ice man Read online

  She didn't push. He'd already given away more than he'd meant to, she knew.

  After a minute he took a quick breath and his pale eyes searched her thin face. "You've lost weight," he remarked abruptly.

  She managed a weak smile. "I started losing meals the day I left the ranch," she confessed, and flushed as she remembered the circumstances.

  "I couldn't eat for the rest of the day," he recalled. He stared at the floor. "I shouldn't have let you go like that, without a word."

  "What could you have said?" she asked. "I felt used..."

  "No!" He was really angry now. "Don't you ever say anything like that to me again. Used! My God!"

  134 MAN OF ICE

  "All right, cheap, then!" she countered, sweeping back an annoying strand of hair. "Isn't that how you wanted me to feel?"

  "No!"

  She glared at him, her lower lip trembling with emotion.

  He made a curt gesture with one big hand and his lips flattened. "Damn." He leaned forward, his head bowed, his hands supporting it as he braced his elbows on his splayed thighs.

  She picked at the bedspread nervously. "You only wanted to see if you were capable with a woman," she muttered. "You said so."

  His hands covered his face and pushed back into his hair. "I had an orgasm," he said roughly.

  She recognized the resentment in the words even though she didn't quite understand their content. "What?"

  He looked up, glared up, at her. "Don't you know what it is?"

  She flushed. "I read books."

  "So do I," he replied, "and until France and then that afternoon, that's the only way I knew what it meant."

  "You're in your mid-thirties," she said pointedly.

  "I'm repressed as hell!" he snapped back. "I never liked losing control, in any way at all with a woman, so I never permitted myself to feel anything... anything like that," he added uncomfortably. His head bent. "I got by on little tastes of pleasure, now and again."

  What she was hearing shocked her. He was admitting, in a roundabout way, that he'd never been completely satisfied by a woman until he'd made love to Barrie.

  "Oh."

  The husky little reply made his head lift. She didn't look like a cat with the cream. She didn't even look smug. She looked...

  "You're embarrassed," he said unexpectedly.

  She averted her eyes. "That's nothing new, with you," she muttered, and blushed even harder.

  Her inhibition made him less irritable, and much less threated. He watched her with open curiosity.

  "Don't stare at me," she grumbled. "I'm not some sort of Victorian exhibit."

  "Aren't you?" He leaned forward, with his arms crossed over his splayed thighs. His wavy gold hair fell roguishly onto his wide forehead, tangled from his restless fingers in it. He hadn't remembered how soft her skin was, how radiant it was at close range. It had the sheen of a pink pearl. He'd bought her a string of them once, and balked at giving them to her. They were still in the safe back in Sheridan.

  '"Did you have one, too?" he asked suddenly.

  Nine

  She didn't know how to answer that. She was intimidated and embarrassed.

  He became more relaxed when he saw her expression. She still hadn't smiled, or acted as if his fall from grace in her arms had made her want to gloat.

  He leaned back and crossed his legs. "Well, well," he murmured, his eyes narrowing. "What a blush. Are you embarrassed?" he added, emphasizing the word with a mocking smile.

  "Yes." She bit her lip. He got up and sat down beside her, his thumb forcing her teeth away from it. His hand spread onto her cheek, gentle and caressing while he studied her pale, pinched face.

  "So am I," he confessed unexpectedly. "But maybe the reason we're embarrassed is because we've never talked about being intimate with each other."

  "You've already said quite enough," she muttered stiffly.

  He let out an odd, amused sound. "Miniskirts," he mused, "silk hose, four boyfriends at a time, low-cut blouses. And it never occurred to me that it was all an act. You little prude."

  Her eyes flashed. "Look who's calling who a prude!!" she raged at him.

  His eyebrows went up. "Who, me?"

  "Yes, you!" She took a shaky breath. "You gave me hell, shamed me, humiliated me, and all because I opened my eyes at the wrong time! I couldn't really see you anyway," she blurted out, "because what I was feeling was so sweet that—" She stopped in midsentence as she realized what she was admitting.

