Chapter Six
THERE WAS A BED IN THE CORNER of the room, with a ragged quilt covering it. This old cabin was used by the men in the spring, when they rounded up the cows and new calves and had to stay with them to protect against predators on two legs and four legs. Cal carried her to it. His body throbbed with unsatisfied passion as he gently laid her on it and came down beside her.
“Cal, I cannot—” she began.
His mouth covered hers, stilling the words. He knew so well how to stem her fears, how to coax her into permitting him the same liberties she had allowed in the buggy. But now they were even more intimate. Somehow while he was kissing her, he had eased away the fabric from her breasts, and even now, with his mouth suckling her tenderly, his hands were busy with the laces of the corset.
“Oh, you must not,” she whispered weakly. Her body sang from the ministrations of his hands and mouth. She was woman, alive for the first time, made of fire and passion, a willing vessel wanting only to be filled and made whole.
He knew that. He savored her like a fine old wine, treating her to an intoxication of the senses that he knew now she had never known before. She was as inexperienced as he was experienced, but knowing it wasn’t enough to stop him. He was at the mercy of his own aching needs, and that was as new to him as Nora’s soft cries of surprised pleasure were to her.
She was shy about her nudity, but his warm, slow mouth gentled her, made her responsive again. She was perfectly formed, all soft skin and delicate coloring, and she smelled of roses. Her smooth white thighs were sweet under his mouth and hands. He liked the tiny cries that pulsed from her mouth when he touched her unexpectedly to make sure that she was ready for what must come next.
Her hands delighted in the thick hair that covered his chest. She stroked him convulsively, blind and deaf and dumb to the world around them, to the storm building outside the warm little cabin. She had no thought of the consequences or the future or anything except the heated pleasure Cal was giving her.
When he was as nude as she, the feel of his masculine body against her feminine one was glory itself. She pressed against him lovingly, jerked a little at the evidence of his desire that pressed hard and hot against the delicate skin of her thighs.
Her wide eyes told their own story. He smiled into them through his own excitement. “I am a man,” he whispered, rubbing his mouth gently over her lips. “We are constructed to fit together in this fashion. Did you not know?”
“I have never…never seen or known…” she faltered.
He lifted himself, straddling her rounded hips. “Look at me,” he said softly.
Her eyes widened, rounded, as they sketched the masculine contours of his body. “Oh…my!” she choked, reddening.
He smiled. “Is it shocking?” He eased down over her, tenderly closing her eyes with kisses as he nudged her legs apart. “You cannot imagine how sweet it will be, the feel of me inside your body,” he whispered.
She shivered. Her nails bit into his arms.
“Gently, my darling,” he said. He nibbled her lips while he surged gently forward, one lean hand lifting, pulling, so that he pressed at the soft folds that enclosed the mystery of her body. “I would not hurt you for all the world.”
She bit her lower lip. “It stings,” she breathed, shivering.
“Only for an instant,” he murmured, forcing himself to be patient when the feel of her like this was sending the blood careening into his head, through his veins. His body corded like a strung rope. He was barely able to contain himself.
She stiffened again, making it difficult.
His mouth slid down to her breasts and he teased them gently, nibbled and smoothed over them until she began to relax. His hand went between them to coax her body, and all at once she shuddered and cried out and pushed up at him of her own accord.
Her eyes opened wide as he pressed completely into her, and they froze like that, searching each other’s eyes in a fever so hot, they seemed to burn together. He groaned harshly, his hips pressing down as he stared at her shocked face.
The movement was sharp, quick, loud in the stillness. Her gasping breaths were echoed in the throat of the man above her. Her lover, she thought while she could. Her lover…her lover…!
She cried out his name, clung to him, gasped as she matched his movements. But all too soon, his lean body corded and he cried out harshly, his face reddening as he arched backward and convulsed.
She was unsatisfied. She seemed to throb, but there was no relief. She couldn’t stop moving, even after he collapsed on her, and she groaned her frustration as the fever only grew worse.
He managed to catch his breath finally, and he rolled sideways, bringing her back to him with a steely hand. “There may be just enough time left,” he whispered, covering her mouth with his.
She didn’t understand, but it no longer mattered. He moved her, and himself, until he brought a shocked cry of pleasure from her. “There,” he whispered roughly. “Yes…there.”
The rhythm was quick and sharp, as it had been before, but this time, she went up into the stars. Her wild, keening cries were music to his ears. He felt her convulse and crushed her hips into his, holding her there while she jerked like a dying thing in his arms and finally, finally, collapsed in sweat and tears against him.
They rested, and slept a little. And then came the shame.
She dressed in silence, with her back to him. Her body ached from the new exercise it had performed, and there was a soreness that was unfamiliar. There were stains, too, from which she averted her eyes. The hardest part was fastening the corset, which she managed after a fashion. She felt, and certainly looked, disheveled. She didn’t know how she was going to explain her long absence to poor Melly, much less her appearance.
