Teddy could feel the hard tension in the nape of his neck, tension her fingers instinctively tried—and failed—to ease. “I never had a reason to,” she confessed finally, her voice small and husky.
“You’re a virgin?” he demanded bluntly.
“Does it matter?” It was an answer.
Zach abruptly pulled away and jerked into a sitting position, his broad back turned to her. “Hell, yes, it matters!” he snapped violently. “I want you, Teddy, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be the first man you take to your bed.”
“Actually, it’s your bed,” she murmured, drawing her shirt closed with trembling fingers and hastily fastening her jeans before she sat up.
He threw one searing look over his shoulder at her, a scornful refusal to respond to that.
Teddy was coping fiercely with the coldness of rejection, even as she tried to understand what had caused it. Her pride was spared the possibility that it was lack of desire on his part, so it was either her virginity or their lack of protection. And since it was something she could explain away, Teddy chose the latter, even though she had a hollow feeling that wasn’t it.
“I wouldn’t get pregnant, Zach. The women in my family have been lucky to produce even one child each generation, going back over a hundred years. It’s … it’s a chemical thing or … or something.”
He said nothing.
She buttoned her shirt slowly, staring at his broad, tense back. Oddly enough, she didn’t feel self-conscious, and there was no regret at all for what had almost happened. Only that it hadn’t. Her body still ached for him. And Teddy, though Zach couldn’t know it—yet—was a very tenacious lady. So she concentrated on getting to the bottom of this.
“Afraid I’d yell rape to the police?” she asked lightly.
“No.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway. What, then, Zach? Afraid I’d hang around your neck forever because you’d be my first lover? Is that it?”
Zach refused to look at her. He was holding on to control with every muscle and gritted teeth, and only his certain knowledge of the dangers inherent in their situation allowed him that fragile command. His body pulsed heavily and his heart was still pounding against his ribs, but his mind was cold and clear.
He wouldn’t go through it again. He wouldn’t.
“Zach?”
But if that wasn’t it, he thought, then maybe … “Why me?” he asked harshly. “Just tell me.”
She hesitated, licking her dry lips, sensing her answer to his question was terribly important. And she didn’t know the answer he needed to hear. “Because … I want you. Because I’ve never felt that way before. Because I—oh, dammit, Zach, what d’you want me to say?”
They had known each other less than twelve hours. Zach knew he had been right.
“You’ve said it.” He reached down for his shirt, then rose quickly and shrugged into it, striding toward the door. “If I catch you outside this cabin,” he said, “I’ll turn you over my knee.”
Angry and bewildered, she snapped, “If I were into that sort of thing, I’d take you up on it!”
He turned at the door, his face hard and remote, a glitter of promise in his eyes. “Don’t push me, Teddy,” he warned. “You wouldn’t like the results. I meant what I said about shipping your little butt out of here.”
Sweetly, she said, “My pretty little butt, remember?”
For a moment, just an instant, she thought that would get a laugh out of him. But then he was gone.
Teddy leaned back against the wall and hugged her raised knees, frowning. She didn’t think much about her motives, partly because things looked confused in that direction and partly because she knew understanding wouldn’t change anything.
Firstly, it didn’t matter that she knew next to nothing about him or about what he was doing here. She had always relied on her instincts—they had never yet failed her—and her instincts told her now that Zach was a man she could trust.
Secondly, Teddy was damned if she’d allow the first man who had ignited her senses to reject her.
She let the question of motive stop right there.
What remained, logically, was the question of what she could do about the problem. Obviously, she first had to find out why Zach was so rabid on the subject of virgins. And she’d have to walk a fine line to keep from interfering with whatever he was doing here so that he wouldn’t send her away.
So. She had a few days, possibly a week or more, in which to convince a tremendously strong, taciturn man of stubborn disposition, uncertain temper, and powerful desires—who might or might not be doing something on the shady side of legal—that her virtuous state held no dangers at all for him.
And to aid her cause were the simple facts that he was more or less stuck here, more or less stuck with her, had already admitted in word and deed that he wanted her, and was obviously a highly sexed man who was unaccustomed to living a celibate life.
Teddy caught herself giggling, and she wondered what her mother would have said if she’d been aware of her daughter’s methodical summation of the problem.
“Go for it, Teddy.”
Yes, she decided, that’s what her mother would have said. Their names had changed through marriage over the generations, but Teddy could indeed trace her bloodline back through a long line of women who had been thrifty in almost every way. They tended to love only one man whom they always married—she had no idea about lovers—to produce one child, invariably a girl; to live in one house from marriage until burial; to possess at least one slightly unusual trait or talent—Teddy’s was an instinctive communication with animals—to use their hormones for things other than growing tall—not one had been taller than five-foot-three; to be red-haired, left-handed, myopic, resistant to most illnesses, and always stronger than they looked. Her mother had broken this pattern in only one respect: With great effort she had managed to produce a second daughter.
The genes handed down all these years from a long-ago and highly improbable mating of a highland Scot and a fiery-eyed Gypsy girl had remained dominant regardless of the fact that two Englishmen, a Spaniard, an Italian, two Cherokee Indians, a cowboy from Montana, an industrialist from California, a politician from New Hampshire, and half a dozen other hopefuls had all thrown their very best into the genetic pool.
