With a husky sound he gave up trying to speak and simply held her while the soft summer wind whispered through the tall grass around them. Finally his arms loosened, and he kissed her as though she were more precious than life itself.
“I’d better get you back,” Carson said reluctantly. “I’m taking up too much of your work time. I know you wanted to have the pictures in to be duplicated last week. And we were late getting up this morning.”
He smiled at the memory even as he realized that the longer Lara took with her historical research, the greater the danger that she would put too many pieces together. And the longer he was with her, the more he understood just how much was at stake. Since he had been fifteen, he had understood that, if he wanted to have a home and be part of a real family, he would have to do it himself. Yet the more women he had had, the less possible the dream of a home had seemed, until he had all but forgotten it.
Then Lara had come back, turning life inside out, revealing to him how empty he had been and how richly she filled him. He was still discovering that richness, still growing to meet the promise of her generous spirit. At times he could almost feel old, scarred layers of himself splitting and falling away, allowing room for new thoughts, new hopes, new laughter, new emotions – even the ability to cry. Lara turned slightly against Carson’s chest and smiled up into his eyes. Against the backdrop of lush grass, the green in his eyes eclipsed the amber, reminding her of Long Pool in late afternoon, clear emerald water sparkling with points of deep golden light.
“You have the most incredible eyes,” she whispered. “Always changing, always beautiful.”
Smiling, Carson bent and smoothed his mustache over Lara’s cheek. “If I start telling you about your incredible, beautiful body and the lovely way it changes when I touch you,” he said, nuzzling along her jawline, “we’d be lucky to get back to the ranch before the first snow, much less in time for dinner.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?” Lara asked softly, turning and catching his lower lip between her teeth for an instant.
“Let’s find out,” he invited.
Carson saw how tempted Lara was in the seconds before she sighed and stroked his mustache with her fingertips. “I should get those pictures so I can catch Donovan before he goes on his vacation.”
Carson was too close to Lara to prevent her feeling the sudden stiffening of his body at the mention of Donovan’s name. She saw the instant deepening of the brackets on either side of Carson’s mouth as his lips flattened. At that moment she realized that, whenever the lawyer’s name came up, Carson changed the subject in one way or another. It was the same when she tried to make or keep various appointments with Donovan – somehow, inevitably, something always came up to prevent her from seeing the lawyer.
“You don’t want me to see Donovan, do you?” Lara said quietly.
“No.” The word was clipped, cold, as bleak as the flat line of Carson’s mouth.
“Why? Surely you can’t still be angry about that note he sent after he found out we were married. I’m certain he didn’t mean to imply that the reason for our hurried marriage was that I was pregnant,” Lara said, smiling crookedly. “He’s too much a gentleman of the old school to be so crude.”
Carson closed his eyes and fought to hold on to his temper as he thought of the note the old lawyer had sent: Fast work, boy. Larry knew you real well, didn’t he? I presume the heir is soon to follow, ensuring that Larry’s progeny will be part of the land forever, world without end, amen.
Indignation and outrage had crackled in every slashing line of Thackery Donovan’s handwriting. Carson had seen it, even if Lara hadn’t. He had wanted to kill the old man for even hinting at what it was his moral duty as a lawyer to keep confidential. But Larry’s will had been like a burr under old Thack’s saddle since the day Larry had walked in and demanded that his will be redrawn. No matter how Thack had fought and shouted about “immoral” or “crazy” or
“stupid,” Larry hadn’t been swayed. It was legal, and that was all that mattered. Larry had known what he wanted. If he couldn’t have it, no one else could have what he wanted, either.
World without end, amen.
“Carson?” asked Lara softly.
Abruptly he focused on Lara rather than on the cruel, destructive and indestructible past.
“Thackery Donovan is like Larry,” Carson said finally. “If you let him, he’ll take all the joy out of life. Thack is part of the past. You and I don’t live there anymore.” Carson bent and kissed Lara’s lips, breathing his warmth into her, breathing her warmth in return.
