by Sandra Brown
She complied. She had no choice. In an arm-wrestling match, she could hardly win against him. And now her breasts were fair game for his condemning gaze again. But when his eyes glanced up from the bizarre manicure he was giving her, they weren’t condemning. Nor were they cold with contempt. They were warm with masculine interest. A lot of interest. So much interest that Rusty’s stomach took another of those elevator rides that never quite took it to the top or the bottom but kept it bobbing up and down somewhere in between.
Cooper took his time trimming the nails on her right hand, as if they needed more care and attention than those on her left. His face was on a level with her chest. In spite of the awful things he’d said to her just moments ago, she wanted to run her fingers through his long, unruly hair.
As she watched his lips, set firmly in a scowl, she couldn’t help but remember how soft they could become in a kiss—how warm and damp—and how marvelous his mustache had felt. If it had felt that good against her upper lip, how good would it feel against other parts of her body? Her neck? Her ear? Her areola—while his lips tugged at her nipple with the gentle fervency of a baby hungry for milk?
He finished cutting her nails and sheathed his knife. But he didn’t release her hand. He held it, staring down at it, then laid it on her thigh, pressing it there with his own hand. Rusty thought her heart would explode from the pressure inside her chest.
He kept his head down, staring at the spot where his hand covered hers high on her thigh. His eyes looked closed from Rusty’s angle. The lashes were thick and crescent shaped. She noticed that they, like his mustache and eyebrows, were tipped with gold. In the summertime his hair would be naturally streaked, bleached from the sun.
“Rusty.”
He said her name. There was a slight creak in his voice, a groaning protest of the raw emotion behind his saying it. Rusty didn’t move, but her heart was beating so fast and wildly that it stirred the silk that wasn’t doing a very adequate job of covering her.
He removed his hand from hers and placed each of his on either side of the chair seat, bracketing her hips. His knuckles pressed into their flaring shape. He remained staring fixedly at her hand, which still lay on her thigh. He looked ready to lower his head and wearily rest his cheek against it, or to bend down and tenderly kiss it, or to nibble on the very fingers he’d just cut the nails from.
If he wanted to, Rusty wouldn’t stop him. She knew that positively. Her body was warm and moist and receptive to the idea. She was ready for whatever happened.
No, she wasn’t.
Because what happened was that Cooper came to his feet hastily. “You’d better get to bed.”
Rusty was stunned by his about-face. The mood had been shattered, the intimacy dispelled. She felt like arguing, but didn’t. What could she say? “Kiss me again, Cooper,” “Touch me”? That would only confirm his low opinion of her.
Feeling rejected, she gathered her belongings, including the pile of dirty clothes she’d left beside the tub, and walked around the curtain. Each of the two beds had been spread with sheets and blankets. A fur pelt had been left at the foot of each. At home her bed was covered in designer sheets and piled with downy pillows, but it had never looked more inviting than this one.
She put her things away and sat down on the bed. In the meantime, Cooper had made several trips outside with buckets of bathwater. When the water level was low enough, he dragged the tub to the door and out onto the porch, then tipped it over the edge and emptied the rest of it. He brought the tub back into the room, replaced it behind the curtain, and from the pump in the sink began filling the pots and kettles again.
“Are you going to take a bath, too?”
“Any objections?”
“No.”
“It’s been a while since I chopped firewood and my back is sore. Besides that, I think I’m beginning to stink.”
“I didn’t notice.”
He looked at her sharply, but when he could see that she was being honest, he came close to smiling. “You will now that you’re clean.”
The kettles had begun to boil. He lifted two of them off the stove and headed toward the tub.
“Do you want me to massage it?” Rusty asked guilelessly.
He stumbled, sloshed boiling water on his legs, and cursed. “What?”
“Massage it?” He gazed at her as though he’d been hit between the eyes with a two-by-four. “Your back.”
“Oh, uh...” His eyes moved over her. The tank top left her throat and shoulders bare, cloaked only with a mass of reddish-brown curls. “No—” he refused curtly “—I told you to go to sleep. We’ve got more work to do tomorrow.” He rudely returned to his task.
Not only was human courtesy impossible for him, he wouldn’t let anybody be nice to him. Well he could rot, for all she cared!
Rusty angrily thrust her feet between the chilly sheets and lay down, but she didn’t close her eyes. Instead she watched Cooper sit down on the edge of his bed and unlace his boots while he was waiting for more water to boil. He tossed his socks onto the pile of dirty clothing she had made and began unbuttoning his shirt. He was wearing only one today because he’d been working so hard outside. He pulled the tails of it from his jeans and took it off.
Rusty sprang to a sitting position. “What happened to you?”
He flung his shirt down onto the pile of clothes to be washed. He didn’t have to ask what she was referring to. If it looked as bad as it felt, the bruise was noticeable even in the dim light.
“My shoulder came into contact with the barrel of Reuben’s rifle. I had to deflect it that way, so my hands would be free to get my own rifle up.”
Rusty winced. The fist-size bruise at the outer edge of his collarbone was black-and-blue and looked extremely painful. “Does it hurt?”
