Читать книгу Part of the Bargain - Linda Miller Lael - Страница 9

Libby sat at the end of the rickety swimming dock, bare feet dangling, shoulders slumped, her gaze fixed on the shimmering waters of the pond. The lines of her long, slender legs were accentuated, rather than disguised, by the old blue jeans she wore. A white eyelet suntop sheltered shapely breasts and a trim stomach and left the rest of her upper body bare.

Jess Barlowe studied her in silence, feeling things that were at wide variance with his personal opinion of the woman. He was certain that he hated Libby, but something inside him wanted, nonetheless, to touch her, to comfort her, to know the scent and texture of her skin.

A reluctant grin tilted one corner of his mouth. One tug at the top of that white eyelet and…

Jess caught his skittering thoughts, marshaled them back into stern order. As innocent and vulnerable as Libby Kincaid looked at the moment, she was a viper, willing to betray her own cousin to get what she wanted.

Jess imagined Libby naked, her glorious breasts free and welcoming. But the man in his mental scenario was not himself—it was Stacey. The thought lay sour in Jess’s mind.

“Did you come to apologize, by any chance?”

The question so startled Jess that he flinched; he had not noticed that Libby had turned around and seen him, so caught up had he been in the vision of her giving herself to his brother.

He scowled, as much to recover his wits as to oppose her. It was and always had been his nature to oppose Libby Kincaid, the way electricity opposes water, and it annoyed him that, for all his travels and his education, he didn’t know why.

“Why would I want to do that?” he shot back, more ruffled by her presence than he ever would have admitted.

“Maybe because you were a complete ass,” she replied in tones as sunny as the big sky stretched out above them.

Jess lifted his hands to his hips and stood fast against whatever it was that was pulling him toward her. I want to make love to you, he thought, and the truth of that ground in his spirit as well as in his loins.

There was pain in Libby’s navy blue eyes, as well as a cautious mischief. “Well?” she prodded.

Jess found that while he could keep himself from going to her, he could not turn away. Maybe her net reached farther than he’d thought. Maybe, like Stacey and that idiot in New York, he was already caught in it.

“I’m not here to apologize,” he said coldly.

“Then why?” she asked with chiming sweetness.

He wondered if she knew what that shoulderless blouse of hers was doing to him. Damn. He hadn’t been this tongue-tied since the night of his fifteenth birthday, when Ginny Hillerman had announced that she would show him hers if he would show her his.

Libby’s eyes were laughing at him. “Jess?”

“Is your dad here?” he threw out in gruff desperation.

One shapely, gossamer eyebrow arched. “You know perfectly well that he isn’t. If Dad were home, his pickup truck would be parked in the driveway.”

Against his will, Jess grinned. His taut shoulders rose in a shrug. The shadows of cottonwood leaves moved on the old wooden dock, forming a mystical path—a path that led to Libby Kincaid.

She patted the sun-warmed wood beside her. “Come and sit down.”

Before Jess could stop himself, he was striding along that small wharf, sinking down to sit beside Libby and dangle his booted feet over the sparkling water. He was never entirely certain what sorcery made him ask what he did.

“What happened to your marriage, Libby?”

The pain he had glimpsed before leapt in her eyes and then faded away again, subdued. “Are you trying to start another fight?”

Jess shook his head. “No,” he answered quietly, “I really want to know.”

She looked away from him, gnawing at her lower lip with her front teeth. All around them were ranch sounds—birds conferring in the trees, leaves rustling in the wind, the clear pond water lapping at the mossy pilings of the dock. But no sound came from Libby.

On an impulse, Jess touched her mouth with the tip of one index finger. Water and electricity—the analogy came back to him with a numbing jolt.

“Stop that,” he barked, to cover his reactions.

Libby ceased chewing at her lip and stared at him with wide eyes. Again he saw the shadow of that nameless, shifting ache inside her. “Stop what?” she wanted to know.

Stop making me want to hold you, he thought. Stop making me want to tuck your hair back behind your ears and tell you that everything will be all right. “Stop biting your lip!” he snapped aloud.

