Part of the Bargain

“Listen to me, you predatory little witch, and listen well,” he hissed, his jade eyes hard, his flesh pale beneath his deep rancher’s tan. “Cathy is good and decent and she loves my brother, though I can’t for the life of me think why she condescends to do so. And I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and watch you and Stacey turn her inside out! Do you understand me?”

Tears of helpless fury and outraged honor burned like fire in Libby’s eyes, but she could neither speak nor move. She could only stare into the frightening face looming only inches from her own. It was a devil’s face.

When Jess’s tightening grasp on her chin made it clear that he would have an answer of some sort, no matter what, Libby managed a small, frantic nod.

Apparently satisfied, Jess released her with such suddenness that she nearly lost her balance and slipped off the stool.

Then he whirled away from her, his broad back taut, one powerful hand running through his obsidian hair in a typical gesture of frustration. “Damn you for ever coming back here,” he said in a voice no less vicious for its softness.

“No problem,” Libby said with great effort. “I’ll leave.”

Jess turned toward her again, this time with an ominous leisure, and his eyes scalded Libby’s face, the hollow of her throat, the firm roundness of her high breasts. “It’s too late,” he said.

Still dazed, Libby sank back against the edge of the drawing table, sighed and covered her eyes with one hand. “Okay,” she began with hard-won, shaky reason, “why is that?”

Jess had stalked to the windows; his back was a barrier between them again, and he was looking out at the pond. Libby longed to sprout claws and tear him to quivering shreds.

“Stacey has the bit in his teeth,” he said at length, his voice low, speculative. “Wherever you went, he’d follow.”

Since Libby didn’t believe that Stacey had declared himself to be in love with her, she didn’t believe that there was any danger of his following her away from the Circle Bar B, either. “You’re crazy,” she said.

Jess faced her quickly, some scathing retort brewing in his eyes, but whatever he had meant to say was lost as Ken strode into the room and demanded, “What the hell’s going on in here? I just found Cathy running up the road in tears!”

“Ask your daughter!” Jess bit out. “Thanks to her, Cathy has just gotten started shedding tears!”

Libby could bear no more; she was like a wild creature goaded to madness, and she flung herself bodily at Jess Barlowe, just as she had in her childhood, fists flying. She would have attacked him gladly if her father hadn’t caught hold of her around the waist and forcibly restrained her.

Jess raked her with one last contemptuous look and moved calmly in the direction of the door. “You ought to tame that little spitfire, Ken,” he commented in passing. “One of these days she’s going to hurt somebody.”

Libby trembled in her father’s hold, stung by his double meaning, and gave one senseless shriek of fury. This brought a mocking chuckle from a disappearing Jess and caused Ken to turn her firmly to face him.

“Good Lord, Libby, what’s the matter with you?”

Libby drew a deep, steadying breath and tried to quiet the raging ten-year-old within her, the child that Jess had always been able to infuriate. “I hate Jess Barlow,” she said flatly. “I hate him.”

“Why?” Ken broke in, and he didn’t look angry anymore. Just honestly puzzled.

“If you knew what he’s been saying about me—”

“If it’s the same as what Stacey’s been mouthing off about, I reckon I do.”

Libby stepped back, stunned. “What?”

Ken Kincaid sighed, and suddenly all his fifty-two years showed clearly in his face. “Stacey and Cathy have been having trouble the last year or so. Now he’s telling everybody who’ll listen that it’s over between him and Cathy and he wants you.”

“I don’t believe it! I—”

“I wanted to warn you, Lib, but you’d been through so much, between losing the boy and then falling out with your husband after that. I thought you needed to be home, but I knew you wouldn’t come near the place if you had any idea what was going on.”

Libby’s chin trembled, and she searched her father’s honest, weathered face anxiously. “I…I haven’t been fooling around with C-Cathy’s husband, Dad.”

He smiled gently. “I know that, Lib—knew it all along. Just never mind Jess and all the rest of them—if you don’t run away, this thing’ll blow over.”

Libby swallowed, thinking of Cathy and the pain she had to be feeling. The betrayal. “I can’t stay here if Cathy is going to be hurt.”

Ken touched her cheek with a work-worn finger. “Cathy doesn’t really believe the rumors, Libby—think about it. Why would she work so hard to fix a studio up for you if she did? Why would she be waiting here to see you again?”

