by Quinn Wilder
"I never said any such thing!" she protested.
"Not in words. I've got the message in every other way you can give it, You don't use my name. You don't say please. You don't say thank you. You don't say well done. As I said, I'm tired of being your toy. Find somebody else to help you paper the world in blue ribbons."
"Dace, I never knew I was making you feel that
way. I " She hesitated. What could she say?
That she was so involved with her own feelings that she had stopped considering his? She didn't know when she'd become so selfish and self-involved, but it shocked her to be confronted with her own behavior.
She wasn't good at apologizing, though heaven knew she was getting enough practice at it around
Dace. But, even while the words were still formulating in her head, he turned and walked away.
Her brief moment of illumination disappeared, and she felt angry all over again. This man made her angrier than any single person on earth had ever done! Here she had been, about to apologize, make herself totally vulnerable, and he wasn't even prepared to listen to her.
"Damn you to hell!" she shouted at his departing back. "How could you be so stupid?" she screamed, when he failed to stop. "Do you think I'd spend all this time and money for a few blue ribbons? Do you think it was ever for blue ribbons? I may not be able to walk very well, you cretin, but I can dream, damn it. Not paltry, stingy, stupid, little dreams. Big dreams."
He stopped, and turned slowly, looking back at her, his dark, thick eyebrows raised quizzically. "What for, then?"
She was aware suddenly that she was crying, that the tears were slithering down her cheeks and splashing off the end of her chin.
"It was for gold," she said, her voice breaking. "I wanted a gold medal."
For a long time he stood silently, gazing at her.
"An Olympic gold medal?" he finally asked softly.
She recognized suddenly that that disturbing look was back in his eyes. The one that had been bothering her all day.
And then she recognized where she had seen it, and couldn't believe that she hadn't recognized it before. It was the same look that lived in her father's eyes when he looked at her.
She brushed a stern hand across her cheeks. "I seem to have some dust in my contact lenses," she croaked.
"You don't wear contact lenses/' he said softly. He was moving toward her, slowly and gracefully, like a big wolf circling its prey. No, more like a big male wolf circling a female wolf
She stopped the thought. It was ludicrous. It was ludicrous, but dammit, there was enough instinct in her to know that something was going on by the look in his eyes.
"How do you know I don't wear contacts?" she snapped, trying to forestall him.
He wouldn't dare kiss her again. He'd promised her that. He was a man of honor and he'd said that she didn't have to lose any sleep over the possibility of his kissing her ever again.
"I notice things," he confessed simply, without embarrassment or apology. "All men notice things. For instance, I know it's not just contact lenses that you don't wear."
She crossed her arms defensively over her chest, knowing exactly what he was talking about. "What are you talking about?" she demanded.
He didn't answer her. She had a funny feeling he'd abandoned that code of honor that he was so fond of. Because he was still coming at her, his stride purposeful, but not nearly as purposeful as the look in his eyes.
"I knew you weren't concentrating on your riding," she accused heatedly, backing awkwardly away from him, from the look in those eyes.
He stopped. A cold light burned through his face and his eyes. "As I said," he said wearily, "find
TO
yourself another toy, Miss Copperthorne." He turned away.
"Dace/' She couldn't believe that tortured sound came from her. "Please don't go. Please don't walk away from here with the only dream I have left. Please." Her voice was barely a whisper. The tears were clogging her throat. "I looked at your eyes, too," she whispered, watching him through the blur of her tears, feeling another shuddering sob rack through her.
Impossibly he seemed to have heard her. He stopped, his whole back stiff. He turned and looked at her. "What did you say?"
"Nothing!" she denied, flinging her head contemptuously. How could she be such a weak ninny? Weil, she would not put on any more of a performance for this man.
He was coming back toward her, not a curious wolf now, but all predator, aggressive, sure of himself. She mourned the day she could have turned and fled from him, as lithe as a deer. It was humiliating just to have to stand here, her damn anguish and heartbreak bald in her face. She looked down in a last desperate effort to keep this man from invading her soul.
He stopped an inch from her. She knew because the toes of his boots had edged into the ring of her downcast vision. He waited for her to look up, as he knew she must. For a long time she defied the electrical command that he was sending her.
Then slowly, slowly, her spine stiff with pride, her eyes flashing warning, she snapped her head up and looked him right in the eye.
"What do you want?"
"This."
He reached out that strong brown hand, but she was surprised by the gentleness with which he touched her. A single finger rested on her cheek, traced the line of a tear to her chin, and then gently nudged her chin upward.
With his finger still on her chin, he dipped his head, and his lips lightly traced hers, tasting her. A shock wave went through her, and she jolted back, and a pain shot through her hip. The pain brought fresh tears to her eyes—because it reminded her who she was, what she must limit her dreams to. Not to gloriously able-bodied men like this. No, Lionel had made it plain what a normal, virile man could handle and could not handle.
When she tried to wrench her head away from his softly plundering lips, his gentleness abruptly died. He wrapped one hand through the wild tangles of her hair, and the other went to the small of her back, forcing her toward him, and then pinning her against his hard, lean length.
