Nobody's Child

“I thought you liked me to.” He got up and moved toward her, trailing his blanket across the bleached pine floor.

“I—I...”

“What’s the matter?”

Frightened, she began backing. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“So—tell.”

“I’m practically engaged to another man.”

“Do you love him?”

The beach morning glories quivered in her hair. The tiny scar beneath her left eye, which was the only blemish on her near-perfect face, whitened. “Of—I’m not sure.”

“So—how do you feel about me?”

Her frantic eyes burned into him the same way her spicy food did.

“I have to know,” Cutter insisted.

“His brother doesn’t want us to marry. He doesn’t think I’m good enough. I—I came here to be alone—To think about Martin and our future together.” Her eyes glistened with unspoken pain as she studied Cutter. “Not for—”

“Not for this.” With one hand Cutter grasped her shoulder. With his other, he caught her red hair and flower petals. His mouth slanted across hers.

Her lips parted hesitantly; he felt her soft, indrawn breath. Next she shocked him by the full heat of her response to his kiss as her tongue slid against his. Consumed by hunger, his arms tightened around her slim waist as she surrendered passionately.

“Cheyenne—”

“No!” She stiffened and drew back. “Please—” She threw the door open and ran.

“Damn,” he muttered, watching her, not following even though he sensed that if he pressed her now, he could win. He was tempted to go after her, to pull her into the sand and seduce her. Then he could tell Martin and advise him that Lords didn’t marry easy women like her.

But three days with her had robbed Cutter of the appetite to destroy her.

She had been so nice to him.

She had saved his life.

Which meant he owed her. Yes. But how much?

Surely not Martin’s future and fortune.

There was a new wrinkle. Cutter now wanted her himself.

Tom, Cutter hesitated—and that wasn’t like him.

Why the hell didn’t he just seduce her?

It was only later that he wondered if he had not sensed the impending danger she would be to his coldly ordered life. To his soul.

But—until he met Cheyenne Rose, Cutter had not known he had a soul.

Until Cheyenne he had glided through life. First as the precocious, brilliant son and dutiful brother. Then as the ruthless businessman who believed that life was about money, not love. He had married; divorced. But ultimately, always—until Cheyenne—he’d been alone, an outcast. Envied and never loved. He had sought admiration. Not love. His loneliness hadn’t mattered—until her.

Arrogant to the core, Cutter was accustomed to the glitter of exotic capitals and the easy pleasures of beautiful women. Long ago, when he had become strong enough to crush his opposition, he had not imagined that anyone, least of all a girl, could ever crush him.

Cutter had lived in many houses and in many foreign lands. He had made many fortunes and had had many women. But nowhere and to no one had he ever belonged, least of all to himself. He spoke many languages, but not one of them was the language of his own soul. He’d had little understanding of those weaker than himself. He had not cared that his younger brother felt jealousy for him instead of love.

And then Cutter had washed up on his island, and she had turned the tables on him by saving his life. His cynical world and all its rules had changed.

Not completely.

Because when she had asked his name, he had lied and said, “Lyon.”

Cheyenne was wearing her bikini and holding her paperback and gauzy cover-up, but she couldn’t work up the nerve to go out on the deck for her daily sunbath.

Because Lyon was somewhere outside.

She couldn’t see him.

Or let him see her.

Lyon had avoided her ever since he’d kissed her yesterday, and she was grateful to him for that.

And yet, somehow, his absence made her think of him even more.

Whenever Lyon came near the house, she kept to Martin’s elegant bedroom with its long windows and dark blue walls and white throw carpets and paintings of the sea.

But she felt miserable and trapped as she stared, with white-knuckled fingers against the shuttered windows, out to the sea and the primroses in the dunes and wondered where Lyon was. She wanted to go out and lie in the sun and listen to the surf and think.

Did she have an hour before he came back?

She wanted to love Martin. Only Martin. Why then did thoughts of Lyon possess her? Why had the dune flowers started to bloom the moment she’d seen Lyon?

This couldn’t be happening.

She couldn’t let it.

All her life Cheyenne had wanted to legitimize herself, to be somebody, to marry someone who was somebody, to have the normal sort of life and family her half sister, Chantal, and so many people were born with and took for granted. To be accepted, valued—

But more than anything, even such a life, Cheyenne now wanted Lyon.

He was a stranger. She knew almost nothing about him.

He was a good listener, but he had revealed very little about himself.

What was he hiding?

He couldn’t hide the fact that he wanted her.

