Contract Bridegroom. Sandra Field
I have to spell it out for you?” he sneered. “You’re beautiful and sexy and it’s been a long time since I’ve bedded anyone. A very long time. Get the picture?”
“I sure do. You have a real way with compliments—that kiss was nothing to do with me, any female would have done.”
“It had everything to do with you!”
“Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “Why did you get so frightened?”
Her temper died. He’d just asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, the one that led her straight back to Darryl. But her heart was no longer trying to batter its way out of her ribcage and Jethro had, after all, let her go when she’d asked him to. Perhaps she owed him the truth. She said, choosing her words, “I had a bad experience with a man once, and I don’t want to repeat it.” From somewhere she dredged up a smile. “The way I backed off—don’t take it personally, in other words.”
His face had hardened. “Were you raped?”
“No. A friend turned up at the door so he stopped.”
“Son of a bitch,” Jethro said in a ugly voice.
Her tension collapsed in a smile. “For once, we’re in agreement.”
“How long ago did it happen?”
“Four or five years ago.”
“You’ve gone to bed with the doctor since then.”
She tossed her wind-tangled curls. “I have not.”
“You’re not telling me you’re a virgin?” Jethro said incredulously. “I don’t believe you.”
“Imagine that,” Celia said nastily. “Jethro, this has been all very entertaining, but I have to go home. I’ve got a ton of things to do.”
He looked like a man doing some hard thinking. “We can walk down together.”
“Your vehicle’s parked in the north lot.”
“If I can climb K2, I’m sure I can walk as far as my car.”
“K2?” she repeated, and wondered why she wasn’t surprised. K2 was probably the most difficult mountain in the world, a much more demanding climb than Everest. No wonder Jethro hadn’t been breathing hard at the top of Gun Hill.
He gave an exasperated sigh. “Back home, I have a reputation for being close-mouthed—that’s a laugh.”
Celia said evenly, “Why didn’t you fly out this morning?”
“Wasn’t ready to.”
“You had this sudden, irresistible urge to climb Gun Hill,” she said sarcastically.
He raised his brow. “One thing I like about you is your intelligence.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask what else he liked. The way she’d kissed him as if there were no tomorrow? As if they were standing on top of the world, responsible to no one? “Let’s go,” she said stiffly. “I shouldn’t even have come up here—my cupboards are a disaster and the movers arrive first thing in the morning.”
She started down the hill ahead of him, picking her way through the boulders and pockets of soggy peat to the treeline, where rusty-tipped ferns brushed her knees. And with every step she took, she was trying to banish the memory of a kiss that had turned her world upside down. She’d never felt even remotely like that when Paul had kissed her; which must be the reason she’d stayed out of his bed.
A flock of kinglets peeped in the trees; shadows slanted across her path. Then Jethro touched her shoulder from behind. “Look, Celia, an eagle.”
Shading her eyes with her hand, Celia watched the great brown wings circle the thermals, the sun dazzling on the bird’s white head and outspread tail. “Wonderful,” she murmured. “Look how it soars…now that’s freedom.”
His dark blue eyes resting on her face, Jethro said, “Freedom…is that why you haven’t married?”
Married. Her father. Jethro.
The words fell together like the last pieces of a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. Without stopping to think, Celia gasped, “Jethro, are you married?”
“Nope.”
“Engaged? Living with someone? Otherwise spoken for?”
“No, no and no. What are you getting at, Celia?”
She gaped at him. “N-nothing, I was just curious,” she stammered, turned on her heel and started down the path as though ten black bears were after her.
She couldn’t. She’d be out of her mind.
Ask Jethro Lathem to marry her? A man compounded of sex appeal, rage and mystery? A man who had only to kiss her to make her understand, truly understand for the first time in her life, the meaning of desire?
Get a life, Celia.
But who else could she ask?
Forcing herself to concentrate on the rough trail, skidding on stones, Celia leaped from rock to rock with the agility of panic. She wouldn’t ask Paul to take on a fake marriage, he’d be horribly hurt. Nor could she ask Darryl or Pedro, either of whom would be delighted. Or any of the men back in Washington who’d been more interested in her father’s fortune than in her.
Jethro didn’t know about her money. And there was no way she could hurt him; she knew instinctively that he’d never let her close enough to do that.
She couldn’t ask him. She couldn’t.
Out of the question.
A spruce bough slapped Celia’s cheek. Her heart was racing in her breast in a way that had nothing to do with her precipitous descent of Gun Hill. She’d never been a coward before. Was she going to start now? Her father could be dead in three months, any chance of reconciliation gone. Is that what she wanted?
How far was she willing to go to set Ellis Scott’s mind to rest in the short time he had left? A long way, she thought. A very long way. Deep down she was still bitterly ashamed of their last horrific argument. At the age of nineteen, in her second year at Harvard, she’d discovered that her father had been having her watched; she was being followed by a bodyguard he’d hired. And she’d lost it.
She’d taken the first train home and confronted Ellis, and as though a lock had broken on her tongue, the pent-up feelings of years had poured out: her loneliness in those bleak months after her mother’s death, when her father had retreated from her in all the ways that mattered. Her resentment of his unceasing control of her actions, the nannies who’d forbidden her to climb trees, the directives to the schools banning her from the high-diving towers and the gymnastic equipment. Her fury when he’d refused to sponsor her for the junior slalom team when she was fourteen; too dangerous, he’d said.
Control, control, control.
She’d yelled at him, her fists clenched at her sides, tears streaming down her face. He hadn’t yelled back. She’d have preferred it if he had. In a cold, clipped voice he’d accused her of ingratitude and wanton rebellion; she was anything, he’d said, but her mother’s daughter. Which had been the unkindest cut of all.
He’d been cruel, certainly, that day eight years ago. But was that how she wanted to remember him?
It was all too easy to interpret his wish to see her married as yet another strand in that stifling over-protectiveness, as one more link in those manacles of control. Older now, perhaps a little wiser, Celia was finally prepared to consider the possibility that this was the only way Ellis knew how to say he loved her.
She loved him, too. Of course she did. Although it was a very long time since she’d told him so.
She could stand anything