by BJ James
“Not until you tell what’s bothering you.” The grin had long disappeared, his eyes were still, bottomless. “Why did you ride across the range as if the devil himself were chasing you?”
“That’s none of your business.” She couldn’t bear the intensity she saw, the caring.
“I’m making it my business.”
“Don’t.” She stared out over the land her father coveted.
“Too late, Savannah.” The name she heard so little was a low, sweet sound falling from his lips. A caress as tangible as his hand at her face. “Far too late.”
“We’re enemies,” she reminded him tensely. “I’ve sworn to do everything in my power to see that you lose what you want most in the world.” With each word her voice grew huskier, lower. “So why do you care?”
“This.” Steve hooked a palm around her nape, drawing her down to him. “This is why I care.”
“No,” Hank cried, but in no more than a desperate whisper.
“Yes.”
His mouth barely touched her. His lips only sipped at the rich promise of hers. But the gentle contact was enough that he felt the soft, unwilling tremor of yielding, enough that he heard the slow, shuddering sigh of a lost battle.
Giving her one last choice, he turned his mouth from hers, drawing away just enough to stare once again into the tortured storm of her silver eyes. Relinquishing his token captivity, his hand slid from her nape, returning to her cheek, then traced a path downward, as light as a whisper, as undemanding. Circling the slender column of her throat, his fingertips swept over the fragile flesh. One by one they plundered the hollow pulsing beneath their touch. One by one they curled into his palm, until his shaking, fisted hand fell away.
Withdrawing, he released the reins. Black Jack was free, she could run or stay.
Holding her, keeping her only with his gaze, he waited.
She stared down at him, her breasts rising with the ragged rhythm of each hard drawn breath. Her mind was reeling and her body trembled. All her life her loyalties had been clear-cut, above challenge. But neither rigorous training nor the harsh existence in which danger was a constant, and survival and success were measured by the same unwavering rules, had prepared her for a time like this. When nothing was as it should be.
She had no concept of danger that threatened the intrinsic values of her life, nor an enemy who looked at her with naked need. There was no defense when his lips were soft and clever, and his kiss sweet and wild.
In the aftermath of Jubal’s celebration, she’d spent days convincing herself the frisson of response stirred by a stolen kiss was shock and anger, not passion. She wanted to believe it now, but twice judged shattered lie.
With brutal Benedict honesty she admitted that it was neither shock nor anger that swept every coherent thought from her mind. The inescapable truth was that Steve Cody’s touch left her weak and confused, with age-old loyalties forgotten. His kiss kindled desire, leaving her yearning for more.
With only his mesmerizing look he kept her when she should fly.
She wanted to go. Common sense demanded she should. Looking to the reins dangling over Black Jack’s massive neck, she willed herself to take them up, to dash like mad to safety and sanity.
A thundering heart that cared nothing for safety and sanity said no.
She was pale, her eyes dark and brooding in the pallor, when she turned again to him. Her thoughts, her struggle, were written on her face, and in her melancholy cry.
“Steve.”
Damning himself and Jake Benedict, Steve lifted her from the saddle. She was nearly weightless in his arms. As he let her body slide the length of his, he realized that in the weeks since he’d come to the canyon, she’d grown smaller, and for all her tenacious strength there was a fragility in her slenderness. There were shadows and fine lines drawn on her face, left by restless fatigue. An accepted condition, more often than not, in ranch life. One he discovered he loathed when it was Savannah who wore the bruise of sleeplessness beneath her eyes.
Regarding her silently, he drew a knuckle over the faint blue marks, as if with tenderness he could erase them. “Savannah.” Her name was a hushed, strangled sigh as his lips followed the path his tender touch had taken. “Sweet Savannah.”
Drawing her closer, bending to her, his mouth dipped to hers. She was pliant and quiet in his arms, her lips were warm but unyielding. He kissed her long and hard, with a building passion, decimating every faltering denial. With the last falling around her like a broken chalice, uttering a sigh of longing and need she opened to him, yielding more than her lips as his tongue teased and stroked, demanding entry.
