“Then what? What are you so afraid of? You weren’t this scared when you were looking down the barrel of your kidnapper’s gun. Why now? Why with me?”
Jessie choked back a sob. Her own stupid fears were going to bring about the one thing she feared most—an insurmountable wall between her and Blake. She had to stop this!
“I’m sorry.” She swallowed and closed her eyes. “I’m not afraid of you. I’ve never been afraid of you.”
“Then tell me,” he urged.
“I…I’m sorry. I’m not used to being afraid. I don’t like it, not at all. It’s not you I’m afraid of. It’s me,” she blurted. “The things you make me feel. They’re so…powerful, so consuming. I feel as though if I let go for even a moment, all these feelings will swallow me whole and there won’t be anything left of me. I’ll just…disappear.”
Blake stared at her in wonder, confused, hopeful. “What do I make you feel, Jessie?”
With anguish marring her face, she tore herself from his grasp and whirled away. “You make me feel weak. Helpless.”
“You?” he said, incredulous. “You’re the strongest, most self-sufficient woman I’ve ever known. When have you ever been weak and helpless?”
“With you,” came her tremulous reply. “I feel weak and helpless with you. I feel…restless. Out of control. Like everything in my life is upside down and you’re the only thing I can hold on to.”
“Then why do you turn away from me? Hold on as tight as you want, Jessie, as tight as you need to.” He slid his arms around her stiff shoulders and pulled her close. “You hold on to me, and I’ll hold on to you.”
Jessie held herself rigid, trying to form a protest. She wasn’t explaining it right, this fear inside her. He didn’t understand. But how could she make him understand, when the logic was beyond her own grasp?
Muscle by muscle, she relaxed against him, giving in to the warmth of his embrace, letting herself lean on him, letting the weakness pour through her.
“Come to bed, Jessie,” he whispered against her ear. “Come to bed and we’ll hold on to each other.”
His hot breath sent shivers of awareness down her neck, her arms, along her spine. Weakness deepened.
It was as he rubbed his cheek against the top of her head that she realized what he’d said. Come to bed.
Blake felt her stiffen against him and read her correctly. To take her mind off the obviously distressing thought of sleeping with him, he tried for nonchalant, and congratulated himself on his outward performance. He released her and sauntered to the bed, where he dropped down on the edge and bent to tug off his boots.
“You must be tired. I’m beat, myself.”
Jessie reacted to the sound of his boot hitting the floor as though it were a gunshot in the quiet dead of night—she flinched. The words “What are you doing?” sprang to her lips, but she managed, at the last minute, to swallow them. She didn’t need to ask. He was her husband; this was their bedroom. He was undressing for bed. As he stood and tugged his shirt tail from his trousers, she held out no hope that he would don a night shirt.
With jerking muscles, she retreated behind the dressing screen—another present, along with the bed, from her mother.
Would he expect her to let him…
Of course he would. Why wouldn’t he? In San Antonio she’d been more than willing—she’d been…insistent. Now she was his wife. The reminder of the night they’d shared, the thought that she now belonged to him—
A startling, insidious idea wove its way through her mind: if she belonged to him, did that not mean that he, then, belonged to her?
She froze in the act of removing her dress. Heat, scorching, melting heat, pooled inside her, deep and low. Her hands trembled with the force of it. Her breathing grew labored.
With widened eyes, she pressed her hands to her cheeks. She was doing it again, giving herself over to feelings she couldn’t control. How could just the thought of touching him undo her willpower, overwhelm her sense of self to the point that she would do anything, give him anything if he would only touch her the way he had that night in San Antonio?
The babe in her womb shifted, and Jessie automatically smoothed her hands across her abdomen in a soothing gesture. Then she smiled wryly. She wouldn’t need to worry about wanting Blake to distraction. Not with her grotesque shape. What man would want a woman so ungainly?
Feeling safer, calmer, and denying any sense of disappointment, Jessie finished undressing, then slipped on her cotton night gown.
