Читать книгу The Best Is Yet to Come - Diana Palmer - Страница 7
ОглавлениеChapter 2
Ryder answered Jean’s teasing questions about his latest jaunt, but his eyes kept going to Ivy. She felt them on her, curious, searching, and she was more nervous with him than she’d ever been.
“I said, do you want some more bacon, darling?” Jean asked her daughter for the second time, smiling as Ryder grimaced—he hated bacon.
“What? Oh, no, thanks, I’ve had enough.” Ivy smiled. She sipped her coffee slowly.
“You look as if you haven’t eaten for weeks,” Ryder observed, studying her over his empty plate. He was leaning back in his chair and he looked impossibly arrogant.
“She hardly eats anything,” Jean muttered, getting up from the table. “Talk some sense into her, Ryder, will you?” she called as she disappeared.
Ryder toyed with his cup, glancing up at Ivy with suddenly piercing gray eyes. “I think what you need most is to get away from things that remind you of the past. Just for a little while.”
She considered that. “That’s a nice thought,” she agreed. “But I have a total of twenty-eight dollars and thirty-five cents in my checking account...”
“Oh, hell, what do you think I’m suggesting, a tourist special with a sight-seeing jaunt by bus thrown in?” he grumbled. “Listen, honey, I’ve got a cabin in the north Georgia mountains, a villa in Nassau and a summer house in Jacksonville. Take your pick,” he said. “I’ll even fly you there myself.”
She smiled at him. “You’re a nice man, Ryder,” she said. “But I couldn’t.”
“Why not? I won’t try to seduce you,” he said, and smiled faintly, although there was no humor in his eyes. Her breath caught and he saw her stir restlessly at the suggestive remark. “I’m just offering you a vacation.”
“I’m not sure what I want to do, just yet,” she said, faltering.
“You aren’t afraid of me, are you?” he asked curiously. “Surely not, as long as we’ve know each other.”
She stared at him then, her eyes faintly hunted. “Yes,” she confessed. “I think I am, a little. Do you mind?”
His smile was gentle and puzzling. “As a matter of fact, Ivy, I don’t mind in the least,” he said. “I’m flattered.”
Despite her marriage, she felt frankly naive in some respects. She stared at Ryder curiously and thought that he’d probably had more women than most men she’d been acquainted with. The thought of Ryder in bed with a woman shocked her, angered her. She was grateful that her mother came back in time to spare her any more embarrassing remarks.
“I wrapped you up some biscuits to take with you,” Jean said, coming out of the pantry with a small sack in hand. She closed the door, picked up the coffeepot and returned to the table.
“You angel,” Ryder said, grinning. “Come home and cook for me. Ivy can feed herself.”
“Brute,” Ivy said indignantly.
“You have Kim Sun,” Jean reminded him as she refilled their cups. “By the way, where is he?”
“Shivering, I expect, and trying to make cherry crepes on an open hearth.” He sighed. “He’s making me a new dish for dinner.” He looked hunted. “Wouldn’t you like to invite me to dinner, and save me?”
“Kim Sun is a wonderful cook!” Jean burst out.
“When it comes to French pastry, maybe,” he muttered. “He’d gone through two pounds of flour when I left the house. I just asked him to fix me some eggs and he muttered something in Korean that I know I’d have fired him for, if I could have translated it.”
“He makes marvelous pastry,” Ivy offered.
“I can’t live on desserts. When I hired him, I didn’t know about this one fatal flaw—I didn’t know he could only cook desserts. He was a pastry chef, for God’s sake, he can’t even boil a damned potato!”
“He spoils you rotten,” Jean reminded him.
He glared at her. “He also has the world’s sharpest tongue and he treats me like dust under his shoes. I’m going to fire him!”
“Oh, is that why you sent for his parents and got them a house to live in and...” Ivy began, amused.
“You can shut up,” he enunciated curtly. He finished his coffee and got up. “I’ve got to go. He may have burned the house down by now.”
“If you’d called us, we’d have had the gas company turn things on for you,” Jean said.
“I thought about it, but I was in a big hurry to get home.” He bent to kiss Jean’s cheek. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“Anytime.”
His pale eyes shot to Ivy, lingering on her face. “Walk me to the door, Ivy,” he invited.
She got up, too, sticking her hands into her pockets. “Poor soul, he can’t find his own way out.” She shook her head. “What do you do when you’re in the city, hire a man to point?”
