“Do you know what you’re doing?”
She was sitting a little sideways, watching his face as fixedly as he watched the road. “I know.”
“I don’t want to leave you with a scrapbook full of memories.” Still matter-of-fact.
“I’ll cross that bridge later.”
“You’ve already crossed it, in your mind. How long are you giving us, Elizabeth? A week? A month?”
“We’ll have what we have.”
“And then?”
“Now who’s looking at endings?” she murmured.
“Answer me, dammit.”
She sighed almost inaudibly. “What do you want me to say, Kelsey?”
“The truth.” His hands gripped the wheel, white-knuckled. “You’ve thought about it, I know. You expect me to leave; what then? Will you marry the shark you know? Settle down in your tame little town and raise a few kids as well as sisters and peaches? And keep a scrapbook somewhere in your mind with memories of your one wild fling? Is that what you’ve decided?”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?” His voice had quickened, become sharp and hard. “A man likes to know where he stands. Is that my role this time, Elizabeth? Is that why you’ve held Mallory off all this time, so you could have that wild fling with someone just breezing through your life? No ties, no promises, just a little scandalous sex before the settled life you want?”
The car fishtailed a bit when he slammed on the brakes and stopped abruptly near the house on the dirt driveway, dust flying, and even as he turned off the engine Elizabeth was out of the car and running to the house.
Kelsey sat there for a moment, hating himself, knowing he was a bastard for what he’d said to her. He tried to tell himself it was for the best, that he had been forced to say those things so that she would realize what she was doing, but the mental assurances were hollow. He was a bastard. He had hurt her, and he was hurting too much himself not to know it. Slowly, he got out of the car, removed his tie, shrugged out of his jacket and tossed them into the back seat, then headed for the house.
He wouldn’t be carrying her over this threshold after all, he told himself somberly as he opened the screen door and went inside. Not in passion, or playfulness, or commitment. Not today. Maybe not ever.
“Elizabeth?”
She didn’t answer, and he went from room to room, searching. She wasn’t in the house. The back door was open, and Kelsey stood gazing out for a moment, before making his way to the barn. It looked like a tumbledown structure, but when he passed through the open door he saw that it was sturdy, and smelled the sweet scent of new hay in the loft above him. “Elizabeth?”
“Up here.”
A narrow stairway led up into the loft, and he went up slowly. Bales of hay were stacked neatly along the three walls of the loft, leaving a space in the center about the size of a small room. Loose hay cushioned the floorboards there, and Elizabeth was sitting very still in the middle of a bright quilt spread out over the hay. She didn’t look at him, and her voice was soft when she spoke.
“What’s the euphemism? A roll in the hay? But hay isn’t very comfortable, so I got this quilt from the house. I knew you’d come after me, Kelsey. You had to. You’re as much a prisoner of this as I am.”
He made his way to where she sat, forced to keep his head bent to avoid hitting it on the beams above him. He knelt down before her, hurt even more by the controlled expressionlessness of her delicate face. “Honey—”
“I won’t marry Blaine. I don’t know what I’ll do … after. No matter what you believe, this isn’t something I planned. But I want you, Kelsey. Is that so wrong? Is it something I should be afraid of, or ashamed of?”
“No.”
She looked at him, her eyes luminous, deep. “I realized something today. I realized that I haven’t done anything just for myself in ten years. I haven’t made a single decision without stopping to consider how it would affect my sisters or the business. I don’t regret that. I made that choice. But now isn’t it my turn, Kelsey? Can’t I decide—about this—just for me now?”
Gently, he said, “You know better than that. This decision affects me too.”
“You want me.”
Kelsey half closed his eyes. “Lord, yes, I want you. But you believe I’ll leave you.”
Her eyes were bottomless.
“Kelsey, whether you’ll leave me isn’t something either of us can predict. You can’t even say it. You can’t say you love me. Can’t say you won’t leave me one day. Even though you want to say it—and I can see it in your eyes—you can’t. You aren’t sure yourself.”
