She closed her eyes to the night and huddled lower in her jacket. Who was she kidding? A part of her wanted to do exactly that—snap her fingers and make the past disappear. To recapture that magical summer when the world stretched out in front of them, full of joy and promise.
There were invisible ties between them. She had felt them tug at her even over the ten years since she’d seen him last. Since his return, they wound tighter and tighter, until she was beginning to fear she would never be able to break free.
Maybe it was because he was the only man she had ever slept with. The only one she had ever wanted to be with.
How pathetic was that? She had remained faithful to a man who had deserted her.
Not that she’d ever dreamed he would come back. She had dated in those ten years. Not a lot—she’d been busy with Lucy, after all—but she had been out more than a few times over the years.
But nothing serious. Nothing lasting. She had never made love with any man but Zack Slater.
Her first and her only.
Back then he had been as cautious about intimacy as he was about everything else, wanting to take things slowly. Finally, with the single-minded purpose only an eighteen-year-old girl in love can claim, she had decided to take matters into her own hands.
On her suggestion, they had taken his pickup up the network of dirt roads crisscrossing the foothills overlooking Salt River, looking for the perfect spot to watch the town’s annual July Fourth fireworks display. She had packed a picnic of sorts. Fresh strawberries. Crusty French bread. A bottle of wine she had been forced to ask the clerk at the store to pick out for her.
All carefully designed with seduction in mind.
She felt ridiculous that it had come to that, to seducing her own fiancé. They were getting married in less than a month. She had her dress picked out, the flowers had been ordered and she was in the middle of addressing all the invitations.
But while they had done just about everything else together, from sweet, tender kisses to long makeout sessions in his pickup that left them both trembling with need, Zack had stubbornly refused to take things all the way.
He wanted to wait, he said. She had to be sure.
“You’re so young,” he had said with those rough, callused hands tracing bare skin just above her hip. “I don’t want your brothers or anybody else saying you rushed into this just because of this…heat between us.”
In those miserable weeks and months after he left, she finally realized that even then he must have been having doubts that he would be able to go through with the wedding. His feet must have already been chilling in his boots even as she set out to remedy her lack of experience.
At the time, though, she had known only the frustration of thwarted desire and had finally convinced herself to take matters into her own hands.
She had loved Zack Slater. Completely and forever. They were going to spend the rest of their lives together and she wanted to take this natural step with him more than anything. So she had packed a thick blanket and her seductive food and suggested they drive above the town lights, where they could watch the fireworks away from the noisy, boisterous crowd.
She closed her eyes now and could see it as vividly as that morning’s trail ride.
The evening sky was streaked with purples and reds as the sun began to set in a blaze of glory. After driving around for a while, Zack had finally parked his battered old pickup on a plateau high above the valley.
She sat next to him, her nerves dancing. She wanted to do this. Wanted it more than she wanted her next breath. But she had to admit she was also scared to death.
“Does this look like a good spot?” he asked.
“Yes,” she mumbled through a mouth that suddenly felt full of dusty rocks. “I think so.”
He spread the thick blanket in the bed of the truck, then lifted her up easily with those powerful hands that could touch her with such breathtaking tenderness.
He seemed a little distant at first, maybe picking up on her own nervousness, but as the sky began to darken and the stars came out one by one, they both began to relax. They laughed and talked and fed each other strawberries.
When she produced the wine and the plastic cups the clerk at the liquor store had graciously provided, he raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.
He must see right through her, she thought, a blush scorching her cheeks. All this time she thought she was being so clever, he knew exactly what she was planning.
She knew they would get around to kissing eventually—they couldn’t seem to be within a few feet of each other without their mouths connecting. Still, the stubborn man let her set the pace.
She laughed and chatted the way she had every other time they’d been together, even while her insides shivered every time she looked at those hard, chiseled features and felt the heat of his gold-flecked eyes on her.
She was right in the middle of a breathless story about the time she’d been caught skinny-dipping with her friends in the mayor’s pond by the mayor and his wife, who had obviously come down to the pond with the same idea, when Zack suddenly yanked her into his lap.
“I can’t take any more,” he murmured against her mouth, and she tasted wine and the sweetness of the berries. “I’ve got to kiss you.”
“Who’s stopping you?” she murmured back, and was rewarded with a fierce, possessive kiss. The shivers in her insides turned to devastating earthquakes of awareness.
That kiss had led to more. And more.
She could remember every second of that night. Every gliding touch, every drugging kiss. Before long, the buttons of her lacy shirt slipped free, and those wonderful hard hands found her unbound breasts.
“No bra tonight?” he murmured against her neck with a surprised laugh.
“It’s the Fourth of July,” she said on a gasp as his fingers danced across a nipple. “My own little celebration of freedom.”
“I’m not sure this is quite what the Founding Fathers had in mind, but hey, I’m as patriotic as the next guy.”
