The Best Way to Lose (16 page)

“You’re looking very pleased with yourself,” Trace observed while he waited for an opening in the stream of cars.

“I am,” she said with a contented and happy sigh. Her dark eyes were bright with the same feelings when she looked at him. “It was a good day. I suppose you’re glad it’s over.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I enjoyed myself.” A car slowed and made a place for him in the exiting line of vehicles.

“Really?” She was faintly skeptical that he was sincere.

“Yes, really.” Trace smiled. “Especially watching the way you wheeled and bluffed and tried to maneuver the bidding. You’re good at it.”

Pilar turned her face to the rush of wind that blew in through the open window. Almost absently she remembered, “It would have driven Elliot up a wall to spend an entire afternoon attending an auction.”

“Why?”

“Oh … he wanted me to buy everything I bid on, regardless of how high it went.” The tone of a dismissing shrug was in her voice as
she rested an elbow on the sill and combed fingers through her hair in an absent fashion. “It used to drive him crazy when someone topped my bid and I wouldn’t say more.”

“He liked to win,” Trace agreed blandly.

“Yes, but sometimes when you win, you lose,” Pilar stated.

“I’ve been in a few no-win situations, so I know what you’re talking about.” Practically all of the traffic was taking the road that lead to the main highway, but Trace turned in the opposite direction. “Sometimes when there’s no way to win, you have to decide the best way to lose.”

“Where are you going?” Pilar realized he’d turned the wrong way.

“I thought we’d beat the traffic and use one of the back roads.” He looked around the countryside as if seeking a familiar landmark. “It’s been a while since I was here, but I think this road takes us past the Windsor ruins.”

His remark prompted her to make a sweep of the surrounding landscape. A couple of miles farther down the road, they came upon the remains of the once magnificent mansion and Trace slowed the car, finally braking to a stop.

A collection of giant, Corinthian columns, towering four stories into the air, stood forlornly in an empty field. They were left behind to mark the site where the antebellum house had once stood. Like silent sentinels they
stood, twenty-two of the original twenty-nine massive pillars that had once fronted the mansion on four sides.

Underbrush and trees had grown up around them as the land struggled to reclaim what belonged to it. The long, golden rays of a setting sun aged them with a yellow light and stretched their shadows over the ground. Time and the elements had chipped and peeled at the architectural moldings that adorned the lofty stone columns.

“It’s sadly beautiful, isn’t it?” Pilar murmured as she gazed at the imposing yet desolate ruins.

“Shall we go have a closer look?” Trace made the suggestion as he switched off the motor and climbed out of the car.

Pilar was slower to follow his lead, stepping out of the passenger side and hesitating by the door. “It’s all fenced. I don’t think whoever owns it now wants people poking around there.”

“We’ll live dangerously and trespass.” He took her firmly by the hand and half pulled her along with him into the tall grass with his customary disregard for rules. “I’ll pay the fine if we’re caught.”

“You’re impossible.” But she laughed when she said it, caught up in the excitement of actually walking among the massive columns.

The long tangle of grass made walking difficult, especially when she had trouble watching where she was going. Her glance kept
looking up and up at the columns, which seemed to grow bigger and higher the closer they came. Trace climbed partway up the surrounding fence and vaulted the rest of the way, then waited to lift her to the ground when she topped the fence.

The grip of his hands on her waist was firm and strong, effortlessly lowering her to the solidness of the ground. Long after he’d taken them away, Pilar could feel the warm imprint of them. That disturbed edge to her senses was creeping back again.

Together they waded through the underbrush to the square base of the nearest column. Pilar had to crane her neck way back in order to see the ornate carvings at the top, forty-five feet in the air. A hot wind rustled through the ruins, seeming a moaning whisper from the past. There was an eerie splendor to the place that awed and hushed. Pieces of grillwork to an upper-floor balcony were still in place, connecting several of the columns on one side.

“It was destroyed by fire, wasn’t it?” It had been a while since she’d heard the story of the Windsor mansion, so her memory wasn’t clear on how it had happened. Pilar noticed traces of charring in the rubble as they strolled in the looming shadows.

