by Diana Palmer
“You see?” he asked, lifting his mouth to brush it over her face in slow, soft kisses that lit a fire in her blood. “I’m not going to pounce on you.”
“You know so much about women,” she murmured, “and I know so little about men. We’re hardly matched.”
His lips tugged into a faint smile. He rested his weight on his elbow and studied her flushed face, her lazy, sensuous eyes. His gaze dropped to her blouse and he eased one finger under the edge of the neckline where it plunged into the narrow space between her small breasts.
He watched the helpless reaction in her eyes as he touched her bare flesh, easing his warm, faintly calloused fingers onto the soft, white swell under the wispy lace of her bra.
“You feel so exquisitely soft,” he whispered, his fingers slow and gentle, edging toward the taut peak.
Her nails bit into his upper arms and her breath caught. Nothing in her life had been like this, no man had ever touched her this way—it was so different from that nightmare attack of her youth, so caring and tender.
She felt herself go taut, and strange tinglings made her body tremble with anticipation.
“Easy, darling,” he whispered softly, leaning close to brush his mouth lightly against hers as his fingers moved again, gentling her. “This is part of it. I’m not going to hurt you. Just relax against me and let it happen.”
Her eyes looked straight up into his. “King, this is...the first time...” she whispered brokenly, trying to tell him, to make him understand the devastating experience it was.
But he seemed to know it already, smiling down at her as he moved, placing his warm mouth over her lips, increasing the pressure gently as his hand eased down, and then up, swallowing her, and she cried out involuntarily at the unexpected surge of pleasure.
He caught his own breath at the wild little sound, drawing back a whisper to look at her. “Magic,” he murmured gruffly. “What we do to each other is magic. Buds opening in the sun...”
She felt the violent shudder of his heart against her body, the rasp of his breath, as he kissed her again, deeply this time. She felt new sensations, wild, delicious surges of pleasure that worked their witchcraft on every tingling nerve. Her hands slid up his arms, feeling him, caressing him. They went around his neck and buried themselves in the thick, cool strands of his hair, to keep him close.
She was vaguely aware that both his hands were under her blouse, but she wasn’t aware of what they were doing until she felt them against her bare skin, cupping her, molding her, rough and tender and warm, and her eyes flew open and looked straight up into his.
His tanned face looked strained, his eyes narrow and glittering as they read hers. “You fit my hands as if you’d been created for them,” he said in a voice she didn’t recognize.
She flushed, her lips parting on an unsteady breath.
He looked down at the blouse, under which his hands were outlined as he touched her. “I want to look at you, Teddi,” he said quietly. “This isn’t enough.”
The thought of his eyes on her bareness was enough to bring her heart into her throat. She wanted that. The breeze on her skin, his eyes seeing her. She wanted him with a suddenness that startled her, all her untouched emotions roused to the point of pain as he caressed her.
“Frightened, little virgin?” he asked softly. “You know I won’t hurt you.”
“Oh, yes, I know,” she said. She reached up and touched his face, daringly, her fingertips tracing the hard line of his mouth, his straight, arrogant nose, pushing back a shock of thick, sun-streaked hair from his broad forehead.
“Do you want it?” he asked quietly.
She touched his mouth, fascinated with it. “If I don’t say no right now,” she confessed honestly, “I won’t be able to. You make me feel as if I’m burning up,” she whispered.
“You make me feel the same way,” he admitted, yielding reluctantly to the plea in her eyes. He drew his hands away from her body with a heavy sigh, and leaned them on either side of her head. His darkened eyes searched hers. “This is the first time for me, too, did you know?”
She smiled lazily, breathing more steadily now. “Pull the other one, Great White Rancher,” she teased.
He grinned back, tugging at a lock of her short hair. “I’m serious. You’re the first virgin I’ve made love to since I was sixteen. And this,” he added wickedly, “is the first time in years that I’ve had to stop.”
