As it happened, while he was silently grinding his teeth and pondering the matter, she took it out of his hands. Almost before the SUV stopped rolling, before he had any idea what she had in mind, she opened up her door and jumped out. By the time he got the motor turned off and the keys out of the ignition and his own door open, she was already halfway across the raggedy dandelion-studded grass, right out in the open, unshielded, unguarded.
With fear and fury propelling him, he caught up with her in about two strides. He grabbed her arm-ignoring her gasp of outraged protest-and steered her away from the front steps and around the side of the house to the back, where he shoved her down beside the stoop and told her to stay there while he did a sweep for intruders. He was almost as surprised as she was when she obeyed him. He could feel her seething about it, though, when he came back and hauled her up the steps and shielded her with his body while she unlocked the door.
Inside the kitchen, he locked the door and pulled down the shades, this time making sure to keep a good firm grip on her arm in case she had any more ideas about dashing off without waiting for him to check things out first. Again, it didn’t make her happy; this time the look she gave him when he told her to stay put while he had a look around probably should have turned him to stone.
“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” he said mildly when he met her in the living room, feeling a little more relaxed now he’d made sure there weren’t any hitmen lurking in her closets or under the bed. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that she hadn’t obeyed his order to stay in the kitchen.
“No,” she snapped, “I’m not.” She had her arms folded and one hip stuck out, and everything about her but the color of her hair screamed, Red-Headed Woman-Handle with Care!
It was an attitude Roan was well acquainted with, having spent a good part of his life in the company of red-haired females, but what he wasn’t prepared for was the little hot spot that opened up in the bottom of his belly, like a slumbering coal flaring to life.
“I’m through being meek and mild,” she bit out between heaving breaths, her eyes spitting green-gold fire, and the thought, Meek and mild? You’ve got to be kidding! flashed through his mind. But the urge to break into a grin vanished when she continued, and he saw the fire in her eyes was just one shaky step away from tears. “I’m tired of…of letting some-some man run my life. Like I’m a little child who needs to be told what to do. Okay, I’ve let it happen, but no more. I’m not a child, I’m a grownup, dammit. I decide whether to go or stay, whether to hide or not. My choice.”
“Fine,” he said, keeping his voice stern, grateful for the sunglasses that wouldn’t let her see what was in his eyes. He folded his arms and faced her across a barrier of space so charged with electricity it seemed almost to hum. “You’re right. You choose. Tell me what you want to do. Do you want to stay here, wait for Diego DelRey or his hitman to come for you? Or do you want to come stay out at my ranch where I can protect you?”
She stared at him through a long, vibrating silence, while the fire in her eyes slowly died. Finally… “I want to stay with you,” she whispered.
The naked longing in her face hit him like a fist in the gut. Reaching for her was a reflex. But she’d already turned away from him, jerky as a mechanical doll.
Stupid, Mary thought. Stupid! Oh God, Oh God, I hope I didn’t let him see….
But she had. She knew she had. She hadn’t missed the way his face…at least the part of it she could see…had changed. She was only glad he was wearing sunglasses, so she hadn’t had to see the pity in his eyes.
“I’ll just be a minute,” she muttered breathlessly as she fled like a coward to her bedroom.
She meant it, too-about taking a minute to pack; she had it down to a science. She began to pull clothes out of drawers and dump them into the suitcase she’d hauled out from the bottom of her closet, pausing long enough to call back to him, “I think I saw a cat carrier in the garage…maybe you could-”
She heard a growled, “I’ll get it,” then the thump of boots on hardwood.
She heard the kitchen door slam. And all the fight and defiance went out of her like air from a balloon. She let the pile of clothes slip from her arms and gripped the edges of the suitcase that was lying open on the bed, leaned on her hands, bowed her head and closed her eyes, weighed down by an overwhelming sense of grief and loss.
I don’t want to do this.
