Made For Each Other (2 page)

“It’ll be a good six weeks before your
clavicle heals, young lady. Your body’s taken quite a bruising, and
you’ll be awfully sore for two or three days. I’d wear that brace
for at least a month. Your friend’s fine, but we usually keep
someone who has suffered a concussion like this under observation
for a day or so to watch for possible contusion, bruising of the
brain.”

Her shoulders would have sagged with
the terrible news had they not been pinned back by the
uncomfortable brace. No car—besides, she couldn’t drive if she
wanted to at that moment. No money in her purse—for either bus fare
back to Santa Fe or a motel room while she waited for Pam to be
discharged from observation. It seemed even Pam was better off than
she, for at least her friend’s insurance would pick up her stayover
in the hospital.

Angrily her gaze switched back to the
stranger, who now stood talking with a highway patrolman, making a
report of the accident. She heard the patrolman say something about
having the car towed in, but the bad news really didn’t bother her
at that point. Pain, though now easing somewhat with the drug she
had been given, occupied every part of her—pain, and irritation at
the stranger who leaned so nonchalantly against the emergency
station’s counter, his faded jeans molding the narrow hips and the
worn boots making him look at least seven feet tall.

It was all his fault!

As if he sensed her gaze on him, he
left the patrolman and crossed to her with a lithe, catlike grace.
His blue eyes were as icy as the snow outside. “According to the
patrolman’s report, you’re the scathing tongue of the Santa Fe
Sun’s political column—Julie Dever.”

Momentarily she was startled by the
coldness behind the statement and the expression of contempt
stamped on the harsh countenance. But the doctor’s next words
brought her attention back in focus. “I’m discharging Miss Dever,”
he told the man and handed him a vial of pills for pain relief.
“You can take her home now—and be sure to tighten her brace every
day,” he added as he turned to attend another patient entering the
emergency room.

The stranger’s eyebrows raked upward
in surprise, but before he could say anything, she blurted, “None
of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for your bright
lights! I’ve nowhere to go, no money, no car—you owe it to me to
pay for my motel room until I can cash a check Monday!”

The straight dark brows came together
in a frown. The lazy-lidded gaze swept over her with disdain, and
it was then she realized what was so familiar about him. He was the
elusive, aloof state senator, Nicholas Raffer— at thirty-two the
youngest senator in New Mexico—that every newspaper and magazine in
the state was eager to do a story about!

Oh, it was common knowledge that
Nicholas’s father owned the enormous San Ramon ranch that was part
of the legendary Spanish land grant south of Taos. And someone had
dug up the fact that Nicholas had worked his way through law school
by roughnecking on New Mexico’s oil wells. But other than that, not
much was known about Nicholas, for he made it clear he wanted to
keep a low profile on his born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth
history and concentrate on his political
accomplishments.

She winced as she recalled she had
crucified him twice within the month in her editorial column—the
“Santa Fe Speculator”—for his favorable stand on nuclear energy. No
wonder he disliked her!

She would have recognized him earlier
had it not been for the dire circumstances of their meeting as well
as for his shaggy beard and rough clothing. She had had a few
glimpses of him at the capitol building or at one of Santa Fe’s
fashionable restaurants, always with a beautiful woman draped
across his arm, and he was each time dressed in impeccably tailored
suits that enhanced his whipcord leanness, and his sun-bronzed face
had always been smoothly shaven to reveal the sharp line of jaw and
mocking curve of lips.

Half the women in town were after the
young senator, but odds heavily favored Santa Pe’s patroness of the
arts and daughter of New Mexico’s chief justice, Sheila Morrison, a
strikingly beautiful woman whose divorce the year before had also
left her wealthy—and free to pursue Nicholas.

Now she looked at Nick’s chiseled face
and felt a tremor of fear under the angry slash of his gaze that
she had provoked with her accusation that the accident had been his
fault. It must have been the reaction to the drug she had taken
that made her snap rashly, “Well, are you going to get me a room—or
do you want your constituents to find out their representative is
not a friend of the people?”

