Diamond Spur

“Which was probably a good thing, or I’d never have had the nerve,” she recalled with a warm smile, studying him. “But you needed someone. Gene was too frightened of you to do any real good, and so was Sheila.”

“They remembered too well what happened when the old man got loaded,” he said, memories tautening his jaw. One corner of his mouth twisted mockingly. “He used to hit. The drunker he was, the harder he hit. I don’t drink often, or very much.” He shifted against the seat, his eyes narrow. “I guess I’ve always been afraid I might end up like him. And who knows, if you hadn’t come along at the right time, I might have.”

“Not you,” she said with conviction, her quiet eyes adoring his profile. “You’re not a cruel man.”

“Neither was he before he started drinking,” Jason said. He sighed. “You were lucky, honey. Your father never touched the stuff.”

“I was lucky in a lot of ways,” she agreed. “I still am.” She wondered if Jason knew that she’d heard about how his father had once extended his blind fury to Jason and Gene’s mother, that he’d beaten Nell Donavan once and only once, and that she’d vanished the next day, leaving her sons at his mercy. Probably he didn’t realize that Sheila had passed that bit of gossip on to Kate. He hardly ever talked about his childhood, even to her. It was a mark of affection he had for her that she knew anything about those dark days. Jason was a very private man. “I’ve never been really afraid of you,” she said absently, “even when you were drinking. That night, I never thought that you might harm me.”

He smiled at her. “You saw deep that night,” he said quietly. “Right through the anger to the pain. Most people never look past my temper, but you did.”

“I liked you, God knows why,” she said, smiling back. “And there wasn’t anybody else who seemed inclined to look after you after that blond sawmill got through with you.”

“She taught me a hard lesson,” he replied. “One I’ll never forget. In my way, I loved her.”

“One bad experience shouldn’t sour you for life,” she told him. “All women aren’t out for what they can get.”

“How would you know?” he asked bitterly. “You with your little girl crushes on movie stars and pinup boys? My God, the men you’ve dated weren’t even men in any real sense. They were geldings you could lead around by the nose,” he said shortly. “You haven’t even been intimate with a man, have you?”

Her face went stiff. Amazing, she thought angrily, that it was the twentieth century and she still couldn’t toss off sophisticated chatter with any credence. “How could I have managed that, with you and my mother bulldogging me at every turn and keeping me away from men who knew anything?” She turned in the seat, her green eyes accusing. “My goodness, after Baxter Hewett joined the Marines, all the local men decided you were too much competition and I’ve spent my evenings at home ever since!”

He lifted his cigarette to his mouth with a faintly surprised glance in her direction as they bumped along the ranch road. “I didn’t realize that.”

“Think how it looks, when you beat up men who try to seduce me,” she sighed.

“I don’t want other men seducing you,” he said without thinking. “Especially not a ladies’ man like Hewett.”

“Why not?” she burst out, exasperated.

“There’s a question.” He turned off onto a dirt road. “God, it’s dusty!” he muttered.

She spared the thick yellow dust a glance and turned her attention back to him. “Go ahead, avoid the question. That’s what you always do when you don’t want to talk about things.”

He lifted an eyebrow as he glanced at her. “Well, it works, doesn’t it?” he asked reasonably. “All right, if you want to know the truth, sexual freedom may be in vogue all over the world, but I’m an old-fashioned man. I believe God made women to have children and be the foundation of a family. To my mind, that doesn’t mix with easy virtue and high-pressured careers.”

She gaped at him. “You reactionary!” she accused. “You mean you think the little woman should stay at home, chained to a stove and slave to a man’s hungers?”

“What would you know about a man’s hungers, Kate?” he asked suddenly, his dark eyes cutting and intent as they met hers across the seat.

She shifted restlessly. “What do you know about a woman’s heart?” she returned. “With an attitude like yours, you’ll never find a woman to marry.”

“Praise God,” he replied easily. “A wife is the last thing on earth I want.”

“Well, you’ll never get an heir for the Spur without one,” she returned.

He frowned thoughtfully through a thin veil of smoke. With a brief glance in the rearview mirror, he pulled off onto the grassy shoulder and cut off the engine. All around them was open land, and Kate noticed the familiar Diamond Spur logo on each gate. What Jason had was a small empire. It stretched practically into San Frio, and encompassed large tracts of bottom land up and down the Frio and small tributaries.

“I want to show you something.” He got out, moving around the Bronco to open the door and help her down from the high cab.

She was briefly close to him until he reached past her to shut the door. Then he leaned back against it, his long legs crossed, the cigarette dangling from one hand.

“Blalock Donavan had a cabin out there,” he said, nodding toward the flat plain that led to the Frio River. “The homestead burned down a month after he took possession, and he and some of the vaqueros put up a shanty just for him to sleep in. Soon after that, he married a Mexican girl and had seven kids in rapid succession. He built a house very much like the one I live in now, but the legend goes that he and the Mexican girl stood off a Comanche war party in that very cabin.”

“Where the mesquite stand is?” she asked, gesturing toward a thick grove of trees with long, feathery green fronds blowing in the wind.

