Denim and Lace

by Diana Palmer

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered. His hips moved with sensual slowness. “Is this gentle enough, amada?”

  Her body relaxed, cradling him, welcoming him. She touched his mouth with hers. “Yes. Oh, yes.” Her arms slid around his broad shoulders and she felt the warm crush of him around her, over her, in a tender loving that she’d shared with him before.

  Every motion was slow, exquisitely tender, every kiss softer than the one before. It was a kind of loving that brought every emotion, every nerve, every sense into play. She wept all through it, because the tenderness they gave each other was so beautiful. She watched him, adoring him while he whispered to her, soft words that increased the sweet tension spiraling upward. His hands trembled at the last, as he brought her hips up to his in one long, final shudder of feeling that burst from him in an anguished groan. She clung, her own body rippling with the same feverish completion, an agony of tenderness lifting them beyond anything she’d known with him before.

  Her tears wet his cheek as it lay against hers, as his arms cradled her in the trembling aftermath.

  “I don’t know what we do together when we make love,” he whispered wearily at her ear. “But whatever it is, it makes sex look like a pagan sacrifice by comparison. I can’t believe the way I feel when it’s over. As if I’ve touched you in ways that have nothing to do with the body at all.”

  “I know.” She smoothed his damp hair and kissed his closed eyelids. “And as close as we are, it still isn’t quite close enough,” she whispered, smiling. “Oh, I do love you so, Cade.”

  “I love you just as much.” His mouth brushed hers and he sighed gently, adoring her with his possessive gaze. “Well, so much for restraint,” he mused, looking down at their locked bodies. “I had planned to start courting you again. Flowers, fancy dinners, phone calls at two in the morning...all those romantic evenings. And here you fling yourself at me the first night and drag me into bed with you.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “It is not a bed. It’s a sofa.”

  “I want to live with you,” he said, the quick humor fading away. “I want to take care of you and our child.”

  “Then I’ll come home,” she said simply. “Because I want to take care of you, too.” She brushed her mouth softly against his nose. “I’ve never felt so alone.”

  “Neither have I.” He sighed against her mouth. “Next time you decide to seduce me in the office,” he whispered, “why don’t you try bending me back over the desk.”

  She laughed under his hard mouth until the warm hunger kindled in her blood again. She moved, and he moved and the laughter melted into something slower and sweeter altogether.

  “Cade,” she asked a long time later when they were curled up in bed together, “you never told me about my ring.”

  “Didn’t I?” He was smoking a cigarette in the warm darkness. “Well, it belonged to my grandfather. It was given to him by his father, who married a Spanish grandee’s daughter and lived very happily on the Spanish land grant that became Lariat. My grandfather gave it to his wife, Desiree, who was French. He used to show it to me when I was a boy and talk about the old days, when his wife was still alive. About the money and the cattle and the politics. He fed me dreams, and I had so little else that I ate them up. Those were raw, bad years when I was a kid. By the time Gary and Robert came along, things were a little better. But I got so damned tired of dressing in rags and being laughed at because my dad couldn’t open his mouth without being profane or obscene and because he was forever getting into fights with people and landing in jail.” He sighed heavily. “Bess, I wanted respectability. At first I convinced myself that that was why I wanted you.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I had that figured out by myself. You wanted a rich debutante. I knew that it was the illusion you saw sometimes, not me.”

  “That might have been true at first.” He drew her closer. “But after we got to know each other, especially after the day you let me make love to you completely, I forgot every motive I’d had. You loved me. That became my strength. Lariat became less important to me, and you became more important. But I didn’t realize what marriage was going to mean, that it was a two-way street. I took you down to Lariat, where we had no privacy, tossed you headfirst into my world and left you to make adjustments. I couldn’t cope with the togetherness because it meant sharing my deepest feelings.”

  “It was hard for me, too.”

  “Not as hard as it was for me,” he mused. “I never had shared them before, with anyone. And then you came into my study one night and made me notice you. My God,” he breathed, “I never dreamed it could be like that between us! I get aroused every time I think about it. But I lost control and it shook me up, really shook me up. I was trying to cope with hurt pride, and then you told me you were barren. God forgive me, I went to pieces inside at the thought that there wouldn’t be any children.”

  “I should have told you in the beginning,” she said. “I didn’t have the right to keep it from you.”

  “No, you should have told me that it was the accident that caused it,” he said quietly. “I’d never have said a word, not if I’d had to bite my tongue off. You let me think that it had been a long-standing condition, and it was the thought of being lied to that hurt.” He pressed his lips down gently on her forehead. “The day I let you go, I knew I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. But there was the matter of bending my pride enough to get you back, and before I could do it, the blessed sheriff was serving me with divorce papers.”

  “I was trying to be noble,” she pointed out, “letting you go so that you could find a nubile redhead to give you—”

  His mouth cut her off, moving subtly on her soft lips. “Shut up,” he whispered.

  “Yes, Cade.”

