The Complete Mackenzies Collection Page 8

  His dark eyes burned with frustration as he glared at her, and suddenly he seemed to realize he was still holding her hand. He released her abruptly and stood. “Look, you can’t be my friend. We can’t befriends.”

  Now that her hand was free, Mary felt abandoned and cold. She clasped her hands in her lap and looked up at him. “Why? Of course, if you simply don’t like me…” Her voice trailed off, and she bent her head to examine her hands as if she’d never seen them before.

  Not like her? He couldn’t sleep, his temper was frayed, he got hard whenever he thought about her, and he thought about her too damn much. He was so physically frustrated that he thought he might go mad, but he couldn’t even ease himself with Julie Oakes or any other woman now, because all he could think about was baby-fine brown hair, slate-blue eyes and skin like translucent rose petals. It was all he could do to keep from taking her, and only the knowledge of how the good townspeople of Ruth would turn on her if he made her his woman kept him from grabbing her. Her stubborn principles hadn’t prepared her for the pain and trouble she would face.

  Suddenly his frustration boiled over, and he was filled with rage at having to walk away from the one woman he wanted to the point of madness. Before he could stop himself, he reached down and grasped her wrists, hauling her to her feet. “No, damn it, we can’t befriends! Do you want to know why? Because I can’t be around you without thinking of stripping you naked and taking you, wherever we happen to be. Hell, I don’t know if I’d take the time to strip you! I want your breasts in my hands, your nipples in my mouth. I want your legs around my waist, or your ankles on my shoulders, or any position at all if I can just get inside you.” He’d pulled her so close that his warm breath brushed her cheeks as he rasped the low, harsh words at her. “So, sweetheart, there’s no way we can be friends.”

  Mary shivered as her body responded to his words. Though they’d been spoken in anger, they told her that he felt the same way she did, and described actions she could only half imagine. She was too inexperienced and honest to hide her feelings from him, so she didn’t even try. Her eyes were filled with painful longing. “Wolf?”

  Just that, but the way she said his name, with an aching little inflection at the end, made his grip on her wrists tighten. “No.”

  “I—I want you.”

  Her whispered, trembly confession left her completely vulnerable to him, and he knew it. He groaned inwardly. Damn it, didn’t she have any sense of self-protection at all? Didn’t she know what it did to a man to have the woman he wanted offer herself like that, with no qualifications or holding back? His control was stretched hair-thin, but he grimly held on to it because the hard truth was that she truly didn’t know. She was a virgin. She was old-fashioned, strictly raised, and had only the vaguest idea of what she was inviting.

  “Don’t say that,” he finally muttered. “I’ve told you before—”

  “I know,” she interrupted. “I’m too inexperienced to be interesting, and you…you don’t want to be used as a guinea pig. I remember.” She seldom cried, but she felt the salty wetness burning her eyes, and he winced at the hurt he saw there.

  “I lied. God, how I lied.”

  Then his control broke. He had to hold her, feel her in his arms just for a little while, have her taste on his mouth again. He drew her wrists up and placed her hands around his neck, then bent his head even as he locked his arms around her and drew her up tight against him. His mouth covered hers, and her eager response seared him. She knew what to do now; her lips parted, allowing his tongue entrance, where she met him with soft, welcoming touches from her own tongue. He had taught her that, just as he’d taught her to melt against him, and the knowledge drove him almost as crazy as the feel of her soft breasts flattening against his chest.

  Mary drowned in the sheer ecstasy of being in his arms again, and the tears that she’d held back spilled past her lashes. This was too painful, and too wonderful, to be mere lust. If this was love, she didn’t know if she could bear it.

  His mouth was hungry and hard, taking long, deep kisses that left her clinging to him mindlessly. His hand moved surely up her stomach and closed over her breast, and all she could do was make a soft sound of pleasure low in her throat. Her nipples burned and throbbed; his touch both assuaged the pain and intensified it, making her want more. She wanted it the way he had described it, with his mouth on her breasts, and she twisted feverishly against him. She was empty and needed to be filled. She needed to be his woman.

