Thea Devine (29 page)

“Jesus, Maggie.”

“I wish you had gotten there first,” she whispered.

“I wish I had too.”

He settled her down on the sofa in front of the fireplace, and he stoked the flames. “It’s a wonder I can look at a fire with equanimity,” she said.

He sat down on the floor with his knees drawn up against his chest. “I’m wondering about that. It can’t devalue the land for
them
. If anything it becomes a fortuitous accident.”

“I had that thought too. I don’t know.” She put her head back and stared at the fire. It was friendly and warm now, radiating a faint heat that would expand with the hours. It felt like she felt, contained and secure now that Logan understood the things he hadn’t known before.

She felt safe with him, not terrorized, not trapped. The net couldn’t swallow her here. There was sanity here, and a sense that all the swirling things she was thinking would coalesce into some kind of coherent whole.

She wanted him. The magic of Logan, she thought, was the fact that nothing else mattered when she was with him. He made her whole again and she knew in that moment it was the reason she had always needed him.

And she, not he, had almost thrown that enchantment away. She wanted to recapture it; she wanted him.

And she knew he wanted her.

They sat in deep silence for a very long time. She didn’t know what to do, but she knew she was the one who had to make the first move. It was just the way it was, and the way she wanted it.

She loved the long tense moments of trying to decide how she would approach him. In her mind she could say and do anything she wanted, everything she had
imagined in her dreams.

In reality there was a barrier between them, as thick as her stubborn streak and twice as wide. It was tangible and it emanated from him, and as the heat grew between them it became something that could not be ignored.

What was it? She knew what it was. She would leave him tomorrow, like he was a man for hire, and he wanted her with him always.

We’ll come to that, she thought, stretching out her hand and touching his thick hair as he gazed pensively into the fireplace. I’m coming to that. I just need a little time. Just a little time.

Her hand told him that as she stroked his hair down to the edge of his collar. She inserted her fingers there and began sliding them around the base of his neck.

Her touch electrified him; he had loved her so long, how could he refuse her? He felt her deep breaths against his ear as her fingers inched their way downward to feel the play of muscle along his shoulders. He felt her lips as she grazed his ear and neck with kisses. And then he turned his head and he felt her tongue as she forced her way into his mouth.

And then his arms closed around her as she tumbled on top of him.

Outside, Reese Colleran watched. There was a window from the parlor that looked directly out onto the porch. It was pitch black. The only illumination was the fire within. He watched as the cowdog slowly undressed Maggie and felt every inch of her satiny flesh.

Never had he imagined her body so beautiful; never had he dreamed a woman could be so willing. He had never seen anything like the ferocity with which she enticed that man with her kisses and the way she wrapped herself around him with wanton abandon.

He couldn’t bear to watch it through this time. He needed desperately to slake his own rising desire, and he knew just where to go. The image of Maggie’s nakedness rode with him as he raced to town.

It was very late when he got there, but he pounded on Melinda Sable’s door violently. By the time she opened it, he had withdrawn a hundred-dollar bill and his aching member.

Her heated gaze ate it up, and he knew she was ready. She gave him a knowing little smile and closed the door behind him.

She awoke beside him, naked, on the floor. “Logan!” she shook him urgently, and he woke up with a start.

“What’s the matter, Maggie?”

“What if someone comes?”

“They’ll knock on the door.”

“This is nothing to laugh about.”

“I’m not laughing,” he said huskily, reaching for her. “Lie down with me, Maggie.”

She nestled against him, back to front, and his arms surrounded her. She felt utterly enfolded by his heat and his scent and the enticing male essence of him.

She reached back and grasped his hard muscular thigh. She felt an immediate reaction. He threw his leg over her and she felt him nudging her and hardening deliciously against her.

“I want you,” he whispered in her ear.

