Читать книгу Sisters Found - Joan Johnston - Страница 7

HOPE BUTLER WAS DESPERATE. The man she loved was engaged to another woman, and he planned to marry her in two weeks. Hope had to do something. Jake Whitelaw didn’t belong with that other woman. He should be spending the rest of his life with her.

Jake had fought his attraction to Hope from the very beginning. She could hardly blame him. She’d been only eighteen when she’d first realized she loved him. He’d been thirty-six. Perhaps her infatuation would have died a quick death if Jake hadn’t returned her interest. But he had.

She hadn’t known for sure until that fateful day more than three years ago, when she’d placed temptation in his path. She recalled their confrontation in her daddy’s barn as though it had happened yesterday.

She’d been waiting a long time for the chance to get Jake alone, and it had come when he made a delivery of hay.

His shirt was dirty, the sleeves rolled up to reveal strong, sinewy forearms. His Stetson was sweaty around the brim, and shaggy black hair was crushed at his nape. His cheeks were hollow, and he had a sharp nose and wide-set, ice-blue eyes. He was half a foot taller than she was, lean at the hip, but with broad, powerful shoulders. He made her body come alive just looking at him.

“How are you, Jake?” she said, walking with her shoulders back so her breasts jutted and her hips swayed.

He eyed her sideways. “Just dandy,” he muttered.

“Daddy wants that hay in the barn,” she said, hop-skipping to keep up with his long strides.

“Why didn’t you just say so? You don’t need to come with me, little girl. I know where it goes.”

Little girl. Hope ground her teeth. She’d show him she was no little girl! “There’s some stuff needs to be moved first,” she hedged. “Machinery that’s too heavy for me to pick up by myself.”

“Why didn’t your daddy move it?”

“I told him I could do it. That is, before I realized how heavy it was,” she fibbed.

Jake didn’t look suspicious, but it wasn’t going to take long once they got inside the barn for him to realize she’d lied. The space where the hay was supposed to be stacked had been cleared out that morning. She opened the door and went inside first, then waited for him to enter before she closed the door behind him.

The barn smelled strongly of leather and manure. Sunlight streamed through the cracks between the planks of the wooden barn, leaving golden lines on the empty, straw-littered dirt floor.

He turned to confront her. “What the hell is going on, little girl?”

She was backed up against the door to keep Jake from leaving. She put her hand over the light switch when he reached for it, afraid of what she’d see in his eyes in the stark light of the naked overhead bulb. He didn’t force the issue, merely stepped back and stood facing her, his legs widespread, his hands on his hips.

“What happens now?” he said. “You want sex? Take off your jeans and panties and lie down over there on that pile of straw on the floor.”

Hope’s eyes went wide when he started to unbuckle his belt. “Stop! Wait.” She was shocked by his brutally frank speech, by the rough sound of his voice, by his plain intention of taking what she seemed to be offering without any pretense of romance. This wasn’t how she’d imagined things happening between them.

He had his shirt unbuttoned and was ripping it out of his jeans when he paused and looked her right in the eye. “You chickening out, little girl?”

Maybe if he hadn’t made it a dare, she would have run, which is what she realized he expected her to do. She stared right back at him and began untying the knot at her midriff.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

She watched his eyes go wide, then narrow. A muscle jerked in his cheek. He no longer seemed interested in taking his clothes off. He was too busy watching her. Waiting, she suspected, to see how far she would go.

Her mouth was bone dry, but she wanted him to know why she was doing this. “I…I love you, Jake.”

He snorted. “Get to it or get out.”

Her cheeks pinkened in mortification, but she refused to run. It wasn’t easy undressing in front of him. She kept her eyes lowered while she fumbled with the knot. He stood watching, waiting like a lone wolf stalking an abandoned calf, certain of the kill.

When the knot came free, her shirt fell open. She let it slide off her shoulders and onto the floor, revealing the pure white demi-cup pushup bra she’d bought with her baby-sitting money, which revealed just about everything but her nipples.

When she lifted her gaze to his face, she was frightened by what she saw. His eyes had a dangerous, feral look, his jaw was clenched tight, and his hands had balled into fists. He looked intense, unapproachable, but she forced herself to walk up to him, to slide her hands around his neck, to lift up on tiptoe to press her lips against his.

