by Diana Palmer
Maris drew a breath. “We get along, but there’s nothing…” The lie got stuck in her throat. “I despise gossip, and I’m surprised you’re listening to it.”
“If there’s no truth to it, it shouldn’t bother you.”
“You must believe it or you wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“That’s not true, Maris. I only wanted you to know about it.”
“So I could do what, Judd? Get all fired up and kick Luke off the ranch?” Disgustedly Maris pushed aside her unfinished soda. “I’m not going to tell him to leave. I need him to break those horses and he’s doing a darned good job of it. If the lily-white citizens of Whitehorn weren’t talking about me, they’d be talking about someone else. Maybe I’m doing someone I don’t even know a big favor.”
“Don’t be bitter, Maris.”
She laughed and it was indeed a bitter sound. “May we go now? I’m tired and would like to go home.”
Judd tried to make amends during the drive from town to Maris’s ranch. She replied to everything he said, but her tone of voice remained unrelentingly cool. Finally Judd came right out and apologized. “I’m sorry I even brought it up, Maris.”
“So am I, Judd,” she said wearily. No one could possibly grasp her situation. If she explained everything from her current financial picture to the sham her marriage really had been, they would understand, but even when things had been unbearable with Ray she’d kept her private life private. Occasionally she had unloaded on Lori, but even Lori didn’t know it all.
Other than one small light illuminating the kitchen window, the ranch was dark when they arrived. Obviously Keith and Luke had gone to bed, which she’d expected, as it was after ten. Judd walked her to the back door. “We’re still friends, aren’t we, Maris?”
“Yes, we’re still friends, Judd. I hope we always will be. Thank you for dinner. Good night.”
“Good night. I’ll drop by in a few days.”
“Do that.”
Judd walked off. Instead of going in, Maris stood with her hand on the doorknob and listened to his car driving away. She glanced behind her to the dark barn and thought of Luke in bed, undoubtedly sound asleep. There were faint noises in the night—the movements of the horses, the chirps of crickets in the grass, the rustling of leaves in a nearby tree.
She didn’t want to go in to her lonely bed. Her heart began fluttering wildly, because what she wanted to do was brazen and brash. But, standing there in the dark, she knew she was going to do it.
Feeling breathless and keyed up, she went to her car for the flashlight she kept under the seat. Getting to the barn in the dark wouldn’t be a problem, but once inside the pitch-black structure she would need a light. She left her purse in the car, then sped across the compound to the barn. Quietly opening one of its smaller doors, she stepped inside. The inky blackness was as she’d anticipated and she switched on the flashlight.
For a moment her courage deserted her, and she shook in her shoes while pondering how much she had changed since meeting Luke. Until Luke, Ray had been her one and only lover. Her high school and college boyfriends had never moved her enough to get past her strict morality. Ray had sweet-talked her into bed on their third date, but only because she had been so in love with him. She had been a stupid, gullible, naive girl to fall for Ray’s line of patter, although even now, in retrospect, she believed that he had loved her for a while. Their problems had begun when she’d happily settled into marriage and he couldn’t. Settling into anything for any length of time just wasn’t in his nature, she had ultimately learned.
A creaking noise in the old barn startled Maris back into the present. Nervously she shone the flashlight on the ladder to the loft. She wasn’t here only because she wanted a baby, she realized. Luke had brought an excitement into her life she couldn’t have imagined before experiencing it. His leaving in September was going to create a void that would take a lot of time to accept, but until then he was here and why should she deny herself the pleasure of being in his arms?
Quietly she crept up the ladder, then tiptoed across the wood floor to the door of the loft bedroom with her heart beating like a tom-tom. Maris slowly turned the knob and pushed the door open. Even without the flashlight she could make out Luke’s form in bed. He was on his left side, facing the window, which put his back to the door and her. His even, shallow breathing told her he was deep in sleep, and she wondered if she should just walk around the bed and awaken him, or if there was a better way.
