“God!” Lauren gasped when she was able to speak. “What is this? I’ve never seen anything like this in my life!”
“Indians call this a male rain,” said Bronco with a half smile. “All sound and fury and not much use to anybody.”
She smiled her appreciation. “What’s a female rain?”
“Gentle,” he said. “Nurturing. It feeds the earth and makes things grow.”
“Ah.” For a long lingering moment her eyes rested on his face, and then she pulled them abruptly away. Even without touching her he felt her begin to shiver.
“Better get out of those wet clothes before you catch pneumonia.” He untied the poncho from the back of the saddle and gave it a shake. “Put this on. We’ll lay your clothes out on the rocks. Back in here where it’s dry there’s enough heat left in ’em-they’ll probably be dry by morning.”
She nodded, and he started to drop the poncho over her head-then stopped when they both realized her T-shirt was going to have to come off first. She hesitated for one awkward moment, then swiftly yanked the sodden thing up and off. “Okay.” It was a breathless whisper, felt rather than heard.
Proud of his stoicism, Bronco gazed silently at the hard tips of her breasts as he lifted the poncho and let it fall onto her bare shoulders.
“But,” she said in a jerky voice he could barely hear above the noise of the slackening rain, “you’re wet, too.”
“I’m fine,” he said, as gruff and macho as he could make it, valiantly suppressing his own shivers.
Apparently not well enough. Because the next thing he heard was, “You’re freezing.” And then, with shivers bumping the words, “I’m…c-cold.” He turned slowly to look at her. In the waning light beneath the overhang her face looked small and drowned, her eyes huge. “There’s room for both of us,” she said.
He held his breath as she tossed the T-shirt toward the nearest rock, then slowly bent and pulled off one of her boots. After a moment, almost in imitation, he pulled one off, too.
Then suddenly it seemed as if they couldn’t get their clothes off fast enough-either of them. Her breath came in desperate whimpers, his in soft grunts, and their shivers seemed to intensify even as the storm around them slackened. When they were both naked, she lifted the poncho and he ducked under it and came up with his mouth hard on hers, his arms wrapped around her chilled body and her breasts firm and cold against his chest.
What happened then he didn’t expect-could never have even imagined, much less prepared for. He felt something inside him, some fragile vessel of sanity and self-control, break, shatter, burst or simply disintegrate. And suddenly set free were all the feelings, all the passion, all the emotions he’d been keeping there, locked safe inside, set free to pour through him in a raging, devastating, terrifying flood. What was he to do with such feelings? He couldn’t possibly contain such emotions, control such passion. Not since he was a child had he been called upon to try.
Fear and longing tore through him and erupted in a gut- wrenching groan. Her body was so strong and vibrant, so soft and fragile in his arms. He couldn’t hold her tightly enough, touch her completely enough. Oh, how he wanted her. Wanted to be inside her, wanted her inside him, wanted her with a wild and desperate hunger. But how could he bear it if he hurt her now?
Her breath gushed in helpless whimpers as he reached for her, cupped her with his hand, felt with his fingers for her wet yielding softness. He drank in her whimpers with a growl of masculine triumph as he pushed deep, deep inside her, aching inside himself, needing to be inside her, needing…needing…
Her whimpers became a high continuous keening, and he felt her body come apart in his hands. He would have used those same hands, then, to hold her together and comfort her while she collapsed against him with soul-stirring sobs. That’s what he would have done. But the next thing he knew her arms were twined around his neck and her legs clasped around his hips, and her warm and still-pulsating feminine softness was pressed against his hot and throbbing shaft, and he desperately feared, was utterly certain, that he was lost.
No! With one wild anguished cry he summoned all his strength, all the tattered remains of his will and his honor. Throwing his head back until the cords of his neck felt like cast iron, he wrenched himself away from that sweet comfort and raised her high in his arms, lifting her onto a chest-high boulder and pulling her legs over his shoulders. Holding her open to him, he sank into her softness, buried himself in her, his face, his mouth, his tongue.
He held her while her body bucked and writhed, arched and tightened like a drawn bow. And then she screamed, a cry of feminine terror, total surrender and a wild and savage joy.
