Thea Devine

by Relentless Passion

  “No, I don’t mind,” she said, but the thought crossed her mind that he would be comfortable around anyone who was willing to listen to him for as many hours as she had.

  She touched his shoulder as she passed him on her way to her room. He was still so likable and harmless—so far. His candor sat well with her, and she even thought she felt a little affection for him, especially after he had defended her to his mother.

  She sank onto her bed wearily, feeling the weight of a massive disappointment sink into her bones as she listened for the tell-tale thump of Reese’s boots that would indicate he was on his way to bed.

  But his footsteps receded instead, and moments later, she heard their measured tread down the outside stairs. She ran to the window in time to see him emerge from the apartment door, and head down the boardwalk, back in the direction of the hotel.

  She felt an irrational fury that he had the freedom to go and come back like that while she was tied to her room by the rules of propriety. She almost thought she should run after him and seek Logan out herself, but that, she thought, would make her no better than Melinda Sable, who by virtue of her reputation had the latitude to do the things that she, Maggie, yearned to do.

  God, it was so unfair.

  She could run a newspaper and support her mother-in-law, but she couldn’t walk abroad at night, couldn’t make love with impunity and without consequences, couldn’t eat alone at the hotel as Reese was no doubt doing now: having a midnight tidbit along with his whiskey, damn him.

  All she could do was wait, and it seemed to her, as she stared into the blackness of the night, that a woman’s life was compounded of so many small moments of waiting. She did not know how it was possible to endure the uncertainty.

  The only way was not to place her reliance on anyone but herself; it was the only way. Anything else led to disaster. Look at her braying at the window, wishing for something with Logan that she knew she could not have.

  It was better that he had not come, better for her. After tonight she would never be caught waiting again.

  And then a dark shadow moved and her heart felt like it would shatter. She knew if she made her way down the inner stairs to the office that she would find Logan at the door.

  Without making a sound, she slipped down to the printing room and lit a lamp. A moment later he knocked at the door and she opened it with trembling hands to let him in.

  And then she didn’t know what to do.

  But Logan knew what to do. He took her right into his arms and held her tightly. She felt all the tension drain out of her body, then he released her, picked up the lamp, took her hand and said, “Come into the office. We’ll talk.”

  He set the lamp down at the far end of the room and put her in her desk chair while he grabbed a plain wooden chair, turned it around, and settled himself opposite her with his arms braced on the chair rail.

  She couldn’t say anything for a long while. She couldn’t find a single word to bridge that gap between the events of the day and his arrival at her door. She just stared at him, and his eyes kindled, brighter than the lamplight.

  “What are you thinking, Maggie?” he asked finally, with a smile in his voice.

  She didn’t know what she was thinking, but she felt that she couldn’t let him believe that she had been waiting for him. “I was thinking how fortuitous it was that I just happened to be down here when you arrived.” Well, the lie tripped neatly from her tongue, but she saw she didn’t fool him at all.

  “Are we going to play those kinds of games, Maggie?” he murmured, extending one hand to touch her face.

  “That is all I have been doing all day,” she snapped, rearing back, away from his dangerous, dangerous caress.

  “Everyone wants your head,” he said sympathetically, removing his hand immediately.

  “And me,” she added testily, this time without considering the effect of her words.

  He stiffened imperceptibly and the atmosphere between them altered. He didn’t need any elaboration; he knew exactly what she meant.

  “I see,” he said slowly, “but you weren’t waiting for me.”

  “I am rather worn out by men with unrealistic expectations today,” Maggie said tightly, and then she wondered why she was trying to scare him off when her feelings about him were so contradictory.

  He smiled. It was an endearing little smile that lifted one corner of his mouth in a conspiratorial salute to her distress. “I can assure you, Maggie, that I have no unrealistic expectations whatsoever.”

  “I was sure of it,” she said tartly, hating his smile and the companionable warmth in his voice.

  “Of course, they haven’t known you as long as I have.”

  “That might be a distinct advantage,” Maggie said heatedly. She hated his smugness and her growing feeling he knew exactly why she was so irritated.

  He shrugged. “It might well be actually. No one else will ever get to see you in a fit of ill humor. You surely don’t put on your best face for me. On the other hand, I want you in spite of all that, so maybe that’s a distinct advantage to you.”

  Oh, and didn’t he turn that around neatly, she thought. But what had she expected him to say? Or was she angry because he had not tried to touch her, or kiss her, or seduce her?

  “And I was so sure you would rethink that notion.”

  “Which one, the advantage or the fact that I want you?”

  “Both.”

  He shook his head. “No, Maggie. That’s too easy—for you.”

  “I beg to differ. It’s too easy for you, and impossibly hard for me.”

  The expression in his eyes flickered and softened. “I told you, it doesn’t have to be.”

  “With you.”

  “Only with me, Maggie,” he said, examining her tired face. “But you know that. You especially know it today.”

  She turned her head away. How perceptive of him. How distressingly clever. She had wanted to hear that, and she hadn’t, and the split in her desire tore her two ways. If he were so astute he would not press her, he wouldn’t touch her, he would never speak of some kind of connection between them.

