by Diana Palmer
“He won’t go home,” she said. “We’re going sailing.”
“Want to bet?”
She looked up at him, her eyes narrowed. “Not with a renegade like you,” she replied. “You stack the deck.”
He smiled, and little thrills raced through her body. She was still vulnerable, and she hated it. Four years should have given her some immunity. In fact, it had only fanned the flame, made her hungry for the sight of him.
Her eyes met his, and she felt her toes curling under at the pleasure of the exchange. The hand holding his cigarette froze in midair, and suddenly his smile was gone. She sensed his abrupt rigidity and felt it reflected in her own posture. At that moment she wanted nothing quite so desperately as to reach up and kiss that warm, hard mouth.
“Dangerous, baby, looking at me like that in public,” Keegan said in a tone she’d never heard him use. He smiled faintly, but it did nothing to disguise the flare of hunger in his eyes.
Before she could answer him, and while she was still trying to get her heart to stop racing, Wade rejoined them. He was frowning, his mind already on business.
“I’m sorry as hell, but I’ve got a European businessman sitting on my front porch drinking my best bourbon and just dying to give me gobs of money for a foal.” He sighed. He grinned at Eleanor and Keegan, ignoring the tension. “I’m sorry, darling, but I’m so mercenary…”
She burst out laughing. “It’s all right. If you’ll drop me off…”
“I’ll let her ride home with me,” Keegan interrupted, lifting the cigarette to his lips. “Then you won’t have to go out of your way.”
Wade and Eleanor both started to protest, but they weren’t as quick as Keegan. He took Eleanor firmly by the arm.
“Come on, I have to pick up some papers from the boat first. See you, Wade!”
Wade faltered. “Well…Eleanor, I’ll call you tonight!”
“Yes…do!” she called over her shoulder, half running to keep up with Keegan’s long strides. She scowled up at him as he propelled her down the marina. “No wonder you have your own boat—you’re a pirate! You can’t just appropriate unwilling passengers!”
“You’re willing,” he replied without looking at her. “At least you will be when I show you what I’ve got in the boat.”
She sighed. “Does it bite?”
“It used to,” he murmured, grinning. He helped her onto the polished deck of the big sailboat, its huge sails neatly wrapped and tied, and went below for a minute. He was back almost before she missed him, with a picnic basket in hand.
“How…what…?” she stammered.
“I had Mary June pack it this morning for us,” he said. He helped her back off the boat. “We can drive down to the picnic area and gorge ourselves. I didn’t have breakfast. I’m starving.”
Her mind was whirling. “You couldn’t have known Wade was going to have company.”
“Sure I did. I sent it over, as a matter of fact,” he said imperturbably, herding her right along.
Her jaw dropped. “Your Irish guests!”
“Dead straight,” he agreed, grinning broadly. “And he’d better hurry home, too, or O’Clancy will have persuaded Mildred to go home with him to Ireland. That man could get funding from Congress for a fruit-fly-mating program. I’ve never seen the beat.”
“You set me up!” she groaned.
“It’s your own fault,” he replied. He led her to his brightred Porsche and put her in on the passenger side. “You wouldn’t come with me when I invited you.”
“I didn’t want to! I still don’t!”
He got in beside her and, flashing a dazzling smile, started up the little convertible. “Mary June’s got roast beef and potato salad and homemade yeast rolls in the basket,” he coaxed. “And she made fried apple pies for dessert.”
She glanced at him mutinously. “I’ll get fat.”
“Is there hope?” he asked wide-eyed. “You’ve lost ten pounds since you came back home, and you were never heavy to start with.”
“I like me the way I am,” she fired back.
“I’ll like you better twenty pounds heavier,” he replied. “There. That looks like a nice, private spot.” He pulled into a parking space in the deserted picnic area and cut off the engine. “Nice view. No people.” He stared at her musingly. “You could make love to me if you wanted to.”
The unexpected remark made her grow hot all over. She practically dived out of the car, avoiding his eyes.
