Lone Calder Star (27 page)

Unhurried, he swung toward her, simultaneously shortening the distance between them and reaching up to brace a hand against the post a few inches above her head.

"Does that mean you think I can?" he asked with a slight grin.

"I suppose it would depend on how you went about it." Again there was a trace of uncertainty, a kind of drawing back that seemed to push him away, but her gaze slid almost unwillingly to his mouth and that pushed him closer.

"I was always taught that a kiss makes everything better." He followed his words with a downward dip of his head and claimed her lips.

The night air had chilled their surface, making his first taste of them cool. He warmed every inch of them with a nuzzling heat that soon coaxed the responsive pressure he sought. The quickening ardor of her lips burned through the restraint he had placed on himself. And the kiss became something that was no longer warm and persuasive, but one that was hot with need, demanding contact with her body.

But the minute his hand gripped her waist to draw her against him, Dallas ripped herself away from his lips and turned into the railing, all in one twisting motion.

"Is that how you usually go about cheering someone up?" The disturbed breathiness in her voice took much of its stiff demand away from it, and offered its own kind of reassurance to Quint.

"I saved it for you." Standing behind her, he wound his arms around her, drawing her back against him and bending his head to nuzzle the side of her neck. "I admit I got a bit carried away," he murmured against her skin. "It's been a little too long since I held you in my arms, and the desire just builds up."

"I could tell."

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"Obvious, wasn't it?" He smiled, but he could feel the tension in her body that kept her from relaxing against him.

"Quint," she began, a wealth of hesitation and reluctance in her voice. "I think we should slow it down."

Quint sensed again this figurative pulling away from him, and it was totally at odds with the passion that had been in her kiss a moment ago. Puzzled by her conflicting signals, Quint turned her around, needing to see her face.

"Are you saying I've been rushing things?" he asked.

Her glance bounced off his face and centered on his shirt collar. "We both have," she replied somewhat stiffly.

" And thats bad" he guessed; yet he was oddly reassured by her comment.

" Not necessarily. I just think it would he too easy to let ourselves get carried away by the heat of the moment and find ourselves in a situation that we might have cause to regret."

Quint smiled at her tactful choice of phrases. "I might as well be honest, Dallas. An affair isn't what I want at all."

" I don't think it would be wise either," she agreed quickly.

" You misunderstand." He tucked a finger under her chin, lifting it to force her to look at him.

"I'm hoping for something more permanant."

Somehing else was mixed in with the shock and disbelief in her, but the dim light made it impossible for Quint to identify it.

"We hardly know each other," Dallas said in confused protest.

He smoothed the hair back from her face. "I wouldn't be surprised that, even after a lifetime together, there would still be things we don't know about each other."

There wasn't an ounce of doubt in his mind that it was a lifetime he wanted to spend with her.

The certainty of it filled him. hut it was the expressions chasing across her face-surprise, joy, doubt, and something akin to panic-that made Quint laugh softly. "There goes that mind of yours again, processing all the data and searching out potential problem areas."

"How can you ignore them?" Dallas countered, her gaze clinging to him in uncertainty. "You don't know me at all."

Unconcerned, Quint smiled. "You'd be surprised at what I know about you."

She stiffened instantly, her hands flattening across his chest, ready to push. "I suppose you hired a private investigator to check me out."

"Not hardly." His smile widened. "He could only supply me with a lot of useless facts and little about you as a person."

"Which, of course, you know." There was something defensive about the hint of scorn in her voice, but her hands had eased their pressure against his chest.

But it was the lingering doubt in her eyes that made Quint patient. "Do you need to be told how warm and caring you are? Not to mention intelligent and proud, not afraid of hard work. Or the deep sense of family loyalty you have." Again Dallas avoided his eyes, and again he tipped up her chin to force the contact. "And it goes without saying that you're beautiful and have the most kissable lips."

To prove it, he covered them with a warm and fiercely tender kiss. Victory came when she leaned into it, a wanting and needing in her response that echoed his own feelings.

