“What’s stopping you?”
“I . . . I just can’t.”
“Saving yourself for your husband?” he sneered.
She flushed to the roots of her hair.
He shoved a hand through his hair and paced away from her before turning back to demand, “Why did you go out with me in the first place? Why did you come here today?”
“I like you. I had a wonderful time with you last night. I thought we could be friends.”
His lips curled up on one side, and he shook his head. “I’m not someone most people would choose for a friend.”
“I’m not most people.”
He stared at her suspiciously for a moment longer. “You really want a friend?”
“Yes, I do.”
“All right.” He held out his hand for her to shake. “You got one.”
She smiled and tentatively laid her hand in his. Sparks flew. Her gaze shot to his, and she discovered he was equally affected by the simple clasp of hands. She looked down at their joined hands and back up at him. Slowly, carefully, she eased her hand from his and threaded her fingers together to avoid reaching out to him again.
“Can I be perfectly honest with you?” she said.
“I wish you would.”
“The truth is . . . I like it when you touch me. I mean, when you kiss me and hold me. Isn’t there some way we could do that without . . . without the other?”
“You mean, just neck and pet and not go all the way.”
That was plain speaking. She felt her cheeks heat. “Yes, that’s it exactly.”
He stood with his hip cocked, his hands stuck in his back pockets in an imitation of her earlier stance. “I guess so. It’s hard . . . Sometimes, if things go too far, it’s hard to stop.”
“But you would stop if I asked, wouldn’t you?”
“I’ll do anything you want, if you’ll keep on seeing me.”
Her smile broadened. “Then we’re agreed?”
“Agreed. Shake on it?”
He held out his hand, and she put hers in it. He pumped it up and down twice. There was an awkward moment before they let go of each other, followed by a longing to connect again. Delia resisted it. She needed more time to get used to him, for the electricity to wear off between them, for them to become more comfortable with each other.
“I think we should take that horseback ride now,” she said.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “Would you rather ride on Circle Crown or North property?”
“It might be better if we rode on your land.”
“All right. I’ll open the gate, and you can come on over.”
They rode for the better part of the afternoon, and Marsh showed her the borders of his father’s property. He didn’t take her anywhere near his house, because his father was there.
“My dad could turn out to be as big a nuisance as your father if he saw us together,” Marsh told her.
“In what way?” she asked.
“He’s . . . I’d rather not talk about him.”
“All right,” Delia said. “No more talk about fathers.”
“You’ve got a deal,” Marsh replied.
Delia managed any number of clandestine meetings with Marsh over the summer. They talked a blue streak when they were together about anything and everything. Except their fathers. By mutual agreement, their fathers were off-limits as a topic of conversation.
And they kissed and touched, learning each other’s bodies, learning what felt good and what felt better. She knew it was hard for Marsh, but he always stopped before the critical moment.
“Lord have mercy, Delia, that was close,” Marsh said one afternoon as they lay panting in the grass beneath the live oak that had become their trysting place.
Delia’s head was on Marsh’s shoulder, and her hand lay across his naked belly. Her sleeveless pink blouse was unbuttoned, and her bra was scrunched up around her throat. Her nipples were damp from his mouth. The sensible white cotton panties she wore had been shoved down by Marsh’s hand inside them, so only flesh showed in the V created by her unzipped jeans.
They were too exhausted to rearrange their clothing, their bodies still shivering from orgasmic tremors. A wet spot stained the front of Marsh’s jeans.
“I want to be inside you so bad . . .” Marsh groaned against her throat. “I can’t stand it, Delia. I . . . I love you. I want us to belong to each other.”
Delia stiffened, and Marsh put a hand beneath her chin to force her face up to his. She resisted.
“Look at me.”
She glanced up at him, then hid beneath lowered lashes.
“I want you to marry me when you graduate from high school next year. I want us to spend our lives together. I promise you won’t regret it. I promise I’ll take care of you.”
Delia felt her nose sting. Her eyes burned with unshed tears. “Oh, Marsh, don’t! I’ve told you what I want to do with my life.”
“That was before we fell in love.”
“What makes you think I love you?” she demanded, her blue eyes flashing up at him.
“I know everything about you, Delia.”
She stared at him aghast. Then realized he didn’t know everything—at least, not the most revolting thing. She rolled away from him and onto her knees, tripped on her jeans as she stood and pulled them up, then stuck her hand back down inside to straighten out her underwear as she rearranged her clothing.
She turned to confront him. “You don’t know what I feel inside, Marsh North, what I need most. Otherwise, you’d know I have no intention of staying in this podunk town one instant after I graduate. I’m going away and make something of myself.”
He had come off the ground the same time she had and was buttoning up his jeans with one hand while he reached down to snag his shirt from a low limb of the tree with the other. “What does that make me? Nothing?”
She froze and shot a stricken look at him. “Oh, Marsh, no, I didn’t mean that you—”
“What did you mean, Delia?”
She came to him and laid her cheek against his bare chest and circled his waist with her arms. She heard his shirt drop and felt his arms close around her. “Knowing you . . . falling in love with you . . . has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said.
“Then why do you want to leave?”
