Long, Tall Texans: Hank & Ultimate Cowboy ; Long, Tall Texans: Hank Read online

  “I’ve never been to Sioux City,” he remarked conversationally. “But you’re an old-fashioned girl, so I guess I’ll have to chase you for a while, won’t I?”

  “You don’t need to start thinking that you’ll wear me down. You won’t. I have no inclination whatsoever, at all, to…to…”

  He stood up slowly in the middle of her tirade, turned off the Jacuzzi and stepped out onto the mat. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. It must be some deep-seated weakness, she decided, some character flaw that made her into a blatant Peeping Tom.

  And it was worse than ever when he reacted to her appreciative eyes and laughed about it.

  She groaned as she pulled a huge bath sheet from the heated towel bar and handed it to him.

  He ignored the bath sheet. His hand shot around her wrist and jerked, pulling her completely against his wet body. Even in his weakened condition, he was alarmingly strong.

  She started to struggle, the sheet dropping to the floor, but he clamped a big hand around her waist and held her firmly to him, groaning in pleasure as her hips moved sharply in her efforts to escape.

  She subsided at once, made breathless by the huge body so intimately close to her. He was so tall that she felt the insistent pressure of him, not against her hips but against her midriff. She caught onto him to keep from reeling, and the feel of that thick mat of hair under her hands paralyzed her with curious pleasure.

  “Shrimp,” he accused at her temple.

  “Giant,” she taunted.

  His hands swept over her back, burning hot through her thin cotton blouse, flattening her breasts against his diaphragm.

  “We don’t even fit together like a normal man and woman,” he remarked as he looked down at her. “We’re like Mutt and Jeff.”

  But it felt right. It felt as natural as breathing to stand close against his aroused body and be at home. She laid her cheek against his damp chest and just stood there, letting him hold her close, while she tried to deal with the unfamiliar feelings that were overwhelming her. It felt like more than physical attraction. It felt like…love.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I’m out of my mind,” he said pleasantly. “I must be, even to consider such a thing with a midget like you. We’d be totally incompatible in bed.”

  She closed her eyes and relaxed against him, feeling him tauten in response. “No, we wouldn’t. I studied anatomy. I’d have to be a foot shorter than I am to be worried. A woman’s body is very elastic.”

  “Is yours elastic enough to accommodate mine?” he asked quietly.

  She lifted her head and looked up into his blue, blue eyes. She felt the hunger all through her, burning and hot. “I think so,” she said involuntarily.

  His jaw clenched as he searched her face. “Then, let me.”

  She swallowed. Her fingers went up to touch his hair-roughened face. His lips were the only bit of skin visible below his cheekbones and his blue eyes. “I can’t.”

  He scowled. “Those damned old-fashioned ideas again! This is the nineties, for God’s sake!”

  “I know.” She traced his hard mouth and wanted so much to lie in his arms and learn what it was to love. But it wasn’t what she wanted. “I’m not emotionally strong enough for brief affairs. That’s why I don’t have them. I really do want a home and children, Hank. I want my husband to be the first. If that’s outdated, I’m sorry. I don’t feel inferior or out of step just because I put a high value on my chastity. I hope the man I marry will feel the same way about his body.”

  His hands loosened. “In other words, you don’t want a permissive man for a husband.”

  She lowered her eyes to his broad chest. “I suppose a lot of women think a man like that can reform, that he can be faithful. But if he’s had a hundred women, he’s already proven that he can’t. He sees sex as an itch to scratch. He’ll probably always consider it that casual, so he’ll feel free to sleep around after he marries. And it will probably surprise him if his wife objects.”

  His big hands smoothed up and down her arms. “I guess I’ve given you the impression that I’m that way with women.”

  She looked up. “Yes.”

  He took a slow breath and smiled tenderly. “You don’t think I might one day value a woman enough to become faithful rather than risk losing her?”

  “I don’t know you,” she said solemnly.