“You’re happy now, little fox,” he whispered. “We both are. Keep away from Thack, and we’ll stay that way.” He smiled slowly, teasingly. “Besides, you have enough stuff scattered around the library for six university degrees. What do you need with more junk?”
“There are gaps in the Rocking B’s legal record,” Lara said, her voice quiet, her eyes intent as she tried to make Carson understand.
“The firm of Donovan, Donovan and Donovan can fill those gaps from their files.” Then, urgently, she added, “Carson, the past can’t hurt us anymore. Some things that happened were sad and bitter, but some things were beautiful, too. It all balances out in the end.”
“Don’t you believe it,” he said flatly. “The past will tear us apart.”
Carson’s voice was so hard, so certain, that Lara was frightened. She had hoped, as he became happier in his own life, he would have less hostility toward the pageant of history that brought her so much joy. But it hadn’t happened that way. If anything, his hostility to their personal past before their marriage had grown greater with every day they were together.
“See?” Carson said, his tone heavy as his thumb traced the downward curve of Lara’s mouth. “We were so happy a few moments ago, but now – “ He swore softly, savagely. “Tell me what you need. I’ll get the damned papers for you. Just stay the hell away from Thackery Donovan!”
Chapter Eleven
Lara pushed back from Carson’s desk and stood up very carefully. She had discovered just a few moments ago that the room had an alarming tendency to revolve around her if she stood up too fast. She was afraid that she had finally caught the respiratory flu that had been making the rounds of the Rocking B. The older hands had been hit hardest, with Murchison and Willie spending two weeks in bed and two more recovering. Murchison had gone back to work too soon; the flu had rebounded and put him back in bed. Spur had been down for three days, then back to work and then down again. Carson had run a slight fever for one day, slept a few more hours than usual that night and been back in the saddle no worse for wear the next day. All the men had joked that the flu was a blessing in disguise: it made them lose their appetite, which was just as well, because Mose’s cooking was worse than usual. As for Yolanda, her niece had taken her back to Billings for a long-overdue vacation. Now that Lara was caring for Carson, there was no reason for Yolanda not to spend time with her nieces and grandchildren.
Lara had sailed through the flu weeks blithely, cooking for the men who were hungry, setting out aspirin and antibiotics that had been prescribed for the hands who needed them, making sure that there was a steady supply of cool, tempting fruit juices on hand to drink. As man after man fell ill, got well and relapsed into flu again, she had assured the cowboys that her health was a clear-cut case of the superiority of clean living over the kind they obviously favored. They had been too tired to give her more than a halfhearted raspberry in rebuttal. Seeing them all so listless and pale had squeezed Lara’s heart. Instead of working on her history project, she had spent most of her time going from ranch house to bunk-house, checking on the men, calling the doctor when the fevers went higher than one hundred and three degrees and then driving to town for another round of antibiotics for the latest flu casualty. Dr. Scott had taken to calling her Lara Nightingale.
Only to herself did Lara admit that she was m
ore tired than usual lately and much less interested in food. She had very much hoped that those symptoms signaled the early stages of pregnancy. It had been seven weeks and four days since her last period. She hadn’t said anything to Carson yet because the last time her period had been late, it had come after seven weeks and five days. She didn’t want to raise his hopes, only to disappoint him again.
But as the room swayed gently around Lara and her skin roughed up with a sudden chill, she bitterly conceded defeat. Flu, not pregnancy, was sapping her normal vitality. Flu, not pregnancy, had taken away her appetite.
“Damn, damn, damn.” Lara said as hot, unexpected tears spilled down her face.
She wiped them away with a hand that shook. Lately her moods had been unpredictable, which had raised her hopes of pregnancy, but this sudden drop into despair was ridiculous. She had gone to the doctor after her previous period had been so late. Dr. Scott had assured her that her body was fully functioning and that sudden changes in a woman’s life – like marriage – could throw off her menstrual cycle. It was nothing to worry about. If she wasn’t pregnant after six or eight months of trying, she and Carson should come in for a thorough workup. Until then, he advised, they both should just relax and enjoy the process of conception.
