Dr. Holt And The Texan. Suzannah Davis
Instead of sleeping the day away, she’d tossed and turned, unable to understand what had happened. How had things gotten out of hand so fast with a man who was supposed to be nothing more than an old friend? She’d been justifiably furious at him, but why had she goaded him into something neither of them was prepared for or wanted?
Liar.
She’d wanted.
A lump of guilt lodged behind her breastbone, and she jumped up, dumping the soup down the disposal. If she were the least bit honest with herself, she had to admit that much. Since she was seventeen, despite the fact she was Kenny Preston’s girl, she’d watched Travis using his prodigious charm on the ladies and wondered if all the rumors she’d heard whispered about him in the girls’ locker room were true. She’d almost found out once, and it seemed now that the silly, spoiled, rebellious child she’d been back then still lived too near the surface for comfort. A wave of self-disgust washed over her.
Grow up, Mercy.
A clutter of dirty dishes spilled over the sink, and she knew she should load them into the dishwasher, but the task seemed too monumental to tackle. Instead she crossed to the sliding glass door and let herself out onto the tiny patio. She breathed in the chilly fall air in a fruitless effort to calm her racing heart.
Car lights danced on the boulevard beyond the brick walls that muffled the never-ending traffic noises, but the air was clear and sweet with the scent of drying grass blowing in off the plains west of Ft. Worth. Shivering beneath her oversize sweater, Mercy lifted her face to the night sky, and the smell of earth and hay caught at her memories with thoughts of Flat Fork and times gone by and damned ole rodeos. Vividly she remembered that night years ago....
The shabby motel room had echoed with the deafening crash of the door slamming behind her furious beau.
“Why does Kenny act like that?”
Mercy’s voice was plaintive, querulous with incipient tears.
“You shouldn’t have surprised him, coming here like this,” Travis said. Bare-chested in hastily pulled-on jeans, sleep groggy and bruised from the day’s bull-riding competition, Travis eyed Mercy with the weary world wisdom of his twenty-one years.
“I drove four hours to see him,” she said indignantly. The room was second-rate and musty smelling, home for the night for a couple of up-and-coming cowboys entered in a second-rate rodeo in a little Texas town. Sinking down on the edge of the lumpy, tumbled bed, she let her lip quiver in self-pity. “Sometimes I think he doesn’t like me at all.”
“He’s crazy about you.”
“Then why’d he run off?”
Travis sighed and leaned one hip against a plastictopped dresser littered with empty beer bottles. “Kenny doesn’t like this sneaking around.”
“I’m not sneaking!”
“It’s the damned middle of the night, gal. Your folks know where you are?”
Guilt heated her cheeks, and she smoothed her hands down the front of her skin-tight jeans. “Not exactly.”
He lifted a dark eyebrow. “Or that you hauled butt way out here all alone in that fancy convertible of yours?”
She tossed her honey blond hair out of her face and tilted her chin at a belligerent angle. “I’m eighteen years old. I can do what I want.”
“It doesn’t make it any easier for a proud man like Kenny, having the Honorable Judge Holt think he isn’t good enough to court his daughter. And you acting like it, too, with this kind of shenanigan.”
“My parents don’t understand,” she said, sullen. “It’s not my fault they’re living in the Stone Age.”
“Grow up, Mercy. Adults don’t deal with each other that way. If you were honest with them—”
“Don’t treat me like a child, Travis. That’s what my parents do. They never listen to what I say about anything—not med school or my friends or getting out of boring Flat Fork.”
“They just don’t want you involved with a rodeo bum, and I can’t say that I blame them. Hell knows we ain’t got much in the way of job security. And maybe defying them is part of Kenny’s appeal for you.”
She gasped, stung. “What a despicable thing to say! I’m in love with him.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes you got a funny way of showing it, darlin’. You put him in a bad position. When are you going to learn to think first, act later?”
His condemnation sent a hot and startling prickle of tears surging behind her eyelids. Travis had been their intermediary time and again, the one whom she’d trusted to convey the most precious secrets of her heart, and now to find he’d been a reluctant and disapproving ally was a betrayal almost as potent as Kenny’s walking out. Maybe more.
Her words rasped with hurt. “If you disapprove so much, why have you tried to help us make this relationship work?”
Travis shrugged. “He’s my best friend.”
“And he’s the man I love,” she avowed, with force enough to squelch any doubts. Thwarted, resentful, the tears spilled over. “And now you’re telling me he hates me just because I wanted to see him. I can’t do anything right. Oh, God, what am I going to do?”
Sobbing, she collapsed onto the crumpled bedspread and curled into a ball of sheer misery.
“Aw, stop, darlin’. Don’t cry, blue eyes.” The bed sank under Travis’s weight, and rope-callused hands lifted her, cradling her against his bare chest. “Mercy, I can’t stand it when you cry.”
“Why does love have to hurt so much?” Weeping, she clung to him, her tears raining onto his bronzed shoulder. He was hard and muscular and smelled intoxicatingly of soap from his shower and healthy male musk.
His voice rumbled rough as gravel. “Love can’t help where it lands sometimes, I reckon.”
“But why can’t he understand? You do, don’t you, Travis?” Hiccoughing on a ragged sob, she looked up at him through tear-blurred eyes. “You’re a better friend than he is. Sometimes I wish—”
“Hush, don’t cry anymore.” He pressed a comforting kiss against her temple, his palm soothing as he stroked her bare arm from shoulder to elbow, his fingertips slipping under the strap of her lace-edged tank top.
Mercy’s breath caught, and she shuddered, her skin quivering beneath his touch. Suddenly there wasn’t enough air in the room, as if a flash of heat lightning had consumed all the oxygen.
Murmuring soothing nothings, he brushed his mouth over the corner of her eye, sipping the salty essence of her tears, and Mercy’s lips parted in a silent exhalation of surprise and anticipation...of what? She didn’t know, could only wait suspended, her middle turning to jelly at the feather touch of his carved male lips, her heart thumping against her ribs so hard she knew he could hear it.
He seemed to be waiting, too, his mouth now hovering mere inches from hers, his coffee-colored eyes hooded and mysterious. Their breaths mingled, warm and uneven across flushed skin, and Travis’s fingers tightened on her arm, his knuckles barely brushing the underside of her breast through the thin knit of her top.
Confused, shamefully aroused, Mercy’s head spun. She couldn’t be feeling this, could she? This utter longing to have his mouth sealed on hers, to experience his taste on her tongue. But this was Travis! Best friend to the man she swore she loved. Was she crazy, or was that light blazing behind his dark eyes a burning curiosity and need that matched her own ungovernable, inappropriate desire?
What would he do if she curled her arm behind his neck and drew him down to her? What would she do if he took up her offer and pressed her down against the bed? Worse, what would she do if he didn’t?
The potential for disaster, for rejection, for utter humiliation made her stiffen, and suddenly the