She liked the way he bound her to him, as if no force on earth could tear her away. She liked the taste of him, the rhythm of his kisses, the way they flowed one into the next.
Kissing led to other things—hands that slid down from the small of her back to cup her buttocks, fingers that tangled in his hair, hips that nestled, legs that entwined, the friction of bodies rubbing together. Palms that swept up beneath the thin, rumpled fabric of her chemise to curl around her breasts.
"Oh!" Ardith breathed as a flurry of new sensations sped through her. "I didn't know you were going to do that." She was a little surprised at how much she liked the feel of his hand on her bare flesh.
"Neither did I. Do you mind that I did?"
Her face went hot again. "No."
"Would you mind if I took off your chemise?"
"N-n-no." It was gone in an instant, swooshed over her head and thrown away.
He pulled her against him, length to length. The hair on his chest scuffed the sensitive skin of her breasts, their bellies bumped, their hips meshed. The thrust of his manhood slid unerringly between her legs.
"Oh," she said again, amazed how just the accidental brush of him kindled up such deep, throbbing heat. She felt him smile in the midst of a kiss as if he knew exactly what she was feeling.
He sought her nipple with his thumb, circling and circling. She felt as if she were circling, too, dissolving into some vortex, going dizzy and languorous with something she was just coming to realize was desire.
He lowered his head and drew her nipple into his mouth, sucking gently. Ribbons of sensation unfurled to the farthest reaches of her body. Her throat went thick. Streamers of heat ran down her legs.
His hands spread against her skin, gathering up as much of her flesh as he could in his palms. And everywhere he touched he left a warm, rippling afterglow. It was as if the very pores of her skin had become luminous from the brush of his hands against them.
The glow sank deep into her flesh, deep into her belly and loins. Deep into her bones, warming her in a way she had never been warmed.
He skimmed her waist, the rise of her hip, and the flare of her flanks. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, feel his shivery awareness of her, the needs that he was harboring.
It made her want to touch him, too, his face and hair, the breadth of his body, the strength of his limbs, but she didn't think she should surprise him by doing that.
"Do you mind if I touch you?"
"Indeed, Ardith," he said in a voice that seemed tinged with amusement, "I was hoping you would."
She filled her hands with him. With the width of his shoulders and the breadth of his back, with the dip of his spine and the rise of his hip. He rolled onto his back, spreading himself before her in all his male splendor.
She rested one palm in the center of his chest and circled outward, the hair on his chest tickling her fingers.
She stroked his nipples more by accident than design and heard him catch his breath. She lingered over them, feeling the flesh bead up beneath her fingertips, teasing the nubs with her fingernails.
He stifled a moan deep in his throat. "You're going to be a veritable temptress, Ardith, once you get the hang of this."
She laughed and traced the high rigid arch of his ribs, the bones of his hips. His architecture. The very structure of him.
She slid her hands inward and down his belly where the hair grew thicker. His male parts lay only inches away.
"Is it all right if I touch you—there?"
"Touch my penis, you mean?" he asked her. His voice was deep. The amusement was gone.
"Well, yes," she agreed. "I won't hurt you, will I? I mean it seems so..."
"Large?" he offered, seeming amused all over again.
"Well, yes, that. But so—erect."
"It's supposed to be erect, Ardith. That's how it works best." When she didn't say anything else, he sighed. "Go ahead. Indulge your curiosity. I really won't mind."
"I wanted you to teach me," she said feeling faintly aggrieved.
"Yes, I know. I just didn't realize it was going to take quite so much forbearance on my part."
With a sniff she took her hand away.
With an imprecation he grabbed it back.
He fit her fingers around his shaft then left her to discover what she wanted to know. His breathing seemed to grow a little unsteady as she explored the length of him, gliding her thumb up over the taut, velvety cap. The tip was dewy to her touch, and he gave a little moan of pleasure.
He liked this. The more she touched him, the more he liked it. The more he liked what she was doing, the more she seemed to like doing it.
Intensity flowed between them like a current of heat, binding them together in some way she didn't fully understand. It gave them a strange equality, a strange interdependence that was pleasing in its complexity.
As she'd become accustomed to the dimness, she was able to see that his eyes had become dark hollows of yearning. His mouth bowed as he breathed. His face went heavy with sensuality—a word whose meaning she hadn't fully understood until now.
"I want to touch you." His voice was low, his words both a request and a demand.
He shifted her onto her back and rolled half over her. He kissed her and kissed her and kissed her. He kissed her until she couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but shiver beneath him.
He trailed his hand from her throat to her hip in a slow, deliberate glide that left flutters of goose-flesh in its wake. He pressed his palm to the curls at the juncture of her legs.
Just the heat of it sent a swift dart of pleasure arcing to the core of her. With a gasp she rose against him.
He murmured as if he meant to soothe her, but the gentle circling motions he made against her most intimate flesh set off a tumble of new sensations. There was a rhythm to the way he moved, something primitive and oddly familiar.
