Rawhide and Lace (8 page)

"Are you all right?" she asked softly.

He stared at her, his face hard but his eyes kindling with a new emotion. "I just hurt a little," he said honestly. "Nothing to bother about. How's your hip?"

She swallowed. "I...uh...hadn't noticed." She touched it gingerly. "I don't enjoy being a cripple," she added, belatedly remembering the source of the argument. "And I'll be glad to do the exercises if it will convince you that I don't want to 'live off you'."

"Good," he said with the hint of a smile. "I don't want to live off you, either. So suppose we start those exercises tonight? I think I could learn to like massaging that hip for you."

"You weren't massaging it."

"What was I doing, then?" he asked innocently.

She glared at him and got out of the car. And was so flustered that she walked firmly on her damaged side for the first time since the surgery.

Chapter Five

That was the first night Ty didn't withdraw into his study immediately after supper to work on his books. He had all kinds of equipment in there, including a state of the art computer with a vast memory in which he kept records of all his cattle. It was, Erin later learned, only a terminal, which was connected to the mainframe in his office. And he had two offices: one on the ranch itself, and another that he shared with several partners in some sweeping cattle-investment corporation. He had his finger in several pies-which accounted for his wealth.

"It takes a lot of figuring to keep up with it all," he told her as they went into the living room for their after-dinner coffee. "I have accountants, but I don't trust my books completely to anyone. I've seen outfits ruined just because the man on top didn't want to be bothered with paperwork and made his people second-guess what he wanted done."

"You don't really trust anyone, do you?" she asked, curious. She sat down in a big armchair across from the sofa, careful not to look toward the fireplace. This was the room where Ty had seduced her, and the memories were disturbing.

"Oh, I don't know," he murmured, watching her. "I guess I'm learning to trust you a little."

"You didn't have much choice, with Bruce's will left the way it was," she replied. She toyed with the skirt of her pale-green jersey dress. "I guess you were pretty upset when you found out what he'd done."

"Ward Jessup and I go back a long way," he said dryly. "I wouldn't have jumped for joy at the prospect of oil rigs mingling with my purebred Santa Gertrudis."

"I imagine not." She looked up. "But how did you know I wouldn't deliberately stay away just to make sure that happened?"

"I didn't," he confessed. He lit a cigarette and leaned back, his dark slacks and light shirt straining against the powerful muscles of an utterly masculine body. His hair was immaculately groomed, thick and black and straight, his face clean-shaven. He always looked neat, even when he was working cattle. Despite his lack of conventional good looks, he was more of a man than anyone Erin had ever known.

"I thought about it," she admitted with a faint smile. "And then I thought about how many people would be out of work because of my stiff pride."

"Softhearted liberal," he chided gently. "Wouldn't it have been worth it to see me brought to my knees after what I did to you?"

Her eyes searched his, and she felt the electricity that had never completely faded between them. "All I really could blame you for was listening to Bruce's lies and refusing to listen to me."

"Think so?" He got up and poured himself a brandy. She noticed that he didn't offer her one and remembered that she'd always refused liquor in the past. He didn't forget much.

"Anyway, it's over and done now," she murmured.

He turned, the brandy glass in one lean hand, staring at her intently. "Do you think it's that easy for me?"

She stared at him, bewildered. "I don't understand."

"You were carrying my child," he said in a tone that went straight to her heart. He looked down into the brandy snifter, sloshing the liquid around as if its color fascinated him. "You can't imagine how I felt when I read that letter, when I knew what I'd done."

Somehow breath had suspended itself in her throat. She felt as if she were drowning in the depths of his pale eyes, held there by something new and strange and vulnerable. He'd always seemed incapable of emotion, yet for one moment, one heart-stopping eternity, his expression had held such pain-such agonized loss-that now she was powerless to move, to speak, even to think.

He lifted his head and stared at the painting above the mantel. It was a scene of Texas that had been done by someone in his family almost a century ago, of longhorn cattle in a storm with a ranch house and windmill in the background.

"Erin..." He paused as if searching for words, his back straight and rigid. "I didn't plan what happened that night. I told you I had, but it wasn't the truth...."

Her hands fiddled with her skirt as she stared at him in wonder. He'd never talked to her like this. She waited silently for him to continue.

"I thought if I goaded you, I might make you mad enough to strike out at me," he said, lifting his eyes to the painting. "When you did, it gave me an excuse to touch you. I'd wanted that. You obsessed me, haunted me. I dreamed about how it would be, touching you that way." He shrugged wearily. "You kissed me back, and I went crazy. To this day, I don't half remember how it happened. I didn't even think about taking precautions. I assumed that you were already doing it, that you were experienced."

The confession fascinated her. She studied the hard muscles of his legs, his narrow hips, remembering how they'd felt under her exploring hands. She flushed a little at the memory. "I thought it was to get me out of Bruce's life."

He turned, pinning her with quiet, steady eyes. "I lied," he said. "Bruce was the last thing on my mind. I wanted you."

She felt like a trapped animal. He was doing it again, trying to take her over, own her. She clenched her hands tightly in her lap. "You let me go," she whispered.

