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Lucas let Reba go ahead of him, watching the tight way she held her body, the tight way she walked. He wanted to tell her it was okay, he wasn’t going to get put off a major purchase because of one outdated hunting shack.
And even if he did decide against the place, on his father’s behalf, Jim Broadbent was right. A buyer would show up soon. She could relax. Meanwhile, whatever happened with the sale, he had no intention of riding rough-shod over her feelings.
He almost reached out to her with the same touch of support and understanding that she’d rejected yesterday when they’d spotted the dead beast, but she was too far in front, and the chance was lost.
For the moment.
But after the way she’d flirted with him in the car, his whole body was primed by the physical stretch of the recent ride and ached for its next opportunity.
The cabin wasn’t locked, of course. The porch floorboards resonated beneath her feet, and by the time he’d stepped onto it behind her, she’d rattled the old door handle and swung the door open. He’d expected a dusty, musty interior, with dirt-misted window panes, uneven floors and shabby furnishings, but it wasn’t like that at all.
“I came up here two days ago, cleaned it and aired it out,” she explained. She’d even put fresh flowers in a couple of vases. There was the smell of lavender in the air. The furniture was old, true, but of good quality, and there were new throw pillows and slipcovers on the couch and two armchairs. The kitchen, also, must have been modernized only about ten years ago.
The old fireplace had been replaced with a modern, glass-fronted wood-burning stove. It was fan-forced, and would give out fantastic heat. You could slide the Persian-style rug closer, arrange the throw pillows in a heap on top, and sit here in front of it.
Toasting marshmallows.
Baking potatoes wrapped in foil.
Making love.
Hard to imagine, on an eighty-five-degree day, that such heat could be needed, but Lucas knew that temperatures could drop to thirty below, up here. Raine’s white Christmas was a pretty safe bet.
The rooms were way too cramped for Raine’s taste, though. He and Reba stood within touching distance because they had little choice. The windows were too small and the ceilings were too low. His stepmother would claim claustrophobia and boredom within a day.
Bulldoze the log cabin, too?
Absolutely not! Raine could build a new one, open plan, with twenty-foot ceilings, acres of glass and satellite TV, in some ostentatious location. Lucas would lay claim to this place for himself—his cut of the purchase, his finder’s fee. It was an irrational, emotional impulse, and he wasn’t sure why he felt it so strongly. He knew it didn’t make sense. He knew it wasn’t even his decision to make.
What was happening, here?
Too much.
More than flirtation.
Already, he understood more than he wanted to about why Reba’s roots ran so deep into this soil.
“Do you want to see upstairs?” she asked him.
“Please.” Sounded as if he were begging, and maybe he was.
She went ahead, denim rear end rocking as usual, and he followed closely, unable to tear himself free of her aura, so that when she suddenly turned and spoke, he was right behind. “I should have showed you the—”
The point she broke off was the point where his hand landed on her hip. Her body softened in an instant, and swayed toward him. Her eyes widened and went dark. Since he was one step below, her mouth was level with his, and only an inch away. He could feel her breath cooling his lip. She didn’t attempt to increase the distance.
Good.
They’d gotten to this, at last.
He hadn’t been sure that they would, and her huge eyes told him it might already be more than she’d expected.
He anchored her other hip in place, to keep the rest of her where she was, and watched her lips press together, then part again. She had another, more determined and even more doomed attempt at saying what she’d wanted to say before. “While we were downstairs, I should have showed you the—” Then she stopped again.
“Just show me the bedroom.” His voice rasped, and the last word lost itself on her mouth.
Her lips were as warm and sweet as ripe fruit. They responded just the way he’d known they would. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look, he only wanted to taste and feel. She stayed in place, thighs pressed to his groin, which meant she had to know just what her body had already done to him.
Oh, yes, she knew! She was overwhelmed by it, but she knew.
Did she know that she’d begun to shimmy against him, too? Her hips slid and rocked, slid and rocked. The movement went just an inch or two either way, and was oh-so-slow, but it made him throb and want to lunge. Her breasts, in their thin covering of lace and stretch cotton, jutted softly against his chest and he imagined her nipples, pebbled as hard as he was, from the slow friction between them.
How would they look, her nipples? Puckered with need? Definitely! Big and dark, or dainty and pink? He didn’t care either way, he just wanted to know, see, touch and kiss.
“Show me the bed,” he said.
Without waiting for her answer, he deepened the kiss, tangling his tongue in her mouth. He tasted the fresh, sweet apple she’d withheld from the horses several minutes ago. He abandoned her hips and slid his hands higher, trailed his fingertips across her breasts and thought, “Yes! I knew it. Like cherry stones.”
She sank back with her spine arched. Suddenly she was seated on the wooden tread of the stairs, reaching up for him, eyes half-closed and hair threatening to tumble from its high knot. He went after her, chasing the taste of her mouth, chasing her body heat. He ended up bracing his fingers on the stair edge, his weight looming over her.
