Scarlet Sunset, Silver Nights

by Leigh Greenwood

  Pamela was unprepared for the rush of anger that washed over her. She had to bite her tongue to keep from making a reply which might have destroyed their friendship. What did Amanda know about Slade’s code of honor, a set of principles far more rigid and inviolate than any social order in Boston or Philadelphia? How could she understand a man who would sacrifice what he wanted, deny his desires, endanger his life—and all for a woman who kept him at arm’s length—when she was afraid to allow her husband even temporary ascendancy over her body? How could she know what it was like to be held safe in Slade’s arms when she didn’t want to share a bed with her own husband?

  “You’ve misjudged Slade,” Pamela said as unemotionally as she could. “He may look like a saddle bum, but I’ve never met anyone with better understanding or with more rigid principles.” She remembered those night watches during the roundup and laughed. “Or who’s been in church so often and knows so many hymns. He’d be more likely to reform my way of life than the other way around.”

  Amanda scowled at her friend impatiently. “If you don’t get that man on his way to California soon, you’ll be lost.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You could have married any of the men you met in Baltimore and grown quite fond of them in a few years. You would have had a quiet, comfortable life, probably taken pride in your children and been a prop to your husband, but you would have always been in control of your life.”

  “But if Slade stays?”

  “You’re practically in love with him, if you aren’t already. I have the feeling that if you ever do fall in love with him, you’ll never be able to bring yourself to marry another man, even if Slade should leave you.”

  “Is falling in love so bad?”

  “I never intend to find out,” Amanda stated. “Outside of the mortifying loss of command over yourself and your life, I imagine it would lead to a most unpleasant existence.”

  “But how, if you truly love the man …”

  “There would undoubtedly be moments of great joy. And many women would envy you your happiness, would say they would give anything to be able to have a love like yours. But they wouldn’t mean it. Your kind of love will also bring you great pain. I, for one, couldn’t endure it.”

  “But Frederick?”

  “I’m very fond of him, I expect I always shall be, but he’ll never break my heart. I don’t want anybody to have that much power over me. Why should I? What’s it worth?”

  “I think …”

  “Don’t tell me,” Amanda said, putting a restraining finger to Pamela’s lips. “The day will come when you’ll hate me for having heard the words. You’ve met a terribly handsome and exciting cowboy who looks like the man of your dreams. You’re living a fantasy nearly every woman hopes for at least once in her lifetime. Enjoy it to the fullest. So few of us ever get the chance you’ve been given. I’m really a little bit jealous. But sooner or later you’ll remember the not-so-insignificant matter of those three men he killed, and you’ll realize you really have nothing in common with him. When that happens, come to me in Baltimore.”

  Amanda stood up and gave her friend a kiss. “Now I’d better see about my packing. I’ve enjoyed my visit even more than I expected, but we have to leave tomorrow if we’re to be in San Francisco on time. I didn’t bring my maid and I doubt your very pregnant cook could manage at all. It’ll probably take me the better part of the evening.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Pamela knew Amanda would give in if she insisted, but she wanted to be alone. She needed time to get over the shock of finding out that, after nearly ten years of considering Amanda her very best friend, they had virtually no thoughts in common. How could she have missed seeing what Frederick and Slade had already seen? And if she were so consistently wrong in her judgments of people, especially Amanda, how could she feel so sure she knew Slade?

  But even that was unimportant compared to the realization that she loved Slade as she never thought she could love anyone. She wanted to be his wife, bear his children, take care of his wounds, lie in his arms at night, sit with him in the moonlight, ride by his side, face the world knowing he would always be with her.

  She wanted it all, everything!

  And she had no excuses to make, no beliefs to readjust, no feelings of shock or surprise to overcome. That had already been done. When she thought she was fighting Slade, she was really fighting herself, convincing herself, demolishing the last of her resistance. Now there was no more reluctance, no more questioning. She knew she was doing the right thing, the only thing she could do.

  Loving Slade was the most natural thing in the world. She only hoped he felt the same way about her.

