by Diana Palmer
“Gladly, it sounds,” she said lightly. “You don’t want a noose around your neck anyway, do you?”
He studied her for a long moment, his eyes quiet, haunted, then he turned his gaze to the road. “If New York is what you really want, tell me!” he bit off.
She took a deep breath. “All right. It’s what I really want!” she lied.
He didn’t say a word for another mile. “Okay,” he said then. “We’re quits.”
Her eyes filled with tears that she was too proud to let him see. It was no good telling herself this was the best way. She was hurting too much. She started to take off the emerald ring, but her fingers wouldn’t cooperate. Soon, she promised. Soon I’ll do it; I’ll give it back.
Sitting beside him in the small private plane as he flew them to the airport, she refused to speak until they’d taxied to a stop and were walking into the terminal.
“Why are we here, anyway?” she asked in a husky tone.
“To meet Layne. She’s agreed to meet me here so I can sign some papers.”
“Layne!” She glared at him, lips trembling, eyes flashing. “You brought me here, knowing that…that woman is coming?” she demanded. “How could you!”
His eyebrows shot straight up. But before he could say anything, he was being paged to the information desk.
“This way,” he said, propelling her with a steely hand. He glanced down at her. “When we’re through here, you’re going to explain that outburst.”
“Don’t hold your breath, big man,” she retorted.
He dragged her to the desk, where a tall, heavyset woman with black hair waited, smiling down at a young boy about six years old.
“Hello, Layne,” a grinning Matt greeted her, holding out a hand to shake hers. After introducing the two women, he said to Layne, “Thanks for making this rushed trip.”
“No problem.” Layne laughed. “My youngest wanted to ride with Mama, so I let him come along. I have three, you know,” she confided to a thunderstruck Catherine. “My husband and I work all hours just to pay the grocery bills. You should see how much food they can put away!”
Matt smiled, but without much feeling. He signed the necessary papers while Catherine stood stock-still nearby, her heart as cold as November snow. She’d really done it now. She’d lied, telling Matt she didn’t want to marry him, only because she was sure he was involved with Layne. And here was Layne, a very married lady who obviously loved her family and whose only interest in Matt was making a sale. Catherine wanted to die. How could she have misread the situation so horribly? And worse, why had Matt deliberately misled her?
She waited until he finished, then said goodbye to Layne and followed Matt back out to the airplane. Stony silence prevailed until after they’d landed at the Comanche Flats airstrip.
“She’s married,” she said dully after he’d put her in the car and gotten in beside her.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“Angel said she called you all the time.”
“Of course. We’ve been working on this deal for a long time. There were days when I wouldn’t even let Angel put her through to me, I was so sick of the wrangling.” He lit a cigarette with a hard sigh. “We closed the deal this morning.”
“I…Hal said she was your latest,” she murmured. “And you let me think she was. Why?”
He shrugged. “It was all part of the game, honey. I thought I was winning, for a while there.”
So she’d been right. Layne was fiction, but the game wasn’t. He’d only been amusing himself. Tears stung her eyes as she stared out at the landscape.
They drove back to the ranch in a stark kind of silence, and as she glanced at Matt, she found the stranger there—a cold, unsmiling man who looked as if he’d lost his whole world. Where was the pleasant, teasing, laughing man of weeks past? And then she began to wonder if that hadn’t been a mask he’d worn to keep her from seeing the very serious man underneath. She felt as if she’d never really known Matt at all. Now New York was more a terror than an anticipated delight.
He stopped at the front porch and waited for Catherine to get out. And she had a premonition that if she did, it would be the end of everything between them. Outside, clouds had formed overhead and it was just beginning to sprinkle rain. But she felt much more stormy than the weather.
She turned to him, but he wouldn’t even look at her. His face was harder than she’d seen it in weeks.
“Matt?” she began softly.
“There’s nothing more to say, Catherine,” he replied quietly. “It’s all over.”