  But if she was embarrassed, he wasn't. His face changed as if by magic, his body became less taut.

  He drew in a quiet breath. "Thank you," he said huskily.

  She didn't recognize the expression on his handsome, darkly tanned face. "What for?"

  His eyes dropped to his hands. "Making the memory bearable."

  "I don't understand."

  He picked at his thumbnail. "I thought you watched because you wanted to enjoy seeing me helpless."

  Tears stung her eyes. She'd always thought of Dawson as invincible, stoic. This man was a stranger, someone who'd known pain and grief and humiliation. She wondered if what he'd let her know about him today was only the tip of the iceberg, if there were other painful memories that went back even farther in his life. Surely it had taken more than her mother's taunts to George Rutherford to make Dawson so bitter about women and his own sexuality.

  Hesitantly, she reached out and touched his hand, lightly, her cold fingers unsteady as she waited to see if she was allowed to touch him.

  138

  Apparently she was. His hand opened, his fingers curled warmly around hers and then linked slowly with them. He turned his head, searching her eyes.

  "Couldn't step on an ant, hmm?" he asked absently, and his eyes softened. "I don't suppose you could. I remember you screaming when you saw a garter snake trapped under the wheelbarrow you were using in the flower beds, and then moving it so the poor thing could escape."

  She liked the way it felt to hold hands with him. "I don't like snakes."

  "I know."

  Her fingers slowly moved against his and she lifted her eyes quickly to make sure that he didn't mind.

  His lips twitched with amusement. "You're not very sure of yourself with me after all these years."

  She smiled briefly. "I'm never sure how you're going to react," she confessed.

  He held her eyes. "Tell me what you felt when we made love in my study."

  She flushed. She tried to look away, but he wouldn't let her avoid him.

  "We've gone too far together for secrets," he said. "We're going to be married. I hurt you when I pulled back. How?"

  She shook her head and dropped her eyes.

  "Talk to me!"

  She grimaced. "I can't!"

  There was a long pause. When she got the courage to look up, he was watching her with an expression she couldn't analyze.

  She felt his hand still holding hers. She looked at it, admiring the long, deeply tanned fingers wrapped in her own. Her hand looked very small in that powerful grasp.

  "Reassure me, then," he said quietly. "I hurt you. But it wasn't all pain, was it?"

  "Oh, no," she said. "There was so much pleasure that I thought I might die of it. I opened my eyes and I saw you. but I felt just barely conscious. Then, you started to draw away and it had been so sweet that I wanted to stay that close to you, so I resisted..." She swallowed. "That's when it started to hurt."

  His breath was audible. "You should have told me what you really wanted."

  "I couldn't. You looked as if you hated me."

  He made a sound deep in his throat. His fingers contracted around hers. "I hated myself," he said roughly. "I've hated myself since we were in France, when I went tax room and all but raped you."

  'It wasn't that," she replied. "I wanted you, too. It was just that I didn't know how."

  "You were a virgin." He brought her hand to his lips and touched it softly with them. "But I wanted you so desperately that
I found excuses to have you."

  He was afraid that he'd injured her because he'd lost control. In fact, he was afraid that he might do it again. She felt warm inside, as if he'd shared something very secret with her. And he had. Certainly his loss of control was part of the problem along with bad memories of his stepmother and how she'd humiliated his father.

  She touched his wavy hair gently. "After I lost... after the baby," she said. "The doctor told me that I should have had a complete gynecological examination before I was intimate with anyone. I was very... intact."

  "I noticed," he muttered. He looked down at her, enjoying the feel of her fingers against his hair. "You said that it hurt when I pulled back, Barrie."

  She flushed. "Dawson, I can't talk about this!"

  He bent and brushed his mouth softly over her forehead. "Yes, you can," he whispered. "Because I have to know." His cheek rested against hers as he spoke, so that she didn't have to look at him. "In the study, just at the last, when I lost control and pushed down, did it hurt you at all, inside?"