She moaned and he drank deep, so deep of her pleasure. He touched her and touched her—like an endlessly repeated request, a plea her body answered with shivers of wonder and gasps of delight.
His breathing was nearly as ragged as hers as he bent over her. "I want to love you, Ardith. Please let me love you."
She had never dreamed she'd hear those words on his lips and knew they couldn't mean to him what they meant to her. But tonight—just for tonight—she let herself pretend they did.
"Love me, Baird. Please, love me."
He came over her and into her, moving with a single gentle stroke. He came deep, so deep. She had never imagined she could be touched so deeply, never dreamed she could possess another soul as completely as she seemed to be possessing him.
Her body throbbed around him, the sensation part pain and part glorious elation. He began to move within her—slowly at first. Gently. Incrementally. Taking and giving back what seemed a greater gift with every thrust. It was a gift that rose and expanded through her.
She looked up into his face, a face that was all arcs and shadows in the half-light. "Baird," she whispered as if she couldn't believe it was he making love to her. "Baird."
He lifted his hips, making her shiver with sensations so sweet they brought her near to weeping. He made those sensations sweeter still, easing her, nudging her toward higher and higher planes of pleasure with the escalating friction of their bodies.
She clung to him in the dark, the world contracting around them until there was only him in her universe. He was the source of her light, the source of her pleasure. The soul of her bliss.
She arched against him, her body craving his, needing him with a strange delicious frenzy. Delight danced along the surface of her skin. Restless expectation fluttered through her belly.
"Oh, Ardith, my love," Baird whispered.
She flowed against him. Deep at the core of her where their bodies joined, her expectation gave way to shattering fulfillment. Shivers of exquisite release rippled outward. They rose through her, shaking every perception she'd ever
had of what loving was like.
Baird surged against her, his body pulsing as he tumbled with her into the maelstrom. They clung together, bound in a way that seemed both fleeting and eternal.
As the shivering ecstasy ebbed away, he drew her even more closely against him. He kissed her brow and temple and the corner of her mouth. His hands moved over her, stroking and savoring her, as if he couldn't bear for the loving to end any more than she could. But at length they drifted together, sighing, sated, and spent.
Ardith came to herself a good while later, sprawled half beneath Baird, feeling giddy and fluid, not quite sure where his body left off and hers began. It was a lovely feeling, hazy enough to keep the world at bay, imbued with breathless contentment. She never wanted to move again.
In truth she wouldn't have moved, except that Baird stirred against her. He mumbled a string of sleepy endearments, kissed her without even opening his eyes, and shifted so she lay safe in the curve of his body, his arms bound tight around her. Before she had so much as settled in, she heard his breathing deepen.
She knew how exhausted he was, knew all that lay ahead for him. Tomorrow was the last day of the roundup. The day after, they'd leave for Cheyenne. Being able to number the days, count in hours the time they had left in this wild and wondrous place, tore the lovely cocoon of her contentment asunder.
Tears rose in her eyes and seeped silently down her cheeks. With the dawn she must put all this away, her memories of this night, her feelings for Baird. She must look to the future—a future that didn't include the man she had come to respect and care for so deeply.
She wasn't sorry she and Baird had made love—this had been the most wonderful night of her life. But it was over now, and she couldn't stop crying.
* * *
"He sent her what?" Baird demanded, wheeling toward China. She stood at the chuck wagon, drinking a cup of Jubal's coffee, having ridden out to the roundup ground where they were holding the steers they'd be taking to Cheyenne tomorrow.
"A ring," she confirmed. "An emerald ring, set with pearls."
"Did Ardith show it to you?"
"She tucked it away in one of those velvet jewelers' boxes when I came into the house. But I know what I saw."
Baird stared at her, dazed and stumbly and gone at the knees. He could barely force the words past the knot in his throat. "And you're sure it was Gavin Rawlinson who sent it?"
"That's what she said, and the postmark on the package was Boston."
He didn't even think to doubt China's information. She had that woman's sense about her, that way of knowing things no man could fathom. And if China took after her mother, she'd recognize expensive jewelry when she saw it.
He didn't take time to think things through. "Stay here," he told her, then grabbed up Dandy's reins and swung into the saddle.
The whole way to the house, his mind tumbled with impressions of the night before. Of Ardith bending above him for that first kiss, of the way her breath had shuddered with nervousness and anticipation as he'd let down her hair, of how she had raised those pristine covers and welcomed him into her bed. The night had been filled with such wonder, touched by unexpected magic.
And now this.
Baird tied his horse to the porch railing and stormed into the house. "Ardith!" he shouted. "Ardith!"
The rooms were as silent and empty as they had been the day he arrived.
Where was that blasted woman, anyway? Out painting somewhere by herself, no doubt.
He understood her compulsion to do that. She was storing up as many memories of this country as she could before she went east. If he'd had half her skill, he'd have done that, too. But he needed to talk to her too much to have patience with her absence.
