Nelson's Brand

by Diana Palmer

  “It’s all right,” she said huskily.

  He averted his gaze and found himself looking at Dale, who was dancing stiffly with a plain, lanky man wearing a red shirt. She gave him a pouting, accusing look before she turned her attention back to her partner.

  Allison followed the cold stare of his eyes. “She’s very pretty,” she remarked quietly.

  He turned, his gaze glittering. “Yes. But she wanted more than I could give her.”

  Was she like that, too, Allison wondered, wanting more than he had to give? It didn’t seem to matter. She was too hopelessly in love with him to let it matter tonight. Soon she’d be alone again, for the rest of her life. Just this one night, she prayed silently. And then the thought bored into her mind—be careful what you ask for…you might get it.

  She quickly lowered her gaze to her own beer. She cupped her hands around the frosty mug and lifted it to her lips, making a face when she tasted it.

  She looked over at Gene. They came from different worlds. He wouldn’t understand her hang-ups any more than she could understand his lack of scruples with women. She’d told a lie and now it was catching up with her. Despite the fact that he’d opened up to her, that they were getting along well together, she was still afraid to tell him the truth about herself. But would it matter—if he were gentle? She flushed.

  Her eyes searched his stern expression. There was a different man that he kept hidden from the world. She caught glimpses of him from time to time, behind the sarcasm and tough facade. She wanted a glimpse of the lonely, wounded man he was hiding.

  A sudden cry split the noise of people and music, and suddenly everything around them abruptly stopped.

  “What is it?” Allison asked, frowning as she looked toward the bar.

  He turned in his seat and stood. “Oh, boy,” he murmured. “Somebody broke a beer bottle and cut his hand half off. Dale’s new beau, Ben, no less.”

  Allison got up without a word and went to the hurt man. She smiled at Dale and then at the cowboy, who was holding his hand and shivering with pain while Dale tried ineffectually to stem the flow of blood.

  “Let me,” she said gently, taking the cloth from Dale’s shaking hands. “I know what to do.”

  She did, too. Gene watched her with fascination, remembering how efficiently she’d patched him up. He wondered where and why she’d gotten her first-aid training. She was good at it, calm and collected and quietly reassuring. Even Dale relaxed, color coming back into her white face.

  “That should do it,” she said after a few minutes of applied pressure. “Fortunately it was a vein and not an artery. But it will need stitches,” she added gently, cleaning her hands with a basin and cloth the bartender had provided after she’d put a temporary bandage over the cut. “Can you drive him to the hospital?”

  “Yes,” Dale said. She hesitated. “Thanks.”

  “That goes double for me,” the cowboy said with a quiet smile of his own, although he was still in a lot of pain. “I could have bled to death.”

  “Not likely, but you’re welcome. Good night.”

  They left, and Allison noticed that Dale gave Gene a long, hurting look even as she went out the door with her wounded cowboy. Poor thing, she thought miserably. Maybe she’d look like that one day, when Gene didn’t want her anymore.

  Without sparing her a glance, Gene led Allison out onto the dance floor. “Full of surprises, aren’t you?” he mused. “Where did you learn so much about first aid?”

  “I had a good teacher,” she said noncommittally, smiling up at him.

  He scowled down at her. “I can’t dig anything out of you, can I?” he asked quietly. “You’re very mysterious, cupcake.”

  “There’s nothing out of the ordinary about me,” she laughed. “I’m just a working girl.”

  “When are you leaving the Manleys’?” he asked suddenly.

  She lowered her eyes to his broad chest. “Next week. I don’t want to, but I need to,” she said. “I’ve got a lot to do.”

  “Where?”

  “In Arizona,” she said.

  “Is that where you work?”

  She hesitated. “I guess it’s where I’ll be working now,” she replied. She didn’t want to think about it. Life was suddenly very complicated, and the worst of it was going to be leaving here and not seeing Gene Nelson again.

  He sighed half angrily. One lean arm pulled her closer and he turned her sharply to the music, so that his powerful leg insinuated itself intimately close to hers.

