Friends and Lovers

She glared at him as he went around the front of the sports car and got in beside her. “Who do I spend most of my spare time with?” she asked archly. “They’ll think it’s yours!”

He laughed softly as he started the car. “You can name it after me, too.”

The thought of having John’s child made her feel strange. She gazed at his profile with curiosity, trying to reconcile the way she was feeling with the old comradeship that seemed to be slipping away. What was happening to her?

He drove in silence to the 610 Loop that circled the city, and smoked his cigarette without moving his eyes from the traffic until he turned off at Montrose and wound down the street where Madeline’s small Victorian house was located.

It was an older section of the city, and a number of the houses had been beautifully renovated. Madeline had inherited hers from a great-aunt who’d preserved the little house with the protective instincts of a mother hen. It might be old, but it was well cared for, and Madeline had kept up the tradition; frugally at first, and then lavishly when she began to show a profit with her writing.

“How’s the new book going?” he asked as he pulled into her driveway.

“Slowly,” she murmured. “Did I tell you there’s actually talk of a movie contract on The Grinding Tower if it continues to pick up readers and critical acclaim?” she added with a flash of sweet triumph in her eyes. “I was so excited I could hardly believe it. And I wanted to call and tell you—but we weren’t speaking.”

He cut the Ferrari’s powerful engine and half turned in the bucket seat to study her in the glare of the porch light from Miss Rose’s house next door. Madeline knew Miss Rose kept an eye out for her when she was late getting home at night. “I lost my temper,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to cut you up that way.”

It was the closest he’d ever come to any apology, and she knew it. He wouldn’t have made the effort for most people.

She shrugged gently. “I really wasn’t leading him on, you know,” she murmured. She glanced at him. “Do I have to remind you how I feel about men?”

He searched her flushed face. “It might help if you go over it every fifteen minutes,” he said enigmatically. “Especially if you’re going to wear dresses like that.”

“This old thing?” she teased, fingering the pleats of the dress. “Why it only cost the better part of one little chapter.”

He laughed softly, his face visible in the glow of his cigarette tip. “Everything is in terms of books with you,” he murmured amusedly. “A car is one book, a dress is a chapter….”

“My car is certainly not worth one book,” she reminded him. “I got it secondhand, it’s great on gas, and I love it.”

“I don’t have any quarrel with making full use of a piece of machinery,” he reminded her, and she suppressed a giggle, thinking of the limits to which he’d push a tractor or a combine.

“Yes, I know,” she mumbled.

His eyes went toward the side of the house where her little yellow Volkswagen was usually parked, and stopped on the huge oak tree beside it. “You need to have that tree taken down,” he said for the tenth time in as many months. “It’s dangerous. One good storm wind will land it right in your living room,” he said, “and I’ll remind you that it’s storm season and we’ve had our share of tornadoes in past years.”

“I will not have Great-Aunt Jessie’s oak tree cut down. Her grandfather planted it, you know,” she said huffily.

“Her grandfather, hell,” he shot back. “She was an orphan!”

She tossed her hair, threatening the elaborate coiffure. “Lies!” she retorted. “I have it on the best authority that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Yankee sea captain and my great-grandmother Surrey!”

He chuckled softly. “How scandalous. Does hot blood run in your family, Miss Vigny?”

She peeked at him through her lashes. “Why, sir, what a scandalous question! Miss Rose would be shocked. She was the one who told me, and she heard it straight from my great-aunt, who was her neighbor for twenty years!”

He finished the cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “I’ll have Josito bring your car home in the morning,” he said. He turned. “Or I can have him fetch you and you can drive it home later.”

“Is that an invitation?” she asked.

He nodded. “We could go riding. We haven’t done that lately.”

She averted her eyes. “I don’t know that I want to go near your stables again. You seem to have the idea that all I want out of life is to seduce your ranch hands one by one.”

“Stop that!” His hand caught her chin and jerked her face around to his blazing eyes. “I don’t want to see men pawing you,” he said curtly. “Especially not my men when they’re drunk!” His eyes ranged over every inch of her soft body, touching it in a way they never had before. His fingers closed on her chin and his eyes were dark and full of secrets. “I don’t want any man…touching you,” he breathed roughly.

