He nodded, followed her into the house where Mary sat in front of her new television, a soft smile on her face as she watched a rerun of Frasier. The Sloan family stood, and they all said their goodbyes, then Grace surprised Mary by hugging her and wishing her well with her sale of the ranch and her move to Las Vegas. When Grace shook Matt’s and Sam’s hands, they flirted shamelessly once again, making her blush.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” Rand said when she turned to shake his hand, as well.
“That’s not nec—”
But he was already holding the door for her, waiting, so she said goodbye one more time to his family, then walked outside.
She stopped on the porch and offered her hand again. “Thank you for your time, Rand. I—”
“I said I’d walk you to your car.”
He placed a hand on the small of her back and guided her down the porch steps and to her car. Her body betrayed her by responding to Rand’s touch. Grace pressed her lips together in irritation. Damn this man. He frustrated the hell out of her, in more ways than one. Heat shimmered up her spine; her skin tightened; her pulse jump-roped.
There was no other word for her reaction to him than pure, man-to-woman, simple lust.
She’d had boyfriends; she’d been attracted to men before. But she’d never experienced anything like this. She suspected she might never again.
There weren’t very many Rand Sloans in this world.
Grace wasn’t certain if that was a good or a bad thing.
He opened the car door and she half expected him to pick her up and toss her inside, he seemed so anxious to be rid of her. Instead, he hesitated, looked down at her in the dim light that shone from the house.
“I appreciate you being nice to my mom,” he said, his hand still on the door. “Things haven’t always been easy for her.”
Or you, either, Grace almost said. “She’s a nice woman. I’m glad we met. If I get to Vegas, I’ll look her up.”
He nodded.
But still he didn’t move.
“Well,” she said awkwardly, then held out her hand again. “Thank you again.”
He ignored her hand. His gaze fell to her mouth; Grace felt her heart lurch.
His jaw tightened. When he turned away from her, Grace’s heart sank.
She nearly laughed at herself as she stood there and watched him walk back to the house. Good heavens, what had she thought? That he was actually going to kiss her? That would be ridiculous. Absurd. They’d just met, and he’d made it clear he wanted no part—
Oh, dear.
He’d whipped back around toward her, a determined, intense expression on his face.
Her breath caught.
As he approached, she opened her mouth to say something, but the words were lost when he reached out and dragged her to him.
“I have to know,” he said fiercely, then covered her mouth with his own.
Nothing could have prepared Grace for the onslaught of emotions swirling through her. His mouth was hard, demanding. A little angry, even. She tried to hang on to reason, but it seemed as if the ground had opened up under her and sucked her into a world where reason and logic simply didn’t exist. She held on to him, not just because she wanted to, but because she needed to. Her legs had turned to the consistency of overcooked noodles.
His kiss shocked her, but what shocked her even more was the fact that she was kissing him back.
She felt the heat of his long, hard body press against her, smelled the masculine scent of his skin. His mouth moved over hers; his teeth nipped at her bottom lip, then his tongue invaded. She welcomed him, met every hot, wet sweep of his tongue with her own.
She thought what she’d felt for him before had been simple lust. How wrong she’d been. There was nothing simple about this at all. It was the most complex, most complicated, most mind-blowing experience she’d ever encountered.
And then it was over.
Just like that, he released her and stepped away. She had to reach for the door frame or she would have slid to the ground.
“Goodbye, Miss Grace,” he said, his voice rough and husky.
Then he turned and walked not to the house, but toward the barn. Still struggling to breathe, she watched him disappear into the darkness.
Two hours later Rand could still taste her.
Even as he swung the hammer and slammed it down on the head of the nail, the taste of rich, sweet chocolate lingered in his mouth. The scent of her perfume filled his nostrils. The feel of her soft, full breasts pressed against his chest sang in his blood.
He had to be the biggest fool that ever lived.
He’d thought that one little taste of her would put her out of his mind. That whatever attraction he’d been feeling toward the woman would dissipate if he wasn’t left wondering what it would be like to give in, to wrap himself around her and just let himself feel.
Big, big mistake.
As if his life hadn’t been difficult enough right now, he’d had to go and make it even more complicated.
Swearing under his breath, he reached for another plank of wood and fitted it snugly against the one he’d just hammered in place. Eleven o’clock at night might be an odd time to repair broken stalls, but what the hell. He wouldn’t be falling asleep anytime soon, anyway.
He appreciated that his brothers understood his need to be alone tonight. They knew about the letter, too. He’d shown it to them when it had first come. Matt had whistled under his breath; Sam had sworn softly. They hadn’t asked him what he was going to do. They both knew that Rand would tell them when he was ready.
“It’s a little late for all this sawing and hammering, don’t you think?”
He turned at the sound of his mother’s voice. She stood at the open barn door, wearing a red-plaid robe over simple, white cotton pajamas and her black cowboy boots. She had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand and two glasses in the other.
He straightened, gave a shrug of his shoulders. “Needs doing. Now’s as good a time as any.”
She walked toward him, set the glasses on the sawhorse, poured a healthy shot of whisky in each one. “It’s been a long day.”
