by Ann Major
But she had to help him—because of Lizzie and her twin. It wasn't going to be easy. Like all men, of all colors and all nations, he was unable to accept the unpalatable possibility that an intelligent woman might be able to put his affairs in order more capably than he.
For all his strutting and chest-thumping, he had certainly made a mess of things. His station was under siege. He was suspected of murdering his own wife. He'd had a year to clear his name, a year to resolve the conflict at Jackson Downs, and what had he accomplished? From what she’d read on the internet, the violence was accelerating. He was living under this terrible shadow and he expected Lizzie to live under it as well. Did he intend to hide out on his station forever in the hope that the sordid rumors would die down? She'd heard he might sell out if things didn't improve. That was no way for a child to grow up. At least not for her own, darling Lizzie.
Jess traced the heavy thread of stitching along the sheet's edge. Her Lizzie. His Lizzie. Whether he liked it or not, they were all in this together.
There was, no doubt, a simple solution to this whole affair. Someone had to ask questions, investigate, think. Men always used force when sometimes a fresh insight, a different tack, would make all the difference. More guns! was their cry when usually what they needed was more brains. There wasn't a man alive who could do much without a woman behind him. Nor a country that could be a great nation without allowing women to realize their full potential. Through the centuries men had warred and strutted, while women had quietly done the really important work—taming and civilizing and promoting culture. Not that men or the history books written by men had ever given them due credit.
Something small and dark moved beneath the spreading branches of the flame tree. The child was at his post again, like a silent sentinel, watching her. Moonlight shone upon the bright thatch of matted curls.
Jess had talked to Wally and to everyone else on the island and learned nothing. This child had followed her everywhere. Why? Did he know something? Why was he so afraid of her?
Jess determined to take him something, a present of some sort, in an attempt to win his trust.
She went out onto the landing. On the stairs lay several of Lizzie's toys. Lizzie had so many.
Jess picked up a small, stuffed pink brontosaurus with a purple ribbon around its neck and carried it down to the flame tree. As always the boy disappeared at her approach, but Jess was sure he couldn't have gone far. She laid the dinosaur down in a nest of tall, damp grasses and then ran back inside the house and up to her room.
No sooner was she inside than there was a crashing sound against her bedroom door. She flew to the window, thinking it was the child. At first she saw nothing but night and stars. Nothing but the Southern Cross blazing overhead like a great brooch on a black velvet canopy.
She opened the door out onto the veranda. The floor planking creaked, and suddenly a huge, ghostly apparition loomed out of nowhere, filling the darkness. She heard the dry rustle of the creature's white gown as it was dragged behind him. She almost screamed before she realized it was Jackson sleepwalking on the veranda. Because of the white sheet wrapped at his waist like a flowing skirt, he towered darker, bigger. Jess's first impression was of a primitive male, powerful and dangerous, sinewy muscles rippling in the moonlight. Then he wobbled against the railing and she was terrified he was going to fall.
The child was forgotten.
"Jackson."
It was a cry, and yet it was softer than velvet in the darkness. She did not recognize it as her own.
His unseeing gaze swept the shadows, fixed upon her, and drank in the sight of the shapely perfection of her female form clearly revealed by her transparent nightgown. The blatant sensuality of the look unnerved Jess.
Her heart froze and then began to pound more violently.
"Jess..." He tumbled toward her.
Her outstretched arms went around his muscled waist. The shock of unexpected contact with his virile body made her gasp. A tremor went through her and through him, as well. The sheet fell away, and cool fingers touched hot, naked male skin. Yet even though her pulse was racing, she did not shrink from touching him. He was burning up.
She was afraid as she'd never been afraid before.
"I thought I heard something," she said, alarmed. "You should be in bed."
"I'm not going to give Lizzie to you!" he roared.
"Dear God," she moaned, "you're delirious again."
He staggered, and they both nearly fell.
"I've got to get you back to bed," she said.
His room was too far. She led him to her own and helped him into her bed. To get him onto it, she collapsed on top of him. When he kept holding her, she could not get up.
In the struggle her corn-silk hair came loose and fell in a mass against his throat, where it was glued against his hot brown skin. She wore only a thin nightgown, and the filmy thing rode up to her thighs. Her legs were spread open across his, and she was straddling him provocatively.
The coarse hair of his muscular legs scratched the satin smoothness of her thighs. Her senses catapulted in alarm as she felt the force of his earthy, pagan attraction. She remembered another night when she'd lain on top of him writhing with ecstasy. That terrible night when she'd unintentionally betrayed her sister and, in doing so, had destroyed them all.
He was sick, she fought to remind herself, attempting to break the spell. She struggled, but he merely tightened his grip and aligned her body more closely to his.
Arousal sizzled through her like an electric current, but fortunately his mind seemed on something else.
"Lizzie... Don't take her away from me again," he pleaded desperately. “Not knowing whether she was alive or dead last year was unbearable.”
Guilt swamped her as she remembered how devastated she’d been when she’d lost Benjamin. Tad was so helpless, so sick. Deirdre had obviously put him through hell. The past year, when he'd been accused of her murder, could not have been easy.
