by Linda Howard
“Relax, no one knows but me. I just happen to know who wasn’t at the picnic yesterday, and word got around about how you left early. She came into town yesterday morning, to the general store, but it was closed. I was sitting outside and saw her. She waved at me. I’ve seen her before, and she’s never been snooty. She’s a straightforward woman, with more grit than just about any two men put together.”
“She does have grit,” Lucas said.
“There’s been lots of talk about you and the banker’s daughter,” Tillie said. She looked him up and down, then shook her head. “I never could see it. You need someone meaner than that, a woman who can stand up to you without blinking an eye.”
Lucas smiled. “Tillie,” he said, “you know too damn much about people.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to study them.”
He put the little sponges in his pocket. “How much do I owe you?”
“They’re on the house. Next time I order some from New Orleans, I’ll let you know so you can get a supply.”
He leaned down and kissed that exquisite mouth, lazily taking his time about it because she was so damn beautiful. When he straightened she blinked and said, “My, my. I haven’t been kissed like that since Charles Dupré—never mind. Are you sure the sponges are all you want?”
He cupped her chin and kissed her again. “I’m sure,” he said. “I need to save my strength.”
She gave a wonderful, lusty laugh. “I guess you do. This is going to just destroy my reputation, us up here laughing like jackasses and you going back downstairs within five minutes.”
He grinned at her as he opened the door. “No, it’ll be my reputation that’s ruined if I couldn’t last more than five minutes.”
She fluttered her lashes at him as she passed by. “If I ever got my hands on you, you might not.”
Lucas was in a good mood as he rode back to the Double C. The sponges in his pocket provoked a big temptation to swing east and visit Dee, but he resisted it. She would be too sore for making love again, and he wasn’t all that certain of his self-control.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, underscoring his decision to go home. He looked upward but saw only deep blue sky. The storm clouds must still be beyond the horizon, he thought. They needed a good rain, since the snowpacks on the mountains weren’t as deep as they should have been, but he sure hoped he got to the ranch before the storm arrived.
Luis looked upward at the same rumble of thunder. Olivia kept her attention on the ground before her as her mare carefully picked her way over some rough ground. “I hope it rains and settles the dust,” she said.
He hoped it rained for more basic reasons. It had been too long since they had had even a brief spring shower, and the water holes were getting a little low, especially since it was just May. But as much as the rain was needed, he hoped it held off for another couple of hours. He didn’t want his time with Olivia cut short.
She had been distinctly nervous when he had ridden up beside her, so he had restricted himself to conversation and the quiet enjoyment of her company. She had slowly relaxed, and now the strain was gone from her face. As much as he wanted to hold her again, he wanted more for her to feel at ease with him. It was time for her to get to know him better. Besides, there were some things he wanted to know about her, too.
“Is there an understanding between you and Lucas Cochran?” he asked quietly, watching her face.
“No,” she replied. “He’s never spoken of marriage, and neither have I, though everyone just assumed that he would.”
“Don’t you want him to? He’s a powerful man, and from what I hear he’s going to be even bigger than he is now.”
“I like Lucas, but he’s just a friend.” How good it felt to be able to say that! From the way he had acted the day before, she was certain he was fascinated with Dee. “If he had asked me, I don’t know what I would have said.”
“Because he’s rich?”
“No. I know I’ve been raised with luxuries, but I don’t think I’ve ever expected them as my due. But I’m twenty-five, and I’m afraid that if I don’t marry soon, I never will, and then I’ll never have my own family.”
“I’m thirty-two,” he said. “I’ve begun to think that I want to have a family, too.”
She gave him a quick look and blushed.
“Why haven’t you married before?” He quietly soothed his horse when the animal shied as a blossom blew in front of it. “I know you must have had offers.”
“No. No one ever asked. Somehow I just never fell in love with anyone, and evidently no one fell in love with me either.”
“I was serious about what I said. About my intentions.”
“I know,” she whispered. She sighed. “Why have you drifted?”
“It’s always seemed the natural thing to do.” He looked up at the sky again, but it was still clear. He wondered if he could explain it so she would under stand. “I’ve always been good with a gun. I’ve never hired it out, but when a man is fast with a six-iron it tends to make most people uneasy around him. And sooner or later someone thinks he’s faster and wants to prove it. No town wants to have a fast gun settle down there, because it draws other guns. For a while I worked for the Sarratt brothers down in New Mexico, and I could have stayed there, but then Celia died, and so did my reason for staying.
“After a while, moving on seems like the natural thing to do. It has its own lure, to see what’s beyond that mountain range, then the next one, then the next one. Always a new place and new faces, and sometimes nothing but a huge empty world with me right in the middle of it, just me and the horse and the sky. I’ve gone weeks without seeing another human being. And sometimes, when I’m in a town, I miss that.”
“But you hired on with Mr. Bellamy. Do you intend to stay?”
“I hired on to rest from the trail for a while and earn some money doing it. I’ve been here almost two months now, and so far I’m content. I like the town. It’s the kind of quiet, sturdy town I like.”
