Man Of Ice

“Excuse me. I’m talking to my stepsister,” he said curtly.

The woman was shocked at being snubbed. She was beautiful and quite obviously used to trapping men with that coquettish manner, and the handsomest man here looked at her as if she smelled bad.

She laughed a little nervously. “Of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Later, perhaps, then?”

She turned and went quickly back into the living room.

Barrie was standing where she’d been throughout the terse exchange, leaning against the banister. Now she moved away from it and down the steps to stand just in front of Dawson. Her green eyes searched his quietly.

His jaw clenched. “I told you. I’m not in the market for a woman—not you or anyone else.”

Her teeth settled into her lower lip, an old habit that he’d once chided her about.

He apparently hadn’t forgotten. His forefinger tapped sharply at her upper lip. “Stop that. You’ll draw blood,” he accused.

She released the stinging flesh. “I didn’t realize,” she murmured. She sighed as she searched his hard face. “You loved women, in the old days,” she said with more bitterness than she knew. “They followed you around like bees on a honey trail.”

His face was hard. “I lost my taste for them.”

“But, why?”

“You don’t have the right to invade my privacy,” he said curtly.

She smiled sadly. “I never did. You were always so mysterious, so private. You never shared anything with me when I was younger. You were always impatient to get away from me.”

“Except once,” he replied shortly. “And see where that got us.”

She took a step toward the living room. “Yes.”

There was a silence, filled by merry voices and the clink of ice in glasses.

“If I ask you something, point-blank, will you answer me?” he asked abruptly.

She turned, her eyes wide, questioning. “That depends on what it is. If you won’t answer personal questions, I don’t see why I should.”

His eyes narrowed. “Perhaps not.”

She grimaced. “All right. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know,” he said quietly, “how many men you’ve really had since me.”

She almost gasped at the audacity of the question.

His eyes slid down her body and back up again, and they were still calculating, the way they’d been all evening. “You dress like a femme fatale. I can’t remember the last time I saw you so uncovered. You flirt and tease, but it’s all show, it’s all on the surface.” He scowled. “Barrie…”

She flushed. “Stop looking into my mind! I hated it when I was in my teens and I hate it now!”

He nodded slowly. “It was always like that. I even knew what you were thinking. It was a rare kind of rapport. Somewhere along the way, we lost it.”

“You smothered it,” she said correcting. He smiled coolly. “I didn’t like having you inside my head.”

“Which works both ways,” she agreed.

He reached out and touched her cheek lightly, his fingers lingering against the silky soft skin. She didn’t move away. That was a first.

“Come here, Barrie,” he invited, and this time he didn’t smile. His eyes held hers, hypnotized her, beckoned her.

She felt her legs moving when she hadn’t meant to let them. She looked up at him with an expression that wasn’t even recognizable.

“Now,” he said softly, touching her mouth. “Tell me the truth.”

She started to clamp down on her lower lip, and his thumb prevented her. It smoothed over her soft lower lip, exploring under the surface, inside where the flesh was moist and vulnerable. She jerked back from him.

“Tell me.” His eyes were relentless. She couldn’t escape. He was too close.

“I…couldn’t, with anyone else,” she whispered huskily. “I was afraid.”

The years of bitterness, of blaming her for what he thought he’d made of her were based on a lie. All the guilt and shame when he heard about her followers, when he saw her with other men—he knew the truth now. He’d destroyed her as a woman. He’d crippled her sexually. And just because, like his father, he’d lost control of himself. He hadn’t known what she’d suffered until a week ago.

He couldn’t tell her that he’d wrangled this invitation from John because he needed an excuse to see her. He hadn’t realized in all the long years how badly he’d damaged her. Her camouflage had been so good. Now that he did know, it was unbelievably painful.

“Dear God,” he said under his breath.

His hand fell away from her cheek. He looked older, suddenly, and there was no mockery in his face now.

“Surprised?” she taunted unsteadily. “Shocked? You’ve always wanted to think the worst of me. Even that afternoon at the beach, before it…before it happened, you thought I just wanted to show off my body.”

He didn’t blink. His eyes searched hers. “The only eyes you wanted on your body were mine,” he said in a dead voice. “I knew it. I wouldn’t admit it, that’s all.”

