Kit couldn’t find the right words to express what she felt. It would have been muddled if she had. She wanted him to look at her; she ached for him to touch her. But it was wrong, because he was only interested in the physical intimacy, and because he was going to marry Betsy. She should scream her head off and order him out of the room, and her brain wanted to, but her body trembled helplessly as he walked toward her. Her eyes told him that he could have anything he wanted.
His own eyes were stormy, not easily read at all. His broad face was without humor or teasing. It was as solemn as if he were in church.
Without a word, he reached and disengaged her hands from her breasts. He moved them away from her body and brought them to her sides. Then he looked at her, with awe and quiet delight while she struggled to breathe normally and failed.
When one big hand came up and gently touched just the tip of her breast, a weak cry escaped her throat.
“This is where you’re most sensitive,” he said, tracing the hard, erect tip. He watched her eyes while he touched it, savoring its heat and hardness with his fingers and then with his palm. “It frightens you to be vulnerable, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Don’t you think I am?” he asked surprisingly. His fingers went to the Western-cut shirt he was wearing and flicked open the pearly snaps.
Her eyes lit up with pure delight as she gazed at the thick dark hair on his broad, bronzed chest.
“Here. Touch me where I’m touching you.”
He drew her fingers to his chest, and let her feel the hard tip over his heart.
She traced it and he caught his breath, laughing softly at her surprise.
“When men and women make love, there’s no real master,” he said, moving so that his big hand could completely cover her soft breast. “Both become vulnerable. Fragile…”
He bent and kissed her parted lips with a tenderness that was indescribable. His hands were gentle on her body, tracing, learning, exploring, until he knew every centimeter of skin above her waist.
Kit, too, was learning. Her hands buried themselves in that thick pelt and tugged at it with a pleasurable rhythm. But all too soon, it was no longer enough, and without conscious intent, she stepped even closer to him and relaxed completely against his aroused body.
“No,” he whispered. His big hand dropped to her hip and gently moved her back. His mouth teased hers again. “This isn’t the time or the place.”
She looked up into his dark, patient eyes. “It makes me ache,” she whispered, trying to put her feelings into words.
“Yes. Me, too.” He drew his face against hers. Both hands slid over her breasts and gently caressed them. “You’re like silk all over, aren’t you?” he whispered. His mouth slid down her throat, over her shoulders and her collarbone. It eased down, down, until it suddenly opened on her soft breast. He touched it with his tongue, producing new and volatile hungers that arched Kit’s body like a bow.
“Hold on, baby,” he whispered roughly.
While she was trying dizzily to comprehend what he meant, his head lifted. For an instant, the coolness of the room was uncomfortable on the moist place he’d left on her skin. Then he burrowed against her, found the hard nipple, took it completely into his mouth and began to suckle it.
For a few seconds, Kit froze. Then she tautened until her muscles felt in danger of shattering. Her body arched and drew in and she pushed up against his mouth as if it were the source of life itself.
Her hands were in his thick, dark hair. They clung, trembling, as the fever he kindled burned high and bright. She shivered, and shivered again, and began to moan. He made a fierce sound and the suction grew harder, more insistent.
Something snapped in Kit’s body. She shuddered as a wave of pleasure hit her right in the core of her body and convulsed her into utter satisfaction.
She couldn’t stop trembling. Her legs were too weak to hold her up. Logan had lifted his head and was looking at her, but she was too busy trying to get her breath back and stop her heart from shaking her to bits to notice. Gently he pressed her bare breasts against his equally bare chest, starting up new sensations as she felt the sexy abrasiveness of his body hair against her warm skin.
He held her cheek there, and under his muscular chest she could hear the irregular beat of his heart as he smoothed her hair back, and brushed soft kisses against her temple.
She thought that she could never look him in the face again. Her abandon had embarrassed and sickened her.
She tried to pull away, finally, but he wouldn’t let her. He tilted her shamed face up to his eyes and searched it quietly. It was somehow more profound because he didn’t speak. His fingers touched her face, cherished it, while he examined every facet of her from the chin up as if he’d never looked at her before.
