As for Priss, it never even occurred to her to pretend. With Eddie it had been no problem. He’d wanted sex. She’d wanted someone to go out with, to talk to, to dance with and flirt with. In the beginning, she’d wanted someone to fall in love with, but it hadn’t taken long to realize that for her, it just wasn’t going to happen.
With Jake, she wanted everything there was. She wanted what all those pregnant women running around in New Hope had had. And she wanted it with Jake. And she wanted it not just for now, but for always.
Nine
The two horses, Baby and Jake’s gelding, Odd Job, grazed peacefully on the long, tender grass beside the creek. Insects droned in the summer heat, and a few small white wildflowers drooped on slender stems.
Priss was blind to it all. Her world began and ended in Jake’s arms. She gazed up at him trustingly, a smile hovering at the corner of her mouth, because she felt too good to hold it in. It had been Jake who had invited her to go riding with him, after all. She hadn’t pushed herself on him. It had been Jake who had insisted she come home with him in the first place. It hadn’t been her idea. Which meant that no matter what he said, he wanted to be with her as much as she wanted to be with him.
He had kissed her three times already, and by now there was not a speck of doubt in her mind how she felt. At twenty-nine, there were some things a woman just knew.
She knew he wanted her. He must have known she was his for the asking, yet he hadn’t taken advantage of her vulnerability. Which meant…
Which had to mean that no matter how much he protested otherwise, he was serious about her. She was no expert on men, but she did know most of them didn’t really cotton to the idea of marriage. Women were the natural nesters. Men, on the other hand, were—
Well, men were whatever it was that men were, Lord love ’em.
For the first time in her life, Priss felt wise in ways that had nothing to do with schooling. Jake might be good at a lot of things, but it took a woman to tame a man, to make him want to settle down and start a family. That was the way it had always been, ever since Adam and Eve and the apple.
Leaning her face against the solid rock of his chest, she tightened her arms and tried to direct her mind toward a serious consideration of the future. His and hers. Theirs. Which wasn’t easy when his heart was pounding so hard right under her ear.
One of his hands moved slowly up to caress the back of her neck, and then down again, curving over her hips, pressing her against him until she could feel every straining muscle of his body. She trembled. In danger of being swept away on a raging flood of passion, she clung to the only solid thing in the universe.
When Jake lowered her to the ground, she didn’t utter a single word of protest. He removed his hat, sailed it over against a cottonwood tree, and knelt stiffly beside her. Without a second thought, she lifted her arms and he groaned and accepted her silent invitation.
“I reckon you need to rest a few minutes before we start back,” he said, and she just smiled, feeling a rush of ancient womanly wisdom.
Priss knew what she needed, and it wasn’t rest.
Jake brushed her hair back from her damp forehead, then carefully removed the pins she had just as carefully placed there that morning. He slipped them into his shirt pocket. “I’ve been wantin’ to do that for years,” he said, and she smiled again. Of course he didn’t actually mean years. They’d only known each other for a few days. It was this feeling that had sprung up between them so quickly, almost as if they’d loved before, in another lifetime. Maybe they hadn’t simply met one another that day in Faith’s shop. Maybe they had recognized each other.
Priss’s mind was awash with compelling new ideas. Her body was awash with even more compelling feelings. Jake was toying with a few strands of hair, winding them around his finger, smoothing them with his thumb. “Honey, you need to understand something before we go any further. I’m not sure just how to say it…”
He didn’t have to say it. She knew.
“The thing is, there’s a lot of work to do around a place like this. I made a promise to myself a long time ago, after—well, let’s just say I haven’t made many promises over the years, but those I do make, I’m obliged to keep.”
“Jake, you don’t have to explain anything, I understand,” she murmured. They were two of a kind. She didn’t make promises lightly, either. It was a good thing she’d shown him how willing she was to work, how quickly she could learn once she set her mind to it. “I feel the same way.”
