Copyright © 1986 by Ann Maxwell
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Photography and Design
by Matthew Maxwell
Elizabeth Lowell
TOO HOT TO HANDLE
For Susan Kyle,
whose books are ardent, amusing, and addictive
1
Tory Wells hung on to her battered luggage with both hands and felt like the earth had been ripped from beneath her feet. But it wasn’t the earth being ripped. It was the letter she had brought with her from Ethan Reever’s cousin, a letter promising her employment on the Sundance Ranch.
“But I was told that—” she began, her voice low, urgent.
“You were told wrong,” Ethan Reever interrupted, dropping the shredded, unread letter into an exquisitely woven Pima basket that held other paper debris. He gave the slender young blonde in front of him a hard glance. “There’s no swimming pool on the Sundance so there’s no need for a ‘swimming counselor.’ His lips thinned in disgust over the last two words. “And unlike my dear cousin Payton, I have no use for bleached blondes who can’t do two licks of work without whining about their nails.”
“My hair isn’t bleached, my nails are short, and the day I whine you can fire me,” Tory said, setting her luggage down with a thump.
Reever laughed. The sound was as hard as the large hands that slapped the desk in an impatient movement as he came to his feet. “Honey, I haven’t hired you, and I’m not going to. I need you like a sidewinder needs ice skates.”
She stared in silence at the man looming behind a desk that was as scarred as her luggage. Reever was nothing like his cousin, Payton Sundance. Payton’s hair was straight and sandy, he was clean shaven, his eyes were a sparkling blue and his body was as thin as it was tall. Reever’s hair was thick, blue-black, and shaggy. So was his mustache. His blunt, angular face showed a shadow of beard, even though it was barely eleven o’clock. His eyes were the color of winter rain and were emphasized by heavy black eyebrows. He had the long, powerful bone structure of a natural athlete and the muscular development to go with it. He was at least six foot three—a dark, intimidating presence watching her with eyes that gave away nothing.
His intense masculinity might have bothered Tory if she hadn’t been so desperate for the job. But she was accustomed to being around men with flawless bodies, swimmers and divers whose lives were dedicated to physical perfection. Yet never had she met a man whose very presence could send frissons of heat searching through her.
Reever threatened her in ways that she couldn’t describe.
But even more than he threatened her, he fascinated her. She found herself wondering what it would be like to be held in those powerful arms. Did that beautifully shaped mouth ever smile gently, and were his hands capable of tenderness as well as strength?
Mentally she shook herself, wondering if she had lost her mind on the long trip to the Sundance Ranch. She should have believed Payton’s warning about Reever’s “devil temper.” Payton was charming, kind, and known for his generosity throughout the Southern California amateur athletic community.
Tory doubted that anyone would use the adjectives generous, charming, or kind to describe Ethan Reever.
Yet she didn’t back down. She had spent her life working with male coaches who had a temper that would shame the devil. Besides, she had to have the Sundance job whether Reever was Satan incarnate or an angel in deep disguise.
At the moment she had exactly two dollars and sixty-three cents to her name. She couldn’t afford a bus trip back to town, much less a cab—not that either bus or cab was available, even if she had money. The Sundance Ranch was in the wild country of northern Arizona, a place where the roads were empty and the land was full of sunlight and silence.
“Mr. Reever,” Tory said carefully, trying not to show her desperation, much less the very feminine curiosity that he aroused in her. She had learned early in life than any sign of weakness could be used against her.
And would be.
“Reever,” he said, his voice harsh. “Just plain Reever. You’re not in the city anymore, Miss Victoria Wells.”
“Really?” she shot back. Her glance went pointedly around the office, where a collection of spurs was tacked to the wall and a half-braided horsehair rope waited in one corner to be completed. “Call me Tory, Reever,” she said, smiling. “Everybody does.”
His eyes narrowed.
She decided that all the books were wrong. The devil’s eyes were gray, not black.
Taking a slow, deep breath, she tried again to get past Reever’s hard exterior. Somewhere inside that man was something more than harshness and the glacial cold of his eyes. She knew that with an instinct so deep that she didn’t question it.
“Mr. Sundance assured me that there would be work for me here,” she said honestly. “I came a long way at my own expense on that assurance. If the Sundance Retreat isn’t open yet, there must be something else I could do on the ranch until the retreat opens.”
Reever stood silently for a moment, giving her the same kind of thorough, cataloging glance that she had given to him a moment earlier. He wanted to see one of Payton’s well-heeled, well-experienced sex bunnies. But Tory didn’t fit the type. Oh, she was female enough, but all her attributes were understated rather than hanging out of a tube top and mid-butt shorts. Her short blonde hair had the kind of streaking that came from the sun, not an expensive salon like his aunt demanded.
