“You’re asking me to treat you like a woman,” he said, his voice low and even. “But you’re just a kid and I treated you like a kid. Don’t push me until you’re old enough to handle it.”
Cathryn whirled and went flying down the stairs in search of Monica, her cheeks still wet with tears as she screamed that he should be fired, now.
Monica laughed in her face. “Don’t be silly, Cathryn,” she said sharply. “We need Rule...I need Rule.”
Behind her Cathryn heard Rule quietly laughing and felt his hand stroke her tumbled mahogany-red hair. “Just settle down, wildcat; you can’t get rid of me that easily.”
Cathryn had jerked her head away from his touch, but he had been right. She hadn’t been able to get rid of him. Ten years later he was still running the ranch and it was she who had left, fleeing from her own home in panic that he would reduce her to the position of mindless supplicant, with no more will of her own than the horses he so easily mastered.
“Are you asleep?” he asked now, drawing her back to the present, and Cathryn opened her eyes.
“No.”
“Then talk to me,” he demanded. Though she wasn’t looking, she could visualize his sensually formed mouth moving as he said the words. She had never forgotten anything about him, from the slow way he talked to the dark, slightly hoarse tone of his voice, as if his vocal cords were rusty from lack of use. He gave her a swift glance. “Tell me about your husband.”
Cathryn was startled, her dark eyes widening. “You met him several times. What would you want to know about David?”
“A lot of things,” he murmured easily. “Such as if he asked you why you weren’t a virgin when he married you.”
Bitter, furious, Cathryn choked back the words that tumbled to her lips. What could she say that he wouldn’t use against her? It’s none of your business? He would only reply that it was more his business than it was any other man’s, considering that he had been the one responsible for the loss of her virginity.
She tried not to look at him, but against her will she turned to him, her eyes wide and vulnerable. “He never asked,” she finally said in a quiet voice. Rule’s profile was etched starkly against the blueness of the sky, and her heart lurched; it brought painfully, vividly to mind that summer day when he had bent over her with the hot molten sun and brazen sky behind him, outlining him like a graven image. Her body tightened automatically in remembered response and she tore her gaze away from him before he turned and saw the rawness of her pain mirrored in her eyes.
“I would have asked,” he rasped.
“David was a gentleman,” she said pointedly.
“Meaning I’m not?”
“You know the answer to that as well as I do. No, you’re not a gentleman. You’re not gentle in any way.”
“I was gentle with you once,” he replied, his dark eyes moving over her with slow relish, tracing the curves of her breasts and hips and thighs. Again the hot tightening of her body warned her that she wasn’t indifferent to this man, had never been, and pain bloomed in her.
“I don’t want to talk about it!” As soon as the words left her mouth she wished they could be unsaid. The ragged panic in her tone made it evident to anyone with normal intelligence that she couldn’t treat that long-ago incident with the indifference that the years should have brought, and Rule was more intelligent and intuitive than most. His next words proved it.
“You can’t run forever. You’re not a kid now, Cat; you’re a woman.”
Oh, she knew that! He had made her a woman when she was seventeen, and the image of him had tormented her since, even intruded between her and her husband and cheated David out of the devotion that had been his due, though she would have died rather than let him guess that her response to him hadn’t been all it should have been. Nor could she tell Rule how deeply he had affected her life with what to him could have been only a casual coupling.
“I didn’t run away,” she denied. “I went to college, which is entirely different.”
“And came home on visits as seldom as you could,” he said with harsh sarcasm. “Did you think I’d attack you every time I saw you? I knew you were too young. Hell, I didn’t mean for it to happen anyway, and I was going to make damned sure the opportunity never came up again, at least until you were older and had a better idea of what it was about.”
“I knew what sex was!” she defied, not wanting him to guess how totally unprepared she had been for the reality of it, but her effort was useless.
“You knew what it was, but not what it was like.” The hard, stark truth of his words silenced her, and after a minute he said grimly, “You weren’t ready for that, were you?”
She drew a shuddering breath, wishing she had pretended to be asleep. Rule was like a blooded stallion: when he got the bit between his teeth there was no stopping him. “No,” she admitted raggedly. “Especially not with you.”
A hard smile curved his grim mouth. “And I took it easy on you. You really would have been scared out of your dainty little pants if I’d let myself go the way I wanted to.”
Twisting agony in her midsection made her lash out at him, hoping futilely that she could hurt him as he had hurt her. “I didn’t want you! I didn’t—”
“You wanted it,” he interrupted harshly. “You were in a redheaded temper and fighting me just for the sake of fighting, but you wanted it. You didn’t try to get away from me. You lit into me and tried to hurt me in any way you could, and somewhere along the line all that temper turned into wanting and you were wrapped around me like a vine.”
Cathryn winced away from the memory. “I don’t want to talk about it!”
Without warning he erupted into fury, into that deadly temper that smart people learned how to avoid. “Well, that’s just too damned bad,” he snarled thickly, switching the controls to automatic pilot and reaching for her.
She made an instinctive, useless effort to ward off his hands, and he brushed her fingers away with laughable ease. His fingers bit into her upper arms as he hauled her out of her seat until she was lying sprawled against him. His mouth was hard, hot, well remembered, the taste of him as familiar as if she’d never gone away. Her slim hands curled into fists and beat ineffectively at his shoulders, but despite her efforts at resistance she found that nothing had changed, nothing at all. A hot swell of sensual excitement made her heart beat faster, made her breath come in panting gasps, her entire body quiver. She wanted him. Oh, damn him, how she wanted him! Some curious chemistry in her makeup made her respond to him like a flower to sunlight, twisting, seeking, even though she knew he was no good for her.
His tongue probed slowly into her mouth and her hands ceased their beating to suddenly clasp his shoulders, feeling the hard muscles under her palms with instant delight. Pleasure was filling her, pleasure comprised of the taste and feel and smell of him, the slightly rough slide of his cheek against hers, the intimacy of his tongue on hers that vividly recalled a hot summer day when no clothing had been between them.
His anger was gone, turned into desire that glittered plainly in his dark eyes when he lifted his mouth just the fraction of an inch necessary to demand, “Did you ever forget what it was like?”
Her hands slipped up to his head, trying to pull him across that delicious, intolerable tiny space to her own mouth, but he resisted and her fingers wrapped in his silky, vibrant dark hair. “Rule,” she muttered huskily.