Her thin shoulders moved restlessly. "Pretty deep," she said with a humorless laugh. "Dane, I have to finish this."

He withdrew his hand, draping it across his knee as he watched her. Her reaction to him was d.a.m.ning. He made her nervous. He could see her hands shaking, and he hated that part of the past that was responsible for her helpless fear.

"You kept coming, no matter how hard I tried to push you away.

You got closer than anyone else ever had," he said without meeting her eyes, his fingers tracing a streak of mud on the knee of his jeans as the involuntary confession escaped him. "I got in over my head before I knew it. I didn't really want a woman in my life."

"But you were married once, before you got shot," she said.

His eyes met hers and he smiled with pure mockery. "I started dating Jane because my mother didn't like her. Then I married her because she wouldn't sleep with me any other way. But she only suffered me in bed for one reason," he said, without elaborating on the reason. His face hardened. "Eventually she went looking for a man who could give her everything she needed. I a.s.sume she found him when we were divorced. She's remarried and has a child."

"Oh." She frowned, her eyes searching his curiously as she tried to get up enough courage to ask a question that was gnawing at her.

"You want to know why she didn't like sleeping with me," he said, nodding. "Do you really need to ask?"

He was like a bulldozer, in every way. Perhaps the ardor he'd shown her that long-ago day was how he made love naturally. She hadn't considered that likelihood.

It opened her mind to new possibilities. She lifted her face. "Was it...were you that way with her? Like you were with me that day?"

47 His jaw tautened. "I've never liked a woman enough to care whether or not she enjoyed me in bed," he said bluntly. "I wanted Jane. I thought if she loved me, preliminaries wouldn't matter."

Her breath escaped in a sigh. She was innocent on certain sub- jects, but she seemed to know more about than he did.

"But...but you can't just...just..." She colored. "Dane, women aren't like men," she said helplessly. "A woman has to have time, tenderness."

"How would you know?" he asked insolently. "Didn't you just practically admit to me that you're still a virgin?"

The blush got worse. She glared at him. "Being innocent doesn't make me stupid. I watch movies and read books, you know. I do have some idea of what a woman is supposed to feel with a man she loves."

"You loved me," he said darkly. "And you felt nothing except fear."

"I was infatuated with you," she corrected, shivering inside at the knowledge that she'd been so transparent. At nineteen, she'd known nothing about how to keep her heart hidden. "You hurt me, and not just emotionally."

"That wasn't deliberate. I was...hungry for you," he said hesi- tantly. He sounded almost vulnerable. "You were sweet and loving, and I thought..." He cursed under his breath. "What does it mat- ter?" His eyes darted up and slammed into hers. "You didn't want me."

"You were so violent," she whispered weakly.

His fist clenched on his knee. "I don't know any other way with a woman!" he said stiffly. His eyes narrowed as they met hers. "I was a late bloomer. My mother was the only woman I'd been around much and she hated men with a vengeance. In fact, she hated me, too. I got my first taste of women when I was a rookie cop. The kind of women you meet out on the streets in police work are every bit as tough as the men, because they have to be. The only encoun- ters I ever had were rushed and unemotional." His eyes were un- consciously intent on her face. "The way I was with you that day...

is the only way I know."

48.

"Dane," she whispered, her voice soft with unwilling compas- sion. "I'm so sorry!"

His dark eyes met hers. "What?" he asked absently.

She wondered if he realized what he'd told her, how much of himself he'd revealed. She reached up, for the first time voluntarily touching his lean cheek. Her fingers were cold.

He jerked back from her, his eyes glittery, and closed up like a clam. "I don't need pity, honey," he said mockingly. "I don't need a d.a.m.ned woman, either."

He got up and stomped off down the aisle, leaving a shocked, puzzled Tess behind.

For the next two days, it was Dane who avoided her, almost as if his confession had embarra.s.sed him. Tess found herself less ner- vous as she considered how his att.i.tude toward women had stifled his ability to feel tenderness.

Tess had never really liked his mother-Nita La.s.siter had been very brittle, very flighty. When Tess's father wasn't around, she was all but hostile toward Tess, and even more so toward Dane.

Dane's ex-wife hadn't seemed much of a prize, either, judging from that one dinner Tess had spent with Dane and her. Her sullen, resentful behavior had convinced Tess that the woman had never loved Dane, and he himself had said that it was the uniform that had attracted Jane more than the man inside it. Jane had struck Tess as being just as much a man-hater as Dane's mother.

