by BETH KERY
She felt like a thief, stealing glances at Vic covertly on those occasions. It heartened her to see that although his hair was still shaggy he at least wasn’t quite as thin as he had been when she first arrived. He was shaving again. The tan that he acquired so easily from riding or working on the farm made him even more magnetically attractive.
Niall found herself staring at his bare forearms while he ate, thinking they were a relatively safe target for her covetous glances. She’d never have guessed before she met Vic that a man’s bare, muscular arms or big, capable-looking hands could be so sexy. For Niall, however, Vic’s forearms and hands rivaled the sight of his long, hard thighs or his tight ass in his well-worn jeans. Well—they took a close second.
And beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Once he’d caught her staring and abruptly paused in the motion of cutting his pork chop. She’d looked up guiltily to find him gazing directly at her. His bronzed skin made his light eyes even more compelling in their impact. Niall froze in her chair like a small animal that had just come into the sight of a predator. She couldn’t read the inexplicable expression in Vic’s eyes in that moment. By the time he made his characteristic rolling motion with his jaw and glanced down, Niall was left breathless with confusion and longing.
He’d left the kitchen early that night, surprising Meg when he turned down a serving of her homemade strawberry shortcake.
Niall watched a few seconds later through the window over the sink as Vic backed out of the driveway. She’d tried not to think of where he might be going, but she was about as successful at that as she was at torturing herself by imagining what he was doing with Eileen Moore on those nights when he stayed in Chicago.
About two weeks after Niall’s arrival, Donny had innocently forced Vic to acknowledge her while they were eating dinner. It was a sunny, comfortably warm summer evening. The fact that it was a Friday night and that Vic was home from Chicago gave a festive air to dinner that night. Niall had spent a good part of the afternoon, after she’d returned from class, cleaning the enormous barbecue in the backyard, which Meg admitted hadn’t been used once since they’d moved into the farmhouse. When Niall’d finally cleaned the monstrous iron contraption to her satisfaction, she’d put it to good use by preparing some juicy steaks, corn on the cob, and baked potatoes on it. They were in the midst of enjoying their summertime feast when Donny suddenly sprung his unexpected question to Niall.
“Want me to teach you how to ride this summer, Ms. Chandler?”
Niall glanced up in surprise, noticing how Vic’s angular jaw paused in the motion of chewing his steak.
“Uh . . . I don’t know about that, Donny,” she equivocated with a nervous laugh. The idea of riding one of those beautiful animals fast and free undoubtedly appealed to her. But that was like saying that the thought of flying in a plane sounded exciting and wonderful when one was scared stiff of takeoff. It didn’t matter how great step two seemed if one was terrified of step one.
“Don’t you think she could learn on Velvet . . . or maybe Aster?” Donny asked Vic pointedly.
Niall waited in growing discomfort as Vic took his time chewing and swallowing. When he finally transferred his gaze to her, it made her feel hot and flustered.
“You’ve never ridden before, have you?”
She shook her head slowly. He’d asked her if she’d ever ridden once while they were dating in Chicago last year and Niall had told him that she hadn’t, then neatly changed the subject.
“I was enrolled for riding lessons when I was seven. On the day that I showed up, the horse they had picked out for me bolted as the instructor was helping me mount. I sort of . . . refused to go back after that, much to my mother’s dismay,” Niall added under her breath.
In fact, Alexis had been at her wits’ end trying to understand how her daughter had been so terrified by the rearing horse. She couldn’t comprehend Niall’s solemn and eventually fierce refusals to return to her lessons. Alexis had been an accomplished equestrian from an early age, and it was beyond her how her own flesh and blood could abhor what she so loved.
“What do you think, Vic?” Donny prompted when Vic just looked down at his plate and speared a piece of steak with his fork.
“It doesn’t matter how much you want her to do it. She’s got to want to do it herself,” Vic stated laconically before he ate the meat.
“But those horses are gentle! Aster wouldn’t . . .”
