Holt's Gamble

by Barbara Ankrum

  Kierin gave him an astonished look. "As a matter of fact-"

  "Don't answer that," he interrupted with a laugh and kicked Taeva into an easy lope.

  The wind licked at her hair, whipping unruly auburn strands loose from the bun at the back of her head, and she smiled in spite of the misgivings she'd had only a moment ago. She'd forgotten how much she loved to ride.

  Clay's arms, in the same moment gentle and steely, circled her. Even through her layers of clothing, she could feel the sinewy muscles in his thighs working as he guided the horse up a gentle swell. She wondered if he could feel her heart pound against his arm.

  For a time, she tried to keep a modicum of space between them but, in the end, gave it up and relaxed against him. She'd never seen this playful side of him before and she wanted to enjoy it, even if it lasted for only a few minutes.

  The train disappeared behind a rise, but Clay pushed the Appaloosa on, heading north into the endless span of grass. The verdant sameness of the tall-grass prairie made it appear from a distance as flat and monotonous as the sea, but in fact, the land was filled with dips and gentle hills. The green flower stalks of the big bluestem grass were so tall, they brushed their knees as they rode through it.

  "Are you sure you know where you're going?" Kierin asked Clay when he'd slowed the horse to an easy trot.

  "It's not much further," he told her, "What's wrong? Don't you trust me?"

  She let out a throaty laugh, catching his playful mood. "That's a dangerous question, Mr. Holt. But frankly," she admitted, throwing her head back, "I don't care if we are lost. It's so beautiful out here without the dust and the cattle and all the noise..." She filled her lungs with the sweet-scented air. "You may have to drag me back to civilization."

  Clay's dark eyebrows arched with feigned surprise. "Civilization?" His blue eyes made a cursory scan of the empty grasslands. "Did I miss it somewhere?"

  Kierin laughed in reply.

  Clay tightened his arms around her slightly and flicked the reins. "I like it out here, too," he admitted, gazing out across the plain. "I never tire of it."

  They headed for a lone bur oak tree which sat at the knoll of a hill. Beneath its spreading limbs, Clay dismounted, then reached up to help her down. She braced her hands atop his broad shoulders while his fingers circled her waist. He lowered her slowly to the ground.

  Holding her closer than was purely necessary, Clay's thumbs traced the boning beneath the front of her blue gingham dress, stalling for time. He was reluctant to release her even while he reminded himself that wasn't the reason he'd brought her out here. He swallowed hard and stepped away.

  The air crackled between them and Kierin pushed away from the horse's flank. She scanned the shiny-leafed branches above them. "Is... this what you wanted me to see?" she asked.

  "No." He resisted the urge to touch her again and motioned silently for her to follow him. At the top of the rise, he lowered himself to the ground and gestured for her to do the same. She flattened herself to the earth beside him with a perplexed expression.

  Without speaking, he pointed below to a sparsely covered meadow of short grass which was scattered with countless little mounds of dirt. It was a hundred acres wide and startlingly alive with thousands upon thousands of prairie dogs.

  "Oh," Kierin breathed, trying to take it all in. "Oh, it's—it's wonderful—enormous. I've never—" Words utterly failed her at the sight. From their position on the crest of the hill, she and Clay were only thirty feet from the closest burrows, but the breeze favored them and carried their scent away from the dog town.

  Clay rested his chin on the backs of his hands and watched her with unconcealed pleasure. Somehow, he'd known she'd enjoy this as much as he had the first time he'd seen it. Her green eyes sparkled with childlike fascination. With her fingertips pressed delightedly against her lips, her smile reminded him of a child who'd tasted her first peppermint.

  "How did you know it was here?" she asked, without pulling her gaze from the sprawling meadow.

  "I found it this afternoon while I was hunting," he explained. "Used to be able to see towns like this from the trail, but you rarely see one this big anywhere near it now."

  For a long time, they silently watched a family of prairie dogs on one of the mounds closest to them. The male stood several inches taller than the others, his shiny black eyes darting back and forth, ever alert to danger. Around him, the pinkish-brown females and young groomed each other with their little paws, then affectionately touched noses.

  "Look, they're kissing," Kierin whispered.

