Intimate Strangers (Eclipse Heat Book 2) (12 page)

“And you were mad about that?” If there was one thing Ambrose Quince loved aside from his children and brother, Lucy already knew it was the Double-Q ranch.

“Like I said, I was lost in a mess of work, facing financial ruin and I didn’t know what to do but get up every day and keep moving. You reached in and before I even knew what you intended, took charge. Now I figure it’s right I do the same for you. You’re lost and scared and your mind doesn’t want to know me anymore, Lucy. I understand that. But your body remembers my touch, sweetheart. Trust it. Trust me.”

He paused at the edge of the campground, nudging her head up ’til she had no choice but to meet his gaze or keep her eyes glued shut.

He brushed his lips across her sealed lids, then lower until he kissed her mouth lightly. “You’re not alone anymore, Lucy.” His chest rumbled beneath her cheek as he breathed the words into wet hair. She shivered, almost remembering those words from a time long gone, and he wrapped his arms tighter around her before stepping from darkness into the light of the campfire.

She pushed against him insistently until he let her free, but before he did so, he reached beneath her cover as he set her on her feet and she felt the rough texture of his calloused hands scraping across nipples that were again pebbled from his touch.

“Ambrose Quince,” she warned him fiercely. “Quit taking liberties not conceded to you.” But her voice was breathless with something other than anger, and his chuckle confirmed that once again he’d intentionally crowded her toward accepting him.

The drovers who weren’t herding the cattle were stretched wherever they could find an empty spot around the fire, exhausted from the first day’s travel. Hamilton reared up and, seeing them, grunted and turned his back, the set of his shoulders telegraphing disgust.

When Lucy would have returned immediately to the wagon, Ambrose stopped her with a brush of his hand down her spine and a squeeze on her shoulder.

“Sit down and let me tend to your hair, Lucy.” He pulled her toward the fire, seating her on the towel, blanket wrapped tight around her as he sprawled on a log behind her, thighs spread wide. She braced her head against his leg while he combed out the wet strands, drying her hair over the banked heat.

More than once, her head bumped his aroused member, a rigid presence outlined beneath his pants. She closed her eyes, shutting out the sight until the rhythmic pull of the comb lulled her to sleep. She woke the next morning in the wagon, curled next to Brody.

* * * * *

Lucy was up at first light, pulling a sleepy Brody behind her to the river to bathe. The memory of her husband’s mouth and hands stayed with her through breakfast until the grit and work of the day buried those thoughts.

She didn’t particularly like driving chuck, but at least it got her out in front of the worst of the red dust. Ambrose had decided that the chuck wagon needed to cross to the other side before the bank became too worn and trampled by the cattle.

After she’d cleared breakfast dishes and repacked the wagon, it was her turn to ford the river. Hamilton climbed on board, taking up the reins before she could. Lucy stayed seated next to him, assuming that she was intended to cross the river on the chuck wagon and not by horse.

She and Hamilton had a truce of sorts—it had been easy to maintain since they rarely spoke. But as soon as the chuck wagon was in motion, he turned and said, “Don’t go practicing your wiles on my brother. You near killed him with ’em once. Don’t do it again, Lucifer.”

”First off, Hamilton Quince, I don’t have any wiles to practice, and secondly…” There was no secondly. She couldn’t deny what she didn’t know. She elected to escape his lecture instead.

Sliding from the wagon seat, she hurried to untie Hamilton’s horse from the back of the wagon before the team entered the water.

“Hey, Luce,” he yelled at her retreating back as she led the horse away.

Before Hamilton or anyone else could stop her, Lucy mounted and rode to the river’s edge and then plunged in, following Ambrose and Alex across. She was still midstream when they climbed the bank on the other side. Ambrose had Brody tucked in front of him, and she was grinning from ear to ear.

Alex rode a speckled blue-roan gelding Lucy thought seemed a little too feisty for a boy, but he looked up from managing him smartly and caught her gaze. She knew that for a split second he had forgotten that she was supposed to be an impostor. He gave her the sweetest smile.

Then he remembered and went back to frowning at her with his Ambrose look on his face. He seemed to have grown older just in the last day. The frown didn’t matter. Lucy tucked that smile away in her heart. Her gaze skated over Ambrose, not ready to deal with the aftermath of his determined seduction.

She was mystified.
How will I look at him again?
His imperious, “I know best for us” assertion followed quickly by his… What had that been?

She felt defensive, unsure and confused. She’d been prepared to fight off a physical joining, the thought of which frightened her. But…

He’d touched her, savored her scent, tasted her. Lucy flushed red and her sex clenched remembering his intimate kisses. She didn’t feel used or abused this morning. For the first time in three years, she felt—like a woman.