“I’m plain,” she said in a brittle tone. “You said so.”
“You infuriate me at times. I say a lot of things I don’t mean and you know it.” His voice deepened. “You know me better than anyone else in the world does, except in one way. In the ultimate way.”
Her cheeks burned with heat.
“I satisfied you, didn’t I?” he asked, his voice soft and intimate. Her eyes fell and she couldn’t speak. “Yes, I thought so. You’re incredibly naive, Kit. You have no real comprehension of what sex is all about. Perhaps now you understand a little better how powerful a force attraction can be.” He put a fist under her chin and tilted up her rebellious face. “I could have you right here, standing up,” he said harshly. “And after the first five seconds, you’d be tearing the clothes away from our bodies for me. That’s how much you want me.”
“That’s cruel,” she choked.
“That’s the truth.” His hands framed her face. He bent and kissed her forcefully, roughly, and jerked his mouth away. “You’d walk to hell for me if I asked you to.”
She stiffened in his embrace and her face turned deathly pale.
“This is why you left in the first place,” he said huskily. “You had to get out because it was killing you to see me with Betsy! You love me!”
The truth of it was in her wide, wounded eyes, blue pools in the white oasis of her face. She looked at him as if he’d put a knife through her.
Until he’d said the words, he hadn’t really known. But now he did, and suddenly the past three years fell into place. So much of his life was involved with Kit’s. He’d fired her, but he hadn’t really wanted her to leave. He’d missed her, ached for her company. Now he ached in another way, in a damned inconvenient way, and he’d just crossed the barrier between friendship and sex. And he’d compounded the error by doing it with a woman who was madly in love with him.
“I never used to be cruel,” he said almost to himself. He winced as he searched her face. “Everything I say makes it worse, doesn’t it?”
“Would you hand me a towel, please?” she asked dully.
“Of course.” He turned away and removed one from the rack to give her. She wrapped it around her like a blanket and stood there, defeated, humiliated, drained.
“If you could make some excuse for me,” she said, her voice so low that he had to strain to hear it. “A headache?”
“I can do that.”
Her eyes closed, shutting him out. She wished she could go through the floor. What must he think of her now?
He drew her forehead to his chest and held it there, his expression troubled. “I’m sorry. I had no right to touch you like that.”
She bit back tears. She didn’t say a word, or yield an inch.
His teeth ground together as silvery waves of pleasure teased his body. Even the smell of her was enough to trigger it. “My God, I want to make love to you, Kit!” He choked.
She wanted it, too, but it was impossible. “You’re engaged,” she reminded him. “What happened…wasn’t right.”
He sighed heavily. “Yes, you’re obsessed with doing the right thing, aren’t you? I used to be, too, until Betsy came along and my glands all exploded. I’d been so busy making money and speculating on ways to make more that I’d all but given up women in the past six months, until Betsy walked in the door.” He brushed his lips over her hair. “There you sat, waiting for me to wake up. But I turned the wrong way, didn’t I?”
“You can’t help loving someone.”
She should know. But she was assuming he loved Betsy, and he didn’t. He wanted her and the only way he could get her was to get married. Now he wasn’t sure that it actually was what he wanted anymore. He scowled as confused thoughts began to gnaw at him.
“Let me go, Logan,” she said, tugging at his hands. “You’d better leave now.”
He stared at her with undisguised longing. “If we were anywhere else, I’d ask you to come to bed with me. I could protect you, Kit. There’d be no risk at all.”
She stared back, wavering. But there was Betsy, and sleeping with a man she wasn’t married to was wrong. No. She couldn’t do that. Her eyes fell.
“Even if that kind of thing is right for the whole rest of the world, it isn’t right for me. I…I’m not made for one-night stands.”
He watched her while he snapped his shirt buttons back up, his face taut and somber. “I don’t think one night would be enough,” he said. “You’re starved for me, Kit. Not just hungry. Starved.”
