by Janet Dailey
“It’s less boring then being downstairs.”
“You’re bored, is that it?” Diana was so angry she was trembling. “Am I supposed to entertain you? What do you want me to do? Strip off my clothes and hop into bed like some whore? Here’s your key!” She hurled it at him. “You know what you can do with it. I’m leaving.”
It bounced off his chest and clattered to the floor. “Alan and Peggy have already gone.”
“So what? There’s more than one way of getting back to the ranch.” She hesitated, knowing where he was vulnerable and using it. “Such as calling Guy and having him come and get me.” A blazing fire leaped into his eyes before they narrowed dangerously. “He’ll be glad to rescue me from your clutches.” Diana added more fuel with malicious satisfaction and pivoted to leave.
She had taken one step when Holt seized a handful of hair at the back of her head. “Like hell!” He yanked her back, twisting her into his arms all in one motion.
The vicious tugging at her tender scalp drew a gasping cry from Diana, which Holt ignored. She lifted a hand to the back of her head to try to ease the pain and found herself locked in the steel trap of his arms.
With her head forced back by the continued pulling of her hair, Holt stared into her eyes for a long minute. Her breath was stolen by fear and something else. She couldn’t speak, not in protest or pain.
“Damn you,” he muttered.
His mouth came down hard on her lips, grinding them against her teeth. Diana heard the whimpering cries muffled in her throat. The ever-tightening circle of his arms flattened her breasts against his chest, the buttons of his shirt digging into the soft flesh. Blackness swam at the edges of her mind.
The pressure of his mouth changed subtlely, cruelty becoming demand. Diana answered it, the treachery of her senses releasing the floodgates and letting the passion flow forth. His hands rubbed her sore scalp, fingers tangling in the black silk of her hair. Her arms were around his neck, lifting herself on tiptoes to more easily reach his mouth. A steel band circled her waist, lifting Diana the rest of the way off her feet. Carrying her thus, Holt walked the few steps to the bed, following her down to the mattress.
The volcano of anger that had been simmering near an eruption became an explosion of desire. His touch, his kiss, the feel of his body burning against hers aroused her, as always, to the primitive animal needs of the flesh. The spouting fires grew hotter and hotter at the wayward caress of his hands and the nuzzling of his mouth along the pulse point of her neck. He was driving her to the edge, knotting her stomach into a tight ball of need, a pulsing ache twisting her body. Her frustrated writhing had worked the length of her skirt around her waist. Her hips were moving in instinctive and automatic reaction to the teasing massage of his hand.
“Do you want me to stop, Diana?” His voice throbbed huskily against the curve of her neck. “Do you?”
A soft moan of protest came from her throat, knowing what her answer was and hating him for making her say it. Why didn’t he take her and be done with it, satisfy the needs that were assaulting them both?
Holt levered himself away from her. “Do you?” he demanded again.
She closed her eyes against the blazing sheen of his. “No,” was her barely audible reply.
But she didn’t receive the assuagement of his hard kiss. Instead, Holt pushed himself off the bed. “Take off your clothes.” At her choked cry of protest, Holt began unbuttoning his shirt with savage impatience. “I don’t want to be explaining ripped clothes when we leave the hotel, and the way I feel right now—” His mouth snapped shut on the rest of the sentence as he turned away.
With shaking hands, Diana pulled the blouse over her head and unfastened the waistband of her skirt. She stepped out of it as she rose from the bed, trembling with shame and a desire that she couldn’t control. Removing her sandals and nylons, she balanced alternately on one foot, aware of the sounds of Holt undressing behind her. As her nylons fell soundlessly on the pile of her other clothes, there was silence. Diana turned, lifting the sides of her hair and holding it away from her face.
His gaze swept slowly over her long legs, slim hips, and full breasts, stopping finally at her face. For the first time in her life, Diana was conscious of her nakedness, as well as his. One coarse or demeaning word from him and she would have fled rather than face the humiliation of surrendering. Conflict warred in the expression on his hard, lean features. His hand lifted, his fingers barely touching the jutting curve of her cheekbone.
