The Best Man

by Maggie Osborne

  Which meant that she was here by choice. Admitting this did not go down well.

  There were so many points against him, she thought, brooding. His weakness for whiskey. His past association with Lola. His work history. His similarity to her father. Moreover, Freddy had always rejected the attentions of ranchers. She didn’t want to end up stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no one but cattle and cowboys for company.

  On the other hand, Dal was educated, and a natural leader. He was confident and strong. He could quote lines from plays and literature. He was ambitious and hardworking; he possessed a certain rough charm. He had dreams.

  But the main reason she had agreed to ruin herself once and for all was because he had awakened something inside her. His slow smile and those intense, narrowed, blue eyes dropped the bottom out of her stomach and made her wild with desire. He had hinted there was more than the disappointment they had experienced on the range, and she yearned to know what that might be.

  Sighing, she lifted a length of hair to the fading sunlight and gazed around the room. The furnishings were nicer than she had expected to find in a frontier town. The bedstead, desk, table, and chairs were made of polished cherrywood. A chintz settee and armchair added warm splashes of color. The decorative touch she most liked was a painted dressing screen.

  Nervously, Freddy clutched her hands in her lap. She wanted to run away. She wished he would get here.

  By the time Dal’s knock sounded at the door, causing her to jump out of her skin, she had donned her damp clothing with the firm intention of leaving. Where she would go, she didn’t know. She only knew that she couldn’t wait another minute—she had to get out of here. The bed had grown in size and importance until it totally dominated the room.

  “Freddy? Open the door.”

  She stood on the other side, twisting her hat in her hands, suffering a spasm of indecision. “I think I’ve changed my mind about this,” she said finally. Then she uttered words she had never thought to hear on her lips. “I want to return to the herd.”

  “Freddy, open the damned door and let me in.”

  “Did you bring the wagon or a horse? I need a horse.” With half a dozen herds camped outside Fort Worth, she worried whether she could find the King’s Walk outfit.

  “Do you suppose we could discuss this while we’re both standing in the same room?” He sounded exasperated and pounded on the door again.

  “If I let you inside, you’ll just try to talk me out of leaving,” she said uncertainly. “Wait a minute. Something’s going on under the window.”

  Leaving Dal standing in the hotel corridor swearing, she returned to the window and leaned out. Two stories below, four Mexican musicians stood grouped around a lantern at their feet. They tipped broad sombreros and smiled up at her, then lifted violins to their chins and played a love song so sweet and filled with longing that it raised a lump in Freddy’s throat. “Oh!”

  Caught in the music, several minutes passed before she noticed the pounding on the door. “Dal?” she said, crossing the room and placing her hand on the knob. “Did you arrange for the musicians?” It was a nice gesture, lovely really. And she could hardly leave in the middle of their serenade; that would be rude. She was stuck until the musicians finished their performance.

  “I swear to you. If you don’t open this door—right now—I’m going to kick it down.”

  She caught her lower lip between her teeth and hesitated, then opened the door wide enough to peek into the hallway. “We’re only going to talk, we’re not—” She stared at the packages surrounding his feet. “What’s all that?”

  “Gifts.”

  Freddy suspected the old warning to beware of Greeks bearing gifts might also apply to cowboys. Then she realized he didn’t look like a work-worn drover tonight.

  He wore new store-bought clothing, a dark jacket over dark trousers and a crisp white shirt with a silver string tie. The hat he held in his hands was brushed and clean and his boots were polished to a high gleam. He smelled of good barbershop cologne, and his hair was parted in the center and slicked back with oil.

  Freddy’s mouth dropped. “You look… different.” And so handsome that he took her breath away. Tonight his tan seemed darker and his eyes bluer. His shoulders wider and his waist leaner. She was accustomed to seeing him with bristle on his jaw, but tonight he was close-shaven, which made her intensely aware of his mouth and lips.

