“Sure,” Debi said, more than happy to comply. But then she glanced down to the ground. Gauging the distance from where she was sitting to where she was supposed to step, she hesitated. It killed her to ask, but it was either that, or risk falling flat on her face in front of him.
Literally.
“Um, I think I might need a little help getting down,” she said in a small voice.
Annabelle remained standing perfectly still. At least the horse was being cooperative, Jackson thought. Moving closer to the center of the mare, he raised his hands up toward Debi.
“Lean forward,” he told her. When she did, he slipped his hands around her waist.
Debi sucked in a breath without meaning to. Her heart did a little dance within her chest, creating havoc.
No, she amended, Jackson was creating the havoc. She sincerely doubted that she would be reacting this way if she was being helped off her mount by someone who looked like an ogre out of a Grimm’s fairy tale.
The next second, as she leaned down and put her hands on his shoulders for leverage, she felt Jackson’s strong, capable hands gently tighten about her waist just before he eased her down.
That was when her body all but slid against his in one continuous motion.
She was only vaguely aware of her feet touching the ground. She was far more acutely aware of the fact that her body had made contact with his.
Soft against hard.
Warm waves went shooting not just up and down her spine but pretty much along the rest of her, as well. Her hands left his shoulders, but rather than falling to her sides, the way she had intended, they went in the other direction and somehow wound up going around the back of his neck.
Their eyes met and held. It seemed to her like things were being said without a single word being uttered.
Her breath caught in her throat. At the very least, she should be pushing him away—not pulling him in closer. This wasn’t her. This wasn’t the way that she normally behaved.
But nothing about this moment in the moonlight resembled her normal existence.
Debi had no idea who initiated the next move. Whether she was the one who tilted her head back, inviting his mouth to visit hers again, or if he made the first move, lowering his head—and his mouth—to hers.
She shouldn’t be doing this, couldn’t be allowing herself to get involved with a man, even this man. Her judgment was beyond poor. She couldn’t risk using it and making another awful mistake.
The way she had with John.
Once a fool was more than enough, she knew that. And yet, somehow, she couldn’t find it in herself to even attempt to resist.
She was drawn to this man who had done such miraculous things with teens—with Ryan—who everyone, including the system, had given up on.
Including?
Especially, she silently emphasized. Especially the system.
And even, secretly, her. She’d been precariously close, fractions of an inch away, to giving up on her brother.
Jackson had saved her from that. From the despair of that.
Jackson was at once her Lancelot, riding to the rescue, her miracle worker, and quite possibly the most compellingly sexy man she had ever met.
Debi melted into him, surrendering to the moment, to the kiss and to the man.
* * *
DAMN IT, HE KNEW this was wrong, knew he had no business being out here with her like this.
No business doing this.
She was technically a client, the guardian of one of his charges, for God’s sake, and he was jeopardizing his standing by dropping his guard and going with his demanding needs.
What the hell was he thinking?
The sad truth of the matter was, he wasn’t thinking. Not for one second. But oh, was he feeling. After being dead inside for so long, he was feeling.
He kissed the woman in his arms over and over again, living inside of the moment before the moment was somehow cruelly snatched away or just mysteriously disappeared into thin air.
But perversely, rather than satiate him, each kiss just made him that much hungrier for more.
Made him want her more.
Pulling Debi so close to him that they were in danger of fusing into one being, for one short moment, he allowed his imagination to go to places he’d never allowed it to venture before.
But then the common sense that had taken Sam so long to drill into his head reluctantly—but stubbornly—rose to reclaim its hold on him. They were inside the stable, but for all intents and purposes, they were still out in the open, still exposed.
He couldn’t allow that to happen. She would suffer for it and he, he could lose at least some of the respect he had worked hard to build up.
She was worth it, a small voice whispered in his head.
Even so, he couldn’t sacrifice the boys to his need for gratification.
Forcing himself to step back, he broke contact with Debi.
He said nothing. Protests filled his mind, scrambling over one another, blotting out beginnings, blocking endings. He took a deep breath to try to regain control of himself.
“Good first lesson,” Debi mumbled to him. “But I need to get back to the house. I’m very tired now and I should get an early start in the morning.”
She was hoping he wouldn’t ask her why because the second the words were out of her mouth, they sounded lame to her. Lame because she was making up the excuse. She shouldn’t have allowed herself to surrender to this, to something that she knew had no future, that barely had a life expectancy.
Certainly not beyond a week.
“I’ll walk you,” Jackson offered.
“No,” she said a bit too quickly. “You take care of the horse. I’ll be fine. It’s not like the house is in the next county.”
She was already crossing the stable’s threshold, moving outside as she said it.
Chapter Fifteen
She couldn’t sleep.