Lost in the plunging, rhythmic caress, her breath grew shallow. Banked fires that smoldered white-hot burst into hotter flames. Amid a wild, smothered cry, her palms skipped over his chest, to his throat, to his nape, clasping the crisp waves that fell too long and shaggy over the collar of his shirt. Holding him, needlessly keeping him where he wanted to be, like an unskilled wanton she lured him deeper into the rich, dark secrets of her kiss.
No woman in his life had ever been like Savannah Benedict. None so elusive, yet so innocently provocative. None was so magnificent an opponent, nor surrendered so completely.
He wanted her. So badly it was frightening—for himself, for her.
“Savannah.” Catching her wrists, his clasp curling about them like manacles, he drew them to his chest. In husky reverence as she looked up at him, he confessed. “Sweet Savannah, I didn’t know.”
“That you could do this to me?” She moved away the little distance his embrace would allow. The tips of her breasts still brushed his chest with each agitated word; as she swayed unconsciously, the line of her thigh was only inches from his. An exquisite intimacy hovering on the brink. An impossible taste of Eden, neither unremembered nor redeemed, bittersweet for having been.
Her eyes were smoky, bleak with the first of innocence lost. “You can’t be blamed for this, not alone. You couldn’t know that with a touch and a kiss, I would forget this is all part of a high stakes game and respond as if it were real.”
Steve had no answer for her, he wasn’t sure what had happened himself. He knew he wanted her, as any virile, red-blooded man would want her. But was this more than a game? More than sexual conquest?
Had she touched his heart, or was it only that she was a woman beyond his experience? “I don’t want to hurt you.” That much he believed was true. “I don’t want either of us to be hurt.”
“I know.” Her smile was filled with regret. “But one of us will be. We must. It was in the cards from the first.”
“Why?” Steve demanded flatly. “Why can’t Jake Benedict be content with what he has?”
Hank shook her head thoughtfully. “Only Jake can answer that. I’ve never really known. Perhaps he lost the canyon when he was bested in a deal. Maybe it’s truly that it sits within the border of the Rafter B—something that isn’t his, something beyond his control, eluding him for years. A terrible prospect for a man who controls everyone and everything around him.”
“Everyone except the women in his life,” Steve suggested.
“In one way or another, he controls us, as well.”
“Only because you let him.”
“Does it matter how or why? If we do what he expects and demands, it’s still control. When he had his stroke and needed me, I left law school without a backward look, and came home where he wanted me.”
“Have you ever regretted coming back, Savannah?”
“No. I understand now that this is where I belong. Where Jake Benedict’s daughter has always belonged.” Her tone changed, her husky voice grew pensive. “But sometimes...” Shrugging away from his embrace, she abandoned a mental quest for words that evaded her. “Sometimes I wonder.”
Feeling incredibly lost without the heat of her body against his, catching her braid he coiled it around his hand. Fascinated by its soft shimmer, letting it slide like a silken rope through his palm, he barely r
esisted a consuming urge to draw her back into his arms. “Would you come back?”
“Would I come back? An odd way to phrase it.” She lifted her head, studying him curiously. “Do you mean to Savannah, or the university?”
“Either. Both.” To my arms, to begin again what can’t end until we resolve it. The words rang hollowly in his mind, words better left unsaid for now. “Savannah.” He spoke of the city, wondering if there was significance in the name. “Is that where you studied?”
“I lived there for a while, with my mother’s family. I share its name in remembrance of her childhood there, but I studied in Athens. At the University of Georgia.” She smiled absently as she recalled another time, another life. “As it turned out, it amounted to a prolonged sabbatical from the ranch.”
That explained the hint of the South he heard in her speech, and the elegant gentility she never quite succeeded in hiding with her rough wrangler’s clothing. “My mother was born in Charleston,” he heard himself saying. “My father met her there when he served a short stint in the navy.”
Hank was surprised at this fragment of information. Not that his mother was a South Carolinian, but that he offered it at all. Steve Cody said little about himself. “Did you visit Charleston with her?”
