Lacy

“What did you expect me to do?” he asked curtly. “Sit around and worship you? My ranch is in trouble, teetering on a precipice in this damned slow agricultural market. I’m too busy trying to support my family to dance attendance on a bored society girl.” He stared at her with cold, dark eyes. “That lounge lizard who led me in here seems to think you’re his private stock. Why?”

That sounded like jealousy, and her heart jumped, but she kept her features calm. “George is my friend. He’d like to marry me.”

“You’ve got a husband. Does he know?”

“No,” she said carelessly. He was getting on her nerves now. She went to the decanter and poured herself a china cup of gin, lacing it with water. She turned back defiantly and sipped her gin, knowing he’d recognize the smell. He did; she saw it in his disapproving stare. She grinned at him impishly over the rim of the delicate china cup. “Why don’t you go and tell him?”

“You should have already,” he said, his voice deep and smooth.

“What for?” she asked innocently. “To make him jealous?”

She could see the control he was exercising, and it excited her. Pushing Cole had always excited her.

“Lead him on,” he dared, “and I’ll kill him.”

Now that was pure possession, and it irritated her. He didn’t want her, but he wasn’t going to let anyone else have her. His flashing dark eyes were telling her so.

“You probably would, you wild man.” She drew back, lifting her chin to glare up at him, unafraid. “Well, let me tell you something, Coleman Whitehall. It’s a pleasant change to be admired and sought after by someone after being ignored by you!”

He stared at her with an odd expression. Almost amusement. “Where’s that temper been all these years?” he taunted. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“Oh, I’ve discovered lots of bad habits since I got away from you,” she told him. “I’ve decided that I like being myself. Don’t you like being disagreed with? God knows, everybody at the ranch is terrified of you!”

“Not you, I gather,” he drawled, taking a last draw from his cigarette.

“Never me.” She sipped some more gin, feeling reckless. “I’m doing great without you. I have a big, fancy house, and beautiful clothes, and lots of friends!”

He finished the cigarette and tossed it into the burning fireplace. The orange-and-yellow flames highlighted his bronzed skin, his sharp, well-defined features.

“The house and clothes don’t suit you, and your friends stink,” he said easily, standing erect with his hands on his slender hips. “You’re getting as wild as Katy. I don’t like it.”

“Then do something about it,” she challenged. “Make me stop, big man. You can do anything…Just ask Ben; he’s your fan club.”

He smiled ruefully. “Not since you left, he isn’t. Even Taggart and Cherry stopped talking to me once you were gone.”

“Nice of you to come right after me and take me home,” she said sarcastically. “Eight months and not even a postcard.”

“You’re the one who wanted to go.” His dark eyes searched her face quietly, and something flashed in them for an instant. “You’re not happy, Lacy,” he said quietly. “And that crowd in there isn’t going to make you happy.”

“What is, you?” she demanded. She felt like crying. She took another sip of gin and turned away from him, hurting like she never had. In the quiet, understated elegance of the enormous room, with its faint odor of lilacs, she felt as out of place as he looked. “Go away, Cole,” she said heavily. “There was never any room for me in your life. You wouldn’t even sleep with me—until that last night.” She didn’t see the expression that statement put on his face. “I decided to cut my losses and go back to the city, where I belonged. I thought you’d be pleased. After all, the marriage was forced on us.”

His face hardened. “You might have talked to me before you left.” He remembered how it had felt to watch her leave. She couldn’t know that his pride had been shattered by that defection, even though it was justified. He’d done his best to drive her away, to make damned sure he didn’t lose control again as he had that one night. The memory of the way he’d hurt her didn’t sit well on his conscience.

He might not have loved her, but he’d missed her. The color had gone out of his world when she’d left it. He stared at her now with an expression he was careful not to let her see. She was so lovely. She deserved a man who’d be good to her, who’d take proper care of her and give her a houseful of children…. His eyes closed briefly and he turned away. “But maybe it was just as well. We’d said it all already, hadn’t we, honey?” he asked quietly.

“Yes, we had,” she agreed. “I suppose we were just too different to make a successful marriage.” She bit her lower lip and closed her eyes. That was a lie, too. But it would please him to have her admit what he already believed.

