Eve shook her head. “No. I don’t want…I…”
“With my body I thee worship,” he murmured, cutting off her confused denial. The look in his eyes was possessive now, sparked with keen anticipation, simmering with heat as his gaze wandered over her face and throat and the soft swell of her breasts beneath the yellow silk dress. “That was another one of the vows I made to you today.” He reached across the table and touched her, catching her chin on his curled finger, brushing his thumb over her full lips, making her think of their one and only kiss. That soft, sweet kiss that had made her lips tingle. As they were tingling now.
She took a quick, unsteady breath.
“I’ll do my best to make you feel worshiped, Eve,” he promised, his voice a low, throaty growl.
Eve swallowed, trying to ease the sudden dryness in her mouth. Beneath the table, she pressed a hand to her stomach, trying to ease the knot that had formed there. “I—”
“Sorry to interrupt your sparkin’, sugar,” Margo said heerfully, flashing a smile at Travis as she propped the edge of her laden tray on the table and began unloading the steaming plates of food and frosty glasses of ice tea. “But you’ll have plenty of time for that later, and you know how cranky Mel gets if you don’t eat his food when it’s pipin’ hot. Come on, girls,” she hollered, raising her voice to be heard above the sound of Elvis Presley crooning “Love Me Tender.” “You, too, Gus. Come and get it before I throw it out.”
She slid the last plate onto the table, then bent down a little. “You eat real hearty, Eve,” she said, just loud enough so only Eve and Travis could hear her. “Rumor has it that this here cowboy is one wild ride. He’s got more stamina than a Brahman bull and—” She smacked Travis lightly on the shoulder with her tray. “More moves than a rank horse. ‘Course, I guess you’d know that already, wouldn’t you?” Her gaze flickered toward the baby who lay gurgling in his stroller and she raised one eyebrow.
Eve blushed and looked down at her plate.
Travis grinned.
Margo chuckled and turned away from the table, tucking her empty tray under her arm as she sashayed back to the kitchen.
Travis picked up his fork, holding it poised above his plate. “Eve?” he murmured, waiting until his blushing bride looked at him.
“What?” she asked when he didn’t immediately say anything.
He gave her a wicked little smile, brimming with laughter, overflowing with self-confident charm, rife with teasing innuendo. “Eat hearty, darlin’,” he said, and dug into the food on his plate like the hungry man he’d claimed to be.
6
RUMOR HAS IT that this here cowboy is one wild ride…
I’ll do my best to make you feel worshiped.
Standing in her plain white cotton nightgown in the middle of the master bedroom, staring at the quiltcovered four-poster that had been the wedding bed for four generations of Holt brides and was now going to be hers, Eve didn’t know which prospect scared her the most.
Once she’d made her decision and accepted the proposal of the man she’d thought had answered her letters, she had resolutely refused to dwell on the wedding night, or let herself imagine it to be any but the most prosaic of events. She envisioned the consummation as a simple physical act devoid of emotion, carried out in silence, in the dark, any bare flesh safely out of sight beneath the blankets. At best, it would be restrained, sedate, and quickly over. At worst, it would be awkward, embarrassing, and possibly, even a bit painful. Whatever it was, she’d get through it and over it, and go on with life.
How bad could it be, really? She wasn’t a naive ingenue, scared out of her wits by the mysteries of the conjugal bed. She was a mature, experienced woman. A mother.
HER FIRST LOOK at Travis Holt, standing there in the cheerful kitchen of the Rocking H had caused her to reevaluate her expectations; there was nothing ordinary or sedate about the tall, outrageously good looking cowboy who stood in the open doorway, scowling at her with an expression on his face that was equal parts suspicion and blatant sexual speculation. Their first conversation had proved him to be far less simple than she’d imagined, too. But it wasn’t until he’d grinned at her over the width of the gingham-covered table at the Double M Cafe, with that wickedly roguish look on his face and his brown eyes gleaming with anticipation and sensual promise, that she’d finally had to dismiss her comforting little wedding night scenario from her mind.