She searched his eyes, loving him, aching for more than just physical contact. She would have given anything for his love. She sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s no need.” He traced one of her thin eyebrows with a lazy finger. “Teddi, haven’t you ever wanted a man?”
She swallowed. She was tempted to tell him all of it, nightmare and all, but this wasn’t the time. It would spoil things between them. “No,” she said after a minute. “At least, not before you.”
He leaned his forehead against hers with a rough sigh. “Oh, honey, what a thing to admit to a man,” he ground out. “Can’t you tell how much I want you?”
It was hard to miss, as close as he was, and she felt faintly embarrassed by the knowledge. “I...don’t imagine you have this problem too often,” she murmured.
He drew away and stared down at her as if he had immediate fears for her sanity, and she flushed beet-red.
“I mean,” she corrected, avoiding his gaze, “I don’t imagine that many women say ‘no’ to you.”
“We won’t talk about other women,” he said firmly. “I’m not a playboy, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”
“You’d hardly have time to be, the way you push yourself here at the ranch,” she agreed, glancing up at him. “You work much too hard.”
He toyed with a strand of her hair. “Habit, darling,” he admitted, and the endearment sounded genuine. “I’ve always had to work hard. In the early days, if I’d allowed myself much time for recreation, everything we had would have gone on the auction block. I had Mother and Jenna to think about after my father died, and three properties to manage. I had to keep everything going.”
“And you’ve made a success of all of them,” she said. Her fingers touched the silky hair at his temples. “It’s made you hard, though.”
“Business is ruthless, little one, didn’t you know?”
“Yes, I know,” she murmured, remembering her own hard knocks in the world of modeling when she’d first entered it.
“Your own life hasn’t been easy,” he remarked.
“It wasn’t so bad, after I got to boarding school,” she lied. A smile touched her mouth. “And I had Jenna to talk to.”
His face seemed to harden. “When I wasn’t making things difficult for you, you mean. I’ve been a brute to you at times. But you can’t know the pressures I was under, the way it’s been with me.” His darkening eyes met her puzzled ones and dropped to her mouth. “Kiss me,” he said gruffly, bending. “Kiss me the way you wanted to that morning in the stables when I teased you.”
Without even thinking, she locked her hands behind his head and dragged it down to hers, letting her mouth tell him how hungry she’d been, and still was, holding him close, close....
“Don’t you like to taste me?” he murmured against her mouth.
“I am,” she murmured back.
He rubbed his nose against hers. “I’m going to have to teach you how to kiss, I can see that right now.”
“I know how,” she protested.
“Little girl kisses,” he scoffed with a wicked gleam in his eyes. “Not half intimate enough. I like it like this, Teddi...” He caught her cheeks and teased her lips with his until they parted hungrily. His tongue shot past them, and she clutched him as he taught her things she’d never known about the way people kissed. He didn’t just use his lips; she felt the gentle thrust of his tongue, the nibbling pressure of lips and teeth as he tormented her until she thought she’d go mad.
“Please, King,” she whispered brokenly, her nails biting int
o his back, her eyes riveted to his mouth. “Please, please...!”
“No holding back this time,” he growled as his mouth took hers fully. “Kiss me.”
And she kissed him back as hungrily as a new wife, as passionately as a woman who’d just found the love of her life. With a sense of awe, she felt the full weight of his body settling over hers until they were locked together, breast to breast, thigh to thigh, hip to hip, and she clung as the unfamiliar contact burned the most exquisite sensations into her reeling mind.
“King,” she whispered into his devouring mouth.
“Darling,” he whispered back on a hard groan, shifting as he felt the soft, involuntary movement of her young body, surprising a sweet little cry from her throat.
She felt herself trembling. Incredibly, so was he, and even as she felt her body yielding everything he was demanding, he suddenly stiffened and, with a muffled curse, rolled away from her. He lay breathing roughly on his back, one knee drawn up between them, his forearms over his face.
“King...?” she asked, concerned at the rigidity of his big body.
