by Twilight
The idea left her weak-kneed and aching with melancholy. Good God, but she’d been half-alive for years, moving woodenly through her life, drowning in all her responsibilities. And now...could she even attempt to deny what this man had awakened in her, something she had no desire to suppress or shackle in puritanical thoughts? And could she marry another? No matter that she still believed him honorable, noble, the most worthy of her trust, the best possible father for her son...a man who would not deceive her as Frank had. Yes, this had been of utmost importance to her. It still was. And yet...
How could she deny herself this? What woman, once given a mere taste of it, possessed the strength to turn her back on the irresistible lure of the unknown and embrace a life certain in its predictability, its utter lack of passion? What woman who was no fool could keep herself from grasping at perhaps the one opportunity at complete fulfillment? The one opportunity to not grow old only to find herself one day a lifetime from now, staring out into that same prairie, with a heart heavy with regret for what could have been—if only.
With Christian clinging like a monkey to his back, Stark turned and waded slowly from the lake. Water spilled over his chest, his belly, plunged over his pelvis and the muscled lengths of his thighs. He was immense, all of him, thick and heavy, full of wild, wicked, wanton promise. A savage born of a woman’s most reckless imaginings. Jessica’s lips parted, her breath came in short gasps, and she realized one hand had clutched to her bosom. Heated pulse pooled in the thrusting peaks of her breasts and between her thighs. Her fingers itched to shred that restrictive gray muslin, to emerge from this thicket naked as he, to dare him to ignore her any longer...a man she barely knew.
And then? What then? Mystery that he was, she sensed he could be fierce if need be. And callous. No doubt legions of women had shared his bed. Without question, he’d left the better part of them in his wake. A woman such as she, all but inexperienced and wide-eyed with the wonder of her newfound sensuality...what would a man like him do to her? Refuse her, no doubt, if he was any sort of gentleman worthy of the name. Simply to spare her the embarrassment, perhaps.
Perhaps. But would he stay?
Once again they plunged into the lake, and Jessica turned about in a stealthy retreat before temptation got the better of her. No, best to keep her clothes on and devise some sort of scheme—that is, after she somehow managed to procure some guile somewhere, something she was grossly lacking. To scheme, to connive. She? All for the sake of a virtual stranger and all those unspoken promises?
Ridiculous. He would see it for what it was. A man as experienced as he surely would. He was too clever by far. He had a century’s worth of wisdom in the lines of his face. True, but she could be clever, as well, and she did possess a female’s superior ability to plot and contrive. Perhaps if she caught him unawares.
Yes, surprise was the best weapon. Something to throw him completely off guard. But what? Launching herself entirely naked into his arms was rather lacking in subtlety and altogether unimaginative. No doubt women had found it necessary to do such a thing innumerable times before for him. The man simply inspired such behavior. He could hardly be blamed for taking full advantage or finding such conduct rather predictable. And she harbored scant desire to be found the least bit predictable by Stark. She’d already allowed the man into her bedroom, and she wearing nothing but her camisole and pantalets, which she’d allowed him all but full exploration of. Utterly predictable, of course, something he’d done countless times in the past. No, this simply would not do.
She paused beside the buggy, one finger drumming upon the ironwork. Blast, but rearranging one’s thinking and behavior was not easily accomplished. These things required years of learning. Good heavens, women all but went to school to become accomplished coquettes. How the devil was she to succeed?
With a troubled frown, she turned, took a step, and almost trod all over a careless pile of clothes on the ground, which she found to be a tangle of faded denim and cotton shirting. With not even a moment’s hesitation, she snatched the pile to her breasts and took three very determined steps, then stopped, awash in indecision. She simply could not abandon the man out here without his clothes. It just wasn’t done. Besides, he would surely guess who had perpetrated such a scheme...or would he? Better yet, what if he did?