She laughed coldly. “You said plenty,” she reminded him. “That I was a tramp, that I was so hot I couldn’t—”

His thumb stopped the words and his eyes closed briefly. “You might not realize it, but you aren’t the only one who paid dearly for what happened that night,” he said after a minute.

“Don’t tell me you were sorry, or that you felt guilty,” she chided. “You don’t have a heart, Dawson. I don’t think you’re even human!”

He laughed faintly. “I have doubts about that myself these days,” he said evenly.

She was shaking with fury, the past impinging on the present as she struggled with wounding memories. “I loved you!” she said brokenly.

“Dear God, don’t you think I know?!” he demanded, and his eyes, for that instant, were terrible to look into.

She went white, paper white. Beside her skirt, her hands clenched. She wanted to throw herself at him and hit him and kick him, to hurt him as he’d hurt her.

But slowly, as she remembered where they were, she forced herself to calm down. “This isn’t the time or the place.” She bit off the words. Her voice shook with emotion.

He stuck his hands into his pockets and looked down at her. “Come to Wyoming with me. It’s time you got it all out of your system. You’ve been hurt enough for something that was never your fault to begin with.”

The words were surprising. He was different, somehow, and she didn’t understand why. Even the antagonism when he saw her had been halfhearted, as if he was only sniping at her out of habit. Now, he wasn’t especially dangerous at all. But she didn’t, couldn’t, trust him. There had to be more to his determination to get her to Wyoming than as a chaperone.

“I’ll think about it,” she said shortly. “But I won’t decide tonight. I’m not sure I want to go back to Sheridan, even to save my inheritance.”

He started to argue, but the strain of the past few minutes had started to show in her face. He hated seeing the brightness gone from it. He shrugged. “All right. Think it over.”

She drew in a steadying breath and walked past him into the living room. And for the rest of the evening, she was the life and soul of the party. Not that Dawson noticed. A couple of minutes after she left him in the hall, he went out the door and drove back to his hotel. Alone.

Two

IT WAS a boring Saturday. Barrie had already done the laundry and gone to the grocery store. She had a date, but she’d canceled it. Somehow, one more outing with a man she didn’t care about was more than she could bear. No one was ever going to measure up to Dawson, anyway, as much as she’d like to pretend it would happen. He owned her, as surely as he owned half a dozen ranches and a veritable fleet of cars, even if he didn’t want her.

She’d given up hoping for miracles, and after last night, it was obvious that the dislike he’d had for her since her fifteenth birthday wasn’t going to diminish. Even her one memory of him as a lover was nothing she wanted to remember. He’d hurt her, and afterward, he’d accused her of being a wanton who’d teased him into seducing her. He could be kind to the people he liked, but he’d never liked Barrie or her mother. They’d been the outsiders, the interlopers, in the Rutherford family. Barrie’s mother had married his father, and Dawson had hated them both from the moment he laid eyes on them.

Eleven years later, after the deaths of both their parents, nothing had changed except that Barrie had learned self-preservation. She’d avoided Dawson like the plague, until last night, when she’d betrayed everything to him in that burst of anger. She was embarrassed and ashamed this morning to have given herself away so completely. Her one hope was that he was already on his way back to Sheridan, and that she wouldn’t have to see him again until the incident was forgotten, until these newest wounds he’d inflicted were healed.

She’d just finished mopping the kitchen floor in her bare feet and had put the mop out on the small balcony of her apartment to dry when the doorbell rang.

It was almost lunchtime and she was hungry, having spent her morning working. She hoped it wasn’t the man she’d turned down for a date that evening, trying to convince her to change her mind.

Her wavy black hair lay in disheveled glory down her back. It was her one good feature, along with her green eyes. Her mouth was shaped like a bow and her nose was straight, but she wasn’t conventionally pretty, although she had a magnificent figure. She was dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of worn jeans. Both garments had shrunk, emphasizing her perfect body. She didn’t have makeup on, but her eyes were bright and her cheeks were rosy from all her exertions.

Without thinking, she opened the door and started to speak, when she realized who was standing there. It definitely wasn’t Phil, the salesman with whom she’d turned down a date.

