Liz Ireland (24 page)

“Fine,” she said. Scowling, she led her horse a few feet away and mounted.

Cecilia brooded as they kicked their horses into a brisk lope and rode on. Jake Reed obviously considered her a millstone around his neck, which just plain made her mad. Why would a man want to go at something like this alone? Worse, why, after sharing her bed Friday night, would he pretend not to feel the powerful draw between them?

Finally, as they skirted an open field by hugging close to a line of trees, she came up close to him and said, “If you want my opinion—”

“I’ll ask for it.”

“I think you’re pretending not to care for me just in case you get killed, so I won’t grieve,” she theorized. “But that’s just plain silly. If you are killed, it won’t make me feel any better to know that you didn’t like me. If I’m going to grieve, I’d just as soon go all the way.”

“That’s the most twisted logic I’ve ever heard,” Jake replied.

Cecilia shrugged casually. “Twisted logic’s the best kind, didn’t you know? Especially when dealing with someone who won’t play straight with you.”

Finally he smiled. “All right, sweetheart, I’ll tell it to you straight. I’m selfish.”

“How so?”

“Because I don’t care if you cry over my carcass or not. But I sure as hell wouldn’t want to go through the hell I would feel if something happened to you.”

Perversely, her pulse did a little dance at his terse statement. “You don’t have to worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

“Good.” He tossed her a tight smile and kicked his horse into a slightly faster gait.

Cecilia caught up with him quickly, but kept silent for a long stretch. Jake Reed wasn’t a man who would open his heart to her all at once, but what he had revealed so far gave her hope in terms of how he felt about her.

She wondered what life would be with a man like Jake. In her imagination, she had no surroundings she could place him in, no context for their being together other than the time they had spent together in Annsboro. But Jake had only been pretending to belong there.

After they cantered around an isolated ranch house, Cecilia drew her horse up alongside his and slowed. “What are you going to do after this is all over?” she asked.

Jake kept scanning the horizon even as his mind scavenged hungrily on her question. Would it ever be over? He’d had so many plans once, but in the past two years, it had seemed all he could do just to hold down a job with some cow outfit or another for a few months.

“Will you stay in Redwood and become a deputy again?” she probed.

Jake nearly choked on her words. He doubted Cecilia would be much in agreement with his way of thinking on this matter, but it was best to get it out in the open. “I sort of hoped to get a job somewhere.”

“A job?” Cecilia’s forehead wrinkled lightly. “You mean, in a store?”

He shook his head.

“Where, then?” she persisted.

“On a ranch.”

Cecilia drew in a swift breath. Of course, ranching was mostly what everyone did, but she was so used to thinking of this man as Pendergast, the hand-kissing schoolteacher! That, however, had been an act. Jake Reed wasn’t a schoolteacher, or the mysterious desperado she had dreamed about, or a cold-blooded killer.

The bitter truth was, she’d gone and fallen for a would-be cowpuncher.

The horror of this discovery stunned her. She almost laughed, but instead heard herself asking, “Have you worked with cattle much?”

Jake nodded. “Since I left Redwood, that’s what I’ve done. Sometimes, when I let myself dream about such things, I’d think about having a ranch of my own.”

Cecilia nodded numbly. A ranch. Just when she’d finally thought she’d found a man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, she discovered that he wanted to spend the rest of his life on a ranch! It was a good thing she hadn’t made a complete fool of herself.

Then she remembered, she
had
made a complete fool of herself. It was too late to pretend she’d had a mere flirtation with this man. She’d been intimate with him; not only that, she had enjoyed it. But even the possible consequences of that union weren’t what made her chase after him all this way. His pull on her was deeper than that. The plain fact of the matter was, she was stuck on the man.

She shook her head as they continued to plod along. His silence was wistful; hers, mournful. A ranch. This was bad. Very bad.

“A
ranch!”