Teddy’s father—the industrialist from California—had insisted that he’d tried his best but hadn’t managed to bequeath to his daughters his height, his excellent vision, his right-handedness, or his inborn ability to make a decent pot of coffee. And since Teddy was their first offspring, gleefully produced after ten years of trying, and since logically, her parents had expected her to be their solitary one, her father, in a rare burst of loquaciousness, had bequeathed to her instead a grand name which by rights should have been divided between at least three girls. (Jennifer was Jennifer Leigh, so it seemed her father had gotten it partially out of his system with Teddy and was too shocked by Jenny’s surprising and successful arrival to be creative.)
At any rate, Teddy had a solid line of slightly offbeat, definitely determined, prudent ladies at her back, and she had no intention of shaming them by meekly accepting rejection.
Zach Steele didn’t have a chance.
She smiled to herself, then suddenly exclaimed as a memory prodded her. She leaned forward to look down at the floor. It was there as she’d thought, looking deceptively innocent and unthreatening in its holster.
What had he said? He’d forgotten he wore a gun because he’d become used to it? A man like Zach, she thought, would be aware that his gun was not in its accustomed place. He’d feel the lack of it automatically.
But Zach had been upset when he’d left, she realized. Upset enough to walk out of the cabin and leave his gun lying on the floor. And that told her two things. He did indeed trust her enough to leave her, awake and aware, in the cabin with weapons another “hostage” would have turned on him. And he had had to fight himself—as well as her—to reject her.
/>
Teddy leaned back against the wall, smiling.
It was a start.
THREE
WHEN ZACH RETURNED to the cabin, the appetizing scents of bacon and pancakes filled the small room, coffee was bubbling on the stove, and Teddy was whistling cheerfully as she set the small table with paper plates and plastic utensils. He closed the door behind him and just stood there for a moment, watching her. She had put her hair up in a ponytail, which made her look ridiculously sweet and innocent, and about sixteen. Zach had automatically checked the dates on her driver’s license and knew she was ten years older.
He glanced toward the bed, seeing that she had hung his shoulder harness over one of the posts and getting the point of that: She hadn’t forgotten it, she knew it was there, and she had no intention of using the gun.
Zach couldn’t figure her out. Other than during the first hour or so of her captivity, she hadn’t reacted in any expectable way to the situation, and God knew she looked calm enough for a woman who had so nearly taken her first lover half an hour ago.
As for himself, Zach was more than a little grim. The icy water of the stream had done little to cool his desire, and even with a mind hell-bent on avoiding sex, he knew just how precarious his control with her really was.
He wanted her. In fact, he couldn’t recall a time when he’d wanted a woman more. Her soft, delightfully feminine body had fit into his arms with utter perfection, and the fire caged in that slim, delicate form had ignited his senses in a way he’d never known before. He didn’t doubt she was a virgin, and yet her innate capacity for passion was staggering and intriguing, tantalizing his mind with its promise.
She looked across the room at him just then, and Zach knew without a shadow of doubt that she had read his mind. He could literally feel something inside him turn over with a thud but had no idea what it was, or what it meant.
“Breakfast is ready.” Her voice was light and casual. “You’d better taste the coffee with care, though.”
Welcoming the distraction, Zach moved to the table and lifted the cup she indicated. The first sip of hot liquid nearly choked him, and he looked at her in disbelief. “I thought I’d tasted the worst coffee ever made, but this … What the hell is this?”
Unoffended, Teddy sat down at the table and shrugged. “My father says that making good coffee is an inborn talent. Unfortunately, it isn’t one of mine. Sorry.” She began buttering the stack of pancakes on her plate, adding, “You really did come prepared to stay awhile, didn’t you? Even butter and syrup. Who made out the shopping list?”
“I did.” He carried his cup to the sink, calmly emptied it, dumped the rest, then made a fresh pot. When it was ready, he carried his refilled cup back to the table and lifted a questioning brow at her.
“I’m used to it,” she said, indicating the remains of her own coffee.
“You must have a cast-iron stomach,” he commented, sitting down.
“Probably. I’m a good cook aside from coffee, however, so you don’t have to worry about food poisoning.”
She had made enough to feed an army, and after the first tentative taste confirmed her promise, Zach, in silent appreciation, cleared away most of what she’d prepared. Teddy waited until he had nearly finished before she quietly dropped her bomb.
“What was her name?”
After an instant’s hesitation he grunted, “Who?” and sat back, sipping his coffee.
Teddy met his stony gaze squarely, her own eyes calm and reflective. “That woman whose first lover you became. The one who somehow burned you. Did she get too demanding, Zach, was that it?”
“Drop it, Teddy.”
She smiled just a little and softly quoted: “ ‘He went back through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone. But he never told anybody.’ Kipling. You don’t tell anybody, either, do you, Zach? You just go your own way, alone and dangerous and stoic. Have you ever let a woman get close to you? Have you ever let down your guard that much?”