It was always the same when she came upon Dawson unawares. Her heart began to race, her breath stilled in her throat, her body burned as if she stood in a fire.

Eyes two shades lighter green than her own looked back at her. Whatever he wore, he looked elegant. He was in designer jeans and a white shirt, with a patterned gray jacket worn loose over them. His feet were encased in hand-tooled gray leather boots and a creamy Stetson dangled from one hand.

He looked her up and down without smiling, without expression. Nothing he felt ever was allowed to show, while Barrie’s face was as open as a child’s book to him.

“What do you want?” she asked belligerently.

An eyebrow jerked over amused green eyes. “A kind word. But I’ve given up asking for the impossible. Can I come in? Or,” he added, the smile fading, “isn’t it convenient?”

She moved away from the door. “Check the bedroom if you like,” she said sarcastically.

He searched her eyes. Once, he might have taken her up on it, just to irritate her. Not since last night, though. He hadn’t the heart to hurt her any more than he already had. He tossed his hat onto the counter and leaned against it to watch her close the door.

“Have you decided whether or not you’ll come back to Sheridan?” he asked bluntly. “It’s only for a week. You’re on summer vacation, and John told me that you’d been laid off at your part-time job.” He looked at the counter and said with calculation, “Surely you can survive without your flock of admirers for that long.”

She didn’t contradict him or fly off the handle. That was what he wanted. She made points with Dawson by remaining calm.

“I don’t want to play chaperone for you, Dawson,” she said simply. “Get someone else.”

“There isn’t anyone else, and you know it. I want that land. What I don’t want is to give Mrs. Holten any opportunities for blackmail. She’s a lady who’s used to getting what she wants.”

“You’re evenly matched, then, aren’t you?” she replied.

“I don’t have everything I want,” he countered. His eyes narrowed. “Corlie and Rodge will be in the house, too. They miss you.”

She didn’t answer. She just looked at him, hating him and loving him while all the bad memories surfaced.

“Your eyes are very expressive,” he said, searching them. There was so much pain behind the pretense, he thought sadly, and he’d caused it. “Such sad eyes, Barrie.”

He sounded mysterious, broody. She sensed a change in him, some ripple of feeling that he concealed, covered up. His lean fingers toyed with the brim of his Stetson and he studied it while he spoke. “I bought you a horse.”

She stared at him. “Why?”

“I thought you might respond to a bribe,” he said carelessly. “He’s a quarter horse. A gelding.” He smiled with faint self-contempt. “Can you still ride?”

“Yes.” She didn’t want to admit that it touched her to have Dawson buy her a present. Even a plastic necklace would have given her pleasure if he’d given it to her.

His eyes lifted back to hers. “Well?”

“You have Rodge and Corlie to play chaperone. You don’t need me.”

His pale eyes held hers. “Yes, I do. More than you know.”

She swallowed. “Look, Dawson, you know I don’t want to come back, and you know why. Let’s just leave it at that.”

His eyes began to glitter. “It’s been five years,” he said coldly. “You can’t live in the past forever!”

“The devil I can’t!” she snapped. Her eyes hated him. “I won’t forgive you,” she whispered, almost choking on the words. “I won’t ever, ever forgive you!”

His gaze fell, and his jaw clenched. “I suppose I should have expected that. But hope springs eternal, don’t they say?” He picked up his hat and turned back to her.

She hadn’t gotten herself under control at all. Her slender hands were clenched at her sides and her eyes blazed.

He paused just in front of her. At close range, he was much taller than she was. And despite their past, his nearness disturbed her. She took a step backward.

“Do you think I don’t have scars of my own?” he asked quietly.

“Men made of ice don’t get scars,” she managed to say hoarsely.

He didn’t say another word. He turned and went toward the door. This wasn’t like Dawson. He was giving up without a fight; he didn’t even seem bent on insulting her. The very lack of retaliation was new and it disturbed her enough to call to him.

“What’s wrong?” she asked abruptly, even as he reached for the doorknob.

The question, intimating concern, stopped him in his tracks. He turned as if he didn’t really believe she’d asked that. “What?”

“I asked what was wrong,” she repeated. “You aren’t yourself.”