  She colored at the memory of how exquisitely he'd lost control. "No."

  "Thank God! I hated your mother because of what she did to my father," he said, and his lean hand brushed back her hair."But that was never your fault. I'm sorry I made you pay for something you didn't do, Barrie," he added bitterly.

  "Why didn't you ever talk to me about my mother and George?"

  "At first because you were so naive about sex. Then, later, I'd built too many walls between us. It was hard to get past them." He drew her hand to his chest and held it there. "I've lived inside myself for most of my adult life. I keep secrets. I share with no one. I've wanted it that way, or I thought I did." His eyes searched hers. "We'll both have to stop running now," he said abruptly. "You can't run from a baby."

  She gaped at him. "Well, I like that!"

  "Yes, you do, don't you?" he asked with a gentle smile. "I like it, too. What were you going to do, go away and invent a fictional husband?"

  She colored. "Stop reading my mind."

  "I wish I could have read it years ago," he returned. "It would have saved us a lot of grief. I still don't know why it never occurred to me that you could become pregnant after that night on the Riviera.''

  "Maybe I wasn't the only one trying to run," she remarked.

  His face closed up. Yes, he had tried to run, tried not to think about a baby at all. Was she rubbing it in? Gloating? Surely she didn't know about his mother, did she? He started to move away, but her hands clung to him, because she knew immediately why he'd withdrawn from her.

  There's a very big difference between teasing and sarcasm,"she reminded him bluntly. "Sarcasm is always meant to hurt. Teasing isn't. I'm not going to live with you if you take offense at everything I say to you."

  His eyebrows went up. "Aren't you assuming a lot?"

  "Not at all. You thought I was making fun of you. I'm not my mother, and you're not your father," she continued firmly. She felt belligerent. "I can't even kill a snake, and you think I could enjoy humiliating you!"

  Put that way, he couldn't, either. Barrie didn't have the killer instinct. She was as gentle as her mother had been cruel. He hadn't given that much thought. Now he had to.

  He sat back down again, his eyes solemn as they searched over her face. "I don't know you at all," he said after a minute. "We've avoided each other for years. As you reminded me once, we've never really talked until the past few weeks."

  "I know that."

  He laughed shortly. "I suppose I'm carrying as many emotional scars as you are."

  "And you don't look as if you have a single one," she replied. Her eyes fixed on him. "Did you give her the silver mouse?"

  He knew at once what she was referring to. He shook his head. "I keep it in the drawer by my bed."

  That was surprising, and it pleased her. She smiled shyly. "I'm glad."

  He didn't return the smile. "I've done a lot of things I regret. Making you look foolish over giving me a birthday present is right at the top of the list. It shamed me, that you cared enough to get something for me, after the way I'd treated you."

  "Coals of fire?"

  "Something like that. Maybe it embarrassed me, too. I never gave you presents, birthday or Christmas."

  "I never expected them."

  He touched her disheveled hair absently. "They're in my closet."

  She frowned. "What's in your closet?"

  "All the presents I bought you and never gave to you."

  Her heart skipped. "What sort of presents?"

  His shoulder lifted and fell. "The emerald necklace you wanted when you were nineteen. The little painting of the ranch the visiting artist did in oils one summer. The Book of Kells reproduction you couldn't afford the year when the traveling European exhibition came through Sheridan. And a few other things."

  She couldn't believe he'd done that for her. "But you never gave them to me!"

  "How could I, after the things I'd said and done?" he asked. "Buying them eased the ache a little. Nothing healed it." He picked up her hand and his thumb smoothed over the emerald ring she was wearing on her engagement finger. "I bought you this set when you left France."

  That was a statement that left her totally breathless. "Why?"

  "Shame. Guilt. I was going to offer you marriage."

  "You never did," she whispered in anguish.

  "Of course I didn't," he said through his teeth. "When I came by your apartment a week after you'd left France, a man answered the door and told me you were in the shower. He was wearing jeans—nothing else, just jeans, and he was sweating."