Her laugh turned into a gasp when he slid down her body and drew the nipple into his mouth, sending shock waves rippling through her. He had never gone this far and she knew this was it.
While he licked and tasted her skin, desire exploded inside her, building and building until she was afraid she would shatter. Finally she couldn’t stand this aching tension. She reached down and cupped his hardness through the thick material of his jeans, her fingers fumbling with the button fly so she could really reach him.
He groaned and shoved against her hand for a moment, then eased away, flopping back on the blanket to stare up at the sky. “Stop. Slow down.”
She sat up, her shirt still unbuttoned and her long hair flying loosely around her face. “Why? I’m so tired of slowing down! I love you, Zack. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. This is right. Why do we have to wait?”
She leaned over him, and this time she kissed him with all the fierce love in her heart. “I love you, Zack Slater,” she murmured. “I will never stop loving you.”
With a groan, he fisted his hands in her hair and devoured her mouth. Lit by only the moonlight and the last glowing rim of sun streaking the mountains, he quickly removed the rest of her clothing.
Though July, it was chilly at this higher elevation, and she shivered a little as a cool wind kissed her bare skin. But only for a moment. Then he covered her with his hard, muscled body and the shocking, incredible sensation of his naked flesh against hers warmed her completely.
She clutched him to her tightly and kissed him while a thousand sensations burned themselves into her brain. He had been so careful. So gentle. Even though she could feel the need trembling through him, feel the strength of his arousal against her, he still moved slowly.
She was far from naive about what went on between a man and a woman but she wasn’t prepared for Zack Slater and that dogged determination of his. He took his dear, sweet time, touching every inch of he
r skin, until she was ready to weep from frustration.
Finally his hand slid between her thighs, to the slick, aching center of her need. She shattered apart instantly, crying out his name.
While her body still pulsed and trembled, he knelt over her. “Are you absolutely sure, Cass? We can still wait.”
She groaned and bit his shoulder hard enough to leave two little crescent-shaped marks. “Yes! I’m positive! Will you just do it?”
With his glittering hazel gaze locked with hers and his hands crushing her fingers, he entered her slowly, carefully, just as the first booming fireworks exploded far below them in town.
They spent the next three weeks finding every opportunity they could to be alone together. Each time they made love was more incredible than the last, and those invisible bonds tightened even more.
And then he’d left.
Something stirred behind her in the brush, and Cassie jolted back to the present, horrified to feel the wet burn of tears in her eyes. She swiped at them with the sleeve of her denim jacket, furious at herself for dredging that all up again and for the low thrum of remembered heat that had burrowed under her skin while she relived those moments in his arms.
With the instincts of one of the small, scurrying creatures of the night, she sensed who was coming long before she saw him. Maybe it was his scent of cedar and sage carried by the breeze. Or maybe it was just the hum and twang of those bonds between them.
Whatever the reason, by the time he broke through the brush to her spot by the lake, all her defenses were firmly in place.
“You should be in bed, Cassie. Aren’t you freezing out here?”
“It’s not so bad,” she answered, relieved that her voice only trembled a little.
The wind whistled through the pines as he stood looking at her. “May I join you?” he finally asked.
No. Go away and leave me in peace. “I was just about ready to turn in.”
He reached out as if to touch her arm, then checked the movement. “Stay a moment with me. Please?”
She studied his features, wishing the moon were full so she could see him a little more clearly. Every instinct warned her that lingering here would be dangerous, especially when her thoughts were filled with the remembered passion between them and the feel of his hands upon her skin.
But she couldn’t walk away.
Oh, sweet mercy. She couldn’t leave. What was wrong with her? She hated Zack all over again for the ache in her throat, the heaviness in her chest. For breaking her heart into tiny jagged pieces, which she still couldn’t seem to make fit back together completely.
He sat beside her on the wide log, sending out an ambient heat that seemed to seep through her jacket. She wanted to burrow closer to that warmth, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough to thaw the cold that had been inside her for ten years.
They sat in silence for several moments, lost in the night and the past. He was the first to break it.
“I thought I could forget you,” he murmured.
She stiffened at his quiet words. She didn’t want to hear this. The urge to run back to the safety of her tent was overwhelming, but pride and something else—an unwilling compulsion to know—kept her glued to the log.
“I wanted to forget you,” he went on. “That was my plan. Move on to the next town, bury myself in hard work and forget all about the Diamond Harte and Star Valley and the pretty blue-eyed girl with the long brown hair and the smile that could make me feel a hundred feet tall.”
“Why?”
The word was wrenched out of her, and she hated herself for asking it and hated him more for forcing her to ask. Why did he want to forget her? Why had he left in the first place?
“Survival,” he answered, his voice grim. “It was sheer torture remembering those nights I held you in my arms. Remembering all the dreams we made together and the future we planned. Somehow I ended up on the rodeo circuit. Those first few months after I left, I think I probably spent more time in the bottle than sober.”
She pictured him ten years younger, desperate and drunk. “If you were so miserable, why didn’t you just come back?”
