Heartbreaker (19 page)

"Don't forget your swimsuit," he
said, remembering that she had always gone swimming at these parties. She'd
loved the water.

Michelle looked away, pretending to check her
purse for something. "I'm not swimming tonight."

"Why not?"

"I just don't feel like it."

Her voice had that flat, expressionless sound
he'd come to hate, the same tone she used whenever he tried to probe into the
reason she sometimes became so quiet and distant. He looked at her sharply, and
his brows drew together. He couldn't remember Michelle ever ''not feeling''
like swimming. Her father had put in a pool for her the first year they'd been
in
Florida
, and she had often spent the entire day lolling in
the water. After she'd married, the pool had gone unused and had finally been
emptied. He didn't think it had ever been filled again, and now it was badly in
need of repairs before it would be usable.

But she'd been with him almost a month, and
he didn't think she'd been in his pool even once. He glanced out at the
balcony; he could just see a corner of the pool, blue and glittering in the
late afternoon sun. He didn't have much time for swimming, but he'd insisted,
eight years ago, on having the big pool and its luxurious landscaping. For her.
Damn it, this whole place was for her: the big house, the comforts, that pool,
even the damn Mercedes. He'd built it for her, not admitting it to himself then
because he couldn't. Why wasn't she using the pool?

Michelle could feel his sharpened gaze on her
as they left the room, but he didn't say anything and, relieved, she realized
he was going to let it go. Maybe he just accepted that she didn't feel like
swimming. If he only knew how much she wanted to swim, how she'd longed for the
feel of cool water on her overheated skin, but she just couldn't bring herself
to put on a bathing suit, even in the privacy of his house.

She knew that the little white scars were
hardly visible now, but she still shrank from the possibility that someone
might notice them. She still felt that they were glaringly obvious, even though
the mirror told her differently. It had become such a habit to hide them that
she couldn't stop. She didn't dress or undress in front of John if she could
help it, and if she couldn't, she always remained facing him, so he wouldn't
see her back. It was such a reversal of modesty that he hadn't even noticed her
reluctance to be nude in front of him. At night, in bed, it didn't matter. If
the lights were on, they were dim, and John had other things on his mind. Still
she insisted on wearing a nightgown to bed. It might be off most of the night,
but it would be on when she got out of bed in the mornings. Everything in her
shrank from having to explain those scars.

The party was just as she had expected, with
a lot of food, a lot of talk, a lot of laughter. Addie had once been one of
Michelle's best friends, and she was still the warm, talkative person she'd
been before. She'd put on a little weight, courtesy of two children, but her
pretty face still glowed with good humor. Steve, her husband, sometimes managed
to put his own two cents into a conversation by the simple means of putting his
hand over her mouth. Addie laughed more than anyone whenever he resorted to
that tactic.

"It's an old joke between us," she
told Michelle as they put together tacos for the children. "When we were
dating, he'd do that so he could kiss me. Holy cow, you look good! Something
must be agreeing with you, and I'd say that 'something' is about six-foot-three
of pure hunk. God, I used to swoon whenever he spoke to me! Remember? You'd
sniff and say he didn't do anything for you. Liar, liar, pants on fire."
Addie chanted the childish verse, her eyes sparkling with mirth, and Michelle
couldn't help laughing with her.

On the other side of the pool, John's head
swiveled at the sound, and he froze, stunned by the way her face lit as she
joked with Addie. He felt the hardening in his loins and swore silently to
himself, jerking his attention back to the talk of cattle and shifting his
position to make his arousal less obvious. Why didn't she laugh like that more
often?

Despite Michelle's reservations, she enjoyed
the party. She'd missed the relaxed gatherings, so different from the
sophisticated dinner parties, yacht parties, divorce parties, fund-raising
dinners, etcetera, that had made up the social life John thought she'd enjoyed
so much, but had only tolerated. She liked the shrieks of the children as they
cannonballed into the pool, splashing any unwary adult in the vicinity, and she
liked it that no one got angry over being wet. Probably it felt good in the
sweltering heat, which had abated only a little.

True to most of the parties she'd attended,
the men tended to group together and the women did the same, with the men
talking cattle and weather, and the women talking about people. But the groups
were fluid, flowing together and intermingling, and by the time the children
had worn down, all the adults were sitting together. John had touched her arm
briefly when he sat down beside her, a small, possessive gesture that made her
tingle. She tried not to stare at him like an infatuated idiot, but she felt as
if everyone there could tell how warm she was getting. Her cheeks flushed, and
she darted a glance at him to find him watching her with blatant need.

"Let's go home," he said in a low
voice.

"So soon?" Addie protested, but at
that moment they all heard the distant rumble of thunder.

As ranchers, they all searched the night sky
for signs of a storm that would break the heat, if only for a little while, and
fill the slow-moving rivers and streams. Out to the west, over the Gulf,
lightning shimmered in a bank of black clouds.

Frank Campbell said, "We sure could use
a good rain. Haven't had one in about a month now."

It had stormed the day John had come over to
her ranch for the first time, Michelle remembered, and again the night they'd
driven back from Tampa…the first time he'd made love to her. His eyes
glittered, and she knew he was thinking the same thing.

Wind suddenly kicked up from the west,
bringing with it the cool smell of rain and salt, the excitement of a storm. Everyone
began gathering up children and food, cleaning up the patio before the rain hit
Soon people were calling out goodbyes and piling into pickup trucks and cars.

"Glad you went?" John asked as he
turned onto the highway.

Michelle was watching the lacy patterns the
lightning made as it forked across the sky. "Yes, I had fun." She
moved closer against him, seeking his warmth.

