Holt's Gamble (19 page)

Kierin laughed in reply.

Clay tightened his arms around her slightly and flicked the reins. "I like it out here, too," he admitted, gazing out across the plain. "I never tire of it."

They headed for a lone bur oak tree which sat at the knoll of a hill. Beneath its spreading limbs, Clay dismounted, then reached up to help her down. She braced her hands atop his broad shoulders while his fingers circled her waist. He lowered her slowly to the ground.

Holding her closer than was purely necessary, Clay's thumbs traced the boning beneath the front of her blue gingham dress, stalling for time. He was reluctant to release her even while he reminded himself that wasn't the reason he'd brought her out here. He swallowed hard and stepped away.

The air crackled between them and Kierin pushed away from the horse's flank. She scanned the shiny-leafed branches above them. "Is... this what you wanted me to see?" she asked.

"No." He resisted the urge to touch her again and motioned silently for her to follow him. At the top of the rise, he lowered himself to the ground and gestured for her to do the same. She flattened herself to the earth beside him with a perplexed expression.

Without speaking, he pointed below to a sparsely covered meadow of short grass which was scattered with countless little mounds of dirt. It was a hundred acres wide and startlingly alive with thousands upon thousands of prairie dogs.

"Oh," Kierin breathed, trying to take it all in. "Oh, it's—it's wonderful—enormous. I've never—" Words utterly failed her at the sight. From their position on the crest of the hill, she and Clay were only thirty feet from the closest burrows, but the breeze favored them and carried their scent away from the dog town.

Clay rested his chin on the backs of his hands and watched her with unconcealed pleasure. Somehow, he'd known she'd enjoy this as much as he had the first time he'd seen it. Her green eyes sparkled with childlike fascination. With her fingertips pressed delightedly against her lips, her smile reminded him of a child who'd tasted her first peppermint.

"How did you know it was here?" she asked, without pulling her gaze from the sprawling meadow.

"I found it this afternoon while I was hunting," he explained. "Used to be able to see towns like this from the trail, but you rarely see one this big anywhere near it now."

For a long time, they silently watched a family of prairie dogs on one of the mounds closest to them. The male stood several inches taller than the others, his shiny black eyes darting back and forth, ever alert to danger. Around him, the pinkish-brown females and young groomed each other with their little paws, then affectionately touched noses.

"Look, they're kissing," Kierin whispered.

Clay nodded. His mouth curved into an unconscious smile. "I don't know what else you could call it. They seem almost human, don't they?"

Kierin tipped her head in Clay's direction. "Mm-m, in a way. It would be nice if our lives were that simple, wouldn't it?" she mused. "We could spend our days preening in the sun, loving our families, undistracted by the worries of the world."

He chuckled. "Their worries are a little more immediate, I guess. Simple things like chasing the owls out of their burrows, keeping grass on the table, that kind of thing."

He was teasing her and Kierin returned his smile. "I guess what I mean," she said after considering her words carefully, "is they don't allow survival to come between them—to break apart their families—like we do."

Clay rolled onto his side and propped a hand at the back of his head. His dark brows lifted inquiringly.

"Are we speaking from personal experience?"

She propped herself up on her elbows and deftly avoided both his stare and his question. "Observation," she answered. "Everyone suffers losses. I doubt I'm any special case."

His hand reached out and stroked her shoulder with a whispering touch. "I'm afraid I'd have to argue with that," he told her. Gently, he brushed a strand of her hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. "You're very special, Kierin."

A rush of heat swept up her spine at his words.

"Clay..."

His hand lingered near her cheek. "Hasn't anyone ever told you that before?"

She edged away from him slightly. "No. I mean—well, only Lily."

Clay's eyebrows tipped downward. "Lily?"

"She... worked at the Independence." Kierin hesitated. "She... ran the upstairs."

