Lacy

She searched his eyes, hoping to find secrets there, but they were like a closed book. “You still haven’t told me what I’ll get if I come,” she repeated, the alcohol dimming her inhibitions, making her reckless for a change.

“What do you want?” he asked, with a mocking smile.

She gave it back. “Maybe I want you,” she said blatantly, the gin giving her a little reckless courage.

He didn’t say a word. His face hardened. His eyes went dark. “You hated it that night,” he said curtly. “You cried.”

“It hurt. It won’t again,” she said simply, airing her newly acquired knowledge. She lifted her chin stubbornly. “I’m twenty-four. This—” she gestured around her “—is what I have to look forward to in my old age. Loneliness and a few hangers-on, and some wild music and booze to dull the hurt. Well, if I’m going to grow old, I don’t want to do it alone.” She moved closer to him, her face quiet with pride. “I’ll go back with you. I’ll live with you. I’ll even pretend that we’re happy together, for appearances. But only if you stay in the same room with me, like a proper husband.” She hated making it an ultimatum, but she wanted a child. She might have to trick him into giving her one, or blackmail him into it, but she was determined.

He actually trembled. “What?” he sounded as if she’d astonished him.

“I want the appearance of normality, and no giggling family making fun of me because you make it so damned obvious that you don’t want me.”

“Stop cursing—” he shot back at her.

“I’ll curse if I feel like it,” she told him. “Cassie was forever making horrible remarks about your insistence on separate rooms, and so were Ben and Katy. Everyone knew you weren’t behaving like a husband. It was just one more humiliation to add to the humiliation of being treated like a stick of furniture! So, if I come back, those are my terms.”

He swallowed. His dark eyes touched every line, every curve of her face. For an instant, she could see him wavering. And then he closed up, all at once.

“I can’t be guided like a blind mule,” he told her bluntly, his stance threatening. “If you want to come, all right. But no conditions. You’ll have your old room, and you’ll sleep in it alone.”

“Would it be that hard for you to sleep with me?” she taunted. She slid her hands over her slender hips. “George wants to.”

His chest expanded roughly. “George can damned well go hang!”

“If you won’t, I’ll let him,” she threatened. Her eyes sparkled with the challenge. Let him sweat for a change. Let him wonder and worry. “I’ll stay right here, and—”

“Damn you!” His dark eyebrows seemed to meet in the middle as he glared at her. “Damn you, Lacy!”

“You can close your eyes and think of England,” she whispered mischievously, because this was fun. The idea of seducing Cole and making him enjoy it was the most delicious fun she’d had in eight long months. And if there was a little revenge mixed up in it, so what? The thought of luring him into her bed, of tempting and tantalizing him, was delightful, especially now that she knew it was unlikely to be painful a second time. Untold pleasures lay in store for both of them, if she could bluff him.

He muttered something under his breath, finished his cigarette, and slammed it into the fireplace. “Damn you!” he repeated.

She moved around in front of him, making him look at her. “Why did you come to me that night if you didn’t want me?”

“I did…want you,” he bit off.

“And now you don’t?”

Oh, God. She was killing him by inches! His body felt like drawn cord. What she was demanding was impossible, but he couldn’t let her carry out her threat. The thought of Lacy with any other man cut his heart. He drew a deep breath. He couldn’t show weakness, not now.

Attack was the best defense. He lifted his face and glared down at her. “Sex is a weapon women use,” he said coldly. “My grandfather taught me to live without it.”

“Your grandfather almost succeeded in making a slab of stone out of you!” she shot back.

“Caring is a weakness,” he said shortly. “It’s a disease. I won’t be owned by any damned woman—much less a society girl from Georgia with a fat wallet!”

Her face blanched. Her fists clenched at her sides. So it was going to be war. All right. He was asking for it.

“Nevertheless,” she said tautly, “if you want me to come back, you’ll have to share a room with me. I’m not going to have the family laughing at me a second time. You don’t even have to touch me, Cole,” she conceded, hoping proximity might accomplish what blackmail couldn’t. “But you are going to have to share my room. If you want me back…” she added calculatingly. “And I think you need me—at least to help you cope with Katy. Don’t you?”