Despite her stubborn will to resist his appeal, a great tenderness welled in Jess. Gently she brushed his cheek, his lips. "I'm not going to take Lizzie away from you."
"No?"
"No," she whispered. “It was never my intention to take her away.”
He breathed more easily.
Again she tried to rise, but he drew her inside the steel circle of his hands, flattening her once more against his chest. "Don't go," he said. She felt his warm breath waft against her throat. "I need you—now. I've been alone so long."
She knew all about being alone. For years, even when she'd been married, she'd felt alone. Jackson seemed so lost, so vulnerable. So hot and ill.
Another involuntary impulse of exquisite tenderness toward him seized her. She wanted to help him, more than she'd ever wanted to help anyone. He was much more charming and trustful delirious than he ever was when he was feeling well. She bent closer to him, meaning only to trace her fingertip across his brow. Instead she found she could not resist kissing his dark lashes. Then her mouth grazed his bearded cheek and last of all his lips, lingering for a timeless moment on their hot, sensual fullness.
He opened his mouth, inviting her to deepen her kiss.
Violent tremors of fresh desire warmed Jess's melting flesh as her mouth lingered on his. She felt his fingers stroke her hips. Her heart fluttered with a strange, thrilled wildness. She caught herself sharply, stunned by the intensity of her emotion. The way she lay against him, it was easy to pretend he didn't really hate her. It was difficult to remember how impossible he would be when he was himself again. He was so sweet, like a sick child.
She felt the hard, muscled contours of his shape burning against her body.
He was no child; he was all man. It was the curse of her life that she had always wanted him, even though he was sexist, pig-headed, and arrogant.
His fingers wound in her hair. "Don't go," he whispered raggedly again.
Nothing seemed to matter at the moment. The only reality
was his touch, his caress, his burning mouth beneath hers tasting faintly of the sugared medicines she'd forced down him.
"Don't leave me."
"You needn't worry about that," she murmured, loosening his hand, making her voice light even though she was more shaken than she would have ever admitted. "Tonight I'm going to take care of you, and when you're better I'm going with you to your property to help you make Jackson Downs safe for Lizzie." She stroked his forehead.
"Dangerous," he muttered thickly. "It's too dangerous."
"Nonsense! Why should you men have all the fun?"
"You're the most meddlesome..." His voice died away.
Jess knew he was too delirious to remember anything, but she kept talking to him because she always talked to patients in his state as if they were perfectly rational. "She needs both of us right now. I know you dislike me."
"I don't dislike you," he muttered passionately.
If only he didn't. If only she didn't long to feverishly draw him closer. If only she didn't enjoy the press of her warm, soft flesh against his quite so much.
"Well, even if you do, your property is so enormous—nearly a million acres? When we aren't actually battling, we shouldn't have to be with one another too often. You see, Jackson, I'm writing a book, from the journals I kept in India. And I've got a recertification exam to study for. So during the lulls, I'll have plenty to do. As you know, I don't believe in wasting anything so precious as time."
"Then why did you let us waste the past ten years?"
You were the one who married first, she wanted to say. The one who always belonged to someone else. Instead, she whispered, "I think we should forget the past and concentrate on taking care of our Lizzie together."
"Together," he groaned.
Whether this was a groan of affirmation or misery Jess couldn't quite tell, but preferring to be optimistic, she told herself he'd agreed. His single word was deep and long and husky before it died away.
His body went limp.
He lay so still that for a moment horror gripped her. She took his pulse. It was rapid but steady. Then she loosened her body from his and stumbled downstairs to get his medicine, water and some towels.
Returning, she chopped his pills, put them into a spoon filled with sugar and water just as she would have done for Lizzie and forced his mouth open. He knocked Jess's hand aside and sent the spoon and medicine clattering to the floor.[JO9]
Jess thought of how docilely the hyperactive Lizzie took her pills. Like all men when ill, Jackson was more difficult to manage than the most obstreperous child. As always, such resistance increased her determination. She commanded Meeta[JO10], who could and do whatever was necessary to make Jess’s life better, to come up, sit on one of his arms and squeeze his nose tightly shut. Jess tied his other hand to the bed, pried the spoon between his clamped teeth and made him swallow the second dose. Although he twisted his head and coughed and sputtered and growled like an angry bear, she succeeded in getting it down him.
"Madame doctor," Meeta whispered in her perfect English, [JO11], "he seems very sick again."
"He made himself sicker by trying to bully me. There's no real danger. He's as strong as an ox. Besides, though I deplore a certain tendency I have to brag, I'm on the job."
The worry went out of Meeta's dark, pretty face, and the flash of her sudden white smile was luminous as she looked up at Jess in that awestruck manner that Jess found so engaging. "You, Madam Doctor, do not brag. I have seen you save so many who were not so strong. My brother..."
Images of frail brown bodies, young and old, lying outside on the pavement of her clinic flashed in Jess's mind's eye before she suppressed the pain of those memories.
"Hush," Jess whispered. Effusive sentimentality always embarrassed her.