He sort of frowned at that, and she thought he might not be convinced yet, but that was no problem. She had the rest of her life to convince him that when something was meant to be, why, then, it was purely meant to be.
She laid her palm on the side of his neck and felt the pulse pounding there. With her newfound confidence and daring, she lifted her head and bit him gently on the chin, then touched the wound with her tongue.
Jake shuddered violently, his eyes tightly shut. “Take it easy, sweetheart,” he growled.
Sweetheart. Oh, how she loved the sound of that word.
He trailed a fingertip down her throat to the opening of her white silk shirt. Her heart skipped a beat and then doubled its rhythm.
“Sunup to sundown,” he muttered, his voice a hoarse rasp against the lazy, summer-afternoon chorus of insects. “Not much time to spare in between. Sometimes I don’t even get to bed until it’s near about time to get up again. It’s a hard enough life for a single man. For a—”
“Shh. I told you, I understand.” She kissed the palm of his hand as he caressed her cheek, and he shook his head and sighed.
As cooler air brushed over the heated skin of her breasts, Priss felt desperately vulnerable and at the same time, almost feverishly joyful. “But if you’re all that busy, I’d hate to think I was keeping you from something important,” she teased.
He lowered his head and she could feel his breath hot on her throat. On her breast. He had unbuttoned her shirt and laid it open, and she knew that if he hadn’t, she would have torn it open. She wanted to feel his hands on her body—his lips on her body.
His full weight on her body.
He said something about long-term plans, but she didn’t listen because at the moment she was more interested in what he was doing to her than in what he was saying to her.
Then, with a deep, urgent groan, he took her mouth with a sexual urgency that robbed her of the last fleeting thought. She strained against him, holding him to her with both arms as he slid his body over hers and ground his hips against her aching pelvis. He was blatantly aroused. Priss felt a glimmer of fear that was gone almost as swiftly as it had arisen.
His belt buckle cut into her belly, and she wanted to tell him to take it off—to take everything off, only he was still kissing her and she didn’t ever want him to stop.
When one of his hands inched its way under her back, she lifted one shoulder to allow him access to her bra hook and made up her mind to call that little French place at the Galleria and order a dozen front-hooked bras to be delivered immediately.
He murmured something that sounded like “Perfect” and “Made for me,” and her breast swelled to meet his questing lips.
“I know,” she whispered.
Of course they were made for each other. His subconscious mind knew it, even if his conscious mind would never in a million years admit it. That was just one of the differences between men and woman. One of the many lovely differences…
Priss’s hands moved down over his hips, savoring the feel of his taut buttocks. He shuddered. His mouth on her breast grew momentarily still, and then he ground his lower body against hers, and she wondered how long it could be before he took off all his clothes, and hers, too, and did what they both wanted until neither of them could speak a coherent sentence.
Priss knew about desire. She might not be terribly experienced, but she knew how it felt, and besides, she had read articles.
Jake paused in the middle of unzipp
ing her jeans to say something about understanding how it was, and she cried impatiently, “Yes! Jake, please hurry, can you?”
Mercy, was that Priss Barrington making those demands? She didn’t even recognize herself!
He fumbled with the hook of the concho belt she had paid a small fortune for, and she wanted to cry, Cut it off! Tear it loose! Hurry, hurry, before I melt!
Frantically, she tugged at his shirttail. Lifting his body for one brief moment, Jake yanked it free, unclipped his belt, and tore two buttons off his shirt. Priss wondered fleetingly if she should find them and save them to sew back on for him, but then she stopped thinking again.
Oh, my. He was beautiful. She told him so, and he grinned, but he didn’t look all that amused. In fact, he looked more like he was in pain.
She reached up and slipped his shirt off his shoulders. While he supported his weight on first one arm and then the other, she pulled it free and tossed it aside. Seeing his scars again, she winced. They weren’t pretty, but they were a part of him, so she kissed them, wishing she could have been there at the time to kiss away the hurt, the way Rosalie used to kiss away hers.
