Sweet Wind, Wild Wind

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Carson’s fingers dug into the muscles knotted at the base of his neck, physical symbol of the tension knotting his mind. He hated digging through the pain and failures of the past.

  “I wanted to yell at you to wake up, to look at reality, to understand that I was your enemy,” Carson said harshly, his voice resonant with anger. “Your innocence enraged me. But most of all I was furious and completely disgusted with myself for being so caught up in the past that I would use another person as I had almost used you. I had hated Larry for years for not being able to control his sexuality even to the point of preventing his mistress’s pregnancy. Yet there I was, about to do the same thing with you. I had no way of protecting you that night, and you were too naive to have protected yourself.”

  Carson shuddered suddenly. “And you know what?” he asked roughly. “That thought was the most exciting of all. Something of me growing in you. Something new. Something untouched by the past. A child. Our child.”

  The sound Carson made then was too harsh to be called a laugh. It was more like a hoarse echo of pain. It cut deeply into Lara, telling her how little she had known about Carson four years ago – and how much she still cared that he had been hurt by the past, too. He was still hurting. Like her. Hurting and not knowing how to make it stop. Without realizing it, Lara’s hand went out to Carson in an instinctive gesture of comfort that stopped short of actually touching him.

  “Nothing escapes the poison of the past,” Carson said flatly. “I spent most of my life fighting that particular truth. I lost. But I finally learned that you can limit the damage by not looking back. So I don’t look back. I go after what I want for the future and to hell with the past. “ He turned and searched Lara’s face, trying to read her emotions beneath the mysterious veils of moonlight and darkness. “Do you understand now?” he asked softly. “It wasn’t you I walked away from that night. It was the past.”

  Lara didn’t realize that she was crying until she felt the heat of her tears against her cool skin. Carson brushed away the tears with a gentle fingertip, then brought his hand to his lips, tasting her tears.

  “Don’t cry, little fox,” he said hoarsely. “The past isn’t worth the salt in your tears. The past is dead. Buried. Don’t let it hurt you anymore. Don’t let it hurt us. Don’t let it ruin our future.”

  Lara closed her eyes, releasing the last of her tears. “Carson,” she whispered shakily, “what do you want from me?”

  He started to speak, then remembered her raw fear when he had tried to kiss her a few moments ago. The sexual implications of marriage would send her fleeing down the hillside like the wind.

  “Another chance,” he said, which was as much of the truth as he felt Lara could handle, as much of the past as he would allow to intrude into the present.

  “Why?”

  “I enjoyed being with you four years ago,” he said simply. “I want that again. We had something that I’ve never found with any other woman. I’ve wanted you for years, but I let the past get in the way.”

  Slowly Lara shook her head. “I don’t have anything to give you anymore,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “That’s not true.”

  She looked at Carson’s narrowed, intent eyes and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Haven’t you listened to me?” she asked hoarsely. “Even when I was a child, I had already learned to fear the passion that drew my mother and your father together, causing so much pain for her. Then you – we – “ For a moment there was only silence while Lara fought to control herself. “I didn’t know how very powerful desire could be, until you touched me. I didn’t know how much I could love, until I loved you. And I didn’t know how much I could be hurt, until you walked away from me.” She let out a shaky breath. “I can’t be that vulnerable again, Carson. I simply can’t. If you walked away again it would destroy me.”

  “I’ll never walk away,” he said flatly. “I can’t.”

  Lara bit her lip and shook her head slowly.

  “So to avoid the possibility of being hurt in the future, you’re killing yourself by inches now,” he said. “Is that it?”

  “I was fine until I came back here.”

  “Were you?” asked Carson softly. “Or were you just so badly poisoned by the past that you were afraid to let yourself feel? Like me.” He ran his fingertip down the silver trail of a tear until he reached the corner of Lara’s mouth. “When you trembled today, it wasn’t all fear, was it?”

  “Carson, I – “

  “Was it?”