“If I weren’t a reasonable man,” he
told her, in a low, tight voice, “I’d jerk you off that table and
tie your waspish tongue in knots!”

Suddenly she found herself in his arms
once again as he edged his way past the nursing station and out the
sliding glass doors that opened electronically at his
approach.

“The nearest motel will be fine,” she
said breathlessly as the bitterly cold night air swept over
her.

When Nick wheeled the car out onto the
main highway and bypassed several motels, she became concerned. As
Roswell’s lights faded behind and the road began to climb and twist
through the Sacramento foothills, she became frightened. “Where are
you taking me?” she demanded.

“You said I owed you a place to stay,”
Nick said, not taking his gaze off the darkened highway. “And in
case you didn’t notice, the motels we passed had ‘No Vacancy’
signs. So you’re staying at my cabin in Ruidoso.”

“But I can’t!” she gasped. “Besides, I
couldn’t put you out of your own cabin.”

Nick slammed on the brakes, and the
vehicle slid to one side on the slick pavement before it came to a
halt under his skillful control. “It’s either stay at my cabin,” he
said, and she did not miss the triumph that gleamed in his eyes,
“or find yourself a room— which, with the ski season, I doubt you
will accomplish.”

She looked away from the piercing blue
eyes to the snow that had begun to swirl again outside. Already her
lids felt drowsy. What could she do? She did not feel like making
any decision right now. She huddled against the door. “All right,”
she agreed miserably.

She was determined she would stay
awake, but involuntarily her lids closed, lying like spilt ink on
her high cheekbones. She was only vaguely aware of the snakelike
twists and hairpin turns the vehicle took as it made its way to the
sleepy village of Ruidoso nestled in the snow-laced mountains. It
seemed only minutes had passed, but the trip had to have taken at
least an hour before the Blazer turned off onto a side road that
wound up into Brady Canyon.

By the time Nick halted the car
beneath the canopy of pines and firs, her mind had alerted her that
the journey was over. She blinked, trying to marshal some sort of
logical thought, yet there existed only the panicky feeling that
she was alone with a man who was notorious for his careless,
offhanded treatment of women.

This time, though, when Nick lifted
her against his chest, she did not cringe, for she was beginning to
feel accustomed to the position. She could make out very little
about the frame cabin, but Nick’s sure footsteps climbing wooden
steps to a deck told her the elevated house must be built on a
hillside.

One boot kicked the door open, and she
felt him shoulder his way through the blackness to another room
before she was lowered onto what had to be a bed. She heard him
cross the room, and a sudden light flared from the kerosene lamp he
lit. In the growing circle of soft yellow illumination she looked
around her. There was only the one bed, a notched chest, and an old
pine nightstand. Through a connecting doorway she could make out
what appeared to be a small bathroom.

In the quietness of the cabin she
realized just how alone she was with this man. “You have a nice
place,” she offered with a bravado she did not feel.

“Primitive by your standards,” he said
dryly. “But it at least has some amenities.” He nodded toward the
telephone on the nightstand. “A convenience dictated by my
occupation.”

He began to unbutton the flannel
shirt, revealing the mat of brown hair on his swarthy chest, and
she cried out, “You said you were going to stay
elsewhere.”

A wicked smile of amusement lit his
face. “No. You did.”

Pinned by his atagonistic gaze she lay
on the wide mattress, helpless to move even if she had not been
injured,

He moved close, so that he stood
directly over her. His eyes, which seemed to miss nothing, looked
down at her petitely curved figure. “Just think,” he said with a
diabolical smile, “after two or three days spent with me you’ll
know all my political stands. You’ll have the reporter’s scoop of
the year.”

His brown fingers reached out to untie
her other pigtail, and the mass of hair tumbled through his fingers
to fall around her shoulder in a burnished cloud. “Of course, you
may find out more than you want to know about some
things.”

