Apache-Colton Series

by Janis Reams Hudson

  He buried his lips in the spot where her shoulder met her neck. “Good God, you’re more woman than a man has a right to.”

  LaRisa felt her knees lose their strength.

  His hands slid up her loosened corset and cupped her breasts. “What man in his right mind would want to even look at another woman when he has you?”

  Words. She assured herself they were only words. They did not have the power to arch her neck to give his lips more room. Their sweetness could not bring her hands up to cup the backs of his where he held her breasts. They could not breach the wall she had been struggling to build around her emotions.

  Words could not do those things. But something did. Something—Spence, his hands, his lips, his heat—something made her do those things, made her moan at the feel of the blatant evidence of his desire pressing against her from behind.

  She moaned again, in protest this time, when his hands left her breasts. She stared at their reflections in the mirror as he pushed each layer of her clothes off one by one, slowly, deliberately, his eyes, too, watching in the mirror until she stood before him naked.

  “Look at you,” he whispered. His palms left trails of fire from her thighs, over her hips, her abdomen, up her ribs to cup her breasts again. With his thumbs, he teased her nipples into tight, hard peaks and sent fire licking at her core. “My God, you’re so beautiful. I love the way you respond to my touch. Tell me,” he said in a hoarse whisper. One hand slid down to cover the triangle of black curls between her legs. “Tell me you want me.”

  She rolled her head across his shoulder, aching with want, need. Hunger. But all she could manage to whisper was his name.

  His hand dipped lower, his fingers, those clever, talented surgeon’s fingers, teased and tormented and delved. “I can feel how much you want me. Say it. Tell me.”

  LaRisa slipped one hand behind her, between their bodies, and touched the hard evidence that proved he wanted her.

  Spence groaned at her touch. His hips thrust forward to press against her hand. His fingers delved deeper into her. “Tell me. Tell me.”

  Her only answer was a low moan. His hand was…oh, God, what his hand was doing to her. Stealing her will, her strength, her breath. She was panting now, almost sobbing. Moaning with each flex of his fingers. She parted her lips to tell him what he wanted to hear so he would end this tormenting pleasure that she never wanted to end, but again, all she could manage was his name as she tore open his pants and slid her hand inside.

  Spence bucked against the feel of her cool, slender fingers closing around him. His control was slipping, and he didn’t care. She wouldn’t tell him that she wanted him, and he didn’t care. He still had all his clothes on, and they were standing in the middle of the room, and he didn’t care about that, either. He only cared about losing himself inside her. She was hot and slick around his fingers, begging for him.

  With a final movement of his hand, he sent her up and over, and watched her face in the mirror when she came with a wordless scream. She convulsed around his fingers; her fingers convulsed around him and nearly sent him to his knees.

  He held her there at the peak until LaRisa thought she would lose her mind. Each time she thought the sensations were easing, he made the smallest movements with his fingers and sent her flying again, once, twice, three times. Her breath came in hard gasps. Tears streamed down her face unheeded. Her heart hammered in her chest. And finally, her legs gave out.

  Spence caught her up in his arms and laid her on the bed. In seconds he’d torn off his clothes and joined their bodies, feeling the aftershocks as they rippled through her. He clenched his jaw and fought for control.

  The instant her legs came around his hips, he lost. One deep plunge to the very heart of her, and he exploded in a climax more mind-shattering, more violent than anything he’d ever known, than he’d ever thought possible.

  Chapter Twenty

  Spence woke before dawn, as usual, and savored the feel of LaRisa in his arms. He had finally gotten around to taking down her hair last night, and now it streamed across his chest and shoulders in silken waves. He wanted to kiss her awake and love her again. He wanted her to turn to him and reach out. He wanted her to initiate their lovemaking, wanted her to tell him she wanted him.

  She wouldn’t.

  He eased from underneath her weight and slid toward the edge of the bed.

  LaRisa stirred and came half awake. “Spence?”