He turned on his heel and headed out to check Primrose's stall. He'd just gone down the steps when he caught a flash of color down by the creek. As he stalked toward it, he could see that Ardith was nestled in the shade at the top of the bank, her painting supplies piled up around her.
Relief went through him like a stiff wind. At least he wasn't going to have to wait to ask her about Gavin.
She must have heard his boots whipping through the grass, because she swiped at her eyes and turned as he approached.
She looked impossibly prim this morning. Her blouse was buttoned all the way up her throat, and her hair was bound tight, with not so much as a strand out of place. She'd become calm, self-possessed Ardith again, except that her eyes were red from crying.
His heart twisted inside him.
He'd risen well before the sun and hadn't said so much as good-bye to her. After the night they spent together, he didn't know what to say. He'd wanted to kiss her awake and make her promises. But they would have been promises he couldn't keep, and he cared too much to lie to her.
Instead he'd slipped away. He wouldn't be here now if it weren't for China.
He stopped and stood looking down at her. "Just when did you intend to tell me about the ring?"
Ardith had the good grace to pale. "How—how did you find out?"
Fresh anger prickled up his spine. "China told me. She said it came in yesterday's mail. Has Rawlinson asked you to marry him?"
Ardith looked down at her paint-splotched hands. "Yes, he has."
Baird forced the question to his lips, determined to hear the whole of it. "And what do you mean to tell him?"
Surely she knew he would ask that, and yet she fumbled for an answer. "I—I'm tired of living as Uncle Franklin's poor relation. I'm tired of being alone. If the time I've spent here at the ranch with you and the children has convinced me of anything, it's that I want a home and a family of my own."
The breath he took burned all the way down. "Does that mean you're going to tell Rawlinson you'll marry him?"
He didn't want her marrying anyone else. In these last weeks he'd realized how much she meant to him. He didn't want to care so much, didn't want to feel like he'd be losing his soul if he let her go—but he did.
He couldn't face knowing some other man was going to argue with her, make plans with her, hear her most intimate thoughts and most devastating fears. He couldn't bear that some other man was going to share her laughter and hold her when she cried. The idea of some other man lying sated and entangled with her in the darkest hours of the night drove him half mad.
Clamping down tightly on his feelings, Baird squatted down beside her. "Are you going to marry Rawlinson?"
Ardith drew in her breath and expelled it on a sigh. "I expect I will."
"But if you meant to marry Gavin, what was last night?" The words were torn from him at the forfeit of his pride.
"You know what last night was."
"I don't."
"You understood what we were doing as well as I did."
"I didn't understand anything," he insisted.
Her eyes sought his. Her gaze moved over him, caressing him in a way that made him ache. "Last night was our last chance," she whispered. "We were saying good-bye."
He could hear the anguish in her voice and knew how much her calm was costing her.
He didn't want to be calm. He wanted to shout at her and shake her and make her take back what she'd said. He wanted to grab her and kiss her until they burst into flame.
"You gave me your innocence," he whispered instead. "You gave me your virginity."
"I gave you myself."
She had given him not just her body, but her facile mind, her infinite tenderness, and her indomitable will. She had shown him her doubts and insecurities. She had offered up every attribute and every flaw. She had given him everything she was, to hold and cherish. For this one night.
Over these last months, he'd done the same, revealing his myriad of imperfections, his few trifling accomplishments, his fragile hopes, and his questionable virtues. Even knowing all that, she had bound him to her heart, made him feel as if he was worthy of the love she gave him. She had made him want to feel it every day of his life—yet he knew that was impossible.
She reached out and took his hand. When she spoke, her voice was as frayed and fragile as ancient silk.
"You have your family, children who love you. You have the estate at Heatherleigh and your life back in England. You must let me go back to Boston and start again."
Her long, paint-stained fingers tightened around his hand. He turned his palm to hers and entwined their fingers. He wanted to hold her, to keep her with him.
"Last night was the most wonderful night of my life." She spoke so softly that the words were all but lost in the rustling of the grass around them. "I will carry the memory of what we gave each other for the rest of my days. But please, Baird, you must release me. You must let me tell Gavin that I'll marry him. You must let me build a future for myself."
Baird shivered, knowing what that meant. It meant she would raise her face for another man's kiss. It meant she would hold another man's baby in her arms. It meant that he must shield the hole she was tearing in his heart and let her go on to someone else.
Did he have the nobility to do that? Was he able to say the words, to tell Ardith what he knew he must? She was asking him to give away the single thing he needed most.
He tightened his grip on her, relishing the warm, renewing brush of her flesh on his, reveling in the faint sensual awareness tingling between them.
His voice went thick with the effort it took to give her the chance she deserved. "No night in my life will ever mean as much to me as last night did. No woman, Ardith, will ever touch me the way you have. No one will ever aggravate and disturb me, or fill me with such joy and pride. You have shown me things inside myself I didn't know were there. You have made me want to be a better father to my children, to be a better man."
He could see the tears shimmering in her eyes, giving proof that her regret was every bit as deep and painful as his.
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