by Cara Colter
"You are beautiful," he told her sternly. "Absolutely gorgeous."
She sputtered indignantly for a few seconds, and then went very still against him.
"Oh, my," she said, as he moved his shoulders and slid his wet chest against the sweet curve of her breasts.
He reached for the soap, lathered it in his hands, and then, using large circular motions, began to wash her back, feeling the wet, beautiful slipperiness of her skin beneath his hands. She tucked in closer to him, but when he allowed his lathered hands to slip down to the delightful full curve of her buttocks, he felt her react, push herself into him.
He took it as a cue and stepped back from her. Slowly and with great tenderness, he soaped her breasts, her tummy. He knelt at her feet and soaped the length of her legs, and the miraculous place between them. He drank in her femininity, worshiped it, with his eyes and his touch and his senses. He let the water wash the soap away, trailed his lips over her rain-clean skin.
"Open your eyes," he told her over the drumming of the water, rising.
She did, lifted her chin, her gaze glued on his face, trying so hard not to look anywhere else.
He handed her the soap and folded her hand around it. "Your turn."
She gasped slightly, looked down at the soap in her hand, closed her eyes again and gulped.
"It's easy," he said, and guided her hand to his shoulder.
And then tentatively she touched him, worked the soapy lather into the slope of his shoulders, moved to the hair on his chest, kissed his pectoral muscles, moved on to his belly.
Her hands, gloved in the soap, brought him as close to heaven as he knew he was ever going to be on this earth.
She made him turn around and she soaped his back.
Her hands, her touch, held innocence and reverence and eagerness. Her fingers were tentative, gentle, unknowingly sensuous, growing more and more certain as she gave herself permission to touch him, to know him in this way.
She stopped and he turned back to face her. Her eyes were wide open now, the water sliding over the silken ribbons of her hair, cascading over the fullness of her breasts, beading on the slender hollow of her stomach, catching like dew in that tangled triangle of temptation between her legs.
"You missed a place," he told her softly.
She hesitated, and then her hands, the soap, found him. He groaned, gathered her in his embrace, let his tongue find and taste the clean wet surfaces of her skin. The water pounded down on them, and the shower stall filled with a warm, sultry mist, cloaking them.
He had never made love in a shower before.
He didn't even know if it was possible. But it wasn't fair to ask her to be the only one taking risks. Her arms wound around his neck, and he lifted her up, amazed by how light she was, amazed again when her legs went around him.
With the water beating down on them, his muscles straining to keep them both from crashing to the floor of the bathtub, one arm braced against the shower stall wall, and the other holding her fast to him, he found out all things are possible.
The water turned cold without warning, and Blake managed to slam down the lever that stopped it from flowing out the shower head. The icy water cascaded out the tap and over his feet, but he was oblivious to it.
He and Holly reached crescendo at exactly the same time.
Gently he set her down outside the tub, jumped out and wrapped her in the big towel. She opened it, and he stood in the folds with her. Her teeth were rattling, so he pulled the towel tighter around them, used his body heat to warm her.
When the worst of her shivering had stopped, he reached for another towel, dried every inch of her.
And then he handed her the towel.
And she dried every inch of him.
And by the time they were done, her shyness had gone, and the heat had risen between them again to nearly fever pitch.
"Race you back to bed," he said.
Laughing, unselfconscious, as uninhibited as a woodland nymph, she darted out of the bathroom and across the cold, rough floor. He was right on her heels when she took a flying leap into the bed, and he landed right beside her.
He took her lips and kissed her until she was breathless once again, her breast heaving against his naked chest.
"Are we going to get any sleep tonight?" she asked playfully, nipping at his ear with her straight, white teeth.
"I certainly hope not," he answered.
But she did sleep after that, in fact she fell asleep with the easy and utter exhaustion of a small child who had spent the day at the beach.
Blake looked at her, her hair scattered across the pillow, her lashes casting small shadows on the roundness of her cheeks, and he marveled.
Who would have ever thought? But the black leather jacket against the white eyelet bedcover should have been his first clue. All Holly Lamb's secrets had been in those startlingly sensual contrasts when he had first tossed her on the bed.
A virgin hiding a tigress at her core.
He knew now the part of Holly Lamb that no one who had ever looked at his prim and proper secretary would have ever guessed at.
Including himself.
The evening they had just spent together had taught him something that he hoped never to forget. That you could think you knew everything there was to know about something, and you might not know it at all.
He had thought, in his arrogance, he knew a thing or two about making love.
And found out what he knew about was sex. More accurately, what he knew about was the four-letter word that guys used so openly in the company of other guys, that word that was flung around so casually and abundantly in pool halls and taverns and the places with bars and locks where Blake had learned the language of being a certain kind of man.
That word had nothing to do with what had happened here tonight.
Or the kind of man he had seen reflected in the wonder in her eyes.
In her innocence and her awe, she had shown him what making love was about. It wasn't about a physical release.