She had felt the hot physical bond almost from the first moment when he’d lain freezing and hurt and helpless on the beach.

Martin must never know.

She shivered in disgust. How could she think like that even for a second?

Because she was illegitimate, everybody in Westville had said she was trash. All her life Cheyenne had tried to live down the taint of her birth. She hadn’t dated because every time she looked at a boy, people said she was as bad and strange as her odd, fast-living mama, Ivory Rose.

As Martin Lord’s wife, everybody would admire her. She could go back to Westville with a grander name than the Wests, her father’s “real family.” Chantal could no longer act so superior. If she, Cheyenne, had her own husband, maybe it would no longer matter that Chantal had married Jack, the young boy whom Chantal’s mother had rescued from the barrio so many years ago. Ever since then, he’d used “West” as his surname.

Before coming to the island Cheyenne had told Martin she hadn’t made up her mind about marrying him. She’d told his odious brother the same thing.

Not that she’d thought there was much to think about. Jack was lost to her forever. Boyish and charming, Martin was the nicest guy she’d met since she’d escaped Westville.

Until Lyon.

A smart girl wouldn’t consider marriage to a stranger who’d washed up on a deserted beach. Even if he had made flowers bloom.

Distracted, she continued to stare outside.

Nothing. Just golden grass and white sand. And endless wildflowers. Yesterday Lyon hadn’t come back all day.

She decided to risk an hour on the deck.

Carefully she tiptoed outside where she took off her gauzy cover-up and swam several laps in the sparkling pool. The water was too cold, so she got out and dried off and lay down on a long white towel.

After a few minutes the warm sunlight drugged her senses.

She didn’t hear him approach.

Suddenly he was just there, blocking the sun—a huge male animal, bronzed and magnificent, his legs thrust widely apart as he loomed over her as if he were a dark giant from a fairy tale.

She twisted her head and looked straight into his starkly handsome face.

And suddenly Martin and all her dreams of a new life vanished.

There was only Lyon. Only this moment and this sharp need. Only this fierce recognition of her other half.

She saw her own desire mirrored in his fiery eyes and for the first time in a long, long time, all the lies she had told and lived since she had run from Westville to Dallas melted away. She didn’t know who he really was, and she didn’t care. His naked, lonely soul reached out to hers and re-created her into some truer self that had longed to exist but had lacked the courage to be until she had formed this incomprehensible bond with him.

Still, when she got up on shaky legs, and he held out her gauzy cover-up, she ran from those outstretched brown hands and from him.

But he had seen the truth in her glowing eyes, or maybe just her desire.

Whatever. He chased her.

Panting, she locked herself inside the patio doors.

But she stood there just inside, expectantly staring at him from behind the shining glass—waiting excitedly.

“Go away,” she whispered even as some deep and truer part of herself challenged him to unthought-of needs and violent deeds.

A huge piece of driftwood that she had found on the beach the first day before the storm and lugged to the deck glistened in the sun at his bronzed feet.

Easily he leaned down and picked up the limb. Then staring into her eager, wide gaze for a long moment, he lifted it high above his head.

Transfixed, she watched as the muscles of his arm bulged before he hurled the wood against the glass, smashing it.

The explosion of zillions of slivered shards of flying glass dazzled her.

Or was it just Lyon?

When he kicked a few shards aside and strode across that ruined threshold, his shoes made crackling sounds in the glass. She just stood there, as frozen and still as a statue while her blood sang with a silent, shocking wildness.

There was no wind, but a powerful force whipped the sea oxeye, sunflowers and sea oats. Suddenly more summer flowers burst forth into bloom.

She knew she should have run and fought and struggled.

But when he seized her and wrapped his body around hers, when his lips came down hard on hers, claiming her in that most basic and eternal way, she could deny him nothing.

She had never existed before his hot mouth made her flame into being just as the dune flowers had.

Nor had he.

Both their lives had been lies.

Nothing on earth—not all the precious dreams and ambitions she had lived on since a child, not even her dream to be as grand as her sister—mattered in the face of Lyon who had become the master of their mutual reality.

Lyon—who was he?

She didn’t know.

She only knew that even as his hands shredded her bikini and tore the bra from her breasts, even as he ripped off his ragged jeans and shirt, she would belong to him forever.

Even if all he ever wanted from her was sex.

She had hungered for her own respectable identity ever since she’d been five and her sister had first branded her with the word bastard.

She had thought money and marriage would give her the security and the respect she craved.

Lyon was everything.

She would be whatever he wanted.