She stared up into his eyes helplessly, tracing the craggy face, the straight nose, the bushy mustache over that hard, sensuous mouth. She could feel the sigh of his breath on her face, and she felt tingly all the way to her toes at the feel of his fingers on her soft cheek and chin.

Involuntarily, her own fingers reached out to touch the mustache over that chiseled mouth.

He seemed to flinch just before his hand went up to catch her wrist in a steely grasp, holding it away.

“Don’t do that,” he said harshly. “Can’t you get it into your head that I don’t want you to touch me?”

Her lower lip trembled, but she managed a nervous laugh. “I’ve got the message, Mr. Durango,” she assured him. “Now if you’ll give me back my arm, I’ll gladly go away and let you rush back to your conquest at Elise’s party.”

But he didn’t let go, and his eyes were watchful. “You’ve been flirting hard with me tonight,” he said quietly. “Trying to make my cousin jealous, Satin?”

She felt shocked, and showed it. “I don’t have that kind of relationship with Donald. It’s the same as it is with you—we’re just friends.”

“Is that what you and I are?” he asked in a strange, deep tone.

“Of course,” she managed. He was making her feel strange. Wary. Excited. Her wrist tingled where he gripped it.

“Then it won’t bother you if I take Melody into my bed, will it?” he asked, his eyes intent on her face.

She felt her breath catch in her throat. John and that mercenary little blonde in bed together, her blond tresses tangling in the dark hair over his bronzed, bare chest as he brushed his mouth over her smooth young body….

With a faint cry, she drew away from him, her face strangely pale, her eyes wide and shocked.

“You may be off sex, but I’m not,” he said deliberately, and he was watching her like a hawk. “Just because I’ve never touched you, that doesn’t mean I’m a eunuch.”

She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I never thought you were,” she said quietly.

He drew a sharp, impatient breath and she heard the click of his lighter as he lit another cigarette.

“You smoke too much,” she chided gently.

“I do a lot of things too much,” he growled, and his eyes seemed to hate her for an instant.

“Like seducing blondes?” she asked, and could have bitten her tongue for the slip.

“It would take a blowtorch to seduce you.”

She glared at him, her eyes flashing with green sparks. “He hurt me!” she threw at him. “You’re a man. What could you possibly know about a woman’s feelings…?”

“He hurt you because you were a virgin,” he growled. His voice, like his eyes, was bitter. “And because he wanted a body, not the emotions, personality and spirit that went with it. No man who cared about a woman would damage her that way. He left scars that haven’t healed in two years. He crippled you.” He drew on the cigarette roughly. “By God, I should have killed him!”

She blinked at him, at the unfamiliar violence in his deep, lazy drawl. “You didn’t even know his last name,” she reminded him.

“Didn’t I?” One corner of the mustache curled faintly, and there was glittering triumph in his eyes. “It wasn’t hard to find out, honey. All I had to do was call the writer’s club where you met him.”

She froze in her seat, staring at him uncomprehendingly. “You…went to see him?”

He nodded.

“And?” she prompted.

He blinked, smoking his cigarette quietly.

“John!” she said, exasperation in her voice.

He blew out a thick cloud of smoke. “When you fall off a horse,” he said, ignoring her, “the quickest way to get over it is to get right back on again.”

She’d had enough. Her fingers gripped her purse as she reached for the door handle. “I’ve had all the physical involvement I want just now,” she ground out. “Good night!”

“Satin!”

She started at the authority in his deep voice and turned to look at him.

“If I’d planned to proposition you, I would have done it over two years ago,” he said shortly. “Will you stop taking offense at everything I say?”

“I thought it was the other way around,” she muttered. Her wide, hurt eyes sought his and she crushed the little purse in her hands. “Oh, John, what’s happening to us?” she asked miserably. “We’ve been so close, such good friends, and all of a sudden it’s falling apart.” She reached out a hand and drew it back when she realized what she was doing—he couldn’t even bear to let her touch him anymore. “I…I don’t get along with most people,” she said with uncommon solemnity. “I’ve always been a misfit, a little odd. But I…I’ve always been able to talk to you, and you understand me. I don’t want to lose that.”

