Then Nita cried out and her body clamped hard around him and he lost it. Orgasm for him had always been swift and simple—a release of pent-up energy. What was happening to him now… It was as if every emotion he’d never let himself feel came crashing down around him all at once. It was almost too much to bear. Too painfully intense. He was still riding it out when Nita collapsed breathlessly in his arms.
That’s when he knew what he’d told her was true. This wasn’t just sex to him. He loved her. She was what he wanted, for the rest of his life, and he would do whatever it took to keep her.
Nita lay sprawled across Connor’s chest, listening to his heart pound against her ear, feeling the deep rise and fall as he breathed.
Normally she didn’t do the whole afterglow routine. It was too personal, too easy to drop her defenses and let those warm, fuzzy feelings mess with her head. But for some reason, she couldn’t seem to make herself get out of his bed. She didn’t want to.
She had known sex with him would be good, but they’d blown right past good the second he’d ripped her bra off. From there she couldn’t even put into words what she’d felt because there were really no words to describe it. He was definitely in a class all by himself.
For a fleeting moment she’d worried that, given his age, she might be too much for him to handle, but he’d had the stamina of men half his age—and then some. And while she’d expected him to be as reserved in bed as he had been in personality, he’d quickly proved her wrong. He’d arranged her in so many different positions—some downright scandalous—that by the time they were finished she’d felt like a human pretzel. Who would have guessed a man as reserved and quiet as Connor would have such an adventurous streak in bed?
Connor stroked her back with a large, warm hand—down her spine, over the curve of her behind and back up again. “Is it safe to talk now?”
“What do you mean?”
“You told me earlier, no more talking tonight. But I figured since it’s 1:00 a.m., it’s technically tomorrow.”
“We have been talking,” she said. There was no way he could accuse her of being quiet during sex.
“By talking, I mean having a conversation, not, ‘Do it harder, Connor,’ or ‘Faster, Connor.’”
She laughed and pinched him playfully. “Yeah, okay. What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know. What do you usually talk about after sex?”
“I don’t. Unlike most women, I’m the first one off the bed and out the door.”
“Why is that?”
She shrugged. “Never seemed much point in hanging around. You do and a man starts to get the wrong idea.”
“But you’re here now.”
“You wore me out. I’m too tired to move.” It wasn’t a complete lie, and it was easier than the truth. Hell, even she didn’t know why she was still lying there. It had to be temporary insanity.
“Have there been many before me?”
She could swear she heard a sour note in his voice. She got up on her elbow and peered at him though the dark. “You jealous, Connor?”
If he was, his face didn’t reveal a thing. “Just curious.”
“Well, it’s less than you’d probably think. Three not including you.” She propped her chin on his chest. “How about you?”
“More than three.”
Meaning he wasn’t going to tell her. That was okay, because if it was an astronomical number, like two hundred, she didn’t even want to know. “How old were you when you lost your virginity?” she asked instead.
“We were both seventeen.”
She tried to imagine Connor at seventeen, before life had hardened his face, what a heartbreaker he must have been. The girls must have flocked to him. “I’ll bet you drove the poor girl wild,” she said.
He chuckled. “I wish. I was so nervous I could barely get the condom on and I lasted all of about ten seconds. I doubt it was a memorable experience. How about you, when was your first time?”
“I was nineteen.”
He looked surprised. “I would have guessed younger.”
“Jane had hammered into me for years that I should save myself for marriage. Not that I didn’t do my fair share of fooling around.”
He stroked a big hand up her arm, across her shoulder. “Your curious nature?”
“Exactly. But I got to thinking that maybe I didn’t ever want to get married. So, it was either die a virgin, or have some harmless fun.”
“Makes sense I guess.”
“And it’s not like I went to a bar and picked some stranger out of the crowd. I was particular when it came to choosing the right man. A couple of months went by and I thought maybe I would never find him, then Jimmy hired a new hand and the second I saw him, I knew he would be the one. He was twenty-nine.”
Connor raised an eyebrow. “Twenty-nine, huh?”
She grinned. “What can I say, I’ve got a thing for older men. We got serious for a while. I even thought I loved him.”
“What happened?”
“He inherited his granddaddy’s ranch in Montana. He wanted me to marry him and move there.”
“I take it you said no.”
“At first I thought about going, even though I would miss Daddy something fierce. We talked about it, and he encouraged me to follow my heart. Ranching sounded like fun and I figured I could start up a horse training business. Until this man made it clear that he would run the ranch and I would cook and clean and become a baby machine. He wanted six kids! Can you believe that?”
“You don’t want kids?”
“Maybe one or two. But six? I said no way, I wasn’t going to be anybody’s domestic slave.”
