Affair of Honor (4 page)

Brenna looked up at him, remaining firmly in her chair. “Why do I have this feeling you don’t lack self-confidence? Do you always organize and manipulate things so that they go the way you want them to go?”

“I’ve picked a way of life that allows me to live on my own terms,” he told her quietly, holding her eyes.

A current passed between them, an electric tension that Brenna felt with overpowering awareness. The menace her senses responded to in him was back in full force.

“But I’m not part of your life,” she heard herself say very clearly. It seemed important to tell him that. She wanted no misunderstandings on the issue. They were neighbors for the summer, nothing more. They were truly from two different worlds.

“Do you philosophy types routinely go around denying reality and the evidence of your own senses? You entered my life last night when you came through my window. This morning I can reach out and touch you…”

He lifted the hand with which he drew the bowstring and put it under her chin. The silvery eyes looked deeply into hers, trapping her momentarily in their glittering depths. “Oh, yes, Brenna Llewellyn. You’re definitely part of my life.”

“Only…only for the summer,” she whispered hoarsely, wishing desperately that she could find the willpower to move away from him. What was she letting him do to her? Was she crazy?

He shrugged dismissingly. “That’s long enough, I imagine.”

Brenna saw the sudden intention in his gaze and made a belated movement to escape. But she was much too slow. The hand under her chin reached around to anchor her gently by the nape of the neck. Bracing his left hand on the back of the chair on which she was sitting, Ryder leaned down to kiss her.

Summing up the situation immediately, Brenna held herself passively still. She sensed the curiosity in him, the exploratory approach. She was a woman he would be living next door to for several weeks and he was testing the waters. The logical response for her to make was polite, bland disinterest. A struggle might provoke a man like this who believed in action and force. So Brenna sat unmoving as his mouth came down on hers.

His lips were warm, firm and questioning. She had been right, she told herself. He was curious about her. She kept her eyes open although his own dark tawny lashes flickered against his cheeks when his mouth made contact. The fingers at the back of her neck moved with a massaging sensuality while his lips explored hers.

Brenna’s fingers tightened on the edge of the table as she held herself stiff and unresponsive. There was more in this slow, questioning embrace than mere curiosity, she realized abruptly. There was a hunger lying in wait. It was held in check and it was, at the moment, unthreatening. In spite of her resolve, she found herself wondering what it would take to unleash it.

Ryder didn’t pursue the kiss long. He brushed her lips one last time with his own and then lifted his head an inch or two and opened his eyes There was a cloudy veil concealing the truth in the gray depths of his gaze, but there was a whimsical tilt to his mouth.

“No?” he asked very gently.

“No.” Brenna’s voice was very assured and she met his eyes in a straight look.

“Is there someone else?” He didn’t move, retaining his hold on the nape of her neck.

Brenna drew in her breath. “Someone else; something else. A lot of reasons.”

The tilt of his mouth widened into the rakish grin for an instant and the silvery eyes gleamed. “Reasons that vague I can handle,” he told her with an amused arrogance.

Perhaps it was time to take a firmer stand. “I’m not here for a summer affair, Ryder.”

He straightened. “Why are you here?”

“To work. To sort out some things in my life. To make some decisions.”

“More vagueness. Does philosophy teach you to be vague in the face of a direct question?”

“Sometimes,” she retorted, deliberately being vague again. But humor lightened her tone now.

“Amazing. No wonder they keep your sort locked up on college campuses. You’d flounder to death if you had to stay very long in the real world!”

“Your prejudice against the academic world is showing.”

“Your prejudice against my world has already surfaced,” he shot back dryly. “Come outside with me and let’s see if we can find a common interest.”

“How?” she asked.

“I’ll teach you to use the bow. When you use it properly, you can think of it as an application and illustration of the philosophic principle of harmony in the universe.” He chuckled, taking her hand and pulling her to her feet.

“While you’ll be thinking of it as a lethal weapon for one of your heroes!”

“So? Just because it’s your nature to look for something intellectually elevating in the exercise, don’t condemn me for looking for something practical.”

