Two Brothers (22 page)
He finished undressing and stretched himself out gracefully on the bed beside her; she reveled in the restrained power of him, the heat and weight and substance, the uncompromising masculinity. He kissed her tenderly, then with more fervor and still more, until she was tossing beneath him, full of need.
“Now?” she whispered.
He grinned and shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “Not for a long, long time.” And then he kissed and nibbled his way down over her jaw and along the length of her neck. He tasted her collarbones, traced them with the tip of his tongue, while his hand made slow, soft circles on her belly and the tops of her thighs, always avoiding the place that strained for him, wanted most to be touched.
When he took a nipple full into his mouth and took suckle, Aislinn cried out in startled pleasure, her back
arching off the feather-filled mattress. His chuckle reverberated through her breast, and he was greedy, there and in other places.
He took his time, loving her, just as he had said he would do. She thrashed and whimpered and pleaded and still he made free with her, teasing, touching, bringing her to the brink of release over and over again, leaving her to tremble there, and then letting her fall once more, back into the heated ministrations of his hands and his mouth and his whispered promises.
She was limp with wanting and slick with perspiration when he finally parted her legs and poised himself over her. He was big; she’d seen and touched his erection, but feeling him at the entrance of her body gave new meaning to the concept of size. She tensed and widened her eyes.
He brushed her lips with his own. “We’ll take this slow, Aislinn,” he said. “Just like I promised. Trust me?”
She nodded and raised her hips, seeking to admit him. It was going to hurt; he’d told her that, so had Eugenie, in her brusque, shy way, during one of their talks. But because Shay was Shay, and because they loved each other, pleasure awaited, beyond the pain.
He eased inside her, just a little way, and she started to panic.
He stopped, kissed her, reassured her. Took her by inches, with a patience she marveled at. Gradually, her body expanded to receive him, and an ancient drumbeat began, quickening her responses, causing her to move beneath him, to move with him. She seemed to exist, during those long, fiery minutes, only in the widespread pulses of her body; she felt a tearing sensation as he breached her virginity at last, but by then she was lost in the heart of her need. Fevered, she flung herself upward to meet every thrust of his powerful hips, her fingers buried in his hair, her thumbs learning the shape of his cheekbones. Their mouths were joined, their tongues
sparring, when the final, highest pinnacle was reached; they rocked together, their cries echoing one inside the other, descended to lesser peaks, one after another, and finally fell in an exhausted tangle to the mattress, arms and legs entwined.
“I love you,” Shay said, when a long time had passed. He still sounded a little breathless.
“And I love you,” she answered, twining one finger in a lock of his hair. “Do you suppose we made a baby?”
He raised his head, looked into her eyes, and grinned. “Twins, probably,” he said. “But maybe we’d better try again, just to make sure.”
She laughed and put her arms around his neck, drew him close for her kiss. “You’re right, Marshal. Let’s not take any chances.”
“Ummm-hmmm,” he agreed, with a look of sober concentration. “Can’t be too careful.” He moved over her, and it all began again, the kissing, the stroking, the teasing, the slow heating of the blood. Stretching forth one arm, Shay turned the lamp down until the flame winked out.
—Rendezvous
“LINDA LAEL MILLER’S TALENT KNOWS NO BOUNDS…EACH STORY SHE CREATES IS…SUPERB.”
NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLING AUTHOR
L
INDA
L
AEL
M
ILLE
R
is “one of the hottest romance authors writing today….Her love scenes sizzle and smolder with sensuality” (
Romantic Times
).
—Affaire de Coeur
“Every novel Linda Lael Miller writes seems even better than the previous….She stirs your soul and makes you yearn along with her characters….encompassing every emotion and leaving you breathless.”
MORE THAN SIX MILLION COPIES OF HER BOOKS IN PRINT!
Two Brothers
For years, bestselling author Linda Lael Miller has delighted readers with her passionate, evocative stories of life and love in the Old West. Now, with this innovative pair of novels, she creates two gripping stories of identical twin brothers, separated at birth, but drawn to each other’s side….
The Gunslinger
Now that he’s finally found his twin brother, all Tristan Saint-Laurent wants is to be a peaceful rancher. What he gets is Miss Emily Starbuck, a determined package of trouble from back East. Tristan knows he should tell Emily and her aggravating sheep to move along, but he doesn’t have the heart. Suddenly this man of danger is dreaming of weddings and babies. But the life he’s left behind may yet come between him and the woman he’s growing to love.
Emily Starbuck is making a fresh start by raising the sheep she’s bought with a meager inheritance. She’s willing to fight every cattleman in the West, but she can’t resist Tristan. His handsome face and lean, strong body make her knees buckle, and her thoughts move to sharing a blissful ranch life with the man. But what Emily doesn’t know about Tristan could jeopardize their dream of happiness.
The Gunslinger
1884
Tristan
Chapter 1
J
UNE
1884
H
E OUGHT TO MOVE ON
, that was all. Bid Shay and his sweet, enterprising wife a fond farewell, saddle up his horse, and ride out of Prominence without looking back. There were a thousand places he might go—up to Montana, where he’d left a thriving cattle operation in the care of hired men, southward to San Francisco and certain women who professed to find him fair. Maybe even back East, to Chicago or Boston or New York—a man with funds to spend and invest might further himself in any of those cities, while enjoying the singular pleasures and graces of civilization.