  “No. You really don’t.” He hesitated for another minute, but then he let her go and bent to pick up the bath sheet she’d dropped.

  She moved away while he dried himself, finding a robe hanging behind the door that she handed to him when he was through. He put it on without a protest and let her help him back to the bedroom.

  “Your hair is still damp,” she said.

  “It dries fast. Don’t bother about the blower.” He started toward the bed, but she diverted him into the chair.

  “I want to change the sheets first. You’ll be more comfortable.”

  He smiled. “Thanks.”

  “Where are they?”

  He told her where to look and sat like a lamb while she remade the bed and then helped him out of his robe and into the bed.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, because he looked so tired.

  “I’m just weak. I think I may sleep for a while.”

  “That would be the best thing for you. Do you need anything?”

  He shook his head. He studied her blouse for a long time, and she wondered why until she looked down and flushed. It had gotten so damp while she was standing against him that it had become see-through, and she wasn’t wearing anything under it because her bra and the clothes she’d put on yesterday were in the load of laundry she’d started earlier.

  Her arms came up over her body and she looked at him defensively.

  “They’re very pretty,” he said with quiet reverence, and no mockery.

  “Marshmallows,” she muttered with self-contempt.

  “Stop that,” he said sharply. “I don’t like big women.”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “All men do…”

  “Not me,” he repeated. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”

  He eased her inferiority complex quite a lot, because he obviously wasn’t lying about the way he felt. She managed a self-conscious smile. “Thanks.”

  He arched his arms behind his head and shifted with an oddly sensuous movement of his body. His eyes cut into hers, faintly glittering. “Open your blouse and come down beside me. I’ll put my mouth on them and show you ten different ways to moan.”

  She flushed, jumping to her feet. “No doubt you could. I’m grass green that way. But I wouldn’t thank you for reducing me to that condition, even if a dozen other women have.”

  She walked toward the door and heard him mutter under his breath.

  “I haven’t had a hundred women,” he said angrily.

  “Oh, sure.” She laughed as she put her hand on the doorknob.

  “I’ve had one. My wife. And she left me impotent.”

  The shock that tore through her spun her around to face him. He wasn’t joking. It was all there, in his drawn face, his bitter eyes, even in the taut line of his mouth.

  “But you’re not impotent!” she blurted.

  “Not with you,” he said, chuckling softly. “You can’t imagine what a shock it was to find out. I’ve been putting off women for years because I was sure that I couldn’t perform in bed.”

  She leaned back against the door. Her legs felt weak. “You weren’t married for very long, though, were you?”

  “Six years,” he told her. “Before that, I gave everything in me to football. I lived in the gym. I had no interest in seducing scores of women, however prudish that sounds. I was like you, bristling with idealism and romance. I saved myself for the right woman. Except she wasn’t the right woman,” he said shortly. “We burned each other up in bed, but we had nothing to talk about in broad daylight.”

  “Did she…know?”

  “No,” he replied. “B
ecause by the time we decided to get married, I discovered that I was one in a line. She’d had one lover after another until I came along, and never wanted to marry any of them. She said that she didn’t think she could ever be faithful to one man, but I was certain that she could. More fool me,” he added bitterly. “Amusing, isn’t it, that you know already that permissive people find it difficult to be faithful, and I had to learn it the hard way.”

  “I wasn’t in love,” she reminded him. “You were.”

  “I should have known. Permissive people don’t seem to make faithful lovers.”

  “But if she was like that,” she began, moving closer to the bed, “experienced, I mean…how did you become impotent?”

  “I stopped being able to want her after she had her third extramarital affair,” he said honestly. “And without a lifetime of experience behind me, I thought that meant that I was permanently demanned. So I didn’t try.”

  She saw him quite suddenly in a different light. Not as a playboy of the music world, but as an intense, deeply emotional man who felt things right down to his soul.