“Why do you have to be so damned beautiful?”
Diana knew. In that flashing second, Diana knew. Holt wanted her more than he despised her. He couldn’t control what he felt any more than she could. He, too, was caught in the dangerous whirlpool of passion and it was dragging them both down. With the desperation of two lovers reaching for each other in death, they came together and let the whirlpool take them where it wished.
Afterward, weak and exhausted, Diana lay in the crook of his arm. She closed her eyes, afraid to speak in case words diminished the wonder of what she had experienced. Holt gently wiped the tears from her cheeks and drew the bedcovers over them both. With the comfort of his arm around her, Diana let herself drift away, floating on a cloud that avoided reality.
Once something disturbed her and Diana stirred restlessly. A soothingly low voice near her ear quieted her. “Ssh, baby. Sleep.” And Diana obeyed the gentle command.
Sometime later a coolness began to chill her skin. She rolled over to snuggle closer to the fiery heat of Holt’s body. When she didn’t immediately encounter his solid form, her hand groped beneath the covers. The fact registered through the haze of her half-sleep that he wasn’t there.
An instant later her eyes opened, her mind surfacing to full consciousness. The room was empty. His clothes were gone. A long, rectangular patch of yellow sunlight streamed through the window. It was late, nearly sundown.
Diana sat up in the bed. With a groan, she buried her face in her hands. Why did she have to wake up alone? It would have made it all so much more bearable if she had awakened in Holt’s arms. Diana bit her lip to hold back a sob.
With a burst of movement, she threw back the covers and slid out of the bed. She walked to the bathroom and stopped at the sight of her sleepy and love-drugged face in the mirror, and the lost look in her eyes. Pivoting sharply away, Diana turned on the shower. She wrapped a towel around her hair to protect it from the wetness of the spray and stepped into the tub-shower, drawing the curtain shut. The needle-like jets of water pummeled her skin, driving out the numbness. She stood beneath the spray, her head back, her eyes closed, her hands raised, her palms open in silent worship to the reviving water.
The rushing deluge flooding over her deafened Diana to any other sound. When the shower curtain was jerked open, she cried out in startled alarm. Holt stood there, impassive in his regard. Her breath came back slowly. She stepped closer to the tiled wall, letting the shower spray come between them as if it shielded her somehow.
“Where have you been?” Her question accused and quivered with hurt.
“The plane arrived.” He continued to hold the shower curtain aside, watching her, his gaze not lowering from her face, shiny and beaded with water. “I had to get the stallion loaded in the van and bring the crew back here.”
“The crew.” Diana remembered that this hotel room belonged to one of them. “I’ll make the bed up as soon as I am out of the shower. I suppose they’re waiting downstairs.”
“The pilot and co-pilot are bunking together, so there’s no hurry to vacate the room.” Holt let go of the curtain and turned to the side. It remained partially open and Diana could see him undressing.
“What are you doing?” She sounded breathless.
Her eyes rounded into large, blue saucers as Holt stepped into the shower. He seemed taller, his shoulders, wider, dwarfing her. His shoulders and back shielded her from the brunt of the spray. She stared into his eyes, darkening into charcoal. His lean, m
uscled form seemed larger than life, all bronze sinew rippling under the cascading water.
A reborn heat was firing her veins, but Diana didn’t move as Holt took a bar of soap from the shelf and lathered his hands. Her lashes fluttered down at the sensual touch of his soap-slicked hands on her neck. There was a crazy, wild singing in her ears as he lathered every inch of her with slow, massaging caresses. Fingers, palms, breasts, legs, navel, all tingled with the erotic cleansing of his hands. Diana was clinging to the hard flesh of his shoulders when her passion-weakened limbs would no longer support her. His mouth closed over hers in a long, drugging kiss.
Water ran over their faces and their entwining bodies. Its warm temperature was nothing compared to the fiery heat that fused them together. The water turned cool before they did. For long minutes Holt held her in his arms, waiting for the tremors to end in his own body, as well as hers.