He held the truck steady against the gusts of
wind buffeting it, feeling her breast brush his arm every time he moved. He
inhaled sharply at his inevitable response.

"What's wrong?" she asked sleepily.

For answer he took her hand and pressed it to
the straining fabric of his jeans. She made a soft sound, and her slender
fingers outlined the hard ridge beneath the fabric as her body automatically
curled toward him. He felt his jeans open; then her hand slid inside the parted
fabric and closed over him, her palm soft and warm. He groaned aloud, his body
jerking as he tried to keep his attention on the road. It was the sweetest
torture he could imagine, and he ground his teeth as her hand moved further
down to gently cup him for a moment before returning to stroke him to the edge
of madness.

He wanted her, and he wanted her now. Jerking
the steering wheel, he pulled the truck onto the side of the road just as fat
raindrops began splattering the windshield. "Why are we stopping?"
Michelle murmured.

He killed the lights and reached for her,
muttering a graphic explanation.

"John! We're on the highway! Anyone
could pass by and see us!"

"It's dark and raining," he said
roughly, untying the drawstring at her waist and pulling her pants down.
"No one can see in."

She'd been enjoying teasing him, exciting
him, exciting herself with the feel of his hardness in her hand, but she'd
thought he would wait until they got home. She should have known better. He
didn't care if they were in a bedroom or not; his appetites were strong and
immediate. She went weak under the onslaught of his mouth and hands, no longer
caring about anything else. The rain was a thunderous din, streaming over the
windows of the truck as if they were sitting under a waterfall. She could
barely hear the rawly sexual things he was saying to her as he slid to the
middle of the seat and lifted her over him. She cried out at his penetration,
her body arching in his hands, and the world spun away in a whirlwind of
sensations.

Later, after the rain had let up, she was
limp in his arms as he carried her inside the house. Her hands slid around his
neck as he bent to place her gently on the bed, and obeying that light pressure
he stretched out on the bed with her. She was exhausted, sated, her body still
throbbing with the remnants of pleasure. He kissed her deeply, rubbing his hand
over her breasts and stomach. "Do you want me to undress you?" he
murmured.

She nuzzled his throat. "No, I'll do
it…in a minute. I don't feel like moving right now."

His big hand paused on her stomach, then
slipped lower. "We didn't use anything."

"It's okay," she assured him
softly. The timing was wrong. She had just finished her cycle, which was one
reason he'd exploded out of control.

He rubbed his lips over hers in warm, quick
kisses. "I'm sorry, baby. I was so damned ready for you, I thought I was
going to go off like a teenager."

"It's okay," she said again. She
loved him so much she trembled with it. Sometimes it was all she could do to
keep from telling him, from crying the words aloud, but she was terrified that if
she did he'd start putting distance between them, wary of too many
entanglements. It had to end sometime, but she wanted it to last every possible
second.

Nothing terrible had happened to her because
she'd gone to the party; in fact, the trip home had been wonderful. For days
afterward, she shivered with delight whenever she thought about it. There
hadn't been any other out of the ordinary phone calls, and gradually she
relaxed, convinced that there had been nothing to them. She was still far more
content remaining on the ranch man she was either socializing or shopping, but
at John's urging she began using the Mercedes to run small errands and
occasionally visit her friends on those days when she wasn't riding with him or
working on the books. She drove over to her house several times to check on
things, but the silence depressed her. John had had the electricity turned back
on, though he hadn't mentioned it to her, but she didn't say anything about
moving back in. She couldn't leave him, not now; she was so helplessly,
hopelessly in love with him that she knew she'd stay with him until he told her
to leave.

One Monday afternoon she'd been on an errand
for John, and on the return trip she detoured by her house to check things
again. She walked through the huge rooms, making certain no pipes had sprung a
leak or anything else needed repair. It was odd; she hadn't been away that
long, but the house felt less and less like her home. It was hard to remember
how it had been before John Rafferty had come storming into her life again; his
presence was so intense it blocked out lesser details. Her troubled dreams had
almost disappeared, and even when she had one, she would wake to find him
beside her in the night, strong and warm. It was becoming easier to trust, to
accept that she wasn't alone to face whatever happened.

It was growing late, and the shadows
lengthened in the house; she carefully locked the door behind her and walked
out to the car. Abruptly she shivered, as if something cold had touched her.
She looked around, but everything was normal. Birds sang in the trees; insects
hummed. But for a moment she'd felt it again, that sense of menace. It was odd.

Logic told her there was nothing to it, but
when she was in the car she locked the doors. She laughed a little at herself.
First a couple of phone calls had seemed spooky, and now she was
"feeling" things in the air.

Because there was so little traffic on the
secondary roads between her ranch and John's, she didn't use the rearview
mirrors very much. The car was on her rear bumper before she noticed it, and
even then she got only a glimpse before it swung to the left to pass. The road
was narrow, and she edged to the right to give the other car more room. It
pulled even with her, and she gave it a cursory glance just as it suddenly
swerved toward her.

"Watch it!" she yelled, jerking the
steering wheel to the right, but mere was a loud grinding sound as metal rubbed
against metal. The Mercedes, smaller than the other car, was pushed violently
to the right Michelle slammed on the brakes as she felt the two right wheels
catch in the sandy soil of the shoulder, pulling the car even harder to that
side.

She wrestled with the steering wheel, too
scared even to swear at the other driver. The other car shot past, and somehow
she managed to jerk the Mercedes back onto the road. Shaking, she braked to a
stop and leaned her head on the steering wheel, then sat upright as she heard
tires squealing. The other car had gone down the road, but now had made a
violent U-turn and was coming back. She only hoped whoever it was had
insurance.