He brought the picnic basket and bypassed the tables. “This looks good,” he remarked, scanning the area. He put the basket down under a huge oak tree overlooking the lake. Far away, the white and multicolored sails spread like tiny map indicators over the blue, blue water. “We can eat and watch the competition all at once.”
She sat down reluctantly in the pleasant shade, watching him spread the cloth and lay out the food. It did look delicious, and she knew Mary June’s reputation as a cook. She and her father had been invited to barbecues and other special events that the Tabers hosted annually for their employees on the farm, and she’d tasted the housekeeper’s cooking many times. Mary June was something of a family institution. Like her father, a treasured employee. The thought made her feel bitter, and she sighed, staring down at her hands in her lap.
“Don’t curdle the dessert by glaring at it,” he teased. “Eat something!”
He handed her a plate and busied himself pouring sweetened iced tea into plastic glasses from a huge jug that contained crushed ice.
She held out her hand for it and sipped the cool liquid with a dreamy smile. “How delicious!”
“I’m partial to it myself.” He filled a plate for her, handing it over and ignoring her dubious expression as he filled another for himself. “Nothing like a picnic to make you hungry, I always say. Eat, for God’s sake, Eleanor!”
Her dark eyes pinned him. “Must you always sling out orders? Can’t you ever just ask?”
“Not my nature,” he said between bites of beef. He sipped tea and watched her for a minute as she began to eat.
“No, that’s true,” she said after she cleared her plate. “You’re a born manipulator. You’re only happy when you get your own way.”
“Aren’t most people?” he asked. He put the plates aside and refilled her glass and his own with iced tea. Then he sprawled back comfortably against the huge tree trunk and crossed his long legs with a sigh. He looked as at ease here as he did at a formal party. Keegan never put on airs or lorded it over anyone. He seemed at home anywhere.
Eleanor sipped her tea, looking out over the lake. “I’ve never been here before,” she remarked. “Dad and I drove past it on our way to see one of my great-aunts once, but we never stopped. We always go fishing on the river.”
“There’s a lot of bass and crappie in this lake,” he replied, smiling. “So you like to fish, do you?”
“Dad does. I go along for the ride, and the peace and quiet. You don’t get much of that in a hospital.”
“What made you choose nursing?” he asked unexpectedly.
She held the cool, frosty cup in both hands and smiled faintly. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I always liked patching people up when they were hurt. I still do. I feel as if I’m giving something back to the world, paying my way as I go.”
“Is that a dig at me?” he asked conversationally, but his blue eyes were serious.
“You work every bit as hard as I do,” she said honestly. “I didn’t mean it as an insult. I was explaining my own philosophy, not condemning your lifestyle.”
His broad chest rose and fell heavily. “Maybe I feel like condemning it,” he said broodingly. He ran a lean finger around the rim of his glass absently, watching its path. “My father built the farm up from bankruptcy when he was a young man. He worked hard all his life so that he’d have something to pass on to me, so that I wouldn’t have to break my back for a living. Well, I didn’t have to work, and it affected me. In consequence, I spent the first twenty-f
ive years of my own life giving my father hell and expecting something for nothing. No matter how well meant, you can give a child too much.” He looked up into her eyes. “I won’t make that mistake with my sons.”
“Sons?” she echoed. “Do you already have names picked out for them, too?”
“Sure,” he said, grinning as the atmosphere changed between them. “Well, for the tenth one, anyway. I’ll call him Quits.”
She smiled, radiant. How odd, to sit and talk, really talk, to him. That was a first. She didn’t want to enjoy it, but she couldn’t help herself.
“How about you?” he asked with apparent carelessness. “Do you want kids?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’d like a daughter, though.”
“A daughter wouldn’t be bad, although boys run in my family. The father determines sex, you know.”
“No!” she said in mock astonishment. “And here I thought the cabbage fairy did all that!”
“Stop it, you idiot,” he muttered, chuckling. “I keep forgetting you went through nurse’s training. I expect you know more than I do about reproduction.”