Then he was lifting her out of the shower and wrapping a towel around her. The towel around her head was sodden, her hair damp when Diana shook it free. She saw the swing of velvet-black hair in the mirror and glanced at her reflection. She looked so very different from how she ever had before. Without vanity, Diana admitted to a radiant beauty that frightened her a little.
Holt’s reflection joined hers, hard, lean, and very male. He stood behind her. Diana watched his dark head lower to the curve of her neck and heard a quickly indrawn breath before realizing she had made the sound. His hands slid down her arms, crossing them in front of her as he explored the pulsing vein in her neck. Turning her around, Holt lifted her in his arms and carried her into the bedroom, dim now in the purpling dusk of night.
Side by side, they lay in the bed, their lips meeting in an occasional kiss, but mostly they simply enjoyed the freedom of touching one another. Her hand was on his shoulder, sliding across to his spine. Diana felt the faint ridges on his hard flesh.
“How did you get them?” She shifted her head on the pillow to see his face.
“Get what?” He rubbed a knuckle in the little hollow behind her ear.
“Those scars.”
“I don’t remember.” And Holt leaned over to kiss her lips, but Diana didn’t want to be sidetracked just yet.
“That’s the same thing you said a long time ago when I asked you.” She moved an inch out of reach of his mouth.
“Are you surprised my story hasn’t changed after all this time?” There was a lazy curve to his mouth, and his hand cupped the back of her head so she couldn’t elude him again.
“Somebody used a whip on you. Why?”
His answer was a hard, silencing kiss. Diana surrendered to it, responded to it, but the instant he released her, she fought back through her befuddled senses to the topic.
“Tell me what happened, Holt.”
A muscle along his jaw rippled in impatience. “This isn’t the time to be recalling ugly memories.”
Her fingers traced the faint marks on his back. “It must have been very painful. Was it?”
As he had that morning, Holt was dragging her hand from his back. He pinned it to the mattress, looming above her, a cold anger flashing across his face. It dissipated just as quickly as his gaze roamed over her features.
“I’ve never met a woman like you.” It was a grudging compliment, issued almost in growling irritation. “You mess up a man’s head until he can’t think straight.”
“I do?” Diana felt an exhilarating sense of power at his admission.
“You knew you were tearing my guts out today when you kept rubbing up against me in that booth,” he accused. “You were all but sitting in my lap.”
“Not deliberately.” She touched a hand to his cheek, stroking the smooth hollow of his jaw. “I couldn’t help it. The booth was meant for two. It was either your lap or that man’s.”
“I even convinced myself that I didn’t give you the room key so that this would happen.”
“Then why did you want me here?” Diana frowned.
“It doesn’t matter. This is really why I wanted you all to myself. It’s why you came, too, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she admitted without hesitation. Anger had merely been an excuse. She had wanted Holt to make love to her.
“Then we both have what we wanted.”
His head moved down, his mouth kissing the exposed hollow of her throat. His weight shifted on the mattress and his hand was curving on the underside of a breast, lifting the nipple to his lips. It grew into a hard, sensitive bud under the manipulation of his tongue. Her skin quivered as he made a matching rosebud of the other. Content with his success, Holt let his attention wander to the swelling curves of her breast and down to her rib cage. The muscles of her stomach constricted spasmodically as he explored the recesses of her belly button. When his downward descent continued, Diana stiffened.
“Holt, no.” Her protest came in an apprehensive whisper.
He laughed at her softly, without malice, his breath warm against her ultra-sensitive skin. “Do you mean you still have some inhibitions left, or do you want me to say ‘grace’ first?”
A crazy, wild tingling was taking over her limbs. “Holt, please, Rand never ... he considered it . . .” Diana never got the rest of the words out as a searing, breath-stealing fire swept through her.
Chapter XV
Purring like a kitten, Diana snuggled closer to his side. She tried not to examine too closely the wildly sweet emotions she was feeling. She just wanted to feel them and not look ahead to see where they might lead. Her fingers lightly stroked his shoulder and arm. Even relaxed, his flesh was hard and muscled. It was crazy the way she couldn’t seem to have enough of touching him.