“I’m waiting,” she murmured, raising her arms behind his neck so that she could both command his kisses and arch herself against him. His tongue immediately possessed her willing mouth and one arm wrapped tightly around her hips, while the other hand covered her breast, just covered it, and held it, with the peak of her nipple pressing hard into the palm of his hand.

“Perfect,” she breathed against his lips.

“Almost perfect,” he whispered, taking her kisses. “Wrap your leg around me, Maggie.”

“Yes,” she murmured, and slid her bare leg over his thigh just as he wanted.

There, when she was open to him, he slid gently into her welcoming fold and held her there to feel the pulsating heart of his desire. She was home to him, beside him, open to him, possessing him as thoroughly as he possessed her. It was an ineffable moment of discovery, a pure bonding that connected them into a new whole. He had never wanted her more and he was content to lie embedded within her, full and whole and perfect.

He did not move for a very long time, and his languid kisses only incited them both. She began thrusting against him with tight little movements that begged him for the full measure of his driving manhood.

“Now, Maggie?”

“I want you desperately,” she whispered.

“Show me how much.”

“You show me.”

Even so, his movements were both limited and enhanced by the way he possessed her. She enfolded him totally and felt each short movement of him deep inside her. She loved how deeply he lay within her and how his hands had access to every inch of her body. She withheld nothing from him when he made love to her this way. Her kisses told him so. The luxurious writhing of her body against him excited him beyond anything he had felt before.

She was Eve, an innocent and temptress in one luscious body. She knew all the secrets of time, yet he found secrets to be discovered.

She gave him her breasts, and he discovered the mystery of her proud nipples. She gave him her feminine heat, and he found the source of her satiety. With each
virile stroke of his towering manhood he took her toward completion.

This stunning tribute to her voluptuous femininity resonated deep within her. She rode with
him
, only him; her body shimmied against him, her leg thrust against him, almost as if she were trying to get away from the intensity of his possession. Her kiss-swollen lips begged him for more, and he gave it to her.

He drove into hot velvet, his tongue caressed hot velvet, she smoldered against him with her sinuous movements, seeking the thing he most wanted to give her.

Slowly it came, from a golden, hot center, elusive and powerfully there, golden molten, dissolving through her veins in a shimmering, sumptuous conclusion to the splendor of his love.

He felt it coming, rippling through her, twisting through him, propelling him like a rock-hard piston to thrust and thrust and thrust until he felt her soaring and breaking down onto him, into the force of his shattering climax.

“I have to see it,” she said, as he grimly prepared to take her back into Colville.

“You don’t want to see it, Maggie.”

“I do. I have to know.”

He looked at her sharply. “I don’t want you to go.”

“I don’t want to go. But I have to. I have to figure it out, Logan.”

He didn’t understand that cryptic statement, and he let it pass; the important thing was, she didn’t want to leave him.

They drove in silence toward the Colleran land. There was still a smokiness in the air, and as they passed by the Mapes’ they saw the heat of the devastation. The house
was gone, the land was barren and naked. Charred trees, bushes, scorched grass were all the eye could see. There was nothing remaining of the cabin where Maggie had spent her first weeks of marriage to Frank. Everything was blackened, burned to the root.

She took a deep breath. “Maybe it’s better.”

“Don’t give in, Maggie.”

“Oh no. Not until I understand why Frank left it to me. I don’t know where to go to find that out.”

They were silent again as he guided the wagon toward town. She was deep in her thoughts and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to interrupt her, until suddenly she gave a short laugh.

“I was thinking about Mother Colleran. She said things would change when Reese arrived.” She turned her head back to look at the desolation one more time. “They did, didn’t they?”

“He never said why he came?”

“She sent for him, or at least that was what she said.”

He thought about that for a while. “After Reese came everything changed. How?”

“What we talked about: Denver North running that ad for construction workers in the readyprint supplement, gossip about my driving up the price of the land by refusing to sell. Dennis’s proposal—Dennis asked me to marry him, remember? He thought Frank would have wanted it.” She ignored his shudder. “A.J.’s death. The fire.
Two
fires. Is that enough? Haven’t we had this conversation before?”

