by Rosalyn West
“I’m sure you’re a very nice young lady, but I’m married, and I’m not looking for—”
Someday gravity would work cruelly against Irma Sue Fielding, but for the moment it was more than kind as she spilled a tremendous bounty from the bodice of her dress with a healthy bounce. Dodge blinked, his mind completely blanked by the spectacle as Irma Sue wiggled down so her impressive breasts sat inches from his face and her palms moved boldly along the tops of his thighs.
“My friend told me how you got yourself hurt and how certain things might not be working the way they should be. I ain’t no doctor, Mr. Dodge, but I bet I can cure what ails you, if you’d be inclined to overlook my daddy’s note for another month.”
“Miss Fielding, I—”
The rest of what he had to say was smothered in her pillowy breasts as she pulled him toward her, hugging his head to her bosom with one hand as her other began a skillful manipulation in his lap. Too stunned to react at once, Dodge struggled to draw a breath and some saving sanity, all the while Irma Sue’s deft touch created enough chaos to make him wonder rather wildly if she wasn’t the answer to his plaguing doubts.
Maybe he’d been listening to the wrong experts.
But even Irma Sue’s expertise couldn’t crowd out the sudden image of Starla’s face or prevent the shock of clear thinking that made him ask, “What friend sent you to me?”
It wasn’t Irma Sue who answered.
“Don’t tell me this is another sister.”
The sense of standing at the edge of an abyss with stones trickling over the rim had him hauling back out of the grip of Irma Sue’s considerable charms only to plunge straight to hell at the sight of Starla staring at both of them with a skeptical glower.
He couldn’t breathe.
“Am I interrupting something?”
Without looking around, Irma Sue drawled, “We’re right in the middle of some delicate negotiations here, so wait your turn, honey.”
Dodge grabbed the front of Irma Sue’s gown and yanked it up, earning an indignant squeal. He never glanced away from Starla’s steady stare.
“We’re finished, Miss Fielding. In fact, we were finished before we started. As I said, send your daddy to talk to me.”
“Well, what got you changin’ your tune in such a damned hurry?” Irma Sue huffed, as she got to her feet.
“His wife,” Starla said, with the lethal clang of a drawn blade.
The muddled harlot looked between the two of them and decided, wisely, to make for the door before all hell broke loose … leaving Dodge to do the impossible.
“I can explain.”
“I bet you can.” Starla walked past his desk, her step brisk with annoyance.
“It wasn’t what it looked like.”
“I see. And now you think I’m blind as well as a fool.”
“No, of course not. I—aw, hell.” How could he expect her to believe him when he couldn’t convince himself? “She was trying to get her father’s note postponed.”
“A convincing argument. Was she successful?”
Alerted by her continued calm, Dodge dragged himself to his feet. His mind scrambled in a dozen different directions; numbed by Irma Sue’s touch, spinning from the effect of Starla’s return, reeling with the fear of losing her, of hurting her….
She had her back to him, her gloved fingertips trailing along the edge of the teller’s cage in a gesture that made his skin quiver in response. How could he be so stunned by her beauty after only a few days’ separation? Eagerness and apprehension twined through him as he followed her behind the teller’s window.
“I didn’t know you’d returned.”
“Obviously. Otherwise you wouldn’t have invited Irma Sue to begin negotiations.”
“Do you know her?”
“She’s a slatternly acquaintance of my—of the Dermonts.”
Dodge paused. Tyler had sent Irma Sue. Why? To discover if he was aiming his pistol without the proper wadding? Or because he’d seen Starla’s arrival and sought to alienate them? Had he in fact succeeded?
“Is she the kind of woman who appeals to you, then?”
She turned toward him, her question seemingly sincere. It took him aback.
“I’m not interested in any woman except you.”
“I see. So you would rather it had been me smothering you in my bosom.”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean—hell, anything I say is going to dig me in deeper. Nothing was going on between me and that woman, I swear to God.”
“Nothing? Would you say no to a woman who offers everything in favor of one who refuses you anything?”
“Starla, you’re the only woman I want. And I’ve wanted you since I first saw you.”
“So,” she said softly, with an absence of inflection, “you would have a wife who acts the whore for you.”
“No.”
“Then you wouldn’t like for me to bare my breasts for you, to put my hands upon you, like so.”
Her palms flattened against the front of his snug silk vest, exciting a sudden lunging gallop of pulse beats. His gaze fell to the soft curve of her bodice as his imagination went momentarily wild.
“You would say, ‘No, stop,’ to me if I were to continue with what she was doing?”
“I—” He couldn’t assemble the words as blood pounded into his head with the first stroke of her fingertips along the front of his trousers. The fact that it was Starla, his wife, touching him flushed all memory of other women from his mind. His hands tightened on the grips of his crutches as he swayed in the thrall of temptation. His eyelids flickered, then focused on Starla, who stared unblinkingly into his face.
This was wrong. He knew it even as she said, “Now I know what’s expected of me if I’m to stay with you.”
“Starla—”
She knelt at his feet in a pool of lilac-colored satin. He was reaching down for her elbows, planning to pull her up, when the door to the bank opened again.