“Aster would . . . if someone made her nervous enough,” Vic told Donny with a pointed glance from beneath his lowered brow. “I haven’t got a horse in my stables that doesn’t have some spirit. None of them are appropriate for a gun-shy first timer . . . except maybe for Traveler,” he added under his breath.
“Traveler?” Meg sputtered. “You’ve got to be kidding. You can’t be thinking of putting little Niall up on that mammoth!”
Vic set his fork down with a clanking sound. “I didn’t say that I was thinking of doing anything.”
Niall shifted in her chair uncomfortably in the tension that followed. Vic must have realized that everyone had paused in their eating and glanced at him, because he slowly inhaled and picked up his fork again.
“I just meant that Traveler is the best trained of the lot. He’d hold steady with a freight train barreling at him.”
“If you were on his back telling him to,” Donny conceded after a thoughtful moment. “But only until the last second before impact. He’d never let Vic get hurt,” the boy added as an aside to Niall.
Niall had caught a glimpse of Vic on Traveler on several occasions, and she had to agree. She’d never seen a man and a beast look so natural and graceful together. She smiled at Donny warmly. They’d been forming a close friendship, and Niall got the impression that the teenager wanted to share something that he knew about and enjoyed with her, just as she’d begun to do by opening up the world of art to him.
“I appreciate you thinking about me, Donny. I do,” she said. “But as much as I have to admit there is a certain appeal to the idea, I somehow don’t think God meant for me ever to get on the back of a horse.”
She felt Vic’s eyes on her as Donny opened his mouth to protest.
“But I think you’d get along great with Velvet. Maybe if—”
“Donny, just let it go,” Vic muttered with exasperation. There was just enough of an edge in his voice to silence Donny for the time being.
The following Friday Vic never showed up at the farm. Niall tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter—which was ridiculous, because it clearly did. A panic rose in her chest every time she considered that her stay on the farm was nearly half over and Vic still hadn’t spoken a dozen words to her since her second day there. And she had a sinking suspicion that he was spending time in another woman’s bed. What if he continued to shut her out, as he’d done to Jennifer Atwood so successfully? Was it past time for her to start accepting that their affair was a finished chapter, at least in Vic’s opinion?
Meg said it was too hot to cook, so Tim invited Niall and her to an Italian restaurant in El Paso that Friday evening. It had been the hottest day of the summer so far, and the evening didn’t appear to be cooling things off much. Niall came downstairs at their agreed-upon time for departure, and met Tim and Meg in the kitchen.
“What?” she asked Meg, her eyes widening in slight alarm when Meg unsuccessfully suppressed laughter at her appearance and Tim’s blue eyes sparkled with amusement.
“We’re not going to the The Ritz, Niall. It’s a little mom-and-pop place in El Paso,” Meg chuckled.
“Well, that’s what I thought,” Niall replied, looking perplexed.
“You’re wearing a dress, high heels, and pearls!” Meg supplied the obvious since Niall didn’t seem to see it.
She looked down, confused that her clothing would be the source for Tim and Meg’s amusement. “I’m wearing a cotton sundress and a pair of sandals. It’s scorching outside.”
“What about your hair?”
Tim teased as he made some swirling motions around his head to signify her upswept hairdo. Meg snorted at his masculine fumbling.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake . . . there. Are you happy?” she asked with mock disgust as she pulled out the single clip that held up her hair and tossed it into her purse. It was one of the most informal of hairstyles, as Meg very well knew! Only a man would think it was fancy because it was up on her head. “A sundress is just as casual as a pair of jeans,” she reminded Meg as they headed out the back door. “And I only wore the pearls because . . .”
She stopped abruptly mid-sentence. Niall hadn’t worn her pearls since coming to the farm. But maybe her melancholy over missing Vic made her reach for them tonight. He’d always told her how much he liked it when she wore her pearls. And of course there had been that one time . . .