“I should have trusted you, shouldn’t I?” she asked, as the puzzle pieces began to fall into place. “I should have realized that you aren’t the kind of man who’d court one woman and keep another on the side. And I didn’t even begin to see it.”
His head turned slowly, his eyes solemn and even as he studied her. “Perhaps you didn’t want to see it,” he remarked, and drew on his cigarette. “You’re very young, Catherine. I should have taken that into account. You didn’t have the experience to understand what was happening.”
She smiled wistfully. “I feel pretty old right now, if you want to know.”
He shook his head. “You needed time, and I couldn’t give it to you. Patience isn’t one of my virtues.” He finished the cigarette and put it out. “Go to New York, honey. Get your wanderlust out of your system. Maybe you’ll find someone up there who’s closer to your own age—”
“No!”
She hadn’t meant to do that, to put quite so much feeling into that one word. But her voice broke on it, and Matt’s head jerked around when he heard her. He searched her anguished face, and his chest was still, as if he’d stopped breathing.
Her eyes locked into his, helpless, hungry. Her lips trembled as she tried to find words and failed.
His face hardened even more; his eyes blazed as they returned her hungry stare. “I love you,” he said roughly. “Is that what you want to hear, Kit?”
Tears came down her cheeks like silver rain, and she managed a watery smile. Rainbows. All her dreams coming true at once. Heaven.
“Oh, God. Come here!” he whispered unsteadily and reached for her.
She felt his mouth devouring hers, his arms crushing her against his hard chest. And outside, the rain beat on the metal roof while she got drunk on Matt’s warm mouth and slid her hands lovingly into his dark, cool hair.
“Love me,” she whispered as his mouth opened and brushed lovingly against hers. “Love me, Matt.”
His hands made magic on her body, finding their way under her blouse to warm, soft curves that he quickly made bare and caressed with aching tenderness. His mouth pressed her head back into his shoulder with its hungry, ardent pressure and he made a rough sound under his breath, a groan.
“I was jealous,” she whispered breathily in his ear as she pressed closer. “I loved you, and there was Layne, and I was so afraid to take you seriously. I couldn’t have gone on living if it hadn’t been true, if you’d only been playing.”
He laughed gruffly and his arms contracted lovingly, pressing her yielding body against his own as the rain made a veil between them and the world. “That was the biggest joke of all,” he whispered, “that I was amusing myself with you. My God, I’ve been out of my mind waiting for you, waiting for you to see me as a man. You came out on the flats and announced you were going to New York, and I felt my world crashing down on my head! And Hal didn’t help. I could have shot him for interfering.”
“I could have, too,” she breathed, nuzzling her face into his throat. “But with all the women you had running after you, I couldn’t believe you’d ever wanted me.”
“Window dressing,” he confessed, lifting his head to pin her with his dark, warm eyes. “Kit, do you remember the night we almost went too far, at the barbecue? And I told you it had been so long since I’d had a woman?”
She nodded, coloring a little with the fierce sweetness of the memory.
He
touched her mouth with fingers that had a fine tremor. “I haven’t had a woman in two years, Kit,” he whispered huskily. “Not since the day I opened my eyes and realized that I’d been possessed by soft green eyes and a laughing young face that were all I wanted to see for the rest of my life.”
She didn’t know what to say. She touched his face, wondering at the love she could read in it so plainly. “How could I have been so blind?” she whispered.
“How could I?” he replied. “All the signs were there, but I was too strung out worrying about losing you to read them. Kit, I tricked you into this engagement, but I wanted it so desperately. I want to marry you. To have children with you. To lie in the darkness with you and love you all the days of my life. If you leave me, I might just as well lie down and die,” he murmured fervently against her warm mouth. “I love you…!”
She felt the wetness of her tears in the kiss and lifted her body against him, savoring the newness of belonging, smiling breathlessly as his searching hands went under her shirt and took possession of the soft weight of her breasts.
