Eye of the Tiger (18 page)

She laughed. “Not me,” she returned, toying with the cup. “I don’t know about horses, and I’m certainly not debutante material.”

“You’re real, though,” he said, forcing her to meet his gaze. “That’s right. You’re honest and stubborn, and you don’t back away from things. You have qualities I admire, Ellie. The economics don’t matter a damn. They never have.”

“They matter to me,” she replied shortly. “Look around you, Keegan. This is a nice house, thanks to you and your father, but it’s not a patch on Flintlock. I’ve never worn fancy clothes until recently, and I didn’t even know that a champagne buffet meant hors d’oeuvres and drinks. When I first walked onto Wade’s property, his mother and sister came at me like spears….”

“Just as I thought,” he said darkly. “I’ve known them for years.”

“I gave as good as I got, thank you,” she told him, “but the fact is, I don’t fit in that kind of society. You were right in the first place when you were warning me off Wade. I’m just a country girl who might someday make a small mark in the nursing profession. But as a—” she searched for a discreet term “—companion for a rich man, I’d be a dead loss.”

“I’m not in the market for a mistress,” he said, his voice like velvet.

Her eyebrows arched. “Excuse me, but isn’t that the position you’re offering me? Or do you make a habit of seducing anyone who happens to be handy?”

He sighed wearily as he lifted the cigarette to his mouth. “Eleanor,” he said, “what am I going to do about you?”

“You might just leave me alone,” she replied, although the thought hurt dreadfully. Still, it was the most sensible course.

“I can’t.” He held out his hand. “Come walking, Ellie. I want to talk.”

She hesitated, but he nodded curtly and she yielded. This would be the last time she obeyed, she promised herself. The very last time.

She took his outstretched hand and followed him out into the sunshine. He locked her fingers with his and went off down a path beside the fence that led to the stream cutting through his property.

“Four years ago,” he said without looking at her, “I came by your house on your birthday and asked you out. That night, when I picked you up, you were wearing a blue print dress with puffy sleeves and a low neckline. Your hair was down around your shoulders and smelled of gardenias. I gave you supper at an exclusive restaurant and then I drove you out to the river and parked on a deserted stretch of dirt road.”

“Keegan…”

“Shhh,” he said gently. He turned her as they reached the shade of a towering oak tree and held her by the arms, studying her face. “And then I started kissing
you. And you kissed me back. I put my hand under your bodice and you held it there. We started kissing feverishly then, and somehow I got you into the backseat of that big Lincoln and eased you down, and you let me take your clothes off. It was a warm, clear night, and we made love to the sound of crickets and rushing water, and afterward you told me that you loved me.”

She lowered her eyes to his chest. “It isn’t kind, reminding me,” she whispered miserably.

“I’m not doing it to torment you, Eleanor,” he said. “I want to make you understand how I felt. You were barely eighteen, not even a full-grown woman, and a virgin to boot. I was considerably older, practically engaged to Lorraine, and I was torn apart with conflicting emotions. I never meant it to happen at all, but once you let me touch you, I couldn’t stop.”

“I realize I was as much to blame as you were, Keegan,” she replied. “I was crazy about you. I thought, since you were asking me out, that you’d stopped caring about Lorraine and I had a chance with you.” She laughed hollowly. “I should have realized that a man like you wouldn’t want a shy little country mouse when he could have a fairy princess like Lorraine, but then, I wasn’t thinking.”

He ground his cigarette out under his heel and took her face in his lean, warm hands. “I never slept with Lorraine,” he said, his voice deep and soft. “Part of what I felt for her was sexual. Probably most of it was. Once I had you, though, I wasn’t able to want her. That was why I drove her away. I had nothing left to give.”

She looked deeply into his blue eyes and was shaken by what she saw. “When you told me why you’d asked
me out, I wanted to die,” she confessed finally. “I’d practically thrown myself at you…. It was humiliating.”

“Not to me,” he murmured. “All my life, women had chased me because I was rich. You were the first, and the last, to want me just for myself.”

She smiled softly. “You were very special.”

“So were you.” He bent and kissed her, tenderly, warmly. His mouth opened and poised there; she could taste the smoke on his breath. “Your body haunted me after you left Lexington. Your face. Your voice. I couldn’t sleep for feeling your body under mine, those sweet little cries that pulsed out of you. Do you know even now how it excites me to hear you moan when I make love to you?”