“I’m sorry!” Libby snapped back, her eyes shooting indigo sparks.

Jess sighed and again spoke involuntarily. “Why did you leave your husband, Libby?”

The question jarred them both: Libby paled a little and tried to scramble to her feet; Jess caught her elbow in one hand and pulled her down again.

“Was it because of Stacey?”

She was livid. “No!”

“Someone else?”

Tears sprang up in Libby’s dark lashes and made then spiky. She wrenched free of his hand but made no move to rise again and run away. “Sure!” she gasped. “‘If it feels good, do it’—that’s my motto! By God, I live by those words!”

“Shut up,” Jess said in a gentle voice.

Incredibly, she fell against him, wept into the shoulder of his blue cotton workshirt. And it was not a delicate, calculating sort of weeping—it was a noisy grief.

Jess drew her close and held her, broken on the shoals of what she was feeling even though he did not know its name. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely.

Libby trembled beneath his arm and wailed like a wounded calf. The sound solidified into a word usually reserved for stubborn horses and income-tax audits.

Jess laughed and, for a reason he would never understand, kissed her forehead. “I love it when you flatter me,” he teased.

Miraculously, Libby laughed, too. But when she tilted her head back to look up at him, and he saw the tear streaks on her beautiful, defiant face, something within him, something that had always been disjointed, was wrenched painfully back into place.

He bent his head and touched his lips to hers, gently, in question. She stiffened, but then, at the cautious bidding of his tongue, her lips parted slightly and her body relaxed against his.

Jess pressed Libby backward until she lay prone on the shifting dock, the kiss unbroken. As she responded to that kiss, it seemed that the sparkling water-light of the pond danced around them both in huge, shimmering chips, that they were floating inside some cosmic prism.

His hand went to the full roundness of her left breast. Beneath his palm and the thin layer of white eyelet, he felt the nipple grow taut in that singular invitation to passion.

Through the back of his shirt, Jess was warmed by the heat of the spring sun and the tender weight of Libby’s hands. He left her mouth to trail soft kisses over her chin, along the sweet, scented lines of her neck.

All the while, he expected her to stiffen again, to thrust him away with her hands and some indignant—and no doubt colorful—outburst. Instead, she was pliant and yielding beneath him.

Enthralled, he dared more and drew downward on the uppermost ruffle of her suntop. Still she did not protest.

Libby arched her back and a low, whimpering sound came from her throat as Jess bared her to the soft spring breeze and the fire of his gaze.

Her breasts were heavy golden-white globes, and their pale rose crests stiffened as Jess perused them. When he offered a whisper-soft kiss to one, Libby moaned and the other peak pouted prettily at his choice. He went to it, soothed it to fury with his tongue.

Libby gave a soft, lusty cry, shuddered and caught her hands in his hair, drawing him closer. He needed more of her and positioned his body accordingly, careful not to let his full weight come to bear. Then, for a few dizzying moments, he took suckle at the straining fount of her breast.

Recovering himself partially, Jess pulled her hands from his hair, gripped them at the wrists, pressed them down above her head in gentle restraint.

Her succulent breasts bore his assessment proudly, rising and falling with the meter of her breathing.

Jess forced himself to meet Libby’s eyes. “This is me,” he reminded her gruffly. “Jess.”

“I know,” she whispered, making no move to free her imprisoned hands.

Jess lowered his head, tormented one delectable nipple by drawing at it with his lips. “This is real, Libby,” he said, circling the morsel with just the tip of his tongue now. “It’s important that you realize that.”

“I do…oh, God… Jess, Jess.”

Reluctantly he left the feast to search her face with disbelieving eyes. “Don’t you want me to stop?”

A delicate shade of rose sifted over her high cheekbones. Her hands still stretched above her, her eyes closed, she shook her head.

Jess went back to the breasts that so bewitched him, nipped at their peaks with gentle teeth. “Do you…know how many…times I’ve wanted…to do this?”