  Clay nodded. His mouth curved into an unconscious smile. "I don't know what else you could call it. They seem almost human, don't they?"

  Kierin tipped her head in Clay's direction. "Mm-m, in a way. It would be nice if our lives were that simple, wouldn't it?" she mused. "We could spend our days preening in the sun, loving our families, undistracted by the worries of the world."

  He chuckled. "Their worries are a little more immediate, I guess. Simple things like chasing the owls out of their burrows, keeping grass on the table, that kind of thing."

  He was teasing her and Kierin returned his smile. "I guess what I mean," she said after considering her words carefully, "is they don't allow survival to come between them—to break apart their families—like we do."

  Clay rolled onto his side and propped a hand at the back of his head. His dark brows lifted inquiringly.

  "Are we speaking from personal experience?"

  She propped herself up on her elbows and deftly avoided both his stare and his question. "Observation," she answered. "Everyone suffers losses. I doubt I'm any special case."

  His hand reached out and stroked her shoulder with a whispering touch. "I'm afraid I'd have to argue with that," he told her. Gently, he brushed a strand of her hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. "You're very special, Kierin."

  A rush of heat swept up her spine at his words.

  "Clay..."

  His hand lingered near her cheek. "Hasn't anyone ever told you that before?"

  She edged away from him slightly. "No. I mean—well, only Lily."

  Clay's eyebrows tipped downward. "Lily?"

  "She... worked at the Independence." Kierin hesitated. "She... ran the upstairs."

  "A madam?" Clay's eyes narrowed fractionally and his lips parted in a silent curse. Rolling onto his back, he glared into the perfect blue dome above them. "Christ, Kierin, that's hardly what I meant."

  She bristled like a bad-tempered cat at his tone and her voice became flat with anger. "Lily was my friend."

  Clay glared back at her. Seeing her here, with the afternoon sun playing in her hair and the prairie reflected in her eyes, it had been easy to forget what she'd been before he'd met her. That, he knew, wasn't even the issue for him anymore. It was all the other men who'd had her before—the way he ached to now. And couldn't. That unreasonable jealousy made him deliberately cruel.

  "You sell yourself short, Princess." His jaw was set in a firm, angry line. "Madams don't have friends. They have business investments."

  Kierin sat up abruptly, propelled by her anger. Hundreds of prairie dogs scattered for their lives in the meadow below, dashing down to the safety of their holes, but neither Kierin nor Clay noticed.

  "It wasn't like that," she snapped, angry at having to defend her relationship with Lily and determined not to. "What would you know about it, anyway?" she demanded. "When was the last time you had to live in a brothel? When did you ever look at one of the women you wrestled under the sheets as something besides chattel, designed to fit neatly into the back corner of your mind where you wouldn't have to ever think of her as a person?"

  Clay propped himself up on one elbow and glared at her. "I don't seem to recall hearing any complaints on that account. In fact," he continued, with uncharacteristic disregard for his hard-and-fast rule never to discuss one woman while in the company of another, "strange as it may seem to you, not a single one cowered b
efore me like a goddamned virgin, afraid that I would hurt her or leave her less than completely satisfied."

  Her eyes narrowed and she tipped her chin up haughtily. "I suppose, by that, you're referring to me?"

  He leveled an insolent "you said it, I didn't" look at her with his steely blue eyes.

  Infuriated, Kierin snatched up a handful of grass and flung it at his face. Clay feinted to the right, dodging the sudden and unexpected attack. His brows arched with surprise as if he were looking into the eyes of a crazy woman.

  "Ooh-h! Damn you, Clay Holt." Kierin's voice was shrill and barely controlled. "Why did you even bring me out here? Just to pick a fight?" She pushed herself up to her knees, hampered by the tangle of her cotton skirts. "You know what your problem is?" she spat, tugging irritably at the troublesome fabric around her legs.

  "No," came his equally testy reply. "Why don't you enlighten m—?"

  "You're so damn busy being mad at me and the rest of the world, you've forgotten how nice it can be to just enjoy the simple pleasures in life—like... like this perfectly beautiful day," she ranted, "without dredging up the past and arguing about things that don't even matter anymore."

