This Fierce Splendor (62 page)

Jennifer felt a twist of longing so strong that it made her stomach hurt as she stared hypnotized at his long hands bringing up a trembling chin on a curved forefinger, capturing a face carefully between his palms, his lips parted, parting further over mouths beneath his. Smooth hands reached up to him during the kisses, caressing
his shoulders, holding his waist, running daringly over the solid willowiness of his buttocks.

Over the music and boom of room noise, the comments of women returning from the stage were clear.

“Oh God … his lips are so soft.…”

“He kisses—I mean he
really
kisses.”

“I could die for a man like that.” A laugh. “I’m going to make my husband do this at home.”

Diane flopped back in her seat beside Jennifer, throwing one hand over her heart.

“You’ve been up there twice,” Annette said, her eyes sparkling, mirthful.

“I know! I told him I had to come back.”

Lydia leaned toward her. “What’d he say?”

“He just laughed. Jennifer, heavens, don’t miss it! How often does anyone get a chance to make magic with a man like that?” Diane gave Jennifer a gay little nudge, and Susan, coming back with flushed cheeks and overbright eyes from the stage, tried laughingly to haul Jennifer to her feet. Sticking like a burr to her small wooden chair, thrown further into unfamiliar mental disarray, Jennifer tried feebly, “I’d better not. I … think I have a cold coming on and I wouldn’t want to—”

The end of her sentence was swallowed up by the laughter of her companions. Lydia was saying, “Fie on you, woman! You haven’t either!” when Jennifer, whose eyes had been straying helplessly to the stage for no very good reason, saw that for the second time that evening, the blond man was looking right at her. He must have seen the attempt of her friends to pull her from the chair, and her strong negative reaction, because he released
the beautiful young woman he was holding. His head tilted in a pantomime of tenderness and curiosity. And then he beckoned to her, his smile roguish, sensual.

Jennifer’s fingers clutched the sides of her chair in a death grip. One corner of his beautiful mouth quirked upward as he gave her a look of humorous reproach. Trying desperately to maintain the little that was left of her dignity, her accustomed air of self-command, she didn’t resort to such drastic measures as putting her head back into her palms until she saw, disbelievingly, that if she wouldn’t come to him, he was going to come to her. She was beyond being about to control the small moan of distress that rose to her lips, or the fluid rise of heat to her cheeks as she covered them with her hands.

The women around her greeted his action with ecstatic relish, yet his seductive murmur touched her ear with the morning-soft mist of his respiration.

“Hello, lady,” he whispered. “Open your eyes.” When she would not, he murmured, “I only want to kiss you.” She felt the shock of his warm hands gently pulling at her wrists and urging her chin up. Then, not persisting in the face of her frozen resistance, he stroked the outer curve of her hot cheek with a soothing finger, “You know what, lady? I think you’re sweet.”

She was not able to watch the rest of his act as he abandoned his final cover to Dylan’s melodic rasp. The unfeigned lyrics of “Lay, Lady, Lay” seeped through the loudspeakers. But she knew that it was another voice and the light experienced
touch of one man that would stay with her through the night.

Read on for an excerpt from Debra Dixon’s
Tall, Dark, and Lonesome

ONE

Soaked to the bone, Niki Devlin began to lose her temper. She swiped at the rain on her cheeks and took a deep, resigned breath. If she ever got back to New York, she intended to wring her editor’s neck. Why had she agreed to spend ten days in the Wyoming wilderness?
Because Eli Neff casually suggested a series of columns on adventure vacations. And you foolishly approved of the idea!

That had been mistake number one. Niki could still see the smirk on his face as he mentioned a ranch outside Cutter’s Creek, Wyoming, that ran an autumn cattle drive for paying customers. Surprised, she’d blurted out, “I grew up in Cutter’s Creek.” Mistake number two.

