What could he do to her? She wasn't alone. She had help now.

But to pay for it she was about to turn over half her property--half of Uncle Joe's legacy to her--to Jamie Slater. If he chose, he could be her neighbor all her life. She could watch him, and torture herself day after day, wondefing who he rode away to see, wondering what it was like when he took a woman into his arms.

She groaned and pushed away from the table. She couldn't solve a thing tonight. She needed some sleep. She needed some sleep very badly.

She doused the light and crawled beneath the covers. It felt so good to be in her own bed again. The sheets were cool and clean and fresh-smelling, and her mattress was soft and firm, and it seemed to caress her deliciously. A faint glow from the stars and the moon entered the room gently. It kept everything in dark shadows, and yet she could see the familiar shapes of her dressing table and her drawers and her little mahogany secretary desk.

The breeze wafted her curtains. She closed her eyes. Perhaps she dozed for a moment. Not much time could have pa.s.sed, and yet she suddenly became aware that nome thing was different. Her door had been thrust open.

She wasn't alone.

Jamie was standing in the doorway, his hands on his hips, his body a silhouette in the soft hazy moonbeams. There was nothing soft or gentle about his stance, however. She could feel the anger that radiated from him.

"All right, Tess, where's my room?"

His room?

"Oh!" she murmured.

"Your room ... well, I didn't think you were going to stay here."

Long strides brought him quickly across the room. She scrambled to a sitting position as he towered over her.

"I.

just spent two days riding with you to get here. I spent two nights sleeping on the hard ground beneath the wagon."

"The hay in the barn is very soft."

"The hay in the barn is very soft," he repeated, staring at her. He leaned closer.

"The hay in the barn is very soft? Is that what you said?" She felt his closeness in the shadows even as she inhaled his clean, fascinating, masculine scent.

His eyes seemed silver in the darkness, satanic. She was rid- died with trembling, so keenly aware of him that it was astonishing.

"You don't have a room for me?" he demanded. "All right, I am sorry.

But you were gone, and we were all exhausted. And you did have a bath somewhere. I just believed that you meant to sleep where you had bathed."

He was still for a moment--dead still. Then he smiled. "Miss. Stuart, move over."

"What?"

"Move over. If there's no room for me, then I'll sleep here."

"Of all the nerve!"

"Hush! We share this bed, or we sleep in the hay together," he warned her.

He meant it! she thought, still incredulous. She started to rise, trying to escape from the bed. He caught her arm and pulled her gently back.

"Where are you going?" he whispered.

"Where else! You're bigger than I am--I can't throw you out! I'm going to the barn!"

"Wait."

"For what?" she demanded.

For what? Every pulse within her was alive and crying out. She felt him with the length of her body, with her heart, with her soul, with her womb.

He did not hold her against him. He caressed her. He was warm, and his smile and the white flash of his teeth in the night were compelling and hypnotic.

"I said that we'd go together," he told her. He swept her up, coc.o.o.ned in a tangle of sheet and quilt. He held her tightly against his body and started for the door. Her arms wound around his neck. She stared at the planes of his face and felt as if the soft magic of the moonbeams had wrapped around her. She should have been screaming, protesting, bringing down the house.

But she was not. Her fingers grazed his nape, and she felt absurdly comfortable in his arms. He was dragging her out to the hay, she thought, and she did not care.

Nor was there anything secretive or furtive about his action. He moved with long strides and went down the stairway with little effort to be quiet. He opened the front door, bracing her weight with one arm, then let it close behind him. He stood on the porch and looked out into the night. Then he stared at her, and she knew that she was smiling.

"Where am I heading?"

"I don't know."

"Where do the hands sleep?"

"In the bunkhouse, by the far barn."

"Then I want the first barn?" he demanded softly. She couldn't answer him.

She wasn't sure what the question was. All she could think was that he meant her to sleep in the hay.

She wasn't sure what else he meant for her to do there, but though she was in his arms now, and though he carried her with a certain force, she suddenly knew that what happened would be her choice. Still, he had caught hold of something deep within her, and she wasn't angry.

She smiled again as she looked at him and told him primly, "You, sir, are completely audacious." "Maybe," he said, and smiled in return. Then it seemed they were locked there in the night, their eyes touching, and something else touching maybe, with the tenderness of the laughter they shared. Then the laughter faded.

He pulled her more tightly against him, higher within his arms. And as she watched him, fascinated, in the glow of the moonbeams, his lips parted upon hers, and the world seemed to explode as his kiss entered into her.

Darkness swirled around her, and sensation took flight. She had to get away from him. and quickly.

No. she had to stay. She was where she wanted to be. Exactly where she wanted to be.

Chapter Eight.

He carried her, in the moonlit night, to the barn. He entered it and laid her, in her coc.o.o.n of covers, in the rear of the building, where soft alfalfa lay freed from its bales, ready to be tossed to the horses.

The smell of the hay was sweet, almost intoxicating.

He lay down beside her and brought the back of his hand against her cheek, touching the length of it, as if he studied just her cheek and found the form and texture both beautiful and fascinating. Then his finger roamed over the damp fullness of her lip. He watched the movement as he touched her, then his eyes met hers. She could still feel, in her memo~j, in the pulse that seemed to beat throughout her, the touch of his lips against hers. And yet when he kissed her again, though the feel was poignant, she knew that he would move away when he did.

He lay back against the hay, staring at the rafters and the ceiling.

He groaned softly, then rolled suddenly, violently, to face her again.

He didn't touch her, but leaned on an elbow to stare at her reproachfully.

"You couldn't have just arranged a room, for me, huh?"

"You couldn't have just stuck around for a while, huh?" ahe retorted.

He was ruining it, dissolving the moonbeams, destroying the moment she had imagined and waited for.

He rolled on his back again.