A second later she was shoved up hard against the barn door with Jake’s hips grinding against her own. His tongue was in her mouth taking what he wanted, and she was so full of sharp, exciting sensations that she couldn’t breathe.

Just as suddenly he backed off, leaving her with Jell-O knees that wanted to buckle, a heart that was threatening to explode and her insides tied up tight, hurting and wanting. “Jake,” she said. It was a cry of emotional pain. A plea for surcease from her unrequited need.

“I’m twice your age,” he said flatly. “You’re too damn young for me, Hope.”

“You want me,” she said boldly.

It would have been hard to deny. His jeans bulged with abundant evidence of his desire. “I’m a grown man. Old enough to know better,” he said with a disgusted sigh. He unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans, but only so he could tuck his shirt back in. He buttoned his shirt, buckled his belt and adjusted his clothes, then leaned down and picked up her shirt. “Put this on,” he said.

She did as she was told. She hadn’t gotten what she’d expected when she’d come into the barn with Jake. But she’d gotten what she wanted. Proof that he desired her. Proof that if she pushed long enough and hard enough, she might convince him that she was what he needed.

Her hands were shaking too much for her to tie a knot in the shirttails.

“I’ll do it,” he said, pushing her hands out of the way.

Her stomach quivered as his knuckles brushed against her flesh. She glanced up and saw the feral look was back in his eyes. He yanked the knot tight and stepped back.

“Now get the hell out of here!” he snarled.

Hope yanked open the barn door and ran.

She’d kept running until she got to the house, unaware of the tears on her face until she slammed into the kitchen. Her twin sister Faith had lurched from the table where she was sitting with her boyfriend Randy and demanded, “What did he do to you?”

“Nothing,” Hope sobbed. That was the problem. To Jake Whitelaw she was just a little girl. She’d run to her room and locked herself in and stayed there the rest of the day.

But the more she’d thought about what had happened, the more encouraged she’d been. Jake might not want to be attracted to her. But he was.

She’d been devastated when she’d discovered at dinner on the night of her high school graduation that he’d gotten himself engaged to the high school English teacher, Miss Carter. Hope was aptly named, because even then, she hadn’t given up hope.

She’d seen Jake once more before the summer was over. And what she’d discovered in that meeting had directed the course of her life over the past three years.

Jake had offered Faith and Randy a ride into town and Hope had gone along. After Jake dropped them off, she was alone with him for the first time since the day she’d revealed her feelings to him in the barn.

Jake was angry. Hope recognized the signs. The vertical lines on either side of his mouth became more pronounced because his jaw was clamped, and his eyes narrowed to slits. There was an overall look of tautness to his body—shoulders, hands, hips—that suggested a tiger ready to leap.

She knew she shouldn’t have invited herself along. She knew Jake didn’t want her around. She also knew he didn’t want her around because he was tempted by her presence, like a beast in rut responding to the relentless call of nature.

Hope let her gaze roam over Jake and saw his nostrils flare as her eyes touched what her hands could not. She wondered whether she ought to push him into something irrevocable. Like taking her virginity.

He would marry her then. She was sure of it. But would he love her? She didn’t want him without his love. She knew that much. But she was running out of time. Why, oh why, had he gotten engaged to Miss Carter? She wouldn’t feel this desperation if he hadn’t forced her hand. She knew in her bones that they belonged together, and she didn’t intend to lose him to another woman.

“You haven’t asked where I want to be let off,” she said when Jake had driven half the length of the main street in town without stopping.

He shot her a look filled with scorn. “Don’t insult my intelligence. You haven’t got any errands to run. But I do. So sit there like a good little girl and be still.”

It was the little girl that did it. It was a flash point with her and always would be, because it diminished who she was, which was more than the sum of her age. She began to unbutton her blouse right there, driving down Main Street.

Jake glanced in her direction and nearly had an accident. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Taking my clothes off.”

“Do you want me to get arrested?”

“I’m not a minor, Jake. We’re two consenting adults.”

“I’m engaged. I’m promised to another woman.”

“Not once word of this gets around,” she said, glancing at the passersby who gawked in through the window as she pulled her shirt off her shoulders, leaving her wearing only a peach-colored bra.