“Go walk around for a minute, love,” he said in a taut, aching tone, “and give me a little while to lie here and curse my own stupidity. Go on,” he added when she hesitated.
She got up shakily and walked over to the bank of the river, watching it run lazily between the banks while her heartbeat slowly calmed. Her back against a tree at the edge, she tore off a bit of bark and sailed it down into the water, her eyes drifting from the majestic pines to the mountains beyond.
She felt rather than saw him behind her a little bit later, and she dropped her eyes to the ground.
“Embarrassed?” he asked gently as he lit a cigarette.
“A little,” she admitted quietly. “I...didn’t know, you see.”
He laughed softly, drawing her close beside him with a protective arm around her shoulders. “We’re both human,” he murmured. “And together, we’re volatile. I should have expected it.”
She looked up at him shyly. “I wasn’t teasing...”
“Don’t you think I know that?” His eyes searched hers quietly. “It was beautiful. Not some sordid roll in the hay, not lust. I’ve never been that gentle with a woman in my life—or that intent on pleasing one. You’re...very special, little one,” he added, frowning. “You make me vulnerable in ways I couldn’t have imagined.”
She dropped her eyes to his chest, drinking in the sound of his deep, tender voice, the words that revealed he had some kind of feeling for her, after all.
“I thought it was the other way around,” she whispered.
His mouth brushed against her forehead. “You can’t imagine what it did to me,” he breathed, “touching you that way, knowing that no other man ever had.” He caught his breath and hugged her close for an instant before he let her go and moved away to retrieve his hat from the ground, where it had fallen an eternity ago.
“As much as I hate the thought,” he said, “I’m a working man. And to make it all worse, I’ve got that bloody accountant coming this afternoon.” His eyes darted to catch hers and he looked faintly irritated. “There’s something you need to know about him before he gets here.”
“What?” she asked, smiling.
He stared at her, captivated by the radiance of her face. “No,” he said. “Not yet. I’ll tell you later. Come on, tiger, let’s go home.”
The ride back was quiet, and Teddi didn’t admit to herself how much she was hoping that when he helped her down in the stables, he’d kiss her just once more. But when they reached the huge barn where the horses were quartered, Blakely and Jenna were just coming from the house, and Teddi felt her heart sink.
“There you are,” Jenna said, clinging to Blakely’s hand and laughing as if she had the sun captured inside her. “Some man is here to see you, King. Mother drove into Calgary to pick him up, and they’ve just come back.”
King nodded. “The accountant,” he said with a strangely secretive glance at Teddi. “Well, let’s go in. You might as well all be introduced at once. He’s going to be here for a few days.”
Teddi dismounted by herself and fell into step with Jenna and Blakely while one of the ranch hands took the horses away. None of them could keep up with King’s long strides; he was walking like a man with a distasteful goal ahead.
“Here’s King, now,” Mary was saying as they walked into the living room.
The visitor stood up, lean and dark and brown-haired, smiling crookedly when he saw Teddi. She got a good look at him at the same time, and all the bad luck in the world seemed to descend on her at once. This wasn’t just any accountant. This was Bruce Billingsly, who’d hounded her so single-mindedly at the beginning of the year that she’d even risked King’s contempt and accepted an invitation from Jenna at Easter. Bruce, who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
So now she knew who King’s secret informant was, who’d been telling him lies about her life, her work. She knew who’d helped to poison his mind against her. And here was the culprit in person, with a gleam in his eye telling her clearly that he had more mischief in mind.
Her wary eyes turned to King, who was watching the silent exchange with a cold scrutiny.
“Small world, Teddi,” Bruce laughed, moving close to bend and kiss her on the cheek, to her amazed indignation. “How do you do, Miss Devereaux, Blakely? Good to see you again, King, but,” he added, with a raised eyebrow as he drew a rigid Teddi to his side, “what’s my girl doing here?”
