Sunset Embrace (42 page)

Lydia plucked at the fabric of her skirt. "When Mama realized I was going to have a baby, she cried for days and days. She got up from her bed and threatened to kill him for what he had done to me. He laughed and slapped her down. She cried more, blaming herself for what had happened. In a few weeks she died. She just went to sleep one night and never woke up." Unheeded tears traced crystal paths down her cheeks.

"I left the next morning and wandered for weeks, living off what I could find. A farm family was kind to me. They fed me and I stayed with them for a time, but then ... I had to move on. I walked until I fell down to have my baby. You know the rest."

Lydia fell silent, thinking that her dream for a better life had just come to an end. Ross would never want her now that he knew about her past.

She had left out the part about Clancey finding her the first time. She had told the kind farmer and his wife that her husband was dead and that she was trying to make it back to her folks' place before her baby was born. Clancey had come along behind her and told them she was a wayward wife. She had fled, but he caught up with her before she had covered a mile. She had fought him. During their struggle he had fallen and hit his temple on a rock. She had thought he was dead. What would Ross say if she told him this detestable stepbrother was still stalking her?

They sat in strained silence. Finally he shifted his weight and sighed deeply. "I was an outlaw; Lydia."

That was the last thing she had expected him to say. Her head came up and she looked at him, her expression having gone from desolation to awe. "An outlaw?" she repeated. It wasn't anything she didn't know. She had seen that poster. What she couldn't believe was his confessing
it
to her. Wasn't that a sign of trust?

"I rode with the James brothers. Held up trains. Shot people. Killed a few." His words were clipped, but she sensed the floodgate opening up inside him. He had kept this secret for years and now he wanted to talk about it.

"Tell me," she said softly.

"My mother was a whore," he said bluntly, and whipped his eyes toward her to test her reaction. He had visualized telling Victoria that, had imagined the horror he would see on her face, a paling of the skin, a tremor of the lips, a shuttering of her eyes. On Lydia's face he read none of that. She only looked back at him expectantly He wanted to brutalize her understanding, perhaps to test it. "Understand me. She was a fat, lazy, dirty whore." If anything, her features softened compassionately.

"Did you love her?"

The question brought him embarrassingly close to tears. He answered introspectively. "I wanted to. God, I wanted to. Maybe I did. When I was a little kid. I wanted her to love me, but ..." He shrugged in a defensive gesture and straightened his back. "I was an inconvenient accident and she never let me forget it."

"Your pa?"

"I never knew who he was." He laughed mirthlessly-"She didn't either. I don't even know my exact birthday. The madam of the house let me stay in a back room with the bartender, who would clout me every time I opened my mouth. Daisy, that was her name, she wouldn't let me call her ma, worked all night and slept during the day. Mostly I was on my own, roaming the streets of town, getting into mischief, stealing, breaking windows, anything I could get away with. And I was good at getting away with pranks. I became bored with them. So I got a job in the livery stable. That's where I learned horses. When I was about fourteen, Daisy died."

"How?"

"She woke up one morning with a bellyache. It didn't get better. The old doc said she had stomach fever and there was nothing he could do. She was dead by the next afternoon."

"The madam booted me out. By this time I'd gotten hored with working at the livery too. I figured, no matter what I did, in the eyes of everybody in town I was always going to be Daisy the whore's son. What was the use of trying to better myself?
By
then I had spent hours in the gambling hall of the whorehouse, learning to drink, cuss, play poker. I learned a lot about taking care of myself."

"I stole a horse from the man I had worked for and lit out on my own. I went all over, raising hell for the most part. The first man I killed had accused me of cheating at poker. He drew on me when I called him a goddamn liar. I drew faster."

"Were you cheating?"

He smiled sadly. "Ofcourse. I think it was a five-dollar stake. I killed a man over five lousy dollars." He looked at her solemnly for a moment before continuing. "I was about twenty when the war broke out. I joined a guerrilla band. It was like a party. I could steal and kill, and I had the sanction of the Confederate Army. For all that, I was a good soldier. Men who don't care whether they die or not take daring chances and usually live. It's the noble men who die," he said reflectively.

