Heartbreaker (18 page)

Over the next three weeks a deep happiness
began forming inside her. She had taken over the paperwork completely, working
on it three days out of the week, which gave John more free time at night than
he'd ever had before. He gave up checking her work, because he never found an
error. On the other days she rode with him, content with his company, and he
discovered that he liked having her nearby. There were times when he was so
hot, dirty and aggravated that he'd be turning the air blue with savage curses,
then he'd look up and catch her smiling at him, and his aggravation would fade
away. What did a contrary steer matter when she looked at him that way? She
never seemed to mind the dust and heat, or the smells. It wasn't what he'd
expected, and sometimes it bothered him. It was as if she were hiding here,
burying herself in this self-contained world. The Michelle he'd known before
had been a laughing, teasing, social creature, enjoying parties and dancing.
This Michelle seldom laughed, though she was so generous with her smiles that
it took him a while to notice. One of those smiles made him and all his men a
little giddy, but he could remember her sparkling laughter, and he wondered
where it had gone.

But it was still so new, having her to
himself, that he wasn't anxious to share her with others. They spent the nights
tangled together in heated passion, and instead of abating, the hunger only
intensified. He spent the days in constant, low-level arousal, and sometimes
all he had to do was look at her and he'd be so hard he'd have to find some way
of disguising it.

One morning Michelle remained at the house to
work in the office; she was alone because Edie had gone grocery shopping. The
telephone rang off the hook that morning, interrupting her time and again.
"

She was already irritated with it when it
jangled yet again and made her stop what she was doing to answer it
"Rafferty residence."

No one answered, though she could hear slow,
deep breathing, as though whoever was on the other end was deliberately
controlling his breath. It wasn't a "breather," though; the sound
wasn't obscenely exaggerated.

"Hello," she said. "Can you
hear me?"

A quiet click sounded in her ear, as if
whoever had been calling had put down the receiver with slow, controlled
caution, much as he'd been breathing.

He
. For some reason she had no doubt it was a man. Common sense said it
could be some bored teenager playing a prank, or simply a wrong number, but a
sudden chill swept over her.

A sense of menace had filled the silence on
the line. For the first time in three weeks she felt isolated and somehow
threatened, though there was no tangible reason for it. Hie chills wouldn't
stop running up and down her spine, and suddenly she had to get out of the
house, into the hot sunshine. She had to see John, just be able to look at him
and hear his deep voice roaring curses, or crooning gently to a horse or a
frightened calf. She needed his heat to dispel the coldness of a menace she
couldn't define.

Two days later there was another phone call
and again, by chance, she answered the phone. "Hello," she said.
"Rafferty residence."

Silence.

Her hand began shaking. She strained her ears
and heard that quiet, even breathing, then the click as the phone was hung up,
and a moment later the dial tone began buzzing in her ear. She felt sick and
cold, without knowing why. What was going on? Who was doing this to her?

Michelle paced the bedroom like a nervous
cat, her silky hair swirling around her head as she moved. "I don't feel
like going," she blurted. "Why didn't you ask me before you told
Addie we'd be there?"

"Because you'd have come up with one
excuse after another why you couldn't go, just like you're doing now," he
answered calmly. He'd been watching her pace back and forth, her eyes
glittering, her usually sinuous movements jerky with agitation. It had been
almost a month since he'd moved her to the ranch, and she had yet to stir
beyond the boundaries of his property, except to visit her own. He'd given her
the keys to the Mercedes and free use of it, but to his knowledge she'd never
taken it out. She hadn't been shopping, though he'd made certain she had money.
He had received the usual invitations to the neighborhood Saturday night
barbecues that had become a county tradition, but she'd always found some
excuse not to attend.

He'd wondered fleetingly if she were ashamed
of having come down in the world, embarrassed because he didn't measure up
financially or in terms of sophistication with the men she'd known before, but
he'd dismissed the notion almost before it formed. It wasn't that. He'd come to
know her better than that. She came into his arms at night too eagerly, too
hungrily, to harbor any feelings that he was socially inferior. A lot of his
ideas about her had been wrong. She didn't look down on work, never had. She
had simply been sheltered from it her entire life. She was willing to work. Damn
it, she insisted on it! He had to watch her to keep her from trying her hand at
bull-dogging. He was as bad as her father had ever been, willing to do just
about anything to keep her happy.