Cecilia wasn’t sure how the exclamation had found its way out of her mouth, but it had been building up in her for hours, all during their long ride into evening and while they had choked down their Spartan dinner of stale biscuits, apples and water. It was bad enough to have lost her head over someone who was pretending to be something he wasn’t, but when the something he actually was—or wanted to be—was a rancher, that made her error ten times as serious.

Her whole life had been geared toward one goal—finding a better life for herself than her mother had wound up with. And she had walked into the very trap she’d tried so hard to avoid!

Jake glared at her across their fireless makeshift camp beneath a live oak tree. “I never said anything against ranching, did I?”

“No, but you knew how I felt about it.” Cecilia crossed her arms challengingly.

A belligerent silence settled between them. Finally, Jake looked away and muttered, “Forget it. We shouldn’t be gabbing like this anyways.”

“Heavens, no!” Cecilia rolled her eyes. “Mercy, I’ve never chattered so much in my entire life,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

He shot her a quelling look and they lapsed into another wordless battle of wills. As he had all day long, Jake wavered between nearly overpowering desire and staunch determination not to start anything up again while they were on the chase. And fear. Anyone who said men weren’t supposed to feel fear hadn’t lived very long. He felt it now every time he looked at Cecilia and imagined anything happening to her, especially through fault of his own. When all this was settled, he swore he’d see to it that she was never in danger again.

“Still, you could have told me.” Cecilia’s sharp tone bit through the dark silent night, picking up the threads of argument where they had left off.

“When?” he asked. “When you were trying to have me booted out of town? I never told you I was a gentleman.”

“But you pretended to be one! You never mentioned a word about
ranching.
” She shuddered, as though the word was abhorrent to her.

And Jake guessed it was, though why he would never know. Cecilia could accuse him all she wanted of not being honest with her, but she wasn’t exactly honest with herself, either.

He let out a chuckle. “Ranches are pretty nice places to be, you know.”

She shot him a withering glance. “You sound like my father! He thinks a woman’s place is on a ranch.”

“And you disagree.”

“Absolutely! I want to live in a big city.”

Jake laughed. “I guess you decided to start small.”

“Well, I
meant
to live in New Orleans,” Cecilia replied huffily. “But that didn’t work out so well.”

Jake had forgotten about Miss Summertree’s supposed misadventures in that city. “I heard they ran you out of town.”

“Over nothing! I sneaked out one time.”

“To meet a man?” Jake asked, unable to deny the twinge of jealousy he felt.

Through the darkness, he saw Cecilia’s mouth turn down in a pout. “No...but could I help it if I just happened to run into a boy I knew, and then we just happened to run into the headmistress’s husband?”

“So you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Cecilia shrugged her thin shoulders and smiled haplessly. “It didn’t help matters that the wrong place just happened to be a gambling establishment.”

“And things just snowballed from there,” Jake guessed.

“I was snatched back to the ranch so fast I didn’t know what hit me,” Cecilia said. “You don’t know how lucky I was to get that teaching position in dull old Annsboro.”

Jake laughed. “So is that town not highfalutin enough for you?”

Cecilia leaned her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her palm. “It’s not that. It’s just life here is so...boring.”

“Where did your parents come from?”

“East Texas. They were one of the first families to settle around here. They had a successful farm, but Daddy was restless and wanted more land. So my poor mother had to follow him.”

“Surely she didn’t mind.”

“Yes, she did.” Cecilia’s voice was dead serious. In response to his puzzled silence, she asked, “You remember that story about the Comanche raid?”

Jake thought back to his first dinner at the boardinghouse. “The one where the little girl was taken captive,” he recalled.

“Ann Summertree was my older sister.”

Jake took in the information, saddened for her, for her whole family.

“That morning of the raid was the last time I saw my mother truly happy. She and I had been out walking, all the way out to a pond miles off where we had waded in the water. It was so hot, even in the morning, that we splashed each other until we were soaking.

“By the time we got back, it was all over. Our little house had been burned to the ground and Ann was gone. The family who lived just a little ways from us had a brother and the father murdered. Another man was killed, too. It was so horrifying—maybe even more so because I hadn’t been there, I sometimes think. I was so young, I could only imagine...”

