A Tradition of Pride (19 page)

Nervously, she clasped the paper in both hands, "I hoped it would." She stared at it, the words blurring in front of her eyes.

Glancing over his shoulder, he impaled her on his thrusting gaze. "Why?"

Widened eyes, shimmering and green, met his without flinching. "Because I want you to stay."

"Because of your father?" Rans persisted, not lessening the intensity of his piercing gaze.

There was a tenseness about him. He seemed to be holding himself rigidly still as if his tall, muscular frame was carved from stone. Lara kept wondering if she was battering her head uselessly against a rock wall that nothing she said would penetrate.

"Partly," she acknowledged, dipping her chin. "He needs you."

"What's the other part?"

Achingly Lara's gaze studied his face, the roughly hewn jaw and chin, the faint lines around his eyes that crinkled when he smiled and the dimpling clefts in his cheeks, the firm line of his mouth, the wide tanned forehead framed by thick, tobacco-brown hair. He was so aggressively virile that her whole body throbbed with his nearness.

"Don't you know?" she whispered.

"No."

A heavy silence weighted the room while Rans waited for her answer. Lara gathered what little of her pride that remained and threw it away.

"Because I'm in love with you, Rans." Her voice quivered. "In my heart I divorced Trevor a long time ago."

Slowly he crossed the room, not releasing her from his pinning gaze. His hands settled on her shoulders, their touch making her sway toward him, but he firmly kept her away.

"Are you sure?" His fingers dug into her flesh as if he meant to shake the truth out of her.

"Very sure," she smiled tremulously.

Some of the hardness began to leave his expression as if the rock wall had started to crumble. "Am I a fool to believe you?" he mused absently, his gaze traveling over the cascading red gold curls falling loosely around her shoulders and returning to the jewel brightness of her eyes.

"Probably," Lara murmured. "I'm headstrong and independent and spoiled. I lose my temper at the drop of a hat. And I'll probably turn into a jealous shrew when I'm old and wrinkled and not pretty enough anymore to make you —"

His mouth closed over hers in a bruising kiss to stop the enumeration of her faults. She melted against him, deepening the kiss with the hungry response of her own lips. Roughly his hands pulled her nearer. The torrid embrace stretched into minutes until Rans gained control of the fire raging inside. Lara's arms remained locked around him as she nestled her head against his chest, the pounding of his heart sounding joyfully in her ears.

"You will stay. Promise me you will never leave." She tipped her head back to gaze at him.

"You will play hell getting rid of me, wildcat," Rans growled affectionately, his fingers twisting into the flame gold of her long hair.

The light radiating from the velvet brown of his eyes took her breath away, at once possessive and passionate and gentle. A sensation of buoyancy seemed to fill her as if she was floating on a cloud.

"Tell me why, Rans?" whispered Lara, watching the hard lips and waiting for them to form the three precious words she was aching to hear.

He didn't disappoint her. "I love you that's why." The iron band of his embracing arms tightened like a vise, crushing her against his trembling length. He pressed his mouth against her temple, murmuring against her skin, "I love you, Lara. I love you." Repeating it as if the words had been bottled up too long inside of him.

Her fingers spread, moving over his back and shoulders in an exploring caress. "I love you too, darling." She rubbed her head against his chin and mouth, dissolving with a completeness of her emotion.

A tenseness seemed to take possession of him. "The way you loved Trevor?"

"Oh, no," Lara denied with a smiling sigh. "I loved his image. I was in love with love. His touch never shattered. His kiss never destroyed. I never felt alive, every nerve tingling, with him the way I do with you. There was always something missing that made me feel incomplete. But not anymore, not when you hold me. It's as if I've come home at last."

"To stay, Lara," he declared firmly, "because I'll never let you go."

"I'll die if you do." She shuddered, remembering the desolation that nearly entered her life when she had thought she might never see him again. "You quit because of me, didn't you?" she breathed.

"Why else?" His mouth crooked into a dry smile as he drew his head back to let his gaze rove possessively over her upturned face. "The job, the work, was everything I ever wanted. I knew that within a few weeks after I arrived. What I hadn't counted on was a beautiful redhead complicating the situation. I managed to ignore you quite successfully for a while. But you kept getting under my skin." Rans chuckled softly, his hands lightly caressing her feminine curves. "I thought you were a frigid piece of baggage, a stunningly wrapped block of ice. It was a challenge to keep chipping away to see if it was solid."

Lara leaned back against his arms, her hands sliding to his broad chest. An impish light gleamed in her green eyes as she met the glittering fire of his gaze.

"My first impression of you was that you were arrogant." Her lips trying to conceal the smile hovering at the corners. "And I haven't revised my opinion at all."

The dimples came into play, carving bewitching clefts in his tanned cheeks while his eyes crinkled at the corners. "You should have," Rans told her, "because with you I was never certain about anything except how much I wanted you. The night I walked home from the stable was possibly the longest walk I ever took. I had found the volcano under the ice cap and I had to come to grips with the way I was really feeling toward you."

"That night was a revelation to me, too," Lara admitted. "I had thought I was immune to any physical need. Before, I was revolted by a man's touch. But not that night. You wiped out the illusion that I was somehow different from everyone else. It was a frightening discovery."

"How do you think I felt, realizing I was falling in love with another man's wife?" A muscle twitched in his jaw. Lara caressed it tenderly to ease his remembered pain. "I had to keep reminding myself you were married and didn't belong to me. And you didn't make things any easier," Rans accused with mocking gruffness.

"I couldn't help it. I wanted you, too," she defended herself.

"I know. That's why I was leaving." He smiled fleetingly. "I knew that if I stayed, it was only a matter of time and I'd have you. I also knew I could never be satisfied with merely possessing you. I wanted you for my wife, to live with me, bear my name and my children. The prospect of an affair filled me with a bitterness that would eventually have destroyed both of us." His mouth closed briefly over hers in a hard kiss. "And that is my proposal of marriage, darling. Do you accept?"

"Yes." Lara breathed the answer that had been written in her face since Rans had taken her in his arms.

His hold tightened punishingly around her. An almost inaudible groan came from his throat as he crushed her against him. "How in the world are we going to make it until your divorce is final?" he muttered into the fiery silk of her hair.

"I can survive anything as long as you love me," was her whispered reply.

"Maybe you can fly to Reno or Mexico," Rans suggested thickly while her fingers lovingly explored the ragged contours of his face. "I don't want to wait another day."

"Neither do I. We'll find a way, darling, and we'll find it together," Lara promised.

"We'll start a new tradition." There was a wicked glint in his eyes as a roguish smile spread across his face. "The MacQuade brides always live happily ever after."