Tears of the Renegade

“You’ve got the Blackstone coloring,” he muttered, staring at her. “Dark hair and blue eyes, but you’re so soft there’s no way in hell you could be a real Blackstone. There’s no hardness in you at all, is there?”

Puzzled, she stared back at him with a tiny frown puckering her brow. “What do you mean by hardness?”

“I don’t think you’d understand if I told you,” he replied cryptically, then added, “were you handpicked to be Vance’s wife?”

“No.” She smiled at the memory. “He picked me himself.”

He gave a silent whistle. “Imogene will never recover from the shock,” he said irreverently, and flashed that mocking grin at her again.

Despite herself, Susan felt the corners of her mouth tilting up in an answering smile. She was enjoying herself, talking to this dangerous, roguish man with the strangely compelling eyes, and she was surprised because she hadn’t really enjoyed herself in such a long time…since Vance’s death, in fact. There had been too many years and too many tears between her smiles, but suddenly things seemed different; she felt different inside herself. At first, she’d thought that she’d never recover from Vance’s death, but five years had passed, and now she realized that she was looking forward to life again. She was enjoying being held in this man’s strong arms and listening to his deep voice…and yes, she enjoyed the look in his eyes, enjoyed the sure feminine knowledge that he wanted her.

She didn’t want to examine her reaction to him; she felt as if she had been dead, too, and was only now coming alive, and she wanted to revel in the change, not analyze it.

She was in danger of drowning in sensation, and she recognized the inner weakness that was overtaking her, but felt helpless to resist it. He must have sensed, with a primal intuition that was as alarming as the aura of danger that surrounded him, that she was close to surrendering to the temptation to play with fire. He leaned down and nuzzled his mouth against the delicate shell of her ear, sending every nerve in her body into delirium. “Go outside with me,” he enticed, dipping his tongue into her ear and tracing the outer curve of it with electrifying precision.

Susan’s entire body reverberated with the shock of it, but his action cleared her mind of the clouds of desire that had been fogging it. Totally flustered, her cheeks suddenly pink, she stopped dead. “Mr. Blackstone!”

“Cord,” he corrected, laughing openly now. “After all, we’re at least kissing cousins, wouldn’t you say?”

She didn’t know what to say, and fortunately she was saved from forming an answer that probably wouldn’t have been coherent anyway, because Preston chose that moment to intervene. She had been vaguely aware, as she circled the room in Cord’s arms, that Preston had been watching every move his cousin made, but she hadn’t noticed him approaching. Putting his hand on Susan’s arm, he stared at his cousin with frosty blue eyes. “Has he said anything to upset you, Susan?”

Again she was thrown into a quandary. If she said yes, there would probably be a scene, and she was determined to avoid that. On the other hand, how could she say no, when it would so obviously be a lie? A spark of genius prompted her to reply with quiet dignity, “We were talking about Vance.”

“I see.” It was perfectly reasonable to Preston that, even after five years, Susan should be upset when speaking of her dead husband. He accepted her statement as an explanation instead of the red herring it was, and gave all of his attention to his cousin, who was standing there totally relaxed, a faintly bored smile on his lips.

“Mother is waiting in the library,” Preston said stiffly. “We assume you have some reason for afflicting us with your company.”

“I do.” Cord agreed easily with Preston’s insult, still smiling as he ignored the red flag being waved at him. He lifted one eyebrow. “Lead the way. Somehow, I don’t trust you at my back.”

Preston stiffened, and Susan forestalled the angry outburst she saw coming by placing her hand lightly on Cord’s arm and saying, “Let’s not keep Mrs. Blackstone waiting.”

As she had known he would, Preston shifted his attention to her. “There’s no reason for you to come along, Susan. You might as well stay here with the guests.”

“I’d like to have her there.” Cord had instantly contradicted his cousin, and in a manner that made Susan certain he’d spoken merely to irritate Preston. “She’s family, isn’t she? She might as well hear it all firsthand, rather than the watered-down and doctored version that she’d get from you and Imogene.”

