Duncan's Bride (4 page)

His mouth was dry, and sweat beaded on his forehead. “Don't pull up your skirt around me again, unless you want me to do something about it,” he said in a guttural tone. His pulse was throbbing through him. She had the best legs he'd ever seen, long and strong, with sleek muscles. She'd be able to lock them around him and hang on, no matter how wild the ride.

Madelyn couldn't speak. Tension stretched between
them, heavy and dark. Fierce, open lust burned in his narrowed eyes, and she couldn't look away, caught in the silent intensity. She was still gripping his forearms, and she felt the heat of his arms, the steely muscles bunched iron-hard under her fingers. Her heart lurched at the sharp realization that he felt some of the turmoil she had been feeling.

She began babbling an apology. “I'm sorry. I didn't intend—that is, I didn't realize—” She stopped, because she couldn't come right out and say that she hadn't meant to arouse him. No matter how she reacted to him, he was still essentially a stranger.

He looked down at her legs, with the skirt still halfway up them, and his hands involuntarily tightened on her waist before he forced himself to release her. “Yeah, I know. It's all right,” he muttered. His voice was still hoarse. It wasn't all right. Every muscle in his body was tight. He stepped back before he could give in to the impulse to move forward instead, putting himself between her legs and opening them wider. All he would have to do would be to slide his hands under the skirt to push it up the rest of the way— He crushed the thought, because if he'd let himself finish it, his control would have shattered.

T
HEY HAD LEFT
Billings far behind before he spoke again. “Are you hungry? If you are, there's a café at the crossroads up ahead.”

“No, thank you,” Madelyn replied a bit dreamily as she stared at the wide vista of countryside around her. She was used to enormous buildings, but suddenly they seemed puny in comparison with this endless expanse of earth and sky. It made her feel both insignificant and
fresh, as if her life were just starting now. “How far is it to your ranch?”

“About a hundred and twenty miles. It'll take us almost three hours to get there.”

She blinked, astonished at the distance. She hadn't realized how much effort it was for him to come to Billings to meet her. “Do you go to Billings often?”

He glanced at her, wondering if she was trying to find out how much he isolated himself on the ranch. “No,” he said briefly.

“So this is a special trip?”

“I did some business this morning, too.” He'd stopped by the bank to give his loan officer the newest figures on the ranch's projected income for the coming year. Right now, it looked better than it had in a long time. He was still flat broke, but he could see daylight now. The banker had been pleased.

Madelyn looked at him with concern darkening her gray eyes. “So you've been on the road since about dawn.”

“About that.”

“You must be tired.”

“You get used to early hours on a ranch. I'm up before dawn every day.”

She looked around again. “I don't know why anyone would stay in bed and miss dawn out here. It must be wonderful.”

Reese thought about it. He could remember how spectacular the dawns were, but it had been a long while since he'd had the time to notice one. “Like everything else, you get used to them. I know for a fact that there are dawns in New York, too.”

She chuckled at his dry tone. “I seem to remember
them, but my apartment faces to the west. I see sunsets, not dawns.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say that they would watch a lot of dawns together, but common sense stopped him. The only dawn they would have in common would be the next day. She wasn't the woman he would choose for a wife.

He reached into his shirt pocket and got out the pack of cigarettes that always resided there, shaking one free and drawing it the rest of the way out with his lips. As he dug in his jeans pocket for his lighter he heard her say incredulously, “You
smoke
?”

Swift irritation rose in him. From the tone of her voice you would have thought she had caught him kicking puppies, or something else equally repulsive. He lit the cigarette and blew smoke into the cab. “Yeah,” he said. “Do you mind?” He made it plain from
his
tone of voice that, since it was his truck, he was damn well going to smoke in it.

Madelyn faced forward again. “If you mean, does the smoke bother me, the answer is no. I just hate to see anyone smoking. It's like playing Russian roulette with your life.”

“Exactly. It's my life.”