“Is he your lover?” he asked suddenly, nodding toward the closed door. “That limp-wristed lizard who showed me in here?”

“I don’t have a lover, Cole,” she said, lifting her eyes bravely to his. “I’ve never had anyone…except you.”

He avoided her eyes, looking over at the mantel. Absently his fingers reached for the Bull Durham pouch. He pulled out a tissue-thin paper with deft, quick fingers and dabbed tobacco in a thin line in the middle of it, rolling it and sealing it with a flick of his tongue. He struck a match on the bricks of the fireplace and bent his dark head to light the finished product. Deep, pungent smoke filled the room.

She toyed with the dainty lace-and-cotton handkerchief in her hands. “Why did you come here?”

He shrugged, his broad chest rising and falling heavily. He turned around and his dark eyes searched her pale ones. He noticed her flushed face and the faint mist in her eyes. His heavy brows came together. “Have you been drinking all night?” he asked curtly.

“Of course,” she said, without subterfuge, and laughed defiantly. “Are you shocked? Or is it that you’re still back in the Dark Ages, when ladies didn’t do that sort of thing?”

“Decent women don’t do that sort of thing,” he told her, his voice unusually deep as he glared at her. “Or wear clothes like that,” he added, nodding toward the expanse of leg below the knee-deep hem of her skirt with her rolled-down hose held up by lacy garters.

“Don’t tell me you’re shocked to see my legs, Cole,” she taunted, lifting her chin as she smiled at him. “Of course, you never have seen my body, have you?” He looked frankly uncomfortable now, and she liked that. She liked making him uncomfortable. Her hands moved slowly down her body, and she watched his eyes follow the movement with satisfaction. “You can’t even talk about sex, can you, Cole? It’s something dark and sinful—and decent people only do it in the dark with the lights off—”

“Stop it!” he said shortly. He turned his back on her, smoking quietly, one hand touching the soft curve of a chair back. His breath seemed to come unsteadily. “Talking about…that…won’t change what happened.”

He almost sounded as if he regretted it. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he thought of it as a weakness. His upbringing had been rigid at best, and his Comanche grandfather had all but stolen him from his parents in those formative young years. He’d learned how to be a man years before age caught up with his conditioning, and tenderness hadn’t been part of his education.

The music suddenly got louder, attracting his attention to the closed door. “Is this a regular thing now, these parties?”

“I suppose so,” she confessed. “I can’t stand my own company, Cole.”

“I’m having some problems of my own.” He sat down in the dainty wing chair, looking so out of place in it that Lacy almost smiled in spite of the gravity between them.

She perched on the edge of the velvet-covered blue sofa and folded her hands primly in her lap.

“The elegant Miss Jarrett,” he murmured, studying her. “I had some exquisite dreams about you while I was in France.”

That shocked her. He’d never talked about France. “Did you? I wrote you every day,” she confessed shyly.

“And never mailed the letters,” he said, with a faint smile. “Katy told me.”

“I was afraid to. You were so reserved, and just because I was best friends with Katy and living in your house was no reason to think you’d welcome my letters. Even after the way we said good-bye,” she added, with unfamiliar self-consciousness. “You never wrote just to me, after all.”

He didn’t tell her why. “I wouldn’t have minded a letter or two. It got pretty bad over there,” he said.

She glanced up and then down. “You were shot down, weren’t you?”

“I got scratched up a little,” he said curtly. “Listen, suppose you come back to Spanish Flats?”

Her heart leapt straight up. She stared at him, searched his dark eyes. He was a proud man. It must have taken a lot of soul-searching for him to come and ask that. “Why, Cole?”

“Mother…isn’t well,” he said after a minute. “Katy’s being courted by some wild man from Chicago. Bennett’s trying to run off to France to join Ernest Hemingway and that Lost Generation of writers.” He ran a hand through his damp hair. “Lacy, they foreclosed on Johnson’s place yesterday,” he added, looking up with eyes as dark as his hair.

Her heart jumped. Spanish Flats was his life. “I still have the inheritance Great-aunt Lucy left me, and some from my parents,” she said gently. “I could—”

“I don’t want your damned money!” He got up, exploding in quiet rage. “I never did!”