He glanced at her. “I got the distinct impression earlier that you’d be delighted to show me to the door,” he said softly.
She flushed. “You...you do come on pretty strong,” she said as they reached the hall, out of Jean’s earshot.
“And if I didn’t?” he asked carelessly.
“I like you just the way you are, Ryder,” she said with unconscious warmth, looking up.
His jaw tautened at that softness in her lovely eyes. He had to drag his eyes away. “I worry about you,” he said tersely. “You can’t live in the past. You’ve got to start living again.”
“I know. It’s the way he died...” She swallowed, folding her arms around her. “It’s going to take time to cope with it once and for all.”
“I know that,” he sighed. His eyes went over her in soft sketches. “If what happened out here disturbed you,” he said suddenly, watching her color as he brought back his unorthodox greeting, “it’s been a long dry spell.”
That she could believe, since he hadn’t noticed her in that way in years. She threw off the pain and managed a dry smile. “Long dry spell, my foot,” she scoffed. “What happened? Did your harem trip over their veils and break something?”
“I don’t have a harem,” he remarked as they reached the front door. His pale eyes wandered slowly down her exquisite figure. “I’ve gone hungry for a long, long time,” he said in a different tone.
She flushed, because the statement seemed to have an intimate connotation, but when he looked up, his eyes were dancing.
“Beast!” she accused, hitting his broad chest playfully.
“Beauty,” he replied.
She started to speak and gave up. He was always one step ahead. “I give up,” she muttered. “It’s like arguing with a broom!”
“I’m going down below Blakely to a farm equipment auction in the morning. Want to ride with me?”
Of course she did, but she knew he only asked out of pity. He was an old family friend and he felt sorry for her. It only made her unrequited love for him more painful. “I have things to do here,” she hedged.
“Tomorrow is Saturday,” he reminded her.
“I know that.” She searched for excuses, but they ran through her mind like sand through a sieve. Her big black eyes lifted, dark with frustration.
“All right,” he said. “No pressure. If you don’t want to come, I won’t hound you.”
She relaxed visibly. “I’m sorry, Ryder...”
“Of course. Another time, then.” He said it lightly, but he seemed brooding, preoccupied as he left.
Later, when she mentioned the invitation to her mother, Jean was puzzled.
“Why didn’t you want to go with him?” she asked her daughter.
She didn’t want to have to explain that. She turned away. “It’s too soon,” she said. “Ben’s barely been dead six months.”
“For heaven’s sake, Ryder isn’t asking you to sleep with him! He only wanted you to go for a ride. Honestly, Ivy, I don’t understand you! Ryder’s the best friend you have.”
“Yes, I know,” Ivy said in anguish. And she thought, that’s the whole problem.
Even though she’d refused to go with him to the auction, Ryder came by the house on his way. He was driving the farm’s four-wheel-drive this time, a big tan-and-brown pickup, and he was dressed in tan boots, tight jeans, and a chambray shirt that might have been tailor-made for him. A black Stetson was cocked over his pale eyes. Ivy stood at the back door and just stared at him, filling her empty heart with the sheer masculine perfection of him as he climbed out of the vehicle and strode lazily toward the porch.
She was wearing a denim skirt and a long-sleeved white blouse with a patterned scarf carelessly knotted at her throat. She had on her boots, too, because she’d planned to go for a walk so that she wouldn’t brood over having turned down Ryder’s invitation. If she’d left five minutes earlier, she’d have missed him. She didn’t know whether to be sorry or glad.
She opened the door as he came up the steps, noticing the way his eyes narrowed and skimmed lightly over her figure before they found their way to her own.
“Ready?” he asked with a taunting smile.
“I was going for a walk,” she began.
“Jean, we’re gone!” he called to her mother.
“Have fun!” Jean called back from her bedroom.
“But, I’m not going with you,” Ivy began weakly.
He swung her easily up in his hard arms, smiling at her consternation. “Yes, you are,” he said softly.
He turned and walked out the door, his taut-muscled, fit body taking her weight as easily as if she were a sack of feathers.
His chest was warm and hard against her breast, and she smelled the tangy cologne he wore and the faint scent of shaving cream on his face. He had lines beside his silvery eyes, and thick black lashes over them. His nose was slightly dented from a few free-for-alls in his younger days. But his mouth...she almost groaned aloud just looking at it. Wide and sensual, chiseled, with a thin upper lip and slightly fuller lower one over perfect white teeth. She wanted so badly to lift her face the fraction of an inch necessary to put her open mouth to his.
