Winter Roses Read online

  He didn’t say anything immediately. He looked thoughtful, and concerned. “I’ve heard it mentioned that Rachel knew where to buy drugs in Jacobsville. We both know that it’s been a hub for illicit drug trafficking in the past. It still is.” He frowned. “That ledger might have some in criminating evidence in it, and not just about Rachel’s boy friend.” He stared at her. “You don’t have any idea what it looks like?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t ask. He was being obnoxious.” She smoothed back her hair. “I wish I could feel something,” she said dully. “I’m sorry she died that way, but we were never close. She did everything she could to ruin my reputation. I used to think we might grow closer as we aged, but she only got more insulting.”

  “Rachel liked living high,” he said. “She didn’t care how she achieved status.”

  There was something in his tone that made her curious. “She was in your class in high school, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes.” His dark eyes narrowed. “She made a play for me. I put her down. She was vengeful, and you and Merrie were best friends.”

  That explained why Rachel had suddenly turned against Ivy; she thought Ivy’s friend ship with Merrie gave her access to Stuart. If Rachel had wanted Stuart, it must have galled her that Ivy was welcome in his house. Rachel might even have guessed how Ivy felt about him, which would have given her a motive to try to convince Stuart that Ivy was promiscuous.

  “So she set out to make you think I was running wild,” she guessed.

  He grimaced. “Yes, she did. I’m sorry to say she might have succeeded, except that Merrie knew you and defended you.”

  She smiled. “Merrie was always more like a sister to me than Rachel ever was.”

  “She likes you, too.” He got up. “Bed. You need rest.”

  She hesitated.

  He guessed why and chuckled. “I didn’t forget.” He produced a bag from Macy’s and handed it to her. “Sleep well.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” she said with determination.

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself. Good night.”

  “Good night.” She hesitated at the door to her room. “Stuart…thanks. For everything.”

  “You’d do the same for anyone who needed help,” he replied easily.

  She smiled. “I guess so.”

  She went into her room and closed the door. When she opened the bag, she caught her breath. He’d purchased a gown and peignoir set for her. The gown was pale lemon silk with white lace trim, ankle-length, with a dipping bodice and spaghetti straps. The peignoir had long sleeves and repeated the pattern of the gown. She’d sighed over similar styles in Macy’s herself and dreamed of owning something so beautiful. It was even prettier than the set Merrie had loaned her that long-ago night. She’d never have been able to afford something like this on her budget. She didn’t know how she was going to repay Stuart for it, but she had to. She couldn’t let him buy something so intimate for her.

  She put on the ensemble and brushed out her blond hair so that it haloed around her shoulders and down her back. When she looked in the mirror, she was surprised at how sensual she looked. That was a laugh. What she knew about men would fit on the back of an envelope.

  She climbed into bed and turned out the light. She wished she had something to read. She wasn’t even sleepy. Her mind went back to the sight of Rachel in the morgue. She forced the memory out and replaced it with lines from a book she’d read about meteorites. That amused her and she laughed to herself. Stuart probably didn’t know how fascinated she was about the space rocks, or that she was constantly borrowing books from the library about their structure. She loved rocks. She had boxes of them at her apartment. Everyone teased her about their number and variety. She was forever looking for anything unusual. Once she walked right out into a plowed field to search for meteorites and came away with projectile points instead. Merrie said she should be studying archaeology, and Ivy had replied that chance would be a fine thing.

  Even if she didn’t study it formally, she knew quite a lot about the subject. Everyone should have a hobby, after all.

  She closed her eyes and thought about the projectile points. She’d taken them to a professor of anthropology at the community college, who’d surprised her by dating them at somewhere around six thousand years old. It had never occurred to her that they were more than a hundred years old. That prompted her to get more books from the library about projectile points. She was surprised to learn that you could date them by their shape and the material from which they were made.

