Covert Cowboy. Harper Allen
exchange was no longer in evidence. Her cool demeanor had fled. And something had replaced the anger in her gaze with total and absolute devastation.
“I keep telling myself it wasn’t my fault, Con.” She didn’t seem to realize she’d used his name. “But it was.”
“What are you talking about?”
Frowning, he crossed the distance between them and stood before her. There was something wrong here, he thought—something badly wrong. Lightly he grasped her shoulders.
“What’s your fault?”
“I should have been there the day he was kidnapped.” Her whisper was raw, her words more directed to herself than to him. “If I had been, maybe I could have prevented it. But I turned around and came home again, because I was too afraid.”
Under his palms her shoulders trembled. She turned haunted eyes to him. “It’s like you said—I’m a coward. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Sky since the time I visited him and Holly. I hadn’t expected to feel that way about a baby, but I took one look at him and I just fell in love,” she added softly. “So I decided I’d set aside my pride and call on Holly that day, put things right between us after all these years. Except I lost my nerve. That must have been just about the time they—just about the time—”
The blue of her eyes sheened over. “I might have saved Sky, Con, and it’s tearing me apart that I didn’t!”
“Don’t say that, cher’,” he began, but with a quick shake of her head she overrode him.
“It’s true. By choosing to keep myself sealed off I put a little boy in terrible danger. And God help me, if you were anyone but a complete stranger, I wouldn’t even have the courage to admit that much.”
Guilt lanced through him. It was way past time to tell her, he thought. If he left it any longer the consequences could be disastrous.
Even as he opened his mouth to speak she forestalled him.
“And maybe I wouldn’t have the courage to go through with this, either,” she said hoarsely.
Her fingers fumbled with the top button of her blouse. She slipped it free and immediately began working on the second one, her movements clumsy with urgency.
“Holly has family and friends to support her.” Her head was bent to her task as if it required her full attention. Without looking at him she continued speaking, her voice little more than a thread. “My father has his wife. Josh may not have found the woman he wants to share his life with yet but he always has someone—someone to hold, someone who can help him keep the nightmares at bay. But I’m the Ice Queen, Con. And ice queens don’t have anybody.”
He had to stop this, Con thought. Whatever she thought she was doing, it was a sure bet she’d hate herself for it before twenty-four hours had passed. His hands moved from her shoulders to grasp her wrists. The edges of her blouse gaped open to reveal a swell of creamy skin, a delicately erotic edging of lace.
Immediate desire burned through him. He swallowed, and forced his gaze to hers.
“I had no right to say what I did, cher’,” he said huskily. “I had no real right to come here at all. I should go now.”
“No!” The single word exploded from her with the desperation of a plea. The blue eyes meeting his were dark with unimaginable pain. “Don’t you get it, Detective? I need to make the nightmares go away for a few hours. Sky’s disappeared. I might have saved him. For nineteen days that knowledge has been tearing me apart, and I just want to blot it out for tonight.”
She undid the last button. His hands slipped away from her wrists, and when she shrugged out of her blouse and let it fall to the floor he made no move to stop her. Cupped by the lacy bra, her breasts rose and fell quickly.
“Take the pain away, Con.” Her whisper was raw. “Please take it away, just for tonight.”
She needed a stranger. She needed someone who would walk away without a second thought after this was over. She needed someone who wouldn’t recall her name a month from now.
And he wasn’t that someone, Con thought. He was just the man who’d loved her for as long as he could remember. If he did what she was asking, after tonight she wouldn’t only have his heart but she’d own his very soul, and any faint hope he might have had for a future with her would have to be forgotten forever.
Take the pain away, Con. Please take it away…
His arms gathered her tightly to him and his mouth came down on hers.
Chapter Two
With a frown Conrad Burke looked around the massive and rustic great room of the Royal Flush Ranch. It had been three months and two weeks since his encounter with Marilyn Langworthy, he reflected, although encounter came nowhere close to describing the conflagration that had consumed the two of them that night in her office. Three months and two weeks of burying himself in his work, of drinking too much, of falling asleep, drunk or sober, with the memory of her haunting his dreams.
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t return to Colorado, but when his old friend Wiley Longbottom had come to him yesterday with a request to meet with a certain Colleen Wellesley here at her ranch, located a couple of hours outside Denver, even the fact that Wiley had refused to reveal what the meeting was about and who Wellesley was hadn’t given him pause. He’d caught a red-eye flight out of Louis Armstrong Airport, touched down in Denver, and the first damn thing he’d done after renting a vehicle had been to head for the city’s lively and upscale LoDo district. He’d parked near the corner of Blake Street and 33rd, within sight of the converted-to-lofts warehouse where he knew Marilyn lived, and had sat behind the wheel of his car all afternoon hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Only when the early November dusk had begun to fall had he left the city, taking I-285 until it hooked up with Highway 9 near Fairplay, just north of the Royal Flush.
Although apparently the house itself had been a bordello in the wild old days, to his mild surprise he’d realized when he’d arrived that the Flush was definitely a working ranch. He was willing to accept that as an excuse for the Wellesley woman’s absence so far, Con told himself, walking over to the antique portrait hanging above the gilded mirror running the length of the heavily varnished and well-stocked pine bar.
He gazed without interest at the rest of the decor, an obvious holdover from those same wild days when this room’s red velvet furnishings and saloon fittings had probably been the last word in decadent luxury for woman-hungry cowboys. Ranch duties or not, if Wiley hadn’t been there, he would have driven back to the airport, Con thought with growing impatience. And this time he wouldn’t have indulged in a foolish and futile side-trip to Marilyn Langworthy’s neighborhood.
It had ended as he’d known it would. After the third time they’d made love she’d fallen asleep in his arms on the sofa, the cashmere throw they’d been lying on pulled lightly over her hips, her head tucked into the hollow of his neck. He hadn’t slept himself, but had spent the few hours before dawn just drinking in the sight of her and breathing in her scent.
During those hours he’d hoped against hope he was wrong. As soon as she’d opened her eyes, hope had died.
Of course she regretted it. What she did with you went against everything she ever thought she was. The only way she could live with herself when she realized she’d made love with a stranger—made love with a stranger and liked it, for God’s sake—would have been to wall herself up again behind the ice that’s protected her all her life. Even before she told you to get out you knew that. Even before she started crying you knew.
So it had ended with her hating herself and hating him, he thought. And if he had it all to do over again, for the life of him he didn’t see how he could have acted differently.
She’d needed someone to love her for a few hours. What she would never realize was that with him she hadn’t had to ask.
“Ray called through to