CHAPTER 6
Harden was grumpy when he got home. Not that anybody noticed, because he was always grumpy. His irritation didn’t improve, either, when his brother Connal showed up.
“Oh, God, no, here he comes again!” Evan groaned when the car pulled up just as he and Harden were coming down the steps.
“That’s no way to talk about your brother,” Harden chided.
“Just wait,” the bigger man said curtly.
“I can’t stand it!” Connal greeted them, throwing up his hands. “We get all the way to the hospital, I make all the necessary phone calls, and they say it’s false labor! Her water hasn’t even broken!”
Evan and Harden exchanged glances.
“He needs help,” Evan said. “Broken water?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Connal said heavily, his lean, dark face worn and haggard. “I’ve just left her sleeping long enough to ask Mother to come back with me. Pepi needs a woman around right now.”
“We’ll starve,” Evan said miserably.
“No, you won’t,” Harden muttered. “We have a cook, remember.”
“Mother tells Jeanie May what to cook. You’d better worry, too,” Evan said shortly. “Even if you don’t live here, you’re always around when the food goes on the table.”
“Don’t you two start, I’ve got enough problems,” Connal muttered darkly.
Evan’s eyebrows arched. “Don’t look at me. You’re the one who made Pepi pregnant.”
“I wanted children. So did she.”
“Then stop muttering and go home.”
Connal glared at the bigger man. “Your day will come,” he assured Evan. “You’ll be walking the streets dreading your own Waterloo in the delivery room, wait and see!”
Evan’s face clouded. His usual carefree expression went into eclipse. “Will I?” he asked on a hard laugh. “Don’t bet on it.”
Connal started to question that look, but Harden stepped in.
“Theodora’s in the study looking up something about how to repair bathrooms,” he said.
“The plumber will love that,” Connal said knowingly. “Don’t worry, I’ll have her out of here before she bursts another pipe.”
“Last one flooded the back hall,” Evan recalled. “I opened the door and almost got swept down to the south forty.”
“She’s got no business trying to fix things. My God, she had a flat tire on the wheelbarrow!” Harden exclaimed.
“Takes talent,” Evan agreed. “But don’t keep her too long, will you? She takes my side against him,” he jerked a thumb at Harden.
“That’s nothing new,” Harden said, lighting a cigarette. “She knows how I feel about her.”
“One day you’ll regret that,” Connal said. It wasn’t something he usually mentioned, but Harden’s attitude was getting to him. Part of the reason he’d come for Theodora was that he’d noticed her increasing depression since Harden had come home from his unexplained stay in Chicago.
“Tell Pepi we asked about her,” Harden said easily, refusing to rise to the bait.
“I’ll do that.”
Connal asked about Donald, who was away again with his wife, and after a minute he said goodbye and went into the house, leaving Harden and Evan to go about their business.
Harden climbed behind the wheel before his brother could protest.
“I’m not riding with you,” he told Evan flatly. “Your foot’s too heavy.”
“I like speed,” Evan said bluntly.
“Lately, you like it too much.” Harden glanced at him and away. “You haven’t been yourself since that girl you were dating broke up with you.”
Evan’s face set and he glanced out the window without speaking.
“I’m sorry,” he told Evan. “I’m sorry as hell. But there has to be a woman for you somewhere.”
“I’m thirty-four,” Evan said quietly. “It’s too late. You used to talk about being a minister. Maybe I should consider it myself.”
“A minister isn’t necessarily celibate,” his brother replied. “You’re thinking of a priest. You aren’t Catholic,” he added.
“No, I’m not. I’m the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk,” he said wearily. He put his hat back on. “I’m sorry I don’t smoke,” he murmured, eyeing Harden’s smoke. “It might keep me as cool as it seems to keep you.”
“I’m not cool.” Harden stared out the windshield. “I’ve got problems of my own.”
“Miranda?” Evan asked slowly.