  “I don’t want a nubile redhead, or any other color head except yours,” he said. “I love you. We’d have adopted children if that was the only way. And if this child is all we ever have, that’s fine with me. I want you. With or without kids, with or without Lariat, with or without anything else. Bess, you’re my heart,” he whispered huskily. “You’re my whole heart, honey.”

  She turned and pressed hard against him, tears stinging her eyes. “You’re my world, Cade.”

  He kissed the tears away. “I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time. I’ll make it up to you, somehow, some way. If it helps, I was just as miserable as you were.”

  She smiled. “Yes, we...oh!”

  “What is it?” He put out the cigarette and turned on the bedside light, his face a study in quick concern. “Are you all right? I didn’t hurt you when we made love...?”

  She was breathless with delight. She pulled aside her pajama top to put his hand on her stomach. She pressed it down at one side and held it there, and then he felt it. The hard, quick flutter against his hand.

  The look on his face was almost comical. It went from shock to awed delight to wonder and then to pure arrogance.

  “He’s strong,” he whispered huskily. “I didn’t know they moved this soon.”

  “Oh, yes,” she laughed. “I’ve felt it for over a week now. Cade, isn’t it a miracle?”

  His hand smoothed over the soft mound. “It’s a miracle all right. You never did explain it to me.”

  She did, mentioning what the doctor had said about the necessary combination for conception.

  “They told you that your husband would have to be very potent for you to conceive?” he murmured with pride.

  She colored. “Indeed they did, and you must be,” she whispered. She pressed his fingers hard against their child. “Cade, we made a baby,” she breathed, the wonder of it in her tone.

  His eyes darkened. He bent and put his mouth softly over hers. “I feel just as awed as you do by it,” he whispered. “Men don’t think about babies when they’re having sex. Not usually. But I thou
ght about it every time with you. We give each other so much when we love. The baby is the proof of it, of what we feel for each other.”

  “That he is. I think he’s going to be a boy,” she said drowsily. She snuggled close with a long sigh as he reached for the light and turned it out. “Have you thought about names?” she murmured.

  “Plenty of time for that, Mrs. Hollister,” he murmured, smiling against her forehead as he pulled her closer. “Go to sleep.”

  “I like Quinn...”

  “Quinn Alexander,” he murmured.

  She smiled. Trust Cade to give an imposing name like that to a little baby, she thought, and she closed her eyes on the thought that it was just the right name for the heir of Lariat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  BESS WALKED DOWN the long airport concourse feeling as if she was walking on air. It had been a long two days, and she was tired, even if she did have a sense of accomplishment from her trip. She’d sold the account, and it would mean a big bonus. She knew just who she was going to spend it on, too.

  She smoothed her neat beige suit and adjusted the matching scarf, sure that she looked younger than her thirty years made her feel. Her bright eyes and lush, waving honey-brown hair and radiant smile caught the eye of a man on the aisle, who leaned back against one of the pillars and stared at her with open delight.

  Her dark eyes spared him a glance. He was a vision. Tall, powerfully muscled, dressed in a very becoming Western-cut suit in a light tan, with matching boots and a Stetson cocked over one eye. He made her knees wobble with that slow, sensual stare.

  “Hello, pretty thing,” he murmured in a deep Texas drawl. “Looking for trouble?”

  She darted a mischievous eye at him. “And if I am?”

  “Well, here it comes.”

  And he stood aside to let a small, dark-haired version of himself fling his small body at her, shouting, “Mommy, what did you bring me?” at the top of his six-year-old lungs.

  “Quinn!” She laughed and dropped to her knees to meet the onrush, barely retaining her balance as she was overwhelmed by her son. Quinn Alexander had been something of a present, born on her twenty-fourth birthday. He still was a small surprise package.

  “Careful, tiger,” Cade chuckled. “Don’t knock Mommy down.”

  “Mommy’s very strong, thank you.” She grinned up at him. She stood up with Quinn in her arms, ignoring his questions long enough to kiss his father with two days’ loneliness in her warm mouth. “I missed you,” she whispered huskily.

  He kissed her hungrily, oblivious of curious stares from passersby, his mouth smiling warmly against hers. “Two nights is too long,” he whispered. “Next time Quinn and I are going along.” He lifted their son out of her arms. “We’d better get sweetheart here home. He’s already turned two vendors’ hair gray.”

  “My daddy’s big as a bear,” Quinn told his mother seriously as he held her hand and Cade’s on the way out of the airport. “Jenny says there’s a bear in her backyard, and it ate her dog.”

  “Her dog ran away to keep from having bows tied on his tail,” Cade whispered over Quinn’s head, and Bess laughed.

  “What did you bring me, Mommy?” Quinn moaned. “I’ve been ever so good, haven’t I, Dad?”

  “That he has,” his father had to admit, his dark eyes beaming down on their son. “He helped me pay bills this morning.”

  “I can imagine how. Have you heard from Mama?”

  “She and your new stepfather are still on their honeymoon in Nassau. My mother wants us to come down to her house for lunch tomorrow.”

  “How about Gary and Robert?”