  She stiffened a little and he slowed, pausing to look down at her.

  “Don’t fight it,” he said huskily. “Life’s too short as it is, and what we’ve got together is magic.” And with that, he caught both her arms and eased them under his and around him while his circled her, bringing her totally against him.

  “Gene,” she protested weakly.

  “This is the way everyone else is doing it, if you want to look around us. Put your cheek on my chest and give in.”

  She knew it was suicide, but she couldn’t help her own weakness. She moved close to him with a long sigh and laid her cheek against his hard chest. Under his blue shirt she could feel the warmth of his body and the rough beat of his heart. He smelled of soap and cologne and starch, and the slow caress of his hands on her back was drugging.

  They moved lazily around the floor as the lights dimmed and the music became sultry. Everyone was relaxed now, a little high from the beer and revelry, and when Gene’s hands slid down to her lower spine and pulled her intimately to him, she didn’t protest.

  His lean, fit body began to react to that closeness almost at once. He felt himself going rigid against her, but he didn’t try to shield her from it. It was too late, anyway.

  He lifted his head and looked down into her eyes while they danced. She looked a little nervous and uncertain, but she wasn’t protesting.

  His eyes fell to her breasts, lingering on them. With a low murmur, he drew his hands up her back to her rib cage and slowly, torturously moved her toward him so that her breasts brushed sensuously against his hard chest, making the tips suddenly hard and swollen. He could feel them even through the fabric, and when she trembled, he felt that, too.

  His eyes lifted to hers, and held them as his hands moved again, down, down, until they reached her hips. He lifted her gently and her thighs brushed his, hard.

  Her breath caught. She flushed, because even an innocent couldn’t mistake what he was feeling and what he wanted now. But the worst of it was that she wanted it just as much. She was caught in a sensual daze and her body ached. She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted his hands on her body to soothe the burning ache he’d created. She wanted…him.

  He stopped dancing and stood with her in the middle of the dance floor, his pale eyes glittery as they searched hers. “I want to take you out of here,” he said huskily. “I can’t stand much more of this.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. She knew what he was saying, and part of her was ashamed and frightened and reluctant. But she cared too much to refuse him.

  “All right.” He let her move slowly away from him, but he didn’t let her go. “I need a minute, cupcake,” he said softly. He pulled her back into his arms, but so that their legs didn’t touch. He drew in deep breaths until he could get his body back in control so that what he felt wouldn’t be on public display. Then, gently, he led her off the dance floor and out the door to the Jeep, ignoring the sandwiches he’d already paid for that had just been placed on their table. Food was the very last thing on his mind right now.

  “Did you enjoy the rodeo?” he asked on the way home. He hadn’t touched her or said anything vaguely romantic since they’d left the bar. Allison was still in a daze, and her body was on fire to be held close to his. But she tried to keep that to herself.

  “I enjoyed it very much,” she said. “I never realized the events were so complicated.”

  “It helps when you know a bit about it,” he said. He was nervous. Imagi
ne that, he thought with graveyard humor, and with his reputation. But Allison wasn’t like other women he’d made love to. She was very, very special, and he wanted this to be like no other time for her. He wanted to give her everything.

  He pulled off the main road and drove toward the ranch, but there was a dirt track that led into a grove of trees by the creek, and he took that one instead of the ranch road that led home.

  Allison felt herself tensing, because she knew instinctively what was in that grove of trees down the road. But she didn’t say a word. She’d committed herself back in Cody. It would be cowardly and cruel to back down now. Of course, that was only an excuse to appease her conscience, and she knew it. She looked at the man beside her and knew that she’d do anything he asked of her. No one had ever been so gentle and kind to her, no man had ever made her feel so special. He’d rescued her from a kind of limbo that she’d been in ever since her parents death.

  “The line cabin is down there,” he said, trying not to show how desperately he needed her or how nervous he was. “It’s old. Probably the oldest building still in use on the place. The men stay here during the winter when they have to keep up with the outlying herds.”

  “I see.”

  He pulled up in front of a small, darkened cabin that looked like something out of a history journal and cut the engine and the lights. “It doesn’t look like much, but it’s pretty well kept.”

