Man Of Ice

She took a step toward the living room. “Yes.”

There was a silence, filled by merry voices and the clink of ice in glasses.

“If I ask you something, point-blank, will you answer me?” he asked abruptly.

She turned, her eyes wide, questioning. “That depends on what it is. If you won’t answer personal questions, I don’t see why I should.”

His eyes narrowed. “Perhaps not.”

She grimaced. “All right. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know,” he said quietly, “how many men you’ve really had since me.”

She almost gasped at the audacity of the question.

His eyes slid down her body and back up again, and they were still calculating, the way they’d been all evening. “You dress like a femme fatale. I can’t remember the last time I saw you so uncovered. You flirt and tease, but it’s all show, it’s all on the surface.” He scowled. “Barrie…”

She flushed. “Stop looking into my mind! I hated it when I was in my teens and I hate it now!”

He nodded slowly. “It was always like that. I even knew what you were thinking. It was a rare kind of rapport. Somewhere along the way, we lost it.”

“You smothered it,” she said correcting. He smiled coolly. “I didn’t like having you inside my head.”

“Which works both ways,” she agreed.

He reached out and touched her cheek lightly, his fingers lingering against the silky soft skin. She didn’t move away. That was a first.

“Come here, Barrie,” he invited, and this time he didn’t smile. His eyes held hers, hypnotized her, beckoned her.

She felt her legs moving when she hadn’t meant to let them. She looked up at him with an expression that wasn’t even recognizable.

“Now,” he said softly, touching her mouth. “Tell me the truth.”

She started to clamp down on her lower lip, and his thumb prevented her. It smoothed over her soft lower lip, exploring under the surface, inside where the flesh was moist and vulnerable. She jerked back from him.

“Tell me.” His eyes were relentless. She couldn’t escape. He was too close.

“I…couldn’t, with anyone else,” she whispered huskily. “I was afraid.”

The years of bitterness, of blaming her for what he thought he’d made of her were based on a lie. All the guilt and shame when he heard about her followers, when he saw her with other men—he knew the truth now. He’d destroyed her as a woman. He’d crippled her sexually. And just because, like his father, he’d lost control of himself. He hadn’t known what she’d suffered until a week ago.

He couldn’t tell her that he’d wrangled this invitation from John because he needed an excuse to see her. He hadn’t realized in all the long years how badly he’d damaged her. Her camouflage had been so good. Now that he did know, it was unbelievably painful.

“Dear God,” he said under his breath.

His hand fell away from her cheek. He looked older, suddenly, and there was no mockery in his face now.

“Surprised?” she taunted unsteadily. “Shocked? You’ve always wanted to think the worst of me. Even that afternoon at the beach, before it…before it happened, you thought I just wanted to show off my body.”

He didn’t blink. His eyes searched hers. “The only eyes you wanted on your body were mine,” he said in a dead voice. “I knew it. I wouldn’t admit it, that’s all.”

She laughed coldly. “You said plenty,” she reminded him. “That I was a tramp, that I was so hot I couldn’t—”

His thumb stopped the words and his eyes closed briefly. “You might not realize it, but you aren’t the only one who paid dearly for what happened that night,” he said after a minute.

“Don’t tell me you were sorry, or that you felt guilty,” she chided. “You don’t have a heart, Dawson. I don’t think you’re even human!”

He laughed faintly. “I have doubts about that myself these days,” he said evenly.

She was shaking with fury, the past impinging on the present as she struggled with wounding memories. “I loved you!” she said brokenly.

“Dear God, don’t you think I know?!” he demanded, and his eyes, for that instant, were terrible to look into.

She went white, paper white. Beside her skirt, her hands clenched. She wanted to throw herself at him and hit him and kick him, to hurt him as he’d hurt her.

But slowly, as she remembered where they were, she forced herself to calm down. “This isn’t the time or the place.” She bit off the words. Her voice shook with emotion.

He stuck his hands into his pockets and looked down at her. “Come to Wyoming with me. It’s time you got it all out of your system. You’ve been hurt enough for something that was never your fault to begin with.”

The words were surprising. He was different, somehow, and she didn’t understand why. Even the antagonism when he saw her had been halfhearted, as if he was only sniping at her out of habit. Now, he wasn’t especially dangerous at all. But she didn’t, couldn’t, trust him. There had to be more to his determination to get her to Wyoming than as a chaperone.

“I’ll think about it,” she said shortly. “But I won’t decide tonight. I’m not sure I want to go back to Sheridan, even to save my inheritance.”

He started to argue, but the strain of the past few minutes had started to show in her face. He hated seeing the brightness gone from it. He shrugged. “All right. Think it over.”

She drew in a steadying breath and walked past him into the living room. And for the rest of the evening, she was the life and soul of the party. Not that Dawson noticed. A couple of minutes after she left him in the hall, he went out the door and drove back to his hotel. Alone.

Two

IT WAS a boring Saturday. Barrie had already done the laundry and gone to the grocery store. She had a date, but she’d canceled it. Somehow, one more outing with a man she didn’t care about was more than she could bear. No one was ever going to measure up to Dawson, anyway, as much as she’d like to pretend it would happen. He owned her, as surely as he owned half a dozen ranches and a veritable fleet of cars, even if he didn’t want her.

She’d given up hoping for miracles, and after last night, it was obvious that the dislike he’d had for her since her fifteenth birthday wasn’t going to diminish. Even her one memory of him as a lover was nothing she wanted to remember. He’d hurt her, and afterward, he’d accused her of being a wanton who’d teased him into seducing her. He could be kind to the people he liked, but he’d never liked Barrie or her mother. They’d been the outsiders, the interlopers, in the Rutherford family. Barrie’s mother had married his father, and Dawson had hated them both from the moment he laid eyes on them.

Eleven years later, after the deaths of both their parents, nothing had changed except that Barrie had learned self-preservation. She’d avoided Dawson like the plague, until last night, when she’d betrayed everything to him in that burst of anger. She was embarrassed and ashamed this morning to have given herself away so completely. Her one hope was that he was already on his way back to Sheridan, and that she wouldn’t have to see him again until the incident was forgotten, until these newest wounds he’d inflicted were healed.

She’d just finished mopping the kitchen floor in her bare feet and had put the mop out on the small balcony of her apartment to dry when the doorbell rang.

It was almost lunchtime and she was hungry, having spent her morning working. She hoped it wasn’t the man she’d turned down for a date that evening, trying to convince her to change her mind.

Her wavy black hair lay in disheveled glory down her back. It was her one good feature, along with her green eyes. Her mouth was shaped like a bow and her nose was straight, but she wasn’t conventionally pretty, although she had a magnificent figure. She was dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of worn jeans. Both garments had shrunk, emphasizing her perfect body. She didn’t have makeup on, but her eyes were bright and her cheeks were rosy from all her exertions.

Without thinking, she opened the door and started to speak, when she realized who was standing there. It definitely wasn’t Phil, the salesman with whom she’d turned down a date.

It was always the same when she came upon Dawson unawares. Her heart began to race, her breath stilled in her throat, her body burned as if she stood in a fire.

Eyes two shades lighter green than her own looked back at her. Whatever he wore, he looked elegant. He was in designer jeans and a white shirt, with a patterned gray jacket worn loose over them. His feet were encased in hand-tooled gray leather boots and a creamy Stetson dangled from one hand.

He looked her up and down without smiling, without expression. Nothing he felt ever was allowed to show, while Barrie’s face was as open as a child’s book to him.