"Go to your room," he told her.

"I had no right to drag you out here."

Tess leaped to her feet, her cheeks flaming, her body and soul in torment.

She stared at him furiously.

"You have no right to do what you're doing now! To ruin everything!"

"To ruin everything?" He scowled.

"Tess! I'm trying d.a.m.ned hard to do the decent thing!" And she would never know what an effort it was taking. He felt on fire, as if he burned in a thousand h.e.l.ls. It had been all right before he touched her, before he felt her lips parting beneath his.

Before he sensed her innocence and the sweet wildness beneath it, the pa.s.sion, the sensuality that simmered and swept beneath it all, that promised heaven. She was different. He wasn't sure if he dared take her all the way, because he knew it would mean fragile ties that might bind him forever. He couldn't find a simple fascination in her beauty; it would be more, and though he couldn't begin to define it, it was there.

He already slept with dreams of her haunting his mind; he never forgot for a moment the way she had looked upon the rock, as naked as Eve, as tempting as original sin.

"Tess, don't you see? I'm trying to let you go!" She paused, and it seemed that she waited upon her toes, as if she would go or stay according to the way the breeze came.

There was a curiously soft smile on her face, almost wistful, a look he had seldom seen.

"What if I don't want to be let go?" she asked him very quietly, with a breathless, melodic whisper. He wasn't sure he had really heard the words.

Real or not, they ignited embers within him. He came to his feet and looked at her across the small, shadowed distance that separated them.

He could almost reach out and touch her. If he did, he would be lost. If he put his hands upon her now, he would never let her go.

"You have to make up your mind." He almost growled the words.

"No strings, no promises, no guarantees. You should run. You should run from me just as fast as one of those thoroughbreds of yours."

"Why?"

She didn't move; she hadn't taken a step. There was a note of amus.e.m.e.nt and challenge in her voice. Her chin was raised high; her eyes were brilliant, nearly coal-black in the shadows. He forced himself to walk around her, but that was a mistake. The moon was filtering through the windows, and the light played havoc with the flannel gown she wore.

Light touched fabric, molded it, saw through it. He felt again the softness of the woman he had held, and his hands itched to touch her again. A hunger took root inside him, one that made him long to caress and taste and know.

"Why?" He repeated her question.

The reasons were swiftly leaving his mind. If she was willing, he was more than anxious to drown in the sweet depths of her fascinating waters. He clenched his fingers and kept moving casually.

"Because we're in a barn, because I've the distinct feeling you don't know what you're doing, because you're young and because you're probably the type of woman who ought to fall in love, deeply in love, with the right man, and have a band of gold, and all the rest. Because I'm the hardened refuse of an ill-fated war, and though I don't mind a fight, I wouldn't be looking for more than a lover."

She smiled.

"Lieutenant, what makes you think I'd be looking for anything more than a lover?"

He almost groaned aloud. If she didn't leave soon. "Tess, I don't think you know" -- "I'm twenty-four, Lieutenant. And just as much the refuse of an ill-fated war as you are. That war taught me a great deal. You can't always wait to seize what you want. Life is too short, too quickly severed."

She was smiling still, and there was something poignant about her words that caught hold of his heart. He had never seen her more beautiful, more feminine, more arresting. Her eyes were wide; her smile was gentle; her still form was compelling in the flannel that was draped over her shoulders, nearly falling from them, that conformed to the rise of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then fell to the floor. Her hair was a river of dating, honeyed light that caressed and embraced her, waving around her shoulders and falling almost to her waist. Her eyes. When he came close, he saw that they were not coal-black at all, but so deeply colored in the near darkness that they appeared to be a rich and hypnotic purple.

He held still. He watched her and tried to find the fight words, the words that would get her to leave. She would hate him for humiliating and rejecting her, but maybe that would be better than what he wanted.

To own her, to have all of her, to teach her everything she wanted to know so thoroughly that she would forget everything but the feel of him beside her.

"Come here then," he said hoa.r.s.ely.

She still seemed to pause. Like a sprite, like a night witch or angel, he knew not which. A rueful curve came to her lips, and she said softly, "Jamie?"

"What?"

"Where did you take your bath?"

He smiled, too.

"At the livery stables. Not at the saloon."

"Thank you," she murmured, then she took a step toward him, and another step, and she was in his arms.

His mouth closed upon hers, and he let his hands wander where they would. He had tried to do the decent thing. And it hadn't worked. So now. She was fragrant, like a drug. He breathed in the scent of her hair and the scent of her flesh. He kissed her lips and her earlobe, and he pressed his tongue against the surge of her pulse at her throat, and he took her lips again, savoring the caress of her tongue, feeling the rise of heat and need and the rampant beat in his loins as the thrusts of their tongues became ever more erotic and telling. He stroked her body through the flannel, caressing her breast, finding the peak and ma.s.saging it to a hard pebble with his thumb and fingers. Then he cried out and lowered his mouth upon her, his teeth grazing the fullness of her breast and the hard peak through the fabric, the dampness of his mouth pervading it and bringing whispers and whimpers to her lips.

She braced herself upon his shoulders, and cried out, falling against him.

Trembling, he lifted her and set her on the coc.o.o.n of sheet and quilt in the hay. Then he stood over her, watching her. He ripped away the kerchief at his throat and slowly undid the b.u.t.tons of his shirt. He watched her all the while, but her eyes did not close. He threw his shirt upon the hay, and pulled off his boots and socks, unbuckled his gun belt and then his pants belt and finally peeled away the last of his clothing. Her eyes closed at last, but not before her cheeks had taken on a dusky hue.

"You can still run," he told her harshly.

She shook her head. Her hair lay spread across the quilt and sheet and dangled into the hay around them. He knelt before 'her and set his hand upon the hem of her gown, pushing it up.