Baby My Baby (A Ranching Family) (15 page)

So much for keeping things light.

“All you said,” he went on, “was that you just didn’t want to be married to me anymore.”

There was accusation in that but he was right. She hadn’t explained herself. To give him reasons when she told him their marriage was over would have meant telling him how he’d hurt her, how lonely she’d been. So she hadn’t said anything at all then, and she didn’t now, either.

Ash continued anyway. “Part of it is my fault. I didn’t push for reasons, because I assumed you’d realized you just didn’t love me and I didn’t want to hear that in words—even if I could have gotten you to say it outright. But as I listened to that wedding ceremony, I decided that it’s time I stop assuming or guessing and know for sure.”

That wasn’t a direct question, just a statement of what he’d decided, so she danced around it. “It’s late,” she said. Late at night. Late for them...

Though she wasn’t looking at him, she could feel the heat and intensity of his gaze on her.

“I won’t push it now if you’re tired. But we
are
going to talk about this,” he warned.

She knew that tone of voice. It meant his tenacity had kicked in. The same tenacity that found funding for difficult projects, lawyers for impossible cases, solutions for insurmountable problems. He meant what he said. He wouldn’t let this rest until he was satisfied.

Beth stopped walking and took off her high-heeled shoes. His hand snaked out to her bare arm to steady her and she tried to ignore how good the strength and warmth of it felt as she took the course of offense as the best form of defense. “You never told me why you wanted the divorce, either. Just that you’d been considering the same thing and maybe it was a good idea.” And her own voice was unsteady with the harsh memory of that, and the anger and hurt it had caused her.

“We’ll get around to talking about that, too,” he assured her. “But you’re the one who initiated the split, so you can tell me why first.”

They’d reached the lodge by then, a semicircle of ten small cabins built around a centrally positioned office. Ash took his key from his pants pocket and opened the heavy wooden door to his cabin. “My car keys are inside. Do you want to come in and talk or shall I get them and take you home and we’ll wait until tomorrow?”

She’d rather not have discussed this at all. “Are those my only two options? Right this minute or tomorrow?”

“That’s it.”

Beth sighed impatiently to let him know just how much she didn’t appreciate this. But when she weighed the choices he’d given her, she decided the late hour now could work to her advantage by at least keeping the discussion brief.

She stepped into the cabin. “I’m not sure what you want to hear.”

The close space was lit only by a chain lamp hanging over a small table to the left of the entrance. The air smelled of his after-shave, his soap, him. It was difficult for her not to be carried away by that and by being in a dim room alone with him and a bed that looked much too inviting.

Not wanting to get too comfortable, she put her shoes back on and perched atop the table. Letting her feet dangle, she clamped the edge with both hands in a white-knuckled grip.

Ash tossed his jacket across the back of one of the two chairs she’d ignored. Then he planted a foot on the seat, a forearm on his raised thigh, and met her eyes on an almost equal level, crowding her a bit as he made it clear they were about to get down to business. “I want to know why you divorced me.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t a good marriage,” she answered simply, as if that said it all.

“We didn’t fight. I didn’t drink or abuse you or cheat...did you?”

“Cheat? You know I didn’t or you wouldn’t have come here so sure the baby was yours.”

“Okay. That’s true. I didn’t really think there was someone else, though that would at least be something concrete to explain why you wanted the divorce. So what made it a bad marriage for you?”

She hated this. She absolutely hated it. There was no way she could talk about her feelings and not hate it. “It wasn’t that it was a
bad
marriage. It just wasn’t much of a marriage at all.”

“It didn’t live up to those hopes and dreams you mentioned earlier?”

“Actually what it didn’t live up to were my expectations. Not that I had a whole slew of them. My mother died when I was so young that I never had much of an up-close example of what marriage was supposed to be. But the one thing I did think was that we’d be together. At least some of the time. And we weren’t,” she said flatly, as if there hadn’t been any emotion involved then or now. As if, like two bottles bobbing separately in the same sea, they’d just drifted calmly apart. No big deal.