  And if he didn’t, she would brand him a liar and no better than any other man of her acquaintance.

  She liked that; her impossible need put him right in a corner where he had to make the right decision—only she could define what it was.

  “Do I?” she murmured.

  “Don’t evade me, Maggie; you can’t do it.”

  “Oh, I guess I can’t, since you know me so well.”

  “And I know why I’m here, too, Maggie. Do you want to deny that?”

  “I could.”

  “I’d leave.”

  That abrupt rejoinder made her raise her eyes to his. Implicit in the two words was the no-nonsense warning—I won’t come back. Men like Logan didn’t play coy games; they were straightforward and real, and she believed that his feeling for her was genuine. But it had been born out of a common past and his subsequent loss of her to Frank. Now she was not the same Maggie Lynch he thought he knew.

  All he knew was that he had the power to arouse her deepest secret yearnings. Her only decision was whether she wanted to explore those feelings or put Logan out of her life altogether.

  “Yes, you would,” she said slowly as the light went out of his eyes and his expression closed up. She waited for him to say something else, but he watched her guardedly and did not say another word.

  He was not going to pressure her, she realized; it would be her decision, and she wondered what she had thought he might do.

  She knew what, in the darkest place in her heart, she thought she wanted him to do, and she knew what she had to say.

  “I don’t want you to leave.”

  The tension eased from his body and his face. “What do you want, Maggie?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “You’ll have to tell me.”

  He shook his head again. “I can only tell you what I want, Maggie. I can tell
you about my dreams and my fears, and the things I thought about and couldn’t share with you, and everything I imagined could happen between us, and a lot that was just plain daydreams that got crazy out of hand from pain and maybe loneliness. I could tell you about long, long nights trailing cows up to Cheyenne and all the forbidden things I thought about, and I could tell you about aching nights in my own bed. But then, you see, there was never a chance that my wants would be satisfied.”

  “And now?” she murmured, spellbound by his voice and the heated images his words conjured up.

  “And now there’s a chance,” he said gently.

  Yes, she thought, and there was more than a chance if she could only let herself acknowledge that she wanted to hear everything he had to tell her.

  “We have time, Maggie,” he added softly, as he read indecision in her eyes. “We don’t have to do anything but talk.”

  She almost said, I don’t want to talk, but then she thought that perhaps she did. “What would we talk about?”

  And she saw she didn’t fool him one bit with that question.

  “You,” he said pointedly.

  She visibly shied away from him. Not her. There was nothing about her he did not know anyway. Not now. “What about you?” she evaded.

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  Her eyes widened at that blatant male forthrightness. It was nothing more than a brazen challenge, even though there was not a nuance of provocation in his tone. She had to take it up. She had to. Even the thought of asking a question made her insides churn with a kind of forbidden excitement, as if this were something she should not want, should not even test. But he made her feel that way, and his words evoked an unbearable tension in her because she knew now the weight of her own privation.

  And yet, to demand to hear these things was almost unthinkable; a woman could not command the knowledge of a man’s innermost thoughts and feelings. She had no right to make him reveal anything to her, she who had not recognized the depth of feeling within him to begin with. She had no claims here, and yet he was handing her everything in the hope that together somehow they could nuture something out of the remnants of a broken past.

  What would she want to know? She knew he wanted her and that he was intent on pursuing her, perhaps he even wanted to marry her, though he had said nothing of that. She knew what he made her feel, and she knew there was a passion in her that had been doused like fire, but that still lived in a faint smoldering ember in the center of her womanhood. He didn’t have to tell her any of this. She knew the things she wanted to know were the things he had dreamed on those long empty nights that he had been alone and she had been in Frank Colleran’s arms.

  She had the feeling he knew it too, and that he wanted to wipe all those memories from her mind and her heart, and that he would do it with words before he did it with his kisses.

  He waited for her to ask, and she could not quite bring herself to do it.

  “What should I want to know?” she asked finally.

  A faint smile played across his mouth. “You’re a damned incurious woman, Maggie. I can’t believe that you don’t have a single question.”

  “Not one,” she said stoutly. After all, neither of them had had a life before this moment when any words she uttered would create a new one.

  His smile deepened. Stubborn woman, he thought, seeing all the questions in her eyes. “I thought we weren’t going to play games, Maggie.”

  “I’m hard pressed to find a reason to pry into your private life,” she retorted.

  But oh so curious, he thought, admiring her backbone, admiring her. “I’ll answer your questions, Maggie; you don’t even have to ask them.”

  “But you don’t—”

  “I do. And I’ll tell you exactly what you want to know. All the dreams, because I knew I could never touch you again after you chose Frank. All those nights of wanting you in my arms when I knew I could not have you. And all the things I wanted to do if I could only have another chance. All the things I imagined when nothing was possible ever again.”

  She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. She wanted to speak, she wanted to ask him what forbidden things he had imagined, and her throat closed up so she couldn’t say a word.