Harden stiffened. His dreams haunted him with the images of Miranda as she’d let him see her that last night at her apartment. The taste of her mouth, the exquisite softness of her body made him shiver with pleasure even in memory. He missed her like hell, but he had to be patient.
He glanced at Evan. He sighed, then, letting it all out. Evan was the only human being alive he could talk to. “Yes.”
“You came home.”
“I had to. She’s so damned vulnerable. I could never be sure it was me she wanted and not a way to avoid coping with the grief.”
“Do you want her?”
Harden took a draw from the cigarette and turned his head. His eyes were blazing as the memories washed over him. “Like I want to breathe,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
The broad shoulders lifted and fell. “I don’t know. I’ll write to her, I guess. Maybe I’ll fly to Chicago now and again. Until she’s completely over her grief, I don’t dare push too hard. I don’t want half a woman.”
“Strange,” Evan said quietly, “thinking about you with a woman.”
“It happens to us all sooner or later, didn’t Connal say?”
Evan smiled. “Well, Miranda’s a dish. When you finally decide to get involved, you sure pick a winner.”
“It’s more than the way she looks,” came the reply. “She’s…different.”
“The woman usually is,” Evan said, his dark eyes sad in his broad face. “Or so they say.”
“You’ll find out yourself one day, old son.”
“Think so? I can hope, I suppose.”
“What we both need is a diversion.”
Evan brightened. “Great. Let’s go to town and wreck a bar.”
“Just because you hate alcohol is no reason to do a Carrie Nation on some defenseless bar,” his brother told him firmly.
Evan shrugged. “Okay, I’m easy. Let’s go to town and wreck a coffee shop.”
Harden chuckled softly. “Not until my eye heals completely,” he said, touching the yellowish bruise over his cheekbone.
“Spoilsport. Well, I guess we can go to the hardware store and order that butane we need to heat the branding irons.”
“That’s better.”
* * *
Harden got his first letter from Miranda the very next day. It didn’t smell of perfume, and it was in a perfectly respectable white envelope instead of a colorful one, but it was newsy and warm.
She mentioned that she’d had dinner with her brother and sister-in-law twice, and that she’d started going to their church—a Baptist church—with them on Sunday. He smiled, wondering if he’d influenced her. She wasn’t a Baptist, but he was; a deacon in his local church, where he also sang in the choir. She missed seeing him, her letter concluded, and she hoped that he could make time to write her once in a while.
She was going to be shocked, he decided as he pulled up the chair to his desk and started the word processing program on his computer. He wrote several pages, about the new bulls they’d bought and the hopes he had for the crossbreeding program he’d spoken about at the conference in Chicago. When he finished, he chuckled at his own unfamiliar verbosity. Of course, reading over what he’d written, he discovered that it was a totally impersonal letter. There was nothing warm about it.
He frowned, fingering the paper after he’d printed it out. Well, he couldn’t very well say that he missed her like hell and wished he was still in Chicago. That would be overdoing it. With a shrug, he signed the letter with a flourish and sealed it before he could change his mind. Personal touches weren’t his style. She’d just have to get used to that.
* * *
Miranda was so thrilled when she opened the letter two days later that she didn’t at first notice the impersonal style of it. It was only after the excitement subsided that she realized he might have been writing it to a stranger.
Consequently she began to wonder if he was really interested in her, or if he was trying to find a way of letting her down, now that they were so far apart. She remembered how sweet it had been in his arms, but that had only been desire on his part. She knew men could fool themselves into thinking they cared about a woman when it was only their glands getting involved. She’d given Harden plenty of license with her body, and it still made her uneasy that she’d been that intimate with him so soon after Tim and the baby. Her own glands were giving her fits, because she couldn’t stop remembering how much pleasure Harden had given her. She missed him until it was like being cut in half. But this letter he’d written to her didn’t sound like he was missing her. Not at all.
