Broken Spurs

by BJ James

  “There’s nothing,” the sheriff assured as he left his own seat, honoring a tradition his mother had drummed into him, standing when a lady stood. And Savannah Benedict was a lady. He’d never doubted that she was. Now he knew she was one hell of a woman, as well. “You’re free to go, Cody, with nary a scrap of paper to be signed, nor an inch of red tape to cut.”

  “Thanks,” Steve extended his hand. They were were much alike. Men who could be friends or continue as careful antagonists. He thought that they might be friends. “I owe you a great deal.”

  “You owe, companero.” As callused palm slapped callused palm, the sheriff looked down on Savannah. “But nothing to me.”

  From its place in a corner, a clock from another era ticked down the minutes of another day. Men who could have lived as well in the time when it was new put aside differences that caused the crossing of their paths. Their handshake was strong and firm, building a bond, signaling a beginning.

  “I wonder—” Blackhawk began, and stopped abruptly.

  “If I know what I’ve been given?” Smiling his first real smile, Steve took Savannah’s arm. “I know. Oh, yes, I know.”

  As Steve Cody escorted Savannah Henrietta Benedict from his office, Billy Blackhawk didn’t call the customary warnings after them. Didn’t suggest that Steve should stay close, or caution that he not leave the country. Intuition, common sense and an old-fashioned gut feeling predicted the so-called squatter of Sunrise Canyon wouldn’t be going anywhere. Not for a long, long time.

  Drawn to the window, brushing motes of dust from the pane to clear his vision, Blackhawk allowed himself an uncommon idle moment. A moment of watching a rare and beautiful woman. Steve Cody had love, fidelity, and valor walking by his side. No man could hope for more.

  “This is your second chance, friend.” Another chance for something Blackhawk knew, too well, many men never had once. “This time, don’t screw it up.”

  The streets of Silverton were eerily deserted. Ranchers, shoppers and tourists had scattered to attend chores and obligations put aside for the days of the festival. Merchants scurried within their establishments, never looking out their quaint storefront windows as profits were tallied, shelves restocked and inventories refurbished. Steve and Savannah walked alone. Unseen and, at last, unwatched.

  It all seemed so easy in Blackhawk’s office, but in their isolation they were ill at ease and restive. Together, yet alone. Friends who had lost their way. Lovers with no idea how to begin healing the breach, and less of their destination.

  Turning from the main thoroughfare, as a matter of habit, Steve took her arm as they stepped together onto the aged, boarded walk that led to the lot where his confiscated truck had been stored. Boot heels tapped in unison over creaking wood, resounding like reveille through the alley as the shade of buildings engulfed them.

  Savannah’s calf length skirt billowed and swirled around her as he drew her to an impatient halt. They were so close he could feel the heat of her, see the sudden rush of her heartbeat throbbing in the hollow of her throat, smell the scent of roses rising from her hair.

  So close. So far. Drawing his hand from her arm, he let it fall heavily to his side. “What now, Savannah? Where do we go from here?”

  There was agony in him, and that she regretted. But there was also need, and in that she found her beginning. “We go home.” Fingers that had ached to touch him drifted over his stubbled cheek and curled into his hair, bringing him down to her, down to her kiss. She whispered against his lips. “We go home.”

  If she’d intended to say more, it was lost in the explosive passion that ravaged Steve at the first touch of her lips, the sweet, rough glide of her tongue. In a swift, fluid move, he backed her into the alcove of a doorway, pinning her against the wall. Then his kiss descended, hot and greedy, on her mouth. Whatever breath the slamming blow of his body hadn’t knocked from her was stolen by an overpowering stab of desire.

  She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. She didn’t fight. She didn’t want to fight. Not even when she felt herself go weak and dizzy with her body’s demands for the ease not meant for public streets or private alleys. Her arms closed tighter around him, one foot braced against the wall, allowing him access. As he caressed her, shamelessly she cradled his trembling body with her own.

