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  He reacted, physically, without a thought, pressing into her, feeling her give way until she couldn’t give way any more. He caught the flare of panic in her eyes, and to save her the added pain of anticipation, he thrust.

  It was heaven, it was coming home. He held himself still, kissing her wantonly to keep from doing anything else, giving her time to adjust. But the time he stole for gallantry was short-lived. Soon his body moved, slowly, with deliberation, then moved again, settling into a potently seductive rhythm. He couldn’t help himself. But he could help her, and he did, touching her in well-taught ways, until between the heat and the rhythm and the sheer pleasure of friction, the girl he loved became a woman in his arms, her sweet gasps echoing in his ears, his name on her lips.

  The tight, wet heat of her pulsing around him tore through him, compelling him to thrust deeper, thrust harder. The sounds of her sent him surging upward, chasing her release with the building intensity of his own. The scent of her, female, sweet, and musky, the taste she’d left on his lips, infused his senses, imprinted her indelibly on all of his body.

  Climaxing amidst such wonder humbled and exalted him, left him spent and weakened, yet immeasurably stronger, for now she was his.

  Sarah.

  He gathered her in his arms and held her, kissing her face and listening to her words of love, until with a naturalness he’d expected, he was hard and ready for her again.

  Sarah felt him rocking against her, felt his kisses change from sweet to serious, and she welcomed him to her once more. She was sore and achy, but he had her swollen with need, and she wasn’t willing to miss even a single chance at the heaven she’d found when he was deep inside her, filling her with his body, with his needs, with his love.

  The boy-turned-man was sweet passion incarnate in her arms, giving her everything with his shameless mouth and powerful young body. She was enough of a woman to recognize the gift of her own pleasure, and enough in love with him to want to return the gift in any way she could.

  Afternoon slipped to dusk, stealing sunlight from the sky while they sought the depths of sensation and satiation within each other. She caressed him everywhere with her tongue, gently biting the soft skin of his inner thigh, sweetly ministering where he begged for her touch.

  When the coolness of evening began its steady intrusion into their sensual idyll, they got half dressed and lay down to watch the last shades of sunset fade from the sky. Wrapped in the warmth of each other’s arms, they accepted what they had become: lovers and mates, the keen edge of excitement on each other’s lives, two people sharing a haven of dreams and love.

  “Sarah.” He whispered her name like an invocation, brushing his face against the side of her neck, inhaling the fragrance of their lovemaking and the sweet melange of scents that were uniquely hers. He wasn’t going anywhere. He couldn’t leave her, not after this. It would take everything he had just to leave her this night.

  He opened his mouth in a soft kiss on her skin. How long, he wondered, would it take to get enough of her? And was it a love even deeper than he’d realized that now made him want to throw roses at her feet? Dark red roses, full-blown and heavy with perfume, petals lush and open, the way she’d been for him. And pink roses, budded and infinitely fragile, with all the innocence she’d given.

  It had to be the overwhelming love he felt, he decided between gentle kisses and deep breaths of bone-deep satisfaction. Where else would a twenty-year-old cowboy from Rock Creek, Wyoming, get a vision of such fanciful eroticism? He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember ever thinking about flowers before, at least not in conjunction with a woman’s body—and he’d done his share of thinking about women’s bodies.

  He bent his head to kiss her again, but got no further than the barest touch of his mouth on hers when his attention was arrested by a flash of light on the far wall. He rolled over on one elbow and saw the light again, flickering through the cracks in the barn wallboards.

  “Get dressed, Sarah. Someone’s coming.” He wasn’t too worried. It was probably Daniel. He shrugged into his shirt and started doing up the snaps, then stopped to do up her buttons instead, smiling and teasing her with quick kisses.

  “Colt, don’t,” she said between laughs as she realized that for every button he was fastening, he was unbuttoning another. “We’ll never get anywhere with you—”

  Her words were cut short by the crashing open of the barn door. The glare of truck headlights poured in on the bottom floor, illuminating the blocked shadows of bales of hay, and a voice rang out in a bellow of rage.

