exquisite experience in her life. “Mahhhhhvelous,” she’d said, laughing, her eyes full of the love she shared with her husband of five years. Lacy had been curious, despite her bad experience, to find out if intimacy could be pleasurable. But she wasn’t quite curious enough to let George Simon have what he’d been lusting after for the past few weeks. George was a sweet man, a good friend. But the thought of his greedy hands on her body was somehow offensive. It was a kind of sacrilege to think of letting anyone but Cole touch her that way.
What utter rot, she thought, with a harsh laugh. Ridiculous to moon over a man who didn’t love her. But worshipping him was such a habit. And she did. She loved everything about him, from the way he sat his horse to the arrogant tilt of his dark head, to the way his skin caught the light and burned like bronze. He wasn’t terribly good to look at, except to Lacy, but he had a masculinity that set her teeth on edge, that made her body go hot and throbbing. Just to touch him could make her tremble.
She sighed shakily as her gray eyes swept the hall. Would he come? Her heart pounded beneath her bodice. Just to see him, she thought, just to lay eyes on him once more, would be heaven. But it was already eleven o’clock, and Cole was usually in bed by nine so that he could be up at the crack of dawn. She turned back toward the living room with a heart like lead. No, he wasn’t coming tonight. It had been a foolish hope.
She went back to her guests, laughing, drinking more and more gin. The police made raids once in a while, but Lacy didn’t care if they came and found the gin. She might go to jail, and Coleman might come and bail her out. Then he might bring her home, and be so inflamed by smoldering passion that he’d do to her what Rudolph Valentino, as the sheik, had done to Agnes Ayres in that wildly passionate film The Sheik. Her heart ran away. She’d gone wild over that movie two years ago and had learned to do the tango soon after Valentino’s Blood and Sand film was released. But, of course, no one in her circle would do it like Valentino.
She took another sip of gin, lost in her thoughts. She jumped as a hand lightly touched her shoulder. She looked up, wide-spaced eyes huge in her face, and relaxed a little when she saw George Simon behind her.
“You startled me,” she said in her calm, very Southern drawl.
“Sorry,” he said, grinning. Well, his teeth were perfect, even if he was slightly balding and overweight. “I just thought you might like to know that you have a visitor.”
She frowned. It was midnight, and despite the fact that the huge Victorian house was overrun with people, it was unusual for anyone to come calling so late. And then she remembered. Cole!
“Male or female?” she asked nervously.
“Definitely male,” George said, without smiling. “He looks like the portrait over the living room mantel. That’s where I left him, staring at it.”
Lacy spilled the drink down the front of the stylishly wispy dress and mopped frantically at it with a handkerchief. “Oh, damn,” she said curtly. “Well, I’ll worry about that later. He’s in the living room?”
“Say, kid…You’re like flour in the face. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. Everything, she thought as she turned and walked stiffly down the long hall, dimly lit by sconces, her wide-heeled shoes beating a dainty tattoo on the bare, polished wood floors as she walked.
She hesitated at the doorway, her eyes huge in her face, her hand poised on the doorknob. She knew already who was going to be waiting for her. She knew by George’s description, but even more by that smell, that pungent smoke that teased her nose even as she opened the door and saw him.
Coleman Whitehall spun on his booted heel with the precision of an athlete. Which he was, of course; ranch work demanded that kind of muscle. His dark eyes narrowed as he looked at Lacy, blazing out of a face like leather under hair as dark as her own. His skin was bronzed, a legacy from the Comanche grandfather who’d instilled pure steel in his makeup and taught him that emotion was a plague to be avoided at all costs.
He was wearing work clothes. Jeans and boots, with wide, flaring leather chaps and a vest over his blue-patterned shirt, leather wristbands on the cuffs. A string hung out of the pocket, which would be the tobacco pouch he always carried, along with a small, flat packet of papers to roll cigarettes from. His forehead was oddly pale as he watched her, his wide-brimmed hat tossed carelessly onto an elegant Victorian wing chair. He lifted his square chin and stared at her with unblinking, unforgiving eyes, the very picture of a Texas cattleman with his weather-beaten face and unyielding pride and blatant arrogance.
She closed the door and moved forward. He didn’t frighten her. He never had, really, although he towered over her like a lean, taciturn giant. He’d hardly smiled in the years she’d lived under his roof. She wondered if he ever had as a boy. She loved him. But love was something he didn’t need. Love. And Lacy. He could do very well without either, and he’d proven it over the past eight lonely months.
“Hello, Cole,” she said softly.
He lifted the smoking cigarette to thin, firm lips that held a faintly mocking smile. “Hello, yourself, kiddo. You look prosperous enough,” he mused, his eyes narrow on her short dark hair in its bob, her face with its outrageously dark lip rouge, her blue eyes quiet and abnormally bright as she stood before him, very trendy in her soft gray dress that clung to her slender figure and displayed her long, elegant legs with scandalous efficiency.
She didn’t avoid his stare. Her eyes wandered over his face like loving hands, seeing the new lines, the rough edges. He was twenty-eight now, but he’d aged in these months they’d been apart. The war had aged him. Marriage hadn’t seemed to help.
“I’m doing very well, thanks,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. It was hard to handle this meeting, with the memory of her abrupt departure—and the reason for it—still between them. He seemed unperturbed by it, but her knees felt weak. “What brings you to San Antonio in the middle of the night?”
“I’ve been trying to sell cattle. Winter’s coming on. Feed’s getting hard to come by.” He studied her blatantly, but there was no feeling in his dark eyes. There was nothing at all.
She moved closer, inhaling the masculine smell of him, the scents of tobacco and leather that had become so familiar. She touched his sleeve gently, loving the warmth of him under it, only to have him jerk away from her and walk back toward the fireplace.
Her hand felt odd, extended like that. She pulled it back to her side with a wistful, bitter little smile. He still didn’t like her to touch him, after all this time. He never had. He took, but he never gave. Lacy wasn’t sure that he knew how to give.
“How is your mother?” she asked.
“She’s fine.”
“And Katy and Bennett?”
“My sister and brother are fine, too.”
She studied his long, lean back, watching him stare at his likeness above the mantel. She’d had it painted soon after she’d left Spanish Flats, and it was his mirror image. Dark, brooding, with eyes that followed her everywhere she went. He was wearing work clothes in the portrait, with a red bandanna at his throat and a white Stetson atop his dark, straight hair. She loved the portrait. She loved the man.
“What’s that in aid of?” he asked insolently, gesturing up at it. He turned, pinning her with his dark gaze. “For show? To let everyone know what a devoted little wife you are?”
She
