“Yes? You do understand?”
“Yes!” she cried out.
“And it all makes sense to you? You’ll do what I’m asking you to do?”
“Yes. We’ll go into town. As soon as I’ve stopped by the paper”
“Before.”
“What difference does it make?”
“Maybe none. But the sooner von Heusen hears about this, the better things are going to be.”
“Fine!” She was nearly screaming again. She was close to tears because she was desperate to escape him and the sensual blanketing of his body upon hers.
“Please, let me up!”
He rolled to his side, and she was free.
“You do sound more like him every day, though,” she muttered heedlessly, lpache Summer 145 rolling from him to rise and dust the hay from her gown.
“Carpetbagging Yanks, all of” — “That’s another thing we’re going to get straight here once and for all!” he stated. Before she could flee as she had intended, his arm snaked around her, and she was tumbling into the hay again. He straddled her, and his hands pinned her down.
“I’m not a Yank. I’m all.S. Cavalry of- ricer now, Miss. Stuart, but I was born and bred in Missouri and I fought with Morgan for many long years in the war. As a Reb, Tess. Got that straight? Don’t you ever go calling me a carpetbagging Yank again, and so help me God, I mean that!
Understand?”
She stared at him blankly. She had called him a Yank a dozen times, and only now was he telling her the truth.
“Tess!”
“Yes!” she cried. She tore at her wrists and freed them from his grasp, then shoved him as hard as she could. He didn’t move.
“Either Jon or I should know where you are at all times.
All right?”
“No hiding in barns or carriage houses.”
“I wasn’t hiding! I was trying to make sure the fire was really out.”
“I wouldn’t have walked out of here without making sure the fire was out.”
“Maybe I needed to see for myself. The printing press is in here.”
“That damned press! It’s everything to you.”
“Yes! The paper does mean everything! It’s the only means I have to tell the truth!”
He was silent for a moment. Then he moved slowly to his feet and reached down for her. She tried to ignore his helping hands, but they were quickly upon her. He stood her up, but he wasn’t ready to release her yet.
“I know what I’m doin [.”
She inhaled the scent of him.
“I do imagine that you do, Lieutenant .”
“What does that mean?”
“You’ve had a nice bath, so it seems.”
“And a shave.”
“May I go now?”
He was smiling again.
“Jealous little thing, aren’t you?”
“Why should I be? I had a wonderfully pleasant afternoon with Mr. Red Feather. He’s extremely well read and well traveled.”
Jamie’s eyes darkened and narrowed. For an instant she hated herself; she had no right to want to cause trouble between the friends. But she seemed driven to try and make Jamie angry.
And then it hit her like a bolt from the blue. She was falling in love with Jamie!
No! I am not in love with him, she thought in dismay. But maybe she was.
She wanted him. In ways she had never imagined a woman would ever want a man. “It’s important,” Jamie repeated softly, “that Jon or I know where you are at all times. Did we get that one down yet?”
“Yes, thank you, I think we did. But since I do seem to get along much better with Jori, don’t you think I should report to him, Lieutenant?” She twisted free and saluted stiffly.
He caught her shoulders and pulled her back.
“You’re a minx, Tess. A tart-mouthed little m’mx with siren’s eyes and the longest claws this side of the Mississippi.”
“Lieutenant, you’re” — “I’m not a Yank, or a carpetbagger, Tess, and so help m ~”
“You’re about to crush my shoulder blades, Lieutenant,” she said as regally as she could manage.
“Oh.” He released her.
“Do excuse me.”
“I try, Lieutenant. Daily. Hourly.” She started for the door.
“Tess?”
She didn’t turn.
“I could have made you beg, you know?”
She spun around. He was laughing. She raced forward in a sudden surge of energy and butted him in the stomach.
Taken off guard, he fell into the singed hay. She didn’t stay to hear anything else he might have to say.
She raced from the carriage house and back to the house, not pausing until she was inside. She leaned against the door, gasping for breath.
The dining table was clean. Jane came from the kitchen and paused when she saw Tess.
“They’ve all gone to bed, Tess. Hank just went to the bunkhouse. Mr. Red Feather suggested that the hands take a few hours apiece on a kind of a guard duty. Roddy called in that big guard dog of his and he’s going to have the dog on the porch, once he sees the lieutenant and tells the dog that the lieutenant is a friend. I was going to go to bed. It’s been a big day for me, Miss. Stuart. A real big day.”
Her eyes rolled and Tess laughed. Impulsively she gave Jane a big hug. It was a mistake. Jane looked as if she was going to start crying all over again.
“I’m just so happy that you’re alive!” she said.
“Thanks. And I’m happy to be home. Come on, let’s go They walked up the stairs together. Jane hugged Tess quickly and fiercely again and headed toward her own room. Wearily Tess pushed open the door to her bedroom and walked in.
Lighting the lamp at her bedside, she shed her clothing and dressed in a soft blue flannel nightgown. She sat in front of her dressing table and picked up the silver-embossed brush that had belonged to her mother. It was good to be home.