Quint knew then he could take her beyond where she wanted to go. Yet there was a risk of later regret, and it wasn't one he wanted to run. He eased the pressure and shifted his interest to the curve of her cheek and along the side of her temple.

She sagged against him, her head dipping to rest again on his chest, a hand balling into a fist near her chin. "You don't know me, Quint," she murmured. "You only think you do. I'm not-"

"Perfect, I suppose," he guessed. "I've never met anyone who was." His arms circled her in a loose, undemanding embrace. "At first I had a hard time dealing with your pessimism until I realized that your thinking wasn't really negative. It's just your nature to analyze every aspect of a
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situation and identify its weaknesses. It's your method of problem solving. Your biggest fault isn't that you think too much. Most of the time, you do what your head tells you, not your heart."

"That isn't wrong," Dallas insisted.

He idly rubbed his chin over the silken strands of her hair. "Not always," Quint agreed. "But a good many years ago my dad gave me some advice. He said if you ever find yourself in a situation where everything seems fine, yet your gut tells you differently, listen to your instincts and forget what your head is saying. That's what you need to do, Dallas, trust your feelings."

He felt the negative, denying movement of her head. In a rare loss of patience, Quint dug his fingers into her shoulders and held her away from him. The roughness of his actions showed in her look of shocked surprise.

" Right now Dallas. Be honest with me and yourself ." The rawness of need was in his demand.

"Tell me what your heart is saying. Not your head, but your heart."

Wordless, she looked at him, a thousand uncertainties in her eyes, The gnawing ache in his chest grew with the lengthening silence.

" Good God, Dallas." His voice was thick with emotion. " Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. My father's death taught me that. Right now-tonight-may be all we ever have. Are you going to deny us that and wait instead until you can get your head to line up with your heart?"

She closed her eyes, making a tight line of her lashes. He dug his lingers into her flesh, but the truth was inescapable: an answer inwillingly given was no answer at all.

Exerting iron control, Quint uncurled his fingers, spreading them wide, and took a step back from her. But there was a certain hardness in his voice when he said, "Let me know when you've made up your mind."

The slight emphasis on the last word was designed to cut, and it did. Her wince was small, but it was there.

Quint pivoted away from her and went back inside, shedding his windbreaker at the door and jamming it onto the wall hook. There was no lingering, no glancing back for any signs of regret from Dallas. He walked straight from the door to the living room.

In the recliner, Empty snorted and stirred, awakened by the sharp sound of Quint's strides.

"What time is it?" he mumbled, throwing a dazed and sleepy look around the room.

"A little after nine." Quint's pace slackened only slightly as he continued across the room.

"Making an early night of it, are you?" Empty surmised.

"Might as well." But fatigue had nothing to do with the decision. Pain and anger and a dozen other emotions roiled too close to the surface. Quint didn't trust himself to see Dallas again that night.

"Think I will, too." Empty lowered the footrest. "Where's Dallas? "

"Out on the porch." Quint's answer was curt, but it left no mark on Empty.

His mind was on other things as he pushed out of the chair and noted Quint's disappearance into the hallway with an absent glance in that direction. The stiffness in his joints gave him a hobbling gait when he crossed to the living room's front door. Old gnarled fingers closed around the knob and swung the door open, letting in the soft, steady sound of falling rain.

It was a moment before his eyes adjusted to the shadowed darkness of the porch and located Dallas standing near the rail. "Quint and me are calling it a night. You'll need to lock up when you come in."

"I will."

The low-voiced answer reached him. As Empty gave the door a closing push, he caught the reflection of multicolored lights on a windowpane and pulled it open again. "Don't forget to unplug the tree lights, too," he added.

Her response was muffled, yet it had an affirmative ring that satisfied Empty. This time he closed the door tight and shuffled oft to his bedroom.