“Mr. Dodge? Oh, there you are.”
“Mrs. Bishop.” Did she notice how ragged his voice sounded? From where she was standing, she could only see him from the chest up on the other side of the teller’s window. Starla was completely out of sight … and beginning a devastating massage through the wool of his trousers. He forced his breathing to remain even.
“Mr. Dodge, I was wondering if we could discuss that loan for the expansion of my dressmaking shop.”
“Now?”
Starla had untucked his shirt. His abdomen quivered as her lips brushed beneath his navel.
“Yes, unless you’re busy. I’ve talked over the monthly payments with my husband, and we thought if we hired on another girl, we’d have no problem keeping up with the—Mr. Dodge, are you all right?”
He was swaying slightly for balance on his crutches, finally forced to grip the edge of the counter as Starla worked his trouser flap open. Her cool fingertips touched him.
“Yes … yes. I—I’m fine. You were saying, about the loan….” He breathed harder. The tightening vortex of heat was spiraling where Starla was purposefully raising havoc.
Raising, swelling, growing hard, harder.
He couldn’t focus his attention on the elderly customer chatting away as the shock of Starla’s silken kiss stroked over him. His knees buckled. His hands curled around the bars.
“Mrs…. Mrs. Bishop … could we go over this tomorrow? I was—I was getting ready to close up. My wife just returned from a short trip, and I … want to be home to welcome her back.”
Myrna Bishop suddenly went all soft with sentimental smiles. “Why, of course. Why didn’t you say so? Tomorrow it is. All the best to your wife.”
“All the best …” he moaned, as the door closed behind the oblivious woman. He rested his cheek against the cool wood of the counter, his eyes closing, his breath altering into short, harsh bursts as his fingers clutched and spasmed around the bars. Starla’s mouth was on him, her tongue swirling, teeth scraping gently, beginning a rhyt
hmic pull that seemed to draw from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair to the very core of his being.
He gasped hoarsely, at first surprised, then lost to shuddering shocks of pleasure that racked him until he was but a drained shell. He couldn’t lift his head from the counter top. His eyes felt too weighted to open. Only his desperate grip on the bars kept him from pouring like liquid to the floor.
Oh, God, never before … never in his life … the rest drifted away on a heavy sated cloud.
The sound of a crutch clattering to the floor roused him from near slumber. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to stir from this blissful sense of rediscovery.
He certainly wasn’t impotent!
He’d flushed enough through his system to seed a desert.
He was grinning with an almost drunken foolishness when he finally made his eyes flutter open at the sound of the front door closing.
Dodge locked up the bank in record time, rushing home in a fever of anticipation that didn’t permit him a clear thought until he stepped into the foyer and saw Starla there. Only then did wild elation give way to reality. She met his look with eyes cold as emerald chips.
He didn’t know what to say to her. He settled for the obvious: “I’m glad you’re home.”
She said nothing.
“How was your trip?”
“Long. I’m very tired.”
And she was angry with him. Angry, and somehow different—as if he’d suddenly taken a tremendous plunge in her estimation.
“Where are your mother and sister?”
“In Michigan by now, I’d imagine. I’ve sent them home.”
“Oh.” The word conveyed a wealth of feelings. Surprise. Relief. Curiosity. Gratitude. But she had voiced none of those things. She stared at him, waiting.
For what? God, he wished he knew something, anything, about her. That he had some way to reach through the silences and secrets.
Finally he just reached for her.
She stiffened as his arms circled her, but she allowed him to bring her to him, to hold her against the hurried thunder of his heart, riding out his massive sigh of relief.
She’d come back; nothing else mattered.
The words “I love you” tasted bittersweet on his tongue but he held them back because there was so much she held back from him. Like why she’d brought him to such a point of exquisite paradise only to abandon him.
Like where she’d learned to do such a thing with a man.
It didn’t matter, he told himself; it shouldn’t. He loved her and she had come back to him. They were on the brink of intimacy and he no longer feared failure in that area.
Why, then, when she stepped back from him, did she look at him as though she loathed him?
Chapter 15
The house was quiet without the invasive Dodge family there. Silence accentuated the fact that it was just the two of them, alone. Starla stood in the doorway to her husband’s bedroom, observing him before he was aware of her presence.
She’d been eager to get back to him. That irony provoked an awful ache. Because the sense of hurt was too difficult to bear, because she felt herself close to tears over what she’d walked in on at the bank, she made herself focus on his failure, not hers. Her good and decent husband, the man she’d let herself trust, was no different from any of them—deceitful, led by their lusts, easily controlled by a tug on the trouser band. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was. She’d wanted to believe his pretty words about honor. She’d needed to think of him as a safe, dependable haven.
Then came the unbidden whisper. If she was more a wife to him, he wouldn’t seek out others. A man can wait only so long before taking what he wants…. She understood that and she’d made the most of it: in surviving her upbringing, and in latching onto an escape from Fair Play. She knew the game of manipulation and how to make it work to her advantage. A game of detachment and calculated response. She’d been a fool not to play it from the first. But she’d hoped … she’d hoped Dodge would be the first to give without first taking.
