Thea Devine (33 page)

She was getting crazy, she was dreaming of him at night and all the things they had done together. She remembered long hot kisses and a long, hot, other part of his anatomy. His legs. Wrapped around her. His hands … all over her … Everytime she created it she shivered with memory. She wanted it again.

She remembered telling Mother Colleran she was
going to marry him.

She hadn’t meant it; she had wanted to aggravate the old witch. And she had wanted it to be true.

What had held her back?

As she wandered aimlessly through another spring day, she couldn’t think of a single thing. Soon they would drive the cattle to market, unless Denver North had a loading dock and a connecting line ready by then, and Logan would be gone for the three weeks or so that it would take to get the cattle to Cheyenne and sell to the best buyer.

Three weeks lost to
her
. Why couldn’t she make an overture? It was as if they were strangers, and all because she could not quite make up her mind.

“I wish you had come sooner,” she had told him on that magical day after the burning of the ranch pasture. She wished he would come now.

He didn’t come, and this wanting and waiting were searing in their intensity.

Her nipples ached for his caress. She yearned for his hard maleness filling her. She needed the feel of his muscular body surrounding her. She needed his kisses.

She could be a wanton and seek him out, and only for that, but was that all she wanted?

No—she wanted all that he offered, and it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps she had nothing to offer in return.

She stared at the vacant lot, an inkling of an idea playing around the edges of her mind.

Was it that the person she thought she was did not exist any more? She had had newspaper bred in her bones by her father. She had been the lady editor, the newspaper lady, the woman who ran the newspaper business, and all of that was gone now.

Was it necessary for her to be that in order for her to be something else?

These became troubling questions to her, shunting aside for a moment her adamant desire.

If she could find the answer to that, she would know what to say to Logan.

She felt like all these important pieces of her life depended on each other, and that only she had to make these choices.

It didn’t have to be so, she thought. She could be everything she needed to be, and she could belong to Logan as well, and he to her. She just didn’t understand the thing in herself that would not let her give in to it.

She could have the paper again, she thought. It could just
be
, and she wouldn’t have to run it, she wouldn’t have to fight because there would be no Arch Warfield with his mythical contract trying to scare her into doing what he wanted. She could start fresh, with her own hand-picked people. There would be no A.J., but she would remember him every day of her life. And there would be a renewed sense of vigor in the startup of a new project, one that would not be shadowed by the presence of anyone she did not want in the press room.

There was so much. She felt it welling up inside her like a bubble, as if this were the answer she had sought and didn’t know where to find before now.

She had the money, she had the resources. She could do it, and if she could do it, she could give herself to Logan forever without a qualm.

The sooner she did it, the sooner she would be in his arms.

He was a man with a restless need and there was nothing that could satisfy it but the luscious body of the woman he loved in his arms.

Where was she? Out trying to figure out how to juggle some mystical freedom with the thought of living with him and being his wife.

It was laughable. Crazy. He knew she was going crazy for him the same way he was for her. It seemed insane that she would deny them both because she needed to find yet another answer to another unsolvable question.

The problems would take care of themselves, he had told her, and he firmly believed it. She could not.

But leaving her alone had not made her so hungry that she had come to seek him out.

If anything, she had stayed more firmly entrenched in town, and he wondered what the hell she was doing there.

What if there were someone else, another man holding her and kissing her, wanting her with almost as much volcanic passion as he did?

What if she felt that he had not kept his promise to pursue her until he overcame her every protest?

He had not done that. A man had to be a saint to put up with the fact that every objection he overruled yielded still another protest.

He felt at wits end. Desire and exasperation had mixed into something akin to a feeling of just letting it be, let it nurture itself until it rooted in something real and positive that they could make grow.

And how did he plant that seed? he wondered.

And then he thought,
maybe he had
.

It was a very easy thing to set into motion. Maggie got an architect and a plan, and before she knew it, she had engaged a construction crew to begin work a month hence.

She was filled with it. She was Maggie Colleran again, active, alive, in charge, and it was all hers. No one could take it away from her.

She couldn’t even analyze why she phrased it that way. All dangers and threats were past. She needed only to reconcile with Logan and she would be whole, complete.

It was now her move, and she willingly made it by driving out to the ranch this one last time. Logan was out in the pasture branding calves, and there were more men around the place than she had seen before

She felt suddenly out of place, a step out of time. The only times she had ever visited him here of her own volition were on the weekends when he had made arrangements that his men be elsewhere.

She hadn’t even thought about the fact there might be work in progress. She had thought only of herself and the news she had to tell him.

And now she had to wade through fifty or more roughshod cowboys to even see him. Somehow it didn’t seem fair.

Or did he see her? In the shimmering heat of the afternoon, he bent over a chute with a hand at the ready to grab the branding iron that was being stoked a few feet away from him. Sweaty with the fire and the heat of the day, he was totally beguiling to her. He was rapt in his work and his shirt clung to his arms and chest and back. She could see the moisture dripping from him, and each nuance of movement as he lifted his arm, grasped iron, and set it against the calf’s haunch.

The hiss and the stench disgusted her, and still she stayed, her eyes riveted upon him, his movements, his intensity. She had come for that and nothing would deny her.

No one commented on her presence until the first round of calves had shot through the chute. Then she heard a low, rough voice tell him, “Hey boss, you gotta visitor.”

He took off his hat and lifted his eyes, and he saw her immediately, beyond the ranch hands. With slow, deliberate
motions he gave instructions to his crew and then walked over to meet her.

What did he see, she wondered, but she knew how she had dressed for him: as elegantly and lightly as possible, in her thinnest dress with the minimum of undergarments, a minimum of everything, including words.

“Hello Logan.”

“Maggie.’

