Friends and Lovers (4 page)

She raced wildly down the wide dirt road between the pastures, laughing, her hair trailing behind her. He’d never catch her now!

But he was right alongside, his eyes biting into hers, and all at once he leaned over and caught the reins in a big, strong hand, easing her mare to a canter, a trot, and then reining her in completely. They were beyond the road now, in the meadow, in a grove of tall pecan trees near the highway.

Madeline glared at him. “I was having fun…!”

“You were about to break your damned neck!” he countered, faintly pale beneath his dark tan, his craggy face unusually hard. “What’s gotten into you, you little fool?”

“Don’t shout at me!” she defended.

“I’m not shouting!” His eyes narrowed and he drew in an annoyed breath. “I could beat the breath out of you when you do crazy things like this, Madeline, I swear to God….” He dismounted, almost jerking her off the horse. He glared down at her, his mouth making a thin line, his eyes blazing. His big hands were gripping her shoulders painfully, and he shook her once, roughly.

“John!” she burst out, shocked. “I was just riding. I’ve done it before!”

His eyes bored into hers and suddenly the world spun crazily around her and the universe dissolved into a pair of steely gray eyes. Her hands were pressing unconsciously against the front of his denim shirt, where it was casually unbuttoned over his massive chest. She moved slightly, and her fingers came into sudden, staggering contact with hair and warm, damp flesh.

He flinched at the light contact, his eyes dilated, his heavy brows drew together.

Sensing something new, something vulnerable in him, she moved her hands deliberately, sensuously, under the edges of the shirt and ran them tentatively across his chest, her lips parting as she felt the tensing, the sudden thunder of his heart under them.

His eyes seemed to blaze down at her. His fingers tightened painfully on her shoulders, his body tensed. She’d never seen John out of control, she’d never seen him anything but in perfect command of himself. But he looked as if he were about to explode, and the dangerous game she was playing only excited her.

She moved closer, her eyes studying the contours of his mouth as her fingers grew bolder and her palms flattened against his powerful chest.

All at once he caught her wrists and jerked them away. “That’s enough,” he growled harshly. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

While she was trying to figure that out, the sound of an approaching car diverted his scorching eyes from her face.

“Oh, hell, tourists,” he said curtly, glaring toward a big touring car with two women in the front seat.

He let Madeline go as the car stopped nearby and the elderly blonde at the wheel leaned out the window, smiling pleasantly.

“Howdy!” she called.

John’s mustache twitched. “Howdy,” he drawled back.

“Is this the way to Houston?” came the reply.

“Only if you plan to cut the road as you go,” John said pleasantly. “This is the Durango ranch.”

“It is?” The woman’s huge blue eyes got wider, matching the cornflowers on her printed blouse. She murmured something to the thinner woman beside her and leaned farther out the window. “This is Big John Durango’s ranch?” she persisted.

John grinned slyly. “Heard of him?”

“My goodness, yes! I retired from business this year, and I never miss my financial magazines. Why, when oil was making headlines, John Durango was a cover story! Imagine, a man that handsome being a tycoon as well!”

John looked sickeningly modest. He tilted his hat back on his head. “What kind of business were you in, ma’am?” he asked with characteristic curiosity.

“Corporate law,” the woman said, smiling.

“Tough profession,” he said.

“Not really. It just takes some study and a lot of practice.”

Catching her breath, Madeline wondered at his charm. The blond woman was staring at him intently. “Do you suppose we might actually get a glimpse of Mr. Durango as we head back toward the highway?” she asked, wide-eyed.

John pursed his lips. “Well, ma’am, he’s a hard man to hold still, if you know what I mean. Most likely he’s carousing in the pool with his women right now. He makes me do all the work while he lives up to his playboy reputation.”

Madeline had to clap a hand over her mouth to keep from giggling out loud. John’s face was deadpan, wearing a look of pure disgust.

“You work here?” the blonde asked.

“Yes, ma’am, like a mule, and that man won’t even pay me the back wages he owes me.”

“You oughtn’t let him get away with it,” the woman told him. “I’d sue him.”

“Well, if I didn’t owe him so much money, I might do that,” John agreed.

