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“I’m thirty-eight,” he murmured. “You’re nearly twenty-two. I’m sixteen years your senior. We’re almost a generation apart.”
“I don’t care…!” she began breathlessly.
His head lifted. “There’s no future in it,” he said mercilessly as he searched her face with quick, hard eyes. “You’re infatuated and set on your first love affair, but it can’t, it won’t, be me. I’m long past the age of hand-holding and petting.”
She stared at him uncomprehendingly. Her body was throbbing with emotion and she wanted nothing more than his mouth on hers.
“You aren’t even listening,” he chided huskily. His gaze fell to her soft mouth. “Do you know what you’re inviting?” He drew her up on her tiptoes and his hard mouth closed slowly, expertly, on hers, teasing her lips apart with a steady insistent pressure that made her body feel swollen and shivery. She hesitated, frightened by it.
“No, you don’t,” he whispered, containing her instinctive withdrawal. “If I teach you nothing else, it’s going to be that desire isn’t a game.”
One lean hand went to her nape, holding her head steady, and then his mouth began to torment hers in brief, rough, biting kisses. He aroused her so swiftly, so completely, that she pressed into him with a harsh whimper and clung, her legs trembling against his as her young body pleaded for relief from the torment that racked it.
She had no control, but Ted never lost his. Tempestuous seconds later, he lifted his mouth from hers slowly, inch by inch, his hands contracting around her upper arms as he eased her away from him and looked down into her shattered eyes.
She knew how she must look, with her swollen mouth still pleading for his kisses, her body trembling with the residue of what he’d aroused. She couldn’t hide her reaction. But none of his showed in his face.
“Do you begin to see how dangerous it is?” he asked with unusual softness in his deep voice. “I could have you against the counter, right now. You’re too shaken, too curious, to deny me, and I’m fairly human in my needs. I can see everything you feel, everything you want, in your face. You have no defense at all.”
“But you…don’t you…want me?” she stammered.
His face contorted for an instant. Then suddenly, all expression left his face. His hands contracted and one corner of his mouth pulled up. “I want a woman,” he said mercilessly. “You’re handy. That’s all it is.”
The revelation was shattering to her ego. “Oh. Oh, I…I see.”
“I hope so. You’re very obvious lately, Coreen. You hang around the ranch waiting for me, you dress up when I come into the feed store. It’s flattering, but I don’t want your juvenile attention or your misplaced infatuation. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that’s how it is. You aren’t the kind of woman who attracts me. You have the body and the outlook of an adolescent.”
She went scarlet. Had she been so obvious? She moved back from him, her arms crossing over her breasts. She was devastated.
His jaw tautened as he looked at her wounded expression, but he didn’t recant. “Don’t take it so hard,” he said curtly. “You’ll learn soon enough that we have to settle for what we can get in life. I’ll send Billy for supplies from now on. And you’ll find some excuse not to come out to the ranch to see Sandy. Won’t you?”
She managed to nod. With a tight smile and threatening tears, she escaped the storeroom and somehow got through the rest of the day. Ted had paused at the front steps to look back at her, an expression of such pain on his face for an instant that she might have been forgiven for thinking he’d lied to her about his feelings. But later she decided that it must have been the sunlight reflecting off those cold blue eyes. He’d let her down hard, but if he couldn’t return her feelings, maybe it was kinder in the long run.
From then on, Ted sent his foreman to buy supplies and never set foot in the feed store again. Coreen saw him occasionally on the streets of Jacobsville, the town being so small that it was impossible to avoid people forever. But she didn’t look at him or speak to him. They went to the same cafeteria for lunch one day, totally by chance, and she left her coffee sitting untouched and went out the back way as he was being seated. Once she caught him watching her from across the street, his face faintly bemused, but he never came close. If he had, she’d have been gone like a shot. Perhaps he knew that. Her fragile pride had taken a hard knock.
