Heartbreaker

by Laurie Paige

  She turned over and looked at him, and her breath caught. He wore pajama bottoms only. His chest was broad and muscular. A generous covering of black hair swirled over trim, washboard ribs and arrowed down to the waistband.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he warned, a hint of laughter in the words, but danger, too.

  He was an aroused male animal. She knew she shouldn’t tempt him too far, but she ignored the warning.

  “Make love to me,” she whispered.

  Regret shadowed his eyes. He shook his head. “I can’t. It’s not good ethics.”

  “Ethics be damned.” She reached for him.

  The kiss was sweet and as hot as a July fire-cracker. Somewhere in the misty delight, she wondered why she wanted this man, this way, this much. It made no sense to desire the enemy. Except he didn’t feel like an enemy.

  She ran her hands over his torso—his back, his sides, his chest, down to his abdomen where the muscles tensed like rocks under her fingers.

  He caught her hands and held them against the mattress, his weight lightly on her. Their bodies slipped down until she lay on the pillow. She could feel her heart beating, felt that his was just as fast. When he let her mouth go, he pressed his face into her hair.

  “You can drive me wild with just a word, a touch,” he admitted.

  “I’ve never wanted anyone like this, either. It’s totally insane, yet…”

  “It seems the only sane thing in a world gone mad,” he finished for her. Then he pulled away and sat up. “But it’s not going to happen.”

  She considered, somehow knowing she could push past his defenses if she persisted. It was heady knowledge. Her nipples beaded as fresh hunger rushed through her.

  He smiled and with a forefinger gently flicked each tip visible against the cotton of the pajamas. “We’re a dangerous combination. Go to sleep, dancing girl, before I forget my good intentions.” With that, he left her and closed her door behind him.

  Sighing deeply, she let the sexual tension drain out of her, refusing to see any other reasons for the passion between them. It was all physical attraction, nothing more.

  Finally she closed her eyes as sleep claimed her again. She felt oddly secure now. She had only to call out and he would be there. It was a good thing to know.

  Susan spotted Michael on the patio as soon as she entered the living room the next morning. He was drinking coffee and reading the paper. She went to the kitchen and poured a cup. Seeing her, he indicated a chair at the glass-topped table. She joined him.

  Bagels, cream cheese and jelly were on a buffet table beside the grill. She helped herself.

  The air was clear in the city that morning and wonderfully refreshing for this time of September, although it would be hot in the afternoon. October was only nine days away.

  She felt her life slipping away with each tick of the clock. And each beat of her heart.

  A need to reach out and grab all she could hit her soul in a tidal wave of grief. With an effort, she summoned her composure and the anger that was rapidly becoming her only barrier to the darkness.

  “Don’t think, because I acceded to your orders last night, that I’m going to do so again,” she told him.

  He hardly glanced up from the paper. “I wouldn’t think of it,” he said drolly.

  She gave him her meanest glare. He didn’t look up.

  “Don’t think to sway me with sex, either. I admit you’re attractive, but I’ve met lots of handsome men. A few kisses don’t mean a thing.”

  He sighed, folded the paper and laid it aside. “Do say what’s on your mind,” he invited.

  “Doctors don’t always know what’s best. My grandmother was told she’d be dead of cancer within six months when she was in her fifties. She’ll be ninety her next birthday.”

  “Sometimes remission happens when we least expect it,” he conceded. “But, unlike the Grinch who stole Christmas, your heart isn’t going to grow three sizes anytime soon.”

  “It’s worked fine for years. Why should it suddenly quit?” she demanded. “Answer me that.”

  He poured fresh coffee from an insulated carafe, taking his sweet time about replying. She sat perfectly still, as if she, too, had all the time in the world.

  Three months. A year.

  No wonder she was having nightmares. How dare he calmly tell her something like that! It was cruel.

  “Brave heart,” he murmured after sipping the hot brew. “You have a hardworking little heart, but it’s worn out. Right now, I’d say it’s running on courage and little else.”

  She fought a wild desire to cry, to fling herself into his arms and sob out her fears and frustrations and fury with the uncertainty that haunted her.

  No! she commanded. The tears receded.

  “You sound like my family,” she told him with an edge of cutting humor. “Susan do this, Susan do that. Listen to your elders. It’s for your own good.”

  “I’m not that much older than you.”

  “But you act like my father—older and wiser and father-knows-best.” She spat out an expletive that told him what she thought of that.

  “Were you always a rebel against authority?” he asked, sounding perfectly good-natured.

  “Always.”

  Michael decided there was only one way to handle an obstinate woman. He’d lay the truth on the line for her so she’d have no misunderstanding of what he was saying.

  “We’ve kissed what, two, three, four times?” he asked.

  The question obviously startled her before she remembered to glare at him in distaste, refusing to answer.

  “Something like that,” he continued in a lazy drawl. “You reacted strongly each time. Like anger, passion is hard on the heart. How are you going to react when your husband tries to make love to you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He did it for her. “You could faint. Or have heart failure. Have you thought of that?”

  “No.”

  “People laugh when older men have heart attacks while making love, but believe me, it isn’t a joke. It’s damn scary for him and for his partner. How do you think your husband would react?”