Her husband wasn’t the shy, inarticulate, salt-of-theearth cowpoke the article in Texas Men had led her to hope for.
He wasn’t the unyielding, steely eyed gunslinger the accompanying picture had made her fear, either.
He was the reckless young cowboy of a hundred thrilling Westerns, the one who rode into town on Saturday night with his spurs jingling and his duster swept back behind his six-guns; the confident, cocksure charmer who had every saloon girl hoping she’d be the one he’d take upstairs with him after the poker game.
And Eve knew, instinctively, that he wouldn’t be satisfied with a quick, furtive union under the covers. Like that brash, brazen cowboy of legend and myth, he’d want passion and heat in his bed. He’d be all flash and fire; a hot-eyed, hot-blooded, tempestuous male in the lusty prime of his life, eager to show off and revel in his repertoire of amorous skills. He’d want her to appreciate those skills. Fully. To enjoy them. Completely. And to reciprocate with skill and flash and fire of her own.
And she couldn’t.
She just couldn’t.
She didn’t want a night of wild, unrestrained passion, not with a man she barely knew! Neither did she want the sham of some imaginary romance in which she played the beloved bride and he the adoring, worshipping groom. She wanted her wedding night to be what it was, the simple, physical joining of two bodies unencumbered by any grand passion or romantic expectations. She didn’t need passion and romance, didn’t want them. They only clouded the issue and made the truth harder to deal with.
The truth was that she had married a total stranger. A stranger she was going to take into her arms and into her body after having known him for less than fortyeight hours. And no amount of romantic fantasy or wishful thinking was going to change that reality.
Hoping he’d fall asleep out there on the front porch wasn’t going to change things, either, she told herself sternly.
It was time to invite him into the bedroom and get it over with.
Still, she hesitated, wanting to delay the inevitable just a few moments longer. She crossed the width of the bedroom to the tiny alcove that had been hastily converted from sitting area to nursery and checked on Timothy. She’d given him his last feeding before she’d taken her bath, urging him to nurse even longer than usual to make sure her breasts were completely empty and he was completely full before she put him down to sleep in his crib. Unless the unaccustomed quiet of the country woke him, he would sleep soundly until six or six-thirty in the morning, leaving his mother and his new father with plenty of uninterrupted time to get to know each other. Intimately.
Knowing she couldn’t, in good conscience, make Travis wait any longer to claim the rights she’d given him, Eve went to the window and pushed aside the heavy lace curtain.
He was standing with his back to the house, one broad shoulder propped against a slender upright col umn at the top of the porch stairs, one booted ankle crossed over the other. He was staring out at the moonlit-shadowed landscape. The soft glow of the globed porch light cast him in sharp relief, like a Frederic Remington sculpture lit by a master hand, highlighting the solid width of his shoulders, the clean, broad sweep of his back, the length of his lean horseman’s legs. Moonlight shimmered off the narrow braided silver band that encircled the crown of his Stetson and turned the silky blond hair peeking out from under the edge of the hat to warm gold. It picked out the details of the embossed design on the back of his wide leather belt, glinted off the metal rivets in the frayed pockets of his faded jeans, and glittered off the blunted rowels of his spurs.
Her friend Barbara had been right on the money about one thing, Eve thought as she stood there staring at him. His shoulders were at least a yard wide and he did have a cute little butt. She just hoped Barbara was right about the rest of it, too. She hoped he’d be worth all the trouble he was sure to bring her.
Taking a quick, quiet breath, Eve lifted her hand and tapped lightly on the window.
Travis turned his head toward the sound, unerringly focusing on her face through the wavy old glass. They stared at each other for a long five seconds—silent, questioning. And then Eve nodded, just once, giving a wordless response to his unvoiced query, then dropped the curtain back into place. She heard his boot heels on the wooden porch, the muted music of the jinglebobs on his spurs, the soft screech of the metal hinges as he opened the screen door. There was a moment’s pause, a brief silence. The screen door hadn’t immediately closed behind him as she’d expected, and Eve realized he must be removing his boots in compliance with a ranch rule she’d already learned. No spurs in the house beyond the kitchen; they scratched the floors and furniture.
