“How did you get here?” he asked abruptly.
Taken off balance, Lisa had to think for a moment before she answered.
“I hired a cab from Butte. Oh, Sam, my suitcase is still down at the end of your driveway. Could you . . . ?”
“I suppose you flew into Butte on one of Amos’s convenient little private jets?” There was the barest suggestion of a sneer in his voice.
“Yes, I did,” Lisa admitted defiantly. “Sam, about my suitcase . . .”
“You won’t need it. I’m taking you back to Butte tonight. In the morning, you can get on your ritzy little airplane and fly away.”
“You can’t take me back to Butte!” Her cry was instinctive. Her last hope of changing his mind involved staying the night. “Your driveway’s not shoveled,” she added lamely, unable to think of a stronger clincher.
His look showed his contempt. “I have a Land Rover,” he said dryly. “So that won’t even slow us down. Put your clothes back on while I go get it out.”
Even before he had finished speaking he was turning away, heading out the kitchen and down through that narrow hallway toward the door. Lisa trailed unhappily behind him, trying to think of some way to delay what she was rapidly coming to realize was the inevitable. Then, as he pulled open the door, a slow smile spread across her face. All was not yet lost, she thought smugly.
“It’s snowing,” she pointed out, as Sam just stood there staring out at the billowing curtain of white. Sam cast her a hard look over his shoulder, then reluctantly turned away from the door, closing it again. As determined as he was to get rid of her, he knew it would be insane to try to drive fifty miles in that.
“So you leave in the morning,” he said coldly, brushing past her as she still stood in the hall. Lisa didn’t answer, but she smiled.
A little later Sam put on a pair of snowshoes and a fleece-lined parka and trudged down to the end of the driveway and back to fetch her suitcase. While he was gone, Lisa rinsed the pan he had used for making hot chocolate and the one cup that was still in one piece. Then she swept up the pieces of the other and wiped the mess from the kitchen floor. Feeling very virtuous, she decided to take a quick tour of the house.
It consisted of the kitchen, a living room, a dining room, three smallish bedrooms, and a single bath. Every bit of it was in at least as bad a shape as the kitchen. Lisa shook her head over the rundown state of the place and considered Sam’s words briefly. Could she stand living in a place like this for the rest of her life? She looked at the paint peeling from the walls, the grubby hardwood and linoleum floors, the stained bathroom fixtures, and made up her mind: absolutely. A house was just four walls and a roof, after all. Love was what turned it into a home. And she was prepared to love this derelict of a place, because Sam did; and, no matter what he said to the contrary, she loved Sam.
By the time Sam returned with her suitcase, Lisa had already decided that with a little paint and some scrubbing up, the house really wouldn’t be so impossible after all. Fixing it up would be fun. . . . But she very sensibly kept her plans from Sam—for the time being, at least.
He ignored her for the rest of the evening, poring over some papers at the kitchen table without looking up even once. Lisa, seated across from him with a stack of Field and Stream magazines that he had handed her with a mocking look, eyed his bent head with some acerbity and asked herself if this infuriating male was really worth all the trouble she was going through to get him. Her eyes slid over the wavy black hair, down to the harsh planes of his dark face, to his massive shoulders and wide chest, and a familiar little flare of excitement ignited inside her. Oh, yes, he was, she decided.
At last he looked up and informed her that it was time they went to bed. Lisa couldn’t help the little spark of hope that lit her eyes at that. If he saw it, he pretended not to. Instead he led her to the small bedroom where he had dropped her case, and with a gesture indicated that it was all hers. She had already discovered, during her exploration of the house, that he slept in the larger bedroom just across the hall. So he intended to hold out to the bitter end, did he? she thought with grim determination. She would just have to see what she could do about that.
Sam allowed her to use the bathroom first, and she hurriedly showered and brushed her teeth before tying a silky green robe around her waist and quitting the bathroom. She wanted to give him plenty of time to fall asleep. . . .