She sat down that night as she watched television and tried to write the same sort of note back. If he wanted to play it cool, she’d do her best to follow his lead. She couldn’t let him know how badly she wanted to be with him, or make him feel guilty for the physical closeness they’d shared. She had to keep things light, or she might inadvertently chase him away. She couldn’t bear that. If he wanted impersonal letters, then that’s what he’d get. She pushed her sadness to the back of her mind and began to write.
From there, it all began to go downhill. Harden frowned over her reply and his own was terse and brief. Maybe she was regretting their time together. Maybe grief had fed her guilt and she wanted him to end it. Maybe what they’d done together was wearing on her conscience and she only wanted to forget. He’d known he was rushing her. Why hadn’t he taken more time?
Once he was back at his apartment in Houston, he was putting things into prospective. There was no future with someone like Miranda, after all. She was a city girl. She’d never fit into ranching. He had his eye on a small ranch near Jacobsville and he’d already put a deposit on it. The house wasn’t much. He was having it renovated, but even then it wouldn’t be a showplace. It was a working ranch, and it would look like one. Miranda would probably hate the hardship of living on the land, even if he did make good money at it.
He stared out his window at the city lights. The office building where the family’s corporate offices were located was visible in the distance among the glittering lights of downtown Houston. He sighed wearily, smoking a cigarette. It had been better when he’d kept to himself and brooded over Theodora’s indiscretion.
For the first time, he allowed himself to wonder if his mother had felt for his father the way he felt with Miranda. If her heart had fallen victim to a passion it couldn’t resist. If she’d loved his father so much that she couldn’t refuse him anything, especially a child.
He thought about the child Miranda had lost, and wondered how it would be to give her another, to watch her grow big with it. He remembered her soft cries of pleasure, the look of utter completion on her face. His teeth ground together.
He turned away from the window angrily. Miranda wrote him the kind of letter his brothers might, so how could he imagine she cared? She was closing doors between them. She didn’t want him. If she did, why hadn’t her later letter been as sweet and warm as that first one?
The more he thought about that, the angrier he got. Days turned to weeks, and before he realized it, three months had passed. He was still writing to Miranda, against his better judgment, but their letters were impersonal and brief. He’d all but stopped writing in the past two weeks. Then a client in Chicago asked Evan to fly up and talk to him.
Evan found an excuse not to go. Connal, a brand-new father with a baby boy to play with, was back on the ranch he and Pepi’s father owned in West Texas. Donald and Jo Ann were just back from overseas, and Harden’s youngest brother said flatly that he wasn’t going anywhere for months—he and Jo Ann had had their fill of traveling.
“Looks like you’re elected,” Evan told Harden with a grin. “Call it fate.”
Harden looked hunted. He paced the office. “I need to stay here.”
“You need to go,” Evan said quietly. “It hasn’t gotten better, you know. You look terrible. You’ve lost weight, and you’re working yourself to death. She’s had time to get herself back together. Go and see if the magic’s still there.”
“She writes me business letters. She’s probably dating somebody else by now.”
“Go find out.”
Harden moved irritably. The temptation was irresistible. The thought of seeing Miranda again made him feel warm. He studied the older man. “I guess I might as well.”
“I’ll handle things here. Have a good trip.”
Harden heard those words over and over. He deliberately put off calling Miranda. He met the client, settled his business, and had lunch. He went to a movie. Then, at five, he happened to walk past her office building just about time for her to come out.
He stood by a traffic sign, Western looking in a pale gray suit with black boots and Stetson, a cigarette in his hand. He got curious, interested looks from several attractive women, but he ignored them. He only had eyes for one woman these days, even if he wasn’t sure exactly how he felt about her.
A siren distracted him and when he glanced back, Miranda was coming out of the entrance, her dark hair around her shoulders, wearing a pale green striped dress that made his temperature soar. Her long legs were encased in hose, her pretty feet in strappy high heels. She looked young and pretty, even if she was just as thin as she’d been when he left her.
She was fumbling in her purse for something, so she didn’t look up until he was standing directly in her path.