She pictured him standing out there on the porch, one hand holding on to the screen door for balance, using the shank of each spur to lever the boots off his feet the way she’d seen him do that afternoon when he’d come in from the corral to get ready for their wedding. It was only a moment or two before she heard the soft screech of the screen door closing behind him and the snick of the hook-and-eye latch as he secured it against the summer night.
Eve knew she should go to the bedroom door, that she should open it for him, and smile and bid him welcome like the good wife she intended to be. It was always best, she felt, to begin as you meant to go on—and she truly meant for the marriage to be real, in every sense of the word. But the age-old feminine instinct for self-preservation was stronger than good intentions and she stood, rooted to the floor in front of the lace-draped window, straining to hear the muffled sound of his footfalls as he crossed the rag rug in the front hall. Her breath whispered raggedly in and out of her lungs, her gaze was glued to the fancifully wrought glass doorknob as she waited for it to turn under his hand.
When it did, she reached up and pressed one hand flat against her chest, as if trying to contain the frantic beating of her heart. And then the door opened. Old wood creaked against old wood and he stepped into the room, still booted, with his spurs dangling from one hand and his broad-brimmed cowboy hat hiding his eyes. He closed the door behind him.
Eve sucked in her breath and held it, unable to do anything more than stand there and wait for him to make his desires known. And hope to hell she could satisfy them without giving away—or losing—too much of herself in the process.
TRAVIS STOOD and stared at her from beneath the brim of his hat for a long, considering moment, searching her face, trying to find a clue to the essence of this woman who was, incredibly, his wife. She wasn’t what he would have chosen, Lord knew, and he wasn’t in love with her. But she was the woman he had married, for better or for worse, and he was a man who always made the best of any situation. He always tried to look on the bright side of things. The best possible situation would be, of course, for him to fall in love with her, and she with him. Perhaps that would come in time. The bright side was that she was standing less than ten feet away, waiting docilely for him to exercise his husbandly prerogatives.
And, Lord, just looking at her…She was lush and voluptuous, and there was something tantalizingly exotic in the angle of her cheekbones and the tilt of her vivid blue eyes. Her fiery red hair tumbled to her shoulders in a mass of springy curls, as thick and tangled as a mustang’s mane. Her head was thrown back slightly. Her nostrils were flared. Her eyes were wide and wary. Her full lips were pressed together to still their trembling. Her delectable body quivered with nervousness under the sleeveless white nightgown.
She had a right to be nervous, he figured. Under the circumstances, just about any woman would be, if she had any brains at all. And he suspected that this one was plenty smart.
Travis knew how to handle nervous women, though. How to gentle them. How to put them at their ease. He knew just how to coax them along: how to change that quivering nervousness into hesitant curiosity; the curiosity into eager anticipation; the anticipation into delicious shivers of excitement; the excitement into passionate demand.
He was smart enough not to say so out loud—at least not where a female of the species could overhear him-but calming a nervous woman was a lot like settling a nervous horse. He’d been dealing with nervous horses all his life, and nervous women since that memorable night in the cab of his daddy’s pickup when he’d sweettalked Chrissie Madison into letting him put his hand under her skirt. Less than a year later, that same easy going, slow-talking charm—and a first-place buckle in the bull riding event—had coaxed a coquettish little barrel racer into helping him lose his virginity at the ripe old age of sixteen, in the back of an empty horse trailer.
It was a knack, his father always said proudly, meaning Travis’s uncanny ability with horses. Some men had it; some didn’t. Travis had been born with it, and it hadn’t taken much to realize that a soft, sooth ing voice, a gentle touch, a little patience and a few diversionary tactics worked wonders whether the female in question was equine or human. He put what he knew to work for Eve…for both of them.