  “Shh.” He brushed her hair from her face and placed a gentle kiss on her lips. She tasted of sleep and sweetness. “Go back to sleep, honey, it’s still early.”

  He carried his clothes and shoes out with him and dressed downstairs so as not to wake her. He had some serious thinking to do. Like how to make her trust him. How to get her to be more open with him. How to make her care as much as he did.

  She needed to feel more comfortable. She needed to feel free, whatever the hell that meant. If she had friends, as he’d thought last night, that might help. And maybe if he didn’t insist on her being at his side every minute, she might not feel so confined. If confined was what she felt. It was damn hard to know what was running through her mind these days.

  The floor overhead creaked. She was up. When she came downstairs a half-hour later, she brought him a cup of coffee. She set it down on his desk, then turned away without looking at him, muttering something about starting breakfast.

  “LaRisa.” He caught her hand and pulled her back to his side, then tugged her down until she sat on his lap. Her startled gaze met his. “Good morning,” he whispered as his lips brushed hers.

  He pulled back and smiled, and his heart gave a leap of joy when she gave him a small, shy smile in return. His LaRisa, shy? That a night of making love with him could leave her shy and smiling made his chest swell. That she was, indeed, his, made him more determined than ever to keep her his.

  “I’ll go start breakfast,” she said softly.

  She started to slide off his lap, and Spence stopped her. He placed another kiss on her lips. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  He met her gaze steadily. “For last night. For coming to Tucson with me. For being my wife.”

  He could have kicked himself the minute the words were out, for something he’d said brought that troubled look back into her eyes. He started to ask what was wrong, but he was suddenly certain that he wouldn’t like her answer.

  “Spence…I—”

  He cut her off with another kiss.

  Hurried, heavy footsteps pounded along the boardwalk outside, followed by insistent knocking on the door. “Doc? Hey, Doc, you in there?”

  It was a day for disasters. The town marshal’s eighty-nine-year-old grandmother forgot she had been heating lard on the stove and suffered severe burns on her hands, arms, and face in the resultant fire that took out the back wall of the house.

  Spence and LaRisa worked together rapidly to disinfect and bandage the burns. LaRisa sat with the old woman and waited for the laudanum to ease her pain while Spence went to see about a man who’d been kicked in the head by a horse at the livery.

  By the time the marshal’s grandmother was asleep and LaRisa had made certain someone would stay with her, Spence had dealt with the injured man at the livery and was on the other side of town removing a bullet from another man’s leg. Spence hadn’t yet returned to the office, where LaRisa waited for him, when two men carried in a young man whose hand had been badly smashed in a wagon accident.

  LaRisa made him as comfortable as possible, but there wasn’t much she could do for him. The bones of his fingers appeared to be broken in several places. She had no experience with that type of injury.

  In answer to her silent prayer, Spence arrived a few minutes later.

  It was late afternoon by the time the young man’s friends carefully carried him home. LaRisa turned from closing the door behind them to find Spence slumped in an exhausted heap on the reception room sofa.

  “God, what a day.” He s
ighed heavily. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay.” She glanced out the window and down the street. “Will his hand…will he be able to use those fingers?”

  Spence sighed with satisfaction. “Yeah, I think he will. I think he’s going to be just fine.”

  “You were wonderful,” she told him.

  Spence smiled crookedly. “You were no slouch, yourself. I wouldn’t have made it through the day without you.”

  LaRisa felt the strings of commitment pull tighter. She felt their lives entwining in a way she had never anticipated, and she didn’t know what to think, how to feel. They had worked well together today, even when they’d been apart. They had depended on each other, helped each other, almost without words, as if their minds had been in tune. The idea was both frightening and exhilarating.

  Maybe…maybe she had been wrong to be so afraid of being Spence’s wife. Maybe…

  The door behind her burst open. Sixteen-year-old Junior Dunsten stood panting, his face pale, his eyes big. “Doctor Spence, you gotta come quick. Pa sent me.”