Lucy was suddenly glad the cook had gotten hurt, even if it was a made-up story Ambrose had concocted as an excuse to bring her along. She kept apart from the other Quinces, watching the happiness play across each face.

When the chuck wagon was across the river, Lucy climbed on the seat and took the reins of the team, sending Hamilton on his way with some advice. “I think you need to tend your own business and let your brother’s concerns be his.”

Hamilton’s gaze followed hers to the other three Quinces. As usual, Alex and Brody were teasing each other and Ambrose watched them both with ill-concealed pride.

“Maybe,” Hamilton grunted, mounting his horse and lowering his voice so the others couldn’t hear. “But he almost didn’t make it when you ran off the last time, Lucifer. I figure you run again and he’ll just up and die.”

Hamilton’s stare was cold and challenging—hers was the same.

Ambrose rode close, swinging Brody from her perch in front of him to the chuck wagon seat. “You ready to head out, Lucy?”

Avoiding his gaze, she clutched the reins and nodded.

“Help your mama today, Brody, and don’t get too much sun.”

Lucy clucked at the draft horses, urging them in motion when Ambrose took off his hat and waved it at riders in the distance, signaling them to get the herd moving.

Crowding his horse closer to the wagon he said, “I’ll be at the back of the herd today but I’ll see you tonight.” Then he leaned down to brush her lips with his, straightened, and rode away.

Brody giggled. “Pa’s sweet on you.”

Lucy didn’t know quite what to say. “Don’t be silly. We’re strangers to each other.”

Brody grinned smugly. “You might not know him, but he sure remembers you.”

* * * * *

Ambrose wasn’t about to lose ground when it came to claiming his wife. But he was no fool either. She’d been looking everywhere but at him this morning and ready to whip the team into high speed when he’d ridden near. Her declaration last night,
“I don’t want any man crawling over me or in me”,
had been noted.

The Lucy now was more than the skittish filly he’d courted and married. She was a full-grown woman with children who was just plain scared at the thought of being with a man. It hurt him inside knowing she had reasons for her terror. She’d been pure confidence before, sure of herself in every situation—and passionate, both in and out of the bedroom. They’d loved hard and fought often, both having opinions and tempers.

He didn’t want to remember the day she’d left, or the final quarrel that had brought it about. Instead, he rode the ridge of his hard-on, thinking about ways to ease under her defenses so she trusted him—and herself, when they were together.

It was six weeks to Wichita, if all went well. While he trailed cattle, eating their dust all day, he plotted his seduction. Like the other cowboys, he looked forward to Lucy’s meals, but she could have served mud and he’d have smiled and swallowed it.

She was cagey, avoiding shadowy spots alone with him. Nevertheless, he made sure he was around after supper each night before he rode back out for night drag. Alex had his orders. “Sleep with a gun at hand under the wagon. When I’m not here, you’re protecting the women.”

Alex didn’t ask questions but he had eyes in his head. Ambrose didn’t hide his intentions from his kids. He wanted Lucy back for good, and he planned on making that happen. With that in mind, and just to get close to her once a day, he walked her to the wagon each night, tucked Brody in, then said his good nights to Lucy with a kiss. To begin with it was too much for her, and she pitched a low-voiced battle to keep her distance.

When she settled down enough to realize he wasn’t making any more claims than a brush of lips across lips, she relaxed and let it happen. By the end of the first week, she even smiled at him a time or two. It wasn’t nearly enough for him, but he figured he had six weeks to…
Dammit, I don’t even know what I want. This is Lucy but not. Sometimes I feel like I’m with a totally different woman than my wife.

* * * * *

Lucy learned about the race to beat another brand to the Wichita stockyards from Brody and, understanding the gravity of the situation, made sure she set a good pace and wasted no time.

The herd numbered close to two thousand, and Ambrose and Hamilton had hired extra help to get the cattle to the railhead. If they met their deadline, they’d get a government contract to supply the army with beef.

There were a lot of ranchers who wanted just such a contract, but the Quince brothers had a spread large enough to raise the beef needed without the army negotiating with four or five smaller ranchers.

Because of that, a conglomerate of cattlemen from smaller spreads had joined with each other and devised a new brand, naming it the Circle Five. The Double-Q brand was racing against more than time. They had to beat this group to the stockyards.

Brody was a cascading fountain of information. By the end of the first week, Lucy knew the history of every rancher around town and more about the people in Eclipse than she wanted to. She also heard the story of Quincy and Luce.

