by Diana Palmer
But if she expected the wedding band to make an immediate difference in their relationship, she was in for a shock. Because that afternoon Dawson, who’d been restless and prowling ever since the reception, suddenly packed a bag and announced that he just had to see a man in California about a seed bull.
“On our wedding day?” Barrie exclaimed, aghast.
He looked more uncomfortable than ever. “It’s urgent. I wouldn’t go otherwise. He’s threatening to sell it to someone else.”
“You could just buy it,” she suggested.
“Not without seeing it first.” He closed his bag. “It won’t take long. A few days.”
“Days?”
He grimaced at her expression. He tried to speak and made a curt gesture with one hand instead. “I won’t be away long. Corlie’s got the number where I can be reached if you need me.”
“I need you already. Don’t go.”
He paused to tilt her face up to his worried eyes. “I have to.” He ground out the words.
She had a feeling that the confinement of marriage was already making him nervous. He’d faced so many things in the past few weeks, including a sudden marriage and a pregnancy. He was trapped and straining at the ropes. And if she didn’t let him go now, she might lose him for good. She was wise enough to know that he needed a little time, a little room. Even if it was on their wedding day. She couldn’t corner him. She had to let go.
“Okay.” She smiled instead of arguing. “If you have to go, you have to go.”
He seemed surprised at her lack of protest. His impatience to leave lessened. “You don’t mind?”
“Yes, I mind,” she said honestly. “But I understand, perhaps better than you realize.”
He glared at her. “It’s only a business trip. It has nothing to do with our marriage or the baby.”
“Of course not.”
He didn’t like the expression in her eyes. “You think you know everything about me, don’t you?”
Her eyebrows raised. “I haven’t even scratched the surface, yet.”
“I’m glad you realize it.”
She reached up and kissed him beside his mouth, very gently, feeling his tall body tense at the unexpected caress. “Do you mind if I kiss you goodbye?” she asked.
He stared at her. “No.”
She grinned. “Have a safe trip. Are you taking the Learjet or a commercial flight?”
“Commercial,” he said surprisingly. “I don’t feel like worrying with maps and vectors today.”
“Good. As long as you don’t feel compelled to tell the pilot how to fly,” she added tongue in cheek, remembering an incident in the past when Dawson had actually gone into the cockpit to instruct the pilot to change his altimeter.
He averted his eyes. “He was a novice commuter pilot and he was so nervous that he had his altimeter set wrong. Good thing I noticed. He’d have crashed.”
“I suppose he would have, at that. And he never flew again, either.”
“He realized he wasn’t cut out for the stress of the job, and he had the guts to admit it.” He looked down at her with calmer eyes, searching over her face. “You look better than you did in Tucson,” he said. “But don’t overdo, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And try to eat more.”
“I will.”
“Don’t drive anywhere unless Rodge and Corlie know where you’re going.”
“Okay.”
“And if something goes wrong, call me. Don’t try to handle it yourself.”
“Anything else?”
He began to look uncomfortable. “Stay away from the horses. You shouldn’t go riding until we know for certain.”
“You’re a case,” she murmured with twinkling eyes. “Imagine that, you worrying about me.”
He didn’t react with humor, as she’d expected. In fact, he looked more solemn than ever. He took a long strand of her hair and tested its soft texture, looking at it instead of her while he spoke. “I’ve always worried about you.”
She sighed, admiring his rare good looks in the tan suit he wore. “I can’t believe that you actually belong to me, now,” she reminded him, noting his shocked expression.
It should have pleased him to hear the note of possession in her voice. It didn’t. Combined with his fears of being vulnerable in her arms, it made him angry. He dropped her hair and moved away. “I’ll phone you tonight. Stay out of trouble.”
She colored at the snub, because that’s what it was. She wasn’t through walking on eggshells with him, she realized at once. She’d only just begun.
“Dawson?”
He paused, looking back with obvious reluctance.
