He wanted more. More than this single kiss. He wanted all of her. Things he’d never had from her before.
But this was Rachel, the woman who thought he’d betrayed her. The woman who hadn’t trusted him enough to let him explain.
“No,” she moaned when he pulled back and ended the kiss. “Don’t stop.”
His chest was heaving. He couldn’t catch his breath.
She didn’t want to stop? Even believing what she did about him? She humbled him. Unnerved him. “I don’t want to stop,” he admitted. He devoured her mouth again and felt the need build, tasted an answering need in her. His hands turned greedy, his blood hot. “I don’t want to stop with just a kiss.”
“Want me,” she breathed, peppering his face with kisses. “Want me, Grady.”
“You know I do.” He took her face in both hands and looked at her, read the acceptance in her eyes. Acceptance of him, of the past, everything. And he read the offer, as well. She was offering him everything. Paradise. “I always wanted…”
“Wanted what?”
“Too much, I guess,” he confessed, shaking his head. “I always wanted to be your first.”
Her eyes lit, her lips curved. “Just let me shut this door, and you will be.”
Grady’s heart skipped one whole beat. Then another. She couldn’t mean…“What did you say?”
“Don’t look so stricken. It means I’m a virgin, not a leper.” Her laughter sounded of nerves. “Is that a problem?”
Yeah, he thought. It was. “You…never?”
One corner of her mouth moved into a wry smile. “What did you think, that you’d leave town and I’d hop into bed with the next guy that came along? After telling you no all my life?”
“But…five years?”
She shrugged. “Is that a problem?” she asked again. The shrug shifted her breasts against his chest and had him closing his eyes in reaction.
Twenty-six years old, and still a virgin. The knowledge staggered him. He was torn between wanting to scoop her up in his arms and carry her, if not to a real bed, to the musty old cot in the corner, or running scared in the opposite direction as fast as he could go.
Scared, because if the offer of her virginity meant she still cared for him, the ramifications were staggering. Scared, because she needed protection—from him. From this overwhelming urge inside him to drag her off by her hair, like some caveman.
He couldn’t think. Didn’t know what to do, what to say. She hadn’t trusted him enough five years ago to listen to his explanation of what had happened, but now she offered herself to him? It made no sense. In any case, he had no business accepting that offer and taking what he wanted from her without first telling her the truth. She thought she was giving herself to a man who had betrayed her.
“I don’t know what to say,” he told her.
The light in her eyes dimmed. “Well, then I guess you’ve said it, haven’t you?” She pulled away from him, her cheeks a bright, flaming red.
“Rachel, no. I didn’t mean—”
She turned toward the door.
“Dammit, Rachel, don’t—” He had taken a step toward her, but his knee gave out. He barely caught himself on the work table before suffering the indignity of crashing to the floor.
“I’d get that knee looked at if I were you,” she said over her shoulder in a choked voice as she walked away.
Jaw clenched in pain—from his knee, from her—Grady watched her leave. Damn her. She still wasn’t going to let him explain anything.
Rachel crammed her sunglasses back on to hide the tears threatening to blind her and took the last few steps to her car at a run. Once inside, she floored the accelerator and flung gravel behind her all the way until she hit the highway and pavement.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. How could she have been so stupid as to have asked him to kiss her?
And why, when he obliged her, was it even more earth-shattering than she had remembered?
The tears gathering in her eyes spilled down onto her cheeks. She left them there and gripped the steering wheel, concentrating on keeping her speed down to a reasonable—legal—level, when what she really wanted to do was curl up in a tight ball and give in to the pain eating at her heart. Five years ago he’d rejected her by fooling around with LaVerne Martin behind her back. Today he had just flat-out rejected her.
When are you going to learn, Rachel?
But what was she supposed to learn? That she wasn’t over him, had never gotten over him? Or was she perhaps supposed to realize, once and for all, that she wasn’t and never had been as important to him as he was to her?
“No.” She refused to taint all those years of memories by believing that their past had never meant anything to Grady. He had loved her. She couldn’t be wrong about that.
At the city limits she slowed down even more and drove straight through town without even thinking about turning off on her street. She headed south down the county highway to the place she always went when she hurt, like a wounded animal to its lair. To the Flying Ace.
But all the way there, she kept seeing the look that had seeped into Grady’s eyes when he realized she had never been with a man. It had looked suspiciously like…fear.
At the realization, her tears dried up as if someone had turned off a faucet.
What, precisely, had he been afraid of?
From the time she was ten, when her parents died, Rachel had always taken her troubles to Ace, who was ten years older than she and, after their parents’ deaths, head of the family. There wasn’t anything should couldn’t talk to Ace about. He’d been the one to tell her about boys, about sex. He’d been the one whose shoulder she’d cried the hardest on when Grady left. She could talk to Jack, too; he was a good listener. But mostly she had talked to Ace.
Yet after the regular Sunday dinner, after the cleanup, when it was nearly time for her to head back to town, Rachel found herself seeking out Trey. Because he was only two years her senior, they had a different relationship, in many ways closer than her relationships with Ace and Jack. Plus, he was only a year older than Grady, and he knew Grady better than their older brothers did.