“Once,” he answered succinctly, not venturing the explanation that it was in search of a second opinion to refute the diagnosis of a terrible illness. A death sentence that would be carried out by degrees, levying a slow and agonizing mental imprisonment with its cruel irony. A sentence most abhorrent, but one with which all of many consultants would finally concur.
“I was nine,” he said as the first silence of sunset began to envelop them. “Just nine, but I never forgot what it was like.”
“Then you know it’s beautiful, but a whole different world. I understand now that Jake knew better than I where I belonged, and why.”
“You’d just begun law school?”
“I was only a week short of completing the second year.”
“But you hated it.”
“Of course I didn’t. I loved every minute of it. Every facet, even the driest facts.”
“Then tell me what Jake knew better than you?”
“I told you, he knew I belonged in the West, not the South.”
“Something you weren’t capable of discovering for yourself?” Before she could lash out at the innuendo, he pushed on, “Or was it something having a law degree would have prevented?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Then you would have come back to the ranch, no matter what?”
“Eventually.”
“Eventually. That means later, rather than sooner?”
“Perhaps,” Hank conceded, wondering where he was taking this.
Steve picked his hat from the ground where it had fallen, unnoticed, long ago. Turning the brim in his hand, watching dust drift from it in a cloud, he muttered an uncomplimentary judgment of selfish and ambitious men like Jake Benedict. “Maybe you’d bet ter explain to me again what prompted Jake to call you home, Savannah.”
“Can you not look at Jake and see he needed me?”
“Why?” Steve asked bluntly.
“To run the Rafter B.”
“Sandy couldn’t?”
“Of course he could!” Stepping blindly into a skillfully laid trap, Hank hurried to defend her foreman. “There’s nothing on the Rafter B Sandy can’t handle.”
“And no reason for Jake to call you home when he did. He used his illness, playing on your love and sympathy to get what he wanted. He’s doing it now. Using his health as leverage, and you as his intermediary to get what he wants.” He clasped her shoulders on emphasis. “We don’t have to do this, Savannah. We don’t have to fight.”
Hank backed away from him, shaking her head as she went. You don’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like to watch a strong, virile man waste away. You don’t know how it feels to see an insightful mind trapped in a crippled body. If you did, you’d understand that I’d do anything to make him even a little happier.
“If that means winning our wager and the canyon,” her voice thinned, “then I’ll do anything I can to win it for him.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
“I’ll remember that.” From arm’s length, he brushed a stray endril from her face, letting his fingers follow the line of her jaw to her chin. With a knuckle, he traced the undercurve of her full lower lip, catching his breath when the soft flesh trembled beneath is touch. “Will you remember this?”
“I’ll remember.” She wouldn’t deny what had happened be tween them. “But don’t make the mistake of thinking it changes anything.”
Her warning given, she backed away, stopping only when she felt Black Jack at her back. With a quick turn and a step into the stir up, she vaulted into the saddle. “Coming here was a mistake. I won’t say I’m sorry, but none of this should have happened.”
A rush of tears threatened, she fought them back and tried not to see how handsome he was.
In three steps he could have her out of the saddle and back in his arms. But he stood his ground, understanding Savannah more than she knew.
“I won’t come again.”
“I know.” A smile curled the corners of his mouth, yet left his eyes untouched. “Jake wanted sons. He’s luckier than he knows having a daughter like you.”
Hank’s eyes glittered brilliantly an instant before she launched this stallion into a full gallop. Dust churned thickly beneath might hooves, and soon it was all that marked their passage.
Steve waited until she disappeared. Then, accompanied by the memory of the gentle lady for whom he would have sacrificed anything, he retraced the hidden path to the floor of the canyon.
Chapter 8
The last of a blood red sun slipped below the horizon. In less than a minute from the time it touched the earth, bathing the land in infinite shades of fire, it was gone. Long shadows pooling in sooty puddles grew longer, thinner, fading to purple. Then blue, then gray. Blending with an encompassing darkness, rising up to embrace the fall of twilight.