She pulled him lower. His face fell between her breasts and she gasped and threw her head to one side. He felt the heat-perfumed mass of her hair drift onto his hand. The soft mounds of her breasts against his cheeks and nose and lips felt like warm satin.
Her thighs parted and squeezed his ribs, half supporting him while he rolled a little. He slid her top up, clumsy with desire. Cupping her with one hand, he thumbed her hardened nipple, then replaced his thumb with his mouth, through a lace and net bra.
She dragged herself back, higher up the stairs, and held his face between her hands. Her eyes were still enormous, filled with a wild light and a soft flame of doubt. Throbbing, damming himself back, he realized she was still debating this. He pressed his lips together, struggling with a code of honor that said it had to be her own decision, made freely.
“Okay, I’ll show you the bed,” she said at last, on another gasp of air.
Her fingers feathered up his neck and into his hair and she stretched to kiss him, her mouth hungry and full of promise. Lucas discovered he was shaking, and that he hadn’t breathed for the entire time she’d studied his face.
They scrambled the rest of the way up the stairs, breathless. There were just two bedrooms built into the roof line, both of them small, and he had to duck his head through the low doorway of the slightly larger one. Beside a double bed covered in fresh white sheets and a faded patchwork quilt, Reba crossed her arms, pulled her tank top over her head and unsnapped her bra.
Both garments fell to the floor in a pale heap and she turned to face him, straight-backed, arms at her sides, giving him the sight of her bare breasts and peaked nipples like a gift. Her eyes were huge and her breath came in shallow pants.
And he knew so totally that she just—didn’t—do—this, she just didn’t bring men to this cabin to make love, on a regular basis, or ever. Letting her make the decision on her own wasn’t enough.
Not with a woman like Reba.
He knew what he wanted. Even if the corporation didn’t buy the ranch, he wanted a piece of it to take away with him. He wanted a piece of Reba Grant, her passion and her intensity, to take away with him in the form of his memory of how she’d feel in his arms, writhing beneath his touch.
But knowing what he wanted wasn’t good enough.
Instead of wrapping himself around her as he wanted to, instead of lifting her against him and pulling at her jeans, he allowed himself just one soft brush of his knuckles across those jutting gifts. They were fuller and rounder than he’d expected them to be, with the crests even bigger and darker than his imagination had painted them.
Then he placed his hands on the knobs of her shoulders, looked into her eyes and said, “Wait.”
She seemed to understand exactly why he’d stopped. Instead of taking it as a way out, however, or even giving herself any further pause for thought, she lifted her chin, looked at him with narrowed, glittering eyes and said, “No.”
“Why, Reba?”
“Because I want this. And so do you. Don’t ask questions. Do me the courtesy of believing I know what I want.”
“I’m not offering anything beyond—”
“I’m not asking for anything beyond. This is now. That’s all. It’s more than I—way more than I expected, even an hour ago, but—” she made her hand into a fist over her stomach “—it feels right, here. It feels necessary.”
For another moment Lucas hesitated, and Reba felt the possibility of rejection slam into her.
Could he?
He couldn’t!
He wanted this every bit as much as she did. She knew that. He hadn’t denied it. The only way he’d reject her would be if some decent, chivalrous, protective instinct overcame him, and he decided that his making love to her right now was a favor she’d be better off without.
Despite the depth she’d glimpsed in him yesterday, Reba wasn’t convinced that a corporate prince like Lucas Halliday possessed any such chivalrous instincts. She certainly didn’t want him to possess them, right now. Gordie McConnell had them, and she was sick of them! Lucas was accurate in what he suspected about her narrow previous experience, and she didn’t want that to get in the way.
Yes, Lucas, you’re right, I’ve never done anything like this before.
Anything like this.
She and Gordie had made love, yes, but Gordie would never have done so in the middle of a working day, with no advance planning, in a location not previously designated as appropriate. And that burned her. So much about her life, and the crossroads she’d reached in it, burned her right now.
Dear Lord, she was nearly twenty-seven years old, she was about to have her home pulled out from under her like an old blanket off a horse’s back. She was going to make love to Lucas now—a rough analysis of her mental calendar told her it should be safe—and she’d think about the ramifications later. She was going to do this before something in her soul atrophied into dry wood and she lost the ability to even imagine a different life for herself, let alone go out and find it!
“There’s no doubt you know what you want.” Lucas’s voice caught on several of his words, and she felt his gaze on her peaked nipples like a caress. “Don’t you care what I want?”
“If you don’t want this…me…my body, then there’s been something very wrong with your signals, since yesterday.” She drew in a deep breath, felt her breasts lift, saw his tongue lap against his lower lip. His jeans strained at the front. He stepped closer to her, but not close enough.
“I’m talking about the ranch,” he said.
“You think this is about—” Anger tightened her scalp. She dragged in a shaky breath and tried again. “You think I’m trying to sell you the ranch, right now, with this? That’s— That’s—”
“No! Hell, no, Reba!” Another step, urgent, that brought him toe to toe against her. He slid his hands up to her elbows. “I just wanted you to consider whether doing this—making love—” the word melted on his tongue like syrup “—would feel different if you knew my decision on the purchase.”
