Lacy (2 page)

Children had been another problem. She'd worked
up enough nerve to approach Coleman shortly after their marriage and ask him if
he wanted them. She'd thought in her innocence that a child might make their
relationship easier. His face had gone a horrible pale shade, and he'd said
things to her that she still had trouble accepting. No, he'd told her, he
didn't want children. Not with a pampered little rich girl like Lacy. And after
a few more insulting words, he'd stormed off in a black temper. She'd never had
the nerve to ask him a second time. In her heart, she'd hoped that she might
become pregnant after that uncomfortable night in his bed, but it hadn't
happened. Maybe it was just as well, because Cole would let no one close to
him. She'd tried everything except being herself. It was hard to be herself
around Cole, because he inhibited her so much. She wanted to play with him and
tease him and make him laugh. She wanted to make him young, because he'd never
been that. He'd been a man ever since she'd known him, a solitary, lonely
figure with steel in his makeup—even at the age of nineteen—which he'd been
when Lacy came to live with the Whitehalls.

In the other room, the radio was giving out New Orleans jazz, and the new Charleston dance was being demonstrated by two visitors whom
Lacy didn't know. There were a lot of people in the house that she didn't know.
What did it matter? They filled the empty rooms.

Lacy walked down the hall, her knee-length gray
dress clinging softly to the slender lines of her body, down her hose-clad legs,
to her buckled high heels. She felt restless again, hungry. She remembered the
hardness of Cole's mouth, the aching sweetness of his kiss that left her lips
softly swollen. All that exquisite passion they'd shared the morning in the
barn, and it had led to.. .that. She shivered. Surely women only allowed men
such license with their bodies to get children.

Bess, one of her married friends, had told her
that sex was the most exquisite experience in her life.
"Mahhhhhvelous," she
'd
said, laughing, her eyes full of the love she shared with her husband of five
years. Lacy had been curious, despite her bad experience, to find out if
intimacy could be pleasurable. But she wasn't quite curious enough to let
George Simon have what he'd been lusting after for the past few weeks. George
was a sweet man, a good friend. But the thought of his greedy hands on her body
was somehow offensive. It was a kind of sacrilege to think of letting anyone
but Cole touch her that way.

What utter rot, she thought, with a harsh laugh.
Ridiculous to moon over a man who didn't love her. But worshipping him was such
a habit. And she did. She loved everything about him, from the way he sat his
horse to the arrogant tilt of his dark head, to the way his skin caught the
light and burned like bronze. He wasn't terribly good to look at, except to
Lacy, but he had a masculinity that set her teeth on edge, that made her body
go hot and throbbing. Just to touch him could make her tremble.

She sighed shakily as her gray eyes swept the
hall. Would he come? Her heart pounded beneath her bodice. Just to see him, she
thought, just to lay eyes on him once more, would be heaven. But it was already
eleven o'clock, and Cole was usually in bed by nine so that he could be up at
the crack of dawn. She turned back toward the living room with a heart like
lead. No, he wasn't coming tonight. It had been a foolish hope.

She went back to her guests, laughing, drinking
more and more gin. The police made raids once in a while, but Lacy didn't care
if they came and found the gin. She might go to jail, and Coleman might come
and bail her out. Then he might bring her home, and be so inflamed by
smoldering passion that he'd do to her what Rudolph Valentino, as the sheik,
had done to Agnes Ayres in that wildly passionate film
The Sheik.
Her
heart ran away. She'd gone wild over that movie two years ago and had learned
to do the tango soon after Valentino's
Blood and Sand
film was released. But,
of course, no one in her circle would do it like Valentino.

She took another sip of gin, lost in her
thoughts. She jumped as a hand lightly touched her shoulder. She looked up,
wide-spaced eyes huge in her face, and relaxed a little when she saw George
Simon behind her.

"You startled me," she said in her
calm, very Southern drawl.

"Sorry," he said, grinning. Well, his
teeth were perfect, even if he was slightly balding and overweight. "I
just thought you might like to know that you have a visitor."

She frowned. It was midnight, and despite the
fact that the huge Victorian house was overrun with people, it was unusual for
anyone to come calling so late. And then she remembered. Cole!

"Male or female?" she asked nervously.

"Definitely male," George said,
without smiling. "He looks like the portrait over the living room mantel.
That's where I left him, staring at it."

Lacy spilled the drink down the front of the
stylishly wispy dress and mopped frantically at it with a handkerchief.
"Oh, damn," she said curtly. "Well, I'll worry about that later.
He's in the living room?"

