His heat made the sun seem a distant thing, and the solidness of his body made the hills around them seem insubstantial. She heard an odd, muffled sound, and realized it was her own breath escaping on a sigh as, just for a moment, she let one thing fill her world completely—the feel of the man holding her.
And as the troubles of her mother’s death, her father’s betrayal, Hobie’s humiliation and the death of the horses faded, something began to take their place. It was something that changed her need from a simple desire to be held by someone much stronger than she to a need for something else, something far more intense—and far more dangerous.
A little frightened by what was happening to her, she drew back, and caught a glimpse of Cole’s face. In the instant before he schooled his features to that unreadable mask, she saw it again—that stark, ravenous heat she’d seen in that electric moment when she’d suggested a rubdown. But this time it had been banked, controlled. And she wondered with a little shock if he had reined it in because he’d known that at that moment she’d just needed to be held.
But now, in this quiet place where she had so often retreated for stolen moments of solitude, she was no longer sure that that was all she needed. Or wanted. Her gaze focused once more on his mouth, on those sexy lips that had teased her all day as they rode. And she found herself wondering what it would be like to be kissed by a mouth like that—to be kissed by a man like Cole Bannister. Did he really know something lesser men didn’t? Did knowing that you were kissing a man who must have been God’s prototype for male beauty make it different?
“Tory.”
It was short, husky and undeniably a warning. Her gaze flicked up to meet his. She felt color tinge her cheeks.
“I...was just wondering—”
“I know what you were wondering. It was written all over your face, little girl.”
She went very still in his arms. “I’m twenty-seven years old, Cole. I’d been to nearly every industrialized nation in the world by the time I was eighteen. I’ve been on my own since I was twenty-two. I’m not a little girl.”
She heard and felt a low groan rumble up from his chest. “A world tour isn’t going to help you here, Tory Flynn. You’re playing with a different kind of fire.”
Her chin came up. She’d had quite enough of feeling naive next to his weary worldliness. “I’m not a virgin, either, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She smiled rather shakily. It was true, but nothing had come even remotely close to making her feel the way just thinking about this man did. “Not physically, anyway,” she amended.
“Damn.” It came out on an explosive breath. He jerked away from her. “Don’t you get it? We’re talking sex here. Not love, not romance, just raw, hot, out-of-control sex. That’s all I deal in, little girl. And if you throw me another look like that, you’re going to find out firsthand.”
Tory’s breath caught in her throat, not so much at the sensual threat inherent in his voice as he spoke the rough words, but at the little thrill that raced through her at the idea of this man feeling this way—over her.
The best defense is a good offense.
The words popped into her head with startling clarity. True, they’d been talking about Rocky then, but she knew with a certainty she couldn’t explain that they applied now, as well.
“Tell me,” she said quietly. “Is calling me ‘little girl’ your way of making sure that doesn’t happen?”
He went very still. He turned his head away. He stared at the little pool of springwater as if the future was held there. When at last he spoke, his voice was thick, almost raspy.
“Remind me to run the next time you start a sentence with ‘tell me.’”
“I learned it from you.”
He let out a long, harsh breath. Then he looked at her, his face once more settled into that unreadable mask.
“Is that what you want, Tory? You want to play with that fire and get yourself burned?”
“No. But you can warm yourself at a fire, too, can’t you?”
“If the fire’s under control.”
She studied him for a moment, daring to wonder if there was something personal in that assessment, but his expression didn’t change, gave her no hint. At last she shrugged.
“I doubt I’m in any danger. I’m hardly the type to send a man’s hormones on a rampage.”
“Damn.”
This time it was low, throttled and came out through clenched teeth. Before she could move he pulled her a little roughly into his arms again. And before she could catch her breath, his mouth was on hers—hot, hard and fierce.
She’d been wrong about her state of naiveté. Nothing in her limited experience, in fact nothing in her entire life, had prepared her for this. Perhaps nothing could have. Heat built up in her until it seemed to burst loose under its own pressure, tumbling through her in waves. And when his mouth suddenly gentled, and she thought the sensation would ease, it instead gained another dimension, adding a series of tiny frissons of excitement that raced along every nerve.
When his tongue gently probed, she opened to him without resistance. Her sense of self-preservation seemed to have been the first casualty of the inferno Cole Bannister was igniting in her. She shivered as he tasted her, running the tip of his tongue along the even ridge of her teeth. It became a shudder when he went deeper—when the rough, wet velvet of him brushed her own tongue.
She heard her own sigh once more, but this time she recognized the sound for what it was—the sound of surrender. And this time it was muffled against his mouth, and he seemed to breathe it in, even as his mouth continued to plunder hers.
She should be worried, she thought vaguely. Worried about stopping this conflagration before it was too late. But for the first time in her life her body seemed beyond her control, and she couldn’t do anything but cling to him. So she did just that, lifting her arms to thread her fingers through the thick strands of his still-damp hair.
She felt his hands, sliding down her back to her hips. She barely had time to marvel at the trail of heat they left behind before her wayward imagination supplied her with a vivid image of what it would feel like if it had been her bare skin he was stroking.
