Calder Storm

by Janet Dailey

  If his hands hadn’t been full, he would have done something about that. As it was, he settled for moving toward her and lessening the space between them.

  “Sorry.” Her apology came out in an easy rush. “I had trouble getting my hair to dry.”

  “No problem.” He extended the hand with the container of milk-diluted coffee. “Your coffee as promised, Ms.—” He checked the movement. “You never did tell me your full name.”

  “It’s Davis,” she replied without hesitation, her eyes sparkling. “Sloan Davis.”

  “Trey Calder,” he volunteered and once more offered the cup to her.

  Her head lifted, a flicker of surprise mixing with the look of recognition. “Of the Montana Calders?”

  Her reaction to his family name was one Trey had seen too many times to be surprised by it. “Fifth generation,” he confirmed. “I guess I don’t have to ask whether you’ve heard of the Calder ranch.”

  “Who hasn’t,” she chided wryly.

  “Nearly everyone in Montana has, that’s for sure.” Making a half turn, he gestured to the exit. “Ready to go?”

  “All set.”

  Together they crossed to the door. Sloan didn’t wait for Trey to open it but pushed it herself and stepped into the crisp, bracing air, as yet unwarmed by the newly risen sun. Its very coolness seemed to invigorate all five senses.

  Trey gestured to the pickup that he had recently parked in front of the entrance. This time he held the passenger door and gave her a hand into the cab, then circled around to the driver’s side and slid behind the wheel.

  As he drove out of the parking lot onto the main road, he stole a glance at Sloan, watching while she took a careful sip of the hot coffee. He felt a high contentment, seeing her sitting there, sharing the seat with him. It was something rare and new, like the day.

  One-handed, he flipped off the lid to his own coffee container and downed a swallow of it. At this early hour there was little traffic on the streets to slow them.

  When they passed the third restaurant, Sloan darted a curious look at him. “Where are we going for breakfast?”

  “A quiet, out-of-the way spot I know.” Trey deliberately refrained from being more forthcoming than that and changed the subject. “Where’s home for you?”

  “Louisiana, originally. At least that’s where I was born.”

  “For someone from Louisiana, you don’t have much of a southern accent.” He ran an idle glance over her, conscious that last night he hadn’t been the least bit interested in hearing her life story, and this morning he wanted to know everything about her.

  “That’s because I’ve lived all over the place since then. Right now I have a beach house on Maui that I use as my home base.”

  “You live in Hawaii?” Shock flattened his voice as a kind of alarm tingled through him.

  “I do.” There was a trace of laughter in her voice. “You seem surprised.”

  “I am.” Trey saw no point in hiding it. “I just assumed you worked for one of the area newspapers.”

  “I’m a free-lance photographer.” An amused smile curved her mouth.

  “So what’s a free-lance photographer from Hawaii doing covering the Miles City Bucking Horse Sale?” His curiosity was aroused, but it wasn’t nearly as strong as the certainty he felt that he didn’t want Sloan to leave when the auction came to an end.

  “I’m wrapping up work on a coffee-table book that deals with rodeo traditions like the Calgary Stampede and the Cheyenne Frontier Days—as well as the Bucking Horse Sale at Miles City. It’s my job to supply the photos, and somebody else writes the copy that goes along with them.”

  She made it sound routine. And Trey suspected it had likely become that for her. But he was wise enough to realize that such things didn’t just happen without cause.

  “You must be good at your work,” he concluded.

  “I am,” she said simply.

  “I figured you must be, or you wouldn’t be able to make a living at it. It’s bound to be a highly competitive field. Is it something you’ve always been interested in?”

  The question caught Sloan in the midst of another sip of coffee. She swallowed and nodded. “Since I was nine years old. I got a camera for my birthday, and it’s been my passion from that day on.” She sat a little sideways on the seat, a shoulder brushing the passenger window, her body angled toward him and both hands curled around the hot cup. When he turned onto another street, her attention shifted to the front. Immediately she straightened in sudden alertness. “This is the way to the art center. What are we doing here?”

