San Antonio Rose (14 page)

Twin flags of embarrassment stained Tony’s cheeks as he reached into the back pocket of his jeans for the work gloves he’d taken off at lunchtime.

Orchestrated chaos prevailed in the camp. Dust clogged the nostrils of humans and horses alike. Calves lowed plaintively for their
mothers, cows for their offspring. The afternoon sun burned a brand of its own into the backs of unprotected necks and hands.

“Now you’re ready,” Rafe said, motioning a regloved Tony over to the campfire so that he could teach him the trick of making a clean brand on the calf being wrestled to the ground.

But the boy was either still smarting over his earlier gaffe or he was digging his heels in deeper as the day grew longer. Maybe a little of both. Whatever, he scuffed the toe of his boot in the dirt and shook his head. “I want Rusty to show me.”

“Rusty’s busy vaccinating the calves.” Jeannie realized that it wasn’t her place to interfere, but he was up to his old tricks again, and she was almost at the end of her rope in the patience department. “So why don’t you let Rafe—”

“I’ll wait for Rusty,” Tony said sullenly, then turned and walked away.

He knows, Jeannie thought, her irritation collapsing under a mother lode of love and guilt as she watched him take up his post at the kneeling ranch manager’s shoulder. Somehow he knows and he’s just trying to sort things out.

Rafe, surprisingly enough, seemed to be taking Tony’s reticence in stride. He grabbed the branding iron and, wielding it with all the expertise of old, pressed its glowing red end firmly onto the exposed flank of the Hereford calf.

“Let ’im up,” he ordered, stepping back from
the bawling calf who now wore the Circle C brand and nodding to the man holding the frightened animal down.

The cowhand let go, and the calf scrambled to all fours. No sooner had the first Hereford hightailed it out of there than a second was dragged kicking and baw-w-w-wing to the ground to be vaccinated and branded.

Calf after calf, it went like clockwork.

Jeannie didn’t notice the way Rafe’s lean muscles rippled beneath his blue chambray work shirt when he knelt to sear the hot brand into the calf’s hide. Nor did she pay any attention to how red and sunburned Tony’s nose was getting as he helped Rusty with the vaccination. All she saw were a man and a boy keeping a painfully polite distance within the tightly knit circle.

Suddenly she wanted to scream at both of them. At Tony for his stubborn rejection and at Rafe for his stoic acceptance. Father and son were tearing her apart, much as father and lover had all those years ago. And she either had to get away or go crazy.

“You take over the ear tagging,” she told one of the cowhands. “I’m going to look for strays.” Then she gathered the reins to her horse, swung into the saddle, and rode out of camp.

Jeannie had made her escape with a perfectly legitimate excuse. Mavericks often concealed themselves from the roundup crew,
taking cover in the scrub oaks and shrubby mesquite trees that crowned the rocky hills or in the tall cottonwoods and knobby cypresses that lined the creek bank. Accordingly she made a last sweeping search of the areas where they were most likely to hide.

After an hour of beating the bushes, she hadn’t come up with any strays but she had calmed down considerably. Her mare, a gleaming chestnut she’d trained herself, whickered softly and tugged at the bit as they approached the creek.

“Thirsty, girl?” Jeannie asked as she dismounted and led her horse toward the silvery rush of water that was fed by the Guadalupe River.

Listening to the mare suck in the liquid in noisy slurps, she realized her own mouth felt dry. She removed her hat, a straw Stetson, and laid it on the ground. Then she shook her hair free after hours of being tucked up under the crown, rolled back the sleeves of the oversize white cotton shirt she’d knotted at her waist, and stretched flat on her stomach on the grassy bank to get a drink.

The water, which she scooped up with one hand while keeping hold of the reins with the other, was spring-thaw cold and so clear she could see the glistening rocks on the creek bottom.

Jeannie had just taken her last drink when she felt a pull on the reins. She tightened her
grip and looked up to find that the chestnut had lifted its head in sudden alertness. As she pushed to her feet, she heard the drumming of a horse’s hooves fast approaching.

Rafe slowed the restive black gelding he’d chosen from the working remuda that morning to a long-striding walk when he saw her standing there. He sat tall and straight in the saddle, his strong hands controlling the reins and his lean thighs straddling the broad back of his mount.