All through the night the two women sponged the man with the hard, beautiful body that seemed to have been cast from bronze. Jess tried to ignore how muscular he was, how shapely. But as always when she touched him, even now when he was so sick, something outside herself took hold. She was aware of a ripple of excitement in the center of her being, of a treacherous softening toward him. Even when he was in the middle of one of his childish tantrums, she sometimes experienced this same keen excitement. Indeed, never except when in his presence did she ever feel so vitally alive.
She had spent her life chasing restlessly about the globe, searching for something that was always just out of reach. Only when she was with him did she feel some sense of being where she really belonged. Now he was in trouble, and she was determined to help him save himself.
“I’m doing it for Lizzy,” she whispered into the dark as she sat beside him.
*
It was almost morning when his fever broke. Jess sent Meeta downstairs, and because Jackson was holding onto her hand, she allowed herself to collapse beside him.
He flung his arms across her waist and drew her close. She was supremely conscious of the feel of his large body all around her as he held her enfolded against him.
"No-no," she protested wearily.
But he was a man, used to getting his way. A man who had never learned to take no for an answer.
And he was stronger than she.
Deep within her was the desire to lie beside him and never leave the contentment she could know with him in that soft, warm bed.
His arms locked around her silken body and she could feel the moist heat of his bare chest burning through her gown to the skin of her breasts.
She couldn't move even if she'd wanted to.
She struggled no more.
*
The cotton sheets were cool against her body as Jess dreamed of Jackson. She was back in her college days at the University of Texas when she'd been young and naive, sure that all the world needed was Jessica Bancroft to solve its problems.
It was a bustling Saturday morning in October. The air was crisp, and the tennis courts were crowded with students who had no Saturday classes and were killing time until the football game and fraternity dances that night. The UT tower chimed the quarter hour.
Jess was sagging against the net while she waited for her twin to return. Deirdre had said she wanted a soft drink. In reality she'd stomped off the court, mad about a line call.
The clay court burned through the rubber soles of Jess's tennis shoes to her toes. Impatiently she glanced at her watch. Why did Deirdre have to be such a bad sport? Jess decided to give her sister five minutes and no more.
Five minutes later when Jess heard someone on the court behind her, she squared her shoulders and prepared herself for battle.
Without warning a golden giant of a man in faded jeans and scarred boots loped across the court and swatted her affectionately on her behind. Furious, she whirled, intending to slap him. He took one look at her scowl and raised hand, laughed, threw his cowboy hat to the ground and pulled her into his arms, crushing her against the granite wall of his chest.
Never in all her life had Jess felt anyone who was so lean and rangy, whose skin was so hot, whose body was so brick hard. He was not the usual UT sort, but a kicker, a man used to the open ranch lands of Texas. His hands were callused but his touch was gentle.
"This court's taken," she hissed.
"I don't want the court," he drawled cowboy-style, smiling down at her. “Did you miss me?”
His smile lit up a pair of beautiful blue male eyes. Even though she could barely think because of the bewildering warmth that heated her trembling body, she realized he must have mistaken her for her twin. Not that he was Deirdre’s usual type.
His features—the wide forehead, the carved cheek and jaw, the strong chin and straight nose—seemed chiseled from dark stone. He was blond, and he kept smiling. Cowboy or no, he was gorgeous and so was his crooked, sexy smile.
He wore a washed-out blue cotton shirt that stretched tautly across powerfully muscled shoulders. She felt mesmerized, frightened. She wanted to look away. To catch her breath. But when he didn't release her from
his level gaze, she found herself gaping at him instead.
"Darlin’," the charismatic stranger drawled. "Don't get so riled."
Her face flamed. "Darlin’?"
She echoed his endearment in a dumbstruck tone, but apparently he thought she was using it in the same seductive manner he had.
"God, you're beautiful," he murmured in that deep voice that made shivers crawl up and down her spine. "What do you say we kiss and make up?"
"Y-you're crazy."
A lazy look of wickedness and delight stole over his face.
She shoved at him, but it was like trying to move a mountain of rock.
"One kiss," he whispered, grinning down at her in a manner she found absurdly engaging.
His long fingers wound into her thick hair, gently pulling her head back so that the curve of her slender neck all the way down to the provocative swell of her breasts was exposed. He lowered his mouth to hers.
She caught the heady scent of his after-shave, and it worked on her shattered senses like an aphrodisiac.
She swayed closer. Why wasn't she doing anything to stop him? He must think she was her twin. Why was she just standing there with her lips pursed in readiness?
Like one hypnotized, Jess watched the tantalizing descent of his beautifully sculptured lips. At the last second, in a frenzy she tried to twist away but that had only increased his determination. His lips ruthlessly zeroed in on hers.
She opened her mouth to scream, but his tongue merely slid inside it. He tasted faintly of cigarettes, which curiously she didn’t mind. She could smell his hot, masculine scent, and the odor was warmly erotic. She felt the heated dampness of his skin under her fingertips. His wide brown hands shaped her against him, and every bone in her skeleton turned to wax.
She felt a quickening deep inside her, a longing so intense it made her feel faint. He was breathing unevenly himself.
One kiss with this brash, blond, suntanned cowboy, and she was dissolving into him butter melting on hot bread. One kiss was merely the appetizer that whetted her appetite for the whole meal.