The charged memory of Vic looking up at her with hot eyes and a slow smile as he held up her pearls swamped her awareness.
Good. Because I’m going to make you come again with these.
She closed her eyes tightly. A strange, trembling sensation began to vibrate in her chest. It took her a moment to recognize it as the first stages of panic.
What was she going to do if she couldn’t get Vic back?
“Niall, are you okay?” Meg asked, her grin wavering.
“We were only kidding,” Tim assured her quickly. “You’d put us hicks to shame if you were wearing a burlap sack.”
Niall opened her eyes slowly and realized that they’d paused on the gravel driveway. “Of course I’m all right,” she said a little too quickly. “Come on, I’ll drive,” she offered, knowing she needed something to focus on besides Vic Savian or his glaring absence from her life.
After dinner she caught a glimpse of why Vic hadn’t immediately returned to the farm that night.
It was knowledge she could, quite frankly, have done without.
The three of them strolled to the car following their dinner, all of them seemingly content and relaxed, coming from the air-conditioned restaurant with good meals in their bellies.
What Niall saw when they approached her car was enough to practically force the pasta that had been resting so peacefully in her stomach onto the pavement. Tim paused when he saw how still and pale she’d gone when she reached the driver’s door. He looked at the parking lot adjacent to the restaurant, where Niall stared fixedly.
“Come on, Niall. I’ll drive,” Tim said softly as he took the car keys from her suddenly numb fingers.
She startled from the trance that held her while she watched Vic kissing a redheaded woman in the parking lot of a place called the El Paso Lounge. The woman’s arms snaked up around his neck. She gripped his too-long hair in a greedy gesture before she ran her fingers through its length. The manner in which Vic leaned over the woman and held their bodies so close made the act look like one of consumption as much as an embrace.
SEVENTEEN
Right before Tim opened the back door, Vic lifted his head from his feeding frenzy on the redhead’s mouth. The next thing Niall knew, Tim was pushing her into the backseat. Niall stared unseeingly at the driver’s headrest in front of her as Tim yanked her seat belt over her and fastened it. After they were on the road for thirty seconds, Meg twisted around to look at her from the front seat.
“Niall?”
“Hmmm? Oh, yeah, fine . . .” She trailed off dazedly.
Meg cast a doubtful glance at Tim, but then an irritated expression came over her handsome features. Niall was in a state of shock at that moment, but that was nothing to what she experienced when Meg next spoke.
“I thought you came down here to get Vic back!”
“I did.”
“Well, when are you going to start doing it?” Meg asked with obvious frustration.
“Honey . . .” Tim began in a conciliatory manner, only to stop when his wife gave him a blazing look that reminded Niall of Vic.
“She’s been here a month, Tim. And she folds up into defensive mode whenever Vic is around.” Meg transferred her attention to a stunned Niall in the backseat. “Vic is a virile man, Niall. He has needs—”
“Oh, and I don’t?” Niall challenged, her anger breaking through her shock.
Meg gave an exaggerated shrug. “I don’t know. Do you? I haven’t seen any evidence of it.”
“Well, they’re not the kind of needs I discuss in an open forum,” Niall defended herself hotly. She blinked as she realized that was exactly what she was doing.
Meg sank back into her seat and sighed regretfully. Niall wondered if she was thinking it had been a big mistake to invite Niall to the farm.
“I’m sorry, Niall,” she muttered after a moment. “I just can’t stand to sit by and watch while you two make such a mess of things.”
Niall felt her eyes begin to sting. It was like salt being poured on a wound to hear a good friend say such a thing right after she’d seen the man she loved in the act of practically having sex with another woman if it weren’t for the flimsy barrier of their clothing. Now Meg was telling her it was all her fault that Vic Savian was mauling some strange woman in a sleazy bar’s parking lot because she wasn’t seeing to his sexual needs!
As if she could when he wouldn’t come within ten feet of her.
