Sleepless in Montana (30 page)

“I hope you got it all out of your system,
because you’re not using her. She’s not up to a threesome with
Simone D’Arcy.” Aaron jabbed a finger into Hogan’s chest.

*** ***

Ben looked down the supper table at his
glowering family and at Jemma, who looked as if she could kill
anyone who spoke to her. He’d seen his family wearing the same
expressions over the years, but they’d never stopped loving one
another. Ben took comfort in the love they still shared.

This time, Hogan was in the midst of it, like
it or not, and he couldn’t play peacemaker when he was obviously
the offender.

Dinah’s hand moved onto Ben’s damaged leg,
taking his hand beneath the table. She squeezed his hand gently and
he wondered if she could feel the prosthesis, if it offended
her.

“Well. This is a nice meal, isn’t it? Baked
chicken, dressing, and a lovely green bean casserole. We’ll have
the fish Jemma caught tomorrow night. Baked with lemon, I think,”
Dinah said lightly, trying to make the dinner pleasant.

Ben stared down at the slender pale hand that
had somehow inched higher on his lap. He knew he trembled, that his
look at Dinah was hot and hungry before shielding it from his
children.

That effort was unnecessary. The brood glared
at one another and passed the food. Carley slapped a spoonful of
dressing on her plate and punched Mitch’s shoulder, just because it
was there.

Ben settled back to enjoy his children and
his wife’s hand in his. For once, he wasn’t at the bottom of the
problem. Clearly, his eldest son had stepped over a line.

When the plates were filled, and his children
and Jemma were eating slowly in simmering dead silence, sliced by
meaningful glares, Ben couldn’t resist asking, “Who’s behind all of
this?”

Hogan leaned back, hooked one arm over the
back of his chair and stared at Jemma, not shielding his anger. He
rocked back on the chair’s legs and studied her.

“Here,” he said, plopping glittering
citrine-and-carnelian earrings onto the table in front of
Jemma.

It wasn’t the presentation of a lover’s gift,
rather a challenge. Ben suspected that Hogan had meant to gift
Jemma with more romance, but with eyes the color of thunderclouds,
she’d been glaring at him across the table.

“Wear them yourself. Simone called here today
just after you left. She’s in Paris and needed you. She was looking
for you. I think she has an itch. Maybe you’d better fly off
and—”

“That’s enough,” Hogan snapped, scowling at
her. “What’s your problem?”

“You left me with those damn fish to clean
and right now, I’d sooner kiss one of them, than you.” Jemma stood
up, hurled her cloth napkin onto the table, and stalked out of the
room and ran up the stairs.

“That is one hot-blooded woman,” Ben heard
himself say, before he clamped his lips closed and settled for a
grin.

His son was definitely simmering, Ben
thought, appreciating the hot look of a man who didn’t know how to
handle the woman he’d claimed, and who obviously was in a snit.
From his brooding expression, Hogan was trying to decide if he
should go after her, or let her cool off, or just walk out. Ben had
been there enough times to recognize the dark, uncertain look on
his son’s face.

“Excuse me. Dinner was good. Thank you,
Dinah.” Hogan got up and stalked after Jemma. The sound of his
footsteps tramping up the stairs echoed over the dining table, and
Maxi sighed dreamily, placing her hand over her heart.

After Jemma’s outraged scream, Hogan’s
footsteps tramped down the stairs again. This time, on his way
outside, he carried a squirming Jemma over his shoulder. One dark
look at his family said he intended to keep the argument with Jemma
very private.

*** ***

In the moonlight, Hogan held Jemma’s arms to
her side, locking his arms around her. “Cool off.”

“One woman wasn’t enough, was it? Not when
she’s in Europe and you’re needing a— I won’t have jewelry you made
for another woman—
They all know, Hogan.
They all know what
we did up there— and that you’re just bored here and that—” Jemma
clenched her lids closed against the burning tears that brimmed and
trailed down her cheeks.

“I made the earrings for you this afternoon.
The color reminds me of your hair in the sunlight. Are you ashamed
of what we did?” He feared her answer.

“I found it entertaining,” she said coolly,
temper simmering beneath the surface as she licked away a telling
tear.

“ ‘Entertaining?’” He stood, riveted by the
meaning of the word. Jemma had hurt him, pierced his protective
shields, ripped him apart.

