This Fierce Splendor: A Loveswept Classic Romance

by Iris Johansen

  As she turned her head to the array of sound equipment edging the stage, Jennifer was wondering mildly how women could bring themselves to go into ecstasies over another of these vacuous, beef-on-the-hoof jocks. Then her gaze lit upon the tall blond man in wheat jeans and a white sweatshirt, who stood by the sound table with a tape in his hand.

  Never had she seen a face like this one. Carved in simple planes, it contained a strict beauty that carried no trace of prettiness. His hair had the diffuse brightness of sunlight pouring through spring water. Under sable eyebrows, a dark fringe of straight lashes defined eyes of haunting crystalline blue. Small smile lines framed a wide mouth. The pure facial structure gave the indelible impression of strength, intelligence and a certain refined tenderness—it was a face built for sweetness. But the brooding eyes were a cynic’s. He was here, yet remote from all this; detached. That, and the straight classical proportions below made him look like a statue of the young Alexander.

  Jennifer heard the woman seated in front of her who’d been addressed as Deb breathe, “What a babe!” While Jennifer disapproved of the extravagant phrasing, she had to admit to some echo of the sentiment inside herself. Here was the expected coronary, but caused by a man who was fully clothed. With a flash of humor, she thumped a fist lightly against her chest and said, “Pump, heart, pump.”

  Her own record with men was not what anyone would call impressive. In her dreams she was brave, polished, even a little wild. In reality, she was a worrier. No one ever worried the way she could. It was the one thing she did really well. And because one of the things she worried the most about was men, there she had erected her strongest defenses. Not a prickly person, she was prickly with men. She wasn’t good with them. She just wasn’t. Attractive males, with their lavish egos, ruffled her the most. Perhaps it was because she was such a plain daisy herself. With her brown hair and brown eyes, she was the very fabric of average. She had a face right off a Norman Rockwell Post cover, the picture of wide-eyed Americana. It was a sincere face, at times even a merry one, but in a crowd heads had never turned to look at it.

  She was threading through the cleared path to her table when one of the nurses interrupted the M.C. by calling out playfully, “Hey! Is the blond guy going to take off his clothes?”

  Jennifer watched him pretend to ignore the remark as he wound the tape, his broad mouth stretched in a smile that suggested he might be laughing inside.

  Mock-indignant, the M.C. made a “naughty-naughty” sign with her index finger. “Have you no shame? The poor kid is barely seventeen years old—” Laughing protests and a suggestive comment or two around the room greeted the obvious fiction. Jennifer would have put his age at perhaps a year or two older than her own. Grinning, the M.C. continued, “I’m ashamed of you ladies and your carnal intentions. And in front of a minor! Anyway, he’s only the sound man, so—behave! Because I’ve got something here for all of you who luh-hu-uvv”—she gave the word three syllables—“law and order: a tribute to our gentlemen in blue! Here’s a man you’d love to go undercover with. For your entertainment pleasure, allow me to present Peter the Policeman!”

  Jennifer landed in her seat just as a magnificent body in a motorcycle cop’s outfit—with silver helmet, shiny black knee-length leather boots, reflecting aviator sunglasses—landed onstage inside a swell of acclaim. Moving at full throttle and with dynamic professionalism to the theme from Peter Gunn, he was a riveting figure. If she hadn’t known he was about to take his clothes off, Jennifer almost might have enjoyed it.

  The aviator shades came off to reveal lustrous black eyes. Beneath the discarded silver helmet was a shining mass of stunning ebony hair and Jennifer swallowed nervously. He slid out of his black leather jacket and began opening his blue shirt. Beneath was a finely muscled chest and taut stomach—Jennifer’s palms started sweating. The half-naked policeman began stroking his palms down his midriff in time to the music, his hips moving. To a riot of encouragement, his deft fingers played with the buckle of his wide black belt. Jennifer had slid so low in her chair that her chin was nearly level with the table. But she was not too low to miss the policeman’s gesture toward her when it came. Fingering the buckle, crooking the index finger of his other hand invitingly, and looking right at her with a come-to-me smile, he showed her by look, by gesture that he wanted her to join him onstage and unzip his … Jennifer choked. The tables around her exploded with excitement and rippling laughter. Embarrassment hit her, so strong that it nauseated her and burned from the top of her head to her shoulders. Her face buried itself in the shelter of her table napkin.

