“Nothing except you wear the same white shirts and jeans five days out of six.” She gestured to the uniform he wore now. White cotton shirt, buttoned to the third button, sleeves rolled to just below the elbow, jeans, boots. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
He turned his lips down and looked at the shirt. “They’re comfortable and cheap and I can toss ’em out when they get messed up. That’s just sensible.”
“Oh,” she said with a touch of irony. “Men are allowed to be sensible, but women have to be pretty. Got it now.”
His smile was natural, teasing and utterly dazzling. “That’s right.”
Mattie rolled her eyes.
“You really aren’t interested in clothes?” he asked, filling a backpack with things from the shelves.
“I’m really not,” she replied. She sat on the edge of the bed to tie her desert boots.
He made a little grunt of surprise and put a can opener in the front pocket of the pack. “Not even some kind of fancy blouse or some go-to-town shoes?”
Mattie considered that. “Black velvet and pearls for the symphony, when I was a little girl. Red shoes like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, but only if they were really magic. A dress like Cinderella in the movie.” She grinned. “Does that make you feel better?”
He inclined his head, his expression musing. “I think you haven’t let yourself want anything.”
Mattie shrugged. “What’s that old prayer—help me to accept what I can’t change?”
“I guess.” He swung the pack over his broad, powerful shoulders. “Come on. Let’s get moving before the morning is completely gone.”
*
ZEKE KNEW EVERYTHING, Mattie thought later, walking happily behind him as he led the way downhill. He knew the names of trees and flowers and the tiny orange mushrooms growing in a grove of trees. He told her that if she ever got lost, she should look for lichen on the trunks of trees to keep her pointing north. He showed her the tracks of animals in the soft damp ground, and knew which ones belonged to which. It amazed and delighted her that he knew so much.
They’d been hiking for hours, following a trail barely visible unless one knew it was there, up the mountain, clear to the summit, which looked out on the surrounding land for hundreds of miles. Zeke pointed out trees and plants, outcroppings of various kinds of rocks, knew the name of each peak they could see.
Now, pleasantly grimy and winded from the long, long walk, she said, “I thought we were going to go swimming. I’m hot.”
“Almost there,” he said, ducking under a branch. He turned his feet sideways to gain purchase in the sandy soil, and Mattie followed suit, skittering and sliding a little. Warm, strong sunlight beat down on her head, and she knew her nose would be sunburned tonight.
“Her we go,” Zeke said, rounding an enormous red-brown boulder. He gestured proudly. “The swimming hole.”
Mattie couldn’t help the sigh of wonder that escaped her lips. The clearing was cozy, guarded on three sides by glittering aspens that whispered a welcome. At their feet was a small green pool, fed by a spring that gurgled up from the ground, and the redolent, curious scent of the water filled the air with an almost aphrodisiac quality.
The pool and the trees, with the vast blue Colorado sky stretched above it, would have been breathtaking enough, but on the fourth side of the pool was a vista Mattie couldn’t believe, a view of a high plain, far below, dusted with green and yellow and fields of orange flowers, and beyond that, mountains rising from the plain in furry blue. “Oh, Zeke,” she said, and. touched his arm. “This is incredible!”
“Not amazing?” He smiled at her, the expression unguarded and deeply pleased. “Why don’t you go change?”
She didn’t need to be urged twice. Eagerly, she dashed into the trees, stripped and slipped into her tank top and shorts. This time she left on her bra—the shirt was not exactly a good fit.
Zeke had plunged into the water ahead of her, and before she could join him, he surfaced, shaking hair from his eyes. Sunlight blazed over the slick expanse of his shoulders, blazed over his muscled chest and arms—and Mattie was so dazzled she forgot her own self-consciousness and allowed herself to stare.
“Come on in.”
Mattie put her folded clothes in a pile on the ground and walked to the edge of the pool, pleasurably aware of the appreciative caress of his eyes on her body. At the edge, she paused to stick a toe in the water.
“It’s like bathwater!” she exclaimed.
“Hot springs,” he said. “It’ll cure whatever ails you.”
