Her gray eyes opened, but there was no real comprehension in them. To his astonishment, her fist doubled, and she tried to swing at him as she obeyed his rough command.
He got the truck door open and half boosted, half pushed her up onto the seat. She sprawled across it, dripping water.
The horse nudged him. If the animal hadn’t been so close he would have left it behind, but a lifetime of taking care of his livestock prompted him to tie the reins to the rear bumper. He wouldn’t be able to drive so fast that the horse couldn’t easily keep pace, even though every instinct screamed that he had to get to the house and get both of them warm.
He pulled himself onto the seat behind the steering wheel and turned on the ignition, then struggled to slide the knob that turned the heater on high. Hot air poured out of the vents, but he was too numb to feel it.
They had to get out of their clothes. The icy wetness was just leaching more heat away from their bodies. He began fighting out of his coat as he barked orders at Madelyn to do the same.
She managed to sit up somehow, but she had almost no coordination. She had been in the water even longer than he had. He didn’t have an easy time of it, but by the time he was naked she was weakly pushing her heavy shearling coat onto the floorboard. Ice crystals had already caked it.
He reached for her buttons. “Come on, sweetheart, we have to get you naked. The clothes will just make you that much colder. Can you talk to me? Say something, Maddie. Talk to me.”
She slowly lifted one hand, with all the fingers folded down except the middle one. He looked at the obscene, or suggestive, gesture—it all depended on how he took it—and despite the gravity of the situation a rough laugh burst from his throat. “I’ll take you up on that, sweetheart, just as soon as we get warm.” A sparkle came into her eyes, giving him hope.
His teeth began chattering, and convulsive shudders racked him. Maddie wasn’t shivering, and that was a bad sign. There were always a blanket and a thermos of coffee in the truck when he went out in the winter, and he pulled the blanket out from behind the seat. Even the simplest movement was a battle requiring all his strength, but he finally got it out and roughly dried them with it as best he could, then wrapped it around her.
With shaking hands he opened the thermos and poured a small amount of steaming coffee into the top, then held it to her lips. “Drink, baby. It’s nice and hot.”
She managed to swallow a little of it, and he drank the rest himself, then poured more into the cup. He could feel it burning down into his stomach. If he didn’t get himself into shape to drive to the ranch, neither one of them would make it. He fought the shaking of his hands until he had downed the entire cup, then poured more and coaxed Madelyn into taking it. That was all he could do for now. He focused his attention and put the truck in gear.
It was slow going. He was shaking so hard that his body wouldn’t obey. He was a little disoriented, sometimes unable to tell where they were. Beside him, Madelyn finally began shivering as the heat blasting from the vents combined with the coffee to revive her a little.
The house had never looked so good to him as it did when it finally came into view and he nursed the truck across the rough ground toward it. He parked as close to the back door as possible and walked naked around the truck to haul Madelyn out the passenger door. He couldn’t feel the snow under his bare feet.
She could walk a little now, and that helped. With their arms around each other they half crawled up the steps to the porch, then into the utility room. The downstairs bathroom was directly across from the utility room; he dragged Madelyn into it and propped her against the wall while he turned on the water in the tub to let it get hot. When steam began rising he turned the cold water tap and hoped he adjusted it right, or they would be scalded. His hands were so cold he simply couldn’t tell.
“Come on, into the tub.”
She struggled to her knees, and Reese pulled her up the rest of the way, but in the end it was simpler for both of them to literally crawl over the edge of the tub into the rising water. She sat in front of him and between his legs, lying back against his chest. Tears ran down her face as the warm water lapped against her cold flesh, bringing it painfully back to life. Reese let his head tilt back until it rested on the wall, his teeth gritted. They had to endure it because it was necessary; they didn’t have anyone else here to take care of them. This was the fastest way to get warm, but it wasn’t pleasant.
Slowly the pain in their extremities eased. When the water was so high that it was lapping out the overflow drain, he turned off the tap and sank deeper until his shoulders were covered. Madelyn’s hair floated on the surface like wet gold.
He tightened his arms around her, trying to absorb her shivering into him.
“Better?”
“Yes.” Her voice was low and even huskier than usual. “That was close.”
He turned her in his arms and hugged her to him with barely controlled desperation. “I was planning to keep that bull for breeding,” he said tightly, “but the sonofabitch is going to be a steer now—if he lives through this.”
She managed a laugh, her lips moving against his throat. The water lapped her chin. “Don’t ever get rid of that horse. He saved our bacon.”
“I’ll give him the biggest stall for the rest of his life.”
They lay in the water until it began to cool; then he pulled the plug and urged her to her feet. She was still looking sleepy, so he held her to him while he closed the shower curtain and turned on the shower, letting the water beat down on their heads. She just stood in his arms with her head on his chest, the way she had stood so many times, but this time was infinitely precious. This time they had cheated death.
The water rained over them. He turned her face up and took her mouth, needing her taste, her touch, to reassure himself that they were really okay. He had come incredibly close to losing her, even closer than he had come to dying himself.