  Nor did she emerge. The banter and cheering around her told her that Susan had taken her place. The music evolved to a slower, more sensual beat. Her head came up in involuntary surprise and alarm when she heard Diane cry out,

  “Oh, my God, will you look at that? It glows in the dark!”

  The policeman’s G-string, glowing like a beacon in the blacklight, was moving with the supple rotation of his pelvis. The light changed again and she tore her gaze away and to the side—and discovered that the light-haired man at the sound table was watching her. Yes, her. The alluring blue eyes were holding her in a level study. As she sat very still, staring numbly back, she began to read in the perceptive depths of his eyes a heart-catching mixture of amusement, sympathy, and interest. For a suspended moment her heart beat oddly as their gazes touched, and then she dragged her eyes away.

  Looking everywhere in the room except the stage, in a harried effort to avoid the trauma of finding out how Peter the Policeman measured up (which was very well according to the wild response around her), she had time to wonder how much of what she had seen in those blue eyes was a trick of her imagination, or the stage lights, or even their breathtaking form. Subliminal chemistry was doing uncomfortable things to the inside of her, but she told herself it was probably due more to the awkwardness of all of this than to a direct response to a man who’d looked at her once. She was too self-conscious to risk another glance back toward him until the policeman had left the stage—out of uniform.

  The blond man at the sound console was making an array of adjustments to the apparatus in front of him, the austere beauty of his hands outlined against the stark mechanics. The practiced movements were done by rote; the far-seeing gaze was softly unfocused as though his thoughts had drifted elsewhere. Appearing from a door on stage right, the M.C. laid her hand on his rear pocket and squeezed gently as she walked by. A tingle of laughter swept through the audience from those who had seen it. The M.C. looked back over her shoulder at the man and his ironical eyes lit slightly as he gave her a smile of bewitching reproach before leaving the area by a side door.

  “Give us the sound man!” came a shout from the banking group.

  The M.C., who had begun to speak, ignored the interruption, but the call for the blond man spread like a chant through the crowded room. Encouraged by a certain gleam in the M.C.’s grin, the clamor grew in momentum. More and more voices joined the swell. Raucous whistles rocketed toward the stage. Rhythmic clapping erupted. Breaking into laughter, motioning the rebels into order, the M.C. had to shout into the microphone to make herself heard.

  “All right, all right! Talk about lascivious … I can see you’ve all had the same thought as I did two years ago when I came upon him sitting on the public pier dangling his toes in the lake, his jeans rolled up to his knees.…” She chuckled at the thunder of delight before her. “When I look for men to dance in my club, I’m looking for very special ones. They have to have better than good looks. They have to have better than good dancing ability. I go way beyond that. I look for men with that unique charisma that—well, you know what it does to you. As you’ve guessed, he’s not the sound man, he’s definitely not a minor and he definitely is the showpiece of the Cougar Club! Ladies, the Cougar Club is proud to present the number one male dancer in the Midwest. Here he is, our own native blueblood to make your blood simmer—”

  Amid pandemonium, and Je
nnifer’s confusion because she had not really guessed that the blond man with the gentle gaze and face like a vision would strip off his clothes for money, he strolled onstage to the beat of “Stray Cat Strut.” It seemed profane. It seemed like Michelangelo’s David leaping down from his pedestal and performing a bump and grind on the Accademia Di Belle Arti floor.

  And yet bump and grind this was not He was a whimsical blue-collar fantasy in a light shiny hardhat. A form-fitting red plaid shirt molded to his upper body, leading the eyes irresistibly downward into the softly faded denim caressing his hips and long thighs. The pounding rhythm loved his hard body. There was a mesmeric quality, an almost playful kinetic energy to his natural grace. Moving to the music with easy sensuality, he pulled off the hardhat in a flow of athletic choreography. The light hair tumbled sensuously, and the blue and hot-silver eyes held a laughter that was at the same time innocent and full of utter deviltry.