A crow cried in alarm as he guided the gelding into the clearing. Squirrels scampered for cover. Even the leaves on the cottonwoods and cypresses trembled in his wake.

From the red bandanna holding his ebony hair back to the spiky rowels on his spurs, he looked like a
comanchero
riding out of the Old West and into the New. His coppery skin, dark beard stubble, and bold smile all served to reinforce the image. As did the silver-bladed knife sheathed at his belt.

His smile widened as his glance skimmed from the bits of green still clinging to the front of her shirt to the grass-stained knees of her jeans. “Been lying down on the job, I see.”

Jeannie dropped the reins and raised her palms in a gesture of surrender. “Caught red-handed.”

“
Wet
-handed is more like it.” Laughing now, Rafe lithely dismounted and let his horse dip its nose into the clear-running creek.

She could feel the swift pace of the blood in
her veins as he leisurely approached her. Wiping the palm of her damp hand on the seat of her pants, she shrugged and said, “I got so thirsty looking for strays, I decided to stop and get a drink.”

“Did you find any?” A lazily seductive gleam entered his blue eyes as he plucked a blade of grass from her cotton-covered breast.

“Not a one.” Her voice slipped a notch when he lifted yet another piece of green, this time from the tail of the knot over her bare stomach.

“Too bad.” His thumb moved up to the deep vee of her neckline to whisk away a blade stuck to her first button.

“Mmm-hmm …” Pleasure burgeoned in her lower body when his hand slid to the second button.

Slowly but thoroughly, as if he had an eternity to complete the project, he picked her shirt clean. The light touch of his dark fingers was both physically and visually stimulating. By the time he finished, her nipples had tightened into hard points against the soft cloth, and her gray eyes held the turbulence of desire long denied.

They hadn’t been alone all day. At the breakfast table they’d been surrounded by a half dozen hungry cowboys. In the barn Rusty had been issuing orders left and right. During branding, Tony had been as daunting as a bad conscience.

Now it was just Rafe and Jeannie. One man and one woman.

“Come here,” he said gruffly.

She gladly obeyed his command.

This was no gentle embrace they shared. He caught her cornsilk hair in one hand, clamped the other over the bare skin between her shirt and jeans, and jerked her against him. She dug her nails into the ropy muscles of his back, and arched into him.

Nor was this the tender kiss that every giddy teenage girl dreamed of and every awkward adolescent boy wanted to get just right. This was an open-mouthed, tongue-thrusting, teeth-grazing act of adult passion and raw need.

Jeannie reveled in the savage male essence of Rafe. He smelled of saddle leather and sweat. Tasted of salt. His heart slammed like a blacksmiths hammer against her breasts. And he was so rigid with want, she couldn’t tell where the knife at his belt ended and his body began.

Together, with mouths clinging, they dropped to their knees on the creek bank.

He released her hair and gripped her shoulders between his hands, angling her backward. She relaxed the curled tension of her fingers as she landed on a bed of grass. When he stretched out on top of her, she opened her thighs. He burrowed, hot and hard, against her warm, welcoming softness.

Only when their lungs threatened to burst for the lack of air did their mouths break apart.

He raised his head. She tipped hers back.
Rapidly breathing they stared into each other’s eyes—his glittering like sapphires in his swarthy face; hers as dark as burnt silver beneath her half-closed lashes.

“I listened for you last night,” she whispered.

“I saw you at the window,” he admitted throatily.

“Wh—” She stopped herself from asking why he hadn’t signaled her, knowing instinctively that he wouldn’t have wanted to risk waking Tony in the room next to hers. “What were you thinking?”

Rafe smiled his hombre’s smile and sat back on his heels. “That I wanted to see you up close.”

Jeannie’s stomach muscles constricted in sensual suspense as he made short work of the knot at her waist and the buttons on her shirt.

He laid the soft cotton open and laughed.

She frowned up at him. “What’s so funny?”

He released her wispy bra’s front clasp with a flick of his fingers. “Only you would wear lace for branding.”

She raised her knees, hugging his lean hips between them. “Ah, but look at the maverick I caught.”

The creek babbled anxiously, echoing her heartbeat, as he peeled back the sheer shells and exposed, for his eyes only, the alabaster perfection of her breasts.