When the hot water began to go he snapped off the tap and reached for towels, wrapping one around her dripping hair and using another to dry her. Though her lips and nails had color now, she was still shivering a little, and he supported her as she stepped carefully from the tub. He took another towel and began rubbing his own head, all the while watching every move she made.
Madelyn felt warm, but incredibly lethargic. She had no more energy than if she had been recovering from a monster case of the flu. More than anything she wanted to lie down in front of the fire and sleep for a week, but she knew enough about hypothermia to be afraid to. She sat on the toilet seat and watched him towel dry, focusing on the magnificent strength made more evident by his nakedness. He gave her a reason to fight her lethargy now, just as he had when she had been on the bottom of the pond.
He cupped her face, making certain she was paying attention. “Don’t go to sleep,” he warned. “Stay in here where it’s hot while I go upstairs to get your robe. Okay?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“I won’t be but a minute.”
She managed a smile, just to reassure him. “Bring my brush and comb, too.”
It took several minutes, but he came back with her robe toasty warm from the clothes dryer, and she shuddered with pleasure as he wrapped it around her. He had taken the time to almost dress, too; he had on socks, unsnapped jeans and a flannel shirt left unbuttoned. He had brought socks for her, and he knelt to slip them on her feet.
He kept his arm around her waist as they went into the kitchen. He pulled out a chair and placed her in it. “Open your mouth,” he said, and when she did he slid the thermometer, which he’d brought from the upstairs bathroom, under her tongue. “Now sit there and be still while I make a pot of coffee.”
That wasn’t hard to do. The only thing she wanted to do more than sit still was to lie down.
When the digital thermometer twittered its alarm, he pulled it out of her mouth and frowned at it. “Ninety six point four. I want it up at least another degree.”
“What about you?”
“I’m more alert than you are. I’m bigger, and I wasn’t in the water as long.” He could still feel a deep inner chill, but nothing like the bone-numbing cold he had felt before. The first cup of coffee almost completely dispelled the rest of the coldness, as both the heat and the caffeine did their work. He made Madelyn drink three cups of coffee, even though she had revived enough to caustically point out that, as usual, he’d made it so strong she was likely to go into caffeine overdose. He watered it down for her, his mouth wry.
When he felt safer about leaving her, he deposited her on the quilts in front of the fire. “I have to go back out,” he said, and he saw panic flare in her eyes. “Not to the range,” he added quickly. “I have to put the horse back in the barn and take care of him. I’ll be back as soon as I’m finished.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she reassured him.
She was still afraid to lie down and go to sleep, even though so much caffeine was humming through her system that she wasn’t certain she would be able to go to sleep that night. She pulled the towel off her head and began combing the tangles out of her hair.
By the time he got back, her hair was dry and she was brushing it into order. He stopped in the doorway, struck as always by the intensely female beauty of the ritual. Her sleeves dropped away from her arms as she lifted them, revealing pale, slender forearms. Her neck was gracefully bent, like a flower nodding in the breeze. His throat tightened, and blood rushed to his loins as he watched her; seven months of marriage and he was still reacting to her like a stallion scenting a mare.
“How are you feeling?” The words were raspy. He had to force them out.
She looked up, her slow smile heating his blood even more. “Better. Warm and awake. How are you after going back out into the cold?”
“I’m okay.” More than okay. They were both alive, and there wasn’t a cell in his body that was cold.
He insisted on taking her temperature again and waited impatiently until the thermometer twittered. “Ninety-seven point six. Good.”
“My normal temperature isn’t much more than that. It usually hovers in the low ninety-eights.”
“Mine is usually around ninety-nine or a little higher.”
“I’m not surprised. Sleeping with you is like sleeping with a furnace.”
“Complaining?”
She shook her head. “Bragging.” Her smile faded, and her gray eyes darkened to charcoal as she reached out to touch his face. “I almost lost you.” He saw the flash of sheer terror in her eyes just before she closed them, and he grabbed her to him with almost desperate relief.
“Baby, I came a lot closer to losing you than you did to losing me,” he said roughly, moving his lips against her hair.
Madelyn wound her arms around his neck. She didn’t often cry; her moods were too even and generally upbeat. The two times she had cried since their marriage had both been the result of pain, once on their wedding night and again just an hour before when the warm water in the tub had begun bringing life back into her frozen skin. But suddenly the enormity and strain of what they had been through swept over her, and her chest tightened. She tried to fight it, tried to keep her composure, but it was a losing battle. With a wrenching sob she buried her face against his throat and clung to him while her body shook with the force of her weeping.
He was more than surprised by her sudden tears, he was astounded. His Maddie was a fighter, one who met his strength with her own and didn’t flinch even from his worst tempers. But now she was sobbing as if she would never stop, and the depth of her distress punched him in the chest. He crooned to her and rubbed her back, whispering reassurances as he lowered her to the quilts.
It took a long time for her sobs to quiet. He didn’t try to get her to stop, sensing that she needed the release, just as he had needed the release of savagely kicking a feed bucket the length of the barn after he had taken care of his horse. He just held her until the storm was over, then gave her his handkerchief for mopping up.
