by Diana Palmer
“For me, nothing. I’ll get cleaned up.”
Tess watched him go. Her eyes were more expressive than she realized as she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and almost shivered, remembering the day he’d cured her of hero worship. She’d wanted so desperately to love him, but he wouldn’t let her. Now he seemed to want to mend fences. Didn’t he realize that it was years too late?
Beryl was giving Tess a curious stare after he left. “You’re afraid of him,” she said unexpectedly, her expression incredulous. “Honey, he wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
Probably not, she thought, but he had hurt her in ways she could never confess to Beryl. “He never liked my father very much,” Tess said evasively. “Or me. He’s been kind to me since I got shot, but I still feel safer across town from him.”
“He isn’t like that.” The older woman tried again. “Sharp, yes, even hot-tempered, but he isn’t vengeful. I’ve known him all his life. He was a sweet child until his father left. His mother took his father’s desertion out on him. I spared him as much as I could, but she was never much of a parent.”
“Neither was my father,” Tess confessed.
“See, you’ve got something in common.”
“Right. We’re both human beings.”
Once she got used to the new routine, Tess found the ranch fascinating and the pace relaxing. She insisted on helping Beryl as much as she could. Her arm was sore, but as she told Beryl, the doctor had said it wouldn’t hurt to exercise it, to prevent it from becoming stiff. She set the table at mealtime and did what she could to lessen the strain of her presence, and she enjoyed the warmth of the other people who lived on the ranch.
But she carefully kept her distance from Dane, to his dismay. There was always some reason why she had to leave a room once he entered it, why she had to be unavailable if he was in the living room after dinner, instead of in his study working.
In the office, their relationship was strictly professional. She took dictation, answered the phone and kept things running smoothly. But here, where he was in his element, he was a different man. She had trouble adjusting to him on a personal level. Even when he’d been shot, he’d been the professional lawman, except for that once. And it had happened at the apartment he kept in town, not here at the ranch. If he had an inner sanctum, this was it. This was the first time she’d seen it; he’d made sure of that.
Here, away from the world, he was relaxed and not so severely on his guard. He limped a little because of the primarily physical work he did on the ranch, and his temper was more noticeable than at the office, but he was also less driven and stoic. That fact was what made Tess so nervous. She was vulnerable here, away from prying eyes. Beryl never intruded. Neither did any of the ranch hands. It made her uneasy to be totally at Dane’s mercy.
He noticed that she avoided him and became impatient with it. And finally, three days later, he confronted her while she was helping feed a stray calf in the barn.
He was angry. The set of his jaw and the glitter in his eyes would have told her, even without the taut stance of his body.
“Stop avoiding me,” he said without preamble, his very tone intimidating.
She looked up at him nervously. She was wearing jeans and a denim coat over her blue blouse, with her hair plaited at her nape. She looked very pretty, even without makeup, something Dane noticed.
“I’m feeding the calf….” she said hesitantly, indicating the bottle she was holding to the calf’s mouth as she balanced its small head on her knee.
“That isn’t what I mean, and you know it.” He whipped off his Stetson, the quick action unnerving, and knelt beside her. He was in working garb, too. His jeans and boots were much more disreputable-looking than hers, his batwing chaps stained and worn. The cuffs of his long-sleeved chambray shirt were speckled with mud and blood, like the sleeves of his open shepherd’s coat. He looked up, catching her eyes in a look she couldn’t break. “I’ve tried to tell you that I regret what I did that day,” he said roughly.
She flushed. Her heart was beating her to death. She didn’t want to analyze why.
“I thought you were more experienced than you turned out to be, or I wouldn’t have taken it that far, that fast.”
“You said so before,” she faltered.
“You didn’t listen before.” He ran his hand through his thick, damp hair. “You go out with men occasionally. You must know by now, at your age, that intimacy can be rough.”
She looked down at the calf. She didn’t answer him.
