“Carson,” she whispered, looking up into male eyes that were dark pools of need and a pleasure so intense that it was nearly pain. Slowly he came to her again, filling her completely, rocking against her gently, perfectly, teaching her with every sweet movement that passion could be expressed in many ways; and that pleasure could build so subtly, almost secretly, that there was no warning of the ecstasy poised to consume her. Seeing his face taut and his powerful body misted with sweat, feeling him move with such restraint inside her, suddenly made her body unravel in tiny, endless ripples that were so exquisite she wept without knowing it.
Carson held himself tightly within Lara, both sharing and increasing her climax with small, powerful movements of his body. Then he was overtaken even as she had been, and he poured himself into her until he cried out unknowingly, consumed by an ecstasy both fierce and endlessly sweet.
When the last aftershocks of pleasure finally stopped sweeping through their joined bodies, Carson kissed away the tears caught in Lara’s black lashes. He rolled onto his side, taking her with him, holding her close. The breeze lifted a corner of the comforter. He caught it and pulled it over Lara, kissing her with tender care. She smiled and curled more closely against him, loving him so much that she was afraid to put it into words because she didn’t want him to think that she was asking him to say the words in return. Finally, with aching tenderness, Lara brushed her lips against Carson’s warm, salty skin and relaxed completely in his arms. He returned the kiss as gently as it had been given to him, holding Lara close while she drifted into sleep, holding her and wishing with all his strength that he could absorb her into his very soul, shaking with the force of that wish.
“Little fox,” he whispered, “what am I going to do if you leave me?”
There was no answer but the wind lifting Lara’s hair across Carson’s cheek in a silky caress.
Chapter Twelve
“Mmmm,” Lara murmured as Carson slowly released her mouth from his kiss, “I thought I was bribing you into bringing my research papers. Now I wonder who’s bribing whom?”
A smile that was both beautiful and oddly haunted transformed Carson’s face. Even though Lara had been up and around for a week, fear still clutched at Carson’s heart every time he remembered how helpless she had been in the library when he had found her.
“I’m bribing you,” he admitted huskily, looking down at Lara as she sat cross-legged on the bed, fully dressed. “I want you to take it easy, even though Dr. Scott said you could go out and brand calves if that’s what you wanted to do. Stay here. Be here when I come back.”
The urgency beneath Carson’s words caught at Lara. “Don’t worry about me,” she said, taking his hand and bringing it to her lips. “I’m fine, Carson. Good as new. Better,” she added, grinning and putting a hand on her slightly rounded stomach. “I’m twice as good. Go on and take care of the ranch. I hate to think of how much work you’ve put off to take care of me the last two weeks.”
“After the fever broke, I enjoyed every bit of it.” Carson hesitated, then looked at Lara with eyes that were intent, luminous…oddly haunted. “You’ve given me so much, Lara,” he said simply. “More than I can tell you. If I’ve been able to give even a small part of it back to you, I’m glad.”
The door closed gently behind Carson, leaving Lara alone but not lonely. The echo of Carson’s deep voice and the memory of the golden warmth of his eyes as he looked at her made loneliness impossible. Smiling, she reached for the stack of documents that dealt with the legal aspects of the Rocking B’s history from 1940 to 1960. Feeling more vital and alive than she had in years, Lara tackled the last two decades of the Rocking B’s history that she needed for her thesis. There were many papers dealing with small loans for seed and fertilizer, loans that were repaid within nine months. Some of the notes amounted to little more than IOUs written by hand on notebook paper. Others were more formal.
One document in particular intrigued Lara. It was dated March 17, 1949, and signed by Larry Blackridge, but it hadn’t been drawn up by any of the Donovan lawyers. If the first page was anything to go by, the document seemed to detail the circumstances under which Larry Blackridge would borrow at no interest a large sum of money from Monroe White.
“White,” muttered Lara. “White. Have I heard that name before in connection with the Rocking B? A shirttail relative of some kind?
Must be. Who else would loan money with no collateral and no interest?”
Lara pulled over a notebook and began to read, pen poised to take notes. The more she read, the less sense the document made. Wryly she reminded herself that impenetrable prose was a common problem in legal documents. With a sigh she began the first page all over. Gradually Lara realized that she was reading a prenuptial agreement between Sharon Harrington and Lawrence Blackridge. Monroe White was Sharon’s maternal grandfather, a man of enormous wealth. Once the legal language was boiled down, the details emerged in all their emotionless austerity. Sharon, a woman of thirty-four years, was to be wife “in every sense of the word” to Larry, a man of twenty-four years. In return for said marriage, she would bring a dowry of fifteen thousand dollars, which would immediately be given to her husband. In addition, the White family would agree to guarantee loans at no interest for the future development of the Rocking B as long as the marriage remained intact.
