Virgin Seduction

by Kathleen Creighton

  Horrified-and helpless to stop it-Leila clapped a hand over her mouth as she reined the roan mare to a halt. She was snuffling with mirth as she hurled herself from the saddle.

  "Cade-what has happened? Are you all right?"

  "Not…really." His voice sounded airless and strained, and she realized that he was trying to hide a grimace of pain.

  She started to go to him, feeling even more terrible for laughing when he must be hurt after all. But he threw up a warning hand with an urgent gasp. "No-don't come any closer. There's cactus everywhere." His lips drew back over tightly clenched teeth. "I think I must have landed in a patch of it."

  This time her hand flew to her mouth in time to muffle her horrified cry. "Oh, Cade-what must I do? How can I help you?" She was bending over him, having disregarded his warning and picked her way through the cactus to his side.

  He shifted in an experimental way and then grunted. "Not…much you can do to help. Unless you think you could throw me over your shoulder and carry me home." He flicked her a glance and a crooked, embarrassed smile.

  Cade Gallagher-embarrassed? Only this morning such a thing would have seemed impossible to her, but now…oh yes, she could see it very clearly. Her so very imposing, intimidating, commanding husband was embarrassed. Quite humiliated, in fact.

  Realizing that, she felt a surge of feeling so alien to her that it was a minute or two before she understood what it was. Power. For the first time in her life, Leila felt…powerful.

  "No, I do not think I would be able to carry you," she said as a strange, protective tenderness began to layer itself with the newfound strength inside of her. "But perhaps the horse-"

  He snorted disgustedly. "Don't think I'm going to be sitting on a horse-or anything else-not until I get these damn spines out of my backside, anyway."

  Leila smiled, gently sympathetic. "I was not suggesting that you should sit. But I think, if you were to lay yourself on your stomach across the saddle-"

  "Hell no!" He reminded Leila very much of an unhappy child. "I'm not about to be carried home like a sack of oats-no way."

  She lowered her eyes. "I am sorry. I was only trying-"

  "Look-" He touched her cheek, and she felt a stirring of pleasure, understanding then that he was only gruff with her because he was so frustrated. "I told you-there's nothing you can do, okay?" But he made a liar of himself by adding, "Just…give me a hand up."

  "Forgive me, but I must ask," said Leila, when he was more or less on his feet again and working himself carefully inch by inch upright. "If you cannot ride, how doyou propose to get back to the ranch?" Before he could answer, she touched her fingertips to her lips and exclaimed, "Oh! And your poor horse, will she be all right? Should I not go and look for her?"

  He gave her a sideways, reproachful look. "My 'poor horse?' Hell, she's long back at the barn by now. Bibi." He snorted, then muttered, "Never did like that horse."

  "What happened to her? I heard such a loud noise-"

  "Lightning struck a tree," said Cade, and his voice was tight with pain as he cautiously eased his weight from one foot to the other. "Pretty close by, too. Didn't you feel it?" As if to underline the question, thunder grumbled and rolled across the grove of trees, and leaves rustled in the rising wind.

  "Well, yes, but then I was too busy trying to control my Kamilah, here-yes, and you are my 'perfect one,' yes, you are…" Leila crooned, as the roan mare, perhaps recognizing her name, began to nibble at her hair. The mare had been waiting on the path-like cow ponies, all of Cade's horses were trained to "ground tie," or stand still when their reins were dropped to the ground-and she was growing impatient for Leila's return. "Kamilah was also very frightened-weren't you, my sweet? She tried to run away." Leila took great care not to mention the fact that she had not landed in the cactus.

  Nevertheless, Cade gave her a dark look and grunted like a bad-tempered camel. "At least yours took off in a straight line. Mine went sideways. Next thing I knew, my butt was bouncing through the cactus." He paused as if listening to the words he had just spoken, then grinned crookedly at her, in a way that made her heart feel fluttery and soft. "This is probably going to seem funny as hell to me someday, but right now it hurts too damn much to laugh."