He sighed and heaved another bag of oats up into the bed of his wagon, a small but sturdy buckboard acquired as part of the bargain when he’d purchased a local ranch nearly a year before. His brother stood watching as he worked, arms folded, one side of his mouth slanted upward in a self-satisfied grin. Shay’s badge, a silver star, gleamed with all the splendor of something netted from a night sky. Shay’d been married for some time now, and the match was a contented one. He’d be a father at any time. He was proud as a rooster, and although Tristan usually found his twin’s blatant good cheer cause for shared celebration, on that particular day, it chafed some
tender and previously unrecognized place inside him almost raw.
“You might lend a hand,” he groused, hoisting up another sack of feed from the pile of bags on the sidewalk, “instead of just standing there, watching me sweat.”
Shay didn’t flick an eyelash or twitch a muscle; right down to that grin—which was all the more irritating for the fact that he’d worn it on his own face often enough—he stayed the same. He didn’t point out that he’d spent many an hour on Tristan’s land, roping and branding calves, rounding up strays, digging post holes, stringing lines of barbed wire, driving nails into shingles on the roof of the ranch house. He didn’t say anything at all.
Tristan shoved past his brother and hurled the oats into the buckboard with such force that the springs bounced and the horses, a mismatched pair of roans better suited to sod-busting, pranced and nickered and tossed their heads.
“Aislinn wants you to come to supper,” Shay announced. The expression of quiet understanding in his eyes was harder to take than most any other emotion would have been, save outright pity, that is. “She’s frying up a couple of chickens. You know how those brothers of hers eat. No doubt, there’ll be gravy and biscuits. Mashed potatoes, too. Green beans, I reckon, boiled up with bacon and onion.”
Tristan’s mouth watered; he swallowed. He was tired of the food at the hotel dining room, passable though it was, and wearier still of his own sorry bachelor cooking. While he didn’t lack for invitations to take evening meals and Sunday dinners in various households thereabouts, he was reluctant to accept, since such doings generally occasioned the presentation of a marriageable daughter, niece or sister. Although he fully intended to take a wife, when he found the right woman, he did not enjoy being pursued, maneuvered, manipulated and arranged. “Biscuits?” he echoed, weakening.
Knowing he’d won the skirmish, Shay pushed away from the frame of the door, took up a bag of feed and flung it into the wagon. “Biscuits,” he confirmed.
Tristan swept off his hat momentarily and thrust a hand through his hair, which felt damp and gritty. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and he probably smelled of sweat and horse manure. “I’m not fit to dine at a lady’s table,” he said, and he heard a woeful note in his voice that shamed him not a little. He wasn’t about to start sympathizing with himself at this late date.
Shay arched an eyebrow as he assessed the sad state of his brother’s grooming. Then he glanced up at the sun, squinting against the glare. When his gaze returned to Tristan’s face, he’d sobered some. “You have time enough to get yourself bathed and barbered, and I can lend you a suit of clothes.”
Tristan pulled off his hat again and slapped his thigh with it. There was something about this situation he didn’t care for, though he couldn’t say precisely what it was. He narrowed his eyes as the nebulous sense of trouble tightened into plain suspicion. “You aren’t planning to include some female in this little do, are you?”
Shay laughed. “Well, Aislinn will be there,” he said. “Dorrie, too, probably. And maybe Eugenie.”
“You know what I mean, damn it. Just because marriage agrees with you and Aislinn, you believe, the pair of you, that everyone else ought to be hitched to somebody, too.”
Shay shook his head, made a clucking sound with his tongue and put a curled fist to his chest, as though to pull out a still-quavering dagger. “To think my own brother, the only real kin I have, doesn’t trust me.”
“You’re damn right I don’t.”
After consulting the sun again, Shay lifted the last of the feed bags into the rig. “You’re getting prickly in your old age,” he commented mildly. “If you don’t have a care, you might turn into one of those crusty codgers who spit tobacco in the churchyard and go around with egg in their beards.
See you at seven o’clock. You need a clean shirt and a pair of pants, you know where to find them.”
“Thanks,” Tristan said, in a tone that might have been counted surly if it hadn’t been entirely justified. He climbed into the wagon box and took up the reins, setting his face toward home. His ranch house was about three miles out of town, on a high bank overlooking Powder Creek, surrounded by a thousand acres of good grassland. To the north was the Kyle property, a vast spread that he coveted with an unholy longing.
Upon his arrival, he drove the rig into the barn, climbed into the back, and unloaded the oats before jumping down to unhitch the lamentable team and settle the animals in their stalls. After feeding those broken-down creatures and the gelding, then filling all the water troughs, he made for the house, a rambling log structure, with a good rock fireplace at either end. The kitchen, dining room and parlor were all one large room, but there were four bedrooms upstairs, good, spacious ones, with lace curtains at the windows and rugs on the wide pine-plank floors. He’d taken the best and biggest for himself; it had a good wood-burning stove and a nice view of the mountains, but it was a lonely place, for all its creature comforts and uncommon size, and he passed as little time there as he could.
He carried water in from the pump in the dooryard and filled the reservoir on the stove, then built up the fire. He looked around him and sighed, wondering when he’d developed this aversion to his own company. He’d spent much of his adult life on the trail, often traveling for days with no other companion than his horse, and it had never bothered him, but instead afforded him welcome opportunity to order his thoughts. Now, even though he had work to do, hard, outdoor labor that used all there was of him, body, mind and spirit, and that he loved, now that he had money, even a family of sorts again, and should have been satisfied with his lot, he felt instead like Cain, marked
and condemned to wander footloose until the end of his days.
Taking up the buckets, he went outside to pump more water, and as he walked, he whistled under his breath, grinning a little. Like as not, he was taking too solemn a view of things. He’d wash up, shave, put on clean clothes, and ride back to town. A dose of Aislinn’s fried chicken would raise his spirits.