Lacy (14 page)

Cole's thin mouth tugged up. "I'm
emotional." "It never shows."Turk pursed his lips. "Why
don't you tell Lacy the truth?"

The smile faded. "Watch out," Cole
warned gently. "There's a line even you can't cross with me."

"Go ahead, punch me,"Turk said.
"But I'll say it anyway. You're wrong about Lacy. She's tough. And if you
don't watch it, you could lose her again."

"Not if I can help it," the older man
said involuntarily.

"Then stop playing your cards so close to
your chest. You're worse than I am about hiding what you feel." He lifted
the cigarette to his mouth again, and a cloud of smoke separated them.
"She has to feel something for you, or she wouldn't have come back, Cole.
Think about that."

"I've thought about it," he ground
out. He sighed heavily, his eyes searching the horizon. "I've made a hell
of a mess of it. I hurt her..." He actually reddened, averting his eyes.

Turk studied him carefully. It could be
dangerous to push him too far, but he didn't want to see the man hurt anymore.
He chose his words before he spoke. "Sometimes it's difficult for a woman
the first time. Women aren't like us; they have to get worked up to it."

Cole literally gaped at him. "They
what?"

Turk struck his hands in his pockets. "They
have to be aroused. It hurts them if they're not, even if it isn't the first
time." He studied the quiet, still features. "You didn't know."

Cole sighed heavily. He smoked a cigarette, his
eyes still on the horizon. "My God, no wonder... "he breathed.
"No,"he said harshly. "I didn't know." He glared at the
blond man. "Go ahead. Laugh!"

Turk shook his head. "Not at you. Never at
you. I understand better than anyone. After all, I know the whole story,"
he said quietly. "It's nothing to be embarrassed about."

"Isn't it?" He stared down at the
ground, a faint reddish flush on his lean cheeks. "I'd rather die than let
her know."

"She doesn't have to, if you're
careful," Turk said. His narrowed eyes met the older man's. "You can
make her want you."

Cole's teeth ground together. It was killing his
pride, but what he felt for Lacy was even stronger. Well, hell; Turk was his
friend, wasn't he? The one person in the world who knew why he was like he was.
"How?" he asked shortly.

"Make her tell you what she likes you to do,"Turk
said gently, his voice not condescending or amused. "That sounds damned
sophisticated; it turns women wild. Act confidently. Watch her reactions and
pretend you know what you're doing, even if you don't. It takes stealth,"
he added, with a faint smile. "It's like planning a campaign, old son. You
get the objective in sight and work your way to it by inches."

"How can I tell when she's ready?" he
asked quietly.

Turk told him, without embarrassment, the subtle
signs of a woman's arousal. "There's one other thing," he added.
"When a woman is enjoying it, don't look for her to smile. She'll look as
if she'd being torn apart. She may cry or whimper or bite and scratch you.
Don't be afraid that you're hurting her. She'll tell you if you are. Pleasure
and pain are sometimes twins in appearance. It's in your favor that she doesn't
know any more about it than you do," he added dryly. "You don't know
what an advantage that is!"

"Hell of a thing," Cole said, with a
sigh, studying his cigarette. "To get to my age and be so damned stupid.
But before the war, I had the responsibility of supporting the family after Dad
died. Afterward..." His face lifted, his eyes darkly tormented.
"Afterward, I didn't have the guts to try. Lacy will never know the hell
it was to find myself forced into marriage with her. I've always wanted her,
Turk. But I can't stomach pity. I couldn't know how she'd react unless I let
her see..." His eyes closed briefly and he looked away. He lifted the
cigarette to his thin lips again. "Fighting Germans was one thing. Facing
Lacy with.. .that.. .is another thing entirely."

"Still sorry I took that pistol away from
you, aren't you, cowboy?"Turk taunted. "Well, I'm not sorry. And one
day, you won't be sorry, either. Lacy is one of those rare women. You'll fine)
that out. And if you'll go slow with her, and do what I told you, you may find
yourself blessed in ways you never suspected."

