Made For Each Other

by Parris Afton Bonds

  By the time Nick halted the car beneath the canopy of pines and firs, her mind had alerted her that the journey was over. She blinked, trying to marshal some sort of logical thought, yet there existed only the panicky feeling that she was alone with a man who was notorious for his careless, offhanded treatment of women.

  This time, though, when Nick lifted her against his chest, she did not cringe, for she was beginning to feel accustomed to the position. She could make out very little about the frame cabin, but Nick’s sure footsteps climbing wooden steps to a deck told her the elevated house must be built on a hillside.

  One boot kicked the door open, and she felt him shoulder his way through the blackness to another room before she was lowered onto what had to be a bed. She heard him cross the room, and a sudden light flared from the kerosene lamp he lit. In the growing circle of soft yellow illumination she looked around her. There was only the one bed, a notched chest, and an old pine nightstand. Through a connecting doorway she could make out what appeared to be a small bathroom.

  In the quietness of the cabin she realized just how alone she was with this man. “You have a nice place,” she offered with a bravado she did not feel.

  “Primitive by your standards,” he said dryly. “But it at least has some amenities.” He nodded toward the telephone on the nightstand. “A convenience dictated by my occupation.”

  He began to unbutton the flannel shirt, revealing the mat of brown hair on his swarthy chest, and she cried out, “You said you were going to stay elsewhere.”

  A wicked smile of amusement lit his face. “No. You did.”

  Pinned by his atagonistic gaze she lay on the wide mattress, helpless to move even if she had not been injured,

  He moved close, so that he stood directly over her. His eyes, which seemed to miss nothing, looked down at her petitely curved figure. “Just think,” he said with a diabolical smile, “after two or three days spent with me you’ll know all my political stands. You’ll have the reporter’s scoop of the year.”

  His brown fingers reached out to untie her other pigtail, and the mass of hair tumbled through his fingers to fall around her shoulder in a burnished cloud. “Of course, you may find out more than you want to know about some things.”

  Inwardly she shrank from the beguilingly gentle fingers, but her voice was firm. “There isn’t anything about you I could possibly want to know, Senator Raffer.”

  Nick dropped the handful of hair, saying quietly, “Are you sure?” He finished unbut-toning his shirt, but when his fingers went to the snaps of his jeans, she squeezed her eyes shut. How could she ever have thought only an hour ago that nothing could be worse? Now it seemed Nicholas Raffer planned to make her the object of his much-sought-after attention.

  The light seemed to fade, and she opened her eyes to find that Nick had extinguished the lamp. Her heart, sluggish beneath the effects of the pill, leaped with a hammering insistence of danger. Where was he? Even in those boots he seemed to move as quietly as a cat.

  Suddenly he was there beside her, the mattress giving with his weight. she stiffened but relaxed as he began to untie one of her tennis shoes. “I don’t like people sleeping in my bed with their shoes on,” he explained as he removed the other tennis shoe and then rose.

  She thought she detected a playful tone in his voice, but she was not sure. After all, how could she trust him? She thought she really ought to try to stay awake. But even with the thought her lids drooped as the drug-induced sleep claimed her.

  Chapter Two

  Sometime during the night Julie was awakened from a sweat-drenched dream by hands lightly cupping her shoulders. Her eyelids flew open. Nick Raffer’s dark face hovered over hers.

  Then it was not all just a bad dream—the accident, the broken clavicle, and her subse-quent confinement with this man who detested her.

  “What do you want?” she whispered in a choked voice.

  “Right now . . . but that can wait.” She felt something small and round shoved into her mouth. “Right now,” he said, “I only want you to take this pill.” He smiled as he held the glass to her lips. “Ravishing a sickly female is not my idea of a night of pleasure. But then maybe later . . .

  She could almost believe he was joking if it were not for the reputation he had as a love-them-and-leave-them womanizer—a rakehell, her grandmother would have called him. “Not enough of those kind of men anymore,” the old woman was fond of saying. “Nowadays your female libbers—is that what you call them?—have castrated all the young men!”