She pulled all the pins out of her hair—and then all the little pieces of hay that had stuck into it—and began to brush it. It fell down her shoulders, long and free. She brushed it mechanically for several minutes, staring at her reflection and not seeing a thing.
Jane had been fight. It had been a big day.
But yon Heusen had been beaten back. Between Jamie and Jon, he had been beaten back. She never had told Jamie that she was grateful. Truly grateful.
He never seemed to give her a chance to say thank you. He was on her side, but it seemed that she was always fighting him. At first, she had been fighting him to make him believe her. Now she was certain he believed her.
He had met yon Heusen. He couldn’t have any doubt that yon Heusen had been responsible for the attack on the wagon train.
And now. Maybe she wasn’t fighting him. Maybe she was fighting herself.
First it had been that darned Eliza. Tess had managed to walk away from Eliza with her dignity intact, but she had heard Jamie speaking to the woman.
No one can make me marry anyone.
No one can make me marry anyone. So he wasn’t the marrying kind.
She was. She wanted a man, a good man. She hadn’t had much time to think about it, what with the war and then everything that had happened since. But when she thought for a moment, she knew. She didn’t want to be a spinster.
The paper was important to her, and she wasn’t just copublisher and a reporter anymore, she was the only publisher.
She had to keep it alive. But she wanted more, too. She wanted a husband, one she really loved, and one who loved her. And she wanted children, and she wanted to give them a world that wasn’t forever tainted with the memories of conflict and death.
And she wanted Jamie Slater. She wasn’t at all sure how the two things intertwined— they didn’t intertwine at all, she admitted. She sighed.
She had to get by the present for the moment. She had to survive yon Heusen.
She shivered suddenly, violently, remembering the way von Heusen had threatened h
er. She would be getting out of town, he had told her. If not by stagecoach, then by some other means.
What could he do to her? She wasn’t alone. She had help now.
But to pay for it she was about to turn over half her property—half of Uncle Joe’s legacy to her—to Jamie Slater. If he chose, he could be her neighbor all her life. She could watch him, and torture herself day after day, wondefing who he rode away to see, wondering what it was like when he took a woman into his arms.
She groaned and pushed away from the table. She couldn’t solve a thing tonight. She needed some sleep. She needed some sleep very badly.
She doused the light and crawled beneath the covers. It felt so good to be in her own bed again. The sheets were cool and clean and fresh-smelling, and her mattress was soft and firm, and it seemed to caress her deliciously. A faint glow from the stars and the moon entered the room gently. It kept everything in dark shadows, and yet she could see the familiar shapes of her dressing table and her drawers and her little mahogany secretary desk.
The breeze wafted her curtains. She closed her eyes. Perhaps she dozed for a moment. Not much time could have passed, and yet she suddenly became aware that nome thing was different. Her door had been thrust open.
She wasn’t alone.
Jamie was standing in the doorway, his hands on his hips, his body a silhouette in the soft hazy moonbeams. There was nothing soft or gentle about his stance, however. She could feel the anger that radiated from him.
“All right, Tess, where’s my room?”
His room?
“Oh!” she murmured.
“Your room … well, I didn’t think you were going to stay here.”
Long strides brought him quickly across the room. She scrambled to a sitting position as he towered over her.
“I just spent two days riding with you to get here. I spent two nights sleeping on the hard ground beneath the wagon.”
“The hay in the barn is very soft.”
“The hay in the barn is very soft,” he repeated, staring at her. He leaned closer.
“The hay in the barn is very soft? Is that what you said?” She felt his closeness in the shadows even as she inhaled his clean, fascinating, masculine scent.
His eyes seemed silver in the darkness, satanic. She was rid- died with trembling, so keenly aware of him that it was astonishing.
“You don’t have a room for me?” he demanded. “All right, I am sorry.
But you were gone, and we were all exhausted. And you did have a bath somewhere. I just believed that you meant to sleep where you had bathed.”
He was still for a moment—dead still. Then he smiled. “Miss. Stuart, move over.”
“What?”
“Move over. If there’s no room for me, then I’ll sleep here.”
“Of all the nerve!”
“Hush! We share this bed, or we sleep in the hay together,” he warned her.
He meant it! she thought, still incredulous. She started to rise, trying to escape from the bed. He caught her arm and pulled her gently back.
“Where are you going?” he whispered.
“Where else! You’re bigger than I am—I can’t throw you out! I’m going to the barn!”
“Wait.”
“For what?” she demanded.
For what? Every pulse within her was alive and crying out. She felt him with the length of her body, with her heart, with her soul, with her womb.
He did not hold her against him. He caressed her. He was warm, and his smile and the white flash of his teeth in the night were compelling and hypnotic.
“I said that we’d go together,” he told her. He swept her up, cocooned in a tangle of sheet and quilt. He held her tightly against his body and started for the door. Her arms wound around his neck. She stared at the planes of his face and felt as if the soft magic of the moonbeams had wrapped around her. She should have been screaming, protesting, bringing down the house.