He set the hammer down and took the drink she offered. They clinked glasses. He tossed his back, while Mary sipped on hers.
“Do you hate me, Rand?”
He frowned at her. “Why would you ask me a dumb question like that?”
She stared at her drink. “You should. Edward Sloan was a first-class bastard to you. He rode you hard, never let up, no matter what you did or didn’t do. I should have stopped him.”
“You couldn’t have stopped him.” Rand reached for the bottle. “Nobody could have stopped him.”
“If it had just been you and me,” Mary said quietly, “I would have left him. But after Matt and Sam came along, he never would have let me go.”
In all the years they’d never spoken of any of this. Of Edward’s strict rules and discipline, the lack of love in the house. The fact that Edward had openly hated Rand, a half-breed Indian boy who wasn’t Sloan blood. Rand knew that if Mary hadn’t been there to temper her husband, to balance out his meanness, Rand would have left long before he turned seventeen.
But there was one question he’d wondered all those years, one question that had never been answered. Rand asked it now.
“Why did he ever adopt me?”
Mary took another sip. “I wanted to adopt, your father—Edward—didn’t. I got a call one night from a lawyer in Granite Springs who’d heard I’d been looking into adoption. He told me about you, that your family had been killed in a car accident and we could meet that night and adopt you immediately, without all the usual red tape and waiting period.”
“Didn’t that strike you as odd?’
“I wasn’t stupid. I knew it wasn’t legal, but I didn’t care. You were so frightened, so lost, and I fell in love with you the second I laid eyes on you. I told Edward if he didn’t agree to adopt you that I’d leave him.” Mary si
ghed. “I should have let you go to a better family, one where both parents would love you. But I was selfish. I’d hoped that Edward would come to care about you, learn to love you as much I did. I was a fool, and you paid for it.”
Rand shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. There’s good that came out of it. I have you and Matt and Sam.”
“And now you have your real brother and sister,” she said softly. “Seth and Lizzie.”
Rand sucked in a breath. Did he have them? At this late date, could he?
“You need to contact that lawyer in Wolf River, Rand,” Mary said. “At least talk to him.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Mary nodded. “And what about Grace?”
He looked up. “What about her?”
“You should go with her,” Mary said. “Down into that canyon where those horses are. You could do a lot of thinking there.”
“Those horses are a lost cause,” he said, and threw back another shot.
“The world is full of lost causes, son.” Mary stood and looked Rand in the eye. “Those are the ones that need help the most.”
She turned and walked toward the barn door, then stopped.
“Rand?” she said without turning around.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for the TV.”
He couldn’t help but smile. “You’re welcome.”
She took another step and stopped again. “Rand?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
Before he could answer her, she was gone. With a sigh he sat on the sawhorse and poured himself another drink, then pulled the letter out of his back pocket and opened it up.
“Dear Mr. Rand Blackhawk…”
“We can do it without him, Tom,” Grace said into the phone as she paced back and forth in her motel room. She was still dressed in her pajamas, waiting for the coffee she’d ordered from the front office. She’d need it strong and black today. “I’ll get the supplies today and meet you at the canyon’s entrance in two days.”
Grace listened as Tom argued with her over the wisdom of proceeding without Rand. They’d been going round and round for the past fifteen minutes.
“There’s nothing supernatural about Rand Sloan,” Grace said irritably. “Don’t believe everything you hear. He’s just a man, a good horseman, yes, but he’s still just an ordinary man.”
Liar, she said to herself as Tom continued to disagree with her. Rand was as far from ordinary as it gets. And she wasn’t quite sure about the supernatural part, either.
Lord knew he’d put some kind of strange spell on her. Not only had she kissed the man like some kind of wanton, sex-starved hussy, she’d had dreams about him all night.
Hot, erotic dreams. His hands on her naked skin, his mouth on her neck, her breasts, and—
She blushed just thinking about it.
She got hot all over again, thinking about it.
Grace heard Tom calling her name and snapped her attention back to the phone. “Tom, we can do this. I know we can.”
Dragging a hand through her loose, tousled hair, she looked at her wristwatch. It was already ten o’clock, and she wanted to be out of here by twelve, loaded with supplies and on her way to Black River Canyon. If she hadn’t overslept, she would have been gone already.
“Listen,” she tried again when Tom still refused to listen to her. “You and Marty are terrific horsemen and you’re wonderful with the mustangs. You can—”
She stopped at the knock on her door. Thank God. She hoped the coffee came with an IV. “Hold on a second,” she said into the phone and opened the door.
Rand.
She heard Tom saying her name, but she was incapable of words. So she simply stared.
He stood in her doorway, leaning casually against the doorjamb. His jeans were faded, his black, collared shirt rolled to the elbows. He wore a black Stetson, black cowboy boots and aviator sunglasses.
She thought he looked like Satan himself.
“Mornin’,” he said.
She felt, rather than saw his gaze slide the length of her.
And still she couldn’t speak.
Tom was frantic at the other end of the line now, thinking something had happened.
