by Diana Palmer
“How...easy?” she parroted breathlessly.
“For an experienced man to knock you off balance and make you give in to him,” he continued. “Grier knows even more than I do. Don’t let him get too close. He’s not a marrying man. In any case, you’re not free to experiment, paper marriage or not.”
She wasn’t getting any of it. She just looked at him, completely disoriented. She’d never dreamed that he’d kiss her like that. He’d sworn in the past that he was never going to touch her. She felt hot and shaky all over. She wanted to lie down with him. She wanted to touch his skin. She wanted him to kiss her breasts, the way men kissed women in those shameful late-night satellite movies that she watched secretly when Maude had gone to bed on the weekends.
“Are you listening to me?” he asked impatiently.
Her head fell back against his shoulder. She pressed one cold hand to his chest and moved it back and forth involuntarily.
“I’m listening. This dress is really hot. Could you help me take it off...?” she whispered wickedly.
He glared down at her. “Stop that,” he said curtly. “I’m trying to talk to you.”
Her eyes were half-closed, her body completely yielding. She felt as if she’d melted into him, become part of him. She wondered what it would feel like to lie under him on a bed. She reddened at the images that had flashed unexpectedly into her mind. Judd, in bed with her, stark naked and hungry for her. Heavens, she’d have died for it!
Her hunger for him was in her face. It amazed him that she was so immediately receptive to him, so hungry. He hadn’t meant to touch her in the first place. It was Grier, damn him. He was uneasy about having her go out with Grier. He didn’t trust the man. It disturbed him that this sudden relationship of hers had happened under his nose and without his knowledge. In his wildest dreams, he’d never expected that Grier could be drawn to a woman Christabel’s age. He didn’t trust Grier’s motives, and he didn’t want Christabel seduced. He was going to have to talk to Grier.
He watched her while his mind worked. She was still shivering faintly. He knew how she felt. He felt the same way. His body ached. He’d never expected such an explosive passion to flare up between them. He should never have touched her. He’d been stupid to let jealousy provoke him into it. He hoped she didn’t know enough to see how susceptible he was to her. He moved back a step, just in case.
She took a step forward. “I can rush right to town and buy a red negligee,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll borrow one. Steal one. There’s a bed only ten feet away...!”
“I told you that we were never going to have any sort of physical relationship,” he said with ice dripping from every syllable.
“You started it,” she reminded him glibly.
“I did it deliberately. I know Grier. You haven’t dated,” he said through his teeth. “You know nothing about men, and that’s my fault. You can’t go out with a man like Grier without knowing the dangers. It was a lesson, Christabel. Just a lesson!”
She was staring at him. Just staring, as all her dreams of belonging and being loved in return went up in smoke. She’d always thought of Judd as being very fastidious about women. But innocence could recognize experience, and she knew at once that she was completely out of his league. She didn’t do a thing for him. He’d only been showing her what a trap passion could be. But it felt different now when she looked at him.
“Have you heard a word I’ve said?” he asked, exasperated.
“A few, here and there,” she said, but she was looking at his mouth. “I’m not sure I understand the lesson completely. Could you do that again...?”
He took an angry breath and his lips flattened. He could taste her on them. That irritated him even more.
“No, I couldn’t do it again!” he raged, furious. “Listen to me, damn it! We are getting an annulment in November, period! I don’t want marriage and a family. I love my job, and my freedom, and I’m not giving up either one. Is that clear?”
Breaking out of her trance, she moved away from him. Yes, it was painfully clear. But she smiled deliberately, anyway. Her voice, like her breathing, was jerky. “Okay. It’s a great loss to my education, but if you feel that way, just don’t expect me to offer to take my clothes off for you ever again. I’ll fix some coffee if you’d like some,” she added. “Cash isn’t due for thirty minutes.”
“Fine.”
She went to the kitchen and made coffee. It calmed her. By the time she put a cup and saucer on the table, along with the condiments, her hands had stopped shaking.
“Do you want it in the study?” she called.
“No. I’ll drink it in here.” He moved into the room and sat down at the small kitchen table. He’d removed his hat and rolled up his sleeves. His hair was still mussed from her restless, hungry fingers, and his mouth, like hers, had a slight swell from the urgency of the kisses they’d shared.
Grier was going to notice that, he mused. Perhaps it would make him hesitate. He wondered why he felt so arrogant when he looked at her now. It felt almost like possession. He clamped down hard on those thoughts. He didn’t want to be married. He wasn’t ready for family life. Infrequent liaisons were enough for him. Love was dangerous, and he wanted no part of it. He’d seen it destroy his father, and he knew that women had no staying power. His mother had left his father. Judd’s one serious love interest had walked out on him ten years ago when he refused to give up his hazardous job for her. It was just as well to avoid tangles. Christabel was very young...
“You’re very solemn,” she pointed out.
“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about what just happened,” he said, pinning her with his eyes.
“I’m not dim,” she told him. She avoided looking directly at him. She was too shaken to hide her emotions. “You said it was only a lesson. I hadn’t planned to jump into the back seat with Grier and have my way with him, you know.”