  He jerked his head up and pressed her face against his shoulder. “I have to stop. Now.” He groaned the words. He was shaking, as hot as any teenage stud in the back seat of his daddy’s car.

  Mary briefly weighed all of Aunt Ardith’s strictures against the way she felt and accepted that she was in love, because this mingled glory and torment could be nothing else. “I don’t want to stop,” she said raggedly. “I want you to love me.”

  “No. I’m Indian. You’re white. The people in this town would destroy you. Tonight was just a taste of what you’d have to go through.”

  “I’m willing to risk it!” she cried desperately.

  “I’m not. I can take it, but you—you hang on to your Pollyanna principles, sweetheart. I can’t offer you anything in return.” If he’d thought there was even a fifty-fifty chance of living here in peace, Wolf would have taken the risk, but he knew there wasn’t, not the way things were. Other than Joe, she was the only human being in the world he’d ever wanted to protect, and it was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

  Mary lifted her head from his shoulder, revealing her wet cheeks. “All I want is you.”

  “I’m the one thing you can’t have. They’d tear you apart.” Very gently he pulled her arms down and turned to leave.

  Her voice came behind him, low and strained as she fought against tears. “I’ll risk it.”

  He stopped, his hand on the doorknob. “I won’t.”

  For the second time she watched him walk away, and this time was far worse than the first.

  Chapter Five

  Joe was unusually distracted; he was normally the most attentive of students, applying himself to the subject at hand with almost phenomenal concentration, but tonight he had something else on his mind. He’d accepted without comment their move to the school for lessons and never even hinted that he’d learned the subject of the school board meeting that had resulted in the change of locations. As it was the beginning of May, and the day had been unseasonably warm, Mary was half inclined to put his restlessness down to spring fever. It had been a long winter, and she was restless herself.

  Finally she closed the book before her. “Why don’t we go home early tonight?” she suggested. “We’re not getting much done.”

  Joe closed his own book and pushed his fingers through his thick black hair, identical to his father’s. Mary had to look away. “Sorry,” he said on a long exhalation. It was typical that he didn’t offer an explanation. Joe didn’t often feel the need to justify himself.

  But in the weeks she’d been tutoring him, they had had a lot of personal conversations between the prepared lessons, and Mary never hesitated when she thought one of her students might be troubled. If it were only spring fever gnawing at him, then she wanted him to say so. “Is something bothering you?”

  He gave her a wry smile, one that was too adult to belong to a sixteen-year-old boy. “You could say that.”

  “Ah.” That smile relieved her, because now she thought she knew the cause of his restlessness. It was indeed spring fever, after a fashion. As Aunt Ardith had often lectured her niece, “When a young man’s sap rises, a girl should look out. I declare, they seem to run mad.” Evidently Joe’s sap was rising. Mary wondered if women had sap, too.

  He picked up his pen and fiddled with it for a moment before tossing it a side as he made up his mind to say more. “Pam Hearst asked me to take her to a movie.”

  “Pam?” This was a surprise, and possible trouble. Ralph Hearst was
one of the townspeople most adamantly opposed to the Mackenzies.

  Joe’s ice-blue eyes were hooded as he glanced at her. “Pam is the girl I told you about before.”

  So, it was Pam Hearst. She was pretty and bright, and her slim young body had a form guaranteed to affect a young man’s sap. Mary wondered if Pam’s father knew she had been flirting with Joe and that was one reason for his hostility.

  “Are you going to go?”

  “No,” he said flatly, surprising her.

  “Why?”

  “There aren’t any movie houses in Ruth.”

  “So?”

  “That’s the whole point. We’d have to go to another town. No one we know would be likely to see us. She wanted me to pick her up behind the school, after it got dark.” He leaned back in his chair and looped his hands behind his head. “She was too ashamed to go to the dance with me, but I’m good enough for her to sneak around and see. Maybe she thought that even if we were seen, the idea that I might go to the Academy would keep her from getting in too much trouble. Folks seem taken with the idea.” His tone was ironic. “I guess it makes a difference when the Indian wears a uniform.”