“Yes.” His gaze seemed to narrow in recollection of the tale, and she paused expectantly to listen to it again. “During the Civil War, General Grant refused to burn it, so it survived the great conflict to suffer a more
inglorious fate. At a party, somewhere around 1890 I believe, a guest tossed a smoldering butt of one of those new tailored cigarettes into a pile of wood shavings left behind by carpenters hired to do some remodeling. It burned to the ground in less than an hour.”

T
he wind whipped at her hair, and Pilar shook the strands out of her face. Either her imagination was very vivid or the smell of smoke actually still lingered among the ruins. She leaned backward to rest against the solid base of a tall Corinthian column. Its surface still held the heat of the sun.

Her glance strayed to Trace and found him watching her. As if to conceal it, he shifted his position slightly and looked around at the encircling ruins. Absently he reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette.

“Don’t smoke.” Pilar straightened from the column and laid a hand on his arm to halt his action. “It seems wrong.”

Slowly he took his hand away from his pocket and turned to face her, his gaze
burrowing into her with some fierce kind of need. Pilar drew back from it, not frightened, but hesitant, until she was again leaning against the sun-heated column. Trace followed her, leaning forward to brace a hand on the chiseled base by her head.

“What about us, Pilar?” His fingertips touched the underside of her jaw, lightly stroking it. “Does it seem wrong to you?”

She breathed in and couldn’t breathe out, the tight little pain in her throat throttling off her air. She could only look at him, mute and hurting, without being sure of the cause. Tremors of longing shook her as she stared at the blunt ridges and hollows of his deeply tanned face. Dark lashes hooded the velvet intensity of his eyes, and the careless wind had trailed strands of black hair onto his forehead.

“I have to know.” There was a huskiness in his voice as he relaxed the straightness of his arm and eased himself closer to her. His caressing fingers glided to the curve of her neck while his warm breath flowed over her sensitive facial skin. “I’ve wanted you for a long time, Pilar … from the day I met you at the wedding. I went away but the memory of you went with me.”

His fingers were behind her neck and in her hair. She felt weak and boneless, incapable of movement. The strong, hard feel of his body leaned onto her, warming her flesh with its heat. Her long lashes fluttered downward as his mouth brushed her temple and stayed there, a hairsbreadth away, making her conscious of the movement of his lips when he spoke.

“I daydreamed about you—and night-dreamed, too.” The muffled ache in his low voice throbbed through her. “You’ll never know how many times I’ve made love to you in my mind. I tried to stay away, but it didn’t seem to matter how many times I told myself that you couldn’t belong to me, that it wasn’t right to want you. I couldn’t stop.” He nuzzled her cheek and the corner of an eye, unleashing little shivers to dance over her skin. “Tell me to go away and never come near you again. Tell me it’s wrong. But for God’s sake, tell me something, Pilar!”

The groan in his voice quaked through her and ignited an ache that made thinking impossible. It was all turmoil inside as her senses took over, heightening her awareness of the hard, muscular thighs tautly pressed to her hips and legs.

There was something in his voice that seemed to be urging her to jump from some high place and promising he’d catch her. But the fear was that he wouldn’t catch her and she’d just keep falling. Yet the insistence of his body was there, trying to make her decide to take that leap.

“I’m trying,” was all she could moan.

Her inability to give him an answer, in itself, was an answer. The torment of having his mouth so close and not having his kisses finally ended as he covered her lips with a muffled sound, rent by an agony of longing. The rhythmic, rocking pressure of his mouth prized her lips apart so he could lick at their sensitive insides and tease the quivering tautness of her tongue.

Her flesh and bones seemed to turn into molten wax, all heated and pliant, fitting themselves to the impression of his hard, male shape. Everything was spinning; up and down became as irrelevant as right and wrong. This time Pilar couldn’t pretend that alcohol had removed all her inhibitions to permit her to respond to a man’s advances. She was abandoning herself to her own desires and wants, arousing and being aroused.