“You’ll always be my friend, Satin,” he said quietly. “That hasn’t changed. It never will.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that I don’t have a hell of a lot of friends myself, male or female? That blonde tonight is a case in point. She likes expensive baubles and I’m rich. She’ll climb into my bed at the drop of a hat, as long as she can expect something tangible in return.”

“They why encourage her?” she grumbled, surprising herself.

The cigarette, forgotten, smoldered while he looked at her impatiently. “Why does the subject of Melody bother you so much? Does it hurt to realize that most women aren’t frozen from the neck down?”

Her face went bloodred. That was the second time he’d made such a remark about her, and she’d had enough. For a split second, she considered slapping him. Her green eyes glittered, her hand lifted.

“Try it,” he encouraged softly, something new and faintly dangerous in his silver eyes as they caught the movement of her hand. “Come on, honey, try it.”

She almost did. It was the first and only time she’d wanted to strike him, and she was tempted. But he had the look of a man who was anticipating retaliation, and she was uncertain about the form it might take.

Her tense body relaxed. “No, thanks,” she said stiffly. “You’re entitled to your opinion of me. I’m aware that it’s gone down a few notches lately.”

He took a draw from the cigarette and studied her flushed face quietly. “For just a minute, that cool little mask you always wear slipped. You wanted to hit me, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said curtly, averting her eyes.

“Why didn’t you?”

She shifted restlessly. “Because I’ve never imagined that you were the kind of man to turn the other cheek.”

“I wouldn’t have hit you back, if that’s what you mean.” He leaned across to open the door, and she felt the brief, hard pressure of his arm across her soft breasts. She sat like a statue until he moved away, and only then did she realize that she’d stopped breathing for an instant.

“What would you have done?” she asked in a strangely breathless tone.

He studied her through a wisp of smoke, his lips pursed thoughtfully. “What do you think?” he asked in a blatantly sensuous tone.

“I think it’s late,” she said.

“Later than you think, honey. I’ll send Josito for you about seven, okay?”

She searched his eyes, finding questions instead of answers. He made her nervous, he frightened her.

“We’ll take it slow and easy,” he said softly, his eyes giving the words a different, exciting meaning.

Incredibly, she blushed, while he searched her eyes until she thought her frantically beating heart would burst.

“Maybe it would be better if I didn’t,” she said in a whisper, thinking out loud.

“Don’t be afraid of me,” he said. “We’ve always trusted one another, Satin.”

She laughed self-consciously. “I must be more exhausted than I imagined,” she said, staring at him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight.”

“Don’t you, honey?”

She swung her long legs to the ground and got out of the low-slung car. “Thanks for bringing me home,” she said in a strained tone.

“Will you be all right?” he asked, and there was genuine concern in his voice.

“Of course I will,” she said firmly. “I don’t need taking care of, you know. I’m very independent.”

“So am I, but who sat up with me for two nights when I had the flu?” he asked, his mustache curling.

She flushed, remembering how she’d helped Josito sponge him down during that unusual illness. John never got sick, but he’d been far from well that night. It had taken both of them to hold him down until the fever broke. And she remembered vividly the feel of his hair-roughened skin under her hands as she’d bathed him to bring down the fever….

“Who else was there?” she muttered self-consciously. “Josito couldn’t manage alone.”

He smiled at her, a quiet, tender smile that made her want to fling herself into his arms. “I’d have done the same for you,” he said. One eye narrowed and the mustache twitched wickedly. “In fact, I’d have enjoyed it tremendously.”

The thought of his big, rough hands touching her the way she’d touched him made her go weak in the knees. It was an odd reaction, a frightening one.

“Go home,” she grumbled, slamming the door.

She started toward the house, digging for her key.

“Seven a.m. sharp!” he called out the window.

She turned and gave him her best fairy-princess curtsy before he reversed the Ferrari and roared away into the night with a chuckle.

