by Nan Ryan
Burt slid his arms around her, locking his wrists behind her waist. “I thought as much. What do you say we dedicate ourselves to enjoying this morning to the fullest?” He lifted an inquisitive dark eyebrow.
Sabella’s hands slid slowly up over his chest. “And why not? Isn’t that what we’re both here for?”
Burt happily shook his head. “You bet it is.”
And he meant it.
He reasoned that one more quick fling wouldn’t hurt anything. Or anybody. Especially since this beautiful woman apparently viewed this budding sexual relationship exactly the same way he did. As a pleasurable, enjoyable game. An amusement. A diversion of no lasting significance.
His kind of woman!
Burt bent and kissed Sabella’s mist-moistened lips. And he kept on kissing her until the kisses became long, deep, arousing caresses. The pair were still kissing there on the rocky pinnacle of The Point when the misty fog lifted and the sunrise turned the deep waters of the Pacific ocean from a cold, dead steel to a hot, molten gold.
When the sun grew warm on his back, Burt tore his lips from Sabella’s, grabbed her hand, and drew her along with him down the rocky path. When he reached the tethered mount below, he untied the roan and looped the reins over the creature’s neck. He climbed on the roan’s back, smiling down at Sabella.
Her cheeks were flushed pink and it wasn’t from the sun. Her lips were beestung, swollen from his kisses. Her large, dark eyes flashed with an appealing mixture of promise and challenge.
Half in jest, half not, he said, “I shouldn’t take you with me. I should just leave you here.”
“You definitely should,” she said, then added saucily, “but you won’t.”
“You’re mighty sure of yourself, Miss Rios.”
“No,” she said, her heavily lashed lids lowering flirtatiously over dark, gleaming eyes. “I’m mighty sure of you, Mr. Burnett.”
Burt loved it. He threw back his dark head and laughed. Then he reached down and grasped Sabella beneath her arms, lifted her, and placed her in the saddle before him.
“What am I going to do with you?” he said.
“You could start by kissing me again.”
The passion in his kiss took Sabella’s breath away. Withholding from this determined, sexually experienced man the only thing he wanted from her would not be easy.
But she would do it.
Today and every day until she became his wife.
That Sunday sunrise began a whirlwind week for the passionate, impatient Burt. As the mission bells rang and the villagers gathered for worship services, Burt whisked Sabella down to the beach and into a secluded cove. While above in the old chapel the padre admonished his flock to “yield not to temptation,” Burt was down below doing his dead level best to persuade Sabella to “yield to temptation.”
She didn’t.
But she did lie in his arms on a spread blanket in the dim cool interior of the concealed cove. Just yards from the crashing surf, they spent the warm spring morning there together, laughing, kissing, sighing, touching, and teasing.
At noon Sabella abruptly pulled from Burt’s embrace and sat up, leaving him blinking in confusion and dazed with passion. She rose to her knees, sank back on her heels, and announced, “I can stay no longer.” She smiled apologetically and stood up.
Burt’s hand shot out, moving quickly under her long skirts. His lean fingers encircled her left ankle.
“Yes, you can.”
He lay stretched out on his back, his black hair disheveled, his blue chambray shirt half open down his dark chest. His hand moved aggressively up over Sabella’s shapely calf as he warned, “I won’t let you go. Not yet.” His thumb made coaxing little circles on the ticklish back of her knee. “Stay awhile. Please.”
Sabella adamantly shook her head. “All we ever do is kiss and hug,” she complained, crossing her arms over her chest. “If I stay, can we talk for a change?”
“Why, sure, sweetheart. Absolutely!”
Burt’s fingers tightened around the back of her leg and he urged her slowly back down to kneel beside him. He rolled up into a sitting position facing her. His hands lifting to span her waist, he drew her forward and buried his face in the softness of her pink-covered bosom. His breath hot, it penetrated the fabric of her dress, scorching her flesh.
She shivered.
Her hands going to the thick raven hair at the sides of his head, Sabella warned, “You promised. You said if I’d stay, we would talk.”
