Trilby (26 page)

“Oh, Trilby,” he whispered reverently.

She reached up and took his face in her cold, nervous hands. She drew it gently toward her.

“My darling,” he said under his breath, sliding his warm hands around her body to cradle her. “My darling.”

Surely that was more than just passion in his deep voice! She yielded to the warm, moist touch of his lips as they explored her soft breasts, making the tips go hard and sensitive.

He picked her up, with his mouth completely covering one soft breast, and walked quickly down the hall into their bedroom, pausing just long enough to lock the door.

He carried her in the darkness to the bed and began to remove her clothing, but her hand stayed him.

“Do you not want me?” he asked unsteadily, pausing.

“Light the lamp,” she whispered. “I…want to watch you take me.”

He groaned, fumbling for matches and almost up-ending the lamp in his haste to get it lit. He turned to her, shaking with passion, devouring her body with his eyes.

“Have I shocked you?” she whispered, propped on her elbows. “Am I—am I too forward?”

“No, you are not,” he said huskily.

He went to her, his mouth ardent as it found her lips and roughly caressed it. “Seduce me,” he breathed boldly against her ear as his hands went to the rest of the fastenings that secured her dress. “I will never taunt you with it, Trilby. Be as forward as you like. It delights me.”

She moaned and gave way to her most outrageous impulses then, drowning in his masculinity and her own femininity. She touched him, whispered to him, adored him as she’d only ever dreamed of doing. He permitted her touch, encouraged it, his voice breaking as he told her what to do.

When he moved over her, she was so desperate for him that her voice sobbed with every deep motion of his body as she clung to him and arched her hips to his in welcome.

But he refused to be rushed. Each movement was calculated, deliberate, each kiss tender and soft and adoring. It was like no other time between them. His voice broke as he whispered to her that this possession
was the deepest, most profound he’d ever shared with her. Even as the words embarrassed, they excited. He whispered that as deep as he was within her, he wanted an even closer melding….

She cried out, because the words and the slow movement of his hips combined to produce a terrifying pinnacle of pleasure. She sobbed against his hard, warm mouth and wondered if she could survive the hot oblivion that actually cost her her consciousness for a few shuddering seconds.

When her eyes opened, Thorn’s strained face was there. He had watched her all the way through it, gloried in her pleasure.

“You saw it…?” she whispered breathlessly.

“Yes. And now you will, Trilby,” he whispered back, his jaw clenching as he began to move. “Watch. I’ll let you… Watch, Trilby. Watch…watch…watch me!”

He cried out, and she did watch, fascinated, as his neck muscles went taut and his head went back, his mouth opening in a hoarse shout of ecstasy. His body shuddered so violently that she caught her breath. And then he relaxed and his weight was heavy on her body, shivering in the aftermath.

“Oh…my,” she said unsteadily, cradling him.

“In the light,” he murmured in exhaustion. “And your eyes on me, and mine on you. I never dreamed of it.”

“Nor I.” She held him possessively, protesting sharply when he sought to move. “Oh, no, please!” she whispered urgently.

He lifted his head and looked into her misty eyes. “It is not possible….”

“I know,” she said softly, searching his face. “I only want to feel you…like this.”

He smiled with such tenderness that her heart ached; then his hands touched her face as he began to kiss it with soft wonder.

“It was me that you wanted, wasn’t it?” she asked slowly.

“I could ask you the same question,” he replied, lifting his head to look at her with solemnity. “Do you lie in my arms and think of the man you lost?”

“It would not be possible,” she said after a minute. “Not when we lie together like this, in such intimacy.”

He felt some of the tension go out of him. Under his body, hers was warm and soft, like silk. He traced her swollen mouth with a faintly unsteady hand. “With my seed deep inside you,” he breathed reverently, watching her color.

“Yes,” she replied, despite her shyness.

He bent and his mouth opened hers, probing delicately inside it. Within her, he stirred and began to swell. She made a sound, halfway between a whimper and a gasp.

“I am capable again,” he whispered into her open mouth. “Are you?”

“Yes…yes! Thorn…please!”

He lifted and, as he moved down, he looked into her eyes. He thought, as the pleasure began to build all over again, that he saw eternity there….