  “Sarah!”

  Colt’s blood ran cold, and he felt Sarah turn to ice beneath his hands. They were both frozen in fear, but for Colt, the fear was quickly replaced by rage. His mother’s caller had come to call on him.

  Paralysis crawled to the tips of Sarah’s fingers and turned her muscles to lead. Her breath wouldn’t come. Heavy footsteps sounded in the dirt below, and her father hollered again.

  “Sarah!”

  She wanted to flee, but there was no place to go. With even more urgency, she wanted Colt to run. Her throat was tight, though, too tight to force his name through. It was too late, anyway, for he was already moving down the ladder, going only a couple of steps before jumping to the ground to face his adversary.

  She scrambled after him, panicked, sobs welling in her throat and almost choking her. She knew her father, too well. She’d seen him fight with other men. It was practically a Friday night family tradition, going to a bar and sitting quiet in a corner while her dad got drunk and mean and her mom got worried and scared.

  “Where’s my girl, boy? What have you done with her?”

  Sarah heard her father locate Colt in the shadows below the loft, his voice deathly calm. Her foot stilled on the top rung.

  “She’s not yours anymore, Bull. She’s mine.” His voice cut through the tension like the edge of a blade.

  Sarah gripped the poles of the ladder, squeezing her eyes shut to fight her sudden anger at Colt. Didn’t he know he was provoking a rattler? Her father could strike so fast, lash out and hurt with a speed what was as frightening as the pain he delivered—and that was without the bullwhip that had earned him his name.

  “Dad . . .” She drew in a shallow breath. “I’m up here. I’m coming down.”

  The scraping noise of her boots touch-tapping and slipping off the wooden rungs of the ladder was the only sound in the barn. She reached the dirt floor and cast a quick glance at Colt, then had to look away before she buckled under the accusations in his eyes. He was wrong. She wasn’t choosing sides. She was choosing to save him. She knew there was no saving herself from her father’s anger.

  A fresh surge of fear almost made her run to Colt and cling to him. Then her courage returned. Her father had never actually hit her, not like he did her mother. He threatened and yelled. He’d back her into a corner and make her cower, but he had never landed a blow, just as he never laid a hand on his young sons.

  She doubted if he’d be as considerate or “gentle” with Colt, especially if Colt insisted on standing up to him. Nothing made him angrier than a show of backbone when he was in a beating mood, and Colt had more backbone than most. And less sense, if he thought he could take on her father.

  “Colt, go home.” She made her own stand, but it was as if she were invisible to the two men. Neither of them acknowledged her shakily given command.

  “The boy and I are going to have a talk,” her father said.

  “Damn straight.” If possible, Colt’s voice was even angrier than her father’s.

  Sarah looked at her father. He wasn’t a big man, but he was hard and uncompromising. His hands were used to tightening into fists. Gray touched his hair, but it had come early. He wasn’t old, not nearly old enough to give Colt an age advantage. Quite the contrary. Sarah thought any age advantage went to her father, along with any experience advantage. He’d been brawling in bars since before she was born. Colt had never been in a bar or a brawl in his
life, not as far as she knew.

  The sound of another car approaching had all three of them glancing toward the door.

  “That’ll be your uncle,” Bull said. “Get, girl.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Lord help her, she prayed, her suddenly parched lips moving soundlessly. There she was, showing her backbone. Her stomach knotted up, and a stitch grew in her side. Her palms started to sweat. She hated herself for being such a coward, “Not without Colt.”

  A door slammed outside.

  “Toby!” her father barked. “Get in here and get Sarah out!”

  Her uncle appeared in the barn door, looking like he wished he was anywhere else on the planet besides standing in that barn, under the perpetual, unforgiving thumb of his older brother.

  “Come on, Sarah. Let’s go.” Toby started toward her, and she took a step back. He stopped, meeting her gaze with steady but hopeless determination. Colt moved, too, and her father intercepted him, blocking the younger man’s way in a standoff.

