“No, wait. Let’s wait until we can talk with Gran, too.”
She didn’t want to have to say these things twice. Actually she didn’t want to say them at all. She wanted to go up to her room—the guest room—pull the covers up and cry. But she wouldn’t.
Gran was on the porch sitting on a straight-backed chair they’d placed there for her as she continued to gain strength and mobility.
“Sit, both of you,” Judi instructed. She perched on the edge of the swing. “I owe you an explanation—and I want to tell you—but I’ve thought about this and I keep coming back to it being better if you don’t know right now. When it’s over, I’ll tell you everything—everything I know, anyhow. But until then…I can tell you I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Are you in danger?” Becky asked.
“No, no, it’s nothing like that. It’s…” She raised her hands then let them drop. “Impossible to explain without explaining. I thought you should know I still can’t tell you before you decide what to do.”
“We’ve already decided, and it’s done. She’s gone, and you’re staying.” Gran made it sound as simple as choosing mayo or butter on a sandwich.
“When did you— I mean, how long have you—?”
“We knew you weren’t Helga Helgerson, and we knew you weren’t a health aide. The agency called the week after you arrived, and Becky took the call. We talked it over, and decided you should stay.”
“We figured you were running from something awful and needed our help.” Becky’s whispery voice would have done credit to a secret agent.
“We needed you,” Gran amended. “You were doing a good job helping me. You got along with Becky, and even made a dent or two in Thomas. Besides, other than a couple insignificant facts, we already knew you are who you’ve told us you are. In here.” She tapped her own chest.
Judi’s eyes filled.
“But Thomas… If he knew I’ve been lying…”
“He’ll blow a gasket when he finds out. But you can handle that. That’s why you’re good for him. You don’t let him close up. You go right at him. Guess I’ve seen him sad too much. Maybe I’ve been too gentle with him.”
She was good for Thomas? Judi had hoped that once. But now…? Not only had she lied to him, she was the absolute last kind of woman he wanted. More important, could she stay knowing he felt that way when she felt…well, something different?
“I really appreciate everything you both did today, and before. I’m so grateful…” Tears clogged the words. “But it would be best for me to move on now, and—”
“You can’t!”
“We need you.”
“Please.” Gran took her granddaughter’s hand in hers as she spoke, uniting them against potential disappointment.
The solitary word and the simple gesture echoed with the departure of another woman from the Diamond V.
Gran had said Thomas saw a connection between her and Maureen. She wasn’t about to strengthen that connection in his mind.
As soon as she could, she’d sit him down and tell him the truth—tell them all the truth. She would leave no lies behind her. And maybe, just maybe Thomas would see that his version of the ideal woman was not the only solution for a lone ranger.
In the meantime…
“If I’m going to stay, I have to feel I’ve earned my way.”
And try not to feel too much more.
Chapter Eight
When Thomas came in for a supper of turkey casserole, green beans and baked apples the next day, he discovered she’d started organizing the desk drawers.
Work had kept him away from supper last night. In fact, kept him out until the house went dark. He was out of the house this morning before she stirred. But it wasn’t like he was trying to avoid her. She would leave, but not for weeks yet. No big deal. As long as he kept some distance.
“I did as much as I could without consulting you, but we’ll need to go over some things before I can finish.”
She looked at him across the table there in front of his grandmother and sister, and gave him a bright smile. Like he hadn’t held her naked the day before. Like she hadn’t closed around him like—
“Thomas?”
He jerked back to now at Gran’s voice.
“Did you hear Helga?”
“Yeah, I heard. Do whatever you want.” He dug his spoon into the softened baked apple, sending juice slopping over the edge of the dish and into the saucer below it. Of course Helga had saucers under the dishes. She thought of everything.
“The bills and the business papers I could organize because I’m familiar with those. But the information on the breeding and training business—that you need to decide how to divide up so when—”
“When you leave,” he interrupted, deliberate and cold.
Her smile sank like a rock. But she pulled in a breath and said, “It’ll be easier to remember if you make up the system.”
“After I finish the night’s paperwork. If you’re still around.”
Bad move, he told himself four hours later.
She’d stayed up after Gran and Becky went to bed, which meant it was the two of them, alone, in a pool of light from the desk lamp talking about color-coded file systems, for God’s sake, and answering her thousand and one questions about horse breeding and training.
At least she hadn’t sat next to him. She’d pulled Gran’s chair to the side of the desk, with the open drawers between them. The problem was, he had a clear view of her face this way. Her face, and the line of her throat down into the vee opening of her top to the hollow that had a pulse so strong and skin almost as soft as the satin cream that covered the rounded curve of her—
“Okay? The red folders for potential training clients—red for hot prospects. Does that work for you?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“What color for follow-ups on training clients?”
“Orange.”
“You don’t think that will be confusing? They’re awfully close in color.”
