by Diana Palmer
Her eyes closed on a wave of embarrassment. “I don’t need company, thank you,” she said proudly. “Except that I’ll have to ask you to get someone to drive me to the doctor next Friday for those X rays.” And he could make what he liked of that; she wasn’t going to beg him to spend any time with her.
“Talk about pride,” he mused, watching her. “I thought I had a monopoly on it. You’d damned well rather crawl there than ask me to take you, wouldn’t you?”
Her eyes opened, glaring. “You know I would,” she whispered, and at the moment, she meant it. She felt an almost primitive dislike of him and the hold he had over her emotions.
It was going to be more difficult than he’d thought. She was as proud as he was, and she wasn’t about to let down her guard. Not after what he’d done to her. It was going to be like pulling teeth just to get her to talk to him. Love was one thing. Trust was something else again. She might worship him from afar, but he was just beginning to understand that she was trying her best to shut him out, to keep him at arm’s length.
“Why don’t you come and keep me company while I do the book work?” he asked unexpectedly.
She stared at the screen. “I’d rather watch this. But thank you anyway.”
He moved around her and switched the television off.
“Jacob!”
He ignored her protest. He bent and lifted her gently in his arms, careful not to jar her, and carried her out of the room and down the hall to his study. She was thinner than he remembered, and frankly delicate. He didn’t want to know how much she weighed now. The wound and his treatment of her had taken their toll.
“You’re as tight-lipped as I am, and about half as proud. You won’t give an inch, and neither will I. You’re not going to hole up in that room and shut me out. I didn’t bring you here to watch you hibernate.”
She felt his strength as he put her down on his burgundy leather sofa. She couldn’t imagine that she’d really heard him say that, and her eyes mirrored her surprise.
“I thought you liked being alone,” she said absently.
“So did I.” He stood up and looked at her. Her hair was growing. Janet had helped her wash it, and it was clean and soft and shining.
“I need a robe….”
“Why?” he asked quietly. “Hank’s playing poker with one of his friends, and Janet’s gone home for the night. We’re by ourselves. There’s no one to see you except me.”
Her face colored delicately. He cocked an eyebrow.
“You aren’t shy?” he asked. “You don’t have anything I haven’t already seen.”
The color grew worse. She averted her shamed eyes from him to the waxed floor with its Indian rugs.
“I’m sorry,” he said tightly. “That was the last thing I should have said to you.”
The apology helped, but she couldn’t raise her eyes. He was bringing back too many painful memories.
He eased down on the sofa beside her, his dark eyes on her head. “I’ve never been so wrong about one human being in all my life,” he said. “I wish you could have talked to me about it.”
Her arms felt chilled. She folded them, staring at the rug. “It was too painful to talk about,” she said. “My father was unbalanced. We knew it, but we were so little, Jacob. There was nothing we could do, no one we could turn to. By the time he died, we were…horribly scarred, mentally.”
“And physically?” he probed, his jaw clenching as he remembered what Tom had told him about the circumstances of her father’s death.
She dug her nails into her arm. “And physically,” she said through her teeth. “Didn’t you see the scars that day at the pool house?”
“I didn’t see anything but red,” he replied. “My God, I could have killed that boy!”
She looked up, shivers of pure pleasure going through her at the fiery darkness of his eyes. “He was only trying to help. You know how afraid I was of snakes. And I’d already made you suspicious by the way I kissed him.” She lowered her eyes to the opening of his shirt, where thick black hair was visible against tanned skin. “You were playing tag with that Dugan woman….”
And Kate had been jealous. His heart raced with the knowledge. It explained a lot of things. He wanted to question her, to bring her feelings out into the open. But that wouldn’t do. He didn’t want her to know that he was aware of her feelings.
“She was playing tag with me,” he replied casually. “I like Barbara. I always did.” He pushed back a lock of her hair that had fallen over one eye. “She’s engaged, did I tell you? To the Hardy man she always fancied.”