It was about a spiritual joining.
It wasn't about some emptiness, longing to be filled.
It was about a lonely soul making its way unerringly toward completion.
Imagine. Educated about making love at the hands of Holly Lamb.
He thought of her hands and could feel his heat rising. Again. As if three times in amazingly quick succession had not been enough. Each time she had grown bolder, more uninhibited, more playful, more a woman than any he had ever known.
Tenderly, he pulled the blanket higher over her naked shoulder. She muttered something, her brow puckered and then her cheek found his chest, and her face relaxed and she went perfectly still. That her trust in him crossed over the barrier between waking and sleeping touched him in yet another way.
It was getting light outside the window.
He contemplated the gift she had given him, stroked her hair, and her cheek, before finally lying down beside her, pulling her into him, wrapping his arms protectively around her. She wriggled close in her sleep, sighed against him.
After all these weeks of feeling so confused, Blake Fallon knew exactly what he wanted.
He wanted to marry her.
That easy.
He wanted to be with her every night, and wake up with her every morning. He wanted to read newspapers in bed with her, and make her tea, and listen to her voice, and feel her eyes on him.
He wanted to make her blush, and make her laugh, and make her lose control over and over again.
He wanted to walk beaches with her, and ride motorcycles, and look at stars. He wanted to see the world through her eyes. He knew it would be a place brand-new to him, exhilarating, full of undiscovered wonders.
He wanted them to run this ranch together. Not him as the boss and her as the secretary, but the two of them as a team.
He realized, ever since she had first come, they had moved more and more in that direction without him realizing it. A team. He thoug
ht of her gentle way with the kids, her quick intelligence, her sense of humor, and he felt what she had felt earlier.
As if it was too much emotion, and it would overflow from him.
And the largest emotion was gratitude. That somehow, when he did not in the least deserve it, she had become his.
She was a woman a man could count on. Could relate to. Could lower his defenses with. She was a woman who allowed a man to be completely and utterly himself, and who did not flinch from what that meant.
No, embraced what it meant.
He was suddenly and humbly so grateful for all the days of her life that she had believed herself to be plain and had dressed the part, acted the part.
It might have been the very thing that saved her treasure for him. And now he would have the great privilege of coaxing her beauty out of her day by day, until she believed it. Radiated it. Was it.
He could picture them growing old together, which startled him. He had never ever looked at a woman and thought of her in terms of the future. Heaven forbid he should think about her hair turning white, and wrinkles appearing around her eyes. None of the women he dated would have much appreciated that projection either.
But with Holly it was a delightful picture. She was one of those women who truly would become better as she aged. She was like a fall-blooming flower, that hardy breed that put the bright blossoms of spring to shame. Fall flowers had strength and resilience, a depth that showed itself in the color that shone forth long after so much else had faded.
Holly Lamb possessed a beauty that went beyond the astonishing hazel shades of her eyes. She possessed a loveliness of soul, and he felt so fortunate that he had seen that first about her.
Blake startled himself further by realizing he could picture her pregnant. All the days of his life he had thought he would not have children. He had thought of the bitter days of his own childhood and reached the conclusion he had been left without the skills necessary to raise a child of his own. A child who was happy and healthy, who had enough self-worth to give the world the gift of himself or herself. The years as director of the Hopechest had, oddly, done nothing to change this assessment of himself.
But when he pictured Holly pregnant, her tummy blossoming with his baby within her, and her breasts growing full, he felt an exquisite tenderness, a yearning to one day have a family with her.
He knew why he had never been able to picture himself as a father before.
Because the magic ingredient had been missing.
The ingredient that could turn a man's hard years into his lessons and his gifts. The ingredient that healed the things a man might carry with him and inadvertently use to hurt others.
The ingredient was love.
With love a man who had spent his childhood either running or locked up would be able to put that aside. With love, a man who had never been read to, or held, would know how to hold his own children, how to cuddle close to them and read them bedtime stories. With love, a man who had played pool instead of Little League, could pitch balls to his own son or daughter.
With the love that shone in Holly's eyes, he could be more a man than he had ever hoped or believed before.
Tomorrow he would go and buy a ring.
The choice would be hers.
But he knew what her choice would be. He had seen it in her eyes. He had been looking at that choice in her eyes for a long, long time.
Imagine her being patient enough to wait until he got it.
He knew what her answer would be to his question "Will you marry me?" and he felt peace. Blake Fallon was a man who, for years now, had thought out each of his actions carefully, analytically, practically.
And lost some part of himself in the process.
The part of him that worked on instinct, survived on instinct, gloried in the adventure of the heart.
Tonight he felt returned to that part of himself. That finally his personality, all of it, could dwell within his own body in peace, integrated.
The wild part of him wanted her, now and forever.
The respectable part of him knew that meant marrying her.
