by Diana Palmer
He sighed heavily. His black eyes searched her wan face, remembering better times, happier times, when he could look at her and get drunk on just the sight of her smile.
“Are you sure you want to keep on working?” he asked quietly, just to change the subject, to get the conversation on an easier level.
She stared down at her plate. “Yes, I’d like to,” she said. “I’ve never really done any work before, except society functions and volunteer work. I like my job.”
“And Barry Holman?” he asked, his smile a challenge.
She got up. She was still wearing her white skirt with a pale pink blouse, and she looked feminine and elegant and very desirable. Her long hair waved down to her shoulders, and Justin wanted to get up and catch two handfuls of it and kiss her until she couldn’t stand up.
“Mr. Holman is my boss,” she said. “Not my lover. I don’t have a lover.”
He got up, too, moving closer, his eyes narrow and calculating, his body tense with years of frustrated desire. “You’re going to have one,” he said curtly.
She wouldn’t back away. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of watching her run. She lifted her face proudly, even though her knees felt weak and her heart was racing madly. She was afraid of him because of their past, because he wanted revenge. She was afraid because he thought she was experienced, and even with that minor surgery, she knew that it wasn’t going to be the easiest time of her life. Justin was deceptively strong. She knew the power in that lean, hard body, and to be overwhelmed by it in passion was a little scary.
He watched the fear flicker in her eyes, and understood it instantly. “You’re off base, honey,” he said quietly. “Way off base. I’d never hurt you in bed, not for revenge or any other reason.”
Her lower lip trembled on a stifled sob and tears welled in her eyes. She lowered her gaze to his broad chest, missing the faint shock in his face at her reaction. “Maybe you wouldn’t be able to help it,” she whispered.
“Shelby, are you really afraid of me?” he asked
huskily.
Her thin shoulders shifted. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Were you afraid with him?” he asked. “With Wheelor?”
She opened her mouth to speak and just gave up. What was the use? He wasn’t going to listen. She turned away and went toward the staircase.
“Running won’t solve anything,” he said shortly, watching her go with mingled feelings, the foremost of which was anger.
“Neither will trying to talk to you,” she replied. She turned at the bottom of the staircase, her green eyes bright with unshed tears and returning spirit. “Do your worst. Make me pay. I’m fresh out of things I care about. I’ve got absolutely nothing left to lose, so look out, Justin. I’m not going to live up to your idea of a society wife. I’m going to be myself, and I’m sorry if it destroys any of your old illusions.”
He eyed her quietly. “Meaning what?”
“No affairs,” she replied, picking the thought out of his mind. “Despite what you think of me, I’m not starved for a man.”
“That much I’d believe,” he said shortly. “My God, I get more warmth out of an ice cube than I ever got from you!”
She felt the impact of those words like daggers against her bare skin. She should have realized that he thought her frigid, but it had never really registered before.
“Maybe Tom Wheelor got more!” she threw at him.
His black eyes splintered with rage. He actually started toward her before he checked himself with the iron control that he kept on his temper.
Shelby saw that movement, and thanked God that he stopped when he did. She lifted her chin. “Good night, Justin. Thank you for a roof over my head and a place to live.”
His eyelids flickered as she started up the staircase. Looking at her he recalled years of dreams, of remembered delight in just being with her, frustration at having to hold back only to lose her anyway. He still cared. He’d lied to protect his pride, but he cared so much. And he was losing her, all over again.
He wanted to tell her that he hadn’t meant to accuse her of being frigid. He’d wanted her to distraction, and she hadn’t wanted him. That had hurt far more than having her break their engagement, especially when he’d found out that Tom Wheelor was her lover. It had damned near killed him. And here she was throwing it in his teeth, hitting him in his most vulnerable spot. He’d always wondered if she found him revolting physically. That was what made him believe that she’d meant what she told him about not wanting him, about wanting Tom Wheelor instead—that reluctance in her to let him get close to her.
And she was different now. She wasn’t the shy, introverted young woman he’d known six years ago. She was oddly reckless; high-spirited and uninhibited when she forgot herself. But he couldn’t bend. He couldn’t make himself bend enough to tell her what was in his heart, how much he still wanted her, because he didn’t dare trust her again. She’d hurt him too badly. He watched her go up the staircase, his eyes black and soft and full of hunger. He didn’t move until she was out of sight.
Chapter Four
Shelby had hoped beyond hope that Justin might still love her. That he might have married her not so much out of pity as out of love. But her wedding day had convinced her that what little emotion had been left in him after years of bitterness was all gone. He still blamed her for what he thought she’d done with Tom Wheelor, and he thought she was frigid.
She didn’t know how to deal with her own fears and his anger. Her marriage was going to be as empty as her life had been. There would be no black-headed little babies to nurse, no soft, sweet loving in the darkness, no shared delight in making a life together. There would be only separate bedrooms and separate lives and Justin’s hunger for vengeance.
