Nine Months Part 2 (36 Hours)

by Beverly Barton

  “You’ll just have to wait and see,” she told him, then disappeared down the hallway.

  The kitchen was as enormous as the living room and opened up onto a rear deck that overlooked a small stream. The arched, paneled ceiling loomed a good fourteen feet overhead and recessed lighting combined with a wide expanse of windows to illuminate the interior.

  Twenty minutes later Paige served Jared a plate filled with crisp bacon, scrambled eggs and buttered toast. She watched in amazement while he devoured every bite and finished off three cups of coffee.

  “You were starving, weren’t you?”

  “I’m a big boy, in case you haven’t noticed,” he said. “It takes a lot to fill me up.”

  “I’ll clean the kitchen, and then we can start work.”

  “Fine. But before you do that, help me into the den. I’ve got things set up in there. A computer that’s linked to the ones at the office, a fax machine, a second phone line. Everything we’ll need.”

  Jared eased his feet off the ottoman, reached for his crutches and stood, balancing his weight on his uninjured foot.

  Paige rushed to his side. “What can I do?”

  “Just follow along behind me and make sure I make it into the den without falling flat on my face.” He started the slow, cumbrous trek across the living room and out into the foyer. “I’m not used to maneuvering like this.”

  “You’re doing fine,” she assured him.

  She helped Jared settle into his den-cum-office, a large, open room with another rock fireplace and double doors opening onto a patio.

  They worked together all morning in a mutual sense of camaraderie, each trying to stay on the other’s good side. Occasionally, Jared’s temper flared, especially after the mild pain medication wore off and his ankle ached.

  Before preparing lunch, Paige insisted Jared take a couple of his pain pills. When she carried a tray laden with their lunch of soup and grilled cheese sandwiches into the den, she heard Jared snoring. Pausing in the doorway, she shook her head and smiled. The map he’d been studying lay across his chest, lifting and falling with each steady breath he took. His head rested on his shoulder. His foot with the sprained ankle had slipped off the small, cane-bottom footstool he’d used as a prop.

  After setting the tray on the massive oak desk, Paige walked over to Jared and knelt down beside him. She lifted a rectangular pillow off the empty rust red leather chair across from where Jared sat, placed the pillow on the footstool and lifted his foot to rest on top. She picked up the neatly folded, Navajo-print, cotton throw off the end of the wide rock hearth, shook it loose and arranged it over Jared’s sleeping form.

  Leaving him to rest peacefully in front of the warm fire, Paige took the tray back to the kitchen and ate her lunch alone. Later, she returned to the den and cleared away the work she and Jared had begun that morning. She reorganized Jared’s home files, which were a mess, explored the huge kitchen, which she found stocked with enough food to see a dozen people through a rough winter, and finally settled down with a geology report on the Rocky Springs Ranch, a large section of property just outside Grand Springs that Montgomery Real Estate and Land Development had recently purchased.

  Jared woke at four-thirty and found himself alone in the den. Someone had wrapped him in a cotton throw. Paige? Of course, Paige. He called her name. No answer. Where was she? Surely, she hadn’t phoned Greg and he’d already taken her back into town.

  Unsteadily, Jared made his way down the hall. His rubber-capped crutches would have allowed him to move in relative quiet, but with all his weight bearing on one booted foot, his hampered walk drummed noisily along the wooden floor.

  “Paige, are you still here?”

  “In the kitchen,” she said loudly. “I just put a pan of lasagna in the oven for your dinner.”

  He found her at the sink, her hands in soapsuds up to her elbows and a dish towel thrown over her shoulder. He grinned. So this was what the phrase domestic goddess really meant. Paige looked right at home in the kitchen. In his kitchen. Preparing his dinner. A primitive masculine sense of Paige was in his kitchen and all was right with the world overwhelmed him. It was only a short mental leap from Paige in his kitchen to Paige in his bedroom.

  “What would you say if I asked you to stay here with me this week?”