Her heart skipped. “Is she?”
“Yes, she is. So if you’d planned on marrying me off to her, you’re out of luck. I guess I’ll just stay a bachelor.”
“Then who’ll inherit Warlance?”
He studied her blushing cheeks, drinking in the scent of roses that clung to her slender body. “Good question. I’ve only thought about children in recent years. I’m thirty-two. Eventually I’ll have to marry, if I want an heir.”
“I don’t imagine you’ll have any trouble finding a candidate,” she said, avoiding his stare. Certainly not, she thought bitterly. The line would form at the gates and Jacob would be wined and dined and hunted like a fox.
“Won’t I?” He leaned back, one arm behind her, his lean body elegant in its relaxed position. “I’m rich, Kate.”
“So?” she replied, glancing at him.
“How will I know I’m not getting a gold digger?”
“Give it all away,” she whispered conspiratorially.
He smiled faintly. “I’m not that desperate.”
“Then you’ll never know.” Her gaze traveled over him, and she forced herself to look away before her eyes betrayed her.
She didn’t know that they already had. Jacob’s chest swelled with the knowledge that she wanted him. Her soft eyes had been shyly covetous, running down his body like hands. She could arouse him just by looking at him that way. He pursed his lips, wondering if she was even aware of the effect she had on him.
“When did you know you weren’t pregnant?” he asked unexpectedly.
She went hot all over, and mumbled, “The next week.”
His dark eyes searched her averted features. “I sweated it out, too,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t talk to me, or want to see me. I called Tom and fed him some wild story about wanting to talk to both of you, just so he’d come down from New York and run interference for me. I had to know if there was going to be a child.”
She gritted her teeth. “Well, there isn’t, so you needn’t worry.”
“I’m not sure that I was worried,” he mused quietly, touching her caftan where a fold of it rested on the sofa. “I wanted to know, that’s all.”
“I wouldn’t have told you,” she said.
He knew that, now. She’d have protected him even in that kind of circumstance. His dark gaze lifted and caught her wide green eyes. “Oh, but I’d have found out, Kate. Just the possibility of it would have kept me ten steps behind you until I knew one way or the other.”
“And if…?” she probed hesitantly.
“You know me well enough that you don’t even have to ask,” he replied.
She lowered her eyes to his jeans, where the fabric lovingly traced the powerful muscles of his thighs. “You’d have married me.”
“A man will do most anything when there’s a child involved, if he has any sense of honor at all,” he reminded her. He didn’t add that the thought of having a child with Kate didn’t bother him one bit. In fact, he’d felt vague disappointment when he’d learned that she wasn’t pregnant. That had puzzled him. He couldn’t equate that disappointment with desire. And it was only desire that he felt. Wasn’t it?
“Well, it’s a good thing it turned out this way,” she said wearily, leaning her head back with her eyes closed. “I don’t want to participate in any shotgun weddings. I’m not even sure I want children at all.”
“Why?�
� he asked, shocked.
“They make people do crazy things,” she said, remembering her father’s cruelty.
“You can’t judge all parents by yours,” he began.
“Why not? You judge all women by your mother,” she replied, turning her head to study him.
He started to speak and then closed his mouth, brooding for several seconds. “I do, don’t I, Kate,” he agreed after a little while.
“That must have been hard on you.”
“Do you remember your mother?” he asked, evading her question.
She shook her head, and her eyes hardened. “Just bits and pieces. Mostly what my father said about her. She was a tramp. She ran off with another man and deserted Tom and me.” Her lower lip trembled. “He beat me…!”
“Oh, God,” he breathed, finding the thought unbearable. Frowning with something like pain, he reached for her, bringing her with exquisite tenderness across his lap to cradle her against him. “Oh, God, honey…!”
The comforting was sweet and heady, and she cried into the slow, pulsating warmth of his throat, clinging with her good arm because she couldn’t lift the other without pain.
