At Close Range (9 page)

Her reaction wasn't too tough to figure out. It didn't take a rocket scientist. Rejection was a tough call at any time, and minutes after a mind-shattering kiss, it was the cruelest act of all.

“Corrie—”

“There's the track,” she said, cutting him off.

He almost flipped the car, taking the turn so abruptly onto the narrow dirt track.

“Now, around this next curve we should hit an arroyo. After that, the ruins.”

Mack didn't say anything, forcing the car to stay on the rough excuse for a road.

As she'd said, after the washed-out arroyo, they cleared a rise and below lay the abandoned half structure of a former small home. He pulled to a halt beside what was left of it.

Everything about the place spoke of emptiness. No birds called, no trees, even denuded by winter, lingered around the place. Even the brisk breeze that had been blowing earlier seemed to avoid this shallow valley.

“Corrie—”

“She can't be here,” Corrie interrupted, and, despite her assertion, climbed out of the car.

Mack swore beneath his breath but followed suit. When Corrie would have stepped through the remnants of what had once been a doorway, he deliberately held out his hand and moved in front of her. He walked beneath a leaning lintel held upright by a couple of strips of charred wood. A fire had taken this place down, he thought, his heart scudding in his chest. He could hear the faint wail of children crying for help.

He kept his hand outstretched to keep Corrie from following until he could make certain the place was indeed empty. And safe.

To his left he could see the crumbled remains of a fireplace and an adjacent wall. These bits of a former
house stood like a triangular gravestone in the middle of a rectangle of desolation.

“She's not here,” Corrie repeated in a near whisper.

“No,” Mack agreed, though his eyes were locked on something bundled in the corner beside the fireplace. “But she's been here. I can see why Chance didn't see this last night.”

“What is that?” Corrie asked, her hand curving around his arm, much as she'd done the night before. Her touch sent a shock wave through him, making him draw a harsh breath.

“I believe it's your coat,” Mack said through a constricted throat.

Corrie waited while Mack retrieved her coat and gloves. He shook them out before handing them to her.

“They're cold,” she said. “She must have left them behind first thing this morning.”

Mack didn't say anything, his back rigid and his face grim. His icy eyes were focused on the dirt floor of the ruin.

“What is it?” Corrie asked, but even as she questioned him, she knew what he was looking at. His footsteps were clearly visible in the early morning light—a set of Saucony tennis shoe prints going to the corner to retrieve her coat and a matching set coming back. No other marks disturbed the many layers of silt and sand.

She stretched out her own boot and pressed it into the ground, much more lightly than she would have trod. She pulled it back. A perfect toe print marred the earth floor.

An atavistic sense of wrongness gripped Corrie, and she wanted to toss the expensive duster and gloves that
Leeza had given her to the ground. A dimly held precept that one didn't deliberately throw away good things or gifts was all that kept the items in her hands.

“She could have walked around behind the walls.”

“Yes,” Corrie said with a little more enthusiasm than the suggestion warranted. “That would explain it. The lack of footprints.”

“She could have just tossed them there, figuring we would come looking for her in the morning.”

“Or she could have had a car waiting for her outside the walls and just dropped them there.”

“Any of those things are possible,” Mack said.

“Anything's possible.”

“Like for you to forgive me for last night?” His voice, deepened by emotion, seemed to slice through her. Her eyes cut to his and the rough demand in his blue eyes snared her completely. She must have looked confused because he added, “For the stupid things I said?”

“I should apologize, too—”

“No,” he said firmly, taking a step forward. “You had every right to be angry. You've been nothing but wonderful from day one. I'm the one who's been slinging a bushel full of mixed signals.”

“You were pretty clear last night,” she said. Her voice felt rusty, her jaw stiff.

“Yes, if you mean my wanting to kiss you. And liking it. And wanting to do it again.”

“You do?”

“God, yes,” he said, and reached out as if he would touch her face, only to pull his hand back and drag it through his hair instead.