“About some of it, maybe,” she said tightly. She finished her tea and got up to put her cup and the plates in a nearby garbage can. When she came back, Keegan hadn’t moved. He was still watching her, his eyes narrow and calculating.
“How about putting my cup in there, too?” He drained it and handed it to her; but just as she reached down to take it, he caught her wrist and propelled her into his hard body, cushioning the impact with his arms.
“Keegan!” she protested, struggling.
He only held her closer, positioning her across his legs, with her head captured in the crook of his elbow. He looked down at her, watching her struggles, feeling the touch of her hands on his chest as she pushed at it, and the blood rushed like lava through his veins.
“I’m not…on the menu,” she said, panting.
“You should be,” he murmured. His blue eyes scanned her delicate features, her full mouth and big brown eyes in a frame of blondish-brown hair. “I like what you’ve done to your hair, Eleanor. I like the new makeup, too.”
She hadn’t thought he’d even noticed it. Her eyes, steady and curious on his hardening face, reflected her puzzlement.
“You were sixteen the first time I kissed you,” he said abruptly, watching her mouth. “It was at the annual Christmas party, up at Flintlock, and you stood under the mistletoe with the damnedest lost look on your face. I bent and kissed you, so gently, and you went beet red and ran away.”
“I wasn’t expecting it,” she muttered, renewing her struggles.
He felt his body going rigid, and he stilled her with a firm hand on her hip. “No,” he said softly. “Lie still. You’re hurting me.”
She froze, because even as he said it she could feel it. Her eyes levered back up to his and were captured by the mixture of hunger and pain she read in them.
“I’m sorry,” she said, lying quietly. “But if you’d just let me go…”
“I don’t want to,” he replied. His possessive gaze traveled boldly from her face to the soft curve of her breasts in the revealing knit shirt, to her slender waist and her long, elegant legs in their tight blue-jeans casing. “I’m sorry I hurt you that night,” he remarked in a deep, velvet-soft tone. “I’m even sorrier that I didn’t make up for it. By then, the risk would have been no worse. I left you with scars, didn’t I?”
“Enough…that I don’t want any more of them! Will you let me go?” she said, panting.
His voice was tender, the slow movements of his hand on her hip maddening. “It must have gone against everything you believed in to give yourself to me. I wasn’t thinking about your upbringing. I was so drunk on the taste and feel of you that I couldn’t think. I remember the scent of your body, the sound of your voice in my ear whispering that you loved me….”
“Stop it!” she cried, hiding her red face against him. Her hands clenched into fists against his chest. “Stop it, Keegan, for heaven’s sake! I was a teenage girl with a furious crush, and you were an experienced man out to revenge yourself on the girl you really loved. That’s all it was!”
“Are you sure?” He tilted her face up to his quiet, solemn eyes. “I’ll admit that I’d had too much to drink and had fought with Lorraine, and you looked…” His mind went back to the way she’d looked in blue satin with her long hair curving around her shoulders and her full, lovely breasts provocatively displayed in the strapless gown. “You looked like Venus walking. I only meant to show you a good time, kiss you a little. But when you moaned and started kissing me back so hungrily, I forgot everything.”
It had been explosive, she remembered, the bare touch of his mouth enough to trigger unexpected longings. She’d wanted it for so many years, hungered for it, ached to know his lovemaking, his possession. She’d had a few drinks of her own, and when he’d started undressing her, she’d gone wild at the touch of his skillful hands on her bare flesh.
He saw those memories in her eyes and felt his body going tense. The soft warmth and weight of her in his arms was making him ache. She smelled of gardenia, and his mind wouldn’t let go of the picture it carried of her that night in the moonlit darkness, writhing under his touch while the car stereo played an exotic, sultry tune that could still bring his blood up four years later.
“Don’t you dare touch me there!” she burst out as his fingers went down to her knit blouse and edged under it to the bottom of her bra.
