“Dulcy!”
She was deaf. She thought she might have been blind, and the side of her neck felt as if it was on fire. Even so, she tried to get up. To get to Noah.
“Dulcy, are you all right?”
She blinked, trying to see through the stinging powder from the close-range shot. “I’m okay, Noah. I’m okay.”
She tried to get to her feet, but her knees wouldn’t cooperate. She needed to get to Noah. He had his gun back in Bill’s face. He had his other hand around Bill’s throat. Bill was gurgling, struggling to get in air.
“It’s okay now,” Bart assured everybody as he handed Josh off to somebody else. “Everybody back away.”
Noah wasn’t listening. He was still intent on a struggling Bill.
“Noah,” Bart repeated. “It’s over. I’ll take him now.”
Noah didn’t pay any attention.
Dulcy finally made it to her feet. She stumbled over to where Noah was silently, ferociously squeezing the life from her captor.
“Noah,” she begged, struggling against the ropes that kept her hands from him. “Noah, stop!”
His attention wavered, dropped. He seemed to really notice her for the first time.
She did her best to smile. “Please,” she begged him, her voice quiet. “Give him to Bart. Let’s go home.”
His eyes widened. Dulcy could see that his hands were starting to shake. His face, so tanned and handsome just a few days ago, was the color of putty.
He sobbed with relief. “I thought…”
“I know. It’s all right now.”
He let go. Bill slumped almost to the ground, gasping and gagging, before Bart hauled him out the door along with the gun Noah had shoved against his head.
“Are you really okay?” Noah asked, his trembling hands up to her face, to her hair. His own face was bleeding from half a dozen small cuts on his forehead. His chest was heaving, and there was sweat pooled under his arms. Dulcy couldn’t stop smiling.
“I’m really okay,” she promised. “I could use a hand with these stupid ropes, though.”
He couldn’t manage the knots. He was shaking too badly; he was too impatient. Finally Bart did the honors and stepped away just in time to keep from being included in an embrace.
More than an embrace. A completion, a possession, the two of them coming together as if reuniting a broken whole.
Dulcy gave in to another sob, thankful to just touch Noah. To know he was there. That he was safe and whole and in the same room.
It was enough.
It didn’t seem it was enough for Noah. He wrapped his arms around her, bent his head over her, until she couldn’t see or hear anyone else around.
“You scared me,” he admitted on a whisper.
Dulcy closed her eyes against the exquisite sense of comfort. The reassurance of his heartbeat against her ear, his callused hands in her hair.
It couldn’t last. She’d known that since she’d begun to suspect that those blue eyes hadn’t been a figment of her imagination after all. Since that night she’d heard him call Marshall Wellman a bastard for making him spend more time with Mitzy Parker.
For this brief moment in Noah’s arms, it didn’t matter.
“You really did it,” she said, still shaking pretty badly herself. “I knew you would.”
Noah straightened enough to glower down at her, his eyes still preternaturally bright. “You, too? What do I have to do to convince people that this isn’t me?”
Dulcy folded herself into his arms and smiled. “It isn’t, huh? Then who came crashing through that window?”
He ran a trembling hand through her hair. “I decided I had to get in the quickest way possible,” he said, defending himself. “Especially when I saw you do your fullback impression at that big guy.”
“The big guy you almost throttled to death?”
His answer, when it came, sounded more surprised than chagrined. “Yeah. I guess I did.”
“You should have seen him at your Uncle Mike’s house,” Bart offered from the doorway. “Amazing.”
“Necessary” was all Noah would offer.
“I guess it just proves that you deserved that Oscar after all,” Dulcy teased, her eyes closed and her attention mostly on the feel of his racing heart, of the soft cotton of his shirt against that hard, strong chest. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“Nobody was acting today, Dulcy,” he admitted, his cheek against her forehead, his arms so tight round her she could hardly breathe. “I was terrified.”
“Ready to go, Sheriff?” came a familiar voice from the door.
Dulcy opened her eyes again and peaked around Noah’s shoulder to find Paco standing in the doorway with Hank. Behind them were the rest of the hands, all cradling Winchesters and grinning a bit sheepishly.
“You were the posse?” Dulcy asked, touched by their presence.
“You bet,” Billy Boy admitted. “We didn’t get you back, we’d have to keep workin’ for Hank here. Didn’t suit us, ya know?”
Even Hank was grinning.
For once in her life Dulcy wished there was more she could say than thank you. “Thank you,” she said, anyway, knowing they’d understand.