She met his gaze as he walked toward her, the water sluicing away from his body to show the flat, hard belly and lean hips, clad in jean shorts. “Is it deep?” she asked.
“Not really.” He stopped with the water at his waist. “I dug it out, and I got tired of digging after a while. ’bout shoulder height on you, I imagine.”
Mattie walked in, amazed. “You dug it out?” she asked, shaking her head. “There’s nothing you can’t do, is there?”
“Well, it takes a pretty clever guy to dig a hole,” he said, light glinting his eyes. He held out his hand to draw her into the water.
“I couldn’t do it,” she parried, and let his hand go as she reached the deeper part of the pool. “And I couldn’t build a house or raise horses or—”
He touched her mouth, smiling. “Hush up, Miss Mary, and just enjoy yourself.”
*
THE POOL WAS one of Zeke’s favorite places on earth, and it never failed to fill him with a buoyant sense of full-heartedness. Today was no different.
No, he corrected, today was even better. Mattie had the rare ability to forget herself and play. She splashed and swam, ducked under the water to disappear in the soft green world to grab his ankles under the water.
Damned if he didn’t find himself doing the same thing. Playing. Ducking and hiding and diving and splashing, like he was fourteen. Their laughter—his as much as hers—filled the still mountain noon with music.
And also like he was fourteen, Zeke found himself indulging the delectable, safe pleasure of touching her like this, grabbing her smooth long legs under the water, feeling her breasts nudge him as they water wrestled. Like a boy, he spent the time lazily, pleasantly aroused.
Seeing her like this, animated and vibrantly enraptured by the mountain air, he couldn’t imagine how he’d ever thought her ordinary-looking. The sun had coaxed warm color into her cheeks and her big brown eyes blazed with vibrant emotion—happiness now, mischief then, a simple flash of hunger, pure and direct. Her cap of hair clung to her well-shaped head and rivulets of water ran over the long pretty neck as if to invite him to taste the path of her throat.
And every time she left the pool for a minute—to dry her face, or get a sip of water from the canteen or rest for a minute in the thick, hot sunshine, he just about came undone.
She didn’t wear tight clothes, so he’d never really seen how voluptuously curved she was. The wet cotton T-shirt and shorts clung to every tiny detail. Full breasts, a slim waist and a beautiful, plump rear end that liked to drive him right around the bend.
Now she swam easily toward the source of the pool, and leaning against a boulder at the other side, Zeke watched her through half-closed eyes. The shirt billowed around her, slipping off her shoulders to show the teeny strap of her bra and her gleaming skin.
The spring bubbled out of a fissure in granite, a little above the pool. Water sprayed over a shelf of rock to form a softly splashing waterfall. Mattie ducked under it, letting the spray tumble over her face.
Zeke’s arousal, pleasantly low-key until that moment, took a sharp turn toward the urgent. Her expression was sybaritic, wholly focused on the pleasure of the moment, and her sexy, sexy mouth was slightly parted, slick with the spray. She braced herself by clinging to the rock behind her, and the position exposed her breasts in full glory—full and white and about to fall out of that ugly little top, which suddenly seemed about a thousand times sexier than any bathing suit he’d
ever seen.
She probably had no idea how stretched that fabric had become, how little it covered. Her bra was a thin beige, made of plain cotton lace, with a tiny pink flower at the center. Through the wet fabric he saw the dark tips of her nipples.
Half-drugged with the need he’d denied for days now, he left his place at the opposite side of the pool and drifted toward her silently. When he reached her, she opened her eyes and he saw by her sharp intake of breath that he’d startled her.
Before she could move, he ducked his head under the waterfall and covered that luscious mouth with his own.
A small noise of surprise came from her throat, but she made no move to get away from him. The spill of warm spring water splashed down over their heads, making their lips slick, giving a musky flavor to their tangling tongues. Zeke pulled back infinitesimally to let the water trickle between them, tasting water and Mattie’s mouth all at once. Her mouth opened and they drank together of the mineral-heavy water from deepest earth and traded the taste with each other, openmouthed. He slid his mouth along her jaw, licked her cheek, her ear, her neck—found again her mouth and suckled it the way he’d wanted to since he’d first laid eyes on her. Plump and sweet. He rubbed his tongue on that plumpness, aware of a wildness rising in him—an unbearable, ungovernable hunger that filled his belly and chest and throat.