“You make it so…so wild,” she faltered.

“So do you, honey,” he replied curtly. His hands tangled in her thick, soft hair, and he tugged at it. “You make it so much more than a merging of bodies. I think about babies when I take you, Eleanor, did you know?” he whispered, and his mouth found hers even as the words registered in her whirling mind.

She gripped his forearms, trembling as he deepened the kiss; then his eyes opened and stared straight into hers.

“Come close,” he said against her mouth.

“I’ll hurt you,” she whispered hesitantly.

“Yes.” He reached down and moved her legs until they touched his, then his eyes closed and his mouth crushed hers in a silence blazing with promise.

He bent, holding the kiss, and lifted her into his arms. “Just once more,” he whispered, his voice deep and husky as he carried her into the shade of the tree
and placed her gently on the ground. “Just one more time, Eleanor….”

He stretched out against her, and the kiss grew urgent, passionate. His hands caressed her pliant body, molding her breasts, her rib cage, her waist and stomach, her long legs.

“No,” she moaned. Her hands pushed halfheartedly at his chest, until they found an opening and pressed into warm, hard muscle and thick hair. His tongue searched inside her mouth, and she felt his heart shaking her with its feverish beat, felt the crush of his body over hers, twisting her against the hard ground as he gave up his control to the passion driving him.

“You want me,” he whispered huskily. “I want you. What else matters?”

“I won’t…be used,” she whimpered. “I won’t!”

“Here,” he said under his breath, moving her hand against his chest. “Touch me like this.”

“Oh, Keegan, this won’t…solve anything.” She panted, twisting her face away from his.

“Yes, it will,” he said. He slid down against her, feverishly pushing up the hem of her shirt, revealing her bare, taut breasts. “God, Ellie, you’ve got the prettiest breasts,” he whispered huskily, then bent his head.

She was lost from the first touch of his open mouth, taking her inside that warm, moist darkness, letting her feel the roughness of his tongue, the soft nip of his teeth. He whispered something she didn’t hear, and his lean hands smoothed warmly up and down her rib cage while his mouth made her tremble.

He worked his way down to the fastening of her jeans, pressing his face into her warm flesh, making
her burn and ache. His fingers dug into her hips, lifting her rhythmically to the probing of his tongue, the nip of his teeth.

“Please,” she whispered helplessly. Her eyes closed and she shuddered. Her hands held his hair, trapping his mouth against her warm belly. “Please, make me stop aching.”

“There’s only one way to do that,” he whispered. He slid up her body, his mouth poised over hers as his hands found and cupped her breasts. He searched her eyes in a lingering scrutiny. “Tell me you love me, Eleanor, and I’ll love you in ways you’ll never forget as long as you live. I’ll make you cry.”

“Please.” She was beyond arguing. Her body throbbed, burned. She arched helplessly, her legs moving in a wild rhythm on the ground. “Keegan…”

“Say the words, baby,” he breathed, toying with the zipper of her jeans. “Come on. Tell me, Ellie.”

Her eyes closed. Why not? He owned her, after all. He owned her. “I love you,” she whispered achingly, her eyes opening, large and dark and full of pain. “I always have. I always will.”

He hesitated, his lips parting, his body shuddering as he looked down at her.

“Isn’t that the price?” she whispered brokenly. She lifted her body, sliding her arms under his to press her breasts hungrily against his chest. “Oh, Lord, how sweet it feels to do that,” she moaned softly. She rubbed her torso against his and felt him tremble at the silken brush of her skin. “I want you. I want all of you, right here, under the sun, I want to look up and watch you having me….”

His mind exploded. He stripped her with hands that trembled, then shrugged off his own clothing and overwhelmed her with feverish abandon.

She laughed. Laughed, as he held her down and forced his body on hers, and she matched that wild passion, every step of the way. Her eyes open, huge, blazing with the same hunger he was feeling, watched him, gloried in what he did to her with his hands, his mouth, his powerful body.

“I love you,” she cried in a voice she barely recognized. Then, as the tension accelerated into something like flying, she felt her body tensing until it threatened to shatter. Her fingers dug into his back while he arched over her and ground her into the dead leaves and grass with the feverish crush of his muscular body.

