by Carole Howey
"What are you talking about?"
"Don't pretend you didn't send Gideon down after me and Bill," she chided him. "His clothing smelled terrible. But still, it was sweet of you."
He was sweet now, was he? Flynn choked back a bitter retort.
"Don't be lettin' it get around," he growled instead, flicking his butt into the dirt beyond the porch.
"And don't be leaving your butts in sight," Missy admonished him in turn. "I've smelled tobacco on Gid eon's breath a time or two, and he's far too young for that habit. I think he picks up your leavings, pinches some papers from Mi, and rolls his own cigarettes."
Flynn chuckled ruefully. "The little imp. Guess I'll have to carry the damned things around in my pocket from now on." He got up, stretched, and sighed. "Want to sit down?" He offered her the only chair on the porch, the one he'd lately vacated.
She shook her head, avoiding his eyes. She did that a lot. He knew why.
"No, thanks. Mi just told me Miss Mabel's been coughing, and she looks as if she might be shaping up," she explained, referring to one of the three dams serviced by Sheik. "I'd better go have a look."
Flynn frowned.
"But it's nowhere near her time!"
She met his gaze at last, and he saw that she was grim with worry. "I know."
"I'll come with you."
A cough could be trouble, Flynn knew, especially if it was accompanied by a runny nose or an elevated body temperature. Such a condition in foaling mares often resulted in abortion, and worse, was contagious. The other two foaling mares were susceptible. Miss Mabel would have to be kept apart from the rest of the stock, particularly the remaining brood mares.
The mares weren't due to foal until January. One had slipped early, Flynn recalled, but Missy had been very diligent and careful with the other three, and she was optimistic about three live, healthy births. She'd pinned many hopes on Sheik's unborn progeny, Flynn knew. Not the least of them was her ability to buy out the remainder of his share of the ranch. Besides which Flynn had a feeling she'd take the loss as personally as she would one of her own, if the mare were to lose the foal
After all, if anyone had been born to be a mother, it was Missy Cannon.
The strong scent of pine oil mingled with the smell of horse and clean hay in the stable. Rich was already scrubbing down the birthing stall, and Mi was with the mare. His usually bland face was grim. Apologetic.
"It don't look good, Miss," he greeted Missy in a low tone, as if Miss Mabel were a human patient who might understand him and become alarmed. "She's down. It don't look like she broke her water yet, so that's good, but she ain't et all day as I can see, and she looks to me like she's bagging up."
Flynn looked as Missy stooped to examine the mare. What he hadn't known about foaling before he came to the C-Bar-C, he'd read up on once he got here. By the light of the three lamps in the stall, it seemed to him that the mare's udder was, indeed, swollen, and that meant she was near foaling.
It meant disaster.
"Christ," he muttered, as much a prayer as an oath.
"Maybe just another spontaneous abortion, just like the other one," Missy said in a matter-of-fact, clinical manner, rising as she rolled up her sleeves. "Although I'd guess it's equine pneumonia. For now, we'll keep her apart. Otherwise, we'll just have to wait and see. It's going to be a long night, I guess."
"Yes, ma'am," Mi agreed heavily, getting to his feet. It was obvious to Flynn that the foreman didn't like this situation any better than Missy did. Flynn realized he didn't, either.
"Why don't you go on back to the house?" he suggested, touching her arm. "I'll stay with Mi. Gideon wants tucking in. Besides, you're not dressed for the kind of work we'll have here tonight."
Missy's gaze followed the trail his arm made until she was looking into his eyes. Her own eyes were shining like wet pearls, and he knew the wetness was unshed tears. He wished he could make them go away with a touch of his hand, or an embrace, but he knew he did not possess that kind of power, even if she still loved him as she had said two months before.
"Thank you," she said softly. "I'll be back."
In less than an hour, she was. She'd put on trousers that she sometimes, but not often, worked in, and a soft flannel shirt. She brought with her blankets and pillows. Lucy, immense with her late pregnancy, followed bearing a coffeepot and a small wicker hamper.
"Thought you might need some victuals," she offered, sounding far more subdued than usual. "I'll be going to bed, myself, miss, if you don't mind. My back's been botherin' me all afternoon."
With a nod, Lucy left them alone.
"I don't like the sound of that either," Missy fretted, looking after the waddling girl. "Mi, I want you to go for the doctor. I think Lucy and Miss Mabel both might need one before this night is out."
Where Lucy's welfare was concerned, Mi didn't need to be asked twice. In moments, Missy and Flynn were alone in the stall except for the ailing mare. Silently Missy handed Flynn one of the blankets and a pillow.
"Is Gideon asleep?" Flynn, accepting them, didn't know what to say to her, but he needed to say something.
She nodded, folding her own blanket and plunking it on the straw like a cushion. "Like a baby," she remarked quietly. "I think he could sleep through an earthquake." She tried to smile, but her effort did not deceive him.