“Did you know I was in bed with you the night Hal tricked me?” she whispered shakily, then caught her breath as his thumbs edged out and found the evidence of her arousal.
“I knew,” he confessed with a faint smile. “But it was too good an opportunity to miss. For once, old Hal did the right thing and tried to make amends, and it didn’t backfire. I took shameless advantage of it. I thought if I could get you to marry me, I could teach you to love me.”
“And I didn’t need teaching,” she murmured softly.
“Well, not in that,” he agreed. “But in other ways.…”
“You’ll have to marry me, then,” she told him. “And…” She gasped, lifting herself closer to his searching hands. “Oh, Matt, it had better be soon!”
“I feel the same way,” he murmured at her mouth. “I want you so badly, Kit. I want the physical expression of love, the joining, the oneness. I’ve never had that because, until now, I’ve never loved.”
He made it sound so beautiful, so much a part of loving and being loved. She looked up at him with her heart in her eyes, feeling already that bonding of skin on skin, of voices urgent and hungry, of hands touching, bodies locking together in a rhythm that was already familiar. Her face reddened at the vivid images, and he saw that look and crushed her mouth with his, groaning.
“I can picture it, too,” he whispered unsteadily, holding her even closer. “Picture it, feel it, the way you’ll be with me. Your body under mine, your voice breaking, your hands clutching at my hips—”
“Matt!” She shuddered with the sweetest kind of pleasure and hid her face against his pounding chest.
“I’ll be so damned tender, Kit,” he breathed. “I’ll cherish you.”
“Yes, I know,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “I love you so.”
“Hush, and kiss me.”
By the time he’d had enough, the windows were fogged up all over, closing out the world, and she lay in his arms looking up at him with lazy, seductive eyes.
“I guess you won’t let me work?” she teased.
“If you want to,” he replied surprisingly. “You can publicize all my sales.”
“You’ll have to pay me a good salary,” she added.
He smiled slowly, looking dark and handsome and wildly possessive. “Oh, I’ll do that. And you get great fringe benefits.”
“Like insurance and retirement?”
“Plus you’ll get to sleep with the boss,” he added, grinning from ear to ear.
She peeked up at him through her lashes. “Nice benefits.”
“Reciprocal, too,” he murmured, letting his eyes run slowly over her body.
He bent to her mouth again, and just as he started to draw her closer, they heard voices outside the car.
“Are you sure they’re in there?” Hal was asking. “Windows sure are foggy.”
“That’s why I’m sure they’re in there,” Betty replied. “Go on, knock on the window.”
“I don’t know. Matt’s got a pretty hard right cross.”
Smiling at Catherine, Matt sighed as he reached over and flicked on the ignition. He let the power window down a couple of inches.
“Well?” he asked Hal and Betty, who were standing huddled under an umbrella.
They took in the picture: swollen mouths, dreamy looks, Catherine’s crumpled shirt, Matt’s shirt half unbuttoned. They grinned.
“How about some champagne?” Hal offered.
“Get it out,” Matt agreed. “It feels like a champagne morning, all right.”
Catherine looked up into the warmly possessive eyes of her husband-to-be, the laughter soft and loving on her face. Yes, it felt like a champagne morning. And it would, all the mornings of their lives. She told him so as the others disappeared, and she watched him smile slowly as he eased the window back up and bent again to her mouth.
* * * * *
New York Times bestselling author
Serves up one of her most popular Texans – Jason Donavan – in a thrilling story destined to enthrall!
“Diana Palmer is a mesmerizing storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.”
—Affaire de Coeur
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DIANA PALMER
The prolific author of more than one hundred books, Diana Palmer got her start as a newspaper reporter. A multi–New York Times bestselling author and one of the top ten romance writers in America, she has a gift for telling the most sensual tales with charm and humor. Diana lives with her family in Cornelia, Georgia.
Visit her website at www.DianaPalmer.com.
ISBN-13: 9781460383650
CHAMPAGNE GIRL
Copyright © 2015 by Diana Palmer
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