He chose to take that as consent and rose quickly. He yanked off his clothes and his boots, tossing the clothes across the chair, shoving the boots against the wall. She watched him, her eyes sorrowful and knowing and full of hopeless yearning.
When he lifted the layers of blankets to slide in beside her, he half expected her to tell him no. But she said nothing, only scooted back enough to give him room.
And then at last, he was there with her, where he’d dreamed of being for months now, wrapped up warm and close, the fresh-showered scent of her taking all his senses. With a groan, he pulled her against him. She came—sighing, soft, willing, sad.
She kissed him, a long, slow, hungry kiss. Her belly pressed against him, and her heavy, ripe breasts, too. She reached down and touched him, a loving touch that turned to stroking.
“No, Meggie...” he groaned.
“Shh...”
He lost it, like some kid who’d never known the feel of a woman’s hand.
Shattered, shamed, he threw an arm across his eyes and looked away from her.
She only pushed back the covers and went to the bathroom for a towel.
A little later, she lay beside him again, in the warm cove the blankets made. He reached for her. And he began to touch her. He could no more stop himself from touching her right then than he could make himself quit breathing. He had to feel every inch of her, to know her again as he had known her before, when they were man and wife, when he had allowed himself to forget for a while that freedom was what he wanted most.
This time, instead of facing him, she lay tucked right into him, spoon-fashion. That gave him free reign to caress her, and also put his body in the best, most complete contact with hers.
He found her somehow softer to the touch than before. Her skin felt hotter, too. And if most of her seemed softer, that didn’t include her belly. The hard tautness of it astounded him. He rubbed the stretched skin gently, felt a movement. She sighed and put her hand over his.
“Does it hurt when he kicks?”
“Not too much. Not most of the time.”
His hand strayed up to cup her full breast. And then down again. All the way down.
“Is it all right?”
“Yes. Carefully. Oh, Nate. Yes.”
He touched her, his fingers parting her, delving in. She moved against him, eager, hungry, totally his. Within moments, she cried out.
As her ragged breathing slowed, he pulled her even closer than before, his body absorbing the heat of hers.
“Sleep now,” he whispered.
“Oh, Nate...”
“Just sleep.”
In the morning, before dawn, Meggie woke and slid out from under the blankets. Not allowing herself to glance back at the warm bed and the man sleeping there, she pulled on her robe. Then she tiptoed around the room, taking clean clothes from the bureau and closet, pulling them on quickly, staying as quiet as she could.
Downstairs, she built up the fire, put on the coffee and whipped up batter for pancakes. Nate came down just as she was pouring the first batch on the griddle and cracking eggs into a pan.
“Sit down,” she said.
He came and stood by the table, looking sheepish and vulnerable. “Meggie, I...”
“Sit down,” she said again.
He dropped to the chair. She moved around the room, pouring him coffee, turning the pancakes, then sliding them onto a warm plate along with three eggs. She set the food in front of him. “Eat.”
He spread butter, poured on syrup, then picked up his fork.
A few minutes later, she joined him. They ate in silence, until the food was gone.
Meggie pushed her plate aside and sat back in her chair.
Nate looked at her broodingly from his end of the table. “All right. What? I shouldn’t have last night. I know.”
“I love you,” she said.
He turned away, toward the still-dark windows that looked out on the yard behind the house.
She folded her hands on the table, stared down at them, then up at him. “Last night was...beautiful for me.”
He looked down, up, toward the window again. Everywhere but at her.
“Nate? Did you hear me?”
“I heard.” He spoke harshly—and then added in a ragged whisper, “And it was...the same for me.”
She waited for him to look at her. But he didn’t. So she asked, “Where are we going together, Nate?”
He shrugged, still looking toward the dark windows.
“Are you my husband?”
He said nothing.
“Nate. I think you’re going to have to decide.”
He made himself look at her then. “I just...I came to help out.”
She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and leveled her gaze on him again. “For calving time.”
“Right.”
“Calving time is almost done.”
“Not quite done.”
“Enough so that we can manage now without you.”
His expression darkened. “What are you talking about? We drove ourselves to the brink yesterday. You need me. If I hadn’t been here—”
“It was the last big storm. You know it. And most of the cows have calved.” She thought for a moment. “But come to think of it...”
“What?”
“You’re right.”
He looked at her sideways. “About what?”
“About how I need you.”
He made a scoffing sound. “I meant you need my help, here, now, to run this damn ranch of yours.”
“And you’re right. I do need your help. I always will.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Well, branding time comes next. And then the spring drive. And after that, it’ll be summer, which means haying, mending fences, trying to keep the weeds down. It goes on and on. You know it does. So you’re right, I do need you. The Double-K needs you. Your baby needs you. And not just for now. Forever.”
She watched his defensiveness turn angry. He didn’t like words like “forever.” “You won’t get any forever from me, Meggie. You knew it all along.”
“Yes. I did.”
His lip curled in a snarl. “But still you came after me.”