She was eventually invited out to the ranch to visit Sandy, again, supposedly with Ted’s blessing. Rather than make Sandy suspicious about her motives, she went, but first she made absolutely sure that Ted was out of town or at least away from the ranch. Sandy noticed and mentioned it, emphasizing that Ted had said it was perfectly all right for her to be there. Coreen wouldn’t discuss it, no matter how much Sandy pried.
Once, after that, Ted came upon her unexpectedly at a social event. She’d gone with Sandy to a square dance to celebrate her twenty-second birthday. Neither of them had dates. Sandy hadn’t mentioned that her brother had planned to go until they were already there. In the middle of a square dance, Coreen found herself passed from one partner to the other until she came face-to-face with a somber Ted. To his surprise, and everyone else’s, she walked off the dance floor and went home.
Gossip ran rampant in Jacobsville after that, because it was the first time in memory that any woman had snubbed Ted Regan publicly. Her father found it curious and amusing. Sandy was devastated; but it was the last time she tried to play Cupid.
There was one social event that Coreen hadn’t planned on attending, since Ted would certainly be there. Her father belonged to a gun club and Coreen had always gone with him to target practice and meetings. Ted was the club president.
Coreen had long since stopped going to the club, but when the annual dance came around, her father insisted that she attend. She didn’t want to. Sandy had already told her in a puzzled way that Ted went wild every time Coreen’s name was mentioned since that square dance. She probably wondered if it was something more than having Coreen snub him at the dance, but she was too polite to ask.
Ted’s venomous glare when he saw her at the gun club party was unsettling. She was wearing a sequined silver dress with spaghetti straps and a low V-neckline, with silver high heels dyed to match it. Her black hair had been waist-length at the time, and it was in a complicated coiffure with tiny wisps curling around her oval face. She looked devastating and the other men in attendance paid her compliments and danced with her. Ted danced with no one. He nursed a whiskey soda on the sidelines, talked to the other men present and glared at Coreen.
He seemed angry out of all proportion to her attendance. Ted had been wearing a dinner jacket with a ruffled white shirt and diamond-and-gold cuff links, and expensive black slacks. There was a red carnation in his lapel. The unattached women fell over themselves trying to attract him, but he ignored them. And then, incredibly, Ted had taken her by the hand, without asking if she wanted to dance, and pulled her into his arms.
Her heart had beaten her breathless while they slowly circled the floor. This was more than a duty dance, because his pale blue eyes were narrowed with anger. As the lights lowered, he’d maneuvered her to the side door and out into the moonlit darkness. There, he’d all but thrown her back against the wall.
“Why did you come tonight?” he said tersely. His blue eyes flared like matches as he stared at her in the light from the inside.
“Not because of you,” she began quickly, ready to explain that she hadn’t wanted to attend in the first place, but her well-meaning father had insisted. He didn’t know about her crush on Ted. He wanted her to meet some eligible men.
“No?” Ted had challenged. His cold gaze had wandered over her and his lids came down to cover the expression in them. “You want me. Your eyes tell me so every time you look at me. You can walk away from dances or refuse to speak to me on the street, but you’re only fooling yourself if you think it doesn’t show!”
Her dark blue eyes had glittered up at him with temper. “You’re very conceited!”
He’d paused to light a cigarette, but as his eyes swept over her, he suddenly tossed it off the porch into the sand and stepped forward. “It isn’t conceit.” He bit off the words, jerking her into his body.
His hand caught her by the nape and held her face poised for the downward descent of his. Her missed breath was audible.
The look in her eyes made him hesitate. Despite all her denials, she looked as if he was offering her heaven. Her breath came in sharp little jerks that were audible.
That excited him. His free hand went to her bodice and spread at the top of the V-neckline against her soft, warm skin. She gasped and as her mouth opened, his lips parted and settled on it. Her faint, anguished moan sent him spinning right off the edge of the world.
He forgot her age and his conscience the second he felt her soft, warm mouth tremble before it began to answer the insistent pressure of his own. He remembered too well the first taste he’d had of her, because his dreams had tormented him ever since. He’d thought he was imagining the pleasure he’d had with her, but he wasn’t. The reality was just as devastating as the memory, and he couldn’t help himself.