She found Trey standing in the kitchen tossing his car keys in the air, getting ready to head for his house on the other side of the ranch. She snagged his keys out of the air and threaded her arm around his.
“Take a walk with me before you leave,” she said.
He studied her a minute, then nodded. “Okay.”
Arm in arm they strolled down the road toward the barn and corrals.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked.
Rachel was grateful that he’d decided not to bring up her drinking and subsequent hangover again. She’d already taken enough flak from the family about that. Sheesh. A girl drinks half a beer, gets a little tipsy, and has to put up with stupid jokes and wisecracks all day.
“It wouldn’t be Grady, would it?” Trey asked.
Rachel smiled slightly. “What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know.” He gave a casual shrug. “Seemed like you two were making a little progress yesterday, until you drank yourself into a stupor.”
She rolled her eyes in disgust. “I did not drink myself into a stupor. It was your fault, anyway. It was your cup I swiped.”
“I wondered what had happened to it. Hell, kid, there wasn’t enough beer left in that cup to drown a flea.”
“This is not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What, then?”
Okay. She had his attention. Now how was she supposed to broach the subject?
“Must be pretty serious,” Trey observed.
This time it was Rachel who shrugged. “Not really. It’s just…I’ve got a hypothetical question for you.”
“Hypothetical?”
“Yes. It’s, well, it’s about men. I need to get inside a man’s—a hypothetical man’s—head.”
“Uh-huh. Okay. Shoot. Metaphorically, that is.”
She didn’t
know any way to do this other than to simply jump in. “Why would a man get scared when a woman he says he wants tells him she’s…never been with a man before?”
Trey choked.
Rachel rolled her eyes and slapped him on the back, two hard whacks.
“Okay, okay! You’re killing me. Jeez Louise, Sis.”
“Well,” she said, folding her arms across her chest and looking out to the rangeland beyond the corrals. “I guess that confirms that it’s not just hypothetical men who are afraid of even the word virgin.”
“Are you—”
“I was speaking hypothetically. I believe I made that perfectly clear.”
“Uh, yeah. Hypothetically. Right.”
“So what is it?” she cried throwing her hands in the air. “Is a man afraid a virgin won’t know how to do it?”
“Ah, jeez, why are you asking me?”
She shot him a narrow-eyed glare. “I suppose I could go find a street corner to stand on and ask the first man who comes along. If a girl can’t ask her own brother these things, who’s she supposed to ask?”
“You could ask Ace, or Jack. Or Belinda. Yeah, you could ask Belinda.”
“I’m asking you.”
“All right, all right. It’s just that I don’t…well, hell, I don’t know. I don’t have any experience with that type of woman.”
“You’ve never…with a virgin? Why not?”
“Because I don’t know any nuns, all right?”
“Oh, that’s just too cute, Number Three. Now you’re calling me a nun.”
“Oh, really? I thought we were speaking hypothetically.”
“I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve never slept with a man.”
“And you shouldn’t be,” Trey said, suddenly serious. “Sex isn’t…it isn’t a thing to be taken lightly. It’s serious business. A woman ought to be damned picky about it, if you ask me.”
“And a man?”
“A man, too.”
“What about this hypothetical man?” she asked, bringing Trey back to the subject she couldn’t let go of. “Why would he get upset and scared just because a woman hadn’t…you know.”
“Jeez, you’re asking me all these questions and you can’t even say it? Just because she hadn’t had her oil checked.”
It was nerves, she decided, that made her laugh. “Trey.”
“It’s intimidating, all right?”
“What’s intimidating? The word sex?”
“No, the thought of having sex—and it shouldn’t be having sex. If it’s a woman’s first time, it should be making love, not just sex.”
“Why is it intimidating?”
“Well, hell, a guy would start wondering if he knew how to make sure she enjoyed it. The first time for a woman can be…”
“Painful?”
He shrugged. “So I’m told. A guy would want to make sure he didn’t, you know, hurt her or anything. Or scare her. He’d be worried that he’d do something she didn’t like and make her not ever want to be with a man again.”
Rachel stared off into the distance again, at the mountains this time, and sighed. The sun was slipping behind the peaks. “Okay. I guess I can see that.”
In a nearby pasture a calf bawled for its mother. The mother gave an answering moo.
Trey’s lips twitched. “So you scared him, huh?”
Rachel pursed her lips and refused to answer.
“I knew Grady wasn’t dumb.”
“Who said anything about Grady?”
“Oh, right. This is some hypothetical guy we’re talking about. A smart one, too. Smart enough to step back and think before he does something they might both be sorry for. If he was somebody like Grady, and she was somebody who maybe had reason to think he might hurt her again, well, that would really make him stop and think. He’d have to wonder why she would even let him near her. And if he was any kind of a man, he’d want to make damn sure he knew what he was getting into, because he would never want to hurt her again. He might even be thinking she might be better off without him.”
The peaks swallowed the last of the sun.
