Outlaw (24 page)

"Should I say hello to Ten, too?" asked Cash on his way out.

Diana's only answer was silence followed by the door shutting firmly behind Cash. He raised his fist to knock on the door again but thought better of it when he heard the broken, unmistakable sounds of someone who was trying not to cry. Swearing silently about the futility of trying to talk rationally to a woman, he turned away and went toward his beat-up Jeep with long, loping strides. If he hurried, he would be at the ranch house before the afternoon thunderstorms turned the road to gumbo.

The next night, barely fifteen minutes after the last grad student left, Diana spotted the scruffy knapsack slumped in a corner. Bill usually remembered halfway home, turned around and came back. It had become a ritual—the knock on the door, the knapsack extended through the half-open door and the embarrassed apologies. Tonight, however, she wondered whether the knapsack would be an overnight resident. Bill had left with Melanie, and the look in his eyes had nothing to do with unimportant details such as knapsacks.

Diana glanced at the clock. Midnight—if Bill were going to retrieve his property, he would be back soon. With a shrug, she sat down at the table full of shards and picked up two. The edges didn't match, but that didn't matter. Diana wasn't seeing them. She was seeing other shards, other shapes and a matching that had been superb.

At least for her.

I've got to stop thinking about it. I've got to stop asking where I went wrong and why I wasn't the woman for Ten when he was the man for me. I've got to stop thinking about the past and start planning for the future. He trusted me enough to give me his baby. That has to be enough.

The sound of knuckles meeting the apartment door was a welcome break from Diana's bleak thoughts.

"Hang on. I'm coming," Diana called out.

She snagged the knapsack by its strap, opened the front door without looking, held out the knapsack at arm's length and waited for Bill to take it.

The door opened fully, pushing Diana back into the living room. The knapsack hit the floor with a soft thump, falling from her nerveless fingers.

Ten walked into the room and shut the door behind himself, watching Diana with hooded eyes that missed none of the subtle signs of stress—the brackets at the side of her mouth, the circles beneath her eyes, the body that was too thin. And most of all the eyes, too bleak, too dark.

Ten didn't know what he had expected Diana to do when he walked back into her life, but shutting down like a flower at sunset wasn't one of the things he had imagined. He kept remembering the moment when she had looked at him with eyes still dazed by pleasure and whispered that she loved him. She must have accepted his explanation that what she felt was temporary rather than lasting, for she had never mentioned love again. Yet the moment and the words had haunted him at odd moments ever since, tearing at his emotions without warning, making it painful to breathe.

But nothing had prepared him for the cruel talons sinking into him when he had opened the folder and seen himself standing alone, watching life pass by in a shimmering parade while he stood lost in shadow.

"You look tired," Diana said tonelessly. "Is the ranch still shorthanded?"

Ten made a dismissing motion. "I didn't come here to talk about the Rocking M's personnel problems."

Diana waited, asking in silence what she didn't trust herself to put into words.
Why are you here?

"I came here to find out why you won't come back and excavate the kiva," Ten said bluntly.

"I have enough work to do in Boulder," she said, lacing her fingers together, trying to conceal their fine tremors.

"Bull."

Her hands clenched. "Why do you want me to excavate the kiva? Why not some other archaeologist?''

"You know why."

"Yes." Her lips curved down. "Sex."

Ten flinched but said nothing.

Diana turned away, knowing that she couldn't conceal her feelings any longer if she kept looking at him. When she spoke, her voice was desperately reasonable. "Don't you think that's rather a long drive just to get laid?"

Ten hissed a vicious word. "That's not what I meant and you know it!"

"Then what did you mean?"

"Are you pregnant?"

The bald question seemed to hang in the stillness like a wire being pulled tighter and tighter until it hummed just above the threshold of hearing.

"Don't worry, Tennessee," Diana said. "I keep my promises and I know you made none. Whether or not I'm pregnant, you're free."

"Dammit, Diana,
are you pregnant?"

She let out a long, soundless breath. "You aren't listening. If I'm pregnant, I continue teaching. If I'm not pregnant, I continue teaching. Either way, I'm not going to excavate that kiva, so it makes no difference to you."

"No difference? What do you take me for!"

"A man who prefers living alone."

In the silence, the sound of Ten's sudden intake of breath was appallingly clear. Anger and the cold fear that had driven Ten since he had looked at the sketch exploded soundlessly inside him.

