by Lisa Plumley
She touched his arm. “Please don’t go.”
Teeth gritted, Mason held his ground.
“This is our last night together,” she said quietly. “Won’t you let me help you?”
Outside, two cats snarled and hissed. Fighting? Or mating? Mason couldn’t tell which. His hand wavered on the planed edge of the door.
“You can’t help me.”
“Then let me comfort you.” Her hair, silky and loose, brushed across his shoulder. Her scent enveloped him, lured him.
“No.”
He couldn’t, couldn’t…but between the bone-weariness that numbed his thoughts, the quiet of the night and the temptation of the woman behind him, he couldn’t remember why. She trailed her hand down his arm, following the curves of muscle, sinew, and bone all the way to the inside of his wrist. He felt his blood pulse against her fingertips. The room closed in, squeezing them together.
Her breath fluttered against his shoulder. “Close the door, Mason. Now that you’re here, stay with me.”
“I’m leaving.” But his feet stayed as though nailed to the floor.
“I love you,” she whispered, her voice breaking.
And he remembered why he had to leave. His fingers groped for the doorjamb, caught it. Mason levered himself outward like a man leaping across a chasm ten feet wide, breathing hard. Blinded by the sudden darkness, he lurched toward the back door.
He heard feet padding hard across the floor before he made it halfway there. Amy’s small, soft body slammed into him from behind, her arms going wide around him. Her hands groped his chest, his belly, his arms, as she tried to get her bearings in the dark.
Breathing his name again and again, she clamped her hands on his shoulders and writhed around to the front. Lace and thin fabric scraped Mason’s skin. Somewhere, she’d abandoned the quilt.
“I won’t let you go,” she gasped, scrabbling upward like a kitten trying to climb his chest. Her kisses landed on the side of his chest, his shoulder…his mouth.
Her breasts pushed against his chest, rubbing hard with her movements. Heat seared between his bare skin and whatever flimsy thing she had on. He ached to rip it away, to cup her breasts in his hands. To taste her. His shaft tightened, hardened, strained beneath his clothes. Her soft, smooth thighs gripped his hip as Amy tried to keep from falling sideways.
The days of denial, of wanting her, melded into a single hard edge of need. Mason groaned, near witless with wanting to take her. His hands found the warm roundness of her buttocks and squeezed them.
Cupping her in both hands, he held Amy high against him. The tender, womanly feel of her drove the last of his resistance from his mind like leaves scattered before an autumn wind. All he knew was the need to keep her close, to satisfy the hunger he’d denied for so long.
A low purr of feminine need rippled from her throat. The erotic sound of it sent an uncontrollable shudder coursing through Mason. She needed, she wanted, too. Wanted him.
Eagerly she kissed him faster, harder, anywhere she could reach. Amy’s hands found the nape of his neck and she pulled him to her, kissing all along his jaw. Her thighs tightened, seeking purchase.
“Careful, Curly Top,” he murmured, his hands still cupping her, holding her high enough to protect himself from her squeezing knees. “Easy, now.”
“I won’t leave you,” she whispered fiercely, clutching his shoulders. “You can’t make me go again. Not tonight.”
In a stray shaft of moonlight he glimpsed her face, small and determined beneath her tangle of blond hair. She jutted her chin forward. Her gaze, luminous with passion, challenged his.
Mason couldn’t have left her if the station burned down all around them. In his chest, some tightness, some ache he’d only been half-aware of, eased.
“Yes, I can,” he rumbled. “I can make you do whatever I want.”
“No.” Her arms tightened stubbornly around his neck. So did her legs, around his hips. His body pulsed in response.
“Watch me,” Mason said.
He wrapped his arms all the way around her, swept Amy up fully against him, and strode back toward the bedroom. Inside, he kicked the door closed, then looked down at her. The barest smile lifted his lips.
“Kiss me,” he told her, “and I’ll show you how.”
Her eyes registered the challenge in his words. Her woman’s smile answered it. Cradling his neck in her hand, Amy pursed her lips and made ready to kiss him.