“I know that, Cole,” she said, trying to soothe him. She stood, too, standing close to his tall, lean body. She stared up at him. “But I’d give it to you, all the same.”

There was a flicker of something in his dark eyes for just an instant. He reached out a lean hand, the one that wasn’t holding the cigarette, and drew his hard knuckles lightly down her creamy cheek, making her tingle all over. “Skin like a rose petal,” he murmured. “So lovely.”

Her full bow of a mouth parted as she sighed. She searched his eyes while time seemed to stop around them. She was a girl again, all shy and weak-kneed, worshipping Cole. Wanting him.

He saw that look and abruptly moved away again. Just like old times, Cole, she thought bitterly. She bit her lower lip until it hurt, trying to banish the other rejections from her mind. He didn’t want her to touch him. She’d have to get used to that.

“This was Mother’s idea,” he said tersely, smoking like a furnace. “She wants you to come home.”

“Marion, not you.” She nodded, sighing. “You don’t want me, do you, Cole? You never have.”

He stared up at the portrait without speaking. “You could come back with me on the train. Jack Henry is servicing my Ford, and Ben took Mother’s runabout yesterday and vanished with it. I caught the train instead.”

The music got louder again. Someone, probably someone tipsy, was playing with the radio knob.

“Why should I?” she asked, with what little pride she had left, shooting the question at him so sharply that it made him look at her. “What can Spanish Flats offer me that I can’t have right here?”

“Peace,” he said shortly, glaring at the music beyond the door. “These aren’t your kind of people.”

Her lips tugged into a smile. “No? What are my kind of people?”

He lifted an eyebrow at her. “Taggart and Cherry, of course,” he said.

Taggart and Cherry were two of the oldest ranch hands. Taggart had ridden with the James gang, back in the late 1800s, and Cherry had driven cattle up the Chisholm Trail with the big Texas outfits. They could tell stories, all right, and if they’d bathed more often than twice a month, they’d have been welcome in the house. Cole was careful to see that they sat on the porch when they came visiting, and that he was upwind of them.

She couldn’t help the grin. “It’s winter. You won’t have to worry about getting downwind.”

He smiled gently, traces of the younger Cole in his face for just a split second. Then he closed up again, like a clam. “Come home with me.”

She searched his eyes, hoping to find secrets there, but they were like a closed book. “You still haven’t told me what I’ll get if I come,” she repeated, the alcohol dimming her inhibitions, making her reckless for a change.

“What do you want?” he asked, with a mocking smile.

She gave it back. “Maybe I want you,” she said blatantly, the gin giving her a little reckless courage.

He didn’t say a word. His face hardened. His eyes went dark. “You hated it that night,” he said curtly. “You cried.”

“It hurt. It won’t again,” she said simply, airing her newly acquired knowledge. She lifted her chin stubbornly. “I’m twenty-four. This—” she gestured around her “—is what I have to look forward to in my old age. Loneliness and a few hangers-on, and some wild music and booze to dull the hurt. Well, if I’m going to grow old, I don’t want to do it alone.” She moved closer to him, her face quiet with pride. “I’ll go back with you. I’ll live with you. I’ll even pretend that we’re happy together, for appearances. But only if you stay in the same room with me, like a proper husband.” She hated making it an ultimatum, but she wanted a child. She might have to trick him into giving her one, or blackmail him into it, but she was determined.

He actually trembled. “What?” he sounded as if she’d astonished him.

“I want the appearance of normality, and no giggling family making fun of me because you make it so damned obvious that you don’t want me.”

“Stop cursing—” he shot back at her.

“I’ll curse if I feel like it,” she told him. “Cassie was forever making horrible remarks about your insistence on separate rooms, and so were Ben and Katy. Everyone knew you weren’t behaving like a husband. It was just one more humiliation to add to the humiliation of being treated like a stick of furniture! So, if I come back, those are my terms.”

He swallowed. His dark eyes touched every line, every curve of her face. For an instant, she could see him wavering. And then he closed up, all at once.

“I can’t be guided like a blind mule,” he told her bluntly, his stance threatening. “If you want to come, all right. But no conditions. You’ll have your old room, and you’ll sleep in it alone.”

“Would it be that hard for you to sleep with me?” she taunted. She slid her hands over her slender hips. “George wants to.”

