by Janet Dailey
The hesitant caress of her hand broke the lines of restraint. He had been too vulnerable to risk a rejection, but it wasn’t a rejection her touch signaled. A deep, low moan of longing came from his throat.
His mouth opened moistly on her lips, taking them whole with a bold sensuality she had never before experienced. This was no awkward schoolboy, bumping noses with her, nor a brash teenager, coming on strong and crudely forceful. It unnerved her the way he hotly consumed her, needing and seeking with an urgency that made her feel raw.
Blindly she gave, trying to supply what he seemed to be desperately searching for. The invasion of his tongue brought with it the taste of beer and smoke, and the essence of something else. Everything quickened and rose, the heat of the blood rushing through her veins and the sudden intensifying of all her senses.
His arms never eased the pressure that pinned her to him even when his hands began moving on her body. She couldn’t keep track of where his hands were as they roamed from shoulder to thigh, always pressing and urging. They seemed to only spread the raw intimacy of his kiss over more parts of her body. Passion was something she’d always known she’d possessed, but nothing had ever ignited it before except her own imagination.
She drank in air when he finally dragged his mouth away. But it wasn’t the end; it was the beginning of a series of warm, wet kisses, one connecting to another in a trail over her features. His breath rushed over her skin, hot, moist waves engulfing her. Jessy was awash with sensation. Her hands had long ago found their way around his shoulders to hug and hold.
“You’re mine.” His low voice vibrated against her skin. “I knew it from the beginning.”
Jessy didn’t hear the faint slurring of his words, only the content. She had stopped believing Ty would ever feel the way she did. lb learn it had begun some time ago for him as well was beyond her wildest dreams.
“So did I,” she whispered with a certain fierceness.
“Oh, God, I’ve wanted you for so long.” The groaned words were filled with pent-up longing as he sought her lips in rough need.
Eagerly she turned into the ardent hunger of his kiss. His arms tightened around her, pulling her with him as Ty gradually sank lower in the seat, sliding until they were both awkwardly lying on the length of the seat. Jessy was on the inside, pinned between the seat back and Ty’s hard masculine body.
She was inexperienced, but not naive. What she hadn’t learned observing animals on the ranch, she had picked up listening to bunkhouse talk. When she felt his hand move inside her blouse, seeking out her breasts, Jessy wasn’t concerned with how far he was going, but whether he was going far enough. Her actions had never been governed by what other people regarded as proper behavior for a girl, and they weren’t now.
His hat was pushed to the back of his head as Ty twisted down to nuzzle the small breasts and their tautly erect nipples. What they lacked in size, they made up for in sensitivity. The encircling lick of his tongue sent curls of excitement spiraling in ever-tightening coils through her body. His hand cupped the underswell of a breast and pushed it up to hold it in position while his mouth rolled onto its hard, flesh-brown tip, letting his teeth, tongue, and lips play with it. Her desire intensified to an ache, her hips writhing in search of pressure to relieve the ache.
Ty seemed to weaken on her, lifting his head from her breasts and swaying unsteadily on the support of an arm braced on the seat. Her hands tightened their hold on his shoulders so he wouldn’t overbalance and tip backwards onto the truck floor. Their pressure brought him back to her lips.
“Don’t stop now, Ty,” There was an edge of frustration in her whispered plea, a faint anger that he’d aroused her to this point and might be too drunk to take her all the way.
His breathing was deep and labored. In his present state, more than half drunk and highly aroused, everything was fuzzy. She’d said something to him, but he’d already forgotten what it was. All he could remember was the insistence in her tone. From past experience, he knew that this was the moment when the protests usually came. Ty sought out her lips in the darkness.
“I’ve got to have you,” he muttered against them and drove deep inside them without meeting any resistance.
His lingers tugged at the snap of her jeans, fumbling awkwardly with it before it finally popped apart. The ensuing urgency was mutual as he roughly worked one side of her jeans down over her hip while Jessy pushed on the other side. His weight moved onto her, their legs tangling as she banged her knee against the steering wheel. The heat of his body more than made up for her lack of clothes, her white jeans getting shoved onto the cab’s dirty floor. At this point it didn’t matter that he hadn’t stripped. It was sufficient that he had unzipped his pants.