Blake stretched out on the bed and pulled the sheet up over himself just as Jessie emerged from behind the screen. The dim lamp light turned her hair to burnished gold. She was soft and lovely and swollen with his child, and he’d never seen anything so beautiful in his life as Jessie was at that moment. She was so beautiful she made his chest ache.
For an instant, she looked startled, as though surprised to find him there. Then she jerked her gaze away and moved to the dressing table, where she sat and took down her hair. He watched her graceful motions as she brushed the long golden tresses, pulling them forward over her shoulder to reach the ends.
She seemed to take an inordinate amount of time at it. Maybe he should have kept his underwear on—for his own sake. He’d thought about it, but had decided to start their marriage as he intended it should go. He wasn’t about to wear underwear to bed with his own wife. Not even to get her used to the idea of sharing a bed with him for the next fifty or sixty years, God willing.
Finally she put the brush down next to a matching hand mirror on the dresser. For a long moment, she sat and stared at it. Then, squaring her shoulders as if for battle, she pushed herself to her feet and turned, keeping her gaze lowered, refusing to look at him.
Blake’s heart started a hard steady thumping behind his breastbone. He told himself to calm down. She was too skittish. Underwear or no underwear, he didn’t want to rush her. He scrubbed his face with both hands, trying to pretend like he wasn’t staring at her. The lamp was on her side of the bed, and she turned it out before crawling under the covers. The mattress dipped only slightly with her weight.
Jessie lay stiff and silent, as close to the edge of the bed as she could get. Her mouth dried out and her pulse pounded. The darkness seemed to magnify the presence of the man next to her. Her husband.
A sound. Sheet sliding across skin. A touch on her arm. His touch. She flinched.
“Easy,” he whispered. “It’s just me.”
“I know.” Jessie forced a deep breath, but her muscles refused to relax.
“Would you rather I didn’t touch you?” he asked slowly.
Her eyes burned with unshed tears. “No. I wouldn’t rather. I just…I’m just a little nervous, that’s all.”
With his hand still on her arm, he turned on his side toward her. “You think I’m not?”
Her heart stilled for an instant, then resumed its frantic beat. “You are?”
His fingers slid down her forearm, over her wrist, and clasped her fingers. “We’ve been married for weeks, but this is our wedding night. I don’t know…what you expect from me. I don’t know what you want.”
Neither do I. She licked her lips. “What…what do you want?”
His thumb smoothed back and forth across the back of her hand. “I want you.”
Jessie swallowed and squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted him, too. Craved him, needed him. The sheer strength of her need frightened her. “Could we…could we do like you said? Could we…just hold each other?”
Without a word he released her hand and slid his arm beneath her head. “Come here,” he whispered. He pulled her toward him, and despite her hammering heart, being nestled against him seemed like the only place in the world to be. His warmth, his strength tempered with gentleness, eventually lulled her into relaxing.
Blake held her close and savored the feel of her, her softness, her sweet scent. He fought down the urge to let his hands roam, the urge to taste her lips, her skin, the urge to l
ose himself in her warmth. Instead, he held her, grateful to have even this much from her.
And when, sometime later, she wrapped her arm around his chest in her sleep and snuggled closer against him, he, too, finally slept.
Blake had studied military history at West Point. He’d served under competent officers, had even led men on his own missions. But never had any military campaign he’d studied or participated in been tackled with such efficiency and attention to detail as were Jessie’s preparations for the move to Tres Colinas.
But all Blake caught were the barest glimpses of linens and dishes and furniture as Jessie martialed the possessions around her, for he was pushed gently but firmly outside so the women wouldn’t keep tripping over him. At Travis’s insistence, Blake picked out a half dozen horses from the small herd kept at the ranch.
“Wedding present,” Travis insisted.