She heard the shower running and the toilet flush. Then the bathroom door opened and his bare feet padded down the hall to his bedroom. His door shut behind him with a sharp click. With a quiver of indignation, Lisa realized that he didn’t even intend to bid her good night!
Still, her mild annoyance didn’t stop her from setting her plan into motion. She put on a beautiful turquoise nightgown that was made almost entirely of lace and left very little to the imagination, brushed her hair until it felt like silk, dabbed perfume liberally on all her pulse points, and even applied a touch of makeup (not that he would be able to see it in the dark, but it was always good to be prepared—he might flick on the bedside lamp). When she was finally ready, she sat on the end of her bed and waited. If this was going to work, she had to catch him at his most vulnerable: after he had gone to sleep.
When at last she judged that enough time had lapsed, she stood up and crept from her bedroom, carefully closing the door behind her so that it didn’t make a sound. As she snuck across the hall, she thought about how it would be: She would crawl into his bed, snuggling down beside him, and let him discover she was there. Lusty animal that he was, she knew that if she got that close, when he was unprepared, he would be unable to resist. And while he was making love to her, she was sure she could get him to promise her anything. . . .
She stood outside his door, her ear pressed against the cheap wood, straining to hear any sound that would tell her if he was asleep or awake. Ah, yes: she thought she detected the deep, untroubled sound of his breathing. Her hand reached for the knob, turned it—it wouldn’t turn. Something must be wrong with it, she thought, pushing against the door in irritation. The door didn’t budge, either. She pushed harder, rattling the knob faintly as she tried to get in. From the other side of the door, she thought she heard a new sound. Then she was sure of it: Sam was laughing! Suddenly the whole thing became clear: he’d locked his bedroom door!
“You bastard!” she stormed at him, kicking the door in frustration. She heard that hateful laugh again. It infuriated her.
“Good night, Lisa,” he called mockingly through the panel, and as she flounced back to her bedroom she heard him laugh again.
XVIII
FOUR months later, Sam was finally forced to admit to himself that he had made a mistake. Instead of dying, as he had imagined it would, his love for Lisa just kept getting stronger until he was starting to feel that it was eating him alive. He had lost weight over the past months, he knew. Even Jay, newly home from school, had commented on his haggard appearance with the brutal candor so characteristic of the young. The truth was, he hadn’t been eating properly because he simply hadn’t been hungry; and he hadn’t been sleeping, because every time he closed his eyes her image rose to haunt him like a taunting ghost. He saw the silver-gilt hair, the green eyes, the exquisite modeling of her face as if she stood before him. He imagined kissing those rosy lips, caressing those perfect breasts and creamy thighs, possessing her, until he was nearly driven crazy with desire. She had gotten under his skin, and, like a particularly resistant parasite, none of the methods he had tried for eradicating her had worked. He was simply going to have to learn to live with the knowledge that he loved her, like it or not.
And he most definitely didn’t like it—at least, not at first. Over the years he had learned to cherish his independence, and he didn’t relish giving it up for a flighty young woman of twenty-five, be she ever so gorgeous. The plain and simple truth was that he was scared. Lisa had hit the nail on the head with that one, he reflected wryly. He was scared to let himself love her
the way he was aching to love her, scared that she would stay with him only a short time and then flit off in search of greener pastures, leaving him to try to put together the shattered pieces of his life.
He tried to figure out when she had first started getting such a grip on his emotions, and decided that it went all the way back to the very beginning. Bruised and dirty, injured and helplessly dependent on him for succor, she had started to twine herself around his heart. He had wanted her from the first moment he had laid eyes on her; that night in her tent, when he had possessed her beautiful, sexy body for the first time, her lovemaking had taken his breath away. To be strictly honest—and it was time and past that he was strictly honest with himself, he thought—her taking matters into her own hands as she had done had only speeded up the process by a few days. He would have taken her sooner or later, and he had known it from the beginning. It had just been easier for him to let her think she had initiated the whole thing.