“But she was crying just now, Dad! And she as much as accused me of carrying on with her husband!”

“She’s been hurt by what’s been said, and Stacey’s been acting like a spoiled kid. Honey, Cathy’s just testing the waters, trying to find out where you stand. You can’t leave her now, because except for Stace, there’s nobody she needs more.”

Despite the fact that all her instincts warned her to put the Circle Bar B behind her as soon as humanly possible, Libby saw the sense in her father’s words. As incredible as it seemed, Cathy would need her—if for nothing else than to lay those wretched rumors to rest once and for all.

“These things Stacey’s been saying—surely he didn’t unload them on Cathy?”

Ken sighed. “I don’t think he’d be that low, Libby. But you know how it is with Cathy, how she always knows the score.”

Libby shook her head distractedly. “Somebody told her, Dad—and I think I know who it was.”

There was disbelief in Ken’s discerning blue eyes, and in his voice, too. “Jess? Now, wait a minute…”

Jess.

Libby couldn’t remember a time when she had gotten along well with him, but she’d been sure that he cared deeply for Cathy. Hadn’t he been the one to insist that Stace and Libby learn signing, as he had, so that everyone could talk to the frightened, confused little girl who couldn’t hear? Hadn’t he gifted Cathy with cherished bullfrogs and clumsily made valentines and even taken her to the high-school prom?

How could Jess, of all people, be the one to hurt Cathy, when he knew as well as anyone how badly she’d been hurt by her handicap and the rejection of her own parents? How?

Libby had no answer for any of these questions. She knew only that she had separate scores to settle with both the Barlowe brothers.

And settle them she would.

Chapter 2

Libby sat at the end of the rickety swimming dock, bare feet dangling, shoulders slumped, her gaze fixed on the shimmering waters of the pond. The lines of her long, slender legs were accentuated, rather than disguised, by the old blue jeans she wore. A white eyelet suntop sheltered shapely breasts and a trim stomach and left the rest of her upper body bare.

Jess Barlowe studied her in silence, feeling things that were at wide variance with his personal opinion of the woman. He was certain that he hated Libby, but something inside him wanted, nonetheless, to touch her, to comfort her, to know the scent and texture of her skin.

A reluctant grin tilted one corner of his mouth. One tug at the top of that white eyelet and…

Jess caught his skittering thoughts, marshaled them back into stern order. As innocent and vulnerable as Libby Kincaid looked at the moment, she was a viper, willing to betray her own cousin to get what she wanted.

Jess imagined Libby naked, her glorious breasts free and welcoming. But the man in his mental scenario was not himself—it was Stacey. The thought lay sour in Jess’s mind.

“Did you come to apologize, by any chance?”

The question so startled Jess that he flinched; he had not noticed that Libby had turned around and seen him, so caught up had he been in the vision of her giving herself to his brother.

He scowled, as much to recover his wits as to oppose her. It was and always had been his nature to oppose Libby Kincaid, the way electricity opposes water, and it annoyed him that, for all his travels and his education, he didn’t know why.

“Why would I want to do that?” he shot back, more ruffled by her presence than he ever would have admitted.

“Maybe because you were a complete ass,” she replied in tones as sunny as the big sky stretched out above them.

Jess lifted his hands to his hips and stood fast against whatever it was that was pulling him toward her. I want to make love to you, he thought, and the truth of that ground in his spirit as well as in his loins.

There was pain in Libby’s navy blue eyes, as well as a cautious mischief. “Well?” she prodded.

Jess found that while he could keep himself from going to her, he could not turn away. Maybe her net reached farther than he’d thought. Maybe, like Stacey and that idiot in New York, he was already caught in it.

“I’m not here to apologize,” he said coldly.

“Then why?” she asked with chiming sweetness.

He wondered if she knew what that shoulderless blouse of hers was doing to him. Damn. He hadn’t been this tongue-tied since the night of his fifteenth birthday, when Ginny Hillerman had announced that she would show him hers if he would show her his.

Libby’s eyes were laughing at him. “Jess?”

“Is your dad here?” he threw out in gruff desperation.

One shapely, gossamer eyebrow arched. “You know perfectly well that he isn’t. If Dad were home, his pickup truck would be parked in the driveway.”

