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  He saw the color tint her cheeks. He traced them gently, amazed at the intensity of feeling she aroused in him. “Erotic dreams?” he asked softly.

  She nodded. “That was the first time I’d ever had them in my life. And the night I came looking for you, when Aggie announced her engagement...”

  “I frightened you,” he recalled curtly.

  She looked up. “Yes, but even then, I felt something,” she whispered. “Something new and a little scary. I started getting wobbly and I had the oddest feeling deep in my stomach.” She smiled sheepishly. “And in my legs. It scared me.”

  He was very still. His eyes held hers. “A kind of dragging sensation,” he said softly.

  “Well, yes,” she said curiously.

  A light began to glow deep in his eyes. “When I traced around your breasts,” he added.

  She shifted her attention to his collar. “And when you backed me into the fence,” she added, forcing a smile. “It wasn’t altogether being overpowered that scared me so badly.”

  “This probably isn’t the best time for it,” he said as his lean hands slid to her waist, “but I think it might be as well to show you what those dragging sensations really are.”

  She looked up without totally comprehending, until she felt his thumbs edging against her breasts. She stiffened, but he shook his head slowly, holding her eyes, and she subsided.

  He watched her face the whole time. His lean hands were expert, slow, and very wise. He traced from the outer edge of her breasts almost to the nipples, with a touch that was almost like a faint breeze, light and teasing. But it was fiercely arousing, and in seconds, she was stiffening in a new way. Her hands caught his upper arms, but for support, not in protest. Her breathing began to change and she looked up at him with an expression in her eyes that made him feel fiercely male.

  His hands turned, so that his thumbs were doing the tracing now, and his nose rubbed softly against hers as he searched for her mouth. He touched it with his, nuzzling it with deft laziness, so that its soft movement both relaxed and stirred her. And still his hands were making magic on her body, his thumbs coming closer and closer to the suddenly hard tips of her breasts.

  “I don’t...understand,” she got out.

  “Open your mouth a little,” he whispered. When she complied mindlessly, his lips moved between them and so did his tongue. At the very instant his tongue went deep into her mouth, his hands claimed her breasts.

  She moaned. She’d never done that before, except in her dreams of him, and her body trembled.

  “Yes, you like it, don’t you?” he whispered into her mouth, and his own smiled faintly as he probed at her soft lips. “Bite me.”

  He enticed her teeth against his lower lip, teaching her the tender pleasure, and his thumbs began to rub with delicious abrasiveness against her hard nipples. She shuddered with each wave of pleasure they caused, her breath rustling against his hard lips, her body moving helplessly toward his hands while she held on for dear life.

  Her nails were digging into him, and she wasn’t even conscious of it, the little kittenlike movements making him even hungrier.

  Her breath was catching. It made it hard to speak. “Bowie, it...makes me so weak,” she whispered shakily, “and I ache.”

  “So do I, baby.”

  “You only call me baby...when you kiss me,” she recalled.

  He smiled against her mouth. “It seems to suit, doesn’t it?” His lean fingers went to the buttons and she looked up into his black eyes without making a sound. “I’m going to bare you to the waist,” he whispered, holding her eyes. “All right?”

  Her body trembled. “All...right.”

  His head spun with the realization that she actually wanted this. She was feeling the same fierce excitement he was.

  The impact of his eyes was frightening, she thought as she watched him peel away her blouse and stare quietly at the lacy bra that covered her breasts. Her nipples were so hard that they pointed against the thin fabric, and that was where his eyes lingered, even when he reached behind her for the catch and loosened it with one deft flick.

  Her hands instinctively came up when he started to pull the straps down. She held the bra to her trembling body, her eyes wide and uncertain and a little frightened now.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT WOULD SEND Bowie through the roof, she just knew it. She closed her eyes, waiting for the explosion.

  But he didn’t blow up. He caught her hands gently, and with a patient smile, he pulled them away from the blouse.

  “None of that,” he said softly. “You and I are going to get married. It’s perfectly acceptable for me to look at you. And that’s all I really have in mind right now. We’re going to do it in easy stages, little one. This is only the first step.”

  He made it sound so easy, and it was. He moved her hands aside, tossed the blouse to the bed beside her, and lazily slid the bra off her. His black eyes held hers all the while, until the lacy garment was lying on the bed and she was bare to the waist in the stillness of the room.

  Only then did he look down, his face tightening a little. His eyes glittered, but not in a frightening way. “Venus,” he murmured, delighted at the soft pink contours, the tilted tips, very hard, their mauve darkness contrasting so beautifully with the creamy perfection of the rest of her skin.

  “Will I do?” she whispered nervously.

  “You’re perfect,” he replied, letting his eyes move up to search hers. “Perfectly formed. Elegant.”

  Her lips parted, and only then did she realize that she’d been holding her breath. It was broad daylight, and she was letting him look at a part of her that even her assailant hadn’t seen in the dark barn. It was new—wondrous, in the best sense of the word. His eyes told her that she was beautiful, and she felt it.

  “Still afraid of me, Gaby?” he asked, and a faint, tender smile smoothed his rigid features.

