by Diana Palmer
“The bastard attacked you!” he raged.
“Yes,” she said huskily. “I bit off part of his face, first,” she added with a smile.
His eyes sparkled. “You what?”
“I bit him,” she said, laughing softly.
“My God,” Jason said gruffly. Gracie had never fought anyone in the twelve years he’d known her.
“When he grabbed me, I used some self-defense that Marquez had taught me. I dug my thumbs into his rib cage and then cupped my hands and slammed them over his ears. I ran and I thought I could get away, but he caught me and wrestled me down. I thought I was done for, but the woman I stayed with sent her son to find the General and he shot the man dead.” She swallowed hard. “I owe him a lot. I hope the Fuentes bunch won’t kill him for helping me escape and losing the ransom.”
“What General?” Jon Blackhawk asked, scowling.
“Emilio Machado,” she replied. “He…”
“Machado? My God!” Jon whipped out his cell phone. “You can’t leave until I get back,” he added, walking out of the room while he punched in numbers.
“Machado!” Kilraven exclaimed. “So that’s where he went!”
“You know him?” Gracie asked, confused.
“Know him? Hell, everybody in Justice knows him!” Kilraven replied. “He was the best friend we had in South America until this nasty little group of anarchists overthrew his government. We were afraid he’d been killed. Nobody knew where he was.”
She felt lightheaded. “He’s not a bad guy?”
“The reverse,” Kilraven replied. “We want to help put him back in power, but the political climate isn’t conducive to international meddling right now. What’s he doing with the Fuentes bunch? He hates drug lords!”
“He’s trying to get enough money to regain his power,” she replied.
“And he helped you escape?”
She nodded, shifting to a more comfortable position. “Boy, that hurts.”
Jason moved closer again, bending to put his lips gently against her bruised shoulder. “Help any?” he asked softly, his black eyes smiling into hers.
She caught her breath at his expression, and the delight that being close to him always produced. She looked at his mouth helplessly.
“Could I get the four of you to leave for a moment while I examine my patient?” Bob Harrison asked, chuckling. “You aren’t supposed to be in here, you know.”
“We feds bluffed the staff,” Kilraven murmured with a grin. “It was the only way we could get in. We were worried.”
“Yes, I understand, but I need…” The doctor’s cell phone rang. He answered it, shooing Glory, Rodrigo and Kilraven out in front of him.
Jason stayed behind. “I thought I’d go mad,” he whispered. He bent and grazed his mouth tenderly over Gracie’s. “God, I was scared!” He kissed her harder, groaning when she stiffened and gasped.
He jerked back, his eyes blazing, his face ruddy with frustrated passion. “Sorry,” he ground out, averting his gaze. “I’ve been out of my mind with fear. Couldn’t help it.”
“It’s…it’s all right,” she stammered.
He looked back into her eyes, frowning. She didn’t look as if he’d frightened her. Or disgusted her. He was remembering the ordeal she’d been through. He felt guilty for touching her like that, even gently.
His fingers smoothed over her bruised skin and he winced, as if it hurt him to see it.
Fascinated, her fingers went up to cover his. She looked into his black eyes and felt as if part of her was melting onto the examination table.
“I thought they might kill you,” he said hoarsely. “And I remembered the fight over Mumbles and how I’d taken Kittie’s side against you.” He closed his eyes. “Hell on earth, Gracie.”
Her fingers tightened around his. “I’m all right,” she said. “I just look bad.”
He brought her fingers to his mouth and kissed them hungrily. “You look beautiful to me.”
Her whole body tingled from the contact. She studied him with shy delight in her face, a flush that was revealing and flattering.
Jason lifted his head and searched her soft eyes. His gaze fell to her mouth. Slowly, so that he didn’t frighten her, he bent and touched his lips delicately to hers, brushing them tenderly. She didn’t withdraw. He caught her upper lip in both of his and slid his tongue just under the silky skin, teasing it. Her breath stopped in her throat and she made an odd little gasping sound.
