by Fran Baker
He circled her shoulders with his right arm and studied her upturned face, his conscience speaking louder than his body now. “You understand I have to leave when I’m finished with the well?”
Joni swallowed the lump in her throat, knowing that trying to tie him down would be like trying to tether the wind. “When will that be?”
If she backed out on him now, he’d never forgive himself for opening his big mouth. He had to answer her honestly, though. “A couple of days, a week at the most.”
But her heart had already made up her mind. “Then let’s make good use of the time that’s left to us.”
Nine
Grandpa was sawing ’em off on the sofa sleeper, Sooner at his side, when Joni and Chance got home.
The bluetick hound raised its black nose in greeting when they tiptoed into the dining room, then snugged it back between its paws when they left on equally silent feet.
Chance turned off the porch light, Joni the hall light, and then there was only moonlight streaming through those sparkling windows and the dark at the top of the stairs.
Nervous now, she wiped damp palms on her chiffon skirt and tried to think of something to say. Something clever like, “My room or yours?” But her throat and mouth felt so cottony, the words wouldn’t come.
He realized this was a big step for her and wanted to help her along. Scooping her into his arms, his widow with the warrior’s heart, he said softly, “Let’s go upstairs.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck, only too happy to let him take charge, and breathed into the dark rain cloud of his hair, “I’m sorry—it’s been a while.”
“For me too,” he admitted throatily, the thought of finally having her naked beneath him making him feel a little dizzy as he lithely climbed the stairs.
Joni raised her head and searched those eyes of incandescent green, almost electric in their intensity. Dare she ask? She jumped in with both feet. “How long?”
“Does it really matter?”
“Yes and no.”
Chance remembered the women he’d known before, the ones who’d demanded nothing of him. Not even honesty. But the woman in his arms now deserved more. “There’s been no one else since I met you.”
She bit her lip, relief mingling with a vague regret for those who’d gone before her. “It’s been three years for me.”
He hated himself for being glad she hadn’t given herself to anyone since her husband, but was glad nonetheless. “Sounds like we’ve both got some catching up to do.”
Not wanting any ghosts coming between them tonight, he bypassed her room in favor of his. She thrilled to his flexing muscles as he let her feet slide slowly to the floor. From the beginning she’d felt his fire. Now she wanted to feed the flame.
He crushed her to him, molding her legs, her hips, her breasts to the fevered length of his body. From the first he’d made her for a scrapper. Now he wanted to make her burn.
Neither heard the tick of the bedside clock as their mouths met. And neither thought of the calendar hanging in the kitchen when their tongues mated. Time lost all meaning as their deliciously heated kiss deepened into an act of love.
His fingers located the buttons at the back of her spun-sugar dress and, one by pearly one, undid them. Despite four years of marriage, being undressed by a man was a new experience for her. But as she slid her hands up the silky lapels and under the broad shoulders of his jacket, she found that two could play this exciting game.
No matter what they were doing with the rest of their bodies, they were determined to stay joined at the mouth.
It made for some funny gymnastics and laughter bubbled between their lips when Joni couldn’t get his polo shirt off without breaking the connection.
Then he reached to switch on the bedside lamp and she made a grab for his hand. “Please—leave it off.”
Chance’s breathing was ragged. “I want to see you.”
“I’m not very … big.” Joni’s voice was as thin as vapor.
“More than a handful’s a waste.” He cupped her bare breasts in his callused palms, finding her all the woman he’d ever want.
And later, when the light did come on, the volcanic pleasure in his eyes touched her in a way his hands could not.
Her doubts dissolved, her hands indulged in their own orgy of discovery. No amount of imagining could have prepared her for the feel of him.
She found him sinuous and tough, scarred and lean. His neck and shoulders were as smooth as polished bronze, yet alive and supple. The hair on his chest—so crisp and curly—softened the sharp edges of his pectoral muscles. She loved the way it swirled around his flat nipples, then made a racing stripe down his springboard of a stomach before fanning out again at the base of his …
He grabbed her curious hand. “Didn’t you ever hear about what happens to girls who play with fire?”
She smiled and squeezed. “They get burned.”
Chance groaned and drove closer. “Then burn, baby, burn.”
Joni did just that, stoking his ardor with bold caresses that brought her endearments spiced with expletives and, at the point of conflagration, his restraining hand.
“Not yet,” he murmured.
A heat she’d never experienced before started deep in her belly and spread quickly out to her limbs when he lowered her to the bed and dropped beside her in a full-length embrace. She watched his gaze wander over her nakedness, the fervor in his eyes firing her skin.
His fingers, callused from the miles of drilling cable he’d handled yet sensitive to a woman’s needs, flickered from her dusty-rose nipples, down the delicate bow of her ribs, to the moist cleft between her thighs. His tongue followed—a living flame—and she melted from the inside out.
Chance moved up over her, sliding into her with an ease that surprised her. Joni opened her eyes to find him watching her while his hips thrust in slow, rhythmic strokes.
“I wish you’d been the first,” she whispered.
He wished it, too, but smiled down without showing it. “As long as I’m the last.”
She touched his lips and took the plunge. “I love you, Chance.”