Arranging his blanket beside hers against the wall, Flynn tried again. "Going to be a long night, I guess."
She did not answer.
He lowered himself to the straw beside her, wanting to touch her, wanting to reach her. He wished to God he knew how.
"Did you at least have a nice ride this afternoon in Bill Boland's surrey?"
Now, why in blue hell had he asked that? he wondered, biting his lip in disgust. The widower was hardly his favorite topic of discussion, and worse, he had the feeling Missy knew that. He clenched his fists, steeling himself against a knowing chuckle.
It never came.
"You don't like Bill," she said instead, wonderingly. "I can't understand why."
Can't you? he wanted to ask her. He knew he couldn't. The knowledge choked him like a chicken bone stuck in his throat.
"Seems to me it's you who doesn't much like him," he retorted gruffly, picking bits of straw from his trousers because he needed to do something to keep from looking at her there beside him. "He's been coming around here 'since the flood,' and I don't guess you two are any closer to tying the knot than you were before I got here. Hell, I bet you've never even let him kiss you."
He felt reckless in the comparative darkness of the stall. Surely Missy, if she were looking, would not be able to see the redness he felt in his face. And much as he hated talking about the ardent rancher who courted her, he found that he was burning to learn if the man had ever known a pleasure from Missy more personal than, say, holding her hand. In fact, he felt he might scorch to a cinder if he didn't find out soon.
Two months earlier, Missy realized, she would have taken umbrage at such an invasive question from Flynn Muldaur. But that had been when she'd entertained a fevered crush for the man beside her. After he'd gently but firmly spelled out his feelings to her that afternoon
in May, she'd managed to put aside those girlish fancies of hers. She felt as if she'd stuffed them in a little-used corner of her heart, as if they were cherished but fragile mementos to be hoarded in a box out of the light. Now, she told herself by rote, he was merely a business associate. An acquaintance. Sometimes even a friend, when she allowed herself to admit to that much feeling for him.
She'd missed having a friend such as he. She found herself liking it. And she'd found herself, despite the secret that kept a certain distance between them, confiding in him more and more.
"Flynn Muldaur, you're as nosy as any old widow," she declared, even managing a slight, if shaky, laugh. "And I can name half a dozen of them hereabouts who'd give their false teeth to know the answer to that question."
Flynn held his breath. Then, whe
n she said nothing more for several seconds, he let it out again.
"Well?" he demanded softly.
A rush of heat filled her face, she wasn't sure why. No, she was sure why, and that was what scared her, suddenly.
"No," she answered at last in a muffled voice, watching the quiet mare. "I've never let him kiss me."
Flynn shifted in his seat, his shoulder jostling hers. His enormous sigh was baffling. "Why not?" he asked at the end of it.
Another rush of heat filled her face and she stared at his boot tops.
"You'll laugh."
"No, I won't."
"Yes, you will."
"Won't. I promise." He made an X across his chest with his finger, something she'd seen Gideon do many times. Against her will, she giggled. The sound echoed
in the otherwise quiet stable, coming all around the high-beamed ceiling again to mock her. She risked a sideways look at him but could not maintain her gaze, because he was staring at her intently. Suddenly she felt his fingers lace with her own between them in the straw, loosely. His fingers were warm and strong. The feel of them in hers coaxed a lump to her throat.
''So tell me," he urged her in a whisper, shaking her hand once, gently. "Why hasn't Bill Boland ever been allowed to taste your lips?"
God, why had he put it that way? The very sound of his sugar-and-cream baritone sent a prickly sensation right down her neck, clear past her spine, and into some deep part of her that turned at once to hot, shimmering liquid. She didn't remember, for a moment, whether she'd been sitting down or if she had fallen down. Or whether she might still be falling.
Flynn was waiting for an answer. She tried to collect herself, but it was not easy between the activity of his fingers on hers, and that odd but utterly glorious feeling between her legs.
"Why he mean" She moistened her lips, which had become dry as dust. Besides being distracted by his attentions, which might or might not have been innocent, she felt terribly embarrassed by what she was about to confess to him.
"No one's ever kissed me before," she blurted, because she knew that was the only way she'd be able to get it all out without falling over her pride. "I don't know how it's done. I was afraid to let him know that. In fact no one else knows that about me, not even Allyn."
Chapter Sixteen
Of all the things Missy might have told him, that was the very last thing Flynn expected. It wasn't that he didn't believe her, either.
It was that he did.
"You promised you wouldn't laugh." Missy's grumble reminded him that he hadn't yet answered her.
Laughing was the farthest thing from his mind, unless it was with relief.
"I'm not laughing," he defended himself, hoping he sounded natural.
"No, but you want to."
"You don't know me, Missy," he told her. "You think you do, but you don't know me at all."