Wedding present. Like the bed. If Daniella had expected anything but sleep to go on in that big bed she’d bought, she would have been disappointed. For a week now Blake had held his bride in his arms and fought down the hot urges that never left him. Still, Jessie was no easier in his presence. She jumped at the sound of his voice and shied from his touch. At night when they were alone, she barely looked at him. She didn’t resist when he pulled her to his side in that big bed, but neither did she come to him on her own. He didn’t know what to do.
A diversion, temporary though it was, gave Blake something else to think about for a while that afternoon. He was in the barn with Travis and Matt, inspecting one of the wagons to be used for the move to his ranch. Joanna was “helping” them.
Suddenly a sound split the air and raised the hair on the back of Blake’s neck. A sound he’d thought to never hear again. A wild, shrill, Apache war cry.
Travis stepped to the door of the barn, braced both hands on his hips, and grinned. With a shriek, Joanna jumped from the wagon bed and ran outside. “It’s Pace!”
Matt’s reaction to his stepbrother’s arrival was much more interesting. His eyes flashed with pain, then anger, before resignation set in and his face fell into lines of bleakness. He looked like a man who’d lost something once held dear.
Blake walked outside. Joanna stood fifty feet away. She held her arms in the air and bounced around excitedly. “Faster, Uncle Pace, faster!”
Blake stared in amazement. Pace let out another cry, then leaned over his horse’s neck and urged the mount into an all-out gallop, straight toward Joanna.
As he drew near the girl, he leaned sideways in the saddle and stretched out his arm. Joanna grabbed it with both hands. Pace lifted her in the air. She flew up, skirt flapping in the wind, legs stretching, face contorted with fierce concentration. With a cry of triumph, she landed squarely behind the saddle.
Travis whistled and applauded as they raced by. Pace let out a victory cry. Joanna, in her high youthful voice, imitated him.
Blake shook his head in amazement.
Pace slowed and turned his horse and rode back to the barn. He held Joanna’s arm while she slid down. Then he made a big production of massaging his shoulder. “I’d say you’ve grown some, Princess. You ’bout pulled my arm loose.”
Joanna shot him a calculating look. “You’re just out of practice, that’s all. If you’d come home more often—”
“Jo,” Matt interrupted. “Don’t pester him. Go tell Gran he’s here.”
With his jaw squared, Pace acknowledged Matt with a nod without really looking at him. Matt returned the nod, then, with shoulders slumped, turned away. “I’ll find Rena.”
It seemed Jessie hadn’t exaggerated when she’d told Blake months ago that Pace hadn’t forgiven Matt for marrying Serena. She hadn’t told him, however, that the estrangement affected Matt so strongly. Blake watched him walk away and wondered how it would feel to have a brother, then lose him.
“We didn’t expect you,” Travis was saying. “Get down, come up to the house. Your mother will be beside herself.”
Pace swung down from the saddle and grinned at Travis. “No offense, Dad, but I came to see the newest member of the family.”
Travis chuckled. “You’ll have to wait awhile, then. Jessie’s baby’s not due for another couple of months.”
“Not the baby, my new brother-in-law. How the hell are you, Renard?”
Blake shook the proffered hand and said he was fine. “I didn’t know anyone had sent word I was here.”
Travis gave Blake a friendly slap on the shoulder. “We didn’t. As much time as you spent on the trail with Pace, I figured you’d realize no one has to tell him anything. He just knows.”
Blake eyed Pace. “Like you know the baby’s a boy?”
Pace grinned. “Like you always know where to find water.”
The three men started toward the house, but after a few steps Pace stopped them. “I need to talk to you before we’re surrounded by women,” he said to Blake.
Travis narrowed his eyes. “Is there trouble?”
Pace shrugged. “Could be. It’s for Blake to decide.”
“What are you talking about?” Blake asked.
“I was down in Tubac when I…realized you were here. Rode past Tres Colinas on the way up.” He took off his hat and fingered a hole in the brim. “Kind of unfriendly in that part of the country.”
Blake looked from Pace to the hole in the hat, then back. “Are you saying someone shot at you on my ranch?”