  He stuck his boot in the door and leaned forward, pushing her out of the way, then he carried the packages to the bed and dropped them on the spread before he pulled a pocket watch out of his vest and consulted the time. “Dinner will be served in our room in an hour.” For the first time since Freddy had met him, he seemed uneasy and uncertain. “I’m going downstairs so you can dress in privacy. I’ll return in forty-five minutes. Here. Alex sent you this.”

  “Wait a minute,” she called. But he was closing the door behind him.

  Alex had sent her perfume? Then Alex knew. Scarlet burned on Freddy’s face, and she collapsed on the side of the bed, clutching the vial in her hand. Damn. During the course of the drive, she had mysteriously moved from not caring what her sisters thought to caring a lot.

  Five miserable minutes elapsed before she thought to wonder why Alex would send her perfume. Removing the stopper, she passed the vial beneath her nose, inhaling a light scent of roses. Could it be that Alex was not the most judgmental woman ever born as Freddy had always supposed? Amazing. She brightened enough to inspect the packages on the bed.

  Before she left, which she still intended to do, she might as well discover what Dal had brought her. After she saw the dinner gown and slippers, the nightgown and ribbons, she listened to the music floating up to her window and scanned the opulent appointments of the room.

  “Well I’ll be,” she marveled softly. “Dal Frisco is a romantic.” But she liked this unexpected side of him, she decided, holding the gown against her body and turning in front of the mirror. He’d chosen green silk with gold ruffles and trim, and the gown looked as if it would fit. Now, if he had just remembered hair pins…

  “You are so wishy-washy,” she said, frowning at her image in the mirror. “Bought off with a new gown and slippers. And a bottle of perfume.” Then she laughed. The gown and perfume were inconsequential. The instant she had seen him, her doubts had settled and her longing to discover how the evening would unfold had returned full force.

  This time when he knocked, she opened the door immediately and several people entered the room. First came a boy carrying baskets of spring flowers followed by two waiters pushing a linen-clad dinner table set with fine china and sparkling silver. Then Dal appeared.

  He stopped mid-stride, just inside the room, and stared. “My God.” A slow narrowed glance traveled over the green gown, paused at her waist and again at her breasts before he met her eyes. “You are absolutely the most beautiful woman I have ever seen!”

  Freddy gazed at him with sparkling eyes and a flirtatious glance. This was the first time she had worn anything but black since her father died, and the first time she had worn a formal gown in Dal’s presence. The mirror told her that she looked lovely, but she needed to hear and see confirmation; she needed to see herself reflected in his eyes.

  For a long moment they gazed at each other, and Freddy felt her mouth go dry and her heartbeat accelerate. If the evening ended right now, she would still remember this moment for all her days. The music, the perfume of the flower baskets, and the hard look of desire in Dal’s eyes.

  Stepping forward, he touched his fingertips to her cheek, then dropped his hand to her waist and led her toward the table. After weeks of sitting on the ground eating supper out of tin plates, the formality of dressing and dining felt strange. Like a role she was playing. Except she didn’t know her lines and his hand on her waist felt warm and strong and would have made her forget her dialogue if she had known it.

  Dal held out her chair and she sat down in a rustle of silk and ruff
les. A waiter draped a linen napkin across her lap, a second man poured wine into her glass. It was a measure of her nervousness that when she saw Dal cover his glass and shake his head, she forgot his history and asked, “Aren’t you having wine?”

  “No.” He drew a breath. “The sight of you is intoxicating enough.”

  Her mouth dropped and she stared. Not in a hundred years could she have imagined him uttering such a romantic comment. This was Dal, the man who rode his horse like the animal was part of him, who turned stampedes in the dark of night, who rode out of the dust and sun as if forged from flying dirt and hard sunlight himself. Dal who shouted and cursed and drove his cattle across swollen rivers, who worked himself and his men without pity. She would have sworn there was no softness in this man, no pretty words of seduction.

  The instant the waiters removed the warming covers, he gruffly ordered, “Leave us.”