For a moment Preston looked as if he would debate the point; then he turned abruptly and walked away. Preston was a Blackstone; he might want to punch Cord in the mouth, but he wouldn’t make a public scene. Cord following him at a slight distance, his hand dropping to rest lightly on Susan’s waist. He grinned down at her. “I wanted to make sure you didn’t get away from me.”

Susan was a grown woman, not a teenager. Moreover, she was a woman who for five years had managed large and varied business concerns with cool acumen; she was twenty-nine years old, and she told herself that she should long ago have passed out of the blushing stage. Yet this man, with the dashing air of a rake and those bold, challenging eyes, could make her blush with a mere glance. Excitement such as she had never felt before was racing through her, setting her heart pounding, and she actually felt giddy. She knew what love was like, and it wasn’t this. She had loved Vance, loved him so strongly that his death had nearly destroyed her, so she realized at once that this wasn’t the same emotion. This was primitive attraction, heady and feverish, and it was based entirely on sex. Vance Blackstone had been Love; Cord Blackstone meant only Lust.

But recognizing it for what it was didn’t lessen its impact as she walked sedately beside him, so vibrantly aware of the hand on her back that he might as well have been touching her naked body. She wasn’t the type for an affair. She was a throwback to the Victorian era, as Vance had once teased her by saying. She had been lovingly but strictly brought up, and she was the lady that her mother had meant her to be, from the top of her head down to her pink toes. Susan had never even thought of rebelling, because she was by nature exactly what she was: a lady. She had known love and would never settle for less than that, not even for the heady delights offered by the black sheep of the Blackstone family.

Just before they entered the library where Imogene waited, Cord leaned down to her. “If you won’t go outside with me, then I’ll take you home and we can neck on the front porch like teenagers.”

She flashed him an indignant glance that made him laugh softly to himself, but she was prevented from answering him because at that moment they passed through the door and she realized that he had perfectly timed his remark. He had a genius for throwing people off-balance, and he had done it again; despite herself, she felt the heat of intensified color in her face.

Imogene regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, her gray eyes sharpening for a fraction of a second as her gaze flickered from Susan to Cord, then back to Susan’s flushed face. Then she controlled her expression, and the gray eyes resumed their normal cool steadiness. “Susan, do you feel well? You look flushed.”

“I became a little warm during the dancing.” Susan was aware that once again she was throwing out a statement that would be regarded as an answer, but was in fact only a smokescreen. If she didn’t watch it, Cord Blackstone would turn her into a world-class liar before the night was out!

The tall man beside her directed her to a robin’s egg blue love seat and sprawled his graceful length beside her, earning himself a glare—which rolled right off of his toughened hide—from both Preston and Imogene. Smiling at his aunt, he drawled a greeting. “Hello, Aunt Imogene. How’s the family fortune?”

He was good at waving his own red flags, Susan noticed. Imogene settled back in her chair and coolly ignored the distraction. “Why have you come back?”

“Why shouldn’t I come back? This is my home, remember? I even own part of the land. I’ve been roaming around for quite a while now, and I’m ready to put down my roots. What better place for that than home? I thought I’d move into the cabin on Jubilee Creek.”

“That shack!” Preston’s voice was full of disdain.

Cord shrugged. “You can’t account for tastes. I prefer shacks to mausoleums.” He grinned, looking around himself at the formal furniture, the original oil paintings, the priceless vases and miniatures that adorned the shelves. Though called a library, the room actually contained few books, and all of them had been bought, Susan sometimes suspected, with an eye on the color of the dust jackets to make certain the books harmonized with the color scheme of the room.

Preston eyed his cousin with cold, silent hatred for a moment, an expanse of time which became heavy with resentment. “How much will it cost us?”

From the corner of her eye, Susan could see the lift of that mocking eyebrow. “Cost you for what?”

“For you to leave this part of the country again.”

Cord smiled, a particularly wolfish smile that should have warned Preston. “You don’t have enough money, Cousin.”

Imogene lifted her hand, forestalling Preston’s heated reply. She had a cooler head and was better at negotiating than her son was. “Don’t be foolish…or hasty,” she counseled. “You do realize that we’re prepared to offer you a substantial sum in exchange for your absence?”

“Not interested,” he said lazily, still smiling.