He grimaced. “It does sound a little familiar, but neither of us were thinking about these things that have happened in term of how they related to Reese’s arrival.”

She thought about it. “That’s true. I’m not sure if they have any bearing at all.”

“Or maybe they are the very reason why he came to Colville.”

It was a startling idea. “He came to Colville to set all these things in motion? That’s crazy; he didn’t know anything about Frank’s business or me or Denver North before he came.”

“Or maybe he did,” Logan said soberly.

That was worse, because she had thought that too. “I considered that. Sometimes it felt like he was aching to take control of the paper away from me. And then when A.J. died, I thought he was shot so that someone could step in and take over from
him
.”

“All these feelings,” Logan muttered.

“And one very suspicious sheriff who would just love to find a reason to hang A.J.’s murder on me. He’s still sniffing around. Even that unctuous Mr. Brown mentioned it when I met him just after the fire.”

“Ummm,” Logan said thoughtfully as they reached the outskirts of town. “I think you’re in danger, Maggie,” he said abruptly.

“Not if I sell the burned acreage,” she said. “Dennis has been pressuring me to do it. He claims my finances are sinking lower than a mine shaft these days with all the drain on my income. I could just sell up and be gone if I go crawling to Mr. Brown.”

“What are you going to do, Maggie?”

“I surely don’t know.”

“God, I hate to leave you alone here, but we have to get the cattle out before they hunker down on the Mapes’ land. I can get back in two or three days.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Go to Arwin if you need help.”

“I will. Nothing is going to happen, though.”

“Don’t be too sure,” he said ominously. “Now, do you think Reese had the sense to stable my horse in the hotel’s barns?”

* * *

He had said it, she had answered it with a nonchalance that she was far from feeling, but as she walked into the hotel, Maggie had a pervasive sense that something was not right. She felt a supreme reluctance to return to the suite, and on an impulse she stopped by the desk where Miles was in attendance and asked if there were another free room.

Miles, the ultimate desk clerk, did not blink an eye. He scanned the booking list and finally said “No, ma’am. I’m sorry.” She believed him because it would have meant more money from her pocket.

She had to go back to the suite, where Logan thought she was in danger.

She let herself in bravely. There was no one there. She breathed a sigh of relief and then wondered if they hadn’t sent a search party for her. But why should they? Reese knew she was with Logan.

Reese didn’t like the fact that she had gone with Logan.

She wondered where Reese was.

It was curiously stale and silent in the sitting room. She sat down tentatively on the little sofa, almost as if she expected to have to leap up and dash out.

Her oozing fear seemed radically misplaced in the face of the normalcy of the suite and the fact that both her mother-in-law and Reese were gone. She had expected a confrontation and had walked into blankness. She was exaggerating things in her mind; nothing could be as spooky as it seemed when she went over it in the silence and dark of night.

On the other hand, the man had issued a thinly disguised threat, and days later the something that
might
have happened did.

Except that Mr. Brown had made it very clear he wasn’t going to make her another offer for that land.

Who, she wondered, would?

She ought to go to him and demand something
incredibly outrageous. He would say scorched earth wasn’t worth it. He would try to break her, to pull down the price he initially offered her, she thought, and that was the why of it. She had been bad—she hadn’t cooperated … odd word to use … and she had been punished.

But why would she think in terms of cooperation?

…
looked into it
… that phrase resurfaced unexpectedly. She was sure Frank had looked into it. Her. Her family. He was the type of man who did not do things impulsively. He checked things out. He must have checked her out.

He wouldn’t have married her, a fresh-faced, innocent twenty year old with a newspaper dowry just out of hand. He hadn’t come to Colville specifically looking for her.

He must have looked into it.

Why would she connect that to her thinking about cooperation?

Cooperation. Colville.

She didn’t see any connection, but the notion of looking into it was so insistent in her mind.