She hesitated, frowning. She was going to have trouble approaching him at all from now on. She had to do it right the first time.
“Marriage doesn’t just happen,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “It takes some cooperation, some compromise. I’ll go halfway, but no further.”
He looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“You’re my husband,” she said, tingling as she said the word.
“And now you think you own me, because I married you?” he asked in a dangerously soft tone.
Her face felt tight. She just stared at him for a minute before she spoke. “Just remember that I didn’t ask you to marry me,” she said quietly. “It was you who came after me. Not the reverse.”
His eyebrows rose at the haughty tone. “I came after you to save you from an unwed pregnancy,” he informed her with a mocking smile. “Or did you think I had other motives? Do I look like a man who’s dying for love of you?” he added with biting sarcasm.
“Of course not,” she said in a subdued tone. “I know that you don’t love me. I’ve always known.”
He didn’t understand the need he felt to cut her, especially now. He’d drained all the joy out of her green eyes, all the pleasure out of her radiant face. She looked tired. If she really was pregnant, as they suspected, upsetting her was the very last thing he should be doing. But she had him now, and he burned for her. He wanted her with a headlong, reckless passion that could place him forever in her power. And that wasn’t the only fear he was nursing. He had cold feet and they were getting colder by the minute. He had to get away now, to be alone so that he could get a grip on himself. Dear God, why did she have to look that way? Her very silence made him feel guilty.
Her chin lifted and she managed a smile. “Have a good trip.”
His eyes narrowed. “You won’t run away while I’m gone?” he asked abruptly, and watched her face color. “Damn it…!”
“Don’t you swear at me!” she snapped back. Her lower lip was trembling, her hands clenched at her sides, her eyes glittered with tears of anger and hurt. “And I’m not the one who’s running, you are! You can’t bear the thought of a wife, can you, especially me!”
Her loud voice brought Corlie into the hall. The housekeeper stopped dead, aghast at the scene before her eyes. There was Dawson with a suitcase, looking as unapproachable as she’d ever seen him, and Barrie crying, shivering.
“You’ve only just got married,” she said hesitantly, looking from one of them to the other.
“Why don’t you tell her the truth, Dawson? We didn’t get married for love. We got married because we had to!” Barrie sobbed. “I’m pregnant, and it’s his fault!”
Dawson’s face went white as the words stabbed him like a knife right out of the past. He was oblivious to Corlie’s shocked expression as he glared at Barrie. “Don’t make it sound like that. You couldn’t possibly know for sure yet!” he snapped at her.
“Yes, I could,” she said in a ghostly tone. “I used one of those home pregnancy kits, and it says I am!” she growled.
Thinking it was one thing. Hearing it, knowing it, being sure—that was something entirely different. He stood with the suitcase in his hand and he didn’t move. She was really pregnant. His eyes went to her stomach, where one of her hands was flattened protectively, and
then back up to her hurt, wet face. But he wasn’t seeing Barrie. He was seeing his mother, blaming him for her marriage, blaming him, and then at the last, in the casket, with the little casket beside her…
“Well, you’re married,” Corlie said, trying to find a glimmer of optimism. “And you both love children…”
Barrie wiped her wet eyes. “Yes, we love children.” She glared at Dawson. “What are you waiting for? There’s a bull standing in a pasture in California just dying for you to rush out there and buy him, isn’t there? Why don’t you go?”
Corlie glanced at him. “You’re going to California to buy a bull on your wedding day?” she asked, as if she couldn’t have heard right.
“Yes, I’m going to buy a bull,” he said belligerently. He slammed his hat on his head, ignoring his guilt at the way Barrie looked. “I’ll be home in a few days.”
He stalked to the front door and jerked it open. He knew both women were watching him, and he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to go rushing to Barrie’s bed like a crazed animal begging for favors, and she needn’t expect it. She had to learn right from the beginning that he had the upper hand, and that he wasn’t going to be some sort of sexual toy for her. She already blamed him for getting her pregnant, for ruining her life. She was going to be like his mother, she was going to torment him. He had to escape while he could.