“But if you do,” he warned, stopping her with her lips only inches from his, “there’s no going back. I won’t be able to stop.”
Mason breathed deeply, holding her gaze with his. He needed to know she understood, needed Amy to know what would happen before she chose. But everything within him urged him to take her, and let the consequences be damned.
“I’ll make you mine, Curly Top,” he said hoarsely. “Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” she whispered against his mouth, and the next thing he knew was the heat of her kiss. “Yes.”
Chapter Seventeen
Mason laid Amy atop the rumpled bedclothes as tenderly as the fire in his blood allowed, eager as a man about to bed his virgin bride for the first time. She unwound her arms from his neck, then, shyly, scooted sideways in the narrow bed to make room for him, too. The wobbly smile she gave him was like a glimpse into her heart, beautiful and innocent at once. Its warmth humbled him. For her, he’d make this night special.
Stepping away from her, Mason reached to turn up the lamp.
“I want to see you,” he murmured, turning the wick key in fingers suddenly gone thick and fumbling. His mouth felt dry. His heart pounded, crowding his throat as he turned back toward the bed and the woman he’d waited so long for.
Golden light flared and trembled. So did Amy. Bolstered by the pillows heaped at the carved wood bedstead, she lay waiting…waiting for him.
Waiting for the man she thought he was, the man she thought she knew.
Mason frowned, suddenly unable to move closer. This was wrong. False. Making love to Amy now would be a lie. As sure as the soil beneath his feet, to make her his now would be a betrayal.
She held her arms out to him, and the lamplight cast her body into revealing shadows beneath her delicate white gown. The sight made his gut clench and his shaft throb with urgency. Amy wanted him. Wanted to care for him. Now, now there was nothing he wanted more.
“Mason?” she whispered. “Is something wrong?”
He shook his head, eager to cast his doubts aside. She was a grown woman. He’d warned her enough. Warned her to get away from him when she could, warned her there was only so much tempting a man could take.
He was, after all, only a man—a man who needed like any other. A man who wanted to taste a woman’s loving, feel a woman’s soft, welcoming body next to him in the night. It was more than he deserved, Mason knew. But that didn’t make him yearn for her any less.
He set his knee on the edge of the bed, felt the mattress dip beneath his weight. Amy’s hands settled on his bare upper arms, reaching to guide him to her. She kept her eyes open, taking in his appearance with undisguised curiosity. Undisguised interest.
Mason felt no hesitancy in her touch, saw no grim forbearance in the curve of her lips. He hadn’t known a giving woman in so long it seemed as though he’d only dreamed it in his past. Yet here was Amy, willing, wanting, to love him.
He bent his head and kissed her, trying to smother the doubts that bedeviled him. She tasted sweet, warm. Her arms twined around his neck, holding him to her as she pressed her generous, womanly body upward to meet him. Mason groaned, flexing his fingers on her waist, bunching her gown higher, fighting for control against the overwhelming pleasure of touching her. Of being touched by her…with love.
Love he didn’t have the future to satisfy. Love that could never be, between two people as different as he and Curly Top were. Mason bent his head, pressing his forehead to her shoulder, trying to catch his breath. Amy’s breath pant
ed past his ear, and her body quivered beneath him.
He raised his head, calling himself a million kinds of fool for what he was about to do.
Something in his movements must have betrayed his thoughts, because she stilled, then sagged slightly into the quilts. Her eyes looked enormous, searching his face with a questioning, vivid blue intensity.
“Mason? What’s wrong?”
Straightening, he set her back gently amongst the pillows. His hands shook as he settled himself in the middle of the bed, already feeling the loss of her that would come next.
Mason clamped his hands together savagely to stop their damned tell-tale trembling. “Curly Top, there’s something you’ve got to know.”
“Know? Now?” Amy leaned forward, her hand outstretched to touch his knee. “I know all I need to. I know that I lo—”
“About me,” he interrupted, staring toward the lamp without seeing it. Anything, anything but look at her and see the horror on her face when he revealed the kind of man he really was. “You have to know everything.”
