by Cait London
“Boring, boring... I’m used to a variety. We’re going to be playing house—unless I can find a way out of this mess. Now doesn’t that make me special? I mean, the only woman who has lived in the great Nick Palladin’s home?” she taunted.
Her glance took in his sparsely furnished home, the hardwood floors softened by woven rugs and sprawling wooden furniture in the living room. She peered into the laundry room, noted the washer and dryer humming, Nick’s ironing board and steam iron. “According to Mamie, you’re a great catch, though I doubt that with all your dark moods and glares—and what woman wants to be packed off like a sack of potatoes? Still, isn’t that some sort of status ranking? Aren’t I special, Nick?” she asked in a sultry tone, pushing him as she placed one slender fingertip on his bare chest to toy with the hair on it.
Nick caught her finger and a jolt of electricity skittered up his arm; his male alarms started clanging and the need to carry her back to bed startled him. Silver’s eyes widened, her hand trembling in his. “Scowling won’t scare me,” she whispered, her bottom lip gleaming as it trembled. “I’ll find another place.”
Nick did not release the “You ungrateful little...” hovering on his tongue. He rummaged through the hours he’d wasted trying to wedge her away from his ranch; not another house matching her conditions was available in the small community. “Try to find something else, why don’t you? Try to come up with another custom lab setup like the one I just had built for you on the north end of the house. But until you find your perfect Nickfree home, maybe you’d better think about closing your bedroom door at night, Silver.”
She’d gotten to him again and, drawn from his customary easygoing cloak, Nick had struck back. “You cry and moan, and from the sounds, there is a real fight going on in that bed. Do you want to tell me about it? Or are you missing De LaFleur?”
She paled, straightened and reclaimed her hand to grip the plaid, her shields raised. “If I needed you to be my friend, I’d worry. I’m going to dress now.”
Nick couldn’t help grinning as Silver walked away. Her exposed lush backside was indeed very admirable and feminine. “Oh, Silver,” he singsonged gently.
“What?” She turned, white-gold hair flying out and settling over her bare shoulders and flowing onto the tartan. The filtered sunlight slid across the delicate flex of her thigh muscles as she braced her legs, and a jolt of pure sensual awareness again slammed into him.
Nick rose slowly. He wanted no shadows between them when he made his point. He walked to her and noted that her eyes widened and she took a step back as he approached, looking up at him. He smoothed a strand of hair with his fingertip, letting it roam downward to her chest. He traced the taut, silky skin over her collarbone, and she shivered delicately. At least he wasn’t the only one affected by this morning’s encounter. “Let’s get this straight. I like the predictable, and I can deal with your spoiled demands. Jumping out of the plane yesterday and showing off didn’t exactly make you points with me. Mamie wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, and I’m not about to play nurse.”
Why did she seem so innocent and yet—
“You’re very big...very...just very,” she whispered unevenly as Nick took a step nearer, wanting to see what was happening inside those wide gray eyes.
He took his time studying the deep crevice between her breasts, and Silver jerked the plaid higher, allowing him a better view of her shapely knees. He’d kiss them one day, the fragrant backs, and take his time inspecting the rest of her, too. “The sight of a nude woman, one fully rounded and fresh from bed, could just set me off. But then, that’s what you want, don’t you? Me drooling after you? Just one more notch on your bedpost?”
Anger shot through the steel gray eyes locked with his, Silver’s temper flashing. “You think I let you see my backside deliberately? Drool on someone else, Fido.”
Nick slid his fingertip along her taut jawline, the silky flesh heating, flushing beneath his touch. “Can’t take it, can you?”
“What?”
The rumpled bed behind her hiked his desire up into sizzling. “You’re handing out plenty and waltzing around here in the morning in nothing, but bare skin isn’t going to work. You stay on your side of the fence, and I’ll stay on mine. This is strictly business.”
Silver’s head went back, sending a fresh wave of her scents to entrance him. “Threats?”
“Promises. You didn’t know you cried in your sleep, did you? That must be hard on relationships... intimate ones. Did De LaFleur sleep through all that?”
The curtains dropped, her face impassive. “He was a gentleman. It was never a problem between us.”
