Eye of the Tiger Read online

  Insanity, she thought, but her hands were insistent, eager. She looked at him, watched the muscles ripple as her hands drew over them warmly, tenderly. He could have died—this might have been impossible. She thought that, and couldn’t resist this once to know him, to possess him.

  When her hands found and caressed his muscular stomach, he groaned and shuddered. She looked up at his hard, drawn face and exulted as she felt him tremble. He looked down at her, his eyes blazing with desire.

  “I wish we were anywhere…except here,” he said, his voice low and rough. “I want to do this to you. Touch you, with my eyes and my hands, in broad daylight. I want to be part of you.”

  “I’m afraid of you,” Eleanor admitted at last, her eyes wide and vulnerable in her pale face.

  “I’m sorry for that,” he replied. “For so many things. I’d take back the past four years if I could. I’d start over with you.”

  “Once broken, a mirror is never the same.”

  “I could prove you wrong, if you’d let me,” he said softly. “If you’d give me half a chance.”

  Eleanor closed her eyes in anguish. She wanted that, with him: wanted a new beginning. But there had been so much wounding, so much hurt.

  “Come up to the house next Saturday and have lunch with us,” he coaxed. “Mary June will be better by then—she’ll do something pretty.”

  “Your houseguests will still be there,” she reminded him.

  “No, they damned well won’t,” he said shortly. “Not if I have to drive them to the airport. I’ve had pretty Maureen up to my neck! I’m sick of being chased. I like to do the chasing myself.”

  He always had. Now he was in pursuit of her, and once he caught her it would be just as it was before. Only this time she wouldn’t recover.

  He held her hands in his, searching her frightened, anxious eyes. “Trust me, just once. Just this once, Eleanor.”

  He sounded sincere. She knew she shouldn’t believe him, but the sound of his voice was weakening her, as was this unnerving proximity to his unclothed body. He was so much a part of her already that nothing he did was unpleasant to her.

  “All…right,” she agreed reluctantly.

  He smiled. “All right.” His blue eyes twinkled. “Now kiss me and I’ll get back in bed.”

  “Promise?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Scout’s honor.” He tilted Eleanor’s face up to his and brought his mouth down, then kissed her as she’d never been kissed before. It made her go hot all over with mingled, confusing emotions.

  “Here,” he whispered unsteadily. His hands caught hers, moving them to the back of his powerful thighs. “Now come close,” he murmured against her mouth. “Come very, very close and let me feel you….”

  His legs actually trembled when she obeyed him. Delicious, exquisite tingles of pleasure throbbed along her nerves as she felt his powerful body surge against her. She jerked a little and he smiled against her warm mouth.

  “See how helpless I am with you?” he whispered. “Just like a boy, all hot and bothered and out of control. And I think it would embarrass me like hell with any other woman.”

  That was flattering. She sighed, then returned his kiss hungrily until he shuddered and gently eased her away.

  He drew in a steadying breath, holding her by the waist as he searched her flushed face. Then he smiled slowly, wickedly. “Knocked the breath right out of you, didn’t it? Same here.”

  “I…have to go,” she faltered.

  “You’d better fix your face first,” he said, touching it with gentle fingers. “You look loved, little Ellie.”

  So did he. His red hair was disheveled, his mouth a little swollen, like her own. She felt the smile in her eyes, her lips, as she reached up and traced his eyebrows, his straight nose, his firm chin.

  He brought her palms to his lips and kissed them. “That was the best medicine I’ve had since I was admitted,” he whispered.

  “And highly unethical it was, too,” she teased. She moved discreetly away, her eyes fascinated by the beauty and symmetry of his body.

  “It shouldn’t embarrass you,” he said quietly. “I don’t feel like this with most women. I’m not ashamed of the way you affect me.”

  “No. I’m not, either,” she said, surprising herself. She even managed to smile at him as he climbed back under the sheet and drew it up to his waist. “You’re beautiful,” she blurted out.

  His warm eyes swept over her body. “So are you.” Suddenly his face hardened. “Make love with me, Eleanor. Let me make the memories sweet. Let me show you how sweet it can be with a man who isn’t a selfish brute.”