His chest expanded roughly. “George can damned well go hang!”

“If you won’t, I’ll let him,” she threatened. Her eyes sparkled with the challenge. Let him sweat for a change. Let him wonder and worry. “I’ll stay right here, and—”

“Damn you!” His dark eyebrows seemed to meet in the middle as he glared at her. “Damn you, Lacy!”

“You can close your eyes and think of England,” she whispered mischievously, because this was fun. The idea of seducing Cole and making him enjoy it was the most delicious fun she’d had in eight long months. And if there was a little revenge mixed up in it, so what? The thought of luring him into her bed, of tempting and tantalizing him, was delightful, especially now that she knew it was unlikely to be painful a second time. Untold pleasures lay in store for both of them, if she could bluff him.

He muttered something under his breath, finished his cigarette, and slammed it into the fireplace. “Damn you!” he repeated.

She moved around in front of him, making him look at her. “Why did you come to me that night if you didn’t want me?”

“I did…want you,” he bit off.

“And now you don’t?”

Oh, God. She was killing him by inches! His body felt like drawn cord. What she was demanding was impossible, but he couldn’t let her carry out her threat. The thought of Lacy with any other man cut his heart. He drew a deep breath. He couldn’t show weakness, not now.

Attack was the best defense. He lifted his face and glared down at her. “Sex is a weapon women use,” he said coldly. “My grandfather taught me to live without it.”

“Your grandfather almost succeeded in making a slab of stone out of you!” she shot back.

“Caring is a weakness,” he said shortly. “It’s a disease. I won’t be owned by any damned woman—much less a society girl from Georgia with a fat wallet!”

Her face blanched. Her fists clenched at her sides. So it was going to be war. All right. He was asking for it.

“Nevertheless,” she said tautly, “if you want me to come back, you’ll have to share a room with me. I’m not going to have the family laughing at me a second time. You don’t even have to touch me, Cole,” she conceded, hoping proximity might accomplish what blackmail couldn’t. “But you are going to have to share my room. If you want me back…” she added calculatingly. “And I think you need me—at least to help you cope with Katy. Don’t you?”

“Haven’t you any pride, woman?”

“No. I gave it up the day I married you,” she told him. “My pride, my self-respect, and my hopes of a rosy future. If you want me back, I’ll come. But on my terms.”

His eyes were fierce, black as coal. He drew in a slow, deep breath. “Your terms,” he said curtly. “Blackmail, you mean.”

He looked so formidable that she almost backed down. Then she remembered how she’d learned to treat George when he got out of hand. She wondered absently if it might work on stone?

She moved a little closer, coquettishly, and deliberately batted her long eyelashes at him. “Kiss me, you fool!” she said vampishly, lifting her face and parting her red lips.

He stared down at her through narrowed eyes and hoped like hell she wouldn’t notice the sudden thunder of his heartbeat at that innocent teasing. “Stop that,” he said irritably, giving nothing away. “All right,” he said, with a rough sigh, “we’ll share a room.”

“Finally, a chink in the stone!” She sighed, smiling wickedly, and he actually seemed to soften a little. Miracle of miracles! Had she accidentally hit on a way to get to him?

He scowled at her for another few seconds, half irritated, half intrigued by this new Lacy. He pursed his lips and almost smiled down at the picture she made. “I’ll pick you up in the morning at seven.” He glanced toward the hall. “You’d better send that pack of coyotes home.”

She curtsied. “Yes, Your Worship!”

“Lacy…” he said warningly.

“You’re so handsome when you’re mad,” she sighed.

The scowl got worse. He actually seemed to vibrate, and she felt a fever of pleasure that she could knock him off-balance. If he were vulnerable, there might be a little hope. Eight months, wasted; years wasted—and now she’d discovered the way to reach him!

“Good night,” he said firmly.

She gave him an impish little grin. “Wouldn’t you like to stay the night?”

“I would not,” he said shortly.

“Then enjoy your last night alone,” she said, with a gleam in her blue eyes. She turned and walked away, on legs that could hardly hold her. And she was laughing when she reached the room where the party was still in full swing.