Since Hogan was holding her arms at her
sides, Jemma pushed her face against his chest and rubbed it to dry
her tears.

Then she lifted her face to burn him with a
dark look. “An entertaining diversion. I haven’t had much time to
think about it, but I’m certain I can be ready by July. I’ve been
working hard— no time to remember something that didn’t matter— you
know, phone calls, deals to make. Oh! Hogan, don’t you dare try
that neck-massaging trick on me!”

He couldn’t resist touching her, not when
she’d wept for what they’d shared, and he was feeling tender and
soft and aglow. He bent to brush his lips across hers.

“Simone hasn’t been my lover for years,” he
whispered against her ear, gently biting the lobe.

“I don’t believe you,” she blazed and walked
back into the house, slamming the front door behind her.

Hogan stood for a long time, staring at the
closed door. He wanted to tear it from the hinges and go after
Jemma— And what? Prove what an idiot he was? Have his family see
that she’d undone his control, laid him open? Unused to the raw
emotions jolting him, Hogan locked his boots to the ground and
hooked his thumbs into his pockets.

Ben stepped out onto the porch and stood in
front of the door as if reading Hogan’s emotions. “I’ve been there,
boy. Better give her time to cool off,” Ben said.

In her upstairs bedroom, Jemma couldn’t
resist easing aside the curtain to look down at Hogan. He stood
there, looking up at her, his tall body outlined in the silvery
moonlight. The tug of his body curled around hers, the memories of
his mouth suckling gently, rhythmically at her breast, sent a hot
sizzle through her. He looked so lonely outlined in the moonlight,
and she ached to hold him tight. Hogan could be sweet, almost
boyish, but he was a man of dark, uncertain needs.

Jemma crushed the lace curtain in her fist.
Could she trust him?
He had a lover who wanted him and yet
he had shed Simone easily— for the moment. Hogan was a Kodiak, and
that meant he’d want a family, because that need had been bred into
him, whether he liked it or not.

She hadn’t thought of herself as a lover. Yet
with him, she had made love and enjoyed the hunger and excitement.
She loved the image of Hogan moving over her, his face dark and
intent as though nothing mattered but what would come between
them.

Jemma’s hand rose to protectively cover the
racing pulse at her throat.
He would want too much.

She opened her other hand. The earrings
glittered in the dim light his trademark stamped on a small disk.
The gift was symbolic, she knew, marking their time together. She
closed her fist over the earrings and brought her hand to her
heart. She’d known him for years and yet that sweet gift had shaken
her— before his lover Simone had slashed through the tender
moment.

Tall and lethal and brooding, Hogan stood
waiting for her to come to him. She couldn’t until she knew what
moved inside her— the aching tenderness warring with her fears of
what Hogan would expect from her— the restrictions and
tethers....

Jemma slashed away tears with the back of her
hand. “Whatever happens, I will not be a fill-in for his lover. But
he can be so sweet and tender and if I didn’t know that, I’d be
just fine.”

Then because she wasn’t one to hide in the
shadows when her emotions were burning, Jemma shoved open the
window. “I love the earrings.”

“Why don’t you come down here and tell me?”
he called back to her.

Because she didn’t dare come close to him, to
see that grin upon his face— no more than a flash of white in the
dark night— Jemma slammed the window down.

He looked up at her and took his hat from his
head, sweeping it in front of him as he bowed. Then he
straightened, put his hat on his head, and blew her a kiss. Hogan
strolled to his pickup and got inside. He backed it up to the
house, climbed up on the cab, and gripped the porch’s roof,
levering himself up. He walked across the roof toward her window.
He rapped on the pane. “Are you going to kiss me good night or
what?”

Because the move was so atypical of Hogan’s
contemplative, predictable nature, Jemma opened the window and
stared at him. “What are you doing, Hogan Kodiak?”

“Kissing my sweetheart good night— unless
you’d rather come to my place. But if you do, you’re not coming
back tonight.”

“You’re not going anywhere until I kiss you,
are you?”

He stared at her, face harsh and intense in
the moonlight. Jemma found herself reaching for his head, wrapping
her fingers in his smooth, crisp hair, and pushing her mouth
against his. It wasn’t a sweet kiss, but Hogan’s hand reached out
to cup the back of her head, drawing her into a long, tender
kiss.