In the pale moonlight, Jake saw a tear streak down her cheek, which she didn’t bother to wipe away. When another followed, he scooted across the ground and enfolded her in his arms. She gratefully buried her face in his chest and let out a long-pent-up sob.

“It’s all right, Cecilia,” he murmured.

She hiccuped lightly. “My mother never allowed us to talk about it, not even when they decided to name the town Annsboro, after Ann. All her life, she kept looking across that flat horizon, though, as if Ann would come running back home, still a little girl. She never stopped hoping.”

Jake kissed the crown of her head softly, then her forehead. “Go ahead and cry,” he said.

Still clinging to him, she stamped her heel on the ground in frustration. “I hate to cry.” She sniffed. “But I suppose now you can see why I would rather be anywhere but here.”

Jake thought for a long moment, torn inside. He’d never held a woman and spoken with her so openly before. Yet Cecilia’s very words, telling him why she didn’t want to live out here, argued for their separation. He wasn’t sure he wanted to give her up, no matter how ill suited she proclaimed they were. He wasn’t sure that he could.

“Still,” he said, “I don’t see where else you would fit in.”

Cecilia looked at him, her eyes still wet and luminous in the dim light. In a split second, a little of her old sassiness returned. “I’ve spent a great deal of time in society, I’ll have you know. And not just at school in New Orleans, either. I’ve stayed with my aunts in Memphis some, too.”

“And hated every minute of it,” Jake guessed.

Cecilia opened her mouth to deny it, but changed her mind when the image of her aunt Caroline’s stuffy parlor in Memphis, full of knickknacks and gewgaws, came to mind. And then there was the endless round of calls to pay to people you really had nothing to say anything to, and dreadful dinners spent talking about such exciting topics as cotton prices and the bloodlines of people she had never heard of and couldn’t care less about. And both of her aunts had considered her too rough around the edges to truly lavish much attention on. Cecilia always felt as though they were keeping her on a tether, lest she get loose and embarrass the family name.

“And I doubt it was much of a coincidence that you were tossed out of that place in New Orleans,” Jake continued. “I’ll wager that, somewhere in the back of your mind, you were relieved to come home.”

“Ha!” She tossed her head, but she didn’t contradict him.

Jake leaned as close to her as he dared, which was close enough to smell the soft, flowery scent of her. Memories of their time together cascaded through him. “You belong out here,” he continued, leaning down to tenderly nuzzle the downy hair at her temple. “People accept you here just as you are.”

How did he know? Cecilia wondered foggily. It was true, she had felt so out of place in Memphis and New Orleans....

“You’ve got a wild streak in you, Cecilia,” Jake whispered into her ear, sending a thrill right down to her curled toes. “You try to hide it, but it always comes out in the end.”

“Mmm,” Cecilia purred as he nipped his way down her neck. Through a blanket of sensation, she gathered her wits enough to say, “You’re wrong.”

He responded by moving up to nibble at her ear. The only way she could stifle a moan was by allowing herself to brush her body against his chest. Like her father said, if you itched, sometimes it was best to go ahead and scratch....

“I only lose control—” She gasped as one of his hands moved up to massage her breast.

“Mmm-hmm?” he asked, his lips hovering over hers hungrily, taunting.

“Wh-when I’m angry,” she said, turning away.

He put a hand to her chin and tilted her lips up to his. He was losing control, too, but after a long day of being strung tighter than barbed wire, he couldn’t think of a more tantalizing way to unwind. “I’ve seen you lose control when you weren’t angry,” he whispered just before his lips dipped down to tease at hers.

Cecilia felt the stirrings of heat deep within her. She was heavy and weightless at the same time, limp in Jake’s arms but so alive with desire that she thought she could pull trees out of the ground, roots and all. And if he didn’t kiss her soon, she thought with rising frustration, she also felt strong enough to throw him to the ground and ravish
him.

