Sutton's Way

by Diana Palmer

  “Are you all right?” he asked her after a minute, staring down at her bent head.

  “Sure.” She forced a smile. “He was so little, Quinn.” She stopped when her voice broke and lowered her eyes to the table. “I guess you think I’m a wimp.”

  “Not really.” Without taking time to think about the consequences, his lean hands pulled her up by the arms, holding her in front of him so that her eyes were on a level with his deep blue, plaid flannel shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, and it was open at the throat, where thick, dark hair curled out of it. He looked and smelled fiercely masculine and Amanda’s knees weakened at the unexpected proximity. His big hands bit into her soft flesh, and she wondered absently if he realized just how strong he was.

  The feel of him so close was new and terribly exciting, especially since he’d reached for her for the first time. She didn’t know what to expect, and her heart was going wild. She lowered her eyes to his throat. His pulse was jumping and she stared at it curiously, only half aware of his hold and the sudden increase of his breathing.

  He was having hell just getting a breath. The scent of her was in his nostrils, drowning him. Woman smell. Sweet and warm. His teeth clenched. It was bad enough having to look at her, but this close, she made his blood run hot and wild as it hadn’t since he was a young man. He didn’t know what he was doing, but the need for her had haunted him for days. He wanted so badly to kiss her, the way she’d kissed him the day before, but in a different way. He wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.

  “You smell of flowers,” he said roughly.

  That was an interesting comment from a nonpoetic man. She smiled a little to herself. “It’s my shampoo,” she murmured.

  He drew in a steadying breath. “You don’t wear your hair down at all, do you?”

  “Just at night,” she replied, aware that his face was closer than it had been, because she could feel his breath on her forehead. He was so tall and overwhelming this close. He made her feel tiny and very feminine.

  “I’m sorry about the calf, Amanda,” he said. “We lose a few every winter. It’s part of ranching.”

  The shock of her name on his lips made her lift her head. She stared up at him curiously, searching his dark, quiet eyes. “I suppose so. I shouldn’t have gotten so upset, though. I guess men don’t react to things the way women do.”

  “You don’t know what kind of man I am,” he replied. His hands felt vaguely tremulous. He wondered if she knew the effect she had on him. “As it happens, I get attached to the damned things, too.” He sighed heavily. “Little things don’t have much choice in this world. They’re at the mercy of everything and everybody.”

  Her eyes softened as they searched his. He sounded different when he spoke that way. Vulnerable. Almost tender. And so alone.

  “You aren’t really afraid of me, are you?” he asked, as if the thought was actually painful.

  She grimaced. “No. Of course not. I was ashamed of what I’d done, and a little nervous of the way you reacted to it, that’s all. I know you wouldn’t hurt me.” She drew in a soft breath. “I know you resent having me here,” she confessed. “I resented having to depend on you for shelter. But the snow will melt soon, and I’ll leave.”

  “I thought you’d had lovers,” he confessed quietly. “The way you acted…well, it just made all those suspicions worse. I took you at face value.”

  Amanda smiled. “It was all put-on. I don’t even know why I did it. I guess I was trying to live down to your image of me.”

  He loved the sensation her sultry black eyes aroused in him. Unconsciously his hands tightened on her arms. “You haven’t had a man, ever?” he asked huskily.

  The odd shadow of dusky color along his cheekbones fascinated her. She wondered about the embarrassment asking the question had caused. “No. Not ever,” she stammered.

  “The way you look?” he asked, his eyes eloquent.

  “What do you mean, the way I look?” she said, bristling.

  “You know you’re beautiful,” he returned. His eyes darkened. “A woman who looks like you do could have her pick of men.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed without conceit. “But I’ve never wanted a man in my life, to be dominated by a man. I’ve made my own way in the world. I’m a musician,” she told him, because that didn’t give away very much. “I support myself by playing a keyboard.”