“I almost did a hundred times. But I knew nothing had changed. I was still the wrong man for you.”
She bit her tongue to hold back the bitter words that wanted to flow out like vinegar from a spilled bottle.
“I tried my damnedest to forget you. But I couldn’t. For ten years I remembered the way you always smelled like wildflowers. The way you tucked your hair behind your ear when you were concentrating on something. The way your mouth would soften like warm caramel when I kissed you.”
He finished on a murmur, his voice just a hush, barely audible above the wind. The low timbre of it reached deep inside her, plucking at those strings only he had ever found.
She shivered, not from the cold this time but from a slow, achy heat she didn’t want to face.
“Is that supposed to matter to me?” she snapped, to cover her reaction. “That once in a while you spared a thought for the stupid, naive girl you left behind?”
“Not only once in a while. Much more often than that.”
She drew in a shaky breath. “Slater, you could have tattooed my name across your forehead for all I care. It still wouldn’t change the basic fact that you left.”
His mouth tightened. “I had reasons. I told you that. At the time it seemed like the best decision all around.”
“Oh, right. I almost forgot. Salt River’s evil drug cartel that was going to arrange things so you were thrown in jail.”
“Damn it, Cassie. I’m telling the truth. I was threatened with exactly that. Ask yourself this. How would you have faced your friends, your brothers, if the man you planned to marry went to prison?”
“We’ll never know, will we?”
He opened his mouth as if to say something, then snapped it shut again. An uneasy silence descended between them again, and he picked up a stone and skipped it into the lake, where it bounced five times, one more than her own personal best. Where the stone hit water, ripples spread out in ever-widening circles that shimmered in the moonlight.
“I figured you’d be long married by now to some prosperous rancher,” he finally said. “Even though that was what I wanted for you, I hated picturing you with a house and a husband and a pack of kids.”
She had to close her eyes at the raw note in his voice. She wouldn’t let him get to her. She couldn’t.
“When I found out you never married, that you were working at the Lost Creek, I realized I had to come back to find out why.”
Why had she never married? Because no one else had ever asked her. Maybe someone might have if she hadn’t always constructed an invisible wall of protection around her wounded heart that no man had ever been able to breach.
“Wait a minute.” Her attention finally caught on his words. “How did you find out I never married?”
In the moonlight she thought she saw his color change slightly, and he refused to meet her gaze, looking out at the water instead.
Finally he shrugged. “I sent out private investigators. You weren’t very hard to find.”
Of course she wasn’t hard to find. She had never gone anywhere. All her life, the only time she had been beyond a hundred-mile radius of Star Valley was the time she and Lucy spent a week with Matt at a stock show in Denver.
She hadn’t been anywhere, hadn’t done anything, hadn’t lived beyond the insular world she had known all her life. The world had marched on in the last ten years—just look at how much Slater had changed—while she had stayed behind, forever frozen in ice.
Waiting for him.
No. No she wasn’t. She denied it vehemently. She had done what she had to do, stayed and raised her niece and helped her brother. She couldn’t regret that.
She loved it here. She had a good life. Good friends, her family. Once she bought Murphy’s in town, she would have everything she had ever needed.
Still, her face burned and she wanted
to press a hand to the sudden slippery self-disgust flipping around in her stomach like one of those trout.
It was far easier to focus her anger at him. “You sent hired dogs after me?”
He grew still, his eyes suddenly cautious over her tone. “Cassie…”
“Am I supposed to be flattered by that?”
“You’re not supposed to be anything.”
“So that’s why Maverick decided to buy the Lost Creek. You found out the ranch was for sale and figured maybe I was, too.”
“No. Of course not.”
“I don’t care how much money you have, Slater, and I never did. You’re the only one who cared about that. If you bought the ranch with some crazy, misguided idea that I would fall back into your arms, you’ve wasted your money.”
Now she wasn’t cold anymore. She was burning up, an angry inferno, and she embraced the heat. She only prayed it would blaze hot enough that the little part of her still clinging to the past would burn away into cinders.
She rose and glared at him. “I was stupid enough to fall for you once, Slater. You can be damn sure I won’t make the same mistake again.”
She whirled and marched away, leaving him sitting by the small mountain lake, watching after her.
CHAPTER 8
Zack lay in his sleeping bag, watching his breath puff out in little clouds in the cold predawn air.
He hadn’t slept more than an hour or two all night, and those had been restless, tortured with dreams of her. In one, she had been standing above him on a high glassy tower flanked by hundreds of giant steps, each taller than he was. Every time he tried to hoist himself up and managed to make it within a few steps from her, she moved a little higher up the tower.
Forever out of reach.
The dream’s symbolism didn’t escape him. He huffed out a breath, grimly aware that he’d messed this whole thing up from the day he came back. What had seemed like such a great idea in Denver—doing everything he could to persuade her to give him another chance—now seemed quixotic in the extreme.
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