by Rosalyn West
She scowled at his questionable compliment, then stiffened because she was obviously having the same effect upon him.
“Tony, please….”
“I plan to.”
He bent slowly, giving her plenty of time to turn away if she wanted. She stared into his eyes, her gaze uncertain and wavering, but she didn’t move. She met the covering warmth of his mouth with her own slightly parted lips.
His kiss was light at first, a playful nibble meant to quiet her fears and relax her tension. The instant he’d accomplished that, his purpose intensified with slanting persuasion. He could feel her fingers clutching at his vest as a long shiver shook through her. Then came the shy touch of her tongue sliding along his lower lip, beginning an unbearably sensuous flirtation with his. She was soft and pliant, and the effect her willingness had upon him was devastating. He wanted to delve into her mouth in search of answering passions, but it was too soon, her trust in him too new to jeopardize all they’d accomplished so far.
So he turned his face to one side, breathing hard into the force of his raging desire, while her nude form languished against him.
Nobility exacted a terrible price sometimes.
“You’d better go get dressed before I decide to close the bank for the day.”
Not missing the rough edge of warning in his voice, Starla slipped his embrace and darted from the room. Dodge looked over his shoulder to appreciate the vision of bare flanks and luscious legs as she disappeared up the stairs. He let out a ragged breath and shook off the gut-twisting effort of restraint. After taking a few wobbling steps forward, he was further distracted by the spears of discomfort pricking at his spine. He ignored them, just as he ignored his doctor’s advice and his wife’s worries.
He was going to walk again, and soon.
He had a wife and child to protect, and he’d do so on his own legs, as no man’s inferior. Or die trying.
They were on their way to breakfast, Dodge depending more than he cared to upon his cane and his wife’s surprisingly strong grip. His steps were slow, but they were his own, and each was a savagely won victory. Starla clung proudly to his arm, her head held high. As always, her fashionable appearance did him credit, giving them a look of comfortable and confident affluence, an important impression to make when doing business with other people’s money. They drew considerable attention, a combination of Starla’s astonishing beauty and Dodge’s graduation from crutches to cane, and whether its citizens liked to admit it or not, they were a familiar sight on the streets of Pride.
And that recognition brought a smugly pleased Hamilton Dodge that much closer to his goal.
They were about to cross a wide side street when a carriage came careening to a stop in front of them, and in a swirl of petticoats, Patrice Garrett swung down without waiting for her white-knuckled husband’s assistance.
“God above, ‘Trice, you’re gonna get us killed with the way you handle the reins,” Reeve grumbled, but Patrice paid him no mind. She was busy embracing his friend.
“Look at you!” Patrice held Dodge back by the shoulders, endangering his balance but delighting him nonetheless. “This is wonderful. I can’t believe you’re almost walking.”
“I was walking until you almost ran us over.” He grinned through his complaint. “We were on our way to breakfast. Would you care to join us?”
Without asking her husband’s opinion, Patrice took hold of Dodge’s other arm. “We’d love to. Reeve, don’t scowl at me. You can do your stuffy ol’ business better on a full stomach. Besides, I was dying to find out what sent the two of you off in such a rush last night.”
Dodge stiffened, his jaw gripping tight, but it was Starla who answered for them.
“Just some business differences. Patrice, no one needs to tell you what an old pooh your brother can be.”
What no one needed to tell Patrice was that there had been a major shift in her best friend’s relationship with her husband. She could see it in Starla’s quick defensiveness, in the solicitous way she guided Dodge’s steps down from the porch and studied his face for indications of distress. The signs of a woman in love. Patrice shot her husband a knowing look.
“Since we didn’t have a chance to do much socializing, why don’t you come out to the Glade again tonight?” So she could set Reeve on Dodge to pump him for information while she cornered Starla for the same.
“Sounds good,” Dodge began.
Then Starla brushed against him to say, “Maybe for a little while. I like to retire early these days.”
Dodge gave her a startled glance. Was she suggesting they had other plans for the evening hours?