“Owe…
him
money?” The tourist’s eyes widened. “For what?”

“Oh, little ticky things. Like rent on this here horse.”

The blonde looked horrified, and Madeline was digging her nails into her palms to keep from howling.

“He makes his men pay rent on their horses—’his’ horses—to work ‘his’ cattle?” the tourist burst out.

“Well, he don’t take in much money on the cattle, so he had to make it up somehow, I reckon,” John said with a shrug. “Of course, it’s not hard to see how he got so rich when you consider how much money we all owe him in gambling debts.”

“You all owe him gambling debts?”

“Well, yes, ma’am,” John continued in his slowest drawl. “You see, he gets us drunk every Friday night and suckers us into playing poker with him. I reckon I owe him less than the others, though. I’ve paid my bill down to where I only got twenty thousand dollars more to pay off.”

“Oh, my God,” the tourist gasped.

John shook his head good-naturedly. “Could be worse,” he assured her.

“I don’t see how!”

John was more than willing to tell her. “He could make me sleep in the bunkhouse with the boys. Got rattlers in there ten feet long, big around as my leg.” He slapped his broad, denim-encased thigh. “Never could find a gun powerful enough to kill them things, so what you have to do is make pets of them. But snakes just don’t take to me like they do to some of them other boys, so Big John lets me sleep in the big house.”

The blonde was beginning to look suspicious. “Snakes ten feet long? Is that what they call a Texas tall tale?”

“Oh, no, ma’am,” John assured her. “I only lie when Big John tells me to, like when the income tax people ask questions about his trips to Europe and the thirty dependents that he swears are his illegitimate children—youngest girl’s twenty, you know….”

The blond woman started to laugh. She kept on until tears were rolling down her cheeks, and her companion was giggling audibly. Madeline let go of her own self-control at last, doubling over with laughter.

“Thank you for the profile, Mr. Durango,” the tourist laughed at John, her eyes twinkling. “Next time I read a story about you in some magazine, I’ll be one of the privileged few who know what a scalawag you really are. Making your men rent their horses…!”

He chuckled. “I’ve thought about it sometimes,” he swore. He pulled out his wallet and handed her a card. “I can always use a good attorney,” he told her. “If retirement gets too tough, give me a call.” He winked at her. “You’re too damned young to retire, honey.”

Madeline could have kissed him when she saw the older woman’s face begin to glow.

“Thank you,” came the heartfelt reply. “Now which way
do
I go to get to Houston?”

After the tourists had driven away, John mounted his gelding, waiting for Madeline to follow suit. He lit a cigarette with steady fingers and led the way toward the barn where his prize bulls were quartered like royalty. They had their own air-conditioning as well as a heating system for winter.

“You scalawag, you,” Madeline muttered, trying to tease him out of his black mood.

He didn’t even spare her a glance. He was still furious, and she didn’t know how she was going to explain her own actions. How could she, when she didn’t understand them herself?

“John, what was your father like?” she asked suddenly.

He glanced at her as they rode along. “What brought that on?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ve never talked about him. I just…wondered.”

He took a draw on the cigarette and stared at the horizon. “He was rigid. Hard. Very disciplined and single-minded. He had nothing as a child, and he was determined to show the whole damned world that he was as capable of getting rich as anybody else. He was a career man in the Marines before he bought Big Sabine and started drilling for oil.” He laughed mirthlessly. “What he found didn’t amount to much at first, but we invested carefully, bought more land, and got lucky.”

“Your mother?” she asked carefully.

“She died when I was born.”

“Oh.” Madeline stared at the red coats of the bulls as they neared the barn. “The ranch was named for a battle, wasn’t it?” she murmured.

“The battle of Sabine Pass,” he agreed, “where my father was born. In 1863, Union troops tried to invade Texas through the pass. Two lieutenants named Richard Dowling and N.H. Smith defended the fort there with six cannon and forty-two men. That defense was so successful that Union troops never tried to invade through the pass again.”

“I’ll bet your father liked the odds when he heard the story, didn’t he?” she asked with a tiny smile.