  She thought back to the summer she was eighteen. Stuart had been out on the ranch with his cowboys rounding up the bulls, to move them to greener pastures. She’d watched him stand up in the saddle and ride like the wind. The picture had stayed with her when he’d come in for lunch. He had seen her rapt attention as he’d swung down out of the saddle with lazy grace.

  He’d looked at her in a curious way, his pale eyes glittering. “Staring at me like that will get you in trouble,” he’d said in a deep, slow tone.

  She’d laughed nervously. “Sorry. I love to watch you ride,” she’d added. “I’ve never seen anybody look so much at home in the saddle.”

  He’d given her a strange look. “I did rodeo for several years when I was in my teens,” he’d said.

  “No wonder you make it look so easy.”

  He’d reached out and touched her soft hair. His eyes had been intent on her face, and he hadn’t smiled. Some odd magnetism had linked them at that moment, so that she could hardly breathe. Even now, almost three years later, she could still feel the pure intensity of that look he gave her. It was when she’d realized how she was starting to feel about him.

  For just a few seconds, his pale eyes had dropped to her soft mouth and lingered until she flushed. She waited, breath less, for his head to bend. And it had started to. Then one of the cowboys had called to him. He’d walked away as if nothing at all had happened. After that, he’d avoided Ivy. Right up until that fateful night she’d spent with Merrie in a borrowed lemon-colored gown…

  Somewhere music was playing softly. Perhaps Stuart had the radio on in the adjoining part of the suite. It was sweet music, sultry and slow. As she listened to it, she began to drift away.

  She was a little girl again, running out through the fields around the house where she’d grown up. She was wearing jeans and an old white shirt and, as usual, she searched for unusual rocks.

  Behind her, Rachel was dancing around in a full white gown and high heeled shoes, singing off-key and stumbling around.

  Ivy turned and called to her, cautioning her about the sudden deep crevasses in the field. Rachel made a face and replied that she knew what she was doing. Just then, she tripped and fell into one of the deep trenches.

  Ivy ran toward her. Rachel was hanging on to a small bush at the edge of the crevasse, screaming at the top of her lungs.

  “If I fall, I’ll tell everyone that you pushed me!” she threatened.

  “I’ll save you, Rachel!” Ivy shouted. “Here. Grab my hand!”

  “Your hands are dirty,” Rachel shouted back. “Dirty, dirty, dirty! You’re dirty. You aren’t my sister! I hate you! Go away! Go away!”

  “Rachel, please…” she pleaded.

  But Rachel jerked her hand back. She made a rude gesture with her hand and leaned back, falling deliberately into the darkness below.

  “You killed me, Ivy. You killed me!” she yelled as she fell faster. Then there was a scream, piercing and terrifying. It went on and on and on…

  CHAPTER NINE

  “IVY. Ivy! Wake up!”

  Strong hands held her by the wrists. She was being lifted, higher and higher. Rachel had fallen to her death, but this determined voice wouldn’t let Ivy follow her. She took a deep breath and slowly opened her eyes.

  Stuart’s eyes were there, filling the world. She blinked sleepily.

  “Wake up, sweet heart,” he said gently. “You were having a night mare.”

&nbs
p; She searched his face. “Rachel wouldn’t let me help her. She fell into a crevasse. I couldn’t save her.”

  His hands became caressing on her wrists. “It was only a dream. You’re safe.”

  “Safe.”

  His gaze dropped to her bodice and his face seemed to clench. “You’re sort of safe,” he amended.

  She was awake now, and she realized suddenly why Stuart was staring at her like that. Her bodice had dropped so that one of her pretty, firm breasts was on open display. Stuart had a ruddy color across his high cheek bones and his teeth were clenched, as if he were exerting maximum self-control.

  “You…you shouldn’t look at me, like that,” she stammered as color shot into her own cheeks.

  “I can’t help it,” he said huskily. “You have the most beautiful breasts I’ve ever seen, Ivy.”

  She couldn’t have uttered a word to save her life. He knew it, too. His big hands let go of her wrists and took her by the shoulders instead. His thumbs eased the tiny straps over her shoulders and down her arms. The bodice fell to her waist.