“Yes, watch me,” she said shakily. “Watch me!”

The leaves above them blurred and burst into color. She felt her mouth open, her body turn to liquid and burn with lightning flashes as she throbbed and throbbed and throbbed. She could hardly see his face above her.

“Eleanor,” he moaned.

Her fingers trembled as they found his and locked with them. “You belong to me,” she whispered.

“Oh, God, yes.” His eyes closed and his head fell beside her ear, tortured breaths pulsating out of him with strangled groans as his body tensed and convulsed. “I…love…you!”

It was the passion talking, of course; she knew that, but it was so sweet to hold him, to soothe him, and know that what she’d given him he could find with
no one else. For this tiny stretch of time, he was completely, wholly hers.

He trembled in her arms for a long time. And this time, there was no lazy awakening, no moving quickly away. He collapsed against her and lay breathing raggedly until she could feel his skin sticking to hers.

“Yes, hold me, Eleanor,” he whispered. One lean hand came up to trace her ear, her cheek, to smooth her damp hair. Somewhere in the tree above them, birds sang sweetly. “Hold me, now.”

“Are you all right?” she asked softly.

“Yes. Are you?”

She smiled against his tanned cheek. “I don’t know.”

He managed to raise himself enough to search her eyes. His were very blue, sated, full of secrets and adoration. Genuine adoration.

“I never stopped loving you,” he whispered, kissing her shocked eyes closed. “I didn’t realize that I did until it was too late, until I’d driven you away with my own confused indifference. And then I couldn’t get you back. I couldn’t get to you.”

“You love me?” she asked uncertainly.

He lifted his head and touched her mouth softly with his. “You can ask that, after the way I just made love to you?” he whispered.

“Desire…” She faltered.

“Physical love,” he corrected quietly. “Because that’s what it is, between you and me. It always was, even the first time. I’ll never get enough of you.”

“But you let me go,” she said uncertainly.

He kissed her forehead with lips that were breathlessly tender. “I had to,” he said simply. “I’d managed
to foul up my whole life by getting myself engaged to Lorraine. I had to force her to break the engagement, and by then you were settled in Louisville. I did write to you, but you wouldn’t answer me. I couldn’t blame you for that, after the way I’d treated you. But it was a damned long four years, Eleanor.”

“You never were trying to make a convenience of me, were you?” she asked wonderingly. “It was this, from the beginning, from the day I came home again.”

He nodded, his eyes quiet and sad. “I loved you so much, little one. And every attempt I made to come close just pushed you further away.”

“I didn’t know,” she said.

“Yes, I realized that. And then Wade Granger started coming around,” he said curtly. “And I wanted to kill him.”

“He saw through me very quickly,” she confessed. “He was my best friend. He knew how I felt about you. He took me out to try and make you jealous.”

“He succeeded,” he said, his voice quiet. “I was terrified of losing you to him. Especially after yesterday. I lost my head once I got you in my arms in that bedroom. I couldn’t have stopped to save my life. And then you said you were going to marry him…”

“He’d have been shocked,” she said with a slow smile. “I’d already refused him. It was all a last-ditch attempt to save myself from you.”

“And look where it got you,” he mused, lifting his head to look down at their locked bodies.

She flushed. “Keegan!”

“You’re not embarrassed?” he teased. “Not after the way you were with me this time?”

She swallowed. “Actually, yes, I am. And for heaven’s sake, what if someone should come along?”

He sighed ruefully. “We could go inside, and do this in a bed,” he said. “Or,” he added with a wicked grin as he lifted himself away from her, “we could drive into town and get a marriage license.”

Eleanor sat up, gaping at him as he dragged on his jeans and tossed hers over to her.

“Don’t look so shocked,” he murmured. “Don’t you want to marry me? You’d get to sleep in my arms every night. You could even have a son or two with me, if you liked.”

She was still gaping. With a resigned sigh, he stuffed her deftly back into her clothing and laughed at her shocked expression.

“A fine lot of help you are,” he muttered as he pulled the knit shirt back over her taut breasts. “Shameless woman.”

“I’m…speechless,” she faltered. “You really want to marry me?”