  Spence pushed himself up from the sofa. “Is it the baby?”

  “Golly, Doctor Spence, it’s everything! The baby’s comin’ and Ma’s hollerin’ like a calf tangled in barbed wire. Pa fell out of the hayloft and broke his leg and now he’s hollerin’, and little Edith is all red and itchy, and she’s hollerin’ louder than any of ‘em.”

  Spence stiffened. He put a hand out to stop LaRisa from going to the boy. “Red and itchy?”

  “Yeah, all over. Ma thinks it might be the measles.”

  “Let me make sure the fire in the stove is banked, and I’ll be ready to go,” LaRisa said.

  An icy shudder ran down Spence’s spine. “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? You want the place to burn down while we’re gone?”

  “I mean no, you’re not going.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I am. You’re going to need all the help you can get.”

  “I know that. Junior, run down to the livery and have Doctor Mac’s gelding hitched to his buggy, and bring it on over here.”

  “Yessir.” The boy rushed out.

  Spence turned to LaRisa. “If Mrs. Dunsten is right and Edith has measles, I don’t want you anywhere near the place.”

  “Spence, I’m as healthy as a mule, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I know you are. I intend to keep you that way.”

  LaRisa bristled at his autocratic tone.

  “Don’t get that look in your eye,” he warned. “Your people are notorious for having no natural immunity to measles. A white person can contract the disease and recover. An Indian will likely die. And if you were lucky enough to survive, I don’t even want to think about what could happen if you’re pregnant.”

  Pregnant. With his child. She’d thought of it once before, but it hadn’t seemed real The possibility spun through her now, leaving her lightheaded. Her hand moved to spread over her abdomen in an instinctive gesture of protection.

  “The possibilities run from blindness to deafness to any one of a number of deformities in babies whose mothers contract measles while pregnant. You’re not going anywhere near the Bar D if there’s even a chance of measles.”

  The rattle of traces and the clomp of hooves announced Junior’s return with the buggy. Spence gave LaRisa a quick, hard kiss on the mouth, then stepped to the door. “Don’t wait up for me. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night. Lock the doors, and don’t open them to anyone you don’t know and trust.”

  With his hand on the doorknob, Spence pause and remembered their dinner invitation tonight with Lawrence and Maryanne. For a moment, he considered urging LaRisa to go without him, not that he thought she would. He discarded the idea as quickly as he’d thought of it. Maryanne could be a very nice person when she wanted to. She could also be cuttingly cruel. He didn’t trust her alone with LaRisa until he could see them together for himself. Then, too, he’d never told LaRisa about the account he’d opened for her at the bank. If Lawrence happened to mention that she had ready access to five hundred dollars, there might be nothing Spence could do or say to keep her from leaving him.

  No, he didn’t want her going to the dinner tonight without him. “I’ll give our regrets to the Hoddingers on my way out of town.”

  The day had seen one emergency after another, but upon Spence’s leaving, the town seemed to have stopped having accidents. No one came bleeding to the door. No young mothers came for advice on colicky babies. No children got sick or injured—at least not to the point that they needed a doctor.

  No one came to the door at all.

  Which left LaRisa with entirely too much time to think. The trouble was, she didn’t know what to think. She had come to Tucson with Spence unwillingly, afraid of the feelings he generated inside her, resentful of his dictatorial attitude, and determined to find a way to leave him.

  Nothing much had changed. He still made her feel things so overwhelming, so powerful, that she instinctively feared them. Last night she would have sold her soul to keep him from leaving her side. That type of need hurt. And it scared her.

  He was still issuing orders, too. Do this, don’t do that. Come with me now. Stay home. But…but today, as he left for the Bar D, he’d actually explained his reasons, and the explanation sounded as though he perhaps cared more for her than she had imagined.

  Could it be true? Could he really care for her, beyond the tenuous, volatile “friendship” they had? And if he did, would it matter?

  It had to matter. Else why was she lying in their bed in the dark, alone and missing him so much it hurt? Was she, too, beginning to care more than she’d realized?

