Thea Devine (11 page)

“And now there’s a chance,” he said gently.

Yes, she thought, and there was more than a chance if she could only let herself acknowledge that she wanted to hear everything he had to tell her.

“We have time, Maggie,” he added softly, as he read indecision in her eyes. “We don’t have to do anything but talk.”

She almost said, I don’t want to talk, but then she thought that perhaps she did. “What would we talk about?”

And she saw she didn’t fool him one bit with that question.

“You,” he said pointedly.

She visibly shied away from him. Not her. There was nothing about her he did not know anyway. Not now. “What about you?” she evaded.

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

Her eyes widened at that blatant male forthrightness. It was nothing more than a brazen challenge, even though there was not a nuance of provocation in his tone. She had to take it up. She had to. Even the thought of asking a question made her insides churn with a kind of forbidden excitement, as if this were something she should not want, should not even test. But he made her feel that way, and his words evoked an unbearable tension in her because she knew now the weight of her own privation.

And yet, to demand to hear these things was almost unthinkable; a woman could not command the knowledge of a man’s innermost thoughts and feelings. She had no right to make him reveal anything to her, she who had not recognized the depth of feeling within him to begin with. She had no claims here, and yet he was handing her everything in the hope that together somehow they could nuture something out of the remnants of a broken past.

What would she want to know? She knew he wanted her and that he was intent on pursuing her, perhaps he even wanted to marry her, though he had said nothing of that. She knew what he made her feel, and she knew there was a passion in her that had been doused like fire, but that still lived in a faint smoldering ember in the center of her womanhood. He didn’t have to tell her any of this. She knew the things she wanted to know were the things he had dreamed on those long empty nights that he had been alone and she had been in Frank Colleran’s arms.

She had the feeling he knew it too, and that he wanted to wipe all those memories from her mind and her heart, and that he would do it with words before he did it with his kisses.

He waited for her to ask, and she could not quite bring herself to do it.

“What should I want to know?” she asked finally.

A faint smile played across his mouth. “You’re a damned incurious woman, Maggie. I can’t believe that you don’t have a single question.”

“Not one,” she said stoutly. After all, neither of them had had a life before this moment when any words she uttered would create a new one.

His smile deepened. Stubborn woman, he thought, seeing all the questions in her eyes. “I thought we weren’t going to play games, Maggie.”

“I’m hard pressed to find a reason to pry into your private life,” she retorted.

But oh so curious, he thought, admiring her backbone, admiring
her
. “I’ll answer your questions, Maggie; you don’t even have to ask them.”

“But you don’t—”

“I do. And I’ll tell you exactly what you want to know. All the dreams, because I knew I could never touch you again after you chose Frank. All those nights of wanting you in my arms when I knew I could not have you. And all the things I wanted to do if I could only have another chance. All the things I imagined when nothing was possible ever again.”

She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. She wanted to speak, she wanted to ask him what forbidden things he had imagined, and her throat closed up so she couldn’t say a word.

“But you know what I imagined, Maggie,” he murmured, almost as if he could read her mind. “I
imagined just kissing you for hours at a time. I envisioned what it would be like to undress you every night, and I carried you naked to my bed and made love to you there. I made love to you everywhere; in the fields, in the house, in this office, on that table where I knew did your writing—everywhere. I saw you in your thick leather apron and you were naked underneath, ready for me. I saw you dressed to work in this office with the knowledge that what was underneath you wore solely for me. I imagined you sitting in that chair at your desk dressed only in a silken robe, waiting for me. I had you sitting in my lap, fully dressed, and letting me feel you everywhere, letting me touch, letting me kiss … is it enough, Maggie? Do you want to know more?”

She reached out her hand blindly, whether to negate his question or encourage him he did not know, and he took it into his firm grip and held it tightly. “I conjured a hundred different ways to make love to you in a hundred different places. I have you now, Maggie, and I’m not going to let go.”

He tugged on her hand to draw her forward. “Maggie!” He felt her resistance, and he pulled again gently until he felt her give and her body move forward, until she was directly opposite him, face to face, her eyes shuttered and her expression faintly wary.

He relinquished her hand to touch her face. “That’s all you have to know, Maggie. The rest I’ll show you, not tonight, maybe not for a while, but soon sometime, you will let me love you and we’ll explore those hundred ways.”

She found her voice then, after feeling utterly overwhelmed by his raw emotion, because she knew it didn’t matter what he wanted. What mattered was the end result, the cost to her if she were careless and allowed herself to be entranced by his wanton words.

