He squarely faced the fact that he wanted to go to bed with her. No, not wanted. That was a take-it-or-leave-it feeling. This was stronger than that. Much stronger. He craved sex with her.
Why shouldn’t he? He was married to her. Sex was part of marriage, he rationalized. So why not indulge his senses?
But what had happened the last time he’d lost his head over a woman? The chilling thought intruded. He’d been sucked into a disastrous situation that had ended in a very acrimonious divorce.
Ann wiggled slightly, and he lost his train of thought at the feel of her soft behind pressing into his groin. He couldn’t stand this! It had been so long since he’d had a woman. Over ten years—and until Ann had arrived, the lack had been no more than a minor inconvenience. But now…
This time would be different, he tried to convince himself. This time he wasn’t wallowing in overheated hormones and calling it love. This time he was in control of both his emotions and the situation and he would remain in control. All he had to do was make sure that he maintained an emotional distance from her. He swallowed as she lurched backward, hitting his chest. But not a physical distance. In fact, he wanted nothing so much as to eliminate all physical distance as soon as possible.
But how? It was a disquieting question. How did he bring up the subject of going to bed with her? He walked Joe around the barnyard in a wide circle while he pondered the problem, but he couldn’t think of a single graceful way of asking her to go to bed with him without first making a lot of emotional promises that he had no intention of keeping.
Joe stopped of his own accord as they approached the open barn door. Nick slowly swung out of the saddle and looked back up at Ann. Her eyes were gleaming with pleasure, and her soft lips were curved in a triumphant smile at her ride. An unexpected feeling of tenderness engulfed him, and he opened his mouth, intending to say something sophisticated and witty. To his horror, what emerged was neither.
“I have no objections to having sex with you,” he said, and then froze in stunned disbelief as he heard his bald words echo through the air.
No objections to having sex with her! The destructive words sliced through Ann’s mind, lacerating her already battered self-confidence. Not even the sop of telling her that he found her attractive and wouldn’t object to getting to know her better. Just a bald “I wouldn’t mind having sex with you.” As if she were a convenience to be used to alleviate his needs with no acknowledgment that she might have feelings and needs of her own.
Was that all she was ever to be to the men in her life? Ann felt chill fingers of despair wrap themselves around her heart. When they eased, hopelessness rushed in to fill the void. She clenched her teeth against an overwhelming urge to burst into tears, refusing to let Nick see just how damaging she had found his words.
Her frantic gaze swung around the barren barnyard. She had to escape. To find a hiding place where she could painfully piece together the tattered remnants of her composure. Acting on instinct, she swung her leg over the horse and half fell, half jumped out of the saddle, only to wind up sprawled on the ground underneath Joe.
Ann bit her lip against the hysterical laughter bubbling up in her throat. The final straw would be if Joe were to step on her.
“That’s not the way to get off a horse.” Nick grabbed her beneath her armpits and hauled her to her feet with effortless ease. “You’ll hurt yourself,” he warned.
He was worried she’d hurt herself? Ann thought incredulously. When he’d already delivered a knockout blow to her fragile sense of worth as a woman? At least broken bones and bruises healed. She wasn’t sure that her emotions would ever feel whole again.
“Um, about what I said…What I meant was that I wouldn’t…I mean…we are married and…”
Nick’s garbled words slowly filtered through the miasma of unhappiness that surrounded her, and Ann forced herself to look at him. The muscles along his jaw were corded and there was a dull red flush underlying his deep tan. As if…he were embarrassed?
The unexpected idea shook Ann free from her own feelings long enough to consider his. Could his offer be the result of embarrassment at the necessity of articulating his emotional needs, rather than a lack of respect or interest in her as a person? It was possible, she conceded. She didn’t know him well enough to be able to say.
All Maggie had told her about Nick were bare facts. Facts about his emotionally starved childhood, facts about his disastrous first marriage, facts about his problems in dealing with the unexpected arrival of his daughter. What Maggie hadn’t been able to tell her was how those facts had shaped him emotionally. How they had shaped his thought processes. She would have to figure that out for herself.
Which left her where? Ann tried to think. Her brand-new husband had suggested that he wouldn’t be averse to having sex with her. She didn’t like the fact that he was thinking in terms of sex while she thought in terms of making love, but maybe that was the way men thought.
A discouraged sigh escaped her. What she didn’t know about men in general and this man in particular would fill a book.
“But, of course, if you don’t…” Nick responded to what he thought was the reason for her sigh. “I mean I can understand that you might not…”
Ann found his disjointed words somehow comforting. He didn’t appear to be any more sure of himself than she was. In fact, if anything, he seemed to be virtually inarticulate when it came to expressing his emotions.
“It isn’t that I don’t want to…” Ann refused to say “have sex” because it sounded so impersonal and dehumanizing, but she didn’t want to say “make love” for fear that he might think that she expected more from him than he had to give. “It’s just that I don’t know you very well and…that’s so…personal,” she finally muttered.
“Not necessarily.” Nick’s bitter tone shocked her. “How about if we leave it for the time being, and when you feel you know me well enough, you tell me and we can take it from there.”
“Okay,” Ann said weakly, trying to envision a set of circumstances where she walked up to Nick and told him she wanted to go to bed with him. To pull off that kind of bluntness took more sophistication than she possessed— than she was ever likely to possess.
“Good.” Nick’s voice sounded overly hearty to Ann. “Now that we’ve settled that, I’d better go help Snake check out the fencing.”
“What about lunch?” she asked as he swung back up into the saddle.
“Snake always brings sandwiches for both of us. It saves us the time of coming back to the ranch. I’ll be back for dinner about five.” Turning Joe around, he headed toward the pasture behind the house at a brisk trot.
Ann watched him until he was out of sight, and then she turned back to the house.
She was fast coming to the conclusion that she hadn’t solved her problems by marrying Nick, she’d simply exchanged one set for another. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t eventually solve them, she assured herself, trying hard to believe it. She was a bright, educated woman of the nineties. Surely she could think of some way to turn their marriage into