It wasn’t because of the heat. Granted, the day had been almost uncomfortably hot, but the heat had long since abated. The temperature in the world outside her open window had dropped by some fifteen degrees in the past few hours and there was even a rather sweet breeze coming in through the bedroom window.
Or, at least it wasn’t because of the heat that existed outside of her. The heat inside of her was an entirely different story.
That heat had its roots in what had happened that evening in the stables, and rather than fading away after she had hurried back into the house, it clung to her.
Clung to her and blossomed.
Tired of tossing and turning, she got up and crossed to the window, hoping that if she stood there, eventually the breeze would cool her off.
It was a good theory. In execution, however, it fell flat—and almost painfully—on its figurative face.
This was absurd, Debi thought, disgusted with herself as she moved away from the window. She felt wide-awake and insanely restless. There was no way she was going to fall asleep like this.
How was she going to go to the clinic in the morning? She needed to be alert when she went to work. She owed as much to the doctors at the clinic, not to mention to the patients that came in.
But she wasn’t exactly going to be fresh as a daisy by morning if she spent the night wide-awake because she was too wired to fall asleep.
By tomorrow morning, Debi thought in despair, she would be a zombie, not exactly someone thought to be an asset when it came to the medical field.
Pacing back and forth around the room and her rumpled bed, Debi dragged a hand through her tousled hair, frustrated and completely at a loss as to how to wind down.
But there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing that would help her resolve her situation or where her head was at...
Unless...
She stopped pacing and looked at the wall to her left. The wall that separated Jackson’s bedroom from the one she was in.
Unless she retraced her dilemma back to its source.
Debi stared at the wall, thinking.
Maybe if she just talked to Jackson, she could also wind up talking herself down out of this strange, disconcerting place where her equally agitated mind and soul were currently residing, giving her no peace.
Summoning her courage—something that took her a bit of doing—she slipped on her robe, essentially a light, short scrap of blue that matched her equally short, equally blue nightgown.
She left her room, glancing up and down the hall to make sure no one was around to witness this, then stood, waffling, in front of Jackson’s door.
Twice she raised her right hand, her knuckles poised to knock, and twice she dropped her hand to her side, never having made contact with the door.
This is insane, she told herself in disgust. Go lie down. Maybe you’ll bore yourself to death and fall asleep that way.
Turning on her bare heel, Debi started to go back to her room.
“Debi? Is something wrong?”
The sound of the deep voice behind her caused her heart to leap into her throat before she even turned back around to look at the man she was trying so hard to get out of her system.
He was bare-chested, the all but worn-out jeans he had on hanging seductively low on his taut hips. Breathing became a conscious effort for her. And having her heart lodged in her throat like this temporarily got in the way of her answering.
“I heard you pacing,” Jackson told her when she said nothing. “Is something wrong?” he repeated.
Clearing her throat, Debi responded in a shaky voice, “Yes—and no.”
“Multiple choice?” Jackson asked.
Her heart was back in place and pounding. Her fingertips felt almost damp and they were tingling.
She’d been a married woman for heaven’s sakes. What was the matter with her? Why was she behaving like some adolescent girl facing her first teenage crush?
Because, for one thing, the man in front of her had a chest that seemed carved out of stone, and just looking at him made her pulse accelerate.
Taking a breath and trying to steady her capricious nerves, she moved closer to Jackson in order to speak quietly. “Listen, about what happened earlier...”
“I know,” he told her, wanting to spare Debi the discomfort of talking about it. “You don’t know what you were thinking,” he said, taking a guess at what her excuse for kissing him with such intensity would be.
When he put it like that, when he handed her a readily crafted excuse for what she’d allowed to happen between them, it seemed to suddenly strip her of her indecisiveness and make the path before her almost crystal clear.
“Actually,” she said softly, stepping into his room and then closing the door behind her without bothering to turn around or even spare it a single glance. “I do,” she assured him softly. “I knew exactly what I was thinking then.
“Exactly what I’m thinking now,” she added, her eyes on his. Suddenly, she felt as if she had been created with just this moment in mind.
The robe slipped from her shoulders, drifting to the floor and pooling there like a sigh.
Watching, mesmerized, he held back a ragged sigh.
How he wanted her.
And yet...
And yet he couldn’t do this, couldn’t allow this to happen. Not for the reasons he suspected lay at the very core of this for her.
Jackson framed her face with his hands, wanting her beyond belief, struggling to keep himself from acting on that feeling while blocking all those finely honed instincts that always rose to the forefront. The instincts that were so deeply entrenched in protecting lost souls and saving them.
Lost souls came in all sizes and shapes.
Some, he thought, belonged to big sisters who worried about their younger brothers caught in endless cycles of delinquent behavior.
The desire to protect this woman was tremendous. He realized that he needed to protect Debi from doing the wrong thing.