“Right?” He caught her softly rounded chin in his lean fingers and tilted her face up to his. “Tell me.”
“There hasn’t been…anybody,” she said unsteadily. “Not…that way.”
His face changed all at once. He frowned slightly, his eyes falling to her parted lips and then back up to her eyes. “How deep are the scars I gave you?” he asked quietly.
Her thin shoulders moved restlessly. “Pretty deep,” she said with a humorless laugh. “Dane, I have to finish this.”
He withdrew his hand, draping it across his knee as he watched her. Her reaction to him was damning. He made her nervous. He could see her hands shaking, and he hated that part of the past that was responsible for her helpless fear.
“You kept coming, no matter how hard I tried to push you away. You got closer than anyone else ever had,” he said without meeting her eyes, his fingers tracing a streak of mud on the knee of his jeans as the involuntary confession escaped him. “I got in over my head before I knew it. I didn’t really want a woman in my life.”
“But you were married once, before you got shot,” she said.
His eyes met hers and he smiled with pure mockery. “I started dating Jane because my mother didn’t like her. Then I married her because she wouldn’t sleep with me any other way. But she only suffered me in bed for one reason,” he said, without elaborating on the reason. His face hardened. “Eventually she went looking for a man who could give her everything she needed. I assume she found him when we were divorced. She’s remarried and has a child.”
“Oh.” She frowned, her eyes searching his curiously as she tried to get up enough courage to ask a question that was gnawing at her.
“You want to know why she didn’t like sleeping with me,” he said, nodding. “Do you really need to ask?”
He was like a bulldozer, in every way. Perhaps the ardor he’d shown her that long-ago day was how he made love naturally. She hadn’t considered that likelihood.
It opened her mind to new possibilities. She lifted her face. “Was it…were you that way with her? Like you were with me that day?”
His jaw tautened. “I’ve never liked a woman enough to care whether or not she enjoyed me in bed,” he said bluntly. “I wanted Jane. I thought if she loved me, preliminaries wouldn’t matter.”
Her breath escaped in a sigh. She was innocent on certain subjects, but she seemed to know more about this subject than he did.
“But…but you can’t just…just…” She colored. “Dane, women aren’t like men,” she said helplessly. “A woman has to have time, tenderness.”
“How would you know?” he asked insolently. “Didn’t you just practically admit to me that you’re still a virgin?”
The blush got worse. She glared at him. “Being innocent doesn’t make me stupid. I watch movies and read books, you know. I do have some idea of what a woman is supposed to feel with a man she loves.”
“You loved me,” he said darkly. “And you felt nothing except fear.”
“I was infatuated with you,” she corrected, shivering inside at the knowledge that she’d been so transparent. At nineteen, she’d known nothing about how to keep her heart hidden. “You hurt me, and not just emotionally.”
“That wasn’t deliberate. I was…hungry for you,” he said hesitantly. He sounded almost vulnerable. “You were sweet and loving, and I thought…” He cursed under his breath. “What does it matter?” His eyes darted up and slammed into hers. “Yo
u didn’t want me.”
“You were so violent,” she whispered weakly.
His fist clenched on his knee. “I don’t know any other way with a woman!” he said stiffly. His eyes narrowed as they met hers. “I was a late bloomer. My mother was the only woman I’d been around much and she hated men with a vengeance. In fact, she hated me, too. I got my first taste of women when I was a rookie cop. The kind of women you meet out on the streets in police work are every bit as tough as the men, because they have to be. The only encounters I ever had were rushed and unemotional.” His eyes were unconsciously intent on her face. “The way I was with you that day…is the only way I know.”
“Dane,” she whispered, her voice soft with unwilling compassion. “I’m so sorry!”
His dark eyes met hers. “What?” he asked absently.
She wondered if he realized what he’d told her, how much of himself he’d revealed. She reached up, for the first time voluntarily touching his lean cheek. Her fingers were cold.