"How the hell did you learn so much about
women?" Cole asked curiously.

"They always seemed to fall into my
arms,"Turk said, chuckling. "And marriage is a great teacher. It's
exciting to go on journeys of discovery with your woman, to find all the ways
you can please her and be pleased by her." He searched the older man's
eyes. "That's more exciting than a full-scale battle."
"Experience helps a little." Cole sighed. "Getting it is better.
More fun,"Turk said, grinning. Cole finished his cigarette. "It would
be easier if I had a little more time with her. But right now, things are
rough. Getting rougher, too," he added, with a meaningful glance toward
the cattle over the fence. "Look at the poor bastards. I can't get enough
feed—can't afford enough feed—to get them through the winter. Without them,
I'll never meet the notes at the bank. And old Henry sure as hell wants this ranch.
He foreclosed on Johnson, and Johnson owed less than I do."

"You've got friends," Turk reminded
him. "Your neighbors have known you all your life, and all theirs. You've
done a lot for them. They won't forget. If it comes down to a fight, they'll stand
behind you."

"What can they do? The economy's killing us
all. They keep talking about damned prosperity, but look around you. Farmers
are going bust everywhere. Maybe it's great on Wall Street, but we're a long
way from New York. I think we're heading for disaster. It's too good to be
true, that financial upswing. It's not natural."

"The war inflated everything,"Turk
said. "Now that it's over, a lot of people are out of work. And it's worse
for farmers and ranchers than it is for business people. I wish to God Coolidge
would do something."

"Give him time," Cole replied.
"He's only just got into office. Maybe he will."

"Maybe."Turk tossed his cigarette into
the dirt and ground it out under his heel. "I guess I'll go ride the fence
line. I'm depressed enough to dig postholes today."

"Don't let it get to you, about Katy,"
Cole said as the younger man mounted his gelding. "She's a Whitehall. She'll manage."

"Sure."Turk lifted his hat over his
eyes. "It's for the best. What could I offer her?"

"Maybe more than you realize," the
older man replied. "At any rate, I'm sorry I fixed things for you. Katy's
special to me, too."

Turk managed a smile. "See you."

Cole watched him ride off with mixed emotions.
He seemed to be fouling everything up lately. It was his marriage, of course.
It was what he felt for Lacy turning him inside out. He wanted her. More than
anything, he wanted a good marriage. But he knew so little about women, and he
had deep emotional scars and a secret he could hardly bear to share with
anyone. Especially with a woman.

Lacy. His mind went back a few nights, to that
warm, slow kiss he'd exchanged with her, to the conversation they'd had. She seemed
as eager as he to make their marriage work. She'd trembled when he'd kissed
her. He wished he'd felt a little more confident, so that he could have
assessed the exact extent of her involvement.

Now that he knew the signs, perhaps he could
grow bolder with her. He hadn't touched her again, not even to kiss her. They'd
talked, and once he'd taken her walking down the path to the cold little stream
running between the barren trees. But he hadn't tried to make love to her, even
though he'd shared the bed with her. That hadn't been easy, sleeping with the
scent and warmth of her beside him in the darkness. He'd had to force himself
to work later and later, so that she was usually asleep when he came in at
night. But he had the oddest feeling that she wanted him to make love to her.
Only how could he do that, make love to her, fully dressed, and not have her
ask why?

He groaned aloud as he finished his cigarette.
Perhaps as time went by, as he learned to trust her, he might get over his
apprehension. God, he wanted to! He wanted to strip that soft, warm body and
see it, in the light, and touch it. He wanted to make her cry out; he wanted to
see her face contorted with longing for him. He went hot all over just thinking
about it.

With a rough word, he stalked off to saddle his
own horse. He had work to do, cattle to worry about. He could worry about other
things in his spare time.