  She wouldn't have understood that reference once. Now, remembering the dampness of her own body after Dawson's fierce lovemaking, she understood it too well.

  "That was Harvey," she said miserably." He was my landlord's son at the apartment house where I lived back then. He and his brother were building cabinets in the kitchen. They took a break and while they were doing that, I had a quick shower. I'd been helping them..." She passed. "Harvey never said I'd had a visitor!"

  He winced.

  You thought he was my lover," she guessed.

  He nodded. "It seemed fairly obvious at the time. I went away eaten up with jealousy, believing that I'd set you off on a path to moral destruction. I was so disheartened that I flew all the way back to France."

  She could have cried. If Harvey hadn't been there, if she hadn't been in the shower, if, if, if. Her face told its own story.

  You see what I meant, the morning I came to take you to Sheridan with me?" he asked quietly. "All it takes is a missed message, a lost letter, a phone call that doesn't get answered. And lives are destroyed."

  He was still holding her hand, looking at the ring on her finger.

  'You knew that I loved emeralds," she said softly. "Of course I knew." He wasn't admitting how he knew, or why he'd gone to so much trouble to find a wedding set exactly like that one.

  Suddenly she remembered. "I saw a ring like this in a magazine, one of those glossy ones," she recalled. "I left a open on the sofa, to show Corlie, because I loved it so much. That was about the time I left for college."

  "You had on a pink tank top and cutoffs," he recalled. "You were barefoot, your hair was halfway down your back. I stood in the doorway and watched you sprawled on the carpet with that magazine, and I had to get out of the house."

  She searched his eyes. "Why?"

  He gave a short laugh. "Can't you guess? Because the same thing happened that always happened when I get close to you. I got aroused."

  "But you acted as if you couldn't bear the sight of me!'' she blurted.

  "Of course I did! I'd have given you the perfect weapon to use against me if I'd let you know how I felt!" he replied without thinking.

  He really believed that. She could see it in his pale eyes as they searched her face. He'd spent all those long years protecting himself, avoiding intimacy or even affection because he thought of it as a weakness tha
t any woman would exploit. It was no wonder that they called him the "ice man." In so many ways, he was. She wondered if anything would thaw him out. Perhaps the baby would be a start. The baby! With wonder, her hands went absently to her flat stomach.

  The involuntary action brought Dawson out of his unpleasant memories. He followed the motion of her hands and the bitterness left his face.

  He reached out and placed one of his big hands over both of hers. "I'll take care of you this time," he said quietly, "even if it means hiring a hospital staff and keeping you in bed for the full nine months."

  Her hands slid over his and rested there. "I won't lose this one," she said with certainty.

  He made an odd sound and there was a glimmer of real affection in his eyes. "I still can't quite believe it," he said with poignant hesitation.

  "Neither can I. Well, so much for that promotion," she murmured dryly. "I'm not living in Tucson alone."

  He cocked an eyebrow. "You can teach in Sheridan."

  "When he starts school," she agreed.

  He searched her eyes. "He?"

  "I hate dolls," she murmured shyly. "But I love football and baseball and soccer and wrestling."

  He chuckled with genuine amusement. "Chauvinist."

  "I am not. I wouldn't mind a daughter, really. I think Antonia's stepdaughter, Maggie, is precious. I'm sure they're as crazy about her as they are about their new son, Nelson." She shrugged. "Besides, Maggie hates dolls, too. but she loves to read and she knows almost as much about cattle as her dad."

  "I like Antonia," he replied.

  "You can get used to Powell. Can't you?" she coaxed.

  He pursed his lips. "I don't know. Will you make it worth my while?" he murmured with a slow, steady appraisal of her relaxed body.

  She couldn't believe she was hearing that. It was the first time in memory that he'd actually teased her. He even looked rakish, with his disheveled wavy gold hair on his forehead and his pale green eyes affectionate. He was so handsome that he took her breath away, but she'd have loved him if he'd been the ugliest man on earth.

  "I've shocked you," he mused.