  He was only wearing silk pajama bottoms. His broad, hair-covered chest was almost touching her bare breasts.

  “As I recall,” he whispered, “this is about where we left off, two years ago. I even got the color of the gown right.”

  He had, but she couldn’t answer him. She couldn’t breathe. The clean, sexy scent of his body wafted up into her nostrils. She felt his breath against her lips as his hands became lightly caressing on her upper arms. The tension between them twisted like cord. Ivy trembled all over as the slow, exquisite pleasure began to grow.

  “What the hell,” he whispered at her mouth. “It’s this or go crazy…”

  His mouth opened on her soft lips in a hard, in sis tent pressure that held traces of desperation. His arms swallowed her, grinding her bare breasts against the warm muscles of his chest.

  She moaned jerkily at the rush of sensation.

  He hesitated. “Did I hurt you?” he whispered.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered back, shyly lifting her arms around his neck. “I didn’t know…it would feel like this.”

  He smiled slowly. “Didn’t you?” He bent again, but this time his mouth was less des per ate. It was tender, teasing. He nibbled her lower lip and smiled again as she parted her lips to lure him closer. His thumb probed gently, coaxing her mouth to open. When it did, his tongue slowly trespassed inside. “No, don’t fight it,” he whispered against her lips. “It’s as natural as breathing…”

  She felt him lift and turn her, so that she was lying on her back. His powerful body eased down over hers, one long leg insinuating itself between both of hers over the gown.

  She stiffened, wanting more and afraid of it, all at once.

  He lifted his head and searched her wide, apprehensive eyes. He brushed the hair back from her temples. His body was half over her and half beside her on the wide bed. But he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He bent and brushed his mouth over her eyelids, closing them. She felt her breasts go tight, pressed so hard up against him. She was aching for something she didn’t understand.

  He seemed to know it. “Ivy?”

  “What?” she managed shakily.

  “Lie back and think of England,” he murmured wickedly.

  A laugh jerked out of her tight throat.

  He lifted his head, grinning down at her. He propped on an elbow while his other hand began to trace lightly, boldly, around a distended nipple. “Or, in our case, lie back and think of Texas.” He bent again, brushing his open mouth along her collarbone. He felt her body shudder. He smiled against her soft skin as his mouth slowly trespassed down, close to but never touching the nipple. She began to twist helplessly as the sensations over whelmed her. She was new to this kind of physical pleasure. Her reactions were unexpected, even to herself.

  Her short nails bit into his shoulders as his mouth teased at her breast.

  “You haven’t done this before,” he murmured, savoring her response.

  “No,” she agreed. She shivered as his mouth grew slowly in sis tent. “Stuart…!” she ground out as his lips traced very lightly closer and closer to the nipple.

  “What do you want?” he whispered against her breast. “Tell me.”

  “I…can’t,” she moaned.

  His hand slid under her, lifting her hips up against the slowly changing contour of his powerful body. “Tell me,” he coaxed. “You can have anything you want.”

  She moaned aloud. “You…know!”

  “Stubborn,” he pronounced. He lifted his head to look down into her misty, fascinated eyes staring blindly up at him. Her whole body was trembling with passion. “You can’t imagine how badly I’ve wanted your breasts under my mouth, Ivy,” he told her as his gaze fell to her bodice. “But even in dreams, it was never this good.” He moved closer. “I like feeling you tremble when I do this,” he whispered as his mouth began to open on the soft flesh. “But it’s going to be like a jolt of lightning when I do what you really want me to do…”

  As he spoke, his warm mouth moved right onto the nipple and pressed down, hard.

  She arched off the bed, crying out. Her whole body shuddered as the pleasure bit into her. She clutched him helplessly, whimpering as his mouth became demanding.

  He rolled onto her, nudging her long legs out of the way so that she could feel him from hip to breast in an intimacy that burst like sensual fire works in her body.

