by Paige Tyler
And her heart.
Even though they’d only known each other for a few days, he understood her well enough to know that she would never give herself easily. If she was allowing him to make sweet love to her, it was only because she felt something more for him than mere desire. Hell, she probably barely knew what desire was. If she wasn’t a virgin he’d kiss Hernandez himself.
But she had known love in her life, he’d bet, and that was what was allowing her to place herself in his care.
For the first time in an interminably long while, he set down the mantle of being El Diablo and became merely Rafe Black—a man determined to pleasure his woman to the very best of his abilities.
Chapter 7
Mary Rose met his eyes, suddenly feeling the weight of what she’d decided—feeling very hesitant at doing something she’d never done before.
Rafe could read her worries in her eyes, stroking her hair gently back from her temples. “Sh. I’ll make it as good for you as I can. I promise. You won’t regret it.”
There was a twinge in Mary Rose’s heart when he said that, but she steeled herself against it. She wanted to know all of him. She wanted to be his, in the most fundamental way possible. In many ways, she already was. All that was left was this last step—giving her body to him for his pleasure.
Although her eyes broadcast her fear, her body was fairly limp, as if she was surrendering herself to him. But he wasn’t a selfish lover—not at all. He got just as aroused at his partner’s pleasure as he did with his own. He moved just a bit to the side, and let just the barest ends of his fingertips follow her curves and valleys, igniting every nerve ending in their path, making her rock and moan and brush up against his hand, begging for more of what he was only too glad to give her.
His every movement was designed to give her the utmost in pleasure—to bring her to the peak of ecstasy. He kissed her until they were both senseless, then butterflied his lips down the elegant column of her neck, making her shiver in his arms. But she nearly screamed and sat bolt upright when his warm wet mouth settled over one of her sensitive tips and began to suckle.
Mary Rose had never known that such pleasure was possible. She was overwhelmed with it. Every place their flesh touched throbbed and yearned for more of him, most especially that forbidden place between her legs. She was so unfamiliar with any sort of stimulation—any sort of feeling at all coming from down there that she found she had to move her hips, trying to alleviate the roaring ache, but nothing seemed to help.
She arched within his arms, pressing her breasts into his mouth, and Rafe closed his eyes, sending a quiet, reverent prayer to God for his fortune in finding this woman—even if he only had this one night with her. He wanted many, many more, but acknowledged the reality of the situation. This was it –this was his one shot at paradise, and he was going to take it before someone took it away from him.
He let one hand wander down her almost too flat tummy, dabbling at her navel then trailing an index finger down to those well-protected swollen lips. Her hand automatically shot down between them to stop him, and he found small, delicate fingers doing their best to encircle his thick wrist.
She couldn’t stop him—she didn’t have the strength. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to. But she was afraid of whatever he was going to do there—not worried necessarily that he would hurt her, just afraid of the unknown and suddenly enduring a flood of all of the patent warnings her mother had given her about nudity and strange men.
“I won’t hurt you, Mary Rose, I won’t. I promise,” Rafe said solemnly, keeping his hand still, and realizing as he said them the absurdity of that kind of reassurance coming from a man like him.
Mary Rose didn’t know why, but she believed him, and loosened her grip on his wrist, clinging to him as his finger descended into her moistness only far enough to find a part of her she’d never known existed and rub it once or twice experimentally.
Her back arched all the way off the bed, almost throwing him totally off her as she cried out in agonizing pleasure. Dear God, what was he doing to her? She never got to answer her own question, because before she knew it, his finger had dipped a little further down to gather her natural essence and bring it back up to that hardened peak, dragging the rough pad of his finger over and over it, making it a slippery slope his finger skied up and down unrelentingly.
Rafe lowered his head enough to capture her closest nipple and tug on it as hard as he could, flicking his tongue furiously over the tip while his finger continued its sensual torture, around and up and down and over that sensitive spot.
Mary Rose couldn’t catch her breath. She thought she was going to faint—she knew she was going to faint and probably die from what he was doing, but it didn’t hurt her … it was just too wonderful to bear! She felt like she was going to fly apart into a million pieces, and then she did, her body convulsing under his knowing touch, her mind leaving her completely as she writhed and jerked in the throws of hundreds of hard, ecstatic contractions that eventually began to ebb away until they were no more, leaving her sweating and wrung out in their wake.
When she finally lay back, Rafe kissed her on the forehead and moved to place himself between her legs, his maleness butting up against the entrance to her body. Before she had a chance to come down from her orgasm, he laced his fingers with hers, where her hands lay palm up next to their hips, and plunged into her.
Those blue eyes grew incredibly round and wide open, like her mouth, but her mouth closed on a sigh of pain. “Ow-wwww,” and he watched her eyes fill with tears.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. But that’s it. No more. All the rest is pleasure like there was before.”
Her eyes were clamped tightly shut, tears leaking from beneath them. “But you said you wouldn’t hurt me,” she barely whispered.
“I’m sorry, honey. I’ll make you forget it, I promise.”
And he did. Several times over.
