His face froze, as if the unexpected compassion had off-balanced him. "I remember."
She got to her feet. Bare feet, because she hated shoes, and hers were under a chair somewhere. "I don't know if you have time now, with things so hectic here," she continued, facing him beside the couch. "I need to know, so that I can make other arrangements...."
He had just noticed her bare feet, and it seemed as if he were having problems keeping back a grin. "Lost your shoes, Cinderella?"
Her bare toes wiggled. "I hate shoes," she muttered. "I even got Becky into the habit around the house, and when she went back to school, she got kept in at recess for it."
“Does she like it at that school?" he asked unexpectedly.
"I suppose so." Maggie hesitated. "She doesn't talk about it. She's a very shy child." She frowned. "She's so easily upset. Perhaps it would be better if I just went home now."
He cocked an eyebrow and slowly lit a cigarette, without once moving his eyes from her face. "What are you afraid of? That I'll upset her? You might be surprised at the way she reacts to my temper, city girl. Most people around here aren't that intimidated by it."
"Of course not," she agreed innocently. "That's why your men hide in the bushes every morning until you're out of sight."
That did produce a smile, of sorts. "Kids see more than adults," he returned mysteriously. "I'll have to get things organized before I can leave. We'll get away about nine."
"You're sure you don't mind?" she persisted.
“I don't put myself out for anyone unless it suits me," he said curtly.
"Then, thank you. I'll be ready."
She started past him, only to find his strong hand on her upper arm, halting her beside him.
"How old are you now?" he asked, his eyes all too close, too searching. It didn't help that her gaze dropped to his hard mouth and remembered vividly its exciting touch.
"I—I'm twenty-five," she stammered.
He studied her quietly. "I'm thirty-eight."
"Yes, I know."
His eyes probed hers in a silence that began to simmer, until the world narrowed to the space they occupied. He turned, just a little, and the cigarette went careening into a large ashtray so that both lean hands could hold her there.
She flinched, and he shook his head.
"No," he said softly. Softly! It was the first time she'd heard that slow, tender note in his deep voice. "I won't be rough with you. Not ever again."
Her body seemed to vibrate as she looked up at him uncomprehendingly.
"I've never deliberately hurt a woman before," he said slowly. "It's just that I've had so damned many prospective brides flung at my head...." His hands slid up her arms, over her shoulders, to cup her face. "I don't like having you flinch from me, Margaret," he whispered, bending. "So I'm going to show you what it should have been like."
"But I don't..." she whispered unsteadily.
He poised there, his pale eyes narrow and flashing as they met hers. "Say my name," he breathed roughly.
"Gabe..."
As the syllable faded, he took it into his mouth, her eyelids trembled and then closed. It was nothing like before. His lips were hard and warm but softly probing this time, brushing, lifting, savoring in a sweet tasting that was beyond her experience of men.
"That's it," he whispered against her slowly parting lips. "That's right, let me have your mouth, I won't hurt it this time."
A tiny, soundless sob broke as he parted her lips tenderly and fit his own to them with a warm, maddening pressure that made her body ache with new and unexpected sensations.
Her hands opened over his shirt, feeling muscle and the soft prickliness of hair underneath their cool palms. His heart was beating slowly, regularly, until her nails contracted, and then his chest began to rise and fall quickly.
His lean fingers stroked gently through her hair, tilting her head back, his mouth insistent as it probed hers in a rhythm that surprised a moan from her.
She felt one of his hands spread against her cheek, and while his mouth was tormenting hers, his thumb rubbed across her lips, sensitizing them, grazing them against her teeth. She made another sound, one she didn't even recognize, and her nails bit into his chest.
"Gabriel." Was that whimper coming from her lips? She was reaching up without realizing it, trying to get closer, to make him kiss her more ardently, more completely.
He obliged her with lazy indulgence, forcing her head back against his shoulder with the hungry but controlled pressure of his mouth opening on hers. She felt his tongue teasing her lips, tasting their inner softness, and her body seemed to throb where it sought his.