  There was a new light in his eyes these days. The light of purpose, of satisfaction of a job well done when he finished with a patient. He was finding his way back to doing what he loved, and LaRisa was glad.

  Yet…yet what?

  She didn’t know. Her feelings swung back and forth. She shouldn’t care so much. But he needs me. No, he was using her. If not for her, he would have to pay someone a salary to work for him. A wife was free labor.

  Yet the labor was work she enjoyed, work she was good at.

  If she went somewhere else, she could do the same work without having to worry about a husband. And never see him again?

  That thought frightened her as much as the thought of her growing attachment to him.

  Through all her confusion, one thing was clear. Her father had sent her to Arizona with Spence because here, he said, her heart would sing. But she heard no song. She heard nothing but confusion, felt nothing but pain and longing for something she didn’t understand, something she couldn’t even name.

  She made breakfast the next morning in the hopes—No. She wasn’t hoping to see Spence walk through the door. She would not hope. But on the chance that he would be back soon, she filled a plate for him, covered it, and left it on the back of the stove to keep warm.

  Surely he would be home soon. Mrs. Dunsten should have had her baby by now, and a broken leg wouldn’t take much time to set. And measles, unless it was a particularly bad case, would not require his constant presence. Surely he would be home soon.

  But he wasn’t.

  At a quarter to noon, Lawrence Hoddinger, looking hollow-eyed, rumpled, and ashen, rushed into the office. “Where’s Spence?” he asked frantically. “He’s got to come to the house.”

  Some of his urgency transferred itself to LaRisa. “He isn’t back from the Bar D yet. What is it? Is it the baby?”

  “Yes.” He ran the splayed fingers of both hands through his unkempt hair. “It started last night, but she wouldn’t let me send for anyone.”

  “I don’t have any idea when Spence will be back. Maybe you should send for Doctor Gonzales.”

  “I will. I’ll go there myself. But…would you come to the house?”

  “Me?”

  “She knows you. She needs a woman with her, someone besides that stupid housekeeper w
ho told her the feathers of a live white chicken and the wings of a dead brown moth stuffed under her pillow would ease the pain.”

  LaRisa covered her mouth with one hand. “I see. But Mr. Hoddinger—”

  “Lawrence, please.”

  “Lawrence, I’m not a doctor, or even a midwife. I’m not experienced in childbirth. I don’t know what I could do to help.”

  “Just be there. Sit with her. That’s all I ask. Please. Her mother and sisters were supposed to be here, but they’re not coming until next week. The baby wasn’t due until then. Please come.”

  “Yes. All right. Let me leave a note for Spence.”

  The Hoddingers’ home was a large, two-story adobe surrounded by a riot of flowers that surely kept a gardener busy around the clock. Inside, LaRisa caught glimpses of gleaming oak furniture, colorful Navajo rugs, priceless paintings framed in gold, and dainty Victorian figurines tucked into nooks and crannies, as Lawrence Hoddinger hurried her to his wife’s bedside.

  When they entered the upstairs bedroom at the end of the hall, Maryanne was in the grip of a contraction. Her face was contorted in agony. Her hands were twisted and knotted with it. Her brow was lined with it, her lips pale with it. Sweat beaded her face and dampened her once-pristine lace and satin nightdress. Dark circles hung beneath her eyes. Her hair clung to her head in clumps. There was absolutely nothing haughty or glamorous about Maryanne Hoddinger now. She was a woman laboring with all her strength to bring forth a new life. And her strength, LaRisa could tell at a glance, was waning.

  In the far corner, a Mexican woman in a black dress and white apron stared blankly and recited the rosary while her fingers counted off the beads.

  Lawrence knelt beside his wife’s bed and waited until the pain eased. “Sugar? Spence wasn’t in, so I’m going for Doctor Gonzales. I’ve brought Spence’s wife. LaRisa will stay with you for a while, sugar. All right?”