  “Since I don’t have one, I couldn’t say.”

  “Come on, entertainers have active imaginations. They have to, in order to transport their audiences into their world of make-believe, don’t they?”

  “You’re the great philosopher. You tell me.”

  What he really wanted to do was sweep her into his arms and take her to his bedroom and show her everything he could make her feel in his arms. It was a temptation, almost more than he could stand.

  A light sheen of moisture broke out all over him.

  “Having children would be out of the question. You are correct in that.”

  “I might,” she contradicted. “If I rested and ate right.” She snapped her fingers. “I know. I could take an aspirin a day. Isn’t that the miracle cure nowadays?”

  “A fight to the finish,” he muttered, admiring her stubborn determination to live life on her terms. He said as gently as he could, “Not for you.”

  Three months. One year.

  Susan felt the words hammer in her brain. Feigning indifference, she finished the bagel and wiped her mouth. “Well, I’m off. Thanks for your hospitality.”

  “It was a pleasure.”

  There was such sincerity in his reply, such warmth in his eyes, she believed him. She took her dishes to the kitchen to escape his gaze.

  He followed her. “I can give you the miracle you need. Let me put your name on the list for a donor.”

  Panic raced through her. “I’d rather be dead than never dance again,” she said as fiercely as she could to let him know she meant it.

  “You have a wonderful talent. Why not share it with others by teaching?”

  “I don’t want to teach. I want to dance.”

  “Grow up,” he said, suddenly harsh. “You’ve fulfilled that dream. Go on to another one.”

  She g
rasped the edge of the counter and stared down at its smooth surface. “I can’t. I’d be someone different.”

  An invalid.

  The hateful word hurled itself from her subconscious into her conscious mind. She would become an invalid, always taking pills, always worrying about a cold, a tiny cut, the least infection that could kill her.

  “What kind of life would I have?” she questioned aloud.

  Laying his hands on her shoulders, he turned her to face him. “It could be normal. Humans have an amazing capacity to adapt, you more than most. You have great self-discipline. You’d establish a new life.”

  Entranced by his belief in her, she was tempted to concede, to simply give in and stop fighting him and her family and those who thought they knew best for her.

  “What’s in this for you?” she demanded, wanting to hurt him because of the pain he stirred in her.

  He gave her a wary, questioning look.

  “Money?” she asked. “Prestige? Ah, the wonderful Dr. O’Day. He saved Susan Wainwright, you know. Her family endowed a whole wing of the hospital in his name—”

  She got no further in her taunting.

  Michael had always been too focused, too busy, to bother with anger, especially with other people. Right now, though, he saw red. It was as if an alien mist had rolled over his mind, taking control of his reactions and his conscience.

  He would teach her a lesson.

  With a quickness of motion ingrained in him from his work, he lifted and carried her to the sofa. There, he laid her out like a feast prepared just for him. Before she could move, he pinned her by lying partially on her, not enough to crush, but enough to keep her at his mercy.

  “Let me go,” she demanded.

  “Not on your life,” he said in an angry snarl.

  Her eyes flicked open wide, then she gave him a narrow-eyed frown of warning. He caught her hands and pinned them above her head before she could think of a way to use them he might not like.

  He took her mouth when she opened it. He delved inside and felt the exquisite heat that was hers. The mist in his mind thickened to a hot haze of desire.

  Against his chest, he felt her nipples contract and knew she felt it, too, in spite of the battle of the wills between them, in spite of both knowing this was insane.

  “How will you respond to this?” he asked huskily, and took her breast in his palm.

  She tensed beneath him, and he experienced the flex of her strong, lithe, trained body. It was like holding some fluid medium, one of energy and force, but crafted with infinite grace, too.

  It was wonderful. It was hell.

  Hell—because he knew he couldn’t go far enough to appease the raging hunger she released in him. But it would be far enough to teach her a lesson.

  With easy movements, he dispensed with the buttons and the belt on her dress, then spread it to either side so that he could look at her. “You take my control to the limit,” he said, warning her and himself.

  Unable to stand it, he unfastened the delicate bra and lavished attention on the rosy tips of her breasts, sucking at one, then the other, until she moved against him, responding as he’d known she must. Neither of them could deny the need they stirred in each other.

  And the anger. He had to hold on to that or he’d let go completely and take them both to paradise.

  “Touch me,” he ordered.

  With a shaky sigh, she yielded to the madness and pushed her hands under his T-shirt. She explored his flesh as if learning to trek through a strange land. When she fingered his nipples, a ripple of longing coursed through him. He sought her lips again.

  The kiss went on and on, past lesson-giving, past reason and integrity and all that baggage.

  “Ohh,” she gasped while he laved hot kisses along her throat. “Come to me.”

  It was a plea.

  He was on fire for her. Some part of him knew he’d slipped beyond—way beyond—the control of his conscience. They were male and female, acting on instincts as old as time and as unrelenting.

  Laying his hand on her breast, he felt the beat of her heart. Against his lips, he could feel the wild, harsh pounding of her pulse. He heard the gasps as she breathed. Her hands roamed over him in sensual forays, needy in the desperate yearning that consumed them.