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Lightning flashed outside Quint's bedroom window, briefly illuminating its interior. Quint lay on his back, staring at the ceiling with one arm flung across the pillow under his head, and the bedcovers pulled halfway up his bare chest. His jaw was clenched against the annoying and incessant drip of water from the eaves.

A troubled sigh came from him. He tried closing his eyes again, but his mind wouldn't rest. In irritation, Quint rolled onto his side, his glance sliding to the luminescent face of the alarm clock that sat on his bedside table. Its hand were postioned at eight minutes to midnight.

" So much for an early night," he muttered and gave the pillow a punch, using more force than necessary to bunch it under his head.

Thunder rumbled long and low, almost muffling the faint scrape of a releasing door latch. But his nerves were strung too tight ,sharpening his senses too keenly for Quint to miss it. With a turning lift of his head, he glanced at the door and watched it swing inward.

For a split second he stared at the woman's shape in the doorway, backlit by the glow from the bathroom's night-light. An

oversized T-shirt stopped near midthigh, revealing a familiar pair of long legs.

Something leaped inside him, but he'd already been burned once tonight. Quint sat upright, the covers slipping down to his hips.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded in a low, half-angry voice.

"I couldn't sleep." Dallas's voice was soft and hesitant.

But Quint found no satisfaction in knowing that sleep had been equally elusive for her. "Unless you've made up your mind, you'd better turn around and leave right now."

It was a warning, generated by the raw desire that ripped through him at the sight of her briefly clad body, when it was obvious she was wearing nothing underneath that thin cotton shirt.

"I have. That's why I'm here." Dallas closed the door behind her and crossed to the side of the bed where he was, the fabric falling in a soft drape from the pointed roundness of her breasts.

"Quint, there's something you need to know."

But it was the dip of the mattress under the weight of the knee she placed on it and not her words that snapped the thing that had held Quint motionless.

He reached out and pulled her onto the bed with him. "There isn't anything I need to know." He pressed her back onto the sheets, his body following to pin her there. "Your here. Thats enough."

"You don't understand." Her head moved in protest, a plea in her eyes.

"No, you don't understand." All the hunger and torment of being without her rose up inside Quint as his hand spread itself across her ribcage just beneath the swell of her breasts. "I love you. There's nothing you can say or do that will ever change that."

"I wish I could believe that," Dallas whispered.

The doubt in her voice momentarily froze him, forcing him to question the assumptions he had made. "Tell me one thing, Dallas, do you love me?"

"Yes, b.."

The single word was all he needed to hear. His mouth came down to smother the unnecessary ones in a kiss rough with need. There was an instant when he thought she was going to resist him Then her arms wound around him, her hands pressing and urgent in their caress.

Gone was the steady calm that had always ruled him, its place taken by something primitive and demanding. Her lips parted under the insistence of his, allowing him to mate with her tongue.

But it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough.

The T-shirt's thin material became an irritating barrier, denying him the sensation of skin against skin. A hand tunneled under its hem and rolled it up while it explored the smooth bend of a hip, the quivering flatness of her stomach, and the button-hard peak of a round breast. The need surfaced to take it into his mouth and taste it.

But with the first dragging movement away from her lips, he encountered the shirt's bunched
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cloth. Impatient hands pushed at it even as hers reached down to pull it off.

Then there was nothing between them, nothing to block the heat of her body from burning its impression along the length of him. The contact with it, the motion of it, wanting and eager, banished all else from his consiousness except the knowledge that her need matched the fierceness of his.

The hot urgency of it turned them both wild as they hungrily sought all the pleasure that can exist between a man and a

woman. Time stood still, without a yesterday or tomorrow-only this night, this moment, together.

There was no patience, no gentleness. The strain of waiting, wondering, wanting, allowed no room for it. There was only the desperate hunger that drove each of them relentlessly and ruthIessly with its urgent demands.

As wave after wave of awesome pleasure shuddered through Quint, an awareness swept through him that one night would never be enough to satisfy his desire for this woman. For that he would need a lifetime.