Delia let herself look fully into his eyes for the space of a heartbeat. She saw the hope there, the yearning, and it tore her apart to think of leaving him behind. “I have to, that’s all.”
“Say you’ll come back to me,” Marsh urged. “Say you’ll be my wife.”
Surely her stepfather wouldn’t dare touch her if she were Marsh’s wife. Marsh’s wife. It had a lovely sound. She did love him, so very much. “I promise I’ll think about it.”
Her promise appeased Marsh, and he lowered her back down to the ground for another bout of deliciously dangerous—because it had to remain unconsummated—lovemaking. The subject of the future was put aside. Delia refused to think about it, because she had her whole senior year of high school to make up her mind. For now, she loved Marsh, and he loved her. She glowed with happiness.
Marsh’s offer of marriage gave her the courage to do something she had wanted to do for a long time. At supper that night she whispered to her father that she needed to talk to him privately.
“Sure, baby,” Ray John said. “After your mom leaves for San Antonio, I’ll come to your room.”
She wished she had the nerve to tell her father to meet her somewhere else, but the moment passed, and she resigned herself to meeting Ray John—one last time—in her bedroom.
She didn’t undress for bed that night. She sat waiting for Ray John to come, her heart in her throat, her body as tight as new-strung barbed wire.
“Your mama’s gotta finish her phone call before she leaves, but I thought we could get started on our talk right now,” Ray John said as he closed her bedroom door behind him and locked it. “Why aren’t you in
bed waitin’ for me?”
She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, fully dressed, with every light in the room on. She looked him in the eye and said, “I can’t do this anymore, Daddy.”
He walked around the room systematically shutting off lights. “Now, doll baby, if you’ve got a problem, Daddy’ll fix it.” When only the dainty ballerina lamp beside her bed was still on, he sat down next to her and put a hand on her knee. “What do you mean, you can’t do this anymore?”
“I mean I want you to stop coming to my room,” she said.
His hand started up the inside of her leg. When she tried to scoot backward out of his way, his hand tightened painfully on her thigh.
“See here, missy,” he said in a hard voice. “That’s enough of that.”
“I won’t do it, Daddy,” she said, her heart racing, her whole body tensed to fight or to flee. “If you try to force me, I’ll scream.”
“Your mama will come runnin’ if you do.”
“I don’t care if she does,” Delia blurted. “I don’t care if she knows!”
“She won’t believe a word you say,” Ray John said in a silky voice. “’Specially with me just sittin’ here, and you all dressed. She’ll think you made it up.”
Delia was having trouble catching her breath, she was so scared. “I’ll . . . I’ll tell someone at school. They’ll believe me.” It was a bluff. She was terrified he would call it.
“Well, now, honey, if that’s the way you really feel, I s’pose I gotta leave you alone. But I’ve got these itches, and somebody’s gonna have to scratch ’em.” He rose from her bed and headed for the door. “Guess I’ll just have to go across the hall and see your sister.”
“Wait!” Delia was off the bed in an instant and grabbed hold of Ray John’s arm to keep him from opening the door. “Daddy, you can’t! Rachel’s barely twelve!”
“Same age as you were, sweetie. Course, she ain’t comin’ along as fast as you did. But she’ll grow.”
Delia felt sick. Stomach acid crawled back up her throat. For a moment she almost let him go. Her chin dropped in defeat.
“Don’t leave, Daddy. Stay here with me.”
“Why, Delia, honey, have you gone and changed your mind on me?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“You know what I like.”
Hattie called up the stairs, “So long, Ray John. I’m leaving now.”
Ray John unlocked Delia’s door, leaned out, and called down, “Hurry back, darlin’. I’ll be missin’ you every minute.”
He closed Delia’s door and leaned back against it while she undressed down to her white cotton bra and panties. She left them on, because he liked to take them off himself. She folded the bedcovers down, then slid under them and lay on the left side of the double bed, flat on her back. The last thing she did was turn down the covers on the other side of the bed to a welcoming angle for him.
Delia turned the light off and heard two thumps as each of Ray John’s boots hit the rag rug beside her bed, then the rustle of denim and cotton as Ray John stripped himself naked. He slipped under the covers, and she could smell the sweat he hadn’t washed off after a day of work on the ranch. He usually showered afterward, before he got in bed with her mother. Delia’s breath caught as he laid his hand on her belly.
“Delia, honey,” he said as his hand slid down between her legs, “you are the absolute best daughter a man could have.”
Delia could not honestly return the compliment.
Chapter Five
Marsh stood at the Carson’s kitchen door trying to summon up the guts to knock on it. He rubbed his sweaty palms along the sides of his jeans, formed a fist, and pounded the screen door twice. His heart was caterwhomping in his chest.
It was barely dawn. Most ranchers hereabouts had already done an hour or two of work and were heading for the Kincaid Hotel in town to have a cup of coffee and trade the latest market information on beef and mohair, the other cash crop in Uvalde. Marsh hoped to catch Ray John Carson before he left home. His hands were damp again by the time the Carsons’ housekeeper answered his knock.
“Buenos dias, señor.”
He tried to speak, couldn’t, cleared his throat and said, “I’m Marshall North. I’d like to see Mr. Carson.”
