Knight in a White Stetson (19 page)

Because, in truth, she’d felt the same thing when she’d seen the smooth, worldly group of men, some already
in
their late twenties, hit the sorority house late that September evening. They’d been dressed in suits and ties, and most of them drove the expensive sports cars that were their New England-middle-management stock-in-trade. Those young girls never knew what hit them.

Calla had been a little overwhelmed herself. Clark’s clean-cut good looks and old-money charm had swept her off her feet. She waited until their third date to tell him she was already twenty years old.

“That’s not true! They were a welcoming committee. His fraternity has been doing it every year for, I don’t know, years.”

“Since about 1989, I imagine,” Henry grumbled from under his hat. “Why did you pick Clark?”

“Clark?”

“I have to distinguish him from the other Dartmouth pedophiles.”

“Hey!”

“Sorry, sorry. Go on. So, why did you choose him out of all those slathering ex-fraternity studs?”

“You act like I had a wide range of choices. Clark was the only one who took the slightest notice of me. And that’s only because I asked
him
out. I was the poor Western washerwoman in a room full of Eastern, finishing-school flowers, remember.”

There was a tense response from under the hat.

“Anyway, we only went out a couple times. Then I came back for my mother’s funeral. I gave Clark my number in Idaho, but I never expected to hear from him.”

“Because you were an old washerwoman, right?”

“Right. But one day, about a year ago, out of the blue, he called me from Boise. He was in town on a real-estate deal for a hotel site in Eagle his father wanted to develop. I was calving out heifers at the time, and I couldn’t leave the ranch, so I invited him out.”

“Was he impressed with the ranch?”

It had never crossed her mind to ask. “I don’t know,” she said simply. “I think that’s enough chitchat about my fiancé. We’d better get going.”

Calla reluctantly left the shelter of Henry’s warm, strong arm and got to her feet. They still had an hour’s ride to the next saltbox, and she wanted to be back in Two Creek Camp before dark.

Henry leaned on an elbow and watched her stretch lazily in the afternoon sunshine.

“Did you tell him about the ranch when you met him?”

She shrugged in midstretch. “I guess so. It’s a pretty difficult subject to avoid considering it’s the only place I’ve ever lived or worked, and my entire family has been here for 114 years.”

Henry got to his feet and walked toward the horses. He took another cursory glance at the pyramid. It occurred to Calla, not for the first time, that she would have loved to watch him at his work. His
real
work, not this game at which he was currently playing. He had such a natural curiosity for everything around him.

“When did he ask you to marry him?”

“He didn’t. I asked him. Last Thursday.” Henry stopped and stared at her.

“I can’t think of a single thing to say about that.”

“Thank God.” She gave him another smile, hoping it was brilliant and amused and detached. She didn’t feel brilliant or amused or detached. She felt embarrassed, as if asking Clark to marry her had been a terribly unfeminine thing to do. She supposed it was. “You usually have far too much to say, anyway.”

* * *

“He’s caught. He’s
caught!”
Henry came awake instantly.

“Calla, wake up.” He went to her on his knees, placed a hand on her shoulder. She jerked under his touch, deep in a nightmare.

“Don’t. Don’t. Let me go.
He’s caught.”

“Calla!” He shook her roughly. Her eyes snapped open. The panic of her nightmare shone brightly in their hazel depths. Henry felt a sick chill. “Calla, wake up. Come on, sweetheart. Wake up.”

She stared, wild-eyed, at him for a moment, clearly unsure who he was. Then she sank back into her cot and closed her eyes. She was peacefully asleep again in seconds, but Henry watched her for a long time. He reached out to brush a loose strand of her thick hair from where it tangled across her forehead, and found his hand was trembling slightly.

She’d had the same dream three nights in a row. He should never have asked her about her brother. Whatever pain she had pushed beneath the surface of her conscious mind had obviously been resurrected.

He exhaled heavily, willing his shaking hands to still, and lay back on his cot. He stared at the tent ceiling.

Five nights now he’d spent with this woman. Five nights and five days. And he was in love with her. How in the world had he made it more than thirty years without it happening, and in a workweek allowed this wild cowgirl to change everything?

He’d lied when he’d said he wished he’d never seen her boots sticking out from under that truck. He’d had more fun, laughed more, dreamed more, been more blood-pumpingly alive since that day on the high desert than he’d ever been. He’d found for the first time what a simple kiss against a haystack could do to a man. It could cripple him with longing, could make him feel as powerful as a thunderstorm.

He’d wanted Heidi, with what he’d thought of then as unusual desire. But when he touched Calla, he knew he’d never really wanted anything before. Not sex, not science, not the secrets of the physical universe.

And, God, he
liked
her. Another revelation after his time with Heidi. He liked Calla so much. Liked the way she looked at the world, liked the way she worked, the way she took care of those three old people back
at
the ranch, the way she remembered her brother and her mother. He liked how she laughed, how she moved, how she thought. He liked that she dashed through lightning to save a frightened horse—it scared him bloodless in practice, but he liked it in theory—and how she stomped around, bossy and cranky and preoccupied, with a heart as fragile as glass.

But more than any of that, if he was honest, he liked how she made him feel. Not a brain attached to arms and legs, but a man, with emotions as unruly as any man’s. When he was with her, when he even thought about her, he was happy or angry or tender or insane with lust. Never indifferent or analytical or detached. In the space of less than four weeks, he’d felt the primitive adrenaline rush of pure jealousy, enough in his system to remind him that, no matter how many years he’d spent in a laboratory, he was still a man, and wanted no other man near the woman he knew
to
be his. He’d laughed harder, been angrier, felt more passion and fear and tenderness than he had since he was a child, since all those clear, true emotions had been educated out of him.

