by Firebrand
“Not today you aren’t,” Letty said forcefully, giving Cade a jerk of her head that indicated he should vamoose.
“I think I’ll let you take over, Letty,” he agreed, and backed out of the bathroom before Rusty completely overpowered him. “Ah, Letty, where is my room?”
“Same place as this one, on the other wing of the house,” she answered. “And I’m thinking it’s a good thing. Out of here, now, before I decide to take off your clothes and turn the cold water on you full blast.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Red underwear!” she was grumbling in mock dismay. “Never worn red underwear in your life. What else did you do to get ready for a husband while you were in Salt Lake City, Willadean Wilder?”
Cade closed the bedroom door, a big foolish grin slashing his face. Sloshing down the hall, Cade decided that a cold shower wasn’t a bad idea. But he might want to wait for a while. Right now, all Letty would get if she doused him was steam.
Rusty opened her eyes, glanced over at the clock, and groaned. The sun was streaming through the window. It took her a moment to realize where she was: In bed, covered with two quilts and a spread.
She groaned.
Surely she’d been dreaming. Surely she wasn’t remembering what had happened.
Everything from the night before had a surrealistic quality about it. Before she’d left Salt Lake City, she’d gone shopping for underwear—red, feminine underwear. She’d smoked her first and only cigarette. She’d even marched into the airport bar and ordered a Scotch and water. Then she’d flown home through the beginning of a storm and crashed the plane. Worse than that, she had more than a vague recollection that she’d made a fool out of herself with Cade. How could she ever face him?
“Hi. Are you going to be my new mommy?”
Rusty followed the sound of the voice until she found its source—a child, a dark-eyed child with masses of jet-black curly hair and a mouth that seemed to ask a permanent question.
“What?”
Rusty knew what the child had said. At least she thought she did. It was just that she and Cade had agreed that his daughter wouldn’t know about their plans. He didn’t want Pixie disappointed, he’d said.
“You look like Glenda, the good witch,” Pixie said solemnly. “I like Glenda. I like Dorothy too. Do you?”
“Oz! That’s where I am,” Rusty declared. “I took off from the Salt Lake City airport and landed, not in Kansas, but Oz. All I need is—”
“Pixie? Are you in here?”
“—the Scarecrow.”
The man sticking his long neck through the door qualified in every sense of the word. All he needed were strands of hay sticking out from beneath his neckline and his hat.
“Oh no,” Pixie said, climbing up on the side of Rusty’s bed. “That’s not the Scarecrow, that’s Eugene. He’s my friend. He’s probably brought you some Tundra Tonic. He makes it, you know, and it’s very good for what ails you.”
Rusty closed her eyes.
When she opened them, the door was wide open, and Letty was standing there, glaring at both the child and the odd-looking man. “And I’m the wicked Witch of the West,” she said with a snort. “If you two don’t get down to breakfast, I’m going to put a spell on you.”
Pixie giggled and slid down from the bed. She started toward the door, ran back, and gave Rusty a quick kiss on her cheek. “I think I’m going to like living in Oz. Thank you for hiring my daddy.”
“Pixie,” Rusty called out, pushing herself to a sitting position. “Who told you that I was going to be your mommy?”
“Oh, I heard Mr. Doak and another man down at the barn talking when I went down to see the bull. I like Pretty Boy too. He’s nice. He got very mad when my daddy made me leave.”
“So much for secrets,” Letty observed with an I-told-you-so click of her teeth as Pixie danced out the door. “Though I don’t know why I should expect the hands to keep their mouths shut when you two are up here in the shower taking off each other’s clothes as openly as a bare-bottomed lady at the Coyote Springs Saloon.”
“Then it’s true? Cade did carry me up here and—and put me in the shower?”
“Who knows? When I came in, you were both in the stall, and you were tearing at his clothes. It was not exactly—” Letty sighed dramatically—“ladylike behavior. Though if I were twenty-five years younger, I might wrestle you for him.”
Rusty threw her feet over the side of the bed and stood up. It was obvious that Cade had been right. She’d suffered a mild case of shock that had made her behave … strangely. Surely Cade understood that, even if Letty was having great fun with what had happened.
“Letty,” she began, “I thought that I explained to you what my plans for Mr. McCall are. He’s on a trial basis here. If at the end of six months I am—” she blushed, and forced herself to go on, “pregnant, we will get married.”
“Humph! Trial for what?”
Rusty swayed for a moment, feeling an unexpected light-headedness. Shock might have been a reasonable excuse for her behavior last night, but even she had difficulty making any such claims this morning. She squared her shoulders, glanced at the clock on her nightstand. “Ten o’clock! Why didn’t you call me earlier?”
“Well, after all the excitement, Cade said to let you sleep.”
“Cade doesn’t make the decisions around here.”
“Oh? Try telling the hands that.”
Rusty came to an abrupt stop and whirled around. “What do you mean by that?”
“Your bull broke out of the pasture about an hour ago, and Cade’s organized a roundup.”
“A roundup? I didn’t know Cade even knew how to ride.”
“Can’t say,” Letty mumbled airily. “But I guess your trial period will tell you lots of—things. Coffee’s on the stove.”