The answer was a soft, strangled cry.

He limited himself to one nipple, worked its surrendering peak into a sweet fervor with his lips and his tongue. “So…many…times. My God, Libby…you’re so beautiful….”

Her words were as halting as his had been. “What’s happening to us? We h-hate each other.”

Jess laughed and began kissing his way softly down over her rib cage, her smooth, firm stomach. The snap on her jeans gave way easily—and was echoed by the sound of car doors slamming in the area of the house.

Instantly the spell was broken. Color surged into Libby’s face and she bolted upright, nearly thrusting Jess off the end of the dock in her efforts to wrench on the discarded suntop and close the fastening of her jeans.

“Broad daylight…” she muttered distractedly, talking more to herself than to Jess.

“Lib!” yelled a jovial masculine voice, approaching fast. “Libby?”

Stacey. The voice belonged to Stacey.

Sudden fierce anger surged, white-hot, through Jess’s aching, bedazzled system. Standing up, not caring that his thwarted passion still strained against his jeans, visible to anyone who might take the trouble to look, he glared down at Libby and rasped, “I guess reinforcements have arrived.”

She gave a primitive, protesting little cry and shot to her feet, her ink-blue eyes flashing with anger and hurt. Before Jess could brace himself, her hands came to his chest like small battering rams and pushed him easily off the end of the dock.

The jolting cold of that spring-fed pond was welcome balm to Jess’s passion-heated flesh, if not his pride. When he surfaced and grasped the end of the dock in both hands, he knew there would be no physical evidence that he and Libby had been doing anything other than fighting.

Libby ached with embarrassment as Stacey and Senator Barlowe made their way down over the slight hillside that separated the backyard from the pond.

The older man cast one mischievously baleful look at his younger son, who was lifting himself indignantly onto the dock, and chuckled, “I see things are the same as always,” he said.

Libby managed a shaky smile. Not quite, she thought, her body remembering the delicious dance Jess’s hard frame had choreographed for it. “Hello, Senator,” she said, rising on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

“Welcome home,” he replied with gruff affection. Then his wise eyes shifted past her to rest again on Jess. “It’s a little cold yet for a swim, isn’t it, son?”

Jess’s hair hung in dripping ebony strands around his face, and his eyes were jade-green flares, avoiding his father to scald Libby’s lips, her throat, her still-pulsing breasts. “We’ll finish our…discussion later,” he said.

Libby’s blood boiled up over her stomach and her breasts to glow in her face. “I wouldn’t count on that!”

“I would,” Jess replied with a smile that was at once tender and evil. And then, without so much as a word to his father and brother, he walked away.

“What the hell did he mean by that?” barked Stacey, red in the face.

The look Libby gave the boyishly handsome, caramel-eyed man beside her was hardly friendly. “You’ve got some tall explaining to do, Stacey Barlowe,” she said.

The senator, a tall, attractive man with hair as gray as Ken’s, cleared his throat in the way of those who have practiced diplomacy long and well. “I believe I’ll go up to the house and see if Ken’s got any beer on hand,” he said. A moment later he was off, following Jess’s soggy path.

Libby straightened her shoulders and calmly slapped Stacey across the face. “How dare you?” she raged, her words strangled in her effort to modulate them.

Stacey reddened again, ran one hand through his fashionably cut wheat-colored hair. He turned, as if to follow his father. “I could use a beer myself,” he said in distracted, evasive tones.

“Oh, no you don’t!” Libby cried, grasping his arm and holding on. The rich leather of his jacket was smooth under her hand. “Don’t you dare walk away from me, Stacey—not until you explain why you’ve been lying about me!”

“I haven’t been lying!” he protested, his hands on his hips now, his expensively clad body blocking the base of the dock as he faced her.

“You have! You’ve been telling everyone that I… That we…”

“That we’ve been doing what you and my brother were doing a few minutes ago?”

If Stacey had shoved Libby into the water, she couldn’t have been more shocked. A furious retort rose to the back of her throat but would go no further.