  “Feeling sorry for me, Poppy?” he taunted as she paused by the bed.

  “Oh, no. I’m feeling sorry for her,” she said. “How sad to have someone love you so much and to be able to feel nothing in return.”

  “She’s happy. She has a husband who doesn’t require faithfulness, and plenty of money to spend.”

  “That wouldn’t make me happy.”

  He smiled. “What would?”

  “Being loved. Having a home. Having children. I’d still practice, of course. I guess I’d have to marry a man who was willing to sacrifice a little so that I could, but I’d make sure he never regretted it.”

  “Do you have hang-ups about sex?” he asked curiously.

  “Just about having it before I get married,” she replied, and grinned at him. “Deep-seated principles aren’t easily uprooted.”

  “People shouldn’t try to uproot them,” he replied. “I’m sorry about that. It was a delicious surprise to find myself so quickly capable with you. I wanted to explore it.” He shrugged. “But I shouldn’t have put pressure on you.”

  “I want to,” she said sincerely. “I’ll bet you’re a wonderful lover. But I want it all, the white wedding gown, the wedding night, the honeymoon…I’m greedy.”

  He smiled. “Don’t sound as if you’re apologizing for it. You’re a breath of fresh air to a cynic like me.” He frowned quizzically at her. “Has it occurred to you that in a few days we’ve become as intimate as a married couple except in one respect?”

  “We still don’t know each other.”

  “You’d be surprised at what I know about you,” he remarked gently. “You like to go barefoot on the carpet. You’re neat, but not fanatical about it. You like to cook, but you don’t like to clean up. You’re intellectual so no situation comedies for you. You like nature specials and news and politics and music. You have a kind heart and you like animals and children, but underneath all that is a passionate nature held under very tight control.” His eyes narrowed on her body. “You’ll be a demanding lover, little Poppy, and some lucky man will probably find you next to insatiable in bed.”

  She lifted both eyebrows. “Stop that.”

  “I wish it was going to be me,” he replied. “But I’ve already messed up one marriage by leaping in with my eyes closed after a one-week courtship. I’m not going to do it twice in one lifetime.”

  “Neither would I, although you didn’t ask.”

  “Sit down.” He pulled her down on the bed and drew her hand to his chest, holding it there. “I’m on the road six months out of the year, recording and making business deals, doing interviews and talk shows and working with underprivileged inner-city kids. It’s a project of mine, finding volunteers to work with them once a week to help keep them out of trouble,” he added with a grin. “When I’m home, and home is Texas, I compose to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes I go for a whole day without eating, because I’m so wrapped up in my work that I forget to cook.” He smoothed his thumb over the back of her hand. “I’d make a lousy husband. In fact, I did. I can’t really blame her—”

  “I can.” She interrupted him. “If you love someone, you accept it all, the separations, the good times, the bad times, the illnesses. It’s all part of marriage.”

  “You’ve already had the illness part,” he mused.

  “I’d have done that for anyone,” she protested.

  “You did it for me, though,” he replied. “Blushing all the way. You don’t do it so much anymore, though,” he added amusedly. “You’re getting used to me, aren’t you?”

  “You’re very nice, when you forget to grumble.”

  “I have my faults. A quick temper is the worst of them. But I don’t drink or gamble, and when I’m not working, I’m fairly easy to get along with.” He searched her eyes. “Why are you called Poppy?”

  “My father told me that my mother loved flowers,” she recalled. “But he added that when I was born, the first thing she thought of was a poem about poppies growing in Flanders Fields where the veterans of World War I were buried. She went into the hospital to have me on Veterans Day and they were selling Buddy Poppies….” She smiled.

  “Muddled, but I get the idea,” he said. “My name is Henry, but everyone called me Hank from the time I was in grammar school.”

  “It’s a nice name.”

  “So is yours.” He drew her hand to his lips and kissed it softly. “Thank you for taking care of me.”