The document went on for page after page of all but unreadable fine print, yet the basic meaning was inescapable. Monroe White had purchased a nearly bankrupt rancher for his beloved, regrettably unattractive spinster granddaughter. Larry had married Sharon not out of love but out of desperation; he had been on the verge of losing the ranch that meant more to him than anything else in the world. White had been a shrewd negotiator. Nowhere did the document allow for Larry to divorce Sharon without immediate forfeiture of the Rocking B. If Sharon wanted the divorce, she in turn forfeited all right to the Rocking B, to repayment of past loans and to custody of any children of their union.
Unconsciously Lara sighed as she set aside the sad circumstances underlying Larry’s marriage. The document answered one question left over from Lara’s own childhood. She now knew why Larry hadn’t married the mother of his illegitimate child. He had loved Becky, but he had loved the Rocking B more. As for Sharon… If the rumors Lara had heard all her life were true, in the beginning Sharon had loved Larry Blackridge with a spinster’s hopeless passion for a man too young and too handsome to come to her without the lure of money. And in the end Sharon had hated Larry with all the fury of a woman scorned.
Frowning, Lara returned to the documents. Nothing unexpected turned up until nearly six years later. There was a terse note signed by a doctor at the Mayo Clinic, who bluntly stated that Sharon Harrington Blackridge was sterile beyond the ability of medical science to cure. Three weeks later another legal document appeared. This, too, had not originated in the offices of Donovan, Donovan and Donovan. In exchange for unspecified “expense money,” an unnamed minor agreed to turn over her baby for adoption by the Blackridges. Two months later baby John Doe legally became Carson Harrington Blackridge, son and heir of Lawrence and Sharon Blackridge. The day the adoption was registered, the sum of one hundred thousand dollars was transferred to the Rocking B’s ranch accounts from the estate of Monroe White.
Tears blurred Lara’s eyes for a moment. Behind the stark fiscal transactions were lives that cried out with pain. She knew from her research that the three years preceding Carson’s adoption had been devastating for the Rocking B. Falling beef prices, brutal blizzards, disease – all the bad luck that ranchers are subject to had descended simultaneously on the Rocking B. Larry had gone deeper and deeper into debt. In the end he had been forced to choose between his dream of conceiving a blood heir and ownership of the Rocking B itself. Nowhere in all the massive legalese was there any clause indicating Larry’s willingness to love the child he had bought and then adopted; but then, nowhere in the Blackridge history had Lara
found any indication that love had been important to Larry. The land was, though. That and blood relationships. In the end, the land had been the stronger obsession.
Without realizing it, Lara rested her hand just below her waist as though to reassure the unborn child that it was wanted, loved and would be cared for with all the understanding she and Carson could command. The baby would never become a pawn in a power struggle between mother and father as Carson had been between Sharon and Larry. The baby would never have to look in a mirror as Carson had done and know that he hadn’t been wanted, not really, not as a child to be loved. Sharon had wanted a family. She had bought both the child and Larry’s compliance in an adoption that it was obvious he had never wanted. Larry’s price had been one hundred thousand dollars. Sadly Lara put aside the thought of how it must have been for Carson as a child, growing up unwanted by the only father he had ever known. Tears blurred her vision. She forced herself to control them. If she thought about Carson now she would lose all the emotional distance from her subject that a researcher must have. Later she would think about the personal sadness, the irreversible pain. Later she would cry for the lonely boy who had become the man she loved. Grimly Lara returned to the papers. She almost missed the document that indirectly had shaped her own childhood. It was another loan paper, another transfer of White money to the Rocking B’s empty coffers. It was the loan that had made possible the doubling of the Rocking B’s boundaries, creating an empire in fact as well as in Larry’s dreams. What caught Lara’s eye was the document’s date –
six months to the day before she was born.
The paper contained a clause which stated that Larry would never, in any covert or overt way, acknowledge any but legitimate offspring. If he died before Sharon, the ranch would go in its totality to her and Carson. If she died first, her half would be held in trust for Carson, with Larry acting as administrator. If Larry tried at any time to will, sell, assign, give away or use as collateral for a loan any part of the ranch to anyone except Sharon or Carson Blackridge, all debts owed to the White estate would become immediately due and payable in full.
In effect, if Larry acknowledged Lara as his illegitimate daughter, he would lose the Rocking B. There was no way he could have repaid the huge “loans” the White estate had made to the ranch through the years unless he sold the land itself.
“My God,” Lara said softly to herself, setting aside the document with a shaking hand. “How Sharon must have hated Larry, hated my mother, hated me. Sharon held the Rocking B like a sword over Larry’s head for almost forty years. He must have hated her in return –
and the ‘son’ she had forced him to accept as an heir when all Larry had ever wanted was a child of his own blood to inherit the ranch that had been Blackridge land since the Civil War.”
It eased an old, old hurt to know that Larry hadn’t refused to acknowledge Lara because he was in some way ashamed of her. The man who had smiled so indulgently into Becky’s camera hadn’t scorned the child of that illicit affair. He had been a man caught in a cruel vise. The fact that it had been largely a vise of his own creation didn’t make the situation less painful or the outcome any less tortured. And then a thought came like black lightning, dragging darkness and cold behind. Carson must have hated Becky, hated Lara. They had the one thing he did not have – Larry’s approval.