~
It was almost noon before they came downstairs, to the leers and jeers of the other two men. Penny regarded Mary Rose inquisitively, but kept her mouth shut. For her part, Mary Rose kept her head down and walked gingerly back to the kitchen, out of earshot of the rude comments the other two men were making.
Eventually the comments and speculation about what they had been doing up there—which were right on target but uncomfortably graphic for the newly initiated Mary Rose—and she wandered from the kitchen into the saloon where everyone else was. Hernandez was nowhere to be seen, probably on watch duty, Mary Rose surmised, until he appeared in the doorway, closing and locking the door behind him. He looked terrified. “There’s men comin’. Hunnerds of ‘em. They’re comin’ from every direction.”
Rafe drew his gun and positioned each man at a window with ample guns and ammo, then took the women to the pantry, which was the least likely room to be hit by gunfire as it was in the geographical center of the house. “You stay right here and don’t come out till I come for you. I mean it now.” He was looking directly at Mary Rose as he issued his warning. He peeped out the window to see dozens of riders coming over the hills surrounding the house. Yep, it looked like the cavalry was finally coming, all right.
Now he just had to keep his cool and play his cards right, and everything would go as it was supposed to. He wrapped his left arm in the strap of his rifle and raised it to his shoulder. “No one fires until I give the word. You hear me?”
All he got back were disgruntled grunts, but that was better than he expected.
He waited until the last possible minute, then gave the order and began to fire himself, carefully aiming over the heads of the charging men. While they were in the heat of the battle, he snuck a look at the other two, who were completely engrossed in the situation, trying to pick off as many of the enemy as they could. Rafe snuck quietly away from his post. They probably wouldn’t question his absence, anyway, figuring he had gone to a place where he had a better shot.
The truth was that he was then a
ble to sneak up on Toze so quietly amid all the gunfire that he was able to issue just one punch that knocked him cold, then tied him up quickly and efficiently and locked him in the kitchen. Now he only had Hernandez to deal with, but he was the loose cannon of the bunch, as evidenced by the way he’d treated Mary Rose the other night, which only made Rafe smile evilly. He’d be only too happy to deck Hernandez with one well placed punch. He hadn’t really done near enough damage to the man for that, as far as he was concerned.
But Hernandez was a little too shifty—too evil for his own good. He looked over to where Toze should have been—and Toze wasn’t the type to dance around during a fight. He stood his ground and got the job done or he’d never have been part of the gang. His rifle was there, and the ammo he’d put out around him, but no Toze. Diablo was gone, too. Something smelled fishy to Hernandez, and he turned to see where either of the men had gone, and caught Rafe in the act of sneaking up behind him.
There was a brief struggle, and Hernandez’s rifle went off. Rafe was the only one to rise from that confrontation, his shirt spattered in blood.
As bullets whizzed around and into the house, he threw his head back and issued a war whoop, much like the one he’d done when he was calling Hernandez and Toze into the saloon several days back. At that sound, all of the gunmen outside put their rifles down and dismounted, the biggest and baddest looking of the bunch leading the way to the door to the saloon.
Mary Rose and Penny were in the pantry, huddling together, terrified by the sounds of all the gunfire outside their little enclosure. Several jars of peaches her aunt had canned in Virginia exploded and rained down on their heads as a few determined, stray bullets actually made it to them. Then they heard that awful, familiar sound, and Mary Rose was sure that El Diablo –the man who had just made the sweetest of love to her not more than two or three hours ago—was calling out to his heathen brethren to descend upon the house and help them fight off the very people who were probably coming to rescue them.
The sound chilled her to the bone, as did the almost dead silence that followed it. She wasn’t sure which was worse, but she knew she couldn’t stand not knowing what was going on for one second longer. She opened the pantry door and peeped out through the narrow slit cautiously, but was unable to see a darned thing.
So she slipped out into the hallway, keeping herself plastered against the wall, until she could see into the living room from where she was, and she could hear what was being said all over the house. But it was the conversation in the living room that hooked her. From her vantage point, she could see that it was El Diablo talking to someone who looked vaguely familiar.
“It all came down just like I planned,” Rafe said. “They fell for me hook, line, and sinker. The women are in the pantry—they should be perfectly fine.”
Fell for him? She wondered what he meant by that, but she was really distracted by the identity of the other man. Where did she know him from? He didn’t look like anyone from town … he was dressed head to toe in black –
He was from town! The thought popped into her head of exactly who he was. He was the man that Rafe had come nose to nose with in Clementine when he’d dragged her into town to send some sort of mysterious telegram. Had he been sending it to that man? No, that would be stupid when they could have just talked face to face … Mary Rose wanted to know what the heck was going on, and she wanted to know now.
Her curiosity was what propelled her forward, into the living room.
Rafe saw her instantly, and frowned deeply, his hands on his hip. “Didn’t I tell you to stay in the pantry until I came for you?”
Mary Rose ignored what he’d said in favor of asking her own question. “What did you mean by that?”
Rafe had the grace to look discomfited by her question. “By what?”
“What you just said about them falling for you?”
The other man excused himself quickly and stalked out through the front door. Mary Rose stood there, her arms folded over her chest, looking at him expectantly.