The hand behind her head contracted, bringing her mouth in to closer contact with his, and his free hand slid uninhibitedly down inside her bodice to cover one small, hard-tipped breast.
She protested, but not strongly enough to deter him. The feel of that big, warm, callused hand so intimately on her skin made her tremble with new sensations. She clung to his arms while he tasted and touched. She barely noticed the tiny strap being eased down her arm, or the slow relinquishing of her mouth, until she felt his mouth slide down her throat, over her collarbone and finally onto the warm silkiness of her breast.
She made a harsh sound and her nails bit into his arms.
“Don’t cry out,” he whispered at her breast. “Bite back those exciting little cries or we’re going to become the evening’s entertainment.” His hand lifted her gently to his waiting mouth. He took the hard nipple inside and slowly, tenderly, began to suckle her.
She wept noiselessly at the ecstasy of his touch, clinging, shivering, as his mouth pleasured her. When it lifted, she hung against him, yielded, waiting, her eyes half-closed and misty with arousal. He looked at her face for one long instant before he pushed the other strap down her arm and watched the silky material fall to her waist. His hands arched her and his head bent. He hesitated just long enough to fill his eyes with the exquisite sight of her bare breasts before he took her inside his hungry mouth, and for a few brief, incandescent seconds, she flew among the stars with him.
She slumped against him when he finally managed to stop. She heard him dragging in long, ragged breaths while he lifted her bodice back into place and eased the shoulder straps up to support it. Then he held her while she shivered.
“Am I the first?” he asked roughly.
“Yes.” She couldn’t have lied to him. She was too weak.
The callused hands at her back contracted bruisingly for a minute. He cursed under his breath, furiously. “This is wrong. Wrong!” He bit off the words. “You’re so young…!”
Her soft cheek nuzzled against his throat. “I love you,” she whispered. “I love you more than my own life.”
“Stop it!” He pushed her away. His eyes were frightening, glittery and dangerous. He moved back, his face rigid with controlled passion, tormented. “I don’t want your love!”
She looked at him sadly, her big blue eyes soft and gentle and vulnerable. “I know,” she said.
His face corded until it looked like a mask over the lean framework of his cheekbones. His fists clenched at his sides. “Stay away from me, Coreen,” he said huskily. “I have nothing to give you. Nothing at all.”
“I know that, too,” she said, her voice calm even as her legs trembled under her. At that moment, he looked capable of the worst kind of violence. “You won’t believe me, but I only came tonight because my father wanted me to.”
His face looked drawn, older. His eyes were like a rainy day, full of storms. “Don’t build any dreams on what just happened. It was only sex,” he said bluntly. “That’s all it was, just a flash of sexual need that got loose for a minute. I’ll never marry, and love isn’t in my vocabulary.”
“Because you won’t let it be,” she said quietly.
“Leave it alone, Coreen,” he returned coldly.
She felt the chill, as she hadn’t before. He was as unapproachable now as stone. The song that was playing inside suddenly caught her attention and she laughed a little nervously. “Thanks for the Memory.” She identified it, and thought how appropriate it was.
“Don’t kid yourself that this was any romantic interlude,” he said with brutal honesty as he fought for breath. “You’re just a kid…little more than a stick figure with two marbles for breasts. Now go away. Get out of my life and stay out!”
He’d walked off and left her out there. It was a summer night and warm. Coreen, wounded to the heart by that parting shot, had gone to her father’s car and sat down in it. She hadn’t gone back inside even when her father came out and asked what was wrong. A headache, she’d told him. He’d seen her leave with Ted, and he knew by the look on her face that she was hurt. He made their excuses and took her home.
Coreen had never gone to another gun club meeting or accepted another invitation from Sandy to come out to the ranch and ride horses. And on the rare occasions when Ted came into the store, she’d made herself scarce. She couldn’t even meet his eyes, ashamed of her own lack of control and his biting comment about her body. For a man who thought she was too small-breasted, he certainly hadn’t been reticent about touching her there, she thought. She knew so little about men, though, perhaps he meant the whole thing as a punishment. But if that had been so, why had his hands trembled?