According to Brody, Ambrose Quince was twenty-eight years old and a toughened rancher when he laid eyes on Lucy McKenna. Lucy was a young lady from Boston who had traveled with her father to Texas to establish a horse farm.

When Brody rolled her eyes at that and snickered over the naiveté of her grandfather, Lucy could see the heavy hand of the Quince family shaping the tale.

“Lucy was eighteen years old and pretty as a picture.” Brody smacked her lips over those words and then looked sideways at Lucy. “I look just like her, you know.” Lucy nodded. Even though she was older and scarred, she could still see Brody’s resemblance to her.

Lucy drove the team while the little girl filled the day with sprinkles of information about forgotten times. “Papa says my Grandfather McKenna rode out by himself one morning and didn’t return.”

Lucy flinched on the wagon seat as though a broom swept dirt from an almost memory. A suffocating ache filled her chest and she blinked tears from her eyes, pretending it was sweat she wiped away with her arm. “What happened?” she asked calmly.

Brody laid her hand on Lucy’s arm, patting her. “By nightfall, Mama was so worried…” She paused and then went on. “By nightfall, you had the town out looking for him.”

She moved closer, delivering the bad news. “Snakebit.”

Lucy shuddered at the horrible image Brody’s words evoked and the little girl gave her a hug, comforting her.

Brody said after the young Lucy had seen her father buried, Ambrose Quince had laid siege in a whirlwind romance culminating in a marriage, quickly followed by the birth of Alex.

Comparing the story to the Ambrose she knew, Lucy assumed he’d edited the account for young ears.

He turned red when I asked him how much choice I had in my future.
As for a whirlwind courtship, Ambrose was currently stalking her, wearing down her resistance. She figured his methods of pursuit hadn’t changed much—when Mr. Quince wanted something, he didn’t take no for an answer.

Right now, whether Lucy agreed or not—and half of her did since her body seemed to crave his—Ambrose herded her toward…
What? Continuing a marriage built on rotten flooring? I need to forget about Ambrose and concentrate. He is determined I left him with another man, but how could I have left Alex and Brody?

But she ran into a blank wall when she tried to remember their past.
Why did I leave?
Until she could make sense of that, building a future with Ambrose seemed impossible.

She remembered his vow in the ranch pantry—he was courting her in his unconventional way. Every morning he said goodbye by brushing his lips across hers. Every night he rode back to camp in time to say good night. He touched her whenever he found opportunity, overwhelming her protests with sweet kisses and carnal intent.

After two weeks of his flattering attentions brought to life a fluttering feminine part of Lucy, she resolved to get better control of the situation. Quincy caused such a foreign response in her sterile existence she paused, examining his motives more closely, determined to start using her brain and asking questions.

That evening, waiting for him to ride in from night patrol to escort her to the wagon, she heated water and had a washcloth and towel ready. When he’d scrubbed dirt and sweat from his face and grunted his appreciation for the warm water, she decided it was time to talk.

“Am I rich?” It didn’t seem possible, but Brody’s description of a Boston debutante visiting Texas implied money had been abundant in the McKenna family.

“Yep.” He rubbed the whiskers sprouting black on his face and said, “I need to use that hot water and shave while I have the chance. Loan me that knife you wear.”

Determined not to let him sidetrack her conversation, she turned enough to hide her action from anyone watching and retrieved the sharp blade sheathed on her thigh. Handing it to him, she said, “How rich?”

He lathered soap over his jaw and squinted at her. “Why the sudden interest in your bank account?”

“How wealthy was I and am I still?”

He concentrated on cutting the stubble from his face. She focused on the clean slide of the knife as she waited for the answer to her question. When he tilted his head to better access his jaw, the rope burn on his neck reminded her of the hangman and she blurted, “Someone wanted us both dead.”

Ambrose rinsed the blade and handed her knife to her before wiping his face on the towel. “That’s occurred to me,” he agreed.

“How much money makes me worth killing?” she persisted.

“Well, your father invested money in the East when he sold out and came to Texas. Besides the funds he deposited in the Eclipse Bank when he arrived, you received a quarterly check from his business earnings.”

Lucy rubbed her head, which had begun to ache. “None of this makes sense to me,” she said impatiently.

“You gonna ask me next if I married you for your money?” He’d crossed his arms, leaning against the wagon as they talked. Now he bent his leg at the knee, assuming an even more casual stance as though her answer wasn’t important.

Lucy couldn’t repress her snort. “If that were the case, Ambrose Quince, we’d have water lines run to the house and a new sink and pump in the kitchen. It hasn’t escaped my attention that nothing nailed down was paid for by me.”