She frowned thoughtfully. Didn't they say a man unconsciously looked for women who reminded him of his mother? Or that men sometimes, equally unconsciously, chose women who lived down to their image of them? Dane had spent his time around women of questionable character in his youth, so perhaps he thought s.e.x was only permissible with women who had no softness, no vulnerability.

It was a sobering thought. But she had no time to work on the theory, because Dane announced suddenly that he'd been away from the office long enough and had to get back. Naturally, Tess agreed to return to work, too, because her arm was back to normal, even if a little soreness remained.

49 He packed and drove them back to Houston, silent and unap- proachable, after Tess had said her goodbyes to Beryl.

"I'm going to post a man outside your apartment, and I'm having you followed," he said curtly when he deposited her suitcases in her apartment an hour later.

She looked up at him irritably. "I don't need a watchdog. I'm perfectly capable of calling the police if I need to."

"No, you aren't," he replied. "You don't know these people. I do."

"Mr. Policeman." She nodded, eyes flashing at him. "I'll bet when you were a beat cop, your badge was sewn to your skin!"

He smiled, a sensual twist of his lips that made her heart race. "I loved the job," he agreed. "It was, and is, the only place I feel comfortable, apart from the ranch. Detective work isn't so different from what I did. Especially when I take a criminal case."

That was a fact. During the time she'd worked for him, she'd known him to track down murderers and bank robbers, to subdue them and bring them in, all as part of the job. Returning fugitives for worried bail bondsmen was a big chunk of the agency's income.

Tame cases he left to the skip tracers and operatives. He took the dangerous ones-he and Nick, his protege.

"It's the adrenaline," she murmured. "You're addicted to the danger."

"Am I?"

"It would explain why you won't slow down," she said. Her eyes slid down the muscular length of him, over the scarred shoulder and chest she knew were hidden under his clothes.

"You wouldn't want to look at me after the damage the bullets did," he said quietly. "It would make you sick."

Her eyes jumped back to his. "I was thinking about how it hap- pened," she said. "Not how it would look."

He relaxed a little, but not much. He always seemed as if his spine were glued to a wall. He walked tall, never slumped or slouched. His posture, like his character, was arrow-straight.

"All the same, I'll never be anyone's idea of a pinup in a bathing suit," he said with a faint smile. "Not that I was before I got shot."

50Diana Palmer Her unblinking stare was involuntary. "I've never seen you in a bathing suit," she remarked absently.

He didn't move, but his eyes darkened, became intent on hers. "I wouldn't be caught dead in one, now. Not in public, anyway." His chest rose and fell heavily. "I'd let you look at me, I guess. But no one else."

Her body stilled as she looked up at him. "Why me?" she asked softly.

"Because you wouldn't make me feel like less of a man," he said simply. "Some women have a knack for putting a knife in a man's ego. It makes them feel superior. When a man does the same thing to a woman, they call him a chauvinist. Some double stan- dard."

"All women aren't like that."

He moved a step closer to her. When she didn't tense or move back, he took another step, and another, until he was close enough to smell the faint scent of violets that clung to her skin. She was wearing a soft gray pantsuit with a heather-colored jacket. Her hair was loose and she looked young and pretty and very vulnerable.

He caught a handful of her hair a little roughly and pushed up at her nape to lift her face to his narrow, darkening eyes.

"Teach me," he said huskily.

Her lips parted on a rush of breath as her heartbeat ran wild. "Wh- what?" she whispered.

His eyes fell to her mouth and he bent toward it, his own mouth parting just as it touched hers. "Teach me how to be gentle...."

He spoke the words into her mouth. She stiffened at the moist, hot pressure, the smokey warmth of his own mouth so intimately touching hers. She could breathe him, smell the tang of cologne, feel the strength and power of his body almost touching her.

His eyes were open, and she looked into them just as his lips brushed hers.

"What do you like, Tess?" he whispered. His teeth opened and closed with exquisite tenderness on her upper lip, while his tongue softly tasted its moist inside. "Tell me."

Her hands were on his chest, under the tweed jacket, against his 51 white shirt. Under the material, she could feel a thick cushion of hair over hard, warm muscle. "Dane, you can't," she began shakily.

"Why?"

His mouth was easing her lips apart. The contact was making her knees weak. "You hated...me," she whispered.

"I hated my mother," he corrected, his eyes searching hers while he played with her mouth, that steely hand at her nape still clutching her soft hair, "I hated my ex-wife...I hated half the world. But I never hated you." His heavy brows drew together in something like pain. "Never, Tess...!"

