Hell on Wheels: A Loveswept Classic Romance (15 page)

“You have to ask, after listening to those stories of his? He obviously doesn’t sit still long enough to have a relationship. And even if he did—would you want to fall in love with someone who’s probably going to kill himself with those idiotic stunts he pulls?”

“Victoria honey …” Nelva led her daughter to the couch, and they both sat down. “I married a nice, safe Nebraska farmer, and look what happened to him. You can’t predict these things, and you can’t live in fear of them. If I had somehow known that your father would be taken from me in his prime, I still would have married him. I treasure the years we did have together.”

Victoria smiled, as she always did when she thought about the strong love between her parents. And that gave her the perfect argument. “Roan and I aren’t in love the way you and Daddy were. I’m not even sure we like each other all that much.”

“Since you’ve known each other for only four days, I’m sure you’re not in love,” Nelva agreed. “But you could at least give it a chance. You always analyze any halfway decent guy to death, until you come up with a reason why you shouldn’t even give it a try. You’ve been like that since puberty.”

Victoria sighed. They’d covered this territory before. “Trust me on this one, Mother. Roan and I are as different as night and day. We disagree constantly, we have nothing in common—”

“Sounds like your father and me,” Nelva said. “You inherited all your caution and common sense from him, you know. I was the crazy one. People thought our marriage would never work.”

“Mother …”

“Okay, okay. Do you still want to play cards?”

“How ’bout we just watch an old movie?”

Nelva dug out a 1930s screwball comedy with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, which gave Victoria a couple of hours of mindless enjoyment. But after her mother went to bed, Victoria’s thoughts turned to Roan again, as they had far too often these past few days. She wondered what he was doing. Was he really reading, or had he simply wanted some time away from her?

After slipping into a knee-length T-shirt she’d found in a drawer in her old bedroom, Victoria sat cross-legged
on her bed and pulled up the latest weather data on her laptop computer. But there was nothing very interesting going on, and more than once she found her gaze straying out the window, where she had a perfect view of the guest cottage. When the lights went off, she pictured Roan lying in the bed they’d made up, the snowy sheets contrasting against his tanned skin. The image sent a shock of awareness coursing through her. When had she become so … so lustful?

She closed the computer and looked out the window again. This time she saw a faint orange pin of light she knew was the end of a cigarette. He was sitting on the porch, smoking. Alone. In the dark.

Prudent or not, cautious or not, it wasn’t in Victoria’s makeup to ignore a creature in pain. And she knew, as surely as she knew her shoe size, that Roan was hurting. She’d thought at first he was just smarting from the tongue-lashing she’d given him, but he wouldn’t still be brooding about that.

Unable to talk herself out of it, she found an old velour robe and tied it tightly about herself, more in deference to the evening chill than modesty. She couldn’t seem to locate any shoes, so she slipped out the kitchen door with nothing but socks to protect her feet from the damp ground and picked her way through the dark toward the cottage.

She couldn’t very well hide her approach. Roan had to have seen her coming from a hundred feet away, but he didn’t move.

“What are you doing here?” he asked flatly when she got close enough.

“Visiting. Move over.”

He obliged by scooting over to give her room to sit on the top porch step beside him. As she sat down, she saw the glowing arc of his cigarette as he tossed it over the railing. It was on the tip of her tongue to remind him about fires, but she stopped herself. The ground was wet, and the ember was probably extinguished the moment it fell.

Besides, she was much more concerned about the fact that Roan wasn’t wearing a shirt. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked. The temperature had already dropped into the fifties.

“A little.”

“Why don’t you get a shirt?”

“Because I like to be cold, okay?”

His surliness silenced her, but only for a moment. “You know, you haven’t been yourself since … well, since we argued.”

“Has my behavior given you anything to complain about?”

“No, I didn’t come here to complain.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I’m concerned. And I feel like I’ve done something to upset you—”

“Other than blowing your stack at me?”

“You had that coming, and I don’t think that’s the problem anyway. I feel like I’ve done something else, but I don’t know what it could be.”

