The Traveling Kind (16 page)

“Sorry. This is a party, isn’t it? How’s your drink? Would you like another?” he offered.

“No,” she refused even though the ice cubes had melted and turned the drink watery.

The front door opened and closed, letting a draft of cool night air into the room. Thinking one of the guests had stepped out for some fresh air, Charley absently glanced toward the door. She looked straight into a pair of glittering blue eyes. Shock riveted her to the floor.

She was hallucinating. Her mind was playing cruel tricks on her. It couldn’t be Shad.

Yet he was crossing the room, walking directly toward her. Dressed in a white shirt and black-quilted vest, he appeared too solid and real to be a mirage. Joy soared through her at the sight of him, lifting her to the unscalable heights of heaven. Her shining gaze wandered over the heavy blackness of his hair and his handsome masculine features, so tanned and vigorous. When he stopped in front of her, it was his eyes that captivated her. The smoldering intensity of their blue light was breathtaking.

“Hello, Charley, my darling.” The lazy drawl of his low voice was a caress, touching her and assuring her of his existence.

“Shad,” she whispered his name.

His glance impatiently swept the gathering of people only just beginning to notice his presence. “It looks like I’m crashing somebody’s party. What is it? A birthday celebration?” His glance returned to Charley. His question brought her sharply back to reality and she had to lower her gaze. Shad looked beyond her. “Is it yours, Gary?”

“No, it isn’t my birthday,” her brother replied dryly and left the explanation to Charley.

“You’re certainly looking fit since the last time I saw you. How is the leg?” Shad made the polite inquiry of her brother but a hard edge began to underscore his voice.

“Good as new.” Gary kept his responses short and to the point, inviting no further discussion of the subject.

“Is this all the welcome I get, Charley?” Shad’s voice came back to her, low and demanding, rough with frustration. “I know I hurt you when I left but— Aren’t you glad to see me?”

Tears were in her eyes when she lifted her gaze. All the bitterness and agony of these past two months were written in their pain-filled depths. There was frustration, too, that Shad should return just when she had reconciled herself to never seeing him again—when she had promised herself to Chuck and taken his ring.

“Why did you wait so long to come?” she accused in a hoarse whisper, her throat raw and throbbing painfully with awful despair.

“Because I was stupid and blind.” His look became warmly possessive as he brought his hands up to grip her shoulders.

The touch of him opened a wound so deeply painful that she started trembling. She loved him so much that it became a physical hurt. The numbing misery of the past two months was gone and every raw nerve in her body became sensitive to him. She ached to be held in his arms and feel the healing beauty of his kisses, but she was kept from seeking his embrace by the diamond ring burning the flesh of her finger. Charley clutched her drink glass with both hands to keep from returning his touch.

“It took me a while to realize it was your voice I heard whispering in the breeze, calling to me,” Shad murmured. “You were the shining warmth I felt when I walked in the sunlight. There was nothing over the next hill that was better than what I’d left behind. The best thing in my life had already happened to me and that was you. Anything else would only be hollow echoes of what I’d known. I was surrounded by emptiness, Charley, and the bittersweet memories of you.”

“Oh, Shad.” She closed her eyes tightly, but the tears squeezed through her lashes to run down her cheeks.

“You have every right to be angry and call me a thousand kinds of fool,” he admitted. “You told me how it would be before I left, and you were right. I can’t live without you, Charley. You are my life.”

Opening her eyes, she blinked through the wall of tears to see the absolute certainty of his ardent expression, the searing fire of his blue gaze. There was a movement beside her. She half turned and recognized Chuck’s blurred form.

“Shad, this isn’t a birthday party.” Her voice was husky with the pain of her announcement. “We are celebrating my engagement to Chuck. We’re going to be married.”

She felt the stillness that rocked him and drained the color from his face, leaving him white beneath his tan. His surprise was so total that she felt the surge of anger. She hadn’t heard a single word from him in all this time. Yet Shad had come back, fully expecting her to forgive and forget all that she had suffered because of him. Just for a second, she hated his male ego and wanted to hurt him as she had been hurt—deep and wounding.

“I told you I wouldn’t wait!” she lashed out with sobbing fury.

A violent shudder racked his lean frame as his hands fell from her shoulders and he turned his head away. He appeared to brace himself to absorb the aftershock of the blow. When he turned back to her, his eyes were dark and haunted. The desolation she saw almost made Charley cry out, but Chuck touched her arm and took the glass from her trembling hands before she dropped it. The movement pulled Shad’s gaze to Chuck.

“Congratulations.” His voice sounded choked as his large hand reached out to shake Chuck’s. “I think you know you’re a lucky man to have a woman like Charley.”

“Yes, I think I do.” Chuck sounded gruff and defensive.

His tortured gaze slid back to her. “I guess I deserve this,” Shad said in a low murmur. Her throat muscles were so tightly constricted that Charley couldn’t speak. She could only look at him in mute agony. “He will be a better husband for you than I could ever be. I told you before that I thought he was a good man for you.”

“Yes.” She remembered it too well. Shad had advised her to marry him.

He didn’t take his darkly haunted eyes from her face, but he addressed his next request to Chuck. “Do you have any objections if I kiss your fiancée? Just one last time.”