He leaned back, inhaled roughly as though he
wanted to climb into the window and make love to her, and then
shook his head— “You’re going to need more casting time. Do you
want me to help you or not?”

“Not tomorrow.” She wanted time to think
about this new Hogan, one who smoothed her hair and took her palm
to his lips. The gesture was humbling, a proud man yielding a bit
to her.

“You’re backing off, aren’t you? Afraid?”

“Yes. I think we’d both better think about
this,” she whispered, because Hogan had known her too long, and
recently, too well. “You’d better go. Be careful. I wouldn’t want
you to break that neck before I do it.”

He chuckled, the rare sound delighting her,
before he crossed the roof and dropped to his pickup bed. Ben
crossed to him, and after a brief talk, their rumbling voices too
low for Jemma to distinguish, Hogan’s sleek truck purred into the
night— headed toward town.

Carley came in and plopped full length on the
bed. “He’s becoming a bit of a Romeo with you. Who would have
thought that Hogan could be so romantic? He’s headed into town.
Aaron is probably already at the Lucky Dollar, brooding about Mom
and Dad’s romance heating up and Savanna not taking his flirting
seriously. Mitch is gone, too. When you get right down to it,
they’re all boys. Disgusting male showoffs, seeing who can spit the
farthest.”

Carley’s frustration did not cover her love
for her family.

“And you love them,” Jemma murmured, because
she knew that Carley’s family was her life.

“Desperately. If I could have one wish, it
would be that somehow, all of us could find peace as a family.
Dysfunctional is a word I know well.”

Despite her own tumultuous emotions, Jemma
moved to sit by Carley. “You haven’t been down to that place— where
it happened, have you?”

“No. I thought about it, but there hasn’t
been time. I haven’t had a minute alone, and I need that, to think.
I know I have to put it past me, but I just can’t.”

“What we need is a break. We’ve been planting
gardens, fighting with Kodiak men, and generally kept like a harem
here in the house— doing ‘women’s work.’”

Carley lifted an eyebrow. “One of us wasn’t.
You certainly looked mashed when you turned up this morning.”

“I’ve been mashed before. I was married,
remember? But then it was all very scheduled and clinical, and
frankly not that much fun... Let’s track them down like dogs at the
Lucky Dollar. A girl’s night out, okay?”

Carley’s eyes lit up. “Do you really think it
will be okay? I’ve never been there before. It’s all dark and
seedy-looking.”

“The question is, do you want to go?” Jemma
ached for Carley, for the experiences she had feared to take, her
life overshadowed long ago by her attacker. Carley had never dated
or played, her nerves skittering when a man came too close.

*** ***

Aaron placed his beer mug down on the
tavern’s battered table. “I bought that old Simmons place, all five
thousand acres of it, next to Dad’s. It’s a good investment. I can
sell it for a profit, or— Holy—” he exclaimed, eyes widening as
Carley and Jemma walked in the door.

Jemma’s hair was piled on top of her head,
tendrils curling down around her face and down her nape. With her
hair held away from her face by combs, the citrine earrings
glittered daintily at her ears. She scanned the dark bar, the
three-piece band and a singer whose lusty voice caught the sensual
tempo easily in an aching slow song of love gone wrong. Jemma’s red
sweater and tight jeans and red boots said she’d come to play. She
eyed the cowboys lined up against the bar, and they were taking in
her long, tall, and hot look.

Carley was smaller, more rounded, compact,
dressed in a black sweater and neat slacks, her light blond hair
catching the dim neon light.

In an unfamiliar setting, she eased back
toward Mitch, who had come to wrap his arm around her protectively.
He bent to her ear, talking above the loud music, and gently took
her into his arms. Carley stood very still, her hands against his
chest, her face pale as she looked up at him. He moved slightly,
smiling tenderly down at her, and Carley looked away, but her body
swayed stiffly to his direction, a safe distance away.

Hogan slowly placed his mug on the table and
forgot about convincing Aaron that Dinah wouldn’t hurt Ben again,
their affection obvious and growing. Hogan looked at the woman who
had just this morning demanded as much as he— and now she was
obviously ready to romp and stomp with the local playboys. She
glanced at him, tossed her head, and looked away, but Hogan had
seen that dangerous, wary look.