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  “Hello, yourself,” Erin replied curtly. He sure didn’t look like a man who couldn’t sleep at night for missing her.

  “Did you come back to get your gear?” he asked, pausing long enough to light a cigarette.

  “Maybe I did.” She straightened. “I can see how welcome I am.”

  “What did you expect, a brass band?” he asked. “I got along my whole life without anybody in the house. It’s pretty pleasant, if you want to know.”

  “Well, New York isn’t bad, either,” she retorted, stung. “I’m having a glorious time! I work every day, in fact, and I’m much in demand for parties and such.”

  “Found somebody else, have you?” he asked with apparent indifference. “I hope he’s rich. You’ll be expensive to keep.”

  “As if I ever cost you a dime, Tyson Radley Wade!” she shot back, raising her voice.

  “Radley?” Red Davis drawled from the corral fence.

  Ty whirled, silver eyes blazing. “Stuff it, Davis!” he growled.

  Red saluted him, but he shut up all the same.

  “That’s it, yell at the poor man,” Erin said scathingly. “Nobody around here is allowed an opinion except you!”

  “You don’t have to start yelling out secrets, do you?” Ty asked, scowling.

  “Oh, was your middle name a secret?” she asked innocently, and looked past him at the cowboys. “Well, it’s not anymore.”

  “Why don’t you go pack your damned bag?”

  She stomped her foot. “Can’t wait to get rid of me, can you? Why did you bother to marry me in the first place?”

  “Because I didn’t want Ward Jessup digging holes in my pasture looking for oil!” he said coldly. “That was it, that was all of it. That, and a little pity. You sure as hell were a basket case when I found you!”

  “And now, thanks to you, I have a wonderful future in store!” she replied angrily. “I love living alone! I have the time of my life walking around stages while middle-aged hippopotamus women try to imagine themselves in dresses that would barely fit around one of their legs! I love being ogled by male designers and hurried by dressers and pestered to death by photographers and harassed by perfectionist directors on commercials! It’s great coming home to an empty apartment and spending my whole weekend watching roller derbies and championship wrestling!”

  The cowboys were trying not to laugh. Ty was gaping at her. He’d never seen her like this.

  She clenched her small hands at her sides, her elfin face red, her eyes sparkling dangerously. “I hate you, you big ugly cowboy!” she raged at him. “I’m tired of waiting for the phone to ring and haunting the mailbox for letters that never come! They’ve offered me a week in Saint-Tropez to shoot a swimsuit commercial, and I’m taking it! The director is French and tall and handsome and sexy, and he wants me, and I’m going!”

  “Like hell you’re going!” he burst out, throwing down the cigarette with a violent flick of his wrist. “You’re not traipsing off to the south of France with any damned Frenchman!”

  “Why not?” she demanded, her voice high-pitched. “You don’t want me! I’m just a burden to you, just a cripple you’re carrying around on your conscience!”

  “Some cripple,” he murmured, studying her.

  “I wish I had a wooden leg, I’d kick you with it, you arrogant cattleman!”

  He smiled slowly.

  “My, my, aren’t we wound up, though?”

  “‘Wound up’?” She backed away a step, eyes narrowing. “Wound up! I’ll show you wound up….”

  She picked up the nearest object—an empty bucket sitting by the fence—and hurled it at him. He ducked, so she grabbed a bridle off the corral and threw that, following it with a piece of loose wood.

  The cowboys were chuckling behind Ty. He glared at them as he dodged the wood.

  “Ship me off to the city, will you?” She pushed back a strand of sweaty hair, looking around for another missile. “Throw me out on my ear, give me over to the mercy of strangers. A fine way to treat your own wife!”

  “You never wanted to be my wife,” he said. “You married me to get even with me!”

  “Sure I did!” she cried, grasping a horse collar. “To get even with you for ignoring me all the time, for baiting me, for killing me with your indifference. You big, stupid man, I love you so much!” Her voice broke as she flung the collar. “I’ve loved you from the first day I saw you, and you’ve given me nothing but hell!”

  He didn’t duck. The horse collar was heavy and it caught him in the chest, but he didn’t even flinch. His eyes were wide and unblinking as he gaped at her, disbelieving. Had he heard right?

