soft curve of a chair back. His breath seemed to come unsteadily. “Talking about…that…won’t change what happened.”
He almost sounded as if he regretted it. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he thought of it as a weakness. His upbringing had been rigid at best, and his Comanche grandfather had all but stolen him from his parents in those formative young years. He’d learned how to be a man years before age caught up with his conditioning, and tenderness hadn’t been part of his education.
The music suddenly got louder, attracting his attention to the closed door. “Is this a regular thing now, these parties?”
“I suppose so,” she confessed. “I can’t stand my own company, Cole.”
“I’m having some problems of my own.” He sat down in the dainty wing chair, looking so out of place in it that Lacy almost smiled in spite of the gravity between them.
She perched on the edge of the velvet-covered blue sofa and folded her hands primly in her lap.
“The elegant Miss Jarrett,” he murmured, studying her. “I had some exquisite dreams about you while I was in France.”
That shocked her. He’d never talked about France. “Did you? I wrote you every day,” she confessed shyly.
“And never mailed the letters,” he said, with a faint smile. “Katy told me.”
“I was afraid to. You were so reserved, and just because I was best friends with Katy and living in your house was no reason to think you’d welcome my letters. Even after the way we said good-bye,” she added, with unfamiliar self-consciousness. “You never wrote just to me, after all.”
He didn’t tell her why. “I wouldn’t have minded a letter or two. It got pretty bad over there,” he said.
She glanced up and then down. “You were shot down, weren’t you?”
“I got scratched up a little,” he said curtly. “Listen, suppose you come back to Spanish Flats?”
Her heart leapt straight up. She stared at him, searched his dark eyes. He was a proud man. It must have taken a lot of soul-searching for him to come and ask that. “Why, Cole?”
“Mother…isn’t well,” he said after a minute. “Katy’s being courted by some wild man from Chicago. Bennett’s trying to run off to France to join Ernest Hemingway and that Lost Generation of writers.” He ran a hand through his damp hair. “Lacy, they foreclosed on Johnson’s place yesterday,” he added, looking up with eyes as dark as his hair.
Her heart jumped. Spanish Flats was his life. “I still have the inheritance Great-aunt Lucy left me, and some from my parents,” she said gently. “I could—”
“I don’t want your damned money!” He got up, exploding in quiet rage. “I never did!”
“I know that, Cole,” she said, trying to soothe him. She stood, too, standing close to his tall, lean body. She stared up at him. “But I’d give it to you, all the same.”
There was a flicker of something in his dark eyes for just an instant. He reached out a lean hand, the one that wasn’t holding the cigarette, and drew his hard knuckles lightly down her creamy cheek, making her tingle all over. “Skin like a rose petal,” he murmured. “So lovely.”
Her full bow of a mouth parted as she sighed. She searched his eyes while time seemed to stop around them. She was a girl again, all shy and weak-kneed, worshipping Cole. Wanting him.
He saw that look and abruptly moved away again. Just like old times, Cole, she thought bitterly. She bit her lower lip until it hurt, trying to banish the other rejections from her mind. He didn’t want her to touch him. She’d have to get used to that.
“This was Mother’s idea,” he said tersely, smoking like a furnace. “She wants you to come home.”
“Marion, not you.” She nodded, sighing. “You don’t want me, do you, Cole? You never have.”
He stared up at the portrait without speaking. “You could come back with me on the train. Jack Henry is servicing my Ford, and Ben took Mother’s runabout yesterday and vanished with it. I caught the train instead.”
The music got louder again. Someone, probably someone tipsy, was playing with the radio knob.
“Why should I?” she asked, with what little pride she had left, shooting the question at him so sharply that it made him look at her. “What can Spanish Flats offer me that I can’t have right here?”
“Peace,” he said shortly, glaring at the music beyond the door. “These aren’t your kind of people.”
Her lips tugged into a smile. “No? What are my kind of people?”
He lifted an eyebrow at her. “Taggart and Cherry, of course,” he said.
Taggart and Cherry were two of the oldest ranch hands. Taggart had ridden with the James gang, back in the late 1800s, and Cherry had driven cattle up the Chisholm Trail with the big Texas outfits. They could tell stories, all right, and if they’d bathed more often than twice a month, they’d have been welcome in the house. Cole was careful to see that they sat on the porch when they came visiting, and that he was upwind of them.
She couldn’t help the grin. “It’s winter. You won’t have to worry about getting downwind.”
He smiled gently, traces of the younger Cole in his face for just a split second. Then he closed up again, like a clam. “Come home with me.”
She searched his eyes, hoping to find secrets there, but they were like a closed book. “You still haven’t told me what I’ll get if I come,” she repeated, the alcohol dimming her inhibitions, making her reckless for a change.
“What do you want?” he asked, with a mocking smile.
She gave it back. “Maybe I want you,” she said blatantly, the gin giving her a little reckless courage.
He didn’t say a word. His face hardened. His eyes went dark. “You hated it that night,” he said curtly. “You cried.”
“It hurt. It won’t again,” she said simply, airing her newly acquired knowledge. She lifted her chin stubbornly. “I’m twenty-four. This—” she gestured around her “—is what I have to look forward to in my old age. Loneliness and a few hangers-on, and some wild music and booze to dull the hurt. Well, if I’m going to grow old, I don’t want to do it alone.” She moved closer to him, her face quiet with pride. “I’ll go back with you. I’ll live with you. I’ll even pretend that we’re happy together, for appearances. But only if you stay in the same room with me, like a proper husband.” She hated making it an ultimatum, but she wanted a child. She might have to trick him into giving her one, or blackmail him into it, but she was determined.
He actually trembled. “What?” he sounded as if she’d astonished him.
“I want the appearance of normality, and no giggling family making fun of me because you make it so damned obvious that you don’t want me.”
“Stop cursing—” he shot back at her.
“I’ll