The feverish need shocked her. She’d never wanted to kiss anyone else so badly, and she’d dreamed about it for years. But she had to remember that Ryder was only being kind. He didn’t feel that way about her, and the sooner she realized it, the better.
Her convictions didn’t help, though, when he balanced her on one knee to open the door and slid her onto the seat. She fell against him in the process and his mouth came so close that she could all but taste the coffee on his breath.
He hesitated, his eyes narrow and glittery, his body tense for just an instant. Then he smiled and let her go, and the moment passed.
He climbed in beside her to start the truck, lifting an eyebrow at her fumbling efforts to fasten her seat belt.
“Bulldozer,” she accused.
He grinned. “Women are like machinery, you have to give them a push sometimes to get them going.”
She laughed in spite of herself. She couldn’t really picture another man with Ryder’s boldness. He was in a class of his own.
“What do you need to buy at an auction that you couldn’t afford at retail prices?” she asked curiously.
He draped his hand over the steering wheel as he sped down the driveway toward the main road. “Nothing in particular.” He shrugged. “It was someplace to go. I don’t like sitting at home. People know where to find me. And Kim Sun loves to put through people I don’t want to talk to,” he added, scowling. “Damn it, I ought to fire him!”
“What did you do to him?”
His eyebrows arched. “What?”
“You must have done something to irritate him,” she persisted.
He glanced at her. “All I did was throw a plate of fish at him,” he muttered. “Well, I hate most fish, anyway,” he said defensively. “But this wasn’t even cooked.”
“Sushi.” She nodded.
He glared at her. “No, not sushi,” he muttered. “I had my heart set on salmon croquettes like your mother makes. He brought me balls of raw salmon with, ugh, onions cut up on them.”
“Did you tell him how to make salmon croquettes?” she asked, trying not to laugh.
“Hell, I don’t know how to cook! If I knew how to cook, would I cart that vicious renegade around with me?”
“Kim Sun can’t read minds,” she said. “If you’ll send him down to us, mother can show him how to make the things you like.”
He shifted his eyes back to the road. “You can cook. You might come up to the house and show him yourself.”
She didn’t answer. She stared at her hands in her lap. The temptation was overwhelming, but he wouldn’t know that.
“We’d have a chaperone,” he said softly.
She flushed, refusing to meet his eyes. “Ryder...!”
“So shy of me,” he said on a heavy sigh. “I’ve stayed away too long. I guess I knew it wouldn’t be long enough, at that, but a man can stand just so much,” he added enigmatically. “I thought you’d be healed by now.”
She swallowed. “Healed?”
“You can’t climb into the grave with him,” he said through his teeth.
“I’m not trying to do that,” she said. She glanced at his strong profile and felt her heart jump. “I...missed you,” she said huskily.
He seemed to shiver. His pale eyes cut sideways, narrow, dangerous. “I’d have come home anytime you told me that,” he said roughly. “In the middle of the night, if you needed me.”
She felt warm all over at the tenderness in his tone, and wanted to cry because it was just friendship. He cared about her, of course he did, but not in the way she wanted him to. She straightened her full skirt. “You had enough to do, without worrying about me,” she said. “All I need is time, you know.”
He pulled into a drive-in and cut off the engine. “Want coffee?” he asked.
“Yes. Black, please.”
“I remember how you like it,” he said. He got out of the truck and came back less than five minutes later with coffee and doughnuts. He handed hers to her and made room for the cups in the holder he’d installed on the dash.
She sipped coffee and ate the doughnut. “Delicious,” she said with a smile. “I haven’t had breakfast.”
“Neither have I. Food bothers me if I eat too early.” He let his eyes slide over her figure. “You’re too thin, little one. You need to eat more.”
“I haven’t had much appetite lately.”
He turned toward her, crossing his long legs as he dipped his doughnut into his coffee and nibbled it. “Talk about it. Maybe it will help.”
She searched his pale eyes, finding nothing there to frighten her. “He was drunk,” she blurted out. “He went to work drinking and pushed the wrong buttons.”
His chiseled lips parted. “I see.”
“Didn’t you know? Don’t pretend you haven’t asked how it happened. The insurance company refused my claim, but the company stood for it, so that we could afford the funeral.” Her big black eyes searched his. “You did it, didn’t you? You made them pay it.”