Rafe ran his hand over his face, rubbing his eyes. He was dead tired. And now he was going to have to explain things to her. Well, he supposed he should just get it over with. “Take a seat. This is going to take a minute.”
“I’ll stand, thank you,” Mary Rose said stubbornly. She didn’t think she was going to like what he was going to have to say. Not one bit.
But Rafe wanted her to sit, so he directed her to a chair and practically pushed her into it, giving her a glare when she moved to get up. He leaned onto the table between them and began to speak, realizing he really didn’t know what to say to her. He guessed he’d better get the truth out on to the table as soon as possible, though. “I’m not El Diablo, although I look a lot like him.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wanted poster for El Diablo, and held it next to his face. They looked almost exactly alike. “We got him a while ago in Texas, but we wanted to get the rest of his gang. I’m a Texas Ranger, and I’ve been working undercover trying to maneuver these guys to a place where we could get them alive, and see what other kind of information we could get from them, before we hang them in Texas.” He pulled his wallet out of another pocket, and showed her a Texas Ranger badge.
Mary Rose was in shock. She felt like a complete fool. “So, you never really were one of the bad guys?”
“No, Ma’am. I’m not. I’m on the side of the law. But—”
“And sleeping with me, and making me b-bathe you, making me look like a complete idiot, was that all a part of your plan, too?” She asked, raising her voice so that all of the men who were crawling around the place gathering weapons and evidence stopped to look at her. But she didn’t care. It was almost worse to know that she’d been so completely duped than to know that he was evil through and through and would either kill her or, at the very least, leave her within the next few days. She’d braced herself for that, but not for anything like this. He’d forced her to sleep in the same bed with him. He’d spanked her bare bottom more than once. He’d forced her to was his hair and his back and his chest, and then, this morning, she’d let him—
Mary Rose put her hand to her mouth, feeling like she was going to be sick, and ran up the stairs to her bedroom, locking the door behind her once she got there then falling onto her bed—the one they’d made love in this morning. Or rather, the one they’d had sex on. There hadn’t been any mention of love between them, and she knew better than to assume it, whether he was a good guy or the bad guy she’d believed he was. Neither of them was obligated in any way towards her.
She was alone in her misery.
~
Later, she heard an insistent knock on the door, but ignored it. It was accompanied by some loud yelling, and she recognized the voice, but she ignored it entirely and turned over, away from the door. Finally, he went away. Not long after, she heard Penny knock at the door. She seemed really worried about her.
“Go away, Penny. I’m fine. I just need some time.”
“Please, Miss Mary, let me in. I don’t want to be out here all by myself with these people. And they’re asking me questions that I can’t rightly answer.”
Mary Rose sat up and sighed heavily. She was right. She hated it, but Penny was right. So she straightened her back and got up, walking to the door as if she was going to her death. As she expected, he was right next to Penny, standing to the side of the door but letting her do the talking. Mary Rose completely ignored him, addressing her question of Penny. “What kind of things are they asking you?”
“All sorta things,” Penny exaggerated as they all started walking towards the stairs. “A lot of ‘em has left. But them that have stayed are helping fix the place up—you know, fill in the bullet holes. The tub was fair riddled with ‘em, so they’re building you another one.”
“How generous of them,” Mary Rose said sarcastically. “I suppose they’ll all be hungry, too.”
Rafe broke in, saying, “They’ll all stay here, and pay you for
their rooms, meals, and drinks while they work. It shouldn’t take them very long to patch things up. I’m having them build another couple of tubs—you’ll be able to quadruple the money you make on baths during roundup.”
Her eyebrows rose before she corralled them. “Who’s paying for the materials?” She kind of expected to hear that the state of Texas was, but she was wrong.
“I am. Out of my own pocket.
If she had been of a mind to, she would have had to admit that she was impressed. That was something she didn’t expect.
She was so distant and cold. Rafe didn’t think it would hurt this much to see her this way. It was almost as if she preferred him as a murderer. He didn’t know what to do. He’d always had it pretty easy with the ladies because of a combination of his family’s money and his natural good looks. But this situation was such a true fiasco that he didn’t know if he could ever get what he wanted—which was more of Mary Rose—all of Mary Rose, actually. He wanted to marry her. He’d never wanted that particular commitment with any woman before, but something in him craved her, even after such a short acquaintance.
His father had always said that when things were right, they were right, regardless. A man just knew, as he had known when he met his wife, that they were destined for each other. Rumor had it that his mother had been the reluctant one of the pair, and it looked like history was repeating himself. But at least Angel Black hadn’t had to deal with having lied to Marguerite Conrad, as he had had to lie to Mary Rose from the very beginning.
“I want to talk to you,” he said, grabbing her hand and pulling her along behind him, back up the stairs she’d just come down.
Mary Rose was pulling back just as fiercely, paying no attention to her precarious position on the stairs, twisting and struggling with all her might—not that it got her anywhere. She was dragged up the stairs as inevitably as the tides came in. But when he wrangled her back into her room, she walked to the window, presenting him with her back.