  She stood, gesturing angrily with her arms. "What's past is past, for God's sake. Can't you—" The toe of her boot caught in her hem. "—just... oh-hh-h!"

  Balance lost, momentum gained, she pitched forward, her lecture ending abruptly in a tangle of cotton gingham. Arms flailing, she fell smack on top of the scowling object of her anger, flattening him to the ground.

  "Oh!" Kierin gasped, irritated beyond endurance to find herself in his arms. "Let me up, you—you—"

  Her elbow dug him painfully in the ribs. "Ow! Simmer down, will you?" Clay yelled, clamping his steely hands around her wrists. He rolled over on top of her and shifted his weight, pinning her completely to the ground.

  "Get... off... of me," she panted. "What do you think you're—"

  He wrestled her still. "Did anyone ever tell you that you're breathtakingly beautiful when you're clumsy?"

  "Ooo-hh. You are the most impossible man I've ever met."

  "So," he replied mildly, pinning her arms above her head, "now you've added impossible to my long list of faults?"

  His amused expression sent her temper flaring. "Yes." Her heart was knocking against her ribs so hard it shook her whole body, "And irritating and closed-mouthed. And let's not forget bullheaded." She squirmed underneath him, but she felt about as puissant as a trussed-up squirrel.

  He lowered a quelling amount of weight against her.

  "What was that you said?" he asked. His mouth tipped up at the corners with mischief. "Simple pleasures?" With its flash of white teeth, his grin was as dangerous as it was seductive.

  She nearly stopped breathing. "That wasn't what I meant."

  Nose to nose, they glared at one another. His lean body pressed against hers with the unyielding rigidity of iron. He'd trapped her wrists up by her ears and her breasts were flattened against the lean-muscled wall of his chest. If he'd wanted to crush her, she knew it would have been a simple matter of shifting his substantial weight off his elbows.

  "Perhaps you should show me what you did mean," he taunted, rocking his hips against hers until she could feel his arousal hard against her.

  Her breath returned in short, angry puffs. "You're a bully, Clay Holt. Let me up," she demanded, but had little hope of his compliance.

  His stormy eyes explored hers as if truly seeing them for the first time. His heated lips caressed her cheek. "I don't think so," he murmured in a voice that was almost a whisper and nearly lost to the vibrant hum of the prairie.

  Her lips parted—with the vague awareness that he intended to kiss her—and unconsciously, she moistened them with the tip of her tongue. She felt him quicken against her belly. A shock raced through her at the foreign sensation and her nerves stretched taut as a fiddle string.

  His head dipped with calculated slowness to her ear, where his tongue traced little circles against the sensitive lobe and then he nipped it playfully.

  "Is this what you meant?" he murmured in a low, breathy hiss.

  "No." The word was little more than a whisper.

  His open mouth descended to the hollow dip in her shoulder. "Or... this?"

  Her head rocked slightly back and forth in a useless denial of the inevitable.

  "No?" Clay's eyes, raised now to hers, had darkened to the color of thunderheads. His mouth hovered a heartbeat away from hers. "What about this?"

  "Don't—" Her lips formed the word, but no sound accompanied the protest, for at that moment, his mouth swooped down on hers. It took complete possession of hers in a kiss so like the man who gave it—passionate and disturbing. Her mouth yielded to his in the space of a breath and her lips, newly tutored by him, opened to the insistence of his tongue.

  The passion exploded between them with such unexpected intensity it left them both gasping. His open palm made a slow, maddening descent down the length of her arm and closed over the full swell of her breast. His fingertips caressed the hardened peak that rose beneath the fabric of her dress, sending exquisite ripples of heat through her limbs.

  Relinquishing her mouth momentarily, he burned fiery, open-mouthed kisses down the length of her slender neck. She thought to protest, but her brain seemed to be working too slowly to form the words. An involuntary shudder raced through her.

  "Ah... perhaps this... was what you meant." His mouth hovered over her, barely touching her neck with butterfly touches of his lips.

  Kierin tilted her head back against the ground, wantonly exposing more of her throat to him, and she pushed her fingers into the dark curls at his temples. Was it what she'd meant? She couldn't remember. More accurately, she couldn't think. Not when his mouth was doing such wonderful things to her.