  Dropping the plastic mixing bowl into the soapy water, Paige whirled around and gazed at Jared, her mouth open in an astonished gasp. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?” He pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat, propping his crutches against the wall directly behind him.

  “You know why not,” she said.

  “What if I promise to be on my best behavior? What if I sign an agreement, in blood, that—”

  “I can’t stay here. I have things to do at home. I’m working on the baby’s nursery. Anyway, all that stuff you bought in Denver is being delivered this week.”

  “So I’ll call and have the delivery delayed until next week,” he said. “You have plenty of time to get the nursery ready. Besides, I thought you were going to let me give you this house. For you and Angela.”

  “I never agreed for you to give me this house.” Paige jerked the dish towel off her shoulder, dried her hands and marched over to Jared. “My staying here is out of the question.” She flipped the dish towel back over her shoulder.

  “Look, honey, I’m going to be working from home the rest of the week. You’ll have to drive out here early every morning and drive back into town late every evening, maybe sometimes at night. It would make a lot more sense for you to move in for the week.”

  “But what would people—” She paused midsentence, realizing what an idiotic statement she’d been about to make.

  “See, you can’t think of a logical reason not to stay here.”

  He was right, of course. The whole world knew they’d been lovers, knew she was pregnant with his child. There was no logical reason for her not to move in for the week. But there were several illogical reasons. She was in love with Jared, and therefore very susceptible to him on an emotional level. And then there was the ever-present sexual attraction that fairly crackled between them as if they were two live wires.

  “I’ll stay,” she said. “But only if you agree not to touch me.”

  Laughter rumbled up from his chest as he shook his head. Paige glared at him.

  “I mean it. I don’t want you to even shake my hand.”

  The laughter died inside him. They were in an impossible situation. He and Paige. They were an unfeasible combination, but a combustible one. Even knowing how wrong they were for each other, how easily they could destroy each other, they could not extinguish the passionate fire that blazed anew each time they touched.

  “I promise that I won’t touch you…unless you touch me first. I’ll force myself to resist you. Do you think you can resist me?”

  “Why you egotistical, macho—”

  “Now, honey, don’t get yourself all riled up.”

  Paige realized that he had issued her a dare—do you think you can resist me? A dare she’d be a fool to take. But then, where Jared was concerned, she’d been a fool since the first moment they met.

  “I’ll need to go home and get some things,” she said. “I can hardly wear these same clothes the rest of the week.”

  “Call Kay and have her go to your place and pack what you need. Greg will bring your bag when he comes out in the morning for our meeting. He’s going to Florida for a couple of weeks to handle some problems in my office down there and I need to brief him before he leaves.”

  “But I can’t sleep in my clothes, and I don’t have a toothbrush and—”

  “I have extra toiletries. Half a dozen new toothbrushes still in their boxes.” He looked her over from head to toe. “I’ll loan you a pair of pajamas for tonight. The top should be just about right for you as a gown.”

  Paige groaned. Her gut instincts told her that she’d live to regret giving in to her desire to be with Jared. Ju
st one week, alone with the father of her child. A week to share a life with him. To pretend that…

  “If you don’t keep your promise, I’ll leave immediately,” she warned him. “And I’ll never trust you ever again.”

  “I swear I won’t touch you, unless you touch me first.”

  “Then I don’t have anything to worry about, do I.”

  He smiled, that damn killer smile of his. “Nope, I guess you don’t.”

  Chapter Eight

  Had she made a deal with the devil, agreeing to stay with Jared for the rest of the week? He had promised not to touch her—unless she touched him first. Would he keep his promise? And could she spend the next few days with him and not succumb to her own desires?

  Despite the chilling autumn wind that whistled around the corners of the three-level cabin, the interior was cosy-warm. Paige snuggled beneath the cranberry red coverlet, soft, thick blanket and flannel sheet. The wind disturbed her. The creaking, house-settling noises disturbed her. The moonlight-illuminated shadows falling across the windows disturbed her.