  “You weren’t all that selfish,” she murmured, embarrassed. “I was just inexperienced. I pushed you over the edge too soon.”

  “Another first,” he replied. “Because you were the only woman I ever lost control with. Is that a shock, baby? It’s the truth.”

  It was a shock. So was what she’d just let happen. She turned and went into his bathroom, smoothing her hair and wincing at the sight of her big dark eyes and swollen mouth. Well, she’d have to make a mad grab for her purse. Maybe Darcy wouldn’t notice.

  “You look fine,” he said when she came out again. He held out his hand, and she went to him without a word, letting him press it to his mouth. “Come back and stay with me when you get off duty.”

  She started to agree, then remembered Wade. “I can’t,” she moaned. “Wade’s taking me out to dinner.”

  His expression was indescribable. He hesitated a moment, then released her hand and leaned back against the pillows. “Granger again. Well, you can just break the date. I don’t want you seeing him anymore.”

  “Oh, here we go again, slinging orders around like hash in a greasy spoon.” She glared at him, stepping back. “Well, Mr. Taber, honey, you just lie here and give all the orders you like, but don’t expect me to come to heel. I’m not your personal slave, despite your undeniable expertise at lovemaking. You won’t seduce me a second time!”

  “Won’t I?” he challenged, bright-eyed. “Wait and see.”

  “You wait. I have work to do.”

  She whirled and stomped out the door, hating herself all over again for having trusted him in a moment of weakness.

  Darcy pretended not to see the results of Keegan’s mouth and hands, but she spent the rest of the day grinning.

  “He wants to see you,” she told Eleanor just before quitting time as she returned from answering Keegan’s light.

  “I’ll have a photograph made, he can look at that. Look at the time!” Eleanor clucked. “I have to run. I’ll give my report and see you tomorrow, darling. Have a nice evening.”

  “Eleanor, you can’t strand me with him,” Darcy wailed. “He doesn’t like me!”

  “That’s all right. He doesn’t like anybody,” Eleanor assured her with a smile. “Just don’t make any sudden moves, and you’ll be fine. See you!”

  Wade picked her up at six, and they went to a nice little Italian restaurant, but Eleanor’s heart wasn’t in it. She picked at her food and made halfhearted responses to Wade’s teasing, and was thoroughly miserable.

  “Is he getting to you, honey?” Wade asked sympathetically.

  “He’s just horrible,” she muttered, “and I don’t know why I can’t manage to put him out of my mind and my life. I feel like such a wimp.”

  “It’s called love,” he told her. “A malady to which we are all vulnerable at one time or another. Chin up, girl, don’t surrender now. We’re just on the verge of victory!”

  “Think so?” She sighed.

  He grinned. “Well, I hear through the grapevine that the O’Clancys are on their way back to Ireland this very minute.”

  “Then as soon as Keegan is on his feet, he’ll probably be right behind them,” she replied.

  “Care to bet? Unless I miss my guess, young lady, you’re the target, not Maureen.”

  “Then he’d better be prepared for a long siege,” she retorted.<
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  “You said he invited you to lunch Saturday. Go. And while you’re there, lay it on thick about how close you and I are getting,” he added. “Then stand back and watch the fireworks.”

  The word “fireworks” brought back vivid memories of that afternoon—of practically swooning in Keegan’s arms while he all but ravished her with his mouth. She felt like someone in the grip of a savage fever, burning up with unsatisfied longings, perishing for lack of love. She had no strength at all anymore; Keegan, on the other hand, was very strong—and single-minded.

  “Save me from him,” she pleaded.

  “You don’t need saving, beautiful girl.” Wade chuckled as he finished his coffee. “He does. You wait. We’ve got him in a corner now.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that,” she said. “He’s slippery. He doesn’t really want to settle down.”

  “I think you’re wrong. I think he wants that very much. Why don’t you listen to him for a change, Eleanor,” he added quietly. “Ask some questions. Be receptive. You might be astonished at the results you get.”