And once she did, it would be all she would see. No more warnings would be needed to keep her away.
“I already know,” she protested. “You already told me about the sheriff, and your escape, and what they said about your wife.” Amy’s hand settled on his knee, stroking. “It was Ellen, wasn’t it? Oh, Mason—I know you’ll set it right. You—”
“No.” He growled the word, forcing it past his constricted throat. “It’s true.”
“But—”
He wrenched his leg out of reach. Better to refuse her touch now than to be denied it later.
“My wife is dead because of me,” Mason said. His gaze bored the truth of his words into Amy, kept her denials at bay. “Sure as if I’d poured the poison down her throat myself.”
Amy flinched, and his voice broke. He sucked in a gulp of air, forcing himself to go on before he lost the will to do what needed to be done. To tell the truth. To destroy her belief in him.
“It wasn’t always like that between us,” he said quietly, staring toward the lamp again. “We…I met her back in the States, in Pennsylvania. When I was in the army. Ellen was…she was different from the other women I knew. More refined, but more…flirtatious, too.”
She’d sent him on a merry chase. Rounds of parties and balls, all in the hopes of seeing Ellen, of stealing a kiss on a veranda corner. Of persuading her to come home with him to the Territory. At the time, it had seemed what she wanted—what they both wanted.
“After we got married,” Mason went on, “we came back here to live. To the farm on the Gila.”
He glanced at Amy. She nodded without meeting his eyes, frowning at a spot just over his shoulder. At some point she’d grabbed the quilt again. She held it to her chest like a shield.
“The army was no life for a lady,” Mason said, rubbing his palms along his thighs. “I thought we’d be happier on the farm. I figured I could make a good living, selling grain to the express stations and military posts nearby.”
“I built a home for us,” –he flexed his fingers as though still feeling the gritty adobe bricks in his hands— “and before two harvests had come, Ben was born.”
Amy’s head turned. Tears glittered in her eyes. “You have a son?”
He nodded, his throat tightening at the thought of his boy. Where was he now? Did Ben believe his father wasn’t coming for him, that he didn’t care about him? Frustration roughened his words. “He’s six years old. I—”
“Where is he now?”
Unblinking, barely breathing, she waited for his answer, watching him with eyes gone wide and horror-filled. Did she think he’d hurt his own child?
“Tucson,” Mason ground out, pushing away from the bed.
Away from her.
He strode across the small room, his footfalls noiseless against the packed-dirt floor. “What did you think I was going to Tucson for? I risked hanging to leave Maricopa Wells. I’ve been hunted and shot at since the day I went on the run from the sheriff. I risked everything to get there.”
He leveled a hard look at Amelia. “What the hell did you think I wanted?”
Her mouth opened, but no sound emerged. Clutching the quilt closer, she tried again. “T—treasure,” she stammered. “Or, or, revenge against somebody.” Her voice rose, beseeching him. “You’re an outlaw! What was I supposed to think?”
“Not that I’d endanger you for the sake of money,” he told her. “Or revenge.”
Mason rubbed his jaw, trying to staunch the sense of betrayal her words engendered. He’d been relying on her faith in him more than he’d known. Believed in it more than he’d wanted to.
“I didn’t see it at first,” he said woodenly, “but Ellen wasn’t the kind of woman for life out here. She was…lonely.” The word choked him, now that he knew the depth of her sadness, now that he knew what it led to. “Lonely without her friends and city life. She wanted to leave.”
“Leave you?” Amy whispered.
Pacing, Mason paused beside the bureau, turned down the lamp. Shadows deepened in the corners of the bedroom. “Leave me, leave the Territory.”
“But she had…had a child. Ben. Why—”
“It wasn’t enough.” Mason’s fingers dug into the scarred bureau top. “I couldn’t give Ellen more children, the children she wanted. Couldn’t give…give her the life she wanted.” He gulped for air, starved for breath. His chest squeezed, hurting him.
He couldn’t face Amy, couldn’t bear to see her face when she learned the truth. His throat felt gravelly, aching. “I promised to take care of her. Promised to give her all I could. And she…she believed me.”