  Flashes of lightning, coming as rapidly as shots from a gun, turned the hallway as bright as day and rendered needless the candle in her hand. But as Pamela walked the distance from her room to Slade’s, she was completely unaware of the deafening cracks of thunder that crashed back and forth between the mountain ridges or the drum of the rain as it pounded on the roof. The rain had been coming down in torrents for hours. There would be flash floods in the mountain canyons, but she didn’t have a thought to spare for Amanda and Frederick who had left early that morning or for her men out on the range.

  She must go to Slade. Nothing else mattered.

  She raised her hand to knock on his door, but drew back before her knuckles could strike wood. Her knees shook badly. She desperately wanted to return to her room, but she didn’t. She had been waiting for this moment for a day and a half. She knew if her nerve failed now, she would never be able to summon the courage again.

  Even before she finished talking with Amanda, she knew she loved Slade. Her feelings didn’t conform to anything she had expected to feel, and they obviously didn’t follow the lines of Amanda’s tepid affection for Frederick, but Pamela recognized them for what they were, total capitulation. She belonged to Slade, and she couldn’t do anything about it.

  It had been terribly difficult to ride next to him all morning, to sit across from him at dinner, to kiss him good night and not beg him to make love to her right then. But she knew he wouldn’t. He had already refused her once when she begged him to quench the fires raging within her. She had to go to him during the night, when his resistance was at low ebb, when dreams had had time to stoke the flame of desire.

  The door opened on silent hinges, and Pamela slipped into the room.

  Slade came awake with a convulsive start that caused Pamela to clutch her throat in alarm. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded, shock and relief combining to deprive him of all ability to speak politely.

  Looking at him now as he sat up in bed, confused and slightly alarmed, she forgot for a moment why she had come. Even now he looked impossibly handsome. His thick, dark blond hair was barely mussed, and sleep had softened the harshness of his expression. His bare torso caused Pamela’s tongue to cleave to the roof of her mouth. She could follow the line of curly hair as it arrowed down his chest and disappeared under the sheet that barely left him decent. Slade was clearly naked in bed, and the realization caused a rod of white-heat to course through her body at break-neck speed.

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Now?” Slade exclaimed, incredulous. He, too, seemed to suddenly become aware of his nakedness, and he pulled the sheet higher over him. “Can’t it wait until morning?”

  “No.”

  “But I’m not dressed.”

  “I know.”

  Slade doubted the thin sheet was sufficient to conceal the state of his loins, but he had nothing else. He had left the blankets in the chest. Then, quite abruptly, the sight of Pamela’s nipples, firm and erect, pushing against the fabric of her gown, told him that she was equally nude under her gown. “You aren’t dressed either.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Hell, woman, I’m not a eunuch. You can’t just walk into a man’s bedroom in the mi
ddle of the night, looking like something out of his favorite fantasy, and expect to discuss Jane Austen.”

  “I don’t want to discuss Jane Austen. I want to talk about us.”

  “That’s even worse,” Slade groaned. “Her heroines must have had their babies by immaculate conception. I don’t think I could manage that.”

  “Stop joking, Slade. I’m serious.”

  “So am I. I’m just doing my best to keep from exploding. If you have any compassion for me, wrap yourself in one of those blankets.”

  “Does the sight of me bother you so much?”

  “God, the woman likes to torture me,” Slade moaned. “Yes, it’s driving me crazy. Much more and I’m bound to do something desperate.”

  “Then you’d better put something over you too,” Pamela said tossing a blanket in his direction. “The sight of your bare chest is causing me to feel quite warm.”

  Slade looked at her in startled surprise. Then a smile spread across his face until he was grinning broadly. “With both of us feeling too hot and bothered to act rationally, don’t you think it’d be a good idea to hold off until tomorrow?”

  “I know exactly what I think and what I mean to say,” Pamela said as she draped a blanket around her shoulders. “That’s part of what has got me so flustered.”