"But the war came to an end and there was nothing for a gunman to do except go on doing that until someone beats him at it. One night in a saloon I drew on a man who eventually backed down. Cole Younger was there, saw how I had handled my gun, and invited me out to meet Jesse and Frank. That's when I started riding with them."

She didn't know about these men he named, but she assumed they were notorious outlaws. "I was with them for about two years. Then we hit a bank that was supposed to be easy pickings. An overzealous deputy got himself killed in the gunfight. I had gone back to pick up one of the Youngers whose horse had been shot out from under him. Someone, the sheriff I think, shot me up bad. I was the only one seriously wounded. They had to leave me in the woods in order to outride the posse after us."

"They left you?"

"They had to." He shrugged. "If it had been one of them, I'd have ridden off too."

"But you could have died!"

He laughed at her naïveté. "That was the general idea. I was supposed to. Lydia, my real name is Sonny Clark. Sonny Clark died that afternoon somewhere in the hills of Tennessee."

Comprehension dawned on her face. "That's when John Sachs found you."

"I don't remember it. I woke up days later in his cabin. Somehow, God knows how, with all those potions he forced me to drink and the rank-smelling poultices he put on my wounds, somehow I lived and in a few months was moving around again. That scar on my chest?" She nodded. "A bullet went straight through. How it missed my heart and lungs I'll never know."

Her mind was working, piecing together the rest. "You changed your name."

"Sachs suggested it. While I was unconscious he had cut my hair to treat a scalp wound." Lydia trembled at the thought of him bleeding. Before either of them noticed the motion, she was sitting between his knees, her hands on his thighs. "My moustache and beard grew. I shaved the beard, but the moustache made me look older, different. I worked on his place for almost a year, spent the winter there. When I left it, I wasn't the same man."

His hands were in her hair now, idly sifting. Her cheek was resting on his thigh. "I changed on the inside too. I wanted to live and make my life count for something. I guess I have Sachs to thank for that. He was the first human being who'd ever given a tinkers damn about me in my whole goddamn life. I felt I owed him something for having gone to the trouble of saving me."

"The only thing I knew, besides killing, was horses. Sachs suggested looking for work around the Gentry stables. I put the past behind me, Lydia. But underneath the new name and face I'm still Sonny Clark, a killer, still an outlaw, probably still wanted in some states."

He was, but she wasn't going to tell him that. She lifted her head and looked up at him. "You
are
changed and you're not Sonny Clark. You said yourself that he died years ago." She touched his moustache. "You're Ross Coleman."

His eyes took on a rare tenderness. Ross wouldn't have recognized himself. "I'm sorry about what I said earlier. Having been what I was and coming from where I did, who am I to judge you?" His fingers tangled in her hair. "God, Lydia, what hell you must have lived through."

She encircled his waist with her arms and laid her head on his chest. "Until I met you. You've made me feel like a proper lady. But . . . but yesterday, when you looked at me like—"

He whispered apologies into her hair. "I was wrong. I was crazy with jealousy, Lydia."

"Jealousy? Because you thought I had sneaked away to meet Winston? He was my friend. That's all. And those others you named, I've never—"

"I know you haven't done anything intentional. I wasn't being straight in my mind. But, dammit, I went livid when all those men were standing there ogling your breasts."

"I don't want another man, Ross. I didn't think I would over want one." Her hands came up and she ran her fingers through his thick hair. "But you kissed me and touched me ..." Her voice dwindled to nothingness as she ducked her head shyly. "And now I love what you do to me."

He spoke one of those profanities that in context wasn't profane at all. Tilting her face back up, his thumb glided lightly over her lips. "I love what we do together."

He kissed her ravenously but tenderly, his tongue probing the cushiony recess of her mouth. His hand slid from her shoulder to her breast and covered it. At her soft moan, he pulled away instantly.

"I know you were frightened and hurt yesterday. God, when I think of what almost happened—" He squeezed his eyes shut and gnashed his teeth, which shone straight and white beneath the moustache. "We don't have to do anything now. I'll understand."