Cal took much less time than she did to pull on his clothing. He was smoking a cigarette by the dingy window when she was through.
He felt sickened at his lack of honor. He had seduced an innocent woman, and all because his pride had been stung by her attitude. It seemed a poor excuse now, in the aftermath of such exhausting passion. He had never known such pleasure before. At least he had given her that as well, despite the price he had exacted from her in return. She was no longer virginal, and there was the risk of a child. He had dishonored her and himself.
“Could we leave now…please?” she asked in a pale, subdued tone.
He turned, wincing at the expression on her face. Gone was the confident, faintly arrogant young woman who had first come to the Tremayne ranch. This was a shy and insecure girl, whose guilt and shame were clearly written on her downcast face.
He opened the door for her, hesitating when she came even with him.
“I did not mean it to happen,” he said quietly. “If you believe nothing else, believe that.”
She nodded without lifting her eyes.
“I will stand by you,” he added stiffly, “if the need arises.”
The need. As if they had not broken rules of conduct, as if they had not sinned and shamed themselves and their families. He was saying that he would sacrifice himself if she had conceived his child, because convention demanded this of an honorable man.
She looked up at him with fury in her eyes. “You would be fortunate indeed if the need arose, would you not, sir? Considering your financial status and my own, I should say that you would feel blessed if I grew large with a child!”
He felt the words to the heels of his boots. She thought he was a gigolo! It would have been laughable if the circumstances had not been so dire. As it was, she only made his guilt worse, and he lashed out at her.
“You have had enough fun at the expense of the men here,” he said coldly. “Your treatment of poor Greely made me determined to show you how easy it would be for a man of experience to make a plaything of you. And I have, madam. You were no challenge at all.”
She went from scarlet to stone-white in seconds, reeling from the accusation. She could not even deny it. She had fallen into his arms without a single protest, but because she loved him. She loved him! And he had no feeling for her, save one of contempt. He had seduced her to avenge his friend Greely. It had been a cold and deliberate act.
“Were I to tell my uncle, he would kill you!” she raged.
“Were you to tell your uncle, he would throw you out the back door,” he said coolly. “He and your aunt are convention’s slaves. They would sacrifice you without a single thought if it meant risking censure or gossip on your behalf, and you well know it.”
She swallowed down her anger, shivering in the aftermath. “I was seduced,” she accused huskily.
“So you were, but willingly,” he reminded her. He smiled, but it was no smile at all. “It surprises me, with your sophisticated background, that your first time should be with a poor cowboy. Would it not have been wiser to save yourself for a more worthy suitor?”
She clutched her cloth drawstring purse tightly in her hands, too ashamed to fight anymore. “Take me back,” she said in a bare whisper, and walked past him out the door.
He slammed his hand against the door. He hadn’t meant to make her more ashamed than she already was, but she enraged him with her superior attitude, with her accusation that he had deliberately seduced her for financial gain. His lack of reason and restraint enraged him even more.
She was in the buggy waiting when he climbed in beside her. She was composed, but so quiet that he was worried.
“You will not do anything rash,” he said curtly, his silver eyes blazing at her. “Do you hear me? If you conceive, the child will be mine as well as yours.”
Her hands clenched again on her purse. “I would not send my soul to hell by killing myself, sir,” she said in a thin voice. “Nor would I condemn a little child to the same fate. Regardless of what you think of me, I am not coldhearted.”
He fingered the reins. He couldn’t manage to look at her. His chest rose and fell in a long, hard sigh. “We must decide what to do, Eleanor,” he said after a minute.
“The decision is mine, not yours,” she told him. “I shall go home.”
“Home!”
“Home!” she returned firmly, her blue eyes daring him to argue. “I shall contact you if…if there is a need, but I shall not stay here one day longer! It would turn my stomach to have to look at you again after—” she swallowed and averted her eyes “—what happened.”
His hands contracted on the reins and his mouth compressed. “It would be ungentlemanly to remind you that you loved what happened,” he said through his teeth as he turned the horse and set the buggy in motion.
She didn’t answer him. Her humiliation was complete enough without that. He had hurt her more than he would ever know, she vowed. She had been falling in love while he was only plotting her downfall, exacting revenge. And even now, he didn’t understand that she hadn’t meant Greely any harm.
She wanted to ask him if his revenge had been worth it, if he felt that his friend was vindicated. But she hadn’t the heart. She was sick at her stomach, her soul, her mind. How could she have been so stupid? Looking back, she realized that he had played on her vanity from the beginning, flattering her, teasing her, when he was only calculating what would be the swiftest way to her downfall.