“But a man with your…lifestyle must have debts that need settling. Then there’s the fact that I have many friends who owe me for favors, and who could be counted on to make your stay unpleasant, at the least.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Aunt Imogene.” Cord was utterly relaxed, his long legs stretched out before him. “The first surprise in store for you is that I don’t need the money. The second is that if any of your ‘friends’ decide to help you by making things difficult for me, I have friends of my own who I can call on, and believe me, my friends make yours look like angels.”

Imogene sniffed. “I’m sure they do, considering.”

For the first time Susan felt compelled to intervene. Fighting upset her; she was quiet and naturally peaceful, but with an inner strength that allowed her to throw herself into the breach. Her gentle voice immediately drew everyone’s attention, though it was to her mother-in-law that she spoke. “Imogene, look at him; look at his clothes.” She waved her slender hand to indicate the man lounging beside her. “He’s telling the truth. He doesn’t need any money. And I think that when he mentions his friends, he isn’t talking about back-alley buddies.”

Cord regarded her with open, if somewhat mocking, admiration. “At last, a Blackstone with perception, though of course you weren’t born to the name, so maybe that explains it. She’s right, Imogene, though I’m sure you don’t like hearing it. I don’t need the Blackstone money because I have money of my own. I plan to live in the cabin because I like my privacy, not because I can’t afford any better. Now, I suggest that we manage to control our differences, because I intend to stay here. If you want to air the family dirty laundry, then go ahead. It won’t bother me; you’ll be the only one to suffer from that.”

Imogene gave a curious little sigh. “You’ve always been difficult, Cord, even when you were a child. My objection to you is based on your past actions, not on you personally. You’ve dragged your family through enough mud to last for four lifetimes, and I find that hard to forgive, and I find it equally as hard to trust you to behave with some degree of civility.”

“It’s been a long time,” he said obliquely. “I’ve spent a lot of time in Europe, and too long in South America; it makes a man appreciate his home.”

“Does it? I wonder. Forgive me if I suspect an ulterior motive, but then, your past gives me little choice. Very well, we’ll call a truce…for the time being.”

“A truce.” He winked at her, and to Susan’s surprise, Imogene blushed. So he had that effect on every female! But he was a fool if he believed that Imogene would go along with a truce. She might appear to give in, but that was all it was: appearance. Imogene never gave in; she merely changed tactics. If she couldn’t bribe or threaten him, then she would try other measures, though for the moment Susan couldn’t think of anything else that could be brought to bear on the man.

He was rising to his feet, his hand under Susan’s elbow, urging her up also. “You’ve been away from your guests long enough,” he told Imogene politely. “I give you my solemn promise that I won’t cause any scandals tonight, so relax and enjoy yourself.” Pulling Susan along with him like a puppy, he crossed the floor to Imogene and bent down to kiss his aunt. Imogene sat perfectly still under the touch of his lips, though her color rose even higher. Then he straightened, his eyes dancing. “Come along, Susan,” he commanded.

“Just a moment,” Preston intervened, stepping before them. Imogene might have called a truce, but Preston hadn’t. “We’ve agreed to no open hostilities; we haven’t agreed to associate with you. Susan isn’t going anywhere with you.”

“Oh? I think that’s up to the lady. Susan?” Cord turned to her, making his wishes known by the curl of his fingers on her arm.

Susan hesitated. She wanted to go with Cord. She wanted to laugh with him, to see the wicked twinkle in his eyes, feel the magic of being held in his arms. But she couldn’t trust him, and for the first time in her life, she didn’t trust herself. Because she wanted so badly to go with him, she had to deny him. Slowly, regretfully, she shook her head. “No. I think it would be better if I didn’t go with you.”

His blue eyes narrowed, and suddenly they were no longer laughing, but wore the sheen of anger. He dropped his hand from her arm. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said coldly, and left her without another word.