Nick had a big problem, his senses leaping to claim a woman who had slept her way into her skills. “A fifty-year-old man and a nineteen-year-old girl could have other problems.”
Her smile was long and lazy and knowing. “Yes, well. We managed. Jacques always gave me what I wanted.”
“I’ll bet.”
Her dark eyebrow hitched up. “I’m going to enjoy flattening you, Palladin.”
“Just do the job you are paid to do.”
Four
Nick ripped off his leather gloves and entered Tallchief House. He’d helped the men lay a new fence, while the Tallchief women visited with Silver. Leaving her amid the family he’d come to adore made him uneasy. Yet Nick needed the relief of hard, physical work, this morning’s image of Silver’s naked and wellendowed body still haunting him. Starting his day with the image of perfect uptilted breasts, silky skin and the intimate juncture of Silver’s thighs, flowing into her long legs, had set his sensual clock ticking. He corrected the thought: Silver had set his senses racing.
He picked his relationships carefully and if he wanted to invite himself to disaster, he just might—
Silver. Hard, reckless, a natural temptress using her powers to get what she wanted. Gossip whispered that she was De LaFleur’s first mistress and protégée and he’d been devoted to her. The perfumer had hoarded his secrets, and only Silver had shared them, proving herself in the industry.
Inside Duncan Tallchief’s home, scents of fresh bread and women and babies and love curled around Nick, stopping him in his tracks as they always did. He brought them into him, cherished them, for he was destined to live apart, alone.
This was a home for generations, all loving, and even the death of the Tallchief parents hadn’t nicked that love. The legacy that Lloyd Palladin had given his sons hadn’t stopped Joel and Rafe from finding happiness, but Nick doubted love was meant for him.
Every time he looked in the mirror, he was reminded that he was Lloyd Palladm’s son—tough, cynical and big enough to hurt a woman if his passions ruled him. Living on the borders of his brothers and the Tallchief family, Nick had found a bit of peace and glimpsed how love could cherish and last.
Shadows and light and cooking scents danced through the huge living room, women talking quietly as they had for ages, a soothing sound. The woman dressed in the Tallchiefs’ great-great-grandmother’s doeskin bridal shift stood in the center of Tallchief House. Her pale hair contrasted with the Sioux warrior’s shield on the rock wall, the arrows and bow used by Tallchief. Her fingers lovingly smoothed the old wood of a cradle carved by the warrior for his first child. Light flowed around her, upon her, settling upon the soft turn of her mouth, the vulnerable line of her throat.
The pose was timeless, effective—a bnde wistfully touching a cradle that had held children, and longing for her own. The scene slammed into Nick with the force of a baseball bat. If he knew anything about himself at all, he knew that this woman was his.
He heard a soft chuckle and turned to the knowing grin of his brother Joel...but Nick had no time for guffawing, tormenting elder brothers, he only had time to study the woman surrounded by other women, his woman.
“Aye,” he heard his brothers murmur behind him, but he had no time for Joel’s and Rafe’s taunting. He had to deal with the woman he had waited for all his life, b
ent over a cradle. The timeless tender scene squeezed his heart, slowing the furious flipflops into an ache to take her into his arms, to shelter and protect her, to comfort and cherish—
For just a heartbeat, he caught Silver’s wistful expression, and in the next heartbeat she straightened slowly, head high, single pale braid flowing down her chest across the blue beaded symbols of Tallchief Mountain. Body taut, her legs and feet braced apart in the leggings and moccasins, her stormy gray eyes locked with his.
She’d come for her quest and Nick realized that he wasn’t letting her go. He fought the tenderness curling within him, the sight of Silver, dressed as a Tallchief bride, facing him as if they were alone in the room.
She’s mine. That knowledge slammed into Nick, and there was nothing he could do but go to her.