“Employees pay into the credit union,” he said tersely. “Ben had accumulated a good bit, to which you were entitled. That’s what paid the funeral expense.”
“You knew he was drunk on the job,” she repeated, her eyes huge and hurt.
He sighed. “Yes, Ivy, I knew,” he replied, meeting her gaze. “I knew about the drinking.” His face tautened. “It’s why I stayed away as much as I did. Because Jean told me about the bruises, once, and if I’d seen them, I’d have killed him right in front of you.”
She started as the words penetrated her brain. She couldn’t even respond, because he looked and sounded violent.
He saw her reaction and cursed his tongue. He couldn’t afford to let anything slip; not now. “I’d have done the same if Eve had been in a similar position,” he added. “You girls mean a lot to me. I’m sure you know that.”
“Yes. Of course.” She couldn’t afford to look disappointed. She managed a smile. “You always were protective.”
“I needed to be, just occasionally.” His eyes pierced into hers. “If I’d been around when Ben made his move on you, you’d never have married him. I couldn’t have been more shocked than I was the day I came back and found you married to him.”
“I’d gone to school with him, you know. We were good friends.”
“Friends don’t necessarily make good mates,” he returned. He finished his coffee. “Ben was known for his drinking even before I hired him. He’d sworn off it and seemed to be on the wagon, so I told the personnel department to give him a chance.”
She’d wondered suddenly why he’d done that. She knew that Ben’s father had worked for the company, but it was curious that he should have hired a man who’d been known for his tendency toward alcohol. Perhaps it had been out of the goodness of his heart, but there was something in his face when he said it...
He looked at her suddenly and she averted her eyes. “Ben appreciated your giving him the job,” she said.
“Hell! He hated my guts and you know it,” he returned, glaring at her. “The longer you were married, the more he hated me.”
She held her breath, hoping he wasn’t going to start asking why. Surely he didn’t suspect the reason?
“He hated mother, too,” she said, trying to smooth it over, “although he never let her see it. He hated anyone I... cared about.”
His face hardened. “And he hit you?”
She averted her gaze to the floorboard. “Not often,” she said huskily.
“My God—” His voice broke. He sat up straight and began to bag up the refuse.
Ivy felt his pain even through the cold wall he was already putting up. Impulsively she touched his hard arm, feeling him stiffen at the light touch. His pale eyes met hers and she saw his breathing quicken.
“Please,” she said softly. “I hurt him. I can’t tell you all of it, but he was a gentle kind of man until he married me. He wanted something I couldn’t give him.”
His eyes held hers. “In bed?” he asked roughly.
She flushed and drew back, embarrassed. “I can’t talk about that,” she said huskily.
“Shades of my prim and proper spinster aunt,” he murmured, watching her. “Three years of marriage and you can’t talk about sex.”
The color deepened. “It’s a deeply personal subject.”
“And you can’t talk to me about it?” he persisted. “There was a time when you could ask me anything without feeling embarrassed.”
“Not about...that,” she amended tautly.
His eyes fell to her firm, high breasts and lingered there with appreciation before they ran back up over her full lips to her eyes. “So reserved,” he murmured. “Such a ladylike appearance. But you have French blood, little one. There must be sensuality in you, even if your husband was never one to drag it out of you. Wasn’t he man enough?” he taunted mockingly.
She actually gasped. He sounded as if he hated Ben, and it was in his eyes, in the way he spoke. He even looked rigid, as if his backbone were encased in plaster.
“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “That was a question I had no right to ask. Here, give me that.”
He took her cup and the paper that had held the doughnut and put them into the sack that had contained the food. He got out without another word to put it in the garbage container.
She sat almost vibrating with nerves. She’d never dreamed that the conversation would turn into an inquisition, and his attitude toward Ben was frightening. How much did he know? And if he’d been aware of Ben’s drinking, why hadn’t he fired him? Ryder was so particular about his work force. He knew intimate little things about almost all of them, and he had his secretary send get-well cards when they were sick and flowers if someone died. He wouldn’t tolerate crooks or drunkards, but he’d tolerated Ben, whom he actively disliked. Why? For Ivy’s sake? Because she was like a younger sister to him? She couldn’t understand it.
He got back into the truck. “Well, I’m still starved, but that will have to do,” he said, good humor apparently restored. “A few hamburgers at lunch will save me yet.”