A hesitant yet triumphant curve softened her mouth, and her feet moved with a peculiar spring through the brush, beneath that sun, in all that billowing heat, the entire way back to the barn...until she spied the handsome curricle parked just beyond the back door.
“Jessica!” It was Louise French, swooping down on her with bustled crimson skirts swinging. “Good grief, whatever were you doing out there in all this sun and— Why, what have you there?”
Jessica blinked at the clothes crushed against her bosom, exceedingly aware that the cloth emitted a crisp male scent that set her pulse hammering in her ears. “This?”
“Yes, that,” Louise said with an arch of her brow and a closer look. “They look to me like a man’s pants. Far too long and rough-looking for your fiancé to wear. Good heavens, you’re blushing like one of your lovely red geraniums, Jessica. I knew I should have come sooner, and blast it, I would have, had John’s aunt Agatha not appeared upon our doorstep with six months’ worth of baggage in tow. We haven’t been able to budge the woman since, and I don’t believe we’ve a chance at that until the baby comes. Some folderol about lending me a hand around the house, though I’ve a notion John arranged it simply to keep me housebound. Little good it did him. Men. Such delightful creatures. I’m here, aren’t I, though he did insist upon driving me.”
Jessica’s eyes darted past her friend to the tall, smartly dressed fellow tending to the curricle and the gray gelding pawing the dirt before it. He cut a dashing figure in dove-gray topcoat and severely pressed trousers, his golden hair agleam in the sunlight, his beard neat and closely trimmed. He caught her eye and greeted her with a smile and a wave. A handsome man, successful, noble, in love with his wife to the extreme. Beneath all that starched and pressed cloth, that mien of respectability, did there lurk the soul of a heathen capable of stirring Louise to passion? Surely her friend would expect nothing less.
Good grief! Was she doomed never to look upon even her closest friends without wondering if they, too, had found that deeply sensual part of their souls?
“I do so detest unexpected visitors,” Louise said with a gentle tweak of Jessica’s arm, as though she sensed her friend’s distraction. “Particularly when my dearest friend is quite obviously keeping something from me. Hmm?” Louise gave her a meaningful look. “Something quite tall, oozing virility. Something that would have a great likelihood of fitting divinely into those pants?”
“Whatever are you talking about?” Jessica sniffed, maneuvering around her friend and stalking swiftly toward the house without favoring Louise with a reply. “Good afternoon, John. Miserable weather we’re having.”
Poor man, trussed up in all those garments on such a day, solely for the sake of propriety. Just like Avram, a man who’d rather die than shed a layer of his clothes. No doubt he believed it his duty to endure the elements with a smile upon his beaded upper lip. Better to succumb to heatstroke with a noble aplomb than to give hint of any weakness of body or spirit.
The irony of her thoughts. She, who had forever sought to dedicate herself to the noble, right thing to do, to remaining here in Twilight, where she belonged, on this farm, never to venture forth in body, thought or spirit, for fear of what? And what had she found? An existence as stifling and as smothering as five layers of heavy clothes and deception by a philandering husband.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Wynne,” John French said with a forced smile. He leaned slightly toward her and lowered his voice. “Would you mind exercising a bit of your sway with my wife and reminding her of the supreme fragility of her condition?”
Jessica gave a sympathetic smile, realizing the futility of arguing with John French. “She looks rather har
dy of constitution to me.”
John French threw his wife a fearsome glower that brimmed with husbandly protectiveness. “Rubbish, I tell you. For God’s sake, she’s having a baby in less than six months. But has this slowed her down a pace? Not my wife. All this insisting that she simply had to come have a look-see no matter that my Aunt Aggie up and surprised us. Why, I simply had to bring her here, lest she work herself into one of her frenzies. And for what?” He swept one arm about. “Nothing out of the ordinary, to my eye. In fact, the place hasn’t looked better in quite a while. Yes, new fence, I see. Fine-looking. Just as I thought. Positively no reason to get herself all in a dither and— Why, look there, isn’t that your buckboard wagon barreling down upon us now? And isn’t that your— With a— Who the devil? Why, he’s...they’re... If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were quite without their—”
Jessica watched the blood drain from John French’s heat-flushed countenance as the words stuck in his throat. She almost couldn’t look when she heard the buckboard’s wheels approaching and Christian’s boisterous bellowing and hooting. And yet she couldn’t help herself. Surely the conjurings of her imagination couldn’t be half as bad as—
Into the yard and toward the barn the wagon sped, Jack’s racing hooves churning a billowing cloud of dust that thankfully hid most from view.