He cleared his throat. “He drives a pickup. There is no back seat.”
She glared at him. “You know what I mean!”
“And it’s not you jumping on him that worries me.”
She lifted both eyebrows. “Why not? Do you think I wouldn’t know how? I do know what goes on between men and women, even if I’m not the voice of experience!”
“I know,” he murmured dryly.
“Excuse me?”
He cleared his throat again. “I pay the satellite bill.”
She was very still. That had never occurred to her before.
He cocked his head. “The titles are self-explanatory. Passionate Partners, Lust in the Sand, The Curious Virgin...shall I go on?”
She groaned and put her face in her hands.
“Just remember that what you’re watching is staged and pure fantasy,” he pointed out. “It’s not like that in real life.”
She moved two of her fingers and looked at him through them, curiously.
He leaned back, feeling his experience keenly as he met that glance. “Two kisses and a pat, and they go at it endlessly with accompanying groans and tormented expressions, in positions that even the Kama Sutra hasn’t listed,” he explained.
She was still watching, listening, waiting.
He let out a long sigh. “Christabel, a woman doesn’t accept a man’s body that quickly, or that easily, without a lot of foreplay. And most men can’t last long enough to go through the whole catalog of outrageous positions. One usually suffices.”
She was fiery red, but paying complete attention while trying not to look as if she was. And he was aching to show her, rather than tell her, how satisfying a physical coming-together could be. All at once, he felt things he didn’t want to feel. And for the one woman on earth who was off limits to him, even if she was the only wife he’d ever had.
He finished his coffee and glared at her. “I
don’t mind if you go out with Grier, as long as you’re discreet,” he said, hating the words even as he spoke them with deliberate carelessness. His black eyes pinned hers. “But you don’t cross the line with him.”
She knew exactly what he meant and she was insulted. “As if I would, Judd!”
“Until it’s annulled, it’s still a marriage,” he continued. “And a few people around town know about it.”
“I understand why you’re so worried about gossip...” she began, and then bit her tongue, because it was a subject he hated.
His chin lifted and his eyes narrowed dangerously. “My father was a minister,” he said roughly. “Can you imagine how it was for him, and for me, to have all of Jacobsville talking about my mother and her blatant affair with the vice president of the local manufacturing company? They didn’t even try to hide it. She moved in with him and lived with him openly while she was still married to my father. Everybody knew. His whole congregation knew, and he had to preach every Sunday. When her lover dropped her for someone younger, after he’d had his fill of the affair, she begged to come home again and pretend that it never happened. My father even tried to let her.”
He averted his eyes to the table, cold with the memory of how those days had been for him. He’d loved his mother. But his father, despite his faith, had been unable to forget what she’d done. In his world, as in Judd’s, vows were sacred. “In the end, it was the gossip that made it impossible for him to forget. It didn’t stop, even after she left her lover. Some of his congregation refused to speak to her. It affected him, even though he tried not to let it. In the end, he asked her to leave, and she went, without an argument.”
“You were only twelve when that happened, weren’t you?” she asked gently, trying to get him to talk about it. He never had.
He nodded. “I loved her. He did, too, but he couldn’t get over what she did. It was too public for either of them to get past it, in a small town.”
Her hand itched to slide across the table to his, but she knew he’d sling it off. He was unapproachable when he talked about the past.
“Did she write to you?”
He shook his head. “He told her that she could, but she moved to Kansas where she had a cousin, and apparently never looked back.” He toyed with the handle of his coffee cup. “We heard that she married again and had a child before she died. All we had was a card announcing the funeral and a dog-eared photograph of Dad and me that she kept in her wallet.” His voice became tight and he sat up straighter.
“Was the child a boy or a girl?” she asked.
He was staring into space with blank eyes. “A girl. She died of spinal meningitis when she was six, and my mother died in a car crash a few months later.” His teeth clenched. “She was a good mother,” he added absently. “Even if she was a lousy wife.”
She studied him quietly. “Sometimes people fall in love with the wrong people,” she began. “I don’t think they can help it.”
His black eyes bore into hers. “In my book, if you make a vow before God, you keep it. Period.”
She sighed, thinking that it was highly unlikely that he’d kept the wedding vow he made to her when she was sixteen, but she didn’t say it. “I expect she was sorry for what she did to your father.”
His broad shoulders moved restlessly. “He said she wrote him a letter. He never told me what was in it, but he admitted that his own pride had killed any hope of them getting back together. He couldn’t bear having everybody know what she did to him.” He smiled sadly. “She was his first woman,” he added, with a glance at Christabel’s wide-eyed stare. “And his last. I don’t suppose some people today even think it’s possible for a man to be faithful to one woman his whole life, but it’s not so rare a thing in small towns, even in the modern world.”
“I guess you’ve thought about how it would have been, if he could have forgiven her.”
“Yes.” He turned the coffee cup in his big, lean hands. “It was a lonely life after she left. I could never talk to him the way I could to her, about things that bothered me. I guess I drew inside myself afterward.”