She was right, and he knew it. He had known since those lonely predawn hours when he had faced too much of himself to ever be able to go back again. “If I said it, and then I had to leave—”
“I know.” Her voice was infinitely gentle. “It would haunt you, just the way your father’s death has haunted you. You had to turn away from that final look at him, even though you loved him. You had to walk away from him. And if you found you had to leave me, had to walk away from someone else you loved, it would haunt you.”
Kelsey drew a shuddering breath, trying to ignore pain and confusion. Did it matter that he hadn’t said it? It shouldn’t matter; what existed was real, voiced aloud or held silent. Yet, somehow, it mattered. “I think—” He cleared his throat roughly. “I think I’ll miss my deadline.”
“In my bed by midnight?” She reached out to lay a hand on his thigh just above his knee. “I don’t think you’ll miss it.”
He looked down at her hand, knowing that his muscles had tautened instantly, that his belly was knotting in a sudden rush of hot desire. His skin felt flushed, and breathing was suddenly very difficult. “Elizabeth, I don’t want to be remembered as the man who tore your life apart.”
“You’ll be remembered as the first man I ever loved.”
Kelsey caught his breath, and whatever it was that had held him back until now splintered in the force of what he felt. “We’re both being too damned fatalistic,” he said thickly, reaching out to grasp her shoulders, rising on his knees as he pulled her up against him. “I control my own destiny, dammit, and if I want to stay with you, I’ll stay with you!”
Her arms slid up around his neck and her body swayed to meet his in a movement as natural as a sunrise. “Just be with me now,” she whispered, her lips feathering along his jaw. “Just be with me as long as you can.”
“Oh, hell, Elizabeth.” But neither her fatalism nor his own apprehension about the future could stop the building chain reaction of desire and willingness. Kelsey’s mind told him that a physical consummation with so much left uncertain between them was dangerous, but the warning was a faint voice lost in the roar of something far more basic and sure than intellect.
And when her mouth opened beneath his, when her full breasts pressed to his chest, when her hips moved in a subtle, unconsciously seeking movement against him, the faint voice of reason was utterly silenced.
The kiss, like the one the night before in the car, was hot, frantic, compulsive. His lips slanted across hers and his tongue thrust starkly in a possession that could never satisfy either of them. They both wanted more, bodies straining to be closer, arms wrapped tightly around each other. For an eternal moment they remained locked in that embrace, the kiss too wild to be reined. Then Kelsey drew away with a rough sound and rose to his feet, pulling her up with him.
It was instinct that kept his head bent to avoid the overhead beams, instinct and the driving need to go on exploring her soft skin. He was pulling her blouse free of the skirt even as her hands shakily tugged his shirt loose, and the softness of her throat drew his lips like a lodestar.
“Kelsey …” The skirt slid down over her hips and legs to pool around her feet, and her fingers coped with the buttons of his shirt blindly. And there was something driven in the breathless rush of her voice. “I want you … so much … I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t wait.”
H
e groaned when she impatiently sent the last two buttons flying, sweeping his shirt open so that she could touch his chest, his hard stomach. She helped him remove her own blouse and the cream-colored bra, rising on tiptoe instantly to press her breasts against his chest. Kelsey held her against him hard for a moment, his breath escaping raggedly as twin points of fire seared his chest. And he lost what was left of his breath when he felt her hands slip between them to fumble at his belt.
“Easy,” he murmured, capturing her wrists and pinning them gently to her sides, knowing he was too close to the edge to take much more.
“No,” she said huskily, her lips moving against his shoulder. “I won’t let you change your mind again.”
His laugh was a rasping sound. “Honey, I couldn’t change my mind if it was the price of my next breath.”
“Good.” Her lips feathered along his jaw and fleetingly brushed his mouth, then she stepped back and bent to skim the flesh-colored panties down her legs and then gather her discarded clothing and toss the bundle to one side of the quilt.