“Once.” He hadn’t meant to say it, and the bleak sound of his own voice startled him. And then he saw that her eyes had softened, gone impossibly tender, and even though he knew it wasn’t real, he couldn’t look away from her small, vital face.
“I’m sorry she hurt you.”
He found himself responding without thought, lost in the satiny brown depths of her eyes. “It wasn’t her fault.”
“What happened, Zach?” she asked gently. She almost held her breath, painfully aware of just how important it was that he tell her about this.
“It … happened, that’s all. It just happened.”
“Tell me.” She had unconsciously lowered her voice almost to a croon, instinctively using the tone that almost magically caused animals to trust her. Even wild ones. And she never thought—then—that it was the jungle-born part of Zach that was responding, that it was there he caged the hurts of his life.
Still without thought, he told her.
“I had set up a security system for an American businessman in South America. His family was there, and he worried about their safety. Rightly, as it turned out. His daughter was kidnapped. They’d breached my security system, and I felt responsible. So I went after her.”
Teddy felt her eyes widen at his flat tone, the utter simplicity of his words. What he had done was matter-of-fact and reasonable to him, as if every man was sometimes called upon to wade into shark-infested waters to retrieve something the swirling currents had carried away from him.
“They had taken her deep into the jungle, but I managed to get to her. And get her safely away from them. But they were after us, and we had miles of jungle to cross before we reached safety. It was hellish and dangerous, and the conditions were primitive in a way she’d never experienced before. She had no one to turn to but me. So she did.”
Zach’s mouth twisted, but he never looked away from Teddy’s eyes. “I found out too late she’d never had a lover. Still, it didn’t seem to matter. She said she’d never been in love before, either. And even though I knew the jungle was no place for love, I believed her. I believed her.”
Because I felt it too.
He didn’t have to say it, but Teddy heard it. She drew a deep breath. “What happened?”
His smile was bleak and rather frightening. “We got back to civilization. And with the mists of the jungle gone, I didn’t fit her image of what her husband should be. I was hard, she said. I frightened her. So I left.” And his next words seemed wrenched from him with a raw, torn sound. “I found out later—she had an abortion.”
Teddy stared into the diamond-bright sheen of his gray eyes and felt a throb of pain for him. No wonder, she thought dimly, he was rabid about being a woman’s first lover and distrustful of “the wrong time” for conception.
“I understood,” he said, calmer, his voice going remote. “What happened between us was an accident, a mistake. She didn’t want to pay for that mistake, and it was her right to make the decision.”
“What if she had told you?” Teddy hadn’t realized she was going to ask him and almost held her breath for his answer.
For the first time Zach looked away from her. His eyes were blind, opaque. He shoved his chair back and rose to his feet, his lean face expressionless. “I love kids,” he said abruptly, and turned away to go over to the clutter of equipment on the makeshift shelf.
Teddy sat where she was, staring at his back. She was unaware of the hot tears brimming over her eyes and searing their way down her cheeks. She was aware of nothing but what her heart was crying out to him.
How long has it been, Zach? How long have you tortured yourself? How many times have you asked yourself what you would have done if she’d told you about your child? Do you wonder if you would have had the right to ask that she give birth to your baby? Do you wonder if you would have asked, rightfully or not?
She got up slowly, stiffly, and began clearing the table. Zach was sitting at his equipment, earphones in place and closing her
out, signaling flatly his refusal to talk anymore. And Teddy respected his wishes, partly because he had withdrawn so completely and partly because he had told her what she guessed he had told no one else. Or at least no other woman.
It was enough. For now it was enough.
She occupied herself in quiet, hearing the occasional clicking of three different tape recorders that seemed to go on and shut off in response to some silent signal. She dug out her deck of playing cards and sat on the bed, playing solitaire and thinking.
He had told her, and in telling her, he had triggered something deep inside her. What was it? she wondered. There had been something deep in his eyes.…
And then she remembered. Years before, she had helped to track a cougar that had escaped a small circus and disappeared into the hills. She had found him, and her tearful, bitter swearing had brought the others to see what she had found. The cougar, young and powerful, had two legs caught and mangled by the cruel steel traps that some fool had set, and he’d had to be destroyed.
But during her few moments alone with the big cat, Teddy had looked into the eyes that held such terrible pain and yet were stoic, proud. Those proud, anguished eyes had seemed to say, “It was my own stupid fault”; he hadn’t blamed the cruel human who’d set the trap. The eyes of an intelligent creature with a wild heart, a creature that would have dragged his mangled body away and licked his wounds alone, given a choice.
Alone …
Teddy felt a wave of dizziness pass over her suddenly, and she seemed to be somewhere else. Behind her closed eyes, images flashed like a film reel gone mad, then slowed and steadied, and the focus sharpened.
A young soldier, his fatigues drenched and muddied, pushed his way cautiously through a cloying jungle, his gray eyes red-rimmed with weariness but sharp. On his left cheek was a long, thin slash that still trickled blood.
The same man, but older now, worked among a bank of electronic equipment, his long fingers moving with expert precision. But he was still in fatigues.
The street was crowded—it was New York—and the man moved with the silence of a shadow in that concrete jungle, yet his fatigues set him apart from the casual and business dress of the hurrying mass of people all around him.