Texas! Chase #2 (18 page)

"Too bad."

"Damn right it's too bad. Because you've got a wonderful woman who is—for reasons I can't comprehend—in love with you. But you're too damn blind to see it. Or too plain stupid. Or self-pitying. I'm not real sure what your problem is."

"You're mad because I didn't make a big deal over your kid."

"And wasn't that small of you!"

"Why haven't you told me?" Chase shouted.

"Why keep it a secret? Building anticipation?"

"No, trying to protect you."

"From what?"

"From the hurt that's tearing your guts out right now."

Chase assumed a combative stance. His breathing was labored, but not from the exertion of splitting firewood. He didn't strike his brother as he appeared ready to do. Instead, he turned his back on him and headed toward the house.

Lucky charged after him, grabbed him by the sleeve, and slung him against the tool-shed beside the woodpile. He made a bar of his forearm across Chase's throat.

"I didn't tell you about my baby before now because I knew it was going to hurt you, Chase. I hate that. I hate it like hell. But that's the way the cards fell and there's not a damn thing I or you or anybody else can do about it.

"I didn't ask for my child to be the first

Tyler grandbaby. I wish it had been yours, as it should have been. But is that supposed to make me less delighted about my own baby?

It can't. I'm sorry. I'm thrilled. I'm bursting with happiness over this kid. I can't wait till it gets here.

"However," he enunciated, thrusting his face closer to his brother's, "that doesn't mean that Devon and I don't still grieve for yours that died with Tanya. We all do. We always will. But life goes on, Chase. At least for most of us it does.

"If you want to live the rest of your life from inside a grave, then do it. I think you're stupid, I think you're sick, but if your misery makes you happy, then by all means be miserable.

Just don't expect the rest of us to crawl into that grave with you and pull the dirt over our heads. We're all damned sick and tired of catering to you."

With an abrupt little shove he let go of

Chase and turned away. He had taken only a few steps when a heavy hand clamped down on his shoulder. Reflexively, he spun around, expecting a blow.

Instead, Chase extended him his right hand.

Lucky saw the tears, which made Chase's gray eyes shimmery. His ordinarily firm lips were unsteady.

"Congratulations, little brother. I'm happy for you."

They shook hands. Then they embraced.

Then they walked back to the house together.

"You didn't have an inkling?"

"About what?"

"That Devon was pregnant."

No.

"I thought Lucky might have told you."

'No."

Chase's mumbled replies were grating on

Marcie's nerves. Her nerves were already raw.

They always were after one of their Sunday dinners with her in-laws.

Not that she was shunned or made to feel unwelcome. The Tylers had graciously incor porated her into the family. Even Lucky, who had expressed the strongest reservations against her marriage to Chase, now teased and joked with her as if she'd been a member of the family for years.

Along with Laurie and Devon, he included her in their warm camaraderie.

Chase's family wasn't at fault. Chase himself was the one who made her edgy and nervous.

He was never verbally abusive. The one and only time that had happened was last Friday night in The Place. He had apologized later for it, and she had accepted his apology, knowing how worried he was about the future of Tyler Drilling and attributing his outrageous behavior to that.

No, she didn't have a quarrel with his deportment.

While they were with his family, he was courteous to her. He didn't criticize her. He didn't embarrass her. He didn't ignore her by treating her as though she were invisible as she had heard wives complaining that their husbands did when they were in public.

In their case, quite the opposite was true.

"You hadn't guessed?"

She jumped, startled by his abrupt question.

"What?"

He was driving her car, with his left wrist crooked over the steering wheel. His right hand was resting on his thigh, within easy reach of the gearshift… or her knee, which he'd found several occasions to cover and caress during the course of the afternoon.

"Women seem to have a sixth sense about

that stuff," he said, referring to Devon's pregnancy.

"I thought maybe you had suspected."

"No. Although I guess I should have read the signs. I remember somebody teasing her at our wedding dinner about eating two desserts."

