Made For Each Other (4 page)

Swiftly, deftly, his fingers worked at
the buckles on the brace straps, adjusting the tightness in
increments until he heard her indrawn gasp of pain. His hand slid
up beneath the heavy curtain of her hair, massaging her neck. “I
can’t deny I don’t take some small amount of pleasure in your
pain,” he whispered, his voice seductive. “But that part’s over,
for the day at least.”

“I’m not into the pain
thing.”
I don’t think
.

“Well, maybe, that’s because you
haven’t ried it.

For a moment She stood transfixed by
the hypnotic touch of his fingers along the column of her neck. But
when his hand moved aside her hair and his lips brushed the nape of
her neck, her knees buckled with the unexpected sensualness that
burned her skin like a raging fever. She stood motionless, like a
doe before the hunter, waiting for the kiss that would initiate the
death of her innocence.

Nick caught her up and laid her on the
bed, and before she could stop him his fingers had released the
snap of her jeans and unzipped them. He began to jerk at the pants
legs, and She flailed her legs in terror. But he continued with
grim determination until she was stripped of the jeans and lay clad
only in her bikini panties and bra.

Expecting to be assaulted, She watched
Nick through the sweep of her thick lashes, her heart beating in
roller-coaster dips. But he straightened from her and crossed to
the dresser to remove a faded blue woolen shirt. Before She could
move he began to slip it over her arms.

“I can do that,” she said as his
supple fingers fastened each button.

“True,” he acknowledged, continuing to
fasten the buttons, “but I can do it much quicker.”

She found her breath suspended when he
knelt to reach the shirt’s hem that fell just above her knees and
his hands brushed her thighs. His dark head was so close she could
have reached out and run her fingers through the thick, lustrous
hair.

“You’ve got great legs, Julie Dever,”
he rasped, his hand trailing the soft line of her thigh. Then his
lips compressed in a moody line, and he moved away. When he began
to shuck his own pants, She turned her head, her lids squeezed
shut. A few seconds later she felt the give of the mattress and the
warm, scratchy woolen blanket being drawn up over her. It seemed as
if hours stretched by while she held her breath, waiting for the
slightest movement in her direction. Actually only several minutes
passed before she heard the quiet, even tempo of Nick’s
breathing.

Reassured, she slipped into a deeply
needed sleep, awakening only once during the night when Nick
brought her another pain pill. In the darkness she could barely
make out his face above hers as he tilted the water glass to her
lips. She was vividly aware of his body, so powerfully virile,
stretched only inches away from her. Obediently she swallowed the
pill. “Thank you,” she whispered.

It would be so easy to fall in love
with Nicholas Raffer, she thought sleepily. Wasn’t that what all
captives did—transfer their affection to their captors, or some
wildly insane reaction like that? But Nick was not actually her
captor, he was not holding her there against her will.

Yet he was a wealthy senator, and she
was only a small-town girl, a free-lance reporter who never knew
where her next dollar was coming from. And he had hated her before
the two of them had even met. So the idea of her becoming
infatuated with the man was absolutely absurd, her mind
whispered—even as her body nestled closer against the broad chest,
seeking the warmth of Nick’s sinewy length.

Chapter Three

T
he mournful shriek of the wind, the insistent pelting of the
snow against the bedroom win-dow, aroused her from a deep sleep.
She lay there in her snug cave of blankets, orienting herself. A
slow blush suffused her suntanned skin as she vaguely recalled
Nick’s hard, warm body that she had cuddled against sometime during
the night and the muscle- corded arms that had enfolded her and
held her throughout the early-morning hours.

When she found her imagination vividly
conjuring up pictures of Nick’s dusky hands caressing the intimate
curves and valleys of her body, she mentally chastised herself. To
surrender to Nick’s passion would be the most foolish thing she
could do, because for him it would only be a casual fling. And for
her—for her, she was afraid, it would be something much
more.

She was glad that Nick was already up
and gone, probably hunting again. She forced herself to get out of
the warm bed, cringing at tboth the pain and the cold hardwood
floor beneath her bare feet. Now that it was Monday morning, she
could telephone the wrecking yard that had towed away her car and
see about getting it repaired before the day was out. And then she
had to check on Pam. If luck allowed, the doctor might discharge
her friend in time for them to drive on to Santa Fe.

But the room’s refrigeratorlike cold
demanded she first stoke the fire. She padded into the living room,
her arms wrapped about her. She poked at the dying fire, thinking
how nice it would be to have a bath. What had it been, two days
since she had last bathed? She probably smelled worse than the
musky old deer Nick stalked. But the brace made bathing out of the
question at the moment. And her hair—she had not even bothered to
look in a mirror. She no doubt looked like Medusa.

The best she could do was brush her
teeth. Gingerly, for every movement was one that induced pain, she
undertook that task of hygiene – with Nick’s toothbrush. If he
noticed, she would doubtlessly pay for that. He seemed to enjoy
inflicting his own brand of pain on her.

It was only then she noticed the world
of white outside the living-room window. A howling maelstrom lashed
around the cabin. She turned on the radio, and the announcer was in
midsentence informing his listening audience that New Mexico’s
worst snowstorm of the year was ravaging the Rocky
Mountains.

What if Nick’s Blazer had slipped off
into one of the gorges that banked the canyon’s road? The worry for
Nick excited her into activity, and she began to pace the floor,
forgetting her plans to telephone the wrecking yard and Pam.
Absentmindedly she reheated the coffee that Nick must have made
before he left at dawn, but all the time her gaze anxiously went to
the window, hoping to see some sign of the blizzard
abating.

She was unsteadily pouring herself
another cup of stale coffee when the door swooshed open and Nick
came in, buffeted by the wind. Clumsily, She whirled about and the
hot coffee splashed on her fingers. With a shriek of pain she
dropped the coffeepot.