“Come inside, señor. I will get him for you.”
The housekeeper left him standing inside the door. As he looked around, he got a harsh reminder of how far above his reach Delia Carson was. Most of the North ranch house would have fit in the Carson kitchen. It was filled with shiny appliances, including one of those new-fangled microwave ovens that cooked without heat. The brick-tiled floor didn’t have a single chip that he could see. And the kitchen table was nothing like the gouged red Formica surface he and his father ate off of. He ran his callused fingertips over the polished oak, jerking his hand away when the maid reappeared. “Señor Carson will see you.”
Marsh stood dumbstruck when she turned and left again, until he realized he was supposed to follow her.
She led him down the hall to a high-ceilinged room filled with guns in glass cases. The wooden shutters were closed, not that there was much daylight yet, even if they’d been open. An intensely bright lamp on the desk provided a circle of light on the cluttered surface.
Delia’s father sat facing a desk where a revolver was spread out in pieces on a cloth in front of him. He appeared to be cleaning it. Delia’s younger sister, Rachel, sat perched on a ladderback chair beside him. She was wearing short shorts and tennis shoes. The ribbon on her blond ponytail matched her sleeveless powder blue shirt.
“What can I do for you?” Ray John asked without looking up from what he was doing.
Marsh glanced at Rachel, who gave him a curious look back. “I wanted to speak with you. Alone.”
“I’m giving Rachel a lesson here. You want to talk? Talk.”
Marsh felt a furious sense of futility. When he and Delia had met the previous day, he had told her what he wanted to do. She had warned him not to try.
“He won’t listen, Marsh,” she had said. “He doesn’t want me dating and that’s that. You’d be wasting your time trying to get permission to see me.”
It seemed she had been right. Carson wasn’t even going to do him the courtesy of speaking with him privately. He felt like turning right around and marching back the way he had come. Except, he wanted something he could only get from the other man. He reined his temper and said, “I want your permission to date Delia.”
“Check to see the bore is clean,” Ray John said to Rachel, completely ignoring Marsh’s statement as though it hadn’t been spoken.
Marsh wasn’t sure what to do except keep talking. “I would treat her with respect, and I would abide by whatever rules you want to set down.”
“Everything fits back together exactly the way it came apart,” Ray John said, putting the gun together with a rapidity that amazed Marsh. When Ray John was done, he held the 1876 model Colt Peacemaker in his hand and admired it. “A Colt .45 is a thing of utter beauty.”
Ray John put the gun to Rachel’s temple. “And certain death.”
“Hey!” Marsh yelped in protest. His heart climbed to his throat. He hadn’t seen Ray John put any bullets in the gun, yet a glance at the desk revealed several—four—bullets scattered on the cloth. Had Ray John loaded the gun when he wasn’t looking?
Rachel’s eyes were closed, and her hands tightly gripped the edge of the desk. She sat absolutely still.
Ray John looked at Marsh intently, pulled the brass trigger, and said, “Bang.”
Marsh felt a shudder go through him as Rachel’s body jerked. “Hey!” he said again. “What’s the big idea? You could have killed her!”
“You think there are bullets in here? Weren’t you watching?” Ray John put the gun to his own head and, as Marsh watched in horror, pulled the trigger again. “Bang,” he said.
Marsh gasped.
Ray John laughed. “If you could only see the look on your face!”
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“You’re sick,” Marsh blurted.
Ray John’s smile disappeared, and Marsh could have kicked himself for insulting the man—even if he was sick. He was on thin enough ice as it was. He wanted Ray John’s permission to see Delia. He was tired of sneaking around, tired of hiding. This had seemed the best way to solve the problem. But he could see now that coming here had been a mistake.
“What you were doing looked dangerous,” Marsh said, the only concession toward apology he was willing to make.
Ray John’s hand settled on Rachel’s nape, and his eyes narrowed on Marsh. “It’s only a game we play. Right, Rachel?”
“Yes, Daddy,” Rachel said. “Can I go now? I have to get ready for Vacation Bible School.”
Ray John gave her a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the rump as she ran from the room. Marsh caught the disapproving look Rachel gave him on her way by.
Ray John reverently placed the Peacemaker back in its place in one of the cabinets, locked it in, then carried the ring of skeleton keys to his desk and set it down. He folded up the cloth, then pulled the rolltop down and locked it, putting that key in his wallet.
“Now, then, what was it you wanted? Oh, yes. Permission to date my daughter.” He turned to face Marsh, his hands gripping the back of the desk chair. “The answer is no.”
“But—”
“If you so much as come near Delia, I will personally take one of these guns and shoot you dead.”
Marsh paled. “You can’t threaten me like that.”
Ray John smiled unpleasantly. “I already have. You and yours are trash, North. Believe me, I’ll convince Sheriff Davis it was necessary to shoot you. Stay away from my daughter, or so help me, I’ll kill you.”
At that moment Delia arrived, breathless, at the door to the gun room. “Rachel said—Marsh! What are you doing here?” It was almost a wail.
“I came to ask your father—”
“Has this saddle bum been botherin’ you, Delia?” Ray John asked.
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