“Because I love you. I told you from the first—if I needed a child to keep my home, I wanted that child to be yours.”
He made a low, derisive sound. “Hell, Meggie. What is it with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You live in some crazy romance inside your own head. You have...no damn judgment at all.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but he ran right over her.
“After all,” he sneered, “you went and chose me as the object of your undying love. That’s pretty damn deluded, if you think about it—first that you chose me. A losing proposition if there ever was one. But even if it had been someone else, someone not quite so... impossible as I am, it’s still nothing more than some big, pointless fantasy, telling yourself for all these years that there’s only one man in the world for you. It’s not normal. No one carries a torch for that long.”
Meggie refused to be shamed by his cruel words. She faced him proudly. “Maybe you’re right. Nobody does. Nobody in the world—except me.”
“Oh, so you’re something rare, are you?” Her rose, his chair scraping the floorboards as he stood. “Something special, in your delusion?”
“Stop it.” She pushed herself to her feet so she could meet him eye-to-eye, grunting a little with the weight of the baby. “Just stop that mean talk. It won’t work on me anymore. I’m not some poor nineteen-year-old girl now, someone you can reduce to tears with a few cruel words. I’ve lived with you, and I know you in the deepest ways. And sometimes, in the best of our days together, I’ve dared to dream that it would work out all right between us.”
He just looked at her, so hard and guarded. “Stop dreaming. It’ll get you nowhere.”
She gave his own hardness right back to him. “
Fine. Then it’s time for you to go. For good and all. It’s time I stopped dreaming of what will never be. And it’s time you stopped hanging around here, angry all the time because you want me, but then not letting yourself have me. If you want to see someone who’s deluded, you just take a good, long look at yourself.”
That reached him, for some reason. His hard mask of angry defensiveness slipped. He allowed her to see the pain underneath. “Meggie, I...”
“What?” She looked straight at him.
He gazed back at her hopelessly.
“Say it,” she prodded. “I can take it. I’ve taken so much. You’ve got no idea how strong I am.”
“I just...can’t be what you want me to be.”
She shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“Hell, Meggie...”
“No. Listen.” She leaned toward him across the table, as much as she could with her stomach in the way. “You are what I want you to be. I’ve never asked you to change.”
“You want me to come here.” He gestured with a sweep of his arm. “To live here. To spend my life working the Double-K. With you.”
“That’s so.”
He grunted, a vindicated sound.
She added, “But it’s not the only option, not as far as I’m concerned.”
He frowned and dropped his arm to his side. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I learned something in November when I lived with you in L.A. I learned that...I could make my home anywhere. If there was love enough. If there was you. I’m saying that I would go with you. Me and our baby. If you would take us. Wherever you wanted to go.”
He gaped at her. “You really mean that. You’d leave the Double-K.”
“I would. For you. To be with you.” She smiled at him then, a sad, resigned smile. “But you won’t take us, will you?”
“I...”
“Will you?”
Slowly, he sank back to his chair.
With a sigh, she sat down, too, and waited for him to answer her. He said nothing. And that was all the answer she required.
She rested a hand on the swell of her belly. “Oh, Nate. I swore to myself, on the morning after our wedding night, that I would take the time we had together and find joy in it—and not ask for more. I’ve tried to do that. I truly have. Maybe I didn’t always succeed. Maybe I...hoped more than I had a right to. Maybe I held on longer than I should have. But when you finally said it was truly over, I accepted your will. I came home and set my mind to leaving you behind.
“But then, you wouldn’t stay away. You had to come back, temporarily, for calving time. And maybe you’re right. Maybe we wouldn’t have made it through without you. But it’s no good, the way you treat me now. It’s as if you have to hurt me. You’ve been riding me all the time, picking fights with me over every little thing. And then, finally, when neither of us could bear it anymore—you fell into bed with me. For what? To relieve the tension a little? So you can start the meanness all over again?”
“Meggie, I didn’t—”
“Don’t lie to me. Lie to yourself if you have to, but not to me. You want me, but you won’t stay with me. You can’t keep your hands off me, but you won’t be my husband. I’m not going to take it anymore. It isn’t any good for me, or for our baby.”
Outside, the sky was beginning to lighten. Meggie pushed herself upright again and picked up her plate, as well as his. She carried both plates to the sink and set them down carefully.
Then she turned to Nate once more. “You’re going to have to make up your mind, Nate. For good and all. Do you stay and make a real marriage with me—or do you go?”
He looked toward the window and the coming dawn. Out in the yard, one of Farrah’s roosters crowed. Sonny’s hound took up the cry, letting out one long, doggy wail to the new day.
“Nate. Make up your mind.”
He turned to her then. She knew his answer before he spoke. She could see it there, in the loneliness of his eyes.
“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll go.”
Chapter Fifteen
Not long after breakfast, Nate rode out with Sonny. But before he left, he kept his word about the Charolais calf. Meggie never knew where he took it, but when she went out to the shed to feed the other calves, it was gone.