The black depression that she’d taken to bed on her wedding night got worse. Justin tolerated her presence, but he was away more often than not. At meals, he spoke to her only when it was necessary, and he never touched her. He was like a polite host instead of a husband. And day by miserable day, Shelby began to feel a new recklessness. While Justin was away one weekend, she went on a white-water rafting race with Abby’s friend Misty Davies. She tried her hand at skydiving. She joined a fencing class. She went back to the old, more reckless days of her adolescence. Justin had never really known her, she thought sometimes. He seemed surprised by the things she enjoyed and a time or two he acted as if her lifestyle bothered him. Well, what had he expected her to do, she fumed, stay at home and arrange flowers? Perhaps that was the image he had of her, that she was a pretty socialite with beauty and no brains.
She’d kept working after the wedding, but Barry Holman insisted that she take a few days off. It wasn’t right, he said, for her to work through her honeymoon. She wanted to laugh at that, and tell him that her husband didn’t want a honeymoon. Justin had come home from his latest trip and had gone straight to the feedlot office with an abrupt and coolly polite greeting. After a few bored hours, Shelby phoned the office, just to see how things were going. She liked her job. She missed working terribly. It was something to do; it helped keep her mind off her marriage and her own inadequacies.
When she called, the poor temporary secretary, Tammy Lester, answered the phone, obviously half out of her mind trying to cope with an impatient, frustrated Barry Holman. So Shelby dressed in a cool white and red summery dress and white high heels and went to work.
The old sedan she drove broke down halfway there and she had to have it towed in to the dealer car lot where she had her mechanical work done.
Once Shelby was at the dealership, as fate would have it, she noticed Abby’s little sports car was there and up for sale. The sight of the car brought back memories. Shelby had driven one like it during six of the blackest months in her life, the time she’d spent in Switzerland after she’d given back Justin’s ring. S
he’d loved that car, but she’d wrecked it accidentally. The wreck hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm for fast cars, though. Now she wanted one—it appealed to the wild streak in her that had never totally disappeared. It wasn’t a suicidal streak; she just loved a challenge. She liked sports cars and the exhilaration of driving in the fast lane.
Justin didn’t know that Shelby had a wild streak, because he’d accepted the illusion of what she appeared to be rather than wondering what was beneath the surface. Well, he was in for a few shocks, she decided, starting now.
Because the dealer knew that Shelby had just married Justin, he didn’t even ask for a cosigner on the note. He sold her the car outright, with payments she could afford on her own salary.
She parked the vehicle right outside the office, delighting in its new paint job. Abby had had it painted red with white racing stripes just before she traded it for something more sedate. The new colors suited Shelby very well. She sighed over it, delighted that she could afford it and even manage the payments by herself. All her life she’d depended on her father’s money. There was something challenging and very satisfying about taking care of herself financially. She was sorry now that she’d panicked at being on her own and rushed into marrying Justin. She’d hoped for something more than a roof over her head, but that wasn’t going to happen. Justin was taking care of her, just as he’d taken care of Abby, and if he had any lingering desire for her, it didn’t show. After he’d accused her of being frigid, she’d kept out of his way altogether. If only she wasn’t so repressed, she could have told him what the problem was and how frightened she was of intimacy. But it was hopeless. Justin would probably be as embarrassed as she was to talk about it, anyway. So things would just have to rock along as they had been, until one of them broke the silence.
When she got to the office, Barry Holman was pacing the floor while the temporary secretary cried. They both turned as Shelby put her purse in the top drawer of the desk and smiled.
“Can I help?” she asked.
The woman at her desk cried even harder. “He yells,” she wailed, pointing at Barry Holman, who looked furiously angry from his blond head to his big feet.
“Only at incompetents!” he flashed back.
“Now, now,” Shelby soothed. “I’m here. I’ll take care of everything. Tammy, why don’t you make Mr. Holman a cup of coffee while I straighten out whatever’s fouled up, then I’ll show you how to update the files and you can keep busy with that. Okay?”
Tammy smiled, her soft brown eyes quiet. “Okay.”
She got up and Shelby sat down. Her dark brows lifted as Barry Holman glanced at her uncomfortably.
“It’s your vacation,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Why not? Justin is working, why shouldn’t I?”
He frowned. “Well…”
“Tell me what needs to be done, and then I’ll show you my new car.” She grinned. “It was Abby’s, and they let me buy it without even a cosigner.”
“Naturally, considering your husband’s credit line,” he mused. She gave him a strange look, but he ignored it, delighting in his good fortune. “Here, this is what’s giving Tammy fits.”
He produced two scribbled pages of notes on a legal pad that he wanted transcribed and put into English instead of abbreviations and scrawls, and fifty copies run off with different salutations on each.
“Simple, isn’t it?” he said. He glared toward the back of the office. “She cried.”
Shelby wanted to. It was an hour’s work just to translate his handwriting. But she knew how to use the computer’s word-processing program, and Tammy had three simplified tutorials spread out on the desk, none of which would explain the program to a person who’d never used a computer.
“She asked me what these were for.” Barry Holman sighed, picking up one of the diskettes in its jacket. He looked up. “She thought they were negatives.”
Shelby had to bite her lower lip. “She’s never had any computer training,” she reminded him.