Driven by that need, he pinned her against the soft earthen wall behind her and trapped her with his arms and legs. He felt the wildness in him with a tiny part of his mind, felt the slight fear in Mattie as he surrounded her with himself. He struggled to pull himself under control, but as if she sensed it, she wrapped her legs around his waist under the water and held him there. Her arms came around his shoulders, and her water-cooled breasts, so thinly covered, pressed into his chest.
Zeke heard his control snap with a cracking sound. Roughly, he dragged her shirt from her shoulders, devouring her mouth, feeling her heat against his aching erection. She gasped slightly and her legs tightened, and now her hands skimmed restlessly over his chest and back, hungry hands, to match her hungry mouth that plucked and bit at his.
Still drugged on wild desire, he struggled with the clasp of her bra, and when it wouldn’t come free, he tore it at the center, where the fabric was thinnest. Mattie cried out, but he captured the sound with his mouth, touching her with a need unlike anything he’d ever felt. Her skin was slick and smooth, her breasts white and full, tipped with cinnamon. He bent his head and tasted her, suckling the tips until he felt her hips moving against him, jarring his passion to a roaring level.
She opened her eyes, wide and brown, filled with a sultriness he must have known could be there. With a strong movement, she put her body against his, locking arms and legs tight around him. She stared at him with a strangely stricken expression, and began to move a little, below, her sweetness against his aching arousal.
He kissed her violently, wanting to somehow inhale her into himself, unable to stop the fury of his reaction, the trembling rocking hunger for her—so vast and all-encompassing, he couldn’t stand it.
Mattie, flowing all around him, met his savagery. He clasped her hips hard against him, found himself biting her neck, laving her breasts with his tongue. He felt such unblunted, furious desire he thought he might die of it.
Sweet Miss Mary grasped handfuls of his hair to drag his head up to her, so she could kiss him—and she was strong, so much stronger than he’d believed. He kissed her, feeling the slight pain of her grip in his hair, feeling her teeth and his, and the bruising sharp blaze of their desire.
He tasted blood on her lips—and the moment shattered. With a rippling sense of honor, he lifted his head, pushing her away urgently to look at her. That beautiful, plump lower lip was split and beading blood; her neck showed a blazing bruise from his mouth, and another showed on her full white breast.
Shaken, he let her go abruptly and swam for the bank, afraid he would be sick before he could get away.
Chapter 10
*
MATTIE PACED THE small space inside the cabin as another late-afternoon rainstorm rolled in, darkening the sky, shooting dramatic slashes of lightning through the gray. The air was almost oppressively still.
A film clip of the scene at the pool this afternoon played over and over in her mind, not in a smooth, orderly way, but in jerky bits: that blistering wildness that came from Zeke all of a sudden, as if his armor had split and let a new man out, this one not reserved or controlled or in the least bit civilized; the sudden claim of his mouth—she touched the bruised lips gingerly as she remembered; the urgent strength of his body.
Remembering, she felt a rustling over her nerves, an alertness in the faintly overused parts of her body. She had a bruise on her neck from his mouth, scarlet and vivid, and one lower on her breast; she couldn’t look at them without feeling a sharp, deep throb in her belly.
His intensity had frightened her. She had to admit that. His need, breaking free all at once, had seemed more than she could manage—he seemed to need to devour her. His hands had been so rough, his mouth so hungry.
And yet, it had been like everything else with Zeke—vivid, overwhelming Technicolor. He hadn’t hurt her at all, not even when his fierce kiss had split her lip. To her deep embarrassment, she found she’d rather liked it wild and intense like that.
In her pacing, she paused at the window. Zeke had disappeared into the sauna when they came back down the mountain, his silence unbroken all the way back to the cabin.