“I wouldn’t dream of condemning you for that!” she scoffed, letting herself be led outdoors into the still-cool mountain morning. She glanced to her left, automatically taking in her surroundings en route to the archery target, and gave a sudden gasp of appreciation.

“Oh, you
can
see the lake from here! The rental agent was right. Isn’t it fantastic? It’s huge. Like an inland sea!”

The dazzling blue depths, so deep the lake never froze even in the heart of winter when the region was converted into a skiing wonderland, reflected the bright morning sun.

“It’s about twenty-two miles long,” Ryder told her. “And about eight miles across at this point. Do you gamble?”

“I beg your pardon?” she asked in surprise.

“I just wondered if you were interested in gambling, since you’ve elected to spend your summer on the Nevada side of the lake,” he explained as they reached the point near the target where he had been standing earlier.

“Oh, I see what you mean. No, I’m not particularly interested. I saw the casinos as I drove through town last night,” she added. “I just happened to wind up here because this looked like the most attractive area available from the agent.”

“Fate,” he suggested dramatically, loosing her hand to unstrap the leather arm guard from around his wrist.

Brenna chuckled. “I’m afraid there is no empirical evidence to suggest that fate is a genuine factor in the world.”

“Lively conversation like that must limit your dating to other faculty members,” he murmured, taking hold of her left wrist and attaching the guard. “So I can assume the ‘someone else’ is another member of your philosophy department staff?”

“You do a pretty good job of lining up the evidence yourself,” she commended casually, examining the wrist guard.

“He doesn’t love you, you know,” Ryder continued, bending down to pick up the quiver of arrows.

Brenna swallowed in a wave of uneasy anger. She should not let herself be drawn into this kind of conversation. “That’s your opinion!”

He put the bow in her hand and looked into her eyes.

“That’s another deduction from empirical evidence,” he corrected.

“What evidence?” she asked huskily.

“He let you come alone to Tahoe for the summer.”

“And from that you assume he doesn’t love me?” she challenged, amber eyes kindling.

“I’m a man. Given what I know about being a man, that’s a reasonable assumption.”

“You’re very sure of yourself,” she taunted, vividly aware of his closeness and the confidence in which he was enveloping her.

“Want to hear another assumption?” he baited softly.

“I doubt it!”

“You don’t really love him, either,” he concluded inexorably.

“You’d like to believe that so you don’t have to feel guilty when you make a pass at me,” she tossed back, proud of the coolness in her voice as she studied the weapon in her hand. Why was she standing there, letting him goad her like this? She should drop the bow and walk back to the cabin and lock the door. But that would be admitting that she couldn’t deal with him, wouldn’t it?

“I won’t feel guilty when I make a pass, don’t fret.” He laughed far back in his throat. “I don’t feel even a pang about that kiss, for example.”

“Why do you say I don’t love him?” She couldn’t resist the question, even though she was disgusted with herself for asking.

“Because you are a woman who concerns herself with such things as honor. If you were in love you would not risk conversations like this with another man,” he told her simply. “Now,” he went on before she could find an answer, “this is called a recurve bow. The way the ends curve and deflect back give a lot more leverage. You’re right-handed so you stand with your left side toward the target. We’ll start with an open stance…”

He knelt in front of her and guided her sandaled feet into the appropriate positions. Brenna found herself listening submissively for a while as he directed the placement of her hands, talked about the basics of safety, and generally involved her more and more deeply in the first lesson. He was good, she realized. An excellent teacher, in fact. If there was one thing she could admire other than sound scholarship, it was the ability to teach.

“My God! It’s hard,” she suddenly complained in astonishment when the time came to practice drawing back the bowstring. “I’ll never be able to draw it far enough to nock an arrow!”

“Sure you will. This is considered a very lightweight bow. A strong woman like you can handle it.”

“What makes you think I’m strong?” she protested, taking a deep breath and attempting once more to draw the bowstring.

“I was the one holding you down on the floor last night, remember?” he said, grinning.