Ash breathed out a short, mirthless laugh. “You know, my grandfather made a remark about my being away from you too much. Does he know something I don’t?”

She shrugged again, only this time it felt so stiff she had to force her shoulders back down again. “I think there just isn’t enough of you to go around. Your work with the foundation is time-consuming. But it’s also important, so it has to take priority. What’s left over isn’t enough to maintain a marriage, too,” she said as if she could accept the reality without a problem.

Ash’s bushy brows dipped together in a frown. “Are you telling me that you felt neglected?” he asked as if he couldn’t believe it.

Beth didn’t like the word
neglected.
Not at all. To her way of thinking, it made her sound weak and needy. And her tone toughened in response. “It was just very frustrating to compete with your work, with the foundation, and with the demands of a whole nation of Native Americans,” she finished with a flourish of exaggeration.

“You felt like you were in competition with all of that?”

“I
was
in competition with all of that.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Oh, come on,” she said with a roll of her eyes.

“You weren’t. The foundation is work. You were my
wife.
Two completely different things.”

“Please.”

“You weren’t competing with it,” he insisted.

“Okay. I wasn’t competing with it, because I chose not to compete. Because I just stayed in the background and let it have you. Until I decided I didn’t want my whole life spent in the background while everything else took priority over me. That’s when I suggested the divorce.”

He looked stunned. He sounded stunned. “Without so much as telling me you felt like this first? Without giving me a clue? My God, Beth, you always acted as if you couldn’t care less how much my work kept me away, as if you were busy and wouldn’t even know I was gone. Sometimes I had the feeling you were glad to be rid of me. Why didn’t you
tell
me this?”

“What should I have said? I’d like to go to the movies tonight so don’t spend the time to find a family that will take in the fourteen-year-old unwed mother, or an Indian home for that baby suffering fetal alcohol syndrome? Don’t raise money for the homeless?” she asked wryly.

“How about just saying you’d like it if I was around more? If I could rearrange things so we could see each other?”

“As if I couldn’t live without you? As if I depended on you?” she demanded, appalled.

“As if you loved me and wanted to be with me. And maybe even needed me just a little.”

Her spine straightened reflexively. “I do all right on my own.”

“Sure you do. At least that’s how you always made it seem. You encouraged me to spend all the time I needed to at the office. To go to every meeting. To see to all the details of everything that came up. To travel when I needed to. You didn’t mind. You said you had paperwork of your own. Or you’d go to the movies with my grandfather. No problem. Except that you damn well divorced me because I believed it and did do it all.”

He looked as if he wanted to shake her.

“Would you have liked it better if I’d whined that we didn’t see each other enough? Or begged you not to do what someone else depended on you for? Or pouted when a business trip took five days instead of three?”

“There’s a difference between whining, begging or pouting, and just letting me know you want me around.”

But the difference was too subtle for her to see. “It should have gone without saying that two people who were married to each other actually spent time together.”

“Not when you were pushing me out the door most of the time.”

“Oh, please. As if I invented all the things that called you away or needed your attention. I was just being supportive in the face of the inevitable.”

“Supportive?” His voice had risen, apparently with the level of his disbelief, and he actually laughed.

Beth didn’t know what he found funny.

“Hell, all that support made me think you could only stand me around in small doses.”

“Sure. I didn’t want to be with you, so I worked on your causes and joined your groups just to catch a glimpse of you, or kept bending over backward to lure you home when I didn’t think it would do any harm to what you were doing somewhere else.”

He pointed a long index finger at her and said, “Boat!” as if it had just occurred to him that that was the purpose of the game.

“Yes, Boat,” she said, embarrassed to have admitted even that much.

He sighed and shook his head. The anger of moments before seemed to have evaporated, along with his need to discuss the reason for the divorce, as more pleasant memories took over. “Boat was one of the few times I honestly knew you wanted me. You’ll never know how much that meant.”