That made him sad, all of a sudden. She didn't know him, he realized. But that wasn't her fault.
Her fingers were soft and warm in his, and he felt them close over his hand. Why had he gotten so close to her? What good could possibly come of it? He wanted to pull away from her, yet at the same time he didn't. His confusion kept him riveted right where he was.
"What I was hoping," Missy continued, sounding surprisingly cool and matter-of-fact, "was that Oh, but no. It's a foolish idea."
"What?" He looked at her profile. Her cheek was round as a half moon and her lips were pursed in a way he found tempting. She was staring hard at the mare in the straw as if she didn't dare look at him. He had to know what she was thinking.
"What, Miss?" he asked again, turning on his hip. "Come on. We're friends, aren't we? Tell me."
She stole a look at him but could not seem to sustain it beyond a glance. Suddenly she jerked her hand away from his and got up, as if she could no longer abide his nearness.
"No," she said firmly, wrapping her arms around herself. "I'm sorry I said anything. Forget it. I feel foolish enough as it is without"
"You want me to show you how it's done."
The words came out of Flynn's mouth before his good sense could hold them back. He could only hope he didn't sound like a prize idiot. He sure felt like one for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that he knew kissing Missy was something he should avoid. For both their sakes. He wished, staring at her back in the dim light of the stable, that he could gather up the words he'd uttered, like the glass marbles Gideon often played with on the parlor floor, and stuff them safely back in the small, dark pouch they had come from.
To Flynn's surprise, Missy let out a small, quavering laugh.
"No, that's quite absurd," she told him, although she did not sound entirely convinced of it. "We're friends, as you said. It wouldn't be . . . appropriate. And anyway, it certainly wouldn't be lifelike kissing aa"
"A lover?" Flynn didn't know whether he was more amused that Missy, so chaste and circumspect that she'd never even allowed herself to be properly kissed by a man, could not even breathe the word lover, or whether he was more insulted that she didn't think him capable of behaving like one. He stood up and dusted the straw from his sleeves.
"I think you underestimate me." Damn it, he'd show her the way lovers kissed; see if he couldn't!
"No, Flynn, this is silly." She sounded composed and resolute this time, but he noticed she still did not look at him. She probably couldn't look at him. The notion inspired a tightness in his chest that was part want and part need.
"I expect when I'm ready to kiss Bill, I will," she continued stolidly. "How I do it doesn't really make any difference, I suppose. For all I know, Bill will like the fact that I've never done it before. Men seem to set a great store by being the first; heaven only knows why. I can't see any great advantage to it. I guess it'll just . . . happen. I'm not ready yet."
I'm not ready yet.
Missy, Flynn knew, if left to her own devices, would never consider herself ready for a man's kiss. Even now, she was pulling away from him like a wary, skittish mare. For some reason he didn't care to ponder, the thought made him even more eager than before to gentle her into sweet submission.
"Excuse me for asking this, but how will you know when you're ready?" he wondered aloud, taking two steps toward her.
"I think you ought to put an end to all your doubt and wondering and fear and don't try to tell me the idea of kissing a man doesn't scare you, because I know you too well by now and let me kiss you." He nearly
choked on the word because his throat closed up on him unexpectedly, but to his amazement he made it through to the end of his casual remark without faltering.
Unexpectedly, she faced him. He was not prepared for the challenging look in her narrowed eyes, like polished pewter by the light of the lamps in the stall. There was fear behind that bravado, he knew, but Missy Cannon did not back down from a challenge. It just wasn't in her.
He knew further that she was not the only one of them who was afraid. He felt as if he were standing on the edge of a precipice. It remained to be seen whether he possessed the courage or the stupidity to step off the edge into the abyss.
"All right, Flynn," she allowed with a stiff nod. "What harm could there be in it?"
Her lower lip, glistening gold in the light, trembled, betraying her. Staring at the tempting vista, Flynn knew what harm lay in it for himself. But it was sure too late to worry about that now.
He steeled himself. It's a kiss, he told himself. Just a simple little kiss. Nothing more. Just wet your lips, and
His mouth was dry as paper. He realized it was because his breaths were coming short and fast. She held him in her direct, bold gaze.
"Well?" she demanded softly, folding her hands at her stomach. "Is this going to take all night?"
If we're very, very lucky, a naughty voice in his head answered. He tried, in the face of her matter-of-factness, to smile.
"I'm trying to decide the best way to do this," he told her, testing the evening stubble on his chin with the
fingers of his left hand as he considered her, two feet away.
"You mean there's more than one way?" Sweet mother of God, there were a million ways. And how he wanted to show her all of them, slowly, slowly. . . .
"Stand very still," he ordered her, moving closer. "And don't move, unless you feel as if you absolutely have to."
With a suspicious look she took half a step backward, which took her nearly to the stable wall.
"You won't try to . . .?"