  “Still, I don’t think …”

  “Listen to me, Slade Morgan, and don’t interrupt,” Pamela ordered, a trifle desperately Slade thought. “I don’t know if I’ll manage to get started again if you stop me.”

  A particularly loud roll of thunder drowned out her words, but Slade said no more.

  “I’d like to apologize for all the things I thought when you came here. Don’t interrupt,” Pamela said when Slade started to speak. “This is harder for me than it is for you. You were right, I was a snob, but I didn’t know it. I wanted something different, better I thought, than life here in Arizona, and I rejected the people as well as the country. I have you to thank for showing me that there can be great beauty, even in Arizona.”

  “And the people?”

  “People are the same everywhere. They aren’t changed by the clothes they wear, the houses they live in, or the schools they go to. They might even act a little better for having a lot less.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Amanda couldn’t understand that a drifting cowboy, especially one without a penny to his name, would neither steal their money nor kidnap her for ransom.”

  “What have you been telling that woman?” demanded Slade. He reacted so abruptly his covers started to slide off. He recovered himself quickly.

  “Actually I was asking her a question. She answered it, but not in the way either of us expected.”

  “What did you ask her?”

  Pamela came a step closer to the bed. “How I would know when I fell in love.”

  “I see. And what did she answer?”

  “She couldn’t. She didn’t know herself.”

  “But you know?”

  “I knew the minute I saw Frederick. But you confused me with your ridiculous act of fawning compliance to Amanda’s every wish. Why was it so important to make me feel jealous? No, don’t answer that. I don’t want to get sidetracked.”

  She came a step closer, and Slade felt the tension inside him build to an almost unbearable pressure. He drew one leg up to disguise the rapidly forming tent between his legs. Hard, he was, hard as steel. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep his hands off her. The ferocity of the storm inside his body was about to destroy his reason and his control.

  “I love you, Slade. I think I have from the moment I saw you enter the valley. Oh, I’ve fought hard against it, partly because of your arrogance, partly because I thought you represented everything I was running away from, and I guess some because I thought I was better than you. There were other stupid reasons, but I don’t remember them anymore. I’m not even sure I care to. All I know is I love you, and I want you to make love to me.”

  A boulder-rattling clap of thunder caused the earth to move under them, but Slade had no question as to what Pamela had said. The words would probably remain engraved on his heart until he died.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.” It hurt to say that, but he forced himself to remain in his bed. He couldn’t honorably do anything else. If he took advantage of Pamela’s weakness now, he would never forgive himself. She might come to hate him for it, and no evening of pleasure was worth a lifetime of remorse.

  “I know very well. I’ve thought about it, and I don’t expect you to marry me. I know I could never live in a cabin in the woods. I would want to, you don’t know how much I’d want to, but I can’t. I would grow to hate it and hate you for keeping me there.” Close to the bed now, she put her fingers on Slade’s lips to keep him from speaking. “But I can’t let you leave without showing you how much I love you. Amanda said she thought I was the kind of woman to love only one man. I think so, too. I don’t know if I can stand for you to leave, not if I don’t have at least one night in your arms to remember.”

  Slade doubted hot tongs couldn’t torture him any more than Pamela’s words. His grip on the bedclothes was like iron. He knew if he dropped them so much as one inch, he would fling them off altogether. Didn’t Pamela have any idea what she asked of him? To resist a direct request to make love to a beautiful woman, especially a beautiful woman he loved and who loved him in return, was agony much worse than blister-covered feet or a bullet in his shoulder.

  “Slade, don’t you want to make love to me?”

  Slade took a grip on the side of the bed that would have dented a corral post. Desire shook him even more violently than the thunder outside shook the heavens. Making love to Pamela was the only thought in his head; it was the reason his body was rigid and inflamed.

  “I’ve been thinking about making love to you for days,” Slade confessed, “but I just can’t love you tonight and ride off tomorrow and never see you again. Suppose you had a baby?”