“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t bring that up again,” she muttered caustically.

“I agreed to think about the bargain you suggested. I haven’t made up my mind to accept it yet. There, that’s it. I told you that you could do it.”

She slackened the tension on the bow so it wouldn’t snap and threw him a glare. But she said nothing else as he took her through the basic fundamentals of archery.

“These are aluminum-shafted arrows,” he told her as he handed the first one to her. “The best. Which means they’re expensive. Lose one in the grass or the pines and you’re going to be spending the rest of the day looking for it.”

“Is that a threat?”

“That’s an added inducement to try to hit the target. Okay, remember that the trick is to combine a relaxation of the muscles in the hand drawing the bowstring at the same moment that you need maximum concentration on aiming. Just relax and release the arrow gently. Hold the release position until the arrow reaches the target.”

“Or until it misses the target completely,” Brenna sighed as the first one went wide.

“It takes practice. Don’t worry about the arrow, I’ve got it spotted over there near that tree. Try another.”

The thrill of having a few actually strike the target was greater than Brenna would have expected. She was elated and not a little exhausted a long time later as she walked with Ryder toward the target to remove the few that had managed to find their way in the right direction.

“Craig would love this,” she remarked enthusiastically, inserting the arrows back into the quiver as he handed them to her.

“Craig?” There was a tight curiosity underlying the neutralness of the question. Brenna heard it and smiled to herself.

“My brother. He’s going to be starting his senior year at the University of California at Berkeley this fall,” she told him.

“You sound proud.”

“I am. He’s a good kid.”

“If he’s almost a senior in college, he should be a good
man
by now,” Ryder observed, giving her a strange glance.

“He is.” She smiled easily. “Sometimes I lapse, I’m afraid. There are a lot of years between us. He’s only twenty and I’m twenty-nine. It’s hard not to keep thinking of him as a kid brother.”

“You sound as if you’re pretty close to him.”

“After Mom and Dad were killed a few years ago, all we had was each other,” Brenna explained quietly as they walked back toward her cabin.

“With that much difference in your ages you must have wound up more or less raising him through his late teens,” Ryder said thoughtfully.

“It was a struggle sometimes.” She laughed, thinking about those years. “But Craig was a very responsible kid and he always seemed to keep in mind that I was a sibling, not a parent. He didn’t deliberately challenge me the way real parents get challenged by teenagers, if you know what I mean.”

“I know. Not from personal experience, because I’ve never had kids, but I’ve seen it in others,” he admitted. “The Gardners, as a matter of fact, had a little trouble with their oldest boy a couple of years ago.”

“But he got straightened out?” she asked with idle curiosity.

“Yes.”

She looked up, intending to ask another question about the Gardners, but Ryder was already turning the conversation toward lunch.

And somehow lunch turned into an afternoon walk along the lakeshore in front of the cabins as she and Ryder explored a few of the picturesque coves and beaches that dotted the shoreline. The mellow warmth of the day hung on until the sun finally began to set behind the soaring peaks to the west. Then, regardless of her firm intention to the contrary, Brenna found herself sharing a whiskey sour with her neighbor as he broiled steaks over the barbecue on his back patio.

When she went back to her own cabin after dinner, there was an element of peace in the atmosphere between herself and Ryder. He dropped the smallest of brushing kisses against her mouth before seeing her safely inside, but it was a calm, good-night salute. It reminded her a little of the impersonal touch he had used when he’d searched her that first evening.

It was, she reflected uneasily, a little confusing. She had half expected to find herself fighting him off at the door. Given his aggressive nature and his apparent interest in pursuing a summer flirtation, it seemed logical.

So why did she feel a little let down? she demanded briskly of herself as she went about climbing the stairs to her loft bedroom. She should be grateful that he wasn’t going to be the pushy type!

The next day she pulled out some of her notes and thought about outlining her fall classes. But that only brought back memories of the decision she had to make that summer. It was difficult, Brenna discovered, planning course work for her students when there was a possibility that she would not even be returning to the college!