Lacy (3 page)

He finished the cigarette and tossed it into the
burning fireplace. The orange-and-yellow flames highlighted his bronzed skin,
his sharp, well-defined features.

"The house and clothes don't suit you, and
your friends stink," he said easily, standing erect with his hands on his
slender hips. "You're getting as wild as Katy. I don't like it."

"Then do something about it," she
challenged. "Make me stop, big man. You can do anything... Just ask Ben;
he's your fan club."

He smiled ruefully. "Not since you left, he
isn't. Even Taggart and Cherry stopped talking to me once you were gone."

"Nice of you to come right after me and
take me home," she said sarcastically. "Eight months and not even a
postcard."

"You're the one who wanted to go." His
dark eyes searched her face quietly, and something flashed in them for an
instant. "You're not happy, Lacy," he said quietly. "And that
crowd in there isn't going to make you happy."

"What is, you?" she demanded. She felt
like crying. She took another sip of gin and turned away from him, hurting like
she never had. In the quiet, understated elegance of the enormous room, with
its faint odor of lilacs, she felt as out of place as he looked. "Go away,
Cole," she said heavily. "There was never any room for me in your
life. You wouldn't even sleep with me—until that last night." She didn't
see the expression that statement put on his face. "I decided to cut my
losses and go back to the city, where I belonged. I thought you'd be pleased.
After all, the marriage was forced on us."

His face hardened. "You might have talked
to me before you left." He remembered how it had felt to watch her leave.
She couldn't know that his pride had been shattered by that defection, even
though it was justified. He'd done his best to drive her away, to make damned
sure he didn't lose control again as he had that one night. The memory of the
way he'd hurt her didn't sit well on his conscience.

He might not have loved her, but he'd missed
her. The color had gone out of his world when she'd left it. He stared at her
now with an expression he was careful not to let her see. She was so lovely.

She deserved a man who'd be good to her, who'd
take proper care

of her and give her a houseful of
children... His eyes closed

briefly and he turned away. "But maybe it
was just as well. We'd said it all already, hadn't we, honey?" he asked
quietly.

"Yes, we had," she agreed. "I
suppose we were just too different to make a successful marriage." She bit
her lower lip and closed her eyes. That was a lie, too. But it would please him
to have her admit what he already believed.

"Is he your lover?" he asked suddenly,
nodding toward the closed door. "That limp-wristed lizard who showed me in
here?"

"I don't have a lover, Cole," she
said, lifting her eyes bravely to his. "I've never had anyone.. .except
you."

He avoided her eyes, looking over at the mantel.
Absently his fingers reached for the Bull Durham pouch. He pulled out a
tissue-thin paper with deft, quick fingers and dabbed tobacco in a thin line in
the middle of it, rolling it and sealing it with a flick of his tongue. He
struck a match on the bricks of the fireplace and bent his dark head to light
the finished product. Deep, pungent smoke filled the room.

She toyed with the dainty lace-and-cotton
handkerchief in her hands. "Why did you come here?"

He shrugged, his broad chest rising and falling
heavily. He turned around and his dark eyes searched her pale ones. He noticed
her flushed face and the faint mist in her eyes. His heavy brows came together.
"Have you been drinking all night?" he asked curtly.

"Of course," she said, without
subterfuge, and laughed defiantly. "Are you shocked? Or is it that you're
still back in the Dark Ages, when ladies didn't do that sort of thing?"

"Decent women
don't
do
that sort of thing," he told her, his voice unusually deep as he glared at
her. "Or wear clothes like that," he added, nodding toward the
expanse of leg below the knee-deep hem of her skirt with her rolled-down hose
held up by lacy garters.

"Don't tell me you're shocked to see my
legs, Cole," she taunted, lifting her chin as she smiled at him. "Of
course, you never have seen my body, have you?" He looked frankly
uncomfortable now, and she liked that. She liked making him uncomfortable. Her
hands moved slowly down her body, and she watched his eyes follow the movement
with satisfaction. "You can't even talk about sex, can you, Cole? It's
something dark and sinful—and decent people only do it in the dark with the
lights off—"

"Stop it!" he said shortly. He turned
his back on her, smoking quietly, one hand touching the soft curve of a chair
back. His breath seemed to come unsteadily. "Talking about.. .that..
.won't change what happened."

He almost sounded as if he regretted it. Perhaps
he did. Perhaps he thought of it as a weakness. His upbringing had been rigid
at best, and his Comanche grandfather had all but stolen him from his parents
in those formative young years. He'd learned how to be a man years before age
caught up with his conditioning, and tenderness hadn't been part of his
education.

The music suddenly got louder, attracting his
attention to the closed door. "Is this a regular thing now, these
parties?"

"I suppose so," she confessed. "I
can't stand my own company, Cole."

"I'm having some problems of my own."
He sat down in the dainty wing chair, looking so out of place in it that Lacy
almost smiled in spite of the gravity between them.

She perched on the edge of the velvet-covered
blue sofa and folded her hands primly in her lap.

"The elegant Miss Jarrett," he
murmured, studying her. "I had some exquisite dreams about you while I was
in France."

That shocked her. He'd never talked about France. "Did you? I wrote you every day," she confessed shyly.

"And never mailed the letters," he
said, with a faint smile. "Katy told me."

"I was afraid to. You were so reserved, and
just because I was best friends with Katy and living in your house was no
reason to think you'd welcome my letters. Even after the way we said
goodbye," she added, with unfamiliar self-consciousness. "You never
wrote just to me, after all."