She laughed, their earlier harsh words already forgotten as he turned the pickup toward the highway.
The auction was fascinating. She walked along beside Ryder, looking at equipment she didn’t even know the name of, listening while he expounded on its merits and flaws.
His pale eyes looked out over the flat horizon and narrowed. “Before too many more years, little one, land and water are going to be as rare as buffalo. The population keeps growing, and someday soon there isn’t going to be enough for all the people.”
“Land grows, too,” she said, smiling up at him. “It comes up out of the ocean.”
“Not around here, it doesn’t,” he mused, tapping her nose with a long forefinger. He smiled back, but his finger moved down to her mouth and began to trace, with apparent carelessness, the perfect outline of her lips.
The tracing made her feel shaky all over. Her breath jerked out against that maddening finger, and he seemed suddenly intent on her mouth, his jaw tensing, his eyes going glittery. His own lips parted and she could actually hear his heartbeat.
“How long have we known each other?” he asked huskily.
“Years,” she whispered. “Since I was...in grammar school.”
“All those years, and nothing but bitter memories for both of us,” he said harshly. His voice had gone deeper, huskier, and his gaze was intent on her mouth. “Yes, you remember, don’t you?” he asked, watching her cheeks flush. “It’s still there between us, even now.”
She could hardly breathe. She dropped her eyes to his chest. “I didn’t realize the door was open,” she said miserably.
“I know. But at the time I didn’t. And for that, I’m sorry.”
Her face did a slow burn. She remembered that night as if it were yesterday. She’d tormented herself with it for years. She’d been spending the night with Eve. She was only eighteen, and a very naive eighteen. Eve had gone with her mother to get a pizza, leaving Ivy alone in the house, or so she thought. Ryder had come home unexpectedly. Not knowing he was in the house, she hadn’t thought to close her bedroom door.
She’d been on her way to the shower and had stripped off everything but the lovely cream-colored silk teddy that Eve had given her for Christmas. It was the most expensive piece of lingerie she’d ever owned, despite the fact that she never expected anyone—much less Ryder—to see her wearing it.
But that night he’d seen the open door, and Ivy in the lacy teddy, and he’d thought she was parading around in it deliberately, for his benefit.
Even now she could see the look on his face. He’d frozen in the doorway, his pale eyes narrowing, darkening. His lips had parted on a shocked breath, and instead of apologizing and going out, he’d closed the door and walked into the room, something in his face vaguely accusing and angry.
Ivy had been eighteen. Young, hopelessly naive, and in the throes of her first real crush. She’d looked up at him with all her helpless longing in her eyes, so innocently beautiful that it had taken all his willpower to keep his hands off her. His eyes had touched her, though, like caressing hands, lingering where the all-but-transparent lace of the bodice gave an explicit glimpse of the tight bud of her nipples, dark against the pale lace.
She’d stopped breathing. Ryder’s eyes had met hers then and held them, his big body rigid.
It was a permissive world, and Eve made no secret of her liberated attitude toward the boys she dated. But Ivy was old-fashioned, and to let a man see her in her underwear was a shocking and embarrassing experience. Unfortunately for her, Ryder didn’t know that. He’d always assumed that she shared Eve’s modern outlook.
“Very nice,” he’d said, his voice caressing while his eyes had feasted on her lace-and-silk-clad body, lingering where her breasts pushed against the bodice. “But then, you always were a beauty, Ivy.”
“You shouldn’t be in here,” she faltered, torn between delight and fear.
“Why not?” His pale eyes had glittered. “You left the door open and waited for me, didn’t you?”
Her eyes had dilated wildly even as he reached for her. “Ryder, you don’t understand...!”
But the feverish protest had come too late. Ryder had been watching her, wanting her, for a long time. Despite his anger at what he thought was entrapment, her beauty was too much for his self-control.
His big, lean hands had framed her face and his eyes watched her as he bent his head. But it wasn’t her mouth he touched. It was the hard, aching tip of her lace-covered breast.
Her hands had curled on his shoulders and she’d made a sound that she could barely recall making. The warm, moist suction of his hard mouth had caused the most abandoned sensations in her slender body, had made her ache and burn and shiver with needs she hadn’t been aware of before. She’d been dazedly aware of his hands sliding the straps of the teddy down her arms, of his eyes suddenly, shockingly, on her bare, mauve-tipped breasts before he bent again. This time, he’d picked her up in his arms, lifting her, his mouth still covering her nipple.