Kissing the scars scattered over his chest and shoulder led to kissing the small, flat brown nipples, savoring the clean, salty taste of his skin. When he shuddered and swore softly under his breath, pushing his male breast against her mouth, Priss felt as if she were about to explode with the sheer joy of love.
He lifted his head and gazed down at her, and she thought, How harsh he looks, with his cheekbones all flushed and angular. Her Jake. Her man. She had seen him in a teasing mood. She had seen him when he was angry, when he was concerned. Now she was seeing him honed to a sharp edge of desire.
“Priss—honey, you do know how I feel, don’t you? I explained…”
She nodded, so full of love and happiness she couldn’t have spoken if she tried. She knew how he felt. She felt the same way. They were in love, and he had warned her that from now on, life wouldn’t be at all the way it used to be when she lived in her father’s house, with servants and nothing more to do than shop and get her legs waxed and her hair and nails done on schedule.
She had known he was kind. In spite of his shabby clothes, he had a kind of bred-in-the-bone integrity that she recognized almost from the first. “I know, darling, I feel the same way. I’m a big girl now. I know what’s—” She broke off, inhaling with a long, shuddery gasp. “Ahhh, would you do that to me again? It makes me feel all lazy and bubbly and warm, like hot molasses…”
And so he did it to her again, and then he lifted her hips and slid her jeans down her legs, and the hot molasses flowed thicker and swifter until she was drowning in the dark, sweet joy of it all.
Jake had protection, but he’d been carrying it around in his wallet for so long that he couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t come apart under the strain. So he asked her point-blank, “Priss, are you on the pill?”
She didn’t think he meant vitamins, and she wasn’t taking anything else, so she shook her head.
“Is it a safe time of the month for you? I mean, I can protect you, but a little backup might not be a bad thing.”
It took a few moments for her to realize what he’d been talking about, and because he seemed so concerned he might stop if she told him she was right in the middle of her cycle, which she’d been keeping track of with a thermometer even before she’d gone to the clinic—she lied. There wasn’t that big a chance, anyway. And besides, they’d be getting married as soon as he felt he could spare the time from all he had to do around here.
“I’m safe,” she said, and was a little shocked at the feeling of guilt that came over her. Except for the polite little white lies she told on occasion to spare someone’s feelings, she was truthful by nature. But then, wasn’t this one of those occasions?
And then, all feelings of guilt were swallowed up by a hoard of other feelings.
Jake counted slowly to ten. He could’ve counted to ten thousand and it wouldn’t have helped. He’d sworn he wouldn’t rush things, because he might not get another chance. Maybe they could come to some sort of an understanding, but in case they couldn’t—in case this was the one and only time in his life he could live out a fantasy—he was determined to make it as good for her as he possibly could. So that at least she would remember him once she was back in that plush apartment of hers, and tooling around town in her vintage Caddy convertible.
With some other guy.
Some other guy who would take her to some swank club and feed her all kinds of fancy food, and dance with her and drink wine with her, and then go home with her and make love to her and wake up the next morning in her fancy bed on her fancy flowered sheets with the scent of her perfume—
“Jake?”
He swallowed hard. “Yeah. Priss—honey, are you sure you’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said simply. “But if you’ve changed your mind…”
He laughed, but there was little amusement in the sound. With trembling fingers, he finished undressing them both, then lowered himself into the cradle of her thighs. One part of him wanted to stand over her and gaze down on her sundappled body with its full, firm breasts, the sweeping incurve of her waist and the slight swell of her belly. His first glimpse of the thatch of dark gold curls between her womanly thighs nearly brought tears to his eyes. She was so perfect. And real—not like one of those skinny fashion models.
She deserved to be pleasured, and if he couldn’t offer her anything else, he could give her that.