“Ohhhhh!” Rusty groaned. She dressed quickly, brushed her teeth, and ran a comb through her hair. “Organized a roundup. Ohhhhh!” What would an oil field drifter know about rounding up a bull? Why would Doak allow him to assume the responsibility anyway? Doak was the foreman. Well, he wasn’t exactly the foreman. She had never bestowed the official title on him. She could never bring herself to go that far. It was one of the ways she made certain that she maintained authority. But Cade?
Before Letty got down the stairs and poured the coffee, Rusty was charging out the back door. At the barn the men were already mounted and gathered around Cade, who was standing in the Jeep.
“You know the land,” he was saying.
Rusty pushed through the riders. “What’s going on?”
“Good morning, Mrs. Wilder.” Cade gave her a quick smile, then replaced it with a serious expression and a businesslike nod. “We’re about ready to go here.”
“Why didn’t you let me know what happened?”
“Because we don’t know what happened. Only Pretty Boy can tell us when we find him, and we need to get to it before he gets any farther away. Doak, I’ll let you give the boys their directions.”
Cade stepped down and held out his hand to Rusty, who found herself offering her own before she realized that she was following his orders too. “But—” she started.
“No!” Cade said under his breath, and shook his head.
After a brief moment of surprise Doak cleared his throat and began assigning sections of land for each group to cover. “If you find him, fire two shots, wait, and fire two more. If there is a problem, fire rapidly in bursts. The truck will get as close to you as possible. Understood?”
The men nodded, glanced back at Rusty, and began to disperse. Rusty, unable to hold her tongue any longer, turned to Cade.
“How dare you make decisions around here! You have no right. No right to stop me either, McCall!”
Cade sat down and started the engine on the Jeep. “Sit down, Willadean.”
“Don’t call me that! And I won’t sit if I don’t want to.”
“Suit yourself.” He put the Jeep in gear and gave it gas, b
iting back the ripple of a smile in the corners of his mouth when Rusty fell back with a jolt. “Why don’t you have two-way radios, at least for Doak and yourself?”
“Because—because we don’t need them.”
“You don’t?”
“Well, we never have before. Where are we going?”
“To find your bull.”
“What makes you think you know where he is?”
Cade drove rapidly across the pasture and up the slope of the ridge that curved around the lower bottleneck of land through which her plane had dropped the night before. Rusty closed her eyes and winced as they passed the plane, its wing digging in the ground, its tail wedged into the side of the hangar wall.
“I don’t know where he is, but I thought we’d find the highest spot around and wait.”
“I can’t sit here and wait while my men look.”
“Why not? Don’t you have good men?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And isn’t Doak your right-hand man?”
“Yes, but—”
“But the bottom line is that you don’t really trust him, or is it that you’re afraid to delegate authority on the chance that your hands can perform their jobs without you looking over their shoulders?”
Cade drove the Jeep as far up the ridge as he could and brought it to a stop. He didn’t know why he was being so hard on her except that he’d been worried that she’d decided to lead the hands.
Turning, he allowed himself to take a long look at Rusty Wilder. He’d thought his memory had played tricks on him last night. She couldn’t possibly be as beautiful and as full of fire as he’d thought. But she was. When her plane had slammed into the hangar, he’d felt something deep inside tear, and he’d lost control.
The men he’d worked with had called him distant. But he’d known the truth. He was frozen inside. As long as he refused to allow any emotion to touch him, the wall of ice he’d created remained intact. First Pixie had come and begun chipping away at it, and then last night Rusty had put a big crack in it, so much so that the feared melting had begun in earnest.
Cade felt like the little Dutch boy with his thumb in the hole in the dike, and every time he looked at Rusty another hole appeared. If Letty hadn’t interrupted, he’d have taken Rusty to bed and made love to her all night long. There was no doubt about that. And she would have let him. He couldn’t have been wrong about her response. She’d been as caught up in desire as he. Had his explanation been right? Had she been suffering from shock? That was likely. And that was the trouble.
For most of the night he’d wrestled with the problem. Why was he having qualms about what had almost happened? If the goal of his being with Rusty was to produce a child, why would making love to her have been wrong? She wanted him; he had no doubt of that. He wanted her. Even now his body reminded him of that fact. Then why?
He didn’t know, and that was what was bothering him. So far he’d spent two nights on Silverwild, and he hadn’t slept for more than a few hours all told. Sooner or later he’d have to find an answer.
The sun was bright and warm this morning. In the distance the fresh snow on the Wasatch Mountain range glistened. Rusty couldn’t look at Cade. She focused her gaze on the snow. If only there were more snow, so many of her problems would be solved.
At least that’s what she would have said last week.
Now Cade McCall had just forced her to look at another problem, one he was creating with his interference. Of course she should be out there with her men. They expected her there. They were a team. She’d always directed them. They’d never given her any back talk about her orders. They simply followed them, silently, without comment.
Still, she couldn’t help but think about the moment back there when Doak had been handing out assignments. The men had talked to him, verified, asked questions. They never did that with her. But that didn’t mean anything. They were just making certain they understood what he’d told them. Cade’s implication that she didn’t trust Doak had been an unnecessary dig. Doak knew she had confidence in him.