“I hated my mother,” she wept. “I still do. How could she leave us? How could she?”
He smoothed her hair, nuzzling it with his hard cheek. “I don’t understand parents any better than you do,” he said quietly. “My mother ran off and left us without a word, and Hank never tried to find her or bring her back. I asked him why once, and he said that you can’t make people stay with you if they don’t want to. It sounded like a cop-out at the time, but the older I get, the better I understand it. In a way, he was saving us all more heartache.”
“You never forgave her, did you?”
His hand stilled on her hair. “She was on her deathbed,” he said softly. “And after all the pain, she was still my mother. Yes, Kate. I forgave her. And that’s something I’ve never even told Hank.”
She moved her face softly against his throat, feeling proud that he was willing to share something so personal with her. “I don’t think I could have been that generous,” she whispered. “I’ll never forgive mine.”
“Do you know where she is?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve never had the money to try and trace her. I don’t think I would even if I could. Tom and I suffered so horribly because of her. At least Hank was good to you.”
“That he was, the old devil. We fight, but I’d die for him, you know.”
She smiled. “I know.”
It was nice, holding her in the silence of the room, hearing the wind outside beginning to cool the air. She fit against him so perfectly, and he remembered vividly how it felt to hold her with no fabric between them. Her breasts were pushing against his chest, and she was wearing only the light caftan over them. He could feel her nipples, taut with arousal, stabbing into the hard muscles of his chest, and his hand contracted in her hair.
She felt his sudden movement with faint curiosity, and drew her head back to look into his dark eyes.
“What is it?” she whispered.
He started to tell her what it was, but he wondered if she even realized that her breasts were telling him intimate secrets about her innermost desires. He sighed heavily and eased her back onto the sofa before he got to his feet and moved away. “Nothing, honey,” he said. “I’ve got to get on my books. What would you like to read?”
“One of those new mysteries,” she suggested, curious about his sudden withdrawal. Did he find her distasteful now?
He pulled down one of the big hardcover books and handed it to her. “Want me to tell you who the murderer is?” he asked with a faint grin.
“You do, and I’ll throw something at you.”
“Not with your left arm, you won’t.” He frowned as she moved and he saw the smoothness under that caftan. “Kate, are you wearing the rib belt?”
“The doctor said I didn’t have to at night,” she reminded him.
“I didn’t jar you when I carried you in here?”
That seemed to concern him, and it made her feel vulnerable and very feminine. “No. I’m fine.”
He nodded and went to sit behind his desk with a pencil and several pages of figures spread out in front of him. Kate tried to read, but it was so exciting just to sit and watch Jacob as he worked. His hair was very thick, almost black, and it gleamed in the overhead light. His hands were lean and dark and strong, very long-fingered, and his wrists had a faint covering of dark hair on their backs. His arms were long and muscular, straining against the soft fabric of his shirt. The shirt itself was unbuttoned at the throat, and the exciting glimpses she got of hair-covered tanned flesh were wildly arousing. His chin was strong, very stubborn. She smiled, letting her eyes run up from it to his firm, sensuous mouth with its thin upper lip and slightly fuller lower one, a mouth chiseled like that of a Greek statue. His nose had a crook in it; he used to be in fights all the time in his youth. And his eyes…
She flushed, because his eyes were staring right back at her, faintly amused by her uninhibited scrutiny.
“Enjoying yourself, Kate?” he asked humorously, and then could have bitten his tongue off at the flaring embarrassment on her face.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare at you.” She looked doggedly down at the book without seeing a single word in it.
Jacob drew in a slow breath, hating his own blatant mockery. He hadn’t meant to make fun of her feelings for him. It was just the way she looked at him. It had a strange, disturbing effect on his body. Everything about her did, lately. He’d worked himself into a stupor for no other reason than to slow down the feverish hunger she aroused, to fight the fire. She didn’t know how often he lay awake reliving that night they’d spent together. She’d given him a kind of fulfillment he’d never had with anyone else, a shuddering completion that could knock the breath out of him just in memory.