  He knew they had to stop.

  “Easy,” he whispered.

  “Now,” she demanded, her hands urgent on him.

  “No.” He kissed her a thousand times, gentle soothing kisses to cool the volcano of need.

  “Why? We’re both willing.”

  He heard the perplexed hurt behind the words. “Because it’s time to leave. My plane is ready. I’ll take you home.”

  “To Mission Creek?”

  “Yes.”

  He knew the moment sanity returned. Regretfully he eased away and stood, freeing her from their mutual madness.

  There would come a time, he was certain, when they wouldn’t, couldn’t, stop. Then where would they be?

  No answer came to him then or on the silent flight to Mission Creek.

  Five

  “Mother, I’m fine. Really,” Susan insisted. She swung her feet off the sofa and sat up. She felt grungy and out of sorts and in need of a shower. Her hair was a mess. She combed a dried grass blade out of it with her fingers.

  Both her parents watched her with grave faces. Vaguely she recalled a similar scene from her childhood, her lying in bed, her mom and dad leaning over her, fear in their eyes while they made her lie still. She’d fainted then, too.

  The memory came back more clearly. Her family—no, not her father, she recalled, but the rest of them—had been to Lake Maria on a picnic while visiting their grandmother. She’d tried to follow her brother in diving down and retrieving a stone from the very bottom of the lake. The next thing she knew, she was in the hospital emergency room, waking to find both her parents bent over her, worry on their faces. Just as they were now.

  “You stay put,” Kate ordered. “I’m going to call Dr. O’Day—”

  “No!” Susan tried to smile and make light of her panicky reaction. “There’s no need to bother him on a Saturday. This is his time to rest.”

  She didn’t add she’d had all of the obnoxious doctor she could take at the present, thank you very much.

  Archy Wainwright, her father, spoke sternly. “I’ve ordered the ranch hands not to let you ride unless they have my direct approval. You could have broken your neck, falling off a horse the way you did. Scared your mother half to death,” he added with a protective glance at his former wife.

  Susan sighed and gave it up. “You’re right,” she admitted, hoping meekness would throw them off track when firmness hadn’t. “I’ll be more careful from now on. Absolutely no more riding alone. I promise.”

  She refrained from holding her hand up in a Scout’s honor pledge. That would be overdoing it.

  “You don’t fool me a bit,” her mother informed her. “I’m going to call Michael O’Day and ask him to come out for lunch. I want to talk to him.”

  “No need for you to bother with a meal,” Archy said to Kate. “Esperanza is already cooking. I’ll tell her to add a plate for you and the doctor.”

  “Yes, that would be good,” Kate said absently, her thoughts obviously on their daughter.

  Looking more than a little worried, Archy left the room, but was back in a moment. He directed a steely eye on his daughter. “We’ll ask the heart doctor the results of your tests and find out how fine you really are.”

  Susan flounced off the sofa. “Since we’re going to have a guest, I suppose I’d better shower.” She rushed to her room before her mother could object.

  Once under the steamy water, she thought of Michael and his threat to join her if she tried to bathe alone. The blood pumped furiously through her, making her vitally aware of how much that appealed to her.

  Oh, she mentally groaned. She was obsessed with the man. What was wrong with her mind, her dancer’s discipline?
>
  Images of him and her at his condo leaped and spun through her brain like the finely executed chaînés she had once done so effortlessly. The visions left her breathless and excited and alarmed.

  She had no time for romantic daydreams, not when her career hung in the balance.

  And her life, according to him.

  Finding it difficult to think of her own mortality, she nevertheless found it worrisome that the dizzy spells were coming more frequently. Perhaps…perhaps she should retire from the active ballet.

  At the dismal thought, pain grabbed her and wouldn’t let go. What would she do with herself? The days were already endless now that she didn’t have practices and performances to gear up for.

  Clean and dry, her hair curling under at her shoulders, she stood in front of the full-length mirrors on her closet doors, dressed only in underwear. Her hand on a chair back, she bent her knees in a plié, a grand plié, then executed a small jump, a jeté.

  Her heart also leaped.

  Grimly, her eyes on the bedside clock, she took her pulse. Slightly over a hundred with just one jeté, and that not even a big one.

  Slumping into a chair, she sat there for a long time, waiting for her pulse to slow to its usual eighty to ninety beats per minute, her mind curiously blank as she watched the activity on the sprawling acres visible from the window.

  Alfalfa was being cut in one field. In another, it was being rolled into huge round bales of hay. Ranch hands were loading some cattle heading for the market.

  Hector Martinez, the gardener, was spraying a bed of roses. His little girl, Maria, held a pair of pruning shears for him. Esperanza, Hector’s wife, came outside and talked to them. Maria, under her father’s direction, cut a dozen roses and gave them to her mother. Esperanza carried them into the house. They would appear on the table at lunch.

  Life as usual on the Wainwright ranch.

  But not for her. She wasn’t to ride alone, she couldn’t drive a car… “Speak of the devil,” she muttered.

  A light-blue sports car parked in front of the house. Michael climbed out. Her mother had wasted no time in calling the arrogant surgeon, it appeared.