Tory’s green eyes were clear, not calculating, and too big in her thin face. No make-up. No painted nails. Pale cotton slacks with dusty cuffs topped by a faded T-shirt proclaiming “Be Kind to Endangered Species—Adopt a Mermaid.”
And a slender, toned body that made Reever remember it had been too long since he’d been around a female who interested him.
She had to go.
Now.
She wasn’t nearly experienced enough for what he wanted. Although she stood still for his appraisal well enough. Maybe she had more experience that he thought.
“If you’re trying to make me uncomfortable, it won’t work,” Tory said. “I’m a competition diver. Diving suits are designed to be a second skin. By the time I get on a platform for my second dive, not much is left for the imagination.”
Despite her words, standing still for Reever’s slow scrutiny was becoming more difficult for her with each passing second. When he looked at her, it was as though his hands were moving over her body while his fingertips learned every feminine curve and hollow. The thought both shocked and intrigued her, making her breath shorten and her eyes darken as the pupils expanded with sensual curiosity. Deep inside her a gentle heat began to uncurl, making her mouth soften in unconscious invitation.
She was too inexperienced to realize what was happening to her. She only knew that the longer she watched Reever, the more she became curious about him as a man.
“Please,” Tory said, her voice husky. “If you had read the letter before you tore it up, you’d know I’m a very hard worker.”
“No, thanks,” he said. “I like my playmates small, stacked, and sexy. You flunk on all three counts.”
For a moment she was too stunned to respond. Her breath came in with a rushing sound as her temper flared.
“I wasn’t offering to—” she began angrily.
“The hel
l you weren’t,” he interrupted, his eyes as contemptuous as his tone. “You were begging for it.”
She flushed, then went very pale. “Go to the devil, Ethan Reever.”
“Didn’t Payton tell you, honey? I am the devil.”
She looked at Reever and wished suddenly, violently, that she had spent her years learning karate rather than the art of diving.
Without a word she picked up her luggage, turned her back on the devil’s taunting smile, and walked out of the room. Before she had gone three steps, she heard the desk chair creak as it once again took Reever’s formidable weight. The sound of the papers being moved on the desk was loud in the silence. She didn’t need to look over her shoulder to know that she had already been wiped from his mind completely, as if she had never stood in front of him and pleaded for a job.
Tory walked through the living room, opened the front door and pulled it shut behind her, using her foot. She would have slammed the door until the house shook but had no wish to call attention to herself again. Just the thought of facing Reever’s contempt brought a sweeping humiliation that was as great as her anger. She would crawl on her hands and knees all nineteen miles back to town before she suffered his contemptuous appraisal again.
Although the ranch house was thousands of feet above the desert floor, the June day was hot enough to bring a mist of perspiration to Tory’s face as she stood on the porch and looked at the long, dusty ranch road that eventually led to a narrow county road and from there to Massacre Creek, the only town within ninety miles of the Sundance Ranch.
She knew from recent experience that the most exciting thing about Massacre Creek was the name. The sign outside the town had proudly proclaimed Population 401, but unless they were counting the litter of fat puppies that she had seen chasing flies and each other in front of the Sunup Café, Tory couldn’t imagine where Massacre Creek’s citizens were. After the relentless concentration of people in coastal Southern California, northern Arizona’s empty reaches seemed alien and...oddly inviting.
At the moment, though, she could have done with a little less scenery and a lot more cheap public transportation. Abruptly she shifted her duffel bag over one shoulder, took a better grasp of the cracked, abrasive handle of her suitcase and stepped off the porch onto the dusty gravel drive. If she wanted to be in town before dark, there was no time to waste on wishful thinking.
Tory pushed aside the reality that there was almost no chance that she would be able to walk nineteen miles before sundown. Without luggage she would have done well enough. There had been some days when she had driven herself to swim nearly that many miles under the sarcastic goading of her coach. She hadn’t been carrying a suitcase, however.
And then there was her knee.
Slowly she walked over the treacherous gravel, alert to each movement of stone beneath her right foot. She didn’t want to think about the knee injury that had finally resulted in surgery three weeks ago. She didn’t want to think about the doctor’s final frightening words, words that had sent her rushing to Arizona with no more than a few dollars and Payton Sundance’s letter in her purse.
I’ve come back from an injury before. I’ll do it again. All I need is the time to heal and the money to survive until I can live up to the demands of my swim club scholarship again.
She was relieved when the gravel gave way to dirt road, but not for long. She soon discovered that the rutted, washboard surface of the road was as tricky to walk on as the gravel had been. Trial and error taught her that the best walking was on the very edge of the road, where tires had passed often enough to make a flat trail but not often enough to leave ruts and ripples in the dirt. Her luggage tended to hang up on roadside bushes, but there weren’t many rocks to bruise her feet through the worn soles of her shoes. Where her little toes had poked through the canvas, pebbles worked into the holes and from there to her tender feet.