“I—I’ll call you back,” she managed and hung up the phone.
“Sweetheart,” Rand said in a rough, hot-whiskey voice. “You’ve got five minutes to get dressed or I’m coming in.”
Four
Grace managed to throw herself together in less than the five minutes he’d given her. She jammed her arms into a white cotton sleeveless blouse, yanked on a pair of jeans while hopping around the room looking for her boots, then grabbed a hair clip and clawed it into the mass of uncombed curls she’d piled on top of her head.
So much for the refined rules of grooming her mother had raised her on.
When she opened her motel room door, she saw Rand leaning against her car, drinking hot coffee out of a large foam cup.
Her coffee, unless she missed her guess.
The steam drifted around that rugged face of his, and she felt her heart trip. When he lifted his gaze to hers, butterflies danced in her stomach. This man should be illegal, she thought. Or, like a pack of cigarettes, come with a warning label: Rand Sloan is hazardous to the health of women everywhere.
Sucking in a breath, she squared her shoulders and marched over to him. “Stealing a person’s morning coffee is punishable by death in this state.”
He lifted a brow. “The state of Texas?”
“The state of Grace.”
He grinned at her and there they were again, dammit. Those irritating butterflies.
“Didn’t your mother teach you to share?” he said, handing her the coffee.
“Not with men who show up unannounced at my motel room.”
“You showed up unannounced at my place,” he reminded her.
“Touché.” She raised her cup to him, took a sip, then handed it back.
She wanted to ask him what he was doing here, why he’d come, but instead, she waited. She understood Rand was a man who did things his way, in his own good time.
The morning was pleasant, with a few wispy clouds in the blue sky. The air was still cool, but quickly warming up. Grace had lived in Texas all her life and knew how fickle the weather was, how quickly it could change. In the summer, though, there were only two degrees of heat—hot and hotter. And because that was too easy by itself, Mother Nature threw in a good dose of humidity to make it more interesting. Years ago Grace had given up trying to dry her hair straight and had resigned herself to the thick, unruly mass of curls she’d inherited from her father’s side of the family.
A man and woman stepped out of the motel room across from hers, said good morning before getting in their car and driving away. Three giggling teenagers, all girls, wearing bathing suits and carrying beach towels, headed for the motel swimming pool at the end of the parking lot.
And still she waited.
It worried her that maybe he hadn’t had a change of heart about going to Black River Canyon. That maybe he’d come here for her. Well, not exactly for her, but for sex. After the way she’d kissed him last night, there was no question she was attracted to him. Maybe he simply had an itch, and he thought she might scratch it for him.
The thought made her stomach twist. She hadn’t meant to give him the impression that she jumped into bed with strange men, or even men she knew, for that matter. She most certainly did not.
But the way she’d kissed him, without even the tiniest protest, could easily have seemed like an invitation for something more intimate. She could hardly blame him if that was what he was thinking.
Still, she couldn’t believe he’d drive a hundred miles for a roll in the hay. Rand Sloan wouldn’t have to drive far to find a willing woman. He wouldn’t have to drive at all, Grace reasoned. A man with Rand’s smoking sensuality could pick up a phone and have a busload of women come directly to his door.
No,
he wasn’t here for sex, Grace decided. Something told her, if he was, he would have already said so.
It annoyed her that she almost felt disappointed.
But as the realization dawned why he had come, Grace felt her pulse begin to race with excitement. He was going to Black River Canyon with her. He had changed his mind.
Her first impulse was to throw her arms around him and hug him, but she quickly fought back the urge. That, she knew, would be a very bad idea. Even though Rand hadn’t come on to her, the tension still simmered between them, and she didn’t dare risk everything by encouraging anything personal between them. Going to Black River Canyon with Rand was going to be difficult enough. Any sort of intimacy between them—even an innocent hug—would only complicate their already delicate relationship.
She wasn’t even going to ask why he’d changed his mind. If he examined the reason too closely, she was afraid he just might change it back again.
They finished the coffee in silence, then he handed the cup back to her.
“We should get going.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “We need to make Dallas before night.”
How like this man, Grace thought. He didn’t say, “If you still want me for the job,” or “I’ve given this some thought and decided to go with you.” He just said, “We should get going.”
Well, she certainly wasn’t going to argue.
“We’ll need to go into town for supplies,” she said. “I’ve got a—”
“Already done.” He nodded toward the end of the parking lot to a dual-cab navy-blue pickup, complete with filled-to-occupancy double horse trailer.
And she thought this man couldn’t still surprise her. She blinked at the truck, then looked back at him. “You don’t waste time, do you?”
“Not once I make a decision.” He pushed away from her truck. “You ready to go?”
His question hit her like a bucket of cold water. Was she? She’d been so sure of herself all along, so determined. Now that he’d actually agreed to go, she was terrified.
She sucked in a deep breath and nodded.
Five minutes later, after she called Tom and checked out of the motel, Rand followed her in his pickup while she returned her rental truck, then she climbed into his truck and they hit the road.
Taming Blackhawk Page 4