Was that it? Rachel wondered. Was that what Grady had been thinking? She wasn’t sure, and wouldn’t know unless she asked him, and even then he might not tell her.
She appreciated Trey more than she could say. Family. They were always there for her. She didn’t know what she would do without her brothers, and now Belinda.
How had Grady stood being away from his family for so long? Away from everything familiar to him. Alone, except for Cody. Except for whatever new friends he made, whatever comfort he might have found.
She remembered when he first came home a few weeks ago, how the pain of his past betrayal had risen up and nearly strangled her. It still hurt to think about it, but the pain was different. Less. It was more a pain for all they’d lost, everything that had been denied them. Yes, he had hurt her. But even more, he had hurt them. He had robbed them of their future together.
Well, he was back now. The future was still out there. And she still wanted it, that future with Grady. Incredible as it seemed in light of what he’d done, she still wanted him.
He might very well break her heart again. He might not return these feelings that were bubbling to life inside her. And even if he did, she might never be able to trust him again, even if he wanted her to.
But Grady was so handsome, so masculine. He was smart and clever and fun to be with. He had a ranch of his own and an adorable son. How long was he going to want to live alone? How long before he decided it was time to share his life with a woman?
If Rachel didn’t take a chance on him now, she might never have another opportunity. She couldn’t imagine her first lover being anyone but Grady. He was the only man she’d ever loved. If he broke her heart again, well, she’d survived that pain once, she could survive it twice.
“What are you going to do?” Trey asked her quietly.
Slowly she smiled and turned to her brother. “What do you think I’m going to do?”
A smile spread across Trey’s face. “Should I warn him?”
“You can if you want, but it won’t do him any good. The man is a goner, or my name’s not Rachel Wilder.”
Chapter Ten
This whole thing would have been easier if she had the slightest idea how to go about seducing a man, but she figured there had to be some truth to that old adage that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach.
If she was going to do this, she needed something to make him weak. Something to make him beg. So Monday at noon she zipped into town and paid a visit to Sumner’s Drug Store and picked up one of Ida’s peach cobblers—an entire cobbler—to go. When a woman was this serious, she wanted the most potent ammunition available.
She stashed it in the refrigerator at the clinic and waited until the end of the day, when she urged Louise out the door.
“Aren’t you leaving?”
“In a little while. I want to look through those résumés we’ve been getting.” They’d placed an ad for another vet and had received three responses so far. Swearing she wouldn’t stay long, she waved goodbye and sent Louise on her way.
As soon as Louise was out of sight, Rachel dashed out to her car and took a change of clothes from her trunk. She wasn’t going to fire her first shot, as it were, smelling of antiseptic and wearing clothes covered in who-knew-what. In the clinic’s tiny bathroom she stripped and took a soapy washcloth to all the important places, touched up her makeup, put on the clothes she’d brought, and fluffed out her hair. A touch of cologne, and she was as ready as she was ever going to be.
But it was too soon, of course. They would just be sitting down to supper. So she pulled out the résumés and started reading. They were all promising.
After that, she took care of a dozen or more little chores she hadn’t had time to see to last week. Then she took care of a few more that she wouldn’t have time to see to this week.
Finally, at seven, she saw Joe and Al
ma drive off and head for home.
Now. It was time.
She wasn’t expecting miracles, she reminded herself as she retrieved the cobbler from the refrigerator. After all, Cody was there. But this was only her first salvo. Well, her second if she counted Sunday in the tack room.
After putting her dirty clothes and her medical bag in her car, she drove down to the house and parked.
With her cobbler in hand, she dodged Harry’s enthusiastic, three-legged greeting, took a deep breath, and knocked on the front door.
Nobody answered.
It was inconceivable that she could have gone to this much trouble and then find out he wasn’t at home. He had to be home. His pickup was here, and Joe and Alma had just left. She knocked again.
Finally the door opened.
She smiled brightly. “Hi. I brought—good grief! What happened to you?” His lip was swollen, his jaw was bruised, and one eye was turning a nasty shade of blue. He wore a steel-and-leather brace outside his jeans on his injured knee.
Behind him she heard a snicker of laughter. “He didn’t eat his vegetables,” Cody said.
Grady turned his head and looked down at Cody, slowly, it seemed to Rachel. As if it hurt to move.
“Smart mouth,” he said.
Cody laughed and danced out of reach. “That’s what you said when I asked.”
Rachel raised a brow at Cody. “And did you eat your vegetables?”
“Sure did. See? Not a mark on me.”
“And let that be a lesson to you,” Grady said.
Rachel smirked. “I knew Alma was strict on you, but I had no idea.”
“What can I do for you?” he asked. “As you can see, I’m not exactly up to entertaining.”
“Or anything else,” she muttered.
“What was that?” Grady asked.
Well, there was obviously no damage to his hearing. “Never mind. Cody, can you take this to the kitchen?” She held out the covered dish of cobbler.
“Sure. What is it?”
“It’s a surprise. For later. No fair peeking. And be careful, it’s heavy.”
“Don’t worry, Miss Dr. Rachel.” He eyed his dad’s bruises and grinned. “I’m minding real good today.”
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