That “better way” took shape in her mind. Before she could lose her nerve she laid the flashlight on a chair and started undressing. She did it quickly, piling her things on top of the flashlight and leaving her shoes on the floor. Naked and barefoot, she moved silently to the bed, cautiously lifted the blankets and then very slowly sat down. Her weight jiggled the bed slightly, but Luke never moved. Taking a very deep but very quiet breath, Maris stretched out and drew the blankets over herself.
Then she lay there with her heart pounding. It was a large bed and Luke was several feet away. She could probably stay here all night without his knowing it until he woke up in the morning.
But she hadn’t taken this daring, brazen step just to sleep on one side of the bed while Luke slept on the other. She began inching over, thinking that it was a wonder the hammering of her heart didn’t awaken Luke, as loud as it was in her own ears. The closer she got to him the more she felt his radiating warmth. It was what she needed, his heat, his passion.
She took the final slide and lay against his back, realizing with mounting excitement that he slept in the nude. Swallowing the choking sensation in her throat, she turned to her side and slid her arm across his waist, nestling her body against his. Her insides began the meltdown she had known would happen, and she started pressing kisses to his back and shoulders while the hand that was over him began caressing his chest and belly. He made an odd little sound, but Maris could tell he hadn’t yet awakened.
Her hand went lower, and when she was holding his manhood and it was getting hard and full in her grasp, she could no longer breathe silently. His hips began moving, thrusting himself against her hand, and his breathing wasn’t even and shallow as it had been before.
He came awake suddenly, startling Maris, raising up and turning over to pin her to the bed. He said nothing, but he found her lips in the dark and kissed her roughly, almost savagely. There were no other preliminaries before he kneed her legs apart and thrust into her, hard and fiercely. It was wild and crazy and the most erotic experience of Maris’s life. She writhed beneath him, moaning and whimpering, urging him on, arching to meet his tempestuous lunges.
Then the feverish pleasure began for Maris, the delicious spasms in her lower belly. She cried out. “Luke…Luke…” He finished only seconds later and collapsed upon her, weak and drained.
She lay with her eyes closed. It had happened so fast. Never could she have visualized her body performing with such haste.
Luke lifted his head and uttered one harsh word: “Why?”
Nervous suddenly, Maris swallowed. “Dare I be flip and ask why not?”
“You refused to talk about us today, then you come crawling into my bed tonight. Tell me why, Maris.”
He wasn’t speaking kindly. There was anger in his voice, and resentment. “You liked it, didn’t you?” she said.
“Hell, yes, I liked it. Any man would like it, but I still want to know why.” Luke was trying to make out her features in the dark. “What happened? Did your boyfriend get you all worked up and then leave you hanging?”
Maris gasped. “I told you Judd and I were only friends. Why won’t you believe that?”
“Because it sounds like a damned fairy tale,” Luke muttered, moving to the side of the bed to sit up. He grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the nightstand and tossed them to Maris. “You’re a sexy woman, and maybe I can’t see old Judd keeping his pants zipped for a whole evening with you.”
“For your information, Judd
has never even tried to kiss me!”
“Then maybe he doesn’t like women.” Moving quickly, Luke lay on top of her again, surprising Maris to a startled gasp.
“That is a reprehensible remark and this is a ridiculous conversation. Get off of me so I can get up.”
Luke studied her shadowed face. “No, I don’t think so. You started this, baby, but I’m going to finish it.”
“You already finished it!”
He chuckled softly, deep in his throat. “That was only round one, Maris. Round two is just coming up.”
She could feel what was “coming up,” quite distinctly. “Luke, it’s getting very late. I…I could come back tomorrow night.” And the night after that, as well, she thought. Three nights in a row during her fertile time would almost guarantee pregnancy.
And then an awful thought struck her. Luke was very careless about using protection. Maybe he, too, had had a vasectomy! Her body went limp. That was it, she thought morosely, the reason he made love without protection.
