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Again she held his eyes, trying to read what was in them, he guessed. He had nothing to hide. He would do what he’d said. He would never break his word to Jenny.
Finally, she nodded. Her hand moved, following the line of his jaw. Her fingers touched the softness of his mustache and then traced up the high cheekbone, thumb brushing across the long, dark lashes, feeling them move as his blue eyes closed in response to her touch.
Her fingers spread, threading into the slightly curling, sun-touched hair at his temple. They cupped the back of his head, pulling his mouth downward to hers, which opened to the caress of his tongue.
His mouth was warm and sweet. So dearly familiar. His tongue teased across her lips and then invaded them, suddenly demanding. Hot and hard. Evoking memories of his body moving above hers in the darkness.
Waking her from sleep. Or coming up behind her to cup his hands under her breasts and trail wet, pulling kisses down her throat as she stood at the kitchen sink, up to her elbows in dirty dishwater. Pushing his arousal into the softness of her bottom. Once Mac had pulled her panties off and simply unzipped his jeans, thrusting into her as she lay where he had placed her on his grandmother’s kitchen table.
Making love to her because that was what he wanted to do. Whenever he wanted to do it. Unthinking. Unplanned and unstudied. Sometimes quick and sometimes endlessly, heartbreakingly slow. This was what their lovemaking had once been. And in her demands for a baby, they had lost this gift.
Perhaps sensing her stillness, Mac lifted his head. His blue eyes were luminous in the darkness. Questioning.
“Make love to me,” she invited softly.
“What the hell do you think I’m doin’, Jenny-Wren?” Mac asked. The soft humor she loved was back in his deep voice.
Please, dear God, she prayed. Don’t let anything happen to Mac. Please, God, keep him safe.
Her eyes burned again, but she blinked, determined not to let him see her cry. He was right. It was his job, and he wouldn’t be the man she had married, the man she loved, if he didn’t do it. At least he had promised to let someone know what was happening. And Chase was home. Chase wouldn’t let anything happen to his brother.
Mac’s big hand found the elastic band of her slacks and began pushing inside, moving awkwardly because of the restriction.
“I can take them off,” she offered without moving. Her face was in the hollow between his shoulder and the strong brown column of his neck, her breath moving against the man-fragranced warmth of his skin. “I can take them off,” Mac said. “I’ve about forgotten what it feels like to undress you.”
“It feels slow,” she said, suddenly inclined to giggle at the unromantic discomfort of her slacks, their waistband rolled and twisted, canted to one side as he struggled to pull them down.
“Damn it,” he breathed, his big hands tangled in the offending garment.
“You used to be better at this,” she teased.
“Your butt used to be smaller,” he parried.
“I can’t believe you said that.”
But she pushed her heels into the mattress, obligingly lifting her bottom off the bed, and felt the slacks and her panties slide downward, guided by his hands. Then his hands deserted her for a moment, and she used her bare feet to push her clothing the rest of the way off her legs.
She was just in time. Mac’s hips and thighs lowered between hers, spreading them. His hand had found her breast, thumb flicking over the cotton-covered nipple that hardened into an tight, aching bud with the first stroke.
She could feel the cloth of his pants against her bare legs and the roughness of that texture was sensuous. Sensual. Teasing and tantalizing her as were his long fingers, which had caught the pearled nipple and were rolling it between them. Rolling it with hard, demanding pressure. Almost to the edge of pain.
The sound that feeling evoked came from deep within her throat, aching with want. With need. He responded immediately, pushing into her so strongly that it literally took her breath. She was a little surprised to realize how ready she had been for his entrance. Wet. So wet for him.
Her heels pressed again into the mattress, lifting her body upward to meet the hard downward thrusts of his. It hadn’t been like this between them in a long time. Almost primitive. Need-driven. No whispered endearments. No laughter or “old married” teasing. Just need. Desire. Hot and hard and aching for each other.
She was so empty. Only Mac could fill her. Only Mac could satisfy the aloneness that she hadn’t even been aware of. The awful black aloneness of even thinking about having to try to exist without him.
She blocked the horror of that thought, denying it, and arched upward again. The sound she made this time was guttural, a response to her desperation to enclose him. To hold him to her. To keep him with her forever.
She locked her legs around his waist, her bare ankles twined, and then closed her mind to everything but the sensations that grew and expanded in her body as his strained above her in their familiar darkness. When she felt the beginnings of his release, she thought it was too soon, and she tightened her hold on him, trying subconsciously to slow him, to slow what was happening.
