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He leaned an elbow on the ironwork bedstead and allowed himself the luxury of just looking at her.
She looked good. Her skin glowed with health and her golden hair still possessed the glossy sheen he remembered. Pregnancy seemed to agree with her. That pleased him. He wanted more children, after this one. A whole house full. It wouldn’t be the way it had been when he was a boy, just him and his father and the endless string of housekeepers who had never managed to take the place that should have been filled by a wife and mother.
His kids would have more than that. His kids would have brothers and sisters—and both of their parents. There would be noise and laughter and a feeling of belonging.
Lacey went on rocking—and she smiled.
He wanted to touch her, to put his hand on the fine, smooth skin of her cheek, to run it down over her throat and then over her breasts, which looked sweet and firm and full, even beneath the shapeless denim dress she wore. He wanted to spread both hands on her belly, test the hardness of it now, when she was so close to term, maybe even get lucky and feel his baby kick.
But he knew she wouldn’t allow such intimate explorations of her body. Not now. Not so soon after he’d forced himself back into her life.
He was going to have to wait to have his hands on her. Probably until after he had managed to convince her to marry him.
Well, fair enough. He’d waited nine months, telling himself most of the time that this physical yearning he felt for Jenna’s little sister would eventually pass.
It hadn’t. And recently he’d allowed himself to accept the fact that it was only Mother Nature playing at irony.
Lacey Bravo, of all people, was his sexual ideal.
Explain it? He couldn’t, didn’t really even care to. Human beings were primates, after all, aroused by things they didn’t consciously understand. By certain scents and secretions. Desire had nothing at all to do with logic. It was a chemical reaction, the natural attraction of one healthy specimen for another, designed to perpetuate the species.
Now that Lacey was having his baby and he meant to marry her, he found it a real bonus that he wanted her so much. They might have their problems in a lot of different areas, but he didn’t think sex was going to be one of them.
She stopped rocking and lifted her head off the backrest. “Are you tired?”
He almost said no. But then he reconsidered. He could use a nap, as a matter of fact. He’d been up well before dawn. And he hadn’t been getting much sleep in the last week anyway, not since her letter had arrived.
“A little,” he said. “I’ll lie down for a while if you will, too.” He wanted to make certain she got plenty of rest.
“It’s a deal.” She put both hands on the rocker arms and levered herself to a standing position.
He asked, in a tone as offhand as he could make it, “Is there a double bed behind that curtain?”
She gave him a lazy grin. “Nice try. You get the daybed.” She shuffled out the back door. After a few minutes, he heard the toilet flush. She came back in, only to disappear behind the curtain in the corner.
He paid a short visit to the bathroom himself, then took off his shoes and lay down. Like every other piece of furniture in the cabin, the bed appeared to be something salvaged from an earlier era. It had creaky springs and a lumpy mattress and it wasn’t long enough to fully accommodate his six-foot-three-inch frame. But he stretched out as best he could, letting his stocking feet hang over the edge and pulling one of the long sausage-shaped bolster pillows under his head.
A strange kind of peace settled over him, a deep relaxation, a sense of well-being. It was a state he hadn’t experienced in a long time. He dropped off to sleep like a rock falling down a well.
The next thing he knew, someone was knocking on the door.
Logan bolted to a sitting position, blinking and staring around him, wondering where the hell he was.
Then it all fell into place. The long trip from California. To this cabin. In Wyoming. Lacey. Pregnant with his baby. She was resting now, on the other side of that curtain over there. He glanced at his Rolex. She’d been in there for less than an hour.
And whatever idiot had dropped in for a visit would probably wake her with the next knock.
He jumped to his feet and padded swiftly to the door. When he pulled it open, he found a cowboy on the other side. Behind the cowboy, hitched to one of the poles that held up the porch, a handsome horse with a reddish-brown coat let out a low snort and flicked his shiny tail at a couple of flies.
The cowboy lifted his hat in greeting, then settled it back on his head. “I’m Zach Bravo.” His gaze shifted down, paused on Logan’s stocking feet, then quickly shifted up again. “Just thought I’d stop by and check on things out here.”
“Logan?” It was Lacey’s voice, sounding slow and sleepy, from the other end of the room. “Who is it?” She stood just beyond the curtain in the corner, her feet bare, her face soft and her hair mussed from sleep.
