdued rage over her behavior. She must think him impotent, at the least, to go so far to get him into bed. Which only made him more suspicious about her motives.
"You used to be interested," she stammered.
"So I did, before you decided that I needed reforming, before you started interfering in my life. I wanted you. But not anymore, honey, and all those cute tricks you're practicing don't do a damned thing for me."
He pulled her against him, "Can't you tell?"
His lack of interest was so blatant that she turned her eyes away, barely aware that he was pulling clothes out of drawers and closets. Tears blinded her. She hid under the covers and pulled them up to her blushing face, shivering with shame. This had been Tim's favorite weapon, making her feel inadequate, too little a woman to arouse him. Her pride lay on the floor at Harden's feet, and he didn't even care.
"For future reference, I'll do the chasing when I'm interested in sex," he said, glaring down at her white face. "I don't want it with you, not anymore. I told you it was over. You should have listened."
"Yes. I should have," she said hoarsely.
He felt wounded all over. She'd loved him, he knew she had, but she couldn't just be his wife, she had to be a reformer, to harp on his feud with Theodora, to make him seem cruel and selfish. He'd been stinging ever since Cancun, especially since some of those accusations were right on the money. But this was the last straw, this seductive act of hers. He'd had women come on to him all his adult life, their very aggressiveness turning him off. He hadn't expected his own wife to treat him like some casual stud to satisfy her passions. Was she really that desperate for sex?
He turned and went out of the room. It didn't help that he could hear Miranda crying even through the closed door.
Evan heard it, too, and minutes later he confronted his brother in the barn, where Harden was checking on one of the mares in foal.
The bigger man was taking off his hat as he walked down the wide, wood-chip-shaving-filled aisle between the rows of stalls, his swarthy face set in hard lines, his mouth barely visible as his jaw clenched.
“That does it," he said, and kept coming. "That really does it. That poor woman's had enough from you!"
Harden threw off his own hat and stood, waiting. "Go ahead, throw a punch. You'll get it back, with interest," he replied, his tone lazy, his blue eyes bright with anger.
"She goes shopping and buys all sorts of sexy clothes to turn you on, and then you leave her in tears! Doesn't it matter to you that she was trying to make it easy for you?" he demanded.
Harden frowned. Something wasn't right here. "Easy for me?" he prompted.
Evan sighed angrily. "I wasn't going to tell you, but maybe I'd better. I told her the truth about you," he said shortly.
"About what?"
"You know about what!" Evan growled. "It was her right to know, after all, she's your wife."
"What did you tell her, for God's sake?" Harden raged, at the end of his patience.
"The truth." Evan squared his shoulders and waited for the explosion as he replied, "I told her you were a virgin."
Chapter Eleven
For a minute Harden just stood staring at his brother, looking as if he hadn't heard a word. Then he began to laugh, softly at first, building into a roar of sound that echoed down the long aisle.
"It isn't funny," Evan glowered at him. "My God, it's nothing to be ashamed of. There are plenty of men who are celibate. Priests, for instance..."
Harden laughed louder.
Evan wiped his sleeve across his broad, damp forehead and sighed heavily. "What's so damned funny?"
Harden stopped to get his breath before he answered, and lit a cigarette. He took a deep draw, staring amusedly at his older brother.
"I never bothered to deny it, because it didn't matter. But I ought to deck you for passing that old gossip on to Miranda. I gave her hell upstairs for what she did. I had no idea she was supposed to be helping me through my first time!"
Evan cocked his head, narrowing one eye. "You aren't a virgin?"
Harden didn't answer him. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth. "Is that why she went on that spending spree in town, to buy sexy clothes to vamp me with?"
"Yes. I'm as much help as Mother, I guess," Evan said quietly. "I overheard her telling Miranda that you'd never get over Anita."
Harden frowned. "When?"
"At the reception, before you left on your honeymoon."
Harden groaned and closed his eyes. He turned to the barn wall and hit it soundly with his fist. "Damn the luck!"
"One misunderstanding after another, isn't it?" Evan leaned a broad shoulder against the wall. "Was she right? Are you still in love with Anita?"
"No. Maybe you were right about that. Maybe it was her time, and Mother was just a link in the chain of events."
"My God," Evan exclaimed reverently. "Is that really you talking, or do you just have a fever?" he asked dryly.
Harden glanced up at the lighted window of the room he shared with Miranda. "I've got a fever, all right. And I know just how to get it down."