  “Yes,” she groaned. “Please, Stuart, please…!” Her voice rose as he pressed her down into the mattress. “Oh, please, don’t stop!”

  His mouth slid up to cover hers, devouring it, possessing it, as his body moved sensuously over hers. She hung on for dear life. She was losing it. She wanted him. She wanted him so badly that it was almost painful when he suddenly rolled away from her and got to his feet.

  She lay there, bare to the waist, shivering in the after math, too weakened by her own surrender to even manage to cover herself. She stared at his long back, watching him fight to regain control.

  After a minute, he took a long, shuddering breath, and then another, before he turned. He stared at her hungrily, his eyes making a meal of her as she lay there, bare-breasted, her hands by her head on the pillow. He stood over her with eyes that burned like dark fires.

  She moved helplessly on the bed.

  “No,” he said quietly. “There’s a time and place. This isn’t it.”

  “You want to,” she said with new knowledge of him.

  “Good God, of course I do!” he ground out. “I hurt like a teenager after his first petting session. Just for the record, I don’t seduce virgins. Ever.”

  She drew in a short, jerky breath. “How do you know…?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” he interrupted.

  Which meant that she was as transparent as glass to him, with his greater experience. Oddly she didn’t feel embarrassed or self-conscious. He was looking at her boldly, and she loved his eyes on her body.

  “I ache all over,” she whispered.

  “So do I.” He sat down beside her and blatantly traced her breasts with the tips of his fingers. “I could do anything I wanted to you. But in the morning, you’d hate both of us.”

  It was the truth. She wished it wasn’t. “Everybody else does it. They had a poll…”

  “Polls can be manipulated.” He bent and put his mouth tenderly against her breasts. “Virginity is sexy,” he whispered. “I lie awake nights thinking about how I’d take yours.”

  She flushed.

  He laughed. “Tell me you’ve never thought about doing it with me,” he dared.

  The flush got worse.

  He drew in a long breath. “One of us has to be sensible, and I’m giving up on you,” he mused, watching her body move on the sheets. “Come here.”

  He slid under the covers and tucked her close against his side. He turned out the light and cuddled her closer. “You can take my word for the fact that I’m violently aroused and des
per ate for relief. So just lie still, recite multiplication tables and try to sleep.”

  “You’re staying?” she whispered, fascinated.

  “Yes. And you won’t have any more night mares. Now go to sleep.”

  She closed her eyes. She was sure that she couldn’t sleep with his warm, powerful body so close to her. But she drifted off almost at once and slept until morning.

  When she woke, it was to a throbbing pain in her right eye and nausea that made her lie very still. The headache wasn’t unexpected. Stress often combined with other factors to cause them.

  Stuart came in with a cup of coffee, but he stopped smiling when he saw Ivy holding her head and pushing against her right eye. “Migraine,” he murmured.

  She nodded, swallowing hard to keep the nausea down. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, you don’t plan to have headaches. Lie back down.”

  When he came back, scant minutes later, he had a doctor with him. The doctor smiled pleasantly, asked her a few questions, listened to her heart and lungs and popped a shot into her arm. She closed her eyes, unable even to thank him, the pain was so severe. She eventually dozed off.

  The second time she awoke, the pain had reduced itself to a dull echo of its former self. She sat up, drowsy, and smiled at Stuart.

  “Thanks,” she said huskily.

  “I know how those head aches feel,” he reminded her. “Can you eat some scram bled eggs and drink some coffee?”

  “I think so.” She got out of bed and staggered a little from the drugs. “It was just all the pressure,” she added. “I always get head aches when I’m under stress.”

  “I know. Come on.” Instead of letting her walk to the table, he swung her up in his arms, in the pale gown, and carried her there. He sat down with Ivy in his lap, within reach of the late break fast he’d ordered, and began to spoon-feed her eggs and bacon.

  She was amazed at the transformation of their relationship, as well as his sudden tenderness. She reacted to it hungrily, never having had anyone treat her so gently in all her life.