“I was standing in front of the house. Bullet took a chunk of adobe out of the wall next to my head. Like I said, kind of unfriendly.”
Blake thought a minute. “Could have been Wade.”
“Wade?”
“My cousin. He rides down and checks on the place now and then. Sometimes stays a few weeks, just to keep the house livable. He could have thought you were up to no good. Or it could have been anybody. Nobody but Wade’s lived there since before I was born.”
Pace was already shaking his head. “If your cousin’s been telling you the house is livable, I’m afraid he and Jessie aren’t going to hit it off. No offense, Blake, but the place is a pig sty. The house, that is. The barn is falling down, the corral all but gone, and the grass has been grazed down to the roots. I didn’t check the well.”
Blake listened to the list of problems with growing resignation. He should have known better than to rely on Wade for anything. Had known better. But until recent years, he’d had no interest in anything Lucien Renard had ever touched. He hadn’t thought of living on his parents’ old ranch and trying to make a go of it until he was already at West Point. Until he’d found the Arabians and knew what he wanted to do. By then it had been too late for him to go down and look the place over.
He took a deep breath and let it out. “Well, hell. I guess I better ride down there and have a look. If it’s as bad as you say, I can’t very well take Jessie there.”
Travis raised his chin. “Jessie’s not afraid of a little dirt.”
“Maybe not, but she’s not in any condition to do heavy work, either,” Blake answered. “And it sounds to me like it will take more work than she should be doing just now. I didn’t marry her to turn her into a drudge.”
“You keep asking me what I want,” Jessie said to Blake that night. She straightened the hairbrush, comb, and hand mirror on her dresser, aligning and realigning them. “I want to go to your ranch. I want to live there. I want to do it now, not months from now.”
Blake sat on the edge of the bed and tugged off his boots. “Jessie, you heard Pace. The place is a wreck. I can’t ask you to live like that.”
“You’re not asking me.” She met his gaze in the mirror. “I’m asking you. We can fix it, can’t we, with a little work?”
He crossed the room and turned her to face him. “Why? Why do you want to go so badly?”
Jessie hung her head and shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I just…just want us to have our own place, that’s all.”
“You want us—just the two of us—to live miles from the n
earest neighbor, when right now you keep your entire family between us all day so you won’t have to be alone with me?”
Jessie stiffened. “I do no such thing.”
“You do.”
Did she? Dear God, was that what she was doing? Confused, she looked away from his eyes that saw too much. “I…I haven’t meant to, honestly I haven’t. There’s been so much to do, that’s all. I swear, I haven’t intentionally avoided you.”
Blake had his own ideas about that, but he kept them to himself. What he didn’t understand was her insistence that they go to Tres Colinas, where there would be no one but the two of them. Still, far be it from him to deny himself something he wanted very much, when she was asking for the same thing.
“All right. I’ll ride down tomorrow and look around, see if the house is even liveable. We’ll decide when I get back.”
Jessie breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t understand her own urgency that they leave the Triple C, she only knew the feeling was strong. She was never going to learn to settle down and be a good wife to Blake, learn to relax around him and get her emotions under control, if she had her entire family to hide behind every day. Blake was right about that, she realized. She had been using the family to keep him at arm’s length.
She and Blake needed their own home, and they needed it now, before she did irreparable harm to their young marriage.
Blake and Pace rode out at sunup the next morning. Jessie stood in the dusty yard and watched them go. As she went back inside, her mother met her in the hall.
Daniella put her arm around Jessie’s shoulders and guided her into the study. “Don’t look so sad, sweetie. He’ll only be gone a few days.”
“I know.”
Daniella closed the door, sealing them in privacy. “Come to think of it, though,” she said, “for a new bride, you’ve looked a little sad all week. Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”
“I’m not sad, Mama.”
“Jessie.” Daniella shook her head. “Even you know what a lousy liar you are. Is Blake…does he hurt you?”
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