“It’s Zach,” said the cowboy, craning to see around Logan, who had positioned himself squarely in the open doorway.
Lacey grinned and started toward them. “Come on in. I can probably scare up a beer if you want one.”
Zach Bravo stayed where he was. “No. Got to get a move on. Never enough hours in a day around here. But Tess asked me to see if you wanted to come over to the house for dinner tonight. Around six?”
Logan stepped aside a little as Lacey came up next to him. “Zach, this is Dr. Logan Severance, a…dear friend.” Logan didn’t miss her slight hesitation over what to call him. He’d bet his license to practice medicine that Zach Bravo didn’t miss it either.
“Pleased to meet you.” The rancher held out a tough brown hand.
Logan took it, gave it a firm shake. “The pleasure is mine.”
“You’ll come for dinner then…both of you?”
Lacey lifted an eyebrow at Logan. He nodded and she smiled at her cousin. “We’ll be there. Six o’clock.”
“So I’m your dear friend,” Logan challenged the minute Zach Bravo had mounted his horse and trotted away down the dirt road that led to the cluster of ranch buildings just over the next rise.
Lacey made a noise in her throat. “What should I have said? Former lover? The father of my child?”
“How about husband?”
“But that wouldn’t be true, now, would it?”
“We could make it true.”
She looked at him for a long, cool moment, then announced defiantly, “Zach comes out to check on me two or three times a day, which is just another reason why I’m perfectly safe on my own here.”
“I’d say he came to check on me this time.”
“Right. He’s protective. More proof that I’m in no danger at all, as I’ve constantly tried to make you realize. You simply do not have to stay in this cabin with me. If you want to be here when the baby’s born, you could take a room in the motel in town and—”
“I’m not leaving, Lacey—and your cousin strikes me as a conservative man, the kind of man who would feel a lot better if you were married to the father of your child.”
She put her hands on her hips. “You are truly relentless. Now we should get married so as not to offend Zach’s conservative sensibilities?”
“I’m only pointing out that—”
“Logan. You said you would drop it.”
Lacey gave him her best unwavering stare. She was wondering, as she had more than once in the past nine months, how she could love such an obnoxious man.
He stared right back, which forced her to demand, “Are you dropping it, Logan?”
He made a growling sound. “All right, all right. I’m dropping it.”
“Good.”
His handsome face had settled into a scowl. She watched him rearrange it to something more gentle. “We’ve got another hour and a half before we have to make our appearance at your cousin’s house. Why don’t you go on back behind that curtain and lie down again?”
She blew a tangled curl out of her eye. “No, thanks. I’m wide awake now.” She marched to the sleeping nook, ducked inside and came out with her lace-up hiking boots.
His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What are you doing?”
She sat in the rocker and pulled on one of the boots. It wasn’t easy, working around the bulge of her stomach, but she’d had a lot of practice in the past few weeks. Huffing and puffing, she tied the boot, pulled on the other one, tied it up, too.
“Lacey.”
She stood, turned to the bureau, picked up the brush lying on top and went to work on her hair. Their eyes met in the mirror. “I’m going out behind the cabin a ways. There’s a creek that runs by back there. Very picturesque. I’ve been doing a few sketches. Willows and cottonwoods, a few cows and their calves…” He was scowling again. She pretended not to notice. “I’ll be back in an hour or so, in plenty of time for dinner with Zach and Tess and the family.”
“Are you sure that you should—?”
She turned and pointed the brush at him. “Don’t, all right? Just…don’t. Nothing’s going to happen to me down by the creek. It’s barely a hundred yards from the back door, for heaven’s sake.”
“What if some big bull comes at you?”
“It’s not an issue.”
“This is a cattle ranch, isn’t it? If I’m not mistaken, bulls live on cattle ranches.”
She struggled to contain her building exasperation. “There’s a barbed-wire fence that runs between this particular spot on the creek and those cattle I mentioned. If there are any bulls nearby, they would most likely be on the other side of that fence.”
“But—”
“Read my lips. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll come with—”
“Logan. Stop. If you insist on staying here, in a twenty-by-twenty-foot space with me, we’re going to have to give each other a little breathing room. I am going alone.”
He shut his mouth, made another growling sound and then dropped to the side of the daybed. “Great. Fine. Do what you want to do. You never in your life did anything else.” He braced his elbows on his spread knees and shook his head at his stocking feet.
