Thea Devine (34 page)

She knew what she was doing to him, and with one sensuous foray deep into her satin heat he repaid her in kind. She writhed against his fingers and signaled her readiness.

“Oh Maggie!” Her nipples enticed him as her hands undressed him further. He touched, he stroked, he kissed, he sucked at them.

He climbed on the table and in one hard stroke he mounted her. They lay together, bathed in the sunlight on the kitchen table.

“This gets tricky,” he whispered.

“I love it.”

Hard against soft, soft against hard. Exquisite, deep, holding. And then hard brisk thrusts; hard, hard, hard; his mouth, hard, seeking; his arms under her, lifting her buttocks to meet his thrusts, to come tighter to him, deeper, circling, pulsating, wrapping herself around him voluptuously, seeking his virility, his tongue, her depths, the creamy satin slide that burst in the very center of her being … just … like … that…

“Oh yes,” she murmured against his lips. “Oh yes, like that … Oh, more … oh yes …”

Oh yes
… he shuddered violently as he spent his desire deeply into her feminine core.

He held her.

“Ummm, Logan?”

“Maggie?”

“We’re on the kitchen table.”

“Did you notice that?”

“It’s hard not to.”

“Poor Maggie; you’re between a rock and a hard place.”

“In more ways than one,” she retorted tartly.

“Not too comfortable?”

“I
was
,” she temporized.

“Yes,” he said softly. “I was too.” He eased himself away from her and had a moment’s tempting vision of Maggie raising herself to a sitting position, the long line of her body as seductive as Eve.

He lifted her off the table and carried her naked into his bedroom.

“Why should I dream of you here, when you are here?” he asked whimsically, settling himself in beside her, body to body, nakedness against nakedness.

She nestled herself tightly against him.

“Did you dream of me?”

“Every night, every day, every way. Why did you need to do this, Maggie?”

“I wish
I
understood,” she said slowly. “Do you realize for how long Dennis had been trying to run my life?
And
Mother Colleran? It just seemed like once they were gone there was nothing, not even the paper. It would have meant coming to you dependent on what you could give me. I didn’t like it.”

“And yet it is the way of things,” he said with just a trace of irony in his voice. He didn’t touch her now. All those little prickly feelings were right on the surface with her. The point was she had come, and he needed to know why. Why she had come, he thought, might be more important than why she had stayed away. It would set the course of their future—if they had one.

“Not my way,” she said staunchly.

“But I knew that.”

She took a deep breath. “So—I’m rebuilding the
Morning Call
office.”

“What!”

“I’m going to publish a newspaper.”

“I see,” he said with no inflection in his voice. But he didn’t see. He saw more fruitless nights alone without her. He saw hurried liaisons once again wherever they could grab a moment’s privacy. He saw only weekends relegated to one day of complete isolation from anyone else and anything else. And he could see nothing beyond that, not marriage or children or a life he could make with Maggie if she were to be managing things the same way.

She had another master, and he wondered if he could give her up to it again. He slid one hand idly along the undulating curves of her body, as if the contact would reconnect him with her.

What was she asking him to relinquish now? Could he live without the voluptuous heat of her body? Could he give her back to running a business and still keep her? Could he, and could he …

The answer was, and he knew it well now, that he would do whatever was necessary to have Maggie.

He became aware of her hand shaking him urgently. “You don’t see, Logan, really. I want to be with you, all the time. I’m not planning to live in town, I want to live here, and I’ll go to Colville every morning, and I’ll hire the best people so I won’t have to kill myself to get the damned thing published, and I’ll—”

He covered her mouth with his hand to stem the flow of all her plans. “Is that really how you want it, Maggie?”

She pulled him toward her confidently. “No, how I really want it is with you.”

He proposed again one bright day as they watched the framing for the new
Morning Call
building being raised.

“I’ve come for you for the last time, Maggie. I want you. I want to marry you.”

“I want to marry
you
,” she said. “Will you marry marry me?”

“I can’t wait,” he answered fervently.

