by Diana Palmer
She was listening. Just listening. Her dark eyes were steady on his face, soft with sympathy.
“There was a lot more than that, too, wasn’t there?” she asked.
His teeth ground together. “A lot more.”
“My father was in the military, in combat,” she said, turning her attention back to the flour. “I heard him talk about it to my mother, just once. He said it was like being sentenced to hell.”
“That’s not a bad analogy.” He sighed. “You never heard from your father, after he left?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to hear from him. He walked out without a word to me, deserted me, for a woman he barely knew. My mother had a lot of lovers before she ended up with Henry,” she added bitterly. “I wouldn’t wish my childhood on my worst enemy.”
“You’re just like me,” he said absently. “Living in the past and can’t move forward.”
She grimaced. “Maybe so.”
“Are you in love with McGuire?” he shot at her.
She caught her breath, her eyes huge as they met his. “I hardly... I hardly even know him,” she stammered.
“He’s a rounder,” he said shortly. He knew that, because McGuire ran in the same social circles that he frequented himself. He’d heard stories about the rancher, even though they were only distant acquaintances.
“Well, look who’s talking,” she retorted, glancing at him as she went back to work, her hands covered in dough. “I’ve never met a cowboy who didn’t have a girl in every rodeo town!”
He bit his lower lip to keep the words back. He wasn’t just a cowboy, but the rounder part was true. He was a pot, calling the kettle black.
“Women are a permissible pleasure,” he said lazily. “I have no plans to marry and settle down and start changing diapers,” he added. It was a lie, but he wasn’t about to encourage Little Miss Muffet, here. He had to marry a woman from his own class, not some rustic cowgirl who wouldn’t know a dessert fork from a butter knife. Why did that bother him? She wasn’t even his type. Ida was.
“I don’t want to get married, either,” she confessed quietly.
He frowned. “Why not?” he asked. “Don’t you want kids?”
She felt hot all over, just thinking about them when he was standing so close to her. The way she’d felt in his arms was scary. She wanted him. She hadn’t known she was vulnerable.
He watched her cheeks color with fascination. If she was really experienced, that flush wasn’t something she could fake.
“Kids are nice, I guess,” she said after a minute. “I’ve never been around them much.”
“Two of my brothers have toddlers,” he said quietly. He smiled, reminiscing. “I don’t live close enough to visit often, but I like my niece and my nephews.”
“How many brothers do you have?” she asked.
“Three. And they’re all in law enforcement.”
She smiled. “Are they older than you?”
“All of them are. You don’t have siblings, do you?”
“None at all. It was a lonely life, even when my father was still at home. He wasn’t, much. Law enforcement takes you out at all hours.”
He recalled that her father had been a policeman. “You’d know, I guess.”
She nodded.
“You like to cook, don’t you?” he remarked as she finished the piecrusts and covered them with clear wrap.
“Very much.”
“Knitting and crocheting, romance novels and cooking,” he mused. “Do you know what century this is?”
She turned with floury hands to glare up at him. “It’s my life and I live it as I please. I don’t make snide remarks about you, do I? I mean, you walk around in cow manure all day and muck out stables. How is that better than knitting? At least yarn doesn’t stink!”
He burst out laughing.
She glared at him. “Thank Bart for the apples, please, and tell him I’ll bring him a nice apple pie tomorrow.”
“He’ll be thrilled. He’s partial to apple pie.”
“I know.”
He scowled. “Why don’t you have anything going with him? He’s got a ranch of his own and he’s a good man, steady and law-abiding.”
“He’s my friend,” she said. “I don’t feel that way about him.”
“And he’s hardly in the same league as McGuire, right?” he persisted. “If you get involved with McGuire, you’ve got a steep learning curve ahead of you. It’s not like this.” He looked around the house. “You’d have to entertain his guests, know how to organize parties, wear the right clothes, use the right utensils at table.”
“Do you think I’m stupid?” she asked, aghast, because she was well on her way to the sort of life McGuire lived. Not that she was going to tell this cowboy anything!
He shrugged. “I guess you can learn. But if you don’t grow up in those circles, it’s not so easy to fit in,” he added with faint hauteur.
Her full lips flattened as she glared up at him. She knew how to wear the right clothes—she’d learned how from a kind makeup artist at the studio where she’d done her very first satellite media tour. It had led her to a high-ticket department store and clothes that suited her slender body. She’d learned how to use utensils in a fancy restaurant simply by observing her editor when they went out to eat. Organizing parties? She hadn’t done it yet, but that was something Pam Simpson could certainly teach her.
“Yes, I can learn,” she said shortly. But she wasn’t thinking of Jake McGuire and fitting into his life. She was thinking of her career, the one she had that this cowboy didn’t even know about.
He looked odd as he studied her in silence for a long moment. She wasn’t really a pretty woman. She had a nice figure and a pretty mouth and that glorious honey-streaked brown hair. It was what was inside her that made her look beautiful. She had a kind heart. He barely remembered his mother, but that was what people always said about her, people who knew her when she was still alive; that she was kindhearted.