“I love you too, Joni.” He found a freedom in saying it that he’d never dreamed possible.
Their mouths met in another ardent kiss and their bodies kept time to the distant drum of the drill bit. Their hearts echoed its primal beat.
Gradually, his strokes increased in tempo. Eventually, she spun out of control. And finally, they whirled in a fiery pas de deux to a loving climax.
Much later they lay entwined in the tangled sheets, basking in an afterglow that would have shamed an aurora. A lover’s moon nestled up to the window. Stars winked from on high. The night-perfumed air fanned their damp bodies, and they fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Chance woke to the creak of a floorboard.
In that first fuzzy moment of arousal, he thought he must have dreamed it. Then he straightened his head around on the pillow and saw her, clothed only in moonlight, bending down to pick up her dress. He knew then this was no dream.
“Joni?”
She picked up her slip.
He braced up on his elbows and glanced at the digital clock. Two-thirty. “I know you’re a compulsive cleaner, but this is ridiculous.”
She picked up her shoes.
When she started toward the door, still without a word of explanation, he levered himself off the bed and went after her. She had nightmares. Maybe she walked in her sleep as well.
“Come on, Joni.” He gripped her upper arm gently so as not to disturb her. “Back to—”
“Let go of me, Chance.” Her low, strangled warning shot his sleepwalking theory all to hell.
He stared down at her bowed head, her wildfire hair, and tightened his fingers on her tender flesh. “Not until you tell me what you’re doing.”
“I’m going back to my room.”
“Why?”
“You were right about me all along, Chance.” She raised her head, and it
was then he saw the glistening tracks of tears on her cheeks. “I can’t let go.”
Swearing softly, he released her arm and took her in both of his, feeling her pain as if it were his own. “Joni, Joni, please don’t cry.”
A small sob escaped her. “I thought I could go through it again—the loving, the losing—but I can’t.”
He felt a shudder possess her body and pinched his eyes shut. “I’ll be back in a month, six weeks at the most.”
“And then you’ll leave again.”
“It’s how I make my living.”
She broke free of his embrace, beyond reason. “And what am I supposed to do while you’re running footloose and fancy free all over the state of Oklahoma?”
Anger stirred the coals of a more compelling emotion. “If you’re so damned worried about what I’m going to be doing while I’m gone, then why don’t you marry me before I go?”
“Marry you?”
“Yeah, marry me.”
She poked his firm shoulder with a furious finger. “What kind of proposal is that?”
He raked an aggravated hand through his hair. “The kind a man makes when he and the woman he loves are buck-naked and butting heads in the middle of the night.”
They stood so close that Chance’s shadow blocked the moonlight from her upturned face. But he could feel her rapid-fire breathing hitting his bare chest, and he knew that it was just a matter of time until she recovered from the shock.
For her part, Joni wasn’t sure she’d ever have the power of speech again. She loved him, no two ways about it. And she’d be lying through her teeth if she said she’d never entertained the fantasy of marrying him. But she’d already had a glimpse of the future, and she couldn’t stand any more good-byes.
She said as much. “I’m not interested in being a part-time wife. Nor do I like the idea of kissing my husband hello one day and good-bye the next.”
“The telephone and bookwork I do now from the trailer I can do from here,” he argued. “So I’d be home a lot more than you think.”
“Half the time, at best.”
“Then take the best.”
She opened the door and started across the hall, shaking her head. “I love you, Chance, but I just can’t see myself in a hit-and-miss marriage.”
“Be reasonable, Joni.” He followed her into her room, feeling as if he were fighting for his life. In a very real way, he was. “I wouldn’t enjoy the good-byes any more than you, but it would make for some pretty damned exciting hellos.”
She switched on her bedside lamp, not the least bit embarrassed by her nudity. Quite a coup, for her. “What if something came up and I needed you here?”
He trailed her to her closet, wondering if he’d ever get enough of her. “I’d never be more than a day’s drive from home.”
“A lot can happen in a day.”
“I’ll buy an airplane.”
She put her shoes on the shelf, then reached for a hanger for her dress. “Is this the same man talking who gave me all that trouble about the twenty thousand doll—”
“What the hell is that?” Chance interrupted coldly.
Joni turned around in time to see a gust of fury pass across his face. Confused, she asked, “What?”
He pointed an accusing finger at the clothes in her closet. “That.”
She looked back at Larry’s jeans and shirts still hanging beside her skirts and dresses and felt her knees buckle. They’d been there so long—
“And all this time I thought it was Larry who was haunting you.” His rusty tone of voice sounded like a death knell in the silent room.
She turned tormented eyes to him. “I completely forgot they were—”
“The truth is, you won’t let him rest in peace.” Auburn hair flew every which way as she shook her head in frantic denial. “That’s not—”
“You’ve even got a different hair shirt for every day of the week.”
“Grandpa kept Grandma’s—”
“In a cedar chest in the attic, not in his bedroom closet.”
“Please, Chance, let me ex—”
“Actions speak louder than words, Joni.”
She held out her hands, pleading for understanding. “I used to lie awake at night, blaming myself and wondering what I’d done to make him so—”
He spun on his heel and strode across the room.
