“You’re crazy as hell if you think I’m going to let that creep get his hands on you,” he said in a cutting voice.
“And just what do you think you’re going to do about it, Nicholas?” she demanded with more courage than she felt. The long, searching kiss and the touch of his big hands had knocked half the fight out of her.
He moved away from her, got out of the car and stood back to let her get out of the car. “I fight with no holds barred,” he reminded her with a strange, cool smile. “And I’ve put in a lot of years on you. I’m not about to stand by and watch you put your pretty neck into a noose.”
“It’s my neck,” she murmured.
He tilted her chin up and bent down to her, brushing his mouth slowly, softly, against hers with something like possession in his dark eyes. He watched her helpless reaction with a smile. “I told you before I left for Paris that one day I was going to be your lover. That day’s closer than you think, sweetheart, and you’re hungrier for me than I’d imagined. Ripe, ready to be picked.”
“I’m not an apple,” she ground out.
“No, you’re a peach,” he corrected with a last, soft kiss. “A sweet, juicy little peach that I could eat. But first, I’m going to have to knock you out of the tree.”
She glared at him as he went around the elegant hood of the Rolls and got in under the steering wheel. “You’d better get a big stick, Nicholas Coleman!” she cried.
He only laughed. “No, honey, you had. I’ll be back.”
And before she could fire a retort, he drove off in a cloud of dust, leaving her standing there in the cold.
MANDY GLANCED UP from the rolls she was making in the kitchen as Keena walked through.
“Flames,” she murmured, muffling a grin.
“What?” Keena asked absently, unaware of the picture she made with her hair mussed from Nick’s big fingers, her eyes wild, her lips swollen and red.
“Coming from you,” Mandy commented drily. She started laying the rolls into a pan. “Seen Nick, have you?”
“Seen him?” she burst out. “You should have heard...” She flushed. “On second thought, you shouldn’t have heard him. But he’s absolutely unreasonable!”
“How?”
“He doesn’t want me to stay here, for one thing,” she muttered darkly, her lovely eyes narrowing. She folded her arms across her throbbing chest and leaned back against the counter. “As if he had any right, any right at all, to order me around. The nerve, talking about knocking me out of trees and getting sticks...”
“You feel all right?” Mandy asked pleasantly.
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“That’s what I’ve always liked most about you—your definite answers.” Mandy grinned.
Keena, not even half hearing her housekeeper, turned in a daze and walked under the ladder where two painters were busy on the walls and ceiling of the dining room. She was confused as she’d never been, as shy as a girl when she thought about seeing Nicholas again after that ardent kiss. He’d touched her...
She sighed, walking aimlessly up the stairs with dreams in her eyes. In all those years, not a single pass, not a touch out of the way, but overnight her whole relationship with Nick was different, exciting. He’d been her friend, but now what was he? She was going to have to rethink her entire relationship with him after today.
Funny, she hadn’t really taken him seriously the night he left for Paris, when he’d said that he was going to be her lover. Reflecting on it, she’d decided that he’d been teasing. But today was no joke. The tenderness of the mouth he’d kissed so thoroughly was very real, and her chest tingled from the long, hard contact with his big body, from the touch of his experienced hands.
Part of her, a small, vague part, was afraid of Nicholas. He wasn’t the kind of man to do anything halfheartedly. He wouldn’t stop at acquiring her for his bed. He’d want nothing less than possession. Keena liked her independence; she wasn’t sure she was ready to give it up. In that, she must have been like her mother, who died giving her birth. Alan Whitman had always spoken fondly of his late wife’s bullheaded independence. Keena was like that herself. She’d been on her own for so long, an achiever without props. Oh, there had been men; charming, attractive companions that she had always managed to keep at a safe distance—no ties, no commitments. She’d let them know that it would be on her terms, or not at all. No, she wasn’t at all sure she could manage a full-time man in her life, especially a man like Nick, in an intimate relationship. She had no doubts at all after today that he’d be everything her body would ever want. But what about the rest of her? Would he try to take her over the way he took over businesses? And if she let herself be drawn into his life, would she ever be able to break away before it was too late? She was afraid to let him close enough to find out. Perhaps it was just as well that he’d gone back to New York. But it wasn’t like Nicholas to give up without a struggle. She had a feeling she hadn’t heard the last of it, either.
* * *
“HOW OLD WERE you when you left here?” Mandy asked several days later when Keena was driving her through town in the rented car, pointing out the small high school, the public library and the modest shopping center near the house.
“Eighteen,” Keena said, veiling the memories that the admission dredged up. They weren’t pleasant ones, for the most part.
“You must have missed it.” Mandy smiled, watching two young boys ride their bicycles along the sidewalk, bundled up from head to toe against the February chill. “It’s a lovely little town.”
“Lovely,” came the absent reply.
The older woman glanced at her. “You’re quiet lately. Brooding because Nick hasn’t come back?” she probed drily.
Keena’s face toasted. “Of course not!”
“Don’t run over the curb, love. You’ll crease the tires,” Mandy pointed out.
Keena steered the car back onto the road, hating that momentary, telling lapse. “Why should I care that he comes storming down here, threatens me and then vanishes into the woodwork? It’s no worry of mine!”
“Oh, that’s obvious.”
“Besides, it’s my life,” Keena added firmly, shifting uneasily behind the wheel. “I can do what pleases me.”
“Sure you can.”
“If I want to decorate the house and give a party, it’s my own business.”
“That’s right, dear.”
“And anyway, if he cares so much, why hasn’t he called?” Keena’s green eyes flashed. “He could have spared time for a phone call.”
“He’s a busy man.”
“I’m busy, too,” Keena pouted. She sighed, the action gently rustling the blue striped scarf at her neck that complemented her navy pantsuit and white silk blouse. “He’s just sour because I’m not at his beck and call down here.”
“He’s jealous of James Harris, you mean,” Mandy remarked with a secret smile.
“There’s nothing to be jealous of. James hasn’t called. He hasn’t come by the house...” That rankled, too. She’d been a very young eighteen when she’d overheard that bitter speech of James’s, when she’d realized just how fully she’d been taken in by his teasing and flirting. She’d been too naive to realize the cruel game he was playing until it was too late. Part