She bit her lip at his curtness. Great going, she thought. That's a good way to get to know someone, attack his personal habits.

“I'm sorry,” she apologized with sincerity. “It's none of my business, and I shouldn't have said anything. It just startled me.”

“Why? People smoke. Or don't you associate with anyone who smokes?”

She thought a minute, treating his sarcastic remark seriously. “Not really. Some of our clients smoke, but
none of my personal friends do. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, and she was very old-fashioned about the vices. I was taught never to swear, smoke or drink spirits. I've never smoked,” she said righteously.

Despite his irritation, he found himself trying not to laugh. “Does that mean you swear and drink spirits?”

“I've been known to be a bit aggressive in my language in moments of stress,” she allowed. Her eyes twinkled at him. “And Grandma Lily thought it was perfectly suitable for a lady to take an occasional glass of wine, medicinally, of course. During my college days, I also swilled beer.”

“Swilled?”

“There's no other word to describe a college student's drinking manners.”

Remembering his own college days, he had to agree.

“But I don't enjoy spirits,” she continued. “So I'd say at least half of Grandma Lily's teachings stuck. Not bad odds.”

“Did she have any rules against gambling?”

Madelyn looked at him, her mouth both wry and tender, gray eyes full of a strange acceptance. “Grandma Lily believed that life is a gamble, and everyone has to take their chances. Sometimes you bust, sometimes you break the house.” It was an outlook she had passed on to her granddaughter. Otherwise, Madelyn thought, why would she be sitting here in a pickup truck, in the process of falling in love with a stranger?

I
T HAD BEEN
a long time since Reese had seen his home through the eyes of a stranger, but as he stopped the truck next to the house, he was suddenly, bitterly ashamed. The paint on the house was badly chipped and peeling, and the outbuildings were even worse.
Long ago he'd given up trying to keep the yard neat and had finally destroyed the flower beds that had once delineated the house, because they had been overrun with weeds. In the past seven years nothing new had been added, and nothing broken had been replaced, except for the absolute necessities. Parts for the truck and tractor had come before house paint. Taking care of the herd had been more important than cutting the grass or weeding the flower beds. Sheer survival hadn't left time for the niceties of life. He'd done what he'd had to do, but that didn't mean he had to like the shape his home was in. He hated for Madelyn to see it like this, when it had once been, if not a showplace, a house no woman would have been ashamed of.

Madelyn saw the peeling paint, but dismissed it; after all, it wasn't anything that a little effort and several gallons of paint wouldn't fix. What caught her attention was the shaded porch, complete with swing, that wrapped all the way around the two-story house. Grandma Lily had had a porch like that, and a swing where they had whiled away many a lazy summer day to the accompaniment of the slow creak of the chains as they gently swayed.

“It reminds me of Grandma Lily's house,” she said, her eyes dreamy again.

He opened her door and put his hands on her waist, lifting her out of the truck before she could slide to the ground. Startled all over again, she quickly looked up at him.

“I wasn't taking any chances with that skirt,” he said, almost growling.

Her pulse began thudding again.

He reached inside the truck and hooked her carry-on bag with one hand, then took her arm with the other.
They entered by the back door, which was unlocked. She was struck by the fact that he felt safe in not locking his door when he was going to be gone all day.

The back door opened into a combination mudroom and laundry. A washer and dryer lined the wall to the left, and the right wall bristled with pegs from which hung an assortment of hats, coats, ponchos and bright yellow rain slickers. A variety of boots, most of them muddy, were lined up on a rubber mat. Straight ahead and across a small hall was a full bathroom, which she realized would be convenient when he came in muddy from head to foot. He could take a bath without tracking mud or dripping water all through the house to the bathroom upstairs.

They turned left and were in the kitchen, a big, open, sunny room with a breakfast nook. Madelyn looked with interest at the enormous appliances, which didn't fit her image of what the kitchen of a small-scale, bachelor rancher should look like. She had expected something smaller and much more old-fashioned than this efficient room with its institutional-sized appliances.

