Sliding his hands down to cup her hips, he brought her more familiarly against him and lowered his mouth to hers. She tasted of sun-ripened grapes fermented to ambrosia, of innocence and sweetness and dark feminine mystery.
She kissed like no woman had ever kissed him before, in a way that had the alarm bells clanging at the back of his mind fighting a losing battle with the pulsing throb of his beleaguered body.
Her lips softened and parted on a whisper. Her tongue, shy as a butterfly, flirted with his, luring him to claim deeper possession of her mouth, and only when it was much too late for him to retreat, enslaving him for as long as it pleased her.
She slipped her arms around his neck and captured his hair in her fingers. Worse, she wove lethal, invisible strands around his heart.
Her flesh was warm and firm beneath his touch, but too well protected by her clothing. Sinking with her to the couch again, he inched up the skirt of her dress and traced the sweet curve of her knee, discovered the tender inner sweep of her silk-stockinged thigh and then, unexpectedly, a strip of naked skin, enticingly soft, unbearably arousing.
Instinctively she clamped her thighs together, trapping his hand next to the damp, delicious warmth of her, and uttered a little moan of despair—an admission that she was his for the taking.
He’d had his share of women and liked to think there wasn’t much that was new or different that he’d yet to learn, but the profoundly erotic effect of that two inches of neutral territory separating him from her most intimate self rocked him to the foundations.
Briefly, lamentably, the atavistic urge to take her then and there, to imprint her with the mark of his possession, blew all other considerations aside. Never mind the wide bed upstairs, never mind chivalry or dignity, and to hell with politically correct. The here and now was what mattered. Urgency raced through his blood, consigning finesse to some other day, some other woman.
But she was not some other woman. She was different, finer. That she was willing to give herself to him was immaterial. Did that give him the right to take her, knowing as he did that, when tomorrow came, he’d have nothing of worth to offer her?
Had he not known the answer, he could have ignored the question. But there was a limit, even to his wilful oversight. Dearly though the effort cost him, he dragged his mouth from hers, grasped her shoulders, and held her at a safe distance.
“This is madness,” he muttered, the breath rasping unevenly from his lungs.
Eyes still closed, she leaned toward him. “No,” she breathed.
“Yes!” He gave her a shake, just sharp enough to snap her back to reality. “Look, Jessica, despite what you said last night—”
He felt her withdrawal even before she moved, and experienced a perverse disappointment as the magic of the moment disintegrated into a thousand shattered pieces.
“Please let’s not spoil Christmas Eve by bringing that up,” she begged, backing away from him.
“I think we must,” he said, figuring that as long as they were talking he couldn’t get into too much trouble. “The fact is, it’s altogether too easy to...act on—”
But talking wasn’t so safe, after all. Afraid that, unless he phrased things carefully, he’d end up making matters worse than they already were, he stumbled to find the right words—an uncommon occurrence for him. If he could marshal convincing arguments for a jury, why not for her?
But how did a man say, Look, we’re here alone, the mood is right, and we’ve been attracted to each other practically from the word go. I’d very much like to make love to you but you’re not my usual type and I’m afraid I can’t live up to what you’d expect of me afterwards?
“Yes, Morgan? Go on.”
Conscious of her unwavering scrutiny, he floundered on. “Well, it would be easy to get carried away by what we’re feeling right now...et cetera.”
“Et cetera,” she echoed, her breast rising and falling on another sigh. “Of course, et cetera. I understand exactly what you mean.”
She turned away, the droop of her head and her profile, illuminated by the fire’s glow, a statement in themselves that she accepted his rejection of her. He should have rejoiced at being so easily let off the hook. Instead, the knot of desire tightened within him, leaving him aching for her.
“Do you?” he replied gloomily. “I wish I did.”
The ghost of a smile touched her mouth. “It’s the loneliness factor,” she said. “It can bring the most unsuitable couples together, especially at this time of year, and fool them so that they can’t always tell the difference between it and real attraction.”
“True.” He seized on the excuse as a drowning man might cling to a life raft. “And being cooped up together like this doesn’t help.”
“I know.”
He sneaked a glance at the clock on the mantel, hoping it was late enough that, under the pretext of needing to get some sleep, he could race upstairs and take a long, cold shower. But he saw with dismay that it was only eight-thirty. Too early for bed and much too late to believe they could while away the next couple of hours in idle chit-chat.
Stymied, he paced to the window and stared out. The wind which had wreaked such freezing havoc for the last forty-eight hours had blown itself out finally and taken the clouds with it.
“We could go for a walk,” he suggested, on a burst of inspiration. “A breath of fresh air might do us good.” Not to mention achieve the same results as a cold shower!
She looked doubtfully at the silky stuff of her dress, her narrow, elegant pumps. “I’ll freeze to death.”
“Not if you borrow Agnes’s long johns,” he said. “They’ll keep the frost away.”
And him! He well remembered seeing Agnes’s red, one-piece winter underwear hanging on the drying rack in the mud room. It was enough to deflate any man’s overactive libido.
