Lacy

Children had been another problem. She’d worked up enough nerve to approach Coleman shortly after their marriage and ask him if he wanted them. She’d thought in her innocence that a child might make their relationship easier. His face had gone a horrible pale shade, and he’d said things to her that she still had trouble accepting. No, he’d told her, he didn’t want children. Not with a pampered little rich girl like Lacy. And after a few more insulting words, he’d stormed off in a black temper. She’d never had the nerve to ask him a second time. In her heart, she’d hoped that she might become pregnant after that uncomfortable night in his bed, but it hadn’t happened. Maybe it was just as well, because Cole would let no one close to him. She’d tried everything except being herself. It was hard to be herself around Cole, because he inhibited her so much. She wanted to play with him and tease him and make him laugh. She wanted to make him young, because he’d never been that. He’d been a man ever since she’d known him, a solitary, lonely figure with steel in his makeup—even at the age of nineteen—which he’d been when Lacy came to live with the Whitehalls.

In the other room, the radio was giving out New Orleans jazz, and the new Charleston dance was being demonstrated by two visitors whom Lacy didn’t know. There were a lot of people in the house that she didn’t know. What did it matter? They filled the empty rooms.

Lacy walked down the hall, her knee-length gray dress clinging softly to the slender lines of her body, down her hose-clad legs, to her buckled high heels. She felt restless again, hungry. She remembered the hardness of Cole’s mouth, the aching sweetness of his kiss that left her lips softly swollen. All that exquisite passion they’d shared the morning in the barn, and it had led to…that. She shivered. Surely women only allowed men such license with their bodies to get children.

Bess, one of her married friends, had told her that sex was the most exquisite experience in her life. “Mahhhhhvelous,” she’d said, laughing, her eyes full of the love she shared with her husband of five years. Lacy had been curious, despite her bad experience, to find out if intimacy could be pleasurable. But she wasn’t quite curious enough to let George Simon have what he’d been lusting after for the past few weeks. George was a sweet man, a good friend. But the thought of his greedy hands on her body was somehow offensive. It was a kind of sacrilege to think of letting anyone but Cole touch her that way.

What utter rot, she thought, with a harsh laugh. Ridiculous to moon over a man who didn’t love her. But worshipping him was such a habit. And she did. She loved everything about him, from the way he sat his horse to the arrogant tilt of his dark head, to the way his skin caught the light and burned like bronze. He wasn’t terribly good to look at, except to Lacy, but he had a masculinity that set her teeth on edge, that made her body go hot and throbbing. Just to touch him could make her tremble.

She sighed shakily as her gray eyes swept the hall. Would he come? Her heart pounded beneath her bodice. Just to see him, she thought, just to lay eyes on him once more, would be heaven. But it was already eleven o’clock, and Cole was usually in bed by nine so that he could be up at the crack of dawn. She turned back toward the living room with a heart like lead. No, he wasn’t coming tonight. It had been a foolish hope.

She went back to her guests, laughing, drinking more and more gin. The police made raids once in a while, but Lacy didn’t care if they came and found the gin. She might go to jail, and Coleman might come and bail her out. Then he might bring her home, and be so inflamed by smoldering passion that he’d do to her what Rudolph Valentino, as the sheik, had done to Agnes Ayres in that wildly passionate film The Sheik. Her heart ran away. She’d gone wild over that movie two years ago and had learned to do the tango soon after Valentino’s Blood and Sand film was released. But, of course, no one in her circle would do it like Valentino.

She took another sip of gin, lost in her thoughts. She jumped as a hand lightly touched her shoulder. She looked up, wide-spaced eyes huge in her face, and relaxed a little when she saw George Simon behind her.

“You startled me,” she said in her calm, very Southern drawl.

“Sorry,” he said, grinning. Well, his teeth were perfect, even if he was slightly balding and overweight. “I just thought you might like to know that you have a visitor.”

She frowned. It was midnight, and despite the fact that the huge Victorian house was overrun with people, it was unusual for anyone to come calling so late. And then she remembered. Cole!

“Male or female?” she asked nervously.

“Definitely male,” George said, without smiling. “He looks like the portrait over the living room mantel. That’s where I left him, staring at it.”

Lacy spilled the drink down the front of the stylishly wispy dress and mopped frantically at it with a handkerchief. “Oh, damn,” she said curtly. “Well, I’ll worry about that later. He’s in the living room?”

“Say, kid…You’re like flour in the face. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. Everything, she thought as she turned and walked stiffly down the long hall, dimly lit by sconces, her wide-heeled shoes beating a dainty tattoo on the bare, polished wood floors as she walked.

She hesitated at the doorway, her eyes huge in her face, her hand poised on the doorknob. She knew already who was going to be waiting for her. She knew by George’s description, but even more by that smell, that pungent smoke that teased her nose even as she opened the door and saw him.

Coleman Whitehall spun on his booted heel with the precision of an athlete. Which he was, of course; ranch work demanded that kind of muscle. His dark eyes narrowed as he looked at Lacy, blazing out of a face like leather under hair as dark as her own. His skin was bronzed, a legacy from the Comanche grandfather who’d instilled pure steel in his makeup and taught him that emotion was a plague to be avoided at all costs.