  He got out and helped her out, then led her up the porch to the front door and inside. She felt oddly light-headed, probably, she thought dizzily, the result of the beer and no food.

  “See, we even have electricity,” he mused, turning on a small lamp.

  The cabin was only one room, with a small kitchen, a fireplace and two chairs, and a neatly made bed with a blue-beige-and-red-patterned quilted coverlet over it. Just the thing, Allison thought, for a cowboy on his own in the winter.

  “The bed linen is washed weekly, even if nobody stays here, and we keep a supply of food in the kitchen,” he told her. He turned, his gaze slow and warm on her face as he took off his Stetson and tossed it onto a chair. She looked so young, he thought, watching her. So sweet and vulnerable and hungry for him. His heart raced.

  Without another word, he unfastened his bola and unsnapped the buttons down the front of his shirt with a dark, lean hand.

  Her breath caught in her throat as he pulled the shirt out of his jeans and opened it. His chest was darkly tanned and thick with curling black hair. He moved toward her with a faintly arrogant expression, as if he knew how exciting and sensuous he was without the trembling of her body and the sudden parting of her lips to tell him.

  He caught her cool hands and brought them under the lapels of the open shirt, pressing them palm down on his warm, rough chest. The sensation was incredible. He shivered. “Feel me,” he said huskily, moving her hands around. He drew her to him and bent to her lips, pausing just above them to tease them, torment them, while he let her hands learn the contours of his torso. It was sheer heaven, the feel of those soft, warm fingers on his taut body. He felt himself going rigid all at once and didn’t even try to hold back.

  “Allison,” he groaned as he bent to her mouth. “Oh, God, I’ve never wanted anyone so much!”

  The wording weakened her, because she knew how he felt. Odd, with his reputation that he could be so vulnerable to an innocent like her. Of course, she thought uneasily, he didn’t know she was innocent. His hands were moving over her back and she hesitated for just one second with maidenly fear of the unknown. Then she relaxed as the kiss began to work on her, his exploring lips making her mouth soft and eager for its moist, warm touch.

  All at once, the wanting broke through his control. His tongue shot into the dark softness of her mouth in a rhythm that was staggeringly sensual and arousing. She gasped in shocked pleasure. But there was more to come.

  His lean hands caught the backs of her thighs and lifted her up to his aroused body in a sharp, quick rhythm that made her knees go weak and shaky. Sensations of hot pleasure rippled through her lower belly like the tide itself. She shuddered all over and grabbed his arms to keep from toppling over at the feverish need she felt. She cried out under his mouth, and he made a deep, satisfied sound in his throat.

  He bent, lifting her totally against him, her feet dangling as his hands suddenly brought his hard thighs between her legs and pressed her intimately to him.

  She moaned harshly, clinging, almost in tears from the sudden fury of her desire of him. She knew in the back of her mind that this was wrong, that she was letting him go too far, but she was helpless from the hot surge of passion he’d kindled in her. She’d never known such pleasure.

  Her mouth answered his, giving him back the deep kiss as hungrily as he offered it. He felt his own body begin to tremble and he knew there was no way he could stop now. It had gone too far.

  He fell onto the bed with her, shivering with need, his hands trembling as they slipped her out of her sweater and T-shirt and the filmy bra she wore under them. He didn’t stop there, either. While he was at it, he unsnapped the skirt and kissed his way down to her thighs while he smoothed the rest of her clothing down her body and tossed it aside with her shoes.

  She lay nude under the slow, insistent brush of his hard mouth. His hands explored while his mouth learned every soft curve of her in a silence that grew hotter with her soft cries of pleasure and the helpless movements of her body on the springy mattress.

  He lifted his head while his fingers brushed expertly over the hard crests of her breasts and he looked into her eyes with pure masculine need. She was shivering, her eyes wide and glazed, her lips parted under hopelessly gasping breaths. Her long legs were moving helplessly on the bed in little jerky motions. Yes, he thought feverishly, and he touched her gently where she was most a woman, deliberately adding to her helplessness as shocks of pleasure lifted her hips and closed her eyes.