  Suddenly her impulsive announcement at the school board meeting didn’t seem like such a good idea. “Do you wish I hadn’t told them?”

  “You had to, considering,” he replied, and by that she knew he was aware of the subject of that meeting. “It puts extra pressure on me to get into the Academy, because if I don’t they’ll all say that the Indian just couldn’t cut it, but that’s not a bad thing. If it will push me to do more, then I’m that much closer to getting in.”

  Privately, Mary didn’t think Joe needed any added incentive; he wanted it so badly now that the need burned in him. She returned the conversation to Pam. “Does it bother you, that she asked now?”

  “It made me mad. And it really made me mad having to turn her down, because I sure would like to get my hands on her.” He stopped abruptly and gave Mary another of those too-adult looks before a little grin tugged at his lips. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to get too personal. Let’s just say that I’m attracted to her physically, but that’s all it is, and I can’t afford to fool with that kind of situation. Pam’s a nice girl, but she doesn’t figure in my plans.”

  Mary understood what he meant. No woman figured in his plans, other than to provide physical release, for a long time, if ever. There was something solitary about him, as there was about Wolf, and in addition, Joe was so possessed by the specter of flight that part of him was already gone. Pam Hearst would marry some local boy, settle down in Ruth or nearby, and raise her own family in the same calm setting where she’d grown up; she wasn’t meant for the brief attention Joe Mackenzie could give her before he moved on.

  “Do you have any idea who started the gossip?” Joe asked, his pale eyes hard. He didn’t like the idea of anyone hurting this woman.

  “No. I haven’t tried to find out. It could have been anyone who drove by and saw your truck at my house. But most people seemed to have forgotten about it now, except for—” She stopped, her eyes troubled.

  “Who?” Joe demanded flatly.

  “I don’t mean that I think she started the gossip,” Mary said hastily. “I just feel uneasy around her. She dislikes me, and I don’t know why. Maybe she’s this way with everyone. Has Dottie Lancaster—”

  “Dottie Lancaster!” He gave a harsh laugh. “Now there’s a thought. Yeah, she could have started the gossip. She’s had a rough life, and I kind of feel sorry for her, but she did her best to make my life hell when I was in her classes.”

  “Rough? How?”

  “Her husband was a truck driver, and he was killed years ago when her son was just a baby. He was on a run in Colorado, and a drunk driver ran him off the side of a cliff. The drunk was an Indian. She never got over it and blames all Indians, I guess.”

  “That’s irrational.”

  He shrugged, as if to say a lot of things were irrational. “Anyway, she was left alone with her kid, and she had a hard time. Not much money. She started teaching, but she had to pay someone to take care of the kid, and he needed special training when he was old enough to start school, which took even more money.”

  “I didn’t know Dottie had any children,” Mary said, surprised.

  “Just Robert—Bobby. He’s about twenty-three or four, I guess. He still lives with Mrs. Lancaster, but he doesn’t go around other people much.”

  “What’s wrong with him? Does he have Down’s syndrome, or a learning disability?”

  “He’s not retarded. Bobby’s just different. He likes people, but not in groups. A lot of people together make him nervous, so he pretty much stays to himself. He reads a lot, and listens to music. But once he had a summer job at the building supply store, and Mr. Watkins told Bobby to fill a wheelbarrow full of sand. Instead of pushing the wheelbarrow to the sandpile and shoveling the sand in, Bobby would get a shovelful of sand and carry it back to the wheelbarrow. It’s things like that. He’d have trouble getting dressed, because he’d put his shoes on first, and then he couldn’t get his jeans on.”

  Mary had seen people like Bobby, who had trouble with practical problem-solving. It was a learning disability, and took a lot of patient, specialized training to handle. She felt sorry for him, and for Dottie, who couldn’t have had a happy life.

  Joe pushed his chair back and stood up, stretching his cramped muscles. “Do you ride?” he asked suddenly.