There was no need. Her own response was again a surprise, its force exploding in shivering torrents throughout her lower body, sensations spreading upward through veins and nerves and muscles like warmed honey. She could hear her own gasping breath above the harsh panting of his. Could feel, despite the chill of the December night, the sweat on his face, its masculine roughness tight-pressed against her cheek.
Slowly, slowly, the sensations faded, retreated, his body stilled, and the world shifted back to its familiar focus. The room was dark and slightly chilled. She shivered involuntarily, either from the temperature or from the aftereffects of their lovemaking. Mac rolled onto his back, muscled arms locked around her body to carry her with him. She lay on top of him, half clothed and totally relaxed, and listened to his heart beat just beneath her ear.
“I love you, Jenny-Wren,” he said softly.
She heard the words, not in the night air that surrounded them, but the sound of them rumbling through their very skins, slick with commingled sweat and still joined. Always joined.
“I love you, too,” she whispered. Her fingers moved across the hair-roughened contours of his chest.
She lay and listened to his breathing, slow and even as his body gradually relaxed under hers. His arms loosened their hold, and she knew finally that he slept.
Still she didn’t move away, and it was a long time before she closed her eyes. She stared instead into the darkness, thinking about what he had promised. Thankful the hot tears that seeped onto the broad, dark chest pillowing her cheek didn’t wake him.
JENNY DIDN’T HAVE ANY idea what time it was when the phone rang. It wasn’t all that unusual for them to get a call in the middle of the night, and Mac’s voice when he answered was calm and official, if not yet fully awake.
She lay and listened to his monosyllables and soft questions without really hearing them. He’d tell her what was going on when he hung up. She closed her eyes and snuggled her bare bottom against his hip. She realized Mac was still wearing his pants, and it wasn’t until the incongruity of that attire penetrated her sleep-fogged consciousness, that she remembered last night.
She sat up, but Mac was already moving out of bed. He stood and put the phone he had been holding back into the cradle on the nightstand. He reached out and grabbed the shirt he’d discarded last night from the foot of the bed and, turning it inside out, began to pull it on over his head.
“Who was it?” she asked.
“Somebody who’s got folks on his property who aren’t supposed to be there.” Mac’s deep voice was muffled momentarily by the shirt.
“What does that mean?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out.”
“Drugs?” she asked, feeling a viselike tightness invade her chest. “Are they—”
“Somebody wants me to check out some trespassers. That’s all I know.”
“Call Chase,” she said.
He had sat down on the edge of the bed and had begun to pull on his boots, but he paused and slanted a look at her over his shoulder.
“What for?” he asked.
“Because…I asked you to,” she suggested. That alone should be reason enough, she thought, and he already knew all the others.
The blue eyes studied her face for a moment before he nodded.
SHE DIDN’T HEAR WHAT he told Chase. He had made that call from the kitchen, and she guessed that had been deliberate. At least he had called. This might not have anything to do with what they had talked about last night, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.
“Chase is coming over here,” Mac said.
She opened her eyes and found him standing in the doorway to the bedroom. His body blocked most of the light that was filtering around him from the distant kitchen.
“I can make coffee,” she offered.
“Don’t get up,” he said. He walked across the floor, his boot heels echoing on the hardwood. “Chase said for you to have breakfast ready when we get back.”
“‘Chase said,’” she teased.
“I thought you wouldn’t let your brother-in-law go hungry.”
“But I would let my husband,” she said.
“I hoped not, but I figure I’ll get better if you know we’re having company.”
She smiled at him, reaching up to catch his fingers in hers. She held them for a moment, still remembering last night.
“Chase sounded strange,” Mac said.
She looked up from his hand. “Strange how?”
He shook his head. “Just…strange. I don’t know. Different. He didn’t want me to go over there and pick him up. Said he’d come here. That’s when he said you could fix breakfast.”
“Ulterior motive,” she suggested, smiling at him.
“I guess.”
“Want anything special?”
“Uh-huh, but I don’t think I’ve got time for it before Chase gets here.” He put his knee down on the bed and the mattress dipped under his weight. He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.
“Sanchez ranch,” he said, his breath warm against her face. “In case anybody needs me.”
She nodded. She wanted to tell him to be careful, but she’d done enough nagging. Mac had promised, and if he told her he’d do something, he would.
“I’m going to wait out in the truck. Go back to sleep.”
He pulled the sheet and the quilt over her shoulders, tucking them around her. She listened to his footsteps fade away over the wooden floors and the sound the front door made as he closed it behind him.
She shrugged off the covers he’d tucked in and pulled his pillow into her body, resting her cheek against the soft cotton of its case. It smelled of Mac. He didn’t use cologne. This was soap. Shampoo. Always the same no-name-brand brands. Or maybe this was just the familiar, beloved scent of his skin.