“Like hell.”
“Did you take an aspirin?”
“No. We need to conserve them.”
“But if you’re hurting—”
“You aren’t taking them for the bruises on your butt.” That remark shocked her speechless. But it didn’t last long. After a moment she said stubbornly, “I still think two aspirin would help.”
“I want to save them. You might have fever again.”
“Oh, I see. You don’t have any aspirin to take for your shoulder because I wasted them on my fever.”
“I didn’t say you wasted them. I said, oh—” Then he said a word that described something neither was in the mood to do, a word that should never be spoken aloud in polite company. “Go to sleep, will you?”
Wearing only his jeans, he went to the stove, apparently decided that the water was hot enough even though it wasn’t quite boiling, and emptied it all into the tub.
Rusty had lain back down, but she watched his shadow moving on the curtain as he shucked off his jeans and stepped naked into the tub. Her imagination got the night off because his shadow left nothing up to it, especially in profile.
She heard cursing as he lowered himself into the water. The tub didn’t accommodate him as easily as it had her. How he expected her to go to sleep with all that splashing going on, she didn’t know. He had splashed more water on the floor than was left in the bottom of the tub by the time he stood up to rinse off.
Rusty’s throat went dry as she watched his shadow. He bent at the waist, repeatedly scooping handfuls of water over himself to rinse off the soap. When he stepped out, he dried with masculine carelessness. The only attention he gave his hair was to make one pass over it with the towel, then to comb his fingers through it. He finished by wrapping the towel around his waist.
He went through the laborious procedure of emptying the tub again. After the last trip to the porch, he left the tub outside. Rusty could tell he was shivering when he moved back to the fire and added several logs. Using the chair as his ladder, he took down the screen the same way he’d put it up. He folded the sheet, placed it on one of the several shelves against the wall, and blew out the lantern on the table. The l
ast thing he did before sliding into his bed was yank the towel from around his waist.
During all that time, he never looked at Rusty. She was hurt that he hadn’t even said goodnight. But then, she might not have been able to answer him.
Her mouth was still dry.
Counting sheep didn’t help.
Reciting poetry didn’t help, especially since the only poems he knew by heart were limericks of a licentious nature.
So Cooper lay there on his back, with his hands stacked beneath his head, staring at the ceiling, and wondering when his stiff manhood was going to stop tenting the covers and relax enough to let him fall asleep. He was exhausted. His overexerted muscles cried out for rest. But his sex wasn’t listening.
Unlike the rest of him, it was feeling great. He felt like taps all over, but it felt like reveille: alert and alive and well. Too well.
In desperation, he put one hand beneath the covers. Maybe... He yanked his hand back. Nope. Uh-uh. Don’t do that. Trying to press it down only made the problem worse.
Furious with Rusty for doing this to him, he rolled to his side. Even that movement created unwanted friction. He uttered an involuntary groaning sound, which he hastily turned into a cough.
What could he do? Nothing that wouldn’t be humiliating. So he’d just have to think about something else.
But dammit, he’d tried. For hours, he’d tried. His thoughts eventually meandered back to her.
Her lips: soft.
Her mouth: vulnerable but curious; then hungry, opening to him.
He clenched his teeth, thinking of the way her mouth had closed around his seeking tongue. God, she tasted good. He’d wanted to go on and on, thrusting his tongue inside her, sending it a little farther into her mouth each time, until he decided exactly what it was she tasted like. It would be an impossible task and therefore endless— because she had her own unique taste.
He should have known better than to kiss her—not even for the sake of fooling the old man. Who had been fooling whom? he asked himself derisively. He had kissed her because he’d wanted to and he had known better. He had suspected that one kiss wouldn’t satisfy him and now he knew that for sure.
What the hell? Why was he being so hard on himself? He was sleeplessly randy because she was the only woman around. Yeah, that was it.
Probably. Possibly. Maybe.
But the fact still remained that she had a knockout face. Sexy-as-hell hair. A body that begged to be mated. Breasts that were created for a man’s enjoyment. A cute, squeezable derriere. Thighs that inspired instant arousal. And what lay nestled between them—
No! his mind warned him. Don’t think about that or you’ll have to do what you have miraculously, and with considerable self-discipline, refrained from doing tonight.
All right, that’s enough. Finis. No mas. The end. Stop thinking like a sex-crazed kid at worst and a redneck sexist at best, and go to sleep.
He closed his eyes and concentrated so hard on keeping them closed that at first he thought the whimpering sound that issued from the other bed was his imagination. Then Rusty sprang up out of the covers like a jack-in-the-box. That wasn’t his imagination. Nor was it something he could ignore by playing possum.
“Rusty?”
“What is that?”
Even with no more to light the room than the dying fire, he could see that her eyes were round and huge with fear. He thought she was having a nightmare. “Lie back down. Everything’s okay.”
She was breathing erratically and clutching the covers to her chest. “What is that noise?”
Had he made a noise? Had he failed to camouflage his groans? “Wha—”
But just as he was about to ask, the mourning, wailing sound came again. Rusty covered her ears and bent double. “I can’t stand it,” she cried.