"You said you loved me."

More accusation than anything else, the words scored Diana. "And you told me I didn't know what love was. You told me what we had was sex. Sex doesn't last."

The bleakness of his own words coming back to him cut into Ten more deeply than any intentional insult could have. Like the sketch, the words were a wounding that sliced through old scars to the living flesh beneath.

"My God, how you must hate me," he whispered. "That's why you sketched me as an outlaw too cruel to be part of his people's freedom."

The pain beneath Ten's words shattered the last of Diana's control. She spun around, her face white. "That's not what I sketched!"

Ten's breath came in hard when he saw the tears glittering on Diana's pale cheeks. He started to speak but she was already talking, words tumbling out, her voice shaking with her need to make him understand.

"I saw a man who turned away from the possibility of love even as he freed me to love for the first time in my life, a love that you didn't believe in. But that's not the point. The point is that you gave me a great deal that is of lasting value and took as much as you wanted from me in return, and what you wanted wasn't lasting. It was a very beautiful, very passionate, very brief affair. I don't hate you. End of story."

Long, lean hands framed Diana's face. Ten bent and kissed away her tears as delicately, as thoroughly, as he had once kissed away her fear of him.

"Ten," she whispered, "don't. Please don't."

"Why? If our affair was that good," he asked in a dark velvet voice, "why can't it go on?"

"What if I—" Diana's voice broke. "Oh, Ten, don't you see? What would happen if there were a child?"

Ten bent again, taking her mouth, making it impossible for her to do anything but kiss him in return. Diana made an odd, broken sound and held on to him, taking and giving and trembling. By the time the kiss ended, she was crying wildly.

"Shh, don't cry," he said repeatedly, trying to kiss away the tears again, but there were too many this time. "Don't cry, baby. It tears me apart. I never wanted to hurt you like this. Everything is all right, baby. Don't cry."

Diana thought of the child growing inside her and felt a dizzying combination of love and despair. Ten was back, but only for a night or two. A week. Maybe even a few months. And then he would leave again.

What we have isn't love. It passes.

"I'm sorry—I can't stop crying and I—I can't—I can't continue our affair."

Ten made a hoarse sound that could have been Diana's name and tried without success to stem the hot silver flood with his thumbs. He kissed her gently, then kissed her again and again, breathing his words over her lips as though wanting to be certain that she absorbed his words physically as well as mentally, that she believed him all the way to her soul.

"Listen to me, Diana. You're the only woman I've ever been completely naked with." His lips brushed hers slowly. "You're the only woman I've ever trusted enough to have my child." His tongue traced her lips. "You're the only woman I've ever wanted so much it haunted me to the point that I couldn't sleep. Not just your beautiful body, but your quicksilver mind and your laughter and your quiet times and even the anger that makes your eyes almost black. I want all of you. Don't turn away from me. Please. I can't bear losing you. Tell me I haven't lost you. Tell me that you still love me."

The dark, ragged velvet of Ten's voice wrapped around Diana, stripping away her defenses, leaving only the truth of her love.

"I'll always love you," Diana said, her voice breaking. "That won't change. But other—other things will. You—I—"

Ten's mouth closed over hers in a kiss that was a promise as well as a caress, a yearning hope as well as a burning hunger, a need and a sharing as complex as love itself. When he finally lifted his mouth he was trembling with more than desire.

"I love you, Diana. It's the last damn thing in the world I expected to happen. But it did and I'm not going to fight it any longer. Don't cry, love," Ten whispered, rocking Diana against his chest. "Don't cry. Just hold on to me and let me hold on to you. I've never been in love before. I've never wanted to live with a woman, to have children with her, to build a life around something other than silence." He looked down at Diana with hungry silver eyes. "Will you marry me? Will you have my children?"

Diana tried to speak but couldn't. She took Ten's hand in hers, kissed his hard palm and silently put it over the soft curve of her body where his baby was growing. She watched his eyes widen, felt his hand probe gently, heard the sudden raggedness of his breathing.

"Diana?"

"Yes," she said, laughing and crying at once. "Oh, yes!"

Ten's arms closed around the woman he loved and he lifted her off the floor in a huge hug, laughing with a joy he had never thought to feel—an outlaw walking out of the shadowed past into a future filled with light.