The night was clear and beautiful. Stars peppered the sky, brighter, larger and more numerous than any she’d ever seen on the coast. A sliver of rising moon showed beyond the lip of the cliff behind the house. Underfoot, the snow gleamed, deceptively smooth and soft to look at, but hard as pavement to touch.
“This way,” Morgan said, his breath ballooning out in front of him. “There’s a trail through the trees that leads to a lake where we swim in the summer.”
Jessica shivered despite the warmth of Agnes’s clothing and huddled deeper into the down-filled jacket. “I find it hard to believe it could ever get hot enough for swimming up here.”
He laughed. “Temperatures can run into the low thirties in July—and I’m talking centigrade. Believe me, there’ve been times when the lake’s felt more like a bath than a swimming hole.”
“We”, he kept saying, as if the place was so full of memories of his ex-wife that, divorced or not, she was still a part of his life.
The Jessica Simms who’d set out from the coast a mere four days ago would have refused to gratify the irrational jealousy inspired by such a revealing little slip. But that woman had gone astray in an avalanche shed in the middle of nowhere, and the one who’d taken her place possessed none of her reticence. She came right out and asked, “Your wife loved it here as well, then?”
He let out a grunt of sound, too bitter to be called laughter though that was undoubtedly what he’d intended. “Hell, no, she hated it! She hated everything about life with me.”
“Then why on earth did the two of you marry?”
“Why does anyone get married?”
“Well,” the new, impertinent Jessica replied, “sometimes because there’s a baby on the way and, from what I’ve seen, you—”
“Tend to behave as if I’ve got no more control over my hormones than I have over the weather?” His laughter this time was laced with self-mockery.
“No!” She drew in an appalled breath. “I was going to say, you strike me as the kind of man who’d honor his obligations.”
The amusement slipped away, replaced by a gravity that bordered on the austere. “There was no baby, eith
er before or after the wedding vows,” he said flatly, “but there was sex and I suppose we both mistook that for love.”
“That’s a terribly cynical thing to say, Morgan.”
He turned a long, level stare on her as they made their way over the frozen snow toward the belt of trees to the west. “I’m a cynical man, Jessica, at least where romantic love is concerned. It’s not a good investment, especially not for someone like me.”
In other words, Don’t make the mistake of thinking that my kissing you was the prelude to a serious commitment. She heard the warning behind his words and refused to heed it. “Just because your marriage went sour is no reason to give up on love.”
“It’s not just my marriage that convinced me,” he said, helping her over a particularly icy patch of ground. “The private lives of too many of my...associates are littered with the same sort of casualties, some of them involving children. At least Daphne and I didn’t add that crime to our list of spectacular failures.”
Jessica knew that the ranch was his home, a place he loved, and she couldn’t picture him anywhere else. He seemed so in tune with the solitude, so content with the unchanging pattern of days spent caring for his horses. Yet just for a second she had the feeling that there was another part of his life that he didn’t want to reveal to her.
“Is working the ranch a full-time career for you, Morgan?” she asked.
“Isn’t it enough?”
“Possibly. But you mentioned associates just now and I—”
“Well, I’m not the only rancher in the area, so of course I have associates. Don’t we all?”
Although he spoke lightly, she sensed a reluctance to pursue the topic further that was borne out when he abruptly changed the subject. “See ahead, where the trees thin out?”
He lifted his arm and pointed. In a clearing lay the lake, a keyhole-shaped body of water whose frozen surface glimmered in the ghostly light. Around its perimeter the dark sentinels of conifers speared the sky.
“It looks magical,” Jessica breathed, captivated. “A place of enchantment untouched by the ills of the mortal world.”
“It’s muddy on the bottom, a haven for mosquitoes in the spring, and the fishing’s lousy, but...” Morgan stamped a path through the snow and grinned. “Yeah, I guess you could call it magical. We spent a lot of happy hours here when we were growing up. Learned to swim and water-ski and skate.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” There, it was out at last, the question she’d been itching to ask.
“My sister and I.”
She waited for him to elaborate, to fill in the huge blanks of his past for her. Instead, he said, “You skate, Jessica?”
“Not since I was about four. I don’t imagine that counts for much.”
He took her hand and drew her down to the lake’s edge. “Let’s find out.”
“What—? Morgan, no!” She hung back, realizing what he had in mind. “I can’t.”
“Sure you can. It’s like riding a bike; you never forget how.” Slithering the last few feet down the sloping bank, he pulled her after him.
“We don’t even have skates,” she protested, dragging her feet. “And what if the ice can’t hold our weight?”
“You’re chicken.” Letting go of her, he stuck out his elbows, flapped his bent arms up and down, and pushed off onto the ice, squawking like a demented rooster the whole time.
“I’m sensible,” she called out, laughing. “One of us has to be.”
“I’m sneaky,” he replied, returning to his starting point with surprising speed. “Come on, Miss Simms. It’s lesson time.”
Before she could back out of range, he grabbed both her hands and, backing out onto the ice again, towed her after him, willy-nilly.
“Care to dance?” he asked, slipping his right arm around her waist.
Choking with laughter, she said, “I hardly think—!”
He cut her off by breaking into a terribly off-key rendition of “The Skaters’ Waltz” and spinning her wildly around the ice.