  “Grandma!” her mother would exclaim, pretending shock at the old woman’s outspo-kenness. But her mother’s shock at the situation Julie was in now would be no pretense.

  Nick stood up, towering over her like the Colossus of Rhodes. “I’m leaving to go deer hunting. I’m locking the door.”

  Her mouth dropped open. Surely Nicholas Raffer, a state senator, wasn’t going to keep her a prisoner! Seeing the sudden fear that leaped into her eyes, Nick laughed. “I just don’t want anyone else coming in and claiming what I haven’t yet had the opportun¬ity to sample. I’ll return before noon—to serve my guest her late breakfast.”

  The faintest trace of dawn’s first purple light broke through the sailcloth curtain of the one high window to fall on Nick Rafter’s roguish face, but she could not tell if he was serious or not. She closed her eyes as his fingers slipped down to trace the slim, graceful column of her neck. They rested just above the V neck of her sweater at the wildly beating pulse of her throat, and she knew he was taking great delight in the refined torturing of her nerves, which were strung as tightly as barbed wire.

  She released an inner sigh of relief at the withdrawal of the sensual touch of his fingers, but when she would have opened her eyes to assure herself of his departure, she found that her lids would not cooperate. She would sleep for just a little while, she told herself. When she woke up in a few minutes she would be rested enough to attempt an escape. . . .

  But somehow the sun was shining brightly through the window when next she awoke. Merely to tilt her head upward and glance about the room caused a jagged stab of pain in her shoulder bone. She listened for sounds of activity in the far room, but there came nothing. Perhaps it was a new day, and luck would be with her—maybe Nick Raffer, the hunter, had not returned yet.

  With the most cautious of movements she slid out of bed into an awkward posture that left her sitting rather than standing on the hardwood floor. Weakly she forced her thigh muscles, and even they protested the pain, to lever her to her feet. Gasping with exhaustion from her exertion, she began to take slow, careful steps toward the living room. Her good shoulder rested against the door’s frame as she renewed her strength and surveyed the outer room.

  A kitchenette took up the far end of the living room, and a round dining table carved of Mexican pine stood in an alcove created by a short bar with wooden stools before it.

  Beneath the living room’s one long window that gave a magnificent view of the Sierra Blanca Peak there was a long sofa with a beige-and-rust Indian print. And at one end of the sofa she noticed a mounded blanket under which Nick had undoubtedly spent the night, or part of it at least.

  She crossed to the caliche fireplace where a low fire burned and held out her hands to absorb the heat. But she happened to glance up over the mantel and see the large stag’s head with its magnificent rack of antlers—a prey, like herself, that could not escape Nick Raffer’s skillful hunting. She shivered at the comparison. For she did not doubt that, before long, Nick would try to make love to her— something he would undoubtedly enjoy doing in retribution for her disparaging columns about him. And the worst was that she did not know if she really had the desire to resist him.

  Julie of the Scathing Tongue isolated in a mountain cabin with Nicholas, the radical left-wing senator. What sweet irony!

  She turned her back on the mounted trophy and crossed to the window. Outside, snow flurried over the densely concentrated firs and pines. Th
e relaxing warmth of the fire and the peaceful panorama of spiraling trees and mulberry-blue mountains, looking like something on a Christmas card, were dangerously deceptive. She could only hope that Monday she could get her car fixed and escape the presence of the man who tantalized her so.

  A freezing rush of air blasted through the room, and she turned to see Nick standing in the doorway. Snow glistened on the saddle- brown hair and the bright red nylon of his him ting jacket. His eyes raked over her in a lazy, insolent fashion that made her quiver inside with apprehension. “Miss me?” he asked with a mocking smile.

  Her mouth stretched flat. She wanted to make some caustic retort, but she was hardly in the position to antagonize him. Instead she pretended indifference. She shrugged her shoulders, saying casually, “I just woke up.”