“Wonderful idea,” he whispered, bringing his mouth down to hers. “Tomorrow night and every night after that.”
Until you leave, Maris thought dully. Damn! She’d been naive again, gullible, dreaming her own silly little dreams, just as she’d done with Ray.
But then Luke’s kisses began seeping into her senses. He had the most incredible mouth, with lips that were both soft and firm, and a unique way of angling his head for a perfect union. The taste of him had her head spinning. His weight merely snuggled the configuration of his body into hers, and in mere seconds she was kissing him back and straining against his feverish skin with her hands locked together behind his head.
They kissed and cuddled and touched each other. Luke’s hands were everywhere, caressing her breasts, her thighs, her belly. She ran her fingertips over his muscular build, absorbing and reveling in his maleness. A disturbing thought crept through the pink haze of desire clouding her mind: she cared for him, maybe even loved him. No, no, a voice in her head cried. That wasn’t supposed to happen. She wasn’t ready to fall in love, and certainly not with a man of Luke’s transitory nature. Yet, spellbound by their intimacy, she couldn’t force herself to break away from his arms, his kisses, his hard, sexy body.
A second shock followed on the heels of that one. Luke abruptly raised his head and huskily whispered, “I’ve been really lax about protection, Maris. We don’t want you getting pregnant, do we? We won’t take any more chances. Don’t move, honey. Let me get something out of my wallet. I’ll only be a second.”
The bed was so large that he had to break all contact with her to reach his wallet on the nightstand. Sudden shock had Maris stiff and chilled. He hadn’t had a vasectomy. He was perfectly capable of making her pregnant, but now he was going to eliminate that possibility by using a condom. And fool that she was, she was falling in love with him, while to him she was merely a convenient and very easy lover!
Seared with humiliation, she scooted to the edge of the bed and got off of it. Luke turned. “What are you doing?”
Maris stumbled to where she’d left her clothes and began feeling around for her underwear. “I…I have to go.”
Frowning, Luke snapped on the bedside lamp, nearly blinding Maris for a minute. Blinking against the sudden infusion of light, she turned her back, quickly drew on her panties and reached for her bra. She could feel Luke’s stare and sensed his perplexity.
“Maris…” There was a note of confusion in his voice. “I don’t get it. What happened?”
“Nothing happened, except I realized just how late it really is,” she lied. This whole affair—the most appropriate name for their relationship—needed rethinking. She wasn’t going to get pregnant if he used protection, but what bothered her more was recognizing how emotionally involved she was becoming with Luke. He was going to leave at the end of September, and if she continued sleeping with him, making love with him, she was going to be in for some heavy-duty heartache.
Luke got up and yanked on a pair of jeans. “If this doesn’t take the damned cake, nothing does,” he muttered angrily.
Maris was hurrying into her dress, her blue-and-white checked shirtwaist that she’d worn for her dinner date with Judd. “You have no right to be angry with me,” she told Luke. “Nor any reason.”
“Lady, I didn’t come sneaking into your bed. You came to me!” He rounded the foot of the bed and stopped right in front of Maris. “Just what the hell is going on with you? You want me, you don’t want me. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“Blame it on hormones,” Maris mumbled, making sure her dress was buttoned and tidy.
“Extremely changeable hormones, apparently,” Luke said dryly. “Where do we go from here, Maris?”
She looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Where do we go? Where do you want us to go, Luke?”
“Well, I sure didn’t want everything to just stop cold like it did.”
“An evasive answer, if I ever heard one.” Buckling her belt around her waist was her final step in dressing, other than slipping into her shoes.
“Maris, you’re a hell of a lot more evasive than I could ever be,” Luke said darkly.
She couldn’t rebut such a blatant truth. Luke had promised her nothing and she was fully cognizant of his obsession with rodeo and his plans to return to the circuit as soon as possible. As for her role in this fiasco, she had been plotting and praying for pregnancy, using him and his body to accomplish her goal.