But she was not. Her fingers grazed his nape, and she felt absurdly comfortable in his arms. He was dragging her out to the hay, she thought, and she did not care.
Nor was there anything secretive or furtive about his action. He moved with long strides and went down the stairway with little effort to be quiet. He opened the front door, bracing her weight with one arm, then let it close behind him. He stood on the porch and looked out into the night. Then he stared at her, and she knew that she was smiling.
“Where am I heading?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where do the hands sleep?”
“In the bunkhouse, by the far barn.”
“Then I want the first barn?” he demanded softly. She couldn’t answer him.
She wasn’t sure what the question was. All she could think was that he meant her to sleep in the hay.
She wasn’t sure what else he meant for her to do there, but though she was in his arms now, and though he carried her with a certain force, she suddenly knew that what happened would be her choice. Still, he had caught hold of something deep within her, and she wasn’t angry.
She smiled again as she looked at him and told him primly, “You, sir, are completely audacious.” “Maybe,” he said, and smiled in return. Then it seemed they were locked there in the night, their eyes touching, and something else touching maybe, with the tenderness of the laughter they shared. Then the laughter faded.
He pulled her more tightly against him, higher within his arms. And as she watched him, fascinated, in the glow of the moonbeams, his lips parted upon hers, and the world seemed to explode as his kiss entered into her.
Darkness swirled around her, and sensation took flight. She had to get away from him. and quickly.
No. she had to stay. She was where she wanted to be. Exactly where she wanted to be.
Chapter Eight
He carried her, in the moonlit night, to the barn. He entered it and laid her, in her cocoon of covers, in the rear of the building, where soft alfalfa lay freed from its bales, ready to be tossed to the horses. The smell of the hay was sweet, almost intoxicating.
He lay down beside her and brought the back of his hand against her cheek, touching the length of it, as if he studied just her cheek and found the form and texture both beautiful and fascinating. Then his finger roamed over the damp fullness of her lip. He watched the movement as he touched her, then his eyes met hers. She could still feel, in her memo~j, in the pulse that seemed to beat throughout her, the touch of his lips against hers. And yet when he kissed her again, though the feel was poignant, she knew that he would move away when he did.
He lay back against the hay, staring at the rafters and the ceiling.
He groaned softly, then rolled suddenly, violently, to face her again. He didn’t touch her, but leaned on an elbow to stare at her reproachfully.
“You couldn’t have just arranged a room, for me, huh?”
“You couldn’t have just stuck around for a while, huh?” ahe retorted.
He was ruining it, dissolving the moonbeams, destroying the moment she had imagined and waited for.
He rolled on his back again.
“Go to your room,” he told her.
“I had no right to drag you out here.”
Tess leaped to her feet, her cheeks flaming, her body and soul in torment.
She stared at him furiously.
“You have no right to do what you’re doing now! To ruin everything!”
“To ruin everything?” He scowled.
“Tess! I’m trying damned hard to do the decent thing!” And she would never know what an effort it was taking. He felt on fire, as if he burned in a thousand hells. It had been all right before he touched her, before he felt her lips parting beneath his.
Before he sensed her innocence and the sweet wildness beneath it, the passion, the sensuality that simmered and swept beneath it all, that promised heaven. She was different. He wasn’t sure if he dared take her all the way, because he knew it would mean fragile ties that might bind him forev
er. He couldn’t find a simple fascination in her beauty; it would be more, and though he couldn’t begin to define it, it was there. He already slept with dreams of her haunting his mind; he never forgot for a moment the way she had looked upon the rock, as naked as Eve, as tempting as original sin.
“Tess, don’t you see? I’m trying to let you go!” She paused, and it seemed that she waited upon her toes, as if she would go or stay according to the way the breeze came.
There was a curiously soft smile on her face, almost wistful, a look he had seldom seen.
“What if I don’t want to be let go?” she asked him very quietly, with a breathless, melodic whisper. He wasn’t sure he had really heard the words.
Real or not, they ignited embers within him. He came to his feet and looked at her across the small, shadowed distance that separated them. He could almost reach out and touch her. If he did, he would be lost. If he put his hands upon her now, he would never let her go.
“You have to make up your mind.” He almost growled the words.
“No strings, no promises, no guarantees. You should run. You should run from me just as fast as one of those thoroughbreds of yours.”
“Why?”
She didn’t move; she hadn’t taken a step. There was a note of amusement and challenge in her voice. Her chin was raised high; her eyes were brilliant, nearly coal-black in the shadows. He forced himself to walk around her, but that was a mistake. The moon was filtering through the windows, and the light played havoc with the flannel gown she wore. Light touched fabric, molded it, saw through it. He felt again the softness of the woman he had held, and his hands itched to touch her again. A hunger took root inside him, one that made him long to caress and taste and know.
“Why?” He repeated her question.
The reasons were swiftly leaving his mind. If she was willing, he was more than anxious to drown in the sweet depths of her fascinating waters. He clenched his fingers and kept moving casually.
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