Renegade Man (20 page)

“And nothing
like that will happen again,” Jonah prompted.

“Right,” Buck
said, his voice filled with a fervid desire to please. “I won’t go within a
mile of you or your dog again. I promise, Miz Randall.”

Jonah gave the
lariat one last violent jerk. “I wouldn’t be forgetting that promise if I were
you, Dillard. ’Cause if you do, I’ll knock you into next week. I’d take it
kindly if you’d pass my warning along to Kingsley, too, if you don’t mind.” Then,
with an easy twist of the lariat, he loosened it from the trailer hitch and said
to her, “Come on, Ritz. This place is starting to stink.”

Once the pickup
was clear of the Split P entrance, she glanced sideways at him and said, “I
thought you told me you weren’t a team player, Jonah Jones.”

It was the wrong
thing to say, of course. It suggested that he might be softening toward her.
His jaw tightened. “That little bit of business back there was purely for my
own pleasure. Don’t go getting any ideas that it was an invitation on my part
to reestablish any kind of relationship.”

“Any kind of
‘relationship’ I might need,” she snapped, “can be filled any day by any number
of willing men.”

He cast her a
disparaging look. “That so? I don’t notice them beating a path to your cabin.”

Her suspicious
gaze collided with his. “Really?” She smiled. “Now, how would you know that?
Have you been cruising by, keeping a check on my nocturnal habits?”

He switched his
gaze back to the road. “That’s easy, Ritz. You’re forgetting how people gossip.
You always were the central topic, weren’t you? These days, Silver City’s booze
emporiums say your nights are colder than mercury at thirty-two degrees.
Apparently your electric blanket is doing a better job than your Swede at
heating you up.”

She was so angry
that she was afraid she would lose control and make a fool of herself if she
said even one word, so she kept silent.

“What happened
to the woman with the quick mouth?”

At that moment
she would gladly have gotten out of the truck, walked ten paces from him,
turned and fired—except for the fact that she had no gun. When she didn’t make
any kind of a retort, he clamped his own mouth shut and didn’t say another word
until they reached her car.

“See you
around,” he said, and drove off, leaving her standing there watching his dust.

“You louse,” she
muttered. How could she be so weak-willed, so lacking in self-esteem, as to let
herself hunger after a man who barely acknowledged her existence? Her life had
been nothing but misery since she had let herself fall victim to his rebel’s
charm.

She tried
telling herself that he was cold-hearted. But if he was a Titanic iceberg, she
was the great San Francisco fire. She tried telling herself that he couldn’t
ignore her for the rest of the summer. He had to care about her, whether he
wanted to admit it or not. What he’d done to Buck—for her sake—proved it.
Surely he would at least wander by her dig sooner or later.

She held on to
her optimism for as long as she could, but as the days slipped by and he kept
his distance, she began to feel the first shaky breaths of despair. She didn’t
even have the excuse of retrieving Magnum from his camp, because, after she
brought the Lab back from the animal clinic, he was too weak to do much more
than stir occasionally from his resting place beneath the cottonwood and pad
down to the river to drink.

Daily she
applied sulfur paste, which the vet had given her, to Magnum’s abraded hide.
The foul¬smelling mixture seemed to help speed the dog’s healing—at least on
the outside. As far as his inner scars went, she couldn’t tell. Who knew how
much, if ever, inner scars—even hers or Jonah’s—healed?

One evening,
Soren came by the cabin. He glanced over at Magnum, who was curled up on a
braided rug in front of the hearth. “Just got back into town. Heard about the
ruckus with Buck Dillard and your dog.” His eyes held a cheerless look for
once. “I also heard that Jonah stepped in and read Dillard his rights, so to
speak. I think that pretty well answers my question—about you marrying me, I
mean.”

She couldn’t
stand seeing the dejection in his face. She lowered her head and nodded. “I
guess so, Soren.”

“Well, I just
wanted to let you know that the cabin is still yours—at least through the
autumn.”

Standing on
tiptoe, she kissed his cheek. “You’re special, Soren.”

He grinned down
at her at last. “And don’t you forget it!”

She decided to
put Soren and Jonah out of her mind. But in bed at night, when she was trying
to get to sleep, she couldn’t. Her thoughts wouldn’t let her. She found herself
jumping if she heard a car go by in the distance. At times she thought it might
be Kingsley come to do battle with her, and she thought she would almost
welcome the diversion. The fact that he wanted her off his land so badly made
her just that much more determined to stay. Ben Schotsky had written her a
short note saying that C.B. had dropped the complaint against her for lack of
sufficient evidence, but that didn’t mean the man might not have something else
up his sleeve.

At other times
she found herself being afraid the passing car might belong to Jonah, then half
hoping it did, so she could have the satisfaction of telling him just where to
go.

Yet those
vengeful thoughts didn’t block the dark, erotic dreams that seeped into her
subconscious during the hot nights, or numb a body that was burning up with the
heat of desire. Her unbridled lust was driving her insane, and she couldn’t
figure out what to do about it, short of taking a lover. And contrary to
whatever opinion the good folk of Silver City might hold of her, she couldn’t
bring herself to accept the casual standards of the stereotypical single
life-style.

Her weakness
whenever she thought about Jonah made her furious with herself. Those
longed-for hot showers at the end of the day were switched to cold ones taken
both morning and night.

And still the
heat of longing burned in her.

Chapter 13

W
earily, Rita-lou
let herself into the cabin, balancing the grocery sack on one hip, then jammed
her key into her shoulder bag. This commuting back and forth to the site was
leaching her energy. Tonight, bedtime couldn’t come quickly enough.

The cabin had
been constructed without any regard for the convenient location of such
amenities as light switches, and she had to negotiate the darkened room like a
blindfolded hostage.