The packing thing she may have had down pat, but the leaving…that was another matter. She thought of all the places she’d left…all the people, most of the time just when she was beginning to get to know them…never long enough to feel that sense of home…of belonging. She had a sudden fierce urge to pick up the suitcase and heave it through the nearest window.
No more. I don’t want to leave again. Not this town. This is where I want to belong.
How insane was that, when this was the town where she’d been assaulted, nearly raped, arrested and charged with murder? Where, but for the sake of a sympathetic judge, she would right now be in jail?
All right, maybe not the town, but the people. Kind people, like Miss Ada and Betty. People who need me, like Susie Grace.
And Roan. You know very well this isn’t about the town, or the people. It’s about one person. Roan.
How insane was that, to fall for the sheriff who’d arrested her and put her in jail for a murder she hadn’t committed?
It was all too much…everything coming down on her at once, happening way too fast. She could feel emotions looming, piling up in her like snow on a precipice. It wouldn’t take much to bring it all tumbling down on her. And so what? she thought recklessly. Let it come. She would welcome it. After everything that had happened to her, after the long, long struggle to outrun Destiny, it would be almost a relief to finally let it sweep her away…
Without a car cluttering up the garage, Roan was able to find the cat carrier without too much difficulty. After sweeping off the worst of the dust, he carried it into the kitchen and left it there while he went to see how Mary was coming along with her packing.
He found her standing in the middle of her bedroom, frowning at a half-filled suitcase on the bed in front of her. She looked no less emotionally fragile than when he’d left her, so he knocked softly on the door frame and eased into the room much the way he’d have entered the cage of a sleeping lioness.
“Found the carrier,” he said, keeping his voice to a neutral mutter. “Now all I need’s the cat. Any idea where I might find him?”
She jerked around, her hair in tumbled disarray, her mouth forming an O of distress. “Oh-oh God. He could be anywhere-curled up asleep somewhere…hunting…visiting the neighbors… He always comes home when he knows I’m here, though. He’ll be here-I know he will. If we wait-”
“Mary…” He said it with a sigh, knowing the battle that was coming. “The longer we wait, the less chance we have of getting you out of town undetected. We can’t-”
She held up a hand. “No-don’t. Don’t even say it.”
Well, he’d known she was going to fight him on it, and she didn’t disappoint him. Her eyes were getting the shimmer again-the fire-and-rain thing that grabbed him in some deep-down part of himself that didn’t know how to say no.
“I’m not leaving without him, Roan. I mean it.”
“Mary-” He put his hands on her arms, gently stroking. Meaning only to comfort her…make her see reason. Honest to God.
She shook her head rapidly, further dislodging her hair from its haphazard moorings and sending strands of it snaking across her face, giving her the wild look of someone fighting her way through a tempest. “He’s not even mine,” she said furiously. “He’s Queenie’s stupid cat. I know he’s hateful and ugly, but she left him with me. I’m responsible for him. I can’t just leave him here. What if someone comes for me and…and hurts him? I can’t…” The words trailed off.
For a moment she simply stared at him, a strange fierce light in her eyes. He�
��d seen it before, that look, during his skydiving training. It was the look of someone about to jump out of an airplane…terrified, but committed. Then, to his utter astonishment, she reached up and took off his sunglasses. For another few seconds she burned that look into his eyes…then hooked a hand around his neck, leaned up and kissed him.
He barely felt the soft pillowing of her mouth against his before it burst like ripe fruit in the sun, flooding him with her warm, sweet essence. The taste and smell and feel of her woman’s body blew through him like summer winds, and remembered heat and sweat and desperate lust of the golden summers of his youth collided with the cold and barrenness of the recent past to form a storm cell within him of epic intensity. It slammed into him with a concussion like thunder. Heat raced through his blood, electricity crackled along his skin.
For a moment, stunned, he merely took what she offered. Then suddenly he was plundering deeper, greedily…driving his hands into her hair while his mouth bore down on hers, demanding more…and more still wasn’t enough. There was desperation in the way his mouth devoured her, recklessness in his exploring hands, fostered by a need greater than anything he’d ever known before.