  Freddy wet her lips and desperately tried to think of something to say to this strange new Dal whom she had never seen before and didn’t know. And it occurred to her that perhaps she seemed as strange to him, gowned and coiffed and perfumed and not the woman he was accustomed to seeing either.

  She moistened her lips with the wine and inspected her dinner. “It looks wonderful,” she murmured, knowing she was too nervous to eat a bite.

  Dal gazed at the ceiling for a moment before he cleared his throat and touched his tie. “ ‘All my desire, all my delight should be, Her to enjoy, her to unite to me.’ ” He turned his empty wineglass between his fingers, running a caressing glance down her throat to the swell of soft flesh curving above the low scoop of her bodice.

  Freddy swallowed, then blurted the first quotation that sprang to her mind. “ ‘Fie on sinful fantasy! Fie on lust and luxury! Lust is but a bloody fire, Kindled with unchaste desire.’ ”

  Smiling, Dal supplied Shakespeare’s next lines, “ ‘Fed in heart, whose flames aspire, as thoughts do blow them, higher and higher.’ ”

  “ ‘Pinch him, fairies, mutually; Pinch him for his villainy.’ ”

  He laughed, then spoke softly, “ ‘There is a garden in her face, Where roses and white lilies grow; A heavenly paradise is that place, Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.’ ”

  Astonishment thrilled her. She could not believe these words were falling from his lips, couldn’t believe they were trading flowery bits of poetry. She liked it, but… it was also a bit overwhelming. She couldn’t quite make the transition from herding cattle yesterday to being romanced today. “Dal,” she whispered, looking into his hot gaze. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to seduce you. Trying to do it right this time,” he said simply, letting his eyes go soft in the candlelight. “You’re so beautiful, Freddy, so lovely.”

  So was he. Candlelight warmed the strong bronzed angles of his face, played across his fingers and the backs of his hands. His eyes had not left her since he returned to the room. Freddy was aware of his body, remembered the iron strength of his thighs and his hard flat stomach. But it was his steady gaze that made her go weak inside, made her feel as if her bones were slowly melting. His gaze turned alternately soft then hard with desire, gentled by the words on his tongue then heated with speculation.

  Her own body responded with a strange restless tension. She felt damp and overly warm, shivery with nerves and anticipation. Picking up her fork, she pushed at the items on her plate, not seeing them. And she listened as he quoted love sonnets to her, feeling her cheeks grow hot when the poetry skirted close to the subject uppermost in her mind, lovemaking.

  Behind him, she glimpsed the bedspread, pale against evening shadows. The music drifting in the opened window was sweet and longing. Tension grew in the pit of her stomach and spread through her body. Her lips trembled and so did her fingertips. When she looked at him across the candle flames, she saw only his eyes and his lips, heard only the words he spoke to her, and she decided if he didn’t kiss her soon, she would faint from the need to feel his mouth on hers.

  As if he’d read her mind, he stood and took her hand, guiding her to her feet. Standing so close that her skirt wrapped his legs, he brought his fingertips to her face and traced the shape of her cheekbones, her jaw-line, her lips. She closed her eyes and swayed as his fingers brushed down the arch of her throat and came to rest on the tops of her breasts. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. And when his mouth finally came down on hers, she released a sound of gratitude that was almost a sob.

  She would have grabbed him and returned his kiss with force and passion, but he wouldn’t permit it. To her frustration, he eased back, keeping his kiss light, holding her at the waist to control her movement. Instead of roughly claiming her mouth as he had done before, he teased her with light kisses across her lips, her eyelids, her temples. But gradually his hands on her waist brought her closer and tighter against his hips, letting her feel the rock-hard state of his arousal.

  Wild with desire, she gasped and moaned and pressed against him, trying to capture his lips with her own, but he remained elusive, tantalizing her with a brief touch of his tongue, like a swift brand of fire, then gone. His hands caressed the curve of waist and rib cage, hot against the silk of her gown, burning through to her skin, stroking up and down but not touching her breasts. So teasingly close and then away, leaving her arched toward him, yearning for his hand on nipples that had risen like hard pebbles toward a touch that didn’t come.