He jerked back from her, his eyes glittery, and closed up like a clam. “I don’t need pity, honey,” he said mockingly. “I don’t need a damned woman, either.”
He got up and stomped off down the aisle, leaving a shocked, puzzled Tess behind.
For the next two days, it was Dane who avoided her, almost as if his confession had embarrassed him. Tess found herself less nervous as she considered how his attitude toward women had stifled his ability to feel tenderness.
Tess had never really liked his mother—Nita Lassiter had been very brittle, very flighty. When Tess’s father wasn’t around, she was all but hostile toward Tess, and even more so toward Dane.
Dane’s ex-wife hadn’t seemed much of a prize, either, judging from that one dinner Tess had spent with Dane and her. Her sullen, resentful behavior had convinced Tess that the woman had never loved Dane, and he himself had said that it was the uniform that had attracted Jane more than the man inside it. Jane had struck Tess as being just as much a man-hater as Dane’s mother.
She frowned thoughtfully. Didn’t they say a man unconsciously looked for women who reminded him of his mother? Or that men sometimes, equally unconsciously, chose women who lived down to their image of them? Dane had spent his time around women of questionable character in his youth, so perhaps he thought sex was only permissible with women who had no softness, no vulnerability.
It was a sobering thought. But she had no time to work on the theory, because Dane announced suddenly that he’d been away from the office long enough and had to get back. Naturally, Tess agreed to return to work, too, because her arm was back to normal, even if a little soreness remained.
He packed and drove them back to Houston, silent and unapproachable, after Tess had said her goodbyes to Beryl.
“I’m going to post a man outside your apartment, and I’m having you followed,” he said curtly when he deposited her suitcases in her apartment an hour later.
She looked up at him irritably. “I don’t need a watchdog. I’m perfectly capable of calling the police if I need to.”
“No, you aren’t,” he replied. “You don’t know these people. I do.”
“Mr. Policeman.” She nodded, eyes flashing at him. “I’ll bet when you were a beat cop, your badge was sewn to your skin!”
He smiled, a sensual twist of his lips that made her heart race. “I loved the job,” he agreed. “It was, and is, the only place I feel comfortable, apart from the ranch. Detective work isn’t so different from what I did. Especially when I take a criminal case.”
That was a fact. During the time she’d worked for him, she’d known him to track down murderers and bank robbers, to subdue them and bring them in, all as part of the job. Returning fugitives for worried bail bondsmen was a big chunk of the agency’s income. Tame cases he left to the skip tracers and operatives. He took the dangerous ones—he and Nick, his protegé.
“It’s the adrenaline,” she murmured. “You’re addicted to the danger.”
“Am I?”
“It would explain why you won’t slow down,” she said. Her eyes slid down the muscular length of him, over the scarred shoulder and chest she knew were hidden under his clothes.
“You wouldn’t want to look at me after the damage the bullets did,” he said quietly. “It would make you sick.”
Her eyes jumped back to his. “I was thinking about how it happened,” she said. “Not how it would look.”
He relaxed a little, but not much. He always seemed as if his spine were glued to a wall. He walked tall, never slumped or slouched. His posture, like his character, was arrow-straight.
“All the same, I’ll never be anyone’s idea of a pinup in a bathing suit,” he said with a faint smile. “Not that I was before I got shot.”
Her unblinking stare was involuntary. “I’ve never seen you in a bathing suit,” she remarked absently.
He didn’t move, but his eyes darkened, became intent on hers. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in one, now. Not in public, anyway.” His chest rose and fell heavily. “I’d let you look at me, I guess. But no one else.”
Her body stilled as she looked up at him. “Why me?” she asked softly.
“Because you wouldn’t make me feel like less of a man,” he said simply. “Some women have a knack for putting a knife in a man’s ego. It makes them feel superior. When a man does the same thing to a woman, they call him a chauvinist. Some double standard.”
“All women aren’t like that.”