  Steve sank deeper into the magic of her kiss. Touching her, feeling the buck and shudder of her hips as he stroked her, sending passion and longing spiraling into urgent, demanding desperation. She was a temptress, a sorceress stealing sanity from him, drawing him into the dark, sweet madness of enchantment. He wanted her naked and wild beneath him, her body arching to take him. He wanted her as mad as he, crying his name as softly and plaintively as she cried when his seeking hands left her breasts to tangle in her hair.

  Clinging to him, she cried out again. “Please.”

  “No.” Tearing himself from her with every shred of strength he had left, staring into her dazed gaze, he found himself falling again under the spell of witch eyes. “No! Dear God, no! I want you, Savannah, so badly I’m not sure I can survive you. But not here.”

  Backing away, he let his hands slide from her hair, to her shoulder, to her breasts. Cupping a perfect, naked globe in his palm, succumbing to temptation more powerful than reason, he bent to suckle. And for his folly was nearly lost to reason and propriety as the soft rosy bloom of a nipple tightened to a taut, pebbled bud against his tongue.

  “No.” Marshaling every ounce of discipline, he said again, “Not here.” Drawing her blouse over her, covering the beguiling nipple, he didn’t turn from her sorceress’s gaze. “Not in a doorway in an alley like a tart.

  “We’re going home, Savannah.” He took her hand, folded it in his. “Home to the Broken Spur.”

  Savannah woke heavy eyed and languid. Purring as contentedly as a kitten, she stretched gingerly, testing each muscle, savoring every delicious ache of her body. Touching her face, she found it not unpleasantly tender from the scratch of Steve’s beard. Her own fault, she remembered, for not giving him time to shave following the bath they’d shared.

  Silently she blessed Jeffie for filling the water tank, starting the generator to heat it, and leaving the music playing. The small bouquet of autumn wild flowers hadn’t been a bad touch. “Jeffie,” she murmured. “A romantic, who would have thought it?”

  Stretching again, finding new and sweeter aches that needed soothing, she slipped from the bed. Winding the sheet around her, she went in search of the only one who could offer the ease she needed.

  Her search didn’t take her far. She found him, barefoot, dressed only in jeans, sitting on the front steps. As he looked blindly out over Sunrise Canyon, shades of twilight slowly deepened into night.

  “Hi,” she murmured as she slid dose.

  “Hi, yourself.” Steve didn’t turn from his deep study, didn’t look at her.

  “Hey!” Touching his chin, turning his face to her, she recognized the troubled look in his eyes. Her heart plummeted, her throat constricted. “Second thoughts?”

  Steve couldn’t deny he was troubled, he didn’t try. “Some.”

  “About me?”

  “Second thoughts for you and what I’ve done to your life, not about you.”

  Savannah smothered a sigh, wondering when he would realize no one person was responsible for the upheaval in their lives. A part of the blame was Jake’s, for being obstinate about the canyon. A part was Angie’s, for her greed. A part, she admitted with brutal honesty, was her own. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” A frown etched the lines between his brows a degree deeper. “Sweet heaven, what have you to be sorry for?”

  “For doubting you.”

  “Doubting isn’t a cardinal sin, sweetheart.”

  “Isn’t it?” Sliding her arm though his, she leaned her head on his shoulder. “If I’d been stronger, surer, and stood by you, maybe none of this would have happened. Angie might be alive, and Tad Jasper a free man.”

  “
What happened to Angie had nothing to do with you. She was trouble looking to happen. It happened to her. Hopefully, with the extenuating circumstances, Tad will only be facing a charge of manslaughter.”

  “I’d like to think that.”

  For a while they sat companionably, her head still on his shoulder, troubles quieted, if not resolved. Steve roused from his thoughts, touched her cheek and made a decision. “Maybe we should leave the canyon.”

  “What?” Savannah jolted from her own reverie. Sitting rigidly erect, she asked more calmly than she felt, “Why would you leave when this is everything you’ve wanted? When this is where you can make the Cody horse a reality?”

  “I said maybe we should leave, love. Maybe the canyon was everything I wanted, but not anymore.” Taking her hand in his, he raised it to his lips. “I want you, more than the canyon, more than the Cody horse, more than anything in the world. If we go, if we leave the canyon to Jake, I hope in time he’ll accept me, that we belong together. And you can be happy.”