  She was cornered. She was scared. Her gaze darted between the three men, and in the split second that she took her eyes off her uncle, he grabbed her. She struggled against his encircling arms, and they tightened, lifting her off the ground.

  “Hush, child,” he said quietly in her ear, sliding his hand over her mouth to silence the scream building in her throat. “Hollering is only going to get him riled.”

  He hauled her out into the night, despite her fighting and squirming. She stared wildly back at the barn and the twin pools of light cocooning Colt and her father against the dark shadows.

  From inside the barn, Colt heard the car pull away. He allowed himself a quick glance into the night to confirm her leaving. Bull went to his truck, and Colt immediately returned his attention to the older man, watching him carefully. He was glad Sarah was gone. What needed to be said between her father and him didn’t need to be heard by her. Bull Brooks could talk all night long and never convince him of a damn thing, but Colt wasn’t leaving until Bull understood that he should stay away from his mother. And that Sarah was his, no compromises.

  A strange flickering movement next to the older man caught Colt’s eye, and he realized Bull had no intention of talking. He’d pulled something off the gun rack in his truck, and it was snaking across the ground, through the dirt and the chaff, looking alive and deadly.

  Colt swore under his breath, filling the harsh syllable with equal measures of fear and disbelief. Then a snapping crack resounded through the air, and pain sliced across his skin.

  Three

  Ten years later…

  A quartet of quavering female voices rose and fell with the plaintive phrases of a hymn, matching the changeable weather blowing past the high church windows. A thunderstorm was building up on the plains, biding its time before rolling over Rock Creek in a torrent of sound and glory.

  A thunderstorm rolling over Rock Creek. Sarah had expected it. She’d been expecting it for days, ever since Amanda Haines had succumbed to a weak heart. Colt was coming home, ten years too late to make a damn bit of difference, ten years too late for her to care.

  But God, how she hurt for him.

  She smoothed her fingers over the worn white-leather cover of her Bible, feeling the pain and loss of the past, remembering the nights she’d soaked the Bible’s pages with her grief, her unanswered prayers. He shouldn’t have left the way he did, without a word, after stealing every ounce of love she had in her heart.

  She knew where he’d gone: to his uncle in California. She knew what he’d done: joined the Navy. She knew what he’d become: part of a SEAL team, the best. But she’d heard none of it from him. He lived in bits and pieces of gossip, in a decade of stray comments voiced in Atlas Drugs.

  Her hand slipped to the black poly-cotton of her simple homemade dress. Wasn’t she a sight? Sitting in church, mourning the death of her father’s mistress. Or did people even use that word anymore? She didn’t know. Rock Creek wasn’t exactly on the cutting edge of society’s mores, and she seldom went anywhere else, not that any of it mattered. She’d liked Amanda Haines. Her parents had divorced years ago. Her mother had taken her young sons and found a man who knew how to love without hitting. Bull and Amanda had seen each other on and off through the years, and one day it had struck Sarah like a bolt of lightning—what had broken Colt’s heart that day so many years ago.

  She’d hated her father for a long time after that, until she’d grown tired of expending her energy on his worthless hide. He still owned every damn thing in town, and she paid him her rent on the drugstore. To the best of her ability, she limited their relationship to that. Her mother lived close enough to keep her from feeling like an orphan, if such a feeling was possible for a grown woman—which, of course, it was.

  She sighed and opened her hymnal, then rose to sing with the rest of the congregation. Most everyone had turned out for Amanda Haines’s funeral, which was only right. The additional voices lifted the singing to new heights, providing volume and steadiness. Sarah let the song sweep her along, her thoughts floating between catching the right note and riding it to the end, and pictures of Amanda, whose greatest contribution to Sarah’s life had been not looking like her son. She couldn’t have borne that, facing those eyes like the Wyoming sky across the prescription counter. For she’d been right: Her greatest fear in making love to Colt had been not having him again. She’d prayed for his return and been denied. She’d prayed for his child and had none. She’d known a few other men, much to her disappointment. He’d ruined her, not by stealing her virginity, but by stealing her trust. It had left her incomplete and unable to love another.