Her eyelids were swollen, and she looked exhausted, but there was no more tightly wound tension in her eyes as she lay quietly in the aftermath. Reese propped himself up on an elbow and tugged at the belt of her robe, pulling it loose and then spreading the lapels to expose her nude body.
He trailed his fingers across the hollow of her throat, then over to her slender collarbone. “Have I ever told you,” he asked musingly, “that just looking at you gets me so hard it hurts?”
Her voice was husky. “No, but you’ve demonstrated it a few times.”
“It does hurt. I feel like I’m going to explode. Then, when I get inside you, the hurt changes to pleasure.” He stroked his hand down to her breast, covering it with the warmth of his palm and feeling her nipple softly pushing at him. Gently he caressed her, circling the nipple with his thumb until it stood upright and darkened in color; then he bent over her to kiss the enticing little nub. Her breathing had changed, getting deeper, and a delicate flush was warming her skin. When he looked up he saw how heavy-lidded her eyes had become, and he was flooded with fiercely masculine satisfaction that he could make her look like that.
Once he had tried to deny himself the sensual pleasure of feasting on her, but no longer. He let himself be absorbed as he stroked his hand down her body, savoring the silky texture of her skin, shaping his hand to the curves and indentations that flowed from one to the other, the swell of her breast to the flat of her stomach, the flare of her hips, the notch between her legs. He watched his tanned, powerful fingers slide through the little triangle of curls and then probe between her soft folds, fascinated by the contrast between his hand and her pale feminine body.
And the taste of her. There was the heated sweetness of her mouth; he sampled it, then tasted again more deeply, making love to her with his tongue. Then there was the warm, fragrant hollow of her throat, and the rose-and-milk taste of her breasts. He lingered there for a long time, until her hands were knotting and twisting in the quilt, and her hips were lifting against him.
Her belly was cool against his lips, and silky smooth. Her tight little navel invited exploration, and he circled it with his tongue. Her hands moved into his hair and tightly pressed against his skull as he moved downward, parting her thighs and draping them over his shoulders.
She was breathing hard, her body twisting and straining. He held her hips and loved her, not stopping until she heaved upward and cried out as the waves of completion overtook her.
She felt drained, more exhausted than before. She lay limply as he knelt between her legs and tore at his clothes, throwing them aside. She could barely open her eyes as he positioned himself and then invaded her with a slow, heavy thrust that carried him into her to the hilt. As always, she was faintly startled by the overwhelming sense of fullness as she adjusted to him.
His full weight was on her, crushing her downward. There was nothing gentlemanly about him now, only the need to enter her as deeply as possible, to carry the embrace to the fullest so that there was no part of her that didn’t feel his possession. His lovemaking was often dominant, but she could usually meet it with her own strength. She couldn’t now; there was a savagery in him that had to be appeased, a hunger that had to be fed. Even though he restrained himself so that he never hurt her, she was helpless to do anything but lie there and accept him, and feel her passion rising within her again with a beating rhythm.
He paused when his tension reached the critical level, not wanting it to end just yet. His green eyes glittered as he framed her face in his hands and measured the strength of her arousal.
He brushed his mouth against her ear. “Did you know that a man normally has…”
She listened to the words rustling in her ear, her hands tightening on his back as she struggled for control. Though she loved their trivia game, she wasn’t in the mood for it now. Finally she gasped, “I wonder why there are so many, when one will do.”
In his best big-bad-wolf voice, admittedly ragge
d, he said, “The better to get you pregnant, my dear,” and he began moving again, hard and fast. And, sometime within the next hour, he did.
CHAPTER TEN
REESE WENT OVER the figures again, but the totals didn’t change. He got to his feet and looked out the window, his hands knotted into fists and his jaw set. All those years of work. All those damn years of work, for nothing.
He had done everything he could think of, cut down on every expense until there was nothing left that could be cut, and still those figures spelled it out in black and white: he had lost. The January blizzard that had killed half of his herd had pushed him so far under that the bank couldn’t carry him any longer. He couldn’t make the mortgage, and there would be no more extensions.
He had three options: one, he could let the bank foreclose, and they would lose everything; two, he could file chapter eleven bankruptcy and keep the ranch but ruin his credit; and three, he could accept Robert’s offer to be an investor. He smiled grimly. Number three was an option only if Robert’s offer was still open, considering that he had made it when the ranch was profitable and now it was going under fast.
He had been so close to making it. He thought that was what made the final defeat so bitter, that he had been close enough to see the end of debt. What April had started almost eight years before was finally coming to fruition: the destruction of his ranch. Who knew what her reasoning had been? Maybe she had done it because he had loved the ranch so much, more than he had ever even thought he loved her. It was his lifeblood, and he was losing it, unless Robert Cannon still wanted to invest. Reese went over the options again, but Robert was his only chance, and a slim one at that, because when Robert saw the figures he would have to be a hell of a gambler to go through with the deal. Reese didn’t hold out much hope, but he would make the effort, because he couldn’t do otherwise. He didn’t have just himself to consider now; he had Madelyn, and he would do what he could to keep her home for her. She hadn’t married him expecting bankruptcy or foreclosure.