“The house has ten rooms,” he said. “Six downstairs, and four bedrooms upstairs.”

“It's a big house for just one person,” she commented, following him upstairs.

“That's why I want to get married.” He made the comment as if explaining why he wanted a drink of water. “My parents built this house when I was a baby. I grew up here. I want to pass it on to my own children.”

She felt a little breathless, and not just from climbing the stairs. The thought of having his children weakened her.

He opened a door directly across from the top of the stairs and ushered her into a large, pleasant bedroom
with white curtains at the windows and a white bedspread on the four-poster bed. She made a soft sound of pleasure. An old rocking chair sat before one of the windows, and what was surely a handmade rug covered the smooth, hardwood plank flooring. The flooring itself was worth a small fortune. For all the charm of the room, there was a sense of bareness to it, no soft touches to personalize it in any way. But he lived here alone, she reminded herself; the personal touches would be in the rooms he used, not in the empty bedrooms waiting for his children to fill them.

He stepped past her and put her bag on the bed. “I can't take the whole day off,” he said. “The chores have to be done, so I'll have to leave you to entertain yourself for a while. You can rest or do whatever you want. The bathroom is right down the hall if you want to freshen up. My bedroom has a private bath, so you don't have to worry about running into me.”

In the space of a heartbeat she knew she didn't want to be left alone to twirl her fingers for the rest of the day. “Can't I go with you?”

“You'll be bored, and it's dirty work.”

She shrugged. “I've been dirty before.”

He looked at her for a long moment, his face unsmiling and expressionless. “All right,” he finally said, wondering if she'd feel the same when her designer shoes were caked with the makings of compost.

Her smile crinkled her eyes. “I'll be changed in three minutes flat.”

He doubted it. “I'll be in the barn. Come on out when you're ready.”

As soon as he had closed the door behind him, Madelyn stripped out of her clothes, slithered into a pair of jeans and shoved her feet into her oldest pair of loaf
ers, which she had brought along for this very purpose. After all, she couldn't very well explore a ranch in high heels. She pulled a white cotton camisole on over her head and sauntered out the door just as he was starting downstairs after changing shirts himself. He gave her a startled look; then his eyes took on a heavy-lidded expression as his gaze swept her throat and shoulders, left bare by the sleeveless camisole. Madelyn almost faltered as that very male look settled on her breasts, and her body felt suddenly warm and weighed down. She had seen men cast quick furtive glances at her breasts before, but Reese was making no effort to hide his speculation. She felt her nipples tingle and harden, rasping against the cotton covering them.

“I didn't think you'd make it,” he said.

“I don't fuss about clothes.”

She didn't have to, he thought. The body she put inside them was enough; anything else was superfluous. He was all but salivating just thinking of her breasts and those long, slender legs. The jeans covered them, but now he knew exactly how long and shapely they were, and, as she turned to close the bedroom door, how curved her buttocks were, like an inverted heart. He felt a lot hotter than the weather warranted.

She walked beside him out to the barn, her head swiveling from side to side as she took in all the aspects of the ranch. A three-door garage in the same style as the house stood behind it. She pointed to it. “How many other cars do you have?”

“None,” he said curtly.

Three other buildings stood empty, their windows blank. “What are those?”

“Bunkhouses.”

There was a well-built chicken coop, with fat white
chickens pecking industriously around the yard. She said, “I see you grow your own eggs.”

From the corner of her eye she saw his lips twitch as if he'd almost smiled. “I grow my own milk, too.”

“Very efficient. I'm impressed. I haven't had fresh milk since I was about six.”

“I didn't think that accent was New York City. Where are you from originally?”

“Virginia. We moved to New York when my mother remarried, but I went back to Virginia for college.”

“Your parents were divorced?”

“No. My father died. Mom remarried three years later.”