  Damn him. She wasn’t ready for him to return. Ten years wasn’t nearly long enough.

  She lifted her voice to meet the chorus and in mid-note stopped cold. Premonition warned her a second before thunder cracked and tore across the sky, shaking the walls. Her heart beat faster, too much faster, while everyone kept on singing as if nothing had happened. Her breath caught in her throat as the first murmurs reached her ears from the back of the church.

  So sorry. So sorry . . . too long . . . anything you need. Good to see you . . . bad circumstances.

  Lightning flashed close, throwing stark illumination into the sanctuary and supercharging the air into another explosion of sound.

  Welcome home . . . so sad . . . a good woman. Gonna miss her . . . the whole town . . . you know. So sorry . . . so sorry, Colton.

  He was there, moving closer with each hushed sound, and she couldn’t have turned around to save her life. It was too much to expect, her having to face him ever.

  She gripped the hymnal, tiny tendons straining all the way up the back of her hand. Thunderheads full of nature’s promised glory rolled over Rock Creek in a wash of water, driving rain against the dust and the clapboard church as he stopped right next to her in the aisle.

  His shoes were black and shiny like pools of liquid wax, mesmerizing. With a carefully calibrated lift of her lashes she followed a knife-edge crease of navy-blue twill up long, rigid legs. A broad hand held the white hat of a Navy officer by his side. The size of him had increased with age. His shoulders went on forever, broad and muscular beneath his tailored dress uniform. He was so stiff, all his muscles frozen at attention. When her gaze reached the pulse point in his neck, she got her first remembrance of the boy she used to know. There the lifeblood beat heavy and strong and vital. She dared go no farther. Her nerves were fraying a thread at a time, right down to the fibers; her heart was still beating too fast.

  He turned his attention to her at that moment, his chin lining up with her gaze, and the compelling force of him drew her on.

  The hymn swirled around them, praising the Lord for His mercies. A hundred bodies filled the small church, a hundred voices, and a hundred other thoughts. Nothing touched her except Colt—the squared line of his jaw, so much more angular than it had been, the hardness around his mouth and the scar on his chin, neither of which had been present w
hen she’d loved him. His nose was more familiar, the short slope and slight uptilt on the end, but his whole countenance had been chiseled by the years, honed down to the basics of leanness and strength.

  Her final error proved fatal: the lifting of her gaze to his eyes. The Wyoming sky had never been bluer, or so empty. No flicker of memory cast a shadow on his eyes. He was Medusa, turning her to stone.

  She nodded, her own body suddenly as stiff as a Navy lieutenant at attention in his dress uniform, and she turned back to her hymnal, picking up the song on the second refrain. She’d known she wasn’t ready, and he’d proved the fact beautifully. How awful.

  He moved on, joining his relatives in the first pew. But he didn’t blend in. Nothing about him resembled either the citizens of Rock Creek or his own flesh and blood. None of them had his warrior’s elegance, the discipline that kept his body straight and tall, even with his head bowed in prayer.

  Funny, she thought, how slowly time was suddenly passing. For an eternity, she studied his broad back and the neatly trimmed hair at the nape of his neck. His hair was darker, not as silvery but more golden, darkly golden. He tilted his head to one side, toward his paternal grandmother, and Sarah’s brows instantly knitted. Her pulse picked up with a simultaneous infusion of adrenaline.

  Good Lord, what had happened to him? Had someone tried to slit his throat and missed? She stared and tried not to imagine how he’d gotten the scar that sliced across the side of his neck. When he dipped his head lower to whisper something to his grandmother, she realized it continued on to his nape. But when he straightened, the white line cutting across his skin disappeared beneath his starched collar.

  Her heart suddenly beat more heavily in her chest. She was even less ready than she’d imagined, less ready than he’d proved. Fortunately, lots of people cried at funerals, and no one would guess her tears were provoked by anything other than an appropriate grief. She knew, though, and the truth horrified her. Crying for him at this late date, after the empty look he’d given her. She obviously had emotions that had never heard the word pride.