But then…he’d never been hungry for so long, and this was a need only a starving man could know.
She tore her mouth from his at last and clung to him, sobbing…gasping for breath. Holding her, he returned to his senses slowly…first to discover they were both shaking, then that his hand was molded to the shape of her breast and his work-roughened skin separated from the delicate silkiness of hers only by the thinnest layer of lace. Not surprisingly, the sweater she was wearing had been no barrier to him at all.
“I’m sorry.” She gulped the words in a tear-thickened voice, not pulling away from him but lowering her face so his lips, already burning with thirst for her, could only find solace in the smooth moist skin of her forehead.
Breath gusted from his chest and stirred her hair. “Mary…”
She gave her head a quick, hard shake…pressed her hand against him, trembling-pushing him away or imploring him to stay? He could feel the battle raging inside her as she said with a heart-rending travesty of a laugh, “That wasn’t-I know there must be rules against you…against us doing this.”
“Probably,” he said, laughing with her, in too much turmoil himself to realize how much she wanted him to deny it. “I don’t think the situation’s come up before.”
He caught only a glimpse of her ravaged face before she turned away from him. One glimpse of pride and despair, hope and grief… And it hit him then, like a nightmare he hadn’t had in so long he’d forgotten how terrible it could be-a sense of loss like a huge dark hole opening up in front of him where his future ought to be.
I can’t lose this woman. Even if it means my job, my career. I’m not going to let her go.
Before the thought had completely formed in his mind his hand lashed out, caught her by the arm and spun her back to him. She came against his chest with a force that drove a gasp from her lungs, and his mouth was there to take it from her. She made a sound-a cry, a whimper, a sob-and he took that, too. Took it, and gave her back everything that was inside him he hadn’t been able to find words to say.
At first, he cradled her head between his two hands, afraid if he let go he might lose her again. Holding her like that, he kissed her mouth, her throat, the wound on her cheek, her eyelids…and when his lips tasted moisture there, felt a stinging in his own throat and the backs of his eyes. Only when he felt her hands tugging at his shirt did he scoop his hands underneath her sweater to reclaim the sweet, aching pleasure of skin on skin. His hands on her skin…her hands on his…oh yes, it was pleasure, and a fierce wild joy he’d sorely missed.
But it was also a strange kind of relief he felt-relief in knowing at last and beyond any doubt that he and this woman were both of like mind and had crossed an invisible line together…two people on a toboggan that had been balanced on the lip of a mountain but had now tipped irrevocably and begun its dangerous, exhilarating journey. For better or worse, there was no getting off now. No turning back.
Treated to the sensory wonder of his hands on her nakedness, he couldn’t get enough, couldn’t get her clothes out of the way fast enough. The fact that she seemed caught on the same snag didn’t help matters; the soft whimpering sounds she made, the cool slide of her hands over his fevered skin were like throwing gasoline on a conflagration. Or maybe it was just her, this woman who’d been called mousy, this redhead who wasn’t…this proud woman with a panther’s walk and fire-and-rain eyes and a mouth that had almost but not quite forgotten how to smile. Without doing a thing, she was more than enough to set a man on fire.
He pulled back from her a little, needing a respite from the sledgehammer pounding of his heart, and she took advantage of the space that opened between them to pull her sweater over her head and drop it to the floor. She stood there and looked at him then, eyes hot and vulnerable at the same time, and instead of quieting down, his heart leaped into his throat. Her breasts, rising and falling with her quick, shallow breaths, were just barely covered by the thinnest and most delicate lace.
Desire shuddered through him. He cupped her breasts in his palms as if they were gifts he’d been given…stroked the beaded tips through the transparent fabric and murmured, “Wow… Miss Mary, it appears you have unplumbed depths.”
A breathy giggle somehow broke loose from her ragged respirations. “Feel free to plumb them-” her voice caught, and she finished in a choking whisper “-if you want.”