L
IFE WAS VERY
good for the next few days. Thorn could barely keep himself away from Trilby, who was radiant and happy in ways that everyone noticed.

The only thing that marred their happiness was a note from Sissy, begging for any news that came of Naki. McCollum, it seemed, had been persuaded to
tell her about Naki’s disappearance and possible death. Sissy was upset and obviously terribly depressed. Trilby had wanted to write back and tell her the truth. But Thorn had convinced her that it wasn’t Naki’s wish. He didn’t want Sissy to know. So she wrote her friend and pleaded with her not to give up hope. Even as she wrote it, she could feel the girl’s terror and pain. It was the only blight on her own radiant happiness with her husband. Until the next morning, when that joy turned to anguish.

“I’
VE NEVER SEEN
my girl look so radiant,” Jack Lang remarked on one of his rare visits to the ranch the next day. He and Thorn were checking brands to make sure that none of Blackwater Springs’s cattle had ventured onto Los Santos property. It was roundup and tempers were usually fraught—especially Thorn’s. But this morning, he was even more testy and irritable than usual. He hardly spoke, and his eyes were as disturbed as his expression.

“Haven’t you?” Thorn murmured in reply to Jack’s remark, and felt cold inside. Trilby did look radiant, but only he knew what the reason might be, and it made him cold all over.

“Is there a particular reason for that radiance I saw in her face when we left the ranch this morning?” the older man probed gently.

Thorn’s jaw clenched. “If you mean, is she pregnant,” he said shortly, “that isn’t why she was smiling.”

“I would hardly have been so blunt,” Jack said stiffly. “I hope that she is as content as she seems. You got off to a rocky start. Trilby had to change some old attitudes, you know. She was raised in a very genteel environ
ment. It was difficult for her to adjust to life out here.” He swept his hand across the vista before them.

“I think she manages very well,” Thorn said. He didn’t mention that something that had happened this very morning had terrified him. Their intimacy had been complete and almost painfully sweet. Thorn had never known such happiness. But even as he savored his wife and the joy she brought him, he had begun to brood over the past and the way he’d seduced her into marriage. He would never know if her reasons for marrying him, and staying with him, had any basis except for propriety’s sake.

She was wild in his arms, wanton and abandoned, but she never spoke of love. Neither did he, despite the effort it cost him. He didn’t dare let her know how much he loved her, for fear of giving her the ultimate weapon to use against him if things ever went bad between them again.

Now it seemed he had cause for his lack of trust. Bates had written to her. He’d seen the letter only this morning, where she must have left it lying on the hall table.

Richard Bates wrote of the great change in his mode of living. He was no longer traveling around Europe. In fact, he’d taken a job in the local bank. He groaned inwardly as he remembered what else the man had written, words that threatened to destroy his very soul.

“You’re very quiet today,” Jack remarked.

“He wrote to her. Bates, that is. He has taken a job in a bank.”

“Dick? My God, a miracle.”

Thorn looked at Jack Lang levelly. “Trilby loved him once. Does she still, do you think?”

Jack’s face went ruddy. “What a hell of a question!”

“I have to know!” Thorn said roughly.

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“Because she won’t talk to me,” he said heavily. “Not about that, at least. She won’t speak of him.”

“She was infatuated with him,” Jack said after a minute. “I’m not sure it was ever more than that, really. Puppy love, don’t you see?”

“I think that perhaps he didn’t know how he felt about her until she married me,” Thorn said. “If he discovered that he had feelings for her, perhaps he has changed his way of life in an attempt to make her see him as a better person.”

“But Trilby’s happy with you.”

“She could be making the most of her situation,” Thorn said stubbornly. He even thought privately that her ardor was almost exclusively a result of her desire for a child. She might think that a child would keep her content as she made a life for herself without the man she really loved.

“She must love you.”

“Must she? Why?” Thorn asked, glancing at Jack. “I have considered offering her a divorce,” he said, shocking his father-in-law speechless.

“A divorce? Why?”

“If she would be happier with Bates, how can I force her to stay with me?” he asked bitterly, hating the memory of seeing it, hating the words he’d read. Trilby had left it on the hall table, and he’d found it and read it. Afterward, he’d replaced it so that she wouldn’t know, and he’d left the house without a word to her.