His mouth met hers in such a wild joining that she thought she would faint from lack of breath and the overwhelming sensations roiling within her. Tongues intertwined, hands explored and massaged and gave long-needed release to the tension that had been building between them. But still Cecilia wanted more, until finally she gave voice to the only word her muzzy senses could latch on to.

“Jake...”

At the sound of his name, the name she’d so recently said she would never get used to, Jake felt a strange triumph. Her high, husky voice worked on him like kerosene poured onto the flames of a campfire; desire leapt in him so fiercely that he could barely leash it as he lowered her to the blanket he’d laid out on the ground for her.

He began fumbling with the buttons of her dress with quaking fingers, and every inch of skin revealed by the task nearly drove him over the edge. Her head lolled as with one free hand he massaged the creamy skin of her neck and back, so smooth, glowing and pale in the moonlight.

Cecilia thought surely she would faint from the myriad sensations clashing through her, yet his slow prolonged movements were a sweet agony she couldn’t deny herself. Finally, as she sloughed off the loose dress and turned to him only in a camisole and thin petticoat, she felt as if she had shed the last remnants of her self-control, as well.

He bestowed kisses on every exposed inch of flesh and made short work of both his and her remaining garments. When finally they lay beside each other, bare and exposed in their unchecked desire, Cecilia let out a sigh of awe at the powerful beauty of his masculine form. Never had she imagined that the mere sight of a man could move her to feel so much, to want so desperately.

He rose up and covered her with his body, stopping just short of joining them together. Though he longed to plunge into her moist heat, he had to see her, had to know that she yearned for him as much as he did for her. “Cecilia.” Her name came out a barely audible groan, and when she looked up at him with eyes so moist with passion they were teary, his thin thread of control snapped.

He pushed inside her female warmth then, and in an explosion of feeling and fierce, blazing desire, they moved together to give and attain release. Cecilia never dreamed she could be so consumed with need, so fired by movement and sheer sensation. She strained against Jake and clung to him, blinded by the intense flames within her that spread to every place they touched and still continued to build at her very core until she thought they would burn out of control.

When finally they found completion in an explosion of blinding pleasure, they collapsed in each other’s arms, passion-sated and slick with sweat. For a moment, the only sound in the night was that of their slowly steadying breaths, which at first were labored but gradually became soft sighs of contentment.

Content. That was how Cecilia felt. Despite the danger around them, a light-headed giddiness pulsed through her. There would be enough troubles tomorrow. For tonight, moment-to-moment happiness would suffice.

* * *

Cecilia smelled the heavenly scent of brewing coffee and stretched languorously. Every inch of her felt sated and happy, and only a scant foggy moment passed before she remembered why. A smile stretched across her slumbering face as she purred happily and nestled once more beneath the blanket.

“Time to get up.”

At the sound of the gruff voice, Cecilia’s eyelids swept open to see Jake standing over her with a steaming tin cup in his hands. She lifted to her elbows, trying to blot out his frown and the hard cast she saw in those brown eyes. “Good morning,” she said, smiling seductively, shyly.

His frowned deepened and he held out the mug to her, pointedly looking away from the peek of cleavage created by the scant covering of the blanket. “Take it.”

She did as he said, but just as quickly put the cup aside, determined to chase away his sour mood. In a sneak attack, she snaked her arms around his neck and pulled him on top of her. “Is that your way of saying good morning?” she asked with a pout a second before her lips lifted to his in a kiss.

Jake couldn’t bring himself to pull away immediately. Tasting Cecilia’s sweet lips had to be the most wonderful breakfast he could imagine, but there were long miles to be covered today, and they needed to be on their way. Reluctantly, he pushed himself a safe distance away from her, trying unsuccessfully to blot out memories of their long night of passionate lovemaking.

She reached out and clamped a hand down on his arm before he could move away. “Is something wrong, Jake?”

Jake’s throat was so dry he could feel his Adam’s apple straining to make the hike up his neck so he could swallow. “I—I think it would be best if we put last night behind us.”