Even though Jessy didn’t now exactly how to do it, she knew what to do. In such restricting confines, cooperation was required. Without hesitation, Jessy reached down and guided him into her, sparing each of them the awkward and frustrating probing. She had anticipated the sharp rip of pain and had her teeth clenched to check any outcry. It gradually dulled with his rhythmic movements, and the beginnings of pleasure silvered into the sensations.
All the discomfort fled as her enjoyment climbed to an exquisite level. Her arms were wound tightly around him, trying to clutch all of him to her while their kisses became rougher and hungrier, always demanding more from the other. Jessy had been silent in her pain, but she made no attempt to contain the raw sounds of pleasure that came from her throat when the climaxing storm of sensation shuddered through her body, turning her bones into jelly.
She had barely begun to recover some measure of sensibility when his arms gripped her hard to his body, her flesh absorbing the racking shudders that went through him. The stiffness slowly flowed out of him as he slumped onto her.
The position that had been so satisfying became uncomfortable; his body became a hot, oppressive weight; the quarters became cramped and her muscles protested against the hardness of the seat. She pushed at him, prodding him into moving off of her.
10
It took some maneuvering before both of them were upright again. Jessy began pulling on her clothes, forced by the steering wheel to angle her body into Ty’s side of the truck. Inside, she felt all warm and loose, silky as cream.
With glowing interest, she looked at Ty. A smile tugged at her lip corners when she noted the hat still perched crookedly on the back of his head. She snapped the waistband of her jeans together and reached over to pull the front of his hat onto his forehead in a proprietorial gesture. His reflexes were slow, but Jessy made no attempt to elude the reach of his hands that gathered her to him. He was so relaxed she could feel the limpness of his muscles as she snuggled into his arms. The brim of his hat brushed her head as he bent to rub his mouth over her hair.
“You gotta marry me, Tara,” he stated thickly, and Jessy went still.
“What?” She insisted he repeat it, hoping she hadn’t heard him correctly.
But Ty took no heed of her request, not even noticing that he was caressing a body that had gone cold in his arms. “Tara, honey,” he groaned. “I love you.” His low voice was neither so thick nor so slurred that Jessy could doubt what she’d heard.
Gripped by a rigid numbness, she woodenly pulled out of his arms. His lax hands made a feeble attempt to hold on to her, but it was a simple matter to elude them. Jessy did it without thinking, moving out of his reach to the driver’s side.
Her fingers curled around the steering wheel in an ever-tightening circle that became a stranglehold. She stared at nothing; everything was focused inward on the devastating discovery that in his drunkenness he had made love to her believing she was someone else. And, fool that she was, she had thought all those things he’d said had been meant for her.
She had been used. It didn’t matter how willing a partner she had been. Ty had used her to fulfill his own fantasy. A violent trembling started and her blood turned into hot ice.
“You bastard.” Jessy turne
d her head to glare her hatred of him. She wanted to tear him apart with her hands. “You low-down, rotten bastard.” The low fury of her words was pushed through her teeth, gritted so tightly together.
But it made no impression on him as he sat slumped against the seat, his chin tucked low against his chest. For a minute, Jessy was too blind with raging pain to notice the deep rhythm of his breathing. When the realization sank in that Ty had passed out, she wanted to scream.
There was no tenderness left in her when she grabbed his shoulders and roughly tried to shake him into consciousness. “Wake up, you son of a bitch.” There weren’t enough vile names to call him. But neither her cursing nor her shaking disturbed his sleeping stupor.
Jessy slammed out of the truck and stalked around to the passenger side. She jerked open the door and stared rigidly at his slumped and unconscious figure. His hat sat crookedly on the back of his bowed head, an insulting reminder that he hadn’t bothered to take it off to make love to her.
“I oughta drag you out and leave you where you fall.” Jessy wasn’t sure why she didn’t carry out that threat unless it was because her second choice had more appeal.