Of course, Eli knew that. Eli knew everything. He knew she avoided Cutter’s Creek and went home only for the big holidays, like the bicentennial celebration.
So Eli, clever man, had gotten her to agree to the idea before telling her where she’d have to go. Niki wanted to tell
him
where to go, but fledgling newspaper columnists didn’t tell syndication editors where to go. Instead, they flew to Wyoming and climbed on a chuck wagon.

Niki slid across the wooden seat and leaned around the side of the white canvas top. She expected to see cattle or, better yet, the cowboy who’d taught her how to drive the team of mules, but she was still alone on the range. She looked down at the mud that sucked the wagon wheels deep into the ooze. All in all, this vacation did not look promising.

“Spit!” she said softly, setting the brake on the wagon. She wouldn’t wait for the cavalry to rescue her. Surely a twenty-six-year-old college graduate could get one little wagon unstuck. Right?

A slash of lightning ripped the sky, followed moments later by an explosion of thunder. Plump drops of rain tattooed the top of Zach Weston’s classic cowboy hat, splintering into smaller drops that rolled off the rim. Reining in his horse, he swore under his breath and shot another irritated glance at the sky. Slate gray clouds churned and tumbled into one another, looking to Zach as if they were in a cosmic race to drench all of Wyoming. His horse shifted restlessly beneath him, anxious to be on the move again.

Zach checked the herd behind him. Twelve hundred
beef cattle were being driven by four experienced hands and nine city slickers, some of whom had never been on a horse before yesterday. To their credit, the amateurs were doing their part to keep the cows moving. Nevertheless, Zach worried as the herd began to bunch tightly, trying to find safety in numbers. Nothing startled a cow faster than an electrical storm. Hoping the blinding flash of light would be the last of the day, he signaled to John Carey, one of the ranch hands.

John was levelheaded, a natural with animals, and, at twenty-two years old, a good ten years younger than Zach. As he slowed his horse he asked, “What’s up, boss?”

“The hair on the back of my neck,” Zach said, smiling, only half intending it as a joke.

“Ain’t that the truth.”

Zach pulled his hat off and slung the water from the brim. “Next time you talk to Mother Nature, remind her that late October’s supposed to be dry and sunny.”

“That reporter said the same thing this morning on account of the weather canceling her flight yesterday,” John commented. “She sure wasn’t happy about being assigned to drive the chuck wagon.”

Everyone on the ranch knew John Carey’s love of practical jokes. So Zach fixed the younger man with a questioning stare. “Before you left her at the lunch site, you did tell her that everybody takes a turn on the chuck wagon?”

“Sort of slipped my mind.”

“Slipped your mind?” Zach asked, pronouncing each word distinctly as he thumbed the reins. “Has anything else slipped your mind?”

John shifted in his saddle, cocked his hat back a notch, and grinned broadly. “Don’t think so, but I was kind of rushing her, since she was a day late and all. Of course, those poky old mules know the range better than I do.”

Suppressing a groan as he wheeled his horse around, Zach said, “Stay here. Mules don’t like thunder any better than cattle. I’ll go and see if there’s anything left of our New York columnist.”

“She’s pretty, too,” John called after Zach.

Pretty? The word rang in Zach’s head like an alarm—it always would. How many
pretty
women had his father dragged to the ranch over the years? Too many. And without exception they had all worried more about chipping their manicures than enjoying the scenery. A beautiful woman was a different matter. True beauty went clear through to the bone and didn’t peel away with the nail polish. Zach had a sinking feeling that the journalist was going to be pretty.

As he rode he kept his head down as much as possible to shelter his face from the stinging slap of the rain. After he crossed the highway that ran through the range, the downpour finally eased, and he lifted his face to a sprinkle of sweet water, full of wilderness perfume. The scent of rain on the foothills
was something he’d never forgotten, not even during the grayest of boarding-school winters.

Turning east, he spurred his horse to a canter and went in search of the chuck wagon. According to plan, it should be over the next rise, nestled next to a stand of Cottonwood trees on the far side of the meadow, coffee simmering on the camp stove. Plan. Zach grinned.
Nothing
had gone according to plan today.