He took her arm and led her over to the shade of the porch where they could be both cool and private.

She hadn’t dreamed they would be so stiff with each other. His sky-blue eyes were guarded, and if he were happy to see her, she couldn’t tell. He couldn’t find words to say to her, nor could she find a way to begin.

Finally he said, “We’re branding today. It’ll be a while.”

“That’s all right,” she said tentatively. What if he told her to come back tomorrow?

“Do you want to stay?” he asked after a moment.

“I’d like that, yes.” She was hesitant. Did he
want
her to stay?

“You can go inside. It’s cooler. Mrs. Martinez has probably left by now …”

“It’s all right. I’ll be fine. Really.”

He turned away and she entered the house. It was very dark inside, very cool. Different from the last time she had been here. A different feeling—not warm. As if he didn’t want her anymore.

So here was a long afternoon at home, if she were with him, if she were not the Maggie Colleran that needed
activity
, and being in
charge
, if she were … his wife.

If she weren’t so intensely self-absorbed.

What would she do in this house all day?

She wandered through it looking for clues. In the kitchen, Mrs. Martinez had set out clay pots filled with dirt all set in a row in the sun-filled window. Outside,
Maggie could see a freshly hoed rectangle of dirt for her garden. Laundry flapped from a rope attached to the house. Fruits and vegetables ripened on a table in preparation for Mrs. Martinez’ cooking or preserving them.

Yes, these were things she could do. The beds would be changed, the mattresses aired. She would make quilts to cover them and stuff pillows to lay on. She would sweep and sew and knit socks in the winter, except she did not know how to knit socks or sew or make quilts.

She didn’t like to garden, and she didn’t know a thing about preserving vegetables, and she didn’t know how she thought this was going to work.

“But there’s always the housekeeper, Maggie,” his voice said behind her, and she jumped.

“I know that,” she said, but she hadn’t thought that he would consent to a housekeeper if indeed he were thinking of taking a wife.

“Problems take care of themselves.” he added, stamping into the room and covering the floor with pasture grit, oblivious to its cleanliness. “We have a nice indoor pump, built the house right around it, Maggie. I was thinking about things even then. Excuse me.” He pumped the water and dunked his head under it when it gushed out, and then reached for a towel to blot his wet face.

Then he stripped off his soaking shirt, and rubbed the towel all over his chest and arms briskly.

The sight of his naked chest mesmerized her. She swallowed convulsively as he leaned against the table, folded his arms across his chest, and leaned toward her with that particular bend of his that signaled he was really listening.

“Maggie?”

“I … um … I’m here,” she said tentatively.

“Finally,” he agreed, with just a trace of acid in
his tone.

It set her hackles up. “Oh, I see. It had to be your way or not at all, is that right?”

“No actually, it had to be a way that satisfied both of us, Maggie, but you weren’t around to help me find that way. You were in town finding your own way, and I assume, because you’re here, you have.”

“It was an idea,” she said stonily. “It doesn’t matter now.” Like ice water, his attitude was. He was like ice. Utterly indifferent to what she had gone through and how much she had needed him. All he cared about was that she had not been around for
him
. “Anyway, this is a waste of time, Logan.”

“Waste my time,” he said.

“I don’t think you’re really prepared to listen.”

“I see. You came here to get angry, to accuse me of doing all the things you’ve been doing so you can have an excuse to just walk away, right Maggie? You want back to town, you want no commitment, no sharing, because then you won’t ever have any control. Nothing, except, if it’s offered, all the sensuality you can handle. That’s not sharing, that’s self-gratification.”

She slapped him. “You bastard. And you’ve been thinking all these weeks that the things I feel most deeply about are just some sort of way to get out of giving you an answer to whatever questions you choose to ask, when
you
choose to ask them. Oh no, Logan, you’re not going to dismiss those feelings so easily, as if I don’t have a right to them and they’re not
real
.”

“That’s good, Maggie, let’s hear about how
real
they are, how many hours you spent soul searching, weighing your precious freedom against whatever you want from me, as long as it’s not something that will bind you to me with any permanence.”

“You stupid fool. Who needs to be vilified for this, permanently?”

“You do, or else why are you here?”

“I’m here—”

“No,” he broke in roughly, “You’re here for
this
,” and he reached for her and pulled her to him violently until she was hard against his naked chest and could hold her chin at precisely the angle where he could delve into her protesting mouth most deeply.

Only … for
this
, she thought, her mind swimming with sensation as he plundered her mouth in a way that seemed wholly new and different to her. One touch, one kiss … she hated him for waiting so long in a place where words were meaningless and only the cataclysmic touch of the senses held any weight.

She ran her hands over his chest and shoulders as she met every kiss with the abandon of someone long denied. Who had ever kissed a woman like this before? Only he. He was the only one. Together they had invented these kisses solely for their own delight.

No words, no words. There was only sense and sensation, the slide of material to bare soft shoulders, the caress of a hand that had never felt the thick sinewy muscles of a man’s forearm—ever. His soft soft touch removed every last garment she had worn. Her nakedness pressed into the rigidity of him, still clothed, still elusive. His mouth sought the kisses she had withheld from him all these weeks, never having enough, always seeking more of the nectar of her sweet mouth. And his hands, his hands sought the ways to enfold her, caress her, possess her, and when that was not enough, he lifted her into his arms and carried her to the table, the long rectanglar table, and laid her on it, sweeping away the ripening vegetables for the taste of her ripe body.

And now he could possess her everywhere, could feel the shock of her greedy fingers seeking him out, wanting to hold the thick thrust of his manhood in her hands and press her lips against the luscious tip of it. He braced
himself against the table and let her have her way, knowing hands playing all over every hard inch of him, her mouth taking its fill of him….