  “It was never Bruce I wanted!” she practically screamed at him. “It was you! You, with your homely face and your big ears and your big feet and your mean temper! I cared so much…and you didn’t even like me! I tried so hard to make you care, but you hated me!”

  He’d heard right. And at that realization, something inside him burst and bubbled up like a spring. She was still raging, something about hating him because he was dumber than a cactus plant, but he didn’t even hear her—he just started to walk toward her like someone in a trance.

  She loved him. Yes, it was in her eyes, in her face, in everything about her. She’d reached a peak now, her voice broken and wounded, and she was going to leave him and go be a famous model….

  In midtorrent, he bent and lifted her in his hard arms and put his mouth over hers. He wasn’t rough. He couldn’t have been rough with her—not now. But he wasn’t that gentle, either, because it had been so long and his mouth was hungry for the sweet softness of hers.

  She mumbled something for a few seconds before her mouth opened and her arms crept around his neck, and he tasted tears on her lips as she kissed him back.

  The cowboys were grinning and chuckling, but neither of them heard. He turned, walking with her in his arms toward the house, opening his eyes only to keep from tripping as he went up the steps and through the front door.

  “Señora!” Conchita laughed as she opened the study door for Ty. “Welcome home.”

  “Umm-hmm,” Erin murmured under the crush of Ty’s mouth, waving languorously as he walked through the door and kicked it shut behind him with one booted foot. He started walking again, then suddenly wheeled and locked the door.

  She felt the sofa cradle her back and the weight of Ty’s body settle completely over her. Her eyes opened a little as his mouth lifted just long enough for her to take a breath.

  “Ty…” she whispered.

  “Are you blind and deaf and dumb?” he asked, his voice deep and harsh. “Look.” He held up the hand that was wearing the ring she’d given him. “Does that tell you anything, little shrew, or do you want the words? I’ll give them to you, but once I start saying them, I may not be able to stop.”

  She touched his mouth, feeling its rough warmth. “I wouldn’t mind,” she whispered, her eyes loving, exquisitely tender.

  His hands cupped her face. “I love you, Erin,” he said fiercely, looking intently into her eyes. “I loved you the day you left here, and I was hurting until I thought I’d die of it. I didn’t realize it…and I listened to my ego instead of my heart and ran you away. Oh, God, I’ve loved you so much, and not ever believed that you could love me back. I’ve been cruel, because I was so damned afraid of losing you…!”

  “Losing me,” she repeated ironically. “As if you could. I adore you. I love all the nooks and crannies of this face.” She touched his lean cheeks while his eyes closed and he shuddered and thanked God for the fact that love was blind. “I love all of you, with all of me. And there is no man on the face of this earth who is handsomer or sexier or more tender than you are. Oh, you sweet big dumb man, you,” she said lovingly, drawing him down to her. “I’ll love you until I die. Until you die. And forever afterward.”

  He crushed her up against him, burying his face in her throat, shuddering with the fulfillment of every dream he’d ever had. “Erin,” he
whispered.

  The unashamed adoration in his tone made her tingle all over. She bit his ear gently and cupped his face in her hands, making him look at her.

  “Ty,” she said softly, searching his eyes, “I’m not taking the Pill.”

  “Aren’t you?” he asked unsteadily. His hands found her macramé belt and loosened it. Then they eased the hem of the sweater up over the lacy little bra she was wearing.

  “You could make me pregnant if we…” She hesitated, feeling oddly shy with him.

  “What a hell of a turn-on,” he whispered, biting tenderly at her lips. He lifted his head and looked right into her eyes. “Say it.”

  Her lips parted, trembling, because she knew what he wanted her to say. It was the right time, at last—for the healing balm for all the wounds they’d inflicted, for the ultimate expression of the love they felt for each other.

  “Give me a baby, Ty,” she whispered with aching tenderness. “This time, let’s make it happen.”

  He searched her eyes for a long moment, then slowly bent his head. And it was a kind of tender loving that erased every other time, that healed all the wounds, opened all the doors. He held nothing back, and neither did she. And what they shared was so profound, so exquisitely sweet and fulfilling, that she cried for a long time when it was over—tears of pure ecstasy—lying in the arms of the man she loved most in all the world.

  She looked up at his face, adoring it, pushing back his damp black hair with hands that trembled.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  “If I hadn’t known already,” she replied, “I’d know now. We never loved like that. Not even that day in the stall when you made me cry.”