Maybe she was embarrassed because they were
living together. This was a rural section, where mores and morality changed
slowly. Their arrangement wouldn't so much as raise an eyebrow in Miami or any
other large city, but they weren't in a large city. John was too self-assured
and arrogant to worry about gossip; he thought of Michelle simply as his woman,
with all the fierce possessiveness implied by the term. She was his. He'd held
her beneath him and made her his, and the bond was reinforced every time he
took her.

Whatever her reason for hiding on the ranch,
it was time for it to end. If she were trying to hide their relationship, he
wasn't going to let her get away with it any longer. She had to become
accustomed to being his woman. He sensed that she was still hiding something of
herself from him, carefully preserving a certain distance between them, and it
enraged him. It wasn't a physical distance. Sweet Lord, no. She was liquid fire
in his arms. The distance was mental; there were times when she was silent and
withdrawn, the sparkle gone from her eyes, but whenever he asked her what was
wrong she would stonewall, and no amount of probing would induce her to tell
him what she'd been thinking.

He was determined to destroy whatever it was
that pulled her away from him; he wanted all of her, mind and body. He wanted
to hear her laugh, to make her lose her temper as he'd used to do, to hear the
haughtiness and petulance in her voice. It was all a part of her, the part she
wasn't giving him now, and he wanted it. Damn it, was she tiptoeing around him
because she thought she
owed
him?

She hadn't stopped pacing. Now she sat down
on the bed and stared at him, her lips set. "I don't want to go."

"I thought you liked Addie." He
pulled off his boots and stood to shrug out of his shirt.

"I do," Michelle said.

"Then why don't you want to go to her
party? Have you even seen her since you've been back?"

"No, but Dad had just died, and I wasn't
in the mood to socialize! Then there was so much work to be done…"

"You don't have that excuse now."

She glared at him. "I decided you were a
bully when I was eighteen years old, and nothing you've done over the years has
changed my opinion!"

He couldn't stop the grin that spread over
his face as he stripped off his jeans. She was something when she got on her
high horse. Going over to the bed, he sat beside her and rubbed her back.
"Just relax," he soothed. "You know everyone who'll be there,
and it's as informal as it always was. You used to have fun at these things,
didn't you? They haven't changed."

Michelle let him coax her into lying against
his shoulder. She would sound crazy if she told him that she didn't feel safe
away from the ranch. He'd want to know why, and what could she tell him? That
she'd had two phone calls and the other person wouldn't say anything, just
quietly hung up? That happened to people all the time when someone had dialed a
wrong number. But she couldn't shake the feeling that something menacing was
waiting out there for her if she left the sanctuary of the ranch, where John
Rafferty ruled supreme. She sighed, turning her face into his throat. She was
overreacting to a simple wrong number; she'd felt safe enough all the time
she'd been alone at her house. This was just another little emotional legacy
from her marriage.

She gave in. "All right, I'll go. What
time does it start?"

"In about two hours." He kissed her
slowly, feeling the tension drain out of her, but he could still sense a
certain distance in her, as if her mind were on something else, and frustration
rose in him. He couldn't pinpoint it, but he knew it was there.

Michelle slipped from his arms, shaking her
head as she stood. "You gave me just enough time to get ready, didn't
you?"

"We could share a shower," he
invited, dropping his last garment at his feet. He stretched, his powerful
torso rippling with muscle, and Michelle couldn't take her eyes off him.
"I don't mind being late if you don't."

She swallowed. "Thanks, but you go
ahead." She was nervous about this party. Even aside from the spooky
feeling those phone calls had given her, she wasn't certain how she felt about
going. She didn't know how much the ranching crowd knew of her circumstances,
but she certainly didn't want anyone pitying her, or making knowing remarks
about her position in John's house. On the other hand, she remember anyone as
being malicious, and she had always liked Addie Layfield and her husband,
Steve. This would be a family oriented group, ranging in age from Frank and
Yetta Campbell, in their seventies, to the young children of several families.
People would sit around and talk, eat barbecue and drink beer, the children and
some of the adults would swim, and the thing would break up of its own accord
at about
ten
o'clock
.

John was waiting for her when she came out of
the bathroom after showering and dressing. She had opted for cool and comfortable,
sleeking her wet hair straight back and twisting it into a knot, which she'd
pinned at her nape, and she wore a minimum of makeup. She had on an oversize
white cotton T-shirt, with the tail tied in a knot on one hip, and loose white
cotton drawstring pants. Her sandals consisted of soles and two straps each. On
someone else the same ensemble might have looked sloppy, but on Michelle it
looked chic. He decided she could wear a feed sack and make it look good.