Widow Woman

by Patricia McLinn

  She tasted of sweet sunshine and clear water. The feel of her under his mouth and hands brought a hammering to his chest like eagle wings beating against a cage.

  “Nick.” Her voice sounded different, thready.

  He skimmed a hand over her abdomen and stomach, started lower.

  “Nick . . . No.”

  This time he heard the panic in her voice.

  “I . . . don’t . . .”

  I don’t know what’s happening to me. Rachel had felt rigid with cold; now heat poured through her, disorienting her with its smoke.

  Only it seemed her faltering words had the same power over the man who held her that a Wyoming blizzard had held over her. His hands didn’t release her but they no longer caressed. He’d stopped doing those wickedly tormenting things with his mouth, but his head remained lowered, so she saw only the dark hair and the angle of one high cheekbone.

  “I can’t . . .”

  It was all she could manage. She couldn’t move, couldn’t jump off his lap, out of his hold the way she ought. She could offer only those two small words.

  He held so still she had an irrational urge to put her palm to his chest to make sure he still breathed. Except she knew he did, for each exhalation stirred a sensation across her damp skin.

  “Why can’t you, Mrs. Terhune?” With nothing gentle about it, his quiet, taut voice made Rachel want to bury her head in his shoulder and cry again.

  “I just . . . can’t.” She held on to the only words she had.

  He stood, lifting her easily, turning to place her in the chair. Alone.

  Before she’d fully adjusted to that or to the cold seeping around her in the absence of his body, he stood by the door, pulling on his heavy coat and his gloves.

  “Nick, where are you going?”

  “Do my job.”

  “But the storm . . .”

  “Cows’ll stand in deep snow till they freeze to death instead of looking for food. You have to lead them to it. Same with water. Most won’t eat snow, so—”

  “I know that,” she said, impatient with his calm lecture on matters he knew she understood. It was matters she didn’t understand that stood between them. “But you could wait.”

  “Why?”

  It was a challenge, as direct as the blaze of black heat in his eyes. She skirted it. “We could talk.”

  “I’m not much for talking.”

  “But . . .”

  He stared at her a long moment, then when she said nothing more, he took his hat off the peg.

  “Nick.” Under his steady look, she tried in desperation, “You don’t understand. It’s me. It’s—It can’t be . . .” His look never wavered, and anger welled in her, until she blurted, “You make me shake! I can’t think and I can’t breathe and I just can’t.”

  Silence swallowed her once more. She was horrified at the echo of her words, at her emotions. She straightened and faced him.

  He stared at her so intently she parted her lips, on the verge of asking what he saw in her face, when she didn’t know what she felt herself. But she closed her mouth before it could expose her to that mortification. Instead, she bowed her head to contemplate her clasped hands.

  “I’ll be back by dark.”

  The rush of cold air from his leaving dissipated before she recognized the sensation on her hands as the fall of her own tears.

  * * * *

  If he were smart, he’d keep riding.

  Rachel Terhune could last out the winter easy with the shack’s shelter and supplies. He could turn Brujo south and with luck make it through before they both froze solid.

  If he were lucky, this would all go away.

  If it had all been on his side, he could have accepted that a man like him shouldn’t have thoughts of a woman like her. But it wasn’t all him. Never had been, not from that first day at Jasper Pond.

  He’d wondered for a long time if his own desires colored what he’d seen in her eyes, read in her voice. But he knew now his instincts hadn’t played him false. Not the way her pulse had thundered under his grip on her wrist that day trailing the herd to Hammer Butte. Not the way her mouth had softened under his kiss at Christmas. Not the way her body had warmed and beckoned just now.

  She’d clung to him, crying like a heart breaking. Then she’d clung to him like a woman who needed the man holding her. Until she’d gotten her senses about her. Then she’d pushed him away.

  You make me shake . . . I can’t think and I can’t breathe . . .

  And that scared the bejabers out of Rachel Phillips Terhune. A woman who rode and roped with the best of them.