“Anyway, my future doesn’t concern you,” she said shortly, turning away. “If you’re like most cowboys around here, you’ll be moving on to greener pastures in a few months. Bill McAllister is the only cowboy I’ve ever known who stayed put.”
“He never married?”
She sighed. “Yes, he did, years and years ago. She died of pneumonia. He never got over it.”
He laughed shortly. “The world is full of women,” he said. “Surely he could find somebody else.”
She turned, frowning. “Haven’t you ever been in love?” she asked, stunned.
“Not really,” he said, searching her eyes. “I’ve had my share of lovers, I guess.”
“It isn’t the same thing,” she returned.
“And how would you know that?” he asked sarcastically.
She averted her eyes. “I was in love once, when I was sixteen,” she said quietly. “I would have died for him.” She wrapped another piecrust in plastic wrap. “My mother noticed how crazy I was about him and she seduced him. Then she came home and told me about it, and she laughed. He was so ashamed that he couldn’t even talk to me anymore.”
Anger flashed in his pale brown eyes. “What a hell of a thing to do.”
“That was my mother,” she said simply. “Anything I cared about was fair game. I wouldn’t even pet a stray cat, because I knew if I did, she’d kill it or have one of her lovers carry it off.”
He winced. “Why?” he asked.
She sighed. “I’ve been asking myself that for years and years,” she confessed. “I don’t know.”
“Was she like that, before your father left?”
She thought back to her childhood. She remembered her mother hitting her, slapping her, when she was just starting in grammar school. She remembered being cursed and belittled, anytime she was alone with her mother.
“Yes,” she said. “All my life.”
He frowned. It didn’t make sense that a parent would be that cruel to a helpless child. He wondered what she looked like when she was small. He could almost picture her in a frilly dress, with her long hair down around her shoulders and a bow holding it out of her eyes. She would have been a precious child. Odd, how that thought made him wish he had a little girl of his own...
“Your mother cared about you, didn’t she?” she asked as she finished the last piecrust.
“She loved all of us,” he said, remembering with sadness those last days she was in the hospital before she died. Cash had stayed with her. Cort had been too young. He sighed. “One of my older brothers was with her in the hospital. Dad couldn’t stand to watch it. He’d gone off with the model he later married. It sounds heartless—maybe it was. But he loved our mother. I always thought it was a defensive thing, hiding his head in the sand with another woman to keep the pain from killing him.”
“If I had a spouse that I loved in the hospital, that’s where I’d be, right until the bitter end,” she said, her dark eyes catching his.
“So would I,” he said softly. “My father isn’t like the rest of us. He doesn’t feel things as deeply as we do.” He sighed. “He was never around when we were kids.” He stopped himself just in time from telling her about the yacht races his father loved, the sporting events he haunted, the jet-setting reputation his father had.
“I wish my mother had never been around,” she said with a whimsical smile. “My life would have been easier if I’d been an orphan, I think.”
“You love cattle, don’t you?”
She smiled. “Yes, I do. Cattle and horses, dogs and cats. It’s so nice, being able to have them and not worrying about something happening to them.” She glanced at him. “Cousin Rogan told my mother that if any of the cattle or horses had ‘accidents,’ he’d make sure the proper authorities were contacted, and she’d read about herself in the tabloids. It was the only time I ever really saw her frightened.”
“Your cousin is a card,” he mused, and could have bitten his tongue for making that slip. He wasn’t supposed to know the man.
But it went right by her. “He is,” she agreed. “I wouldn’t even have had the ranch if he hadn’t intervened.”
“He and McGuire are partners in that Australian cattle station, aren’t they?”
She nodded. “Cousin Rogan hates snow. The station is near the desert, always hot,” she said on a laugh.
“I like snow,” he mused. “We don’t get a lot back home in my part of Texas.”
“I like it until I have to drive in it,” she sighed. “I’ve been stuck in ditches too many times in my life because I never learned how to drive properly.”
“Was there a reason for that?”
She nodded. “My mother couldn’t drive at all, and I’d have walked two miles to town before I’d have asked any of her lovers to teach me—especially Henry.”
“I thought they had classes in high school.”
“Not here, they didn’t. Budget issues,” she added. She put the piecrusts aside and started to pick up the basket of apples.
“Here. Let me do that,” he said softly. He lifted it up onto the table for her and set it down.
“Thanks,” she said huskily. “I didn’t realize how heavy it was.”
He smiled. “It’s only heavy to shrimps like you,” he said on a grin.
She laughed. “I’m not a shrimp.”
“Honey, compared to me, you’re a shrimp.” He moved closer, catching her by the waist. He pulled her against him and bent to brush his hard mouth against hers almost tenderly. “You taste like those apples,” he whispered into her lips. “Green. Very green.”
She hated herself because she couldn’t manage to pull back or protest. She looked up into his pale brown eyes helplessly as he teased her mouth.
“It’s a learning curve,” he whispered as his lean hands framed her face. “We all start out as beginners.”