But he had told himself that it was all sex between them. No tenderness, or, God forbid, love, but simply a male and a female body generating an extraordinary chemistry. And he had really believed that was all it was. Until that day when he had taken her shooting out in the harsh African scrubland, and she had turned in his arms and kissed him so sweetly. . . . He had wanted her then more than he had ever wanted a woman in his life. And he had taken her, loving the feel of her, the touch and taste and smell of her. Her lips and tongue and hands on him had driven him wild. He had emerged from their encounter shaken to the core—and what had he done? What had he said? Had he thanked her for the most beautiful experience of his life? Hell, no! He had insulted her, deliberately, with malice aforethought, then taken her body again, cruelly, in as degrading a manner as he knew how, simply to prove to her and to himself that she meant nothing to him. Looking back on that now, Sam winced.
When she had told him that she loved him, it had seemed like a miracle. She had touched a cord in him that he had not even known existed, satisfied a craving that he had never realized he felt. In all his life, no woman had really loved him. Oh, there had been lots of sex, lots of women and lots of bodies. But there had always been a price, a payoff of some kind. No woman had ever offered him the generous, unselfish tenderness that Lisa had been ready to give him, and for nothing. And he, stupid, stubborn fool that he was, had thrown it all away.
Lisa had accused him once of being a coward, and she wasn’t far wrong. She scared the pants off him. Which was almost funny, when he thought about it. He, who had faced enemy bullets and bombs and bayonets without flinching, was afraid of what couldn’t have been more than 120 pounds of female flesh. Because he loved her. And that was what he had to force himself to face.
He didn’t want just to sleep with her, although he reflected with an inward grin that that was certainly a nice bonus. He wanted to care for her, to protect her, to smile at her and have her smile back, to have her laugh and cry in his arms, even to be the object of her ridiculous temper tantrums. He would rather have Lisa hurling cups at him than anyone else kissing him. Which showed just how far gone he was. There was no help for it, he decided resignedly: he would have to marry her. If she would have him, after all he had said and done.
As for the money—well, he had to admit that it stuck in his craw a little bit. He had always believed that it was a man’s responsibility to provide for his woman, to furnish her food and shelter and clothing and all the dozens of small luxuries so dear to female hearts. He wanted to do that for Lisa. In fact, he was surprised at the strength of the urge he felt to provide for her. And if she had been an ordinary woman, a secretary, say, or a store clerk, or even a reporter living on a reporter’s salary, he could have done so—quite nicely. He had made, and would continue to make, plenty to support a wife, in comfort if not in luxury. But Lisa . . . His mouth twisted wryly. She was used to big houses and servants, to jewels and furs and designer clothes, to ladies’ luncheons and fancy evening parties. He couldn’t give her that. But he had told her that, more than once, and she had insisted that it didn’t matter. And now Sam had to believe her, had to take her at her word. He wanted her far too much to do anything else. And he thought—he hoped—she wanted him too. Enough to gamble on him, to take a chance.
After he had made up his mind to that, Sam’s mood lightened considerably. He didn’t anticipate having any real problems persuading Lisa to marry him. All he had to do was to get her into bed and the hot little witch would promise him anything. And he would apologize, he told himself sternly. He owed her that.
Before he could go fetch her home, however, there were a few things that needed to be done. With Jay home from school and the men he had hired to help tend his fledgling cattle herd available, there was no reason why the house couldn’t be gotten into some kind of order as well. He set two of the men to painting it, and brought others out from town to work on the plumbing and wiring. He even ordered new kitchen appliances, right down to a dishwasher. Then he and Jay spent every night for a week stripping and sanding and restaining the hardwood floors, and when that was done painting the interior walls. Nothing fancy, just good plain white paint. If he knew women, Lisa would want to do the fancy stuff herself.