Three weeks later, in the church where Frank had been memorialized, Maggie Colleran married Logan Ramsey in a simple ceremony to which they invited everyone in town. Afterward they celebrated with a lavish wedding luncheon on the front lawn of the church.

And Maggie felt happy and loved; she was Maggie Ramsey now, not Mrs. Frank, not ever again. No one had the nerve to even mention what Frank Colleran might have done. But Colville knew how to enjoy a party; Maggie and Logan were their own, home bred and home settled, and on the day of their wedding the townspeople gave them their support and affection.

In the end, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey decided to spend their wedding week on the ranch.

Martinez and the boys were herding the cattle up to Cheyenne. Denver North was proceeding approximately a month behind schedule, and Colville was growing by leaps and bounds as Mr. Brown gleefully wrote up notices of the new western boom town and inserted them in newspapers from New York to California.

The new
Morning Call
building was nearly sided and was waiting for the plasterers. Maggie cheerfully hired Jean away from Arch Warfield and set him to work supervising the construction crew. Annie Mapes had left town after Sean was shot dead in a drunken barroom brawl, and Melinda Sable shamelessly recruited likely young women from the newcomers in town attracted by Mr. Brown’s advertisements.

But all these things were forty-five minutes away from the ranch where Logan held Maggie tightly in his arms in a secluded little world all their own. She felt secure and whole and at one with his weight pressing into her and
holding her fast. She loved his weight on her, and the way he fit so perfectly between her legs. She never got used to it, the sensual arousal, the erotic penetration, the movement, the motion, the explosion of joy. Each time it was different, with other ways, other words, other joy.

He had found a new way to pleasure her. Not really a new way at all but rather a communication as old as nature and yet wholly new to them. He came to her honey source so gently and forcefully at the same time, spreading her legs, seeking her with his tongue, caressing her in this new delicious way.

She twisted to find him, to hold him, or kiss him, or something wonderful to show him how much she loved this new wondrous expression of his love for her.

He shifted himself to give her the utmost freedom to explore his surging manhood with the same desire with which he explored her.

She was all silk and satin, lush to the touch. He felt her mouth, her tongue coming at him with the same insatiable fervor with which he approached her, with the loving, passionate desire to discover everything about him there was to know.

There were no barriers now; they had each other as completely as if they were one. His kiss seduced her, had her demanding more. Her succulent exploration of him nearly sent him reeling over the edge. How potent was her mouth on him. The knowledge of Eve caressed him knowingly in just the right way, with just the right touch.

And when she bore down against him he knew what he had to do to bring her to completion. Her writhing movements complemented her own torrid caresses. She felt the turbulent release coming, coming, and she enfolded him deep within her velvet mouth. Together they pitched headlong into a tumultuous culmination, all the more sensational for their intimate radiant trust of each other.

The heat spiraled downward almost unendingly in completion of this erotic demonstration of his complete love and desire for her. And then he wrapped himself around her as if he would never let her go.

One day, not too many weeks after the wedding, the stage from Denver drew up to the Colville depot with a wrenching halt. It carried a lone passenger, and in the early evening hour only Arwin Bodey, who had come to pick up the mail, saw her.

“Mother Colleran?” he demanded in disbelief.

“Hello, Arwin,” she said airily, just as if she had expected to see him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked cautiously. He felt he should ask, at any rate, because he was the one who was going to relay the unwelcome news to Maggie, and not too soon either.

“Oh, my dear Arwin, I have been consumed with guilt for ever leaving Colville and abandoning Maggie. So self-centered of me; I must have gone mad after Reese died, I swear, to think of leaving Maggie alone with all those new people coming to town and her so eligible and wealthy. I came back to chaperone her of course, Arwin, and to make sure she makes the right decision about her future, and not wind up with that smelly cowboy. Arwin? Did you say something?
Arwin?
”

About the Author

Thea Devine’s books defined erotic historical romance. She’s the author of more than two dozen erotic historical and contemporary romances, a dozen novella, and is a Romantic Times Romance Pioneer honoree.