She had no idea what had made him surface so abruptly, what had made him push her away. With a stunned and plummeting sense of frustration, she’d watched him splashing awkwardly in his haste. Mattie had called after him, to tell him she was all right, but he ignored her, stumbling on water-heavy legs as he made his way toward the trees.
And then she’d realized she was standing waist-deep in the pool, her shirt bunched around her waist. Pierced, she sank under the water hastily and tugged the wet fabric over herself.
Now she paced to the stove and back to the door, peering out to the grayness beyond, watching the lightning come closer and shiver over distant mountains. A flicker of uneasy guilt touched her. Was what they’d done wrong? Was it wrong to feel such powerful desire? Was that what was meant by lust?
Absently, she touched the place on her neck that held the stain of his mouth, thinking of the way it had felt to have his tongue on her skin there. A rippling hunger weakened her knees. Was this lust?
She had no idea.
Was it dangerous? Would he have hurt her?
No. The feeling was very strong. It might have been intense, wild, but he wouldn’t have hurt her. If she had wanted him to stop, it might have taken a minute to penetrate that haze of desire, but she knew without a doubt that he would have listened to her.
Mattie’s eyes were drawn to the picture of the blonde on the wall, the woman who stared with such naked longing at Zeke. He seemed oblivious to the emotion in her eyes, and Mattie felt a stirring of sympathy for the woman.
There were men who couldn’t accept love, and Zeke, with his history, was a likely candidate for that sort of emotional stunting. He’d said as much.
And yet, she thought of his eyes earlier, when the raccoon had been on the back porch. Mattie had touched his scars and seen a boiling in those beautiful eyes. He wanted to be able to reach out, to break free, but he didn’t know how. He couldn’t reach out to her when she was being tender with him, so his emotions had exploded at the swimming hole.
The question was, then, had the blond woman in the picture seen what Mattie had seen? Had she tried to breach his walls, and failed? Did Mattie have anything she could give Zeke Shephard that a dozen other women didn’t have?
Did she dare reach out?
As if her turmoil drew him, he emerged from the mysterious little building, the interior of which she had yet to see. His hair was still damp, curling on his shoulders, and he’d changed into his usual uniform—the jeans and white shirt�
��except his feet were bare. The sight of those high, bare arches sent a bright pulsing hunger through her. She crossed her arms over herself in warning. A little chagrined, she also found herself covering the mark of his mouth on her neck with a carefully draped hand, and wished for her hair to draw around herself.
So it wouldn’t seem as if she’d been waiting for him, Mattie hurried over to the bed and flung herself down on the pillows, picking up a book she’d attempted to read earlier. Then she wondered if the bed was too suggestive and sat up, intending to race over to the couch, but he walked in.
Before, when he’d gone to the sauna, he’d returned in much better spirits, but there was no such lightening on his face now. He brought with him such a dark presence, it was almost frightening. He stared at her for a moment, and Mattie saw his gaze touch her mouth, the mark on her neck, saw the bleakness in his eyes. He seemed to hover at the door, staring at her, for an endless time. “We need to talk about some things, Mattie.” His voice was heavy.
She nodded, waiting.
From his pocket, he took one of his rare cigarettes and lit it restlessly, blowing smoke toward the open door. A breeze snatched the smoke outside with a jerk. He lowered his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice almost a growl in the depths of his throat. The sound, Mattie thought, of a dangerously wounded animal.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” she said. Softly.
It seemed hard for him to meet her eyes, but he did it, finally. Mattie flinched inwardly at the blaze in his eyes. So haunted. “Right,” he said.
She thought of the way he’d gentled under her hand earlier and stood up, intending to go sit beside him. “Zeke.”
“Don’t touch me, Mattie.” The husky strain in his voice froze her.
She sank down on the bed.
“I’m gonna tell you a story,” he said. “About the meanest son of a bitch that ever lived on this planet.” He licked his lips, drew on the cigarette, stood up to put his back to her. “He wasn’t but sixteen when he knocked up a local girl and had to marry her because that’s how things were done then. He probably hated her before the baby was ever born, but her father promised he’d kill him if he disgraced her, so he stayed.”
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