Nick’s gaze rapidly took in the
situation: her clad only in his shirt, standing in the kitchen with
shards of glass lying in the coffee that puddled at her bare feet.
Quickly he dumped the wood he carried on the hearth and crossed to
her.

“Where have you been?” she demanded,
half in tears as he swept her up and put her on the
couch.

Nick eyed her flushed face with arched
brows that were white. Even his beard was white so that he looked
like some fierce Nordic raider. He retrieved a damp cloth from the
kitchen and began to wipe away the coffee that had splattered on
her feet. “You wear the look of a woman glad for her lover’s
return,” he said lightly.

“I—I was just relieved ... I didn’t
want to be left here alone.”

As he began to scrub the cloth along
her calves, she became unnerved by such an intimate performance on
his part. She fixed her gaze on the ice particles trapped in his
hair and on the forest of his long black lashes. “You didn’t go
hunting?” she asked uneasily.

“No.” He concentrated on his task.
“The blizzard makes it too dangerous to leave. I chopped a fresh
supply of wood in case we get snowed in for a couple of
days.”

She jerked her leg away. “We can’t get
snowed in!” she wailed.

Beneath Nick’s high slash of
cheekbones the indentations on either side of his chiseled lips
betrayed his amusement. “Oh? Why not?”

“We—I—I’ve got to get back to
work.”

“I’m sure the Sun can get along
without its ‘Speculator’ for a few days. As I’ve said before,
you’ve got great legs—for a dwarf.”

For the first time she realized she
was sitting before Nicholas Raffer dressed only in her scanty
underwear and his shirt. The outrageous situation she was in, the
pain in her shoulder, the strain of the past two days— all of these
combined in a furious eruption.

“I’m not a dwarf `` and it’s all your
fault I’m stranded here, Nick Raffer!”

Nick sprang to his feet and threw the
cloth into the kitchen sink. “I’m going to be as glad to get rid of
you as you are me!”

She tried to get up from the couch,
swearing she’d walk back to Roswell if she had to, and Nick
snapped, “Sit down—before you trip and break your other
collarbone!”

She wanted to stick out her tongue or
hurl an ashtray at him, but she knew she was being childish about
the situation. There was nothing either of them could do about the
weather. She would simply have to wait it out and hope the blizzard
let up before nightfall. She gathered the blanket around her and
watched with tight lips as Nick prepared bacon sandwiches. It was
all she could do to mutter a polite “Thank you” when he brought her
a sandwich and a glass of milk.

He slumped down into the easy chair
across the room with his own plate, and she watched from beneath
lowered lashes as he ate his sandwich in moody silence. For the
first time she noted the lines of fatigue around the finely carved
lips and at either side of the sensually flaring nostrils. And
there were sun-squint lines at the outer corners of his eyes that
she had never noticed. No wonder he was tired. For two days he had
been getting up at dawn to hunt, then waiting on her the rest of
the day.

When next she cast a glance at Nick,
his eyes had closed and the sandwich lay half eaten on the plate in
his lap. Asleep, he did not look nearly so ferocious. In fact, she
would have liked to see him without the beard, close up.

She remembered him as being a devastat
ingly handsome man. And yet there was something about the rugged
growth of beard and mustache, the careless way his overly long dark
brown hair fell at an angle across his broad brow, that made his
face much more exciting than the male-model image the newspaper and
magazine photographs cast him in.

As a young teenager she had often
fantasized being kidnapped by someone senusous and solicitous. And
isolated in the cabin with a man like Nick— it could have been a
fantasy come true . . . if one ignored the fact, she thought
grimly, that the two of them were enemies.

As quietly as she could, she got up
and took the plate from Nick’s lap. After she had put the
half-eaten sandwich in the kitchen, she took the blanket off the
couch and covered Nick. She was about to turn away when his hand
shot out and grabbed hers. At the contact with him her stomach
knotted as if she had been running. Why did he have that power to
make her knees weak? No other man had ever had that control over
her.

Nick’s black-fringed eyes riveted her
where she stood, seeming to look into the far comers of her mind as
if he were searching for something that she herself was not even
aware was hidden there. At last he said simply, “Thank you, Julie,”
and closed his eyes as if prepared to sleep.

After a moment she pivoted and went
into the bedroom, bewildered. She told herself that she should be
angry with Nick, that everything that had happened was his fault.
She lay across the bed thinking of a hundred ways she could tell
him off, of how she would snub him if they ever met
again.

But somehow in her dreams her scathing
words of contempt became twisted with his whispered words of
seduction, so that when she opened her eyes and found Nick bending
over her, she thought it was still part of her dream. “Julie,” he
said huskily, “you were moaning. Are you all right?”

In the room’s semilight she could just
make out the hazy contours of the fierce counte¬nance. Her right
hand slipped up to touch the squared-off line of the bearded jaw.
“Nick,” she murmured sleepily. Then she saw the sudden light of
desire flicker in his eyes, and she rapidly blinked her lids to
clear the confusion from her sleep-fogged mind. “I thought that—I
was dreaming that ...”

“What were you dreaming, Julie?” he
asked.

His face was so close to hers, his
hands resting on either side of her head, that she found it
difficult to concentrate on what she was saying. Her head moved
slowly back and forth. “I don’t remember,” she lied.

One brow shot up. “Oh?” His fingers
brushed aside the wisps of hair that had fallen across her
forehead. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” she whispered, disconcerted by
the chiseled lips that hovered just over hers and the bold blue
eyes that seemed to devour her. “It must be that awful Third Day of
promised pain.” If he would just go away so she could compose her
emotions! Her heart beat so wildly she knew he must hear it. “I—I’m
thirsty, though. I’d like to get a drink.”