It was absurd, an adolescent lark that they were both too old to indulge in, and they should both have fallen on their faces. But he kept them firmly upright and the moon shone down on them and another kind of magic took hold.
Slowly his singing and her laughter died and the only sound to split the night was the rustle of their feet on the ice. Slowly, it, too, faded into silence.
His hands came up and closed around her upper arms, imprisoning her far too close to him for safety. Against her will she allowed her gaze to lock with his.
For one long, trembling moment that threatened to outlast eternity, they stared into each other’s eyes. The messages, floodlit by the moon’s pale radiance, were plain enough to understand.
She saw torment and indecision in those deep blue, soul-searching eyes of his, and a raw masculine hunger that stole her breath away. And she knew that he read longing in hers, and the wanting that refused to go ignored.
The blood thundered in her ears, echoing the frenzied beat of her heart. Her breasts, flattened against his chest, surged alive, the ache that brought her nipples into stark relief spiraling down to clench her flesh in pleasure. And nothing, not even the barrier of heavy winter clothing, could disguise his response to her as he pressed against her, hard, forceful, male.
But mostly it was their breathing that gave them away, erupting in harsh, jagged gasps to mate plainly and deliriously in the cold night air. Writhing, coiling, becoming one.
As she longed to do with him.
As she was sure he longed to do with her. She felt the fight go out of him in the way his shoulders sagged beneath her touch, read the terms of his surrender in the way his lashes drooped and his gaze fastened on her mouth.
The silence spoke for itself, cutting through all the subterfuge to reveal the truth they’d both tried to ignore. It screamed between them, deafening in its tacit admission.
He slackened his grip enough to hold her at arm’s length. “You see?” he whispered hoarsely. “This is what I was trying to say, back at the house. A kiss won’t be enough. Things aren’t going to stop there with us.”
“Where will they stop, Morgan?”
He shook his head. “Only you can decide that, because my answer might not be the one you want to hear.”
She knew then that what he was really saying was that he could make her no promises beyond today, and that she had to determine if she could live with the fact, afterward, when this special place in time was no more than a memory and they had gone their separate ways.
Why did this have to be so complicated? she wondered, shifting her gaze to the silent, watchful trees. Why couldn’t love between a man and a woman be straight-forward and mutual, instead of plagued by self-doubt and the insecurity of never knowing for sure the depth of the other person’s feelings?
She had thought, when Stuart had filled every corner of her life, that what she’d shared with him was extraordinary, and strong enough to withstand whatever test was flung in its path. But at the end of it all what she’d mistaken for love had turned out to be nothing but an illusion.
“Not that we haven’t had fun,” he’d told her with charming regret, the day he’d decided she was becoming too much of a liability, “but I can’t afford to run the risk of getting fired from this job.”
“Fired?” She’d stared at him, too stunned—too stupid —to comprehend where the conversation was leading. “We can’t be fired for falling in love, Stuart!”
“Ah, well,” he’d said, running a paint-stained fingertip down her cheek, “if that were all, perhaps not.”
Premonition had cast a chilling shadow over her at his words. “It’s all that matters to me,” she’d cried, turning her cheek and pressing her mouth to his palm in a desperate kiss. He’d been cleaning the brushes used by his senior oil-painting class and even now, five years later, the smell of turpentine revived the memory of that day in stark and degrading detail. “Nothing else compares.”
He’d snatched his hand away and cast a nervous eye at the glass-paned door of the art room, as if afraid a passing student or teacher might happen to glance in and see what was taking place. “But we haven’t been as discreet as we hoped. It seems we were spotted together away from the school and the sort of gossip that’s given rise to, well....” He’d backed away and his lopsided, careless smile had torn her heart to shreds. “The fact of the matter is, I’m married, sweet thing, and damn me if I don’t like the arrangement.”
So many little things she’d refused to acknowledge had risen up to confront her then. The fact that they spent almost all their time in the shuttered privacy of her apartment. He seldom took her out in public and when he did it was to some obscure little hole in the wall at the other end of town, or, better yet, out of town altogether.
The fact that they never shared special times like Christmas. “Must pay my respects to the family,” he’d say, with such dutiful long-suffering that she’d overflowed with sympathy for him, even though she would have given everything she possessed to have a family of her own to go home to. “Terribly tedious, of course, and I wouldn’t dream of asking you to traipse halfway across the continent with me. You’d be bored out of your skull, darling. Best you do your thing and I’ll do mine, and we’ll make up for it in the new year.”
And, perhaps most telling of all, his insistence that they keep their relationship secret from their co-workers. “It’s not a good idea to try to mix work with pleasure,” he’d said, the first time they’d made love. “Let that lot of busybodies think we’re just friendly colleagues. They’ll have a field day discussing us if they ever find out differently.”
But the other teachers had talked anyway. If their sudden silences when she walked into the staffroom hadn’t told her so, their pitying glances had. She’d thought it was because he was so much older than she was, and had turned a deaf ear when a few of the younger staff had tried to involve her in their own social groups. Only when he’d dropped the news that he was married had she understood that they’d known all along what was going on and had felt sorry for her.
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