Chapter Three

John’s ranch was small by Texas standards, but then it wasn’t his main source of income. Oil was, and the ranch was more of a hobby than a business. He raised thoroughbred Santa Gertrudis cattle, and his champion bulls brought high prices at market. The older ones, the ribbon winners whose photographs lined the walls of his office and his den, were worth up to a half-million dollars apiece. Even the young bulls brought good prices, though, for their superior bloodlines.

Riding along beside John, between the neat white fences that separated the pastures stretching to the flat horizon, she was struck by the difference in him. He was in denims and boots and that battered black Stetson he wore around the ranch—this was a far cry from the elegantly dressed man who’d driven her home the night before.

“You’re staring again,” he observed with a wry glance, the habitual cigarette in his long, brown fingers.

“I was just thinking how different you are here,” she admitted.

His eyes ran over her slender body in jodhpurs and a short-sleeved green print blouse. The morning was cloudy and a little chilly, but she hated the idea of a sweater. John must have, too, because his denim shirt was rolled up to his elbows.

“I like you in green,” he said thoughtfully.

She smiled, shaking back her loosened hair, and then wondered at the way his eyes followed the movement. “They say it’s a restful color,” she murmured.

“Just what I need,” he replied dryly. “I didn’t get much sleep.”

She stared at him, the smile fading. She tugged on the reins and increased the pressure of her knees, forcing the little Appaloosa mare she was riding into a canter. She could have ridden the horse right over John Durango. Damned arrogant man, flinging his one-night stand in her face!

He effortlessly caught up with her on his big Appaloosa gelding.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he growled.

She wouldn’t look at him. “Nothing,” she said tersely. “Are those cows new?” she asked, changing the subject.

“No, they’re not new. Answer me.”

She flashed him a glance before she urged the mare into a gallop, leaning over her mane. The wind lashed her face, tore through her hair. She needed the burst of excitement that the speed gave her. She needed the element of danger.

She raced wildly down the wide dirt road between the pastures, laughing, her hair trailing behind her. He’d never catch her now!

But he was right alongside, his eyes biting into hers, and all at once he leaned over and caught the reins in a big, strong hand, easing her mare to a canter, a trot, and then reining her in completely. They were beyond the road now, in the meadow, in a grove of tall pecan trees near the highway.

Madeline glared at him. “I was having fun…!”

“You were about to break your damned neck!” he countered, faintly pale beneath his dark tan, his craggy face unusually hard. “What’s gotten into you, you little fool?”

“Don’t shout at me!” she defended.

“I’m not shouting!” His eyes narrowed and he drew in an annoyed breath. “I could beat the breath out of you when you do crazy things like this, Madeline, I swear to God….” He dismounted, almost jerking her off the horse. He glared down at her, his mouth making a thin line, his eyes blazing. His big hands were gripping her shoulders painfully, and he shook her once, roughly.

“John!” she burst out, shocked. “I was just riding. I’ve done it before!”

His eyes bored into hers and suddenly the world spun crazily around her and the universe dissolved into a pair of steely gray eyes. Her hands were pressing unconsciously against the front of his denim shirt, where it was casually unbuttoned over his massive chest. She moved slightly, and her fingers came into sudden, staggering contact with hair and warm, damp flesh.

He flinched at the light contact, his eyes dilated, his heavy brows drew together.

Sensing something new, something vulnerable in him, she moved her hands deliberately, sensuously, under the edges of the shirt and ran them tentatively across his chest, her lips parting as she felt the tensing, the sudden thunder of his heart under them.

His eyes seemed to blaze down at her. His fingers tightened painfully on her shoulders, his body tensed. She’d never seen John out of control, she’d never seen him anything but in perfect command of himself. But he looked as if he were about to explode, and the dangerous game she was playing only excited her.

She moved closer, her eyes studying the contours of his mouth as her fingers grew bolder and her palms flattened against his powerful chest.

All at once he caught her wrists and jerked them away. “That’s enough,” he growled harshly. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

While she was trying to figure that out, the sound of an approaching car diverted his scorching eyes from her face.

“Oh, hell, tourists,” he said curtly, glaring toward a big touring car with two women in the front seat.

He let Madeline go as the car stopped nearby and the elderly blonde at the wheel leaned out the window, smiling pleasantly.