  “They’re sailing in the Gulf, as usual, with their wives.” Cade sighed. “My God, I’m the only working man left in the family.”

  “They signed over their interest in Lariat when you bought them out year before last, darling,” Bess reminded him. “They’re making enough at their respective jobs to enjoy an occasional vacation.”

  “I guess so. How was the presentation?” he asked with a smile.

  His pride in her work never ceased to amaze her. She’d always thought him a particularly chauvinistic kind of man before they married, but he’d been supportive and had encouraged her at her job. She was already in the job Julie had once occupied. Julie herself was an executive vice president. Nell was married—to Mr. Ryker, for five years now, and they had two children.

  “The presentation was a great success. But it’s going to be my last one for a while,” she said, smiling up at him while they tried to keep their son from taking their hands in opposite directions on the way to the car. “I want to take it easy for a few months.”

  “Okay. If you want a vacation, we could—”

  She glanced up at him dryly. “Cade, it isn’t exactly going to be a vacation,” she began. “Didn’t you say six years ago that you’d manage with just one heir?”

  He stopped, staring at her over their son’s head. “Bess, you know what the doctors said. Once was a miracle...”

  “So what is twice?” she asked, and tears of unbounded joy touched her eyelashes. “I fainted at the presentation,” she whispered. “They got a doctor for me.” She laughed through watery sniffles. “I’m pregnant!”

  “God.” He drew her close, wrapping her up against him, his free arm around his son, who was looking up curiously at them. “God, what a homecoming present,” he whispered with the breath knocked out of him as he stared down at her with aching tenderness and love.

  “I want a girl this time,” she said laughing. She smiled down at young Quinn and touched his face gently. “We’re going to have a new baby, young man,” she told him. “And you and Daddy and I will take very good care of her.”

  “Him,” Quinn said. “I want a baby brother.”

  “I’ll settle for whatever I get, and so will you,” Cade told him with a chuckle. He ruffled the hair that was already as dark as his own. “Although you were and are the light of my life, young man.”

  “I’m not a light,” Quinn muttered grumpily.

  Bess bent to kiss him. She looked up at Cade with a radiance in her eyes that almost blinded him.

  “Six wonderful years,” she whispered. “And now this. It’s scary, so much happiness.”

  “Scary,” he agreed. He sighed heavily. “I never dreamed we’d have two of them. A matched set. Our mothers will be ecstatic.”

  “Yes. They’re better friends than ever these days.”

  “Because Gussie told Mother the truth finally,” he added. “I had to browbeat her into it, but I told her that secrets were much more damaging than the truth was. So she gave in, years too late. Mother already knew that Dad was a philanderer.”

  Bess’s lips parted. She remembered what Elise had told her, but she hadn’t let Cade know. She had to pretend surprise. “She knew about your father’s affairs?”

  “That’s right. Someone had told her long ago. She pretended that she didn’t know in order to protect Gary and Robert and me.” He looked down at Quinn contemplatively. “I guess we’ll be doing similar things for him, when he’s older. And for this other one,” he said softly, touching her belly.

  “What other one?” Quinn frowned.

  “The one who’s going to look like you,” his mother told him. She brushed back his unruly hair. “Your brother or sister.”

  “Where is she?” Quinn asked, looking around.

  “Well?” Bess asked, lifting her eyebrows at Cade.

  He cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable. “We’l
l talk about it at home, son,” he said, glancing around them at the crowd of people. “Where we left that chocolate ice cream we had—”

  “—for breakfast.” Quinn nodded. “It was good, wasn’t it, Daddy? And the cake—”

  “Cake!” Bess exclaimed, wide-eyed. “You fed our child cake for breakfast?!”

  “Well, ice cream, too.” He shrugged. “Honest to God, honey, you know I can’t cook!”

  “Cake and ice cream!”

  “Chocolate.” Quinn grinned. He pulled at her hand. “Let’s go home, Mommy, and you can have some, too.”

  “Not for lunch.” Cade shuddered. “We’ll eat the rest of the cookies instead,” he added with a grin at Bess.

  “I can see that I didn’t come back a minute too soon,” she said. “We’ll stop by the store on the way home and get some ham and some salad fixings...”

  “Yuck!” Quinn said. “Me and Daddy don’t want that awful stuff.”

  Cade looked at Bess and smiled slowly. “Yes, we do,” he said. He pulled Bess close against his side. “As long as Mommy’s here to fix it for us. Right?”

  “Right.” Quinn sighed. He winked up at his mother. She tightened her hold on his small hand as Cade guided them out of the terminal into the bright summer day. As Bess lifted her soft, dark eyes to her husband’s, the radiance in her face made him catch his breath.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked softly.

  He laughed at his own reaction to her. He was denim to her lace, he thought, studying her. But in all the important ways, all the good ways, they were as alike as two people could get.

  “No,” he said, smiling slowly. “Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.” He linked his fingers into hers and lifted Quinn Alexander Hollister in his arms to carry him across the street. And his thoughts were warm and satisfying.

  * * * * *

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  Diana Palmer’s next book in her WYOMING MEN series,