  “I’ll be happy wherever you are, but we’d both be happiest here. I doubt Jake will be spending much time thinking of the canyon. Before my mother is finished with him, I don’t think he’ll have the time or the inclination to bother.”

  “He’s wanted the canyon for a long time.”

  “She’s going to prove to him he wants her more.” Savannah planted a trail of kisses over his bare shoulder. “In time, she’ll convince him to be magnanimous and forgive me for defecting.”

  “Is that what you did? Defect?”

  “No.” Rising from the step, she stood before him taking both his hands in hers. “I fell in love, and, as a wise man told me I should, I listened to my heart’s voice.”

  “Your mother, is she strong enough to convince Jake of that?”

  “At the moment, she’s invincible.” Drawing him to his feet, with her lashes dipping to her cheek, then rising to let her steady look meet his, she smiled her sorceress’s smile. “But no more than I.”

  “Ah?” The lift of his brow was an unspoken challenge. “You’re certain of that?”

  She laughed softly. And in the twilight, with her languid gaze, her mouth swollen with his kisses, and her hair falling to her waist in a dusky tangle, she was irresistible.

  “Cocky, aren’t you?” he whispered hoarsely as his voice failed him.

  “Am I?” She took a small step back. “You tell me.”

  A flick of her hand and the sheet was falling. Before it hit the ground she was in his arms, and he was striding up the steps, across the porch to the bed that waited.

  The room lay in near darkness. In the little light their bodies gleamed with the sweat of battle, of loving, of exhaustion. As her hands locked about his wrists, holding them above his head, her hair swept over his chest, blunt cut tips teasing and tantalizing, seducing him again. His gasp and a stifled groan sent ripples of pleasure quivering and sweet, low in her belly. And as she felt his captured body’s response, she began to move again, slowly, leisurely savoring the pleasure she took, the pleasure she gave. Then, as his breath quickened, her teasing and her mood changed. One wicked, one wanton, as she watched and played a silent game of waiting.

  His breaking point was prefaced by a cry and a thrashing, rearing turn. His body still immersed in hers, he crushed her beneath him. Dragging her arms above her head, holding her captive as she had him, he set out to conquer as he’d been conquered.

  “Drive me mad, would you?” he growled in her ear.

  “Mad, yes,” she admitted. “As mad as I can.”

  “Two can play the game,” he promised, or perhaps he threatened.

  “No.” Thrashing against him, straining away from his hold, she turned her head to catch his lips. Hungering for them, dying for them, she found herself engulfed, devoured, as the rhythm of his probing tongue matched the endless pounding thrust of his body.

  Paroxysms of pleasure too glorious to bear splintered through her, threatened to destroy her. Tearing her wrists from his grasp, she clawed at his hair, wrenching her mouth from his. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  His rhythm didn’t slacken, nor, for all her protests, did hers. Convinced she would die if he didn’t stop, certain she would die if he did, she found herself cleaving to him, battling him, matching thrust for thrust, shudder for shudder, cry for cry.

  Tension escalated. There was pain, there was euphoria, there was regret, and joy. Deep inside her the one small part she thought would only be hers, loosened. And loosened again.

  “No,” she whispered, wanting to hold on, wanting to let go.

  “Yes.” Understanding her conflict, fury swept from him. When he had been fierce, he was gentle. But in his gentleness there was no relief for her.

  “I can’t.” Her nails pierced his shoulders, her teeth scraped his skin. “I can’t.”

  “You can. You must. We must.” Brushing her hair from her face he looked into her fevered eyes. “Let me show you,” he murmured, sighing softly against her cheek, drawing away from her as if he would leave her.

  Her scream was a wild ululation as her body lunged to keep him. “No! No! No!”

  “Yes.” With a return of fury, he plunged deeper, farther, taking the part she would keep, claiming all of Savannah as his own.

  And as their world exploded, filling hearts and souls with the brilliance of a shower of a thousand falling stars, Steve gave to her as much of himself.