  “God, he’s so …” murmured Annette.

  The quaking excitement inside Jennifer had nothing to do with embarrassment, though heaven knew she was embarrassed by what she saw, by what she felt. The icy ball that her stomach had become was melting all down the inside of her, through her nerves, into pumping pathways that led downward, inward.

  He drew a woman from the eager audience. She came easily to him, and basking her in the flood of his radiant gaze, he lifted her hand gently to the top button of his shirt. Holding her smaller hand cupped inside his against his chest, he guided her hand slowly lower, and the buttons fell open as he moved himself, and her, to the music that had grown softer. Soft too was the brush of a finger under her chin, tipping up her face for a lingering kiss.

  He let one arm shrug out of the shirt, then more slowly the other, the liquid sway of his hips still catching the beat. Jennifer could almost feel the softness of his bare flesh, the heat and steel that came beneath. Her throat could almost taste the light tang of sweat that traced the intoxicating hollows stretched along his muscles. His vitality projected like rocket fire through the room, burning the imagination, flaming the watching bodies. At the edge of the stage he held out his hand to a woman seated below. When she stood beside the stage, hungry to touch him, he took her wrists in his hands and stirred her palms slowly over his lean hips and the compact satin flesh of his lower stomach. One of his hands slipped into her short curls, dropping her head lightly back to receive his kiss.

  Smoky disco and husky harmonics poured over the stage and into the audience as another woman came forward. He carried her hands to his jeans and through the motions of dragging open the snap, dragging down the dense brass ribbon of the zipper, and peeling the pliant cotton fabric lower as though she were unwrapping hard candy.

  Now, except for the slight fabric that left him exposed almost completely in back, he was nude. The purity of clean body lines in the ivory spot carried the wattage of chain lightning. The rim of the low stage filled four deep with women waiting breathlessly to tuck a folded dollar into the tiny garment he wore and to kiss the wide, smiling mouth.

  Jennifer felt a twist of longing so strong that it made her stomach hurt as she stared hypnotized at his long hands bringing up a trembling chin on a curved forefinger, capturing a face carefully between his palms, his lips parted, parting further over mouths beneath his. Smooth hands reached up to him during the kisses, caressing his shoulders, holding his waist, running daringly over the solid willowiness of his buttocks.

  Over the music and boom of room noise, the comments of women returning from the stage were clear.

  “Oh God … his lips are so soft.…”

  “He kisses—I mean he really kisses.”

  “I could die for a man like that.” A laugh. “I’m going to make my husband do this at home.”

  Diane flopped back in her seat beside Jennifer, throwing one hand over her heart.

  “You’ve been up there twice,” Annette said, her eyes sparkling, mirthful.

  “I know! I told him I had to come back.”

  Lydia leaned toward her. “What’d he say?”

  “He just laughed. Jennifer, heavens, don’t miss it! How often does anyone get a chance to make magic with a man like that?” Diane gave Jennifer a gay little nudge, and Susan, coming back with flushed cheeks and overbright eyes from the stage, tried laughingly to haul Jennifer to her feet. Sticking like a burr to her small wooden chair, thrown further into unfamiliar mental disarray, Jennifer tried feebly, “I’d better not. I … think I have a cold coming on and I wouldn’t want to—”

  The end of her sentence was swallowed up by the laughter of her companions. Lydia was saying, “Fie on you, woman! You haven’t either!” when Jennifer, whose eyes had been straying helplessly to the stage for no very good reason, saw that for the second time that evening, the blond man was looking right at her. He must have seen the attempt of her friends to pull her from the chair, and her strong negative reaction, because he released the beautiful young woman he was holding. His head tilted in a pantomime of tenderness and curiosity. And then he beckoned to her, his smile roguish, sensual.