“Stop tormenting yourself,” he said tightly, as they approached the crossroads where Melly sat in the buggy under a tree with the rain slicker wrapped around her. “Nothing will undo it.”
“More’s the pity,” she said unsteadily.
“For God’s sake, don’t cry!” he bit off. “If she sees tears, she will know everything!”
Nora fought the tears, wiping roughly at her eyes.
“Surely you have had encounters with men,” he accused, hating the guilt he felt. “I cannot have been the first man to kiss you or touch you as I did.”
Her voice wobbled when she replied, “But you were, just the same. I have had no interest in men.”
“Because you found none of your social level to ply your wiles on?” He laughed harshly.
She lifted her eyes to his hard, lean face. If there was pain or guilt there, he hid it well. She lowered her gaze. “Because I have never loved,” she corrected huskily, and only then realized what she had admitted.
The terrible contortion of his features told her immediately that he knew she loved him. It also betrayed his guilt. He had hidden it well, but no mask could conceal the shock and anguish of knowing that he had captured her heart in his zeal to avenge Greely. He had that to bear, too; that he had not only dishonored her, but that he had broken her heart as well.
His features softened as he looked at her with faint pity. “My dear,” he began slowly, hesitantly.
“I am not your dear,” she choked. “Indeed, sir, I hate you now as much as it is possible for me to hate anyone! I only pray that there will be no little baby to suffer for our sins, because hell would be preferable to marriage to you!”
While he was absorbing that unpleasant blow, she climbed out of the buggy and ran to Melly and climbed swiftly into the other buggy.
“Heavens, Nora, what happened?” Melly exclaimed when she saw the condition her cousin was in.
“The storm caught us,” Nora said, “and we had to shelter in a cabin. Oh, it was terrible, Melly, the lightning and thunder and the rain as we ran…. Cal threw his coat over me, and I am all but disarranged!”
Melly visibly relaxed. “Is that all!” she laughed. “I am ashamed of my first thoughts. We must get home right away! We will tell Mama that we were caught in the storm and sheltered together in the cabin, just in case.”
Nora’s eyes blurred with tears. “You are so kind, Melly.”
“Would you not do the same for me?” she teased.
Nora didn’t reply that she wasn’t that cruel. She watched the buggy Cal was driving vanish into the rain and they turned and went the other way.
SHE DIDN’T SPEAK ABOUT her need to leave the ranch when they returned, for fear of giving away what had happened. She changed clothes while Melly told the lie they had concocted, and she came back out neat as a pin and smiling through her pain. She looked the same as always, and fortunately the rain had not caused a chill. But inside, she felt dead.
The next morning, after a sleepless night, she approached her aunt in the sitting room.
“I should not mention it, I suppose, but Melly said that I had received an invitation to visit relatives in Europe through my mother,” she began.
Helen smiled sheepishly. “Yes, you did. I should have told you before now, but I hesitated to give you an excuse to leave us. Melly has been so much happier since you came.”
“I have enjoyed my visit,” Nora replied, and smiled back. “But to be presented at court…!” She let her deliberate enthusiasm speak for itself.
“I know. I would have been hard-pressed to refuse the chance myself, dear,” Helen said gently. She got up and fetched her sister’s letter and handed it to Nora. “It is only a few days’ delay, you know. I am sorry, but selfishly, I did not want you to go. There. Read it for yourself.”
Nora did. It was an invitation to the Randolph estate near London. The only thing that made her uneasy was that Edward Summerville was a friend of the Randolphs, but certainly he would have given up his mad pursuit of her after the thrashing her cousins gave him in Africa. London. The palace. An introduction to Queen Victoria herself and to the Prince of Wales. Perhaps the excitement of it would take her mind off her fall from grace and help her to forget that a man she had loved had betrayed her.
“I must go,” she told Helen, turning. “Really, I must. I am sorry.”
Helen shook her head. “There is no need to apologize. But I hope that you may want to return to us when you come back, so that we can hear all about it.”
“I would be delighted to return,” Nora lied. She would never come near the ranch again as long as Cal Barton worked on it. She couldn’t stop thinking about what she had done. She had given herself to a common cowboy. Would he brag about his conquest? Her knees went weak at the thought that he might tell other people what had happened.
“You look ill,” Helen remarked worriedly. “You are not chilled from the rainstorm?”
“No,” Nora said quickly. “I am a little tired, that is all. The storm was very violent, and we were fortunate to chance on the little cabin.”
“Indeed you were.”
“I must start getting my things together. Perhaps Uncle Chester could drive me in to the depot tomorrow morning?”
“Yes, and you can catch the early train.” Helen moved her hands helplessly. “Oh, my dear, I do hate to see you go. It was like having your dear mother with me again, just for a little while.”