He was wearing work clothes. Jeans and boots, with wide, flaring leather chaps and a vest over his blue-patterned shirt, leather wristbands on the cuffs. A string hung out of the pocket, which would be the tobacco pouch he always carried, along with a small, flat packet of papers to roll cigarettes from. His forehead was oddly pale as he watched her, his wide-brimmed hat tossed carelessly onto an elegant Victorian wing chair. He lifted his square chin and stared at her with unblinking, unforgiving eyes, the very picture of a Texas cattleman with his weather-beaten face and unyielding pride and blatant arrogance.

She closed the door and moved forward. He didn’t frighten her. He never had, really, although he towered over her like a lean, taciturn giant. He’d hardly smiled in the years she’d lived under his roof. She wondered if he ever had as a boy. She loved him. But love was something he didn’t need. Love. And Lacy. He could do very well without either, and he’d proven it over the past eight lonely months.

“Hello, Cole,” she said softly.

He lifted the smoking cigarette to thin, firm lips that held a faintly mocking smile. “Hello, yourself, kiddo. You look prosperous enough,” he mused, his eyes narrow on her short dark hair in its bob, her face with its outrageously dark lip rouge, her blue eyes quiet and abnormally bright as she stood before him, very trendy in her soft gray dress that clung to her slender figure and displayed her long, elegant legs with scandalous efficiency.

She didn’t avoid his stare. Her eyes wandered over his face like loving hands, seeing the new lines, the rough edges. He was twenty-eight now, but he’d aged in these months they’d been apart. The war had aged him. Marriage hadn’t seemed to help.

“I’m doing very well, thanks,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. It was hard to handle this meeting, with the memory of her abrupt departure—and the reason for it—still between them. He seemed unperturbed by it, but her knees felt weak. “What brings you to San Antonio in the middle of the night?”

“I’ve been trying to sell cattle. Winter’s coming on. Feed’s getting hard to come by.” He studied her blatantly, but there was no feeling in his dark eyes. There was nothing at all.

She moved closer, inhaling the masculine smell of him, the scents of tobacco and leather that had become so familiar. She touched his sleeve gently, loving the warmth of him under it, only to have him jerk away from her and walk back toward the fireplace.

Her hand felt odd, extended like that. She pulled it back to her side with a wistful, bitter little smile. He still didn’t like her to touch him, after all this time. He never had. He took, but he never gave. Lacy wasn’t sure that he knew how to give.

“How is your mother?” she asked.

“She’s fine.”

“And Katy and Bennett?”

“My sister and brother are fine, too.”

She studied his long, lean back, watching him stare at his likeness above the mantel. She’d had it painted soon after she’d left Spanish Flats, and it was his mirror image. Dark, brooding, with eyes that followed her everywhere she went. He was wearing work clothes in the portrait, with a red bandanna at his throat and a white Stetson atop his dark, straight hair. She loved the portrait. She loved the man.

“What’s that in aid of?” he asked insolently, gesturing up at it. He turned, pinning her with his dark gaze. “For show? To let everyone know what a devoted little wife you are?”

She smiled sadly. “Are we going to have that argument again? I’m not suited to the ranch. You’ve been telling me that since the day I stepped on the place for the first time. I’m—how did you put it?—too genteel.” That was a lie. She was well suited, and she loved it. Her eyes glared at him. “But we both know why I left Spanish Flats, Cole.”

His eyes flashed, and a dark stain of color washed over his high cheekbones. He averted his eyes.

Oh, damn, Lacy thought miserably. My tongue will be the death of me. She laced her hands together. “Anyway, you never knew I was around,” she said stiffly. “Your day-to-day indifference finally chased me away.”

“What did you expect me to do?” he asked curtly. “Sit around and worship you? My ranch is in trouble, teetering on a precipice in this damned slow agricultural market. I’m too busy trying to support my family to dance attendance on a bored society girl.” He stared at her with cold, dark eyes. “That lounge lizard who led me in here seems to think you’re his private stock. Why?”

That sounded like jealousy, and her heart jumped, but she kept her features calm. “George is my friend. He’d like to marry me.”

“You’ve got a husband. Does he know?”

“No,” she said carelessly. He was getting on her nerves now. She went to the decanter and poured herself a china cup of gin, lacing it with water. She turned back defiantly and sipped her gin, knowing he’d recognize the smell. He did; she saw it in his disapproving stare. She grinned at him impishly over the rim of the delicate china cup. “Why don’t you go and tell him?”

“You should have already,” he said, his voice deep and smooth.

“What for?” she asked innocently. “To make him jealous?”

She could see the control he was exercising, and it excited her. Pushing Cole had always excited her.

“Lead him on,” he dared, “and I’ll kill him.”

Now that was pure possession, and it irritated her. He didn’t want her, but he wasn’t going to let anyone else have her. His flashing dark eyes were telling her so.

“You probably would, you wild man.” She drew back, lifting her chin to glare up at him, unafraid. “Well, let me tell you something, Coleman Whitehall. It’s a pleasant change to be admired and sought after by someone after being ignored by you!”

He stared at her with an odd expression. Almost amusement. “Where’s that temper been all these years?” he taunted. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“Oh, I’ve discovered lots of bad habits since I got away from you,” she told him. “I’ve decided that I like being myself. Don’t you like being disagreed with? God knows, everybody at the ranch is terrified of you!”

“Not you, I gather,” he drawled, taking a last draw from his cigarette.

“Never me.” She sipped some more gin, feeling reckless. “I’m doing great without you. I have a big, fancy house, and beautiful clothes, and lots of friends!”