  “Yes, Elliot told me. I’ve heard you play for him. You’re good.” He felt his heartbeat increasing as he looked at her. She smelled so good. He looked down at her mouth and remembered how it had felt for those few seconds when he’d given in to her playful kiss. Would she let him do it? He knew so little about those subtle messages women were supposed to send out when they wanted a man’s lovemaking. He couldn’t read Amanda’s eyes. But her lips were parted and her breath was coming rather fast from between them. Her face was flushed, but that could have been from the cold.

  She gazed up into his eyes and couldn’t look away. He wasn’t handsome. His face really seemed as if it had been chipped away from the side of the Rockies, all craggy angles and hard lines. His mouth was thin and faintly cruel looking. She wondered if it would feel as hard as it looked if he was in control, dominating her lips. It had been different when she’d kissed him….

  “What are you thinking?” he asked huskily, because her eyes were quite frankly on his mouth.

  “I…was wondering,” she whispered hesitantly, “how hard your mouth would be if you kissed me.”

  His heart stopped and then began to slam against his chest. “Don’t you know already?” he asked, his voice deeper, harsher. “You kissed me.”

  “Not…properly.”

  He wondered what she meant by properly. His wife had only kissed him when she had to, and only in the very beginning of their courtship. She always pushed him away and murmured something about mussing her makeup. He couldn’t remember one time when he’d kissed anyone with passion, or when he’d ever been kissed by anyone else like that.

  His warm, rough hands let go of her arms and came up to frame her soft oval face. His breath shuddered out of his chest when she didn’t protest as he bent his dark head.

  “Show me what you mean…by properly,” he whispered.

  He had to know, she thought dizzily. But his lips touched hers and she tasted the wind and the sun on them. Her hands clenched the thick flannel shirt and she resisted searching for buttons, because she wanted very much to touch that thicket of black, curling hair that covered his broad chest. She went on her tiptoes and pushed her mouth against his, the force of the action parting his lips as well as her own, and she felt him stiffen and heard him groan as their open mouths met.

  She dropped back onto her feet, her wide, curious eyes meeting his stormy ones.

  “Like that?” he whispered gruffly, bending to repeat the action with his own mouth. “I’ve never done it…with my mouth open,” he said, biting off the words against her open lips.

  She couldn’t believe he’d said that. She couldn’t believe, either, the sensations rippling down to her toes when she gave in to the force of his ardor and let him kiss her that way, his mouth rough and demanding as one big hand slid to the back of her head to press her even closer.

  A soft sound passed her lips, a faint moan, because she couldn’t get close enough to him. Her breasts were flattened against his hard chest, and she felt his heartbeat against them. But she wanted to be closer than that, enveloped, crushed to him.

  “Did I hurt you?” he asked in a shaky whisper that touched her lips.

  “What?” she whispered back dizzily.

  “You made a sound.”

  Her eyes searched his, her own misty and half closed and rapt. “I moaned,” she whispered. Her nails stroked him through the shirt and she liked the faint tautness of his body as he reacted to it. “I like being kissed like that.” She rubbed her forehead against him, smelling soap and detergent and pure man. “Could we take your shirt off?” she whispered.

>   Her hands were driving him nuts, and he was wondering the same thing himself. But somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered that Harry was around, and that it might look compromising if he let her touch him that way. In fact, it might get compromising, because he felt his body harden in a way it hadn’t since his marriage. And because it made him vulnerable and he didn’t want her to feel it, he took her gently by the arms and moved her away from him with a muffled curse.

  “Harry,” he said, his breath coming deep and rough.

  She colored. “Oh, yes.” She moved back, her eyes a little wild.

  “You don’t have to look so threatened. I won’t do it again,” he said, misunderstanding her retreat. Had he frightened her again?

  “Oh, it’s not that. You didn’t frighten me.” She lowered her eyes to the floor. “I’m just wondering if you’ll think I’m easy….”

  He scowled. “Easy?”