Pain usually had a sobering effect, or so she’d heard from bunkhouse tales of drunken cowboys. Cursing and shaking had failed to rouse him, but pain should.
Doubling up her fist, Jessy took aim on his slack mouth and chin and pulled her arm back. Her lips pressed together in a thin line of grim pleasure as she let loose her cocked fist. The impact was jarring, but when she felt his lower lip splitting against his teeth, she understood the satisfaction men got from fighting.
The blow jerked his head, instantly snapping him awake. A dazed frown claimed his features as Ty looked around, semialert yet not quite sure what had happened. It was a full second before he noticed Jessy or felt the pain in his mouth and jaw. He pressed a hand to his mouth, then looked at the smear of blood on his fingers with bewildered amazement.
“What the hell’s going on?” The thickening influence of liquor was still in his voice, but he seemed almost sober.
Jessy said nothing and stood there waiting—waiting for him to remember what had happened between them before he’d passed out. But the yard light spilled over the roof of the truck cab and illuminated her features, accenting their strongly boned look. There were no distorting shadows to let him think she was anyone else.
“Who hit me?” Ty continued to frown at her while he licked at the cut and tested his sore jaw. “I don’t remember a fight.”
“I did,” Jessy told him, the hurt and anger going deeper at his evident failure to recall what had transpired. She vibrated with the urge to hit him again, regardless of the sore throbbing in her knuckles from the last time.
The announcement startled him. “What the hell for?” No matter how sober he sounded, there remained a lack of coordination as he tried to get his long legs into a position that would get him out of the truck.
“You had passed out,” she stated contemptuously and stepped back while he stumbled out of the cab. “And I wasn’t about to carry you into the house.”
“That was no damned reason to hit me,” he muttered and gripped the open truck door to steady himself, wiping at his bloodied lip again. Then he pushed off, weaving toward the front steps with a staggering stride.
“You could say thanks,” Jessy shot out. “I did get you home in one piece.” Which was more than she could say for herself.
Ty stopped with one foot on the steps, his tongue loosened by the beer he’d consumed. “I could have driven home by myself.” He resented being beholden to the tall, self-sufficient girl. “Why don’t you wait until someone asks you for help instead of always buttin’ your nose in where it isn’t wanted? I never asked for your help—an’ I never wanted it.” In a sober moment, he would have been more tolerant of her solicitous actions on his behalf.
Jessy paled at this rejection of all she had ever done for him. But she had been schooled by the most poker-faced cowboys in the outfit not to let her feelings show in her face. Only the whitening of her flesh revealed that his words had made any effect at all.
In a pain-choked silence, she watched him start up the steps, trip on the edge of one, and stumble forward, cracking his knee and knocking himself sideways to land hard on one hip. Cursing savagely, Ty attempted to get his feet under him again, but they kept getting tangled. He was on all fours, trying to walk and climb up the steps all at the same time.
The ludicrous sight of him, clambering like a drunken fool, pulled Jessy to the steps. Her hands were rigidly clamped to her hips, refusing to make any gesture of help. His momentary shock of sobriety was wearing off. When Ty saw her standing at the foot of the steps watching him struggle, he flared in drunken irritation.
“Dammit, give me a hand,” he snapped or tried to, but it came out with slurring force.
Smiling thinly, Jessy went up three steps and reached down to help him up. “It’s a pity your precious Tara isn’t here to see you like this.” She didn’t check the bitterness that curled through her voice.
“Tara.” Ty looked around, as if expecting to see her appear. “I thought she was here.” His head swung around to Jessy as he leaned heavily on her shoulders to negotiate the steps. “Wasn’t she here?”
“No.” It was a hard, flat answer.
A melancholia seemed to droop itself over him. “No. She had a date tonight. . . with somebody else. Always with somebody else.” He was muttering to himself, unmindful that he was speaking aloud, or that Jessy could hear. “I must be drunk. It seemed ... so real.”
Jessy walked him across the wide porch to the front door, laboring slightly under the increasing weight on her shoulders. Listening to him and knowing what she knew, it hurt bitterly.