Chapter Seven
There was a small flash of emotion in King’s gray eyes that no one seemed to catch except Teddi. When he turned to Bruce Billingsly, there was nothing in his expression except a trace of mockery.
“As I told you before,” he told Teddi over Bruce’s shoulder, “we have a mutual acquaintance.”
“Sure. Me,” Bruce said with a grin. “Oh, I’ve been singing your praises for the past several months, honey. King didn’t know much about your modeling career, but I filled him in.”
I’ll just bet you did, Teddi thought miserably, remembering how she’d tried to elude her aunt’s boyfriend. He was like so many of Dilly’s other pickups, arrogant, a little conceited, and money-hungry as well. Since he couldn’t land Dilly, he’d set his sights on Teddi, with a lot of enthusiasm and no success at all. And apparently when he realized that King had a passing acquaintance with her, he decided to make sure that nothing could develop in that quarter while he was pursuing her. He’d even shown up at college once or twice, and she’d had a time trying to shoo him away.
Teddi’s apprehensive eyes looked up into King’s and read the disgust and contempt there. Bruce’s arrival had killed the trust that had been growing so delicately between them. The beautiful morning would become a memory, there would never be a repeat of it. She saw that in King’s hard face. It was as if he’d been looking for an excuse, a weapon. And now he had it.
“Aren’t you glad to see me, Teddi?” Bruce, grinning, hugged her.
King stabbed his hands into his jean pockets. “You didn’t tell me about your budding romance, darling,” he said, and it didn’t sound like an endearment anymore. “But now that Billingsly is here, perhaps you’ll have time to pursue it. When,” he added with a cold smile for Bruce, “he’s through getting my books in order. And there’s no time like the present. Shall we get to it?”
“But, King, he’s only just arrived,” Mary protested, her sense of hospitality outraged.
“He didn’t come here for a social gathering, Mother,” he reminded her. “Billingsly?”
Bruce knew the whip in that deep voice, apparently. “I’m ready,” he lied, letting go of Teddi reluctantly. “I’ll see you later, honey, we’ve got a lot to talk about.”
“Indeed we have,” Teddi said with a venomous smile, her dark eyes flashing.
King didn’t even look her way, and his back was arrow-straight as he led the shorter man out of the room.
“What was that all about?” Jenna
asked, while Blakely and her mother discussed ranch business.
“I told you about him,” Teddi moaned. “The one who chased me until I couldn’t stay in New York at all for being hounded?”
“That’s him?” Jenna gasped. “Here?”
“Here, though heaven only knows how. He works for the firm that does King’s accounting, I suppose,” she said miserably. “Now that I think of it, he told me he knew King when he was running after me, but I never asked how. I should have realized...”
“That’s the man who came up to college looking for you,” Jenna burst out, remembering. “Holy mackerel!”
“He just wouldn’t take no for an answer. I thought that when I came up here at Easter I’d finally gotten rid of him,” she said with a wan smile. “Oh, Jenna, what am I going to do? King believes him, he really believes there’s something between us. I couldn’t even push the silly man away, I was too shocked at seeing him here, and heaven only knows what lies he’s been telling King about me! And King will believe every word,” she added miserably.
Jenna was beginning to add things up. The look on Teddi’s face when she and King had ridden in, the very tender light in her brother’s eyes, the slight swell of Teddi’s lower lip, the pine straw in her hair—it all began to make sense.
“Just what were you and King doing in the woods besides discussing international economics and the future of democracy?” Jenna asked, tongue in cheek.
Teddi blushed, and Jenna had the answer she wanted. She laughed delightedly.
“Now I know why King’s been so hard to live with,” she murmured. “Mother said he’d been horrible since Easter. Something happened then, too, didn’t it, after you threw that feed bucket at him? Oh, my friend—” her gray eyes lit up “—if you knew how I’ve dreamed of having you for a sister-in-law....”
“It isn’t like that,” Teddi protested, embarrassed. “And you mustn’t say anything. Oh, please, Jenna, you can’t!”
