Dee held the platter of biscuits out to Chance. He forked three to his plate before passing them on to his sister.
“There isn’t any need for her to finish each one of those designs before she leaves here,” Dee told Sarah Jane. “Your wedding isn’t until May. She can mail the patterns back to us, if need be.”
“I’m going to tell her that,” Sarah Jane said with a nod of her head. “And I’ll take her a tray of something later. Maybe she’ll eat then.”
Chance suddenly slammed down his fork. “What the hell are you going to do that for? She doesn’t need to be coddled!”
Sarah Jane turned a glare on her brother. “No. She needs to be treated like a human being. Something, it appears, that you’ve forgotten how to do.”
Chance frowned at her. “What’s that supposed to mean? It isn’t my fault that Lucy doesn’t want to come out and face us!”
“And just whose fault is it, Chance? Mother and I weren’t the ones who accused her of being a fugitive from the law!”
“She told you that?”
He was close to shouting the question. Dee looked at him calmly. “I had a talk with Lucy, Chance.”
“And now I’m supposed to feel guilty because I questioned her about leaving Chicago? That shouldn’t have insulted her. Unless she’s guilty of something.”
Sarah Jane made a snorting noise while Dee said, “Perhaps it was the way you went at it?”
Chance’s eyes lifted to the ceiling. “She’s supposed to be handled with kid gloves. Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“I’m just saying you could be a little more sensitive,” Dee suggested.
Frowning, Chance stabbed a biscuit with his fork, then ripped it open. “Why should I be? The woman pumps me for private information.”
Sarah Jane groaned. “Chance, it’s a good thing you’ve never been inclined to marry again. The way you are, I doubt you’d have much luck keeping a wife.”
A cold, distant look crept slowly over his features. “I doubt I would, either. After all, I didn’t with the first one, did I?”
Sarah Jane’s expression was suddenly remorseful. “Oh, I—I’m sorry, Chance. I didn’t mean it like that. I wasn’t talking about Jolene.”
Chance was suddenly too weary to eat. Picking up his coffee cup, he rose to his feet. “Forget it, sis.”
Tears welled in Sarah Jane’s eyes. “I’m sorry, brother,” she said quietly.
Stepping around to her chair, Chance bent down and kissed her cheek. “Don’t be sorry. Forget it and eat your supper before James throws you over for a woman with some meat on her bones.”
At the far end of the house, there was a study that Chance used as an office. He hated paperwork and usually put it off until his desk was running over with statements and receipts. But tonight he was looking for anything to get his mind off Lucinda.
In the small room, he switched on a desk lamp, then turned on the radio. The Amarillo station, which normally played country music, was now into the Christmas season. Brenda Lee was belting out “Jingle Bell Rock.”
On the right-hand corner of the desk, feed bills were stacked elbow high. One by one Chance began posting them in the ledger. As he came to the last and latest one, he growled a curse word under his breath.
Horse feed had taken a sharp rise. Twenty cents a sack. With his ink pen, he scratched out a quick tabulation on the margin of the ledger book. At that rate, he’d be paying eighty dollars more a ton. Three hundred and forty dollars more a month.
Tossing the bill to one side, he leaned back in his chair and linked his hands at the back of his neck. The ranch could absorb the extra expense, but he’d definitely rather be spending the money for new fencing.
Chance supposed he could get rid of two, maybe three of the older horses, but in the long run that wouldn’t save the ranch all that much money. Besides, he might as well face it, he was attached to all of them, and deciding which two or three to sell, would be like deciding which leg or arm he wanted to give up. That’s why he’d been eager to show the horses to Lucinda. They were like his children and he’d wanted her to enjoy them as much as he did.
Lucinda! Why did she keep coming back to his thoughts? Why couldn’t he forget about the way he’d kissed her? The way she’d kissed him back!
A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. Knowing how his mother hated it when a person didn’t eat, he expected to see her come waltzing into the room with a loaded tray of food.