“I didn’t try on Una’s bridal shift because it was lovely doeskin, weighted with pretty sky blue beads and fringes and memories of love. I didn’t wear it because it was precious to the Tallchiefs, scented of romance and crushed lavender and kisses and dreams of babies to come. I tried it on because it brought me closer to their hearts, and I need them to think of me as one of their own. That way, I’ll have what I want out of them. Then Nick had to ruin it all.” Silver breathed in the sage-scented afternoon air carefully, lifting the weights she held in either hand. Dressed in a scooped-neck sleeveless cotton T-shirt and loose shorts, she was sweaty and mad, working off steam in Nick’s home.
On her first day in Amen Flats, Nick Palladin had loomed behind her every step—quiet, lethal and putting a crimp in her efforts to get closer to the Tallchiefs. The guardian knight of the Tallchiefs didn’t trust her. Fine. They were even.
She smiled tightly and lay down, hands behind her head, and tucked her gym shoes beneath a bar. Feet elevated on the workout bench, head on the floor mat, she began sit-ups. She forced herself to concentrate on her muscles, her breathing, and not the burn of Nick’s hot gaze when he saw her in the dress. She touched her knees with opposite elbows before going down and back up; she cursed Nick’s black heart for making her own leap and flip-flop at that look, the way he strolled toward her as if he were a hunter latched on to his prey.
“I make my own choices, not him. If I wanted to try on the dress, it wasn’t to please Nick Palladin.” The sweatband on her forehead was wet, sweat pouring off her body like the temper Nick could raise with one dark, shielded look.
Clearly Nick was a fond member of the family, cuddling babies and kissing cousins’ cheeks. Babies came to him for piggyback rides and to feed him bits of cake. He had no right to hold a black-haired, gray-eyed baby upon his lap, rocking her to sleep, nor to let them ride his hip easily, as though he were suited to the feel of a child draped around him. Nick, lying on the floor, buried beneath a flurry of giggling chubby little children and chuckling with delight, would stir any woman’s heart.
Silver hurried through another set of elbow-knee exercises. Oh, Nick knew how to get to women. It was his gift. Women had drooled after him in the airport. More than one woman in Amen Flats had almost driven off the road staring at Nick this morning. Silver narrowed her eyes and hurried through another set, furious with Nick. He had a look that made a woman want to smooth back that wave from his forehead—
He was rotten to have the perfect house, a sprawling, warm. sparsely furnished home of wood and shadows, aching for light touches of plants and afghans and a loom by the window where a woman could pass hours dreaming.
As kitchens went, though Silver had cooked little more than sandwiches and frozen dinners in her lifetime, Nick’s was big, neat and furnished with that gorgeous, long, sturdy pioneer table. The man liked to cook sturdy food, braids of chili peppers and garlic hung over pottery bowls, another bowl stuffed with cooking tools, green peppers on a wooden chopping board. A black skillet waited on the stove, a rack of evil-looking knives nearby.
The fireplace, taking up one wall, would be perfect in winter, blazing away and warming to the bones. The crock placed carelessly against the wall would be perfect for wildflowers and herbs.
His bedroom was as barren as the rest of the house, and Nick’s high-tech black-and-chrome office, an extension of Palladin, Inc. in Amen Flats, had a view of nothing but fields and mountains and wide blue Wyoming sky.
But the laundry room, with its neat shelves and hangers and worn ironing board and flashy steam iron had been well used, a small television propped upon a shelf, a fancy radio nearby. Nick had smelled like that this morning, of clothing detergent, of softeners and ironing.
Not that she was interested in home and families. Or marrying a potential partner and conceiving a baby—not even with those meadow green eyes and that cleft upon his chin. Silver pushed out the air in her lungs, Clearly she was physically attracted to Nick. All those muscles and cords and lovely tanned skin with the essence of how a man should smell—salty sweat, sage and leather, the hunger humming beneath—There was that lovely untamed tilt to his head, and danger in his dark eyes, like a warrior filled with arrogance and holy manhood, that just made her want to take him down. How he looked at her was enough to start her melting, heating, and she understood none of it. A part of her wanted to leap upon him and take—
There had been other men, interesting, gorgeous ones, but when Nick looked at her intently, he stood out from the pack, enough danger riding him to lift the hair on her nape.
She didn’t have time for good-smelling, arrogant men...for big, wary, desirable men who could block her from reaching her goal.