“And then what?” she asked, and her voice was hoarse with some other kind of passion.

He knew what it was and what she wanted to hear. “Maggie, I would marry you in a minute, but you don’t love me and you don’t want to be married right now. You’ve said it and I believe it. You think it leads to constraints that won’t allow you the freedom you have now. Fine. You don’t want a child. Fine. But you need me and I sure as hell want you, and that is just how we will be until you decide otherwise.”

“That is too much to ask of you,” she threw at him, because she needed to find distance from those heated words that had painted forbidden pictures for her. She saw herself everywhere, with him, just as he wanted. She wanted to do it, all of it, and she wanted to run away from her desire.

“Damn it, Maggie, it was too much to ask for me to accept your marriage to Frank. Nothing is too damned much after that. Maggie—if I touch you, you’ll know. If I kiss you again, you want me to kiss you again, you want all of that…” his voice deepened as he gauged her response, “and I want you.”

She felt helpless and torn. He understood so much and she comprehended so little. “How—where?” Already the complications intruded, dancing around in her mind tormentingly. Even if she wanted to she had Mother Colleran to contend with, and Reese, and
he
was so far away to begin with.

“Here, whenever I can get away. You’ll know, Maggie.”

Yes, she thought, I will know. She saw no reason to say no; she couldn’t see how it could work. And that, she thought, would damp down his desire faster than anything else.

He left without touching her, and she felt an angry
disappointment that he had not at least kissed her. She had wanted him to kiss her, and now she would have to wait—for everything. She wondered if it had been deliberate, if he had known that she would spend the long night hours thinking of the carnal images he had evoked and the desire he had aroused in her, and she wondered how long he would taunt her by staying away.

Chapter Eight

In the morning everything was the same—and nothing was the same. She dressed for business as usual and was down in the office at six o’clock as was her habit. A.J. joined her shortly thereafter and they talked over the coming week’s events and how to pitch their coverage of the railroad story from then on. They talked about the events Arch Warfield should cover and whether Maggie herself should follow the progress of the engineers or whether A.J. should do it. They prepared their newsprint order and checked back over the business ads they had printed the week before to make sure to solicit new ads this week. They checked the print case to be sure that the typefaces were clean and unbroken.

They did all the small chores they normally did the weekday following publication, and yet Maggie felt the difference and the underlying excitement that something cataclysmic was going to happen, something that appealed to her deepest sense of her womanly self. Not knowing when it would happen heightened her expectation and her tension. And the waiting, she discovered, made her want it more.

Her hands trembled as she wrote down the day’s schedule and she thought about his seductive words. She
bit her lips and remembered his kisses. She felt her body strain to the memory of his touch.

He didn’t come, and her restless night was fraught with sensual visions of what might have happened and what didn’t. How could his fancies have captivated her so completely when she had resisted them so ardently?

He did not come, and she felt, the next day, that that was fine and just as it should be. She was not Melinda Sable, to be had at any man’s whim for whatever price she cared to claim. Logan was no different from any other man: if his ploy didn’t work, he would seek solace elsewhere, and no doubt he had done that. And it was just as well. She didn’t want the entanglement, she didn’t need the tension of the emotion.

She felt frenetic at the end of the day. Her body was telling her a totally different story, and she hated having no control over her desire. It crept up on her willy-nilly, at times when she needed her full faculties for the job at hand. She would sit staring, thinking wanton thoughts that had nothing to do with the work on her desk.

How had he done this to her? No, she was doing it to herself. She had let him talk and now she couldn’t forget a word he had said.

He did not come.

She went out in the streets the next day in Reese’s company, stayed a half hour in Bodey’s store, stopped by the stage depot to hear news of any new arrivals in town, had lunch with Reese at the hotel, and listened for gossip, and all the while the thrumming excitement pulsed through her veins. And there was the waiting—the waiting that was the lot of women like her.

She felt taut as a bowstring, ready to snap.

Reese found her curiously preoccupied and not a little distracted.

“Well, I hardly have the same means of seeking relief as a man does,” she said waspishly, and realized after she
said it that he could interpret it more than one way. God, her unruly mouth.

“Oh now Maggie, surely there’s a decanter of whiskey in some sideboard in that apartment. You don’t need company to drink, for heaven’s sake.”

She sent him a skeptical look. “I don’t drink anyway.”

“Of course you don’t,” he said comfortingly.

And then back at the office there was Jean, looking at her with a hectic expression in his eyes as she entered with Reese.