“I am not!” she said miserably, lifting wild blue eyes to his.
“If you’re not,” he replied quietly, “then explain to me how I managed to fulfill you just by putting my mouth to your breast. Or do you think it’s a common occurrence for women?”
She felt her face go even whiter at the charge. “If you’re implying that I’m wanton…!”
“Oh, yes, you’re wanton,” he said huskily. “Sexy as hell and heaven to kiss. I’d give my right arm to go all the way with you.”
In that moment he looked as if he actually meant it. His posture was as intense as the way he was looking at her.
“You’re engaged,” she said sadly.
“Yes.”
She felt cold. “I’m sure that…that Betsy attracts you just as much. And probably any experienced man could have made me feel the same as you just did.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“Maybe I should ask Emmett…”
“I’ll break your neck if I catch you so much as looking at Emmett!” he burst out, but returned to normal in a flash, his usual domineering, impatient, outra-geous self.
“How interesting,” she said calmly.
“You little fool, he’s out of your league,” he persisted, hating the very thought of her with his cousin.
“He wants to marry me. He said so.”
Logan’s lips compressed. He glared at her. “He can’t have you.”
She felt intimidated by the look he was giving her. He was bristling with bad temper, she thought, and felt an involuntary surge of compassion for him. He wasn’t a bad man. He loved Betsy, that was all. Probably he was missing her, and Kit had been a stand-in. She felt sad, knowing that.
“Logan, you have your own life,” she said gently. “Your own priorities. However I feel, and you don’t really know,” she emphasized, “Betsy should be your main concern right now.”
His eyes narrowed in anger. “I can manage my own private life, thank you.”
“Good. Why don’t you go and do it?”
“I might as well,” he said irritably. He gave her one long, lingering look, and found that he had to force his legs to move. She’d been so sweet in his arms. But she was right. He had Betsy to think about. Touching Kit had been in no way honorable, even if it had been heaven.
He finally started toward the door. He didn’t say another word. He unlocked the door and didn’t even bother to close it on his way out.
Much later, when Kit was in bed, Tansy came to check on her.
“Logan’s outside howling at the moon,” Tansy said. “He’s utterly demolished half a glass of good Scotch whiskey. Your doing, I presume?”
“I, uh, we had a slight misunderstanding. He seems to feel that he can be engaged to Betsy and still make a grab for me if he feels like it,” she said through her teeth, without elaborating on her own part in her downfall.
Tansy took one of Kit’s hands gently in hers. “Let me tell you something you may not realize. In three years, you’ve been all Logan ever talked about when he came to see me. It was always Kit said this, Kit did that. You’ve been his world all that time.”
“Then why is he going to marry Betsy?”
Tansy let go of her hand and shrugged. “Who can fathom the mind of a man?” she asked. “I think perhaps he hasn’t realized yet how much a part of him you are. Sometimes it takes a drastic change to make a man look a different way at something. I don’t believe he’s ever really seen you, Kit. How’s that for irony?”
He’d seen her in ways she couldn’t tell his mother, too. She didn’t dare bare her soul that far. “If he marries that woman, he’ll never recover,” Kit said sadly. “But he won’t listen. He just won’t listen!”
“He’s not going to admit that he made that kind of mistake, I’m afraid,” Tansy said. “Logan never would admit to being in the wrong. Too, perhaps he resents having you try to nurture him. He likes to think that he’s doing the nurturing. But Betsy is a bad woman, Kit,” she added quietly. “A bad egg. I know the danger Logan is in. I just don’t know what to do about it, short of having the kids kidnap Betsy.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I wonder if I could get Emmett to bribe them….”
Kit laughed reluctantly at the thought of Betsy tied to a stake. “It’s an idea.”
“Kit, please don’t give up on him,” Tansy pleaded. “Chris and I are the love-’em-and-leave-’em type. But Logan is different. He’s deep and when he loves, it’s with everything he has, everything he is. A man like that who loves the wrong woman paves the way to his own destruction.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “But if he loves her…”
“If he loved her, he wouldn’t have been shut up in a bathroom with you for several minutes,” Tansy said with a wicked grin.