“Jessica, who is that man there with—?” Louise asked. “Are they... I can’t quite see, but I think— No, it can’t possibly be—”
Jessica licked parched lips and had a devil of a time keeping her eyes from the bare curve of Logan’s hip, where it met with his thigh. And the length of his torso. All of him, actually. He was quite magnificent, after all, even at such a distance, half-hidden by dust. And then they disappeared into the barn, thankfully, sparing Jessica further explanation.
Jessica found herself staring at the clothes she was clutching, as if seeing them for the first time. “I—” She glanced from a frowning Louise to John and back. Both stared at the clothes she carried. With a calm smile, she asked, “Lemonade, anyone?”
Chapter Eight
Rance sensed the movement behind him even before the footfall registered on the barn’s hay-strewn floor. He glanced over his shoulder, stuffing his shirttails into his pants as he did so. A sliver of warning shot through him when his eyes met with the man’s. Though the sunlit barn door at the man’s back shadowed most of his features, Rance didn’t recognize the fellow. Too dapper and respectable to have ever done business with Spotz. Too keenly observant, and brimming with a noble sort of antagonism. Simple curiosity, or something more? Suspicion lurked there in the quick shifting of his eyes.
Damn, but he should have laid low for a while, not gone to town like he had for all his supplies, not shown his face around, like some kind of fool tempting fate. Not used Logan as any part of his name. He hadn’t been using his head with that one. Then again, he’d never thought to linger here long enough to allow anyone to get suspicious of him.
The fellow’s arm extended from the shadows to shove a glass of lemonade at him. “Mrs. Wynne sent this out for you, Stark.”
Rance nodded his thanks and took the glass, draining its contents before glancing at the man again. The hackles rose along his neck, despite the oppressive heat, his guard amply roused by the man’s interest in the stacks of lumber and, next to those, Rance’s saddle and gear.
He stared hard at Rance. “Who the hell are you, Logan Stark?”
“I might ask the same of you.”
“Union-issue rifle you got there. Memento?”
Rance could barely keep the derision from seeping into his voice. “Hardly.”
Silence encroached as the man seemed lost in his own thoughts or memories. “You decorated?” he asked at length.
Rance nodded, entirely ill at ease with any talk whatsoever of the war, particularly with a stranger, a man with whom he would need a clear mind uncluttered of sour memory. No matter that he sensed that the same images of the war haunted this fellow.
“And after that?” the fellow asked.
To probe a man’s innermost thoughts, his true purpose. Had there ever been a time when Rance wished to more than now? Yet some instinct told him honesty would prove the best course with this man. “Ran shotgun guard for Wells Fargo gold shipments for a few years.”
The man seemed to ponder this before glancing again at Rance’s saddle. “Farmhands don’t own gear like that. Pretty fancy stuff. You don’t find workmanship like that around these parts.”
Intelligent man. “I got it in Mexico a couple years back, after I got paid.”
“For doing what?”
“Driving a herd.”
“For who?”
Rance smiled, slow and even. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“John French, attorney-at-law.” French displayed an even smile that never quite reached his glittering eyes. “A close friend of Mrs. Wynne’s.”
“A fine lady,” Rance said, moving to the pile of lumber to examine several newly cut pieces.
“The finest,” French echoed. His footfalls stirred the hay as he moved behind Rance, lingered, then paused beside him to run a black-gloved finger along the length of one piece of lumber. “Hell of a job you’re doing rebuilding the barn here.”