Slowly, carefully, as if she was an untamed young mare who would spook if he moved too fast, Travis sauntered over to the foot of the big four-poster and reached up, looping the heel chain of his spurs over the spindled top of the bedpost. He took off his Stetson hat and hung it on the same post. Then, deliberately, he turned to look at his wife again, without the brim of his hat hiding his eyes.
Standing very still, he let his gaze wander over the exotic planes and angles of her face, down the slim, el egant column of her throat, to the full, firm breasts pressing against the front of her cotton gown, to the shadowed curve of her waist and the swell of her hips, all maddeningly, inaccurately, incompletely exposed by the dim, wavering light shining through the window behind her. He took his time looking, letting her see him do it, letting her watch the heat build, drawing it out until her little pink toes curled against the bare wooden floor and her pulse hammered in the delicate hollow of her throat. Then he lifted his gaze to hers and smiled, slow and sweet.
“The baby get to sleep all right?” he asked softly, casually lifting one hand to the row of pearl snaps marching down the front of his chambray shirt.
“Ah…yes,” Eve said, thrown by the discrepancy between the question and the smile; they didn’t fit with the intense, heated look in his eyes. “He went out like a light as soon as I put him down,” she said, her gaze darting back and forth between his face and the hand that was slowly, casually, unfastening one pearl snap after another. “He’ll probably sleep right through the night.”
Travis nodded absently, as if he weren’t inordinately pleased to hear that reassuring bit of information. “Good.” The possibility of a baby interrupting his lovemaking wasn’t something he’d ever had to contend with before. “That’s real good.” Snaps undone, he slipped his hand inside the loosened placket of his shirt and scratched lazily at the golden whorls of hair covering his chest. “I’ve heard babies don’t always sleep real well in new surroundings.”
“I guess that’s true for some babies,” Eve said, simply to have something, anything, to say. “But Timothy always sleeps just—”
Travis had begun pulling the tail of his shirt out of the waistband of his jeans. When he reached around be hind him to pull the shirt free, the hard mounds of his pectorals and the long, smooth muscles in his stomach flexed and rippled.
“He sleeps just fine,” she concluded weakly.
Travis ducked his head a bit, hiding a pleased grin. He wasn’t a vain man. At least, no more so than any other champion rodeo cowboy. And it wasn’t vanity for a man to acknowledge the power of his appeal to the opposite sex. The simple fact was, more than one woman had turned giddy wit
h lust at the sight of his bare chest; he knew that. Not that he expected giddiness from his little mail-order bride; she was too nervous and too controlled for that. The way she’d caught her breath suited him just fine, for now. And the lustful giddiness would come later, he promised himself, when he had her beneath him in bed.
He yawned and stretched, rolling his shoulders like a big, lazy cat as he slipped out of his shirt. Letting it dangle from one hand, he moved toward her, casually, ostensibly heading for the large, armless rocking chair that sat to one side of the window where she stood. She was staring at him with that wary, wide-eyed look on her face. He stopped short of his goal, right in front of her.
WITH TRAVIS STILL in his boots and her in bare feet, he towered over her, making Eve feel tiny and vulnerable. His bare, sculpted chest seemed massive. His broad shoulders seemed far more than a just mere yard wide. The solid muscle of his right deltoid and the hard curve of his pectoral, from just under his right nipple to below his ribs, bore irregular ridges of jagged scar tissue, pearly white against the gold of his skin. The scars were old but savage, the result of an accident, not a surgeon’s scalpel.
She caught her breath. “What happened?” she whispered, unable to hold back the question.
Travis lifted his broad shoulders in a careless shrug. “I zigged when I should’ve zagged,” he said easily, automatically down-playing the incident that had ended his rodeo career. “Ol’ Vortex nicked me a good one.”
“Nicked you?” Eve lifted her gaze from the scars on his chest to his face. “You mean, you were gored?” She was incredulous, forgetting, for a moment, to be alarmed by his size and nearness. “By a bull?”
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