"I just thought she was putting on a few extra pounds."

Marcie smiled. "I'm sure she is." Chase didn't smile. "She's already six months. I can't believe she hid it so well for so long. Of course, she's tall. And clothing can camouflage a lot.

But my goodness, the baby will be here before we know it."

"Hmm."

"And when it gets here, are you going to continue acting like a jerk about it?" Chase's head came around. He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and closed his mouth with an angry little click. "When you stamped out of the house like that, Chase, it broke your mother's heart."

"My heart's been broken too."

"Oh, yes, we all know that. You wear it so well on your sleeve for all the world to see.

Well, we've all seen it, and frankly, it's getting old."

"I apologized to Lucky, didn't I? I told him

I was happy for him."

"I know, I know. I even saw you giving

Devon an obligatory hug. That's the very least you could have done."

"If I had gushed and simpered, it would have been hypocritical."

" 'Hypocritical'? What an odd word for you to use."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He stopped the car in their driveway. Marcie alighted and headed for the door. She was already inside shrugging off her coat when he caught up with her.

"What's that supposed to mean?" he repeated angrily, tossing his coat in the general direction of the coat tree and missing it by a mile.

Something inside Marcie snapped. For over a month she had been pampering him, humoring his dour disposition and overlooking his provocations, which she knew were deliberate.

The harder she tried to make life pleasant, the harder he worked at being a jackass.

Well, she had had it with him. Good wife be damned. It was time he got as good as he gave.

Her red hair was bristling. As she closed in on him her eyes narrowed. "What it means, Chase Tyler, is that you are a hypocrite every single Sunday we go out there. It means that your congratulations to them were no more genuine than your phony displays of affection for me."

He shook his head stubbornly. "That's not true. I'm very happy for my bro— Wait a minute. What phony displays of affection for you?"

"Come on, Chase," she cried. "You don't want me to spell it out."

"Like hell I don't. What are you talking about?"

She drew back her shoulders and glared up at him. There was heat radiating out of her cheeks. Every muscle in her body was pulled taut.

"I'm talking about the knee massages. I sit on the sofa, you sit on the sofa. I cross my legs, you cover my knee with your hand. I

stand up, you place your arm across my shoulders.

I shiver, you offer me your jacket. I look up at you, you touch my hair. I laugh. You laugh."

His jaw was working, the muscles in his face knotting. Marcie knew she was pushing, but she couldn't stop. For a month she had been living with a chameleon. For several hours each Sunday she had endured his sweet, husbandly caresses that she knew meant nothing.

She would return home feverish and aroused to the point of agony. And there was never any relief.

Because once they were away from his family, he reverted to being broody and remote.

"I'm only trying to be nice," he said defensively.

"But if you don't like it, I'll dispense with these courtesies." He turned away and went to the fireplace in the living room, where he began stoking up the fire. All his motions were angry, jerky.

Marcie wasn't finished with him. She joined him at the hearth, catching his arm as he laid aside the poker. "Your family is carefully gauging us, watching to see how we relate to each other. Thanks to your Academy Award performance every Sunday, I'm sure they're convinced that everything is hunky-dory. Little do they know that we're celibates.

"Oh, no, because they're bound to have intercepted some of those smoldering looks you send my way when you know they're watching.

I'm sure they saw you twining that strand of my hair around your fingertip while you talked NBA basketball with Lucky. How could they miss it when you nudged my breast with your elbow as you reached for your coffee cup?"

"Don't pretend now that you didn't like it,

Marcie," he said in a low, vibrating voice.

"Because even through my sleeve I felt your nipple get hard. I heard that little catch in your throat." He used her momentary speechlessness to launch his own attack. "While we're on the subject, I don't like your foreplay any—"

"Foreplay?"

"Foreplay. What else would you call it when you lay your hand on the inside of my thigh and rub it up and down? Oh, you're careful to make it look wifely and casual, but you know it's there and I know it's there and we both know what's going on about four inches up from there.