“Impossible odds?” he mused. “Yes. That appealed to him, all right. The only thing that didn’t was fatherhood. He spent the first twenty years of my life blaming me for my mother’s death. It was just as well that he left me with my uncle while he was in the service.”

She studied his rigid profile wonderingly. She was curious about him in new ways; she wanted to know what forces had shaped him into the man he was.

He dismounted at the fence and hooked his boot on the lowest rung, leaning his arms over it to watch a huge Santa Gertrudis bull lumber along in his solitary pasture.

Madeline joined him by the fence, drawn by his strength and size, as she thought about the lonely young boy he must have been. She liked the closeness—perhaps, she told herself, because of the faint chill in the air. John radiated warmth at this range. Her eyes swept over him—from the long, powerful legs up to the broad leather belt around his lean waist, the massive chest and muscular arms. His forearms were dark with the same sprinkling of hair that covered the rest of his body, and there was a thin gold watch strapped over his wrist. He wore no rings at all and had beautiful hands—broad, tanned, with long fingers and a feathering of hair over their backs. The nails were flat, neatly trimmed and immaculate, despite the manual labor he did when at the ranch.

“Are you considering taking up art?” he asked with a lash in his voice. “You must have me memorized by now.”

She dragged her eyes back to the bull. “I was thinking,” she said shortly. “You just sort of got in the way.”

“Thinking about what?” he prodded. “Your next murder victim?”

It was the first sign of melting in the glacier he’d drawn around himself, and she met his look with a shy smile.

“Not quite,” she assured him. “Only the vile tools I’m going to need and the grisly details.”

He laughed softly, bending his head to light a cigarette. “Who’s going to get the ax this time?” he asked.

She peeked up at him. “I thought I’d kill off the detective-hero.”

“Your fans would hang you from the nearest tree,” he commented. He glanced down at her, his eyes taking in the long, waving disarray of her red gold hair in the early-morning light, the flush of her cheeks, the sparkle in her green eyes. They narrowed. “A more unlikely murderess…” he murmured.

She smiled pertly. “I’ve always loved detective fiction,” she said with a sigh. “Solving crimes. I wanted to be a policewoman, but I was too busy covering news.”

“Ever miss it?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

“Reporting, you mean?” She thought back to those days. It seemed so long ago, when she was sole reporter and photographer for a small-town weekly newspaper. “I’m not sure. Sometimes I think I’d give anything to go back to it. It was so uncomplicated, compared to what I do now, so cut and dried. I didn’t have to create the news, only report it.”

“I shouldn’t think it was so hard finding new ways to kill people,” he said with a teasing glance.

She laughed. “You’d be surprised. Competition is fierce, you know, and I’m the new kid on the block. I’ve got to be the best I can be, or I’ll go on unemployment in no time.”

“I liked
The Grinding Tower
,” he remarked.

“Thank you.”

He grinned. “The hero had some…familiar characteristics.”

She felt herself flushing as she recalled her detective: tall, broad-shouldered, with a mustache, a taste for Scotch whiskey and a habit of forcing his equipment to go more than the last mile. Yes, she’d patterned him after John, but she hadn’t expected…

“Want to sue me?” she asked with a shy glance.

“I’m too flattered to sue you.” He tilted his hat lower across his eyes. They narrowed, running down the length of her body and back up again. “The heroine sounded a little like you,” he remarked.

She met his eyes and felt her pulse leap wildly. She hadn’t realized that. “Did she?” she murmured.

The dark, intent look on his face made her nervous. “Why did you run away from me, just before those tourists showed up? Was it what I said about being without sleep? Did you think I’d spent the night with Melody?”

Her breath caught in her throat. How well he read her! She swallowed. “I…I just wanted to ride a little faster, that’s all.”

“Was it?” He reached out, tucking a careless finger into the V-neck of her blouse to tug her gently toward him. But he didn’t release his hold on her. That long, maddening finger slowly traced the beginning slope of her breasts under the thin fabric. She was suddenly and shyly aware that she wasn’t wearing a bra. And judging by the look on his dark, taut face, he’d just discovered that as well.

The effect of the light, disturbing caress was beginning to be very visible, especially to the silver eyes that dropped pointedly to the thrust of her high, small breasts against the thin cotton.