  Tossing and turning in the queen-size, pencil-post bed, Paige longed for sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t forget that Jared was in the room across the hall. He was so very near and yet so very far away. Distance did not separate them. Only the strength of his promise and her iron-willed determination kept them apart.

  When he’d shown her into this room, one of five guest bedrooms in the sprawling log cabin, why hadn’t she insisted on another room, farther from his, even one on another floor? Why had she so readily agreed not only to stay with him all week, but to sleep directly across the hall from him?

  He had issued her a dare—I won’t touch you if you don’t touch me first—and there was no law saying she had to accept his dare. But she had, and she’d done it without thoroughly thinking through the whole situation. She’d been so damned and determined to prove to him that he wasn’t irresistible and that she could and would hold out against his devastating charm, that she hadn’t taken into account her own desperate desire for him.

  She could deny the truth all she wanted to, but the truth was still the truth. She was in love with Jared Montgomery and probably had been since they’d made love in the elevator. She had tried to convince herself that her cowboy stranger and L. J. Montgomery were two different men. But they weren’t. They were just two different sides of the same man—a man that she now believed she had been destined to love. And even if Jared didn’t know it, she was his destiny—the woman he was meant to share his life with, the woman he was meant to love.

  Paige wanted Jared as she had never wanted another man. The sexual electricity between them was like nothing she’d ever experienced.

  She needed him in her life, caring for her, surrounding her with his protection, loving her completely. If only she could find a way to reach his heart, to break through the protective barrier that he’d built around his deepest feelings.

  Was she longing for the impossible, for a man who believed himself incapable of loving, a man who didn’t even believe the romantic emotion existed, to love her as she loved him?

  She was a fool!

  Kay was wrong, wasn’t she, Paige wondered, if she thought you could teach another person how to love? Love was an emotion, a deep, heartfelt need, not a lesson that could be taught and learned.

  Paige had been surrounded by love her entire life. Conceived in Walt and Dora Summers’ passionate love. Born into the safe, secure love of two devoted parents. Raised in a home filled with genuine, abiding love.

  But what if the circumstances of her life had been different? What if, as Jared, she’d never known real love? Would she be capable of opening up her heart to another and bestowing upon him life’s most basic yet most precious gift? Jared didn’t believe in love because he had never loved or been loved.

  A loud crash came from across the hall, followed by several thunderous bumps and a string of expressive curse words.

  Paige sat straight up in bed. Jared? The noise had come from his room, hadn’t it? She threw back the covers, turned on a bedside lamp and got up. Had Jared fallen? Was he hurt? Did he need her?

  She rushed across the room, opened the door and ran across the hall. Standing barefoot at Jared’s bedroom door, she knocked loudly.

  “Jared, are you all right?”

  “How the hell should I know?” He responded in an angry roar. “I’m lying flat on my back on the floor in this pitch-black room!”

  Paige flung open the door and immediately flipped on the light switch, which activated brass lamps on the nightstands that flanked his king-size bed. The soft, low-wattage lamplight caressed the forty-five-foot-square area, gilding every inch of the room with a transparent golden glow.

  She entered his room, then stopped abruptly after taking only a couple of tentative steps. The sight of Jared, wearing nothing but the pajama bottom that was the mate to the black silk top she wore, took Paige’s breath away. He lay sprawled out on the wooden floor, halfway between his bed and the bathroom. The tip of one crutch peeked out from underneath the bed. The other crutch, which lay on a knotted brown area rug, pointed toward the French doors to the right of the massive rock fireplace.

  Momentarily mesmerized by Jared’s long, lean body, Paige stared at him, scanning every muscle. She noted the width of his naked shoulders, the strength of his powerful arms, the thatch of curling dark hair that covered his broad chest, narrowed to a seductive, thin line and disappeared beneath the waistband of his pajamas.