She noticed that he hadn’t answered her question but didn’t feel that she had the right to press him further. What would it take to induce him to settle down? she wondered. Marriage? He hadn’t said so, and she would be foolish to assume that such was his intention, perhaps almost as foolish as she would be to consider marrying him at all.
But he fascinated her in a way no one else had ever done. She glanced at his dark, lean face, admiring his wonderfully chiseled features. There was an obvious aura of danger about him, but she never felt threat ened. Instead, when his warm, dark gaze touched her, she felt infinitely admired and . . . safe, as if he would forever stand between her and anything that would harm her.
Thunder rumbled again, closer this time. He looked regretful. “We’d better turn back.”
Common sense agreed with him, but she felt like shaking her fist at the sky. Why couldn’t the rain have held off just another hour or so? The storm might even bypass them completely, but they couldn’t depend on that.
Smiling at the disappointment on her face, Luis reined his horse closer to hers and leaned over to kiss her lingeringly. Her lips parted for him without hesitation, so sweetly that it was all he could do to break away. He might not have if his horse hadn’t sidestepped nervously, away from such close contact with her mount.
One kiss would have to be enough, he thought, or they would likely get caught by the storm anyway. They reined the horses around and started back.
“I don’t know when I’ll get back to town,” he said after a while, “but I’ll see you when I do.”
She started to ask him how he would contact her but kept silent when she realized how insulting the question would be, for it would imply that he wasn’t good enough simply to come to her house and ask to see her. Yet weren’t they going out of their way not to let anyone see them together precisely because they both knew her parents would object?
She should tell them, she thought, and let them know that she . . . what? Was considering ma
rrying Luis? Without knowing where or how they would live? Honora would make herself ill with worry. Her parents were indulgent rather than dictatorial, so she didn’t fear they would forbid her to see Luis; she was twenty-five, not a giddy seventeen-year-old to be locked in her room. But it would upset them, and she didn’t want that.
So it seemed as if she could either have them upset or continue to sneak around as if she were doing something wrong, and neither choice appealed to her. The only solution was to stop seeing Luis entirely, which she discarded at once as unacceptable. In one short day he had shattered the pall of gray desolation that had shrouded her for so long, and she felt wondrously alive, her heart pounding with excitement whenever she was with him.
She had always done exactly as a lady ought, living contentedly within the boundaries of convention. This was the only time she had ever stepped outside those boundaries, and she found it exhilarating. If she was condemned for it, then she would simply have to deal with it, for she found that the need for his company was as compelling for her as drifting had been for him.
Dee looked up when she heard the patter of rain on the tin roof, the sound quickly increasing to a soporific drumming that drowned out all other sounds. With the rain came a chill, but she didn’t want to light a fire, so she got a quilt from the bed and sat down in her big chair with it wrapped around her. The warmth of the quilt comforted her.
She had been reading, but the book no longer interested her. She laid her head back and closed her eyes, letting the rain-induced drowsiness wash over her.
Lucas hadn’t been back today. She had been jittery all day long, expecting him to come riding up with that intense look in his eyes that she now knew to be desire. He was arrogant enough to expect her to lie down with him whenever he wanted her, but she hadn’t made up her mind about the situation.
She loved him. Since she had unwillingly admitted to herself the source of her agitation whenever she was around him, she had analyzed the situation from every angle and accepted that there was no easy solution to it. By loving him she had made herself vulnerable, and she would eventually be hurt by it. He didn’t love her, which was the only thing that would have made him equally vulnerable and kept their relationship balanced. Loving him hadn’t blinded her to the truth: Lucas was a hard man, one who was ruthless in getting his own way. He wanted her physically, he even cared for her to some extent, but that wasn’t at all the same thing as love.
It would be better for her if she stopped the relationship cold, but she didn’t know if she could. Lucas wouldn’t give up without a fight, and she doubted her own ability to resist him. She wanted him with a deep, primitive strength that frightened her, knowing as she did that it was beyond her control.
There was always the chance that her feelings would lessen over time, as she grew to know him better, but she didn’t think so. His character would always challenge her, both infuriating and invigorating, but never boring. She had always been protected from love because she had never met a man whose will was as strong as hers until Lucas. He would fight and laugh and love with her, and she would fall more and more in love with him.
Despite his assurance that there were ways to prevent conception, she knew that she would be at risk every time she made love with him. Bearing an illegitimate child, no matter how beloved, would destroy her standing with the townfolk. She cherished the respect she received now because only she knew how hard she had worked to earn it. Some people might not like her, and probably most of them thought her odd, but no one could say that she wasn’t respected.
So she had to consider the possibility of pregnancy, and she ached deep inside in a way she never had before. She was intensely female, vital, and earthy, and thinking about his children shattered her old self-contentment and made her aware that there was something else that she needed in life, something so much a part of herself that she wondered a little numbly how she hadn’t known this truth about herself long before this. She wanted children, wanted to feel them growing inside her, wanted to hold greedy little mouths to her breast, wanted to watch them grow and prosper and someday bring their own children to her to be rocked. She wanted Lucas’s children.