For a burning moment he did nothing more than look his fill. Yielding to her silent yearning
then, he lowered his dark head and drew her dusky nipple into his mouth.

She gave a shuddering cry and gripped his head with both hands, holding it against her. Her back arched off the ground as he circled her and suckled her, using his tongue and teeth and lips to take her higher than she’d ever gone before.

A thousand forgotten feelings swept over Jeannie as Rafe kissed his way across her chest, to claim her other breast. She shuddered with rising excitement when his tongue fluttered back and forth and all around the rosy tip. His fingers, as deft and daring as ever, continued to fondle the swollen crest he’d just aroused.

“Sweet,” he breathed hotly against her highly sensitized skin. And then, as though English couldn’t possibly express his emotions, he murmured,
“Dulce … dulce.”

Oh, and it was sweet, so sweet, to be held and kissed and caressed by the only man who knew her inside out. To hold and kiss and caress him in return …

She slipped off his bandanna and felt his hair fall over her hands. Black silk. She bent her head and touched her lips to his earring. Warm silver. She reached between them and unbuttoned his shirt. Furred strength.

He moaned deeply, more vibration than sound, when her fingers made contact with his turgid nipples. Then his head came back up and he covered her mouth with his, the
velvet rapier of his tongue engaging hers in an erotic duel in which there were no losers, only winners.

Their bodies, joined from lips to hips but still separated by the denim barriers of their jeans, found that wonderful mating rhythm that made the world go around. But after eleven years apart, it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. They needed to know each other in the fullest sense. They needed to know each other in the flesh.

Rafe broke off the kiss and raised his head, staring down at her with naked desire. “I want you, Jeannie.”

“I want you too,” she whispered, looking up at him with a love undimmed by time, untarnished by treachery.

Was it the sighing breeze or the twin rasps of their zippers that breached the stillness of the clearing? Was it the leaf-filtered sunlight or the smoldering gaze of the man that gave the skin she bared such a rosy glow? Was it the spring heat or the long-awaited sight of the woman that caused the breath in his lungs to catch fire?

“You’re even more beautiful than I remembered,” Rafe said, his voice rich and low as he cupped the round globe of her breast, smoothed the silken plane of her stomach, sought the swollen folds beneath the golden curls nesting between her legs.

“So are you.” Jeannie returned the compliment, marveling at the strength and the power of him as she caressed his muscular
back, praised his runner’s buttocks, found the bold proof of his desire for her with a gentle fist and a glad refrain, “So are you.”

Time spiraled in reverse when he rolled her to her back and braced himself above her. The wasted years simply slipped away as she arched her hips to meet the thrust of his, then caught a breath of mingled pleasure and pain.

Rafe was instantly aware of why she tensed. He stopped, ecstatic disbelief flaring in his blue-ribbon eyes as he searched her flushed face. “I thought you and Webb—”

“You thought wrong.” Jeannie’s lips curved in a loving smile as her body conformed to his with a silent entreaty. “Don’t hold anything back. I want all of you.”

All of him was what she got. He was hard and hot and supremely male. And all of herself was what she gave. She was soft and dewy and splendidly female.

They watched each other as he entered her. Kissed each other when they were finally one. Whispered to each other in a mixture of Spanish and English as they moved in unison.

“Jeannie … 
querida
 …”

“Rafe … my love …”

He’d been the first for her, and she for him. Together again, they found the lasting fulfillment they’d thought was forever lost to them.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No. Why?”

Rafe bent his head and kissed away the tears that sparkled on her cheeks. “You’re crying.”

Jeannie reached up and touched his lower lip with her forefinger. “Tears of joy.”

He frowned and nipped her finger with his strong white teeth. “Maybe twice was too much.”

She smiled and snuggled contentedly to his naked length. “No way, Jose.”

They’d loved and laughed and, after rinsing off in the cold, clear creek, they’d loved again. Now they lay with arms and legs entwined, relishing the delicious feeling of skin on skin and the utter rightness of being together again.

But trite as it sounded, all good things had to come to an end. And though neither of them wanted to admit it—not just yet anyway—both of them knew their stolen hour was ticking away without regard for their hearts’ wishes.