Then she destroyed that raw lusting with an upward look at him, through eyes so meltingly shy and insecure, he’d have cut out his own heart before disillusioning her. He smiled, reassuring her that her first attempt at genuine seduction hadn’t fallen short of the mark.
“Just for a little while. Starla needs a lot of spoiling.”
As flickers of fragile passion danced in her emerald gaze, it was all Dodge could do not to swoop down to her soft lips for a soul-ravaging kiss. But he was also aware of Patrice’s intuiting stare and Reeve’s smirk of amusement, so he refrained. Instead, he offered his lovely bride a covert wink that had her moistening her lips in response.
They could forgo breakfast and lock themselves up in the bank. The cot in the back wasn’t the most comfortable, but it would do in a pinch….
Reeve’s sudden sharp inhalation knocked his amorous thoughts off track. Dodge looked about, alert to danger.
He saw only a Union officer on horseback wearing cavalry insignia from a frontier battalion. It wasn’t anyone he recognized, but from his reaction, Reeve apparently did.
Reeve strode out into the street, grabbing the officer by the arm to drag him out of the saddle and into an engulfing hug.
“My God,” Patrice murmured. “It’s Noble.”
Noble. Noble Banning.
Starla’s Noble.
She’d gone still as stone beside him, not even breathing as her stare fixed on the handsome cavalry officer. The minute he and Reeve separated, she flew out into the street with a squeal of joy to fling herself into his arms, kissing his scruffy face madly.
The sight hit Dodge like a heart attack.
“Oh, Noble! Noble! I never thought I’d see you again.”
“Stand down, Starla darlin’ and let me get a look at you. My God, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”
Dodge felt sick.
Turning his wife for inspection was the rival from his worst nightmares: tall, toned, handsome as sin, and Southern to boot. How the hell could he hope to compete with that?
Dodge was vaguely aware of the support of Patrice’s arm about his middle. Without it, his suddenly strengthless legs would have failed him. Of all the times to be tottering and off balance—when Starla finally remembered him and hauled her old beau over to exclaim, rather breathlessly, “Noble, this is Hamilton Dodge. My husband.”
Surprise widened Noble Banning’s ice-blue eyes, but his smile and the offer of his hand were genuine. “Husband? I’ve got to shake the hand of the man smart enough to catch Starla Fairfax.”
Dodge’s return smile felt stiff. The other man’s grip was firm and strong.
“I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Noble blinked at the clip of his accent. “But I guess not enough about you.”
“Dodge and I served together,” Reeve explained easily, looping an arm about the tall Southerner’s shoulders. “We took turns saving each other’s hides. I brought him here to take over Jonah’s bank, though most of Pride would rather have their hides torn off than take his help. Bunch of fools.”
Noble still smiled, but Dodge, being an outsider, caught an edge that Reeve, as his old friend, wouldn’t Dodge wondered if Noble Banning was going to prove himself to be one of the fools.
“Patrice Sinclair, you look gorgeous as ever.”
Patrice opened her arms wide, nearly
letting Dodge fall. He managed to catch himself as she stretched up to hug Noble, saying, “It’s Patrice Garrett now.”
“Why, a man goes away for a while and his whole world gets turned upside down.”
He said it with a grin, but Dodge had to wonder what part of the man’s world his own marriage to Starla had upended.
Patrice continued to hug to Noble’s arm. “We were just talking about getting together over dinner. Please say you’ll join us out at the Glade.”
“You remember the way out there, don’t you?” Reeve teased.
“Blindfolded,” Noble assured him. “Nothing would make me happier. But first I’ve got to go home to see my folks. And to get out of this uniform. Four years is long enough.”
“It’s good to have you home,” Reeve pronounced, pumping his friend’s hand.
Dodge would have preferred to have Noble Banning anywhere else.
Talk of him dominated breakfast: Reeve’s best friend, Starla’s lost love, the paragon of Pride County. Dodge could hardly swallow.