Tenderness washed through her. She set down the brush. “You’re the one who needs more rest. Come on. Stretch out and sleep for an hour. You’ll have the cabin all to yourself. Forget all your cares and I’ll wake you up when I get back.”
He didn’t say anything, just went on staring at his socks.
“Logan…”
“All right. I’ll take a damn nap.” He lay down on his back with his feet over the edge, turned his face to the wall and shut his eyes.
Smiling to herself, Lacey collected her sketch pad and a couple of nice, soft pencils from the chair where she’d set them earlier. Before she went out, she couldn’t resist whispering, “Sleep well.”
“Thanks,” he grumbled, neither turning his head nor opening his eyes. “Be careful, for God’s sake.”
“I will, Logan. I promise you.”
He was sound asleep when she returned, lying in almost the same position she’d left him in, his hands folded on his chest. His head, however, was turned toward the room now.
Lacey stood over him, admiring the beauty of his body in repose, thinking that maybe she could do a few sketches of him sleeping—nothing too challenging right now. She wasn’t up for it. But she could certainly line out a few ideas in pencil.
Then, later, after the baby came, she could go back to what she’d started, delve more deeply. She loved the softness of his face when he was sleeping. And something else. Some…determined vulnerability. Some aspect of his will that came through even when he was unconscious, some sense that he distrusted the necessity of surrendering to sleep.
He had a wonderful face, handsome in a classic way. And very masculine—she’d always thought so, even before she realized she was in love with him. A broad forehead, a strongly defined supraorbital arch, so the eyes were set deep, shadowed in their sockets. Cheekbones and jawline were clean and clear-cut and his finely shaped mouth possessed just enough softness to betray the sensuality she’d discovered with such delight during their five incredible days together last fall.
Though he didn’t know it, she had painted him. A number of nudes, from memory, in the first months after their affair. She believed they were her best work so far. And she had exercised great ingenuity, in all of them, so as not to reveal his face.
Had she been wrong to paint him without his knowledge? After all, Logan Severance was not the kind of man who posed for nude studies—let alone the kind who would allow them to be hung in an art gallery for all the world to see. Those paintings weren’t in any gallery yet. But someday they would be. Lacey had told herself that she’d protected his privacy by obscuring his face. But sometimes she felt just a little bit guilty about them, wondered what his reaction would be if he ever saw them—which he would probably have to. Someday.
She wasn’t particularly looking forward to that day.
“What are you staring at?”
Caught thoroughly off guard, Lacey gasped and stepped back. She could have sworn he was sound asleep just seconds ago. But those eyes looking into hers now were clear and alert.
“Well?”
The truth slipped out—or at least, some of it. “I was thinking that I’d like to sketch you while you’re sleeping.”
“Why?”
“Something in your face. Something…unguarded, but unwillingly so. It’s very appealing.”
He grinned. “You like me best unconscious, is that what you’re telling me?”
She’d regained her composure enough to reply smartly, “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but now that you’ve done it yourself…”
“Marry me. You can watch me sleep for the rest of our lives.”
She resolutely did not respond to that. “We should go. It’s quarter of six.”
At the big side-gabled wood frame ranch house, Zach introduced his family to Logan.
“This is Tess.” He put his arm around his wife. “And our daughters, Starr and Jobeth.”
The older of the two girls, a beauty of about eighteen, with black hair and Elizabeth Taylor eyes, gave him a polite “Hello.” The younger one, Jobeth, who looked ten or eleven, smiled shyly and nodded.
Next, Logan shook Edna Heller’s slim, fine-boned hand and learned that she had once been the ranch’s housekeeper but now was one of the family; her only daughter had married a Bravo cousin, Cash. She lived in the foreman’s cottage, which was just across the drive from the main house.
“And this is Ethan John,” Tess said. She held up a big, healthy blue-eyed baby. “Ethan is just six months old today.” The baby gurgled out something that sounded almost like a greeting.
They ate at the long table in the Bravos’ formal dining room. Ethan John sat in his high chair and chewed on a teething ring and occasionally let out a happy, crowing laugh.
“Ethan’s already had his dinner,” Tess explained. “We enjoy having him with us during meals, but we don’t enjoy watching the food fly. So I feed him early and he sits with us and everybody’s happy.” Tess turned her smile on Logan. “Do you have children, Mr. Severance?”
Logan answered that one carefully. “Not yet.”