At first Tory stopped and emptied her shoe every time a pebble got inside. She soon gave that up. She was spending more time hopping around on one foot and dumping out the other shoe than she was walking. So she just kept going until the first pebble was joined by a second and then a third, or until her arms and shoulders sent threatening messages to her brain. Then she would stop, dump her luggage in the dirt, stretch, and empty her shoes. The carefully rationed rest stops were far too short, but Tory knew that she didn’t dare extend them.
She really didn’t want to be walking through the countryside after dark.
Her best chance of a safe ride into town was to catch the mail carrier somewhere along the county road. She wished that she had listened more closely to the woman’s friendly chatter as she had delivered Tory—and a generous supply of junk mail—right to the Sundance Ranch’s front door.
Did the woman say that the made a loop that led back to town after a circuit of ranch roads? Or did she say that she went out the south end of town and came in the north?
If it was the latter, there was no hope of getting a ride back into town. Nor did Tory want to take her chances on hitching a ride with a stranger. Living in cosmopolitan Southern California had taught her not to trust strangers. If she kept walking, she would get to town eventually. She had no such assurance if she hitchhiked.
By the time the Sundance Ranch’s dirt road met the two-lane blacktop of the county road, Tory was bathed in sweat and aching in every limb. She hoped that the road’s dark, even surface would ease the throb in her right knee. She had no such hope for the burning of her blistered palms. Swimming might have strengthened her body, but it had done nothing to toughen her hands or feet.
With a stifled groan she remembered the mail carrier’s words to the effect that it was five miles to the Sundance ranch house from the county road. She couldn’t believe it. She had to have walked more than five miles by now.
It can’t be fourteen more miles to town.
“Stop whining,” she muttered to herself. “Whining takes energy. Think about something pleasant—like drowning that arrogant son of Satan in the deep end of a pool.”
Stretching, smiling, Tory thought of having Reever gasping and begging for mercy at her hands. It was a fantasy she had often had about her coaches in the past when they pushed her beyond what she thought she could endure.
Yet each time she was pushed she had learned that she could endure.
Not only that, she had learned that she could strengthen and improve until workouts that once would have left her gasping became nothing more than good exercise. But until their bodies were conditioned, she and her teammates spent many hours planning complicated and satisfying vengeance on their various coaches.
Yet when Tory thought of revenge on Reever, the picture of him apologizing for not giving her a job kept going out of focus. In its place came a sudden, searing image of him bending down to her and his large, hard hands cupping her face gently as he whispered against her lips that now that he had found her, he would never let her go.
The image shocked her. It made her realize that a few minutes with Reever had had more impact on her than other men in a few years. She had never been in love, never wanted to be in love—but now she wondered what it would be like to love and be loved by Ethan Reever.
“Sidewinders will be ice-skating in Reever’s birthplace before that happens,” Tory said, ignoring the flush climbing up her body.
I’m in a desert. Of course I’m hot.
Besides, he couldn’t have been clearer that he thought my female attractions...weren’t. Face it. His eyesight is as sharp as his tongue.
Small, stacked and sexy. You flunk on all three counts.
Tory wished that she could disagree with his assessment, but she knew better. She was tall, gently rounded, and in all considered herself about as sexy as an ironing board. Although her hair was a shiny, many-hued blond, it was also a short, softly curling cap. The first rule of being a sexy bl
ond was that your hair had to be a long, ravishing, silky mass slithering down between your shoulder blades. The second rule of a sexy blonde was that your chest had to be a double handful for any man, and your heart-shaped butt had to swing like a bell when you walked. The third rule was that a sexy blonde was always ready, willing, and able to trip a man and beat him to the floor.
“Even if I could trip that big devil, I wouldn’t know what to do next.”
Her lack of experience had never bothered her before. She had grown up watching the sudden passions and equally sudden separations of her teammates. The pressures of competition and endless, grinding workouts were often relieved by brief, hot affairs.
The first thing she had learned was that usually it was the girl who was hurt. It was the girl who paid the price emotionally, competitively, and in terms of her reputation. There were exceptions, of course—boys whose competitive edge was dulled by a failed love affair or girls who changed partners as casually and frequently as they changed swimsuits—but those exceptions were very few.
Tory had decided before puberty that the dubious rewards of “love” really weren’t worth the costs. Life had taught her that men simply weren’t capable of caring. Her father hadn’t even noticed her when he was still living with her mother, no matter how many medals she had won in competitive swimming. After the divorce her father had simply vanished, sending nothing to his daughter, not even a card at Christmas.
Her stepfather hadn’t been much better. He had begrudged every penny spent on her, pointing out to her many times that her father was a selfish jerk who had never sent a dime on child support and never would. Her mother had rarely protected her daughter; she was too grateful to find a man to support her.
Years later Tory had realized that she was born three months after her mother’s first marriage, when her mother had been barely seventeen, and wasn’t really certain who was the biological father.
Too Hot To Handle Page 1