After he’d opened the bank and started to work, he’d catch Starla leaning on her elbows at the teller window, her eyes dreamy and far away—dreaming about whom, he wondered irritably. Not about a short, lame husband with an abrasive accent whom she begot of a bartered marriage, he was damn sure.
He shuffled through his papers, wishing he could get rid of the awful queasiness making knots in his gut. He heard a whisper of silk and looked up to see Starla standing next to him. He blinked quickly to hide the feelings in his eyes.
“Do you mind if I leave a little early? Myrna Bishop has a new dress ready for me and I’d like to have it for tonight.”
He didn’t mention that she had a whole closet full of goddamn dresses that were good enough.
“Go ahead.” She hadn’t been much use for anything all day, anyway, what with her eyes filled with stars—and the dashing image of Noble Banning. He looked back at his papers and was surprised by the quick kiss Starla dusted against his temple. When she was gone, he let his head drop into his hands and groaned miserably.
He wasn’t sick; he was going to die. It was going to kill him to lose her to another man.
It was the dress that nearly killed him.
Red.
Deep red velvet, as sensuous to the touch as it was sinful to the eyes. The plunging vee of the neckline was mirrored in a row of chevrons down its sweeping pleated skirt with satin rosette bows over loops of ribbon, dazzling with a small agrafe of diamonds in each center. Against the rich hue, her amply displayed bosom was pale, its shadowed valley inviting a man’s gaze to lose itself in the looking.
When she saw him staring, Starla pirouetted with a childlike excitement.
“Do you like it?”
“I’d like to take it off you.” And bury it deep in the back of her wardrobe, where Noble Banning would never set his eyes upon it. But Starla blushed prettily, interpreting his words differently.
“Shame on you, Lieutenant Dodge. Behave yourself.”
Behave himself. With his wife’s glorious chest exposed for her former lover’s appreciation. She should be hoping he didn’t commit murder before the night was over.
She stood before the mirror, strangely self-conscious for a woman of her stunning looks as she fussed with the heavy weight of her hair. She pursed her lips.
“Are you sure? It’s not too … cheap?”
“Cheap? You could pay off the mortgages on half the farms in Pride with what it must have cost you.”
She frowned at him, hurt by his grumbling assessment. “I meant ‘cheap’ as in ‘vulgar.’ I wouldn’t want to look less than a … lady.”
The vulnerable tug in her tone shamed him for his ill temper. He put his hands on her bare shoulders, gratified when she didn’t flinch at the contact. He touched a kiss to that soft skin.
“No one could ever mistake you for less than a lady, Star. You honor me, as always.”
Unexpected tears sparkled like the diamond-center rosettes, but she quickly blinked them away. “You’re too kind.”
No, he was too truthful.
It was an evening in hell.
Dodge didn’t mind the focus centering on a long-lost friend returned to the fold. He didn’t mind that Noble and Reeve shared a friendship that excluded him. He didn’t really care that the ladies were all aflutter when Noble smiled, or that the topics of Conversation predated his own arrival in Pride. He was as fascinated as the rest of them by Noble’s tales of Indians and western adventures.
What he minded was the change in Starla.
She was a rose in bloom: delicate, blushing, beautiful.
Alive.
He’d never seen her without the cautious coloring of suspicion and wariness. But tonight, he was seeing the young woman she once was, bubbling with animation, an endearing mix of shyness and flirtation that took a man’s breath away. All for Noble Banning.
It scared the hell out of him.
The woman was his wife. His. But only because a piece of paper said so. Not because of any consummation. Not because of any claim from her lips.
“Awful quiet tonight.”
Dodge smiled faintly as Reeve joined him out on the front porch, where he stood wreathed in cigar smoke and melancholy.
“Not much to say that can match massacres on the frontier.”
Reeve gave him a long look. “That bothering you? It shouldn’t, you know.”
“I know, and it doesn’t. He’s a colorful character.”
“He’s a helluva friend. We go back a long way. All of us do.”