Against his will, Jess grinned. His taut shoulders rose in a shrug. The shadows of cottonwood leaves moved on the old wooden dock, forming a mystical path—a path that led to Libby Kincaid.

She patted the sun-warmed wood beside her. “Come and sit down.”

Before Jess could stop himself, he was striding along that small wharf, sinking down to sit beside Libby and dangle his booted feet over the sparkling water. He was never entirely certain what sorcery made him ask what he did.

“What happened to your marriage, Libby?”

The pain he had glimpsed before leapt in her eyes and then faded away again, subdued. “Are you trying to start another fight?”

Jess shook his head. “No,” he answered quietly, “I really want to know.”

She looked away from him, gnawing at her lower lip with her front teeth. All around them were ranch sounds—birds conferring in the trees, leaves rustling in the wind, the clear pond water lapping at the mossy pilings of the dock. But no sound came from Libby.

On an impulse, Jess touched her mouth with the tip of one index finger. Water and electricity—the analogy came back to him with a numbing jolt.

“Stop that,” he barked, to cover his reactions.

Libby ceased chewing at her lip and stared at him with wide eyes. Again he saw the shadow of that nameless, shifting ache inside her. “Stop what?” she wanted to know.

Stop making me want to hold you, he thought. Stop making me want to tuck your hair back behind your ears and tell you that everything will be all right. “Stop biting your lip!” he snapped aloud.

“I’m sorry!” Libby snapped back, her eyes shooting indigo sparks.

Jess sighed and again spoke involuntarily. “Why did you leave your husband, Libby?”

The question jarred them both: Libby paled a little and tried to scramble to her feet; Jess caught her elbow in one hand and pulled her down again.

“Was it because of Stacey?”

She was livid. “No!”

“Someone else?”

Tears sprang up in Libby’s dark lashes and made then spiky. She wrenched free of his hand but made no move to rise again and run away. “Sure!” she gasped. “‘If it feels good, do it’—that’s my motto! By God, I live by those words!”

“Shut up,” Jess said in a gentle voice.

Incredibly, she fell against him, wept into the shoulder of his blue cotton workshirt. And it was not a delicate, calculating sort of weeping—it was a noisy grief.

Jess drew her close and held her, broken on the shoals of what she was feeling even though he did not know its name. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely.

Libby trembled beneath his arm and wailed like a wounded calf. The sound solidified into a word usually reserved for stubborn horses and income-tax audits.

Jess laughed and, for a reason he would never understand, kissed her forehead. “I love it when you flatter me,” he teased.

Miraculously, Libby laughed, too. But when she tilted her head back to look up at him, and he saw the tear streaks on her beautiful, defiant face, something within him, something that had always been disjointed, was wrenched painfully back into place.

He bent his head and touched his lips to hers, gently, in question. She stiffened, but then, at the cautious bidding of his tongue, her lips parted slightly and her body relaxed against his.

Jess pressed Libby backward until she lay prone on the shifting dock, the kiss unbroken. As she responded to that kiss, it seemed that the sparkling water-light of the pond danced around them both in huge, shimmering chips, that they were floating inside some cosmic prism.

His hand went to the full roundness of her left breast. Beneath his palm and the thin layer of white eyelet, he felt the nipple grow taut in that singular invitation to passion.

Through the back of his shirt, Jess was warmed by the heat of the spring sun and the tender weight of Libby’s hands. He left her mouth to trail soft kisses over her chin, along the sweet, scented lines of her neck.

All the while, he expected her to stiffen again, to thrust him away with her hands and some indignant—and no doubt colorful—outburst. Instead, she was pliant and yielding beneath him.

Enthralled, he dared more and drew downward on the uppermost ruffle of her suntop. Still she did not protest.

Libby arched her back and a low, whimpering sound came from her throat as Jess bared her to the soft spring breeze and the fire of his gaze.

Her breasts were heavy golden-white globes, and their pale rose crests stiffened as Jess perused them. When he offered a whisper-soft kiss to one, Libby moaned and the other peak pouted prettily at his choice. He went to it, soothed it to fury with his tongue.

Libby gave a soft, lusty cry, shuddered and caught her hands in his hair, drawing him closer. He needed more of her and positioned his body accordingly, careful not to let his full weight come to bear. Then, for a few dizzying moments, he took suckle at the straining fount of her breast.