  Well, he couldn’t think and he couldn’t breathe when he held her hot and close, either, and when it came right down to it, you might even say she made him shake. The hell of it was, that didn’t stop him from wanting to bed her. Why did it stop her?

  By God, the woman almost acted as if she were a virgin.

  Unconsciously, Nick pulled back on the reins. A virgin. But she’d been married. And what he’d heard of Terhune, from Shag and others, he didn’t let anything he saw as his property go unused. Shag said Terhune had wanted young Rachel Phillips, and had paid for her. He wouldn’t have left her a virgin.

  . . . I just can’t . . .

  None of that did damn-all to change how her body felt against his, her mouth under his.

  No, this wasn’t going away.

  He wasn’t that lucky.

  And he’d never been one to cut and run.

  He wasn’t that smart.

  * * * *

  When he returned, she’d dressed. A rawhide tie looped from a ripped hole to a true buttonhole and the three remaining buttons held the bodice closed.

  She shifted under his regard, fingering the closing. When his gaze went to the valise he’d brought from the stage, she cleared her throat.

  “I brought only my—I mean . . . I didn’t carry extra, uh, outer clothes. I didn’t count on stopping.” She glared, as if he’d accused her of something. “I’d’ve been home in another night, and had everything I need.”

  Wordlessly, he snagged his second-best shirt from a peg and handed it to her. She took it with a murmured thanks. No fluttering, no hemming or hawing. It might be one of the things he liked best in her.

  With her back to him, she slipped it over her head, wiggled out of the bodice under the covering shirt, then slipped her arms into the sleeves. She was rolling up extra length of a sleeve when she turned to find him watching. Color suffused her cheeks, but she didn’t say anything.

  Neither of them said anything.

  After a silent supper of canned tomatoes and salt pork, he put his bedroll before the stove, and crawled in.

  He heard her moving about the shack, picking up something from the table, straightening his two tin cups, then moving to the bed he’d left for her alone tonight.

  Against his will, he traced her sounds to taking down her hair. Remembering that pale figure at her window Christmas Eve, he needed a tight rein on the urge to turn and watch. New sounds, and he guessed she rebraided it. She stood. Brief silence, then a faint whisper of material sliding over material as she stepped out of her skirt.

  He thought a petticoat went, too, but didn’t know exactly when she slipped between the sheets, because blood roared in his ears and his teeth clamped at the desire hardening his body.

  * * * *

  Rachel woke, thickheaded and groggy, to find Nick and his bedroll gone; not surprising since she’d slept to near mid-morning. The tiny shack felt empty of a vital force.

  From unconsciously burrowing deeper into the bunk, she sat up abruptly. She pushed aside the blankets and practically scrambled out of the bed, away from whispers of leather and horse and sagebrush and man.

  Dressing rapidly against the harsh chill, she added wood to the fire before lifting the oiled covering over the small window. The world was awash in white. Even with the sun only a vague brightness beyond clouds it dazzled her. Full out, it would have been a cert
ain invitation to snow blindness to anyone venturing out.

  The wind had eased and snow fell in a gentle drift.

  Nick was likely checking the herd. He could be gone days, to the farthest reaches of his section, or an hour.

  With the storm not full done, he’d be riding a risk by going far. But what might she risk cooped up here with him for the hours or days it might take the storm to finish?

  Dropping the window covering, she gave herself a mental shake. Speculating would bring no answer. Neither would letting her mind dwell on the sensations of being rocked and stroked. She would put her time to better use.

  She washed as best she could from a tin pitcher and bowl. She smoothed the covers into order, swept the rough floor with a scraggly excuse of a broom. With the fire warming the room nicely, she started stew from the remains of last night’s supper. Drawing a remnant of a quilt around her shoulders as a shawl, she sat in the rocker to rest a moment . . . and awoke to find Nick dishing up stew, and the light seeping in telling her it was past midday.

  “I fell asleep,” she said, still disoriented.