Sundown. Time of illusion. When the stark beauty of a stark land became a sensuous play of ever changing textures. When there was languor in a natural calm, when a breathless hush that was muted sound, never its absence, grew deeper still.
A light switched on, turning a bunkhouse window into a tiny beacon guiding the tardy and the weary to their beds. Muffled laughter drifted from sheltering shadows, while cigarette smoke wove a lazy thread through lingering scents of the day. From a little distance away a guitar played. A low and unfettered strum, a soothing, tuneless melody.
Serenity, the hard won reward at the end of a fruitful day. One that escaped Savannah Henrietta Benedict as she paced the veranda that swept the length and breadth of the sprawling ranch house.
She’d paid her dues to the day. First to begin, logging her fair share in the saddle, collecting her portion of dust, earning her quota of secret aches. Last to ride in, last to topple gracelessly from the saddle, stumbling on protesting legs to the stable.
Her relief and gratitude were beyond measure when Jeffie dashed to take her mount from her, offering his services with the blushing gallantry of an adolescent crush. Now, an hour later, dust and aches sluiced away by a steamy shower, the dazed exhaustion had been blunted. But nagging concerns that scratched at her mind remained, compelling this restless rambling.
She paced, absorbed, on the ragged edge. Oblivious to the coming night, to music and laughter. Unaware of the quiet step at her back.
“Savannah.”
With a strangled response, she whirled, her freshly washed hair flying damply about her before falling again to her waist. One hand curled at the furious lurch of her heart, the other clawed at a banister for support. “What—”
The question faltered on her lips as Bonita stepped through the doorway leading from the kitchen. This gently determined in truder was small and pleasantly
plump, a woman with the dark hair and dusky skin of her Mexican-Indian heritage. A graceful lady who moved with a step more suited to dancing than keeping house of cooking. A face avouching the acclaim of her name was scored with lines of distress the erratic light of a lantern couldn’t erase.
“What is it, Bonita? Is it Jake?” Hank’s tone was sharp with alarm. “Has something happened to Jake?”
“All is well with Senor Jake,” Bonita assured with an implacable poise. “He plays chess with Sandy.”
Alarm quieted. Worry that was a constant companion slipped into its secret hideaway, to sleep again its light sleep, waiting to wake another time. A captured breath whispered from Hank, her tongentled. “If all is well, then why the frown?”
“You, Savannah Benedict.” The handsome woman crossed her arms over generous breasts, her scowl unrelenting. “You make me frown.”
Hank laughed, an expression of relief more than humor. In her distraction she’d forgotten Bonita always called her Savannah when displeased with her. Apparently her displeasure was monumental this time. “Oh, dear, what have I done now?”
“It’s what you haven’t done, and what your momma is going to say to me when she sees what I’ve let happen to her daughter.”
“What I haven’t done?” Hank was puzzled by Bonita’s oblique scolding. “If I haven’t done something, why would you be blamed?” There was no need to add it was unlikely Camilla Neal Benedict would be seeing her daughter, or Bonita, in the immediate future.
“Look at you!” In a imperious gesture Bonita directed Hank’s attention to herself. “You do the rough work harder and longer than ever before. You do not sleep. You sit without speaking, with your head somewhere else.” A grave note in her voice, Bonita intoned Hank’s cardinal sin. “And no matter what I cook to tempt your appetite, you eat less and less. I watch you disappear in mind and body, of course I worry, and sometimes I wonder if it is the sickness.”
“The sickness?” The housekeeper pronounced it as if it were an epidemic, yet Hank had heard nothing of it. The ranch hands and their families, always notoriously healthy, were healthy still. “What on earth are you talking about? Everyone on the ranch is fine and dandy, including me. Especially me. No fever, no chills.” Hank held out her arms. A token gesture, for below the turned back sleeves of her shirt, only her wrists and forearms were visible, the sun darkened flesh darkened more by the dim light. “No rash.”