He drew away again, studying her. She wasn’t trying to get away. In fact, she looked as if she wanted him to do it again.
He framed her face in his big, warm hands and bent again. His mouth smoothed her lips apart and moved between them in a slow, delicate, sensual tasting that made her stiffen, but not with fear.
When he lifted his mouth, hers followed it. She’d forgotten Kittie, the argument, everything. All she knew was that kissing Jason was delicious. Her arms slid hesitantly up around his neck, coaxing him back to her. This time the kiss was neither tender nor brief. It was a conflagration, like tossing matches into dry wood. It was so sensuous that she even forgot her aches and pains.
But after a minute, he pulled back from her, breathing roughly. His eyes were smoldering. There was a question in them.
“The last time, when you landed the car in the ditch, you pushed me away and ran!” he whispered, confused.
“You scared me,” she whispered back. “You put your mouth on my…on my…” She cleared her throat. “I remembered my mother. He…my father…bit her there. She came out of the bedroom night after night with her gown soaked in blood!”
“What?” he exclaimed, shocked.
“She had scars,” she managed to say. “She said…that men were only gentle until they got you behind a locked door, and then they were animals. She warned me. She said men liked to hurt women, that it was the only way they got pleasure out of it.”
His eyes darkened even more. “Not me,” he whispered. “Not ever!”
Her eyes softened as they searched his. “Really?”
His heart ran away. Those eyes were saying something incredible to him.
Suddenly they dropped, as reality came back full force. “Did Kittie come with you?” she asked coldly.
“Kittie?” He caught his breath. “Kittie… No! Hell, no! She’s in New York. I broke the engagement and kicked her out of the house the minute I knew what she’d done to you and the others!”
“You’re not engaged to her anymore?” she asked breathlessly.
“No,” he said huskily.
“But you loved her,” she began.
“Never!”
“I don’t understand,” she said, wide-eyed.
He bent and brushed his mouth over hers again, lingering this time. “We’ll talk at the house,” he whispered. “When you’ve been examined, I’ll take you home.”
She bit her lower lip. “But I don’t live there anymore,” she said. “I live with Barbara in Jacobsville. I have a job now, and a car…”
“What?!”
She wanted to explain, but Dr. Harrison walked in and shooed a protesting, cursing Jason out of the cubicle. After he examined her and gave her something for pain, the feds were back and she was too tranquillized to talk anymore. She told Jason that she was going to ride to Jacobsville with Glory and Rodrigo.
“I’ll come down and see you tomorrow,” he said doggedly.
She nodded.
“I’m coming down, too,” Jon Blackhawk added. “You have to talk to me about Machado. There are plans in the works that you’re becoming critical to. All right?”
“All right,” she agreed.
Glory and Rodrigo stabilized her as she walked out of the cubicle. Jason watched her go with bridled rage. He felt as if the whole world was conspiring to keep him away from Gracie.
Jason walked out past the policeman who’d escorted them to the hospital. He’d been talking to Kilraven and he had an amused look on his face.
“
Was it a boy or a girl?” he asked Jason.
Jason turned toward him with the frustration of the whole miserable time in his black eyes. The policeman held up both hands and walked away, laughing to himself.
GRACIE SLEPT UNTIL THE next afternoon in Barbara’s guest room, where she’d been staying since she left the mansion in San Antonio. When she woke up, Jason was sitting on the side of her bed, wearing working clothes. He’d been out with his men, too, she could tell. His batwing chaps were dusty and his blue-checked Western-cut shirt and Stetson were stained with sweat.
“How do you feel?” he asked gently.
She managed a smile, but winced at the pain. “Bruised and battered,” she said. She looked at him with knowing eyes. “Just like you. It can’t be working cattle. Roundup was two months ago.”
“We’re shipping out more culls,” he said. “We had a bumper crop of hay and corn, despite the flooding, so we can feed out our own yearlings, but we’re getting rid of the older females who aren’t pregnant.”
She grimaced. “It isn’t nice to eat cows who don’t have calves.”