“That’s why it works. They’ll bring those horses back—unless they sell because they decide the problem’s with the animal or go to another trainer because they decide the problem’s with me.”
“Bring them back? For advanced training?”
“Remedial training. Retraining, because the horse has been screwed up again. Nine times out of ten a horse with bad habits has learned them from a bad rider. The tenth time the rider hasn’t given the horse enough time and patience to wipe out the bad habits.”
“But once you train a horse like Dickens and have him working well…”
“He’ll last a while, until Warren Upton or somebody else who doesn’t know how to handle horses gets him right back into those bad habits. What ought to be done is training the riders.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Folks want fancy places to teach horsemanship, with jodhpurs and jackets. Nobody wants to come to a plain working ranch for that.”
“I don’t see why not, especially when they’re riding on a working ranch like Warren Upton does. He doesn’t want jumping or hunter classes or dressage, he wants to know how to ride a horse to cut cattle or rope.”
“How do you know about hunter classes and dressage?”
He waited for the familiar I don’t remember.
She met his eyes for a split second, then looked at the folders in her hands. She put them on the desk.
“You’re right, it’s time for me to go to bed,” she said, as if he’d just said that instead of it being a good hour ago, “Good night, Thomas.”
She got up and walked out of the kitchen without ever looking his way, and he made no move to stop her.
She couldn’t say I don’t remember to him anymore. Well, he supposed that was something. Just not nearly enough.
Thomas sipped from his first cup of coffee two mornings later.
Good coffee was about all that had kept him going the past two days.
The kitchen was silent
except for the low hum of the new coffeemaker. The day’s first light spread across the east-facing windows. That was another change Helga had made, leaving those curtains open at night so he had morning light when he came down.
The daylight caught something on the table he hadn’t noticed when he’d come in last night—a newspaper folded into quarters, showing the classified section. As he took it to the window to see it better, water came on in the upstairs bathroom.
He took another swallow of coffee as he noted comments in Helga’s handwriting in the margin near four ads that had been circled. The ads were for low-priced used cars.
She was leaving.
She could use a ranch truck for any other transportation need. Only reason she’d need her own car was to leave.
She was leaving.
Of course she was. The six weeks were nearly up. She didn’t have any other reason to stay.
Did she?
So there was chemistry between them. Powerful, atomic-bomb chemistry. He wasn’t stupid enough to start thinking that meant anything you could count on. Thinking any other way was a prescription for disaster. Hadn’t he seen that? Wasn’t he living with the consequences of it right now?
Being a reasonable human being, he couldn’t expect her to do anything but leave. Because the alternative was that she would stay.
So she was looking up used-car ads. Made sense.
She was leaving.
The hell she was.
Having let the water run long enough to warm up, Judi adjusted the faucets and stepped into the shower.
She shouldn’t have been so depressed last night. By the light of day things looked considerably better.
Once the date of Sterling’s shipment passed she wouldn’t have to keep the secret any longer. So there would no longer be any reason for her not to tell Thomas, tell them all, why she’d hid her identity. She’d tell him the truth, and he’d understand.
She’d have to go back to Illinois for a while—to let her family and friends know she was fine, and she supposed that undercover girlfriend of Geoff’s might want to see her. But she’d explain all that to Thomas, and then she’d come back, and they could…
Well, she didn’t know what they would do. She put the soap in the dish and turned to rinse.
It wasn’t like Thomas had said anything that hinted he’d thought of a future with her.
A vision flashed into her head—Thomas waiting at the front of a church, and her walking down an aisle. “Are you sure?” her father asked, looking at her with concern. “Yes!” she shouted.
Judi waited for the vision to pop like a soap bubble. Nope, still there. Maybe motion would pop it. She turned and let the water cascade down her back. Still there.
She was in love with Thomas. Totally and completely in love with him.
The shower curtain opened and Thomas stepped in.
She covered her own mouth to stop a scream.
“Thomas! What are you doing? Get out of here! You can’t do this.”
“I already have.” He slid his hands around her back and pulled her close to his naked and aroused body then shut the shower curtain. “We have to talk.”
“Talk?” she squeaked.
“There’s no reason for you to get a car.”
“Car? I…oh. But—”
“Gran’s not ready to do without help yet. Nowhere near ready.” He kissed the spot where her neck met her shoulder, then at the base of her throat, tonguing the hollow there. “We need you for another six weeks.”
At the moment she didn’t care if he thought Gran would need help for that long or if it was an excuse to keep her around. Either way, it bought her time.
Time to see if Thomas could fall in love with her.
“I’ll let the agency know. But it’ll be okay, because we can contract on our own after the initial contact,” she adlibbed.
“Consider yourself contracted for another six weeks then.”
“Okay.” She sucked in a breath as his hand stroked down her back to the curve of her derriere, pulling her tight against his hardened body. “But I still need a car, and I’ll need a week or so to go, uh, see if there’re ways to get my memory back.”
