“The devil I can’t!” she snapped. Her eyes hated him. “I won’t forgive you,” she whispered, almost choking on the words. “I won’t ever, ever forgive you!”
His gaze fell, and his jaw clenched. “I suppose I should have expected that. But hope springs eternal, don’t they say?” He picked up his hat and turned back to her.
She hadn’t gotten herself under control at all. Her slender hands were clenched at her sides and her eyes blazed.
He paused just in front of her. At close range, he was much taller than she was. And despite their past, his nearness disturbed her. She took a step backward.
“Do you think I don’t have scars of my own?” he asked quietly.
“Men made of ice don’t get scars,” she managed to say hoarsely.
He didn’t say another word. He turned and went toward the door. This wasn’t like Dawson. He was giving up without a fight; he didn’t even seem bent on insulting her. The very lack of retaliation was new and it disturbed her enough to call to him.
“What’s wrong?” she asked abruptly, even as he reached for the doorknob.
The question, intimating concern, stopped him in his tracks. He turned as if he didn’t really believe she’d asked that. “What?”
“I asked what was wrong,” she repeated. “You aren’t yourself.”
His hand tightened on the doorknob. “How the hell would you know whether I am or not?” he returned.
“You’re holding something back.”
He stood there breathing roughly, glaring at her. He shifted, restless, as highly strung as she remembered him. He was a little thinner these days, fine-drawn. His eyes narrowed on her face.
“Are you going to tell me?” she asked him.
“No,” he said after a minute. “It wouldn’t change anything. I don’t blame you for wanting to stay away.”
He was hiding something. She knew instinctively that he didn’t want to tell her. He seemed vulnerable. It shocked her into moving toward him. The action was so unexpected, so foreign, that it stilled his hand on the doorknob. Barrie hadn’t come toward him in five years.
She stopped an arm’s length away and looked up at him. “Come on, tell me,” she said gently. “You’re just like your father, everything has to be dragged out of you. Tell me, Dawson.”
He took a deep breath, hesitated, and then just told her.
She didn’t understand at first.
“You’re what?” she asked.
“I’m impotent!”
She just looked at him. So the gossips weren’t talking about a cold nature when they called him the “ice man.” They were talking about a loss of virility. She hadn’t really believed the rumors she’d heard about him.
“But…how…why?” she asked huskily.
“Who knows?” he asked irritably. “What difference does it make?” He took off his hat and ran a lean hand through his hair. “Mrs. Holton is a determined woman, and she thinks she’s God’s gift to manhood.” His face clenched and he averted it, as if it tormented him to tell her all of it. “I need that damn tract of land, but I have to let her come to Sheridan to talk to me about selling it. She wants me, and she’ll find out, if she pushes hard enough, that I’m…incapable. Right now it’s just gossip. But she’d make me the news item of the century. Who knows? Maybe that’s her real reason for wanting to come in the first place, to check out the gossip.”
Barrie was horrified. She moved back to the sofa and sat down, hard. Her face was drawn and pale, like his. It shocked her that he’d tell her such a thing, when she was his worst enemy. It was like offering an armed, angry man a bullet for his gun.
He saw her expression and grew angry. “Say something.”
“What could I possibly say?” she whispered.
“So you do have some idea of how devastating it is,” he murmured from a rigid face.
She folded her hands in her lap. “Then I’m to run interference for you? Will the threat of a sister stop her?”
“That isn’t how you’d come back to Sheridan.”
She lifted both eyebrows. “How, then?”
He fished a small velvet box out of his pocket and tossed it to her.
She frowned as she opened it. There were two rings inside, a perfect emerald in a Tiffany setting and a matching wedding band set with diamonds and emeralds.
She actually gasped, and dropped the box as if it were red-hot.
He didn’t react, although a shadow seemed to pass over his eyes. “Well, that’s a novel way of expressing your feelings,” he said sardonically.
“You can’t be serious!”
“Why can’t I?”
“We’re related,” she blurted out, flushing.
“Like hell we are. There isn’t one mutual relative between us.”
“People would talk.”
“People sure as hell would,” he agreed, “but not about my…condition.”
She understood now, as she hadn’t before, exactly what he wanted her to do. He wanted her to come back to Sheridan and pretend to be engaged to him, to stop all the gossip. Most especially, he wanted her there to run interference while Mrs. Holton was visiting, so that she wouldn’t find out the truth about him in a physical way while he tried to coax her into selling him that vital piece of land. He could kill two birds with one stone.
To think of Dawson as impotent was staggering. She couldn’t imagine what had caused it. Perhaps he’d fallen in love. There had been some talk of him mooning over a woman a few years ago, but no name was ever mentioned.
“How long ago did it happen?” she asked without thinking.
He turned and his green eyes were scorching. “That’s none of your business.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Well, excuse me! Exactly who’s doing whom the favor here?”
“It doesn’t give you the right to ask me intimate questions. And it isn’t as if you won’t benefit from getting her to sell me the land.”
She flushed and averted her face.
He rammed his hands into his pockets with an angry murmur. “Barrie, it hurts to talk about it,” he snapped.
She should have realized that. A man’s ego was a surprisingly fragile thing, and if what she’d read and heard was correct, a large part of that ego had to do with his prowess in bed.
“But you could…you did…with me,” she blurted out.
He made a rough sound, almost a laugh. “Oh, yes.” He sounded bitter. “I did, didn’t I? I wish I could forget.”
That was surprising. He’d enjoyed what he did to her, or she certainly thought he had. In fact, he’d sounded as if the pleasure was…She shut out the forbidden thoughts firmly.
He bent and retrieved the jewelry box from the floor, balancing it on his palm.
“It’s a very pretty set,” she remarked tautly. “Did you just buy it?”
“I’ve had it for…a while.” He stared at the box and then shoved it back into his pocket before he looked at her. He didn’t ask. He just looked.
She didn’t want to go back to Sheridan. She’d learned last night and this morning that she was still vulnerable with