"A
madam?"
Clay's eyes narrowed fractionally and his lips parted in a silent curse. Rolling onto his back, he glared into the perfect blue dome above them. "Christ, Kierin, that's hardly what I meant."

She bristled like a bad-tempered cat at his tone and her voice became flat with anger. "Lily was my friend."

Clay glared back at her. Seeing her here, with the afternoon sun playing in her hair and the prairie reflected in her eyes, it had been easy to forget what she'd been before he'd met her. That, he knew, wasn't even the issue for him anymore. It was all the other men who'd had her before—the way
he
ached to now. And
couldn't.
That unreasonable jealousy made him deliberately cruel.

"You sell yourself short, Princess." His jaw was set in a firm, angry line. "Madams don't have friends. They have business investments."

Kierin sat up abruptly, propelled by her anger. Hundreds of prairie dogs scattered for their lives in the meadow below, dashing down to the safety of their holes, but neither Kierin nor Clay noticed.

"It wasn't like that," she snapped, angry at having to defend her relationship with Lily and determined not to. "What would you know about it, anyway?" she demanded. "When was the last time you had to live in a brothel? When did you ever look at one of the women you wrestled under the sheets as something besides chattel, designed to fit neatly into the back corner of your mind where you wouldn't have to ever think of her as a person?"

Clay propped himself up on one elbow and glared at her. "I don't seem to recall hearing any complaints on that account. In fact," he continued, with uncharacteristic disregard for his hard-and-fast rule never to discuss one woman while in the company of another, "strange as it may seem to you, not a single one cowered before me like a goddamned virgin, afraid that I would hurt her or leave her less than completely satisfied."

Her eyes narrowed and she tipped her chin up haughtily. "I suppose, by that, you're referring to
me?"

He leveled an insolent "you said it, I didn't" look at her with his steely blue eyes.

Infuriated, Kierin snatched up a handful of grass and flung it at his face. Clay feinted to the right, dodging the sudden and unexpected attack. His brows arched with surprise as if he were looking into the eyes of a crazy woman.

"Ooh-h! Damn you, Clay Holt." Kierin's voice was shrill and barely controlled. "Why did you even bring me out here? Just to pick a fight?" She pushed herself up to her knees, hampered by the tangle of her cotton skirts. "You know what your problem is?" she spat, tugging irritably at the troublesome fabric around her legs.

"No," came his equally testy reply. "Why don't you enlighten m—?"

"You're so damn busy being mad at me and the rest of the world, you've forgotten how nice it can be to just enjoy the simple pleasures in life—like... like this perfectly beautiful day," she ranted, "without dredging up the past and arguing about things that don't even matter anymore."

She stood, gesturing angrily with her arms. "What's past is past, for God's sake. Can't you—" The toe of her boot caught in her hem. "—just... oh-hh-h!"

Balance lost, momentum gained, she pitched forward, her lecture ending abruptly in a tangle of cotton gingham. Arms flailing, she fell smack on top of the scowling object of her anger, flattening him to the ground.

"Oh!" Kierin gasped, irritated beyond endurance to find herself in his arms. "Let me up, you—you—"

Her elbow dug him painfully in the ribs. "Ow! Simmer down, will you?" Clay yelled, clamping his steely hands around her wrists. He rolled over on top of her and shifted his weight, pinning her completely to the ground.

"Get... off... of me," she panted. "What do you think you're—"

He wrestled her still. "Did anyone ever tell you that you're breathtakingly beautiful when you're clumsy?"

"Ooo-hh. You are the most impossible man I've ever met."

"So," he replied mildly, pinning her arms above her head, "now you've added
impossible
to my long list of faults?"

His amused expression sent her temper flaring. "Yes." Her heart was knocking against her ribs so hard it shook her whole body, "And irritating and closed-mouthed. And let's not forget bullheaded." She squirmed underneath him, but she felt about as puissant as a trussed-up squirrel.

He lowered a quelling amount of weight against her.