  Lara shivered as the ball of Carson’s thumb stroked her lower lip very lightly, tracing the full curve.

  “Give us a chance,” he said, his voice low, coaxing. “Stop running long enough to get to know me again. I won’t drag you into bed. I promise.” He smiled crookedly. “As Cheyenne would say, my intentions toward you are strictly honorable, more than you know.”

  Carson hesitated, then made a movement with his hand that was impatient, almost angry. He wanted to talk of marriage but knew it was too soon. “I won’t do to you what my father did to your mother,”

  Carson said finally. “I won’t dishonor you.”

  “But if you don’t believe in love – “ Lara’s voice stretched and broke into silence as she remembered his words. Love is a lie, a trick played on the unwary.

  “Do you?” Carson asked, his tone curious, his expression surprised.

  “Despite all the pain, my mother loved your father,” whispered Lara. “My grandfather loved the grandmother I never knew. He talked about her until the day he died. And he and my mother loved me. I loved them. Yes, I believe in love.”

  Carson’s smile was bittersweet, almost yearning. “Then you’re stronger than I am, little fox, or much more naive.” He lifted Lara’s hand to his mouth and kissed her palm with such exquisite restraint that she barely felt the warmth of his lips before he lifted his head and looked straight into her eyes.

  “If you eventually decide that you want me, remember this: I would never turn you into a kept woman for others to sneer at and condemn. I would never get you pregnant and then not marry you. I would never allow a child of mine to be sold like I was or to be raised as a bastard like you were. If you trust yourself to me, I will take care of you and our children. Always. The future, Lara. Not the past.”

  Lara closed her eyes and felt her palm tingling where Carson’s lips had brushed over her. He was sometimes a hard man, even a fierce one, yet even his worst enemy had to admit that Carson’s promises were as solid and unchanging as the mountains themselves. As she listened to his words again in her mind, she felt them sinking into her like an intangible balm, healing places she hadn’t even known were raw. Carson would not seduce her and then abandon her to a lonely pregnancy and an even more lonely life as a single parent. Nor would he condemn his own child to a life of illegitimacy in a time and a place where such things still mattered. He might not believe in love, but he did believe in personal responsibility.

  That was why he had walked away from her four years ago. It hadn’t been disgust with her. It was simply that he had been too decent to use her for revenge like that.

  Slowly Lara’s eyes opened. She looked at the long, powerful body of the man stretched out on the grass so close to her. Moonlight and shadows outlined his strength, heightening every line of his body; his need was a long ridge of moonlight and darkness rising against his jeans. Oddly, the blunt evidence of Carson’s desire reassured her. Despite his obvious physical hunger, once he had understood her fear, he had made no move to touch her in any way but gently. She drew a slow breath.

  “All right,” Lara whispered. “Another chance.”

  “No more looking back?” Carson asked, his voice urgent, as though he needed reassurance as much as she did.

  “Carson,” Lara said very softly, her voice breaking. “Oh, Carson, the past isn’t dead. The more you learn about it, the more it changes. That’s not s
omething to fear or avoid. It’s a miracle. It allows you to grow past pain, to heal.”

  “You’re wrong,” Carson said flatly, his voice as bleak as his eyes.

  “For us, the past is dead. It has to be, or the future is dead, too. Believe me, Lara. Please. The past can’t heal us, but it can destroy us. Let it be. Let the dead bury the dead.”

  Lara opened her mouth. No words came out. There was an emotion close to desperation in Carson’s flat words. He believed what he was saying and wanted her to believe, too. He wanted the past dead, buried, gone, untouchable, unspeakable.

  Carson came to his feet in a swift, lithe movement and held out his hand to Lara. After an instant’s hesitation she took it, allowing herself to be pulled toward him. She walked with him back down through the moonlight and darkness over Blackridge land, going toward the Chandler homestead – going toward the past, feeling the future tugging at her hand, letting the warmth of Carson’s skin drive away her doubts.