“What was in that letter, Thorn?” Jack asked worriedly.

Thorn smoothed his palms over the saddle horn and stared into space with an aching heart. “He said that he had a good job and excellent prospects. That he realized only too late how much he loved her. He wants her to leave me and marry him. He says that she will be much happier in her own environment, where she won’t have to suffer deprivation with a…savage like me.”

“S
URELY YOU’RE MISTAKEN
…?”
Jack began.

“I’m not. I read the letter twice. She didn’t tell me about it,” he added. That was what had hurt most. “She didn’t mention it at all.”

“But she would hardly have left it in plain view if she had minded your seeing it,” Jack protested.

“Wouldn’t she? Perhaps she thought it was the kindest way to tell me that she wanted to leave.”

That was possible. Jack was lost for words. Thorn was quite obviously crushed, despite the brave face he was putting on. He felt sorry for the man, for the first time in memory.

“I could speak to her,” Jack offered.

“To what purpose? To tell her that divorce is unthinkable? I don’t want a woman who endures me and romances over another man,” he said stiffly. “I must let her go.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Then say nothing, least of all to Trilby. We must work this out ourselves,” he said quietly. “I’ll do whatever she wants. Her happiness is my only concern.”

Jack stared at him. “I thought you didn’t love her.”

Thorn laughed hardly. “I would die for her,” he said huskily.

The older man sighed softly. “I’m sorry.”

“Yes. So am I.” Thorn wheeled his horse. “We haven’t much time,” he added, glancing at the darkening sky. “We’d better hurry the men along.”

Thorn tormented himself with painful thoughts all day. When he got home that evening, it was dark and the house was quiet. He tiptoed in to say good night to Samantha, but she was sound asleep. He stood looking down at her. His child. It seemed so long ago that Sally had presented him with a tiny red infant. He’d adored her, but Sally’s attitude had prevented much contact with the child. Distance had separated them until Trilby had come here to live. Now, Samantha was no longer withdrawn and shy. She laughed and played like a happy child, and her pleasure in her father’s company was very evident.

“She’s asleep,” Trilby said from the door.

He stiffened. “Yes, I know.”

“Are you hungry? There’s some soup that I’ve just reheated, and I made some bread to go with it.”

“I am rather empty. Thank you,” he said. But he didn’t look at her. He took off his hat and tossed it onto the rack near the door, the spurs on his booted feet making sharp little jingling noises as he walked down the hall behind her toward the dining room.

Trilby felt his stiffness, his formality. It puzzled her. Then she remembered quite suddenly the letter she’d found lying on the hall table. Samantha had taken it from her dresser to ask if she could have the stamp for her collection—and then had forgotten it when she found Trilby taking a plate of cookies out of the oven.

By the time Samantha remembered again, and Trilby retrieved it, Thorn had long since left the house. She’d
worried that he might have accidentally seen it. Now she was certain that her worst fears were confirmed.

She looked across the table at him, her hands clenched on the back of the ladder-back, cane-bottomed chair. “Thorn, you saw the letter, did you not?” she asked hesitantly.

He lifted an eyebrow, but not one muscle in his face moved. “Surely you meant for me to see it?” he asked. “Write to Bates if you like,” he added, pulling out a chair and dropping into it. “It makes no difference to me…when your body responds so hungrily to mine in bed.” He looked straight into her shocked eyes, his own darkly mocking as the raging pain and hurt inside him found utterance. “I do want your body, Trilby, and perhaps a son,” he added, to complete the deception. “As long as I have you, Bates is welcome to your heart.”

She went paper white. If it hadn’t been for her grip on the chair, she might have fallen. “What?” she asked thinly.

“You heard me.” He shook out the linen napkin and put it in his lap, then helped himself to a ladle of soup from the china bowl Trilby had set at his place. “Is there some butter for this bread?” he asked carelessly.

Trilby fetched it from the icebox, her hands shaking as she placed it on the table and removed the cloth that covered it. She almost dropped the butter knife before she managed to get it beside the dish.

“Thank you,” he said. “Aren’t you eating?”