“Oh, I want.” He hooked his thumbs in the straps of her bra and drew them slowly over her shoulders. “I definitely want.” Dazed…humbled by the beauty of what he’d uncovered…what she’d offered, he lifted his eyes to hers and said in a thickened voice, “That’s…if you want, too.”
It was another thing he’d forgotten-the vulnerability. Intimacy never had come easy for him. He and Erin had been kids together, played naked in the sprinkler together. Skinny-dipped together. Yet he remembered the first time they’d made love-virgins, both of them-how scared he’d been, not just the usual kind of performance anxiety most of the guys he knew wouldn’t ever admit to having, not in a million years, and probably did a whole lot of bragging to cover up. No…the kind of fear he’d felt had been more in the nature of awe, an overwhelming sense of wonder at the magnitude of this step he was taking…that they were taking. He and Erin. That this woman would open up the most private and personal, intimate part of herself…to him. That he would allow her to see him without any of his defenses…utterly naked in every sense of the word.
After Erin, he’d thought he’d never go through that with another woman, ever again. And yet…here he was.
“I want,” she whispered.
He released a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding…closed his eyes and lowered his head…pressed his mouth to her throat…her breasts… moistening her skin and the lace alike with his essence. Inhaled deeply…he’d forgotten how good a woman’s skin smelled. Tasted. Felt.
The desire to bury himself in her warm body and lose himself there was so intense he felt dizzy with it…hollow, as if he hadn’t eaten in days. His stomach growled, and it made him think again of Erin, other times, before they’d made love, when they’d been necking and his stomach would growl, and she’d tease him about being hungry. Oh, yeah…but not that kind of hungry.
That memory led to another-the reason for those frustrating make-out sessions when he’d been so hard and hot and young enough to think he’d surely die from it: he’d been too afraid to buy condoms, because he figured if Boyd found out-and he was sure to find out, in a town where everybody knew everybody’s business and the only drug store was owned by Boyd’s late wife’s cousin-he’d kill him.
Then one day when they were cleaning out the stables together, Boyd had handed him a packet of condoms. Roan could still hear the rancher’s crusty voice, could still recall, word for word, what he’d said: “You care abou
t a gal, you take care of her. You hear me, son? You take care of my girl.”
Take care of her… Well, he’d done his best. To the best of his knowledge, his father-in-law hadn’t ever held it against him that his best hadn’t been good enough.
“Mary…” He pulled away from her with a groan of regret he felt deep in his belly…his groin…all the way to his toes. “We can’t do this. Not now. I don’t have anything. I’m sorry…”
“There’s a package of condoms in the medicine cabinet,” she said in a strangled voice. And quickly added when his startled stare jerked to hers, “Not mine-they came with the house. I guess Queenie forgot them.” There was a different kind of light in her eyes, one he’d never seen there before. “Either that, or…”
“A housewarming gift?” He managed to say it with a straight face, though he’d already realized the light in her eyes must be laughter. It seemed so improbable, so rare, that glint of wicked humor, his impulse was to shelter and nourish it with secret delight, like an orchid found blooming in a dark wood.
“Talk about unplumbed depths,” Mary murmured solemnly.
And suddenly they were holding each other again, clinging hard, her face buried in the curve of his neck, his in her hair, both of them shaking with smothered laughter, giddy relief and maybe fear.
“Do you want to go get them,” he whispered finally, “or shall I?”
“You go. Just don’t…” She tipped her head back and her eyes, fathomless and green as oceans, searched his. “Don’t be too long.” Again her voice was unsteady, and he knew what she’d left unsaid.
Don’t take too long…don’t think too much…don’t lose this.
“Count on it,” he growled. He kissed her long and deeply, then left her.
It’s because of moments like this, Mary thought as she waited for Roan to return, lovers consider darkness a friend.
Darkness would have spared her the agony of wondering how to wait for him…whether to undress or not…whether to wait for him in bed or not. How humiliating it would be if she did those things, and he changed his mind. Came to his senses.
The Sheriff of Heartbreak County Page 20