Without looking around, he said, “Mother, I’m not starving to death, I’ll eat—”
“It’s not your mother.”
Chance’s head whipped around, then his breath drew in sharply as he saw Lucinda standing just inside the door.
“Lucy.”
No man had ever said her name that way, with his voice somehow both soft and rough, so full of emotion. The sweetness of the sound lifted her eyes to his face and for long moments she simply looked at him.
“I—don’t want to disturb you,” she said, then nervously licking her lips, she took one step closer.
She’d already disturbed the hell out of him. And he’d already decided that she was going to stay in his head whether she was in this room with him, or some other part of the house.
“You’re not disturbing me. Come in.”
Reaching behind her, she gently pushed the door shut, then clasped her hands in front of her. The room was small and dimly lit. One small lamp burned on the desk. Its light pooled on the pages of the open ledger and reflected up to Chance’s face. She could see that his gray eyes were red with fatigue while black whiskers shadowed his chin and jaws and upper lip. She’d thought about him all evening, the things she’d said to him and the way she’d felt in his arms. Now that she was standing here looking at him, all she could think about was going to him and laying her cheek against his.
“Was there something you wanted?” he asked.
Dear God, yes. She wanted him. Couldn’t he see it all over her face? Each time she looked at him, even thought of him, a surge of yearning poured through her like kerosene on fire. And she seemed powerless to stop it.
Taking another step closer, she said, “Yes. I—I’ve been thinking about—” She breathed in deeply and tried again. “The way I behaved this afternoon. I know you didn’t understand—”
“I still don’t understand,” he swiftly cut in.
“I’m not a bad person, Chance.”
“I don’t think you are,” he replied, his eyes quietly studying her troubled face.
Surprise lifted her eyebrows. “But you implied—”
Shaking his head, he said, “Lucy, you looked like the devil himself had taken a seat on your shoulder. What was I supposed to think? I was worried about you.”
Worried about her? No. Lucy couldn’t imagine Chance Delacroix being concerned about her. She was just a stranger passing through, a momentary disruption in his life. Still, like a child drawn to the magic of Christmas, Chance’s words drew Lucinda to him.
“I know I overreacted. But—” Pausing, she spread her hands in a helpless gesture as she tried to assemble the best words to explain herself. “It wasn’t Troy, personally, you see. He seemed like a very nice man.”
“He is a very nice man. Even if he is my cousin.”
She tried to swallow, then brought her hand to her throat when it refused to cooperate. “But all policemen aren’t nice guys,” she finally managed to say. “I know, because Richard was a policeman.”
Rising to his feet, Chance closed the three steps that separated them. “Your ex-fiancé was a policeman?”
Her face solemn, Lucy nodded up at him. Once she’d left Chicago she’d planned to keep all this information to herself. But no matter what consequences came out of this, she couldn’t let Chance go on thinking badly of her. She couldn’t bear that.
“He was—is a homicide detective on the Chicago police force.”
“I see,” he said, his expression suddenly thoughtful.
&
nbsp; “I doubt it. You’re probably thinking that doesn’t explain my reaction to Troy. But believe me, Chance, Richard turned out to be—well, he could be very unpleasant at times. He ruined my impression and my trust for the law. I know that doesn’t exactly make sense, and the logical part of me knows that all law officials aren’t like him, but I still can’t seem to make the separation.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Her mouth twisted wryly. “For the same reason you don’t want to tell me things. It hurts.”
Oh yes, Chance knew how the past, and retelling it, could hurt. As it had obviously hurt Lucinda, he thought grimly.
He didn’t know what had prompted her to come to him and open up like this. But now that she had, Chance felt like a bastard. No, he more than felt like one. He was one. From the moment he’d picked Lucinda up from her wrecked car on the highway, he’d questioned her motives, her past, her future. He’d expected her to give out any information he wanted to know while, like a miser clutching his pennies, he’d held the biggest part of himself back from her. But then, he’d been doing that for more than ten years now. And the hell of it was, no one but Lucinda had pointed it out to him. Or maybe they had and she’d been the only one he’d listened to?