Oh, Lord, he felt good. He felt warm and vibrant and alive. He felt so entirely male. So strong. He smelled good; he smelled of horses and leather and sweat. The physical contact shattered the walls she had been building around herself. She needed to be touched. Oh, Lord, she was starved to be touched. Until last week, since the accident she had allowed no one to touch her—a manifestation of the self-doubt Lionel had introduced to her world.
She had always been a rider first. Anything else had come second. Being a woman had come second. Being a daughter had come second. Being anything else had never occurred to her. And when that had been taken from her—when her primary identity had been violently and suddenly stripped from
her—she had simply concluded she was nothing. That there was nothing left of her. A shell. A broken spirit.
But when Dace had kissed her that first time, she had become aware that there was a part of her she had not even known existed that lived. And wanted to live. That lived to be kissed by him again.
Just like this. With his breath stirring an answering breath of life within her, with the heat of his loins where he was pressed against her stirring an answering heat in her that mocked that passion she had felt when she rode. She had thought that was the height of what she could be—until he had teased her once with this. No, she had never felt anything that could even mildly approach this. Lionel's kisses had been pleasant, but not this.
This was the life force itself. Strong. Pure. Powerful. And in this split second she knew she lived, and that she was more than she had ever, ever given herself credit for being. In this split second it became so headily apparent to her that riding was what she had done, not who she was.
For a moment, she stood gloriously free, having found herself. And then she threw herself over the precipice of real passion and was lost again.
Oh, but not in a gray and lifeless place, without light, without color, without passion. No, she threw herself eagerly in
to the very eye of the storm.
He sensed the change in her, and answered it. He pressed her lips open with a tender, stern command from his teeth. His tongue invaded the warm hollow of her mouth, like drug into a vein. She felt ignited.
This was not the pleasant or languorous sensation of a warm sunny afternoon. This was storm. Vigorous. Exciting. Challenging. Wild. Beyond
taming. And yet still a part of her rose to the challenge of it. She mounted the whirling storm of her passion and rode it.
Her tongue answered the quest of his, tangled with his, boldly explored his taste and his texture. He tasted good, his mouth sweet and smoky. Exotic sensation shivered up and down her spine and intensified as his fevered hands began to explore the satin of her skin. She had never been so aware of that surface of her body, of its ability to feel, to tingle, to tempt, to absorb sensation, to give.
Her own hands tugged at his shirt, until it pulled free of his jodhpurs. Her heated hands moved with hunger over the powerful corded muscle of his lower back, then slid around to the front of him, tracing the hard plane of his stomach. Steel sheathed in silk.
The storm had been brewing all day, and now it broke over them. A storm of fire erupted inside her, just as the storm outside them broke. Rain poured down in slashing sheets, though for a while they were so warmed by their own fires that they could ignore it.
She was dazed when his lips finally released hers, and she slumped against him. He gathered her in his arms, as if to protect her, as if he would never let her go. He was staring down at her with that disturbing, unfathomable look in his eyes. The look she had been seeing in his eyes all week.
She recognized it, and didn't want to believe it. But she knew. She knew. How could she have forgotten? How could she have let passion override the fact that Dace Stanton looked at her with a faint sadness, so remarkably like her father's, as if he knew what she once had been and wished it back?
She jerked away from him. And then she raised her hand and hit him across the cheek so hard it turned his head. Slowly, he turned back to her. It looked, for a moment, as if he might raise a hand to rub where the red welt was appearing on his cheek, but she suspected pride prevented him from allowing her to see she had succeeded in hurting him.
"I don't need your pity. Do you understand? And I don't need you to ride my horse. Quit if you want to. You were absolutely right— I'm just a rich girl who needed a new toy to play with." It was raining so hard he would have no way of knowing those were tears slithering down her cheeks.
"Lady," he said, with dangerous quiet, "nobody pities a wildcat."
He turned abruptly from her and went and took Storm by the reins, and urged him at a trot toward the stables.
Only once he was safely in the shadows did he look back at her. She was limping painfully. Every step looked like an exercise in anguish. Her nose was so high in the air that she might be drowned.
He touched his cheek where she had walloped him, and felt a cold anger with her. And with himself. What the hell did he think he'd been doing?
But he knew he'd been thinking of little else except plundering that wide mouth again since he'd seen that videotape. And he had no regrets. Lord, the woman was fire. Absolute fire. Not that he had any intention of getting burned.
Damn it, against his better judgment he wanted her to have that dream that she yearned for. That she had sacrificed herself for.
Maybe deep inside him he wondered if the dream couid make her back into the woman who'd ridden Storm Warrior, the one who seemed to be full of easy laughter and mischievous eyes... Even a fraction of that woman was something to behold.
Lord, that kiss had held more lightning than the damn storm.
Storm Warrior was nervous inside the stable. He was always nervous inside. Dace picked up a handful of straw and began rubbing him down.
"Well, boy, what do you say? You want to go for the gold? You owe her, you know."
Dace didn't. He didn't owe her a bloody thing. But it seemed to him there were different kinds of gold in this life. And suddenly he wanted, just once, at any price, to see what a moment or two of happiness would do to the gold of her eyes.
