by Diana Palmer
She opened her eyes, and there was Rey, sitting by the bed, still wearing the same jeans and shirt and boots he’d worn to the shooting range. Meredith was aware of the bedspread covering her up to her waist. Her boots were off, but she was also wearing the same clothes she’d started out in that morning.
‘‘What time is it?’’ she asked in a husky, slightly disoriented tone.
‘‘Five hours past the time you flaked out on me,’’ he said, smiling gently. ‘‘Micah knocked you out. He thought some sleep might help.’’ The smile faded into quiet concern. ‘‘You don’t sleep much, do you, Meredith?’’ he asked surprisingly.
She sighed, brushed back her disheveled blond hair, and shook her head. ‘‘When I go to sleep, I have nightmares. I wake up in a cold sweat, and I see them, lying there on the floor, just the way they looked in those vivid crime scene photos.’’ She closed her eyes and shivered. ‘‘People look so fragile like that, they look like big dolls, sprawled in pitiful disarray on the floor. Everybody stares at them…’’
He brushed back her hair with a lean, gentle hand. ‘‘They got the guys who did it,’’ he reminded her. ‘‘Including the trigger man. He’ll serve life without any hope of parole. He’ll pay for it.’’
Her pale eyes were tormented as they met his. ‘‘Yes, but it won’t bring them back, will it?’’ she asked. ‘‘And do you know why they said they did it? For a bet. For a stupid bet, they killed two innocent people!’’
‘‘They also ruined their own lives,’’ he reminded her, ‘‘and the lives of their own families.’’
She looked at him blankly, scowling.
‘‘Don’t you ever think about that?’’ he asked softly. ‘‘Criminals have families, too. Most of them have loving, decent parents who took care of them and disciplined them and blame themselves for what their children do. It must be pure hell, to have your child kill someone, and feel responsible for it.’’
‘‘I haven’t considered that,’’ she admitted.
He continued. ‘‘When I was in high school, one of my best friends was arrested for murder. He killed the old man next door in the process of stealing his wallet. He wanted to buy his girl a diamond necklace she liked, and he didn’t have any money. He figured the man was old and didn’t need money anyway, so he might as well take it. He was sorry about it, but he never figured on killing the man or getting caught.’’
‘‘Was he a good friend?’’ she asked.
He looked at their linked fingers. He nodded. ‘‘We were pals since grammar school. He wasn’t quite as bright as some of the other boys, but he had a gentle nature. Or so we thought.’’ He met her eyes. ‘‘His mom and dad always had a houseful of other peoples’ kids. They were everybody’s mom and dad. It shattered them when Joey went to prison. Even the children of the old man felt sorry for them.’’
‘‘Funny,’’ she mused. ‘‘I never even thought of how it would feel to have a child or a parent or a sibling who broke the law in some terrible way.’’ She met his eyes. ‘‘I guess I’d feel guilty, too.’’
‘‘Most kids are raised right. But some of them have a wild streak that nobody can tame, others have poor impulse control. Many are handicapped. Nobody goes to jail because he wants to.’’
‘‘I never thought of you as a sensitive man,’’ she blurted out, and then flushed at the insult.
His eyebrows lifted. ‘‘Who, me? I stop to pick worms out of the highway so my tires won’t bruise their little bodies, and you think I’m insensitive?’’
It took a minute for the words to make sense, and then she burst out laughing.
‘‘That’s better,’’ he said. He smiled and squeezed her fingers. ‘‘You’re going to be okay. You’ve had a lot of traumatic experiences just lately. No wonder you caved in.’’
‘‘Lucky for you,’’ she shot back.
‘‘Me? Why?’’
‘‘Because if we’d unpacked those shotguns, I’d have destroyed your ego,’’ she said with a smug smile. ‘‘At Mike’s gun club, they used to call me ‘dead-eye.’’’
‘‘Oh, they did, did they?’’ he challenged. ‘‘Well, we’ll see about that when you step up to my gun range.’’
She studied his lean face. He wasn’t handsome, but he had strong, stubborn features. He was familiar to her now, almost necessary. She thought about going back to Houston with real panic.
He touched her cheek where the bruises were a mixture of purple and yellow, much less vivid now. ‘‘He really knocked you around,’’ he said, and his face hardened visibly. ‘‘I don’t care if a man is drunk, there’s no excuse for hitting a woman.’’