But he let the wild side have the last word: soon. He would marry her with great haste. For her. So that she would never feel a moment's guilt about what had transpired between them. Or a moment's anxiety that it would not last, that it was a flash in the pan.
He would marry her with great haste. For him. To honor that voice within him that he had silenced for too long, that told him exactly what he needed to survive. More, it told him what he needed to be happy.
He needed Holly Lamb.
He needed her like air and water and sunshine. His soul needed her.
He needed her in order that he become the man he was meant to be. Not just a respected man, not just a man who had risen above the troubles of his youth, not just a successful man. But a man who knew how to love. How to give his heart. How to accept love in return. That was the essential element that had been missing from Blake Fallon.
For the first time since the water on the Hopechest Ranch had been poisoned, Blake fell into a deep and untroubled sleep.
That sleep was shattered, after what seemed like only seconds, by a bloodcurdling scream.
Thirteen
The monster was enormous. He had red leathery skin that bubbled briskly like oil boiling. He snorted smoke and his eyes were orange and evil, black-slatted like a snake's. Under each of his warty arms he held a rusty barrel, clearly marked.
DMBE. And in smaller letters DiMethyl Butyl Ether.
Now he was at the wellhead, and the monster peeled the soldered cap off the well with no more effort than it took to peel back the lid off a tin of anchovies. And then he squeezed the barrels in his monster-huge hands, and the bottom and the tops blew off, and liquid began to ooze out, huge dollops of it falling down the well pipe, splashing into the water.
The liquid was luminous, and green. Holly could tell by looking at it that it held death and destruction, hell and heartbreak.
The monster was laughing now, and she felt startled. Did she know that laughter? Did she recognize it? The laughter was a human sound, not as evil as she might have expected, but hard and cynical, an edge of meanness in it.
A feeling of terror encompassed her. A feeling that she knew the monster.
As if sensing the presence of the dreamer, he turned, looked at her, and his face began to shift, to melt before her eyes.
Always before when the dream had reached this point, Holly had awakened, screaming and terrified, knowing the face below the monster's would be the most horrifying thing she had ever seen.
But tonight, even though she was afraid, she felt oddly safe and warm, protected, as if something much stronger than the monster was holding her in its embrace.
Not breathing, not blinking, Holly waited for the monster to show her his face.
She watched, horrified, fascinated, as the red scales fell away, the lumpy warts disintegrated, bone structure appeared, pink skin, human skin. The monster was a man.
She knew suddenly where she recognized the laughter from.
You're going to work where? For how much? The laughter. You're crazy. You have the brains to do anything, my girl, anything. Come work for me. Together we could conquer the world, you and I.
My girl. My girl. My girl.
Something in her began to scream, her denial desperate. No. No. No. Stop. She had decided she didn't want to see. She begged the monster to stop. She didn't want to know. But the face kept emerging, taking shape, forming before her eyes.
She tried to turn away before her world collapsed, but there were arms around her. She fought them, but they held, so strong, not allowing her to escape.
She tried to cover her eyes, she tried not to look. She shut her eyes tight.
But even the closed eyes did not help. She knew. And she was not allowed to escape what she knew any longer. She saw the face, and her screams intensified. The monster's face was the most horrifying face she had ever s
een.
Not because the man was ugly. No, not that. He wasn't ugly at all. Plain, her mother would have said. You inherited your looks from your father.
That was why it was so horrifying. Because she had expected to see the face of a stranger. And instead she found herself looking into a face nearly as familiar to her as her own.
Her father.
Her father was the monster.
* * *
"Holly, wake up. Geez, that's quite the right punch. Hey, you're going to give me a black eye. Come out of it. Come on, baby."
Holly jerked awake, stared uncomprehending. Her screams still seemed to hang, chilling, in the bedroom air.
"Blake?" For a moment she was so disoriented she thought she must still be dreaming. Blake in her bed?
"Yeah, Blake. Were you expecting someone else?" He raised a wicked, teasing eyebrow at her.
But the other dream held her in its grip. She tried to shake free of it, but could not. Holly began to tremble, trying to hold back the revulsion and fear she felt. The dream had been trying to tell her for months, and she had been too afraid to face its truth.
Only tonight, in the arms of the man who had shown her a piece of heaven, shared that piece of heaven with her, had she finally felt safe and strong. Safe and strong enough to look into the face of that monster.
"Shhh," he said, "Holly, it was only a dream."
He wrapped his arms tight around her, stroked her hair, murmured against her neck. How wonderful that would have felt, if it was only a dream, to come awake to him.
The tears came, the sobs wracked her body. It wasn't only a dream. She knew that with a terrible certainty.
She knew who had sabotaged the ranch. She had known all along, in some dark corner of her mind. Her father had done it, as coldly, as analytically as he had done everything else in his life.
What was she going to say to Blake?
Oh, God, what if he believed she had seduced him to cover up for her father? What if he thought she had known all along? Here she had been accepting credit for getting the water turned off so quickly.