“Oh, Carson,” Lara said softly, looking blindly down at the documents scattered across the bed. “How terrible it must have been for you. And how ironic that from such hatred came such beauty for us. If you hadn’t wanted to get even with Larry four years ago, you never would have come close enough to me to know me as myself rather than as a living symbol of so much of your unhappiness.”
Tears burned in Lara’s eyes as she remembered that night four years ago. But they were tears of a different sort, understanding rather than humiliation, shared pain rather than shame.
“The miracle, my love,” she whispered, “is that you didn’t utterly destroy me four years ago when you had the chance. How hard it must have been for you to walk away from the revenge you had wanted all your life.”
Lara closed her eyes and tried not to cry as she realized how close she had come to never knowing Carson as friend and lover, husband and father of her child. All those sad, tangled lives, a past that had been so cruel that Carson simply refused to discuss it even now, just as he refused to believe in love. She didn’t blame him for that. If she had been raised as he had been, watching what “love” had done to Sharon and Becky and Larry, she doubted that she would be strong enough to risk what would certainly seem like the agony of love.
“Someday you’ll understand, Carson,” she whispered, running her fingers slowly over the thick, smooth surface of the paper in her lap.
“The past is behind us, not in front of us. Their sadness isn’t ours, nor are their hatreds. We’re beyond that. We’ve fought our own battles. And we’ve won.”
Yet even as Lara whispered the words, tears slid silently down her cheeks. The documents she had just read had made the huge book of history turn over a new leaf, bringing her a new understanding of the past and the present. The new knowledge was poignant, even painful. She had a deeper understanding of why Carson sometimes watched her with haunted eyes. He had never been loved. Even now he found it all but impossible to believe in her love, and so he expected it to be taken away without warning.
Let the dead bury the dead, and the living get on with living. The past can’t do anything for the present except ruin it. How many times had Carson said those words to her in one variation or another?
And how many times had she tried to make him understand her love for all the small acts and large emotions of history that had shaped the present?
Carson’s hostility to the past was as deeply rooted as Lara’s fascination with it. No, that was wrong. His hostility was greater. He feared and hated the past because it had almost destroyed him. He was still fighting it, still trying to climb out from under the cold dead weight of the past and live securely in the warm possibilities of the present.
Lara knew that it wasn’t an easy process for Carson. Last night she had awakened to find him sitting up in bed, rigid. His skin had been clammy to her touch. She had been afraid that he was having a relapse of the flu that had made everyone on the Rocking B so miserable, but when she had asked him if he felt all right, he had said only 1dreamed you were gone. Then he had made love to her with aching intensity, as though he were trying to take her into himself all the way to his soul. Even when they finally slept again, he had held her tightly, as though he still feared waking and finding her gone.
And what had he said this morning as he left her surrounded by the heaped documents of the past? Stay here. Be here when I come back. Lara brushed futilely at the tears that welled more quickly than her hand could carry them away. The understanding of the depth of Carson’s past wounding was as painful to her as if she herself had been the one raised without love. She wanted to go to Carson, to tell him that she loved him and would never leave him, to hold him and be held by him in turn. Yet even as the impulse came, she knew that it was more for her own comfort than for Carson’s. The hurt was new to her. It wasn’t to him. It was as much a part of his life as the Rocking B
itself.
“Use your head, not your heart,” she told herself, wiping away the last of her tears. “You can’t change in a day the lessons that took Carson a lifetime to learn, and it’s both stupid and cruel of you to try. You know it’s all right to believe in love because you’ve always been loved. Carson has only allowed himself to be loved by you for a few months. Give him enough time to let love become part of his past as well as his present. Then he’ll be able to look at the future without fear. That’s how you can heal him. Hold him when he wakes up in the middle of the night. Be there in the morning. Love him.”
Gradually Lara’s tears dried as she forced herself to stop thinking about Carson and get to work s
orting and stacking two decades of Rocking B legal documents into neat piles. When she was finished, she labeled and set aside the piles with a feeling of relief. Research had never been an unpleasant chore for her, but these last two decades of the Rocking B’s history had simply been too painful for her to enjoy researching them. The worst was over, though. No more basic research had to be done. She could begin to organize her paper. As a reward for a hard job conscientiously completed, Lara turned to the box of Cheyenne’s journals that Carson had brought over from the homestead for her to read. She loved the spare wit and deeply felt descriptions of the land that were the hallmarks of her grandfather’s observations on the ranch, people and life. She had read through all Cheyenne’s journals except the one dealing with the years of her own life because she hadn’t needed those years for her research. Nor had she felt strong enough to deal with her own past before this moment. But after seeing the circumstances that had shaped Carson’s life, she turned to her own history as to a healing balm.
Lara lifted the heavy leather-bound book onto her lap and leaned against the bedstead for support. One of the enduring threads of her childhood had been the image of Cheyenne pulling a big leather book from a locked cupboard and going to the kitchen. On the nights when Cheyenne had spent hours writing by lamplight, or when he had carefully fastened photos, letters and other small mementos to the pages, Lara had watched, fascinated.
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