“How…?”
“Those kids, how else?” Tansy sighed. “They were up here trying to take the doorknob off with a screwdriver when Emmett caught them. Don’t worry.” She chuckled at Kit’s horror. “The walls are two inches thick, nothing gets past them. But if they’d managed to get the doorknob off, things would have gotten a bit interesting…”
Kit buried her face in her hands. “Oh, dear,” she whispered, thinking how embarrassing it would have been, even though nothing terribly indiscreet had happened.
“Don’t be like this, sweetheart,” Tansy said gently. “My goodness, you do take life so seriously. How do you expect to live if you can’t bend the rules occasionally? It isn’t as if you’re a promiscuous person who thrives on flaunting herself. You’re a nice, decent woman, and I do wish it was you instead of Betsy that I was going to have for a daughter-in-law.”
“Nothing really terrible went on in there,” she began.
“So what if it had? Since when have you been perfect?” Tansy smiled. “My dear, you have a very rigid and rather unflattering view of God if you think He’s as narrow-minded and petty as most human beings are. Give Him credit for knowing all about you, not just what shows.”
“I thought you didn’t go to church,” Kit said, amazed.
“I don’t. There are too many denominations fighting each other, when they should be trying to please God. Fellowship is nice, but I don’t think just going to church alone will get a mean person into heaven.”
“Maybe not,” Kit said. “But without some kind of rules, what would we have?”
“What we’ve got,” Tansy told her. “The most confused generation of kids who ever lived on the planet. There are no rules, no values, no heroes. Have you ever studied ancient civilizations, Kit?”
“Not really.”
“The first sign of a declining civilization is a decline in the arts. And I think we have a very definite decline in culture and art. It’s been replaced by video games and plastic toys and television and VCRs.”
“I’m glad the kids don’t have a video camera,” Kit said with faint humor as she began to relax a little.
Tansy chuckled. “Remind me to give them one for Christmas.”
“Poor Emmett! He’ll never get a bride then!”
“Are you feeling better?” Tansy asked. “A little less tormented?”
“Yes. You’re nice medicine.”
“I’ve never been called that. Well, off to bed. We go back to Houston in the morning.” Her eyes twinkled at Kit. “After that, who knows?”
“Tansy, you won’t vanish again!”
“Dear girl, if I stay in one place very long, I’ll die there. At my age, one must keep moving or freeze up. If old age catches me, it’ll have to outrun me.” She got up and went to the door. “I’d lock this,” she said. “The kids don’t have a VCR, but they do have a Polaroid camera….”
Kit leaped out of bed without an argument. She could imagine the kind of photographs she might appear in if she left that door unlocked, even though she didn’t sleep naked.
At breakfast the next morning, the kids were gathered around and snickering faintly as they looked from a hung over, very quiet Logan to a shy Kit.
“I hid the screwdrivers, Kit, don’t worry,” Emmett said with a wicked glance toward her and then Logan. “You’re safe this morning. All the same, I wouldn’t lock myself in any more bathrooms with Logan around here, if I were you. They’ve got this Polaroid camera and a saw….”
“What screwdriver?” Logan asked with restrained shock.
“The one they were using to take the doorknob off Kit’s bathroom door,” Emmett said smoothly.
Logan put down his fork. “My God!” he exclaimed, staring at the children.
“He never tells us nothing!” Guy muttered, and when he scowled at Emmett, it was like looking at a miniature of the man.
“Emmett, have you ever considered giving up rodeo for a season and raising your kids?” Logan asked curtly.
Emmett glared at him. “They’re my kids and it’s my life. I don’t come up to Houston and try to tell you how to live, do I?”
“Somebody ought to,” Tansy remarked pleasantly, “before he ruins it.”
“Thank you very much,” Logan growled at his mother.
She smiled vacantly. “Why, you’re welcome, dear. Emmett, wouldn’t you like to bring the kids and come and visit Logan? I’d love for you to meet his new fiancée…!”