Shaken, he clutched her to him, rocking her and murmuring words of comfort and contrition into her hair. But sobbing, she slithered out of his grasp and downward along his body, and he felt the coolness of her tears on his fevered flesh-and then her mouth. And with a groan he gave himself up to her, knowing his only salvation lay in a quick and cataclysmic release.
Bronco watched the first rays of the sun streak across the shoulders of the Sacred Mountain and tried to think whether he’d ever done such a thing before-ever slept all night with a woman in his arms and watched the sunrise with the sweet scent of her in his nostrils and her warm breath pooling on his skin. He didn’t think so; if he had, he’d have surely remembered it.
He wasn’t aware of having made any noise, but Lauren stirred and gave a vocal yawn, a good-humored waking-up sound. She raised her head and looked at him with the untroubled gaze of a small child, and then casually, as if it was something she did every day of her life, leaned down and kissed him.
Before he could identify the unfamiliar flutterings that action generated in his heart, before the first drumbeats of response deep in his belly had time to find their own rhythm, she lifted her head and looked beyond him at the vista of the plateau spread out below and breathed a single word. “Wow.”
For a few minutes she didn’t say anything more, while the sun splashed gold across the purple land and edged the tattered scraps of last night’s storm clouds with coral, pink and mauve. And then she caught her breath. “Look. Is that…?” Far out on the lightening plateau, a cloud of dust rose and caught the sunlight and became a plume of gold.
“Looks like the wild horse herd,” Bronco said just as a piercing whinny from directly below them confirmed it.
“Oh,” Lauren whispered, “it’s so beautiful.”
Something clutched at Bronco’s heart-a longing for, a hope of, a tiny glimpse of heaven. With tightening throat he muttered, “I’ve always thought so.”
Her eyes came back to him, bright and full of smiles. Since he was beginning to realize she was one of those people who woke up fast, fresh as a daisy and ready to meet the day, he put a warning hand on her shoulder and said gruffly, “Careful-don’t sit up too suddenly.”
She cringed in the process of doing just that and squinted over her shoulder at the solid rock just inches above her head. “Oh, wow,” she said. “We’re a rock sandwich.”
Bronco laughed; he supposed she hadn’t realized when he’d squeezed them in here last night how narrow the crevice was. He’d forgotten himself. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “When I was a kid you could sit up in here. It’s gotten a lot smaller. Here-if we move farther out, we’ll be okay.”
He’d made their bed in the narrow space where a second slab of rock overlapped the upper side of the protruding boulder, leaving the sheltered place below for the horses. There hadn’t been a flat space large enough for two to stretch out under the overhang, anyway. The crevice had made a cozy enough bed, once he’d eliminated any possibility of rattlers.
Now, on his elbows he scooted himself and the blanket backward out of the crevice and onto the ledge. Lauren moved with him, pulling, tugging and straightening, until they were clear of the overhang. Then she stretched her arms over her head and drew her legs into a cross-legged sitting position.
“So,” she sa
id, looking around with bright-eyed curiosity, “this is another one of your childhood haunts.”
He couldn’t answer immediately, distracted as he was by the incredibly arousing vision of her long pale legs and firm round breasts just barely covered by the drape of one of his old undershirts. As sudden and breathtaking as a punch in the gut came the memory of those legs coiled around him last night, and the whisper-soft brush of her thigh against his cheek, the scent and taste of her, that wild primitive cry.
“Let me guess. I’ll bet you called this Lookout Rock.” She was smiling at him, fresh and sweet as the new day.
Bronco shook his head, and not only because she’d guessed wrong about the name. He was feeling a little light-headed and having some trouble reconciling this morning’s Lauren, wholesome as milk and cornflakes, with last night’s mind-blowing, self-control-shattering wanton.
“In a way I guess it was a lookout,” he said, struggling to a sitting position himself. “But my cousins and I used to call it the Smoking Rock-not in the presence of any grown-ups, though.”
“Really? Smoking Rock…” She tilted her head, intrigued.