Her expression told him everything he wanted to know. It went from shock to disbelief to utter delight in seconds, her huge silvery eyes like saucers as they met his.
“Harden!” she whispered joyously.
“No need to ask if you’re glad to see me,” he murmured dryly. “Hello, Miranda.”
“When did you get here? How long can you stay? Do you have time to get a cup of coffee with me…!”
He touched his forefinger to her soft mouth with a smile, oblivious to onlookers and pedestrians and motorists that sped past them. “I’ll answer all those questions later. I’m parked over here. Let’s go.”
“I was fumbling for change for the bus,” she stammered, red-faced and shaken by his unexpected appearance. Her eyes adored him. “I didn’t have it. Have you been here long?”
“A few minutes. I got in this morning.” He looked down at her. “You’re still thin, but you have a bit more color than you did. Is it getting easier?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “It’s amazing what time can accomplish. I think I have things in perspective now. I’m still sad about the baby, but I’m getting over it.”
He paused at his rented Lincoln and opened the passenger door for her. “I’m glad.”
She waited until he got in beside her and started the car before she spoke. “I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” she confessed. “Your letters got shorter and shorter.”
“So did yours,” he said, and his deep voice sounded vaguely accusing.
“I thought maybe my first one made you uncomfortable,” she confessed with a smile. “I sort of used yours as a pattern.”
He smiled, too, because that explained everything. Now he understood what she’d done, and why.
“I don’t know how to write a letter to a woman,” he said after a minute, when he’d pulled into traffic and was negotiating lanes. “That was the first time I ever had.”
Her face brightened. “I didn’t know.”
He shrugged. “No reason you should.”
“How long can you stay?”
“I had to see a client,” he replied. “I did that this morning.”
“Then, you’re on your way home. I see,” she said quietly. She twisted her purse on her lap and stared out at traffic. Disappointment lined her face, but she didn’t let him see. “Well, I’m glad you stopped by, anyway. It was a nice surprise.”
He cocked an eyebrow. Either she was transparent, or he was learning to read her very well. “Can’t wait to get rid of me, can you?” he mused. “I had thought about staying until tomorrow, at least.”
Her face turned toward his, and her eyes brightened. “Were you? I could cook supper.”
“I might let you, this time,” he said. “I don’t want to waste the whole evening in a restaurant.”
“Do you need to go back to your hotel first?” she asked.
“What for? I’m wearing the only suit I brought with me, and I’ve got my wallet in my pocket.”
She laughed. “Then we can just go straight home.”
He remembered where her apartment house was without any difficulty. He parked the car as close to it as he could get, locked it, and escorted her inside.
While she was changing into jeans and a pink knit top, he wandered around her living room. Nothing had changed, except that there were more books. He picked up one of the paperbacks on the table beside the couch and smiled at her taste. Detective stories and romance novels.
“I like Erle Stanley Gardner,” he remarked when she was busy in the kitchen.
“So do I,” she told him, smiling over her shoulder as she put coffee on to perk. “And I’m crazy about Sherlock Holmes—on the educational channel, you know.”
“I watch that myself.”
He perched himself on a stool in front of her breakfast bar and folded his arms on it to study her trim figure as she worked. She produced an ashtray for him, but as she put it down, he caught her waist and pulled her between his legs.
“Kiss me,” he said quietly, holding her gaze. “It’s been a long, dry spell.”
“You haven’t been kissed in three months?” she stammered, a little nervous of the proximity.
He smiled. “I hate women, remember? Kiss me, before you start on the steak.”
She smiled jerkily. “All right.” She leaned foreward, closed her eyes, and brushed her mouth softly against his.
His lean hand tangled in her long hair and held her there, taking over, parting her lips, deepening the kiss. His breath caught at the intensity of it, like a lightning bolt in the silence of the kitchen.
“It isn’t enough,” he said tersely, drawing back just long enough to crush out his cigarette. Both arms slid around her and brought her intimately close, so that her belly was against his, her face on an unnerving level with his glittery blue eyes. “I’ve missed you, woman,” he whispered roughly.