Stacey’s tarnished-gold eyes flashed. “Jess was making love to you, wasn’t he?”

“What if he was?” managed Libby after a painful struggle with her vocal cords. “It certainly wouldn’t be any of your business, would it?”

“Yes, it would. I love you, Libby.”

“You love Cathy!”

Stacey shook his head. “No. Not anymore.”

“Don’t say that,” Libby pleaded, suddenly deflated. “Oh, Stacey, don’t. Don’t do this….”

His hands came to her shoulders, fierce and strong. The topaz fever in his eyes made Libby wonder if he was sane. “I love you, Libby Kincaid,” he vowed softly but ferociously, “and I mean to have you.”

Libby retreated a step, stunned, shaking her head. The reality of this situation was so different from what she had imagined it would be. In her thoughts, Stacey had laughed when she confronted him, ruffled her hair in that familiar brotherly way of old, and said that it was all a mistake. That he loved Cathy, wanted Cathy, and couldn’t anyone around here take a joke?

But here he was declaring himself in a way that was unsettlingly serious.

Libby took another step backward. “Stacey, I need to be here, where my dad is. Where things are familiar and comfortable. Please…don’t force me to leave.”

Stacey smiled. “There is no point in leaving, Lib. If you do, I’ll be right behind you.”

She shivered. “You’ve lost your mind!”

But Stacey looked entirely sane as he shook his handsome head and wedged his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Just my heart,” he said. “Corny, isn’t it?”

“It’s worse than corny. Stacey, you’re unbalanced or something. You’re fantasizing. There was never anything between us—”

“No?” The word was crooned.

“No! You need help.”

His face had all the innocence of an altar boy’s. “If I’m insane, darlin’, it’s something you could cure.”

Libby resisted an urge to slap him again. She wanted to race into the house, but he was still barring her way, so that she could not leave the dock without brushing against him. “Stay away from me, Stacey,” she said as he advanced toward her. “I mean it—stay away from me!”

“I can’t, Libby.”

The sincerity in his voice was chilling; for the first time in all the years she’d known Stacey Barlowe, Libby was afraid of him. Discretion kept her from screaming, but just barely.

Stacey paled, as though he’d read her thoughts. “Don’t look at me like that, Libby— I wouldn’t hurt you under any circumstances. And I’m not crazy.”

She lifted her chin. “Let me by, Stacey. I want to go into the house.”

He tilted his head back, sighed, met her eyes again. “I’ve frightened you, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

Libby couldn’t speak. Despite his rational, settling words, she was sick with the knowledge that he meant to pursue her.

“You must know,” he said softly, “how good it could be for us. You needed me in New York, Libby, and now I need you.”

The third voice, from the base of the hillside, was to Libby as a life preserver to a drowning person. “Let her pass, Stacey.”

Libby looked up quickly to see Jess, unlikely rescuer that he was. His hair was towel-rumpled and his jeans clung to muscular thighs—thighs that only minutes ago had pressed against her own in a demand as old as time. His manner was calm as he buttoned a shirt, probably borrowed from Ken, over his broad chest.

Stacey shrugged affably and walked past his brother without a word of argument.

Watching him go, Libby went weak with relief. A lump rose in her throat as she forced herself to meet Jess’s gaze. “You were right,” she muttered miserably. “You were right.”

Jess was watching her much the way a mountain cat would watch a cornered rabbit. For the briefest moment there was a look of tenderness in the green eyes, but then his expression turned hard and a muscle flexed in his jaw. “I trust the welcome-home party has been scheduled for later—after Cathy has been tucked into her bed, for instance?”

Libby gaped at him, appalled. Had he interceded only to torment her himself?

Jess’s eyes were contemptuous as they swept over her. “What’s the matter, Lib? Couldn’t you bring yourself to tell your married lover that the welcoming had already been taken care of?”

Rage went through Libby’s body like an electric current surging into a wire. “You don’t seriously think that I would… That I was—”

“You even managed to be alone with him. Tell me, Lib—how did you get rid of my father?”