He moved a step closer to her. When she didn’t tense or move back, he took another step, and another, until he was close enough to smell the faint scent of violets that clung to her skin. She was wearing a soft gray pantsuit with a heather-colored jacket. Her hair was loose and she looked young and pretty and very vulnerable.
He caught a handful of her hair a little roughly and pushed up at her nape to lift her face to his narrow, darkening eyes.
“Teach me,” he said huskily.
Her lips parted on a rush of breath as her heartbeat ran wild. “Wh-what?” she whispered.
His eyes fell to her mouth and he bent toward it, his own mouth parting just as it touched hers. “Teach me how to be gentle….”
He spoke the words into her mouth. She stiffened at the moist, hot pressure, the smokey warmth of his own mouth so intimately touching hers. She could breathe him, smell the tang of cologne, feel the strength and power of his body almost touching her.
His eyes were open, and she looked into them just as his lips brushed hers.
“What do you like, Tess?” he whispered. His teeth opened and closed with exquisite tenderness on her upper lip, while his tongue softly tasted its moist inside. “Tell me.”
Her hands were on his chest, under the tweed jacket, against his white shirt. Under the material, she could feel a thick cushion of hair over hard, warm muscle. “Dane, you can’t,” she began shakily.
“Why?”
His mouth was easing her lips apart. The contact was making her knees weak. “You hated…me,” she whispered.
“I hated my mother,” he corrected, his eyes searching hers while he played with her mouth, that steely hand at her nape still clutching her soft hair, “I hated my ex-wife…I hated half the world. But I never hated you.” His heavy brows drew together in something like pain. “Never, Tess…!”
She felt him shudder as his mouth came down completely over hers, capturing it in a silence that danced with tension, with impossible desires.
For an instant, it was like the past again. But his arms weren’t bruising. She could feel the restraint in him, the determination to go slow, to not rush her. Because of it, and because of what she’d learned about him, the panic began to recede. She let him hold her. And for the first time, she allowed herself to feel his mouth, to let herself taste it as he kissed her with exquisite softness. The contact was more pleasurable than she’d ever dreamed. His lips were firm, and he tasted of coffee. She liked the way he tasted.
As the pleasure grew
, she felt a sudden heat in her lower body, a faint trembling in her legs. “Dane…” She heard her voice sobbing against the pleasure of his mouth, but like lightning striking, his hand contracted and he ground her lips apart under his, so that his tongue could ease between her teeth and push softly inside the sweet darkness of her mouth.
She remembered the one time she’d shared a deep kiss with him and gasped.
He lifted his head slowly, his heart pounding with a heavy beat. He looked down into her shaken eyes for a long moment, fiercely satisfied with what he saw there. She wasn’t afraid; she was aroused. Amazing, that tenderness could make such a difference. It enhanced his own pleasure.
But he read the hesitation she couldn’t disguise. “You don’t like deep kisses with me, do you?” he asked huskily, his eyes glittering with desire. “My tongue pushes inside your mouth, penetrates it, and you shiver because of the images it produces.” His hand loosened on her hair, smoothing it. She stood quietly against him, not protesting, as his deep, soft voice held her captive. “It’s very much like another kind of penetration,” he breathed, nibbling at her mouth. “Intimate, and urgent, and very, very deep….” He whispered into her mouth, suiting the action to the words as his tongue probed slowly.
She cried out and suddenly lifted her arms convulsively around his neck, at almost the same moment that the telephone jangled noisely in the heated silence.
Her body jumped, and her wounded arm throbbed, even as his head lifted with a faint groan. Her eyes were wild, frightened all over again. She was trembling, but this time not because of fear. She was clinging to him, not fighting him. He’d aroused her. The knowledge made his heart slam at his ribs.
She couldn’t stand. Her knees gave way when he let go of her.
“It’s all right,” he whispered, lifting her in his arms. “I’ve got you.”
She laid her cheek against his jacket, clinging to him weakly as he carried her to the sofa and sat down with her in his lap before he answered the telephone.