“Haven’t you any pride, woman?”

“No. I gave it up the day I married you,” she told him. “My pride, my self-respect, and my hopes of a rosy future. If you want me back, I’ll come. But on my terms.”

His eyes were fierce, black as coal. He drew in a slow, deep breath. “Your terms,” he said curtly. “Blackmail, you mean.”

He looked so formidable that she almost backed down. Then she remembered how she’d learned to treat George when he got out of hand. She wondered absently if it might work on stone?

She moved a little closer, coquettishly, and deliberately batted her long eyelashes at him. “Kiss me, you fool!” she said vampishly, lifting her face and parting her red lips.

He stared down at her through narrowed eyes and hoped like hell she wouldn’t notice the sudden thunder of his heartbeat at that innocent teasing. “Stop that,” he said irritably, giving nothing away. “All right,” he said, with a rough sigh, “we’ll share a room.”

“Finally, a chink in the stone!” She sighed, smiling wickedly, and he actually seemed to soften a little. Miracle of miracles! Had she accidentally hit on a way to get to him?

He scowled at her for another few seconds, half irritated, half intrigued by this new Lacy. He pursed his lips and almost smiled down at the picture she made. “I’ll pick you up in the morning at seven.” He glanced toward the hall. “You’d better send that pack of coyotes home.”

She curtsied. “Yes, Your Worship!”

“Lacy…” he said warningly.

“You’re so handsome when you’re mad,” she sighed.

The scowl got worse. He actually seemed to vibrate, and she felt a fever of pleasure that she could knock him off-balance. If he were vulnerable, there might be a little hope. Eight months, wasted; years wasted—and now she’d discovered the way to reach him!

“Good night,” he said firmly.

She gave him an impish little grin. “Wouldn’t you like to stay the night?”

“I would not,” he said shortly.

“Then enjoy your last night alone,” she said, with a gleam in her blue eyes. She turned and walked away, on legs that could hardly hold her. And she was laughing when she reached the room where the party was still in full swing.

But the man letting himself out the front door wasn’t laughing. He never should have agreed to her terms. He should have told her to take them and go to hell. Only he was so hungry for the sight of her that his mind had stopped working. It was probably all bluff on her part, about sleeping with that tall clown. But how could he risk it? By God, he’d beat the man to death if he so much as touched her!

The violence of his feelings disturbed him. She was just a woman, just Lacy, who’d been around so long she was like the flowers his mother always put on the hall table. But things had been different since that night with her. He hadn’t meant to touch her. The marriage had been forced; he’d been determined to find some way to drive her from the ranch without ever consummating it. And then he’d started kissing her, and one thing had led to another. He wasn’t sorry, except for hurting her. It had been magic. But it was too big a risk to repeat. How in hell was he going to share a room with her and keep his secret? In that intimacy, which he’d avoided for years even with his men, how could he keep her from finding out?

He’d lose her when she knew, he thought. That hadn’t bothered him at first, but he’d had too much time to think. He’d missed her. He’d wanted her. Avoiding her hadn’t worked. He’d tried that, eight months’ worth, and tonight was the first time he’d felt alive since she’d left him. He sighed. Well, he’d take it one day at a time. That was what Turk always said: Stop gulping life down in a swallow. So maybe he’d try that. As he left the house, the look in his eyes was as grim as rain, as hopeless as dead flowers on a grave.

Chapter

Two

Lacy sat down heavily in the wing chair, still reeling from her demands and Cole’s reluctant agreement to them. She’d been bluffing, but fortunately he didn’t know that. Imagine, she thought, shy little Lacy Jarrett actually winning one over Coleman Whitehall. The gin had helped, of course. She still wasn’t used to it, and it had gone to her head. Also, she mused, to her tongue.

Back in the old days, she would have been too shy to even speak to him. Her eyes closed and she drifted back to those first, nerve-wracking days at Spanish Flats following the death of her parents.

Katy had been welcoming, like Marion and Ben. But Cole had been formal, distant, and almost hostile to her. She’d made a habit of keeping out of his way, so quiet when he was at the table for meals that she seemed invisible. It didn’t help that she started falling in love with him almost at once.