“G-get rid…” Libby stopped, tears of shock and mortification aching in her throat and burning behind her eyes. She drew a deep, audible breath, trying to assemble herself, to think clearly.

But the whole world seemed to be tilting and swirling like some out-of-control carnival ride. When Libby closed her eyes against the sensation, she swayed dangerously and would probably have fallen if Jess hadn’t reached her in a few strides and caught her shoulders in his hands.

“Libby…” he said, and there was anger in the sound, but there was a hollow quality, too—one that Libby couldn’t find a name for.

Her knees were trembling. Too much, it was all too much. Jonathan’s death, the ugly divorce, the trouble that Stacey had caused with his misplaced affections—all of those things weighed on her, but none were so crushing as the blatant contempt of this man. It was apparent to Libby now that the lovemaking they had almost shared, so new and beautiful to her, had been some sort of cruel joke to Jess.

“How could you?” she choked out. “Oh, Jess, how could you?”

His face was grim, seeming to float in a shimmering mist. Instead of answering, Jess lifted Libby into his arms and carried her up the little hill toward the house.

She didn’t remember reaching the back door.

“What the devil happened on that dock today, Jess?” Cleave Barlowe demanded, hands grasping the edge of his desk.

His younger son stood at the mahogany bar, his shoulders stiff, his attention carefully fixed on the glass of straight Scotch he meant to consume. “Why don’t you ask Stacey?”

“Goddammit, I’m asking you!” barked Cleave. “Ken’s mad as hell, and I don’t blame him—that girl of his was shattered!”

Girl. The word caught in Jess’s beleaguered mind. He remembered the way Libby had responded to him, meeting his passion with her own, welcoming the greed he’d shown at her breasts. Had it not been for the arrival of his father and brother, he would have possessed her completely within minutes. “She’s no ‘girl,’” he said, still aching to bury himself in the depths of her.

The senator swore roundly. “What did you say to her, Jess?” he pressed, once the spate of unpoliticianly profanity had passed.

Jess lowered his head. He’d meant the things he’d said to Libby, and he couldn’t, in all honesty, have taken them back. But he knew some of what she’d been through in New York, her trysts with Stacey notwithstanding, and he was ashamed of the way he’d goaded her. She had come home to heal—the look in her eyes had told him that much—and instead of respecting that, he had made things more difficult for her.

Never one to be thwarted by silence, no matter how eloquent, Senator Barlowe persisted. “Dammit, Jess, I might expect this kind of thing from Stacey, but I thought you had more sense! You were harassing Libby about these blasted rumors your brother has been spreading, weren’t you?”

Jess sighed, set aside the drink he had yet to take a sip from, and faced his angry father. “Yes,” he said.

“Why?”

Stubbornly, Jess refused to answer. He took an interest in the imposing oak desk where his father sat, the heavy draperies that kept out the sun, the carved ivory of the fireplace.

“All right, mulehead,” Cleave muttered furiously, “don’t talk! Don’t explain! And don’t go near Ken Kincaid’s daughter again, damn you. That man’s the best foreman I’ve ever had and if he gets riled and quits because of you, Jess, you and I are going to come to time!”

Jess almost smiled, though he didn’t quite dare. Not too many years before the phrase “come to time,” when used by his father, had presaged a session in the woodshed. He wondered what it meant now that he was thirty-three years old, a member of the Montana State Bar Association, and a full partner in the family corporation. “I care about Cathy,” he said evenly. “What was I supposed to do—stand by and watch Libby and Stace grind her up into emotional hamburger?”

Cleave gave a heavy sigh and sank into the richly upholstered swivel chair behind his desk. “I love Cathy, too,” he said at length, “but Stacey’s behind this whole mess, not Libby. Dammit, that woman has been through hell from what Ken says—she was married to a man who slept in every bed but his own, and she had to watch her nine-year-old stepson die by inches. Now she comes home looking for a little peace, and what does she get? Trouble!”