  “It has a great little park area overlooking the Yellowstone River. It’s an ideal place for a picnic,” Trey replied, with a sidelong watch for her reaction.

  She laughed softly in surprise. “A picnic breakfast. That’s a first.” An instant later, Sloan made a quick visual search of the floorboard area by her feet and the empty section of seat between them. “Where’s the food?”

  “I stowed it behind the seat.”

  Head tipped to one side, she gave him a long look. “You must have been very busy after you left my room.”

  Trey laughed low in his throat. “Let’s just say that if you had gotten to the lobby on time, you would have been waiting for me.”

  “Next time I won’t bother to get my hair all the way dry.” She settled back in the seat, a glow of anticipation in her eyes.

  No phrase had ever sounded sweeter to Trey than the one Sloan had used. It told him that she expected there to be a “next time.”

  Chapter Four

  Sunlight glistened on the dew-damp grass, intensifying its young green color. A few yards away, at the foot of the bluff, the Yellowstone River followed its snaking course eastward. A wide sweep of prairie flowed from the opposite bank, stretching the eye with its bigness.

  A vagrant breeze flipped up a corner of the blanket that served as both a table and protection from the damp grasses underneath. Sloan sat cross-legged on it, a half-eaten flaky croissant in one hand and a plastic glass filled with a mixture of champagne and orange juice in the other.

  More croissants were piled atop the paper sack that had contained them. Next to it sat a plastic box of California strawberries. Their luscious red color was a contrast to the bunch of shiny black grapes lying atop a paper napkin.

  A cardboard box that had seen duty as a picnic hamper sat off to the side. Even now it held the opened champagne bottle, the orange juice carton, a thermos of coffee, a pint of milk, plus more napkins, extra glasses, and a collection of plastic flatware.

  Trey sat at right angles to Sloan, propped upright by a bracing arm. He had one leg stretched out its full length while the other was bent to act as a support for the arm casually hooked over the knee. Every inch of him was male, from the rawboned strength in his features to the muscled leanness of his body. He certainly did not appear the kind to have croissants and mimosas for breakfast.

  “I have to admit,” Sloan began, “when you pulled out that paper sack, I thought for sure there would be sausage-and-egg biscuits inside it. This isn’t what you usually have for breakfast, is it?” she asked in open doubt.

  His lazy smile, combined with the gleam in his eyes, seemed somehow sexily reckless and challenging. “My choice tends more to the steak-and-eggs side of the menu. But I figured that a woman who starts her morning with a double latte probably favors something lighter and a little more European.”

  “You certainly accomplished that,” Sloan declared. “About the only thing missing is some yogurt and granola. Don’t get me wrong,” she added hastily, holding up a cautioning finger. “As far as I’m concerned, this is more than enough.”

  “I’m glad you approve.”

  “Wholeheartedly,” she assured him.

  The steady regard of his gaze grew slightly serious. “So what happens when you finish up here? Will you be flying back to Hawaii?”

  “Probably.” She took another bite of the pastry and used the little finger of
that hand to brush the flaky crumbs from her lips.

  “I figured that.” He nodded. “Although there was the off chance you might be stopping off somewhere to visit family.”

  Sloan shook her head and quickly finished the bite in her mouth. “I don’t have any family. Both my parents are gone, and I was the only child of parents who were only children themselves. It’s been just me for so long that I’ve gotten used to it.” She sent him a quick glance. “That probably sounds strange to you.”

  “Not really. My father died when I was just a little tyke. I don’t remember him at all.”

  His words touched a chord in Sloan. Since she lost her parents when she was six, her memories of them were sketchy at best.

  “It couldn’t have been easy for you, growing up,” she said, thinking of her own childhood.

  “I always had Gramps.” The corners of his mouth lifted in a smile of affection, but it was the brightening light in his eyes that spoke of his deep regard for the man. “I was named after him—the same as he was named after his grandfather. Chase Benteen Calder. Gramps is the one who started calling me Trey so there wouldn’t be the confusion of two people being called by the same name. Which is the way it should be,” he said with a shrugging lift of his head. “There’s only one Chase Calder.”