On her desk was a stack of handwritten notes. More words, she thought, sinking down into her chair resignedly. Just not the right ones.

His note was on the bottom.
Tonight, same time
.

She crumpled it up, started to toss it away and then thought the better of it and slipped it into her pocket of her apron.

Tonight
.

She felt feverish all over again. She couldn’t for the life of her imagine tonight. Tonight felt like it was a thousand hours away. Tonight he would … come. How could she envision anything past that, when she felt such betrayal that she had had to wait.

Mother Colleran got in her way. Dennis sent his own note, reminding her to remember her promise about her treatment of the railroad. Jean seemed everywhere around her, hovering in a way that made her extraordinarily uncomfortable.

Everything felt out of shape and moving in the slowest possible motion. Mother Colleran ate dinner and Reese went out. Maggie ate at her desk in the company of Jean, who had decided to work late.

Tonight, same time. Would Jean never leave?

He finally left. She went upstairs to spend an hour or so with Mother Colleran, whose everlasting complaint was that no one paid any attention to her, and even
though Reese was here he seemed to have found a set of friends to keep him away at night, and anyway, the whole thing was Maggie’s fault. Maggie wasn’t nice enough to Reese. Maggie wouldn’t let him help with the newspaper. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie …

She went downstairs finally to escape the carping. The woman was mad. She couldn’t possibly have thought Maggie would let Reese anywhere near the paper.

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the slow ticking of the clock and her growing anticipation as the night sounds around her melted into silence and a rhythmic beating that mirrored the pounding of her own heart.

Much later, as she listened, she heard Reese come back and then go out again. She decided she would not light a lamp tonight, in case Reese should return and come to investigate. She would do nothing but remain by the door until she heard Logan’s signal. She would let him in of her own free will and then she would bear the consequences.

Later still, there was a soft knock at the rear door in the printing room. She opened the door and felt his solid male presence as he entered and closed the door silently behind him.

He reached for her unerringly in the dark, and she knew this was the ineffable moment for which she had waited. She felt the touch of his hands first, drawing her tightly against the length of his body. Then there was the shock of his hands moving up her arms to her shoulders and neck and upward to cup her face to center it, in the dark, in that breathless instant before his lips touched hers. And then there was just the pure hot sensation of penetration and the luscious taste of him seeking the essence of her.

What was the essence but the giving, the surrendering of that part of her sensual soul to his demand of that
moment? She yielded it willingly.

Here, in the dark, there were no questions that could not be answered; there was only the sense that this capitulation was foreordained, not because of her hunger but because of his constancy and his desire to change and reorder the past.

“There’s no light,” she whispered against his lips at one point.

“We don’t need one,” he murmured, touching her lips with his fingers, feeling their softness and texture, feeling them quiver as he stroked the tender inner side of the lower lip before nipping at it lightly.

No, she thought, they didn’t need one. The darkness illuminated everything for her. The forbidden became admissable, because she knew he would do nothing she did not want him to do.

And she wanted his kisses. If she had nothing else but tonight her ordeal of waiting would have been worth it. She adored how he kissed her, the way he slowly and voluptuously fit his mouth against hers in just such a way that she could do nothing but part her lips to admit his questing tongue. Her arms wound around him to pull him even deeper within her, and she allowed herself the kind of wanton response she had never experienced with Frank.

He lost himself in it. Never had he thought that she would give herself to him so completely so soon. There was no submerged anger in her tonight. Her need for what he offered was real: he could taste her fierce demand. Her glittering sensuality was totally untapped, he thought, and he was going to be the one to unleash the storm within her. Oh, but slowly, ever so slowly. He knew she thought she would be using him, that
he
was to be her convenience. And why not, as long as he wanted it this much? But she didn’t know the rest. She didn’t know she could love him, she didn’t know he was going to seduce
her until she was conscious only of the need to join with him, and
only
him. Then she would know where her destiny lay.

Even so, her passionate kisses made his head reel, made him almost lose command of his senses, made him want to reach for her and couple with her in the most primitive and elemental way. It was that terrible craving for her that he had to learn to control.

But if he touched her anywhere he might explode. She might explode. He never dreamed that her kisses could be so incendiary, or that the press of her body against his would arouse him to a fever to possess her that was almost impossible to subdue. He wanted everything—tonight, and he knew nothing was possible but the lush possession of her mouth and his firm hold of her pulsating body.

It was enough for tonight to feel her yearning and stroke her desire.