“We’ll talk, honey,” Burt murmured, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the swell of her breast through the thin fabric of her clothing. “We’ll talk about making love.”
“Oh, you!” She forcefully shoved him away, shot to her feet, and fled.
By the week’s end, Burt knew he was pretty much a goner.
The beautiful, elusive Sabella Rios was in his blood and under his skin. She drove him half crazy. He was helplessly attracted. He was endlessly fascinated. He was constantly tortured by his growing hunger to possess her.
Unfulfilled and unsatisfied desire fueled the striving and the passion. He let his work go at the ranch and spent the lengthening spring days with Sabella. He made outlandish excuses to Gena in order to spend the warm starlit nights with Sabella.
The fever in his blood grew steadily hotter and he took the object of his fierce desire to secret, romantic places in an all-out attempt to sweep her off her feet and out of her clothes.
Sabella would not be swayed.
She was not blinded by passion or by love. While she couldn’t deny that his skillful, drugging kisses made her pulse race erratically and elevated her body temperature, her heart remained chilled through and through, her mind alert and of a single purpose.
Beneath the magnetic charm and masculine beauty of the man, Sabella saw Burt Burnett for what he really was. A cunning swindler. A heartless thief. The despised enemy.
“Let me,” Burt murmured, his lips hot against her throat, “let me, baby.”
“No, Burt. No,” Sabella found herself repeating those oft-used words again. If she had said no once in the last few days, she had said it a thousand times.
It was Sunday. Again. A full week had passed since that misty dawn at The Point.
They stood now embracing on the brow of a green, velvety-topped mesa at sunset. They were miles from the nearest house, had ridden hours to reach this place.
Burt was bare-chested. His discarded shirt lay on the ground at their feet. Sabella’s white blouse was open down the front, the long tails outside her tight leather trousers. She wore nothing—no chemise, no camisole, nothing—beneath the open shirt.
So she was saying no and frantically trying to rebutton the blouse that Burt had so skillfully unbuttoned. While she was attempting to button the blouse, he was attempting to push it apart. Sabella managed to get a couple of buttons buttoned as his heated lips moved over her face.
Kissing her cheeks, her eyelids, he whispered coaxingly, “Ah, Sabella, just take your shirt off, that’s all.” He kissed her top lip, bit it gently. “Nothing else. Just your shirt.”
Before she could reply his mouth took hers in a spine-melting kiss that was instantly so hot and overwhelmingly sexual it loosened raw emotions in them both. Within seconds they were too weak to stand. They sank slowly to their knees, their mouths fused, their hearts pounding. Caught up in the lingering kiss, Sabella temporarily forgot the buttons of her blouse.
Burt didn’t forget for a second.
Sabella wound her weak arms around Burt’s neck and clung to him. Her tongue plunged boldly into his mouth, pleasing him, thrilling him. She felt him shudder against her and her own body involuntarily shuddered in return.
Since first they met they had kissed dozens—hundreds—of times. But this kiss was different somehow from all of the others. The reasons were many. For one thing, they had never been together this far from civilization before. In this beautiful, desolate spot in the remote foothills of the Chocolate Mounta
ins, it was as if no one had ever been here before, as though they were the only two people alive. A safe, rugged place of primitive beauty, it did things to the senses.
Sabella knelt there on that velvet-topped mesa in the dying sun, with her dark eyes closed, sighing, wondering at the indescribable pleasure of the prolonged kiss, the tingling joy, the incredible warmth enveloping her.
Slowly it began to dawn.
It wasn’t just the splendor of this private wilderness paradise or the heat of Burt’s lips that were responsible for the feverish flow of blood through her veins. It was more. All at once she became vitally aware that the blouse she had struggled so hard to button was once again completely open and pushed back away from her body.
Her bared breasts were touching Burt’s naked chest. Her nipples had turned into twin points of fire, stinging with hot burning pain. The only hope of extinguishing the fierce flame was to press closer to that hard-muscled male flesh. The only soothing balm for such sweet agony was to bury the aching points of pure sensation more deeply in the dense growth of crisp black hair covering his broad torso.
