Page 39 of Snow Kisses

“Sour grapes,” he said, grinning. “If you’d caught him, your half would have been twice as good as mine, wouldn’t it?”

She shrugged. “Well, I guess so.” Her eyes gazed over the river dreamily. “I used to love fishing. Now I don’t have time for anything except work. Or didn’t have, until I came back here. Funny how time seems to stop in a place like this,” she added quietly. “Not another soul in sight, and you can drive for miles without seeing a ranch house or a store. It must have looked like this when the first settlers came and put down roots. The winter killed a lot of them didn’t it?”

He nodded. “Montana winters are rough. I know. I lose cattle every year, and once we lost a man in a line cabin. He froze to death sitting up.”

She shivered. “I remember. That was when I was just out of grammar school. When Melly and I went riding, we wouldn’t go near that cabin, thinking it was haunted.”

He shook his head. “Well, I’ve got a couple of old hands now who feel the same way. Hank’s one.”

“I didn’t think Hank was afraid of anything.”

He lifted an amused eyebrow. “Do you ever miss this, in New York?”

She searched his face, thinking how she missed him every waking moment. She looked away. “I miss it a lot. There’s so much history here. So much privacy and peace.” She remembered the role she had to play, almost too late. “But, of course, New York has its good points, as well. There’s always a new play to see. Sometimes I go to the opera or the ballet. And there are nightclubs and little coffeehouses, and museums….”

“None of which you find around here,” he said harshly. “There’s not much place for sophistication in the middle of a cattle spread, is there?”

He was watching her with narrowed, calculating eyes, and a dark kind of pain washed over his face before she saw it. Deliberately he crushed out the cigarette on the ground beside him.

She turned, glancing down at him. He was lying on his back with his hands under his head, and his eyes were closed. His powerful legs were crossed, stretching the denim sensuously over their muscular contours. Her eyes took in every detail, from head to broad chest to quiet face, and she felt suddenly reckless.

She picked up a long blade of grass and moved close enough to draw it lightly over his chest.

He grabbed it. “Courting trouble, Abby?” he asked curtly.

There was a wildness in her that sprang from lookingat his impassive face. He wouldn’t let her close—he spent his life pushing her away. Today would be the last day she’d ever have with him to remember, and today she was going to make him feel something. Even if it was only rage.

“Oh, I just live for it, Cade,” she murmured, edging closer. She bent over him before he could stop her, and pressed her lips down on his broad, warm chest.

“God!” he burst out, catching the back of her head. But his hands hesitated, as if he couldn’t decide whether to push or pull.

Her nostrils tickled where the thick, curling hair brushed them and she smelled the faint traces of soap and cologne that clung to him. His chest rose and fell with ragged irregularity and she felt the powerful muscles stiffen as she drew her mouth across them, acting on pure instinct alone.

“You sweet little fool,” he rasped. “Oh, God, I’m only human, and I want you until I can hardly stand up straight…!”

He jerked her alongside him and bent over her with hands that trembled as his mouth homed in on hers.

Hungry as she’d never imagined she could be, she turned in his big arms and pressed close, half shocked to find his body blatantly aroused as it touched hers. For an instant she tried to draw away, but one lean, steely hand slid quickly to the base of her spine and gathered her hips back against his.

“You wanted it,” he ground out against her mouth. “Don’t start fighting me now.”

Her hands were tangled in the hair over his chest, butshe was still rational enough to realize just how involved he already was. “Cade, I only wanted—” she began, only to have the words crushed under his devouring mouth.

“This is what I’ve been trying to tell you all along,” he whispered shakily, moving his lips to her throat. “I want you, Abby. I’d die to have you! And you can feel how much now, can’t you? This is how it is between lovers. This is what happens to a man when he’s pushed beyond his limits.”

Even as he spoke, his hands were sliding under her blouse, finding bare skin at her back and a clasp that snapped apart with devastating ease.

“I haven’t been with a woman for so damned long, I’d forgotten how soft…” he murmured, sliding his fingers under her breasts to cup their tender weight. His thumbs found suddenly hard peaks, making her shudder with new pleasure.

Abby’s legs moved restlessly as Cade’s eased between them. He turned, and she felt the ground under her and the full weight of his big body over her. She moaned at the intimacy, unfamiliar and arousing.

Her sharp nails dug into his back and raked down to his waist, feeling the warmth and moistness of his flesh as his hands touched her in ways that should have shocked her. His mouth was hungrier than she would ever have believed possible. She opened her own mouth helplessly, eagerly, tasting him, experiencing him.

She felt his hands on the buttons of her blouse, and seconds later his chest crushed the softness of her breasts in a joining that made her cry out again.

He lifted his head and his eyes glittered frighteningly. He was trembling all over with desire, and his face was hard with it.

“Is this what you wanted to know?” he demanded unsteadily. “If you could drive me out of my mind with wanting? To see how it would be if you pushed too hard? I want you, all right. I wanted you when you were eighteen, I’d have killed for you. But when I’d made up my mind to ask you to stay with me, you got on that damned bus and you never looked at me!”

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