The terrible anger flashed into his eyes again. “When he hit you…” He stopped, and she saw his jaw muscles work when he clamped his teeth together.
Lifting her free hand, she touched his sleeve. Through the material, she felt the heat radiating from him. She rested her hand on him and felt the tension in his arm.
“Don’t,” he said, looking harried and angry and perplexed all at the same time.
She couldn’t help herself. Slowly, she ran her hand up his arm and over his shoulder. She trailed her fingers across his collarbone until she reached the strong brown column of his neck. She found the pulse there, beating strong and steady.
Laying her hand flat against his chest, she soaked up the warmth. Closing her eyes, she savored the strength in his body, ready to be used at his command, and marveled at the fact that he’d used it for her.
“How did you know I needed you?” she asked. Her voice seemed to come from a long way off.
“I know where you go when you want to be alone.”
“I see.” He knew her habits much better than she knew his. And knowing she was alone down by the river, had he followed her for reasons of his own?
“You always spend time by the river during your free time. I was out walking when I saw Hodkin’s truck on the side of the road. I didn’t know if he’d…bother you.”
She heard the pause as he chose his words and knew he’d been deeply concerned for her. “Not me. It was Venita he wanted. He’s spoken to her a couple of times this week, so I knew he was after her.”
“And you went to her rescue.”
“Mm-hmm.” She didn’t want to talk. Actually, she wanted him to kiss her. A sort of sleepy languor washed over her, and she swayed against him.
He uttered a low curse, then picked her up. Carrying her into the bedroom, he laid her on the huge bed, removed her shoes and sat beside her. After turning on the bedside lamp, he frowned at her as if he didn’t quite know what to do next.
The thought occurred to her that probably he had never had a woman in his bed that he wasn’t intent on making love to. This had to be a new experience.
All sorts of fantasies danced through her head as she mulled over the things they could do. If they were lovers.
He removed the paper towel she still held to her lip. With his thumb, he pulled her lower lip down until he could see the injury. He leaned forward to inspect it.
“The bleeding has stopped,” he reported. “I don’t think you need stitches. I would advise against eating anything hot and spicy for a few days.”
She smiled, carefully because her lip hurt when she moved it, at his wry advice. She wondered if he fell into the category of “hot and spicy.”
Curiosity got the better of her. She licked her tongue across his thumb and tasted the slightly salty tang of his skin.
He drew his hand back, startled. When she lifted her gaze to his face, his expression was stern and unreadable. She waited, not sure what he would do.
“You’re just asking for trouble, aren’t you?” he said after an eternity of heartbeats.
She shook her head, then changed her mind and nodded yes.
He bit out an expletive. “You get to me faster than any woman I’ve ever met.”
“Is that good or bad?” she dared to ask.
The room was filled with soft shadows as the sky darkened into deep twilight. The cone of light from the lamp enclosed them in its golden hue. The atmosphere was private and intimate and very, very nice.
“Oh, it would be good.” He laughed, the sound soft but harsh with cynicism. His glance raked boldly over her, effectively changing the subject to one deeply personal be tween them.
“I know.” It was a simple answer to a simple truth. Simple? she mused. Yes, simple… and complicated and dangerous.
Heat flared in his eyes, and she knew he’d thought of her this way, of the two of them alone in the privacy of his bedroom, more than once. She’d done the same. Passion had sizzled between them from the moment of that first contact. It hadn’t let up.
Stealing a peek at him through her lashes, she knew she had to be careful. He was still high on the surprising fury that had erupted when he’d come to her rescue. She wanted more than an adrenaline rush, more than passion, between them.
As sudden as a spring shower, she knew she was in danger of falling in love with Ty. Panic washed through her, then subsided. She’d learned long ago not to fight what life dished out. To do so was an exercise in futility. But falling in love…no way.
“You had better watch what you say. You’re alone with me in my bedroom,” he reminded her, his tone cool, his eyes hot. “Aren’t you worried about your virtue?”
“I’d never worry with you.”
That brought him up short. He stared at her, as if trying to figure her out. She held his gaze.
He raised one eyebrow, giving her a quizzical look. “Are you inviting me to make love to you?”
It was with a sense of pure elation that she realized she wanted that very much. “Not now. Not this way.”
“What way?” he challenged. “I’m willing to try anything within reason.” He gave her a knowing look.
She cursed the women who had come before her, those who had made him hard and skeptical and cautious.
“I wonder if you know…” he began.
“Know what?” she asked, feeling a hazy languor spread over her like a warm blanket. It was really too hard to think.
“What your eyes are saying.” His gaze skimmed her lips, down her body, then returned to her eyes. “Do you?”
She laid her hand on his chest, unable to resist touching him when he was so close. He felt nice to touch. His eyes darkened as she let her hand trail down to rest on his thigh, palm up. He laid his hand over hers.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I know.”
This wasn’t like her. She was cautious and levelheaded. She was ambitious and career-driven. There was no place in her life for a man.
“Anything we share, it’s for the moment only,” he said with savage honesty.