That he was behaving irrationally didn’t even occur to him. Not then, at least.
But by the time he was ensconced in his California hotel suite, the world seemed to snap quite suddenly back into focus.
He looked around him with vague shock. He’d walked out on his wife of two hours, left her alone and pregnant, to go and buy a bull. He couldn’t believe what he’d done, what he’d said to her. He must have been out of his mind.
Perhaps he really was, he thought. He’d tortured himself with thoughts of making love to Barrie, but once again he’d have to submit to the madness she created in his body. He’d be helpless, vulnerable, weak. She’d watch him…she’d see not only his surrender to her body, but what he really felt. In the heat of ecstasy he wouldn’t be able to hide it from her.
He took a long breath. He’d never faced his own vulnerability with her. In fact, he’d gone to extreme lengths to make sure he didn’t have to face it. It had been impossible for him to lower the barriers between them, for fear that she’d want revenge even now for the way he’d treated her. If he let her see the extent of his desire, she’d use it against him. Hadn’t his own mother taunted him with his childish weaknesses, ridiculed him, made him look small in front of his father and his friends? Hadn’t she pointed out that he was a sissy because he’d cried when his German shepherd had been hit by a car? Hadn’t she spent his childhood making fun of him, making him pay, unbeknownst to his father, for a marriage she’d never wanted in the first place? Dawson had been a mistake, she often told him, and she’d had to marry a man she didn’t really love because of it…
Funny that he hadn’t let himself remember those words until today. Barrie was pregnant and she’d cried that she’d had to marry Dawson because of it. If she hadn’t said that, he’d never have gone out the door. Ironic that her own mother had said the same thing about her, he thought, recalling what she’d told him in Tucson. Maybe women didn’t really want babies at all except as a means of torturing men and making them feel guilty. He wondered if that thought was quite coherent.
He sprawled on the luxurious sofa in the sitting room, remembering other things, remembering Barrie’s soft skin under his, her sweet cries of passion as he drove her into the carpet beneath the heated thrust of his body. He groaned aloud as the memory of the ecstasy she’d given him poured into his mind and made him shiver. Could he live without ever again knowing that pleasure, regardless of the price?
His eyes closed as he lay back. He could always turn out the lights, he thought with dry humor. Then she couldn’t look at him. It wouldn’t matter if she heard him. He’d hear her, too. She was none too quiet when they made love. His eyes blazed with feeling as he recalled her own shocked pleasure that morning on the carpet. She’d known only pain from him before. He’d taught her that she could expect far more than that.
She’d said she loved him. Good God, how could she love him, when he kept pushing her away? Why couldn’t he accept her love, why couldn’t he accept his own addiction to her? She was pregnant, and he’d left her in Sheridan on their wedding day out of nothing more than cold fear because he…because he…
He opened his eyes and took a slow, painful breath. Because he loved her. There. He couldn’t admit it to her, but he couldn’t hide it from himself. He loved her. He’d loved her since she was fifteen, since she’d given him a silver mouse on his birthday. He’d loved her in France, hated himself for taking advantage of what she felt for him in an attempt to deny that love. But it had grown and grown until it consumed him. He couldn’t get rid of it. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t give in to it. What was he going to do?
Well, he thought as he managed to get to his feet, there was one thing he could do. He could have a drink, and then he was going to call Barrie and set her straight on a few things!
* * *
Barrie was surprised when she heard Dawson’s thick voice on the telephone. She hadn’t really expected him to call after the furious way he’d left. She’d spent the rest of the day alternately crying and cursing, while Corlie did her best to comfort and reassure her. She’d gone to bed early, sick and disappointed because her new husband couldn’t even stand to be in the same house with her. And after the tenderness she’d felt in him in Tucson, too. It had been utter devastation.