“The very one. There’s a legend that she saw her patron saint standing beside the river, and he promised her that she and her husband would be spared. The name San Frio came loosely from it—San for Saint and Frio for the Frio River.” He glanced at her and grinned. “Even legends have some truth, but Blalock was a gambler and a realist. He wrote in his diary that it was rain as much as divine intervention that saved them.”

She leaned back against the Bronco’s door beside him, trying not to notice the powerful lines of his body, or the thick shadow of chest hair that peeked out at the unbuttoned neck of his shirt. “Rain?” she coaxed.

“Comanches lashed the arrowheads on their arrows with rawhide,” he explained. “When it rained, the humidity, so the story goes, made the rawhide relax.” His dark eyes twinkled down at her. “So the arrowheads had this tendency to fall off in wet weather, before they got to the intended victim.”

She laughed gently at the irony of it. Of course, those warriors surely had other weapons just as deadly, and they were fabulous horsemen and fighters. But it was one tiny Achilles’ heel in an otherwise terrifying memory, and she liked knowing that even those men had one.

“The things you never learn in history class,” she mused.

“They say that one of my ancestors was a Comanche,” he remarked. “A lot more were Spanish and Mexican.”

“I guess most of mine were Irish,” she sighed. She watched the horizon, fascinated with the broad reach of open land. “There can’t be a more beautiful place on earth than this,” she said suddenly.

“It’s that,” he agreed, smiling with faint possession and pride as he followed her gaze. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth. “From a few scraggly longhorns to this,” he mused. “It was a long road, Kate.”

“And a hard one,” she murmured. Her eyes lifted to his face, tracing the hard lines. “Your age tells on you sometimes.”

“I guess it does. I feel it more these days.” He turned his head and looked down at her, and without warning, the world narrowed to black eyes and green ones. Around them, the skies were growing dark, the thunder rumbling. The wind kindled like cool fire, whipping across Kate’s face as she met and wondered at the sudden lack of expression in Jason’s features, and the curious narrow glitter in his black eyes as his chin lifted slightly and his body stilled.

Lightning striking, Kate thought while she could. Her heart was as wild as the wind around them, her breath stuck like a cactus in her throat. Jason was looking at her in a way he never had, not in all the years she’d known him. Something in that look made her toes curl in her boots, making her body feel as if his hands had stroked it.

He shifted, the movement slow, easy, turning so that his side was against the Bronco. His right hand, holding the dead cigarette, rested on the open window. The other was suddenly at Kate’s neck, brushing stray wisps of long, dark hair, tracing an artery that was pounding crazily.

Jason was so close that she could smell the tobacco and leather scents that mingled with his spicy cologne. She could feel the warmth of his muscular body, the quiet threat of his masculinity. His dark eyes searched hers quietly with a new kind of curiosity. And then, all at once, they dropped to her soft bow of a mouth and lingered there with veiled intent.

The static from the CB radio was overloud drifting out the open window of the deserted cab, and Kate tried to concentrate on it, not on the very disturbing way Jason was looking at her. Any minute, everything she felt was going to start showing, and she couldn’t bear to have him know how vulnerable she was.

But he already did. His dark eyes had caught every single giveaway movement of her body—her swollen breasts, her quick breathing, the yielding softness of her eyes. He wasn’t all that experienced, and for the past few years he’d lived almost like a monk because of Melody’s painful defection. But Kate was even less experienced than he was, and everything she felt was visible.

It gave him an odd sensation to know that she was aroused by him. He wasn’t a handsome man. He was rich, and his wealth had given him opportunities with women even if he was still too bitter to accept them. But he couldn’t remember a time when a woman had wanted just him, craggy face, mean temper and all. Even the one woman he’d loved had only wanted what he could give her. But Kate was looking at him in a way that made his blood run hot, and he realized suddenly that if he tried to kiss her, she’d more than likely let him.

When he realized that, reason deserted him. It was a new experience, having Kate want him. Breathing just a little unsteadily, he reached behind her tilted head, loosening the ribbon that held her long braid in place. With deft, easy movements, he loosened her hair and his fingers smoothed it down her back, slowly bringing her even closer to him.

“There’s a storm...coming,” she remarked in a quick, breathless voice.

“A hell of a storm, Kate,” he breathed as his free hand slid to her waist and then around her, roughly pulling her closer so that the tips of her breasts came into sudden contact with his chest.

Kate felt electricity rustle through her body at the feel of him so close against her. Her hands went to his shirt instinctively and pressed there, feeling the cushy softness of his chest hair against hard, pulsating muscle. It was wildly arousing, and she couldn’t hide her sudden trembling.

The wind whipped through her hair and the dark skies over Jason’s head outlined the set of his jaw, the shadowy darkness of his eyes. “Jason?” she whispered in what was half question, half protest.

His gaze fell to her mouth while his lean fingers dug in and pulled her even closer. He was burning now, the cool wind making the fever bearable as he breathed in the scent of roses that clung to Kate’s soft body. All the reasons he shouldn’t let this happen fell away at the hunger that drew his head down. He wanted her. She wanted him. There was nothing in the world but Kate and her mouth, parted, softly tremulous, welcoming....