One lean hand moved then, easing down over her shoulder to the soft blouse, finding only softer woman beneath it, and no bra—finding a hard peak that aroused him beyond bearing. His hand slid farther down, over her narrow waist, the curve of her hip, and around to the base of her spine. He drew her hips in slowly until they merged with his, and he gloried in her sudden trembling as she felt the fierce arousal of his body.
"No," she pleaded, trying feebly to turn her head. "Oh, you mustn't!"
He didn't insist. His hand slid back up to her face, brushing away the damp hair, tilting her chin so that he could look into her misty, dazed eyes above a mouth that was parted and softly swollen from his kisses.
"Was he ever able to make you want him?" he whispered softly.
"No...oh, not ever like this," she sobbed, hating her inability to lie to him.
His fingers caressed her face gently. "There's nothing to be embarrassed about," he said, his voice deep and slow as he watched her. "You're pretty much a novice, despite your marriage. An experienced man knows how to make himself acceptable to a woman."
She was still trying to get her breath back, and his body against hers was warm and hard and welcome. "You've...had women," she whispered, searching the eyes that weren't so hard after all.
He nodded. He looked down at her yielding body, then back up at her parted lips. "And with very little effort, I could have you," he said quietly. "But that isn't what I want. This was a nonverbal apology, nothing more. I don't need the practice."
Before she could react to that, he eased her away, steadying her. "Want something to drink?" he asked then, as casually as if they'd just met.
"A...a brandy."
"Sit down. I'll get it."
She curled up in an armchair, her heart beating wildly, her eyes like green saucers in a face flushed with unexpected pleasure.
He dashed brandy into two snifters, passed her one, and perched on the arm of her chair while she sipped at it with jerky motions.
"I...should go home," she burst out, thinking out loud.
"Why?" he asked. "I won't seduce you." He tilted her chin up and looked into her eyes, noting her scarlet blush, her quickened breathing. "More than likely, I'd get you pregnant," he said with more amusement than irritation.
"No, you wouldn't," she replied, her voice still a trifle unsteady. "I'm on the pill. I had a slight female dysfunction, and the doctor put me on it to regulate me. So I'm not...vulnerable that way."
His eyebrows arched and he smiled slowly. "Then suppose you come up to bed with me."
"I don't believe in that kind of thing," she said quietly.
"No wedding ring, no sex?" he taunted. "How old-fashioned of you, Miss Margaret."
"Anyway," she countered, staring at her drink, "sex isn't all that fabulous for women."
"Think so?" Again he tilted her chin to force her eyes up to his. "I've had women claw my back raw, and it wasn't because I was hurting them."
She flushed to the roots of her hair, barely able to breathe at all.
"I could make you claw me, too," he breathed at her lips. "I could make you writhe like a wild thing under my body and scream with the need to have me."
"You shouldn't...say things like that," she said brokenly.
"You're more a virgin than a divorced woman with a child," he returned, searching her
eyes. "Was there any other man?"
"No," she whispered. "Only...him."
"In the ways that count, you're untouched," he murmured. "A walking green-eyed challenge. Too bad, Margaret, that we didn't ignore the obstacles all those years ago and take what we really wanted from each other. I might have broken your young heart, but I'd have made you whole in every other way. We have an unusually potent chemical reaction to each other. We always did."
She knew that, but it didn't make her feel particularly good to have it reduced to technical terms.
He threw down the rest of his brandy and stood up, his back to her. "You'd better get some rest, honey. We'll have a long trip ahead of us."
"Yes. Of course." She finished her own brandy, put the snifter down and stood up.
He turned, towering over her. "He cowed you, didn't he?" he asked unexpectedly, his eyes narrow, calculating. "You're nothing like the woman I remember. All that sweet wildness I used to watch in you is gone."
"I got tired of being slapped down," she replied. "He got his revenge...in bed."
"Oh, God," he breathed roughly.
She looked up, searching his eyes. "You'd never be cruel that way," she said, knowing it. "You might cut a woman with words, but you'd never be physically cruel. Even that day, in the backyard, you didn't really hurt me."