Lydia stood up and offered him her back, lifting her hair off her neck. "Would you help me with these buttons, please?"

Ross's whole chest swelled with an emotion unnamed, but more potent than any he had felt in his life. He sat on the edge of the stool. Lydia was standing between his outstretched legs. At first his fingers were clumsy as he began to unbutton the row of buttons on her shirtwaist.

When they were undone, he unfastened the waistband of her skirt, untied the bands of her petticoat, and pulled them down her legs. Reaching under her chemise, he undid the waist of her bloomers. When he lowered them to her ankles, she gracefully stepped out of the garments and pushed them out of the way with her foot.

There was something incredibly arousing about her wearing only her blouse and chemise now. When she shrugged out of the blouse and began to unbutton her chemise, he reached around her and caught her hands with his.

"Let me."

With only his sense of touch to guide him, he felt for each button and slowly released it. His hands fumbled between her breasts, taking lengthy intermissions to caress her through the sheer cotton. They moved past her waist to unbutton all the buttons on the chemise.

Gently, with no objection from her, he peeled the chemise down her shoulders and arms until the material was encircling her hips like a cloud. Her back was a flawless expanse of warm, glowing skin. From her shoulders to her hips, her spine tunneled a shallow groove. He placed hit fingertip in it and drew it down, past the small of her back to the very base.

Alluring twin dimples were on both sides of her spine at the first gradual swell of her hips. He kissed them in turn, then nibbled his way up her delicately ridged backbone to her shoulder blades.

Lydia shivered with delight when she felt the wet warmth of his tongue dragging down the center of her back. At her waist, he planted his mouth firmly on her skin and kissed her ardently, his hands coming around to find her breasts and knead them lovingly. His tongue caressed as his mouth applied a sweet sucking pressure to the erogenous spot.

"Turn around," he commanded softly.

As he knew they would be, her nipples were large and dark at his fingers urging. Placing his hands over the cheeks of her buttocks, he brought her closer and kissed the taut coral peaks. He nudged her breasts with his nose, affectionately butting his head against them.

The softly glowing lantern cast flickering light on her, making shadows dance across the golden, fragrant skin. He wanted to devour it. Instead, he curbed the cannibal instinct and curved his hands under her breasts, his thumbs meeting in the valley between her ribs.

Leaning forward, he let his lips skim her stomach lightly. Then his tongue etched a pattern of erotic sensations down her midriff. His thumbs continued to caress the undersides of her breasts, frequently venturing high enough to sweep across her nipples that were flushed and aching to be appeased. His mouth reached her navel. He circled the dainty rim with the pointed tip of his tongue. Then, with a gentle probing, he deflowered it.

Her hands dug through his hair to close around his head. She had never known such levels of pleasure could exist. Was what they were doing wicked? Was it something everyone else knew, but that she was just now learning?

Ross's body was in chaos. Blood pumped erratically yet irrevocably to his loins. He could feel her hands moving in his hair, smell the scent of her skin, taste her loveliness. He was drowning in her, but it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. He wanted more. Everything.

He pulled back and in the dim light saw the wedge of flesh revealed between the opening of the chemise where it still rested on her hips. Below her navel it was shadowy, but he could see the curling nest of tawny hair barely catching the light.

His pulse pounded, his rampant sex tested the buttons oh his pants. He wavered, wondering if he dared. Then he leaned forward again and put his lips between the edges of fabric. She didn't move. He rubbed his moustache lightly, so lightly, against her belly, then down, down, until it teased the top edge of that sweet triangle. His lips opened His breath fanned the soft hair.

She reacted with a sudden jolt of her entire body. Her breath was sucked in sharply, and she gasped loudly in the stillness, her hands automatically clenched in his hair. He was instantly ashamed of the advantage he had taken and pulled back quickly. Clumsily he stood up, almost banging his head against the canvas. Quite naturally she shimmied out of her chemise and stood before him wearing only shoes and stockings.

She still didn't realize how seductive she was and her inadvertent naivete temporarily restored his sanity. "Take off your shoes, but leave your stockings on."