  Flattening his palms against the floor, Jared lifted himself into a sitting position and braced his body with his arms. He looked up and saw Paige standing just inside the doorway. Every muscle in his body tensed. His heartbeat drummed in his ears. His sex hardened instantly.

  She was beautiful beyond words, beyond reason. Like a vision out of his most erotic dream. She stood there, her skin glistening in the golden light, her mahogany red hair spread out over her shoulders and down her back, her full breasts pushing against the black silk and her nipples tightened to pinpoints. His pajama top hit her mid-thigh, revealing the long, creamy expanse of her slender legs. She stared at him, her brown eyes filled with undisguised longing.

  He groaned, the sound beginning deep inside him, at gut level, rising in his throat and erupting from his lips on one long, agonized breath.

  “You are hurt!” Paige hurried to Jared, knelt at his side and laid her hand on his shoulder. “What happened? Did you injure your sprained ankle?”

  A knot formed in his throat, the tension threatening to choke him. He swallowed, dislodging the emotional knot, then glanced meaningfully at her hand resting on his naked shoulder. “I was on my way back from the bathroom. One of my damn crutches got tangled up in that stupid rug—” he nodded to the guilty object “—and the next thing I knew I landed flat of my back and the crutches went flying.”

  “Do you think you can get up if I help you?” Leaning over him, she slipped her arm around his waist. “Or are you in too much pain to move?”

  He was in pain, all right, but not the kind of pain she meant. He was mad as hell about taking a spill, but the only thing he’d hurt in the fall was his pride. However, he was in pain. He ached with a purely primitive male need that the very sight of her had brought to torturous life.

  “I’m okay, honey. Help me stand up.” He eased his arm around her shoulders, boosted himself upward with his other arm and stood on one shaky leg. “Help me get back in bed.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Paige assisted him. Allowing him to lean heavily on her, she led him slowly toward his massive bed.

  “I’m sorry I made so much noise that I woke you,” he said. “I know how important getting plenty of rest is for you and the baby.”

  “I wasn’t asleep,” she admitted, then immediately wished she hadn’t been so honest. He would wonder, wouldn’t he, why she was still awake in the middle of the night?

  “I was having a
difficult time getting to sleep, too.” He tightened his hold around her shoulder. “I kept thinking about you being right across the hall. Were thoughts of me being so close keeping you awake?”

  Shivers of awareness rippled along Paige’s nerve endings. Her femininity tightened and released, tingling with anticipation. “I should have gone back to my apartment tonight. Then both of us would have gotten a good night’s sleep.”

  “But if you’d gone home, I’d have been all alone,” he told her. “With no one to help me.”

  When they reached the edge of his bed, Paige removed her arm from around his waist, then stepped out from under his big arm. Wavering on one foot, Jared held out his hands to her in a pleading gesture.

  “You don’t need me,” she said. “Just sit down.” She nudged him in the middle of his chest.

  He grabbed her wrist, and as he fell backward onto the rumpled covers, he pulled her down on top of him. “But I do need you, honey.” Placing his hand at the base of her spine, he eased it over her buttocks and down her bare legs.

  Squirming against him, she issued a weak protest. “No, Jared. Please.” His sex pulsated against her feminine mound, igniting a gush of warm, damp heat. “You promised.”

  Easing his hand up and under the silk pajama top, he cupped her hip. She moaned. Gazing into her dreamy brown eyes, he slipped his fingers inside the elastic waistband and slid her beige lace panties down her hips. “You touched me first,” he reminded her.

  While he kneaded the firm flesh of her buttocks with one hand, he grasped the back of her head with the other and drew her face to his. “I didn’t break my promise.” He whispered the words against her lips.

  “You don’t play fair.” Her breath mingled with his. “I touched you because you needed my help.”

  He ran the tip of his tongue across her bottom lip. She sighed. He smiled. “But you did touch me first, honey, and there were no stipulations to our deal.”

  “This won’t change anything,” she told him. “No matter what happens—”