“Where?”
“Uh, I thought maybe the agency could help me.”
“South Dakota? I’ll take you.”
“There’s no need—”
“Right after—” He dropped his head and took her nipple into his mouth, sucking and licking. She arched her back, giving him greater access and fitting more tightly against his lower body. He licked at the hollow between her breasts. “I pay off Maureen.”
“No need…”
But he’d taken her other nipple, and there was need…just not the same kind. The smooth heat of him pressed against her, seeking entrance.
He muttered against her flesh, then held absolutely still for a half dozen heartbeats. Then he went into motion. He pivoted her around, backing her into the corner of the enclosure.
“Stay there,” he ordered. Like she might go wandering off.
He opened the shower curtain, letting water spray across the floor. “Thomas!”
But he was yanking open the medicine cabinet door. “It’ll dry.”
Before she’d budged the curtain he was back, the curtain closed and he was tearing open a packet.
Hot, wet flesh, stubborn latex and two sets of eager hands turned the next few minutes into a symphony of groans, curses, pleas and laughter.
“We would never make it on a how-to video,” she said with another giggle, stroking the back of his neck.
He slid his hand to the inside of her thigh, exerting pressure to draw it up and up, until her leg naturally curled around him. He traced a path down the back of her raised leg, then around, slipping a slow finger into her entrance with a murmur of appreciation. Rocked from the inside out, she grabbed onto his shoulders with one hand and the towel bar with the other for balance.
“This—” he cupped her, opened her wider, then positioned himself “—is the how-to where we shine.”
He thrust home, and balance was gone for good.
All that mattered was holding him, welcoming him. Judi had time now. Time to show him, time to build trust at a level deeper and more enduring than words. She took him into her body, and wrapped herself around him, and surely he would understand this for the most honest, most trusting exchange possible between a man and a woman. So this spiral of stroke and thrust where each motion, each touch elaborated on the one that had gone before—and more important what they felt that brought them to this—would endure when the paper walls of words spoken and not spoken tumbled down.
“Thomas…”
He kissed her, his mouth covering hers, his tongue matching their rhythm. Faster now. Their mouths separated as they gasped for oxygen to fuel the race.
She had wrapped both legs around him, no longer bound by such necessities as standing. The spiral tightened, cycling, reaching for a point she could almost touch, almost…yes…almost…
She pressed her mouth to his shoulder, muffling the cries that wanted to be shouted. He dropped his head back, while his arms crushed her to him, and she felt the power of his response inside and around her.
They collapsed into each other, and simply occupied this slice of time and space until reality returned.
She was held up between the wall and him—she surely couldn’t have held herself up even if her feet had been on the ground. Had she ever kept her feet on the ground when Thomas touched her? Still inside her, he was slumped against her, pulling in air.
She moved one hand—that was all she could manage—to stroke his back. Goose bumps.
“Thomas! You’re cold.”
He raised his head from her shoulder, but it took another second for his eyes to clear. “Hot water must’ve run out.”
“How long ago?”
“Don’t know.”
And he didn’t sound like he cared, but she felt the chill in him now. She nudged him. “Thoma
s, we have to get out of here. Turn the water off.”
He kissed her once, quick and sweet on her closed mouth, then pulled away, turned off the water and held back the shower curtain for her.
He wrapped her in a towel, disposed of the condom and grabbed another towel for himself.
The bath mat had slid to the far side of the bathroom, she pulled it back with her toes and discovered they’d created a puddle on the floor—probably when Thomas had hopped out. She started to sop it up with another towel, but he pulled her up against him, and the only puddle on her mind then was the one where her backbone should have been.
“I want you in my bed.”
The puddle turned to steam. “We can’t.”
He stroked down her arm.
“Really, Thomas. We can’t.” She retreated a step. “You know how I knew you were in my room that day I came in here and you were shaving?”
He looked at her. And that look said he didn’t care how she’d known, because he didn’t care what her reasons were for saying they couldn’t. And if she looked at him much longer she’d be drawn right along with his not caring.
“I heard your footsteps.”
He kissed the side of her neck. The heat there melted her muscles, maybe the bone, too. “Thomas. They’ll hear us. My room’s right over Gran’s.”
He raised his head from where her shoulder met her neck. “My room…”
“Is right over Becky’s. And if you don’t think she would figure it out, you don’t know your sister.”
He stared at her another beat. Muttered an oath, then tucked her up against him, with his chin on her wet hair.
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do. Slip out of the house tonight after Gran and Becky are asleep, and meet me down the back road. I’ll have the new truck there.”
“But where—”
“Will you meet me?”
“Yes, bu—”
“All I want is the yes.”
“What took you so long?”
She could hear the grin in Thomas’s voice as she climbed into the truck. He leaned across her to shut the passenger door then drew her up against him.
“Those wretched noisy stairs. I thought the whole county could hear me.”
The Runaway Bride Page 16