The silence in the library was total, the three occupants motionless. Then Imogene sighed again. “Thank heavens you didn’t go with him, dear. He’s charming, I know, but beneath all of that charm, he hates this entire family. He’ll do anything, anything, he can to harm us. You don’t know him, but it’s in your best interest if you avoid him.” Having delivered her graceful warning, Imogene shrugged. “Ah, well, I suppose we’ll have to suffer through this until he gets bored and drifts off to hunt other amusements. He was right about one thing, the wretch; I do have to get back to my guests.” She rose and left the room, her mist-gray gown swaying elegantly about her feet as she walked. Imogene was still a beautiful woman; she hardly looked old enough to be the mother of the man who stood beside Susan. Imogene didn’t age; she endured.

After a moment, Preston took Susan’s hand, his ingrained sense of courtesy taking control of him again. His confrontation with his cousin had been the only occasion when Susan could remember seeing Preston be anything but polite, even when he was disagreeing with someone. “Let’s relax for a moment before we rejoin them. Would you like a drink?” he suggested.

“No, thank you.” Susan allowed him to seat her on the love seat again, and she watched as he poured himself a neat whiskey and sat down beside her, a small frown puckering his brow as he regarded the glass in his hand. Something was on his mind; she knew his mannerisms as well as she knew her own. She waited, not pushing him. She and Preston had become close since Vance’s death, and she felt strongly affectionate toward him. He looked so much like Vance, so much like all the Blackstones, with his dark hair and blue eyes and lopsided smile. Preston lacked Vance’s sense of humor, but he was a formidable opponent in business. He was stubborn; slower than Vance to react, but more determined when he did.

“You’re a lovely woman, Susan,” he said abruptly.

Startled, she stared at him. She knew she looked good tonight; she had debated over wearing the cream silk dress, for her tastes since Vance’s death had been somber, but she had remembered that the medieval color of mourning had been white, not black, and only she knew when she put on the white dress that she did so with a small but poignant remnant of grief. She had dressed for Vance tonight, wearing the pearls that he had given her, spraying herself with his favorite perfume. But for a few mad moments she had gloried in the knowledge that she looked good, not for Vance’s sake, but because of the admiration she had seen in another pair of eyes, strange lodestone eyes. What would have happened if she had gone with Cord Blackstone tonight, instead of playing it safe?

Preston’s eyes softened as he looked at her. “You’re no match for him. If you let him, he’ll use you to hurt us; then he’ll leave you on the trash pile and walk away without looking back. Stay away from him; he’s poison.”

Susan regarded him steadily. “Preston, I’m a woman, not a child; I’m capable of making my own decisions. I can see why you wouldn’t like your cousin, since he’s so totally different from you. But he hasn’t done anything to harm me, and I won’t snub him.”

He gave a rueful smile at her firm, reasonable tone. “I’ve heard that voice in enough board meetings over the past five years to know you’ve dug in your heels and won’t budge without a good reason. But you don’t know what he’s like. You’re a lady; you’ve never been exposed to the sort of things that are commonplace to him. He’s lived the life of an alley cat, not because he had no choice, no way out, but because he preferred that type of life. He broke his mother’s heart, making her so ashamed of him that he wasn’t welcome in her home.”

“Exactly what did he do that was so terrible?” Deliberately, she kept her tone light, not wanting Preston to see how deeply she was interested in the answer, how deeply she was disturbed by Cord Blackstone.

“What didn’t he do?” Sarcasm edged Preston’s answer. “Fights, drinking, women, gambling…but the final straw was the scandal when he was caught with Grant Keller’s wife.”

Susan choked. Grant Keller was dignity personified, and so was his wife. Preston looked at her and couldn’t prevent a grin. “Not this Mrs. Keller; the former Mrs. Keller was entirely different. She was thirty-six, and Cord was twenty-one when they left town together.”

“That was a long time ago,” Susan pointed out.

“Fourteen years, but people have long memories. I saw Grant Keller’s face when he recognized Cord tonight, and he looked murderous.”

Susan was certain there was more to the story, but she was reluctant to pry any deeper. The old scandal in no way explained Preston’s very personal hatred for Cord. For right now, though, she was suddenly very tired and didn’t want to pursue the subject. All the excitement that had lit her up while she was dancing with Cord had faded. Rising, she smoothed her skirt. “Will you take me home? I’m exhausted.”