  Jennifer’s fingers clutched the sides of her chair in a death grip. One corner of his beautiful mouth quirked upward as he gave her a look of humorous reproach. Trying desperately to maintain the little that was left of her dignity, her accustomed air of self-command, she didn’t resort to such drastic measures as putting her head back into her palms until she saw, disbelievingly, that if she wouldn’t come to him, he was going to come to her. She was beyond being about to control the small moan of distress that rose to her lips, or the fluid rise of heat to her cheeks as she covered them with her hands.

  The women around her greeted his action with ecstatic relish, yet his seductive murmur touched her ear with the morning-soft mist of his respiration.

  “Hello, lady,” he whispered. “Open your eyes.” When she would not, he murmured, “I only want to kiss you.” She felt the shock of his warm hands gently pulling at her wrists and urging her chin up. Then, not persisting in the face of her frozen resistance, he stroked the outer curve of her hot cheek with a soothing finger, “You know what, lady? I think you’re sweet.”

  She was not able to watch the rest of his act as he abandoned his final cover to Dylan’s melodic rasp. The unfeigned lyrics of “Lay, Lady, Lay” seeped through the loudspeakers. But she knew that it was another voice and the light experienced touch of one man that would stay with her through the night.

  Read on for an excerpt from Debra Dixon’s Tall, Dark, and Lonesome

  ONE

  Soaked to the bone, Niki Devlin began to lose her temper. She swiped at the rain on her cheeks and took a deep, resigned breath. If she ever got back to New York, she intended to wring her editor’s neck. Why had she agreed to spend ten days in the Wyoming wilderness? Because Eli Neff casually suggested a series of columns on adventure vacations. And you foolishly approved of the idea!

  That had been mistake number one. Niki could still see the smirk on his face as he mentioned a ranch outside Cutter’s Creek, Wyoming, that ran an autumn cattle drive for paying customers. Surprised, she’d blurted out, “I grew up in Cutter’s Creek.” Mistake number two.

  Of course, Eli knew that. Eli knew everything. He knew she avoided Cutter’s Creek and went home only for the big holidays, like the bicentennial celebration. So Eli, clever man, had gotten her to agree to the idea before telling her where she’d have to go. Niki wanted to tell him where to go, but fledgling newspaper columnists didn’t tell syndication editors where to go. Instead, they flew to Wyoming and climbed on a chuck wagon.

  Niki slid across the wooden seat and leaned around the side of the white canvas top. She expected to see cattle or, better yet, the cowboy who’d taught her how to drive the team of mules, but she was still alone on the range. She looked down at the mud that sucked the wagon wheels deep into the ooze. All in all, this vacation did not look promising.

  “Spit!” she said softly, setting the brake on the wagon. She wouldn’t wait for t
he cavalry to rescue her. Surely a twenty-six-year-old college graduate could get one little wagon unstuck. Right?

  A slash of lightning ripped the sky, followed moments later by an explosion of thunder. Plump drops of rain tattooed the top of Zach Weston’s classic cowboy hat, splintering into smaller drops that rolled off the rim. Reining in his horse, he swore under his breath and shot another irritated glance at the sky. Slate gray clouds churned and tumbled into one another, looking to Zach as if they were in a cosmic race to drench all of Wyoming. His horse shifted restlessly beneath him, anxious to be on the move again.

  Zach checked the herd behind him. Twelve hundred beef cattle were being driven by four experienced hands and nine city slickers, some of whom had never been on a horse before yesterday. To their credit, the amateurs were doing their part to keep the cows moving. Nevertheless, Zach worried as the herd began to bunch tightly, trying to find safety in numbers. Nothing startled a cow faster than an electrical storm. Hoping the blinding flash of light would be the last of the day, he signaled to John Carey, one of the ranch hands.

  John was levelheaded, a natural with animals, and, at twenty-two years old, a good ten years younger than Zach. As he slowed his horse he asked, “What’s up, boss?”

  “The hair on the back of my neck,” Zach said, smiling, only half intending it as a joke.

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Zach pulled his hat off and slung the water from the brim. “Next time you talk to Mother Nature, remind her that late October’s supposed to be dry and sunny.”

  “That reporter said the same thing this morning on account of the weather canceling her flight yesterday,” John commented. “She sure wasn’t happy about being assigned to drive the chuck wagon.”