Impulsively Nora hugged her. “I shall come back again,” she promised. Perhaps one day she could, if Cal Barton ever resigned his post. And if there were no terrible consequences to face from her stupidity. It went without saying that her aunt would immediately disown her if she fell pregnant out of wedlock. Scandalous women were discarded by society; even by kin.
MELLY HELPED HER PACK, looking morose and sad. “I wish you could stay,” she said. “How can you go away when you feel the way you do about Cal? Won’t you miss him terribly?”
“Why, of course I shall,” Nora said, forcing herself to sound carelessly polite. “It has been fun, meeting him in secret. But you know that I could not become serious about such a man, Melly. Honestly, could you see Mr. Barton at the opera in those boots he wears?” she laughed.
The laughter sounded a little frantic. Melly frowned at her. Nora hadn’t been the same since yesterday, and her eyes had been red when she came back to the buggy from her ride with Cal.
“He upset you, didn’t he?” Melly asked gently.
Nora bit her lower lip, but the tears came just the same. She buried her face in her hands. “It was all for revenge, Melly, all the sweet things he said to me. He told me so. He was getting even for what he thinks I did to Greely. He was…taking me down a peg, that was all. He never cared for me. He only wanted to shame me, to hurt me, to make me sorry for making fun of his friend.” She sobbed brokenly. “Oh, I hate him,” she whispered. “I hate him!”
Melly wrapped her arms around the older woman. “The snake,” she muttered. “How could he be so cruel!”
“I never meant to make Greely quit,” Nora said. “I only liked his shyness. I was not deliberately cruel!”
“Hush, dear. I know. I know.”
“I loved Cal,” she confessed in a whisper. “How could he hurt me so?”
“Men are often cruel, sometimes without meaning to be,” Melly told her. “Are you certain that he does not love you in return?”
“He said that I was a fool,” she wept. “He said that all of it, the flattery and the secret meetings, were only to make me sorry for what I had done.”
Melly held her closer. “And this is why you are going home?”
“I must,” she said, hiding her fear from her cousin. “There is nothing for me here. In England I will be far away from him. My heart will heal.”
Melly wondered, but she didn’t reply. Sometimes words only made things worse. She smoothed the chestnut hair and let Nora cry until the tears finally stopped.
NORA’S BAGS WERE PUT into the surrey and she said her goodbyes to Melly and her aunt Helen while Uncle Chester gave some orders to his men.
Cal Barton came up beside her, hat in hand, mindful of the curious glance that came his way from Nora’s aunt.
“I hope you have a safe trip back to Virginia, Miss Marlowe,” he said politely.
“Thank you, Mr. Barton,” she said in a thin voice. Her heart beat madly and she had to drag her eyes away from his. She remembered too well her fall from grace at his hands.
“Look at me!”
Her face jerked up, flushed under the glitter of his pale eyes as they sought the ravages of the day before. He said something under his breath, and his hand crushed the brim of his hat.
“Running away will not solve this,” he said.
“Neither will staying,” she said with the remnants of her pride. “You have nothing to give me.”
He looked away, his face hard with control. “My life was planned,” he said. “I have dreams of my own to fulfill, and no place for a woman in them. While you,” he added, “have no place in your life for a fortune-hunting cowboy. Is that not so?”
She flushed. “I was wrong to accuse you of such a thing,” she said miserably. “I know you that well, at least.”
His face tightened. “You know me better than you realize,” he said. “In every way.”
“Do not!” she whispered frantically.
“We went together to paradise,” he said roughly. “Can you forget?”
“Do not shame me!”
He hated their audience, even if it was out of earshot. He didn’t want her to go. Something must be worked out; surely he could think of some way to keep her here!
“Stay!” he whispered huskily.
She bit her lip. She couldn’t look at him, because if she did, she couldn’t leave. He didn’t want marriage, he only wanted her body. She couldn’t give in to the weakness. She loved him, but he felt no such emotion for her.
“I cannot,” she said heavily. “I must not.” She lifted her eyes to his finally. “There is so much that you do not know about me,” she told him plaintively. “I knew that I could never marry or have a child. I had accepted it. I would never have loved…if you had not made me!”
He scowled. “What do you mean?”
Her uncle was coming back. There was no more time. It was too late. Too late!
“Goodbye,” she said swiftly, and made to climb onto the surrey. Cal helped her. His hand on her arm was like a brand, burning into her heart forever. She sat heavily on the wood seat, hot tears threatening her eyes.
“Ready to go, girl?” Uncle Chester said cheerfully.
“Yes,” she said, forcing a smile and waving to her aunt and cousin. “Yes, I’m ready. Goodbye!”
They called their goodbyes back, but Cal Barton stood off to one side, his head bare in the sun, watching her leave him. He hadn’t loved her, he told himself, he was only guilty because he had compromised her. But that didn’t explain the emptiness inside him that grew bigger as the surrey grew smaller in the distance.