Lara’s lips trembled between smiling and crying as she thought that never had a doctor’s advice been so enthusiastically followed. The currents of passion flowing between herself and Carson increased in depth and intensity each time they made love. When Carson gave her a certain look or a certain smile, fire shimmered through her. It was the same for him. A look, a touch, and she could see his blood begin to beat heavily, filling him with sensual heat. Lara shivered suddenly and rubbed her arms. She could use some of Carson’s heat right now. It was cold for September. Yet when she went to check the thermometer on the library wall, the mercury was nudging eighty. It wasn’t cold for the season. It was hot. And so was she. Too hot.
As Lara turned away from the thermometer, the library seemed to darken for a moment. She braced herself against the wall until the dizziness passed. Ruefully she conceded that the older hands hadn’t been joking when they had called this bug the worst one since the Second World War. The only silver lining to this particular flu cloud was that it didn’t have you hanging your head in the toilet until you prayed you would die. This bug just laid you out for a few days or weeks while the world passed by in a fever haze, followed by the kind of exhaustion that made you sweat if you walked across the room. The bug hit fast and hard. Spur had barely been able to ride in from the range. Lara had suspected that he was making more of his sickness than there was. Now she knew better. Waves of weakness washed over her. She was grateful that all she had to do was get to the library couch. Walking to the bedroom would have been beyond her. As she groped for the couch, she told herself that she would have to apologize to Spur for teasing him about being too sick to ride. With a sigh Lara tumbled onto the couch and lay there for a moment, trying to get up the strength to pull the af-ghan off the back of the couch and cover herself. Then she realized that she had already pulled the blanket off and fallen on top of it. To cover herself she would have to roll to her side in order to free the afghan. That would take a lot of energy. She fell asleep before she decided whether moving aside was worth the trouble in order to get warm.
“Take care of Socks for me, would you, Willie?” asked Carson, handing over the reins. “I want to check on Lara. She looked kind of pale this morning.”
“She hasn’t been to the bunkhouse since last night,” offered Willie, taking the big horse’s reins. ‘“Course, only one of the hands is still down, and Jim-Bob ain’t all that sick now.”
Carson took the front steps two at a time, smiling in anticipation of seeing Lara’s face light up with pleasure when he walked in. For the first few weeks after they had argued over Thackery Donovan, Carson had been worried that Lara would piece together too much of the past from the legal documents he had reluctantly gotten for her, but as far as he knew, she hadn’t done more than leaf quickly through the papers, checking dates against a column that contained cryptic entries referring to the reams of oral history she had typed up. He had helped her as much as possible, wanting the damn project over and done with so that he could draw a breath without waiting for his newly discovered, unexpectedly beautiful life to blow up in his face. The fear of losing everything was always there, a cold shadow of the past lying beneath the brilliant warmth of the present. Pausing in the living room, Carson listened intently. No quiet sound of movement came from the kitchen where Lara had taken over Yolanda’s duties. No muted click of keys came from the computer he had taught Lara how to use, saving her hours of time as she worked on her paper. In fact, there were no sounds at all. Frowning, Carson stood without moving, wondering if Lara had gone to the Chandler homestead to work on Cheyenne’s notebooks.
At the thought of the homestead, Carson smiled to himself, remembering Lara’s look of stunned delight when he had given her the deed to the homestead as a wedding present. He had wanted her to have it. He had wanted her to know beyond doubt that she was as deeply rooted on the Blackridge ranch as anyone who had ever lived there. He had wanted to give her the security of having her own place, her own piece of the earth no matter what happened. And if the worst happened, he prayed that the homestead would keep her from turning her back and simply walking away from the past, the Rocking B and him.