"Say, kid... You're like flour in the face.
What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she said. Everything, she
thought as she turned and walked stiffly down the long hall, dimly lit by
sconces, her wide-heeled shoes beating a dainty tattoo on the bare, polished
wood floors as she walked.

She hesitated at the doorway, her eyes huge in
her face, her hand poised on the doorknob. She knew already who was going to be
waiting for her. She knew by George's description, but even more by that smell,
that pungent smoke that teased her nose even as she opened the door and saw
him.

Coleman Whitehall spun on his booted heel with
the precision of an athlete. Which he was, of course; ranch work demanded that
kind of muscle. His dark eyes narrowed as he looked at Lacy, blazing out of a
face like leather under hair as dark as her own. His skin was bronzed, a legacy
from the Comanche grandfather who'd instilled pure steel in his makeup and
taught him that emotion was a plague to be avoided at all costs.

He was wearing work clothes. Jeans and boots,
with wide, flaring leather chaps and a vest over his blue-patterned shirt,
leather wristbands on the cuffs. A string hung out of the pocket, which would
be the tobacco pouch he always carried, along with a small, flat packet of
papers to roll cigarettes from. His forehead was oddly pale as he watched her,
his wide-brimmed hat tossed carelessly onto an elegant Victorian wing chair. He
lifted his square chin and stared at her with unblinking, unforgiving eyes, the
very picture of a Texas cattleman with his weather-beaten face and unyielding
pride and blatant arrogance.

She closed the door and moved forward. He didn't
frighten her. He never had, really, although he towered over her like a lean,
taciturn giant. He'd hardly smiled in the years she'd lived under his roof. She
wondered if he ever had as a boy. She loved him. But love was something he
didn't need. Love. And Lacy. He could do very well without either, and he'd
proven it over the past eight lonely months.

"Hello, Cole," she said softly.

He lifted the smoking cigarette to thin, firm
lips that held a faintly mocking smile. "Hello, yourself, kiddo. You look
prosperous enough," he mused, his eyes narrow on her short dark hair in
its bob, her face with its outrageously dark lip rouge, her blue eyes quiet and
abnormally bright as she stood before him, very trendy in her soft gray dress
that clung to her slender figure and displayed her long, elegant legs with
scandalous efficiency.

She didn't avoid his stare. Her eyes wandered
over his face like loving hands, seeing the new lines, the rough edges. He was
twenty-eight now, but he'd aged in these months they'd been apart. The war had
aged him. Marriage hadn't seemed to help.

"I'm doing very well, thanks," she
said, trying to keep her voice light. It was hard to handle this meeting, with
the memory of her abrupt departure—and the reason for it—still between them. He
seemed unperturbed by it, but her knees felt weak. "What brings you to San Antonio in the middle of the night?"

"I've been trying to sell cattle. Winter's
coming on. Feed's getting hard to come by." He studied her blatantly, but
there was no feeling in his dark eyes. There was nothing at all.

She moved closer, inhaling the masculine smell
of him, the scents of tobacco and leather that had become so familiar. She
touched his sleeve gently, loving the warmth of him under it, only to have him
jerk away from her and walk back toward the fireplace.

Her hand felt odd, extended like that. She
pulled it back to her side with a wistful, bitter little smile. He still didn't
like her to touch him, after all this time. He never had. He took, but he never
gave. Lacy wasn't sure that he knew how to give.

"How is your mother?" she asked.

"She's fine."

"And Katy and Bennett?"

"My sister and brother are fine, too."

She studied his long, lean back, watching him
stare at his likeness above the mantel. She'd had it painted soon after she'd
left Spanish Flats, and it was his mirror image. Dark, brooding, with eyes that
followed her everywhere she went. He was wearing work clothes in the portrait,
with a red bandanna at his throat and a white Stetson atop his dark, straight
hair. She loved the portrait. She loved the man.

"What's that in aid of?" he asked
insolently, gesturing up at it. He turned, pinning her with his dark gaze.
"For show?
To
let everyone know
what a devoted little wife you are?"

She smiled sadly. "Are we going to have
that argument again? I'm not suited to the ranch. You've been telling me that
since the day I stepped on the place for the first time. I'm—how did you put
it?—too genteel." That was a lie. She was well suited, and she loved it.
Her eyes glared at him. "But we both know why I left Spanish Flats,
Cole."

His eyes flashed, and a dark stain of color
washed over his high cheekbones. He averted his eyes.

Oh, damn, Lacy thought miserably. My tongue will
be the death of me. She laced her hands together. "Anyway, you never knew
I was around," she said stiffly. "Your day-to-day indifference
finally chased me away."

"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!"