He didn't tell her why. "I wouldn't have
minded a letter or two. It got pretty bad over there," he said.

She glanced up and then down. "You were
shot down, weren't you?"

"I got scratched up a little," he said
curtly. "Listen, suppose you come back to Spanish Flats?"

Her heart leapt straight up. She stared at him,
searched his dark eyes. He was a proud man. It must have taken a lot of
soul-searching for him to come and ask that. "Why, Cole?"

"Mother.. .isn't well," he said after
a minute. "Katy's being courted by some wild man from Chicago. Bennett's
trying to run off to France to join Ernest Hemingway and that Lost Generation
of writers." He ran a hand through his damp hair. "Lacy, they
foreclosed on Johnson's place yesterday," he added, looking up with eyes
as dark as his hair.

Her heart jumped. Spanish Flats was his life.
"I still have the inheritance Great-aunt Lucy left me, and some from my
parents," she said gently. "I could—"

"I don't want your damned money!" He
got up, exploding in quiet rage. "I never did!"

"I know that, Cole," she said, trying
to soothe him. She stood, too, standing close to his tall, lean body. She
stared up at him. "But I'd give it to you, all the same."

There was a flicker of something in his dark
eyes for just an instant. He reached out a lean hand, the one that wasn't
holding the cigarette, and drew his hard knuckles lightly down her creamy
cheek, making her tingle all over. "Skin like a rose petal," he
murmured. "So lovely."

Her full bow of a mouth parted as she sighed.
She searched his eyes while time seemed to stop around them. She was a girl
again, all shy and weak-kneed, worshipping Cole. Wanting him.

He saw that look and abruptly moved away again.
Just like old times, Cole, she thought bitterly. She bit her lower lip until it
hurt, trying to banish the other rejections from her mind. He didn't want her
to touch him. She'd have to get used to that.

"This was Mother's idea,"he said
tersely, smoking like a furnace. "She wants you to come home."

"Marion, not you." She nodded,
sighing. "You don't want me, do you, Cole? You never have."

He stared up at the portrait without speaking.
"You could come back with me on the train. Jack Henry is servicing my
Ford, and

Ben took Mother's runabout yesterday and
vanished with it. I caught the train instead."

The music got louder again. Someone, probably
someone tipsy, was playing with the radio knob.

"Why should I?" she asked, with what
little pride she had left, shooting the question at him so sharply that it made
him look at her. "What can Spanish Flats offer me that I can't have right
here?"

"Peace," he said shortly, glaring at
the music beyond the door. "These aren't your kind of people."

Her lips tugged into a smile. "No? What are
my kind of people?"

He lifted an eyebrow at her. "Taggart and
Cherry, of course," he said.

Taggart and Cherry were two of the oldest ranch
hands. Taggart had ridden with the James gang, back in the late 1800s, and
Cherry had driven cattle up the Chisholm Trail with the big Texas outfits. They
could tell stories, all right, and if they'd bathed more often than twice a
month, they'd have been welcome in the house. Cole was careful to see that they
sat on the porch when they came visiting, and that he was upwind of them.

She couldn't help the grin. "It's winter.
You won't have to worry about getting downwind."

He smiled gently, traces of the younger Cole in
his face for just a split second. Then he closed up again, like a clam.
"Come home with me."

She searched his eyes, hoping to find secrets
there, but they were like a closed book. "You still haven't told me what
I'll get if I come," she repeated, the alcohol dimming her inhibitions,
making her reckless for a change.

"What do you want?" he asked, with a
mocking smile.

She gave it back. "Maybe I want you,"
she said blatantly, the gin giving her a little reckless courage.

He didn't say a word. His face hardened. His
eyes went dark. "You hated it that night," he said curtly. "You
cried."

"It hurt. It won't again," she said
simply, airing her newly acquired knowledge. She lifted her chin stubbornly.
"I'm twenty-four. This—" she gestured around her "—is what I
have to look forward to in my old age. Loneliness and a few hangers-on, and
some wild music and booze to dull the hurt. Well, if I'm going to grow old, I
don't want to do it alone." She moved closer to him, her face quiet with
pride. "I'll go back with you. I'll live with you. I'll even pretend that
we're happy together, for appearances. But only if you stay in the same room
with me, like a proper husband." She hated making it an ultimatum, but she
wanted a child. She might have to trick him into giving her one, or blackmail
him into it, but she was determined.

He actually trembled. "What?" he
sounded as if she'd astonished him.

"I want the appearance of normality, and no
giggling family making fun of me because you make it so damned obvious that you
don't want me."

"Stop cursing—" he shot back at her.

"I'll curse if I feel like it," she
told him. "Cassie was forever making horrible remarks about your
insistence on separate rooms, and so were Ben and Katy. Everyone knew you
weren't behaving like a husband. It was just one more humiliation to add to the
humiliation of being treated like a stick of furniture! So, if I come back,
those are my terms."

He swallowed. His dark eyes touched every line,
every curve of her face. For an instant, she could see him wavering. And then
he closed up, all at once.

"I can't be guided like a blind mule,"
he told her bluntly, his stance threatening. "If you want to come, all
right. But no conditions. You'll have your old room, and you'll sleep in it
alone."

"Would it be that hard for you to sleep
with me?" she taunted. She slid her hands over her slender hips.
"George wants to."