Needed, in this case, to protect her from himself.
Talk about being consigned to hell...
“I don’t want this happening because you’re feeling misplaced gratitude because of Ryan,” he told her. That would be tantamount to his almost preying on her.
Debi placed a finger to his lips to keep Jackson from saying anything further.
“You saved Ryan and I’d have to be a robot not to feel something for you because of that,” she whispered. “But it’s not just that.” She tilted her head back, bringing her mouth temptingly closer to his. “It’s more. So much more.”
What she was experiencing wasn’t misplaced gratitude. Yes, it had sprung into being because of gratitude, but it was so much more than that.
What she felt for him intensified because he was trying to dissuade her. The man was incredibly selfless.
Her heart swelled.
“You’re lonely,” he guessed. Loneliness caused people to do foolish things they lived to regret. “Your jackass of a husband made you choose between him and Ryan—and when you did, he was outraged and insulted, so he left.” Jackson searched her eyes for more insight as he spoke. “He didn’t try to compromise or to negotiate, he just left. That had to hurt.”
He wasn’t given to violence, but he would have throttled the man for having hurt Debi this way.
Especially when he saw the tears.
She blinked back the tears that were now laced through her eyelashes. He had gotten it almost all right. “I’d forgotten. You know everything about what happened, don’t you?”
“You did tell me some of it,” he reminded her. “I looked into the rest.” He’d done it to make sure that there wasn’t something she was keeping back, something she was ashamed of. To his relief, she hadn’t been physically abused. “Sheriff Santiago’s got a deputy that knows her way around computers and search engines,” he confessed. “She’s gotten to be practically a wizard at it.” Jackson paused, struggling between doing what he felt was the right thing—and taking what she was so generously offering him. “I just don’t want you waking up tomorrow morning with regrets.”
“If I do have regrets, it won’t be because I made love with you,” she told him softly. “It’ll be because I didn’t.”
All the words he should have said to talk her out of this frame of mind fled as if they had been caught in a windstorm and swept out to sea. The next thing he was aware of was wrapping his arms around Debi, then feeling the soft contours of her body as it pressed up against the hardened, unyielding ridges of his.
But he was feeling far more than that.
Feeling guilt because he was unable to pull back, unable to lead her back to her room.
Unable to save her from herself—and from him, heaven help him.
But her mouth was so sweet, her body beyond tempting—and he was just a man.
A man with desires and weaknesses. A man who had gone through life, changed himself more than once, and when he’d finally got it right, had been so strict and demanding of himself that there had been—and was—no room for anything but the purpose, the calling that he had chosen: saving young lives by turning them around.
Companionship, romance and love, that was all for other people, people who didn’t have something to atone for the way that he did. Who didn’t have a debt to repay the way he did.
But this woman that fate—and her wayward brother—had brought to him, she made him forget all the rules that had been set in stone, all his silent promises to himself—and to the late uncle he would forever be grateful and indebted to.
This woman was, he felt quite simply, the fever in hi
s blood—and his pending downfall as sure as day followed night.
Just kissing Debi gave him a rush, made his head spin.
Her nightgown—the bright blue scrap on her body—quickly became an afterthought as it found its way to the floor.
Jackson memorized her body with his hands before he ever actually laid his eyes on it. When he did, when he actually looked at her, he froze for a moment, stunned by how truly beautiful she was to him.
She had the body of goddess.
And a mouth that was made for sin, he thought the next moment.
His frayed, all but paper-thin jeans disappeared moments later. His body was totally primed for the final conquest, but he wanted her to derive as much pleasure from this as he could possibly give her. That meant placing more foreplay ahead of his own gratification.
Accustomed to all forms of self-denial, Jackson held himself in check for as long as he could, making love to each part of her as if it was a separate entity as well as part of a greater, completely enticing whole.
He kissed her eyelids, the hollow of her throat, the nape of her neck before eventually working his way downward.
Using the tip of his tongue, he caressed her breasts, hardening the tips, finding a thrill in the way she moaned and shuddered in response before he worked his way to her belly, making it quiver.
And then, as the path took him ever lower, Jackson created a fire within her very core with teasing thrusts of his tongue.
Her movements beneath him grew in ever-increasing intensity and urgency.
Debi bucked and arched, grabbing fistfuls of the quilted cover beneath her on his bed. She all but bit through her lower lip to keep from crying out in sheer ecstasy as peak after peak rippled through her body that was so damp with sweat.
* * *
NO ONE FELT like this and lived, she thought, falling back against the bed, exhausted, after yet another climax had seized her and then burst apart like so many fireworks. She had no idea exactly what she had been doing those years she’d been married to John and they had purportedly been making love. But whatever it was, it didn’t hold the hint of a candle to this.
The Cowboy and the Lady Page 16