The whole damned plot was backfiring, which was probably no more than she deserved. Regardless, falling in love seemed to be an awfully high price to pay for a few days of fantasy.
Well, that was over. Any more fooling around with Luke would cause her nothing but future misery. Already just thinking of the day that he would drive away created an ache she damn well didn’t need.
Seeing that she was ready to go, Luke moved closer and put his hands on her shoulders to probe the depths of her eyes. “Be honest with me, Maris. Please. Tell me what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling.”
She certainly couldn’t tell him that she was falling in love with him, nor could she confess her foolish hopes of becoming pregnant.
Her gaze remained steady, though her knees were shaking. “You’re good in bed. I like making love with you.”
A bleakness entered Luke’s eyes. “And that’s it, all of it.”
“What else could there be?” That peculiar, slightly hurt look in his eyes made Maris’s blood run faster. “Is there more for you?”
He took a breath, releasing it slowly. He would never beg a woman, not for anything. “No.”
Maris’s spurt of hope died. “That’s what I thought.” She picked up the flashlight. “Good night.”
“Want me to walk you to the house?”
“Please don’t. If Keith should happen to wake up when I go in, I’d rather he not see us together.”
“Maris, he’s not a child. Don’t you think he knows what goes on between men and women?”
“That’s beside the point. I want Keith’s respect.”
“You have Keith’s respect. Why would him adding up two and two about us change that?”
Maris went to the door. “I won’t take that risk. Good night, Luke.”
Luke followed her down the ladder, then stood at the door of the barn and watched her winding her way to the house. She was the confusingest woman he’d ever known, the most stubborn, the most irritating.
The most exciting. “Damn,” he muttered with his lips in a thin, grim line. If she liked him in bed so much, why had she suddenly turned off on him?
Maris stole into the house on tiptoes. She almost turned off the kitchen light without looking around, but fortunately she saw the piece of paper taped to the refrigerator just as she reached for the light switch.
Walking over to it, she pulled it loose. It was a note from Keith:
Maris,
I’m going to see my dad tomorrow. Mrs. McCallum arranged
for someone to pick me up at five in the morning. I’ll probably be gone all day. See you when I get back, unless you’re up in the morning before I leave.
Keith
Maris had mixed feelings about Keith visiting his father, but it wasn’t her place to judge.
Sighing heavily, she turned off the light and made her way to her bedroom in the dark. Nothing was ever easy or simple, not one blasted thing.
Twelve
Maris made sure she was up, dressed and ready to say a few words to Keith before he left the next morning. “How did this happen, Keith?” she asked gently.
Keith explained Jessica’s message, adding, “Mrs. McCallum said I didn’t have to go, but…” The boy looked down at the floor for a moment, then lifted his gaze to Maris’s. There was maturity in his eyes and a strength that Maris hadn’t seen before. “It’s something I have to do, Maris.”
She couldn’t doubt his sincerity, or the gravity of his decision. “I understand, and I’d like to say how very proud I am of you.” Unable to resist the impulse, Maris put her arms around Keith and hugged him. To her surprise, he returned the hug without embarrassment. It was a lovely moment for Maris, and she had to blink back tears.
A car horn honked outside. Immediately she put on a bright smile. “That must be your ride. Take care, Keith.”
“I will. See you tonight. Tell Luke…tell ’im I’m sorry about not being here today to help with the horses.”
“He’ll understand.”
After Keith had gone Maris put on a pot of coffee. She didn’t expect Luke to walk in quite this early, but he was suddenly filling her kitchen. “Good morning,” she said calmly, though her pulse did a great deal of fluttering.
“’Morning. Where’d Keith go so early?”
“To visit his father.” Maris related the facts behind Keith’s departure. “He said to tell you he was sorry about not being here to help you today.”
“He’s a nice kid.” Luke looked at the gurgling coffeepot. “Not quite ready yet?”