  He didn’t question why she should be so easily and quickly aroused, or why her eyes opened in something like faint shock when he threw off his shirt and boots and socks and started unzipping his jeans with quick, economical movements. He didn’t question why she lifted up suddenly on her elbows and gasped when he turned, his blatant arousal the crowning glory of a body that some women had called perfection itself. His mind was buried in the desire for her that had made him shudder at just the sight of that creamy pink body with its firm, soft breasts and exquisite figure, lying there waiting for him, trembling.

  He straddled her hips arrogantly, watching her watch him with wide, almost frightened eyes.

  “You can take me, if that’s what you’re frightened of,” he said gently, levering down so that his body slowly overwhelmed hers, his elbows catching his weight. “A woman’s body is a miracle,” he whispered at her lips. “Elastic and soft and vibrant with life.” His mouth brushed hers in tender little contacts that aroused like wildfire while his hands smoothed down her body, his thumbs hard on her belly, rough, making some unbelievable sensations kindle with each long pass of his hands. She shivered under his warm mouth, her nudity and his maleness almost forgotten until his knee began to ease between her long legs.

  “Shhh,” he whispered when she tensed. “Don’t do that. I want you just as badly, but if you tense up, it’s going to hurt.”

  She swallowed. It would hurt anyway, but it was too late to tell him that, because his hips were already probing delicately at hers.

  He kissed her face with trembling, aching tenderness, while his lean hands gently positioned her hips. “One, long, sweet joining,” he whispered into her open mouth. “That’s what I want first, before I even begin to love you.” His thumbs pressed into her belly again, making her shiver. He smiled tenderly against her lips. “Now lift up against me, very, very slowly,” he whispered. He lifted his eyes to watch. He’d never wanted to watch before, but this was like no other time in his life. Her eyes were wide, almost frightened. “Shhh,” he breathed, achingly tender as he began the slow, dow
nward movement of his body. “Shhh. Be one with me, now,” he whispered. She tensed and he smiled, sliding one hand between them to gently caress her flat belly. “Yes, just relax and let it happen. Don’t close your eyes,” he said huskily. “Watch me. Let me watch you. I want…to see you…take me!”

  His teeth ground together and Allison was so shocked by what he was saying and doing that she forgot to be afraid. His powerful body was tanned all over, except for that pale strip across his lean hips, and she saw his eyes dilate, his teeth clench, his face contort with wonder. She could feel the shudder that went through him, she could actually see him lose control.

  It was what made it bearable when he suddenly cried out and pushed into her body with helpless, driving urgency. The pain was scalding, like being torn with a hot knife, and she both stiffened and dug her fingers into his arms, weeping suddenly as he hurt her.

  But she was too ready for him for it to last long. Gene felt the barrier give, somewhere in the back of his mind, although it didn’t register through the blinding throb of pleasure that ran down his backbone and sent him wild in her arms. He buffeted her with a total, absolute loss of control, borne of too many months of abstinence and his raging hunger for her. A loaded gun wouldn’t have stopped him.

  Allison wept silently for her lack of resistance. He was going to hate her. He couldn’t not know what she was, now.

  Seconds later, he stiffened and cried out, and Allison watched his corded torso lift as his hips enforced their mastery of her, watched his face contort in the unmistakable mask of fulfillment. His voice throbbed hoarsely as he cried her name once, twice, and then like a prayer, his body convulsed in a red fever of blinding ecstasy.

  It hadn’t hurt as much as she thought it would. He was lying on her heavily now, his body drenched in sweat, his mouth against her bare shoulder. Still flushing from what she’d seen, she stroked his damp, black hair absently, her eyes wide and shocked as she stared at the rough wood of the ceiling. Despite everything it was so sweet to lie and hold him like this, so close that they were still one person. The embarrassment and pain and shame would follow, she knew, and would be almost unbearable. But for these few seconds, he was helpless and in need of comfort, and she held him to her with tender generosity, her eyes closing as she whispered her love for him silently, without a sound.