She made him think, this clever woman with her quick mind and her world of troubles; but better, she made him feel.

He turned on his side, found her watching him. Her hands were tucked under her cheek like a child.

“Henry?”

“What, honey?”

“What time is it?”

Henry looked at the glowing dial of his watch. It was 12:48 a.m. Saturday morning.

“It’s almost one.”

He heard her sigh, saw her close her eyes. “We go home in the morning.”

“Yes.”

During the long silence that followed, he thought she’d gone back to sleep. As he watched over her dreams, he turned his mind and his heart back to the question that had plagued him for days. How was he going to make this woman feel for him all that he felt for her?

“Henry?”

“Yes, Calla?”

“I don’t know what to do.” Her voice was a whisper in the darkness, but he heard the break
in
it. It quickened his sore heart.

“About what?”

“About Clark. The ranch. About … you.”

His breath stopped. “You know what to do, Calla.”

“There’s so much riding on … I have so many responsibilities. So many people counting on me.” Dead and alive and not even born yet, she thought, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. A hundred years back, a hundred years forward.

He shifted onto his elbow, his head propped on his hand. Pretty, he thought. Beautiful, amazing woman.

She mirrored his posture in her own cot. They watched one another, while she decided, while he willed her forward.

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“About what?” he asked. His voice sounded strange in his own ears, thick with sleep, and with a desire that had been simmering for weeks.

“About you. About us. I don’t want to go the rest of my life not knowing. I want…” She stopped, unsure.

Henry came off his cot slowly, crossed the narrow space between, knelt beside her.

“Say it, Calla.”

“I can’t. You say it for me. I don’t want to be wrong about this.”

He touched her hair, her face. “Me, Calla. You want me.”

“Yes.”

The word caught in her throat as he rose, giving her a starlit view of that honed body she’d come to crave more than anything else. He shucked his old-fashioned shorts and stood, already fully aroused, letting her know the impact of her decision for just a moment before he dropped beside her again.

“I haven’t even touched you,” she whispered, awestruck, embarrassed, but he stopped her silly words when he kissed her. And kept on kissing her.

Time made its own way, then, as it will for lovers. It seemed hours that he knelt beside her, kissing her, allowing her
to
kiss him. Such a gift, she mused.

It may have been hours. Calla didn’t know, and Henry didn’t care. He didn’t feel the rough boards under his knees, or the chill of the night air on his back. The long wait, the weeks-long lovers’ dance, the power of every glance and delay of every touch was passed between them in those kisses, along with murmurs and moans and sweet words.

Tongues met, stroked, met again and soothed, dove greedily into dark crevasses and slipped gently along wet surfaces. Oh, to kiss like this. Neither had ever done so, and they could barely stop for breath. This kind of kissing was for teenagers, for young lovers with nothing but time and no other outlet, but neither Calla nor Henry had ever been so young, and they took their time to learn, so late, what everyone else already knew. Calla’s broken heart was forgotten, Henry’s indifferent heart filled with new love, as sweet as any young love.

And finally, he touched her, and she hadn’t known how desperately she’d wanted him to until he did. His hands, the hands she’d so admired, the hands that had been the focus of too many small fantasies to count, slid beneath the cover of her sleeping bag and smoothed down her body, over the soft cloth of a worn nightgown, into the curves and dips of her body, stopping to admire with sensitive fingertips this flat plane, that high peak. She shivered and writhed under them.

Henry fisted one hand in her hair to keep her still—he was terrified she’d make him stop—while the other one made the most incredible discoveries. He rolled a taut nipple between his thumb and forefinger, measured the length of a strong, smooth thigh, smoothed the flannel of her gown over the triangle of hair below her stomach, over and over until she cried out, until he felt a wetness through the heavy fabric, and he wished fervently that it was noon, so he could see what he was touching.

He reached for the hem of her gown and tugged it upward. She lifted her bottom and he took it higher, higher. He touched again everything he’d touched before, only without barrier this time. Eyes closed, he let his lesser senses, of touch and smell, take over every other. His hand shook.

The poor, rough skin of her mending scrape he tended to gently, apologizing without words for his part in marking her. He gripped her throat, slid his open hand down the center of her, smoothed over her hip, reached under and palmed her bottom. He touched her everywhere, and if she’d protested, he would have completely, unconscionably, ignored her.

He came back to her breasts—finally, she thought, finally—and tugged at them, rolled them between his rough fingers, until the nipples stood as stiff as gemstones, and she begged for his mouth on her.

He dropped his head and suckled. It brought him as much comfort as it did pleasure. Calla experienced nothing of that deeper significance. All she felt was the lust.

It exploded inside her like a range fire. She gripped his head and kept him in place, arching under him so he’d take more, suck harder. She felt wild, displaced, frantic.

“Oh. My. Goodness.” She moaned out each word separately as she slid to the floor onto her knees. She bunched her nightgown at her chest and arced her back
to
give him better access and wondered why the hell she’d never done this before.

And when Henry dipped his finger into her, and groaned like a man dying when he felt how wet she was, she knew she’d die with him, from gratification and greediness and bliss.

He played with her mercilessly. Slow circles, long strokes, his clever fingers dancing, fluttering, exploring, soothing, inciting. When it became too much to passively bear, she fell upon him like a madwoman, breaking contact with his fingers and his busy mouth on a cry of dismay, tipping him over backward, straddling him, kissing him frantically because she didn’t know what else
to
do.