Eventually she’d come to grips with it. She’d put Ted into a compartment of her past and locked him up, and she’d pretended that the night of the dance had never happened. Then her father had a heart attack and became an invalid. It was up to Coreen to run the business and she wasn’t doing very well. That was when Barry had come into her life. Coreen and her father had been forced to put the feed store on the market and Barry had liked the prospect of owning it. He’d also liked the looks of Coreen, and suddenly made himself indispensable to her and her father. Anything they needed, he’d get them, despite her pride and protests.
He was always around, offering comfort and soft kisses to Coreen, who was upset about the doctor’s prognosis, and hungry for a little kindness. Ted’s behavior had killed something vulnerable in her. Barry’s attention was a soothing balm to her wounds.
Ted had heard that his favorite cousin, Barry, was seeing a lot of Coreen. Ted stopped by often to see her father, and he watched her now, in an intense, disturbing way. He was gentle, almost hesitant, when he spoke to her. But Coreen had learned her lesson. She was distant and barely polite, so remote that they might have been strangers. When he came close, she moved away. That had stopped him in his tracks the first time it happened.
After that, he became cruel with her, at a time when she needed tenderness desperately. He began to taunt her about Barry, out of her father’s hearing, mocking her for trying to entice his rich cousin to take care of her. Everyone knew that the feed store was about to go bankrupt because of the neglect by her sick father and his mounting medical bills.
The taunts frightened her. She knew how desperate their situation was becoming, and she daren’t ask Ted for help in his present mood. Ironically his attitude pushed her further into Barry’s waiting arms. Her vulnerability appealed to Barry. He took over, assuming the debts and taking the load from Coreen’s shoulders.
The night her father died, Barry took charge of everything, paid all the expenses and proposed marriage to Coreen. She was confused and frightened, and when Ted came by the house to pay his respects, Barry wouldn’t let him near her. Ted left in a furious mood and Barry convinced Coreen that his cousin hadn’t wanted to speak to her, anyway.
Barry was beside her every minute at the funeral, keeping her away from Ted’s suspicious, concerned gaze and making sure he had not a minute alone with her. The same day, he presented her with a marriage license and coaxed her into taking a blood test.
Ted left on a European business trip just after he refused Barry’s invitation to be best man at the wedding. Ted’s face when Barry made the announcement was indescribable. He looked at Coreen with eyes so terrible that she trembled and dropped her own. He strode out without a word to her and got on a plane the same day. It was confirmation, if Coreen needed it, that Ted didn’t care what she did with her life as long as it didn’t involve him. She might as well marry Barry as anyone, she decided, since she couldn’t have the one man she loved.
But she was naive about the demands of marriage, and especially about the man Barry really was behind his social mask. Coreen lived in agony after her marriage. Barry knew nothing of tenderness and he was incapable of any normal method of satisfaction in bed. He had abnormal ways of fulfillment that hurt her and his cruelty wore away her confidence and her self-esteem until she became clumsy and withdrawn. Ted didn’t come near them and Sandy’s invitations were ignored by Barry. He all but broke up her friendship with Sandy. Not that it wouldn’t have been broken up, anyway. Ted moved to Victoria and took Sandy with him, keeping the old Regan homestead for a holiday house and turning over the management of his cattle ranch to a man named Emmett Deverell.
Barry had known how Coreen felt about Ted. Eventually Ted became the best weapon in his arsenal, his favorite way of asserting his power over Coreen by taunting her about the man who didn’t want her. They’d been married just a year when Ted finally accepted Barry’s invitation to visit them in Jacobsville. Coreen hadn’t expected Ted to come, but he had.