He left Evan standing and went up to the bedroom, his eyes gleaming with mischief and anticipated pleasure.
But the sight tha
t met him when he opened the door wasn't conducive to pleasure. Miranda was fully dressed in a pretty white silk dress that was even more seductive than the nightgown she'd discarded, and she was packing a suitcase.
She turned a tearstained face to his. "Don't worry, I'm going," she said shortly. "You don't have to throw me off the place."
He closed the door calmly, turned the lock, and tossed his hat onto a chair before he moved toward her.
"You can stop right there," she said warningly. I’m going home!"
"You are home," he said evenly.
He swept the suitcase, clothes and all, off the bed onto the floor into a littered heap and bent to lift a startled Miranda in his hard arms.
"You put me down!" she raged.
"Anything to oblige, sweetheart." He threw her onto the bed and before she could roll away, he had her pinned against the disheveled covers, one long leg holding her thrashing body. She fought him like a tigress until he caught her wrists and pressed them into the mattress on either side of her head.
Her hair was a dark cloud around her flushed face as she stared up at him furiously, her silver eyes flashing at him.
"I've had enough of damned men!" she raged at him. "It was bad enough having Tim tell me I wasn't woman enough to hold a man without having you rub my face in it, too! I have my pride!"
"Pride, and a lot of other faults," he mused. "Bad temper, impatience, interfering in things that don't concern you..."
"What are you, Mr. Sweetness and Light, a pattern for perfect manhood?!"
"Not by a long shot," he said pleasantly, studying her face. "You're a wildcat, Miranda. Everything I ever wanted, even if it did take me a long time to realize it, and to admit it."
"You don't want me," she said, her voice breaking as she tried to speak bravely about it. "You showed me...!"
"I had a cold shower, remember," he whispered, smiling gently. "Here. Feel."
He moved slowly, sensuously, and something predictable and beautiful happened to him, something so blatant that she caught her breath.
"I want you," he said softly. "But it's much, much more than wanting. Do you like poetry, Miranda?" he breathed at her lips, brushing them with maddening leisure as he spoke. "'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely, and more temperate...'" He kissed her slowly, nibbling at her lower lip while she trembled with pleasure. "Shakespeare couldn't have been talking about you, could he, sweetheart? You aren't temperate, even if you are every bit as lovely as a summer's day...!"
The kiss grew rough, and deep, and his lean hands found her hips, grinding them up against his fierce arousal.
"This is how much I want you," he bit off at her lips. "I hope you took vitamins, because you're going to need every bit of strength you've got."
She couldn't even speak. His hands were against her skin, and then his mouth was. She'd never in her wildest dreams imagined some of the ways he touched her, some of the things he whispered while he aroused her. He took her almost effortlessly to a fever pitch of passion and then calmed her and started all over again.
It was the sweetest kind of pleasure to feel him get the fabric away from her hot skin, and then to feel his own hair-roughened body intimately against her own. It was all of heaven to kiss and be kissed, to touch and be touched, to let him pleasure her until she was mindless with need.
"Evan said...you were...a virgin," she whispered, her voice breaking as she looked, shocked, into the amused indulgence of his face when the tension was unbearable.
He laughed, the sound soft and predatory. "Am I?" he whispered, and pushed down, hard.
She couldn't believe what she was feeling. His face blurred and then vanished, and it was all feverish motion and frantic grasping and sharp, hot pleasure that brought convulsive statisfaction.
She lay in his arms afterward, tears running helplessly down her cheeks while he smoked a cigarette and absently smoothed her disheveled hair. She was still trembling in the aftermath.
"Are you all right, little one?" he asked gently.
"Yes." She laid her wet cheek against his shoulder. "I didn't know," she stammered.
"It's different, every time," he replied quietly. "But sometimes there's a level of pleasure that you can only experience with one certain person." His lips brushed her forehead with breathless tenderness. "It helps if you're in love with them."
"I suppose you couldn't help but know that," she said, her eyes faintly sad. "I always did wear my heart on my sleeve."
He nuzzled her face until she lifted it to his quiet, vivid blue eyes. "I love you," he said quietly. "Didn't you know?"
No, she didn't know. Her breath stopped in her throat and she felt the flush that even reddened her breasts.
"My God," he murmured, watching it spread. "I've never seen a woman blush here." He touched her breasts, very gently.
"Well, now you have, and you can stop throwing your conquests in my face— Oh!"