He kicked his shoes off, hardly noticing that one landed down in the barn hall, his own fingers fumbling at his belt as he watched her unselfconscious grace. “God, you’re beautiful,” he said thickly, watching her breasts lift as she reached up to free her hair, so that it fell around her tanned shoulders in a curtain of spun silver. Her breasts were honey gold tipped in rosy brown, the nipples hard with wanting him. Her waist was tiny, hips flaring gently in perfect curves, and her legs had been made by Nature to give a man wistful dreams.
Kelsey had always been of the opinion that most bodies required a judicious draping of material here or there, since few perfect examples of the human form could be found. Elizabeth was the only woman in his experience who was actually more beautiful totally naked than clothed. Silver and gold, her vivid green eyes pools of enchantment, standing before him the way a woman should stand before a man, all grace and pride and with knowledge born in the caves glowing in her eyes.
He was hardly aware that he had shed the remainder of his clothing, and it was only when he felt the quilt beneath his feet that he realized he had stepped closer. One hand lifted, and he traced a lingering line across the slopes of her full breasts. “No bathing suit pallor,” he murmured hoarsely.
Elizabeth didn’t move, but her eyes were heavy-lidded, her lips parted. “Outside my bedroom window,” she whispered, “there’s a little balcony. I sunbathe out there when I’m alone.”
“In the nude.”
She half nodded, the wild ferocity of that unhooded falcon growing more intense in her eyes. “In the nude. Does that shock you, Kelsey?”
He could feel something fluttering in the back of his mind, some response, a sudden understanding. Softly, he said, “I don’t know why I had you figured as small town conventional. You aren’t that at all, are you, Elizabeth? You made yourself fit because you had to, but your spirit is … wild.”
She lifted her arms slowly until her hands slid around his neck. “Wild enough to catch a chameleon?” she questioned in her breathless, driven voice.
“We’ll find out.” It was almost a groan, and he pulled her against him, blindly finding her lips.
He didn’t know if he had drawn her down to the quilt or she had guided them; it didn’t matter. The thick quilt and layer of hay beneath cushioned them, and he lost himself in her. She was so utterly responsive, so wildly hungry for him, and the simmering fire between them exploded in a raw detonation just as he had believed it would.
Whatever violence existed in him was more than matched by her passionate response, and Kelsey stopped wondering which of them would be burned by the fire. They were both burned.
If he had stopped to think about it, Kelsey would have been astonished that he could rein his own desire even temporarily, but she was as curious and entranced by his body as he was by hers, and somehow their bodies allowed them the time to explore.
He surrounded her breasts with his hands, his thumbs probing the hard nipples before his mouth found them, her soft sighs and murmurs a siren song in his ears. And he could feel her hands exploring, her nails occasionally raking softly so that his muscles writhed like living things beneath her touch. He realized on some distant level of his mind that her fingers paused at every scar, tracing slowly, but not even the evidence of his dangerous past was enough to cool the fire.
Elizabeth held him, breathless and dizzy, ripples of heat spreading through her until her skin burned and her body was aching and restless. She probed his shoulders and back compulsively, feeling coiled muscles that were a stark indication of physical strength and power, feeling here and there a rough area, a puckering of his bronze skin indicating a scar. There was a long scar just beneath his breastbone, another low on his stomach and ridged by muscle. Some distant part of her wanted to acknowledge her understanding of the battle scars he wore; she wanted to cry at the pain of his past, the marring of a beautiful male body, but she could only whimper aloud at the emotions and sensations tearing through her own body.
“Kelsey …”
He was breathing harshly, his face intent, fixed in expression. One hand left her breasts to stroke over her quivering belly, lower, and he caught his breath even as she did. “Lovely. So soft and warm,” he said in a thickened voice. “Elizabeth, my Elizabeth.”
“Yes.” The restless ache was building, becoming more than she could stand, and she writhed suddenly with a gasp. “Yes! Yours, Kelsey … make me yours.”