“I love you,” she beseeched his broad, retreating back.
In the doorway he paused and looked over his shoulder with something like pain in his eyes. “The price of loving is letting go.”
Things went from bad to worse when Joni dragged herself out of bed at just after daybreak and found that Grandpa’s feet were so swollen, he couldn’t get his shoes on.
“Are his hands and face puffy too?” Dr. Rayburn asked when she called him at home.
“Yes, but remember, he ate a lot of salt on his tomatoes yesterday.” With the receiver braced in the hollow of her shoulder, Joni stood before the kitchen counter, fixing Grandpa’s breakfast.
“How’s his breathing?”
“He sounded like a suction pump when I came downstairs.”
“Did you give him his medicine?”
“First thing this morning.” She buttered Grandpa’s toast and cut it in half, remembering with a twinge of regret how Chance had reacted when she’d challenged him about having beer for breakfast. Come to think of it, he never did drink it.
“I’ll swing by the house on my way to the office,” Dr. Rayburn said before they hung up. “But in the meantime, keep him in bed.”
Grandpa wasn’t very talkative when Joni first carried his breakfast tray into the dining room. She knew he didn’t feel well. But when he even failed to inquire as to Chance’s whereabouts, she knew that he must have heard the muffled slap of the screen door in the middle of the night.
The fact that Chance hadn’t slammed the door behind him but had closed it quietly made his departure seem that much more final. Loud noises were second nature to Joni. She could shout and stamp and slam with the best of them. But silence …
Silence was a killer.
Larry had been the silent type. When she’d married him, she’d considered it a sign of strength. Only now, three years after she’d buried him, was she beginning to see that it could also be a fatal character flaw.
He’d never been one to discuss his feelings. Even during their courtship and the early years of their marriage she’d had to be content with the rare “I love you.” But as their debts had mounted, he’d grown more and more distant. He’d skipped meals, claiming he wasn’t really hungry. He’d sit alone in the living room, staring at the wall. When she’d called his name to rouse him, he’d stumbled upstairs to bed and turned his back to her.
Joni had begged him to talk to her, to see a counselor, but misplaced masculine pride had tied his tongue. He hadn’t seemed to understand that the shame wasn’t in having a problem, but in not doing anything to solve it. Even Grandpa, who’d never meddled in their marriage, had felt compelled to put his two cents’ worth in. He’d tried to tell Larry that their farm deficits weren’t all his fault, but Larry had turned a deaf ear.
Then came that fateful day when the mortgage company had delivered the foreclosure notice. Larry had gone to the mailbox—later, she’d followed a trail of discarded letters and bills from their rural mailbox at the side of the road to the barn. She couldn’t presume to know what had gone through his mind when he’d found it, but he probably hadn’t stopped to think about that exclusion clause in his life insurance policy. Already depressed, he’d probably seen it as the final straw.
She’d blamed herself for being at work. And who wouldn’t have after coming home and discovering her husband dead in the barn, a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand? Who wouldn’t have played judge and jury with her own soul? Found herself guilty of crimes of the heart? Crimes that only now was she learning she hadn’t committed.
And she’d been mad. Damn good and mad, though she
hadn’t even realized until she met Chance how much anger she harbored. If Larry had ever really loved her, how could he have pulled the rug out from under her like that?
There were no easy answers to her questions. No convenient outlets for her rage. Joni realized that Chance was right. The price of love was letting go of the anger and the guilt. Only when she’d purged herself of those destructive emotions could she quit clinging to the past and begin embracing the future.
Grandpa spooned up a bite of soft-boiled egg, his spirits improving now that his medicine was taking effect. “Who were you talking to on the phone?”
“Dr. Rayburn.” She reached to adjust the shutter above his bed, letting in a buttery-yellow stream of sunshine. “He’s going to stop by in a little while.”
“I wonder if hell have time for a game of pitch.” Grandpa’s breathing sounded better, but he still looked puffy.
She pulled up a chair and sat down beside the sleeper sofa. “Don’t you ever give up?”
“Would I be drilling an oil well at my age if I did?” The wrinkles that threescore years and ten had etched into his face deepened in a smile.
Joni could see the men climbing on the rig from the dining room window, but from this distance she couldn’t tell if any of them was Chance. “I suppose not.”
“Yessireebob …” Grandpa dunked a corner of his toast into his coffee. “You sure can tell a lot about a man by the way he loses at cards.”
She gave him her I’m-on-to-you-mister look.
He chewed the soggy toast, then swallowed it and wiped his whiskery chin. “A good loser, he’ll just smile and challenge you to another hand.”
Joni remembered Chance laughing and referring to Grandpa as “Diamond Jim Brady,” then rolling up his sleeves and going back for more.
“But a sore loser …” Grandpa took a sip of his coffee. “He’ll walk away mad and probably take it out on someone else.”
Now she remembered Larry coming to bed one night shortly after she’d married him, blaming her because Grandpa had pulled a fast one on him and refusing to play anymore.
“I’d rather play with a good loser because he’s more fun.” Grandpa set his cup in the saucer with a shaky hand, then cleared his throat. “By the same token, I’d rather beat a sore loser because he’s got it coming.”