By that time, Coreen was more afraid of Barry than she’d ever dreamed she could be. He was impotent and he made intimacy degrading, a disgusting ordeal that made her physically sick. When he drank, which became a regular thing after their marriage, he became even more brutal. He blamed her for his impotence, he blamed her infatuation for Ted and harped on it all the time until finally she stiffened whenever she heard Ted’s name. She tried to leave him several times, but a man of such wealth had his own ways of finding her and dealing with her, and with anyone who tried to help her. In the end she gave up trying, for fear of causing a tragedy. When he turned to other women, it was almost a relief. For a long time, he left her alone and she had peace, although she wondered if he was impotent with his lovers. But he began to taunt her again, after he’d run into Ted at a business conference. And he’d invited Ted to visit them in Jacobsville.
Ted had watched her covertly during that brief visit, as if something puzzled him. She was jumpy and nervous, and when Barry asked her for anything, she almost ran to get it.
“See?” Barry had laughed. “Isn’t she the perfect little homemaker? That’s my girl.”
Ted hadn’t laughed. He’d noticed the harried, hunted expression on Coreen’s face and the pitiful thinness of her body. He’d also noticed the full liquor cabinet and remarked on it, because everyone knew that it was Tina’s house that Barry and Coreen were staying in, and that Tina detested liquor.
“Oh, a swallow of alcohol doesn’t hurt, and Coreen likes her gin, don’t you, honey?” he teased.
Coreen kept her eyes hidden. “Of course,” she lied. He’d already warned her about what would happen if she didn’t go along with anything he said. He’d been even more explicit about the consequences if she so much as looked longingly at Ted. He’d invited his cousin to torment Coreen, and it was working. He was in a better humor than he’d enjoyed in months.
“Get us a drink. What will you have, Ted?”
The older man declined and he didn’t stay long. Ted had never come back to visit after that. Barry met his cousin occasionally and he enjoyed telling Coreen how sorry Ted felt for him. She knew that Barry was telling him lies about her, but she was too afraid to ask what they were.
Her life had become almost meaningless. It didn’t help that her earlier clumsiness had been magnified tenfold. She was forever falling into flowerpots or tripping over throw rugs. Barry made it worse by constantly calling attention to it, chiding her and calling her names. Eventually she didn’t react anymore. Her self-esteem was so low that it no longer seemed important to defend herself. She tried to run away. But he always found her…
He mentioned once how his mother, Tina, had controlled him all his life. Perhaps his weakness stemmed from her dominance and the lack of a father. His drinking grew worse. There were other women, scores of them, and in between he was cruel to Coreen, in bed and out of it. He was no longer discreet with his affairs. But he was less interested in tormenting Coreen as well. Until that card came from Sandy on Coreen’s birthday, the day before the tragic accident that had killed Barry. It had Ted’s signature on it, too, a shocking addition, and Barry had gone crazy at the sight of it. He’d gotten drunk and that night he’d held Coreen down on the sofa with a knife at her throat and threatened to cut her up….
A sudden buzz of conversation brought Coreen back to the present. Shivering from the memory, she focused her eyes on the big oak desk where the lawyer was sitting and realized that he was almost through reading the will.
“That does it, I’m afraid,” he concluded, peering over his small glasses at them. “Everything goes to his mother. The one exception is the stallion he willed to his cousin, Ted Regan. And a legacy of one hundred thousand dollars is to be left to Mrs. Barry Tarleton, under the administration of Ted Regan, to be held in trust for her until she reaches the age of twenty-five. Are there any questions?”
Ted was scowling as he looked at Coreen, but there was no shock or surprise on her face. There was only stiff resignation and a frightening calmness.
Tina got to her feet. She glanced at Coreen coldly. “I’ll give you a little while to get out of the house. Just to stem any further gossip, you understand, not out of any regard. I blame you for what happened to my son. I always will.” She turned and left the room, her expression foreboding.
Coreen didn’t reply. She stared at her hands in her lap. She couldn’t look at Ted. She was homeless, and Ted controlled the only money she had. She could imagine that she’d have to go on her knees to him to get a new pair of stockings. She was going to have to get a job, quick.