  Chapter Six

  Lara turned off her tape recorder and stretched, flexing fingers that were numbed from working the old manual typewriter that was all she could afford. Despite her aching back and sore fingers, she smiled at the neatly stacked sheets of paper. Willie had finally broken down and told her a carefully edited version of the day he had danced barefoot in the spring grass with the woman who later became known as Tickling Liz. Willie’s halting, hesitant words had sketched in the lines of a society and a time when lust was the only word used to describe all sexual feelings outside marriage. Yet it had been more than lust for Willie, and perhaps even for Liz. Surely no woman who was merely a whore would have taken so much gentle care in seducing a terribly shy boy.

  Slowly Lara leafed through the papers again, but she didn’t need to see the words. She could still hear Willie’s thin voice and see the memories glowing in his eyes.

  …and I took off my boots so I wouldn’t hurt her if I missed a step. She smiled up at me and laughed soft and low, and for a time life was warm and sweet as summer honey.

  Lara knew she would never again look at Willie and see simply a gnarled old cowhand. She would also see the boy he had once been, dark-haired and strong for his years, holding a woman in his arms while she taught him all the different ways there were to dance. That was the kind of knowledge that Lara wanted in her history of the Rocking B. It was a ranch and a state and a country built by men and women like Willie and Liz – neither saints nor devils, simply people who had been born into and had grown up in a world they hadn’t made, a world inherited from their parents. And, like their parents, like themselves, the world was imperfect. Often it seemed that there was more hate than love, more hurting than healing, more death than life. Yet even in the very worst of times, some people still loved, still healed, still created life in the midst of death. It was those people who left the world a better place than they had found it, not the conquerors and kings who marched hard shouldered through history. Smiling, Lara let the pages of Willie’s memories drift from her fingers back onto the scarred oak table. She knew her gentle views of history would never be as popular as the fierce cycles of ambition and bigotry, war and betrayal that most people thought of when they heard the word history. Those things existed, of course, and they had changed the outward appearance of countries and the distribution of various peoples since the beginning of time. But beneath those outward changes lay the unchanging reality of human emotions, human needs. That, too, was history, and it was a history far more enduring than any royal dynasty or national boundary.

  “Lara?”

  The sound of Carson’s voice whisked Lara out of her history project and into the present. Her breath caught for an instant and her heartbeat speeded up. It had been two weeks since she and Carson had made their truce on the ridge between the ranch house and the homestead. She had seen him every day and most evenings, but it hadn’t been to research the Rocking B by going through the boxes of old papers and cabinets of photographs. Instead, they had simply talked after dinner about what Carson had done that day on the ranch or what interviews Lara had done for her history project. After they had discovered a mutual passion for cribbage, they spent many hours pegging up and down the ivory cribbage board that Larry Blackridge’s great-uncle had carved from the horns of a massive elk he had shot for winter meat nearly a century before.

  “Door’s open,” Lara called, frowning and wishing that time hadn’t gotten away from her. Now it was too late to shower and change clothes before she went riding.

  Even as Lara realized that she wanted to look pretty for Carson, uneasiness prickled through her. She shouldn’t care whether he found her attractive. But she did. It was there in the quickened beat of her heart and in the breath wedging in her throat as he walked into the small living room. He filled the doorway. Even with his hat off, he had to duck beneath the lintel. In his cowboy boots he was six feet six inches tall.

  Carson saw Lara’s sudden, intent stare and stopped moving toward her. “What’s wrong, honey? Did I startle you?”

  “No. It’s just – you’re so much bigger than the men who built this house.”

  Carson’s green-flecked, golden-brown eyes traveled down the curving length of Lara’s body with a possessive-ness that he didn’t bother to conceal. “Don’t let it bother you. You’re bigger than the women were then, too. We’ll fit together perfectly, just like we did when we danced.”