"What was that you said?" he asked. His mouth tipped up at the corners with mischief. "Simple pleasures?" With its flash of white teeth, his grin was as dangerous as it was seductive.

She nearly stopped breathing. "That wasn't what I meant."

Nose to nose, they glared at one another. His lean body pressed against hers with the unyielding rigidity of iron. He'd trapped her wrists up by her ears and her breasts were flattened against the lean-muscled wall of his chest. If he'd wanted to crush her, she knew it would have been a simple matter of shifting his substantial weight off his elbows.

"Perhaps you should show me what you
did
mean," he taunted, rocking his hips against hers until she could feel his arousal hard against her.

Her breath returned in short, angry puffs. "You're a bully, Clay Holt. Let me up," she demanded, but had little hope of his compliance.

His stormy eyes explored hers as if truly seeing them for the first time. His heated lips caressed her cheek. "I don't think so," he murmured in a voice that was almost a whisper and nearly lost to the vibrant hum of the prairie.

Her lips parted—with the vague awareness that he intended to kiss her—and unconsciously, she moistened them with the tip of her tongue. She felt him quicken against her belly. A shock raced through her at the foreign sensation and her nerves stretched taut as a fiddle string.

His head dipped with calculated slowness to her ear, where his tongue traced little circles against the sensitive lobe and then he nipped it playfully.

"Is this what you meant?" he murmured in a low, breathy hiss.

"No." The word was little more than a whisper.

His open mouth descended to the hollow dip in her shoulder. "Or... this?"

Her head rocked slightly back and forth in a useless denial of the inevitable.

"No?" Clay's eyes, raised now to hers, had darkened to the color of thunderheads. His mouth hovered a heartbeat away from hers. "What about this?"

"Don't—" Her lips formed the word, but no sound accompanied the protest, for at that moment, his mouth swooped down on hers. It took complete possession of hers in a kiss so like the man who gave it—passionate and disturbing. Her mouth yielded to his in the space of a breath and her lips, newly tutored by him, opened to the insistence of his tongue.

The passion exploded between them with such unexpected intensity it left them both gasping. His open palm made a slow, maddening descent down the length of her arm and closed over the full swell of her breast. His fingertips caressed the hardened peak that rose beneath the fabric of her dress, sending exquisite ripples of heat through her limbs.

Relinquishing her mouth momentarily, he burned fiery, open-mouthed kisses down the length of her slender neck. She thought to protest, but her brain seemed to be working too slowly to form the words. An involuntary shudder raced through her.

"Ah... perhaps this... was what you meant." His mouth hovered over her, barely touching her neck with butterfly touches of his lips.

Kierin tilted her head back against the ground, wantonly exposing more of her throat to him, and she pushed her fingers into the dark curls at his temples. Was it what she'd meant? She couldn't remember. More accurately, she couldn't think. Not when his mouth was doing such wonderful things to her.

His lips sought hers again. "Kierin..." he whispered against her mouth, the raw hunger roughening his voice. "God... you make me—"

The prairie had swallowed the sound of the approaching horse until it was almost upon them. Instincts dulled by languid passion surged through him with a rush of adrenaline.

"Bloody hell!" Clay rolled off her, his Colt already clearing the leather strapped to his thigh. His vision was momentarily impaired by the glare of the late afternoon sun, but he saw the dark shape of a rider haul back on the reins some twenty feet away.

"Holy hell—don't shoot!" a familiar voice cried. The man wheeled his mount as if ready to flee.

Clay squinted into the blinding glare. Relief swamped him. It was Mel Watkins on his dun horse, looking, at the moment, as if he'd rather be anywhere else in the world but where he was.

Clay lowered the pistol, but his heart thudded heavily in his chest. He looked back at Kierin, who was sitting up now, arms splayed at her sides against the ground. Her cheeks were flushed a bright pink—from passion or embarrassment he couldn't be sure—and her teeth toyed worriedly with the edge of her bottom lip.