Jake swore under his breath and gunned the engine, heading for the old, abandoned railroad depot on the outskirts of town. He braked to a halt in front of the depot and turned to glare at her. She saw the flicker of heat as he glimpsed the fullness of her breasts above her bra.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m not a little girl anymore, Jake. I don’t know what I have to do to prove it to you.”

“I’m not going to marry you, Hope. You’re not what I want. I want someone who can share my memories of the world, someone who’s lived a little.”

“I can catch up,” she said desperately.

He shook his head. “No, little girl. You can’t.”

Hope felt her chin quivering and gritted her teeth to try to keep it still. “So you’re going to marry Miss Carter?”

“Yes, I’m going to marry her. Put your blouse back on, Hope.”

She grabbed her shirt and tried to get it on, but the long sleeves were inside out, and her hands were shaking too badly to straighten it.

She heard Jake swear before he scooted across the bench seat, pulled the shirt from her hands and began to pull the sleeves right-side out. He held the shirt for her while she slipped her arms into it. Her cheek brushed against his as she was straightening. She turned her head and discovered his mouth only a breath from her own. Their eyes caught and held.

She wasn’t sure who moved first, but an instant later their mouths were meshed, and his tongue was inside searching, teasing, tasting. He was rough and reckless, his hands cupping her breasts as a guttural groan was wrenched from his very marrow. His mouth ravaged hers as his hands demanded a response.

She couldn’t catch up. He was moving too fast.

And then he was gone. Out the opposite door. She scrambled after him, pausing in the driver’s seat when she spied him leaning against the van, his palms flat against the metal, his head down, his chest heaving.

He stood and faced her. “That was my fault,” he said. “I…” His eyes were full of pain and regret. “You’re formidable, Hope. I’ll grant you that. Somewhere out there is a very lucky young man.”

“I want you,” she cried.

“I belong to someone else.”

“You’re only marrying Miss Carter because you don’t think you can have me. But you can!” Hope insisted. “There’s nothing stopping us from being together except your own stubborn bias against my age.”

“Your youth,” he corrected.

She snorted. “Eighteen years isn’t that much. Lots of men marry younger women.”

“You need to go to college. You need to find out what you want to do with your life. Maybe you’ll decide you want more out of life than simply being some rancher’s wife. If I were to marry you now, the day might come when you decided marriage to me wasn’t fulfilling enough, that you needed to go find yourself.”

“Is that what happened with your first wife?” Hope asked, her eyes wide.

“I’ve seen it happen,” Jake said without answering her question directly. “You’re too young to know what you’d be giving up, Hope. Go to school. Get an education. Find out what you want to do with your life.”

“If I do that, if I go to college, will you wait for me?”

She saw the struggle before he answered, “In four years I’ll be forty. I—”

“Wait for me,” she said, stepping out of the van. “Don’t marry Miss Carter. Promise you’ll wait for me.”

“I can’t promise anything, Hope. There’s another person in this equation you’re not considering. I’ve proposed to another woman, and she’s said yes. Unless Amanda breaks the engagement, I’m honor-bound to marry her.”

“Even if you don’t love her?”

“Who says I don’t?”

The shock of his words held Hope speechless. “How could you love her and want me like you do?”

He shoved a frustrated hand through his hair. “I respect and admire her. And she loves me. We can have a good life together.”

“You don’t love her,” Hope accused.

“I don’t know what I feel anymore,” he retorted. “You’ve got me so damned confused—”

“Wait for me,” Hope said. “There are such things as long engagements.”

“That wouldn’t be fair to Amanda,” Jake said stubbornly.

“It is if you don’t love her. Don’t you think she’ll notice? Don’t you think she’ll miss being loved?”

Jake stared at the ground, then back at her. “I’ll go this far,” he said. “I won’t press her to get married. But I’m not going to walk away if she sets a date.”

“Thank you, Jake,” she said. “At least that gives me a chance.”

Hope had finished college in three years, waiting with bated breath the entire time for news of Jake’s wedding. But it had never come. She’d seen as much as she could of the world in her two summers off, traveling once to Australia and once to Europe. She’d kept her eyes wide open, absorbing as much of life as she could, trying hard to catch up to Jake.

She’d come home in September, still in love with him, still wanting to spend her life with him, only to discover that Amanda Carter had at long last set a date for their wedding—Christmas Eve.

Which gave Hope only two more weeks to find a way to stop it.