  Leila didn't feel like laughing, either. She realized that what she wanted more than anything in the world was to put her arms around him-or at least touch his face…stroke and soothe him. But she sensed that would be the last thing he would want from her now. Still, she could not resist asking, in a voice husky with concern, "Are you…in very much pain?"

  Then, of course, being a man, he must try to be heroic and act as though he was not. "Oh, hell-I'll live. I guess I' ve been in worse shape." He paused in the middle of hobbling back to the path to tilt his head sideways. "Been awhile, though."

  Leila gave a small gasp. "Do you mean that this has happened to you before?"

  "No, no-" his laugh was dark rather than humorous "-I was thinking of the last time my dad tanned my backside with his belt. I guess I must have been twelve."

  "You do not mean-he beat you?" Her tender heart was appalled. "But…that is terrible!"

  He paused to look down at her. Her heart jumped nervously, then began to beat with a quick and painful rhythm. "Hey, what can I say?" he said softly. "He was a drunk. I guess I never told you that, huh."

  No, Leila thought, precarious and wondering. Betsy did, but you didn 't. And little else about yourself, either. And she held her breath and prayed that he would not stop now.

  He lifted his head to gaze beyond her. "Actually, he was a pretty decent guy when he wasn't drinking. Of course, he was drunk most of the time. Although to be honest, on that particular occasion-from his point of view, anyway-I probably deserved the licking."

  "What did you do?" Her voice was hushed; she did not believe he could have done anything that would deserve a beating.

  He gave a bark of laughter and his eyes came back to her. "Took my bike apart. Brand new-just got it for my birthday. Don't know what it cost, but it had to be expensive. I'd been begging for one for months, knowing my parents couldn't afford it." He shook his head; his eyes seemed to glow with remembering. "I couldn't believe it when I went out that morning and there it was." He paused, but Leila did not interrupt.

  After a moment he drew a breath that seemed to hurt him, but inside, not where the cactus spines were. And when he tried to smile again, there was only the slightest flicker at the corners of his mouth. "Anyway, when my dad came home that evening, I had that bike in a million pieces. Had 'em all spread out on a blanket on the floor of the garage. I thought he was going to kill me. Darn near did. Then he rolled all those pieces into the blanket and threw 'em in the back of his truck and drove off. Last I ever saw of my bike." He drew the pain-filled breath again. "That hurt worse than the licking."

  "But, why?" Leila dared to whisper. "Why did you do such a thing to this bike you wanted so much?"

  He shrugged. "I just wanted to see how everything worked, find out how it all fit together. I was going to put it all back. It's just the way I am-the way I've always been." He frowned, looking past her again. "My mom understood that, but for some reason Dad…" After a moment he brought his eyes back to her, and the pain in them almost made her cry out in instinctive response. Because, as before, she knew this pain was not caused by the cactus spines, but by memories carried deep in his heart. "Anyway, my folks split up a couple months after that. For years I thought it was because of me. Silly, huh?" He gave his head a rueful scratch.

  Then, in what even to Leila seemed an obvious attempt to escape these "unmanly" emotions, he gruffly muttered, "Where the hell's my hat?"

  No, she thought, I do not think you are silly at all. I think you are a very strong and imposing man with a little boy inside you. A little boy who has been very much hurt. And I love that you have told me these things, even here in the middle of a cactus patch. I wish that you would not feel embarrassed that you have told me. And I wish that you wo
uld not stop.

  But all she said out loud was, "There it is. Wait-I will get it." And she ran to scoop up his cowboy hat from the path. "Now it is my turn to rescue your hat," she said in a bumpy voice as she held it out to him, and as she did, touched his eyes with hers. And with that look, with all that was in her eyes, she was offering her compassionate woman's heart to the hurt little boy she had seen in his. Offering her newfound strength to him as she might have given her hand to a child.

  The look lasted for uncounted seconds, in a silence that seemed to shimmer with electricity, to rumble with tension like distant thunder.

  Leila spoke at last, in a choked whisper. "We do not seem to have very good luck with hats, you and I."