He started to speak, but she seemed involved in the novel. He turned his attention back to his books, forcing himself not to look at her again. That caftan was the most seductive garment he’d ever seen her in. She probably thought it was concealing and proper attire. Actually, she could only have aroused him more by going stark naked.
It was hard for Kate to concentrate after that mocking remark of his. She felt self-conscious, afraid even to look up at him. Her old self would have been more than able to stand up to him, but she was weak and tired and there had been more nightmares than she wanted to admit. She could close her eyes and hear the sound of the bullets, feel the sudden, horrible impact of the bullet that had hit her, feel the unbearable pain that never seemed to end.
She closed her eyes with a faint shudder. Reporting had been a dream job before this happened. Now she was afraid. Afraid of what she might be expected to do. She realized that the accident was a freak-one of those things that happened one time out of several thousand, but her nerve was shattered. She was only just realizing that she couldn’t go back to police reporting. That meant that if there wasn’t another slot open at the paper—and they didn’t have a large turnover—she might not have a job to go back to. Her check came regularly, once a week, and that was nice of Mr. Winthrop. The paper had insurance that would pay her hospital bill. But she was going to have to have a job, and what if there wasn’t one available?
“What’s wrong?” Jacob asked quietly.
She hadn’t realized that he was watching the drift of expressions across her face. She forced a smile. “Nothing. I was just figuring out who the murderer is.”
“Sure. With the book upside down.”
She glanced down. Sure enough it was. She righted it, fumbling a little because she’d been caught.
He put down his pencil with a sigh and came around the desk. “Kate, you can’t spend your life looking back.”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I realize that.”
“In no time at all, this will all be a bad dream.”
She set the book aside and slowly got to her
feet. “I’d like to go back and lie down. I think I can sleep now. Thanks for the company.”
He stopped her before she got three feet, his hands strong and gentle on her arms. She could feel his warm breath in her hair.
“Talk to me.”
She stiffened under his hands. “I’m all right. I don’t need to confess anything, thanks.”
He sighed heavily. Nothing was working out as he’d expected. She was every bit as zealous about privacy as he was. “I’m not used to other people, either. I talk to no one, least of all Hank, about things that bother me. I keep everything in.” His fingers pressed her arms slightly, caressing. “This is as hard for me as it is for you. If you keep pulling back, we’ll never be able to communicate with each other.”
“I’m afraid of you,” she said quietly.
“I’m not blind. I realize that. You’ve got every reason to feel that way, after what’s happened. You let your guard down with me, and I betrayed you. That’s going to take a lot of forgetting.” He drew her slowly back until she was pressed against his warm chest, and his cheek nuzzled her clean, soft hair, making her heartbeat run wild. “I told you in the hospital that I’ve never tried to be gentle. It was the truth. Even with women, in intimacy…” His hands smoothed down her bare arms under the caftan. “I can’t sleep at night anymore, remembering how I hurt you,” he said under his breath. “I’ve avoided you ever since we got here, because I can’t bear being reminded…”
She turned, curious. “Jacob, you didn’t shoot me,” she said.
“I pushed you in front of the gun,” he replied, his eyes narrow and dark and haunted. “You were looking for a way out.”
She turned beet red under that knowing stare. Her eyes fell to his chest, to its strong, quick rise and fall. “Police reporting can be dangerous in a city the size of Chicago,” she said finally. “I thought it would help me to stop thinking about…what happened. I wasn’t consciously trying to commit suicide.”
“You don’t know how I’ve blamed myself.”
“You didn’t know.” She lifted soft, tender eyes to his. “I wanted you,” she whispered shyly.
“I wanted you, too,” he said quietly. He touched her hair, brushing it back, his dark eyes curiously soft in the silence of the room. “God help me, Kate, I still do.”