“I don’t have spare bedrooms,” Logan said abruptly.
“You do so,” Tansy argued. “Three of them.”
“They’re being remodeled.”
“They are not,” she argued.
“They will be by tomorrow,” he said under his breath. “Besides, Emmett’s riding in a rodeo out in Montana.”
“In the snow?” Tansy exclaimed.
“Arizona,” Emmett corrected lazily. He glared at Logan. “Some cousin you are. I offer you the hospitality of my home and loving family, and you don’t even want us to stay a night with you.”
“Loving family?” Logan’s eyes widened. He looked at the kids. “Them?”
“We’re loving,” Amy said, glaring at him.
“All of us,” Guy seconded, scowling.
“You better not say we ain’t loving, mister,” Polk added.
“That’s my kids,” Emmett said smugly. “Listen up, you kids, how would you like Kit there for a mother?”
“She ain’t pretty,” Guy said.
“She’s nice, though,” Amy interrupted. “And she doesn’t have to fix her face every two minutes and paint her fingernails like that lady in the glittery dress that you brought home that night you thought we were asleep,” she reminded Emmett.
Polk frowned as Emmett’s dark face flushed. “He sure took her away in a hurry when he saw us, didn’t he?”
“Will you stop?” Emmett asked him.
Kit chuckled to herself. She did like Emmett. But not enough to marry him.
“You could marry that glittery lady,” Polk suggested. “She said she sure did like your money. She didn’t like us much, though. What was it she called us, Guy?”
“Guy, shut up!” Emmett raged.
“You were so married to our mama, weren’t you, Emmett?” Amy asked. She called her father by his given name, a habit he’d reluctantly gotten used to because he couldn’t seem to break it.
“Yes, I was, Amy,” he said.
“So that means we’re not—”
“Amy, I’m warning you!” Emmett threatened.
“Oh, very well, Emmett,” she said primly, dabbing at her mouth. “May we be excused?”
“Why? Are you in a rush to hijack a truck or something?”
They glared at him. “We’re helping Mrs. Gibbs bake a cake. She’s the foreman’s wife,” Amy explained to everyone. “She said we could.”
“God help Mrs. Gibbs.”
“Some father you are,” Logan muttered as the kids escaped out the backdoor, heading for the foreman’s house.
“Mrs. Gibbs has nerves of steel and they listen to her,” he argued.
“They ought to be listening to you,” Logan persisted.
“Talk about soreheads!” Emmett said, making a clicking sound. “Frustration sure doesn’t sit well with you, does it? And you ought to be ashamed of yourself, making advances to Kit when you’re engaged to that Betsy woman. Something I would never do if you got engaged to me, Kit, my dear,” he added silkily.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Logan roared. He threw down his napkin and walked out of the room.
His back was growing very familiar to Kit, who saw more of it lately than she ever had.
“I really can’t marry you, Emmett. I’m sorry,” Kit said.
“I’m persistent,” he remarked with a lazy smile. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
She smiled, but it wasn’t an encouraging smile.
Two hours later, they said their goodbyes and Logan drove Kit and Tansy to the airport. Their seats were widely separated, and for that small mercy Kit was glad. It was good to go home and get away from the enforced intimacy with Logan. He barely spoke to her now, and she was equally glad to avoid him. After the explosive interlude they’d shared, she didn’t know how to behave with him. All she knew was that she didn’t want to end up in his bed because he was frustrated and she was weak. Going back to Houston and keeping out of his way seemed the only sensible thing to do.
Logan was thinking the same thing. He’d just begun to realize what a horrible mistake he’d be making if he married Betsy. But admitting it was next to impossible. It would kill his pride.
On the other hand, Kit’s well-meant interference had only made him dig his heels in deeper. All the way back home he did his best to convince himself that Kit was wrong and he was right about Betsy. But the doubts were beginning to outweigh the certainties in the relationship. He was at a crossroads and he honestly didn’t know which way to turn.