She closed her eyes, willing herself not to think about anything but that. About last night. After the argument.
It was possible that she had gone back to sleep. She could never say for sure whether she had been awake or asleep when she heard the explosion. But she had known at once what it was. There had never been the least doubt in her mind, not from the first sound, exactly what she was hearing.
Chase would sometimes say that he could close his eyes and see Mac’s truck exploding, his brother’s burning body thrown out onto the ground. Jenny had no clear memory of any of that. The horror for her always began and ended with that sound.
The rest of it simply blended into the endless black nightmare she had always known living without Mac would be.
CHAPTER ONE
Five years later
“YOU GOING TO the wedding?” Chase McCullar asked his sister-in-law. His blue eyes were directed downward toward the coffee cup he held, rather than at Jenny, and his voice was almost innocent of inflection.
“Of course,” Jenny said, glancing at him over her shoulder. “Aren’t you?”
“You think I’ll get an invitation?”
“I think a better question might be, do you want one?”
“What makes you think I wouldn’t want an invitation?”
She laid the dishcloth she’d been using on the counter beside the sink and turned around to face him. Chase was sitting at her kitchen table, a table that had been in his family for three generations. He must have eaten tens of thousands of meals at its scarred wooden surface. Maybe that was why he looked so right sitting there, as if he still belonged here, living in this house instead of the one he had built on his half of the McCullar land.
Or maybe he looked so right, she acknowledged, because he always reminded her of Mac. They even had the same way of sitting, forearms on the table and broad shoulders slightly hunched, both hands wrapped around a mug, as if savoring against their fingers the warmth of the coffee it held.
She banished that memory as she had so many others in the past few weeks. She had even dreamed about Mac last night, dreamed about him making love to her, and that hadn’t happened in a very long time.
There had been too much upheaval lately, too many disturbances in her usually placid existence, she supposed. The kidnapping of Chase’s daughter and his belated marriage to her mother, Samantha Kincaid. Rio’s return from prison. Doc Horn’s brutal murder.
Apparently those things, as unlikely as it seemed, had somehow rekindled the memories of those nearly perfect days with Mac. Or maybe seeing Chase and Samantha finally together had made her remember her own marriage. Or perhaps that had been triggered by the way Rio looked at Anne Richardson, the two of them sitting at this very kitchen table, whatever had been in Rio’s black eyes so much like the way Mac used to look at her. Or, at least, she amended, the way she always remembered his look.
Most things were better replayed in memory than they had been in actuality. The reality of long-ago events faded, and the remembrance of them had a tendency to become more perfect with the passage of time, she reminded herself, trying to be fair to Trent. Anne Richardson’s brother, Trent, was the man she was fortunate enough to have in love with her now. A good man who wanted to marry her. A man who deserved not to have to fight against all those perfect memories.
Not that she minded having only good memories of her marriage, of course. However, she now admitted that savoring those had prevented her from moving on, from getting on with the business of living her life, and she was determined to change that. She had loved Mac McCullar with every fiber of her being, but Mac was dead. He had been dead for almost five years, and she knew it was time for her to begin living again.
She remembered that she had once accused Chase of doing that—of trying to crawl down into that grave with Mac. And instead she had discovered that she was the one who had been guilty of that sin. Once she had had the courage to make that admission, to face what her life had become, she had decided it was time to do something about it.
She realized suddenly that Chase was waiting for her answer, his blue eyes—eyes that were just like Mac’s—studying her face as she stood, lost in memory and regret.
“You and Rio haven’t exactly been…” She hesitated, searching for the right word, thinking about the strange relationship that existed between the half brothers.
“Not exactly bosom buddies,” Chase suggested caustically.
“Not exactly brothers,” she countered. “At least you haven’t acted like brothers.”
“I thought he killed Mac. At least had a part in Mac’s death. How did you want me to treat him?”
“You thought?” she asked, emphasizing the past tense, which was, to her, the pertinent part of that statement. “But you don’t think that anymore?”
“Hell, Jenny…” Chase began, and then he hesitated. “Sometimes even I don’t know what I believe anymore.” He shook his head, eyes lowering again to the steaming coffee. “It just doesn’t…” He shook his head again.
“Feel right to hate Rio any longer? Or to blame him for Mac’s death?” Jenny suggested.
Chase looked up. “You think I was wrong about that.”
“Yes,” she said simply.
Chase’s mouth tightened. It would be hard for him to make that admission, she knew. Almost as hard as it had been for her to make the unwanted one about her own life that she’d recently made.
“If that’s true,” Chase said, “then he probably hates me.”