“That’s no excuse for not having a brain,” he returned hotly.
“Mr. Holman!” Tammy exclaimed, glaring at him as she came back with three cups of black coffee on a tray. “That was unkind and unfair.”
“Didn’t they tell you at the temporary-services agency that computer experience was necessary to do this job?” he grumbled.
“I have computer experience,” Tammy replied with hauteur. “I play games on my brother’s Atari all the time.”
Mr. Holman looked as if he wanted to cry. He ground his teeth together, went back into his office and closed the door.
“I guess I told him.” Tammy grinned wickedly.
There was a loud, feverish, furious, “Damn!” from the vicinity of Mr. Holman’s office. Shelby and Tammy exchanged amused glances.
“They didn’t tell me about the computer,” Tammy confided. “They asked if I had office skills, and I do. I type over a hundred words a minute and take dictation at ninety. But I don’t read Sanskrit,” she whispered, pointing at the scribbling on the legal sheets.
Shelby burst out laughing. It felt so good to laugh, and she thanked God for this job, which was going to save her sanity. She shook her head and, putting the books aside, she began to explain the computer’s operation to Tammy.
After work, she took the long route home. Mr. Holman had relaxed after lunch, and he was tolerating Tammy much better now. In fact, he hadn’t even growled when Shelby had mentioned that it might be economical to have two secretaries in the office because of the backlog of filing and updating the computer’s entries. He’d talked about taking on an associate, and if he hired Tammy full time, he could do it.
Shelby turned the small sports car onto the highway sharply, delighting in its rack-and-pinion steering and easy handling. She gunned it up and up and up, loving the speed, loving the freedom and the wind tearing through her long hair. She felt reckless. As she’d told Justin, she had nothing left to lose. She was going to enjoy her life from now on. Justin could just do his worst.
There was a slow car in front, and she didn’t even brake. She surged around it and barely got back into her lane as a white car sped in the opposite direction. She thought it looked familiar, but she didn’t look in the rearview mirror. It was going toward the feedlot. She passed the turnoff, increasing her speed. She wasn’t ready to go home to her cell just yet.
Calhoun was muttering a prayer as he pulled up in front of the feedlot. That was Abby’s old car, and it had been Shelby at the wheel. He’d barely recognized her in that split second, her face laughing with pleasure at the speed, her hair flying in the wind. She made Abby’s friend Misty Davies look like a safe driver by comparison.
Justin looked up from his desk as Calhoun came in and closed the door behind him. “It’s almost time to go home,” he remarked, glancing at his Rolex. “I didn’t think you were coming back today from Montana.”
Calhoun grinned. “I missed Abby. Speaking of Abby,” he added, perching himself lazily on the edge of his brother’s desk, “a wild woman driving her sports car just came within an inch of running me down.”
“Didn’t Abby sell it?” Justin remarked.
“She certainly did. I insisted.”
“I see.” Justin smiled faintly. He leaned back with his cigarette smoking in his lean fingers. “I gather that some other fool’s wife is driving it?”
“You could put it that way. She was doing eighty if she was doing a mile.” His dark eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you want Shelby to have it?”
There was a shocked silence. “What do you mean, do I want Shelby to have it?” Justin sat up abruptly. “Are you telling me Shelby was driving that sports car?”
“I’m afraid so,” Calhoun said quietly. “You didn’t know?”
Justin’s expression became grim. Shelby wasn’t
happy and he knew it. Her most recent behavior was already worrying him, although he was careful to keep his misgivings from Shelby. But purchasing a sports car was going too far. He was going to have to talk to her. He’d avoided confrontations, letting her settle in, keeping his distance while he tried to cope with the anguish of having Shelby in his house when she backed away the minute he came into the room. But this was too much.
He couldn’t let her kill herself. He got up from the desk without even looking at Calhoun, plucked his hat off the hat rack and started for the door. “Was she going toward the house?” he asked curtly.
“The opposite direction,” Calhoun told him. His eyes narrowed. “Justin, what’s going on between the two of you?”
The older man looked at him, black eyes glittering. “My private life is none of your business.”
Calhoun folded his arms. “Abby says Shelby is running wild, and that you’re apparently doing nothing to stop her. Are you that hell-bent on revenge?”
“You make it sound as if she’s suicidal,” Justin said coldly. “She’s not.”
“If she was happy, she wouldn’t be like this,” the younger man persisted. “You’ve got to stop trying to live in the past. It’s time to forget what happened.”
“That’s damned easy for you to say.” Justin’s black eyes flashed. “She threw me over and slept with another man!”
Calhoun stared at him. “You don’t have my track record, but you’re no more a saint than I am, big brother. Suppose Shelby couldn’t accept the women in your past?”
“It’s different with men,” the older man said irritably.
“Is it?”
“She was mine. I was so damned careful never to put a foot wrong with her. I held back and gritted my teeth to keep from scaring her, and she flinched away from me every time I touched her. And all the while she was sleeping with that pasty-faced boy millionaire. How do you think I felt?” he blazed. “And then she told me that I was too poor to suit her expensive tastes, she wanted somebody rich.”