Inwardly she shrank from the
beguilingly gentle fingers, but her voice was firm. “There isn’t
anything about you I could possibly want to know, Senator
Raffer.”

Nick dropped the handful of hair,
saying quietly, “Are you sure?” He finished unbut-toning his shirt,
but when his fingers went to the snaps of his jeans, she squeezed
her eyes shut. How could she ever have thought only an hour ago
that nothing could be worse? Now it seemed Nicholas Raffer planned
to make her the object of his much-sought-after
attention.

The light seemed to fade, and she
opened her eyes to find that Nick had extinguished the lamp. Her
heart, sluggish beneath the effects of the pill, leaped with a
hammering insistence of danger. Where was he? Even in those boots
he seemed to move as quietly as a cat.

Suddenly he was there beside her, the
mattress giving with his weight. she stiffened but relaxed as he
began to untie one of her tennis shoes. “I don’t like people
sleeping in my bed with their shoes on,” he explained as he removed
the other tennis shoe and then rose.

She thought she detected a playful
tone in his voice, but she was not sure. After all, how could she
trust him? She thought she really ought to try to stay awake. But
even with the thought her lids drooped as the drug-induced sleep
claimed her.

Chapter Two

S
ometime during the night Julie was awakened from a
sweat-drenched dream by hands lightly cupping her shoulders. Her
eyelids flew open. Nick Raffer’s dark face hovered over
hers.

Then it was not all just a bad
dream—the accident, the broken clavicle, and her subse-quent
confinement with this man who detested her.

“What do you want?” she whispered in a
choked voice.

“Right now . . . but that can wait.”
She felt something small and round shoved into her mouth. “Right
now,” he said, “I only want you to take this pill.” He smiled as he
held the glass to her lips. “Ravishing a sickly female is not my
idea of a night of pleasure. But then maybe later . . .

She could almost believe he was joking
if it were not for the reputation he had as a
love-them-and-leave-them womanizer—a rakehell, her grandmother
would have called him. “Not enough of those kind of men anymore,”
the old woman was fond of saying. “Nowadays your female libbers—is
that what you call them?—have castrated all the young
men!”

“Grandma!” her mother would exclaim,
pretending shock at the old woman’s outspo-kenness. But her
mother’s shock at the situation Julie was in now would be no
pretense.

Nick stood up, towering over her like
the Colossus of Rhodes. “I’m leaving to go deer hunting. I’m
locking the door.”

Her mouth dropped open. Surely
Nicholas Raffer, a state senator, wasn’t going to keep her a
prisoner! Seeing the sudden fear that leaped into her eyes, Nick
laughed. “I just don’t want anyone else coming in and claiming what
I haven’t yet had the opportun¬ity to sample. I’ll return before
noon—to serve my guest her late breakfast.”

The faintest trace of dawn’s first
purple light broke through the sailcloth curtain of the one high
window to fall on Nick Rafter’s roguish face, but she could not
tell if he was serious or not. She closed her eyes as his fingers
slipped down to trace the slim, graceful column of her neck. They
rested just above the V neck of her sweater at the wildly beating
pulse of her throat, and she knew he was taking great delight in
the refined torturing of her nerves, which were strung as tightly
as barbed wire.

She released an inner sigh of relief
at the withdrawal of the sensual touch of his fingers, but when she
would have opened her eyes to assure herself of his departure, she
found that her lids would not cooperate. She would sleep for just a
little while, she told herself. When she woke up in a few minutes
she would be rested enough to attempt an escape. . . .

But somehow the sun was shining
brightly through the window when next she awoke. Merely to tilt her
head upward and glance about the room caused a jagged stab of pain
in her shoulder bone. She listened for sounds of activity in the
far room, but there came nothing. Perhaps it was a new day, and
luck would be with her—maybe Nick Raffer, the hunter, had not
returned yet.