  Nick’s eyes narrowed, as if he were reassessing her. He set aside his rifle and tossed the hunting jacket on a leather-upholstered easy chair. “I’m going to shower,” he tossed over his shoulder, “then I’ll feed my guest. Are you hungry enough to eat?” his muffled voice came from the bedroom. But apparently he did not even wait for a reply, for seconds later the hissing of the shower could be heard from the bathroom.

  She found it impossible to sit idle, for her thoughts turned constantly to the raskishly handsome man in the next room, wondering just how safe she was from him—and herself. With a sigh of disgust, she crossed to the kitchen, hoping she could occupy herself in there and take her mind off Nick. She found the coffee canister and began to measure out the coffee into a battered tin pot. Oh, God, tell my muscles to shut-up their whining.

  By the time Nick emerged from the bedroom, sheathed in clean western jeans and a blue plaid shirt that hung open outside his pants, the pungent aroma of percolating coffee and sizzling bacon that she had found in the refrigerator filled the room. Hampered by the brace, she moved awkwardly as she cracked the eggs over the bowl’s rim. But, if she had not known how much Nick disliked her, she would have sworn she saw a look of admiration in those shuttered eyes before he turned his attention to the long sleeves he was rolling up, revealing forearms darkened by fine brown hair.

  While she set the round table, Nick replenished the fire, so that the sweet scent of burning pinon warmed the room when the two of them sat down to eat her breakfast. But a few minutes later, as She reached for her coffee cup, Nick put out his hand, palm up. A small pink pill glistened in the center.

  Her gaze went from the pill to the brilliant blue eyes in the suntanned face. “I really feel fine,” she lied, for already her shoulder was beginning to hurt from the movement she had subjected it to while cooking.

  Nick sighed with exasperation. “You might feel better, but it’s only the effects of the muscle relaxer I gave you early this morning. If you don’t take this pill, the aches and bruises will rally to torment you again. In fact, by the third day, by tomorrow, you’re going to feel as if a steamroller had flattened you.”

  “My agony would delight you, wouldn’t it?” she charged. But she took the coffee cup and the innocuous-looking pink pill he passed her.

  “You deserve it, you’ll admit.”

  “No, I won’t admit it. The accident wasn’t my—” But she broke off as Nick lifted one mocking brow. Obediently she swallowed the pill, almost scalding her tongue on the coffee. “Ugh!”

  Nick smiled. “I hate to deprive you of my company, but I need to butcher the deer meat hanging outside and chop some more firewood. It looks like another blizzard is rolling in.”

  “Your leavetaking can’t be soon enough,” She muttered to herself and began to clear away the breakfast dishes. She barely got the dishes washed and put away before the pill began to make her drowsy again. She sought out the comfortable couch and snuggled in Nick’s blanket. She would only take a short nap, she told herself.

  But when next she awakened the pine-paneled walls were tinted a warm pink by shafts of dying sunlight. She had slept through the afternoon! Warily her gaze reconnoitered the room, halting as it came upon Nick hunkered before the fire, sharpening his knife.

  As though he sensed her intent gaze, he raised his dark head. His light blue eyes—as clear as New Mexico’s skies—pinned her where she lay. They took in her tousled cinnamon-red hair and the heavy-lidded eyes that watched him with an unaware sleepy sensuality. Slowly, purposefully, he rose and crossed the room to stand over her. One hand reached out to play along her full cheekbone, and She trembled inside. “No, don’t,” she whispered.

  He squatted on his haunches, his face even with hers. “I can’t resist,” he said quietly. For a brief second his lips hovered over hers, and she shut her eyes against the approaching kiss.

  At twenty-five the small-town girl was no novice to lovemaking. Though it might have shocked her mother, she had petted in the back seat of cars once or twice, but the high-school superjock had gotten no further than fondling her blouse-covered breasts. Her virginal state was due not so much to the principles her parents had instilled in her as to her boredom with sex. If the gorgeous hunk who was the football cocaptain her senior year could not move her with his wet, tongue-gouging kisses that almost suffocated her, and if the dates she had in later years left her feeling as if she had been mauled, her body inruded upon, she felt no great desire to see what the sexual act itself was like.