"I had to, damn it!" he cried. "You were his, for all practical purposes. I'd betrayed him; so had you. I couldn't live with it. I had to get you out of here before I..."

"Before what, iron man?" she asked him. "Before you lost your head again? Is it so hard to admit that you're human enough to feel desire?"

"Yes!"

He slammed the brandy snifter into the fire, watching it splinter amid the explosion of blazing liquor. Erin jumped at the impact, but he didn't even flinch. He brushed back a lock of unruly hair and reached automatically into his pocket for a cigarette. He lit it and took a long draw while Erin sat nervously watching him.

He moved away from the fireplace restlessly. "My father's idea of marriage was warped. He saw it as a business merger. Sex, he always told me, was a weakness that a man with any backbone should be able to overcome." He paused in front of her and looked down, his silvery eyes cold and unfeeling. "Erin, I had my first woman when I was twenty-one, and it took weeks to get over the guilt. I gave in to a desire I couldn't control, and I hated it. And her." He lifted his shoulders. "Maybe I hated my father, too, for forcing his principles onto me. My mother couldn't live with him. She was normal. A warm, loving woman. He couldn't even touch her at the last."

He moved back to the fireplace and stared into the flames while Erin sat quietly and thrilled to the wonder of hearing these intimate things-things, she knew, that he'd never shared with another living soul.

"I'm more like him every day," he said dully, studying the flames. "I can't change. Walls work both ways. They keep people out...but they keep people in, too."

Her heart ached for him. Her own problems seemed to diminish a little as she realized what he was saying.

"You're lonely," she said gently.

He turned and looked at her, and for the first time his expression wasn't hidden. He seemed older, worn; and there was pain in every line of his hard face. "Honey, I've been lonely all my life," he said, his voice deep and quiet, the endearment curiously exciting to Erin because it was so unlike him. "My upbringing and my looks have been two strikes against me with women ever since I can remember."

She blinked. "Your looks?"

"Don't be coy," he muttered. "I know I'm no prize."

"If you think looks make any difference, you're no prize mentally, and that's for sure," she said slowly, deliberately. "I've never known anyone who was more a man than you are."

His eyes widened, as if the compliment had shocked him. He stared at her, the cigarette forgotten. "I hurt you-"

"I was a virgin," she said softly. "Sometimes it's difficult for women the first time. You couldn't have helped that."

His jaw tensed. "Coals of fire, Erin."

She remembered the quotation from the Bible, about heaping coals of fire on an enemy's head by being kind to him. "It isn't flattery," she told him. "I don't like you enough to flatter you."

He actually laughed. "Aiding and abetting the enemy, then?"

She shrugged. "The enemy's managed to bring me back to life. I think I owe you a compliment or two."

"You won't think so when I start on that hip," he assured her. He lifted his chin imperiously and smiled. "Drill instructors will look like pussycats when I get through with you."

"You were a marine, weren't you?" she shot back. "'Once a marine, always a marine'-isn't that what they say? Well, you won't break me, mister. I'm tough!"

He liked her spirit. He always had. But the woman he'd found in that New York apartment hadn't shown any. It had taken this trip and a lot of goading, but he'd managed to shake her out of all that self-pitying apathy. And he was pleased with the result.

"You're pretty like that," he remarked, noting the color in her cheeks, the emerald depths of her eyes, the provocative disorder of all that black hair curling around her elfin face. "Scars and all. In no time at all, you'll never know where the cuts were."

"My hip will never look the same without skin grafts," she muttered, brought back to painful reality. "And I don't really want to go through any more surgery."

"Once a man got you undressed, a scar on your hip would be the last thing he'd be staring at," he said bluntly.

She'd forgotten that he'd seen her by the firelight without her clothing. She remembered that frank appraisal, as if he'd never seen a nude woman before and wanted to memorize every soft line and curve. Her breasts had fascinated him. He'd touched them so gently, caressed them, whispered how beautiful they were. Without warning, her face went scarlet.

"Yes, you remember too, don't you?" he asked, his voice low and sensuous. "It was right where I'm standing, and I looked at you until I got drunk on the sight. And you let me. You lay there all soft and sweetly moving, and you let me."

"It was new," she said defensively, lowering her eyes to her dress.

"It was heaven," he corrected. "The closest I ever expect to get in my lifetime. If it hadn't been for Bruce..." He turned and threw his cigarette into the fire, closing his eyes against the pain. "Oh, God, I'll never forgive him!"

His tone of voice disturbed her. It was bitter, yet filled with the anguish of loss...profound loss. She got up, unconsciously walking without the cane, limping a little as she paused beside him.

He was so tall. Towering. She had to look up to see his dark face, and the warmth and strength of him drew her like a magnet. It had been so sweet that afternoon to lie in his arms again and feel his mouth; and those memories were her undoing.

"It doesn't matter anymore," she said gently. "He's dead. Let him rest in peace. He had so little of it in life, Ty."

"How much do you think I have?" he demanded, staring down at her with tormented eyes. "It's eating me alive!"