  And at that moment the rain came, rain such as Leila had never seen before. It fell with a great rushing sound, hard and heavy, straight down on their heads, as if someone had turned on a giant faucet in the sky. In seconds they were both drenched and gasping, and Leila's hat, which, unlike Cade's, was not meant to withstand all kinds of weather, had begun to wilt like a paper boat in a fountain.

  "You sure don't," Cade shouted, and reached out to tip the sodden wreck of her hat backward and off of her head. "Look, why don't you go on-you know the way back to the ranch from here, don't you? Take the mare and go. I'll meet you back-"

  "Are you crazy?' Leila shouted back through the curtain of rain, not even thinking that perhaps it was not the sort of thing a woman should say to her husband. "Do you think I would go away and leave you?"

  "What, do you think I'm helpless?" Cade sputtered, looking very much like a stubborn donkey. "Go on- get in out of this!"

  "Of course I do not think you are helpless. And I do not dissolve in water. This is only a little rain. So, we will walk home. It cannot be far."

  Cade glared at her. The rain was already beginning to slacken at little, so he did not really have to shout at her the way he did. "Do you know that for a princess, you are awfully damn stubborn?"

  "Yes," she said, flashing her dimples, "I suppose that I am." And she was surprised, because it was the first time all day that she had even remembered that she was a princess.

  * * *

  "Damn," Cade said gloomily, "I should have known." He flicked the light switch up and down again, with the same result. The power was out again. Naturally.

  "It is not so very dark," Leila said as she slipped past him. "We can see quite well. It will not be night for several hours. By that time perhaps the electricity will be back on."

  Cade made an ambiguous sound as he closed the door behind him. Then he stood for a moment and regarded her warily in the dim, shadowy light. He wasn't quite sure what to make of this new Leila, couldn't even decide in exactly what ways she was new. Her cheerfulness in the face of all the various discomforts and inconveniences he'd put her through was unexpected, maybe, except when he stopped to realize that he never really had heard her complain. Ever. Then there was the way she'd stood by him, out there in the cactus and the rain, when she could have been nice and cozy in a dry house. And he hadn't forgotten what had happened between them up there on the hilltop. God, no. But this "newness" didn't have anything to do with those things.

  No…if he had to put a name to it, he'd probably call it self-confidence, though that commodity wasn't exactly new to her, either. She'd sure had no lack of it when he'd first met her. But this…whatever it was… was nothing like the unabashed cheekiness that had made her seem so young-and which he'd found so alluring-in the fairy-tale atmosphere of Tamir. He couldn't quite put his finger on why, but he knew this was different. And that his awareness of it, and her, was a vibrating knot of energy in the core of his body, like a miniature dynamo pumping out electrical impulses along all his nerves, keeping his senses charged to full capacity and tuned to her precise wavelength.

  Those humming nerves made him cranky and snappish. "Yeah, well, it's gonna be tough to see to pull out these damn cactus spines," he growled, hunching his shoulders and heading for the kitchen like a man walking on eggs.

  She pivoted as he passed her, then followed him. "How are you going to do that?"

  "What, pull out the spines?" He was rummaging in the drawer where he kept the flashlights and other essentials, and didn't look at her. Though he could have gauged his distance from her as accurately as if he'd been equipped with his own personal GPS. "Only thing I know of that'll do the job is a pair of needlenose pliers. Like these right here." Having located his in the drawer, he brandished them at her.

  "No, I mean, how are you going to do it?" She was regarding him calmly, all shades of black and gray in the murky light. "The cactus is in your back, is it not?" He glared at her, unable to think of a thing to say. She came toward him, and his skin shivered with goose bumps. "I think that you will need help to pull out these spines." And she had taken the pliers from his hand before he could stop her.

  When she would have taken the flashlight as well, though, he jerked it away from her like an obstinate child. "No," he croaked. "No way. I'll manage. I'll…I'll use a mirror."

  "And who will hold the flashlight?" He was sure he could hear laughter in her voice. "Will you grow a third hand?" Cade made a growling sound in his throat and headed for the bathroom. In his wake he heard a patient little sigh. "Cade, please do not be stubborn. You know that you cannot possibly do this by yourself. You must let me help you."