  “Savannah?” She lay so still, so quiet, Steve was frightened. Rearing over her, by the light of a harvest moon falling through the window he searched her face. Teardrops shimmered on her lashes and spilled in shining paths down her cheeks. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  She didn’t move, didn’t seem to hear. He grew frantic. “Dear heaven, sweetheart, did I hurt you?”

  “Hurt me?” she mused. Drawn from her reverie, meeting his tortured gaze, she said solemnly, “You could never hurt me.”

  “Then why these?” He caught a tear on a fingertip. “Why the tears?”

  “Because I didn’t know.”

  “How it would be to love completely?”

  She looked away, afraid of what she might see in him. “You must think I’m a naive simpleton.”

  “What I think,” he declared as he brought her back to him, “is that you’re wonderful. And if you’re naive or simple because you’ve never felt like this, my dearest love, my first love, then so am I.”

  “Dearest? First?”

  He kissed her and smiled.

  “Love?” He’d said it before many times. She needed to hear it again.

  “Love most definite.”

  “Before,” she faltered and swallowed, and moistened dry lips. “Before, when you asked if I would leave the canyon, were you asking me to marry you?”

  “No.” Too quickly for pain or disillusion, he said gently, “It wasn’t a proposal, but only because that wasn’t how I wanted it to be. Neither is this, but what the hell!”

  Laughing, he scooped her up and tumbled her on top of him. “Savannah Henrietta Benedict, with your hair like pale midnight and your eyes like new silver, will you marry me?”

  A look of mischief flickered in her solemn face. “Do you think I should?”

  “Considering the magnitude of what just happened, for the sake of our future generations, I think you’d better.”

  Mischief turned to grave wonder. “Could it truly be...do you think...would you mind?”

  As gravely as she, he considered. “In reverse order, would I mind? No. Do I think you might have conceived my child? A definite possibility. Could it truly be?” He drew a long, slow breath, considering again. “In case it isn’t, we could always try again.”

  “Now?”

  “Do you know a better time?”

  Peering through the gloom to see if he was teasing, she realized he was not. “You’d have to be an iron man.”

  “Maybe I am, sweetheart, and the fault is yours.”

  As simply as that, in a move as smo
oth as silk, he spun with her, covered her, made good his speculation, proved his accusation.

  Chapter 18

  “Nervous?”

  “As a filly looking at her first bridle.”

  While he struggled with his tie, Steve bent to kiss Savannah’s cheek in the blaze of the not so newly installed electric lights, in the not so newly remodeled and enlarged ranch house. Gently he chided against her. fragrant cheek, “And you’re the one who’s been assuring me that everything is going to be all right.”

  Savannah laid down her brush. “I’m sure it will be. It’s just that I haven’t seen my father in over a year.”

  Saying nothing, quietly Steve let her convince herself. “Mother says he’s fine. Sleeping with her often and quite lustily. Riding horses, bossing the hands, arguing with Jubal, and in general, driving Sandy nuts and firing him regularly.”

  “He would.”

  A frown marred the smooth plane of her brow. “She said he still limps a bit and cramps when he’s done too much.”

  Steve sighed and gave up on his tie. “Do you think Camilla, martinet that she is, would let him do any real harm to himself?”

  Savannah folded her nervous hands in her lap. “Of course not.”

  “Sweetheart.” Kneeling behind her, Steve pressed his face to hers, watching her in the mirror of her dressing table. “He’s going to take one look at our little girl and fall madly in love. Then he’s going to be so proud of you for producing such a wonderful combination of Benedict and Cody, he won’t be able to stay mad at you.

  “After that, he’s going to size me up. He’ll think about it for a minute, then come to the only conclusion he could.” Patting her stomach, he grinned and kissed her ear. “He’s going to think I’m one helluva guy for putting our little bundle in you in the first place.”

  Laughing as he intended she should, Savannah swatted his hand away. “In your dreams.”

  Rising, Steve gathered her shoulder length hair in his palms. “Stranger things have happened.” Things like a bucking horse called Shattered Dreams, who’d given him the best dream. And men like Charlie and Sandy, who would never admit they were in cahoots, but had played at long-distance matchmaking. And, finally, a half-breed sheriff, who believed in a woman so strongly, he helped her save the man she loved.