‘‘Shades of primitive man,’’ she chided with a smile.
‘‘Women are the cradles of life,’’ he said simply. ‘‘What sort of man tries to break a cradle?’’
‘‘You have a unique way of putting things.’’
‘‘We had Spanish ancestors,’’ he told her. ‘‘They were old-world men, conquerors, adventurers. One of them made his way to Texas and was given a huge tract of land under a Spanish land grant, for services to the crown of Spain.’’ He noticed a start of surprise on her face. ‘‘Do you know the legend of the Cid?’’
‘‘Yes!’’ she exclaimed. ‘‘He was a great Spanish hero. Cid is for the Arabic ‘Sidi’ which means Lord.’’
‘‘Well, our ancestor wasn’t El Cid,’’ he said on a chuckle. ‘‘But he fought his way through hostile neighbors to claim his land, and he held it as long as he lived. Our family still holds it, through our late uncle, who left us this ranch.’’
‘‘This is the original grant?’’ she exclaimed.
He nodded. ‘‘It isn’t nearly as big as it was a couple of hundred years ago, but it’s no weekend farm, either. Didn’t you notice the antique silver service in the dining room?’’
‘‘Yes, I’ve been afraid to touch it. It looks very old.’’
He smiled. ‘‘It came from Madrid. It’s over two hundred years old.’’
‘‘An heirloom!’’ she breathed.
‘‘Yes. Like the ranch itself.’’ He tilted his head and studied her for a long time. ‘‘Now I understand. Your father wasn’t violent until the killer’s trial, was he?’’
‘‘No, he wasn’t.’’ She looked down at Rey’s big, warm hand wrapped around her own. It made her feel safe. ‘‘He told Mike to drive Mama to the bank,’’ she added reluctantly. ‘‘He had papers to grade. He couldn’t spare the time, he said, and he snapped at her when she protested that Mike was spending his day off, carting her all over Houston.’’ She glanced at him. ‘‘I was called in to work at a clinic my boss holds in the Hispanic community every Saturday. There’s a regular nurse, but she was at home with a sick child. I went to stand in for her.’’ Her eyes fell to his broad chest. ‘‘I could have asked someone to go in my place. I didn’t. So he and I both have our guilt.’’
‘‘Because you lived and they didn’t,’’ Rey said bluntly.
She gasped. ‘‘No, that’s not true!’’
‘‘It is true.’’ His black eyes held hers relentlessly. ‘‘The same thing happens to people who survive airplane crashes, automobile wrecks, sinking ships. It’s a normal, human reaction to surviving when other people don’t. It’s worse when the victims include close relatives or friends.’’
‘‘Where did you learn that?’’ she asked.
‘‘From Janie Brewster,’’ he said.
She frowned. ‘‘That name sounds familiar.’’
‘‘We’ve mentioned her to you. She’s the daughter of a neighboring cattleman,’’ he related. ‘‘She got her associate degree in psychology from our community college, and now she’s studying it in Houston,’’ he added with a grin. ‘‘She’s almost twenty. They let her take college courses while she was still in high school, so she’s ahead.’’
‘‘Oh.’’
‘‘She’s not hard on the eyes, either,’’ he murmured, avoiding her eyes. ‘‘She and her father
live alone. Leo and I have a standing dinner invitation, any time we care to show up.’’
She started to say ‘‘oh’’ again, and realized how juvenile she was behaving. She straightened her shoulders against the pillow that was propping her up, and tugged at the hand Rey still held. ‘‘Then if she can bake biscuits, you’re saved when I leave, aren’t you?’’ she asked coolly.
‘‘Well, she can’t exactly bake stuff,’’ Rey had to admit.
‘‘Why?’’
‘‘She has no sense of time. She sets the timer and it goes off, and she never hears it. So the chicken bounces, the heat-and-serve rolls usually come out black, and I won’t even mention what happens to vegetables she tries to cook on top of the stove.’’ He gave her a sad look. ‘‘She did try to make us a pan of biscuits once.’’ He actually shuddered.
‘‘Not a successful try?’’ she fished.