Recovering himself partially, Jess pulled her hands from his hair, gripped them at the wrists, pressed them down above her head in gentle restraint.

Her succulent breasts bore his assessment proudly, rising and falling with the meter of her breathing.

Jess forced himself to meet Libby’s eyes. “This is me,” he reminded her gruffly. “Jess.”

“I know,” she whispered, making no move to free her imprisoned hands.

Jess lowered his head, tormented one delectable nipple by drawing at it with his lips. “This is real, Libby,” he said, circling the morsel with just the tip of his tongue now. “It’s important that you realize that.”

“I do…oh, God… Jess, Jess.”

Reluctantly he left the feast to search her face with disbelieving eyes. “Don’t you want me to stop?”

A delicate shade of rose sifted over her high cheekbones. Her hands still stretched above her, her eyes closed, she shook her head.

Jess went back to the breasts that so bewitched him, nipped at their peaks with gentle teeth. “Do you…know how many…times I’ve wanted…to do this?”

The answer was a soft, strangled cry.

He limited himself to one nipple, worked its surrendering peak into a sweet fervor with his lips and his tongue. “So…many…times. My God, Libby…you’re so beautiful….”

Her words were as halting as his had been. “What’s happening to us? We h-hate each other.”

Jess laughed and began kissing his way softly down over her rib cage, her smooth, firm stomach. The snap on her jeans gave way easily—and was echoed by the sound of car doors slamming in the area of the house.

Instantly the spell was broken. Color surged into Libby’s face and she bolted upright, nearly thrusting Jess off the end of the dock in her efforts to wrench on the discarded suntop and close the fastening of her jeans.

“Broad daylight…” she muttered distractedly, talking more to herself than to Jess.

“Lib!” yelled a jovial masculine voice, approaching fast. “Libby?”

Stacey. The voice belonged to Stacey.

Sudden fierce anger surged, white-hot, through Jess’s aching, bedazzled system. Standing up, not caring that his thwarted passion still strained against his jeans, visible to anyone who might take the trouble to look, he glared down at Libby and rasped, “I guess reinforcements have arrived.”

She gave a primitive, protesting little cry and shot to her feet, her ink-blue eyes flashing with anger and hurt. Before Jess could brace himself, her hands came to his chest like small battering rams and pushed him easily off the end of the dock.

The jolting cold of that spring-fed pond was welcome balm to Jess’s passion-heated flesh, if not his pride. When he surfaced and grasped the end of the dock in both hands, he knew there would be no physical evidence that he and Libby had been doing anything other than fighting.

Libby ached with embarrassment as Stacey and Senator Barlowe made their way down over the slight hillside that separated the backyard from the pond.

The older man cast one mischievously baleful look at his younger son, who was lifting himself indignantly onto the dock, and chuckled, “I see things are the same as always,” he said.

Libby managed a shaky smile. Not quite, she thought, her body remembering the delicious dance Jess’s hard frame had choreographed for it. “Hello, Senator,” she said, rising on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

“Welcome home,” he replied with gruff affection. Then his wise eyes shifted past her to rest again on Jess. “It’s a little cold yet for a swim, isn’t it, son?”

Jess’s hair hung in dripping ebony strands around his face, and his eyes were jade-green flares, avoiding his father to scald Libby’s lips, her throat, her still-pulsing breasts. “We’ll finish our…discussion later,” he said.

Libby’s blood boiled up over her stomach and her breasts to glow in her face. “I wouldn’t count on that!”

“I would,” Jess replied with a smile that was at once tender and evil. And then, without so much as a word to his father and brother, he walked away.

“What the hell did he mean by that?” barked Stacey, red in the face.

The look Libby gave the boyishly handsome, caramel-eyed man beside her was hardly friendly. “You’ve got some tall explaining to do, Stacey Barlowe,” she said.

The senator, a tall, attractive man with hair as gray as Ken’s, cleared his throat in the way of those who have practiced diplomacy long and well. “I believe I’ll go up to the house and see if Ken’s got any beer on hand,” he said. A moment later he was off, following Jess’s soggy path.

Libby straightened her shoulders and calmly slapped Stacey across the face. “How dare you?” she raged, her words strangled in her effort to modulate them.