“Of course,” he said immediately, as she had known he would. Preston was entirely predictable, always solicitous of her. At times, the cushion of gallantry that protected her gave her a warm sense of security, but at other times she felt restricted. Tonight, the feeling of restriction deepened until she felt as if she were being smothered. She wanted to breathe freely, to be unobserved.

It was only a fifteen-minute drive to her home, and soon she was blessedly alone, sitting on the dark front porch in the wooden porch swing, listening to the music of a Southern night. She had waited until Preston left before she came out to sit in the darkness, her right foot gently pushing her back and forth to the accompanying squeak of the chains that held the swing. A light breeze rustled through the trees and kissed her face, and she closed her eyes. As she often did, she tried to summon up Vance’s face, to reassure herself with the mental picture of his violet-blue eyes and lopsided grin, but to her alarm, the face that formed wasn’t his. Instead she saw pale blue eyes above the short black beard of a desperado; they were the reckless eyes of a man who dared anything. A shiver ran down her spine as she recalled the touch of his warm mouth on her shoulder, and her skin tingled as if his lips were still pressed there.

Thank heavens she had had the good sense to ask Preston to bring her home instead of going with that man as he had asked. Preston was at least safe, and Cord Blackstone had probably never heard the word.

Chapter Two

The Blackstone social circle ranged in a sort of open arc from Mobile to New Orleans, with the Gulfport-Biloxi area as the center of their far-flung web of moneyed and blue-blooded acquaintances. With such a wide area and so many friends of such varied interests, Susan was amazed that the sole topic of conversation seemed to be Cord Blackstone’s return. She lost count of the number of women, many of them married, who drilled her on why he was back, how long he was staying, whether he was married, whether he had been married, and endless variations on those questions, none of which she could answer. What could she tell them? That she had danced two dances with him and gotten drunk on his smile?

She hadn’t seen him since the night of his return, and she made a point of not asking about him. She told herself that it was best to leave well enough alone and let her interest in him die a natural death. All she had to do was do nothing and refuse to feed the strange attraction. It wasn’t as if he were chasing her all over south Mississippi; he hadn’t called, hadn’t sought her out as she had half feared, half wanted him to do.

But her resolution to forget about him was stymied at every turn; even Preston seldom talked of anything except his cousin. She decided that all Cord had to do to irritate Preston was to breathe. Through Preston, she learned that Cord was working on the old cabin at Jubilee Creek, replacing the roof and the sagging old porch, putting in new windows. Preston had tried to find out where Cord had borrowed the money to repair the cabin, and found instead, to his chagrin, that there was no loan involved. Cord was paying for everything in cash, and had opened a sizable checking account at the largest bank in Biloxi. Preston and Imogene spent hours speculating on how he had acquired the money, and what his purpose was in returning to Mississippi. Susan wondered why they found it so hard to accept that he had simply returned home. As people grew older, it wasn’t unusual for them to want to return to the area where they had grown up. It seemed silly to her that they attached such sinister motives to his smallest action, but then she realized that she was guilty of the same thing. She’d all but convinced herself that, if she had allowed him to drive her home that night, he would have taken her to bed over any protests she might have made…if any.

If any. That was the hard part for her to accept. Would she have made any protest, even a token one? What had happened to her? One moment her life had been as serene as a quiet pool on a lazy summer day, and she had been satisfied, except for the hollowness left by Vance’s death. Then Cord Blackstone had walked in out of the night and everything had shifted, the world had been thrown out of kilter. Now, suddenly, she wanted to run away, or at least smash something…do anything, anything at all, that was totally out of character.

And it was all because of Cord. He was a man who lived by his own rules, a man who lived recklessly and dangerously, but with a vital intensity that made every other man seem insipid when compared to him. By contrast, she was a field mouse who was comfortable only with security, yet now the very security that she had always treasured was chafing at her. The priorities that she had set for herself now seemed valueless in comparison with the wild freedom that Cord enjoyed.

She had been a quiet child, then a quiet girl, never according her parents any of the worries that most parents had concerning their children. Susan’s personality was serene, naturally kind and courteous, and the old-fashioned, genteel upbringing she’d had merely reinforced those qualities. By both nature and practice she was a lady, in every sense of the word.