He laughed softly and took off his hat, tossing it onto a nearby chair. “I don’t run beef cattle,” he reminded her.
“Then where are you shipping them?”
“To ranchers who do run beef cattle,” he replied wickedly.
She laughed softly.
His black eyes went over her like hands, bold on her body in the soft flannel gown that clung lovingly to her breasts.
She flushed and tugged at the cover.
He averted his gaze to the floor. “We’ve never talked about intimate things together,” he said after a minute. “I had no idea that your mother had been treated that way. Odd, that she’d marry my father,” he added, glancing at Gracie. “He went through women like tissue paper. He only married the ones who refused to sleep with him.”
She toyed with the coverlet. This was painful territory. She didn’t want to tell him too much. “She’d been abused for so many years, I guess she was overwhelmed when your father was kind and gentle with her. Maybe she thought she could sleep with him, if she tried, and then in the end, she couldn’t…” She stopped when she saw his face.
He scowled. “Gracie, what do you know that you haven’t told me?”
She could have cursed her own lack of restraint. But perhaps that wasn’t so very bad. She could tell him that. She bit her lower lip. “She said that he’d been kind to her and she really wanted to please him, but she couldn’t…she just couldn’t do it with him. He was furious. He was going to divorce her. She was afraid for me. We had no family except each other.” She closed her eyes. “Everybody else thought it was an accident, but I knew better. She aimed for that tree, Jason. She couldn’t live with what she was.”
He let out the breath he’d been holding. “Did he know, about her first marriage?”
“She didn’t want anybody to know,” she said slowly. “Especially him.” She lowered her eyes.
“What a hell of a way to begin a marriage.”
“With lies,” she agreed sadly. “You don’t know what it was like,” she said hesitantly. “Even when I was little, I could hear her crying, late at night. She never let me see what he did to her until I was almost fourteen. I was up late watching a movie when she came out of the bedroom. It scared me to death. Her whole gown was soaked in blood.” She shuddered. “I made her let me treat the cuts. He did it with his teeth. He had to hurt her to…get anything out of it, she said. It had been that way since they married, but much, much worse after he started, well, started drinking.”
He didn’t know what to say. He was shocked. Speechless.
She avoided his eyes. “She had deep scars all over her chest. She said all men were like that, they couldn’t get any satisfaction unless they hurt women. She said I could never trust any man, no matter how gentle he seemed, that my father had been gentle too, at first. But once they were married, and she was pregnant, it was too late. He kept her by threatening to take me away from her. She had no education, nothing except a pretty face. She believed he could do it. She stayed for me.” She trembled. “I’ve been terrified of sex all my life, Jason. It’s why I’ve stayed single. Every time I think about it, I see her…” She let her voice trail off.
He hadn’t expected what he was hearing. It had never occurred to him that any man could be that brutal with a woman. He’d heard stories about other men, but this was out of his experience. No wonder she ran from him. He hadn’t been particularly gentle with her that night, either. His passion had burst its bonds. He must have seemed threatening.
“God, I’m sorry,” he said huskily. “I had no idea. None at all.”
She bunched up the cover in her fingers. “We didn’t talk about things like that. I couldn’t find a way to tell you. Then there was Kittie…”
“Yes. There was Kittie.” He felt two inches high. He’d used Kittie to wound her. It was a sickening thought, that he’d added to her emotional scars.
A soft meow caught his attention. Old Mumbles jumped up onto the bed and came to him, rubbing against his arm. He smoothed his hand over the old cat’s enormous head. “Hi, Mumbles.” He glanced at Gracie. “I told Mrs. Harcourt to tell you that we’d keep him if I had to build him a damned house of his own. Did she tell you?”
She shook her head. “We had other things to worry about by then.”
“What other things?” he asked, suspicious. “How did Kittie get all of you out of the house without a fight? You can’t have thought I’d allow it?”