‘‘We had to take the damned things home, or her father would never have let us near the Salers heifers he was offering for sale.’’ He glanced at her. ‘‘Leo just bought us a big Salers bull, and we needed purebred heifers to breed to him. Purebred breeding stock brings a big price, especially if you show cattle and win ribbons.’’ He shrugged. ‘‘So we took the biscuits home.’’
‘‘Did you eat them?’’ she persisted.
He shook his head and he shuddered again.
‘‘Then what did you do with them?’’ she asked, thinking he probably fed them to the cattle dogs or some livestock.
‘‘Well, actually, we took them out to the skeet field and used them for clay pigeons,’’ he confessed with a grin. ‘‘They were the best damned targets we ever had, but we didn’t dare say where we got them!’’
She put her face in her hands and burst out laughing. ‘‘Oh, the poor girl!’’ she chuckled.
‘‘Don’t worry, we’d never tell her,’’ he promised. ‘‘But we did ask her for another pan of biscuits, without telling her why.’’ He sighed. ‘‘That woman has a ready-made profession as a target maker, and we haven’t got the guts to tell her so. Hell of a shame!’’
She brushed at her eyes with the hem of her blouse. Poor Janie. And she’d been jealous.
‘‘What does she look like?’’ she asked, curious.
‘‘She comes up to my shoulder. She’s got light brown hair, longer than yours, and her eyes are green. If she didn’t know everything, and tell you so every time you saw her, she might get married one day.’’
‘‘You don’t want to marry her?’’ she teased. ‘‘Not even for an inexhaustible supply of skeet targets?’’
‘‘I don’t want to marry anybody,’’ he said bluntly, and he looked her straight in the eye when he said it. ‘‘I love my freedom.’’
She sighed and smiled. ‘‘So do I,’’ she confessed. ‘‘I don’t think I could ever settle for diapers and dishes. Not with my background.’’
‘‘You were a science major, weren’t you?’’ he asked abruptly.
‘‘Yes. Chemistry and biology, genetics—stuff like that. I made good grades, but it was hard work. Then I went right to work for my boss, straight out of college. I need to be two people, just to catch up. I run my legs off. The stress is pretty bad sometimes.’’
‘‘No wonder keeping house and baking biscuits seemed like a holiday to you,’’ he said to himself.
‘‘It’s been fun,’’ she agreed. ‘‘I love to cook. I do it a lot, at home. I used to when Mama was alive,’’ she recalled. ‘‘She hated housework and cooking. I came home from work and did it all.’’
‘‘I’ve read about the sort of work you do,’’ he commented, recalling articles he’d seen in the daily newspaper. ‘‘You’re second only to a physician in authority. The only thing you can’t do is write a prescription without his supervision.’’
‘‘That’s true.’’ She smiled.
He studied her slender body, her exquisite figure nicely outlined by the garments she was wearing. ‘‘All those years, nothing but textbooks and exams and, then, a hectic career. No men?’’ he added, with a calculating stare.
“I dated,” she replied. “I just couldn’t afford to get serious about anybody. My father scraped and begged and borrowed to get the money to finance my nursing education,” she told him. “Even Mike…contributed to it.” She drew in a steadying breath and locked her fingers together on her lap. “It would have been so petty of me to throw all that up, just so I could go to parties and get drunk with the other students.”
‘‘Surely there wasn’t much of that, at a community college?’’
She laughed. ‘‘You’d be surprised. There was all too much, for my taste. But I didn’t live on campus. I lived at home and commuted.’’ She met his searching gaze. ‘‘That party I was at, when Leo was attacked—the woman who gave it was a college classmate who works for a doctor in our practice. I knew she sort of had a reputation. I guess I should have realized how wild things would get, but I was so depressed that I let her pressure me into going to the party. It was a mistake.’’
‘‘A lucky mistake, for my brother,’’ Rey said gently. ‘‘He might have been killed, if you hadn’t come along when you did.’’ He scowled. ‘‘You said, you ran at the attackers, waving your arms.’’
She nodded. ‘‘Mike taught me about shock tactics,’’ she said sadly. ‘‘I was afraid it wouldn’t work, but I had no weapon, no other way of stopping them. So I took the risk.’’
‘‘I’m grateful that you did.’’ He shook his head slowly. ‘‘But it was an act of lunacy, Meredith. You could have been lying on the grass next to Leo.’’