  She shrugged, and the smile that touched her full mouth was wistful. “All he’d want is an affair. I don’t need that.”

  “You need him,” he told her. “How are you going to survive without him? Honey, sometimes it takes a compromise to satisfy both parties. You might think about that.”

  “I don’t mind compromise. But I’m not going the whole way alone,” she replied.

  He lifted his coffee cup. “I don’t think you’ll have to. I think very soon I may have to start looking around for a new companion.” He sighed. “And I’ll never find a girl like you again. I’d have Keegan pushed out of an airplane if I thought it would get me you. But I would like to see you happy. And I don’t think you’ll ever find what you want with anyone except Keegan.”

  She was beginning to think that herself. It was kind of depressing, though. She watched Wade drive away an hour later, feeling as if her last friend had deserted her. He hadn’t even fixed another date. He seemed to expect that she and Keegan would work it out, but she had reservations. Maureen might be out of the picture—but only temporarily, only until Keegan had satisfied his lust for Eleanor. There were too many differences socially and economically between the Tabers and the Whitmans for anything more permanent. And Eleanor didn’t want a backstairs affair. Problem was, she admitted ruefully, she didn’t know what to do anymore.

  When she went on duty the next day, it was to find that Keegan had checked himself out the night before and gone home. It was a disappointment and a relief.

  She worked her shift, dodged Darcy’s questions and was emotionally exhausted by the time she went home. Her father was busy in his woodworking shop and didn’t question her when she announced that she was going to take a nap before she cooked supper.

  * * *

  She was dreaming. She was being held and touched and loved, and she smiled as Keegan’s face came into focus above hers. Then she realized with a start that it wasn’t a dream. He was real.

  “Don’t panic,” Keegan said with a soft, deep laugh as he lifted her from the bed in his arms. “I’m just going to take you up to the house to see my new colt.”

  “But…but I’m asleep,” she protested drowsily, wiping her eyes with her hands.

  “No, you aren’t, pretty thing.” His eyes wandered over her. She’d changed into white shorts and a pink button-up sleeveless blouse, and he loved the softness of her tanned body, the sweet weight in his arms. “God, you’re pretty.”

  He bent and kissed her sleepy lips gently. “Wake up, beauty.”

  She linked her arms around his neck with a stifled yawn and buried her face in his throat. He smelled of Oriental cologne and soap, and she nuzzled closer.

  “Don’t do that,” he said uneasily, “unless you want me to find a satisfying use for your bed.”

  Her breath caught. She was half-asleep and all too vulnerable, and suddenly the atmosphere in the room was hot and tense and full of promise.

  “Your father went up to the house with my dad to see the colt,” Keegan said, his voice deep and husky. “I told him I’d bring you along.” He drew her closer. “It will take them half an hour to miss us…. Eleanor?”

  She drew her head back to his shoulder and looked up at him, and she didn’t have time to hide the hunger.

  His eyes darkened, shifted to her breasts. She hadn’t put on a bra, and he could see the dark, taut outline of her nipples. This wasn’t how he’d planned it, but his body was in torment. He wanted her unbearably. And she wanted him.

  “We could love each other on that bed,” he whispered shakily, moving back toward it. “Cool sheets, hot bodies twisting together like twining vines. I can give you pleasure and watch you give yourself to me, Ellie. I can let you watch me go crazy when the time comes. Let me.”

  Keegan set her down on the sheet, holding her as he stripped away the coverlet, his eyes never leaving hers. Then he eased her back down, tossing the pillow to one side. His eyes burned with intent as his fingers slowly did away with buttons and pushed the blouse gently aside to bare her breasts.

  He looked down and caught his breath at the mauve-and-pink perfection revealed there. She was fuller than she had been at eighteen, a vision. He reached down and touched the hard tips, rubbing them so that she trembled and bit her lip.

  “Cry out, if you feel like it,” he said huskily. “You can make all the noise you want to with me. No one will hear us.”

  Eleanor arched helplessly. He’d come along at the worst possible time, caught her at her most vulnerable. Years of repressed longing were freed at last, and the ensuing explosion of passion left her powerless to resist.