Jay, when informed why these elaborate preparations were taking place, fell on the work with a will. He had never understood why the two of them had broken up in the first place, he said. Anybody could see that Lisa would make a great wife, even if she couldn’t do things like cook. And then, to Sam’s amusement, his son had proceeded to give him detailed instructions on how to go about proposing marriage to a woman. Rolling around on the floor behind a couch just didn’t make it, Jay told him sternly.
Despite the almost overwhelming preoccupation with Lisa, Sam found time to make a few inquiries into the fate of the men who had accompanied him on that ill-starred mission to Rhodesia. When he finally got Frank Leads on the phone—at his daughter’s house in Florida—Sam was conscious of a deep sense of relief. As the leader, he had been responsible for the safety of his men, and to his own mind he had failed them miserably. Although exactly what he could have done to avert the shambles the mission had been reduced to he didn’t know. But he couldn’t help thinking that if he had not been so caught up with Lisa, things might have turned out differently. Very differently.
Sam could tell from Frank’s voice that his old friend was as relieved to hear his voice as he was to hear Frank’s. They laughed and joked, each recounting his experiences in getting out of Rhodesia—although Sam’s carefully edited version was by far the more exciting of the two, as Frank and the rest of the survivors managed to catch the scheduled airplane out. Then the talk turned serious. Five men had died over there, the four killed by the initial blast and young Mike Harley. And at least one—either of the survivors or of the dead—had betrayed them. At this point it was impossible to positively identify the traitor, although Frank, like Sam, had his suspicions. In any case, it no longer mattered. Again like Sam, Frank had decided that he was getting too old to lay his life on the line for every crazy despot with a fistful of money. He had retired as of the day he had set foot back in the States, he told Sam, and was in the process of setting up a little business taking tourists out on boats to fish. When Sam confessed, almost sheepishly, to his own plans to marry Lisa—if she would have him—Frank guffawed and twitted him loudly for some minutes before growing serious and wishing him the best. Sam returned those wishes, then both men grew embarrassed by their lapse into sentimentality. The conversation ended quickly. But afterward Sam felt better than he had for a long time.
It was the middle of June before Sam finally felt that everything at the ranch was as ready as it was going to get. There was nothing left to do but go fetch Lisa. Sitting in his seat in a plane bound for Washington, D.C., Sam felt as nervous as a young kid getting ready to ask a girl out for the first time. Which was stupid, at his age, he knew, but—what if she wouldn’t have him?
It was hot as hell when he walked out of National Airpo
rt in Washington toward the rental car that awaited him. Must have been ninety in the shade. The sun shone over everything, reflecting hotly off the pavement and the shiny tops of the cars as they pulled in and out of the airport. People bustled about everywhere, always in a hurry. He had never liked Washington: it was too crowded and noisy and dirty.
By the time he had fought his way out of the city’s congested traffic and set the cream-colored LeMans on the road for Annapolis, Sam was burning up. Of course, the damned air-conditioner was on the blink. He shed the lightweight tan sportscoat in which he had traveled, thanking God that his pale blue sports shirt was short-sleeved, and wished vainly for a pair of cut-off jeans instead of the navy-blue slacks he was wearing. But with the windows rolled down so that the breeze generated by the car’s movement circulated through the interior, it wasn’t too bad. With a faint grin, he decided that he would survive it.
His first setback came at the house. Mary Dobson, giving him a long, disapproving look that he couldn’t account for, informed him that Mrs. Collins no longer lived there: she had taken an apartment in Baltimore. Sam was floored by this announcement, at least temporarily. Then he realized that he would just have to drive on to Baltimore, which was only about twenty-five miles away. To his surprise, Mary flatly refused to give him the address. He would have to wait and talk to Mr. Bennet, who was in the city and wouldn’t be back until later that evening, she said, before practically closing the door in his face. Sam had been about to bang on it again, demanding the information he wanted, when he spied Henry Dobson around at the side. Getting Lisa’s address out of Henry took only a few minutes, but something in the man’s attitude started Sam thinking. He had seemed almost as disapproving as his wife.
To Love a Man Page 29