What exactly did that sneering blond man mean to her?
"I don't care," he muttered to himself. But if he didn't care why did he think of her kissing him that day on the porch so much?
He sighed. Of course, he was in this anyway. He owed Sloan, and Sloan had called in his debt. He had too much of a sense of honor to back out now.
It was still mostly for Sloan, he told himself. He'd finish what he had started... for Sloan.
He decided firmly that he'd sell his soul to the devil before he'd give in to the heavenly temptation of her lips again. He sighed. He hoped that after their discussion today she'd have the decency to start wearing a bra.
He grinned, well aware that he didn't hope that at all.
CHAPTER SIX
"Oh," Cadence said haughtily, the following Monday morning. "You didn't quit, after all."
It was a hazy day. A huge forest fire several hundred miles to the west had blanketed the whole region in smoke. The sun burned red behind a curtain of yellowish gray.
Dace turned from tightening Storm's girth, and gave her a measuring, slightly amused look. Though she would not have been able to come up with a shred of evidence to support her theory, she was fired with the certainty that somehow Dace Stanton knew she was wearing a bra today.
She wondered if he also knew she'd sat in the shade of the veranda on Saturday and Sunday, with binoculars trained on the stables. Originally, she'd just done it—admittedly with her heart in her throat—to see if he was packing to leave. And she'd been surprised to see he was out in the school, riding Ohmylady.
On Sunday morning he'd hauled old practice jumps out of storage, and with much consulting with a book he'd mapped out a course. In the afternoon, he'd saddled Storm, and for a moment she'd thought he had the audacity to start on the bigger jumps himself. But he had let himself out of the gate and disappeared to somewhere on the ranch... which had made her speculate uneasily if he was tired of being watched.
"Yes, ma'am. I think I can ride your Storm."
She started, then eyed him narrowly. Had that been a reference to that kiss that had passed between them? That stormy, electrical, unforgettable kiss? She decided to ignore his possible double meaning.
Besides, it probably wasn't a reference to the kiss at all. Storm seemed to be in one of his jittery moods today. Dace was saying he could handle the horse—nothing more.
"Yes/' she said sharply, "I noticed you can ride Storm. You did quite a bit of it this weekend. You might have asked, you know."
He turned and gave her an undisturbed grin. He shook his head slightly. "You looking for a fight this morning, Cade?"
"Certainly not!"
"Then why don't you thank me for showing dedication and ambition far beyond the call of duty! I was riding these horses and setting up the jumps on my own time, after all."
"It's not that I don't appreciate it," she said with stubborn coolness, "it's just that it might have been nice to have been consulted."
Dace shook his head again. "That still didn't sound much like a thank-you."
She felt backed right into a corner. He had a point. He was giving her something she couldn't begin to pay him for: his enthusiasm. His utter involvement in what they were doing. His willingness to immerse himself in this new world.
"Thank you," she snapped. "There. Are you happy now?"
"Sure," he said evenly. He vaulted into the saddle and looked down at her. "Are you?"
"You might have asked. That's all."
"Cade Copperthorne, a man wouldn't want to give you too much rope. Before I knew it I'd be asking for permission to take off my boots at night. I took some initiative. That's a good thing."
"Are you implying that I'm bossy and domineering?"
"No, ma'am. Just a pretty typical redhead."
"You seem to know more about
redheads than the Encyclopaedia Brittanica" she said scathingly.
He grinned again. "And learning a little bit more every day." Storm skittered sideways unexpectedly. "Hey, buddy, none of that," Dace said, completely unruffled. His voice was stern and calm.
Cadence had felt just one of those feelings the doctor had warned her about. A phantom fear had stabbed through her like a knife.
"Storm might not be the best choice for today and I don't know about those jumps. I don't know if you're ready for them." Actually, she knew damn well he was ready for them, but she wanted to reassert who was the boss... and hide the twinges of fear behind a wall of aggression.
"Look, Cade, I've been doing quite a lot of reading, and you're going to ruin your horses taking them over jumps so much smaller than what they're capable of."
His tone was reasonable and she knew he was right.
Dace turned the horse away toward the school. Cadence knew that if the dream was ever going to become a reality the moods of the horse could not be pandered to. Still, she felt herself trying to remember if Storm had given her warning signals like this the day of the accident. She couldn't remember.
She became aware that Dace had stopped and was watching her, a frown on his face. "Are you coming?"
A leaf rattled by Storm and the horse stiffened and sidled sideways, toward her. She did not want to be around this powerful horse today. His edginess, his leashed power, were stirring up something within her. She hoped her disturbed ghosts were not evident in her face. She did not want to be vulnerable in front of Dace.
"Not today," she said shakily. "I just came to tell you I don't feel well. If you wanted to do some more hacking today "
"Hacking?"
"Trail riding. I "
Comprehension dawned in his eyes. "The horse is making you nervous, isn't he?"
She watched Dace, unable to speak. She searched his face for the mockery she dreaded, but did not find it there. She found something worse: compassion. That look again. That look that asked her to be something she no longer was. But he had never known her before. How could he possibly be looking at her like that? With that look that was so similar to the one she saw on her father's face? On Timothy's?