And then that image was shattered as one of his hands moved up her body to cup a breast. He massaged the soft curve as he teased her tongue with his, and took in the tiny cry she made when his thumb brushed over her nipple. The little dart of fire that shot through her at that intimate touch seemed to rocket around inside her until it settled someplace low and deep—the place that made her welcome the moment when his other hand pulled her hips hard against his.
She arched to him, wanting without knowing what she wanted. When she felt the pressure of his aroused flesh against her, heat swept through her in a billowing wave, and that glowing place within her became an inferno.
She felt another odd sensation, a sort of distant ripple of movement, and it took her a moment to realize that it seemed distant because it wasn’t her, it was Cole who was shaking. For her.
Stunned, she broke the kiss. She stared up at his face. There was nothing of that practiced mask there now. Nothing but need and heat and an arousal that almost frightened her. And something that did frighten her: a trace of that stark self-loathing she’d seen that first day.
“Damn.”
This third time the oath was delivered without heat. In fact, it was the coldest, bleakest thing she’d ever heard. Without another word he rose to his feet, grabbed his hat and slammed it on his head in a choppy motion, so unlike his usual streamlined grace that it gave away a great deal about his state of mind.
He turned his back to her and walked stiffly over to the horses without looking back. He pulled up Buck’s head and slipped the bit back into the buckskin’s mouth. Mac’s head came up, as well, watching the proceedings, then turning to look at Tory as if to ask if they, too, were going to leave.
I guess we are, she silently answered the horse. And I suppose I should be glad, she added to herself. I
probably just got saved from handing my heart over to be broken by an expert.
Chapter 9
Cole shut off the notebook computer and leaned back in the chair. He’d hooked up to the office network to do a little probing of his own, had turned up some interesting but not particularly useful facts and had left some instructions that would be found when the crew came in in the morning.
He looked up at a sound, and saw Rocky stroll into the office, a piece of red cloth caught in his mouth and trailing behind him.
“Now, what?” he muttered, then smothered a groan when he recognized it as a bandanna like the one Tory had worn today.
Well, if she wanted it back, she could get it herself, he thought. She’s the one who always just laughed at Rocky’s troublemaking. The cat leapt up to the desk top, dragging the bandanna along. Cole ignored him.
He sat there for a while, thinking. He hadn’t been convinced by Eric and Kurt when he’d talked to them this afternoon. The two teenagers’ vehement denial of any knowledge at all of any of the deaths was very interesting, since their denial had come before he’d even asked them. He’d merely mentioned what had been happening, in a conversational way, and out had come the disavowal, followed shortly by their rather abrupt departure.
Nudging Rocky out of the way, he reached over and picked up the envelope that held the autopsy reports on the first two horses. He’d read them once, but quickly. It wouldn’t hurt to go over them again. A half an hour later, he let his head loll back as he mulled it over.
Traces of moldy feed were discovered in the stomach of the first horse. Not a lot, but enough to point toward the eventual diagnosis of cause of death. No trace of mold in the contents of the second horse’s stomach, but the same kind of feed, and no other indications of illness or injury to explain the sudden death. Colic was presumed to be the culprit in this case, also.
“Nothin’ new?”
Cole raised his head to look at Hobie. “No. But I didn’t expect to find anything.”
Hobie looked at him for a long moment. “Tory’d die before she’d give a horse bad feed.”
Cole sighed. He didn’t doubt Hobie. It was just that he’d been here long enough already to see how hard she was working. And under enough pressure, anyone could make a slip. But he didn’t say it to Hobie.
“At this point,” he said, tossing the reports on the desk, “I’m not sure the cause of death really matters. What does, is that whoever this is has been able to come and go without attracting any attention.”
“Or is already here,” Hobie said.
“It’s a possibility we can’t afford to ignore,” he agreed.
And he couldn’t afford to stall anymore. He’d waited far too long to get his sorry butt in gear. He’d come here hoping for a miracle, that something would turn up to point him in the right direction without him having to do anything. But after this morning with Tory, he knew he couldn’t wait any longer. Things were getting too tangled up. He was getting too tangled up, too enmeshed in life here. He had to get moving. He had to stir things up and see what floated to the top. He had to poke and prod until somebody reacted.
But most of all, he had to get Tory out of his mind. He had to forget the shock that had jolted him to his toes when he’d kissed her, when he’d let himself touch her. If she hadn’t pulled back when she had, if she hadn’t looked at him like that, in such wonder, as if stunned by her own response, God knows if he could have stopped himself.
He could have taken her, then and there. It had been in every motion of her slender body, in every tiny sound she’d made and in her wide-eyed astonishment when she’d looked at him. Looked at him in a way that had made him want to do just that, to skim that T-shirt off of her and bury his face between her breasts, to tug her worn, tight jeans down those legs that went on and on, and bury his aching arousal between her taut thighs. He’d wanted to ride her with all the ferocity he’d once brought to the rodeo, and then he wanted her to ride him the same way.