They did. Chuckling and jostling like kids, they all retreated out beyond the cabin to leave Dulcy and Noah alone. Dulcy heard the rest of the people sorting themselves out for the ride back down the mountain and ignored them. She only focused on Noah. On knowing that he was all right, on knowing that she meant enough to him for him to do what he had this evening.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Noah demanded. “Solving the problem? Ending up on the wrong end of an extortion scheme?”
“Making you worry.”
“I doubt sincerely this is going to be the last time you do that, Dulce,” he admitted.
“I was never once kidnapped until I met you,” she protested. “Contrary to popular opinion, I also don’t seek out much excitement in my life.”
Dulcy had meant to be flip, funny. The minute she said it, she knew she’d made a mistake. It wasn’t much of a reaction, but it was there, deep in his eyes where she’d learned to look.
“I guess this is where I should say I’m sorry, too,” he apologized, his own grin not as easy. “I should have trusted you with the truth about who I was.”
Dulcy made it a point to flash him a completely irreverent grin. “Now, this is a discussion I think we’ve had before.”
He smiled for her, and Dulcy thought maybe it could be okay. “I’ve never had anybody prefer gray eyes before,” he admitted, his eyes briefly, baldly vulnerable. Shy. The honorable, hardworking man Dulcy had grown to know in this valley, before she’d realized what his place was out in the real world.
The real Noah Campbell she’d fallen in love with.
“We don’t trust flashy people in this valley,” she teased. “We’re just ranchers here, ya know.”
“We need to talk.”
“Oh, yes, we do,” she agreed. “But first we need to get home. I need to see Hannah, and you might just need some stitches. You’re bleeding.”
He didn’t bother to reach up to the cut along his hairline. “Real windows are a lot harder than candy glass,” he admitted.
“I imagine. Looks like it hurts.”
“No.” Now his expression grew rueful. He still didn’t move. “My ankle hurts.”
Dulcy looked down to see that he really wasn’t putting any weight on his left leg. “Your ankle? What happened?”
He grinned, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I think I broke it when I came through the window.”
Dulcy couldn’t help it. After all that had happened in the last few hours, in the last days and weeks, all she could do was laugh. “I guess you’re right after all.”
“About what?” He didn’t seem nearly as amused.
“I’ve never heard of Cameron Ross doing something that dumb. You must be Noah Campbell after all.”
Good thing, too, because it was Noah Campbell Dulcy wanted to kiss. It was Noah Campbell who kissed her, deeply and sweetly and thoroughly. It was Noah Campbell who let her help him out to the Jeep and down the mountain. It was Noah Campbell who asked her to come home with him to the ranch with Hannah when the work of the night was all over. It was Noah Campbell she accepted.
“So let me get this straight,” Hannah said. “Clowns are strangers, too?”
“Yes,” both Dulcy and Noah answered in unison.
“Even in the circus?”
“Especially in the circus,” Noah offered.
Dulcy ignored him. “Unless I’m with you, they are,” she assured the little girl.
Hannah spent a few minutes nodding to herself. “Okay. Can we come back now, Mom?”
Dulcy didn’t answer right away. She hadn’t gotten that far yet. It had been enough to get back down from that line shack to find Hannah entertaining Noah’s cousin Ethan on the porch of the ranch house, and from there include those two and Sally in the ride to take Noah to Bozeman to get his ankle X-rayed and casted.
Noah had used the ride time to explain how he’d figured Uncle Mike to be the only local devious and hungry enough to be the silent partner in IIT. How, once they’d gone in with the court order, they’d found Uncle Mike’s accounts to be in far worse shape than anyone in the valley had thought. In bad enough shape that being the enforcer for a huge buy out had made sense to him.
Uncle Mike had not only known that Cletus Wilson couldn’t have financially stood the suspicions they’d cast on him, he’d known better than anyone in the valley that Dulcy was the secret behind the Lazy V’s success. Without her, he felt he could systematically wreak havoc until Noah decided to quit the valley, and IIT could move in uncontested.
Uncle Mike had not only underestimated Noah, but Dulcy, as well.
“Of course you’re coming back,” Noah assured Hannah from where he lounged, leg propped on a pillow, on the couch.
Seated on the floor alongside with Hannah in her lap, Dulcy looked up to shoot him a cautionary glance. “Noah and I still have to talk about that,” she demurred.
“You have to come back,” Ethan objected from his spot on the recliner, the almost-as-handsome twin of his more famous cousin. “Hank won’t talk to me.”