But the man letting himself out the front door wasn’t laughing. He never should have agreed to her terms. He should have told her to take them and go to hell. Only he was so hungry for the sight of her that his mind had stopped working. It was probably all bluff on her part, about sleeping with that tall clown. But how could he risk it? By God, he’d beat the man to death if he so much as touched her!

The violence of his feelings disturbed him. She was just a woman, just Lacy, who’d been around so long she was like the flowers his mother always put on the hall table. But things had been different since that night with her. He hadn’t meant to touch her. The marriage had been forced; he’d been determined to find some way to drive her from the ranch without ever consummating it. And then he’d started kissing her, and one thing had led to another. He wasn’t sorry, except for hurting her. It had been magic. But it was too big a risk to repeat. How in hell was he going to share a room with her and keep his secret? In that intimacy, which he’d avoided for years even with his men, how could he keep her from finding out?

He’d lose her when she knew, he thought. That hadn’t bothered him at first, but he’d had too much time to think. He’d missed her. He’d wanted her. Avoiding her hadn’t worked. He’d tried that, eight months’ worth, and tonight was the first time he’d felt alive since she’d left him. He sighed. Well, he’d take it one day at a time. That was what Turk always said: Stop gulping life down in a swallow. So maybe he’d try that. As he left the house, the look in his eyes was as grim as rain, as hopeless as dead flowers on a grave.

Chapter

Two

Lacy sat down heavily in the wing chair, still reeling from her demands and Cole’s reluctant agreement to them. She’d been bluffing, but fortunately he didn’t know that. Imagine, she thought, shy little Lacy Jarrett actually winning one over Coleman Whitehall. The gin had helped, of course. She still wasn’t used to it, and it had gone to her head. Also, she mused, to her tongue.

Back in the old days, she would have been too shy to even speak to him. Her eyes closed and she drifted back to those first, nerve-wracking days at Spanish Flats following the death of her parents.

Katy had been welcoming, like Marion and Ben. But Cole had been formal, distant, and almost hostile to her. She’d made a habit of keeping out of his way, so quiet when he was at the table for meals that she seemed invisible. It didn’t help that she started falling in love with him almost at once.

There had been rare times when he was less antagonistic. Once, he’d helped her save a kitten from a stray dog. He’d placed the tiny thing in her hands and his eyes had held hers for so long that she blushed furiously and was only able to stammer her thanks. When she’d gotten sick from being out in the sun without her bonnet, it was Cole who’d carried her inside to her bed, who’d hovered despite Marion and Katy’s ministrations until he was certain that she was all right. Occasionally he’d been home when Lacy went for the quiet walks she enjoyed so much, and he’d fallen into step beside her, pointing out crops and explaining the cattle business to her. Eventually she lost much of her fear of him, but he disturbed her so much when he came close that she couldn’t quite hide it.

Her reactions seemed to make him irritable, as if he didn’t understand that it was physical attraction and not fear that caused them. Cole didn’t go to parties, and Lacy had never known him to keep company with a woman. He worked from dawn until well after dark, overseeing every phase of ranch operation, even keeping the books and handling the mounting paperwork. He had a good business head, but he also had all the responsibility. It didn’t leave much time for recreation.

The blow came when war broke out in Europe. Everyone was sure that America would eventually become involved, and Lacy found herself worrying constantly that Cole would have to go. He was young and strong and patriotic. Even if he weren’t called up, it was inevitable that he would volunteer. His conversation about the news items in the papers told her that.

Aviation, the new science, was one of his consuming interests. He talked about airplanes as some boys talked about girls. He read everything he could find on the subject. Lacy was his only willing audience, soaking up the information he imparted enthusiastically—even while she prayed that the flying fever wouldn’t take him over to France, where American boys were flocking to join the Lafayette Escadrille.

But America’s entry into the war in April, 1917, smashed Lacy’s dreams. Cole enlisted and requested service with the fledgling Army Air Service. He’d wanted to volunteer for the famous Lafayette Escadrille a year earlier, along with other American pilots attached to the French Flying Corps. But the death of his father and the weight of responsibility for his mother and sister and brother—not to mention Lacy—put paid to that idea. However, when President Wilson announced American participation in the war, Cole immediately signed up. He found neighbors willing to handle ranch chores for him while his mother and Lacy assumed the duty of keeping the books, and Cole packed to leave for France.