His hand tightened on the doorknob. “How the hell would you know whether I am or not?” he returned.

“You’re holding something back.”

He stood there breathing roughly, glaring at her. He shifted, restless, as highly strung as she remembered him. He was a little thinner these days, fine-drawn. His eyes narrowed on her face.

“Are you going to tell me?” she asked him.

“No,” he said after a minute. “It wouldn’t change anything. I don’t blame you for wanting to stay away.”

He was hiding something. She knew instinctively that he didn’t want to tell her. He seemed vulnerable. It shocked her into moving toward him. The action was so unexpected, so foreign, that it stilled his hand on the doorknob. Barrie hadn’t come toward him in five years.

She stopped an arm’s length away and looked up at him. “Come on, tell me,” she said gently. “You’re just like your father, everything has to be dragged out of you. Tell me, Dawson.”

He took a deep breath, hesitated, and then just told her.

She didn’t understand at first.

“You’re what?” she asked.

“I’m impotent!”

She just looked at him. So the gossips weren’t talking about a cold nature when they called him the “ice man.” They were talking about a loss of virility. She hadn’t really believed the rumors she’d heard about him.

“But…how…why?” she asked huskily.

“Who knows?” he asked irritably. “What difference does it make?” He took off his hat and ran a lean hand through his hair. “Mrs. Holton is a determined woman, and she thinks she’s God’s gift to manhood.” His face clenched and he averted it, as if it tormented him to tell her all of it. “I need that damn tract of land, but I have to let her come to Sheridan to talk to me about selling it. She wants me, and she’ll find out, if she pushes hard enough, that I’m…incapable. Right now it’s just gossip. But she’d make me the news item of the century. Who knows? Maybe that’s her real reason for wanting to come in the first place, to check out the gossip.”

Barrie was horrified. She moved back to the sofa and sat down, hard. Her face was drawn and pale, like his. It shocked her that he’d tell her such a thing, when she was his worst enemy. It was like offering an armed, angry man a bullet for his gun.

He saw her expression and grew angry. “Say something.”

“What could I possibly say?” she whispered.

“So you do have some idea of how devastating it is,” he murmured from a rigid face.

She folded her hands in her lap. “Then I’m to run interference for you? Will the threat of a sister stop her?”

“That isn’t how you’d come back to Sheridan.”

She lifted both eyebrows. “How, then?”

He fished a small velvet box out of his pocket and tossed it to her.

She frowned as she opened it. There were two rings inside, a perfect emerald in a Tiffany setting and a matching wedding band set with diamonds and emeralds.

She actually gasped, and dropped the box as if it were red-hot.

He didn’t react, although a shadow seemed to pass over his eyes. “Well, that’s a novel way of expressing your feelings,” he said sardonically.

“You can’t be serious!”

“Why can’t I?”

“We’re related,” she blurted out, flushing.

“Like hell we are. There isn’t one mutual relative between us.”

“People would talk.”

“People sure as hell would,” he agreed, “but not about my…condition.”

She understood now, as she hadn’t before, exactly what he wanted her to do. He wanted her to come back to Sheridan and pretend to be engaged to him, to stop all the gossip. Most especially, he wanted her there to run interference while Mrs. Holton was visiting, so that she wouldn’t find out the truth about him in a physical way while he tried to coax her into selling him that vital piece of land. He could kill two birds with one stone.

To think of Dawson as impotent was staggering. She couldn’t imagine what had caused it. Perhaps he’d fallen in love. There had been some talk of him mooning over a woman a few years ago, but no name was ever mentioned.

“How long ago did it happen?” she asked without thinking.

He turned and his green eyes were scorching. “That’s none of your business.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Well, excuse me! Exactly who’s doing whom the favor here?”

“It doesn’t give you the right to ask me intimate questions. And it isn’t as if you won’t benefit from getting her to sell me the land.”

She flushed and averted her face.

He rammed his hands into his pockets with an angry murmur. “Barrie, it hurts to talk about it,” he snapped.

She should have realized that. A man’s ego was a surprisingly fragile thing, and if what she’d read and heard was correct, a large part of that ego had to do with his prowess in bed.

“But you could…you did…with me,” she blurted out.