“Do you have any family?” Diana wondered aloud, her voice a soft whisper. “I can’t remember you ever leaving the ranch. Were you raised in Arizona?” She let her nose be tickled by the hairs on his chest, inhaling the scent of him. At his silence, her thoughts wandered further. “Your wife . . . Guy’s mother—I know you split up when he was small, but you must have loved her once. Didn’t you?”
“That’s typical. A man takes a woman to bed and she thinks she’s entitled to know his life history.”
For all his amused and mocking tone, there was a closed look about him when Diana tipped her head back to see his face. She laughed softly in her throat.
“You’d like to tell me to shut up, wouldn’t you, the way you always do with Rube? It won’t work, not with me.” Her hand slid up to the tanned column of his neck where a fingertip began tracing a lazy circle near his ear. “You’ll have to find some other way.”
“Like this?” His fingers closed around her throat, exerting pressure and lifting her face to his. With hard demand, Holt covered her lips, kissing her into silence before his mouth blazed a fiery trail to the curve of her neck.
“God!” Diana felt the taut breath he released against her sensitive skin, his mouth nibbling here and there. “I’m beginning to memorize the smell of you. I could find you in the dark.”
“It is dark.”
Diana arched closer to him, shooting fires racing through her veins. She had believed her passion was burned out, but his touch, his kiss, his nearness was rekindling it again.
At her growing arousal, Holt accused, “You are an insatiable bitch.”
But Diana felt the hardening bone against her skin. A feline smile curved her lips. “What does that make you?”
With a quick twist, Holt rolled her onto her back, pinning her shoulders against the mattress. Then he was lowering his body onto hers, his mouth finding hers in a fiercely consuming kiss. The fire raged out of control.
For a second time, Diana fell into an exhausted sleep in his arms. She felt at home there, more comfortable than in her own bed, the most natural place in the world to be. Even in sleep, there was a trace of a smile on her lips.
A hand gently shook her shoulder. “Wake up, Diana.” With a negative movement of her head, she cuddled closer to the hard pillow she had made of his chest. “Come on. Wake u
p.” Holt’s voice became firm. “It’s almost midnight.”
Moaning a protest, Diana forced her eyes open. Holt took his arm from around her and tossed back the covers. She sat up, covering her eyes when he switched on the light. The mattress shifted as he climbed out of bed and walked to the bathroom, where he had left his clothes.
“Get dressed,” he ordered.
Diana obeyed. She was fastening her sandals when he walked from the bathroom. Except for the darkening shadow of a beard, he looked vital and fresh, tobacco-brown hair gleaming in the artificial light.
“I’ll bring the truck and van around and wait for you in front of the hotel.”
Before leaving, he tossed the room key on the dresser to save leaving it at the night desk. The door closed as Diana took the hair brush from her purse. The image of her love-softened face in the mirror held her spellbound. Anyone looking at her would know she had been made love to very thoroughly and had enjoyed it. There wasn’t a trace of haughtiness or arrogant pride. Diana knew, at this moment, she was very, very vulnerable.
The thought of Holt waiting for her lifted the brush to her hair. A touch of lip gloss and Diana was ready. There were voices in the hallway outside the door, and the first crush of reality began to press on her. She waited until she heard the closing of doors before she ventured out. She almost ran to the staircase.
As she descended the steps, Diana felt like she was running a gauntlet of eyes. On the surface, no one seemed to pay undue attention to her, no more than any halfway attractive woman would receive at that hour of the night. Yet, Diana was weighted by the knowledge that she might be recognized by local people. Would they wonder where she had been? Would they guess she had been in one of the hotel rooms with her lover? Would the gossip about her divorce feed their imaginations? Would the rumor get back to the Major?
Diana almost burst out of the door, away from the suffocating atmosphere of the hotel into the fresh air and silence of the night. The truck was idling in the street on the other side of the cars parked in front of the hotel. Diana ran to the passenger’s door and climbed in, her heart pounding. Holt shifted the truck into gear and started out slowly. Diana could hear the shifting of hooves in the horse van drawn behind the truck.
