Page 39 of Rainwater
She looked down. “Yes.”
“I rest my case.” He turned then and walked away from her.
Chapter
Eight
Jennifer felt the anger build within her with every loose-hipped step he took. What the hell was going on with this guy? She took a monumental risk in sleeping with him, and he acted as though he’d taken advantage of her. Well, she didn’t sleep with just anyone. She’dchosento make love tohim. Hell, she’d waited thirteen years.Thirteen years!
It had been worth the wait.
She stomped after him and grabbed his arm, turning him to face her. She saw the pain in his eyes and the distressed look on his face. A man on the edge, she thought again. She wanted so much to pull him back from the chasm. “That wasn’t a one-night stand and you know it!”
His eyes pinned her with their intensity. She saw his fear, need, and, God help her, his vulnerability.
“Okay. How about a once-in-a-lifetime encounter?” he quipped, his emotional distance obviously back in place.
She took a deep fortifying breath at his shuttered expression. The vulnerability disappeared as if it had never been there. But she’d seen it. It had been real. Her heart spasmed because of it. “Corey, you weren’t the only consenting adult in that bed last night.”
He looked down and toed a rock with the tip of his dusty boot. “You’re right!” He ground the rock beneath his boot as if he were trying to crush something inside himself. “I was just as consenting as you. I let you seduce me, because like I said last night, I’m a bastard.”
“You let me!” Her voice rose with each word.
“Jennifer, keep your voice down.”
“Keep my voice down? I will not! I’m not ashamed of anything. Corey, what’s so wrong with what we did? It was beautiful and I won’t have you making it into some kind of shameful act on your behalf. I wanted you, so stop with this nonsense about being a bastard.” She swallowed convulsively so that she could get the next words out of her mouth without stumbling over them. “It was wonderful, but I know the score. I’m a b big girl. You walk away in the end. I know that. There’s no reason we can’t—”
“No!” he said vehemently. With an exasperated flick of his thumb, he pushed the hat off his head.
“Corey, look—”
“No, Jennifer, you look. I made a mistake last night that I don’t intend to make again. I’ll turn around right now and walk off this ranch if you push me on this, I swear it.” He turned away, his body rigid.
“What are you afraid of?”
“You,” he said harshly. He looked toward the house where Ellie had disappeared. “And her.”
“Why?”
“You make me want to stay.” The anguished words burst from his mouth as he grabbed her upper arms and shook her. “I can’t. I can’t be what you want me to be. And she…God, she makes me want to be a father in the worst way, but that’s another impossibility. I won’t have kids.”
He shifted uncomfortably, shying away from the hand she lifted to touch his face. “And you deserve kids, lots and lots of kids. She deserves a normal father.” He faced her, his turquoise eyes tortured and shielded at the same time. He raked his hands through his long hair. “I’m a drifter who’s wasted his years on the circuit. I have no future, Jen. Accept that. It was true what I said last night. I have nothing to give you except maybe heartache.” Abruptly he turned to go.
Again she stopped him. “It isn’t that easy for me to ask.”
“It isn’t easy for me to say no.”
She watched him saunter toward the foreman’s cottage with his saddlebags draped over his shoulder, and her emptiness and sorrow was almost too much for her to bear. Too late, she thought. The heartache was already there.
How could she get through that thick skull of his that he was all she needed, all she wanted? She’d been waiting for him all her life. She hadn’t realized it until now. He’d set her free, yet he didn’t know how to set himself free.
She wanted to know about those shadows in his eyes, and she wanted the knowledge she needed to banish them back into the darkness. He hadn’t said hecouldn’thave children, he saidwouldn’t. Why? What could he possibly fear? The need to know ate at her.
She’d let him inside her heart too deep to dig him out. This man who was tortured, yet protected her as if he was her own appointed guardian angel. This man who was obviously running from something painful and deep, yet had stopped for her, been beaten senseless, his personal property ruined. Didn’t he know that he had himself to give? All the passion she’d experienced last night couldn’t have been just show.
She had taken greedily and she wanted more. “The fight has only begun. You’re going to lose and you’re damn well going to like it!” she murmured under her breath as she watched himdisappear into the foreman’s cottage. She kicked at the dirt determinedly before she turned and walked into the house.
The next morningshe found the first slashed canvas. The frame was broken and splintered with jagged pieces of wood sticking up like bleached broken bones. The tattered canvas had held some kind of painting, but it was unrecognizable now. An undercurrent of uneasiness spread through her as she fingered the ruined edge of the material. She’d asked Corey to dinner last night and he had refused right through the cottage door. He wouldn’t even open it to talk to her face-to-face. She had been so angry she’d told him to go ahead and starve.