He made a rough sound, almost a laugh. “Oh, yes.” He sounded bitter. “I did, didn’t I? I wish I could forget.”

That was surprising. He’d enjoyed what he did to her, or she certainly thought he had. In fact, he’d sounded as if the pleasure was…She shut out the forbidden thoughts firmly.

He bent and retrieved the jewelry box from the floor, balancing it on his palm.

“It’s a very pretty set,” she remarked tautly. “Did you just buy it?”

“I’ve had it for…a while.” He stared at the box and then shoved it back into his pocket before he looked at her. He didn’t ask. He just looked.

She didn’t want to go back to Sheridan. She’d learned last night and this morning that she was still vulnerable with him. But the thought of Dawson being made a laughingstock disturbed her. He had tremendous pride and she didn’t want that hurt. What if Mrs. Holton did find out about him and went back to Bighorn and spread it around? Dawson might have recourse at law, but what good would that do once the rumors started flying?

She remembered so well the agony her stepfather and Antonia Hayes had suffered over malicious gossip. Dawson must be remembering as well. There was really no way to answer suspicious looks and whispers. He seemed to have had a bad enough time from just the gossip. How would it be for him if everyone knew for certain that he wasn’t capable of having sex?

“Barrie?” he prompted curtly.

She sighed. “Only for a week, you said?” she asked, lifting her eyes to surprise a curious stillness in the expression on his lean, handsome face. “And nobody would know about the ‘engagement’ except Mrs. Holton?”

He studied his boots. “It might have to be in the local papers, to make it sound real.” He didn’t look at her. “I doubt it would reach as far as Tucson. Even if it did, we could always break the engagement. Later.”

This was all very strange and unexpected. She hadn’t really had time to think it through. She should hate him. She’d tried to, over the years. But it all came down to basics, and love didn’t die or wear out, no matter how viciously a heart was treated. She’d probably go to her grave with Dawson’s name on her lips, despite the lost baby he didn’t even know about, and the secret grief she’d endured.

“I need my mind examined,” she said absently.

“You’ll do it?”

She shrugged. “I’ll do it.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then the box came out of his pocket. “You’ll have to wear this.”

He knelt just in front of her, where she sat on the sofa, and took out the engagement ring.

“But it might not fit…”

She stopped in midstatement as he slid the emerald gently onto her ring finger. It was a perfect fit, as if it had been measured exactly for it.

He didn’t say a word. He had her hand in his and, as she watched, he lifted it to his mouth and kissed the ring so tenderly that she stiffened.

He laughed coldly before he lifted his eyes to hers, and if there had been any expression in them, it was gone now. “We might as well do the thing properly, hadn’t we?” he asked mockingly, and got gracefully to his feet.

She didn’t reply. She still felt his warm mouth on her fingers, as if it were a brand. She looked down at the ring, thinking how perfect the emerald was. Such a flawless stone was easily worth the price of a diamond of equal size.

“Is it synthetic?” she asked absently.

“No. It’s not.”

She traced around it. “I love emeralds.”

“Do you?” he asked carefully.

She lifted her eyes back to his. “I’ll take good care of it. The woman you originally bought it for, didn’t she want it?” she asked.

His face closed up. “She didn’t want me,” he replied. “And it’s a good thing, considering the circumstances, isn’t it?”

He sounded angry. Bitter. Barrie couldn’t imagine any sane woman not wanting him. She did, emotionally if not physically. But her responses had been damaged, and he hadn’t been particularly kind to her in the aftermath of their one intimacy.

Her eyes on the emerald she asked, “Could you, with her?”

There was a cold pause. “Yes. But she’s no longer part of my life, or ever likely to be again.”

She recognized the brief flare of anger in his deep voice. “Sorry,” she said lightly. “I won’t ask any more questions.”

He turned away, his hands back in his pockets again. “I thought I might fly you up to Wyoming today, if you don’t have anything pressing. A date, perhaps.”

She stared at his back. It was strangely straight, almost rigid. “I had the offer of a date,” she admitted, “but I refused it. That’s who I thought you were. He said he wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer….”

Just as she said that, an insistent buzz came from the doorbell. It was repeated three times in quick succession.