He’d never talked to her this way before, as if she were an adult, an equal. She studied his hard face and ached to have his mouth on hers again. She knew she’d never be able to forget how it felt.
He pushed back from the table and got to his feet. “I need to get back to Victoria.”
She got up, too, eyeing him curiously. “What did you come down here for?”
“Leo Hart phoned me about some Salers bulls that have died mysteriously. He said he’d heard that our young one was poisoned. I wanted to talk to you about it.”
“Yes, I tried to tell you when it happened that I thought Jack Clark was responsible, and you wouldn’t listen...” she began.
He held up a hand. “You know you didn’t have the boys check that pasture for bloat-causing weeds,” he pointed out. “I told Leo so. I warned you about that, Christabel. You can’t accuse people of crimes without solid proof.”
“I wasn’t! Judd,” she said, exasperated, “there were four other young bulls in that pasture with him. They didn’t die.”
“I know that. They were lucky.”
She grimaced. “They were Herefords,” she said impatiently. “The only bull we lost was a Salers, and he was one of the same group that Fred Brewster bought calves from. He thinks Mr. Brewster’s bull was poisoned, and I still think ours was, too.”
He picked up his Stetson and slanted it across his brow. “Prove it,” he said.
She threw up her hands. “I don’t save dead bulls!” she exclaimed. “You wouldn’t believe me and I couldn’t afford an autopsy! We buried him with the backhoe!”
“Dig him up.”
She gave him a speaking glare. “Even if I did, where am I going to get the money to have an autopsy done?”
“Good point.” He sighed. “I’m skint. I used the last of my savings to repair that used tractor we had to have for haying.”
“I know,” she said, feeling guilty. “Listen, as soon as I graduate next year, I’ll get a job in town at one of the businesses. Computer programming pays good wages.”
“Then who’ll do the books?” he asked. “I don’t mind writing checks to pay bills, but I’m not burying myself in ten columns of figures and justifying bank statements. That’s your department.”
“I’ll justify the statements and do the printouts at night or on the weekends.”
“Poor Grier,” he said sarcastically.
“I only just met the man,” she pointed out.
“Stay out of parked cars with him,” he said with rare malice.
“He drives a truck,” she reminded him pertly, throwing his own earlier statement back at him.
“You know what I mean.” He turned and started out the front door.
She followed him, seething inside. He didn’t want her, but he didn’t want any other man around her, either.
“I’ll do what I please, Judd,” she said haughtily.
He whirled at the front porch. “You put your name on a marriage license,” he reminded her curtly.
“So did you, but that’s not stopping you from doing what you want to!”
He lifted an eyebrow and went on down the steps to his truck. “The film people are coming back Saturday to set up their equipment,” he added. “The director’s bringing Tippy Moore with him, and the guy who’s playing the cowboy—Rance Wayne.”
She couldn’t have cared less about the movie people. She hated the way Judd’s eyes twinkled when he mentioned Tippy Moore. The woman was internationally famous for her beauty. Christabel was going to look like a cactus plant by comparison, and she didn’t like it.
“I can hardly wait,” she muttered. “Do they like pet snakes? I’m thinking of adopting a black one and keeping it in the l
iving room...”
“You be nice,” he said firmly. “We need the money. There’s no way we can fix the barn or buy new electric fencing without that grubstake.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “I’ll be nice.”
“That’ll be a change,” he remarked deliberately.
“And that’s just sour grapes because I didn’t dress up and look sexy for you,” she said, striking a pose. “You can go home and dream about me in that red negligee, because that’s the only way you’ll ever see it,” she added.
He made a rough sound in his throat, something like laughter, and kept walking.
She stared after him with flashing dark eyes, wishing that Cash would drive up before he left so that she could flaunt her date in front of him.
Daydreams so rarely come true, she thought wistfully as Judd climbed in behind the wheel, started the SUV, and drove off with a perfunctory wave of his hand.
It was a full ten minutes later that Cash Grier drove up in his black pickup truck. It was a huge, new vehicle with a spotlessly clean bed.
“Well, I can see that you don’t haul cattle,” she remarked as she went out to meet him at the bottom of the steps.
“Maybe I just keep an immaculate truck,” he chuckled.
He looked really good. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater with a casual jacket and dress slacks. His shoes were polished to a perfect shine. His dark hair was in a neat ponytail. He was easy on the eyes.
“You look nice, even out of uniform,” she pointed out.
He was doing some looking of his own, with eyes at least as experienced as Judd’s. She thought about the way Judd had kissed her and she flushed.
“You look a little uptight,” he remarked. “Second thoughts about tonight?”
“Not a single one,” she said firmly.
“Not worried about what Judd will say?” he persisted as he helped her into the truck.
“Judd said he didn’t care,” she replied. “He was here earlier.”
Which explained her flustered look and the deep swell of her lower lip, Cash thought privately and with some amusement. Apparently Judd was more jealous of his paper wife than Christabel realized, and had made sure that she had a yardstick to measure men by. He had a feeling he’d never measure up to the hero-worship she felt for her husband. But she made him feel good inside, young inside, and he wasn’t going to fall at the first fence because of a little competition.