She felt him shudder as his mouth came down completely over hers, capturing it in a silence that danced with tension, with impos- sible desires.

For an instant, it was like the past again. But his arms weren't bruising. She could feel the restraint in him, the determination to go slow, to not rush her. Because of it, and because of what she'd learned about him, the panic began to recede. She let him hold her.

And for the first time, she allowed herself to feel his mouth, to let herself taste it as he kissed her with exquisite softness. The contact was more pleasurable than she'd ever dreamed. His lips were firm, and he tasted of coffee. She liked the way he tasted.

As the pleasure grew, she felt a sudden heat in her lower body, a faint trembling in her legs. "Dane..." She heard her voice sobbing against the pleasure of his mouth, but like lightning striking, his hand contracted and he ground her lips apart under his, so that his tongue could ease between her teeth and push softly inside the sweet darkness of her mouth.

She remembered the one time she'd shared a deep kiss with him and gasped.

He lifted his head slowly, his heart pounding with a heavy beat.

He looked down into her shaken eyes for a long moment, fiercely satisfied with what he saw there. She wasn't afraid; she was aroused.

Amazing, that tenderness could make such a difference. It enhanced his own pleasure.

But he read the hesitation she couldn't disguise. "You don't like deep kisses with me, do you?" he asked huskily, his eyes glittering with desire. "My tongue pushes inside your mouth, penetrates it, 52.

and you shiver because of the images it produces." His hand loos- ened on her hair, smoothing it. She stood quietly against him, not protesting, as his deep, soft voice held her captive. "It's very much like another kind of penetration," he breathed, nibbling at her mouth. "Intimate, and urgent, and very, very deep...." He whis- pered into her mouth, suiting the action to the words as his tongue probed slowly.

She cried out and suddenly lifted her arms convulsively around his neck, at almost the same moment that the telephone jangled noisely in the heated silence.

Her body jumped, and her wounded arm throbbed, even as his head lifted with a faint groan. Her eyes were wild, frightened all over again. She was trembling, but this time not because of fear.

She was clinging to him, not fighting him. He'd aroused her. The knowledge made his heart slam at his ribs.

She couldn't stand. Her knees gave way when he let go of her.

"It's all right," he whispered, lifting her in his arms. "I've got you."

She laid her cheek against his jacket, clinging to him weakly as he carried her to the sofa and sat down with her in his lap before he answered the telephone.

"Yes, she's back. Yes, she's all right. No, you can't speak to her.

I'll have her call you later," he said tersely.

He hung up. "Helen," he murmured dryly, looking down into her dazed eyes. "Checking to see if you were home."

"That was nice of her."

"Yes, it was, but her timing stinks," he said huskily. His eyes fell to her mouth. "I'm glad that I can make you want me, Tess."

"That's conceit..." she began.

His mouth covered hers, parting her mouth, making her cling to his strong neck. He didn't increase the pressure or deepen the kiss.

He stroked her mouth with his for a few aching seconds and then lifted his head. He looked at her with pure hunger until she flushed and averted her gaze to his throat.

"I've never kissed anyone like this," he whispered after a minute.

"Neither have I." Her cheeks flushed with heat. "The things you said to me...!"

53 "Turned you on so much that you gasped," he murmured, his eyes glittering. "I've never said things like that to another woman.

They seem to come naturally with you."

"You didn't hurt me."

His jaw tautened. He looked at her mouth until his body began to ache. He was getting in over his head here. He had to stop, now, while he still could. "No," he returned deeply. "I didn't hurt you."

He'd never tried to be gentle. Tess made him want that. Made him want things he resented wanting. "I couldn't hurt you now. Not even if I wanted to."

He nuzzled his cheek against hers with rough affection and hugged her close for an instant before he made himself put her gently away and get to his feet. "I'd better go. Keep the door locked.

Get some rest. We'll try to restore order to the office in the morning, if you're sure you feel up to a day's work."

"Of course I do," she stammered. Her hair was disheveled, and her mouth tingled. She stared at him helplessly as he straightened his tie. "Why?" she whispered.

He was still getting himself back together. He'd never felt such a weakness for a woman, such a raging need to please, to pleasure her. He hadn't thought he was still vulnerable, but he was. He wanted Tess as he'd never wanted another woman. He couldn't af- ford to give in to it. Not now. Not yet.

His dark eyes pinned hers. "Remuneration for past sins?" he asked, lifting an eyebrow as he smiled mockingly.