  She stood in the bathroom doorway and watched him struggle with it, watched him strain to find a reason why she must be wrong. She did not know why it was such a struggle for him. That was why she sighed.

  Daringly, she said, "Is it so difficult for you, to let a woman tend you? Perhaps I do not understand. Is this not allowed in America-in Texas? Is it not-what is the word I have heard-macho?" She dimpled shamelessly at him; whether or not he could see them in the dimness, he would hear them in her voice.

  He must have, because the sound he made was only a half-hearted snort. He did not growl at her as fiercely as before.

  But then pain hissed between his teeth. He had unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it open, and was trying to shrug it away from his shoulders and back. The flashlight in his hand was an encumbrance to him now, and she thought it a minor victory that he did not object when she took it from him.

  She switched the light on and trained it on his back.

  "How bad is it?" He was straining to see over his shoulder.

  She hastily turned off the light. "Not so terrible as I expected." She imagined the lie balanced on her tongue like a soap bubble. "I will have them out in no time. But first, we must have some antiseptic, I think. There is something here, surely? A medicine kit?"

  Cade braced on the sink and glared at his hands, anchoring himself in the familiar shape of them, dark against the white porcelain as he felt his world, his life spin out of his reach. He felt an odd sense of fatalism, like an off balance skier heading down a treacherous slope. One way or another he was bound to get to the bottom.

  "Yeah, in the plane," he muttered. "Somewhere around here, too, probably, but I'm damned if I know where."

  "Never mind, I think I have seen something…" Her voice, somehow both breathless and tranquil, had retreated back into the kitchen. "Yes-here it is. This will do, I think…"

  Curious to see what it was she'd found, afraid he already knew, he met her in the hallway. Sure enough. There was just enough light for him to see the bottle in her hands.

  "Hey," he said, in a voice ragged with outrage, "that's good bourbon."

  "Yes-it is alcohol, is it not?" He watched as she unscrewed the cap and took a sniff. His jaws cramped and his mouth began to water. "Mmm, and it smells good, too. Much nicer than the medicine kind. Come-" she waved the bottle imperiously "-it will be better, I think, if you lie down."

  Cade meekly followed her into the bedroom she'd chosen-the one with her things in it. His heart was thumping and the energy dynamo inside him was whining away at fever pitch. And this rushing noise in his head-was that the sound of his life-ev
ents, fate-racing by, just beyond his reach?

  She stood beside the bed and watched him come to her, the bottle of bourbon in one hand, the flashlight and needlenose pliers in the other and her eyes full of mysteries. She drew a breath and when she spoke her voice was breathless still, but no longer the slightest bit tranquil. "First," she said-and he knew he could hear a tremor in it-"it will be necessary for you to remove your trousers."

  And he felt a shivering, quivering, wholly unexpected desire to laugh when she abruptly turned her back and closed her eyes. He thought it was so like her. His virgin princess…

  Oh, Leila thought, I really wish my voice had not trembled. She felt shaky all over, and she really could not allow that. It was not fear that made her tremble-she still felt that heady and wonderful sense of power, a kind of strength she somehow knew must be uniquely female. No-she shivered now with excitement Something new…something she had never felt before. She shivered and shivered and could not seem to stop.

  "I think," Cade said in a muffled voice, "that's about the best I can do. Hurts too much to bend over…"

  She opened her eyes and turned, and her heart felt as though it had lodged in her throat. He was lying facedown across the bed, looking all gangly and ungraceful with his feet hanging over the edge. His trousers were bunched around the tops of his boots. Except for that, and a strip of white cloth across his buttocks, he was naked.

  She placed the bottle of bourbon, the pliers and flashlight on the bed and gulped a breath of air. "Well," she said brightly, "I told you you would need my help."

  She snatched another breath. Then she firmly grasped one booted foot and pulled. She felt his muscles tighten and pull against hers, and in another moment the boot slipped off and dropped onto the floor with a thump. Light-headed with that triumph, she went to the other foot and quickly did the same. Then she took hold of both legs of his blue jeans at the same time and pulled them off, then dropped them on top of the boots. By that time her legs were trembling so badly, it was a relief to sit down on the bed.