Instinctively, Sabella arched her back, pressed her swelling breasts intimately closer to the hot haven of Burt’s muscular chest.
He sighed with pleasure.
While he feasted on the honeyed mouth opened sweetly to his, Burt slid a hand up Sabella’s back, underneath the open shirt, and drew her closer still. Blood pounded in his ears and he groaned with ecstasy at the feel of her diamond hard nipples gouging into his chest. He was sure it was only a matter of minutes before eager lips were at her breasts, kissing their soft creamy fullness, sucking on the tight sensitive nipples.
He was equally sure they were all alone here on this distant mesa, that they could do anything they pleased right out in the open and no one would see. The prospect was tremendously exciting—making love to this fiery beauty atop this isolated tableland with the old Sun God their only witness.
Their lips separated at last and, breathing hard, Burt sank back on his heels, bringing Sabella with him, cradling her against his chest.
“Ah, yes, baby,” he murmured huskily, “yes.”
Thirteen
“BURT … OOOOH, BURT,” SABELLA whispered dreamily. Burt’s arms tightened around her. He held his breath, waited, every muscle in his long, lean body tensed and straining. Her flushed cheek was against his bare, heaving chest. She turned her face inward, kissed his madly beating heart, and said breathlessly, “No, no, we … can’t.”
She scrambled out of his arms and out of his reach with a swiftness that surprised him and left him grasping at thin air. Her back to him, she sat on her heels and quickly buttoned the blouse.
A long silence.
“Jesus Christ!” Burt finally exploded and fell over flat on his back, his hands first clasping his throbbing temples, then clenching into tight fists at his sides. His stomach muscles were pulled so tautly, his faded Levi’s fell away from his belly, exposing his navel.
He wanted her so badly. Never had he wanted a woman so much. She loosed in him a raw emotion hidden even from himself, and in his deep frustration, he was tempted to grab her, tear the clothes from her body, and take her whether she wanted it or not.
Burt was jolted back to reality when, as if she had read his darkest thoughts, Sabella said softly, her back still to him, “Go ahead if you’re determined.” She finally turned to look at him. Her large dark eyes were those of a frightened child. “You’re bigger, stronger than I. I couldn’t stop you.”
Burt’s jaw was tightly clenched and his half-closed eyes were a wintry gray. His fists flexed and unflexed. At last he exhaled heavily.
“I don’t rape women, Miss Rios,” he said coolly. He lifted his arms, folded them beneath his head. “Not even tempting, tormenting golden-haired witches who delight in pushing me past the edge of my endurance.”
“You think that’s what I’m doing?” Sabella crawled closer, sat down, and laid a soft hand on his ridged belly. Burt winced involuntarily.
“No, I don’t think that,” he muttered, a muscle working furiously in his jaw, “I know that.”
Sabella’s expression became one of wounded innocence. Her fingertips traced the thick line of jet-black hair going down the center of Burt’s flat stomach.
“Now why would I do such a cruel heartless thing?”
Burt closed his eyes against the dying sun’s harsh glare and against the wily seductress toying so mercilessly with him. “You tell me, sweetheart,” he said curtly. “Maybe just because you’re a woman.” His eyes opened, he looked up at her. “Back in the days of the Roman Empire, a wise man named Juvenal wrote, and I quote, ‘Cruelty is natural to women; they torment their husbands, whip the housekeeper, and enjoy having slaves flogged almost to death.’ Unquote.”
Sabella remained silent for a long uneasy moment, wondering if he suspected the truth about her; knew what she was really up to. But she felt the tensed muscles beneath her hand slacken and saw the corners of Burt’s full lips start to turn up in the beginnings of that easy, familiar smile.
Quick as a wink she rose to her knees, threw a leg over his supine body, climbed astride him, and sat down atop him. She looked at him, smiled, and said, “Since I have neither husband, housekeeper, or slave, that leaves only you for me to torture.”
Burt finally laughed. “At least you’re honest.”
Sabella made no reply. She leaned down, started to kiss him, but Burt stopped her. “No, baby, don’t. Not now. I’ve had enough torture for one afternoon.”