Nate stayed for two more days, until all the calves weakened by the blizzard were back on their feet again. Through that time, he and Meggie were unfailingly kind to each other. Kind, and as polite as strangers.
On Sunday, after breakfast, Nate rose from the table and went back upstairs.
Ten minutes later, he came down. Meggie was in the living room, feeding wood into the heat stove. She shoved in a log and shut the small iron door in the side of the stove.
“Meggie.”
She rose and faced him. He carried that big duffel he used as a suitcase.
She rubbed her hands down the sides of the jumper she wore. Inside her, the yearning rose up, to reach out, to whisper, Don’t go.... She pushed the yearning back down, into the deepest part of her, where it made a dull, never-ending ache.
“Well,” she said in the false, bright voice she’d been using with him for the past two days now. “You’re all ready.”
“Yeah.” His tone was gruff. “All packed and ready.”
“All right, then.”
He seemed to struggle with what to say next. “If you need me...” he began.
She shook her head. “I’ll let you know. When the baby comes.”
“Thanks.”
“And I’ll send the papers, as soon as I get out of the hospital.”
“Papers?”
“For the divorce.”
His jaw tightened, and then relaxed. “Good enough.”
They stared at each other.
He shrugged. “Well. Goodbye, then.”
“Goodbye, Nate. And...thank you.”
He actually grinned. “What for? Making you miserable for weeks on end?”
“You know what for. If there’s ever anything I can—”
He put up his free hand. “Don’t.”
She closed her eyes, bit her lip and nodded.
“Goodbye, Meggie.”
She nodded again, because her throat had tightened up and she didn’t think she could push any words through it. And she kept her eyes closed, so she wouldn’t have to watch him go. She heard his boots moving toward the door.
And then they stopped. “Meggie?”
She made herself open her eyes.
“The other night, when I asked you about Cotes...that was wrong of me. You said it then—I had no right to ask a thing like that.”
She still didn’t speak. She couldn’t.
“Meggie, what I’m trying to say is, if you find someone you think you could make a life with—even if it’s that smug little twit Cotes—I want you to go for it. All right?”
She swallowed and managed to whisper, “All right.”
It was a lie, of course. There would be no other men for Megan Bravo. She was like her father. A person who gave her love only once. She felt in her heart that Nate knew she lied.
But he didn’t let on. He only gave her one last toobrief smile. And went out the door.
How did she live through that parting? It was worse than it had been when he sent her away after Thanksgiving, as if a big piece of her heart had been torn out.
Yet Meggie was a strong woman. And she had her land and a baby to live for. She knew that as calving time passed and the first wildflowers begin to appear in the snow-patched meadows, she would find peace inside herself once more.
Nate had no such expectations. Peace was a word in a language not his own.
In the days immediately following his departure from the Double-K, he slept little. Every time he did, he dreamed the dream of darkness. Of musty wool. Of his vow to get free.
Or else he dreamed of Meggie. Calling him. He saw her eyes, looking into his, just the way she had looked at him when he went out her door
that last time: a look of undying love—and pure determination to get on with her life.
Without him.
He knew that he could not go back to her. Ever. That he had to leave her alone to put her life back together again.
And he would leave her alone.
He swore to himself that he would.
Maybe he would move. His neighbors all seemed poisoned against him. They had adored Meggie. And they blamed him for her departure.
Rightly so.
For five years, he’d lived just fine with their indifference. But their simmering resentment set his teeth on edge. That damn Dolores looked at him as if he’d just done murder and buried the evidence.
On Tuesday, two days after he returned to L.A., Nate took a job tracking down a runaway, a kid of fifteen who’d stolen his father’s Mercedes and gone south. Nate found the kid on Wednesday night, in a seedy bar just over the Mexican border.
It was a disaster. The kid had taken up with some teenaged gangster types. The gangsters had guns. Nate ended up in a shoot-out, and took a bullet in the left arm, midway between the shoulder and the elbow. The gangsters got nervous. They ran out, guns blazing, and jumped into the Mercedes. They took off, peeling rubber—and leaving the runaway in tears in a back room.
The barmaid, a kindhearted type, poured tequila over the bullet hole in Nate’s arm and then wrapped it in a bar towel. The kid, by that time, was more than willing to go home.
They started back around three on Thursday morning. The trip was pure hell. Nate’s arm burned as though someone had stuck a hot poker in it, and the kid cried the whole way, swearing that his parents didn’t care about him, that all he wanted was his freedom.
Near Blythe, just before dawn, Nate pulled over to the side of the road. “Get out.”
The kid sniffed and gaped. “Huh?”
“You want your damn freedom, you got it. Get out.”
The kid blinked, then looked frantically out the windows. The highway was deserted in both directions. A lone Joshua tree stood a few feet from the passenger door. “It’s the middle of the desert. I can’t get out here.”
Nate scowled across the distance between them. “You want your freedom or not?”
The kid whimpered. “I just want them to care about me.”
Marriage By Necessity Page 18