His mouth stopped the tirade, and he smiled against it. "They weren't conquests, they were educational experiences that made me the perfect specimen of male prowess you see before you."
"Of all the conceited people..." she began.
He touched her, and she gasped, clinging to him.
"What was that bit, about being conceited?" he asked.
She moaned and curled into his body, shivering. "Harden!" she cried.
"I'll bet you didn't even know that only one man out of twenty is capable of this...."
The cigarette went into the ashtray and his body covered hers. And he gave her a long and unbearably sweet lesson in rare male endurance that lasted almost until morning.
When she woke, he was dressed, whistling to himself as he whipped a belt around his lean hips and secured the big silver buckle.
"Awake?" he murmured dryly. He arched an eyebrow as she moved and groaned and winced. "I could stay home and we could make love some more."
She caught her breath, gaping at him. "And your brother thinks you're a virgin!" she burst out.
He shrugged. "We all make mistakes."
"Yes, well the people who write sex manuals could do two chapters on you!" she gasped.
He grinned. "I could return the compliment. Don't get up unless you want to. Having you take to your bed can only reflect favorably on my reputation in the household."
She burst out laughing at the expression on his face. She sat up, letting the covers fall below her bare breasts, and held out her arms.
He dropped into them, kissing her with lazy affec-
HARDEN
tion. "I love you," he whispered. "I'm sorry if I was a little too enthusiastic about showing it."
"No more enthusiastic than I was," she murmured softly. She reached up and kissed him back. "I wish you could stay home. I wish I wasn't so... incapacitated."
"Don't sound regretful," he chuckled. "Wasn't it fun getting you that way?"
She clung to him, sighing. "Oh, yes." Her eyes opened and she stared past him at the wall, almost purring as his hands found her silky breasts and caressed them softly. "Harden?"
"What, sweetheart?"
She closed her eyes. "Nothing. Just...I love you."
He smiled, and reached down to kiss her again.
When he went downstairs to have Jeanie May take a tray up to Miranda, Evan grinned like a Cheshire cat.
"Worn her out after only one day? You'd better put some vitamins on that tray and feed her up," he said.
Harden actually grinned back. "I'm working on that."
"I gather everything's going to be all right?"
"No thanks to you," Harden said meaningfully.
Evan's cheeks went ruddy. "I was only trying to help, and how was I to know the truth? My God, you never went around with women, you never brought anybody home... You could have been a virgin!"
Harden smiled secretly. "Yes, I could have."
The way he put it made Evan more suspicious than ever. "Are you?" he asked.
"Not anymore," came the dr
y reply. "Even if I was," he added to further confound the older man. The smile faded. "Where's Theodora?"
"Out feeding her chickens."
He nodded, and went out the back door. He'd said some hard things to Theodora over the years, and Miranda was right about his vendetta. It was time to run up the white flag.
Theodora saw him coming and grimaced, and when he saw that expression, something twisted in his heart.
"Good morning," he said, his hands stuffed into his pockets.
Theodora glanced at him warily. "Good morning," she replied, tossing corn to her small congregation of Rhode Island Reds.
"I thought we might have a talk."
"Why bother?" she asked quietly. "You and Miranda will be in your own place by next week. You won't have to come over here except at Christmas."
He took out a cigarette and lit it, trying to decide how to proceed. It wasn't going to be easy. In all fairness, it shouldn't be, he conceded.
"I...would like to know about my father," he said.
The bowl slid involuntarily from Theodora's hands and scattered the rest of the corn while she stared, white-faced, at Harden. "What?" she asked.
"I want to know about my father," he said tersely.
"Who he was, what he looked like." He hesitated. "How you...felt about him."
"I imagine you know that already," she replied proudly. "Don't you?"
He blew out a cloud of smoke. "Yes. I think I do, now," he agreed. "There's a big difference between love and infatuation. I didn't know, until I met Mir- anda."
"All the same, I'm sorry about Anita," she said tightly. "I've had to live with it, too, you know."
"Yes." He hesitated. "It...must have been hard for you. Having me, living here." He stared at her, searching for words. "If Miranda and I hadn't married, if I'd given her a child, I know she'd have had it. Cherished it. Loved it, because it would have been a part of me."
Theodora nodded.
"And all the shame, all the taunts and cutting remarks, would have passed right off her because we loved each other so much," he continued. "She'd have raised my child, and what she felt for him would have been...special, because a love like that only happens once for most people."
Books By Diana Palmer Page 67