“Then talk to me,” she coaxed, “and not about making love. Tell me all about you. About your family, your ranch, the land.”
“Honey, I can’t think with you straddling me,” Burt said candidly. “You want anything out of me other than groans of agony, you’ll have to get up.” He winked at her, grinned impishly, and added, “So you won’t get me up.”
“Burt Burnett!” she scolded him for his crudity, but promptly moved. Seated crossed-legged beside him, Sabella again gently prodded him to talk, to tell her something about himself.
Burt just smiled lazily, rolled up into a sitting position, draped his long arms over his knees, and said, “Ladies first. You came to Capistrano to investigate an old inheritance. That’s all I know about you. Fill me in. Tell me about your home in Arizona. About your family. Your life there. Tell me which side of the bed you sleep on. How you like your eggs in the morning. Where you got that pale blond hair and those dark eyes.” He paused, turned his head, rested his chin on his bare upper arm. “How many lovers you’ve driven mad. Tell me everything.”
Laughing now, Sabella carefully revealed only as much as she wanted him to know. She pulled up a blade of grass, twisted it between thumb and forefinger and blew on it before she spoke.
“I was born and raised in the Arizona Territory,” she began. “My parents are both dead.”
“Honey, I’m sorry,” Burt said sympathetically. “That’s really tough.”
Sabella continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “My father, a Spaniard named Tito Rios, worked on a small cattle ranch owned by Victor and Carmelita Rivera. Carmelita is the dear friend and chaperon who is with me in Capistrano.”
“I see,” said Burt, his narrowed gray gaze resting on Sabella’s beautiful face.
“Teresa, my mother, was orphaned when she was a child and placed in a convent. When she turned eighteen, she came to live at the Rivera ranch. She met my father, they fell in love, got married, and I was born within a year. My pale hair came from my blond, blue-eyed father. My dark eyes and olive skin from my mother. I sleep in the middle of my bed. I don’t eat eggs.” Smiling, she tickled his bare arm with the blade of grass. “Long ago I lost count of how many lovers I’ve driven mad.”
Burt grinned. “You have lots of younger brothers and sisters?”
“No. No, I don’t. I’m an only child.”
“Ah, ha! That’s it. That’s why you’re so spoiled,” accused Burt, lifting his chin from
his arm, his gray eyes twinkling.
“Me?” She made a face. “What about you? I don’t have to ask if you are an only child.”
“You don’t?”
“No. It’s evident you are. So arrogant, so demanding, so persuasive. Tell me, do you always get your way?”
Burt chuckled good-naturedly. “I did until you came along.” He placed a hand on her knee, fiddling with the inside seam of her leathered trousers. “Go on, tell me about—”
“There’s really not much more to tell,” Sabella said. “I have Carmelita—she’s widowed now—and she’s family to me.” Sabella shrugged her slender shoulders. “As I’ve told you, we came here to check on a possible inheritance and … ”
“Anything I can do to help? Dad’s an attorney. Of course, he hasn’t practiced in years, but—”
“No, thanks all the same.” She pushed her hair from her eyes. “Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. Have you always lived here in Southern California?”
“Born right here on Lindo Vista,” Burt said, nodding, and his forefinger started sliding slowly up her inside trouser seam. Sabella swiftly caught his hand, held it in both of her own. “Except for the four years I was away at the university,” he went on, “I’ve been right here at the rancho.”
“You say right here. Do you mean that this mesa where we are now—way out here—is all part of the rancho?”
“Yes, indeedy.”
“But we’re miles from … ” She looked all around. “Your ranch must be very large.”
“Thirty-three square leagues.” He withdrew his hand from hers.
“Thirty-three square leagues?” Her well-arched eyebrows lifted.
“146,000 acres,” he said, smiling. “Poco más o menos. A little more or less.”
“That’s enormous.”
“One of the last coastal tracts of its size between the Oregon border and Baja, California,” stated Burt proudly. “Back in its heyday Lindo Vista supported ten thousand head of cattle and half as many horses.”
Sabella mused aloud, “It must have been difficult drawing an accurate diseno for such a large tract.”