  Pamela couldn’t suppress a feeling of disappointment. It would have been so much nicer if he had thought of her first, but she supposed men were always thinking about someone to carry on their name.

  “If I loved you enough to make love to you tonight, and I do,” Slade continued, “don’t you think I would love you enough to want to stay and keep on making love to you?”

  Pamela’s heart was full once more. “I know you’re not the kind of man to settle down, raise a family, and go to community picnics. I won’t try to hold you. I only want to love you while I can.”

  “What would your father say?” asked Slade. “I can’t imagine he would be pleased to come home and find his daughter sleeping with a vagabond cowboy.”

  A convulsive sob shook Pamela. “Dad’s dead,” she said before giving vent to a wail of deep anguish. “I know somebody has killed him.”

  Slade was out of the bed and enfolding her in his arms almost before Pamela could finish speaking. Somehow he managed to keep his grip on the bed clothes between them. As yet he was unaware of the draft on his backside.

  “There could be lots of reasons why he hasn’t returned yet,” Slade said. He had hoped Pamela wouldn’t come to the conclusion he had reached nearly a week ago.

  “Why wouldn’t he write?” she sobbed.

  Slade didn’t know what to say, so he held her more closely. Pamela held tightly to him, letting the fear and worry pour out of her. “Now you’ll go away and leave me, too. I’ll never see you again. I can’t stand it.”

  Slade tried to soothe her. “You’ll have Amanda and Frederick.”

  “That would have been enough before you got here,” Pamela sobbed, “but you ruined them for me. You ruined everything for me except you, and you’re going away.”

  Slade thought of the Texas sheriff headed this way determined to collect the price on his head. Pamela hadn’t told him what Marshall Alcott said, but Gaddy had. How could he stay much longer when every day meant possible capture and retu
rn to Texas and certain death?

  But he thought of the distraught woman in his arms and asked himself how he could leave. Surrounded by danger, her father probably dead, and the worst crisis yet to come. How could there be any question?

  But more important, she was the woman he loved, the woman who loved him. From the moment he saw Pamela, from the moment he knew he loved her, hope had been growing inside him that he would find a way for them to be together. Even though everything around them seemed to be conspiring to destroy their happiness, he couldn’t give up hope, not as long as he could be near her.

  “I won’t leave you,” he murmured, dropping his head so his lips could kiss her ear, his breath tickle her hair. But unwilling to give her hope where he still couldn’t see the way, he added, “Not until this is over. I make no promises after that.”

  “I don’t ask for any,” Pamela said as she pulled his head down for a hungry kiss. “All I want is for you to stay with me now, to make love to me while we are together.”

  “Pamela, I don’t think …”

  “Don’t think. Please, don’t think of anybody except me or anytime except now.”

  Slade could resist no longer. He couldn’t even think of the reasons why he should. All he knew was that Pamela was in his arms, and she wanted to make love to him as much as he wanted to make love to her.

  She would have her night to remember. And so would he.

  Slade’s mouth captured hers in a hungry kiss, a kiss no longer constrained by limits. His tongue teased her lips until they slowly opened allowing him to gently slide his hot tongue into her moist heat. He wrapped his arms around her, his hands at the small of her back, pressing her to him, lifting her to meet his embrace. Pamela clung to him, her arms around his neck, her fingers buried in the soft hair at the nape of his neck, her sensitive breasts crushed against his hard chest. She felt this strange need to be as close to him as possible, to be absorbed by him.

  Pamela encircled him with her arms, her soft fingertips brushing the rippling, corded muscles of his back. Hurriedly, roughly, Slade slipped the gown from her shoulders and exposed the soft skin of her neck. He loved the feel of her skin beneath his lips, his fingertips. It reminded him so much of the moonlight, pale white and utterly innocent. He traced circles with his fingertips—Pamela quivered when it tickled—and some knot inside him slowly unraveled. The kisses he placed on her shoulders were gently insistent, no longer harsh and demanding; the fierce need inside stopped driving him forward, as though for the first time in his life Slade knew he had the luxury of time.