His long body pinned her to the stone pedestal as Trace flattened himself against her, as if to keep them from being whirled into some black space. The wildness was growing, reckless urges leading her to the edge. Pilar teetered, wanting to let go, yet not trusting her judgment.

With a twist of her head, she broke free of his kiss and pressed her forehead to his shoulder. Her heart was pounding in her throat, and the hands that had been embracing him became taut little fists of mute resistance.

“Please, let me stop.” She was half-sobbing the demand.

There was an instant of rigidity, a silent rebellion by Trace that any of the onus should be placed on him. Yet something in her air of vulnerability aroused the male instinct to protect.

Relief shuddered rawly through her when he eased the physical pressure of his body, albeit with obvious reluctance. His arms gathered her away from the pedestal and held her with taut gentleness. His hand trembled slightly as it stroked her hair.

For long seconds she let him hold her while she cried silently and inwardly. Through his shirt she could feel the heat of his skin and the heavy thudding of his heart. The smell of him was hot and heady, like a rich wine that had sat in the sun.

“I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this, Pilar.” His mouth moved against the silken texture of her ebony hair. “Wanting you and not having you.”

The comfort of his arms suddenly became a torment. With a jerkiness that seemed at odds with her natural grace, Pilar turned out of them and took a quick step away. Feeling oddly cold without the heat of his body to warm her, she clutched at her arms and hugged them tightly. The hot summer wind whipped at her, lashing long strands of hair to sting her face. Her eyes smarted with tears but she didn’t cry.

There was a faint sound behind her. She sucked in her breath at the light touch of his hands on her shoulders. Tactile and restless, they traveled down her arms and slipped onto
the front of her taut stomach. The outline of his body began to make its impression down the length of her spine and her tensed bottom.

“I don’t know which is worse, Pilar.” He rubbed his chin and jaw against her hair. “Being away from you or being near you. Both of them are hell.”

“Don’t say any more,” she protested on a taut whisper. “Don’t make it impossible for me to—” Her mind seemed to go blank, unable to find the words to finish the sentence as his hands slid under her crossed arms to cup the underswell of her breasts.

“To what? To be with me?” There was a roughness to his low voice, a faint note of derision that she hadn’t realized it was already impossible.

Her fingers pulled at his wrists to tug his hands from their evocative possession of her breasts. “Don’t.” She moved out of his destroying hold and swung around to eye him warily while she ached inside. “You touch me and it’s all confusion.”

“Is that bad?” There was something hungry and needing about the way he looked at her and it nearly shoved her back into his arms.

All that want was on a chain and the links were stretching. Yet Pilar couldn’t answer with any certainty in her heart. Between them lay the long shadow of a towering column, a symbol of something from the past that was over and dead.

An anger seemed to wash through him,
transposing that stillness into a restless energy that pushed him into movement and directed his reaching strides away from her. “You don’t have to say anything,” he muttered testily. “It’s plain what you think of me, and God knows I never claimed my morals were above reproach.” In two more strides he was at the fence. The wires groaned as he made a quick climb to the top and vaulted to the opposite side, then turned to impatiently eye her. “Come on. Let’s get back to the car.”

Some invisible force seemed to draw her slowly to the fence where he waited. Pilar searched the bronzed tautness of his face, aware of the glittering reluctance of his gray eyes to meet her look. Her fingers curled onto the barbed wire, but she made no effort to climb it.

“You’re wrong, Trace,” she said quietly.

“About what?” he challenged in a short, stiff voice.

“My opinion of you,” she replied. There was a slow movement of her head that swayed it from side to side. “Whatever I may have thought about you before, it’s changed. Sometimes I wonder if you don’t deliberately act tough and uncaring so others don’t discover how strong and sensitive you are.”

“Don’t go making romantic images of me in your mind,” Trace warned tersely. “I’m not a dashing hero. You’re mixing me up with my father.”

“Am I?” Pilar came back with a calm,
steady response. “Earlier … you stopped. You didn’t want to—you didn’t have to—but you did.”

He stepped closer to the barrier of barbed wire that separated them. It would have been a simple matter to reach through and touch him, but the gray smolder in his eyes kept her motionless.