“We called it that,” Bronco drawled, half smiling, “because this is where we’d come to smoke the cigarettes we’d stolen from our elders. And eat the cookies we’d swiped from Grandmother Rose’s kitchen so she wouldn’t smell the tobacco on our breath.”
“Dang,” exclaimed Lauren, laughing, “you were a wild child.”
“Told you I was. Most all the stories you’ll hear people tell about me are true-and a lot more nobody knows about but me.” He listened to his own words and felt a cold shell creep back around his heart. After a moment he threw her a smile that now felt strained and tight. “What about you, Laurie Brown? You ever do anything bad when you were a kid? Not even bad, just…you know, naughty, a little wild and crazy.”
“Before I met you, you mean?” she said dryly, then frowned at her hands, laced together across the open space between her knees. “I think I was a spoiled brat when I was very small. But-” she drew herself up straight, in ironic demonstration of what she was saying “-I grew up fast after my folks split up. I became the classic ‘good girl,’ a model child. I did everything that was expected of me-valedictorian, college, law school…” She stopped, alarmed and suddenly fragile. She feared, if she spoke one more word, her face would crumple into tears.
The wave of emotion had taken her by surprise, coming out of nowhere just when she’d been feeling so happy, so carefree. But thinking of the child, the girl, the woman she’d been… So much had happened in so short a time, and she wasn’t that person anymore! And never would be again. And that realization filled her with a sudden sharp sense of loss, of regret and fear. Somehow, in her rush to escape from her old familiar life, she’d run herself into a blind alley, and now she didn’t know where to turn.
She became aware that Bronco had taken her hands, and that once again he was gently stroking her left ring finger.
His voice, normally so warm and deep, had a sharp and sandy edge. “Your engagement-was that expected of you, too?”
She pulled her hands away. “How did you know I was-”
He broke in with his familiar snort of laughter. “Shoot, it was in all the papers. Maybe a White House wedding, they said.”
Lauren looked away, words of explanation backing up behind the swelling in her throat. She swallowed, then swallowed again, before she heard him ask, “Why don’t you wear a ring?”
Then it was surprisingly easy to say, “I gave it back. Called it off.”
He wouldn’t leave it there but asked in that soft-rough voice, “How come?” She shook her head; tears had begun to stream silently down her face. “You decide you didn’t love him?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered, unable to look at him, wretchedly ashamed. “I thought I did. But I just realized one day that I wasn’t…happy. Not only that, I was miserably unhappy. Oh-” she brushed savagely, angrily at her cheeks “-I know how that must sound. Poor little overprivileged girl-the perfect life, the perfect family, the perfect fiancé-yes, even Benjamin was perfect! And I was unhappy? How dare I be unhappy! But I was. And in pursuit of happiness, I chucked it all-my job, my fiancé, my family… Oh God-” She clapped a hand over her mouth, cutting herself off in midsob. And she stared at him, awash in self-revelation, trembling with the shock of sudden understanding.
“That’s what she did,” she whispered, hollow and cold inside. Even her tears had stopped-she felt too frozen to cry. “That’s what she said-my mother-when she left us. She said she wanted, deserved, a chance to be happy. I guess I did exactly the same thing, didn’t I? God, it’s funny, all those years I tried so hard not to be like her-everyone said how selfish she was-so I was determined I wasn’t going to be like her. And in the end it turns out I’m just like her, after all. Isn’t that just too…ironic?” She tried to laugh, wanting desperately to cry, aching with self-loathing. Oh, how judgmental she’d been. How self-righteous. How steadfastly unforgiving.
“Don’t underestimate the pursuit of happiness,” Bronco said dryly. “It’s a powerful human imperative-right up there behind life and liberty.”
“I guess…I understand that now,” said Lauren in a whisper and a flood of freshening tears. “I just hope I get a chance to tell her someday…how sorry I am.”
There was a pause, and then Bronco reached behind him for the blanket and began rolling it into a tight bundle. “Time to go,” he said, and once again his voice was bear-rug soft and curiously gentle.