His mouth met hers with enough force to push her head back against his hand. He was rough because he was starved for her, and it was a mutual thing. She hesitated only for a second before her arms went around his neck and she pressed close with a soft moan, loving the warm strength of his body as she was enveloped against it. She could hear his breath sighing out as his mouth grew harder on hers, bruising her lips, pushing them apart to give him total access to their moist inner softness.
All at once, his tongue pushed past her lips and into her mouth, and a sensation like liquid fire burst in her stomach. It was as intimate as lovemaking. She felt her whole body begin to throb as he tasted her in a quick, hard rhythm. She made a sound she’d never heard from her throat in her life and shuddered as she moved closer to him, her legs trembling against his.
“Yes,” he breathed unsteadily into her mouth. “Yes, sweetheart, like…that…!”
He stood up, taking her with him, one lean hand drop ping to her hips to grind them into his own. She stiffened at his fierce arousal, but he ignored her instinctive withdrawal.
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “Relax. Just relax. I won’t hurt you.”
His voice had the oddest effect on her. The struggle went out of her all at once, and she gave in to him with an unsteady sigh. Her hands pressed gently into his shirt front and lingered there while the kiss went on and on and she felt a slight tremor in his own powerful legs.
He lifted his head finally and looked down at her, breathing unsteadily, fighting to control what he felt for her.
His hands at her waist tightened and the helpless, submissive look on her soft face pushed him over the edge. “Is there anything cooking that won’t keep for a few minutes, Miranda?” he asked quietly.
She swallowed. “No. But…”
He bent and lifted her gently into his arms and carried her out of the kitchen. “Don’t be afraid, little one,” he said quietly.
“Harden, I don’t…I’m still not using anything,” she stammered.
He didn’t look at her as he walked into her bedroom. “We won’t make love.”
Her lips parted. They felt sore and they tasted of him when she touched them with her tongue. He laid her down on the bed and stood looking at her for a long moment before he sat down beside her and bent to take her mouth softly under his once again.
The look in his eyes fascinated her. It was desire mingled with irritation and something darker, something far less identifiable. His gaze fell to the unsteady rise and fall of the knit top she was wearing and his hand moved to smooth down her shoulder to her collarbone.
“No bra tonight?” he asked bluntly, meeting her eyes.
She flushed. “I…”
He put a long forefinger on her lips. “What we do together is between you and me,” he said solemnly. “Not even my own brothers know anything about my personal life. I want very badly to touch you again, Miranda. I think you want it just as much. If you do, there isn’t really any reason we can’t indulge each other.”
She searched his eyes quietly. “I couldn’t sleep, for dreaming about how it was between us, last time,” she whispered.
“Neither could I,” he replied. His hands moved to her waist and brought her into a sitting position. Gently he removed the pink knit top and put it aside, letting his eyes adore her pink and mauve nudity. He smiled when her nipples went hard under the scrutiny.
Her hands touched his lean cheeks hesitantly and she shivered as she drew his face toward her, arching her back to show him what she wanted most.
“Here?” he whispered, obliging her.
She drew in her breath as his mouth opened over her breast, taking almost all of one inside. The faint suction made her tremble, made her nails bite into the shoulders of his suit jacket.
“Too…many clothes, Harden,” she whispered.
He lifted his head and pressed a soft kiss on her mouth before he stood up. “Yes. Far too many.”
He watched her while he removed everything above his belt, enjoying the way her eyes sketched over him.
“Harden,” she began shyly, her eyes falling to the wide silver belt.
“No,” he said, reading the question in her eyes. He sat down beside her and drew her gently across his lap, moving her breasts into the thick mat of hair over his chest. “If I take anything else off, we’ll be lovers.”
“Don’t you want to?” she asked breathlessly.
“Yes,” he said simply. “But it’s still too soon for that.” He looked down where her pale body was pressed to his darkly tanned one. “I want you to come home with me, Miranda.”