“So I guess I’ll say good-night. I just wanted you to know how things were with me,” Lucinda went on with a shrug of her shoulder. “I didn’t want you thinking I had a suitcase full of stolen money stashed away in the car trunk and my being here would implicate you and your family.”
Turning, she started toward the door. But before her hand reached the knob, Chance grabbed her shoulders and spun her back to him.
“I didn’t really think that, Lucy,” he said, his face bent close to hers. “I was just angry at you because you were being so damn closemouthed.”
The warm light in his gray eyes made Lucinda believe him. It also made her quiver with longing. “Like you?” she couldn’t help asking.
Chance couldn’t be angry with her. How could he be, when everything inside of him wanted to pull her into his arms, cherish her warmth and her softness?
“It’s been a long time since a woman has made me want to look twice,” he admitted in a husky voice. “And now that you’ve come along, I don’t know what to do about it.”
At first Lucinda thought she’d heard him wrong, then when she realized she hadn’t, her heart began to pound. “You—shouldn’t do anything about it,” she breathed.
His hands on her upper arms, he guided her back a step until she was pressed against the closed door. “Why? Because you’re still in love with your policeman?”
The mere thought of loving Richard made her shiver with revulsion. “No! I’m not so sure I ever loved the man. At one time, I believed I did. But now I think I only accepted his engagement ring because I wanted security in my life. I’ve never had that before, you see.”
“Maybe you wanted love to go along with that security,” he suggested softly.
His hands were burning through her sweater, right down to the tips of her fingers. His lips, just inches away, were hypnotizing her, making it impossible to tear her eyes away from them. “I did want love. I’d wanted it very badly. But I didn’t get it.”
One hand lifted to touch her cheek, then tunneled into the side of her hair. “I didn’t get it, either,” he murmured.
His touch stirred Lucinda’s senses, but it was his words that tugged at her heart. “But you—didn’t you love Jolene? Didn’t she love you back?”
All of a sudden, he moved away from her and went to stand by a single window. The drapes were parted, and beyond the glass panes, Christmas lights twinkled on the eave of the porch. Lucinda thought the cheerful decoration was an odd contrast to the twisted look of anguish on Chance’s face.
“Oh, we were married,” he conceded. “And we were in love, or so we thought. But I was barely twenty at the time and Jolene was nineteen. I think she was more in love with the idea of marriage and babies than she was with me.”
“And you?”
“I wanted her. Physically. And back then I was too young to know physical desire wasn’t what love was all about.”
Lucinda didn’t know what to say. All this time she’d believed he was harboring a great, deep-seated love for his dead wife. If that wasn’t the case, why had he avoided women for so long? Why did he look so tormented now?
“Do you know how guilty that makes me feel?” he asked, when she failed to make a reply.
Frowning, Lucinda walked over to where he stood. “Why should you feel guilty? Jolene wanted to marry you, didn’t she?”
A wan smile suddenly touched his features. “Oh yes. In fact, we eloped because she was afraid my parents would try to stop it.” He looked at Lucinda. “You see, Jolene was from a poor family and she believed all the Delacroix resented her.”
Lucinda couldn’t imagine Dee being the sort of person to resent another just because they were less fortunate. But where their children were concerned, people often behaved differently. “Did your folks resent her?”
“No. But they didn’t approve of us living in Amarillo.”
A frown puckered her brow. “You didn’t live here on the ranch?”
Chance shook his head. “Jolene didn’t want to live around my family. Since she’d never had much of a home, she wanted one of her very own. So I tried my best to give her one. I got a job on a ranch just outside of the city and we rented a little house not far away from it. I worked during the days and went to college at night for a degree in agriculture.”