  “How could I be, when you look at me like that?” she whispered huskily. “Oh, Bowie, you...make me feel beautiful.”

  “Is that so surprising, when you are?”

  “I felt dirty afterwards,” she said in a hushed tone, meeting his gaze. “He handled me, and even though he didn’t see me, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without feeling ashamed.”

  He felt a surge of pure rage against the animal who’d done that to a fifteen-year-old girl. “The shame was his, not yours. That’s over,” he said quietly.

  “Not...while I can still feel his hands,” she whispered, flushing as she tried to get across to him what she wanted. Her shy gaze fell to his chest. “Could you...touch me?”

  “If you want it, yes,” he said huskily, his pride kindled by the soft question, by the courage it must have taken to ask it.

  She moved a little closer. “It won’t bother you or anything?” she asked worriedly.

  He smiled. “Of course it will bother me,” he murmured. “But I want it as much as you do.”

  That was a hopeful sign, she thought, because it had to mean that he still wanted her, that he wasn’t giving up on her. She steeled herself not to fight him or flinch or draw back.

  As it turned out, none of those things happened, because he didn’t touch her with his hands. He bent, and his warm mouth brushed softly over the curve of one firm breast, in a touch like warm sunlight, like a summer wind.

  She gasped. She hadn’t expected that. Her body trembled with a whisper of pure pleasure, but he felt the ripple and lifted his blond head to search her eyes quietly.

  “I didn’t know you were going to do that,” she faltered.

  “I’m going to be very gentle, Gaby,” he said quietly. “I won’t hurt you. Watch...”

  She’d never dreamed of anything half so erotic. Her shocked eyes watched his mouth smooth over the creamy skin,
and she gasped again at the sting of pleasure as his lips parted and moved closer to the small, hard tip.

  One lean hand was at her back, holding her. His other hand was at her rib cage, making warm, lazy patterns on it. All the while, his mouth grazed leisurely back and forth, back and forth, each movement sensual and delicious as he teased the swollen contours and threatened the hardness that was growing more sensitive with each pass.

  Her cold fingers moved into his thick blond hair. She didn’t know what she was doing, but she knew what she wanted. She began to pull gently.

  He lifted his head, pleased to find her eyes misty and half-closed, her face not frightened, but faintly aroused.

  “I know what you want,” he whispered. “But let’s not rush it, little one. I can make the pleasure so much more intense this way, if I take my time.”

  Her breath was unsteady. “It’s very...sweet,” she managed, trying to convey what she was feeling.

  Sweet wasn’t the word he wanted from her, but passion would be difficult for her—he understood that. His mouth went back to its silky teasing. He lifted her a little closer, but he was still denying her what she wanted most.

  She moaned under her breath, biting back the sound. Her fingers contracted in his hair, loving its cool softness. Something was building, deep inside her—the same shuddery feeling she’d known only once before, when Bowie had kissed her so hungrily.

  His mouth opened, moist and deliberately sensual, his tongue touching her skin now, still smoothing lazily toward the object of his attentions.

  She arched helplessly, needing something she didn’t even understand.

  But he seemed to. All at once his mouth moved to cover that hard, aching tip. He took it inside his lips, and she shuddered as a flush of heat ran through her body like fire. Her fingers caught in his hair and forced his mouth hard against her. She gasped, her lips moving against his hair tenderly, encouraging him.

  She felt him lift her and lay her against the pillows, but she didn’t open her eyes. She felt nothing except the warm delight of his mouth on her skin, learning her body with tenderness and expertise, making her arch and tremble as it drew a new kind of pleasure from the recesses of her mind and brought it into the light.

  When he finally could force his mouth away from the sweet perfection of her breasts and sat up, he hardly recognized the woman lying so helpless on the pillows. Her face was warm with color, her eyes drowsy with pleasure, her lips slightly swollen.

  He leaned over her, his black eyes searching as he balanced himself above her, careful not to threaten her with his weight.

  But Gaby was in the throes of her first experience of desire. It was only a spark, but the impact of it was shattering. She reached up with trembling hands and began to unbutton his shirt.

  “I... I want to touch you, too,” she whispered apologetically.

  “My God, don’t apologize,” he said huskily. He clenched his hands beside her head and tried not to groan at the fumbling slowness of her fingers undoing the buttons. Finally, she got them open and tugged his shirt out of the way. Then he felt her hands, and he bit back a curse and shuddered. Even untutored, those soft fingers made him feverishly hungry.

  When she lifted, unconsciously seeking a contact that he wanted just as badly, he forgot everything but the fierce need she was kindling. He let his weight down over her and dragged his hair-roughened chest against her breasts in slow, achingly tender patterns that widened her eyes and made her arch up again to make the contact even closer.

  “If I give you my weight, are you going to scream?” he whispered roughly.

  “No...” she whispered uncertainly, because what he was doing to her made her feel oddly weak.

  With a harsh sound, he levered down over her, his long legs tangling in hers, his fierce arousal so obvious that it must have been faintly uncomfortable for her with his weight behind it. His mouth searched for hers and opened it, and he held her in an embrace that drove sanity, convention, everything from his mind except the fever of desire.

