by Cindy Gerard
And then he lay in the diluted darkness, his arms full of woman, his chest full of emotions too rich to comprehend, too frightening to claim, and drifted into an exhausted sleep.
Eight
When next he woke, the room was still swathed in darkness but the thin sliver of light snaking through a split in the curtains told him the sun was well up in the day. The empty spot beside him on the bed told him Sloan was up, too.
He rolled onto his back, crossed his arms behind his head and listened to the sound of the shower, smelled the scent of coffee perking in the little pot she’d set up on the dresser.
He should get up. He should get out. Go check on D.U. and then go strap himself to the closest train track and let a thousand tons of steel grind his worthless hide into dust.
He was a bastard and a user. And he’d used the one woman who didn’t deserve the grief he was going to dish out. Yet as he lay there, damning himself as the lowest of the low, he knew he would do it all over again if he had the chance. Just to lose himself again in the sweet healing embrace of her body.
Making love to her last night had been the most devastating experience of his life. He’d had hot sex before. He’d had wild, willing sex with women who knew their way around a man’s body the way actresses knew their way around a stage. But he’d never, ever, experienced anything as powerful as what he’d shared with that wild rose who hadn’t known she was supposed to watch herself around the likes of him.
When she stepped out of the steamy bathroom in the midst of those devastating thoughts, he knew his career as a user was far from over.
She’d wound her hair on top of her head with a gold clip. Her short, midnight-blue robe barely covered the sexy curve of her bottom, clung provocatively to the moisture pearling on her body. His mouth went dry. And he wanted her again. He wanted her now and was struck by the sinking feeling that if he wasn’t careful, he might find himself wanting her forever.
“I called the hospital while you were still asleep,” she said when she saw that he was awake and watching her. “D.U.’s been upgraded from critical to serious. I was able to talk to his sister. She’s very encouraged. She says he’s responding to all the right stimuli. Even though his jaw is wired shut, he can nod and shake his head and he’s giving the right answers—enough to let them know he’s with the program.”
Jesse watched her face as she continued her monologue. The relief he felt over the prospect of D.U.’s recovery drained some of the tension from his chest. The studied way she avoided his eyes, however, added another dimension to the pressure that had been building.
He sat up, propped the pillows behind his head and leaned back against the headboard. And watched her. Watched the barely discernible unsteadiness of her hands as she unwrapped the plastic from a pair of foam cups. Watched the stiff set of her shoulders, her stilted movements as she lifted the pot, asked him pohtely if he’d like a cup.
“What I’d like is for you to come over here,” he said, then swallowed hard when she braced her hands on the dresser for a steadying moment before turning and walking to the bed.
He patted the mattress at his hip. “Sit.”
She sat, then busied her hands and her attention with creasing a fold in the sheets.
“Look at me, Country,” he ordered gently.
When she raised her head and met his eyes, he pressed for more. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”
Her hands stilled. She let out a deep breath. “I was thinking you were probably beating yourself over the head this morning. And I’ve been waiting for an apology that was really going to tick me off.”
For some unfathomable reason, he felt like smiling. “You were going to be angry if I apologized?”
She looked from his face to her hands, to his face again. “You had a need last night, Jesse. I wanted to be the one to fill it. D.U. is family to you and you were hurting. I know that. And I took advantage.”
“Sloan—”
“No. Let me finish. I know you think it’s the other way around, so I guess we’re even. Don’t turn me into a victim here, Jesse. Please—give me more credit than that.”
She searched his face and whatever she thought she saw there prompted her to continue. “I came into this with my eyes open, okay? I came into this knowing it was going to be good for as long as it lasts.”
He studied the graceful slope of her throat, her petalsoft skin. And realized just how much steel was hidden beneath her giving curves and tender hands.
“So—this using you’re worried about. . . it’s not going to be one-sided, okay? I’m going to take from you, too. Whatever you have to give—” she continued, holding his gaze with dark determination “—if it’s just last night, or just a week, I’ll take it. I want it.
“I need it,” she added after a long, probing look, “maybe for the same reason you need to ride. Life’s a risk. I’m tired of playing it safe.
“So, please, please, don’t apologize,” she continued as if she still sensed one coming. “And don’t you dare mope around in a hair shirt of your own making or wallow in a guilt I didn’t ask for and don’t need.”
It was uncanny how well she had him pegged. Uncanny, unnerving, and enlightening as hell. “What do you want, then, Sloan? What do you want from me?”
“Your honesty,” she said without hesitation. “Just. . .your honesty. What I don’t want is your promises. Don’t promise me you’ll stay, or that when you leave, you’ll come back . . . don’t promise something you can’t deliver.”
She was so certain. So determined. And he should be relieved. She was offering to play the game his way. So, yeah, he should be relieved. Instead he was angry. For her. At himself. She deserved promises. She deserved forever, and no matter how much she denied it, her eyes gave away that it was promises she wanted even though she knew she couldn’t count on them from him.
But he was weaker than his anger. Weaker than his convictions. So weak, he found himself reaching for the gold clip and tugging it from her hair. He buried his hands in that glorious tumble of silk then indulged in the gentle pressure of her kisses as she climbed onto his lap and unknotted the tie of her robe.