  “But you know what I imagined, Maggie,” he murmured, almost as if he could read her mind. “I imagined just kissing you for hours at a time. I envisioned what it would be like to undress you every night, and I carried you naked to my bed and made love to you there. I made love to you everywhere; in the fields, in the house, in this office, on that table where I knew did your writing—everywhere. I saw you in your thick leather apron and you were naked underneath, ready for me. I saw you dressed to work in this office with the knowledge that what was underneath you wore solely for me. I imagined you sitting in that chair at your desk dressed only in a silken robe, waiting for me. I had you sitting in my lap, fully dressed, and letting me feel you everywhere, letting me touch, letting me kiss … is it enough, Maggie? Do you want to know more?”

  She reached out her hand blindly, whether to negate his question or encourage him he did not know, and he took it into his firm grip and held it tightly. “I conjured a hundred different ways to make love to you in a hundred different places. I have you now, Maggie, and I’m not going to let go.”

  He tugged on her hand to draw her forward. “Maggie!” He felt her resistance, and he pulled again gently until he felt her give and her body move forward, until she was directly opposite him, face to face, her eyes shuttered and her expression faintly wary.

  He relinquished her hand to touch her face. “That’s all you have to know, Maggie. The rest I’ll show you, not tonight, maybe not for a while, but soon sometime, you will let me love you and we’ll explore those hundred ways.”

  She found her voice then, after feeling utterly overwhelmed by his raw emotion, because she knew it didn’t matter what he wanted. What mattered was the end result, the cost to her if she were careless and allowed herself to be entranced by his wanton words.

  “And then what?” she asked, and her voice was hoarse with some other kind of passion.

  He knew what it was and what she wanted to hear. “Maggie, I would marry you in a minute, but you don’t love me and you don’t want to be married right now. You’ve said it and I believe it. You think it leads to constraints that won’t allow you the freedom you have now. Fine. You don’t want a child. Fine. But you need me and I sure as hell want you, and that is just how we will be until you decide otherwise.”

  “That is too much to ask of you,” she threw at him, because she needed to find distance from those heated words that had painted forbidden pictures for her. She saw herself everywhere, with him, just as he wanted. She wanted to do it, all of it, and she wanted to run away from her desire.

  “Damn it, Maggie, it was too much to ask for me to accept your marriage to Frank. Nothing is too damned much after that. Maggie—if I touch you, you’ll know. If I kiss you again, you want me to kiss you again, you want all of that…” his voice deepened as he gauged her response, “and I want you.”

  She felt helpless and torn. He understood so much and she comprehended so little. “How—where?” Already the complications intruded, dancing around in her mind tormentingly. Even if she wanted to she had Mother Colleran to contend with, and Reese, and he was so far away to begin with.

  “Here, whenever I can get away. You’ll know, Maggie.”

  Yes, she thought, I will know. She saw no reason to say no; she couldn’t see how it could work. And that, she thought, would damp down his desire faster than anything else.

  He left without touching her, and she felt an angry disappointment that he had not at least kissed her. She had wanted him to kiss her, and now she would have to wait—for everything. She wondered if it had been deliberate, if he had known that she would spend the long night hours thinking of the carnal images he had evoked and the desire he had aroused in her, and she wondered how long
he would taunt her by staying away.

  Chapter Eight

  In the morning everything was the same—and nothing was the same. She dressed for business as usual and was down in the office at six o’clock as was her habit. A.J. joined her shortly thereafter and they talked over the coming week’s events and how to pitch their coverage of the railroad story from then on. They talked about the events Arch Warfield should cover and whether Maggie herself should follow the progress of the engineers or whether A.J. should do it. They prepared their newsprint order and checked back over the business ads they had printed the week before to make sure to solicit new ads this week. They checked the print case to be sure that the typefaces were clean and unbroken.

  They did all the small chores they normally did the weekday following publication, and yet Maggie felt the difference and the underlying excitement that something cataclysmic was going to happen, something that appealed to her deepest sense of her womanly self. Not knowing when it would happen heightened her expectation and her tension. And the waiting, she discovered, made her want it more.

  Her hands trembled as she wrote down the day’s schedule and she thought about his seductive words. She bit her lips and remembered his kisses. She felt her body strain to the memory of his touch.

  He didn’t come, and her restless night was fraught with sensual visions of what might have happened and what didn’t. How could his fancies have captivated her so completely when she had resisted them so ardently?

  He did not come, and she felt, the next day, that that was fine and just as it should be. She was not Melinda Sable, to be had at any man’s whim for whatever price she cared to claim. Logan was no different from any other man: if his ploy didn’t work, he would seek solace elsewhere, and no doubt he had done that. And it was just as well. She didn’t want the entanglement, she didn’t need the tension of the emotion.

  She felt frenetic at the end of the day. Her body was telling her a totally different story, and she hated having no control over her desire. It crept up on her willy-nilly, at times when she needed her full faculties for the job at hand. She would sit staring, thinking wanton thoughts that had nothing to do with the work on her desk.