Dodge nodded, saying nothing.
Still marveling over the fact that he could stand at all, Reeve gestured to the cane. “Oughtn’t you to give it a rest for a while?”
“Don’t fuss. You’re as bad as Starla. If I wanted to be mothered, I’d go home.”
“I thought you were home.”
Again Dodge answered with silence. Then, after a beat, he said, “I foreclosed on my first farm today.”
“Who?”
“The Emmericks. Know ’em?”
“Everyone knows everyone around here.”
“Five kids, all of ’em crying, the husband cussing, the wife spitting on me. Helluva day.”
“You couldn’t do anything for them?”
He shrugged. “I can’t save them all, Reeve. Maybe if they’d talked to me a couple of months ago, before they got in so deep to the rest of their creditors. Then Emmerick took to drinking and gambled away what little they did have, instead of working to build it up. Gave them to the end of the week. I hate being the villain.”
“You didn’t make their trouble for them, Dodge.”
“I didn’t make it any easier for them, either. You can rescue a dozen, but it’s the one you let go that everyone’s going to remember.”
“Unless you’re one of the dozen.”
Dodge sighed. “I guess.”
“What else?”
“What else, what?”
“What else has got you dragging so low? Something a little closer to home?”
He took a long draw on his cigar and blew a series of irregular smoke rings toward the moon.
“I warned you, didn’t I? You’ve got the look of a man chewing on his heart. Believe me, I know the look. And it’s damn near always fatal.”
“Thanks for the encouragement. You’re a true friend in need.” Then he spoke it plain, hating the fact that he spoke at all. “Were they lovers?”
“No. She chased ’em all but wouldn’t let any of ’em catch her. Too afraid of what her daddy would do. She might have slowed down for Noble, if he’d been willing to chase her back, but he never did—not seriously, anyway.”
“Was he blind?”
“Blinded by the law. That’s all that’s ever held his interest. Starla wasn’t exactly his ideal of a lawyer’s wife.”
Dodge’s gaze narrowed slightly. “Why’s that?”
“Too fond of trouble, between her and Tyler. Noble w
as looking for a deep pool, and she was the rapids, all shallow turmoil, fast moves, and sharp rocks. Don’t squint at me like that. I know what I’m talking about.”
“But you don’t know Starla.”
“It’s true she’s been gone for years, but I know enough to know you’ve got your hands full. Are you worrying that she’s still in love with Noble? Don’t be. I don’t think she understands the concept. You worrying she’s still thinking of chasing after him, maybe you got a right to be. What are you going to do about it?”
The tip of his cigar flared bright and hot. Dodge sent a stream of smoke jetting through clenched teeth.
“I’m going to trust her.”
“Think that’s smart?”
“Think it’s about time someone did.”
Laughter heralded the approach of Noble Banning with an attractive married woman on either arm. Patrice slipped to Reeve’s side, but Starla remained firmly where she was. Her stare fixed upon his, but Dodge couldn’t read what flickered through its mysterious depths. He thought he recognized regret—regret that she was free to remain where she was, with the man she preferred?
They made a dramatic couple—Banning all tall, dark sophistication and Starla a dazzling flash of femininity. The way the Southerner was perusing her attributes gave no indication that he’d be opposed to a good chase. Dodge forced a smile.
“It’s getting late and I’ve got some work waiting. It was nice to meet you, Banning.”
Noble took his hand. “Likewise. You’ve got yourself quite a woman here.”
“I know.”
Starla’s protest came as no great surprise. “Can’t your work wait until morning? The night’s still young—”
“Why don’t you stay? Mr. Banning can bring you home, if he doesn’t mind.”
Dodge waited for Starla to decline, but with a tip of her chin and a tighter cinch on Noble’s arm, she glared straight at him and said, “I’m sure Noble won’t mind.”
So much for his wife’s eagerness to retire early.
And as he drove back to Pride alone, Dodge learned a lot about the nature of trust.
Mostly that it made for bad company.