  Always a stickler for details, Sloan frowned. “Aren’t you forgetting about your great-great grandfather? His name was Chase Calder, too.”

  “According to Gramps, he never used it. He went by Benteen.”

  “I wonder why?” she murmured.

  “Who knows?” Trey said, unconcerned, and downed the rest of his champagne drink in a series of manly gulps.

  He examined the empty plastic glass for a moment. Then a restlessness seemed to sweep through him, and he rolled to his knees, shooting her a look as he shifted toward the picnic box.

  “I’m ready for some coffee. How about you?” he asked.

  “Not right now,” Sloan told him.

  But she took advantage of the chance to study him unobserved. She thought back on the previous day’s encounters with him, first at the motel, then later at the rodeo arena. Initially she had regarded him as a rugged-jaw cowboy hunk with a smile that could make any woman’s pulse race. She certainly hadn’t been immune to it. But now she saw something more in him.

  When he had suggested meeting at the street dance, she had agreed on a whim—partly to escape the monotony of another night in a motel room, partly out of curiosity about the event, and partly because of that potent smile. Any personal risk had seemed small, since it was a public event and she was furnishing her own transportation to and from it.

  Just the same, Sloan had assumed she would be spending much of the evening fending off the advances of her lusty rodeo Romeo. However, except for that initial kiss that had relied more on raw heat than finesse, the evening hadn’t turned out that way.

  The noisy crowd and loud music had kept any conversation to a minimum, which had suited Sloan just fine at the time. Then later, outside her motel room, when Trey had kissed her that second time—the mere memory of its slow, drugging force was enough to make her toes curl all over again with a remnant of that delicious ache she’d felt.

  Studying him while he poured steaming coffee out of the thermos, Sloan was struck again by the fact that he looked every inch a cowboy. He had the physique of a rider, wide at the shoulders and narrow at the hip, with all lean, sinewy muscle in between. And he had a horseman’s way of walking as well, one that suggested he was more at home in the saddle than on foot.

  In looks he was a throwback to something from the past, all steely strength and iron resolve. Handsome was too tame a word for the compelling quality of his features, features that were formed out of hard angles and smooth planes, without a trace of softness to them until he smiled and took a woman’s breath away.

  Yet an ordinary cowboy he wasn’t. This breakfast selection showed Trey had a worldly side. More than that, it revealed he could be thoughtful and caring. And that discovery made Sloan wonder all the more about the kind of lover he’d be.

  After tightening the thermos lid, Trey set the bottle back in the box and made his way across the blanket to rejoin her. His nearness coupled with the direction her own thoughts had taken started her pulse drumming a little erratically. To cover it, Sloan popped the last of the croissant in her mouth and reached for a napkin.

  Trey helped himself to a handful of strawberries, then offered Sloan her choice. “Have one?”

  Using hand signals and an exaggerated chewing motion, she indicated she already had a mouthful of food. His mouth quirking, he nodded in understanding and proceeded to stem the fruit in his hand and, one by one, eat the berries whole.

  As Sloan washed down the last of the croissant with a drink of her champagne cocktail, Trey remarked, “It’s a beautiful morning.”

  “It certainly is.” She let her gaze wander to the prairie-scape on the opposite side of the Yellowstone. “I wish I’d brought my camera.”

  “Is this your first trip to Montana?”

  “No, but all the other times I was here, I was always in the mountains or Glacier Park. The mountains are always big and beautiful, but here…there’s a different kind of bigness.”

  “A big land and a big sky,” Trey agreed.

  But he wasn’t looking at either. She could almost feel the touch of his gaze moving over her face, as in a caress. She felt self-conscious, wondering what he saw. As always, the attack of nerves prompted Sloan to keep her hands busy. She selected a big, ripe berry and made slow work of removing its stem.