“Hank won’t talk to anybody,” Hannah informed him.
“Hannah and I haven’t finished our Hootie Hoedown yet,” Noah objected to Dulcy. “You can’t go.”
“Don’t I hear the bedtime bell?” Sally interjected from her own spot in the rocker.
“Aunt Sally, I just got home,” Hannah protested.
Sally was already on her feet. “Well, you can make sure nobody’s snuck in and redecorated your bedroom. Come on.”
“Mo-o-om.”
Dulcy gave Hannah a little push in the right direction and followed to her own feet. “Aunt Sally’s right, honey. Come on. I’ll tuck you in.”
“Check the room for any suspicious clowns while you’re at it,” Noah suggested.
Hannah groaned. Then she leaned over and dropped a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you for bringing my mom home.”
Noah grinned. “It was my pleasure, Hannah.”
Dulcy took Hannah’s hand and led her on upstairs, Sally’s voice following her up.
“So, is Mitzy Parker as wild as I’ve heard?”
It didn’t take Dulcy long, but by the time she got back, both Sally and Ethan were missing. There was just Noah, stretched out on her couch like a movie diva, his hair tousled and his jaw just showing new stubble. Now that it was a moot point, he’d left out his gray contacts. His eyes were blue. Bright, blinding blue, the color of morning glories. His force field hadn’t dimmed any, either, licking along the surface of Dulcy’s limbs and setting up a dance in her chest that robbed her breath.
“Strategic withdrawal, huh?” she asked, bending to pick up half-drained glasses.
“Ethan drove Sally home.”
Dulcy nodded, skittish, wondering how this story was going to be retold, since Sally’s car had been sitting out in the driveway right alongside the truck they’d probably taken.
“Hope he doesn’t get lost,” she said, straightening.
As she walked by, Noah grabbed her wrist.
“Sit down,” he commanded gently.
Suddenly, Dulcy felt fidgety and shy. “I need to…”
“You need to talk to me,” he said.
She did. She knew it. So she set the glasses back down and settled herself alongside him on the couch. And she tried, very hard, to look into those blue eyes. To ignore the sudden flash of memory that put her back in his arms, tangled in the sheets on a stormy afternoon.
“The moment of truth,” she blurted out, trying very hard to be flip.
Noah reached up and drew a finger along her cheek. “You know that discussion I was going to have with you when I got back?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I have a question.”
Dulcy wanted to back away. She couldn’t seem to separate from his touch, though. It wasn’t just electricity. It was life. A surging thrill of the world that seemed to seek her out and infect her whenever she was with him. A different, more visceral awareness she hadn’t allowed herself since it had hurt her the last time.
It was Noah. Hard-edged and soft-eyed and as much a part of her now as Hannah, as Montana, as breathing.
“The answer is yes,” she said very quietly. “A person can fall in love in only a week.”
For a second it seemed the light had drained right out of Noah’s eyes. Dulcy held her breath, unable to take back what she’d said, unable to go on. Terrified of the lightning in those startling blue eyes and even more terrified of losing it again.
“And now,” Noah said. “Is it any…different?”
“You mean because you’re also Cameron Ross?”
“Yes.”
She considered him. Considered how different he was with his smooth cheeks and blue eyes, how she never would have been comfortable with him if he’d shown up like this the first day. She tried very hard to consider implications, complications.
“Yes,” she said honestly. “It is.”
He seemed to actually deflate before her eyes. Dulcy couldn’t tolerate it. She knew, suddenly, what his question had meant. What he needed from her.
What she could give, because she’d never meant anything more in her life. Because no one deserved it more than he.
“I fell in love with Noah Campbell,” she said, unable to keep her hands away from him anymore. “And that’s who I’ll always love. Who I’ll always want. I have no idea how I’ll get along with Cameron Ross.”
“Could you, though?”
Dulcy actually managed a chuckle. “Can Cameron Ross get along with me?” she asked.
Noah smiled back. “Cameron Ross couldn’t keep his mind on the movie he was shooting. He kept thinking of this spitfire redhead in Montana.”
Dulcy’s heart rate kicked up. Her chest seemed suddenly tight, as the spark flared between them. Was it her imagination that Noah’s heart seemed to speed up as well beneath her fingers? Did his pupils widen, just a little?
A man couldn’t lie with a physical reaction like that, could he?
“He did?”
Noah wrapped his hands around hers, held them gently against the hard warmth of his chest. Reconnected them both to what they had felt and been and known. “I know this isn’t an easy proposition,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of it, though. Actually, I’ve been thinking of it so much I haven’t gotten anything else done.”