Her answer must have pleased him because he grinned, shoved away from the wagon and slid his arm around her shoulders for a quick squeeze. “Now you know what we fought about,” he said, sounding almost playful.

She hadn’t thought much about his shaving until he ushered her away from the wagon and into the starlit night. She looked up at him obliquely when he stopped by a spill of boulders standing in the middle of nowhere.

“There’s rattlesnakes, wolves and coyotes lurking around these parts and I don’t favor tangling with any of them,” she told him. But he lifted her onto the first rock and urged her forward and up ’til they stood on a flat, granite slab high enough to see the glowing embers of the campfire.

Then he turned her in his arms and kissed her. Lucy leaned into his embrace, feeling safer than any place she’d ever been. She stood on her toes, reaching higher to pull his head even closer, fitting her body to his and rolling her hips against his arousal. She kissed her way from his lips to his smooth jaw and rubbed her cheek against it, purring her pleasure.

“I really loved you, didn’t I?” she asked, her voice a soft, husky sound in the night.

“Yes,” he growled. Not yep, his usual offhand answer, but a resounding yes.

“We enjoyed the marriage bed, didn’t we?” It was a bold question she already knew the answer to, but his response was important.

His answer was more physical. He dropped one hand to her rump and pressed her tighter to his confined shaft, lowering his head to nuzzle her neck before answering, “Never doubt it.”

Lucy stepped away from Ambrose. “Then why would you think I left you?” she asked tartly.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he snarled, the amorous male of moments before replaced by a surly beast. “I didn’t come out here to have a conversation.”

She poked him in the chest. “I know exactly what you came out here for, Mr. Ambrose
I-want-you-to-be-my-wife
Quince. And I’ll bet that every time I tried to have an intelligent discussion in the years we were together, you distracted me the same way.”

She stomped her foot and glared at him when he caught her hand and lifted her fingers to his mouth to suck on one.

“Stop that.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t think when you do that. For all your saying ‘we need to talk,’ we never do.” When she remained firmly disinterested in his plans for seduction, he bit the tip of her finger hard enough to sting and then kissed it before dropping her hand.

She peppered him with questions as he helped her off the rock. “Did I have money with me when I left? How did I live? What happened to the quarterly infusion during the past three years?”

His answers came fast and clipped. “You had the clothes on your back, your horse and your sidesaddle when you left. You emptied your account at the bank that day. You must have lived pretty well until the no account you ran off with spent your money.”

Before she could ask how much, he said grimly, “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Lucy could only gulp and stare at him. After three years of no money, it was an incomprehensible sum. She was so astonished by the magnitude of her once wealth she almost missed his reference to a lover accompanying her on her flight.

When it registered, she waited ’til Ambrose set her on the ground before she slapped his face—hard. “That’s the second time you’ve implied I’m a whore. Don’t do it again.”

“You’ve kneed me in the groin, slammed me in the head with a feed scoop and now hit me in the mouth. I’ve cut you a lot of slack because of your hard times, but make no mistake and think you can pummel me like a dummy. ” He was breathing hard, his voice strained and angry.

Lucy answered. “You are a dummy if you think I ran off and left my children. As for hitting you, I suspect it’s deserved ten times over and been a long time coming, Mr. Quince. But you can rest easy that you’re safe from my ire as long as you keep your distance.”

He walked her to the wagon, refraining from his usual kiss good night, politely seeing her inside before he left. Lucy fidgeted, trying not to wake Brody, and finally slid back to the ground. Ambrose was readying to leave for night patrol when she hurried across to him. When he looked at her sternly, his eyebrow cocked in question, she said, “Take care when you ride out tonight.”

Before he could reply, she scurried back to the wagon and climbed in, pulling the canvas flap closed so she didn’t have to watch him ride away.

In the morning when he returned from night duty to grab coffee and a quick meal, he sought her out and said gruffly, “Hit me when you need to knock sense into my head.”

She was mixing another bowl of flapjacks but set it aside to catch his arm as he turned away. She tapped his forehead playfully. “Won’t do any good. Too hard.”

Lucy’s fingers skated down his cheek in an almost caress before she brushed her knuckles across his chin. “I had to know,” she explained.

“Had to know what?” he asked.

She picked up her bowl and stirred the contents, answering smugly, “If you were one to beat a woman with your fists, I guess I’d have found out last night.”

* * * * *

Ambrose wasn’t sure whether his courtship had suffered a setback or jumped forward. Lucy’s incredible admission she’d been testing his temperament left him astonished. It was a jarring reminder she didn’t know him at all.
Hell, had I been the man she suspected, I could have killed her out there. That was a damn stupid risk she took.