"Didn't I?" he said curtly. "I cut your mouth."
It seemed to bother him that he had. She put a finger to his lower lip, where her own teeth had bitten into it in her passion minutes before. He stiffened at the light contact.
"I cut yours," she whispered.
His jaw clenched and his breathing was audible. "In passion," he whispered back. "Not in anger."
She withdrew her hand with a small laugh. "I never suspected that I was capable of passion."
She turned away, oblivious to the blinding hunger in the pale eyes of the man behind her. "Good night— Oh!"
He'd pulled her around. "Say my name, saucy girl," he whispered, teasing her. "Come on."
"I won't," she said, feeling a rising new excitement.
His lip tugged up. "Say it," he challenged, pulling her body against his, "or I'll kiss you blind"
He could have, too. She drew in a jerky breath. "Gabriel," she said.
He let her go with a faint smile. "Good night." And he walked away without another word.
Enigma, she thought confusedly. Enigma. She'd never known anyone like him. And her body was sending out smoke signals, begging for him. She'd never expected complications like this. And now she didn't know what to do.
At precisely nine o'clock the next morning, when Maggie came downstairs dressed in a neat gray suit, Gabe was waiting for her at the front door. He was wearing gray, too, a vested suit that made him look debonair, sophisticated, almost handsome—and every inch a very male man. He smelled of spicy cologne and soap, and Maggie wondered why she couldn't seem to stop staring at him. She gripped her purse as Janet came out to say goodbye.
"I'd go with you," she told Maggie, "but it's less crowded this way. Have a safe trip."
"I'll take care of her," Gabe said carelessly. He spared his mother a glance and walked off without even a smile.
Maggie didn't say a lot on the way to the airstrip. She was curious about him, in so many ways. She wanted to ask questions, to learn new things. And that was dangerous.
"Nervous?" Gabe asked after a minute, glancing at her wickedly as he lifted his cigarette to his lips.
"Not really. I'm not afraid of flying," she murmured evasively.
"And that wasn't what I meant, either." He pulled off the main ranch road onto a dirt track with deep ruts that led toward the airstrip and the big hangar where he kept his twin-engine planes. He had two, he explained: one for work, for herding cattle; the other for business trips.
"Don't you ever fly for pleasure?" she asked.
Gabe glanced at her. "I have women for pleasure, when I can't stand the ache any longer. That's about the extent of my recreational activities these days."
She stared out the window, embarrassed despite her age and experience. "You're very blunt."
"I don't pull my punches—about anything," he replied. "I believe in total honesty. I've never yet found a woman who did."
"Your mother told me that you..." She stopped when she realized what she was betraying.
His icy-blue eyes cut at her. "Did she tell you all of it, or aren't you that privileged?" he asked with bitter sarcasm.
"I'm sorry. It's none of my business. I shouldn't have said anything."
He took a deep draw from the ever-present cigarette and drove faster. "My God, is nothing sacred these days?"
"She thought it might help me to understand things a little better," Maggie replied quietly.
"Did it?" he asked cuttingly.
She met his brief glance. "Yes. It explained everything."
He searched her eyes quickly and then turned back to the road, slowing as they approached the airstrip. "I hated him," he said. "Even before that happened. I saw through him a hell of a long time before she did. And in spite of it, she wouldn't leave him."
"Love imprisons people, so I've heard," she said.
"Didn't you love your husband?" Gabe asked, his smile mocking.
"I thought I did," she replied. "He was charming. Utterly charming. I was shy in those days, and overwhelmed that such a handsome man would be interested in me. I was an heiress, you know. Filthy rich."
"Yes. I remember," he said bitterly. He stared at the airplane in the distance, watching a mechanic go over the large red-and-white Piper Navajo. "Our place had fallen on hard times when you were a teenager."
"I didn't know." She stared at her lap. "Dennis had fallen on hard times, too. I was eighteen," she said. "Green as grass and infatuated, and every time he kissed me, I was on fire. And then we got married." She shuddered. "My God, for all my reading, I never realized the things men would expect of women in bed!"