With a silent, savage curse Carson shoved the bleak thought back down in his mind. It wouldn’t come to that. Somehow, someway, he would prevent that.
A small sound came from the library, as though a stack of papers had slithered across the floor. In three long strides Carson was across the living room. His boots scuffed softly on the narrow rug in the hall leading to the library. The door was ajar. He pushed it open a bit more and slipped in, waiting to hear the swift intake of Lara’s breath wher she spotted him standing there.
The only thing Carson heard was the same odd, slithering sound. He walked further into the room. What he saw made his heart turn over. Lara was struggling to sit up on the couch, but even as he watched, she slumped backward. The sound of her clothes rubbing over the leather couch was what he had heard.
“Lara!”
She turned toward his voice. “Carson? I – “ Her teeth chattered.
“Cold,” she said raggedly. “So cold.”
“It’s all right, little fox,” he said, scooping her up off the couch, holding her close to his own warmth. “I’m here. I’ll take care of you.”
The instant Carson touched Lara, he knew that she was a lot sicker than any of the men had been. She literally burned beneath his touch, yet he could feel the chills shaking her. He wondered how long she had lain on the couch, too weak even to pull the afghan over herself. The thought twisted through him, hurting him as nothing before ever had.
She had been helpless, and he hadn’t even known.
Carson carried Lara upstairs and put her under the covers. Pausing only long enough to kick off his boots, he slid in next to her, pulling her close once more. He held her while chills racked her slender body. He stroked her slowly and spoke softly, telling her again and again that she would be all right, he would take care of her, he would warm her and she would sleep and then she would be well again. He doubted that she heard him, but he kept talking, anyway. It helped to keep his own freezing fear at bay.
He had been afraid of losing her, but never like this, having her life slide through his fingers like twilight bleeding into night. Even as the thought came, Carson told himself he was being foolish. Lara was young, healthy, rippling with laughter and vitality. She simply had the flu. In a few days or weeks she would be well again. She would look up at him and smile, and then she would nuzzle against his mustache, teasing him until he made love to her and she came apart in his arms, crying his name and her love. She would be all right. She had to be. Anything else was unthinkable.
When t
he last of the chills finally faded, Lara sighed brokenly and lay without moving in Carson’s arms. He waited until he was sure that she was asleep before he eased carefully out of bed, tucking the covers around her to keep her warm. She whimpered softly, restlessly, searching blindly for him even in her fever-ridden sleep.
“I’m here,” Carson said quietly, stroking Lara’s hair. “Rest, little fox. I’ll be right here the whole time.”
With his free hand Carson picked up the receiver of the bedside phone, punched in the doctor’s number and waited impatiently for Dr. Scott to take the call.
“Another hand down with the flu?” asked the doctor.
“It’s Lara. I found her on the couch, too weak to sit up.”
“Fever?”
“Like hell itself.”
“How high?”
“You tell me. Her teeth are chattering too hard to put in a thermometer. Her skin feels like an oven.”
“Nausea?”
“All she said was, ‘Cold. So cold.’ As soon as the chills stopped, she fell asleep.”
The doctor grunted. “How does her breathing sound? Too many of these flu cases are going straight into pneumonia.”
Carson’s expression became even more bleak. He bent over and listened to Lara for a minute before turning back to the phone.
“Her breathing sounds okay,” said Carson. “A little fast, maybe, but she’s not having any trouble that I can hear.”
“I’ll be out in two hours. Keep her warm and quiet. Get her to drink something if you can. If her breathing changes, prop her up in bed and call me right away.”
Carson hung up, looked at the clock and then back at Lara lying bundled up in the middle of the bed, her black hair streaming out over the covers. She looked too small, too pale, her fingers fragile against the forest-green bedspread. Gently he picked up her hand, kissed it and tucked it beneath the covers once more. She murmured something and turned toward his touch. He stroked her hair until she sighed and curled up against his thigh, calm again.
Sweet Wind, Wild Wind Page 18