Slowly, carefully, Jake brought her to the peak of desire, using every skill at his command. He loved her with his hands, with his lips, with his tongue. By the time he eased his painfully aroused shaft into her threshold, he was half out of his mind.
By the time he realized she was a virgin, it was too late.
Unable to hold back, he thrust wildly, again and again. Finally he shuddered and collapsed, allowing his head to fall onto her shoulder while he struggled to recover from what had been the single most powerful experience of his life.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he whispered harshly when he could once more command his wits.
Priss didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. He had to have heard her gasp—she’d read somewhere that men could always tell, but then, she’d also read that they couldn’t, and anyway, what difference did it make? “I didn’t think it mattered.”
Rolling off her, Jake lay face down, his head resting on his crossed arms. He didn’t speak, and Priss reached down and tugged a shirt—his, as it happened—over her naked body. Nearby, a frog croaked. A flock of crows landed noisily in the cottonwood and took off again, loudly protesting the intrusion. She didn’t hear any of it.
Watching for some clue as to what was wrong, she studied the long form stretched out beside her in the grass. From the waist up, he was brown. And smooth, except for those little tufts of hair under his arms and the thicket she knew was right in the middle of his chest. From the waist down, he was white and hairy. She thought it was a remarkably fine combination. “Jake? Is something wrong?” She knew she probably hadn’t done it right, but surely he understood that with a little practice, she’d do better. She knew the mechanics of it now. With a little practice she would master the art.
He turned onto his side and glared at her. “Damn right there’s something wrong. You lied to me!”
Bolting upright, she glared right back. “I did n—Well, maybe I did, but it wasn’t a big lie.”
And anyway, how did he know for sure? Without one of those little kits, even she couldn’t know for sure that she was fertile, and even if she was, it was a longshot. And anyhow, he’d worn one of those thingies, hadn’t he?
“What do you mean, not a big lie? Honey, if you’ve hung on to your virginity this long, losing it is no small deal. What I want to know is why? What the devil did you hope to gain?”
So much for her newfound womanly wisdom. Priss had mistaken what had upset him, but she d
idn’t mistake the “honey” for an endearment. Not this time. Not spoken in that scathing tone of voice. “I don’t think that’s any of your business. And anyway, you can’t be sure I was a virgin. I read this article once that said that except in a few cases, men couldn’t—”
“Oh, yeah? Well, this man can! And just in case you’ve got some harebrained notion of cashing in on it, you can forget it, because like I told you right up front, I’m not in the market for any long-term deals.”
“Fine. Good. Because I’m not, either, and even if I were, I wouldn’t—I w-wouldn’t—”
Scrambling onto her hands and knees, Priss gathered her scattered clothing and started putting it on, not daring to look at Jake. Hoping he wasn’t looking at her. Hoping he had taken a flying leap into that damned creek, which was only a few feet deep but would serve the purpose.
Oh, this is all wrong! This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen!
After cramming her bare feet into her boots and stuffing her socks under her belt, she stomped over to where the two horses were grazing. “Come here, horse,” she snarled, hoping the blasted thing knew more about this riding business than she did. She snatched up the reins and tried to remember which side she was supposed to mount from. Lefty, loosey, righty, tighty.
No, that was faucets.
Evidently, she did it the right way, because Babe didn’t seem to object. Wiggling her bottom back and forth, she clucked the patient mare into a leisurely stroll.
Jake watched her go. They were probably both going to wind up covered with chigger bites, but that was the least of his problems.
And hers. Leastwise, if she thought that just because she’d given up her virginity, he was bound to marry her.
Given it up? Hell, she’d all but forced it on him!
She was twenty-nine years old. No woman kept it that long anymore. Not unless she was some kind of a nut case.
Which Priss was, only not that kind of a nut case. Actually, as nuts went, she was a pretty nice one. He had to admit he’d gotten a kick out of the way she’d thrown herself into everything she’d tackled, from cooking to washing to ironing—even if she had loused it up.
The Baby Notion Page 13