“Damn!” she
mumbled when her leg caught the edge of the coffee table. Wincing at the pain,
she groped her way to the dining table and set down both the sack and her purse
so she could rub at the small but rapidly swelling lump on her shin. Old C.B.
doesn’t have to worry about thinking up ways to plague you, she told herself.
You seem to be doing very well on your own.

As she put the
milk and eggs away, Magnum padded over to the hearth to curl up for a snooze.
The dog’s strength had been slow in returning, and what with the way his coat
was growing back in some spots and not in others, he looked like a stray mutt
with the mange.

When she was
finished with the groceries, she limped toward the bedroom, tugging off her
tank top as she went. It was ironic, she thought, switching on the bathroom
light, how determined C.B. was to run her off his grazing land. All his efforts
had achieved was to make her even more determined to stay put. She had so
little to show for her months of backbreaking labor that she might have given
up weeks ago if it hadn’t been for her stubborn refusal to let him drive her
out of the valley.

No, she thought,
stepping out of her shorts and turning on the shower, she wouldn’t have given
up even if the Cattle Baron had left her alone. She still had something to
prove to Silver City.

The shower’s brisk
spray revitalized her, at least enough for her to think about heating a can of
chili for dinner. After a quick rubdown with baby lotion to ward off the drying
effect of the high desert on her skin, she wrapped the terry-cloth robe around
herself and started back toward the kitchen.

At the sound of
a snort, she whirled around. Stretched out on the bed, his usual impudent grin
firmly in place, lay Jonah. He was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt.
Clasping a beer can on his chest, he stared at her with slumberous eyes.

“Want to tell me
why you snuck in here?” she demanded, still weak-kneed from the scare he had
given her. She was absurdly, insanely happy to see him.

“Well, I
couldn’t very well just walk in, sweetheart. The door was locked. First I had
to jimmy the window screen, and then—”

“That’s not what
I meant!” Her fists clenched, and she started again in a more reasonable voice,
though her words were spaced and clipped. At least she wasn’t shouting. The
fact was that she was angry—not with him, but with herself, with her body’s
traitorous responses to his presence. “I want to know why you are sleeping in
my bed.”

He swung his
long body over the edge of the mattress, set the beer can on the nightstand and
stood up to stretch. “Certainly not playing Goldilocks. And while we’re
speaking of games—”

“I wasn’t
speaking of games,” she said coldly, and crossed her arms.

“I’m tired of
playing them.” He started toward her, and she backed away, only to bump into a
dresser. He closed in on her. “I want you so bad I hurt, Ritz, and I know you
want me.”

“The only thing
I want is you out of here.”

“Liar,” he
breathed against her cheek. He braced his hands on the dresser top, fencing her
in between his powerful arms. “Why don’t you have the guts to tell me you want
me? This isn’t the Rita-lou Randall I used to know. Did married life make you
go soft?”

No, but she went
all soft at his touch, God help her. She turned her face away. “Not soft in the
head, which is what I’d have to be to crawl into bed with any man who asked.”

Using his jaw,
he nudged her cheek in his direction, and she smelled the beer on his warm
breath. “We have a twenty-year-old score to settle,” he whispered against the
edge of her mouth.

She pushed at
his chest. She might as well have been trying to bench-press three hundred
pounds for all the good it did her. “Whatever happened twenty years ago is over
and done with, Captian Hook.”

“I don’t think
so. Twenty years ago you were passing out your favors to Chap, and, if I
remember rightly, I was standing in the same line. I’m here for my turn.”

“Get out!”

“Mmmm,” he
purred against her compressed lips. “Do you think you could open your mouth a
little more?”

He lifted one
hand and gently, easily, trailed a finger along the line of her chin. His touch
was her undoing. She moaned softly, and helplessly parted her lips for him. His
tongue prodded her teeth apart, and his hands pushed aside her robe and slid
inside to cup her naked buttocks, pulling her hard against him. He ground his
hips against her, and the cold snap of his jeans chafed the bare flesh below he
rnavel..

She knew she
would regret what was about to happen, but as his tongue ravaged her mouth she
forgot to think any further. His tongue probed deeper, as if he would leave no
secret places untouched before he was finished. Like a flame-crazed moth, her
tongue was drawn into a death dance with his.

His thumb and
forefinger found her nipple, teasing it with a roughened pressure that jolted
her with unexpected pleasure. “Jonah...” she gasped, arching her pelvis against
him.

“What’s the
matter?” The ragged sound of his breathing filled her ear. “This isn’t the way
Chap made love to you?”

She jerked away.
“I told you, I don’t want it to happen like this,” she pleaded.

His hands went
to his jeans, and in the quiet room his zipper grated loudly down. Transfixed,
she stared at the revealed expanse of his stomach, at how flat and hard it was.
She couldn’t even remember Chap’s body now, and by the time she had met Robert,
his body had lost some of its tone from sitting behind an office desk. But
Jonah... Jonah was magnificent.

She turned to
flee, but he latched on to her arm. “It’s too late to change your mind.” He
released her momentarily so he could draw his T-shirt over his head. “All the
times this summer when you teased me, tempted me, I’ve let you off. I told
myself you didn’t really know what you were getting yourself into with me.” He
paused. “But you did.”

She turned her
head away as his denim jeans slid lower, then fell to the floor.

“But like I
said, sweetheart,” he continued, “I’m tired of playing games.”

Her lower lip
quivered. She looked over her shoulder at him, and despite her attempts to
avoid glancing in that direction, her gaze dropped to the navy blue briefs that
hugged his hips—hugged them snugly enough to reveal the full extent of his
arousal. “Jonah,” she whispered, tears roughening her voice, “you’re
frightening me.”