The praise from Shad must have assured Chuck that there was no threat, because he gave his permission. “I have no objections.”

Shad stepped forward and cupped her face in his hands, his thumbs lightly stroking her cheeks. A moan came from her throat, so soft that it was barely audible; a tiny cry of utter longing. He brought his face closer to hers, his gaze seeming to memorize every feature.

“No one will ever love you as much as I do, Charley.” His low drawl was so quiet only she could hear what he was saying. “I don’t have to travel over the next hill to know that. It probably doesn’t mean anything to you but I’m not drifting anymore. I’ve crossed my last river.”

Her breath came in a sharp gasp, then his lips were trembling against hers, moving over them softly. She swayed against him, her hands spreading across his smooth vest. A raw hunger claimed him, hardening the kiss with its fierce urgency. Charley responded to its demands, aware only of her deep, abiding love for him.

Then Shad was breaking it off, letting her go abruptly to turn away. He muttered an emotionally thick, “Take care of her,” to Chuck and left a dazed Charley standing there to watch him stride across the room and out the front door.

“Are you going to let him walk away?” It was Gary who prodded her into awareness.

“What else can I do?” She turned her tear- filled eyes onto her brother.

“You love him, Charley. Damn it, go after him,” he declared impatiently. “Don’t stand here crying!”

“Was this your idea?” she demanded, remembering how determined her brother had been to put a stop to her marriage to Chuck. “Did you ask Shad to come here tonight? Did you do this?”

“If I had known how to get a hold of him or where to find him, I would have dragged him here, willing or not,” Gary admitted. “But I didn’t. He came back to you on his own. That has to prove something to you. Are you going to let him leave? “

Her gaze rushed to the front door where Shad had gone. She longed to run after him but she hesitated, twisting the diamond on her finger. She looked at it, trying not to feel the weight of her promise to Chuck, a man so unswerving in his loyalty.

“You want to go to him, don’t you?” His sad voice spoke to her.

“Chuck.” She turned to him, an aching regret sweeping through her at the defeat in his expression. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I guess I always knew it wasn’t meant to be for us. I’ve just been kidding myself, pretending that you might care for me someday.” His mouth twisted in a rueful line as he bent his head.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it.

He was shaking a little as he took her left hand. “I put this ring on your finger and I’ll take it off.” It slipped off easily at his touch. “You’re free, Charley. Go to him. He’s the one you want.”

Charley wanted to thank him, but Gary was already pushing her toward the door. “Hurry up before he leaves.”

She started out at a walk. Before she had taken three steps, she was running. Distantly she heard the astonished murmur of voices from the guests, but she was past caring what anybody thought as she raced out the door and into the night.

At the top of the porch steps she paused to search the shadowed yard of parked vehicles for Shad. There was a second of panic until she noticed a dejected figure leaning against the cab of a pickup, an arm hooked over a side mirror for support. She flew down the steps and through the shadows toward him.

“Shad!”

He stiffened at the sound of her voice and turned to face her, his posture rigid. She stopped short of him, able to make out his lean features and the pain carved in them. Love kindled a fire that sent its warm glow through her body.

“I don’t know where you think you are going, Shad Russell.” She was smiling as she wiped away the moisture on her cheeks. “But this time, you aren’t leaving without me.”

“Charley.” He took a step forward and stopped.

She guessed the cause for his hesitancy and explained, “Chuck has the ring. The engagement is off. You are the only man I love—the only man I have ever loved.”

With a shout of delight Shad swept her into his arms, lifting her into the air and whirling her around. She was laughing with free-flowing happiness when he finally stopped. For a breathless moment they both looked at each other.

When his mouth settled onto hers, his kiss wiped out all the pain and torment. Now there was room only for the boundless joy they found in each other. Their appetite was insatiable, one that not even time could reduce.

Ending the kiss, Shad kept his arm around her as he opened the driver’s door of the truck and gave her a push. “Inside,” he ordered.

“Where are we going?” Not that it mattered as long as they were together.

“We’re going across the state line into Nevada and find ourselves the first preacher who will marry us,” he stated as he climbed behind the wheel once she was in the cab.

“If that’s a proposal, I accept.” Charley laughed.

Reaching in the side pocket of his vest, he took out a small box and dropped it into her lap as he started the engine. “There is even a ring to go with the proposal.”

She opened it and drew a breath of delight. It’ was a simple diamond solitaire set in a wide band of gold. “It’s perfect; it’s beautiful. I love it.” Her arms went around his neck as she placed an appreciative kiss on the corner of his mouth.

“Careful, I’m driving,” he warned mockingly, and kissed her lightly on the lips before negotiating the truck through the parked cars. “Aren’t you interested in where we’re going after we’re married?”

“Where?” If it was to the ends of the earth, she’d follow him.

“To my ranch near the Bitterroots. I’ve spent the past two weeks fixing the house and modernizing the kitchen for you. New draperies, the works,” he said. “If there is anything you don’t like, you can change it.”

“We’re going to have a home?”

“I told you. I’ve crossed my last river.” He stopped the truck to take her in his arms and drown in her love.