“I had mine with Samantha. If you don’t mind, could you leave the dishes in the sink when you’re through? I’ll deal with them in the morning.”

He looked at her with veiled anger. “Will you still welcome me tonight, Trilby? Or is your head stuffed
with romantic daydreams of Bates? I promise you, if you’re asleep when I come to you, I won’t have any qualms about waking you. He may want to marry you now, but you’re my wife until I decide to send you away.”

She stared at him as if he were a stranger. “You opened it,” she exclaimed. She put a hand to her throat. “You read my letter.”

“Yes, I read it,” he said furiously. “Is that why you’ve been so generous in my arms, Trilby? Are you trying to sweeten me up so that I’ll agree to a divorce?” He felt his temper slipping its bonds, and he couldn’t stop it. “Damn you, how many other letters have there been before this one?”

“None,” she said hurriedly. “None, Thorn, I swear!”

He got up, overturning the chair as he went around the table and took hold of her, his eyes blazing, his body taut and shivering with an excess of emotion. “By God, Trilby, you won’t think of him tonight. I swear you won’t!”

His mouth went down to cover hers, devouring it. He lifted her roughly from the floor and carried her down the hall, his lips clinging to hers, demanding, insistent with desperate passion.

Trilby tried to protest, but his strength was frightening. He carried her into their bedroom, locked the door, and threw her onto the bed.

“Bates thinks I’m a savage,” he said, standing over her with a face like carved stone. “You’ve never thought of me any other way. Perhaps it’s time I lived down to your low image of me.”

And even as he finished speaking, he knelt over her, his hands determined, his eyes blazing with passion.
Trilby’s last thought was that he acted much more like a hurt and jealous lover than a man making the most of a second marriage.

F
IRST LIGHT CAME
in through the lacy curtains, and Trilby opened her eyes with a grimace. There wasn’t one tiny spot on her body that hadn’t felt Thorn’s hands and lips. Their passion had always been sweet and satisfying, but this morning she felt positively ravished, and she blushed remembering some of the things he’d done to her.

He might have meant to be brutal, but it hadn’t been that way at all. He’d been totally abandoned when his powerful body had overwhelmed her.

The shameful thing was that she’d experienced the most powerful surge of pleasure he’d ever given her in the process. His anguish—and her need to appease it—had created a tension that had built to the point of madness before his violently thrusting body had exacted ecstasy for both of them. She remembered sobbing brokenly as she went over the edge, her entire body blazing with heat as completion made her mindless with the sweetest kind of anguish.

It had been that way for him, too. She knew it had. But once hadn’t satisfied him. He’d taken her again and again, his passion endless, tireless, his voice breaking as he felt the world explode under them time and time again through the long night. Only when exhaustion made it impossible to go on any longer did he roll away from her, finally, to sleep. Trilby had drifted off immediately, her nude body on top of the covers shamelessly as she slept. She looked around the room, but Thorn was nowhere to be seen. One of the wardrobes was standing just a little ajar. And as she sat up, she noticed writing
on a pad on the table. She stared at it, wondering uneasily what she was going to find there.

S
HE COULDN’T KNOW
that Thorn had cursed himself the minute he awoke that morning, long before she did, and kept cursing himself as he dressed. His eyes swept over Trilby’s prone body and he saw the marks his fingers and mouth had left on her alabaster skin. Guilt, and jealousy, and hopelessness, and anguished grief consumed him. He’d shocked and shamed himself with his abandon, his vulnerability. It had begun with temper—and ended in a loss of control he’d never experienced before in his life. He knew that a woman of her gentility would—could—never forgive what he’d done to her in the night. He could never forgive himself. She couldn’t help it if she loved someone else.

It was only that he wanted her love so much, he thought miserably. He’d loved her endlessly, until his heart hurt at just the sight of her. And now he knew the hopelessness of it. She loved Bates. She would never be happy with him because Bates had finally admitted his love and need of her. It would destroy their marriage.

The only honorable thing he could do now, to make amends for his unacceptable behavior, was to let her go—to send her back to the man she really loved. Yes, he decided finally, with bitter resignation, that was the only thing left to do.