And wouldn’t that just shock Ms. Flynn? She might not be the little girl he’d called her—in his futile effort to do just as she’d cleverly discerned, relegate her to a safe, untouchable niche—but he knew damned well that she was far removed from the kind of women he usually relieved his urges with.
But then, this urge was also far removed from the usual. It was stronger than anything he’d known in years, perhaps ever. And he didn’t know if the impossibility of anything between them made things better or worse. Either way, he had to put a halt to it.
All he had to do was figure out how.
* * *
Tory sighed, and leaned against Mac’s muscled shoulder, taking comfort from the silky warmth of his coat. She felt weighed down, not just by the horses’ deaths, but by the feeling that her world was once more caving in on her.
Was there some lesson she hadn’t learned the first time this had happened to her? Some reason why—after pulling herself back together after the shattering of her perception of her father, indeed, her entire life—she had to go through it again? She wouldn’t care so much, if it wasn’t for the fact that this time, Hobie was going to lose, too...lose the thing he’d worked so hard for, risked his very life for.
She desperately wished there was someone she could turn to, someone who would just listen. She’d always gone to Hobie before, but he was hurting enough about all this without having to carry her load, too.
Maybe that was the lesson she needed to learn, she thought sadly as she walked across the pasture to the barn. Not to cut herself off so completely. When she’d first come here, some of the local women had made overtures of friendship to her. But she’d been so wrapped up in her misery, so consumed by her fury at her father, that she had ignored them. Eventually they’d given up. And once she’d got herself back in balance, she had found herself content enough with just Hobie and the horses, and hadn’t tried to change things.
Now five, almost six years had gone by in relative peace. It startled her sometimes, the time that had passed. She hadn’t really thought about being twenty-seven, until it had come up with Cole the other day. It hadn’t seemed that old until she had wondered if he, like her father, usually limited his sexual forays to younger prey. Jack Flynn preferred them closer to twenty-one, just old enough to keep him out of legal trouble when he took them out and charmed them into his bed with champagne and roses and diamonds.
Not that she doubted that, at that moment at least, Cole had wanted her. She might truly be as naive as he seemed to think she was, but even she couldn’t have misunderstood the ferocity of that kiss, his aroused state or the shudder that had racked him in the moment before it had ended.
No, she knew it had been real. It was the reason behind it she questioned. And no matter how she looked at it, being the only female handy kept coming up on top of the list. More than once she’d heard her father joke about all cats looking alike in the dark.
She rounded the corner of the barn in time to see the blue-and-white truck of an express-delivery service pulling away. Hobie stood on the front porch of the house with a large, thick envelope adorned with priority stickers in one hand as he ran the other hand through his silver hair. Rocky lay nearby, exquisitely balanced on the porch rail, and completely unconcerned by the interruption. He was lying on something red, and when she got closer, she laughingly realized it was the bandanna she hadn’t been able to find.
“It’s for Cole,” Hobie said when she reached him. “Looks important, too. Hope he gets back soon.”
“He’s gone?” she asked, bandanna forgotten.
They’d communicated so little in the two days since he’d kissed her, she had no idea what he was doing. She didn’t really wonder why, she had a feeling she already knew. That kiss had sent him running like a jackrabbit, no doubt appalled that he’d become that hard up for female companionship.
“Left about an hour ago.” Hobie tugged at his mustache. “Forgot about it, or I would have had him pick up those blamed pills of mine at t
he drugstore.”
“You’re out?” The doctor had prescribed the medication recently to ease Hobie’s breathing at night, and it at last seemed to be kicking in.
Hobie nodded. “Took the last one last night, but I was half asleep and forgot it until just now when I saw Joey.”
“Oh.” The express-delivery driver was the son of Marcy Redman, the Summer Springs pharmacist. Tory stifled a sigh. Hobie needed those pills. For that matter, so did she. She didn’t want to go back to spending the night with her heart in her throat, listening to him breathe.
“I’ll go get them. Just let me get cleaned up.”
“Now, don’t you worry about it. It’s been a rough day for you. I can get through one night. I only mentioned it so’s at least one of us would remember to get ‘em soon.”
“No, I’ll go. I need to pick up a couple of things, anyway.”
What she needed could have waited, she thought later as she wheeled the Jeep down the street that bisected the more modern shopping district of the small town. But she didn’t want Hobie without those pills. And besides, she found herself glad to be out and away, even if it was only for a short trip to the drugstore. It was even nice to be out of her jeans. Her light-cotton, sleeveless dress was pleasantly cool in the still-warm evening air.
There were a couple of people ahead of her, but when she stepped up to the counter, the petite, blond-haired woman—who didn’t look at all old enough to have a son Joey’s age—handed her a small white bag that had obviously already been prepared.
“Hobie called ahead,” she explained.
“Oh. Thanks, Marcy.”
“Hear you’ve been having some trouble,” Marcy said sympathetically as Tory wrote out a check. Tory’s pen halted, then went on. Marcy had been one of the women who had tried to make friends, but unlike some of the others, she had never seemed to hold it against Tory when she’d been ignored, so Tory tried not to read any malicious intent into the simple comment.
Out of the Dark Page 11