Now, here he was on the phone trying to talk to her, and unless she missed her guess, he was blind, stinking drunk!
“Did you hear me?” he demanded. “I said, from now on, we’re only going to make love in the dark!”
“I don’t mind,” she said, confused.
“I didn’t ask if you minded,” he muttered. “And you can’t look at me while we do it.”
“It would never occur to me,” she said placatingly.
“And don’t say you own me. You don’t own me. No woman is going to own me.”
“Dawson, I never said that.”
“You said I belonged to you. I’m not a dog. Did you hear me?”
“Yes, I heard you.” She smiled to herself at his efforts to enunciate properly. The anguish and disappointment of the afternoon had vanished as he poured out his deepest fears without even realizing it. It was a fascinating glimpse at the real man, without the mask.
“I don’t belong to you,” he continued. He felt hot. He pushed back his hair. He was sweating. Maybe he should turn on the air conditioner. If he could only find it. He bumped into the table and almost upset the lamp. In the tangle, he dropped the phone.
“Dawson?” Barrie called, concerned when she heard the crash.
There were muttered, half-incoherent curses and a scrambling sound as he retrieved the receiver. “I walked into the table. And don’t laugh!”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it,” she assured him. “I can’t find the air conditioner. It must be in this room somewhere. How the hell can they hide something that big?”
She almost lost it then. She had to stifle a burst of laughter. “Look under the window,” she instructed. “What window? Oh, that one. Okay.” There was another pause and some odd sounds, followed by a curse and a thud. “I think I turned on the heat,” he said. “It’s hot in here.”
“You might call housekeeping and ask them to check,” she said hesitantly.
“Check what?”
“The air conditioner.”
“I already checked it,” he muttered. “It’s under the window.”
She wasn’t going to argue. “Did you see the bull?” she asked.
“What bull?” There was a pause. “Listen, there’s no bull in here, are you crazy? This is a hotel!”
By now, Barrie was rolling on the floor.
“A
re you laughing?” he asked furiously.
“No.” She choked. “I have a cough. I’m coughing.” She coughed.
There was another pause. “I was going to tell you something,” he said, trying to focus. “Oh, I remember. Listen here, Barrie, I can live without sex. I don’t even need it.”
“Yes, Dawson,” she agreed gently.
“But if you want to sleep with me, you can,” he continued generously.
“Yes, I would like that, very much,” she said.
He cleared his throat. “You would?”
“I love sleeping with you,” she said softly.
He cleared his throat again. “Oh,” he said after a minute.
The opportunity was too good to miss. He was talking to her as if he’d had truth serum. “Dawson,” she began carefully, “why did you go to California?”
“So I wouldn’t make love to you,” he said drowsily. “I didn’t want you to see…how much I wanted to. How much I cared.”
Her heart began to swell, to lift, to soar. “I love you,” she whispered.
He sucked in a sharp breath. “I know. I love you, too,” he said drowsily. “Love you…so much. So much, Barrie, so much, so much…!” He swallowed. He couldn’t quite talk.
Which was just as well, because Barrie was as speechless as he was. She gripped the receiver like a life jacket, staring into space with her heart in her mouth. “But I don’t want you to know it,” he continued quite clearly. “Because women like having weapons. You can’t know how I feel, Barrie,” he continued. “You’d torment me with it, just like your mother tormented George because he wanted her so much.”
She felt the pain right down to her toes. She’d never known these things about Dawson.
“Listen, I have to go to bed now,” he said. He frowned, trying to remember something. “I can’t remember why I called you.”
“That’s all right, darling,” she said softly. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Darling,” he repeated slowly. He took a heavy breath. “You don’t know how it hurts when you call me ‘darling.’ I’m buried inside myself. I can’t dig my way out. I miss you,” he whispered, his voice husky and deep. “You don’t know how much. Good night…sweetheart.”