“Good thing,” Connor said. “One week of your cooking and he’d have sent you straight back to Texas.”
Some women might have been offended by his remark. She only laughed. “I’m just not cut out for domestic life. Even though people in town don’t think that’s right. They think being raised without a mother messed me up somehow.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t care what they think. I was born this way and if they don’t like it they can all go to hell. The more they push me, I push back twice as hard. I’m sure you’ve heard things.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I’ve heard a thing or two.”
“How about you?” she asked. “Ever been married?”
“Nope.”
“Ever come close?”
“Never.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
“I never let myself get that close to a woman,” he said, reaching up to stroke her cheek. “This is different.”
A tangle of emotions she didn’t want to feel wrapped themselves around her heart and squeezed. She didn’t even want to know what he’d meant by that.
She laid her head on his chest and closed her eyes, afraid of what she might see if she dared look at him again. Somehow the conversation had gone from casually playful to solemn and profound and she just couldn’t deal with it right now. “It’s late, I should go to bed.”
“I thought you were too tired to move.”
“I’ve had time to recover.”
His hand wandered down to stroke her behind. “Guess I’ll just have to wear you out again.”
“I think it’s better if I just go.” She made a move to leave and his arms went around her, holding her close to him.
“Don’t go, Nita.”
There was world of feeling packed into those three little words. She wanted to hate it, wanted to run and hide, but then he started kissing her, started touching her, and all she could do was melt.
One night, she decided as he rolled her over, started kissing his way down under the covers. She’d give him one full night.
He parted her legs, touched her with his mouth and she groaned with pleasure.
One night together, then things were going to change.
Nita endorsed the checks that had arrived in the mail that afternoon and set th
em in the top drawer, ready for her weekly trip to the bank. She swallowed the knot of anxiety that had lodged itself in her throat and tried to convince herself things would be okay—she could hold it together. With so much of their business lost, compounded by the vet bills from the poisoned feed, things were even worse than she’d thought. The worst they’d ever been.
She hoped the Devlins were happy. They’d been trying for years to get their hands on the land and this time they just might have succeeded. A few more months of this and she and her daddy might have to sell.
The phone rang, but when she looked at the caller ID she didn’t recognize the number. “Windcroft’s, Nita speaking.”
“Nita, honey, it’s Jane.”
“Jane!” Nita felt a gush of relief. “It’s so good to hear your voice. Please tell me you’ve decided to come back.”
There was a pause, then Jane said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not coming back. I heard what happened with the truck and I was calling to see that you’re all right.”
Nita’s disappointment felt like a swift jab to her chest. She wished her father would stop being such a pain and just ask Jane to come home. Beg her, if that’s what it took. “I’m okay,” Nita said. “Just had a bit of a scare.”
“Is Connor still there with you?”
She glanced through the open office door to the bench where Connor sat, his nose buried in Jane’s book. “Yep. My own personal G.I. Joe. He’s sitting out in the foyer as we speak, guarding the office door.”
“I’m glad. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you or…” She trailed off, her voice sad.
“Jane, please come home. We miss you. Daddy has been downright miserable with you gone. Not to mention the house is falling apart and he refuses to hire a new housekeeper. He’s convinced you’re coming back.”
“That’s exactly why I can’t.”
“I know he loves you. He’s just so darned stubborn. I was on my way to come talk to you when the brakes went out.”
“Well, I could have saved you the trip. I couldn’t live with myself if I went crawling back to him. I have to salvage what little dignity I have left and move on.”
Nita could hear that she was close to tears. She hadn’t realized until that moment just how deeply Jane had been hurt.
“Nita, I have to go.”
“Jane, he’ll come around.”
She went on like Nita hadn’t spoken. “Next time I’m in Royal maybe we can meet for lunch. Keep in touch.”
“Jane—” The line went dead. Nita sighed and hung up.
“She’s not coming back?”
Nita looked up, saw Connor standing in the office doorway.
“Nope. Not till my daddy asks her, and he won’t talk to her till she comes back.”
“That could be a problem.”
“I swear, they’re the two most stubborn people in the world. But I’ll figure something out. A way to get them together.” She closed her laptop, got up and met him at the door. She slid her hands up his chest and he looped his arms around her waist. His body was so big and sturdy and strong. She loved that she could touch him this way whenever the mood struck her. Which was happening an awful lot the past couple of days. “I was thinking I’d better go get cleaned up for dinner.”
Connor looked at his watch. “It’s only four.”
“I’m going to need a shower. You being my bodyguard and all, you’ll have to be there to keep me safe.”
A grin curled his mouth. “I will, huh?”
“And you know what happens when I get you naked.” She pressed a kiss to his rough chin. “I just can’t keep my hands to myself. So we may need a couple of hours.”