  The gentle caress was thrilling. She smiled. “It was very educational.”

  One blue eye narrowed. “Just don’t start experimenting with men who aren’t sick,” he said.

  Her eyebrows went up.

  He laughed and let go of her hand. “Now I know I must be delirious with fever.”

  “I guess so,” she murmured dryly. “I’ll finish the wash then clean up the kitchen while you nap.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” he said gently.

  “We both need some clean clothes. It’s no trouble.”

  “Thanks, then.”

  She shrugged, smiled and went back to her chores. All the while she was thinking about Hank and how easily they seemed to fall into living together. Not that it was the normal sort of living together, she reminded herself.

  But it was exciting all the same, and there was a closeness here that she’d never known. She liked just being with Hank, listening to his deep voice as he talked. He was intelligent and kind, and not at all the unprincipled rounder she’d thought he was. She thought of him in a totally different light now, and she knew that she was going to miss him terribly when the weather broke enough to let them out of this cabin.

  She tried to put it out of her mind while she did the chores. She was beginning to feel very much at home here. The views were spectacular and she enjoyed the solitude. It would have been the ideal place to live, with the right man.

  It occurred to her that Hank was the right man, the one she’d been looking for all her life. But it was impossible. You couldn’t fall in love in four days, not the sort of love you needed to get married. Besides, Hank had a failed marriage behind him and he didn’t want to risk a second. All that would have been left for them was an affair, which she couldn’t accept.

  She finished the washing and put the clothes into the dryer, wondering how it was going to be when she got back home. Probably she’d put this adventure into perspective and forget about it in a few months. Of course she would.

  * * *

  Hank slept for the rest of the afternoon, while Poppy amused herself with the piano, lowering the volume to keep from disturbing the man in the master bedroom. The song he was working on was lying on the table beside the piano. She glanced over the tune and began to pick it out, slowly, smiling as the beautiful melody met her ears.

  He didn’t have more than a few words on paper, rhyming words mostly and not in any sort of order. Love, he’
d written, when the feeling stirred fluttered like a…and he’d crossed out two words that didn’t quite rhyme with it.

  “A bright redbird,” she mumbled, “playing in the snow.”

  “That’s it!”

  She jumped and caught her breath. Hank was leaning against the doorframe in his bathrobe. His blue eyes were glimmering, and he was laughing.

  “I couldn’t get the rhyme or any sort of reason to go with those words,” he explained. “But that’s it, that’s exactly it…!”

  He moved to the piano and slid onto the bench beside her. He played the song with a deep bass beat that emphasized the sweetness of the high melody.

  “Love when the feeling stirred, fluttered like a redbird, playing in the snow,” he sang in his deep, soft voice, looking at her and grinning. “Flew like an arrow through the sky, higher than a redbird flies, left me all aglow.”

  Only words, she thought, but when the music was put with them, major and minor chords intermixing, when he sang the words, when the deep, throbbing counterrhythm caught her up—it was going to be a hit. She knew it and felt goose bumps rise on her arms at the power and beauty of it.

  “You feel it, too, don’t you?” he asked, stopping. “It’s good, isn’t it? Really good.”

  “The best yet,” she had to agree. “Who did the music?”

  One corner of his mouth tugged up just a fraction of an inch and she laughed. “Silly question,” she murmured. “Sorry.”

  “It will take some more work, but that’s the melody.” He chuckled. “Imagine that, I’d been sitting in here for a solid week trying to come up with something, anything…and all I needed was a veterinarian to point me in the right direction.” He grinned at her. “I suppose you treat birds, too, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “Parrots and canaries and parakeets, for lung infections. Birds are mostly lung, you know.” She searched his face. “You shouldn’t be up. It’s too soon.”

  “I heard you playing my song,” he explained. “I had to come and see what you thought of it.”

  “I think it’s great.”

  He smiled. “Thanks.” She was slowly touching the keys again and some soft sadness in her face touched him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.