Her fingers had been in his thick hair, holding his mouth to her body while she fought with pride and inhibitions and a certainty that he’d lost control of his own body.
“Ryder, you mustn’t,” she’d whispered weakly as he laid her on the twin bed across the room from Eve’s, the bed she was sleeping in during her overnight visit. “You mustn’t!”
He hadn’t seemed to hear her. He’d followed her down onto the bed, his long, powerful legs trapping hers, his hands smoothing the satiny skin of her back while his mouth suddenly found hers and took it with deliberate intent.
It was the first real adult kiss Ivy had ever received, and so passionate that even the memory of it could make her blush. It was a deep, sultry probing of her mouth that had left her shaking and helpless in his arms.
His mouth had smoothed over her body then, like fire, and she’d arched upward, her response so uninhibited that it had knocked any suspicion of her innocence right out of his whirling mind. Her arms had twined around him, her hands tangling in his thick hair, and tiny little moans had whispered into his mouth as he teased her nipples with strong, warm hands before he began to nuzzle them with his lips and bite at them gently.
Her trembling pleas had sent him over the edge. “Feel how hard you turn me on,” he’d whispered roughly, his dark eyes looking down into hers as his hands contracted on her hips, bringing them into tight contact with his aroused body. He ground her against the hardness, watching her lips tremble, her eyes widen at the graphic evidence of his desire. “I want you so much, I can hardly bear it! Can you take care of yourself, baby?”
The husky question had brought her to her senses like a shower of cold water. “Take...care of myself?” she’d faltered, her body throbbing with pleasure from the warmth of his hands, the sweet brush of his mouth.
“Have you got something to use, or are you on the pill?” he’d demanded, his voice deeper, his eyes dark with passion as he fought to maintain control.
Her face had gone scarlet. “Ryder, I’m... I’m a virgin,” she’d whispered. “I don’t know how to...to...I mean, I’m not on the pill.”
His dark brows had drawn together. “You’re a what?”
She’d swallowed, because he looked frightening. “I’ve never done this before,” she whispered.
He’d said something that she’d never heard from a man’s lips before he dragged himself away from her and got to his feet, glaring down at her as if he hated her. “Damn you,” he’d sworn huskily, the very softness of his voice more intimidating than shouting would have been. “You vicious little tease!” He’d added some other insults to that one, words she’d spent years trying to forget, explicit things that she couldn’t have imagined Ryder saying to any woman. He’d left her, but she hadn’t heard him go. She’d cried all night long, deceiving Eve when she returned with the pretence of a migraine. And she’d never again spent a night at the Calaway house, despite all Eve’s invitations. Only she and Ryder knew why, and until now, they’d never mentioned the subject.
It had left scars on Ivy’s emotions. The experience had made her feel cheap, somehow. Also, it had shown her how vulnerable she was, and how skillful Ryder was at seduction. Eve had talked occasionally about Ryder’s women and his love of freedom, so she knew it had only been an impulse with him, a momentary yielding to desire.
But she’d given him her heart that night. Afterward, she’d found reasons not to go to the Calaway house overnight again. And, indeed, during those two years before Ben came into her life, Ryder had seemed to avoid Ivy as well. But about the time Ben started noticing her, Ryder had come back into her life and casually invited her to dinner one night. Frightened of herself, and of the look in his eyes when he watched her, she’d invented a date with Ben. When she’d confessed what she’d done to Ben, he’d made the date real. Weeks later, while Ryder was out of the country, she and Ben were quietly married.
“Yes, you remember, don’t you?” he asked. “I made the mistake of my life that night. The next day I went to Toronto, and I avoided you like the plague after that, or didn’t you notice?” he asked on a rueful laugh. “And from that day on, if you spent the night with Eve, it was at your house, not mine.”
“It wasn’t what you thought,” she began. “I honestly didn’t know you were in the house.”
His face contorted and he looked away. “Oh, God, don’t you think I finally realized that? But the damage was done. The only reparation I could make was to keep out of your way. I’d made you afraid of me. I didn’t want to do any worse damage. But in the end it wasn’t necessary. You ran straight to Ben the first time I asked you out on a date.”