She held tight to her disappointment. If she wanted a happy ending to her life, she had to write it herself. And it began here, with this man. She could escape, either with him or through him. But it was up to him.
He saw her then and stopped what he was doing. A hint of caution colored his gaze, reminding her to play her role carefully. She forced a smile and moved toward him, making no attempt to hold the front of her silky robe closed. She watched heat darken his stare as he took in what that gap revealed: her body, outlined in wisps of lace. He wet his lips and spoke with an odd huskiness.
“Did you come to say good night, or was there something else you wanted? I can apologize only so many times.”
As if words would be enough to heal the fracture of her faith. She let none of her emotions show in her face.
“Perhaps I came to see if there was anything else you wanted.”
What he wanted was no mystery. It blazed in his eyes, it thundered through his throat beneath her knuckles. He wanted her. She made herself stand before him, a gift partially unwrapped, hinting of delights inside, should he decide to take them. She froze as he lifted his hand, but it was only to capture her own, to enfold it within the curl of his fingers, to hold it pressed over his rapidly beating heart.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I have everything I want right here.”
She’d come to him for one reason: to gain control through confusion. She was afraid that when he stopped feeling guilty, he’d start asking questions: about her trip, about its purpose—questions she didn’t want to answer. But a man couldn’t think with his head when his lust ran rampant. That’s what she’d counted upon. Then why did she feel as though it was she who was confused—by his simple yet elegant words, by the yearning steeped in his dark eyes?
She smiled, canting her gaze downward with a flutter of her lashes. It was a practiced seduction, one that startled most men into excited thoughts of conquest.
But why was Dodge beginning to frown?
What was she doing wrong?
He levered back on his crutches. The wanting was still there, a hot coal of desire, but banking it was a containing suspicion: she was moving too fast.
“You missed me.”
“Yes.”
“Enough to grant me a favor?” She glanced up at him, tempering her coy manner with just enough directness to put him at ease.
“I would do anything for you.”
She hated the way he said that because it created a false warmth inside her, a sense of believing what she knew to be untrue.
“I’d like to work in the bank with you. I know you said you didn’t need my help when I asked before, but—”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Yes. If you want to work there, that’s fine with me.”
“Oh.” She smiled. “Good. It’s settled, then.”
“When would you want to start?”
“Tomorrow?”
“All right.”
Now she was suspicious—of his quick agreement, of the reasons behind it. Why had he changed his mind, after being so adamant about not wanting her interfering in his business, both personal and professional? Was he afraid she’d try to run from him again?
That wasn’t good. If he was wary, he’d be watchful. She had to lull his caution. She could do this, she told herself. She could earn his trust.
She began with a grateful smile. “Thank you, Dodge. I want to be useful … to you, and to the people of Pride.”
She felt the slightest wince of guilt with his approval. Then it was his turn to knock her back on her heels in surprise.
“I met your father yesterday.”
She wasn’t in time to catch the initial jerk of reaction or the shudder that followed. But her tone was carefully modulated when she replied, “Really? And what did he have to say?”
“He wanted to congratulate us on our marriage.”
She stared at
him dead on and drawled, “I doubt that very much.” She started to pace around the room in agitation and anger. “Did he tell you that you’d made an unfortunate choice?”
“Something like that.”
“Did he tell you I’m mentally unstable? That I was dangerous to myself and others, and prone to fits of delusion and melancholia?”
A pause, then a soft, “No. He didn’t.”
Starla halted her travels and her ramblings, having committed a serious faux pas by revealing more than necessary. “Well, it’s not true.”
He didn’t respond. Instead, he crossed to the unmade bed and eased himself down, setting aside the crutches and positioning his legs on the mattress so he was sitting upright, braced by the headboard. His expression gave nothing away—not doubt, not curiosity, not dismay.
“He said you belonged at home with him, that I’d be asking for trouble if I got in the way of that.”
Starla hugged herself against the sudden pervasive chill. “My father is a very possessive man. He drove my mother away with his need to own her. He sees me as a substitute.”
“You don’t need to be afraid of him.”
“You don’t know him.”
“I think he and I got a pretty good look at each other’s hands. But I didn’t show him all my cards.”
She faced him then, her features taut and pale. “This isn’t a game, Dodge. Not to him.”
“Not to me, either. I never gamble with what I can’t afford to lose. And I won’t lose you, Starla.”
There was such strength in that claim. It drew her, unbidden, across the room and into his open arms. There was such surety in his embrace, it made it easy for her to cling, to get lost in the tight wrap of his care so that it didn’t matter if he wanted her only for sex, or for the child she carried. It didn’t matter because he was going to keep her safe, and that was worth any sacrifice.
“Don’t be afraid.”
She felt his quiet command clear to her soul. It shook loose all the fears long since relegated to dark corners where they crouched ready to spring and ruin any chance at happiness. They prowled now, those awful truths, those past sins, reminding her in ugly whispers that she wasn’t worth the care this man was showing her. If he knew her—really knew her—he’d cast her away in disgust.