“Howdy!” she called.

John’s mustache twitched. “Howdy,” he drawled back.

“Is this the way to Houston?” came the reply.

“Only if you plan to cut the road as you go,” John said pleasantly. “This is the Durango ranch.”

“It is?” The woman’s huge blue eyes got wider, matching the cornflowers on her printed blouse. She murmured something to the thinner woman beside her and leaned farther out the window. “This is Big John Durango’s ranch?” she persisted.

John grinned slyly. “Heard of him?”

“My goodness, yes! I retired from business this year, and I never miss my financial magazines. Why, when oil was making headlines, John Durango was a cover story! Imagine, a man that handsome being a tycoon as well!”

John looked sickeningly modest. He tilted his hat back on his head. “What kind of business were you in, ma’am?” he asked with characteristic curiosity.

“Corporate law,” the woman said, smiling.

“Tough profession,” he said.

“Not really. It just takes some study and a lot of practice.”

Catching her breath, Madeline wondered at his charm. The blond woman was staring at him intently. “Do you suppose we might actually get a glimpse of Mr. Durango as we head back toward the highway?” she asked, wide-eyed.

John pursed his lips. “Well, ma’am, he’s a hard man to hold still, if you know what I mean. Most likely he’s carousing in the pool with his women right now. He makes me do all the work while he lives up to his playboy reputation.”

Madeline had to clap a hand over her mouth to keep from giggling out loud. John’s face was deadpan, wearing a look of pure disgust.

“You work here?” the blonde asked.

“Yes, ma’am, like a mule, and that man won’t even pay me the back wages he owes me.”

“You oughtn’t let him get away with it,” the woman told him. “I’d sue him.”

“Well, if I didn’t owe him so much money, I might do that,” John agreed.

“Owe…him money?” The tourist’s eyes widened. “For what?”

“Oh, little ticky things. Like rent on this here horse.”

The blonde looked horrified, and Madeline was digging her nails into her palms to keep from howling.

“He makes his men pay rent on their horses—’his’ horses—to work ‘his’ cattle?” the tourist burst out.

“Well, he don’t take in much money on the cattle, so he had to make it up somehow, I reckon,” John said with a shrug. “Of course, it’s not hard to see how he got so rich when you consider how much money we all owe him in gambling debts.”

“You all owe him gambling debts?”

“Well, yes, ma’am,” John continued in his slowest drawl. “You see, he gets us drunk every Friday night and suckers us into playing poker with him. I reckon I owe him less than the others, though. I’ve paid my bill down to where I only got twenty thousand dollars more to pay off.”

“Oh, my God,” the tourist gasped.

John shook his head good-naturedly. “Could be worse,” he assured her.

“I don’t see how!”

John was more than willing to tell her. “He could make me sleep in the bunkhouse with the boys. Got rattlers in there ten feet long, big around as my leg.” He slapped his broad, denim-encased thigh. “Never could find a gun powerful enough to kill them things, so what you have to do is make pets of them. But snakes just don’t take to me like they do to some of them other boys, so Big John lets me sleep in the big house.”

The blonde was beginning to look suspicious. “Snakes ten feet long? Is that what they call a Texas tall tale?”

“Oh, no, ma’am,” John assured her. “I only lie when Big John tells me to, like when the income tax people ask questions about his trips to Europe and the thirty dependents that he swears are his illegitimate children—youngest girl’s twenty, you know….”

The blond woman started to laugh. She kept on until tears were rolling down her cheeks, and her companion was giggling audibly. Madeline let go of her own self-control at last, doubling over with laughter.

“Thank you for the profile, Mr. Durango,” the tourist laughed at John, her eyes twinkling. “Next time I read a story about you in some magazine, I’ll be one of the privileged few who know what a scalawag you really are. Making your men rent their horses…!”

He chuckled. “I’ve thought about it sometimes,” he swore. He pulled out his wallet and handed her a card. “I can always use a good attorney,” he told her. “If retirement gets too tough, give me a call.” He winked at her. “You’re too damned young to retire, honey.”

Madeline could have kissed him when she saw the older woman’s face begin to glow.