She felt the pain of rejection, as if he’d promised her the moon and taken it back.
He leaned over her, his mouth very close to hers. “You didn’t like that. Did you expect oaths of undying love?”
“Would you give them?”
“No. Don’t expect anything of me but this.” His lips met hers on the last word.
Any answer she might have made was forgotten in the wonder of his touch. He glided over her lips, lingering here and there, with the softest of caresses. His gentleness was her undoing. Fury she could have resisted, but this…no.
“Give me your mouth,” he coaxed.
She opened her lips. A tiny groan escaped him before his tongue slipped inside and flicked against hers. His arm stole behind her, pulling her close until her breasts were pressed to his chest. She felt his breathing quicken.
She wasn’t prepared for the sparks that shot away down inside her, nor for the wildfires they set off in secret places in her body. When he slipped one hand into her hair, she wrapped her arms around him and held on.
It came as a surprise, this gentle flow of passion, not at all like the kiss in the twilight last week. She gave a little cry of delight. It felt so good to be held this way.
Just when she thought she might drown in ecstasy, he lifted his head. He was breathing hard, as hard as she was.
“You’d take me right here, right now,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She wasn’t prepared to answer that.
“What’s in it for you?” he demanded.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing but a pleasant toss in the blankets?” He shook his head. “A woman like you, you’d expect more than that.”
“A woman like me?”
He watched her, his eyes so dark with emotion they looked black in the lamp light. When the telephone rang, he continued to study her while he picked it up. To her surprise, his expre
ssion softened when he heard who was on the line. “Good,” he said. “Yeah, you can walk by yourself. I’ll meet you halfway.” He said goodbye and hung up.
She started to swing her legs off the bed when he stood.
“Stay here,” he ordered. “Jonathan had dinner with Martha and Buck. He’s on his way home. I need to put him to bed, then I want to talk to you.”
“What about?” She felt dizzy as she sat up. Those couple of blows had been more damaging than she’d thought. She lay against the pillows and waited for the wooziness to pass.
“You know the answer to that.”
The quiet accusation in his voice caused the wild heat to run over her again, starting from some fire deep inside and running to her skin, bringing a flush with it.
He touched her cheek, a gesture at once seductive and oddly tender. “You seem so totally without subterfuge. I wonder…”
“What?”
“What you’d take from a man.” He paused at the door. “And what you’d give.”
He left her there on his bed, wondering the same things.
Chapter Five
Carly must have dozed off. She sat up, startled, when she heard a child’s voice in the hall.
“It was really neat, Dad. Do you think I could try it?”
“We’ll see, son.” The standard parental delaying tactic in answer to a child’s eagerness for life.
She smiled, then winced at the painful pull on her lip.
“It’s for free, and Mike’s mom said she’d bring me home.”
“Sounds like you have it all worked out,” Ty said with wry amusement.
“So can I? Please?”
“I guess so. But you have to listen and do everything the coach tells you. Learning to rope is hard work.”
“Right. I’ll be really careful.”
Carly crept off the comfortable bed and padded over to the door. Ty and a youngster about six stopped on the marble steps.
“Who’re you?” the boy asked with friendly curiosity.
“Carly Lightfoot. Are you Jonathan?”
“Yes. Are you visiting my dad?” He looked beyond her to the bedroom, then returned his gaze to her. “Say, are you my new mom?”
She was astounded by the question. For once in her life, she was completely without words.
“No, she isn’t,” Ty said.
The boy looked disappointed. “Your hair is really long,” he went on. “All the way down your back. It’s pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you going to stay with us awhile?”
Carly wondered how many other women had “stayed” with them.
“No,” Ty broke in decisively. “She was hurt, and I had to treat the injury.”
“Oh. Where did you get hurt?” Jonathan asked Carly, at once interested in this new fact.
His eyes, she noted, were the same sky blue as his father’s, but his hair was light blond rather than tawny.
“My lip.” She bent down so he could see and touched the sore spot to show him.
He studied it for a few seconds. “It doesn’t look too bad,” he assured her. “Hardly swollen at all.”
“It’s time for your bath,” Ty reminded the boy.
“You can come talk to me,” Jonathan invited. “My friend and I are going to take rodeo lessons and learn how to ride and rope a bull. Have you been to the rodeo? We’re going to have one at school for Halloween. Neat, huh?”
“It sounds super. I remember reading about it in the paper,” Carly said, falling into step beside the talkative boy.
Jonathan chatted happily about learning to rope. Like his father, he hadn’t a shy bone in his body.
Ty wasn’t contributing much to the conversation. However, he didn’t seem to mind his son talking to her.
The boy’s bedroom was a child’s delight. The bed was part of a gym-and-storage set. A desk was tucked into the structure, too. There were lots of nooks and crannies in the room, all filled with books and games and fun things to do and learn.
“This is very nice,” she said, noticing how it all went together for optimum storage, leaving a broad play area in the middle of the room.