He took some paper from the writing table and sat down at the window, scribbling a few words on the pristine white tablet. He read them over, signed his name, and with one long last look at Trilby, left the room.

He was taking the coward’s way out, but he couldn’t help it. The contempt and distaste he knew he would
see on her face would have destroyed his manhood. He simply could not face her after what he’d done to her the night before….

“Good morning, señor,” Jorge greeted him. “You are much earlier than usual.” He frowned at the packed valise Thorn was carrying as he started toward the car. “Señor, you are going somewhere?”

“Yes. To Tucson. I’m going to look at some cattle I was contacted about last month.”

“Those.
Sí.
But I understood that you had decided not to buy them…?”

Thorn glared at him from bloodshot eyes. “And now I have,” he said curtly. “Come on. You’ll have to drive me in to the station and bring the car back.”

“
Sí,
señor.” Jorge smiled in a conciliatory way. He knew the
patrón’s
temper too well to risk provoking it.

“Look out for Mrs. Vance as long as she’s here. I’ve already told her that she can leave Samantha with her people if she—if she needs to, for any reason.”

Jorge frowned, puzzled. “Yes, señor.”

“I’ll be back in a few days.” He cranked the car, put his valise in back, and waited for an uneasy Jorge to get in beside him before he drove away. He didn’t look back. If he had, he was certain that he wouldn’t have the strength to leave.

T
RILBY PICKED UP
the pad with trembling hands and read it. Her breath drew in painfully.

“I beg your forgiveness for last night,” Thorn had written,

It was signed with his black scrawl, and left starkly revealed where he’d put it.

Trilby sat down unsteadily in the chair he must have occupied while he wrote it. He was letting her go. He was sending her away. He thought she loved Richard, that she wanted to go!

She put her face in her hands and wept brokenly. Why hadn’t she told him the truth? She loved him with all her heart. She hadn’t been making the most of a bad situation. She stayed with him because he was her whole world. Nights in his arms were as close to heaven as she’d ever been. And yesterday, when the letter from Richard came, she’d just been out behind the house losing her breakfast for the third day in a row. She was almost certainly pregnant, and had apparently been that way for some weeks. It all added up; her fainting spells, her lack of appetite, her unusual fatigue…. She’d been so happy, so radiant. She’d started out to tell Thorn when her father had ridden up on his horse and prevented her.

The two men had ridden away. Trilby hadn’t been upset, because she could tell Thorn when he came home. She was certain that he’d be pleased with her news. He spoke much less of Sally these days, and he was all ten
derness and consideration in bed and out of it. She had begun to hope…

Why? Why had Richard suddenly decided to love her, just when she knew she cared nothing for him, when she loved her husband and was carrying his child? It was so unfair!

She got up and dressed, barely making it to the back porch before she lost the coffee she’d just swallowed. The thought of a long train trip to Louisiana was unpleasant and unwelcome. But Thorn’s note had made it clear that he expected her to leave, wanted her to leave. He’d even gone away himself to make the break easier, giving her instructions about his daughter to ease her way.

She could stay in spite of the letter, she knew. She could refuse to go. But what if she did? He’d told her last night that what he felt for her was desire, not love. Even though he might regret his abandoned passion of the previous night, he was more than willing to let her get a divorce and go to Richard. If he loved her, surely he’d have fought to keep her. It wasn’t Thorn’s way to back off from a fight, to give up something he wanted without a struggle.

It was that thought that decided her to leave. She was convinced now that Thorn was telling her to leave. He was giving her away, like a gun he’d tired of using.

She dashed at the hot tears. Well, she had his child, she thought. It was some consolation to know that. He wouldn’t know. She grimaced. She’d go away and have his child and he’d never know. Of course he would, she thought miserably, because her parents would surely know and tell him. She could hardly marry Richard, either. She didn’t love him at all.

With resignation, she went to pack. She could worry about it all when she got back to Louisiana. She would take Samantha to her parents on the pretext of shopping, she thought, working it out. Then, from the train station she could telephone and let them know she was leaving, at the last minute. That way, there would be no danger that they might try to sway her. It was impossible to stay with Thorn, knowing that he felt nothing for her except desire and perhaps pity. But she didn’t really know how she was going to manage without him. He’d already become the center of her life.