“What if your father catches us? I feel like I’m disrespecting him.”
She rubbed herself against him, felt his body responding to her. “He won’t climb the stairs in his cast. He’ll never know. And I’m just dying to know what you look like soapy and wet.”
The grin widened and she knew she had him. “Meet me in the bathroom in five minutes.”
Twelve
“How’s your dinner, Daddy?”
“It’s fine,” her daddy said, because he would never say anything to hurt her feelings. But fine, came nowhere near to describing what she’d set in front of him.
Rather than do her best to make dinner edible tonight, and since it was Friday and the men had gone out for the evening, she’d done all she could to make it as unpalatable as humanly possibly—which for her was second nature. She’d found an old loaf of bread shoved to the very back of the bread box under some old hot dog buns. It was dry, mashed flat in places and moldy on the edges. The stew was from a can, which in itself was bad enough, but she hadn’t heated it all the way through and it looked like chunky, congealed gravy sitting in the bowl.
It was all part of her new plan to get her daddy and Jane back together.
“Speaking of cooking, Jane called today.”
Her daddy didn’t even look up from his bowl. If nothing else, he huddled even lower over it. “Oh yeah.”
“She wants me to bring her the book with all the family recipes in it.”
He didn’t respond.
“She needs it for her new job.”
He was trying his best to look disinterested, but she saw some unidentifiable emotion flicker in his eyes. “Got a new job, huh?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Guess that’s good. Gotta make a living.”
“That’s what I thought, too, until she told me the details. She went to see Lucas Devlin about a job. He hired her on the spot, no references or anything.”
Her daddy’s knuckles turned white as he gripped his spoon tighter and Connor flashed her a questioning look. He knew darn well Jane had said no such thing.
“She seemed pretty taken with him,” Nita continued, pouring gasoline on the fire. “She kept going on about what a nice man he is, and how we’ve been wrong about him all these years. She can’t wait to start working for him next week.”
Her daddy’s face turned so red she thought his head might explode, but he didn’t say a word. Now for the really good stuff.
She shook her head in mock disgust. “The way she talked, you’d have thought she had a crush on him or something.”
Will slammed his spoon down on the table and stood, grabbing his crutches.
“You didn’t finish your dinner,” Nita said.
“Lost my appetite,” he grumbled and stormed out of the kitchen—as best as a person could storm with a broken leg. A minute later she heard his bedroom door slam.
Connor was shaking his head. “You are such a liar.”
“Well, I had to do something,” Nita said, feeling completely justified in her actions. They couldn’t survive this way much longer.
He pushed his bowl away, his stew barely touched. “Is that what this whole awful meal was about? You’re trying to make him miss her cooking? Because even you can do better than this.”
“If he really truly loves her, no way in hell he’ll let her hook up with a Devlin. It couldn’t be any worse if I’d said she was shacking up with Satan himself.”
“And how are you going to explain it when they figure out they’ve been duped?”
“I won’t have to. They’ll be so happy to be together, they won’t care.”
“You better hope you’re right.” He balled his napkin and tossed it in his bowl. “Let’s clean up this mess and get out of here.”
“Where are we going?”
“It’s chili night at the Royal Diner,” he said.
When they pulled up the driveway two hours later, stuffed from a meal of chili and biscuits, the house was dark and both trucks were gone.
The men had taken one, meaning her father must have taken the other.
“He knows he’s not supposed to drive,” Nita said, and for the first time that evening showed a hint of reservation, as though she was beginning to wonder if lying to her father was such a hot idea after all.
“What did you expect?” Connor asked her as they climbed out of the car. “You made it sound like she and Lucas Devlin were getting ready to elope.”
“I figured he’d call her. I didn’t know he’d drive all the way to Odessa.” A slow smile curled her mouth and she walked around to his side. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“We have the entire farm to ourselves.” She slid her hands up his chest. “Where do you want to do it first?”
Earlier that afternoon it had been the shower, the night before that he’d taken her up against the wall in the stable after the hands had retired for the evening. The woman was downright insatiable.
“How about right here on your car?” she asked, stepping backward toward the hood, unfastening the buttons on her shirt.
“Outside?”
“It’s dark. No one will see.”
“With all the mischief going on here, you can’t be too sure of that.”
Her grin faded. “I never thought of that.”
“How about inside the house?”
She thought about that for a minute, tracing her finger along the edge of her bra. “On the kitchen table maybe?”
“And suppose your father comes home. What then?”
The grin reappeared. “It’s always more fun if you think you might get caught.”
For her maybe, but she wouldn’t be the one staring down the barrel of her father’s shotgun if they were discovered. “How about a good old-fashioned bed?” he asked. “That would be a nice change.”
Round-the-Clock Temptation Page 12