Her shoulders lifted and fell in a helpless little gesture. “I thought you might still think I was a...tease and...” She swallowed. Her fears sounded juvenile now. She wrapped her arms around her. “I couldn’t be sure that you might not be in the mood for a little revenge. You seemed to hate me that night. You said...” She laughed brokenly. “You said I was too small-breasted to appeal to any real adult male, and that it was just proximity that had made you touch me at all.”
His eyes closed on a heavy sigh. He turned toward the horizon again and rammed his hand into his pocket. “Men... say things when they’re frustrated,” he murmured uneasily. “I’m sure you know that now. I didn’t mean any of the things I said to you that night. I was hurting pretty bad.”
She stared at the ground. She’d managed to work that out, over the years. It didn’t help very much. She’d loved him, and he’d savaged her fragile ego. “I’m sorry,” she said helplessly.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he replied curtly. “I should have walked away, but I couldn’t. I’d never seen anything so beautiful.” He glanced at her, his face rigid when he read the doubt in her dark eyes.
She felt warm all over at the softness in his deep voice. She couldn’t quite manage to meet his eyes, though, and it sounded more like an apology than praise. “Thank you, but you don’t have to pretend,” she said, her eyes staring blankly toward the distant trees. “Ben thought I was...too small, too—Ryder!”
He took her by the arms, his steely grip unconsciously bruising as he jerked her up against him. “I lied,” he said huskily, eyes blazing. “Can’t you get it through your head that I lied? I wanted you almost enough to force you, damn it! I had to get out of there, I had to hurt you so that you wouldn’t reach out to me when I let you go!” His tall, powerful frame seemed to vibrate with passion. “Oh, God, Ivy, you don’t know how that night has haunted me over the years. You don’t know...!”
She recognized the unholy torment in his face without understanding what was causing it. Without thinking, she reached up to his lean cheek and touched it gently. He actually flinched, but when she started to draw her hand back, he pressed it, palm flat, to his jaw.
“It’s all right,” she faltered. “It was years ago.”
“It was yesterday.” He looked older suddenly. Bone-weary. His eyes darkened as they searched her face. “You ran from me,” he said huskily.
Her eyes fell. “I didn’t know what else to do. I could never talk to Mama about things like that.”
He pulled her against him and held her gently, his eyes staring blankly toward the auction platform. “Maybe it was a good thing to get it out in the open, to talk about it.”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes. It was heaven to stand in his arms, to be close to him like this. She shivered with pleasure.
Ryder felt the trembling and went rigid. She was afraid of him. He’d thought the fear was because she wanted him. But was he only deluding himself, again? His big hand slid slowly down her back, bringing her even closer. He could feel her breath sighing out quickly at his throat, an erotic little sigh that made him feel hot all over. He liked the feel of her so close. It brought back memories of that night long ago when he’d tasted her, when she’d been everything in the world to him. She still was, but over the years the feeling had grown and ripened, until now what he felt for her was a raging fever that all the oceans on earth couldn’t have put out. He wanted her, but not just physically. He wanted her like a thirsting man wants water, all of her, just for him.
“I used to wonder what life would have been like if I hadn’t lost my head with you,” he said under his breath, folding her even closer. “We were friends. Over the years I hoped that we could regain that closeness.”
“I...thought we had,” she said, trying to make her voice steadier, to calm her screaming pulse. The feel of all that masculine strength so close to her was doing impossible things to her. She wanted to reach up and hold him, to bury her face against his bare skin and feel him wanting her....
“Not quite,” he said huskily. He drew in a ragged sigh. “But maybe if we work at it, Ivy, we might manage friendship again. What do you think?”
She closed her eyes. “I think we might, too,” she whispered.
His heart raced wildly in his chest. He lifted his head and tilted her face up to him. “So beautiful,” he said deeply. “Every man’s dream.”
Except yours. She almost said the words aloud. She smiled a little sadly and pulled away. “Not quite,” she replied, laughing nervously. “Shouldn’t we get back?” she said evasively, noticing the crowd gathering around the auction platform. “I think they’re starting.”
“What?” He had to force his mind to work. The scent of her was in his nostrils, the feel of her... He glanced where she was staring. “Oh. The auction. Yes, we’d better get back.”
Back to reality, that was. He took her arm and guided her through the crowd, still savoring his brief taste of heaven. Friendship, he told himself firmly, was better than nothing. And from there, he might build something much more lasting and satisfying. He was smiling by the time the auctioneer began rattling off items for sale.