Again, she didn’t hesitate. “If you’ve made a decision, I don’t want to know. Because it wouldn’t make a difference. Okay?”
He nodded, touched her hair, her neck, let his hand trail lower, and bent his head to her mouth. “Yeah, you’re right, I guess,” he said, on a soft growl. “Wouldn’t make a difference to me, either.”
For the first time, she held him. She ran her palms up his strong back, and learned the pattern of his muscles, on either side of his spine. She helped him wrench the unwanted T-shirt up and over his head, put her tongue to her fingertip then, looking down, touched the moisture to his nipples. They hardened into little beads as it evaporated, and she felt a coil of pleasure and satisfaction deep inside.
She could do this to a man. She could do this to Lucas Halliday. And she wanted to do a whole lot more.
“Tell me what you like,” she said, branding him with kisses between every phrase. “Show me. Touch me in all the places you want. With your hands. With your mouth. Teach me, Lucas.”
“Hell, haven’t you ever—?”
“Yes. Yes, I have. But not like this. Nothing like this.” She reached for the front of his pants, fumbling a little as she snapped them open. She began to ease the zipper down, and he took a hissing breath. “Did I catch you?” she asked.
“No. Keep going. Yes, like that.”
She did, even more slowly, feeling the straining ridge of cloth and man pushing at her hand. When he was free, she slid trousers and underwear down in one movement. She dropped low in front of him and let her mouth explore the texture of his thigh on the way. She knew exactly where he wanted to be touched, but kept that pleasure from him, stringing it out.
He couldn’t stand it, pulled her back up and hauled her toward him so that they were pressed together from her breasts to her knees. His thigh eased between her legs, and she knew how hot she must feel to him, how full and ready.
“Take off your boots and your jeans,” he said. “Let me look at you.”
The old bed creaked as he sat and levered his own boots off. He kicked them beneath the bed, beyond the hem of the quilt, and she did the same. Then he watched while she shimmied her jeans down her hips, and she could tell he liked everything he saw.
“I didn’t…uh…come equipped for this,” he said, reaching for her. “If we need to set limits, can we set them now?”
“It’s okay. The timing is— No limits.” She brushed his mouth with hers, lifted his hands and brought them to her breasts.
“None?”
“Anything that feels good. Anything that’s a part of this.”
“Touching you, Reba, that’s everything.”
They kissed until her bones softened to liquid, and she no longer knew where her body ended and his began. His mouth was everywhere. She gripped him the way she’d have gripped a bolting horse, only who was bolting, who was out of control? Him, or her?
She leaned back on her hands and he knelt in front of her, on the braided woollen rug, trailing his lips down her jaw, her neck, to her breasts and beyond, to her sweet core. She bucked and twisted and sank into the bed, clenched her fists against the flood that swept her away, then felt him slide higher and seek entry. She was so swollen and ready that he slipped into her in a single movement, and a sound wrenched out of him, making his body vibrate against her chest.
“Reba, you’re so beautiful, so strong. The way you moved just now…”
He thrust and she rocked, clinging to him, digging her fingers into the muscles of his back. She loved his weight on top of her and the almond smell of his hair in every breath she took.
Their climax came freely, and ebbed in a series of aftershocks that jerked both their bodies like whips. Reba didn’t know what to say, whether to say anything at all, so she kissed him again, touching her mouth to his softly, as if each kiss was a word of tenderness or thanks.
“Hey…” he finally whispered.
“Hey,” she answered back.
Chapter Four
“Y ou okay?” Lucas asked. He was watching the way Reba winced and shifted in the unforgiving, creaky office chair, his eyes bright with perception, as usual—perception and suspicion.
And, yes, okay, she didn’t feel very comfortable right now. Who could, with this tightness coming and going? The pregnancy book she’d bought talked about false contractions—irregular, tight rather than painful, normal and nothing to worry about. This was apparently them, and normal or not, she didn’t like them.
There wasn’t a lot of tenderness in Lucas’s question, she noted. The hard, calculating shell of a successful business man appeared to be back in place, making Reba question the other qualities she had thought she’d discovered in him last September, as well as the heat and exhilaration and happiness she would have sworn they’d both felt, the first time they’d made love.
“My back’s a little sore, that’s all,” she answered him, playing it down. “I’ve been on my feet a bit too long tonight.”
As soon as she’d waded through this confrontation with Lucas, she would ask Carla about the way her body felt and the way it should feel. She would consult the doctor, give in her notice to the steakhouse management tomorrow, spend the next three months flat out in bed, if she had to.
“You’re looking after yourself, I hope,” Lucas said. “You’re getting the proper prenatal care?” Again, it sounded like an accusation, rather than a sign of his concern. Where was the man who’d lain in bed with her, so hungry and so tender?
Reba lifted her chin. “The doctor thinks I’m doing great, especially considering the one I lost.”
“Is that what happened? Is that possible?”