“You stopped coming home even for that,” she said quietly, suffering anew the rejection she’d felt at the time.

He laughed wryly. “That’s because I started to worry that it was only my services in bed that you were interested in.” Again he sighed away the tension in the room. “Some of the best memories I have are of Boat,” he said, his voice a deeper, huskier timbre, lost suddenly in the past. “Remember the rainstorm last year?”

Oh, she remembered all right. It sent shivers along the surface of her skin just thinking about it. “It’s a wonder we didn’t catch pneumonia.” She pretended to chastise him for what had really been a delicious addition to the game. “Opening all the windows so the rain and wind could come in, as if we really were out in a storm at sea.”

“Making wild, abandoned love to match it,” he reminisced in a near whisper that brought him close enough for her to feel the warmth of his breath against her cheek. He shook his head and laughed yet again. “The marriage wasn’t all bad.”

She ignored that tie-in to what they’d been talking about, glad for any distraction from the more serious subject of before. “That was the coldest rain...” But even as she tried to make it sound bad, her tone gave her away.

“God, that was a great night,” he said, with a groan that matched some he’d made in the act. “If ever there was a time I thought you might get pregnant even using birth control, it was that night.”

“We
weren’t
using birth control after a while. We ran out, and even that didn’t stop things.”

“There aren’t any drugstores on boats cast asea in a storm. And as I recall we couldn’t help ourselves.”

“Carried away like two hormonal teenagers.” The intended rebuke sounded more like a sweet remembrance.

He leaned forward, his beautifully boned face just inches from hers. “You needed me to keep you warm.” He placed a brief peck of a kiss on her lips.

“I needed you to shut the windows.”

“That’s not what you said at the time,” he reminded with a smug grin before he kissed her again, holding it a moment longer this time.

“I expected icicles to grow from my ears.”

He moved just enough to gently bite one lobe and then pressed slow kisses down the side of her neck to the spot where it dipped to her shoulder. “I’d never have let that happen. But I do remember some pretty great goose bumps.” He laughed. “Yeah—like those. I didn’t know you could do it on demand.”

The goose bumps were hardly voluntary. They came in response to his kisses.

At any rate, her resistance was low, and so the sparks he rained through her went unchecked. The best she could manage was another phony complaint about that earlier event. “Not to mention that the neighbors could probably see what we were doing, since the curtains were open to let in the weather.”

“The electricity was out and there wasn’t even a moon.” He reached behind her and turned off the wall switch so his room—like theirs that night—was lit only by milky light from outside.

He laid his palm against her cheek. “What a night that was,” he said again, just before covering her mouth with his, completely, firmly, insistently.

His lips were parted and he urged hers open, too. Not that it took much persuasion. Beth let her head fall back and answered his kiss, the parting of his lips, even the first meeting of his tongue and hers.

He still smelled faintly of after-shave, and she breathed deeply of it, enjoying it, for once savoring what it did to her senses instead of fighting it.

On its own, one of her hands reached inside his collar to the side of his neck, thick and corded and strong. His skin was smooth, warm, and she had much too vivid a memory of what it had felt like to have the whole length of his naked body against hers.

She raised her other hand to his chest, telling herself to push him away. But that wasn’t what she did. Instead she just left it there, wishing in her heart of hearts that his shirt wasn’t between them.

His kiss turned more insistent, as if answering the need she felt. Her back arched her closer to him.

He helped that along by wrapping an arm around her, pulling her more to the edge of the table where her knees just brushed the hard ridge of his desire for her.

Aware of that, she told herself to stop this. Now.

But she didn’t pay much attention. Too many wonderful things were awake inside of her, awake and crying out for Ash.

She felt his hand slide from its caress of her cheek to her back. Slowly, slowly, he pulled her zipper down, and as he pulled it, her dress inched lower on her breast, stopping tantalizingly near the hardened crest.

She meant to stop him. She really did. But her body, her breast ached for his touch, cried out to know the feel of his hand against her, and rather than moving away from him, she arched even more seductively toward him.