A harsh sound escaped him, and Kelsey buried his face between her breasts for a moment. “I can’t wait,” he muttered as he lifted his head. “I need you so much, I can’t wait.”
Elizabeth caught at his shoulders as he rose above her, slipped between her thighs. She felt a seeking touch, warm and hard, and a fleeting moment of purely instinctive panic vanished as her body responded wildly to the touch of him. His mouth covered hers in a fiery kiss, and even as his tongue possessed her mouth, his body moved in a slow, powerful thrust to possess hers.
She barely felt the slight, quick pain; all her senses were caught up with the throbbing fullness of him inside her. The sensation was wild, strange, heated. She had lost her breath somewhere along the way, and her body held him with a tightness she could feel as well as he could.
Kelsey caught his breath with a rasping sound, his eyes closing briefly, and even through the hot veils of passion he realized something. But nothing could have stopped him in that moment, and when her body sheathed him totally with its tight heat, he forgot everything but spiraling hunger.
She moaned deeply, arching up to meet him as he began moving, the feverish heat inside her burning until she couldn’t stand it. She lost control even as he did, matching his hot rhythm with her own wild response, hearing his groan and her own whimpering cries and feeling the primitive need to fuse their bodies together until nothing could ever tear them apart. He could never be hers except by his own will, but her body claimed his for all time and she knew there would never be another for her.
The hot, sweet tension coiled unbearably and yet she wanted it to last forever. But her body surged toward release, desperate, driven, and when it came at last in a blinding, shattering explosion she cried out wildly, barely hearing Kelsey’s ragged groan of pleasure.
His weight was wonderful, and Elizabeth murmured a protest when he would have left her. He eased up on his elbows, still breathing roughly, gazing down at her flushed, contented face.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked huskily.
In a dreamy voice, she said, “I didn’t notice.”
Brushing a strand of her silver hair back, he said, “Dammit, why didn’t you tell me?”
Elizabeth didn’t pretend to misunderstand. Smiling a little, her eyes darkened, she said simply, “You would have changed your mind again.”
Even though his mind and instincts had balked at the thought of Blaine Mallory having been Elizabeth’s lover, Kelsey had never even considered the possibility that no one h
ad been. And when he told her that—somewhat severely—she laughed and raised her head to kiss his chin.
“Thanks a lot.”
Kelsey shook his head helplessly. “You’re just so damned beautiful! If I’d been around, you wouldn’t have gotten out of high school without me as your lover.”
“But you weren’t around,” she murmured, smiling. “And I was never much impressed by the sexual revolution. If it didn’t feel right, then it obviously wasn’t right for me.”
He shook his head again, bemused. “If I’d been thinking at all a few minutes ago, I would have thought you’d had at least one long-term relationship behind you. You were so—so natural.”
“Because I belonged to you,” she said matter-of-factly. “I felt completely natural.”
He was obviously troubled by that, and she lifted her head to kiss him lightly.
“Stop brooding,” she ordered in a gentle tone. “I love you too much to ever regret this. Ever. No matter what happens.”
“Elizabeth …” He lowered his head to kiss her, the first tenderness almost instantly becoming something else, and they both felt the stirring of need again.
Raising his head, Kelsey half closed his eyes and caught his breath when he felt her inner muscles immediately tighten around him. A bit thickly, he said, “For an inexperienced lady, you sure know what you’re doing.”
Elizabeth smiled a slow, unconsciously sultry smile. “Just doing what comes naturally.”
Kelsey approved wholeheartedly.
SEVEN
“WHERE THE HELL’S my shoe?”
Folding the quilt neatly, Elizabeth gave him an innocent look. “I think it flew down into the hall. You didn’t seem to be paying attention at the time.”
“I was being seduced,” he retorted, going to the edge of the loft to look downward.
Hearing his half-conscious curse, she said, “Horses do leave evidence of their presence, I’m afraid.”
Kelsey looked at her. “Uh-huh. And, of course, my shoe would have to land in the middle of some of that evidence.”