Lucy’s slap in the face got his attention and exacerbated the dilemma in his mind.

He didn’t want to revisit the past, shying away from those memories, determined to build new ones with the woman who’d returned. But trust her? How could he? The sad truth was, she’d left her family once before and it might happen again.
Me, I understand. We didn’t agree on much toward the end and I guess she just gave up. But the kids?

He backed off his attentions, uneasily watching as mother and daughter sat side by side driving the chuck wagon each day. Brody was a talker and telling Quince business whether Lucy wanted to hear it or not, but Ambrose was pretty damned sure Lucy was sopping it up.

During the third week of the trip, he kept his hands to himself, tucking Lucy into her prim bed without so much as a chaste kiss. He was determined to get a handle on his lust and use his head. But that didn’t make it any easier riding his swollen cock every night.

Instead of following the very rules she’d laid down, Lucy became more relaxed around him, refusing to allow his evasive answers to her questions. Frequently she returned to the subject of her bank account, irritating him with her continual focus on her money.

Laying her hand on his arm each evening, she invited him to escort her around the perimeter of the camp. As soon as they began the circuit she’d begin probing for answers. “You didn’t say what happened to the quarterly dividend paid into my account.”

“I’ve told you before. Every goddamned penny is sitting where it was put. If not, you’ll have to bludgeon Pauley with your accusations.”

Instead of letting him pull his arm away when he tried, she squeezed his forearm reassuringly. “But no one has audited his management, correct?”

He relaxed, seeing where she was going with her inquiry. “Nope.”

“And as long as I remained missing and not dead, nobody would—correct?”

“Lucy, I wasn’t interested in your money then and I’m not now.” Ambrose felt the drag of depression seep through his veins. “When Brody was born, we had wills made. If anything happened to me, I left my share of the Double-Q to you. If you died, the kids got your money.”

“And if both of us were gone?” She continued to probe. “Who would raise the children?”

“Their Uncle Hamilton,” Ambrose said grimly. “Don’t suggest he’d kill me or you to get his hands on what belongs to Alex and Brody.”

They’d made it around the camp and to the chuck wagon when he braced to defend Hamilton against her suspicions but she had another man in her sights.

“I’m thinking that Mr. Pauley has done a lot of maneuvering to keep my money in his bank. I don’t know how that fits into the puzzle of my disappearance, but surely you can see that something is wrong with the picture that’s been drawn for me.”

Her words made him edgy, as if he’d been overlooking things he should have seen. He spent the rest of the night thinking hard about past pictures he’d been shown.

On their circuit the next night, he reopened the discussion. “The bank president is no better than a snake in the grass,” Ambrose told Lucy. “I don’t doubt that Pauley coveted your wealth. And you disappearing certainly left him in control of it. But it doesn’t explain how you ended up scarred and cooking meals in Buffalo Creek.”

“I’m working on that answer,” she told him before she said good night.

She’d questioned Hamilton’s loyalty and he decided to set her straight on that issue after he’d chewed on it half a week. “My brother would no more raise a hand to hurt you than shoot himself in the head. Get that out of your mind. There was no love lost between you but he defends the Quince brand and that includes you.”

“What did we quarrel about?”

He snorted, remembering past fights. “You were jealous of him, plain and simple.”

“Why would I have been jealous of your brother?”

“You just couldn’t get it in your head that he’s my partner in business as well as kin. We had to spend a lot of time together and still do.”

“If we shared the same bed at night, we spent a lot of time together too. And when we married, I thought that made us partners,” she replied, her tone dry.

She steered him into a patch of shadow and unexpectedly twined her arms around his neck, pulling his lips down to meet hers. At the beginning of the week, she’d told him to keep his hands off of her but since she started the kiss, Ambrose had no problem finishing it.

God, she felt good in his arms, melting against him, reminding him as she swayed against his cock how much he wanted inside her. When they finally separated, they were both gasping for breath. She stepped out of the shadows, pulling him along toward the end of their walk before he could reach for seconds.

On the way to the chuck wagon she composed herself and asked, “If Hamilton rode to Wichita, sold the steers and didn’t come back, what would you do?”

Dammit, she’d gone back to her infernal inquiries. “I’d check the jail and undertaker and then start hunting his killer—because the only thing that would keep Hamilton from coming back to the Double-Q is a bullet.”

She nodded and looked at him shrewdly. “Maybe I had reason to be jealous. Think about it.” Then she climbed into the wagon leaving him aroused and alone, worrying that she’d hit an unhappy truth.