“What makes you so sure I’m ‘upset,’ as you put it?”

“I can tell. Give me some credit.”

“Yeah, well, whatever’s wrong, don’t flatter yourself. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

Victoria refused to let his words hurt her. She was sure he was trying to drive her away, and she wouldn’t be driven. “What is wrong, then? I’ll understand if you don’t want to talk about it—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

A supercharged silence stretched between them, growing more taut by the second. Victoria had to resist a powerful urge to touch Roan, to offer comfort even if she didn’t understand why he was hurting. But she knew from recent experience how quickly comfort could turn into passion.

She tried to think of something to say, something that would ease them out of the awkward silence. But Roan beat her to it.

“Do you really want to know what’s on my mind?” he asked bitterly. “Do you honestly want to find out what kind of selfish bastard I am?”

The harshness in his voice scared her. Maybe she didn’t want to know. But regardless of whether she did, she sensed that Roan needed to tell her. “Yes. I want to know what’s troubling you.”

He sighed heavily. “We were talking earlier about my sister. My baby sister, twenty-two years old. She died scuba diving, but it wasn’t an accident.

“I killed her.”

Roan knew he’d shocked her. As dark as it was, he could see that her eyes were huge and full of questions.

“I don’t believe it,” she finally said.

“It’s true.”

“Explain it to me.”

He heaved another great sigh. The incident was as familiar to him as his own face in the mirror. He could recite the facts in his sleep. Not that he would enjoy telling the story, but if that’s what it took to make her go away and leave him in peace …

“I was in Australia, working on some photos of the Great Barrier Reef for
Nature
magazine, and Kim decided to come visit me. We were never very close, what with the age difference and all, and I thought this would be a great chance for us to get to know each other, adult to adult.”

Roan stared out into nothingness as he spoke, turning over the painful images in his mind the way a kid
overturns rocks to see what squirmy things lurk underneath.

“I’d been doing some underwater photography, and I wanted to show her the incredible things I’d seen. She was a good swimmer, but she was afraid to swim in the ocean.

“I badgered her for a couple of days, promised her over and over that nothing would happen to her as long as she was with me. Finally I talked her into it. I think in the end she gave in because she didn’t want me to think she was a wimp.

“Anyway, I took her to a calm cove first, and when that went okay we went into deeper waters. Lots deeper. It was way too challenging for a first-time diver, but she was doing so well, I didn’t give it a second thought. I really believed that nothing could touch her as long as big brother was there to protect her.”

He paused to chance a look at Victoria. She was all rapt attention, leaning closer to catch his hushed words. He could smell a soft, undefinable scent that was hers alone.

“We were about seventy feet down when Kim somehow breathed in a mouthful of water. She signaled me that she was in trouble, and her first instinct was to shoot for the surface, but I stopped her because I didn’t want her to get the bends. So we made a slow, controlled ascent, and she was gripping my hand so hard …

“About halfway to the surface, I felt her grip loosen. And when we finally made it, her face was blue and she
was unconscious. I dragged her to the beach and did CPR on her, but …”

“She died?” Victoria finished for him in a small voice. “That quickly?”

“It didn’t seem quick.”

Victoria shivered. “I’m sure it must have been the most agonizing few minutes of your life.”

“It was more agonizing for Kim. I would have done better to just put a bullet in her head—”

“Roan, that’s not true, and you know it,” Victoria cut in sharply.

“All I know is that I made a stupid mistake, and I should have been the one to die, not an innocent—” He buried his face in his hands, muffling his words. “God, she wasn’t much more than a child.”

“You didn’t do it on purpose. You said it yourself—it was a mistake. An accident. How could you even think it was anything else?”

He balled his hands into fists and slammed them against his knees. “I didn’t think, dammit! I ignored her fears of the ocean as if they were nothing. I ignored all the safety rules because I was sure I knew what I was doing. I thought I was so all-fired invincible that no accident would dare intrude into my world.”