But his hand kept moving, and she could feel his warm breath at her ear, whispering things she didn’t hear. She struggled again, until his strength subdued her. The silence around them was tense, broken by bird songs, the lap of the water on the shore and the rustle of windblown leaves. Eleanor could hardly hear them above the beat of her heart. She could even hear his, and she marveled at the electricity they created together. It seemed even more potent than it had four years ago, perhaps because she was a woman now.
“Hush, Ellie,” he whispered, ignoring the hand tugging at his wrist. “Shhhhh. Lie still for me….”
She had to bite her lip to keep from crying out. He had her wrapped up so tightly that she couldn’t even squirm. She didn’t want his hands on her; she couldn’t bear the remembered pleasure of it. She moaned sharply, hating the vulnerability that he could hear now as he found the front clip of the garment and gently unhooked it. She could feel herself swelling, and he wasn’t even touching her yet. His fingers rested on the clip as the bra parted in front and began to peel away.
He lifted his head, finding her eyes, paralyzing her with the sweet warmth of that possessive gaze, while his fingers tortured her with slow, expert movements.
“All I want is to touch you, stroke you a little,” he said in a voice as lazy and sultry as a summer night.
“Don’t!” she cried, biting her lip hard as his free hand began to move the bra away from soft flesh. “Please don’t do this to me, Keegan!”
“Why are you so afraid of it?” he asked gently, searching her wild eyes. “You’re a woman now, not a child. Four years older, wiser, experienced yourself. This is just an interlude. Share a little pleasure with me, Ellie. Let me bring back the memories.”
“They were terrible memories,” she reminded him on a caught breath. “You hurt me!”
“I know, baby,” he said softly, and his eyes for an instant were haunted. He bent and brushed his mouth gently over her forehead. “Once, but never again, never. Lie still, baby, and let me touch you.”
She wanted to stop him. To cry out, to protest. He’d hurt her pride so desperately, and he was only playing with her. But he was calling her “baby,” just as he had on that night, and she remembered the feel of his hair-roughened chest against her taut breasts, the smooth, hard muscles of his bare legs against her own, the unexpected steely strength of his body as he held her down and overwhelmed her in the moonlit darkness….
How could she want this, after the way he’d hurt her? But she
did; she wanted it, her body was gently arching, and his hand was tracing her rib cage, taunting her, teasing her. “Shhhh,” he whispered again. The arm supporting her lifted her a little closer to his chest, turning her so that her hot face could fall against his neck.
She shuddered helplessly and raised her hands, tangling them gently in the slightly curly hair at the nape of his strong neck. She couldn’t breathe properly, and she couldn’t hide it. She moaned again, a breath of sound that barely reached his ear.
His cheek brushed against hers. His mouth touched her ear, her cheek, her nose. “Ellie,” he whispered, and his lips found hers, probing them delicately apart, biting at them.
It was just like that night. Explosive. Blazing. Frightening, a brushfire that hardly needed its own spark to ignite.
“Keegan,” she moaned against his lips, shaking all over. Her eyes opened, anguished, and found a matching torment in the blue depths.
“Nothing’s changed,” he whispered, his deep voice a little husky with emotion. “Touching you excites me so. This, with you, is as satisfying as lovemaking. You make such sweet noises when I do this….”
“This” was an achingly slow tracing around her breast until his fingers brushed the taut hardness and made it throb with pleasure. Her body jerked and she moaned against his mouth. He reveled in the trembling hunger he could feel in her. Lost, burning up with remembered passion, he opened his mouth and gently thrust his tongue into her mouth. It was surprising, the way she tensed, as if she weren’t used to this kind of kissing. Surprising, and wildly arousing.
His hands teased her body until he felt her fingers at his wrist, pleading, guiding. Surges of pleasure shot through him like fire as his hand found her, so gently, and she froze in the tender embrace, her breath catching as he took the delicate weight and found the hardness with his thumb. She jerked at that brushing contact, shuddering with obvious pleasure.
“Do you like it like that?” he whispered. “Does it please you when I touch them this way? Or is it better like this?”