He topped the rise. The stand of cottonwoods was just as he pictured, but everything else was wrong. The wagon sat a full two hundred yards from the trees, its rear wheels up to their hubs in mud. A woman stood with her back to him, a neon pink rain slicker thrown on the ground beside her and her hands on her hips. Zach watched in amazement as the woman spoke to the wagon.

“Don’t you dare think you’ve won. I haven’t given up. I’m only resting. And plotting,” she warned ominously.

Tucking her hands in the back pockets of sopping-wet, mud-splattered jeans, she rocked back and forth for a few moments. Suddenly she straightened and marched toward the wagon. A thick braid of dark hair hung past the small of her back and swayed as she walked. As soon as she grabbed for the long plank normally used as an impromptu buffet table, Zach eased his horse forward.

“Need some help, Cookie?” he asked quietly.

“What?” Niki’s heart skipped a beat, and her question
was more a gasp than a word. As she whirled to face the man with the deep, slow voice, Niki’s right boot heel sank into the soft ground. Tilting backward, she windmilled her arms to restore her balance, lost the battle, and landed rump first in the mud.

“Well, spit!”

“Excuse me?”

By the time Niki looked up, mirth struggled with exasperation, and when she realized that the cowboy in front of her thought she wanted him to spit, she dissolved into laughter. The opening line for a column popped into her mind.
The Western version of “out of the frying pan and into the fire” is “out of the chuck wagon and into the mud
.”

Finally she pulled herself together. Between hiccups of laughter, Niki studied the man. Against the silvery backdrop of the sky, the man sat his dapple gray horse easily, leaning on the pommel of his saddle. The brim of his Stetson shadowed his face, but Niki was positive his features would be as cleanly chiseled as any of the hard-edged cowboys depicted in western art collections. When he spoke, his voice chased a slow shiver down her spine.

“Are you okay?”

Niki raised an eyebrow. “I’m sitting in mud. But nothing’s broken, so I guess I’m all right.”

“You sure are all right. I give you an eight for style. You’d have scored nine out of ten points, but I had to penalize you a point for landing on your braid,”
Zach drawled, enjoying the look of astonishment on her face as his last words registered.

A curse exploded from Niki as she snatched the braid out from under her and scrambled to her feet. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“Considering what the rest of you looks like, I didn’t think it mattered.”

“What?” Niki asked. Then she looked down and grimaced. “I look like hell.”

“Exactly,” Zach agreed, hiding a smile as he dismounted. Rain and mud destroyed any claim she might have had to fashion. Her purple T-shirt hung four inches lower on the right side than the left, and the dampness plastered the thin cotton to her curves. But it was the gaping tear in her jeans that captured Zach’s attention. The provocative slit bared the smooth flesh of her thigh almost to the hip.

“Eli’s paying for these jeans,” Niki announced disgustedly as she surveyed the damage. “Do you have any idea what a good pair of acid-washed jeans costs? Forget about that.” She flipped the muddy braid over her shoulder and sighed. “Do you know how long I’ve been breaking in this pair of jeans?”

As soon as she lifted moss green eyes to his, Zach decided to explain the difference between beautiful and pretty to John Carey. Eyelashes still wet from the rain glittered, and a generous smudge of mud graced one creamy cheek, but it was her voice that tipped the scale to beautiful. It was rich, full of confidence, smooth and sexy. Zach suspected people fell
into intimate conversations with this woman without remembering she was a stranger.

“Why should Eli pay?” Zach asked, intrigued by her logic. He had expected her to ask the ranch for reimbursement.

“Because he’s my idiot editor, and he sent me here thinking this experience would be good for a few laughs and a few columns. Of course, the joke’s on me,” Niki explained patiently as she tried to blow a few incorrigible strands of hair from her face. Giving up, she looked back at the cowboy, scrubbed one hand against her shirt, and held it out. “I’m Niki Devlin—slave to editorial whims.”