  For a moment Lara was speechless, totally surprised by the sensual implications of Carson’s words. He hadn’t touched her even in the most casual way since the night he had led her down off the ridge and squeezed her hand in farewell at the homestead’s door. Yet the look in his eyes right now was enough to light fires in a snowbank. Even as Lara’s own eyes widened, she felt a soft bloom of heat deep within her body.

  “Carson, you promised,” she said, her voice sounding husky, almost breathless.

  “I’m not touching you,” he pointed out, smiling slowly as he looked at the escaped tendrils of her hair curling around her face, teasing her red lips.

  Carson may not have been touching Lara physically, but his smile sent another pulse of heat expanding through her. She realized that at some level she wanted to be touched by him, just as she wanted to be pretty for him. For a moment fear and excitement warred within her. Carson saw the fear. Even as he told himself not to worry, it had only been two weeks, his smile faded. Two weeks, and nothing had changed. She was still afraid. Would it be the same after two months?

  Six? Sixteen? Would he lose the only future he wanted because of the mistakes of the past?

  He closed his eyes, fighting the rush of fear that came when he thought that Lara might not change in time, might not turn to him with trust instead of fear in her eyes before it was too late. He could not let that happen. He could not let the past win again, taking everything he wanted, everything he needed.

  Suddenly Carson felt each separate ache in his body, legacy of the tiredness that had come to him because he had cut short his sleep in order to spend more time with Lara and still get all the ranch work done. Unconsciously he rubbed his neck, trying to loosen muscles knotted by too much work, too much tension, too little peace of mind.

  “Carson?” asked Lara softly, hating to see the light and laughter go out of his eyes.

  He looked at her, forcing a smile. “Ready to look at those old boundary markers?”

  “I – I packed a picnic lunch if you…that is, I know how busy you are and – “ Lara stopped speaking and made an uncertain gesture with her hands.

  Carson’s mouth softened into a true smile. “Clever little fox. How did you know that I needed to get away from accounts and breeding books for a while?”

  “Because it’s so beautiful outside,” she said promptly, smiling because she had chased the darkness from his eyes. “Everyone knows it’s bad for your health to be inside on a day like this.”

  “You have a swimsuit?” he asked.

&n
bsp; She nodded.

  “Bring it. We’ll go up to Long Pool.”

  “Is it warm enough?” she asked, thinking of the clear green water of the Rocking B’s favorite swimming and fishing hole.

  “We’ll swim fast,” he suggested wryly. “Or if you’re too chicken –

  “

  “Never,” she interrupted quickly, rising to the bait “I joined the Polar Bear Club as soon as I was old enough to swim. I was so little they had to put me on a fishing line and dunk me like a worm.”

  Carson laughed, and the lines of strain bracketing his mouth dissolved, making him look much less intimidating. For an instant his hand stroked Lara’s shining black hair in a gesture of appreciation for her company. Even though he withdrew his hand almost as quickly as he had extended it, she felt the brief touch all the way to the soles of her feet.

  “I’ve got to get a few things,” Lara said huskily. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “I’m afraid I’d fall asleep,” he admitted, muffling a yawn.

  “There’s coffee on the back of the stove.”

  Carson’s eyes flew open, revealing flecks of green as well as the familiar golden brown. “You have no idea of the things I’d do for a cup of coffee right now.”

  “Then I’d better get you one before I find out,” she said quickly, a smile tugging at her lips.

  “Chicken,” he said as she retreated.

  “I’m a fox, remember?” she shot back, refusing to rise to the bait again. “They aren’t chickens – they eat ‘em.”

  Carson’s low chuckle warmed Lara. She loved being with him like this, teasing and laughing and enjoying each other. And if his eyes flared with desire from time to time, that, too, was warming. By the time Lara had combed her hair and added a swim-suit and towel to her picnic collection, Carson was finishing his second cup of coffee. He looked more alert, but Lara couldn’t tell whether that was the result of the coffee or the sight of her teal-blue two-piece bathing suit dangling from one end of the rolled towel. Although he said nothing, his dark brown eyebrows rose in a silent show of anticipation.