Every instinct in Corrie told her to retreat, to be
silent, to literally leave well enough alone. Every adage she'd been raised with clamored at her to let her gaze fall from his and just walk away.
All's well that ends well—Shakespeare. Can one go upon hot coals and his feet not be burned?—Proverbs. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen—some crazed coward.

“Please kiss me, then,” she said. Her heart beat a jagged rhythm in her chest; her breathing seemed tangled in her throat. She suspected her hands were shaking and knew full well her knees were. And yet she continued to stand exactly where she was, her eyes linked with his, her request hanging in the air between them. “Please.”

Even if he drew her into the hell he lived, even if he hurt her immeasurably in the far distant next ten minutes, Mack could no more have resisted Corrie's request than he could have stopped himself from running into that burning hallway two years ago.

The two feet separating them disappeared in a single step forward. He plunged a trembling hand into her amazing hair and used the other to sweep the coat and gloves from her grasp and draw her body to his. As his lips lowered onto hers, capturing her very breath, he told himself to stop, to hold back, to remember the myriad reasons he shouldn't be giving in to this fierce demand. But as her lips opened to him, as her hand stole around his neck to pull him even closer, all rational thought evaporated.

He was a man and she was every man's dream of a woman. And in a force as primal as tides, moonrises, and as turbulent as hurricanes and thunderstorms, he lost himself in the wonder of holding her close, tasting
her, drinking in her scent, drowning in her moans of acceptance.

Corrie felt awash in contrasting sensations. An icy breeze teased at her fingers while Mack's fiery-hot lips sparked a raging fire within her. She seemed mindless, yet had never thought more clearly in her life. As his hands tangled in her hair, making her moan with a wanton lust, she understood how long she'd been standing on the outside of life. Maybe it took feeling fire to know it could burn. Maybe it took tasting a man's unbridled hunger to know how to give it in return.

His free hand roamed her back, then slid beneath her warm poncho. She gasped as his cold fingers grasped her body and sighed when they created a blaze in her loins. Her already trembling knees gave way, and it seemed she was floating in his rock-hard grip.

If La Dolorosa had led them there, if she was an apparition only of lonely nights, then she'd blessed them by abandoning them by day, leaving this place empty of all but a thick duster and a pair of gloves.

As if reading her thoughts, Mack groaned aloud and lowered her to the duster he'd spilled to the ground. Like a magician, he swung it open, creating a bed with a wave of his hand.

He cushioned her head in the crook of his arm and gently swept her hair from her face. Cold fingers—hot touch.

“Corrie…”

“Please,” she said, unable to voice anything else but sheer want, utter need.

“Look at me, Corrie,” he whispered.

She felt as if she heard his voice from far away, his
touch already having taken her as far from earthly ground as possible.

He was bent over her, his eyes clouded with want, his lips moist with her kisses. “You make me crazy,” he said.

“Welcome to the nuthouse,” she quipped, and was amazed at how naturally the light banter slipped from her tongue. A minor miracle.

He swept her poncho up and it pooled around her neck. He lifted her slightly and slipped it from her head, letting it become a pillow. His hot gaze burned through her thin layer of clothing, heating her.

He said raggedly, “Corrie, if you want to stop, tell me now. Because God knows in half a second there won't be any turning back.”

“If you stop now, I'd probably die right here,” she murmured, and thought that in another place or time she might have blushed at her own temerity. As it was, she reached for his jacket and slid her hands into the warm interior, making him draw a sharp breath.

“I don't have protection,” he rasped.

Corrie couldn't help the rush of desire his simple words brought her, nor hide the sudden flare of color in her cheeks.

He lowered his lips to the pulse throbbing just above her collarbone. He deftly unbuttoned her blouse, spreading her blouse open, and ran the tips of his fingers across the swell of her breasts.

“In—in the pocket of my duster,” she gasped out.

He gave a rough chuckle, his hot breath fanning her breasts. “Prepared?”

She squirmed beneath his touch, his fire-kissed lips. “I'm—I'm the sex education teacher.”

He gave a muffled chortle in the hollow between her breasts. “They must love your classes.”