  “That’ll likely happen a while yet.”

  Without looking at her he set two plates of stew on the table, poured coffee, then pulled the stool before one place, and gestured for her to bring the chair to the other. “Best eat if you want your strength.”

  She obeyed, though her insides knotted and her throat tightened. If only they could return to how it was before.

  No, it had never been easy between them. There’d been moments, flashes when humor or respect or the need to get a job done overrode everything else. But then this other feeling would take hold again, and she would get edgy and off balance, and thoroughly uncomfortable.

  She swallowed down the food without tasting it.

  “Another bowl will finish the pot.” Her voice skidded over the mundane words like a foal in mud.

  “You have it.”

  She shook her head. With a shrug, Nick took the last.

  Unwilling to watch him eat and unable to look anywhere else, she rose to begin the scant cleaning necessary. She used hot water from the pan that always sat by the fire to scrub at her plate and spoon, then started on the stew pot.

  He watched her. She knew it, but didn’t meet his eyes. Not even when she took his empty plate and put it in the wash water.

  “He hurt you.”

  She jumped at the sound, though his voice was quiet and the statement flat. She faced him, back straight.

  “What?”

  “Terhune. He hurt you.”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “When he bedded you.”

  The fire of mortification rushed into her face. Heat eased into other parts of her, too. Places that had never before burned when she was embarrassed. Her hands gripped the rough cupboard behind her for support.

  “That’s not seemly talk—”

  That was no bar to him; she should have known that. “Some men don’t know—or don’t care—for a woman’s pleasure when they bed her. It doesn’t need to be that way. It won’t be. With us.”

  She’d opened her mouth to still him with a stream of outrage. Only a gasp escaped.

  “It won’t hurt, I’ll make sure of that.” His eyes raked over her, and she felt sensation surge to the places his eyes had touched. “I can pleasure you, Rachel.”

  “I . . . you . . .”

  He watched her closely. Apparently satisfied she had no more to say for now, he went on. “You’re not one to turn your eyes away from nature, Rachel. You’ve bred horses. You know. You know how it drives them. How they shudder with it. You’ve seen it. You know its power. It’s not always pretty. It’s not soft. But it has power, Rachel.”

  The scrape of his chair as he stood brought a shiver to her skin as real as if the sound had been a touch. She waited, caught, uncertain if he would come to her this very moment. Even less certain how she would react

  “Power enough to make you shake, Rachel.”

  He stood motionless, while her breathing jolted from a dead stop to a gallop, her eyes not leaving his.

  “Another storm coming.” His words should have seemed mundane, anticlimactic. Except she wondered if he meant outside or inside. “I’ll check down the line some.”

  Unmoving, she watched as he looped a scarf around his neck, pulled on his woolen jacket, then a long slicker and settled his hat low on his head. He had one gloved hand on the latch when he turned to her.

  “I’ll be back when the light goes.”

  He said no more, drawing the door closed behind him. But she knew.

  He’d return at sundown. When he did, he’d claim her.

  Chapter Nine

  The opening door ushered in a swirl of cold and snow. And a solitary man.

  His dark eyes came immediately to where she sat in the rocker. The chair lost its impetus and soon rocked itself still. He stood in the opening, a dusting of white emphasizing the breadth of his shoulders and the chill air reminding Rachel forcefully of the heat of his body.

  Nick closed the door, and took off his outer clothing as calmly as ever. He even removed his boots. Her gaze fastened on those boots set by the door, spreading damp patches on the floor from the melting snow.

  Rachel felt as if she were trying to digest a hot poker. All her insides burned, her lungs, her stomach . . . and parts she didn’t dare consider.

  Without a word, Nick crossed to her, waiting until she looked up. For a moment, while he stood without moving and only his black eyes revealing a glittering intensity, she thought he meant to do no more. And she felt a dizzying dismay that shocked her more than anything else ever had.

  She wanted to lie with this man.