“She could have waited until tomorrow,” Sandy muttered to Ted when they were back outside, watching Tina climb into the Lincoln.
“Why did he do that?” Ted asked with open puzzlement. “For God’s sake, he was worth millions! He’s involved me in it, and she’ll have literally nothing for another year, until she turns twenty-five! She’ll even have to ask me for gas money!”
Sandy glanced at him with faint surprise at the concern he’d betrayed for Coreen. “She’ll cope. She knew Barry wasn’t leaving her much. She’s prepared. She said it didn’t matter.”
“Hell, of course it matters! Someone needs to talk some sense into her! She could sue for a widow’s allowance.”
“I doubt that she will. Money was never one of her priorities, or didn’t you know?”
He didn’t reply. His eyes were narrow and introspective.
“She looks odd, did you notice?” Sandy asked worriedly. “Really odd. I hope she isn’t going to do anything foolish.”
“Let’s go,” Ted said as he got in behind the steering wheel, and he sounded bitter. “I want to talk to that lawyer before we go home.”
Sandy frowned as she looked at him. She was worried, but it wasn’t about Coreen’s money problems, or the will. Coreen was hopelessly clumsy since she’d married Barry. She said that she liked to skydive and go up in sailplanes, especially when she was upset, because she said it relaxed her. But she’d related tales of some of the craziest accidents Sandy had ever heard of. Sometimes she thought that Barry had programmed Coreen to be accident-prone. The few times early in their marriage that she’d seen her friend, before Barry had cut her out of Coreen’s life, he’d enjoyed embarrassing Coreen about her clumsiness.
Ted didn’t know about the accidents. Until the funeral, he’d walked away every time Sandy even mentioned Coreen, almost as if it hurt him to talk about her. He had the strangest attitude about her friend. He didn’t care much for women, she knew, but the way he treated Coreen was intriguing. And the most curious thing had been the way he’d looked, holding Coreen in the living room earlier. The expression on his face had been one of torment, not hatred.
She was never going to understand her brother, she thought. The violence of his reaction to Coreen was completely at odds with the tenderness he’d shown her. Perhaps he did care, in some way, and simply didn’t realize it.
Sandy insisted on staying with Coreen overnight, and she offered her best friend the sanctuary of the ranch until she found a place to live. Coreen refused bluntly, put off by even the thought of having to look at Ted over coffee every morning.
Coreen got her friend away the next morning, after a long and sleepless night blaming herself and remembering Ted’s accusation of the day before.
“We’re just getting moved in. Remember, Ted leased the place, along with the cattle farm, and we moved to Victoria about the time you married Barry. Ted’s away a lot now, over at our cattle farm on the outskirts of Jacobsville, that Emmett Deverell and his family operate for him. We’re going to have thoroughbred horses at our place and some nice saddle mounts. We can go riding like we used to. Won’t you come with me? I’ll work it out with Ted,” Sandy pleaded.
“And let Ted drive me into a nervous breakdown?” came the brittle laugh. “No, thanks. He hates me. I didn’t realize how much until yesterday. He would rather it had been me than Barry, didn’t you see? He thinks I’m a murderess…!”
Sandy hugged her shaken friend close. “My brother is an idiot!” she said angrily. “Listen, he’s not as brutal as he seems when you get to know him, really he isn’t.”
“He’s never been anything except cruel to me,” Coreen replied, subdued. She pulled away. “Tell him to do whatever he likes with the trust, I won’t need it. I can take care of myself. Be happy, Sandy. You’ve got a great career with that computer company, even a part interest. Make your mark in the world, and think of me once in a while. Try to remember all the good times, won’t you?”
Sandy felt a chill run up her spine. Coreen had that restless look about her, all over again. There had been two bad accidents over the years because of Coreen’s passion for flying and skydiving: a broken leg and two cracked ribs. Sandy had gone to see her in the hospital and Barry had been always in residence, refusing to let Coreen talk much about how the accidents had happened.
“Please be careful. You really are a little accident-prone,” she began.