He looked out over the horizon, his gaze steady
and level. He wondered how Katy and Ben were managing. Young Ben had decided to
stay in San Antonio to begin that new job he was so excited about. Cole smiled
faintly. Ben was so young, so emotional. He loved the boy, although it had
needled him that Ben asked so many damned questions about the war. Cole didn't
like remembering it, much less talking about it. Perhaps if he could have
admitted that to Ben, explained it to him, there wouldn't be so much friction
between them. He shook his head ruefully. Someday, his own obsession with
personal privacy was going to be his undoing. But for now, there was no way he
could change that.

BACK IN SAN ANTONIO,
young
Ben was managing very well. His mother had agreed to let him keep the runabout
for a while, and he was doing rather well at his new job.

He'd moved into a boardinghouse, and he'd been
sneaking out with Jessica every night since that first night they'd spent
together. He was on fire for her, all the time. Finding places to be together
was getting harder, but it was exciting, too. One night, he'd sneaked out one
of his landlady's sheets, neatly folded under his jacket, and he and Jessica
had spread it on the front seat of the runabout and made wild, uninhibited love
in the cold evening air sitting straight up under an oak tree. Their bodies had
been feverish enough that they didn't even notice the cold. They'd been totally
nude together, and the danger of discovery had made it all the more exciting.
Afterward she'd lain in his lap, still undressed, and she'd let him do things
to her in the moonlight that could arouse him even in memory.

The only drawback about his new life was the
journalism itself, even though it had originally been the most exciting part.
Ben didn't really care for sex and scandal in print, but that was what Mr.
Bradley demanded for his tabloid. The local newspapers had done their best to
compete, but Bradley's tabloid was outselling them all. And it was because of
Ben's talent with words. He could turn the most ordinary police news into
delicious scandal. There had been threatened lawsuits, and once a victim's
brother had even punched him in the nose while he sat at his desk. But still,
the tabloid's sales excelled. The addition of a crossword puzzle page had
boosted them still more, taking advantage of the nation's growing infatuation
with crosswords.

One day, Bradley had instructed Ben to come up
with a hoax, since there was no real news to parlay into sales that week. So
Ben had obligingly taken a tall tale of Turk's and expanded it into front-page
news.

It seemed, he wrote, that there was a big-footed
wild creature, as big as a grizzly bear, roaming around area ranches. It walked
like a man, and had fur that was more like human hair. A local rancher had
actually found some of it tangled in his barbed wire, near the horribly
mutilated bodies of two of his cows. Ben even had a photograph of some of the
"fur"—which was actually a tuft of Ben's own hair that Jessica had
clipped with her scissors. It had been planted on a string of barbed wire,
where the paper's photographer snapped it. The story caught on, and sales went
up again. And every week, Ben added to it.

He and Jessica were getting thicker by the
minute. His writing in the tabloid was attracting national attention, carefully
nurtured by Jessica's father. And Jessica, seeing opportunity knocking, began
to make subtle and not-so-subtle hints about marriage.

Ben obligingly proposed. And then Jessica
announced that she and her father wanted to meet Ben's family. Ben almost had
apoplexy at the thought of taking them down to Spanish Flats. Oh, the house was
elegant enough; it had been built originally by a Spanish grandee. But Cole was
a wild man, unpredictable at best, and so was Turk. Ben worried about what his
big brother might do or say when confronted with his young brother's
"large financial and business interest in the ranch." Ben didn't want
to have his chin smashed in front of his intended. So he kept putting Jessica
off with tales of the family traveling widely in Europe, off to visit the
Hemingways in France, and then on to Spain for the bullfights …

It worked. He settled down to his job, and put
off his worried mother with the occasional phone call. Katy's marriage to a Chicago businessman had come as a shock, and he was careful not to mention the
circumstances to his employer and his fiancee. He didn't want them to know
about Katy's racketeer husband, either. His family seemed to be doing its best
to disgrace him, he thought angrily.