“Maggie …”

“Don’t stop.”

“Shhh …” He touched her lips. “Come inside …”

“Yes—” She took his hand and carefully led him into the office. Yes, here there would be even more privacy, in the dark, with the door closed and the magic of him to light her way. She found her chair and he settled into it and pulled her down on his lap.

The feeling of taking her body against his was so natural. Every movement of her torso as she twisted to find a comfortable position sounded a chord in him that demanded to be answered.

A sensual heat arose between them as she became aware of his pounding heart and powerful scent and the thick, pulsating length of him beneath her.

She licked her lips, thinking of what that meant to her—that she was here with him willingly, that she wanted his kisses, that she wanted him to hold her, and
more, that she wanted him to touch her anywhere he wanted to.

She drew her breath in with a little hiss as her imagination envisioned the torrid caresses that he had yet to initiate. Only the avid thrust of his rock-hard manhood against her bottom told her that his desire was growing every bit as volcanic as hers.

He was holding back as he had promised, and yet he had her in his arms in a way that would allow him to feel her and arouse her just as he had dreamed of doing. Just the way she wanted him to.

And so it happened:
she
had crossed the line into a fevered erotic yearning that was rushing headlong into pure greediness, a greed to experience the lush sensations she knew he could excite in her.

But he had said, and she remembered, that he would not do anything she did not want him to.

She wanted him to.

When had she come to that?

Her hands moved of their own volition around his neck to pull his mouth down against hers.

“I need your kisses,” she whispered, and gratifyingly, his mouth crushed down over hers as though he had been waiting for this bold invitation.

“Tell me more, Maggie,” he murmured between his sultry kisses and the heated thrust of his tongue as he expertly explored every inch of her mouth.

“I want more,” she sighed, opening her mouth to him again, reveling in the feel of his hands in her hair, holding her again in that precise way as if he were drinking nectar from her lips.

She moved her own hands to touch his face, downward to feel the movement of his mouth on hers as he plunged voraciously into her mouth, seeking, dueling, playing, tasting, easing away to lick her lips, to rim them with the wet heat of his tongue.

Everything he did in this carnal probing aroused her beyond anything in her experience. She didn’t want him to stop, and she wanted, she wanted …

… she didn’t want to want…

… she felt him sucking her tongue so very gently …

… she felt him elongating under her as if that part of him were some separate entity seducing her as well…

… she wanted …

His sucking became intense, overtly sensual, bewitching her with the ravishing motion of his lips pulling against her tongue just … lusciously … so …

She moved with this erotic provocation because she could not help it; her body wanted the movement that the gorgeous motion of his lips foretold. She remembered, oh how she remembered … and there for the taking was the powerful essence, the potent maleness, the culmination of what she really wanted.

Her hips ground against his towering sex in a timeless mating dance. Timeless, the whole was timeless, and they would come to it, she knew now they would come to it, as her body felt the living heat of his manhood through the layers of clothes and the hot naked kisses of his mouth, kisses that made her want to strip away her clothes and bare herself to him totally.

His mouth moved away from hers, hovering a mere breath away as his sensitive fingers touched her swollen lips. She was shaking with excitement and arousal. He wanted to move his hands, he wanted to feel her pulsating body that he had incited into such an erotic heat, and all he could do was wait.

“Maggie …”

“Oh God …”

“I’ll stay here all night kissing you.”

“Yes, kiss me, kiss me again just the same way; I love how you kiss me,” and a moment later, his tongue sought hers and his lips closed around it and began the same
rhythmic caress, while he felt the one part of her body that she could not deny him—her beautiful face and neck and the insatiable motion of her wanton tongue.

And then it all became one, a fusion of her body rocking against his ramrod manhood, arching upward as if she were demanding his caress, and the firm enticing thrust of her tongue in concert with his mouth, and the darkness, and the fiery response of her, and the smooth texture of her skin, and his explosive need of her. His one hand reached for her, sliding down her chest to meet the straining tip of her breast. The buttons, the hell-be-damned buttons … He gripped the buttons and ripped them away, stripping the impeding material from her body until he could feel the naked lushness of her breast in his hand.

He wouldn’t let her break the kiss. He held her and he kissed her until her faint tremor turned into yearning once more. Only then did he begin his exquisite exploration of her luscious breast. He felt her arch toward him so he could hold her more fully; he felt her body squirm tantalizingly against his tumescence as he touched her nipple and caressed and gently squeezed its voluptuous tip.