Stacey reddened again, ran one hand through his fashionably cut wheat-colored hair. He turned, as if to follow his father. “I could use a beer myself,” he said in distracted, evasive tones.

“Oh, no you don’t!” Libby cried, grasping his arm and holding on. The rich leather of his jacket was smooth under her hand. “Don’t you dare walk away from me, Stacey—not until you explain why you’ve been lying about me!”

“I haven’t been lying!” he protested, his hands on his hips now, his expensively clad body blocking the base of the dock as he faced her.

“You have! You’ve been telling everyone that I… That we…”

“That we’ve been doing what you and my brother were doing a few minutes ago?”

If Stacey had shoved Libby into the water, she couldn’t have been more shocked. A furious retort rose to the back of her throat but would go no further.

Stacey’s tarnished-gold eyes flashed. “Jess was making love to you, wasn’t he?”

“What if he was?” managed Libby after a painful struggle with her vocal cords. “It certainly wouldn’t be any of your business, would it?”

“Yes, it would. I love you, Libby.”

“You love Cathy!”

Stacey shook his head. “No. Not anymore.”

“Don’t say that,” Libby pleaded, suddenly deflated. “Oh, Stacey, don’t. Don’t do this….”

His hands came to her shoulders, fierce and strong. The topaz fever in his eyes made Libby wonder if he was sane. “I love you, Libby Kincaid,” he vowed softly but ferociously, “and I mean to have you.”

Libby retreated a step, stunned, shaking her head. The reality of this situation was so different from what she had imagined it would be. In her thoughts, Stacey had laughed when she confronted him, ruffled her hair in that familiar brotherly way of old, and said that it was all a mistake. That he loved Cathy, wanted Cathy, and couldn’t anyone around here take a joke?

But here he was declaring himself in a way that was unsettlingly serious.

Libby took another step backward. “Stacey, I need to be here, where my dad is. Where things are familiar and comfortable. Please…don’t force me to leave.”

Stacey smiled. “There is no point in leaving, Lib. If you do, I’ll be right behind you.”

She shivered. “You’ve lost your mind!”

But Stacey looked entirely sane as he shook his handsome head and wedged his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Just my heart,” he said. “Corny, isn’t it?”

“It’s worse than corny. Stacey, you’re unbalanced or something. You’re fantasizing. There was never anything between us—”

“No?” The word was crooned.

“No! You need help.”

His face had all the innocence of an altar boy’s. “If I’m insane, darlin’, it’s something you could cure.”

Libby resisted an urge to slap him again. She wanted to race into the house, but he was still barring her way, so that she could not leave the dock without brushing against him. “Stay away from me, Stacey,” she said as he advanced toward her. “I mean it—stay away from me!”

“I can’t, Libby.”

The sincerity in his voice was chilling; for the first time in all the years she’d known Stacey Barlowe, Libby was afraid of him. Discretion kept her from screaming, but just barely.

Stacey paled, as though he’d read her thoughts. “Don’t look at me like that, Libby— I wouldn’t hurt you under any circumstances. And I’m not crazy.”

She lifted her chin. “Let me by, Stacey. I want to go into the house.”

He tilted his head back, sighed, met her eyes again. “I’ve frightened you, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

Libby couldn’t speak. Despite his rational, settling words, she was sick with the knowledge that he meant to pursue her.

“You must know,” he said softly, “how good it could be for us. You needed me in New York, Libby, and now I need you.”

The third voice, from the base of the hillside, was to Libby as a life preserver to a drowning person. “Let her pass, Stacey.”

Libby looked up quickly to see Jess, unlikely rescuer that he was. His hair was towel-rumpled and his jeans clung to muscular thighs—thighs that only minutes ago had pressed against her own in a demand as old as time. His manner was calm as he buttoned a shirt, probably borrowed from Ken, over his broad chest.

Stacey shrugged affably and walked past his brother without a word of argument.

Watching him go, Libby went weak with relief. A lump rose in her throat as she forced herself to meet Jess’s gaze. “You were right,” she muttered miserably. “You were right.”

Jess was watching her much the way a mountain cat would watch a cornered rabbit. For the briefest moment there was a look of tenderness in the green eyes, but then his expression turned hard and a muscle flexed in his jaw. “I trust the welcome-home party has been scheduled for later—after Cathy has been tucked into her bed, for instance?”