  “I don’t usually come on to men,” she said softly. “And I’ve never asked anybody to take his shirt off before.” She glanced up at him, fascinated by the expression on his face. “Well, I haven’t,” she said belligerently. “And you don’t have to worry; I won’t throw myself at you anymore, either. I just got carried away in the heat of the moment….”

  His eyebrows arched. None of what she was saying made sense. “Like you did yesterday?” he mused, liking the color that came and went in her face. “I did accuse you of throwing yourself at me,” he said on a long sigh.

  “Yes. You seem to think I’m some sort of liberated sex maniac.”

  His lips curled involuntarily. “Are you?” he asked, and sounded interested.

  She stamped her foot. “Stop that. I don’t want to stay here anymore!”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea myself,” he mused, watching her eyes glitter with rage. God, she was pretty! “I mean, if you tried to seduce me, things could get sticky.”

  The red in her cheeks got darker. “I don’t have any plans to seduce you.”

  “Well, if you get any, you’d better tell me in advance,” he said, pulling a cigarette from his shirt pocket. “Just so I can be prepared to fight you off.”

  That dry drawl confused her. Suddenly he was a different man, full of male arrogance and amusement. Things had shifted between them during that long, hard kiss. The distance had shortened, and he was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t quite understand.

  “How did you get to the age you are without winding up in someone’s bed?” Quinn asked then. He’d wondered at her shyness with him and then at the way she blushed all the time. He didn’t know much about women, but he wanted to know everything about her.

  Amanda wrapped her arms around herself and shrugged. When he lit his cigarette and still stood there waiting for an answer, she gave in and replied. “I couldn’t give up control,” she said simply. “All my life I’d been dominated and pushed around by my father. Giving in to a man seemed like throwing away my rights as a person. Especially giving in to a man in bed,” she stammered, averting her gaze. “I don’t think there’s anyplace in the world where a man is more the master than in a bedroom, despite all the liberation and freedom of modern life.”

  “And you think that women should dominate there.”

  She looked up. “Well, not dominate.” She hesitated. “But a woman shouldn’t be used just because she’s a woman.”

  His thin mouth curled slightly. “Neither should a man.”

  “I wasn’t using you,” she shot back.

  “Did I accuse you?” he returned innocently.

  She swallowed. “No, I guess not.” She folded her arms over her breasts, wincing because the tips were hard and unexpectedly tender.

  “That hardness means you feel desire,” he said, grinning when she gaped and then glared at him. She made him feel about ten feet tall. “I read this book about sex,” he continued. “It didn’t make much sense to me at the time, but it’s beginning to.”

  “I am not available as a living model for sex education!”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself. But it’s a hell of a loss to my education.”

  “You don’t need educating,” she muttered. “You were married.”

  He nodded. “Sure I was.” He pursed his lips and let his eyes run lazily over her body. “Except that she never wanted me, before or after I married her.”

  Amanda’s lips parted. “Oh, Quinn,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “So was I, at the time.” He shook his head. “I used to wonder at first why she pulled back every time I kissed her. I guess she was suffering it until she could get me to put the ring on her finger. Up until then, I thought it was her scruples that kept me at arm’s length. But she never had many morals.” He stared at Amanda curiously, surprised at how easy it was to tell her things he’d never shared with another human being. “After I found out what she really was, I couldn’t have cared less about sharing her bed.”

  “No, I don’t suppose so,” she agreed.

  He lifted the cigarette to his lips and his eyes narrowed as he studied her. “Elliot’s almost thirteen,” he said. “He’s been my whole life. I’ve taken care of him and done for him. He knows there’s no blood tie between us, but I love him and he loves me. In all the important ways, I’m his father and he’s my son.”

  “He loves you very much,” she said with a smile. “He talks about you all the time.”

  “He’s a good boy.” He moved a little closer, noticing how she tensed when he came close. He liked that reaction a lot. It told him that she was aware of him, but shy and reticent. “You don’t have men,” he said softly. “Well, I don’t have women.”