She lowered her eyes to Mumbles, who came and sat on her chest, still purring. “I didn’t know how you felt. You took her side against all of us. She said you felt that I was taking advantage of you by letting you support me, when I wasn’t even family. I hadn’t ever thought of it from your point of view, but I had to, after that. She was right, Jason. You don’t owe me a thing.”
He let out a barrage of bad words that cut her off. He got to his feet, running an angry hand through his hair, stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and stared blindly out the window.
“Don’t,” she said worriedly. “I can support myself. I have a job. I’m standing on my own two feet for the first time in my life. It isn’t a punishment, Jason. I’m…learning that I have abilities I never guessed I had. I can do more than hostess parties and give teas,” she added bitterly.
He winced. “I said that, didn’t I? That, and a lot more.” His tall frame seemed to stoop. “It seems like a hundred years since we went to that sale barn.”
“Yes,” she agreed. It had been like another life, considering what had happened between then and now.
“You pushed me away,” he said after a minute. “Savaged my pride. Made me ashamed of myself. I went off to New York and got drunk at a party. I woke up in bed with Kittie.”
She closed her eyes on a wave of nausea and pain. He’d slept with that redheaded spider. He’d slept with her!
“Damn you!” she sobbed angrily.
He whirled. If that wasn’t jealousy, he didn’t know anything about women. He moved back to the bed and looked down at her, fascinated.
“You slept with her!”
He drew in a long breath. It might have been to his advantage to let her think that, but she’d been through so much already. He couldn’t hurt her any more than he already had.
“I wasn’t sure if I had or not,” he confessed quietly. “I knew I was too far gone to have thought about precautions. So if it had happened, there might have been a child.” He averted his eyes. It was mortifying, that admission. “I had to keep her around until I was sure. She used it. We could get engaged, she said, just in case. I was hurting and ashamed of what had happened with you. I didn’t have much to look forward to.” He shrugged. “I gave in. Later, I found out that she’d had a couple of dozen men in the same time frame she’d supposedly slept with me. I put the pressure on and she confessed that nothing had happened.”
Gracie relaxed, visib
ly.
“By then, everybody knew we were engaged and I was in such a black mood and so overwhelmed with business worries that I just let it go on. I didn’t care much about anything anymore.” He met her wounded eyes. “I met her in London and she asked if she could stay in the house and just make a few little adjustments to the décor.” He laughed hollowly. “I had no idea what she was capable of until I walked in unexpectedly and saw her idea of adjustments.” He flinched. “Your room looked like a bordello. All your clothes were gone, even the gown I brought you from Paris…” He looked as if that hurt most of all.
“John and I hid my few bits of furniture and some clothes and Christmas decorations in the attic,” she confessed. “I doubt if Kittie wanted to risk dust and bugs by looking up there for all of it.”
He smiled. “Good for John. At least not everything was destroyed.”
She searched his black eyes. “You were engaged to her for months.”
He knew what she was hinting at. He sat back down beside her, leaning across her prone body with a big hand beside her head on the snowy-white pillowcase. “I couldn’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“I couldn’t have sex with her,” he said bluntly. “That was the biggest source of friction. She saw a bottomless checkbook with everything she wanted in it. All she had to do was get me into bed again and claim she was pregnant. But it backfired. By that time, I knew her all too well. She didn’t love me. She didn’t even want me. She wanted what I had.”
“I could have told you that the first time I saw her,” she said bitterly.
He studied her closed expression. “She hated you. She hated every member of the staff. She wanted to shut off access to anybody who might become a threat.” He laughed shortly.
“She overplayed her hand when she wanted Mumbles out of the house. That was the last straw…and upsetting Mrs. Harcourt at her birthday party hadn’t helped,” he added.
“Poor Mrs. Harcourt,” she said quietly. “She’s been through so much.”
“I don’t understand why she left,” he said. “She knew I’d never let Kittie fire her.”
Gracie moved her head on the pillow. “She talked to Kittie alone. Up until then, she said she was staying until you told her to leave. She was white in the face and just scared to death.” She hesitated. “Do you think she has some dark secret that Kittie knows about in her past?”