Lover in the Rough (6 page)

Reba closed her eyes and trembled as a strange weakness claimed her, his words like fire inside her. She looked up at him with dazed cinnamon eyes, unsure of herself, almost afraid of him. “Chance—”

He kissed her gently, soothing rather than overwhelming her. “But I’ve shocked you and Tim enough for one day,” he said, smiling down at her crookedly.

The world returned to Reba in a rush. She realized that she had been standing in her office with the door wide open, passionately kissing a man she barely knew. Scarlet stained her cheekbones.

“The door,” she said, trying to step away from Chance.

“Tim closed it,” said Chance, tightening his arms, holding her close. “A discreet young man, your Tim.”

“Not mine. Gina’s.”

“A good thing, too,” said Chance, biting her lower lip in a slow, gentle caress that made her weak all over again. “I’d hate to have to take such a nice young man out in the desert and lose him.”

Chance was smiling but his eyes were cold silver.

“Tim’s like the brother I never had,” said Reba, holding onto Chance’s hard upper arms, wanting him to understand. “That’s all he is.” Then she heard her own words and was divided between confusion and irritation. Why should she have to explain her friendships to Chance Walker? No matter how intense the feelings he evoked in her, she had known him only a short time. “Not,” she added evenly, “that how I feel about Tim is any business of yours.”

“You don’t believe that, do you?” asked Chance quietly.

Reba stared at him for a long moment, eyes clear and hard. Then she shook her head slowly, sending dark blond hair whispering over her cheeks. “No, I don’t believe that. But I’m
damned
if I know why. I don’t know you, Chance Walker. And when I’m with you, I don’t even know myself.”

“You keep taking words out of my mind,” he drawled. “Shall we get to know each other by playing Twenty Questions over lunch?”

Reba couldn’t help smiling at the idea of sharing a child’s game with a man called Chance. “All right. Me first, though,” she added, gathering up her hair as she spoke and twisting it expertly into a coil.

“Why?” he asked, amused.

“You’re bigger and a lot tougher than I am. I need whatever advantage I can get.”

He put his hand on her cheek and looked at her searchingly. “Don’t be afraid of me,
chaton
.”

Sensing the vulnerability beneath his quiet words, she turned her face and kissed his hard palm. “I’m not afraid of your strength. It’s your questions that I’m uncomfortable about.” She smiled at his startled look. “Don’t you have things you’d just as soon not talk about?” she asked, searching his clear, oddly colored eyes.

His hand moved from her cheek as his face changed, all expression gone. He was again a stranger, hard and utterly assured, invulnerable. “Did you have any particular area of questioning in mind?” he asked, his voice uninflected.

Chance’s black moustache didn’t disguise the harsh lines of his face or the unflinching intelligence that appraised her. Compelling, dangerous, a Tiger God hewn out of uncompromising stone.

“No,” she whispered.

Stillness pooled in the room for a long moment, then the coiled intensity slowly seeped out of Chance. He touched her cheek. “Yes, there are things I’d rather not talk about.”

“And they’re the only ones that matter, aren’t they?”

“Do you have a jacket?” he said calmly. “There’s a cool wind blowing outside.”

Reba thought of repeating her question until she remembered his cold words to Todd.
Keep pushing, you’ll get there.
She wouldn’t push. Not yet. Pushing a man like Chance was not only dangerous, it was futile. She might as well go push a mountain. When he trusted her, he would talk freely.

That is, if a man like Chance Walker ever trusted anybody. But he had to, for without trust nothing was possible, not pleasure, not friendship, and certainly not love.

With a feeling close to fear, Reba realized that she wanted to know all of those things with Chance, and more—things for which she had no names, only a hunger as deep as the one he had revealed to her when he kissed her in the moon shadow of the dunes. The thought of such
wanting
was a shock to her, and the implications frightening.

“I seem to have lost my comb,” she said casually, but the hand holding her hair had a fine tremor in it.