The front door was unlocked. With a kick of her foot, Jessy pushed the solid-core door to swing inward, then tried to squeeze sideways through the opening with Ty. He bumped a shoulder against the door’s twin and careened off it. Unbalanced, he went staggering loudly into the foyer, dragging Jessy with him. It was several feet before she managed to dig her heels in and check their forward rush.
“You bumbling idiot!”
“I’m so damned tired,” Ty mumbled, then turned to look at her, his tall body swaying as he pressed a silencing finger to his lips. “Mustn’t wake Cathleen.”
A light came on upstairs, throwing a track of light down the stairwell that opened to the living room. Chase Calder came down the steps and paused on the landing to survey the scene. He hadn’t bothered to button his shirt or tuck its tails inside his pants. As he came down the last flight of steps and approached them, his craggy face was creased with puffy sleep lines. A hoary frost silvered the mat of hair on his chest, although this sign of graying hadn’t yet reached his thick head of hair.
His disapproving glance slid off Ty to center on Jessy. “What happened?” Without pausing, he alleviated Jessy’s burden by hooking one of Ty’s arms around his neck and supporting him with an arm around his middle.
“He was too drunk to drive himself home from Sally’s, so I brought him.” She did not explain why she had volunteered instead of allowing one of the Triple C cowboys to bring him.
It seemed to take Ty several seconds to realize what had happened. “Well, if it isn’t the mighty Chase Calder.” He swayed backwards as if trying to bring his father into focus.
“That will be enough, Ty.” He gave his son a hard, impatient look, then turned to Jessy to ask her something, but he was interrupted before he had a chance to speak.
“What’s the matter?” Ty demanded. “Did I break some precious code of yours by getting drunk? I suppose a Calder isn’t supposed to get drunk and have fun. He’s got to be a man and hold his liquor.” He made a mockery of standing up straight and tall.
“You’re drunk,” Chase stated flatly.
“Yeah?” The response was a taunting challenge. “You ain’t so almighty righteous yourself.”
Jessy glimpsed movement on the stai
rcase. Ty’s mother was silently gliding down the steps, hurriedly belting her robe. “Chase, what is it? Is Ty all right?”
The sound of her voice brought an instant change in Ty’s attitude. The belligerence disappeared without a trace as he turned his head to watch her approach, a slack smile curving his mouth.
“He’s fine.”
“Don’t worry about me, Mom,” Ty inserted. “I’m just a little drunk.”
“I was just going to get him up to bed,” Chase said and nodded his head in Jessy’s direction. “Make sure Jessy has a way to get home.”
Maggie Calder glanced uncertainly after her husband and son before she looked back at Jessy. “I’ll drive home in Ty’s pickup and have someone bring it back in the morning,” Jessy stated.
“All right.” But there was hesitation in her voice as she took notice of the smears of dust on Jessy’s white jeans and saw the taut pallor underlying her skin. “Ty’s lip was cut. There wasn’t an accident or a fight?”
“No.” With a trace of self-consciousness, Jessy brushed at her jeans. “I guess I got dirty trying to get Ty out of the truck.” When Jessy turned to leave, a consuming curiosity prompted her to turn back. “Mrs. Calder, who is Tara? Ty mentioned her name several times tonight.”
“Tara is the daughter of E. J. Dyson.” She seemed almost relieved by the question. “She’s a lovely girl. I’m not surprised he mentioned her. He’s been dating Tara for some time now.”
“I see,” Jessy murmured. “Good night, Mrs. Calder.”
“Good night, Jessy. And thank you for making sure Ty got home safely,” she added.
Halfway to South Branch, the tears finally began to collect in Jessy’s eyes and slide down her lashes. Her cheekbones glistened wetly, but there was no one to see except the thousands of stars in the sky or the luminous, shining eyes of a coyote trotting across the road in front of her truck.
At The Homestead, Maggie looked in on their daughter, who had slept soundly through Ty’s noisy arrival home. Chase joined her in the upstairs hallway after manhandling their son into bed, where he’d started snoring almost as soon as he hit the mattress.