Dulcy grinned right past the breathlessness, the sudden, exhilarating uncertainty. “Which was why Marshall Wellman was screaming over the phone an hour ago.”
“Well,” Noah admitted with that wonderful, brash grin of his. “That and the broken ankle. I’m screwing up his shooting schedule.”
“To save little old me?” she asked with a wide blink to her eyes.
His grin faded, and his grasp tightened. “I’m serious, Dulcy. I’ve never been more serious in my life. Will you hear me out?”
Finally, no retreat, no games, no jokes. “Yes,” Dulcy agreed. “I’ll hear you out.”
He nodded, arming himself, she thought, with his certainty. His need. “You belong here, Dulcy. In Montana, on the ranch, with your family and friends. And even though I’d have to leave for long periods of time to film, I want this to be my home. For you to be my home. Do you think you could live like that?”
“And Hannah?” she asked.
“Are you kidding?” he demanded, his smile a rare gem. “I already bought her a harp.”
Dulcy stopped breathing altogether. “You did?”
“Do you think she’d be interested in the proposition?”
“I don’t know,” Dulcy admitted. “It’s something we’ll have to work through, the three of us.”
“And you wouldn’t mind my only being here part-time, just like before?”
“I think the cat’s out of the bag about who you are,” she said.
“Yeah, but on the other side of that, the valley’s sure decided they made a mistake. You’ll have all the help you need.”
It was true. As they’d stopped back at the sheriff’s office to finish making statements, she and Noah had been met by a veritable procession of townspeople who had professed their apologies. More had left food on the doorstep, like high cholesterol penance. It seemed that Dulcy’s attempt to save the valley from the grasp of outside developers had offset her reputation. Even her Aunt Mary hadn’t been able to really fault Dulcy for her part in Uncle Mike’s downfall.
And Noah? Noah was a knight in shining armor in the finest tradition of the Old West. Noah had saved not only one of their own, but the valley itself. Instead of a poor, benighted fool, he was now considered an honorable, brave man. Noah was one of theirs.
“Well,” Dulcy demurred, struggling to maintain a straight face when she felt like flying. “I wouldn’t really want to uproot Hannah right now and look for a new job.”
Noah let go of one of her hands to reach for her hair tie. “It would be traumatic,” he agreed, his concentration on pulling it out. Pulling her braid out with it so her hair tumbled over her shoulders.
Dulcy struggled to keep from groaning at the sudden shower of chills he was unleashing. “And I’ve just got the breeding program in shape.”
He pulled her close until his lips were against her ear. “Best in the state.”
Dulcy opened her mouth to answer. She couldn’t manage words. He was nibbling at her earlobe and winnowing his hand in her hair. He was somehow managing to free the buttons on her shirt at the same time. Dulcy shuddered, closed her eyes, felt herself sinking right into that fire that seemed to spark and flare from his fingers, from his tongue. From the smell and sound and touch of him against her.
“You’re gonna hurt yourself,” she gasped, knowing she should pull away. Arching against him instead so he could find her breasts. So he could torment them with his newly callused hands.
“I already did.” He chuckled against her hair, granting her wish. Slipping his hand inside her plain plaid shirt, inside her serviceable bra as if it were a seductress’s lure. Wrapping his long fingers around her breast and letting his thumb torment her nipple. “Thought it was time to feel better.”
Dulcy gasped again, writhed against him. She could feel him hard against her and thought if he could forget the cast on his leg, so could she.
She had more to say, she knew it. She couldn’t remember what it was, suddenly. She just knew she wanted her clothes off in this hot house. She wanted her skin abraded by rough hands and the hair on a man’s chest. She wanted to rub against him, curl around him, watch those blue eyes get all dark and smoldering as she tormented him.
“You haven’t given an answer yet,” he protested as she let her own hand wander. As she undid buttons she needed freed and examined a badly strained zipper.
“You’re distracting me,” she answered agreeably, moving carefully alongside him. Splaying her hand against his chest and thinking that it was a magnificent chest, a heck of a set of shoulders, a pair of thighs that begged exploration. Moving already so that she could accommodate him, so she could give his hands free rein.
Dulcy lost her shirt. She helped Noah out of his. She undid zippers and flies and got her own boots off so she could straddle him. So she could torment him with her mouth and her hair and her soft skin. So she could know that he needed her as much as she needed him.