Chance smiled and reached into the pocket of the tailored charcoal wool slacks he was wearing. He held out his hand to her. On his palm was the simple jet comb that had held her hair in place. “This one? Or”—he reached into the pocket of his pearl-grey chamois shirt—“this one?”

His left hand held the polished ivory comb that she had worn in Death Valley. She looked up at him, remembering the night and the dunes where she had felt safe enough to let down the barriers she held against the world and cry in his arms until she was too weak to stand. Then his kiss, and the world falling away as they held each other and discovered needs and possibilities she had never before known.

“The jet, I think,” Chance said when Reba didn’t speak. He fitted the comb into the shining mass of hair coiled on her head. He stroked her hair. “It’s a shame to imprison such beauty. But there are compensations.” His teeth moved delicately along the curve of her ear.

She closed her eyes and trembled at the sensations he caused, a tightness going from her throat to her navel and beyond. When the tip of his tongue moved intimately, learning every contour of her ear, she made an inarticulate sound. Her hands went to his arms, steadying herself in a world that had suddenly begun to turn swiftly around her, throwing her off balance. She felt the tremor that went through him, the heat and tension of his body as it moved against hers.

With a soft curse Chance held her at arm’s length. “Lunch,” he said in a husky voice. “Unless you’re on the menu . . . ?”

“Why do I suddenly feel like I’m being stalked by a tiger?” Reba asked, laughter and something more serious rippling beneath her question.

He chuckled. His lips brushed her temple. “Are there any restaurants around that serve live Maine lobster?”

“You’re very good at changing subjects, aren’t you?”

Chance smiled down at her. “If you don’t like lobster—”

“I love Maine lobster,” she interrupted in an exasperated voice.

“So do I, and I haven’t had any for seven years.” He laughed at the curiosity that leaped in her eyes. “You’d make a wonderful cat,” he murmured, “all tawny and supple, with a cat’s full share of grace and curiosity.”

“Flattery will get you.”

“Get me what?”

Reba smiled like a cat and walked out of the office without answering.

T
he restaurant was small, unobtrusive, and dedicated to the principle that customers preferred the management to spend money on food rather than fancy furnishings. As a result, Jaime’s was unknown to the tourists who sought out only the flashy and more famous watering holes. The atmosphere in the restaurant was convivial, the selection of wines limited but well chosen, and the customers more interested in conversation than in being seen and oohed over by strangers. Jaime’s had been one of Jeremy’s favorite restaurants.

“What is it?” asked Chance quietly, sensing the change in Reba as she looked around the room.

“Jeremy loved this place,” she said, her voice even.

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” asked Chance, taking her hand in both of his.

“No,” she said, feeling his warmth and hard strength surrounding her hand. “Since Death Valley, it’s been . . . better. I can look at his picture. I can remember things we did together and not cry every time. I think I’ve accepted the fact that Jeremy is dead.” She looked at Chance. “Thank you. I was running blind before you found me in the dunes. It was only a matter of time until I tripped and broke my neck.”

Chance lifted her hand to his mouth. His moustache stroked her palm like a silk brush. “You would have survived. You’re stronger than you know.”

Reba smiled slightly. Tears magnified her eyes. “Sure,” she said huskily, “I’m a regular cat, born to land on my feet. You just happened to find me when I’d lost my balance.”

A waiter appeared to show Chance and Reba to their table. Chance sat next to Reba, waved away the menus and ordered lobster for both of them. He looked at the wine list and then at Reba.

“No Australian wines,” he said wryly. “Unless you have a better suggestion, I’ll just close my eyes, point my finger at the white wines and pray.”

“I have a weakness for Chardonnay,” she admitted, reading the list quickly. She looked up at him from beneath thick, dark brown lashes. “Unless you’d prefer something sweeter?”

His slow smile made heat tingle through her. “What I want isn’t on any wine list,” he drawled softly, looking at her lips with hungry silver-green eyes.