  “No. I’ve never even been on a horse.” Mary chuckled. “Will that get me thrown out of Wyoming?”

  His tone was grave. “It could. Why don’t you come up on the mountain some Saturday and I’ll give you riding lessons? School will be out for the summer soon, and you’ll have a lot of time to practice.”

  He couldn’t know how appealing the idea was, not only to ride but to see Wolf again. The only thing was, it would hurt just as much to see him as it did not to see him, because he was still out of her reach. “I’ll think about it,” she promised, but she doubted she would ever take him up on the offer.

  Joe didn’t push it, but he didn’t intend to let it drop, either. He’d get Mary up on the mountain one way or another. He figured Wolf had about reached the limits of his restraint. Parading her right under his nose would be like leading a mare in heat in front of a stallion. His pretty, tart-tongued little teacher would be lucky if his dad didn’t have her flat on her back before she had the hello out of her mouth. Joe had to hide his smile. He’d never seen anyone get to Wolf the way Miss Mary Elizabeth Potter had. She had Wolf so tied in knots he was as dangerous as a wounded cougar.

  He mentally hummed a few bars of “Matchmaker.”

  When Mary got home the next Friday afternoon, there was a letter in the mailbox from Senator Allard, and her fingers trembled as she tore it open. If it was bad news for Joe, if Senator Allard had declined to recommend him to the Academy, she didn’t know what she would do. Senator Allard wasn’t their only possibility, but he had seemed the most receptive, and a turndown from him would really be discouraging.

  The senator’s letter to her was brief, thanking her for her efforts in bringing Joe to his attention. He had decided to recommend Joe for admittance to the Academy, for the freshman class beginning after Joe’s graduation from high school. From there on, it would be up to Joe to pass the rigorous academic and physical examinations.

  Enclosed was a private letter of congratulations to Joe.

  Mary hugged the letters to her breast, and tears welled in her eyes. They had done it, and it hadn’t even been that difficult! She had been prepared to petition every congressman every week until Joe was given his chance, but it hadn’t been necessary. Joe’s grades and credits had done it for him.

  It was news too good to wait, so she got back into her car and drove up Mackenzie’s Mountain. The drive was much different now; the snow had melted, and wildflowers bloomed beside the road. After the harsh winter cold, the spring warmth felt like a blessing on her skin,
though it still wasn’t nearly as warm as the springs she had known in Savannah. She was so excited and happy that she didn’t even notice the steep drop on the side of the road as it wound higher, but she did notice the wild grandeur of the mountains, stretching magnificently toward the dark blue heavens. She drew a deep breath and realized that the spring did make up for the winter. It felt like home, a new home, a place dear and familiar.

  The tires threw out a spray of gravel as she slid to a stop at the kitchen door of Wolf’s one-story frame house, and before the vehicle had rocked back on its springs she was bounding up the steps to pound on the door. “Wolf! Joe!” She knew she was yelling in a very unladylike manner, but she was too happy to care. Some situations just called for yelling.

  “Mary!”

  The call came from behind her, and she whirled. Wolf was coming from the barn at a dead run, his powerful body surging fluidly. Mary yelped in excitement and launched herself from the steps, her skirt flying up as she bolted down the graveled drive toward the barn. “He got it!” she screamed, waving the letters. “He got it!”

  Wolf skidded to a halt and watched the sedate teacher literally skipping and leaping toward him, her skirt kicking up around her thighs with each step. He just had time to realize there was nothing wrong, that she was laughing, when, three steps away, she went airborne. He braced himself and caught her weight against his chest, his brawny arms wrapping around her.

  “He got it!” she shrieked again, and threw her arms around his neck.

  Wolf could think of only one thing, and it made his mouth go dry. “He got it?”

  She waved the letters under his nose. “He got it! Senator Allard—the letter was in my mailbox—I couldn’t wait—where’s Joe?” She knew she was almost incoherent and made an effort to compose herself, but she just couldn’t stop grinning.

  “He’s in town picking up a load of fencing. Damn it, are you sure that’s what it says? He still has a year of school—”