  So when Nick merely brushed his warm lips across hers, so lightly that she was not certain it had actually happened, a thousand hummingbird wings fluttered in her stomach in an unidentifiable response. Nick’s laughter was husky. “So, the leprechaun doesn’t like my kisses ... or is there someone else?”

  Her tangled lashes swept open. “No—I mean, yes.”

  Nick raked a brow in amusement but returned to the fireplace and resumed sharpening his knife. She shuddered at her close brush with his passions. She watched the deft way he drew the blade along the whetstone, and she shuddered again, but this time at the thought of the savagery that seemed to lie beneath his polished veneer.

  “Why must you kill the helpless deer?” she demanded, now knowing exactly how the beautiful animal must feel at being stalked.

  Nick’s blue eyes swung on her. “I kill only for food, Julie. I never waste. There is the balance of nature. If too many deer live through the next season, they must either eat every corn crop meant for man’s own survival—or starve, which is much more painful, and wasteful, than a quick death by a bullet.”

  She wanted to refute his logic, but she guiltily acknowledged to herself that the love of fishing her father had taught her would be just as damnable. She changed the subject. “And polluting our earth with nuclear waste— how do you defend that?”

  Nick’s unrelenting gaze drilled into her. “If you had taken any time to attend the open meetings of the Senate Energy Commission before you so ignorantly castigated the proposed nuclear-water bill in your column, you would have heard the defense.”

  He sheathed his knife with a sigh. “Look, Julie, you and I would find something to argue about if it was only the weather.” He stood and stretched, as if preparing for bed, and She could not help but notice his magnificent physique.

  When he crossed to her, she struggled to stand. She was still seething at his rebuke, and her caution had temporarily ebbed. “Here, you can have your couch,” she said haughtily.

  Nick’s lips parted in a devilish smile. “The bed in there is also mine.”

  She looked up into that rugged countenance. “All right,” she said, “I’ll take the couch.”

  Nick shrugged. “Have it your way. But that blanket won’t keep you nearly warm enough.” His close scrutiny took in the rumpled raspberry-colored sweater and the jeans that hugged her butt. “Did you want to change into anything more comfortable for bedtime?” he asked with mock concern.

  She almost made the error of agreeing until she realized he would have to help her. Her right hand came to the V neck of her sweater as if defending herself from his consuming gaze. She dropped her head, unable to meet his eyes. “No, I�
�my clothes are all in my car.”

  “I could lend you one of my clean shirts,” he suggested, moving close to her so that she could feel his breath rustling the wisps of hair about her temples. Yet his thumbs remained hooked in the belt loops of his jeans, and she realized that once again he was taunting her.

  “No—what I have on will be fine.” Why did she have to tremble so at his nearness? She could only reason that her helplessness created by her injury aroused as much fear as her apprehension at being confined with a man who not only disliked her but who could, no doubt, make her surrender all control over her emotions with a mere kiss. A man with Nick’s animal magnetism she had not been prepared to encounter.

  Nick reached for her now, and She almost fell back on the couch in her effort to avoid his tantalizing touch, but his hands caught her about the waist. “Regardless of how much you might detest me, Julie, you’re going to have to let me disrobe you.”

  “No!” She said. She tried to twist out of his embrace, but the rigid position of the halter that bound her permitted only the barest movement above her waist.

  As easily as he would lift a deer’s carcass, one of Nick’s hands lowered to catch her behind the knees so that she was cradled in his arms. Once in the darkened bedroom he set her down. “Stand still,” he commanded, “or this will be much more painful than it’s going to be as it is.”

  “Nick,” she begged. “Please—”

  Nick grimaced. “I told you I’m not interested in unwilling females.”

  His voice dropped to a soft, persuasive tone, as if he were gentling a horse, and She could easily understand how he held sway over the senate floor with his power of oration. “Your brace has to be tightened daily—it gives with your body movements. And without tight support your collarbone won’t heal properly.” At her doubtful look, he said, “It’s true—I broke my collarbone skiing three winters back. And I know it’s a nuisance to be so helpless—to feel so helpless—when you’re all right otherwise.”