“That must have been difficult,” Lucinda said as she tried to picture a very young Chance struggling to become a husband and a man all at once.
He shrugged. “I’m sure you did the same thing. You obviously had to.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But I only had the responsibility of taking care of myself.”
With a long sigh, he turned his gaze back out toward the dark night. “Well, we made it somehow. Even up until it was time for the baby.”
“The baby!” Lucinda gasped.
His face turned back to hers and Lucinda was suddenly haunted by the shadows she saw in his eyes.
“Yes. I figured Mother had already told you. Jolene died trying to have my child.”
Stunned, Lucinda slowly shook her head. She’d expected him to say anything but that. “No. I didn’t know. I—can’t imagine such a thing happening to you.”
His face full of bitterness, he said, “Neither could I. But there I was in the hospital waiting room, certain I was giving my wife the best of care, when the doctors came out and told me she was gone and so was the baby. A girl. Perfectly formed, but gone. Like her mother.”
Lucinda’s heart squeezed with pain for him. In less than two years, he’d lost his wife and child, then his father. How had he endured such pain?
“What happened to her and the baby?” she asked.
One of his shoulders lifted, then fell. “Oh, the doctors gave me all sorts of medical excuses, most of which I couldn’t understand. I just knew that something had caused her to hemorrhage so violently they couldn’t stop it. At the time, I didn’t care to hear their reasons or explanations, anyway. Jolene and the baby were dead. As far as I was concerned I’d killed them.”
“Chance!” she gasped. “That’s crazy.”
“Maybe so. But I’m the one who made Jolene pregnant in the first place.”
“And that’s supposed to make you a murderer?”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he sighed, then said, “I’ve always thought so.”
Determined to reach him, Lucinda grabbed both his hands and held them tightly. “Then it’s high time you stopped,” she told him. “You need to put all of that behind you—leave it in the past where it belongs.”
His eyes lifted and locked with hers as slowly his fingers folded around hers and squeezed. “Do you think you’re the woman who can make me put it all in the past?”
She wasn’t expecting him to ask s
uch a thing. Even so, the moment her heart had heard the question it had known the answer. She wanted to be that woman. His woman. The woman to give him true love and happiness. But that wasn’t possible. Not with Richard hanging like a dangerous cloud just behind her shoulder.
“Chance, I’m not—I can’t be that sort of woman to you—or any man.”
“Why not?”
With an anguished groan, she turned away from him. “Because it isn’t possible. Because I can’t forget—”
Before she could get it out of her mouth, he snatched her arm and spun her back around to him.
“You just told me I needed to forget the past. Put it behind me. Why can’t you? Or is this a case of do as I say, not as I do?”
“This is different,” she said, her voice full of torment. “I have reasons to steer clear of a relationship with a man.”
His hands came up to gently frame her face. “For years I’ve had lots of reasons hanging in front of my eyes. Now you’ve come along and made them all look not so important anymore.”
Oh, dear God, he shouldn’t be saying this to her, she thought. And she shouldn’t be wanting to hear it. But her heart reveled in his sweet confession, glowed with a love as warm and bright as the Christmas candle burning on the living room mantel.
“I’m glad, Chance.” With one hand she reached up and traced his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “You deserve to be happy. But not with me.”
“You might be wrong about that, Lucy,” he murmured. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.”
As if she were under some sort of spell, she stood totally still and watched his face bend to hers. “Chance—”
“Don’t talk, Lucy. Just close your eyes and let me kiss you. The way I’ve wanted to kiss you since the first night I saw you.”
The last was said against her lips, and by then Lucinda had already surrendered to him. Like butter sliding down a stack of warm pancakes, she melted against him, opened her mouth to him and welcomed the sweet invasion of his tongue.
The smell of him, the feel of him had already become achingly familiar to her, and knowing these moments would have to last her a lifetime, she held on to him tightly. Urgently.
A Cowboy for Christmas Page 11