  His lips sought hers again. "Kierin..." he whispered against her mouth, the raw hunger roughening his voice. "God... you make me—"

  The prairie had swallowed the sound of the approaching horse until it was almost upon them. Instincts dulled by languid passion surged through him with a rush of adrenaline.

  "Bloody hell!" Clay rolled off her, his Colt already clearing the leather strapped to his thigh. His vision was momentarily impaired by the glare of the late afternoon sun, but he saw the dark shape of a rider haul back on the reins some twenty feet away.

  "Holy hell—don't shoot!" a familiar voice cried. The man wheeled his mount as if ready to flee.

  Clay squinted into the blinding glare. Relief swamped him. It was Mel Watkins on his dun horse, looking, at the moment, as if he'd rather be anywhere else in the world but where he was.

  Clay lowered the pistol, but his heart thudded heavily in his chest. He looked back at Kierin, who was sitting up now, arms splayed at her sides against the ground. Her cheeks were flushed a bright pink—from passion or embarrassment he couldn't be sure—and her teeth toyed worriedly with the edge of her bottom lip.

  It wasn't like him to let his guard down like that. With a shudder, he realized it could have easily been an unfriendly Indian hunting party as the harmless man mounted before them. A bead of sweat tricked down his back between his shoulder blades. What if his carelessness had gotten her killed?

  Watkin's horse pranced nervously in a circle. Its rider, dark-haired and with the solid build of a farmer, fought to keep his seat. "Hey, remind me not to come at you from the blind side again, huh?"

  "Sorry, Mel," Clay answered with a singular lack of sincerity. "What do you want?"

  Mel raised an amused eyebrow at the blunt dismissal in Clay's voice and eyed the beautiful, somewhat rumpled woman beside him. "Mrs. Holt." He touched the brim of his hat to her and returned his gaze to Holt. "Jacob asked me to come out and find you. Says he needs a hand with the stock when we make the crossing."

  "Crossing?" Clay replied, straightening. "I thought we weren't supposed to make the ford until tomorrow."

  "Yeah. But Kelly found a promising spot a day closer a
nd he's already moving some of the wagons across."

  Clay holstered his gun and sighed. "Thanks, Mel. Tell Jacob we're right behind you."

  Mel tossed him a knowing smile. "Will do. And my apologies for the... interruption," he added as tactfully as possible. He nodded to Kierin. "Afternoon, ma'am."

  Kierin blushed deeper in reply and forced a small, tight smile. "Mr. Watkins."

  Watkins laid a spur to his horse's flank and soon disappeared over the rise.

  Kierin flopped back with a dramatic moan to the ground, arms flung wide, eyes clamped shut. "Oh God!"

  "It's all right," he told her, getting to his feet. He knew exactly what she was feeling.

  "All right?" She nearly laughed. She would have laughed if it hadn't all been so humiliating. "Did you see the look on his face?"

  "Yeah," Clay answered, his grin returning at the memory of Watkin's expression. "Sheer terror."

  Kierin ignored his optimism and groaned. "I give him all of ten minutes before the whole train knows what we were doing out here."

  He leaned down and reached a slender hand down to her. "If he says anything," Clay responded gently, "it'll be that I was having a hell of a time controlling myself around my beautiful 'wife.' " His gaze swept over her face. "And who would blame me?"

  She was caught off guard by the sudden tenderness in his voice. It was the nicest thing he'd ever said to her. Kierin lifted her gaze slowly to meet his, fearful that he was merely teasing her again. But one look told her he wasn't. The candor in his eyes startled her, sending currents of warmth flooding through her.

  "Come on," he repeated, taking her hand. "We'd better get back." He helped her up and whistled for Taeva, who'd been grazing not far away.

  He pulled her up behind him this time after he'd mounted. Her arms circled his tapered waist and she clung to him, cheek pressed against his back as the prairie sped by them.

  Her mind was a jumble of emotions. Clay was as unpredictable as the wind that buffeted the plain, as mysterious as its secrets. But in spite of his hostility and all the other things she'd accused him of earlier, she was suddenly and unalterably aware of a new truth.