her forehead.
“Still fighting me?” he growled. “When are you going to learn that if there’s any bending to be done between us, you’ll do it?”
She subsided against him, her eyes blazing, wide with fury. “I hate you!” she mouthed deliberately.
He chuckled softly. “No, you don’t,” he said, his glittering eyes narrow with amusement as he looked down at her. “You hate not being able to argue with me, but you don’t hate me. I’ll never let that happen, Heather.”
The shock of hearing her name on his lips brought a faint frown to her face. He rarely ever called her by name. It was as if he threw careless endearments at her to keep her at a distance.
He pushed the damp hair back from her face. “You’ll talk again,” he said in an uncommonly kind tone. “And you’ll sing, too, but you have to believe in yourself. Life is a challenge, Heather, not a gift. Nothing is handed to us without a little effort on our parts.”
But I did work, she tried to tell him, I did, even if I had the talent to begin with, I worked to polish it! But without her voice, only her eyes could speak for her.
He searched the blue, misty depths with a quiet intensity that fanned her pulse. In the sudden silence of the room, every emotion seemed magnified. He touched her mouth with a long finger and traced, very gently, every soft curve of it. His eyes followed the movement, very narrow, very intent….
Her lips parted involuntarily under that strange gaze, her breath rushed out in a soft sigh. When his eyes darted back up to hers, something in them made her want to tear away from him and run. She’d never before felt the electricity that was gathering between them now with all the intensity of a summer storm.
“Cole…” she whispered unthinkingly, the name coming to her lips with unconscious ease. She paused, startled at the sound of her own voice.
Cole smiled. “It’s taken you a long time, Heather,” he said quietly.
“For…what?” she mouthed, unwilling to trust herself to speak again.
“To wonder how it would feel if I took your mouth under mine,” he said.
Her cheeks flushed wildly with color as the words hit home. Suddenly everything was changed, upside down. She was being forced to admit something she’d submerged in her mind for ages—that she was aware of Cole as a man.
There was absolute stillness as two pairs of eyes met, asked questions, and waited for answers. Time hung, quivering, between them.
Chapter Three
Emma’s quick step in the hall outside broke the spell. Cole released Heather with reluctance, and she avoided his eyes as she stood quietly beside the window seat.
“Here I am,” Emma said with a smile, darting a quick look from her son to her stepdaughter. She didn’t mention the raw tension she felt in the room as she set down a tray on the bedside table. There was a steaming cup of hot chocolate and a slice of fresh cheesecake on the tray, and Heather suddenly realized how hungry she was.
She smiled and mouthed “thank you” at the older woman, who beamed.
“Don’t forget Tessa, dear,” Emma told her son as she sat down in the wing chair by the bed.
“As if I could,” he replied with a frankly sensual smile. Without even glancing in Heather’s direction, he turned and strode with catlike grace to the door. “I think Heather’s on the road to recovery. She was just able to say my name out loud,” he called over his shoulder before he closed the door behind him.
Tessa. Heather felt a queer emptiness as she recalled the other girl’s jet-black hair, swinging down to an impossibly narrow waist, and her black eyes that always kept the men jumping at parties. Tessa was the only daughter of a neighboring rancher, and as spoiled as a three-day-old dead fish. Anything she wanted, she got. And for years now, she’d wanted Cole.
“It’s Tessa’s birthday.” Emma was chattering as if Heather had been paying rapt attention. “Cole’s flying her to a concert in San Antonio. Poor dear, she’s spent weeks choosing just the right dress.”
Poor dear, indeed, Heather thought. Tessa would walk over Joan of Arc to get to Cole. And anything that threatened to take him away, even briefly, was in danger of attack. Heather’s last visit home had been ruined by Tessa’s jealousy. Somehow she’d managed to cheat Heather out of any time alone with Cole during the hectic three-day stopover between singing engagements.
Tessa was envious of the younger girl’s career, her clothes, her beauty. She took every opportunity to throw catty remarks at her—remarks that went over Cole’s head and far right of Emma’s forgiving nature. It was like being clawed to death by an invisible enemy with everyone watching. Tessa had always been Heather’s worst enemy. Now, at least, the younger girl knew how to protect herself. In the past, when Heather’s mother was alive, she’d been more vulnerable.
Tessa had six years’ advantage on the gangly child Heather had been, and in her late teens, she was unusually sophisticated for her age, just the kind of girl to appeal to a woman like Deidre Shaw. Tessa had spent more time at Big Spur than she had in her own home, and Heather had received nothing but the leftover crumbs of her mother’s affection. When Deidre Shaw succumbed to pneumonia, it was Tessa she called for to nurse her. And at the funeral a few short weeks later, Heather felt as distant from her mother in death as she had in life.
Two years later Emma Everett, recently widowed herself, agreed to marry Jed Shaw and take Heather under her wing. Their families had always been close because of Jed’s friendship with Big Jace Everett. With both Emma and Jed suffering the loneliness of bereavement, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for them to turn to each other. Emma and Cole were a part of Big Spur from the moment they moved in, and for the first time in her life Heather was surrounded by the warmth and affection she’d always longed for.
Cole! A tremor swept over her slender body. She’d always thought of him as her big brother. What if he did kiss her? That thought was new, and faintly shocking, as if it were forbidden to even consider any intimacy with him. But they weren’t blood kin; they weren’t related at all, even distantly. That made her vulnerable. It meant Cole could kiss her, touch her, and there was no reason for him to restrain himself. He could even make love to her….
Her face went scarlet. Surely her innocence would protect her—or would it? Despite the affection Cole had always felt for her, he was a man. And something she’d seen in his eyes today for the first time had convinced her that his attitude toward her had changed. Cole was the kind of man who wouldn’t accept limits. He was far too experienced to revert to adolescence for the sake of a woman, and Heather didn’t know how she was going to protect herself if he decided he wanted her.
With a sigh, she pulled herself up straight. All she had to go on was a new look in Cole’s eyes, and she might have misread the situation entirely. Perhaps he’d only been teasing, and here she was going wild at an imagined intimacy.
She jerked her mind back to Emma’s running commentary on the ranch, and her efforts to set up a day-care center for children of working mothers in the area. That was it, she’d only imagined Cole’s interest. But in the back of her mind, she could still hear his male voice, quiet and dangerous, awakening dormant longings deep inside her.
Three