Cooper tossed back the covers on his bed and reached hers in seconds. “Wolves, Rusty. Timber wolves. That’s all. They’re not as close as they sound and they can’t hurt us.”
Gently he unfolded her and eased her back until she was lying down again. But her face was far from restful. Her eyes apprehensively darted around the dark interior of the cabin as though it had been invaded by demons of the night.
“Wolves?”
“They smell the—”
“Bodies.”
“Yes,” he replied with regret.
“Oh, God.” She covered her face with her hands.
“Shh, shh. They can’t get to them because I covered the graves with rocks. They’ll eventually go away. Hush, now, and go to sleep.”
He’d been so miserable with his own problem that he’d paid scant attention to the barking of the pack that lurked in the woods surrounding the cabin. But he could see that Rusty’s fear was genuine. She clasped his hand and drew it up under her chin as a child might hold his teddy bear to help ward off the terrors of a recent nightmare.
“I hate this place,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“I’ve tried to be brave.”
“You have been.”
She shook her head adamantly. “No, I’m a coward. My father saw it. He was the one who suggested that I return home ahead of schedule.”
“Lots of people can’t stand seeing animals killed.”
“I broke down and cried today in front of you. You’ve known all along that I’m useless. I’m no good at this. And I don’t want to be good at it.” Her voice was defiant, incongruous with the tears that washed her cheeks. “You think I’m a terrible person.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, honest.”
“Then why did you accuse me of enticing those men?”
“I was angry.”
“Why?”
Because you entice me, too, and I don’t want to be enticed. He didn’t tell her that. Instead he muttered, “Never mind.”
“I want to go home. Where everything is safe and warm and clean.”
He could argue that the streets of Los Angeles couldn’t always be considered safe, but knew that now wasn’t the time for teasing—even gentle teasing.
It went against his grain to compliment her, but he felt she’d earned it. “You’ve done exceptionally well.”
She lifted watery eyes to his. “No, I haven’t.”
“Far better than I ever expected.”
“Really?” she asked hopefully.
The breathlessness of her voice and the feminine appeal on her face was almost too much for him. “Really. Now, ignore the wolves and go back to sleep.” He pulled his hand from her grasp and turned away. Before he could move, however, another wolf howled. She cried out and reached for him again, throwing herself against him when he turned back to her.
“I don’t care if I am a coward. Hold me, Cooper. Please hold me.”
Reflexively his arms went around her. Like that other time he had held her while she wept, he felt the same sense of helplessness steal over him. It was lunacy to hold her for any reason, but it would be abominably cruel to turn away. So even though it was as much agony as ecstasy, he drew her close and buried his lips in her wealth of hair.
As he spoke them, his words were sincere. He was sorry this had happened to her. He wished they would be rescued. He wanted her to be returned safely home. He was sorry she was frightened. If there was something he could do to get them out of their predicament, he would.
“You’ve done everything possible. But just hold me a minute longer,” she begged.
“I will.”
He continued to hold her. His arms remained around her. But he didn’t move his hands. He didn’t trust himself to rub them over her back and stop with that. He wanted to touch her all over. He wanted to knead her breasts and investigate the warm, soft place between her thighs. Desire made him shiver.
“You’re freezing.” Rusty ran her hands over the goose-flesh on his upper arms.
“I’m fine.”
“Get under the covers.”
“No.”
“Uh-uh. I’m going back to my own bed.”
“You said you’d hold me. Please. Just until I fall asleep.”
“But, I’m—”
“Please, Cooper.”
He swore, but slid beneath the covers with her. She cuddled against him, nuzzling her face against the fuzzy security of his chest. Her body became pliant against his. He gritted his teeth.
Seconds after she had relaxed against him, she pushed herself away. “Oh!” she exclaimed softly. “I forgot that you were—”
“Naked. That’s right. But it’s too late now, baby.”
Chapter Seven
Masculine urges governed him now. His mouth moved over hers in a deep, long, questing kiss while his body settled heavily against hers. Angling his head first to one side, then the other, he made heated love to her mouth with his greedy tongue.
Shock was Rusty’s initial reaction. His wonderful nakedness was a stunning surprise. Then, before she could recover from that, she was swept up into his tempestuous kiss.
Her next reaction was spontaneous longing. It surged up through her middle, overwhelming her heart and mind, obliterating all else but the man who was ravishing her mouth so expertly. Her arms encircled his neck and drew him closer. Reflexively she arched against him, bringing her body in contact with his hard, rigid flesh.
Groaning in near pain, he buried his face in her neck. “God, it’s so full it’s about to burst.”
“What do you want, Cooper?”
He laughed harshly. “That’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“I know; but, what do you want me to do?”
“Either touch me all over or don’t touch me at all.” His breath struck her face in hot, rapid gusts. “But whatever you decide, decide now.”
Rusty hesitated only half a heartbeat before she ran the fingers of one hand up through his hair and settled them against his scalp. She used the other to comb through the crisp hair on his chest, massaging the muscles that had beguiled her.