Perhaps if she became pregnant, he would want her to marry him.
She shied away from the thought as soon as it occurred. She didn’t want to be married, not even to Lucas. A woman became a man’s property as soon as she became his wife. Dee wasn’t afraid that Lucas would ever mistreat her, but she couldn’t bear the thought of losing the independence, the acknowledgement of herself as someone to be dealt with, that she had worked so hard to establish. Her land would become his without his having to pay one cent for it.
Thinking about it, she decided that he would be certain to want to marry her if she became pregnant, because Lucas would want his child, would in fact do whatever was necessary to make certain the baby bore his name. And she thought him capable of marrying her in order to get Angel Creek. She couldn’t bear it either way, because she wanted to be loved for herself, wanted for herself, not because of a child inside of her or the land she owned.
She sat wrapped in the quilt long after the rain had stopped, long after the sun had gone down, her eyes open and somber as she looked at the various choices she could make. All of them would bring her pain, and because she loved him she would accept that pain in order to have whatever time with him she had been allotted.
11
THE RAIN THE DAY BEFORE HADN’T BEEN ENOUGH TO raise the levels in the streams or watering holes, but the fresh spring grass was vibrantly green and abundant, and the air was washed clean of dust. Lucas was tired and sore after a day of branding calves, but whenever he lifted his head and looked around him he felt a deep sense of peace. All of the land that he saw in every direction was his, and he had never wanted to be anywhere else than right there. He loved it with every particle of his being, and he wouldn’t hesitate to kill to protect his home, as he had done before, or to die in the effort. He was willing to spill both blood and sweat on the ground to make it prosper.
When the last calf of the day was branded and had been released to run bawling back to its mother Lucas stood and stretched, turning from side to side to work the kinks out of his back. He eyed the sun; it was only an hour until sundown, not enough time for him to get back to the house and change out of his filthy clothes, then get over the narrow pass leading down to Angel Creek before dark. He could go the long way around, taking the road to Prosper and then cutting back toward the mountains, but the ride alone would take him over two hours, and it was possible someone would see him riding toward Dee’s place. He wasn’t going to have people whispering about her behind her back, so that option was out. But he needed her with a deep, burning ache that had grown worse as the day passed and wouldn’t get any better until he was with her again, sliding deep into her silky body, feeling her wrap those strong, graceful legs around him. He looked again at the sun, thinking of taking his chances over the pass, then finally realized that it would be stupid to try. He would have to get through another night without her.
He had spent only the one afternoon with her, yet he craved her with the ferocity that drove the addicts in the San Francisco opium dens to their pipes. Losing his brother Matt had been hard, and since then he had been essentially alone in spirit because he had taught himself to need no one, to be complete unto himself; but now he had to deal with a nagging sense of incompletion, as if he had left part of himself down at Angel Creek. The notion was ridiculous, and he scoffed silently at himself. No one could mean that much to anyone else. It was just that Dee wasn’t like other women he had known, and her differences were what intrigued him. He wanted her, that was all. It was a challenge to get past all of those thorns to the wild-honey sweetness of her
He wondered with disgust when he had taken up lying to himself.
Thunder boomed, and he looked at the sky for the third time. His foreman, William Tobias, evidently thought he was looking for signs of rain and said, “I don’
t think that one’s going to come our way. Sounds like it’s headed for the mountains.” The gangly sundried man leaned over to spit. “Sure do wish we’d get a hard spell of rain. We ain’t dry, but I’d like to have more water in those holes before summer gets here.”
Lucas thought of the pure, never-ending water of Angel Creek and felt the old irritation with his father rise up within him. That land should have belonged to the Double C for a long time, but due to his father’s lack of judgment it was now in the hands of a stubborn woman who was likely to work herself to death rather than listen to reason.
But if his father had bought Angel Creek all those years ago, Dee’s father wouldn’t have settled there, and he would never have met Dee. Lucas frowned, trying to balance the pleasure of owning Angel Creek against the excitement of making love to Dee. The frown changed to a wry smile. Angel Creek wasn’t going anywhere; he’d get it eventually. Maybe he was just as glad that it had been unsettled when George Swann had brought his family west.
He and the foreman stood watching the storm clouds low on the horizon as they drifted away toward the mountains. The late afternoon thunderstorms were a frequent occurrence during spring and early summer, so both men expected they would get their share of rain.
Resigned now to the fact that he wouldn’t get over to Dee’s after all, Lucas mounted his horse and started back toward the house. If he knew Dee, she had probably decided that he intended to visit only when he needed sex and would have the shotgun in her hands the next time he showed his face.
He realized that he was grinning as he rode home. Damn if getting her wouldn’t be worth a load of buckshot in his ass!
Dee stepped outside the next morning just as dawn was turning the sky a glowing, translucent pink. She had reached for the feed pan as soon as she had stepped onto the stoop, but now she withdrew her hand without touching it, her eyes on that wonderful sky arching above her, around her, surrounding her with the glow.