  He moved against her in a way he never had, in an intimacy he never had. She felt him that way and gasped at the explicit motion, the shudder that rippled the heavy, hard muscles of his big body. He was so huge, and she began to grow frightened. He was moving sharply now, his hips grinding down against hers while his mouth demanded something she didn’t understand. One lean hand suddenly curved around her upper thigh, and she felt him surge against her with a feeling of frank terror.

  “Bowie...!” she cried out, stiffening.

  He heard the fear in her voice and had a hell of a time stopping. She was soft under him, and only a faint layer of fabric stood in his way. He could remove that barrier and drown himself in her. His control was all but gone. But then sanity began to return, and he knew that he couldn’t do it. He had to stop. He had to...

  He forced himself to roll away from her, but he couldn’t get off the bed. He lay there in agony, his face contorted with the desire he couldn’t express or satisfy, his body arching helplessly, shuddering with its need. His hands clenched in the pillow under his head and he groaned harshly.

  Gaby had never seen a man like that. She reached out to touch him and thought better of it. She didn’t know what to do. She knew there were things a woman could do, but she didn’t know what they were, and she was too shy to ask. She felt terrible guilt at having let it go that far. But it had been so sweet to be held and touched and kissed like that. She hadn’t dreamed how quickly it could get out of hand for a man.

  “What can I do?” she whispered unsteadily. She was sitting up now, her body still trembling as she stared at him with helpless concern.

  “Nothing.” His voice sounded unfamiliar. His teeth clenched.

  “Bowie,” she whispered miserably. She was near tears. She hadn’t known that men could be that helpless, that vulnerable. He was obviously in pain, and she couldn’t do anything to help.

  He jackknifed and managed to drag himself off the bed and into the bathroom. The door slammed behind him and Gaby sat there shivering, too shocked and upset to get dressed. She pulled the cover up to shield her breasts and waited.

  Several minutes passed before he came back. He was white in the face, and his hands shook as he lit a cigarette. He sat down heavily on the side of the bed next to her and pulled an empty candy dish on the bedside table toward him to use for an ashtray.

  “I think I’ll just shoot myself and be done with it,” she whispered tearfully. “I hurt you.”

  He could barely get words out of his tight throat. Subconsciously he’d known that once she started touching him, he wouldn’t be able to control his need. She might as well know the truth.

  “This is why I’ve kept my distance,” he said heavily. “Inevitably, one day I’ll lose my head completely. I almost lost it just now.” He searched her eyes. “Gaby, I don’t think I could live with myself if something happened against your will. But marriage should be...”

  “It should be a complete commitment,” she said for him. “Physical, as well as emotional. Yes, I know.” She lowered her eyes, hurting. She only wished she could tell him why she always drew back at the last minute. Being overpowered was her greatest fear. “Bowie, I think we should break off the engagement.”

  He stared at her without knowing what to say. That was the last thing he’d expected from her. “Break it off?”

  “Yes.” She wiped the tears away. “I never dreamed it would hurt you so much to have to draw back, and it will only get worse. I just can’t make myself do it, Bowie.” Her big, wounded eyes lifted to his, filled with apology and fear. “You know it’s for the best. You can’t go on like this. You deserve so much more than I can give you.”

  He couldn’t remember ever feeling so helpless. He knew she loved him. It was more than just virginal fear, he was sure of it. There was something she was ho
lding back—something she wasn’t telling him. He wished he could make her trust him enough to tell him all of it, but she had to come to that realization herself. In the meantime, he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t dare pressure her anymore. The hell of it was that she was right about his own limits. He couldn’t go on like this, even if he hated admitting it, hated seeing that tragic sadness in her olive-green eyes.

  “Are you sure that this is how you want it?” he asked quietly.

  “No, but it’s how it has to be,” she said. She felt like half a woman. The odd thing was that she’d almost wanted him. If only she could get over the past. And it wasn’t so much what had happened to her as what had come after it. The violence was what frightened her, much more than the intimacy.

  She wished she could tell him the whole story, but he’d hate her. Not only that, the risk was too great. The scandal would be devastating—especially now, with things so unsettled at Casa Río.

  “It’s just as well that we didn’t make an announcement or buy a ring, isn’t it?” she said hesitantly.

  “I guess so.” He ran a big hand through his sweaty hair. “I thought I could make enough concessions—that I could be patient, until you were ready for intimacy. But I’ve been too long without a woman, and I’m too much a man.” He looked up. “I don’t mean that in any conceited way. I need a woman. I can’t settle for companionship. It would be a disaster to try and suffer a platonic marriage.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” she said gently. “I understand. I’m not blaming you. The pattern was set a long, long time ago. I had hoped that I could break it, but I can’t.” She stared at her hands, clenched on the sheet. “I should go to Phoenix and get my old job back,” she began.

  “There’s no need. You’ll be happy enough working down here. I’ll be in Tucson during the week, and I’ve got my own job to keep me busy,” he replied. “There’s no reason you can’t stay at Casa Río. You’ll have to, now that you own the biggest part of it.”