Rance felt a stab of pride, then dismissed it. John French, attorney-at-law, would know precisely how to lower a man’s guard. Stooping, Rance hauled one long, flat piece of lumber onto his good shoulder and moved to the side of the barn and all his works-in-progress. To his surprise, French and his starched finery followed him, one hand supporting the end of the board. Unease squirmed like a living thing in Rance’s gut. He grunted his thanks and set the plank against the bowed wall. Then he turned to French, hands planted on his hips. A belligerent stance, true, certain to stir the man, which was precisely what Rance intended. Hell, he still had a full day’s work to do, something he wasn’t about to let some pompous lawyer sort keep him from.
“Dammit, French, what is it that you want?”
French narrowed his eyes. “Ornery, aren’t you, for a man who just rode naked into a lady’s backyard. You do realize I may never be able to wipe that image from my wife’s mind. That alone should make me loathe you for the rest of my days. However, Mrs. Wynne came as close as she ever will to confessing in the small matter of your missing trousers. It appears that you, sir, are innocent in the matter. And Mrs. Wynne’s reputation is still as unblemished as always, as far as Louise and I are concerned. A bit of mischief never damaged anyone, I would think.”
“A remarkable woman.”
“All the same, she’s a grieving widow, newly engaged to our local—”
“I’ve met him.”
“Ah.” French seemed to choose his words with care. “A good man. Stood right by her after her husband was killed, and afterward, when all the—er, well, it was nasty business. Creditors can be horrible people. The reverend will make her a fine husband. A good, fine husband. Rather unlike the other. And a father to the boy. Just what she needs, I say. He—” French jerked his chin at Rance. “He hasn’t tried to run you off yet, eh?”
“I believe Jess has dealt with that.”
French nodded slowly, a curious frown puckering his brow. “I see. Rather odd, to my eye, but then again, I’m the sort who would have poked a shotgun into your ribs and escorted you to the next state before you could even bid my wife a by-your-leave.”
“I don’t doubt that for a moment, French.”
French shifted his neck inside his stiff celluloid collar. “Call it what you will. My wife Louise is inclined to think me a bit, well...overprotective, as though that were some sort of vice, dammit all.”
“What sort of man wouldn’t feel that way about his wife?”
French arched a brow, and his chest puffed up measurably. “A man who’s no man at all. Indeed, Stark. Damned females, how’s a man to know what to do with them?”
Rance shrugged, and the image loomed of Jess standing in the y
ard, clutching his clothes. What the hell had prompted that?
“Take my wife, for instance. For days she’s been insisting I bring her here, and now I know why, of course. Folks in Twilight don’t take to strangers, you see. Not many pass through here that we don’t know right off. Most going east continue on up to Kansas City or west to Wichita. Naturally, we like to find out as much as we can about the strangers, the womenfolk in particular, of course. Can’t stand not knowing positively all there is to know about everything. But what’s a man to do while she’s in there—” He tossed his head toward the house and grimaced. “Do you realize they’ll be chattering till long past sunset, and that’s if we’re lucky? Could be midnight. Do you ever wonder what they have to talk about, Stark?”
No, he’d never wondered, perhaps because he’d never taken a close interest in a particular female’s behavior, which made his curiosity about Jessica Wynne all the more disturbing. Then again, she was no typical female. Still, to his mind, were he Jess’s husband, say, he would derive intense comfort from knowing where his woman was, knowing that he could, if he so desired, storm into that kitchen—knowing it was his kitchen—interrupt all that conversation, haul her over his shoulder and take her to his bed and spend the entirety of this sultry summer day with her there.
“There’s still comfort in knowing that, French,” he muttered, struggling to keep those taunting images at bay by measuring wood. “It doesn’t matter to me what she’s talking about.”
“You’ve never been married, have you, Stark?”
“That obvious, eh?”