He did. He groaned. He bucked. He held on to her as if she were saving him from a long fall. He whispered her name and then groaned it. He held her with his hands and delighted her with his mouth, her hair falling over them both like a fiery cascade, her hips moving, already undulating against his hand, against his clever fingers, against his murmured urgings.
They were balanced on the couch, trying to protect his cast, his jeans half-off, her clothes strewn across the floor. It didn’t matter. Only they mattered, what they needed, what they had missed, what they so wanted to promise. They promised with their hands and their mouths and their bodies, and when Dulcy lowered herself onto him, they moved as one, faster, faster, their smiles growing as they feasted on each other’s eyes, on each other’s smiles, on the sweet fire they’d never found anywhere but on this couch, in this house, in each other’s arms. They sang and spun and laughed, until they climaxed almost together, their heads back, their hands tight, their bodies sweat sheened and satisfied. And then, shattered, they sank into silence.
“You still,” Noah managed to say sometime later, still not moving, his arms around Dulcy, “haven’t answered.”
Dulcy knew she should move. He was probably awfully uncomfortable. It didn’t seem to matter. “Mmmmm,” she murmured. “Let me get this straight. You here for six weeks at a time, all the time. Kind of like being with a traveling salesman who travels all at once.”
“Kind of like. Except you have one thing wrong.”
“Oh?” She knew he could feel her heart stumble with sudden, stupid fear. “What’s that?”
“That ‘being with’ part. I don’t want you to ‘be with’ anybody. I want you to marry me.”
That was what got her to push up off his chest. “Marry?” she asked, as if she’d never heard the word before.
She would have thought he was lying except for his eyes. “Marry. Like for better or for worse. All that.”
He meant it. Dulcy could see it. She believed it now, which was just doing worse things to her heart rate. To her throat, which seemed suddenly full of tears.
“I would like to at least meet Cameron Ross a time or two before I make up my mind,” she managed to say, trying so hard to maintain any sense at all, when all she could think of was waking up alongside Noah every morning.
He held on more tightly. “You’ll try?”
Dulcy straightened, her hair brushing the tops of her breasts. She faced those unnerving blue eyes and thought that they really were the same—warm and inviting and just a little uncertain. They were Noah’s eyes, and she would promise them anything. Give them anything.
“On one condition,” she said, anyway.
Noah never hesitated. “Anything.”
“That when you’re here, you don’t shave.”
That stopped him cold. “Why?”
She smiled and gave in to the impulse to winnow her hands through his hair. “Because Noah Campbell doesn’t like to shave, of course. Or dress up. He wears battered jeans and a hat that’s put out one too many fires, and he loves Hootie and the Blowfish. He rides like a cowboy and curses like a sailor and loves more than anything when he can wade around in the mud and manure and work his ranch.”
Dulcy saw his uncertainty explode into joy and felt it echo in her chest. In her heart. In the deepest recesses of her, where for so long she had been so careful not to court it.
“That’s the only you I want, Noah,” she told him. “It’s the only you I need.”
“It’s going to be a lot to put up with,” Noah cautioned.
Dulcy laughed. “Hannah’s going to go through puberty in about five years,” she reminded him. “That’s going to be a lot to put up with.”
“I’m not perfect.”
“I’m the one who dragged you in here the first night. You’re not telling me a thing.”
He held on tighter. “You mean it? You’d like to try?”
“I mean it, Noah.”
His eyes. His sweet, searing eyes that had always compelled her. Now they seduced her, his eyes and nothing more. Dulcy saw in them everything she could have wanted, more than she could have dreamed.
“I love you, Dulcy,” he whispered.
Dulcy didn’t know how to feel more. Her heart battered at her chest, and her throat ached with the sweetness of his words, with the incandescent flame of his eyes.
He loved her. He loved her. Even after touching ground back in his other life where the women didn’t have to scrape cow manure off their boots, where he could have anyone or anything he wanted.
He wanted her.
Dulcy smiled, knowing Noah saw the tears in her eyes. “I love you, too, Noah.”
“Not Cameron?”
“Cameron doesn’t live here,” she said, lifting his hand and placing it against her heart. “Noah does.”
“Then I’m home,” he marveled softly. “I’m really home.”
Dulcy smiled. “You’re home.”
Bending over, she proceeded to prove it in the simplest way she knew. And even with his leg in a cast, both of them battered and bruised and exhausted, they found their home together in each other’s hearts, in each other’s arms. In the sweet, throaty music of their laughter that drifted out on the night breeze to where the Montana night arced high and silent over a huge old Victorian house and the new family nestled inside.