‘‘But I wasn’t.’’ She hunched her shoulders as if she felt a chill. ‘‘I think there might be a force behind every single chain of events,’’ she said thoughtfully. ‘‘I don’t believe in chaos,’’ she elaborated. ‘‘The body is such a messy, beautiful miracle. A single cell has chemical processes that are so complex, so meticulously crafted, that I can’t believe life is an accident. If it isn’t accidental, it has to be planned.’’ She shrugged. ‘‘That’s simple logic. That’s why I don’t think God is a myth.’’
They were silent for a moment. ‘‘You’re the most intriguing woman I’ve ever met,’’ he murmured, and his dark eyes fell to her soft, full mouth.
‘‘Surely not?’’ she asked demurely. ‘‘I don’t have any secrets left.’’
‘‘That’s what you think,’’ he said in a soft, low tone.
She looked up and he moved toward her, one hand catching the wooden headboard as he levered his hard mouth down against her soft one.
Her hands instinctively went to his chest, but its muscular warmth was fascinating. She’d never done anything really intimate with her infrequent dates, having been completely turned off by men with fast reputations. She preferred gentlemen to rounders. She knew that Rey had been a rounder. She wanted to draw away. She really did.
But Rey Hart was completely out of her experience. He wasn’t aggressive and insistent, as one of Meredith’s rare dates had been. He didn’t rush at her. He didn’t insist. He wasn’t insulting with the speed of his advances. He simply bent and kissed her, slowly and gently, with nothing more intimate than his hard, tender lips touching hers. He nibbled her upper lip and lifted his mouth slowly.
‘‘You’re doing a surfboard imitation,’’ he murmured. ‘‘There’s no need. I’m too good a cattleman to rush my fences.’’
She was trying to understand the slow, sensuous speech when his lips came down on hers again and caressed her upper lip. Her hands pressed flat against his muscular chest. She liked the way he felt. She could feel the quick, strong pulse of his heart under her palms. She could feel the growing rise and fall of his breathing.
His teeth nibbled her lips again, tenderly, and she found her hands moving under his arms and around him. She wanted to be held close, tight. She wanted him to envelop her against him. She wanted something more than this torturous teasing of his mouth on hers.
She mad
e a husky, high-pitched little cry into his mouth and her nails bit into the solid muscles of his back.
‘‘What do you want?’’ he whispered just above her lips.
‘‘Kiss me,’’ she moaned huskily.
‘‘Kisses are dangerous, didn’t you know?’’ he murmured, smiling against her responsive mouth. ‘‘They can be very addictive.’’
She was following his lips mindlessly. Her body was on fire. She’d never felt such headlong desire. Belatedly she realized that his hands were at her rib cage. Whether by accident or design, they were moving slowly up and down, up and down, so that his long fingers just lightly brushed the underswell of her breasts. It was extremely provocative. It was arousing.
She caught her breath as they moved ever closer to entrapment, and her eyes locked into his.
‘‘Don’t you like it this way?’’ he asked at her lips, brushing his mouth against them.
‘‘Like…it?’’ she murmured mindlessly. Her body was reaching up toward those tormenting hands. She was shivering with every pulsating motion of her body, trembling with new and exciting surges of pleasure.
He laughed softly, sensuously. ‘‘Never mind.’’ He lifted a hand to her hair and tugged out the hairpins, so that her beautiful long hair fell down around her shoulders. He tugged aside the top she was wearing, so that her shoulder was bare. Then he bent to it with his mouth, and she felt the warm, moist press of his lips right in the hollow of her shoulder.
Her nails dug into him. She lifted toward his mouth with a hoarse moan as she felt the slow tracing of his tongue against skin that had never known a man’s touch. She was on fire. She was going to go up in flames right here. She didn’t want to think, see, hear anything. She only wanted Rey to keep on touching her, to keep on holding her, to never, never stop…!
Eight
Just when the world was spinning away in a warm, pleasurable oblivion, the sound of loud, urgent footsteps echoed down the hall and brought Rey upright.
He looked at her with narrow, blank eyes as the sound grew louder. He cursed under his breath and got to his feet, keeping his back to her as he moved to the window, gripped the curtains and stared out at the pasture beyond.