He scowled. "What, exactly, did he want of you?"
Maggie flushed. "I can't tell you."
"I think I can guess, all the same,” he said, his eyes narrowing.
She stared at her crossed hands. Amazing how easy it was to talk to him about such intimate things. "When I froze, he accused me of being frigid. From then on, it got worse. I didn't even mind that much when he started seeing other women. It was almost a relief, except that it stung my pride. I'd planned to leave him. And then I discovered that I was pregnant"
"You stuck it out for a long time," he observed.
"My mother was still alive then," she replied. "She'd told me what to do all my life; I was afraid to go against her. She said that divorce was an unspeakable scandal, that nobody in her family had ever been divorced. So I didn't disgrace her. After she died, it didn't seem to matter anymore. The money was gone; there were no social peers to be scandalized by what I did."
"You said that your daughter was afraid of him," he reminded her.
"Becky's easily hurt," she said. "He terrifies her. He drinks, you see." She sighed "The last time he had a visiting session with her, she did something that upset him. He left some marks on her. She's been afraid of him ever since."
Gabe said something under his breath that embarrassed her and braked to a halt beside the airstrip tarmac. "Is he suing for sole custody?" he asked, turning to look at her.
"Yes."
"We'll see your attorney while we're in San Antonio." He opened the car door. "And if he doesn't suit me, you'll use mine."
"Now, wait a minute," Maggie began as he came around to open her door.
"You wait a minute," he countered, helping her out. He held her just in front of him, towering over her slender height. "If that child is on my property, she's my responsibility. So are you, for that matter. And until you leave, I'll take care of you, whether you like it or not!"
"You...you...Texas bulldozer!" she accused, eyes flashing as they hadn't since her childhood.
"Go ahead, argue with me," he respond
ed, smiling slightly. "Make a fuss. And when I've had enough, guess how I'll deal with you?"
She has a good idea, but she wasn't backing down. 'That's—that's male chauvinism," she sputtered.
"I'm a man, all right," he replied without the least bit of self-reproach. "Come on, honey. Make a fuss."
He looked as if he'd really enjoy that, and Maggie remembered how it had been in the backyard that day, when he'd backed her against the oak tree and taken what he'd wanted. Her face colored.
His blue eyes sparkled with pure enjoyment "That's exactly what I'd do, you little prude. Only this time, I'd go further than a few kisses, and it wouldn't be in anger or bad temper. I'd wear you down and lay you down, and when I got through, you'd ache for me the rest of your life."
"Conceited jackass," she enunciated clearly.
He laughed softly. "Am I? Apparently, Miss Maggie, you've forgotten how you react to me. You always did get flustered and nervous when I came too close, even at sixteen." His pale-blue eyes narrowed as they traveled down her slender body, making her tingle with the frank appraisal. "You always were a beauty, to me. Especially in a bathing suit, with that long black hair down to your waist... Why did you cut it?" he asked unexpectedly.
She sighed. "I thought it looked too girlish for a woman my age," she told him, then smiled. "And it was hot in the summer."
"Would it shock you to know that I used to dream about wrapping it around my wrist?" Gabe asked, his voice gentle. "And pillowing you on it, while I laid you down on one of those loungers that used to sit by the pool?"
Again Maggie colored, but she didn't look away. She seemed to blush all the time around him! "Did you really?" she asked.
He nodded. "It got to be more than disturbing, especially considering the age difference. I'll be blunt, Maggie, I was glad when you stopped coming here to see the girls. You caused me some sleepless nights."
"You heard what I said to Janet, didn't you?" she asked suddenly. "About having a crush on you?"
"Yes. But I knew already." His eyes narrowed, glittering. "That was what worried me so much. Your eyes were sultry and just faintly hungry when you looked at me. I knew I could do anything I wanted to you, and you'd let me. The thought tormented me."
She'd thought about that, too; about having him kiss her and make love to her. Her heart went wild in her chest She wondered suddenly and startlingly what it would feel like to make love with him.
Books By Diana Palmer Page 17