  “Where did you come by an unusual name like Sloan?” Trey asked. “There’s bound to be a story behind it.”

  The question came almost as a relief. Mostly because the answer was easy. “Not a story exactly, but a reason. But before I tell you, I need to explain that my full name is Sloan Taylor Davis. Sloan is my mother’s maiden name, and Taylor is my dad’s mother’s maiden name. Which makes my name also my lineage. That’s become something of a custom in certain southern circles. Therefore, when you meet someone, you already know everything about their background. So it really isn’t unusual to meet a southern-born woman with a given name of Campbell or Fallon or Sloan.”

  “That’s bound to make you think twice about the name of the person you marry,” Trey suggested, his voice dry with humor, “Can you imagine saddling a girl with a name like Lipshitz or Bumgartner?”

  Sloan laughed. “I never thought of that, but you’re right. It’s for sure I’m never going to name any daughter of mine Davis.”

  “That’s good.” He broke off one of the larger branches from the grape cluster.

  “I thought so.” Sloan bit into the strawberry. Juice gushed onto her chin and she immediately tried to catch it in her hand. “Why didn’t you tell me how juicy these are?” she complained and hurriedly set her drink aside, freeing her hand to grab a napkin.

  “You never asked.” Using his teeth, Trey calmly pulled a grape off its stem and rolled it into his mouth.

  Sloan absently watched him devour the grapes while she wiped the stickiness from her hand. For a man who usually breakfasted on steak and eggs, she knew croissants and fruit could hardly satisfy his morning appetite.

  “You must be starving,” she said with feeling.

  He aimed his steady gaze at her. “Only for you.”

  His look was too blatantly sensual for Sloan to misconstrue his meaning. For a split second she was totally robbed of speech even as her heart began thudding madly against her ribs.

  She made a shaky attempt to laugh it off. “You’re very direct, aren’t you?”

  “You aren’t giving me enough time to court you the right way.”

  Oddly flustered by his answer, Sloan wasn’t sure how seriously she should take it. So she strove for a response that would fall somewhere in between.

  “What an old-fashioned choice of words.”

  “It surprises me, too,” Trey admitted. “But si
nce I met you, I realize that I want it all—strolling hand in hand across a meadow of flowers, sitting on a front-porch swing on a moonlit night, stealing kisses, and hoping nobody turns on the porch light.”

  The images pulled her as much as his presence. “No one has swings on their front porches anymore.” Sloan found herself regretting that fact.

  “I know.” Trey leaned toward her. “That’s why a guy has to steal a kiss when and wherever he can.”

  He cupped a hand behind her neck, exerting light pressure to eliminate the space between them. The kiss was sweet and warm, heady in its strength and incredibly easy to return. His mouth tasted of grapes and coffee and—most stimulating of all—desire.

  Sloan was never sure how it happened. One minute they were straining closer to each other, and the next, Trey was on his back and she was lying half across him.

  With the coolness of morning all around, she found warmth in his arms, an all-pervading heat that came from the delving hunger of his kiss, the molding caress of his hands, and the muscled solidness of the body beneath hers. It was something to bask in and explore.

  There was no camera separating her from the experience. It wasn’t enough simply to record it; she had to participate to feel for herself the springy thickness of his hair, taste the sharp tang of aftershave on his skin, and glory in the half-strangled moan that slipped from him when she nibbled at his ear.

  In the next breath, the tables were turned and Trey was the one administering the love nibbles, igniting a series of thrilling shivers radiating from them and eliciting a groaning sigh of her own. Then his mouth was there to swallow the sigh and claim her lips.

  When she felt the first invading touch of his hands sliding under her top, she drew in a quick breath that was all pleasure. It wasn’t something she had known she wanted until she felt the splaying of his hands over her skin. The stretchy fabric of her sports bra acted like a second skin when he molded his hand to the underswell of her breast, his thumb making a stroking search to find the hard nubbin of her nipple. Sensation spiraled through her, and the ache grew.