  “Dal… Dal…” Mindlessly, she whispered his name as his kisses deepened and became possessive and deliberate. But slow. Exploring. Teasing. Never quite enough. Kisses that drank desire from her mouth and left her frantic with wanting, wanting, wanting.

  When she was writhing in his arms, helpless in her need, his fingers deftly opened the hooks running up the back of her gown and Freddy collapsed against him in relief. The sensations rippling through her body, heat and tension and moisture and anxiety and nervousness and desire, oh the desire that made her shake and tremble and fear that her legs would give way and she would fall, these sensations overpowered her and all she could think about was him, his touch, his next kiss, taking him inside of her, melding into him and him into her. She had never dreamed that she could lose herself so completely in a man’s kisses. That clothing could become an insupportable barrier or that the world could shrink to the thrill of one man’s touch.

  She had always believed it would embarrass her to stand naked before a man’s gaze, but it didn’t. She heard his sharp intake of breath and saw in his eyes that she was beautiful to him. And when he, too, was naked, she gazed in wonder at his hard male beauty and the differences between men and women. He, too, was damp with desire, and his lean body gleamed in the candlelight. When she stretched a trembling hand to stroke the dark hair on his chest, his skin was hot to the touch, as was hers, and he, too, was trembling, which surprised her.

  She thought they would immediately resume where they had ended out on the range, but it didn’t happen that way. He lifted her in his arms and gently placed her on the bed, then stretched out beside her and began to kiss her again while his fingers wandered over her breasts and waist and hips. She felt his need pressing against her stomach and instinctively wrapped her legs around him, but he didn’t move to enter her as she had expected.

  Instead, he trailed his mouth down her throat to her aching breasts and sucked one nipple into his mouth and fluttered his tongue across it, and then did the same to her other breast, taking his time. A lightning thrill of surprise and pleasure raced through her body, searing and electric and unlike anything Freddy had ever experienced. And then his mouth moved lower, to her waist and belly then lower still, until he found her center and she gasped, unable to believe what he was doing, something she had never imagined.

  When his tongue stroked across her there, she tensed, intending to push him away, but waves of sensation rocked her mind. And she exploded. The tension that had been building gathered into a molten ball that shattered in a burst of ecstasy. She thought she
would faint with the intense pleasure of it, thought perhaps she had fainted. Throwing her head back into the pillows, she panted, fighting to catch a full breath and trying to understand what had happened.

  And then, Dal was leaning over her, gazing into her stunned eyes, covering her with his hips. When he entered the moist heat of her, she gasped and wrapped her arms around him and raised her legs, her movement instinctive. There was no pain this time, just a blissful fullness that felt so right, so complete. Just pure pleasure, and an urge to meet his slow deep thrusts, to draw him deeply into her.

  And she felt it beginning again, that swiftly gathering hot tension that drained the strength from her limbs and scalded her mind and body with a thrilling pleasure so sweet and intense that she couldn’t contain it, could only let it sweep her up and up and up on waves of breathless joy.

  Clinging to him, struggling to breathe, she held him as his shoulders tensed and he murmured her name, then clasped her hard against him. He held her a minute after his body stopped moving, then he eased to one side and guided her into his arms.

  Freddy pressed her cheek against his shoulder, struggling to calm her breathing. Her body was bathed in sweat and the night air from the window felt good flowing across her hot skin.

  Never again would she look at a married couple in quite the same way. Now she knew why men and women stayed together through adversity and hardship. Why they needed each other so much.

  “I played Madame de Chimay all wrong,” she murmured drowsily.

  Dal lifted his head from the pillow and blinked at her. “What?”

  “She’s a married woman in love with her husband. But I didn’t understand.” She placed her hand on his chest and watched her fingers rise and fall with his breathing. “Now don’t take offense. What happened just now was…” There weren’t words to describe it. “Unbelievable. I had no idea I could feel like…” She pressed up against him. “Is it like this always?”