“The Balverne Chardonnay,” she told the waiter quickly, watching as the man tried not to smile, and failed.

Chance laughed, a sound as soft and fundamentally untamed as his chamois shirt.

“Question number one,” said Reba in a determined voice. “Where were you born and where have you lived since then?”

“That’s two questions,” he pointed out.

“Where have you lived since you were born?” asked Reba, smiling triumphantly at having squeezed two questions into one.

Chance saluted her silently, admiring her quick intelligence. “I was born on the New Mexico-Texas-Mexico border. No one knows for sure where we were when mother couldn’t walk any further and lay down to have me beside the trail. Dad, as usual, was dragging her from one place to another on some damned fool treasure hunt and, as usual, his map was a smudged twentieth-century copy of a seventeenth-century liar’s tale.” Chance shrugged, but his eyes were the pale, transparent green of glacier ice. “New Mexico is listed as my birthplace on my passport.”

Reba listened intently, watching the subtle shift of expressions across Chance’s face.

“Eventually we went to Lightning Ridge. I don’t remember much from that time. I was too young. But if I had a home, I suppose it was Australia. Whenever Dad failed in one part of the world, we’d go back to Lightning Ridge until we’d found enough opals to buy another bloody treasure map.” He smiled grimly to himself. “There’s nothing crazier than a Texan with a treasure map, hellbent on wealth. Unless it’s that Texan’s son, hellbent on proving himself a man.”

“You?” she asked softly.

Chance shrugged. “I was thinking of Luck, but I suppose the description would have fitted me when I was fourteen.”

“How old is Luck?”

He said nothing. Then, “Luck is dead.”

Reba put her hand over Chance’s. His fingers curled around hers, accepting her wordless sympathy.

“I was almost fifteen when he died,” Chance continued in a voice that no longer drawled. “Luck was twenty-four, older but not smarter. He broke the first and only law of the South American jungle:
Never drink with a diamond miner
. When Luck didn’t come back to camp one night, I went looking for him. I didn’t find him, but I found the miner who had cut Luck’s throat.”

Reba waited, but Chance said no more.

“Afterwards, Glory—my older sister—sold the diamonds miners had given her and took me to Australia. Dad didn’t want to leave Venezuela. He’d heard that there was an even bigger diamond strike in Guaniamo, a few miles over on a tributary of the Orinoco River. Glory didn’t argue with Dad. She just bought our way out of the jungle and never looked back. We went to Lightning Ridge because that was the only place we’d been to more than once in our lives. She started up a small business hauling drinking water to the opal gougers.”

“What did you do?”

“Gouged opals with the best of them,” Chance said sardonically. “It gets in your blood worse than malaria.” He put his hand under Reba’s chin and tipped her head so that light flowed across the earrings she wore. “I could have been the one to tear these opals out of the earth,” he said softly, “sweating and bleeding in a tight black hole so that you could wear gems to equal your beauty. But they don’t equal it,” he murmured, brushing her ear with his soft moustache, smiling as she shivered beneath his touch.

The waiter appeared with two platters. A scarlet lobster crouched on each large plate, surrounded by crisp vegetables and pots of butter as clear as amber. While the mouth-watering scent of lobster rose up to Reba’s nostrils, the waiter poured a bit of wine in Chance’s glass. He tasted the wine, nodded, then handed the glass to Reba.

“It was your choice, after all,” he said, smiling. “You should have a chance to approve it.”

She tasted the wine and turned to the waiter. “Yes, we’ll take this one.”

For a time there was only silence and the sounds of lobster shells cracking as both Reba and Chance pried out succulent bites of pearly flesh. Reba had discovered long ago that there was no prim, civilized way to eat whole lobster. For the duration of the meal, fingers were considered nothing more than especially useful utensils. She didn’t actually smack her lips, but she did lick her fingertips discreetly from time to time. Once, she looked up and found Chance watching her.