  “Not for…a few months?” she stammered, because she couldn’t imagine that he was telling the truth.

  He shrugged his powerful shoulders. “Well, not for a bit longer than that. Not much opportunity up here. And I can’t go off and leave Elliot while I tomcat around town. It’s been a bit longer than thirteen years.”

  “A bit?”

  He looked down at her with a curious, mocking smile. “When I was a boy, I didn’t know how to get girls. I was big and clumsy and shy, so it was the other boys who scored.” He took another draw, a slightly jerky one, from his cigarette. “I still have the same problem around most women. It’s not so much hatred as a lack of ability, and shyness. I don’t know how to come on to a woman,” he confessed with a faint smile.

  Amanda felt as if the sun had just come out. She smiled back. “Don’t you, really?” she asked softly. “I thought it was just that you found me lacking, or that I wasn’t woman enough to interest you.”

  He could have laughed out loud at that assumption. “Is that why you called me Goody Two Shoes?” he asked pleasantly.

  She laughed softly. “Well, that was sort of sour grapes.” She lowered her eyes to his chest. “It hurt my feelings that you thought I didn’t have any morals, when I’d never made one single move toward any other man in my whole life.”

  He felt warm all over from that shy confession. It took down the final brick in his wall of reserve. She wasn’t like any woman he’d ever known. “I’m glad to know that. But you and I have more in common than a lack of technique,” he said, hesitating.

  “We do?” she asked. Her soft eyes held his. “What do you mean?”

  He turned and deliberately put out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table beside them. He straightened and looked down at her speculatively for a few seconds before he went for broke. “Well, what I mean, Amanda,” he replied finally, “is that you aren’t the only virgin on the place.”

  Chapter Six

  “I didn’t hear that,” Amanda said, because she knew she hadn’t. Quinn Sutton couldn’t have told her that he was a virgin.

  “Yes, you did,” he replied. “And it’s not all that farfetched. Old McNaber down the hill’s never had a woman, and he’s in his seventies. There are all sorts of reasons why men don’t get experience. Morals, scruples, isolation, or even plain shyness.
Just like women,” he added with a meaningful look at Amanda. “I couldn’t go to bed with somebody just to say I’d had sex. I’d have to care about her, want her, and I’d want her to care about me. There are idealistic people all over the world who never find that particular combination, so they stay celibate. And really, I think that people who sleep around indiscriminately are in the minority even in these liberated times. Only a fool takes that sort of risk with the health dangers what they are.”

  “Yes, I know.” She watched him with fascinated eyes. “Haven’t you ever…wanted to?” she asked.

  “Well, that’s the problem, you see,” he replied, his dark eyes steady on her face.

  “What is?”

  “I have…wanted to. With you.”

  She leaned back against the counter, just to make sure she didn’t fall down. “With me?”

  “That first night you came here, when I was so sick, and your hair drifted down over my naked chest. I shivered, and you thought it was with fever,” he mused. “It was a fever, all right, but it didn’t have anything to do with the virus.”

  Her fingers clenched the counter. She’d wondered about his violent reaction at the time, but it seemed so unlikely that a cold man like Quinn Sutton would feel that way about a woman. He was human, she thought absently, watching him.

  “That’s why I’ve given you such a hard time,” he confessed with narrowed, quiet eyes. “I don’t know how to handle desire. I can’t throw you over my shoulder and carry you upstairs, not with Elliot and Harry around, even if you were the kind of woman I thought at first you were. The fact that you’re as innocent as I am only makes it more complicated.”

  She looked at him with new understanding, as fascinated by him as he seemed to be by her. He wasn’t that bad looking, she mused. And he was terribly strong, and sexy in an earthy kind of way. She especially liked his eyes. They were much more expressive than that poker face.

  “Fortunately for you, I’m kind of shy, too,” she murmured.

  “Except when you’re asking men to take their clothes off,” Quinn said, nodding.