"And if you don't like having me place my arm across your shoulders, you shouldn't snuggle up against me. If you don't like my offering you my jacket, don't make sure I notice through your blouse that you're chilled. While

I've got my hand on your knee, you've got

your foot moving against my calf. Now if that's not an invitation, I don't know what is."

The building flames in the grate were reflected in his eyes, flashes of passion and anger that fed each other. "I didn't see you pulling your head back when I was fiddling with your hair. Oh, no. Instead, you nuzzled the palm of my hand. I felt your tongue. It left a damp spot.

"You laughed because I dripped coffee into my lap. And I dripped coffee into my lap because you jostled my elbow with your breast.

And I laughed back because you blotted up the drips with your napkin, and then it was either laugh or moan. Now which would you rather I do in my mother's dining room while you're mashing your hand against my crotch, laugh or moan?

"So don't preach to me about how to conduct myself. I'll be more than glad to put a stop to this sexual charade if you will. Because if this playacting we do every Sunday makes you crazy, you can imagine what it does to me!"

After his shouting, the quiet in the room was sudden and intense. Marcie took a step nearer to him and in a sultry voice asked,

"What does it do to you, Chase?"

He reached for her hand, yanked it forward, and pressed it open against his distended fly.

"That."

Her fingers closed around his steely erection.

"Why do you stop with the foreplay,

Chase? Why don't you do something with

this?" With each slow, milking motion of her hand his breath grew louder, harsher. "Are you afraid you won't like it? Or are you afraid you will?"

She released him and raised both hands to his head, sinking her fingers into his hair and cupping his scalp. "Kiss me. Kiss me right."

Stretching up so that her lips were just beneath his, she added in a seductive whisper,

"I dare you."

The sound that issued from his throat was feral. The manner in which his lips swooped down on hers was savage. So brutal was his kiss that at first her lips were benumbed by it. Gradually, however, she was able to separate them. Then she felt the swift and sure thrust of his tongue. Madly, rampantly, rapaciously, it swept her mouth.

Like her, he buried his fingers in her abundance of hair and held her head in place for the plundering mastery of his kiss. He drew on her like a man starved, as though he wanted to suck her entire mouth into his. He pulled away to catch his breath. Even then, his tongue was flicking over her lips, tasting her.

Unappeased, he came back for more. And more.

And more.

Marcie reveled in the carnality of his kiss.

She loved the texture of his tongue, the taste of his saliva, the firmness of his lips, the rasp of his beard against her chin and cheeks. Her senses wallowed in the pleasure of smelling his skin and feeling his hair—Chase's skin,

Chase's hair. Chase's hardness gouging her middle.

As one, they dropped to their knees on the plush rug in front of the hearth. Their mouths went on feeding frenzies over each other's face, indiscriminately moving their lips over cheeks, chins, eyelids.

When their mouths fused again, he sent his tongue deep, penetrating her mouth and saturating her with desire. His hands smoothed over her back, moved to her sides, rubbed the crescents of her breasts with the heels of them. Then, exercising no subtlety, he covered her derriere and pulled her against him.

Marcie didn't even consider being coy. She allowed him to push suggestively against her cleft. She even gloried in the obvious strength of his desire and ground her middle against it.

Groaning, he wrapped his arms around her so tightly she could no longer move and whispered fiercely,

"Stop or it'll be all over."

"Not yet. Not yet."

She put enough space between them to peel his sweater over his head. Next she attacked the buttons of his shirt. When it had been cast aside, her fingertips roved over him in an orgy of discovery, like a blind person who was seeing for the first time.

With a hungry whimper she leaned into his chest and pressed her open mouth upon it. He cupped her head, but allowed it to move freely from spot to spot. Her lips found his nipple in a spiral of dark, crinkly hair. Shyly at first,

then more aggressively, she caressed it with her tongue.

Swearing in whispered agony, he set her away from him. "Take off your clothes."

"You take them off," she challenged huskily.