Weakness transitioned to strength of her making, a strength she nurtured and fed as she straddled him and with his hands spanning her hips to guide her, took him deep inside.
He watched her face through half-hdded eyes as his hands brushed her robe aside and molded them over her breasts. He watched her throw her head back and brace her hands on his shoulders as she rode him and stroked him with a fluid grace and an exotic beauty that robbed him of breath and of the ability to remember why this shouldn’t be.
They both took another quick shower, then went to the hospital together. While D.U. was still in serious condition, the reports were encouraging. The brain scans looked good. If no complications presented themselves within the next twelve hours, his prognosis would improve dramatically.
The fact that the rodeo was on for another four days was a relief to Jesse. He didn’t want to leave town until he knew D.U. was out of the woods. And he wasn’t going to leave him today until he absolutely had to get back to the arena for the evening’s competition.
Sloan, however, had work to do. She left Jesse with D.U. to go check on her stock and make sure everything was lined up for the night. She used the distance from Jesse to sort through the events of the past twenty-four hours. D.U. was never far from her thoughts—neither was Jesse and the night she’d spent with him.
It had been wonderful, their lovemaking unlike any she’d ever experienced. Granted, her experience was limited. His, most definitely, was not. Yet he’d made her feel as though she was the one woman, the only woman, who had ever been or would ever be in his life.
As she saw to the numerous details in preparation for the night ahead, she dispelled that notion for the utter foolishness that it was. Jesse was just what Jesse appeared to be. He was a love-the-one-you’re-with kind of guy who wasn’t out to hurt anyone but wasn’t about to
love any one woman for the long haul.
Well, she’d known the rules going into this. She’d promised herself there would be no regrets. After a night in his arms, though, a night in which Jesse had introduced her to a side of herself that she hadn’t known was so sensual, she knew she’d lied. There would be regrets. She knew now what it was like to love as a woman, to make love as a woman, not the starry-eyed girl who had fallen for Noah’s father. And she would regret Jesse’s leaving more than she could have possibly imagined.
But that was life. That was the risk she’d taken. She would figure out a way to live with it. Just as she would never let him know how much his leaving was going to hurt.
Later that night, as she watched Jesse settle over a big Char-Bray cross and begin his wrap, she couldn’t help but compare the risk she’d taken by getting involved with him with the risk of bull riding.
As D.U.’s disastrous ride had reminded them all, there was always danger. Yet her heart had never been so unsettled, her hands never less steady as the gate flew open and the bull, with Jesse on board, slammed out of the chute and bucked for the sky.
There was a new wildness about Jesse as he rode tonight. There was a fever in his eyes, a combative determination in the grim set of his mouth. He was totally without fear, undeniably reckless as he clung to the bull’s back like lint, bottling centrifugal force and inertia and close to a ton of unbridled fury on the hoof and won the go-round money for the night. And she knew, as he walked from the arena to the alley, his expression hard and closed, that he’d fought that particular battle for D.U.
When he came to her room at midnight and pulled her roughly into his arms, that same urgency, that same feverish need, still had him in its grips. But the victory he claimed as he took her to bed was one he needed for himself. With savagely exquisite demands, he rode her hard and long, sent her careening over that jagged edge with him where urgency jockeyed with greed and pleasure flirted with sensations so intense they competed with pain.
When she lay spent and utterly defenseless beneath him, he cradled her in his arms, pressed soothing kisses to her brow and loved her again. This time when he took her, it was with a tenderness that brought renewed tears, a gentleness that left her breathless, a devout attention to her needs that left her helplessly, wantonly, whispering his name.
It was the middle of the afternoon, their last day in Bozeman. They’d just made love to celebrate D.U.’s promising recovery and Jesse had decided he needed something to eat.
While he was out hunting up a pizza, Sloan slipped into the shower. When she came out, unclipping her hair from where she’d knotted it on top of her head, she spotted his hat lying on her dresser.
Surprised that he’d left without it, she walked over, picked it up, put it on. With a secret smile, she-checked it out in the mirror, tipped it at a rakish angle. The light above the vanity mirror reflected and Hashed on a glint of silver in the background. She turned and considered the glittering silver concho on the leg of the black batwing riding chaps he’d draped across a chair in the corner of the room.
Slowly, she walked over, ran her fingers across the black suede, sifted them through the trailing fringe of a metallic, midnight blue.
With only a moment’s hesitation, she picked up the chaps, tested their weight in her hand, and shrugged out of her robe.
They’d be leaving Bozeman in the morning. For all she knew, Jesse would go one way and she’d go another and the week they’d spent together making love would be no more than a memory.
From the beginning she’d been prepared for that probability. And she could handle it if it was over between them then. She’d lost people before—her mother when she was five, Noah’s daddy before Noah was even born. When she’d tangled herself up with Jesse James, she hadn’t made the mistake of thinking goodbye wasn’t a part of the plan.