Lauren blinked the last of the tears from her eyes and rubbed them away with her fingers. She sniffed and asked, “Where, Bronco? Where are you taking me now?”
For a long time he looked at her, with eyes glowing black and deep, like a panther’s coat. Then…
“Home,” he said softly. “I’m taking you home.”
Chapter 13
The sun was climbing up a smoky sky splotched with gray and white clouds as they made their way across the plateau-taking a long slow time of it, it seemed to Lauren. What had appeared from above to be flat terrain had turned out to consist of undulating ridges separated by gulleys and washes and thickly dotted with cacti and numerous other species of inhospitable plant life. Though her impatience with their progress probably had more to do with the words Bronco had spoken to her just before they’d started out than their actual rate of travel.
Home. He was taking her home. He’d said so, and he had no reason to lie to her. Though where that home was or how he planned to get her there, she didn’t know; she couldn’t see him driving her up to her father’s doorstep, wherever he might be at the moment. The local police station seemed equally unlikely. On the other hand she couldn’t believe he planned to drop her off at the nearest phone booth or bus depot, either.
Home. The images in her mind and the longing in her heart evoked by that word had more to do with people’s faces than any particular place. She couldn’t wait to see them again-her father and Dixie, her brother and, yes, her mother, too. When this was all over, she told herself, just as soon as she could get to a telephone, she’d call. Yes, and tell her what? It had been such a long time; they were practically strangers. One phone call wasn’t going to mend sixteen years of anger and hurt, she knew that, but it was a start. It wasn’t too late. Now that this nightmare was all but over, once she got her life back, things would be different.
Different? Oh, everything was different now-for her. But what about Bronco? What was to become of him, this strange and contradictory man who’d kidnapped her, then saved her from almost certain death? Would he be in prison? Or assuming he was able to avoid capture, would he be off in some godforsaken wilderness camp planning further mayhem with another anti-government militia group? Or would he somehow manage to just go back to being John Bracco, half-Apache horse trainer with a driver’s license, credit cards and a drinking problem? And how could any of those scenarios possibly fit into her life?
The answer wa
s simple and unarguable. They couldn’t. He couldn’t. No way. End of story.
The end. Lauren’s stomach turned over and tears stung her eyes. The pain in her heart was so sharp and terrible she gave an involuntary gasp.
That got her a soft, “You okay back there?” from Bronco. Concerned about her lack of a hat, he’d insisted she wear the poncho over her head like a burnoose as protection against the broiling sun. As a consequence, she was in imminent danger of death by steam-cooking.
She gulped two quick breaths and was able to reply in a grumpy tone, “I’m fine. If you don’t count suffocation.”
“Leave that thing on. Can’t have you getting sunburned.”
“What difference does it make? Oh, I forgot,” she jokingly said, “I’m so valuable.”
He gave his dry ironic snort and muttered, “Not anymore,” as Red, responding to an unseen signal, broke into a gallop.
Lauren laughed, a sudden sunburst of joy. No, not anymore. She was no longer a hostage. He was taking her home.
In disobedience of orders, she let the poncho slip below her shoulders and lifted her head to give the cooling wind access to her sweat-damp hair. She watched Bronco’s long black hair, loose on his back, gently lifting and falling against the soft cotton fabric of his shirt with the rocking rhythm of the stallion’s gait. And she couldn’t resist the impulse to lay her face against it and breathe in the warm masculine scent of him one more time. Oh, please-not the last time. She loved the smell of him-clean salt-sweat, human and horse; sun and earth and pine needles and a hint of herbal soap. She would remember that smell for the rest of her life.
The two mares cantered by, tails lifted to the wind, feeling their oats. Their belated arrival earned them barely a whicker from a subdued Cochise Red; the long trek through mountains and storms had taken its toll on the stallion.
“They’re still with us,” Lauren said, raising her voice above the rush of the wind, the horses’ grunts, the thump of hooves and the squeak of saddle leather. She’d feared they might have run off with the wild horses, though to her intense disappointment she’d seen no sign of the herd since sunrise. They’d be going back to the high country where the good grazing was, Bronco had told her, now that the storm had passed.
The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda Page 20