“Mason, I—”
“When Ellen died, part of me was relieved. Relieved!” He whirled to face her at last, unable to stop the choked sound that came from his throat. Damn, but it felt weak to say the words. “And the rest of me knew I could have stopped her.”
Mason slammed his hand into the bureau, welcoming the fresh pain that roiled through him. At least this was pain he understood, action and reaction that made sense. Ellen’s death was a waste, a sickening waste, and the knowledge that he might have prevented it ate at him.
“How?” Amy asked quietly, her eyes clear now and her posture straight and motionless atop the mattress.
Her composure baffled him. Mason stared at her, hardly able to believe she hadn’t shrunk into the corner already, hefted a gun from his gun belt to protect herself with, screamed for Manuel and James to help her.
“How, Mason? Stopped her from doing what?”
He stared, groping for words. Images of Ellen rose in his mind—Ellen pleading with him to move to the city, to go back east, to find out why, month after month, another child never came to them. And then, after enough years had passed, begging him to leave her alone.
And eventually, he had. Anything to escape her sighs, her accusing looks, her mouth pinched with disappointment. Nothing short of a good horn of whiskey had fortified him enough to risk trying to love her again. Nights of reaching for Ellen, only to feel her shrink away, turn her face to the wall.
“She was my wife,” he said, pacing again. “I promised to take care of her.” He stopped and glanced at Amy. “I didn’t.”
“It’s not your fault she wasn’t suited for this life. She must have known before you were married that your life was here, in the Territory.”
“She told me she was unhappy. I…thought it would pass. I promised to move as far as Tucson, once I’d made something of the farm. To me, it was over with then.”
He raked his hand through his hair, only half-feeling the jaggedly shorn strands through his fingers. “But not to Ellen. Not long after, she stopped waiting. She…swallowed a vial of laudanum she got from a drummer passing through, and by the next morning she was gone.”
Ben had run through the fields to fetch him, his little legs pumping as fast as they were able. His eyes had been so scared in that round, babyish face.
&nbs
p; “Mama’s sleeping! She won’t wake up today,” he’d cried, trying to drag Mason home again. Looking half-sure he was in trouble for bothering his Papa at work in the fields, but too afraid for his Mama not to try, Ben had been the only one with Ellen at the end.
Mason pushed the heel of his palm against his closed eyelids, hiding the damned shameful tears that burned at the memory.
“I should’ve seen the laudanum. Should’ve listened to her more. Moved to the city sooner. Dammit, I could have done something to help her.” His voice broke, wavered. “She trusted me.”
From behind, Amy’s arms came around his waist. She leaned against him, holding him tightly. He didn’t know when she’d moved to comfort him. More, Mason couldn’t imagine why.
Roughly, he wrenched her arms from around him and stepped out of reach. Keeping his back to her, he took a deep, shuddering breath.
“I drank my way through the morning Ellen died, and I didn’t quit all through her funeral. At her wake, the whole house smelled like whiskey. Ben wouldn’t even come near me.”
He remembered his son’s wrinkled nose, his red, tear-blotched face turning away from him, and his soul ached at the loss.
“Mason—” Amy whispered, but this time she didn’t come near. This time she held herself rigidly apart from him. The span of earthen floor and rag rug might as well have been a valley a thousand miles wide. And Mason knew, at last, that he’d driven her away, too.
“God help me, but by then I don’t even know if I loved her anymore,” he said, his fists clenching uncontrollably at his sides. “I didn’t want her to die, but I swear I don’t know if I mourned her true at the end and at least she deserved that.” A sob tore from his throat, and fresh grief shuddered to life within him, too much to be contained.
“Mason, dear God—” Amy grabbed him, hurled herself at his chest, and the hot wetness of her tears burned his skin. “You can’t go on like this,” she cried. “Please, please—”
“No—” He tried to push her away, tried to hold her apart from him. But somehow his arms wouldn’t obey his mind, and his heart stayed there with Amy. Convulsively, Mason’s hands buried in her hair, holding her closer instead.