Ignoring the knot that tightened to an ache in her breast, she assured herself that, yes, she was resigned to that inevitability—but she’d be damned if she was going to make it easy for him to forget her. And she’d be damned if she was going to make it easy for him to walk away.
When he breezed in the door a few minutes later, a box of carry-out pizza balanced in his hand, she was posed by the wall next to the bed, waiting for him.
“Pizza delivery,” he announced with a smile in his voice as he kicked the door shut behind him—then stopped dead in his tracks when he looked up and spotted her standing there.
“Oh, man,” he croaked, his voice sounding rusty and strained as he stood transfixed by the picture she made wearing nothing but black. His black hat Her black boots. His black chaps. Her black hair.
He swallowed hard, felt the fever grip him. “You’re in big trouble now.”
“Hey, cowboy.” Her voice was a low, husky invitation, her brown eyes darkening in reaction to the fire in his. “Think you’re up for a little more than an eight count?”
Jesse felt as if he’d just rammed head-on into a train wreck. His heart rate skyrocketed off the charts. His mouth went dry. In an instant he’d turned as hard as stone at the provocative sight she made standing there.
Beneath the brim of his hat, her dark eyes glittered with an arresting mix of hesitance and seduction. Her breasts, still pink from his earlier loving, peeked through strands of midnight-black silk that trailed almost to her waist. And lower, the woman curves of her slender hips and taut abdomen were clad only in the low riding leather of his chaps.
She’d hooked her thumbs into the belt at her hip points, tucked a packet of protection beneath the narrow buckle that rode low over the golden skin inches below her navel. Her long legs were cloaked in supple suede and trailing metallic blue fringe, but her feminine curls were exposed for his hungry eyes, showcased by the open, inverted U of the snug-fitting leather.
It was the most erotic sight he’d ever seen, the sultry smile in her eyes, the most compelling invitation.
He tossed the box of pizza onto the dresser and crossed the room in three long strides. He had her pinned against the wall and his hands on her body so quickly he stole her breath, knocking his hat to the floor in the process.
And then he was on his knees in front of her, hooking one of those long, glorious legs over his shoulder, filling his palms with her bare bottom, and possessing her with his mouth.
With the first fierce spear of his tongue Sloan came apart. She cried out, clutching a handful of his hair with one hand, groping a flattened palm against the wall at her back with the other. Lightning sizzled through that part of her his mouth devoured, spread like wildfire, burned with piercing heat then burst through her body in consuming flames.
She cried his name as her knee buckled, then sobbed out a shaken breath when he rose, gathered her against him and tossed her onto her back on the bed. His eyes burned as he stripped off his shirt, then roughly unzipped his jeans and freed himself. His hands shook, his breath was ragged as he snagged the packet of protection, ripped it open with his teeth and shielded himself.
Then he came to her, one knee digging deep into the bed at her side as he reached for the pillows, hurriedly stacked them beneath her hips and drove himself inside her.
His first thrust lifted her from the bed, his second wrung out a shuddering moan. And then there was nothing but sensation and the sound of hot, hungry loving. His hands bit into the tender flesh of her hips as he lifted her and shifted her to the driving rhythm.
With a final thrust and a guttural groan, he drove them both to the summit and suspended them there. Hovering on that delicious brink of delirium, she sobbed his name, locked her ankles around his hips and took him deep, deep inside.
Together they fell. As one, they collided with that ultimate release that left them weak and trembling and shaken by the depth of the love they had made.
Bending over her, he collapsed on the bed. Gathering her tightly in his arms, he rolled onto his back and brought her with him. Wasted, devastated, they drifted on the aftermath of the storm. Slowly, their
heartbeats settled, their perspiration-drenched bodies cooled.
With a calloused hand he stroked her hair, with a gentling touch, he caressed a silken hip.
“If I’d known pizza delivery boys got such good tips,” he murmured, his breath still ragged as he tucked her head beneath his chin, “I might have considered a different profession.”
When he felt her lips curve into a smile against his shoulder, he began to laugh. A low, rumbling, selfsatisfied chuckle that made his whole body shake.
She pulled away from him, shoved up on an elbow. “And what’s so funny?”
He opened his eyes, grinned at her and lifted his hand to tuck a ribbon of hair behind her shoulder. “I was just thinking about my chances of having another ride like that in me tonight,” he teased, brushing his knuckles across the rise of the breast he’d just bared.
“Have I just been compared to a bull ride?” The slight twitch of her lips as she fought a smile took the sting out of her words.
“Honey....” He cupped her neck in his palm and pulled her mouth down to his. “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that compares to you. What’d you say your name was again?”
She was laughing when she slugged him in the chest and tried to pull away. His hand in her hair stopped her. His mouth gently nuzzling at her breast took all the fight out of her.
Before he rolled her beneath him again, he finished undressing them both. And this time, he made slow, tender love to her, absolving himself of any transgressions. . .past, present, or future.
Sloan’s phone rang late that night, after the rodeo. Jesse’s sleeping form stirred beside her as she snagged the receiver from the cradle on the second ring.
“’Lo,” she murmured.
“Hi, honey. It’s Dad.”