  “I wasn’t sure of you then,” he said gently. “I wanted to see if I could make you tell me what you felt. But I couldn’t.”

  “You couldn’t read my mind,” she murmured. “Inside, I was screaming it.”

  “So was I.” He bent to her mouth and smiled as he kissed it. “Come home, Erin,” he breathed. “I’m lonely.”

  “I’m lonely, too.” She nuzzled her face against his chest and smiled again. “But I never will be again, and neither will you. I’ll never leave you.”

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. His mouth brushed down upon hers, and the fires began to burn again. She reached up her arms and closed her eyes and kissed him back.

  Epilogue

  Ed Johnson checked his briefcase one last time before he knocked on the door at Staghorn. Conchita let him in, grinning from ear to ear.

  “You look like the cat left all alone with the canary bird,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “Señor, you will have to see it to believe it,” she assured him. “Such changes in this house in the past year! I am constantly amazed. Come. I will show you.”

  She led him to the doorway of the den, and he stopped there, staring. Tyson Wade was lying on his back on the carpet with a fat, laughing baby sitting on his flat stomach, and Ty was laughing with it.

  He turned his head sideways as Ed entered the room. “Good morning.”

  As he spoke, a second baby crawled up from his other side and pulled at his hair, cooing.

  “You’re baby-sitting the twins?” Ed asked.

  “Erin’s upstairs,” Ty told him. “But I change a mean diaper. Got the papers?”

  “Right here,” the attorney said, patting the briefcase. “You made a hell of an amazing recovery, you know. Last year about this time, you’d just escaped bankruptcy.”

  “I had a strong incentive.” He grinned. “A pregnant wife can sure light a fire under a man. And twins put wood on it.”

  “How old are they now?” Ed asked, kneeling beside Ty to grasp a pudgy little hand and be cooed at.

  “Just five months,” Ty replied. “We sit and stare at them sometimes, trying to believe it.”

  Ed remembered the baby Erin had lost and smiled at the tiny miracles. “Twin blessings,” he murmured.

  “Thank God.” Ty looked up at the older man and laughed. “If you’ll hold up that contract, I’ll try to sign it.”

  “No need,” Erin said, smiling as she joined them. “I’ll take the boys while you do the honors.”

  “There’s just one thing,” Ty told the attorney as Erin scooped up Jason and Matthew. “If Ward Jessup blows a gusher under just one of my cows…”

  “He won’t. And he promised to lease just what he needed. Amazing,” he murmured, watching Ty scrawl his signature on the contract, “how the two of you finally sat down and ironed out your differences. That feud’s been going on since you were barely out of your teens.”

  “Not so amazing,” Ty said, glancing past his attorney at Erin, who was cuddling the babies on her lap and looking so beautiful that his breath caught. “No, not so amazing at all.”

  Ed followed his rapt gaze and smiled. Ty had changed, and so had his outlook. He wondered if Erin knew how great a difference she’d made in the taciturn rancher’s life, just with her presence.

  She looked up at that moment and met his curious gaze. And she grinned. Yes, he thought; she knew, all right.

  He packed up the contracts and said his goodbyes. As he walked out the door, he looked back and saw Erin handing Ty one of the boys with a look of such love that he turned away, feeling as if he were trespassing. Outside, the air was sweet with the smells of summer. He drank in a deep breath of Texas air. Maybe there was something to that marriage business, he decided. He’d have to start looking around. Babies were pretty cute, and he wasn’t getting any younger.

  He got into his car. The windows were down, and just as he started the engine, he heard the sound of deep, vibrant laughter coming from the open windows of the house. Ed smiled to himself and drove down the winding driveway. Out by the fence, the prickly pear cacti were in full bloom. Sometimes, he thought, the ugliest plants put out the most beautiful flowers. He guessed there was a man back the road a piece who wouldn’t argue with that statement one bit. And neither would the woman who’d put the bloom there.

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  ISBN: 9781488741036

  TITLE: RAWHIDE AND LACE

  First Australian Publication 2014

  Copyright © 2014 Diana Palmer

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises (Australia) Pty Ltd, Level 4, 132 Arthur Street, North Sydney, N.S.W., Australia 2060.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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