Jess lowered his head, turned away—ostensibly to take up his glass of Scotch. He’d known about the bad marriage— Ken had cussed the day Aaron Strand was born often enough—but he hadn’t heard about the little boy. My God, he hadn’t known about the boy.

“Maybe Strand couldn’t sleep in his own bed,” he said, urged on by some ugliness that had surfaced inside him since Libby’s return. “Maybe Stacey was already in it.”

“Enough!” boomed the senator in a voice that had made presidents tremble in their shoes. “I like Libby and I’m not going to listen to any more of this, either from you or from your brother! Do I make myself clear?”

“Abundantly clear,” replied Jess, realizing that the Scotch was in his hand now and feeling honor-bound to take at least one gulp of the stuff. The taste was reminiscent of scorched rubber, but since the liquor seemed to quiet the raging demons in his mind, he finished the drink and poured another.

He fully intended to get drunk. It was something he hadn’t done since high school, but it suddenly seemed appealing. Maybe he would stop hardening every time he thought of Libby, stop craving her.

Too, after the things he’d said to her that afternoon by the pond, he didn’t want to remain sober any longer than necessary. “What did you mean,” he ventured, after downing his fourth drink, “when you said Libby had to watch her stepson die?”

Papers rustled at the big desk behind him. “Stacey says the child had leukemia.”

Jess poured another drink and closed his eyes. Oh, Libby, he thought, I’m sorry. My God, I’m sorry. “I guess Stacey would know,” he said aloud, with bitterness.

There was a short, thunderous silence. Jess expected his father to explode into one of his famous tirades, was genuinely surprised when the man sighed instead. Still, his words dropped on Jess’s mind like a bomb.

“The firewater isn’t going to change the fact that you love Libby Kincaid, Jess,” he said reasonably. “Making her life and your own miserable isn’t going to change it, either.”

Love Libby Kincaid? Impossible. The strange needs possessing him now were rooted in his libido, not his heart. Once he’d had her—and have her he would, or go crazy—her hold on him would be broken. “I’ve never loved a woman in my life,” he said.

“Fool. You’ve loved one woman—Libby—since you were seven years old. Exactly seven years old, in fact.”

Jess turned, studying his father quizzically. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Your seventh birthday,” recalled Cleave, his eyes far away. “Your mother and I gave you a pony. First time you saw Libby Kincaid, you were out of that saddle and helping her into it.”

The memory burst, full-blown, into Jess’s mind. A pinto pony. The new foreman arriving. The little girl with dark blue eyes and hair the color of winter moonlight.

He’d spent the whole afternoon squiring Libby around the yard, content to walk while she rode.

“What do you suppose Ken would say if I went over there and asked to see his daughter?” Jess asked.

“I imagine he’d shoot you, after today.”

“I imagine he would. But I think I’ll risk it.”

“You’ve made enough trouble for one day,” argued Cleave, taking obvious note of his son’s inebriated state. “Libby needs time, Jess. She needs to be close to Ken. If you’re smart, you’ll leave her alone until she has a chance to get her emotional bearings again.”

Jess didn’t want his father to be right, not in this instance, anyway, but he knew that he was. Much as he wanted to go to Libby and try to make things right, the fact was that he was the last person in the world she needed or wanted to see.

“Better?”

Libby smiled at Ken as she came into the kitchen, freshly showered and wrapped in the cozy, familiar chenille robe she’d found in the back of her closet. “Lots better,” she answered softly.

Her father was standing at the kitchen stove stirring something in the blackened cast-iron skillet.

Libby scuffled to the table and sat down. It was good to be home, so good. Why hadn’t she come sooner? “Whatever you’re cooking there smells good,” she said.

Ken beamed. In his jeans and his western shirt, he looked out of place at that stove. He should, Libby decided fancifully, have been crouching at some campfire on the range, stirring beans in a blue enamel pot. “This here’s my world-famous red-devil sauce,” he grinned, “for which I am known and respected.”

Libby laughed, and tears of homecoming filled her eyes. She went to her father and hugged him, needing to be a little girl again, just for a moment.