True Colors

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said harshly, borrowing one of Henry’s favorite euphemisms, “I didn’t become a streetwalker!”

He relaxed visibly, and she hated herself for reacting to that horrible expression in his eyes. She should have let him think what he liked.

“Get in,” he said, weary with relief. “I’ll drive you to the house.”

She didn’t argue. It was a dark and lonely night, and she’d never liked being on her own after dusk. Usually she wasn’t; Mr. Smith was always somewhere nearby.

“Who is he?” he asked as the powerful car purred away from the curb and down the long, wide street.

“He?”

“Don’t play games. The man leaving your house that morning.”

“His name is Mr. Smith,” she said simply.

“Is he your lover?”

She leaned her head back against the seat with a long sigh. “Isn’t it a nice evening?” she mused. “I always did love Billings at night.”

“You haven’t answered me,” he said impatiently.

“I won’t, either,” she replied. She turned toward him, her eyes steady and accusing. “You have no right at all to ask anything about my personal life. Not after what you did to me.”

He didn’t look at her. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Why didn’t you go with him?”

“He works in Chicago,” she said. “I work here. For the time being.”

His dark eyes narrowed angrily. “Is it serious?”

Her thin shoulders rose and fell. “Not really. He’s a friend.”

He let out a held breath.

“Why would it matter to you?” she asked, conversationally. “What we…did was over long ago.”

He looked at her while he stopped for a traffic light, his gaze slow and possessive. “I burn every time I look at you,” he said gruffly. “I ache for you. There hasn’t been one woman who could block you out of my mind for five minutes.”

Her face burned. “That’s lust,” she said, enunciating the word clearly. “That’s all it ever was to you. You wanted me. You couldn’t get enough. You’d have come to me from your deathbed if I’d asked you, and we both know it. But it wasn’t enough then, and it isn’t now.”

“I don’t remember you having so many moral scruples at the time,” he said mockingly.

Her head lowered. “I had none at all. I was in love with you.”

He made a sound. The flat statement had shocked him. He’d never really questioned Meredith’s motives for the affair. He’d always assumed that she felt the same helpless, raging desire that he did.

“Sure,” he said after a minute, his voice harsh. “That’s why you fell into bed with Tony.”

She tilted her head toward him and smiled coldly. “I went to you a virgin. I was so besotted with you that I couldn’t have given myself to another man if I’d been stinking drunk.”

“Maybe that was how you got him to help you steal the money,” he persisted, his eyes calculating.

She laughed. “Tony gave all the money back, though, didn’t he?” she asked icily. “And if you’d pushed him hard enough, he’d have told you that we never had either a conspiracy or a relationship.”

Cy looked straight at the road. “Tell me, Meredith,” he said unexpectedly.

“Tell you what?”

“The truth.” He looked at her. “Tell me all of it.”

She smiled, unblinking. “I offered it to you six years ago and you didn’t want it.”

“Now I do.”

“Then ask your mother,” she said. “Ask Myrna Harden for it.”

“You won’t get anywhere by trying to drag my mother into this,” he said. “We both know she disapproved of you.”

“She hated me,” she corrected. “I have Indian relatives, remember? I come from poor people, from ordinary stock. My parents had a very small farm until they died, and I can remember needing shoes and having to wear secondhand ones before my great-aunt and great-uncle took me in. But even afterward, I didn’t have social status or money, and that’s what your mother wanted for you. I wasn’t good enough. It had to be a blue blood.”

He turned into the street that led past her great-aunt’s house. His face was rigid with pent-up emotions. “Most mothers want what’s best for their children.”

She thought of Blake and nodded. “Yes. But all mothers don’t interfere to the point of making decisions for them. I never would,” she added.

He pulled into her driveway and turned off the engine and the lights, turning to look at her in the porch light.

“Why are you still here?” he asked quietly. “If there’s a man waiting in Chicago, why haven’t you gone back to him?”

She looked into his face, and all the anguish came flooding back, all the rejection, all the love. “I have my reasons,” she said.

He slid his arm over the back of the seat, tugging the fabric of his gray jacket closer to his muscular body. He smelled of spice and soap. Meredith remembered how it had felt to lie in his arms with nothing between them except the beads of sweat they generated as they melded together in passion.

He seemed to sense those memories. His voice was husky when he spoke. “The first time was under a tree by the lake on my ranch,” he recalled quietly, as if he’d read her mind. “We’d gone riding, but by then, we were both burning with need of each other. I pulled off your top and you let me. I put you down on the grass and you let me. I undressed you, and myself, and I couldn’t even wait long enough to arouse you. I had you—” his voice deepened as he moved closer “—in one long, hard thrust.”

She flushed. “Don’t!”

“Does it embarrass you?” he asked. He jerked her against him, imprisoning her against his chest. “You were tight and afraid, and when I started convulsing, you asked if I was hurt.” He bent and whispered into her ear, then her mouth. “But the second time, I kissed you from head to toe and bit the inside of your thighs and your nipples, and when I took you, you were ready for me. We were all over the ground that second time, thrashing, shaking. We came apart because I was too explosive, and you came after me, sitting over me to finish it. I watched you,” he breathed into her, his tongue following the words into the soft darkness.

Meredith’s eyes stung with tears as she reached up to him, her arms clinging. Vivid memories flashed through her mind.

“Yes,” he groaned. His mouth opened, insistent, while his hands fought under her blouse and bra to find the soft warmth of her body.

She didn’t think about the changes he was sure to find. He knew her body as well as she did in the old days. It was inevitable that her maturity would be noticeable.

His fingers pushed softly at one breast before his palm slid under it, lifting it. He raised his head, and his eyes burned into hers. “You’re bigger.”

“I’m older,” she said huskily.

He moved, and before she realized what he meant to do, he had the blouse and bra up past her collarbone, and he was looking at her. His breath caught at her soft firmness, at her delicate color.