She answered his chuckle with a gasp as his hand freed a breast from the confines of her bra and his fingers took a hardened nipple in a swift, sure capture.

Molten liquid coursed through her and she arched upward, her hands automatically seeking his face to draw him down to her.

“This should be a bed on a moonlit night,” he said.

“This is perfect,” she said, and gently caught his lower lip between her teeth.

Mack drew in his breath on a hiss. It did seem perfect. His every fantasy come true. And, thrusting conscience and good intentions aside, he couldn't resist seizing the perfection and damning the inevitable shoe falling later. The result might very well be a terrifying plummet into chaos, but for this moment, in this time, the touch of her hand, the feel of her lips against his, drove consequences to some nether region.

When her fingers dipped inside his shirt, making contact with the damaged skin on his chest, he had to close his eyes against succumbing too rapidly to the sheer pleasure of being touched, of being caressed. Her sigh of pleasure made him want to pull her even closer, plunge into her and just stay there forever, lose himself in a perfect world that held no nightmares, no fires, no dying children.

And yet, as she spread open his shirt, her heavy-lidded eyes taking in the evidence of his past, he felt burned anew by her touch, by her nonjudgmental steady gaze.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

More than you can ever know, he wanted to tell
her. “No,” he said, because truthfully, her touch, while enflaming him, didn't cause physical pain.

“You feel new,” she murmured.

He stilled. With her, he
felt
new. Renewed. Reborn. As if promises and hope were possible. As though right around a touch he would find that miracle he'd sought when coming to the ranch.

“And you feel like a wonder,” he said, exploring her, tasting what he discovered.

She did feel wonder as his hands brought her body alive. Hunger, impatience and longing rippled through her, followed by waves of slow, almost painful enticement as his fingers danced and plied, teased and tortured.

She couldn't have guessed when her body was bared to his gaze, for it seemed to her that her clothes magically evaporated. But once they were removed, she was heated by the harsh need in his hungry eyes.

“You're so incredibly lovely,” he said. As if he were an artist, he brushed her bare breasts with his fingertips. Like a sculptor, he molded them to his hands, kneading, reshaping, then using his tongue on her nipples.

Like a musician, he played symphonies on her skin, creating a sweet harmony of his breath and hers. His tongue danced and played while his fingers created a counterpoint harmony. His hands exhorted while his body pressed against hers.

And when she would have screamed aloud, begging him, ordering him to take her, he dug into her duster pockets and unerringly found the packets he sought.

“I wondered what you had in your pockets that
night you came to the bunkhouse,” he said, tearing open a packet with his teeth.

She chuckled, relishing the sound, stretching out beneath him, reaching for his male hardness. He bounced in her hands, like an eager animal, then grew even larger in her capture.

“They were probably there then, too.”

“Good thing I didn't know it,” he murmured before kissing her fiercely.

He sheathed himself with the condom, gripping her hands as he rolled it downward, helping her slip it over his length. Then, while she still held him warm in her grasp, he slid a finger inside her. And back out. And inside again.

“Mack…”

Instead of answering, he bent over her and trapped her lips beneath his. His tongue slipped into her mouth as his finger slipped into her core and he rocked into her hands.

She dragged her lips free. “Oh, please. Please.” But she didn't know what she was begging him for.

Mack felt crazed with the need to join Corrie, to unite in the most primitive of ways. She lay open beneath him, her magnificent eyes at half-mast. Her hands pulled him to her, demanding, imploring.

As he hadn't been able to resist her before, not even the reappearance of La Dolorosa could make him do so now. Half fearing what entering would make him feel if just touching her made him so alive, he lowered himself into her.

“Corrie,” he ground out as he slid into her warm sheath of pure liquid fire.

He felt her rise to meet him, as if they'd been to
gether a thousand times instead of this first. She shuddered and cried out his name as he continued into her, impaling her beneath him. Her legs encircled him, drawing him even deeper. And all control left him. Her silky skin touching his, her warm breath upon his neck, her cold-hot hands strafing his scarred back.