“Let me out, Tim,” Niall demanded abruptly. “I’ll walk the rest of the way home.”
“No, you won’t,” both Tim and Meg said at once.
“Yes, I will. It’s my car.” She clicked off her seat belt, forcing Tim to slow and finally stop at the side of the rural road.
“Niall, I’m sorry,” Meg apologized rapidly as Niall clambered to open the door. “It’s just that—”
“It’s okay,” Niall said. “I just need to get out right now.”
She averted her eyes from Meg’s distressed expression and Tim’s concerned one before she slammed the door and started walking down the blacktop road. What she’d said was true. She felt like she was going to have a panic attack if she remained in the confined space of her car. Images of Vic pressed so tightly against that woman played in graphic, haunting detail in her mind’s eye. Volatile emotions bubbled like a wicked brew in her chest—fury, jealousy, anguish . . . desire.
Yes, desire.
It made her nauseous to realize it, but sexual arousal had simmered in her lower belly, hot and tingling, when she’d seen Vic in such a blatantly erotic tableau. Memories and sensations of what it had felt like to have him make love to her with his characteristic intensity and passion had smacked into her awareness with the equivalent of a physical blow.
And Meg had accused her of not having any needs. What a joke.
After Tim and Meg had passed out of sight, Niall stopped on the side of the road and let out a sob of pure misery. She didn’t know how long she stood like that, bawling her eyes out with only thousands and thousands of foot-high corn stalks as her witness, but it was twilight by the time she started walking down the road again. Unfortunately, her cry had done her no good. The graphic memory of Vic kissing that woman kept her right in the center of her emotional storm.
It took her a minute to realize that the low heels of her sandals were sinking slightly into the heated blacktop. She hissed a furious curse when she lifted a foot and saw that the tarlike substance stuck to her shoes. She’d never get the damn stuff off!
When she heard a car coming down the road behind her, she moved off to the side. The gravel at the periphery of the road adhered to her sticky sandals. Tears of sheer frustration slipped down her flushed cheeks.
It took her a few seconds to realize that the vehicle had slowed and stopped next to her. She glanced to her right warily. Vic was staring down at her from the cab of his dark blue pickup truck.
“What’re you doing?” he asked in equal parts irritation and puzzlement.
Niall gritted her teeth as she swiped at her wet cheeks. Great, this was just great. “Leave me alone. I’m taking a walk.”
He grunted incredulously. “It’s ninety degrees plus,
and it’s getting dark. You’re wearing high heels.”
“So?” Niall asked furiously. Why the hell did everyone have to keep mentioning her shoes? She paused to try and pry off the widening patch of gummy gravel on her left heel with her right toe. The clod came off her heel and stuck on her other sandal. She kicked her foot in mounting irritation.
“Get in the truck. I’ll take you back to the farm.”
“No,” Niall stated emphatically, refusing to look at him as he stared down at her.
“Get in the goddamned truck, Niall,” Vic growled when she sprinted forward several steps, trying to ignore the fact that it felt like she was walking through glue.
Without pause she suddenly did an about-face and circled around the back of Vic’s truck. What the hell? Why should she care if Vic saw her at her emotional worst? He was the one who was responsible for it, after all.
Her tears cooled when they came into contact with the frigid interior of Vic’s air-conditioned cab. Before she shut the door, she sat sideways in her seat and removed her ruined sandals. She glared at him after she resoundingly slammed her door shut, glad to see that he looked as angry as she was. Her rage required an outlet and a calm, reasonable man wouldn’t have supplied it.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” she asked sourly as she jerked her seat belt with unnecessary force.
Vic leaned forward, his forearms on the wheel, and studied her. His face looked dark and ominous in the shadows of the truck, reminding Niall of a storm that was about to break.
“I don’t owe you any explanations.”
“Then what are you doing here?” she demanded hotly. Tears continued to course down her face, but she could have given a good goddamn at this point. “Why aren’t you carrying on with your parking lot romance?”