“My dad and I designed it,” Jonathan said proudly. “Then we built it, well, him mostly, but I helped.”
Carly looked at Ty. His expression mocked her surprise at his abilities. She’d learned that he liked growing things and experimenting with new types of cattle and working with nature during her days at the ranch. Now she knew he also liked building things. And that he cared very much for his son.
The love was evident in every movement, every inflection of his voice, as he started the shower and laid out pajamas, then reminded Jonathan to put his clothes in the hamper and that the water was running. The man had a soft spot, after all.
“We’ll have a story after my shower,” Jonathan told her. “You can listen to it if you want to. Can’t she, Dad?”
Ty hesitated, then nodded. “Sure.”
She realized he didn’t like her being there, listening to their intimate family life. Well, too bad. She hadn’t asked to come. After all, he was the one who’d dragged her to his home and insisted on doctoring her.
Her lips burned as she recalled that strange kiss. By some instinct, she knew that he’d wanted to kiss her passionately and without restraint, but he hadn’t. He’d been careful.
It gave her a strange feeling to know he was, for all his bruskness and cowboy toughness, a considerate person.
Jonathan went into the bathroom and closed the door. In a minute, she heard him singing in the shower. She turned her gaze upon Ty, knowing whom the boy got the habit from.
He shrugged in an offhand manner. “In the shower, everyone sounds like Caruso.”
His embarrassment was endearing. The idea of him singing in the shower, as well as other images that thought invoked, caused her breath to catch in her throat. Inside, she went all nervous and fluttery as usual.
She watched while he turned back the covers on the high bed with its railing all around like a log fence. He put away a couple of toy trucks and straightened the room.
The sounds of the shower stopped. In another minute, Jonathan came out of the steamy bathroom dressed in cotton pajamas.
There was something very sweet about a child who was clean and ready for bed. This one had a curious vulnerability about him. His trust in the world was absolute. As hers had been long ago.
“Come sit on the bench with me and Dad,” he invited.
She glanced at Ty and got his slight nod before advancing to the wide, padded bench built under the window. Jonathan sat in the middle, between her and his father, and picked up the book he’d selected. He handed it to Ty and settled against a wedged-shaped cushion. Ty opened the book.
His baritone voice, with the attractive grittiness in it, rumbled pleasantly in the room as he read the adventure story. He made the tale come alive as he and Jonathan became engrossed in the lives of a pioneer family.
It seemed to her that the mere sound of Ty’s voice held the night at bay, and that all the good things in life were safely encircled and contained here in this room by that voice. It was a sound to lull angels to sleep.
Her lashes drooped heavily against her cheeks. She could hardly hold her head up. She shifted more comfortably against the cushion and forced her eyes open. Looking at Ty and his son caused an ache in her heart.
She wondered about the woman who had been in their lives and had left. What a fool she’d been to give them up.
When the story was over, Ty tucked Jonathan into bed. The boy kissed his father, then looked expectantly at her. She went over and received a kiss on the cheek and a hug. It made her feel funny inside, as if her skin were suddenly too tight for her body.
“I told Dad I wanted him to get us a new mom. I have my real mom in New York, but we need one for here, too. I like you.” He touched her hair, which was cascading down over her shoulders. “You’re pretty.”
“Thank you,” she
said, feeling very humble. The gift of trust and friendship was a precious thing.
She walked out while Ty finished saying good-night to his son and discussed a project for the next day. She lingered at the door. Watching them, a strange notion leapt into her mind and refused to budge. She wondered what it would be like to be the woman in their lives…the one they needed on a daily basis.
Ty came into the kitchen right after the coffee finished heating. She poured two mugs and took them to the breakfast bar. “Your home is lovely,” she said.
The kitchen had a beige counter that looked like smooth sand but was of man-made material. The floor was textured vinyl, which she’d first thought was green marble. Some of the white cabinets had glass doors. Behind them, she could see crystal bowls and glasses that looked expensive.
A pattern in the beige-and-green curtains had been duplicated in the wallpaper that covered one wall and was continued down the hall. Green and white were the dominant colors in the house.
“It should be. We paid some decorator enough to retire in style by the time she finished with it.”
Carly smiled. “A typical male attitude. You’d have probably been satisfied to slap some paint around and call it quits.”
“What would you have done?”
“With this room?” she asked, stalling as she thought of sharing a house with him. It sounded like fun to pore over books and ideas together.
He nodded, coming over and sitting on one of the leather bar stools on the other side of the counter from where she stood.
“I like it as it is. I’d add some plants, maybe an herb garden in the greenhouse window.” She nodded to the window that jutted out from the wall.
“That’s what it’s for. My ex-wife liked to use fresh seasoning when she cooked.” He took a drink of the coffee she’d found in the pot and reheated, then peered into the cup as if wondering if he could trust her not to poison him or something.
“Was she a gourmet cook?” Carly asked, feeling very put out with him because of his ex-wife’s cooking ability. She was such a lousy cook. When she invited her friends over for dinner, they always came early and took over the kitchen themselves.
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