“Of course I trust Doak,” she said into the long silence.
“But you don’t let him make decisions.”
“What business is that of yours, McCall?”
“None, now, but what happens when you’re carrying our child?”
Rusty let out a surprised breath as she unclenched the hand that was holding on to the door of the Jeep. “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“Maybe” was his only comment.
“Damn you, Cade McCall,” she finally said. “You’ve only just come here, and already you’re trying to do the very thing I explicitly warned you against.”
“What’s that?”
“Take over Silverwild. I am in charge, and I’ll stay in charge.”
“I know,” he admitted, and after a long while turned toward her with genuine regret in his eyes. “You’re right, and I’m sorry.”
“You are?” An apology was totally unexpected. He was still looking at her with regret. This morning his dark eyes seemed old, very old, as if he’d witnessed the passage of a thousand years and stored those visions somewhere deep inside. There was pain there, and maybe acceptance. She felt her heart pounding and caught her breath. The silence magnified its beat until it seemed to reverberate across the hills and slam against her like the beat of ancient drums.
“You know that I wanted to make love to you last night so badly it hurt. I would have if Letty hadn’t come,” he said.
“I know.”
She was finding it hard to talk. The focus had changed from what was happening now to what had happened last night. She’d known from the first time their eyes met this morning that it was still between them, as strong as it had been then.
“And it would have been wrong,” he said.
“Why? That’s what you were hired for.”
“I know.” He broke their eye contact and got out of the Jeep.
She watched him for a moment as he walked up the hill, then scrambled after him, reaching him as he came to a stop at the top of the rise.
“Silverwild is very beautiful. I can understand why you want it to go on forever.”
“Then why was it wrong?” Rusty asked again, deliberately looking out across the range, forcing herself to close out the overwhelming physical compulsion she experienced every time they came together. “I wanted you, McCall, and it had nothing to do with the accident. That’s something new for me.”
“I thought it might be.”
“Cade.”
This time they turned at the same time. Rusty met his stare and held it defiantly. She didn’t know where they were heading, but she knew that he was her answer, her question, and her resolution. She wouldn’t allow him to back away.
“Are you sure you want me to stay? You can still change your mind.” His eyes went even darker as he asked the question.
Rusty nodded. She brought her hand to his chin and rubbed her fingertips along the rough stubble of his beard. She felt a strange lightness, as if the height on the mountainside might be affecting her balance. A gust of cold air caught at her hair and billowed it behind her.
Cade waited, willing himself not to move.
Rusty’s fingers slid down his cheek, around his chin, and rimmed his lips. She marveled at the weathered look of the man. He was like stone—immobile, tense. She had the feeling that if he ever let go, she’d be caught up in the fury of his release like a prairie fire fanned by a crosswind. Down his chin, under his neck to the opening of his shirt her fingertips moved slowly, as if she were measuring the strength of his will.
Heat, more heat, boiling heat was flowing across every nerve ending of her body. Lust, desire, the kind she’d never known before. She knew only that she was on fire and that the man she was touching was chiseled ice beneath her touch. She shivered.
Cade felt Rusty’s shiver. His body was wired, his control stretched to the breaking point. The sunlight danced about her h
air, fanning little points of light into a blazing fire that licked at every part of his mind. Her touch was light, but he knew that he was lost. He had been from the first moment he’d seen her in the airport.
This kind of instant desire didn’t happen. If it did, it flared up and burned itself out. This intense feeling couldn’t survive the heat of its passion. But his desire intensified with every touch. He was like the atomic reactor without the cool-down tank, and sooner or later he would explode.
What was holding him back?
“What are you afraid of, McCall?”
“You, myself, us.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He watched as her breathing quickened, her lips trembled, her eyes widened.
“Don’t do this, Rusty. Not unless you want me to lose all my control.”
“Why should I spare you? I’ve already lost mine.”
Abruptly he reached out, slid his thigh between her legs, and jerked her forward as he crushed her lips savagely beneath his. The intimacy was overwhelming. She felt him harden against her leg. He was clasping her against him, arching her body into his as he shattered her with the power of his desire.
A riot of sensation exploded through her body and into every part of her. He was claiming all, and she was giving all. Cade McCall was the master—her master. That knowledge shot through her like the sound of a bullet. She felt her body lurch. Bullet—bullets? What she was hearing was gunshots.
“McCall, stop!”
Cade drew back. “What’s wrong? Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Rusty drew a deep breath and slid back, separating her protesting body from Cade. “Listen, Cade, the shots. They’ve found Pretty Boy.” She turned away, still breathing hard, and stumbled to the Jeep. “We have to go. You drive, please. I don’t think I can.”
Cade closed his eyes and tried to regain control. The devil. He was sure his first suspicions were right. Rusty Wilder was a messenger from Satan, and she’d already claimed his soul. As he moved back to the Jeep and started the engine, he desperately tried to remember what happened to Faust.
In the end it didn’t matter. He’d already been branded by her flame.