  “Lift up,” he said gently. “Let me undress you.”

  She let him do it; wide-eyed, she watched him, felt his warm, callused hands easily disposing of her shorts, her lacy briefs, until she lay revealed and yielding on the cool sheets.

  Keegan brought her hands to his body, pressing them against him, holding her eyes with his. “Take my clothes off, Eleanor.”

  She didn’t know where she found the courage. She’d never in her life undressed a man for this reason, not even Keegan. Most of all she remembered the pain, and her hands hesitated after she removed his shirt and let it drop to the floor.

  He tilted her chin up until their eyes met. “It won’t hurt this time,” he promised. “This time is going to be everything your first time should have been.”

  She found the buckle of his belt, and even then she hesitated. He laughed softly at her fumbles and got to his feet.

  “I’ll do it this time,” he murmured.

  Keegan removed the rest of his clothing, while she watched him, fascinated. Then he turned and stretched out lazily beside her.

  “And they say dreams don’t come true,” he whispered as his hands traveled sensuously up her rib cage to cup her breasts. “They do. Oh, yes, they do…. Turn over and lie against me, little one. I want to feel every inch of you touching my body.”

  He helped her, bending to kiss her open mouth as his hands moved up and down and around her soft, yielding body.

  Eleanor lay still at first, accepting his caresses. But as Keegan found more intimate ways of touching her, she began to writhe. By the time his mouth had worked its way over her breasts and down her hips and thighs, she was crying.

  Keegan had never aroused a woman to that state before. Most of them had been experienced, of course, and not as innocently accepting and eager as Eleanor. It excited him unbearably that she was so hungry for him. She must love him, he told himself. She wouldn’t be so openly receptive to his loving if she didn’t. The thought made him wild. He groaned against her stomach, and his fingers bit hard at her hips, lifting her.

  “Want you,” she whispered brokenly. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back, her hands trembling on his hips. “I want you, want you!”

  His mouth slid all the way up her body as he settled his weight along her legs and hips and br
easts, feeling her soft body press deeply into the mattress. Eleanor trembled a little as he moved his body over hers, and he lifted his head to watch her, to make sure that he didn’t hurt her.

  “Shhh,” he whispered reassuringly, brushing back her disheveled honey-brown hair. Her eyes were huge, frightened. “Relax for me, Ellie. Yes, like that, just relax and let me do the rest. Yes.” He smiled softly, feeling the yielding, the warm softness enfolding him with delicious ease. He shifted closer, feeling her nails bite into his hips as she surged up against him with a gasp.

  “Oh, God, this is going to be heaven,” he whispered gruffly. “Don’t be afraid, but it’s going to get a little… rough…now, baby!” He groaned and shuddered as the fever began to burn in him. He clenched his hands under her hips, lifting her. “Baby, baby!”

  Eleanor felt the rough movement of his body with a sense of awe, because it wasn’t pain she was feeling. It was something unbearably sweet. Her eyes closed in an exquisite shudder as he touched her in a way that made her body ripple with pleasure.

  “Yes…do that,” she pleaded against his suddenly devouring mouth. “Yes, like that, like that! Keegan!”

  She was crying now, whimpering, her soft hands clutching at his hips, his thighs, working magic on the long, damp sleekness of his back as his body rose and fell with hers in the sunlit silence of the bedroom.

  Keegan never remembered what happened next. Eleanor was crying and he was on a roller coaster that he couldn’t stop. He cried out above her, his voice like that of someone in torment. His body arched like a bow, and his face contorted in exquisite agony as he cried her name.

  She reached up, drawing him down against her, comforting him, because she was blazing with tenderness and fulfilled desire, her face wet with tears.

  “Keegan,” she whispered in wonder. Her lips touched his face, his eyes, his cheeks, his trembling mouth. She smiled. “Keegan.”

  “Thank you,” he whispered shakily. “Thank you for trusting me, for giving yourself so sweetly. I never knew peace, until now. I had to show you, teach you, that it can be magic. A man and a woman can touch the sky.”

  “Lovemaking,” she whispered. Her eyes closed. “You’re my lover.”