While he spoke, he began to fit his lips exactly to hers, coaxing them to part, brushing and stroking until she was rigid with unexpected hunger. Her hands, still floury, pressed into his blue flannel shirt, feeling muscle and soft, cushy hair under it while she stood, breathlessly fascinated, in his arms.
She felt his tongue easing under her top lip, smoothing against the warm, moist skin with a motion that was arousing. It made her hungry. She went on tiptoe to tempt him to do it harder, but he drew back a breath and started all over again.
His own breath was coming hard and fast. She was delicious. He’d never tasted a woman with such delicacy, such tenderness. He didn’t understand why he wanted it like this. Perhaps because she was so green. First times, he thought, should be tender.
She let him kiss her. It was so sweet, to feel him close like this, to feel his mouth savoring hers like a particularly delicious pastry. She smiled under his lips.
He drew back a breath. “What’s funny?” he whispered.
“I feel like a nice dessert,” she whispered back, her dark eyes sparkling as they met his.
He smiled, too. “You do taste delicious, little virgin,” he murmured as he brushed her mouth again. He drew in a deep breath and his lean hands caught her waist and moved her, reluctantly, away.
“I’m not used to sudden stops,” he said. “I’ve spent too much of my life enjoying women I barely knew.” He searched her eyes. “I’m not adding you to the notches on my bedpost.”
She flushed and then laughed. “Okay.” She peered up at him. “Thanks,” she said with a faint grimace. “I don’t know enough to cope with...with experienced men.”
“I noticed.” He was thinking how easy it would be to kiss her into fascinated submission and carry her to the nearest bed. Which was why he backed up a little. A lot of women pretended innocence with a flair. But this one was the genuine article. He’d have bet his life on it. “So we’ll cool it.”
She nodded. “Thanks.”
“I’d prefer to toss you down on the nearest bed, of course,” he confessed, grinning at her scarlet flush. “You are one delicious little pastry.”
“I’d give you indigestion,” she teased.
“I don’t think so.” His face tautened. “You watch McGuire,” he added. “He’s been around the world a few times. Sophisticated men are devious.”
“He’s not like that,” she said. She put some apples into a bowl and found a paring knife before she sat down in a chair at the table with the bowl in her lap. “He really likes me.” She made a face. “It’s worrying.”
He was puzzled. She didn’t act like a mercenary woman. McGuire was rich. But she wasn’t talking about his wealth. She was worried that he liked her.
“You don’t like him.”
She looked up. “Oh no. I like him very much.” She bit her lower lip and tasted Cort there. Kissing him was addictive. She didn’t look at him. “It’s just that what he wants goes beyond liking.”
“Easy fix. Don’t go out with him.”
“Well,” she sighed, “I already promised to go to Galveston with him this weekend.”
“For the weekend?” he asked, angry and frankly jealous.
She laughed. “No, no, no. I balked, and he said it would just be a day trip. He promised.”
Something inside him relaxed, just a little. “Why Galveston?”
“Seafood,” she replied. She laughed. “He seems to know all the best restaurants in the country. In fact, he knows them in Manhattan as well. He offered to fly me up there in four weeks. That one’s a business trip, though.”
He didn’t like thinking of her with McGuire. It made him irritable that he was vulnerable. He’d had so many women. He couldn’t understand why he felt differently about her.
“I see,” he said after a minute.
She star
ted to explain why it was a business trip. He didn’t know about her career. Perhaps it was time that he did.
“About New York,” she began.
He glanced at his watch and grimaced. “Bart’s meeting with some advertising person about your production sale,” he said abruptly. “He wants me to help come up with some ideas.”
“Why you?” she asked, surprised.
Because he owned the biggest ranch in West Texas and had production sales of his own each year. He was experienced in advertising for them. In fact, the production sale at Latigo was why he couldn’t stay more than another few weeks. Odd, how uncomfortable it made him feel to think about leaving. She was getting under his skin. He didn’t like being vulnerable. He never had been before. Not with a woman.
It took him a minute to realize that he hadn’t answered her. He shrugged. “Back home, boss always asked for my input on ads. I dated an executive from an ad agency for a few months,” he added involuntarily.
She frowned.
He could have chewed his tongue through at that slip. How would a plain cowboy, which she thought he was, have anything to do with an executive of any sort? It was hardly a common match.
“She came to the ranch about a production sale. We started talking and found a lot in common,” he improvised. Actually, he’d met her in Manhattan, on a business trip, and they’d been an item for two or three months, until the passion wore out. Passion always wore out, he’d found. Women in his life lacked staying power. They came and went. Mostly they went.
“Oh,” she said, having lacked any sort of sensible reply. She didn’t like the jealous feelings he engendered in her. He went around with Ida, which wounded her, and now he was talking about yet another woman. Well, he was experienced, and it showed. Probably there had been a lot of women. She felt inadequate.
“Not to worry,” he said softly. “I’m not in the market for a woman who reads romance novels.”
Her eyebrows arched. She wouldn’t ask, she wouldn’t ask...!
“You have a rose-colored view of life, honey,” he said gently, and made the endearment feel like a verbal caress. “Mine is raw and blunt. They won’t mix.”