If I don’t save him, Mr. Collier will kill him.”
“Good.”
“No! Please…He’s better. I know he’s still easy to startle, but he’ll get even better. It’s just going to take time and patience. He’s been through a lot.”
“He’s a killer.”
“Not many living creatures get the easy, pampered start in life you’ve had. That’s why you can’t possibly understand what it’s like for the rest of us!”
Her lovely voice had softened with desperation and love for Wild Thing but it didn’t hold a trace of self-pity. When her impassioned eyes misted, he noticed they were as beautiful as sparkling amethysts.
“I know you don’t care what I think, but Lizzie loves him. Spare him for her sake!”
The girl was passionate, compassionate…and despite her ragged jeans and faded shirt, gorgeous, as well.
Damn those eyes of hers. Again they reminded him of jewels, with lavender facets of light and dark that made his blood run hot and cold. Those damn eyes, coupled with having held her too close for too long in a shadowy barn that afforded him the privacy to follow through on his desire, had him hard as granite. Aware of her soft, slim body pressed tightly into his, he didn’t even try to defend himself from the heat that her sexy curves generated.
It would be so easy to take her right here.
Her mouth was full and luscious and suddenly he wanted to kiss her, to dip his tongue inside and taste her. Would she open her mouth and let him?
The heat in her gaze was generated from some emotion. Maybe she felt what he did.
“What?” She had gone still. Her eyes never left his face. “Let me go!” Her voice was shallow.
“You don’t want me to do that, and you know it.” In the grip of a need too fierce to deny, his voice was raspy.
His gaze moved hungrily lower. She had soft, lush breasts. Hell, he wanted way more than a kiss, and he wanted it very badly. She was Jesse Ray’s daughter, so she probably wanted it, too.
Feeling justified in testing a girl of such easy virtue, he gripped her shoulders and pulled her closer. Before she could react, he lowered his mouth to hers so he could take his first taste of her. His lips were hard and demanding because he expected easy compliance. And for an instant she responded just as favorably as he’d imagined, by gasping and sighing and clutching him closer. Her lips did part, and he felt her tongue, if only for an instant. Then almost immediately she stiffened. Recoiling, she balled her hands and began to pound at his chest, thrashing wildly.
When he didn’t immediately let her go, her face flushed with anger. “You wouldn’t treat Lizzie like this! You wouldn’t try to take her in a barn like she was something cheap and easy without ever even having a single conversation with her!”
“Well, you’re not Lizzie Collier, are you? You’re Jesse Ray’s girl.”
“And that makes me too low to have feelings like you and your kind? Well, I do have feelings! And I’m not like my mother, you hear! So, go find your precious, saintly Lizzie Collier, and leave me in peace! She’s your girlfriend. Not me! And I wouldn’t ever want to be!”
But the last was a lie. The quick tears of shame and desolation in her lovely eyes and the thick pain in her ravaged tone told him so. She wanted him, but on equal terms. She didn’t want to be someone cheap in his eyes. Her pride, as well as her longing for him, tugged at his heart and made him feel ashamed even as it made his desire for her increase a thousandfold.
He hadn’t misread her. She had wanted him, badly. But Jesse Ray’s daughter had as much self-respect as Lizzie Collier did any day.
For a long moment, she gazed at him as if pleading for something he was at a loss to give even as her look tore his heart. Then, with a desperate cry, she pushed free of him and ran out of the barn. As he watched her retreating across the pasture, he was stunned by her grace and vital beauty and by how much more he wanted her than he’d ever wanted Lizzie. He was baffled by how low and ashamed he felt by that fact. She was just Jesse Ray’s girl. Why the hell should he feel such an overpowering need for her, such a need to apologize to her?
For weeks afterward, he’d tried to put the scent and softness and taste of the spirited and unsuitable girl out of his mind, but she’d been too lovely, too passionate, too brave, too forthright—too sexy. He’d dreamed of her, dreamed of making love to her.
He tried to forget her, but then his friends began to tell him stories about Maddie—marvelous stories he’d hungered to hear. How Maddie raced with the other kids, mostly the boys, in the pastures outside town. How she always won on the back of that prancing demon, Wild Thing. They said that she’d tamed him, that she was fearless, that she would ride bareback, that the pair could jump anything.
Why, one day after school when Cole’s friend Lyle had been smoking in his vintage Mustang with the top down, she and Wild Thing jumped over him and the car.
“Crazy horse came so close to my head I dropped my cigarette in my crotch. Burned a hole in my best pair of jeans,” Lyle had complained.
Such stories had impressed Lizzie, but they’d merely proved to Cole that Maddie was a headstrong fool—and brave, stubborn and determined. Even if the older generation in Yella wouldn’t change their minds about her because of her mother, some of the kids began to think she wasn’t as bad as they’d been taught. Maddie was smart in school, too, and Miss Jennie, whose approval was hard to win, thought she was as good as anybody.
For all that, Cole knew his mother would never approve of Maddie as his girlfriend. After his mother had married into the legendary Coleman family, she felt her children had a position to uphold. Still, despite his better judgment, his fascination with Maddie began to consume him. Thus, it hadn’t been long before Cole started coming home from the university every weekend to seek her out.
He’d go to the barn and watch her train Lizzie’s horses, especially Wild Thing. Maddie worked hard, giving more than she should to that monstrous beast, who now behaved like a docile pet to please her. Not that she said “I told you so” when Cole admitted he’d been wrong about her horse-training abilities. She simply basked in his praise, and he’d realized how much she enjoyed being admired rather than scorned. She was sweet when he apologized for kissing her, too.
Cole broke up with Lizzie and, with immense determination, began to court Maddie—but secretly.
He decided the gossips were wrong. Although she resembled her mother physically, she had a different character. Yes, mother and daughter shared the same jet-black hair, the same smooth, pale skin and the same lavender eyes that could turn blue when impassioned. Yes, their curvy bodies and sensual natures had been designed by God to drive men wild. But unlike her mother, Maddie was sweet and true.
Then she’d jilted Cole for Vernon Turner and left town, proving his assessment wrong. She was just as feckless and promiscuous as her mother.
If she was trash, why couldn’t he forget her? Why did he care if she was back in Yella?
She doesn’t matter anymore. Hell, she never should have mattered.
So why did every nerve in his body feel taut? Why was his heart racing at the possibility