“But, Roan, we all suffer from bad judgment sometime in our lives. We all have decisions we regret. That doesn’t make us bad people.”

“Oh, really? When have you ever made a decision that cost someone her life?”

She was silent for a moment, and he thought he’d
made his point. But when she finally answered his question, her words were so soft, he could barely hear them.

“I decided to change my shoes before running out to tell my father the tornado sirens were going off. That two or three minutes could have made the difference.”

In the past three years, Roan had never met anyone who could understand what he’d gone through with Kim. He’d listened to their platitudes, shrugged off their comfort, closed his ears when they’d tried to absolve his guilt. He’d been so secure in the knowledge that no one could understand like he did.

Now, here was Victoria Driscoll, telling him that she did understand. She’d been through it. A decision as mundane as what shoes to wear might have cost her her father’s life.

When he looked over at her again and their gazes met, he felt a connection to her so strong and powerful, it took his breath away. The magnetic pull was far stronger than even the most insistent sexual desire, more potent than any compulsion he’d ever had. Yet he couldn’t close the gap between them, those few inches of cold air that represented a fathomless canyon.

He’d promised, dammit. He’d let her down before, and he would not—

“Roan,” Victoria’s voice was unsure, like a young girl’s. “You don’t have to be a gentleman tonight if you don’t want to.”

He stared at her for several seconds, uncomprehending. Then all at once he understood what she was saying, and the enormity of it scared the hell out of him,
almost swamping the red-hot desire coursing through his veins. Almost.

Kissing her seemed too sudden, too radical. He was afraid that if he touched her or tried to hold on to her, she would disappear in a puff of smoke. Instead, he reached out a tentative hand and stroked her hair, all loose and disheveled like he’d never seen it. It was silky soft. And she was real, as real as the porch he was sitting on. More real than any fantasy. Was it just last night he’d dreamed about her hair like this?

She took his hand and pressed the back to her lips in a sweet, gentle gesture that should have touched his heart. Instead, it sent fire to his loins.

“Oh, Vic, what you do to me,” he whispered. “But I don’t deserve this.”

“Don’t say that. No matter what you’ve done, or believe you’ve done, by simple virtue of the fact that you’re human you deserve to be loved.”

You deserve to be loved
. Did Victoria mean love in the physical sense, or the emotional? Was she telling him how she felt about him, or merely verbalizing a universal truth? And why was he debating semantics when she was offering herself so sweetly?

Already at the limits of his control, he took one look at her moist pink lips, slightly parted, and made a decision he knew could change him forever. He leaned forward and captured those lips with his own, weaving his fingers through her hair as he held her a willing captive.

As before, the kiss was wild and hot, almost painful in its intensity. Unlike before, he felt no compulsion to stop or pull back. She was going to be his. And even if
tomorrow she regretted it, he would still have this night and the memory of Victoria’s understanding, her willing response, her healing touch.

Her arms stole around his shoulders, her hands like timid birds against the bare skin of his back. Acutely aware of her every breath, every flutter of her eyes, and the soft sounds she made in the back of her throat, he increased the intensity of the kiss, slanting his mouth against hers, invading with his tongue, plundering her sweet recesses.

She melted against him, twisting herself so that her body pressed against his. Her velour robe tickled his chest hair and rubbed against his nipples as she shifted in an effort to bring them closer together.

“Ah, Vic,” he groaned against her cheek. She was giving so freely, and all he could think about was taking, taking. He wanted to go slowly, wanted to make it good for her, but she was driving him to the brink of his restraint. And she still had her clothes on.

He yanked on her belt. The robe fell open and his eager hands invaded, circling her waist, then sliding up to cradle her breasts through the T-shirt she wore.

Her sharp intake of breath spurred him on. He stroked her nipples with his thumbs and watched the effects on her expressive face.

“Sh-should we go inside?” she managed to ask.

He nuzzled her neck. “Mmm, you afraid your mama might be watching out the window?”

“No, but it’s too cold out here to take off my clothes. And that’s what I desperately want to do.”