Silver squeezed her lids closed and did a quick series of furious sit-ups. She couldn’t afford to be one of his conquests—the message machine had several messages from women wanting more than they said. Mrs. Kelsey, a middle-aged sounding woman, wondered if he’d like to come over for her apple pie...and meet her daughter, Jennifer.
Nicholas Palladin wasn’t sweet. When he’d returned from an afternoon of building fences, there was nothing friendly about the way his fiery green gaze immediately locked to her, his muscles taut and rippling beneath his worn shirt and jeans. He stood there, dappled with laughter and sunlight, a big cowboy dressed in long, lean faded jeans, who ripped off his leather gloves impatiently as he looked at her. “Prying out all the little secrets you came for?” he’d demanded softly.
How dare he start nettling her, when she had found the first peace in years?
Peace. Its name wasn’t Nick Palladin.
His look had scraped at her, burning, possessive. “Lady,” he’d said quietly, firmly, amid the children scrambling for attention, the men wanting food and the women hushing them. Nick’s “Lady” had the sound of fascinating secrets left unsaid.
He’ll be a fine beast of a man, haughty and proud and strong as a bear, gnawing at the maiden’s shields, testing her, claiming her with wicked eyes....
Fantasy and moonlight had curled around the word, stunning her. She was almost afraid of him then, of what he could do, of how he could make her feel—He’d wrapped his hand in her single long braid and had tugged it lightly, playfully.
Silver finished a sit-up and slashed her terry-cloth wristband across her throat, her fingers staying to test her racing pulse. So she was a bleached blonde; so what? Did it matter? And why did the gentle flicker of his dark green eyes enchant her?
Flattening to her back, Silver used a nearby towel to wipe her damp face. She couldn’t offend the Tallchiefs’ favorite and spoiled bachelor. She’d play him; she’d destroy him.
She rolled her feet back over her head and leaped agilely to her feet. The previous hours’ aerobic workout wasn’t enough; weights and sit-ups weren’t enough to drain the bristling energy in her.
She was so close to her goal, to Jasmine’s goal.
She couldn’t afford to make an enemy of Nick Palladin.
She hated him for coming to her in a moment when she recognized the depth of love, how it coursed through generations and how much the wedding ceremonies and tradition meant to the Tallchiefs. She hated him for seeing
her wrapped in vulnerability, her hand upon the cradle, the startling, earthshaking desire to have a child nestling within her.
With an experienced movement, Silver dusted her palm across the white jasmine blooms on the potted plant and ran her hands over her sweaty arms and legs, keeping Jasmine and her goal close to her. She nipped a jasmine bud and placed it between her breasts, rubbing it gently to free the scent.
She glanced at the serene Tallchief Mountain shading the valley as jutting and hard as Nick Palladin. Outside in the yard. fragrant with wildflowers and meadows, cattle and sheep grazed peacefully. Nick’s house...his rules... If she had to live in Nick’s house, under his keeping, then she would. Silver quickly jerked on boxing gloves and attacked the punching bag, dancing around it, kicking and hitting it with all her strength.
“Aye!” she muttered, snatching a Tallchief word for a deep emotion, a pledge, and jabbed at the bag. “Here I was feeling sweet and feminine, and he swaggers in from the fields and stares at me as though I’ve committed a crime...oh, I’d like to—” She side-kicked the bag furiously. “I’d really like to take Nick Palladin’s well-shaped backside and—”
Well, never mind what she wanted to do with his backside. Diving into that hard body wasn’t on her list. She didn’t have the experience to do what she wanted with his backside. He had no business looking so raw and primitive, challenging her and then delighted with the children scrambling upon him. The image was too appealing and one she couldn’t afford. He had no business making her feel soft and feminine and yearning for love, a touch of a lover, those safe, strong arms encircling her. He had no right to call her “Lady” in that deep, raspy, uneven tone. She couldn’t afford any of it.
She shot a furious one-two punch into the bag—it didn’t move, Nick’s hands holding it. He looked down at her as she wiped a sweaty forearm across her eyes. “Would you like to go a round with me? From the looks of it, you’re not done with your snit.”