  Still giddy with the recognition, she barely took it in when Nick begun methodically unbuttoning his vest. She watched, unblinking, as he pulled his arms free, folded the heavy cloth lengthwise and placed it on the table. Her eyes followed his hands as if connected by a string as he reached to the top button on his shirt. With the second button open, a patch of bronze chest showed above the neck of the cotton undershirt. His skin had paled from midsummer, but the flood of heat in her was the same.

  Clasping both hands at her breast to draw the quilt shawl around her shoulders, she jolted out of the chair.

  “What are you . . .?”

  She had nowhere to go. His body blocked retreat, even if her muscles had obeyed an order to turn from the fascinating progress of his fingers.

  “You can’t . . .” Her protest melted like the snow on his boots.

  In a fluid movement, he pulled the shirt forward and over his head. “You were curious. At the pond. You wanted to see.”

  “No. I didn’t—”

  He stopped the lie with a look. He opened the buttons of his undershirt. Fabric gaped, revealing the full length of the golden, muscled chest that had held her memory more than half a year.

  “Look all you want.” He yanked his arms from the sleeves and let the shirt hang down his back. “And touch.”

  He reached toward her. She backed a step, knocking the rocker’s seat. Nick closed the space, not fast, not angry, but denying retreat. He reached again, and this time he took hold of her hand, still clasping the quilt.

  Without hurting her any he exerted enough pressure to straighten her fingers one by one.

  “I don’t . . .” Her protest faded because she didn’t know what words to add.

  I don’t want to? No, that wasn’t right.

  I don’t know how. How to touch or be touched.

  The thoughts fled along with the words to speak them when his hand carried hers to his chest, spreading it so her palm and fingers pressed against the heated strength.

  “You do.” His voice was as unyielding as his flesh.

  Her palm absorbed the faint prickle of black hairs that wedged down his chest. Below that, she felt the surprisingly smooth skin covering another layer, muscle that rippled and shifted under her hand as he dragged it slowly across hi
s chest.

  “I won’t . . .”

  I won’t do it right.

  I won’t please you .

  “You will.”

  She drew in a sharp, quick breath before she reminded herself he’d answered her words, not her thoughts. He could give no reassurance to her thoughts.

  His arms circled her, and before she could adjust to that, he lifted her off her feet and set her on the bunk. She’d lost the quilt shawl somewhere, and his fingers were busy at the buttons of his shirt she wore.

  “Nick.”

  The first touch of his fingers to her skin, slipping below her chemise, turned her protest into a quickly drawn breath. She raised her arms to help him tug the shirt over her head, also freeing tendrils of hair from her braid.

  Smoothing the wisps, he cupped her face between his large palms. When his mouth met hers, she opened readily. His mouth fascinated her. Lips that spoke so little, that formed such an uncompromising line, that now expanded on pleasures they had introduced her to in a shadowed pantry.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t feel his hands opening the waist of her skirt and fumbling loose the fastening of her corset. It wasn’t even that she didn’t care.

  She felt his movements—they drew movements from her, some cooperative, raising an obliging arm, some exploratory, pressing herself against his hard, warm chest. Oh, yes, she cared that he peeled away layers of her clothes—she cared because she wanted him to. She wanted to lie with this man, and she wanted nothing between them.

  How odd, an isolated part of her mind marveled even as she rubbed her bare shoulder against Nick’s arm to enjoy that light friction. She’d always been in her nightdress when Edward had entered her bedroom, and had never considered removing it. The opposite, in fact. She had kept as much of it between them as possible. When he had grunted and rolled off her, she had drawn the gown down to her ankles and the covers up to her chin.

  Nick abruptly released her mouth. Pulling in air greedily, she yet felt the loss. She also felt a renewed sense of her situation. Only her chemise and one stocking covered her nakedness. She half reclined on the bed, held up more by Nick’s arm than her own inclination, her fanny snug in his lap and, against her hip, his heated, hardened shaft very much in evidence through his opened trousers.