For as long as he wanted. With or without marriage.

He was hers. In that single shining moment, as he held and kissed Cheyenne, they burned with the same flame and everything was very simple.

Only later did it become so complex and terrible.

Cutter made no sound as he lifted her and carried her across the litter of white carpets, up the swirl of stairs, to the bedroom that looked across the dunes to the sea. He took time to open all the doors, so that the surf roared in their ears, so that they could smell the salt and feel the damp wind against their hot, naked bodies. Then he fell across her on the bed and, with one fist grasping her long red hair, he shaped her to him and plunged inside her.

They came together violently, in quick, fluid thrusts, like a primitive couple, their bodies sparking, rising and falling in the wildness of the ancient ritual.

They took no time to know each other.

Both were shocked.

He to discover that this wanton whose golden body responded to him with such primitive eager response was a virgin.

She to discover that pain could open the floodgates to ecstasy and knowledge of another’s soul.

They didn’t speak.

Not then.

Not later.

There were no words.

They needed no words.

They just loved. Sometimes with their bodies fused quietly. Sometimes they twisted and writhed.

All that afternoon.

Into the brief glow that is a southern twilight on a windswept beach.

And again during their long, single black night together.

Endlessly.

Completely.

But, ah, so devastatingly.

And when it was over, the island was even hotter than it ever got in full summer. Bees buzzed above the dune flowers. Cicadas sang as if under a spell.

The man and the woman lay wrapped together, each sure that, whatever happened, she could never, ever marry Martin Lord.

One

Nothing sells like celebrity murder.

Especially not on a humid, spring night in Houston, Texas, when lilacs and wisteria as well as wild water lilies have suddenly decided to bloom early—and all these magic blossoms are three times their normal sizes.

Thus, the hottest ticket in that southern city of skyscrapers, freeways and sluggish brown bayous on that cool Saturday night was the Martin Lord bankruptcy auction at the Castle Galleries in the city’s fashionable Southwest.

Quite naturally everybody, absolutely everybody, attended. The Wests from their great ranch, El Atascadero, near Westville and Theodora West’s even more famous ranching cousins, the Jacksons from their far grander ranch, were there en masse. Mercedes and Wayne Jackson, Amy and Nick Browning, as well as Megan and Jeb Jackson had all come. Yes, the rich, the greedy, the overdressed, the envious, as well as the merely curious were there to watch and to gloat at the widow’s latest humiliation, as one by one, Cheyenne’s most beloved and most prized possessions went on the auction block.

The gossips buzzed.

Had she killed Martin?

Or had his older brother?

There had always been gossip about Martin and Cheyenne Lord even before Martin’s chain-draped, nude body had washed ashore on an oyster reef in Galveston Bay six months ago. Even in Houston, the youngest, brashest city in Texas where flamboyant behavior on the part of the city’s rich is almost a duty, the couple, who had lived both extravagantly and scandalously, had continually raised the bar of vulgar excesses.

Take the Lords’s wedding seven years ago at the Jackson Ranch in south Texas when Martin had gotten roaring drunk and ridden one of Jeb Jackson’s prize bulls up the aisle to take his vows. Not to be outdone, the groom’s older brother had stormed in late during the reception and forced the bride to kiss him. And not a brotherly kiss, but a kiss so electric with white-hot passion that every single guest had been charred by its carnal sizzle. Indeed, Mrs. Gilchrist, a gray-headed society matron, whose seat had been the closest to the embracing couple, had told everyone who would listen that wisps of steam had arisen from her very own cuticles for as long as the couple’s lips remained fused.

Fortunately before Mrs. Gilchrist’s fingernails could be completely eviscerated, Cheyenne had fainted in Cutter’s arms. The rogue would have carried her off, had not the groom and his groomsmen seized Cutter by the throat and hurled him to the ground. They might have killed him, if Jeb and Tad Jackson hadn’t pulled them off and rushed the unconscious Cutter Lord to a hospital.

Cutter retaliated by seizing control of his younger brother’s fortune and firing Martin from Lord Enterprises. Thus, had it not been for Martin’s rich friends, the newlyweds would have begun their lives together almost penniless.

There had been more talk when Cheyenne had delivered a strapping, ten-pound son with a shock of ebony hair less than eight months later.

Even more talk when Cutter had showed up in the hospital nursery and possessively glowered down at the baby that looked so alarmingly like him and then exchanged cruel, damning words with the new mother who had almost died giving birth to the boy he claimed as his son.

The baby had started to cry, and Cutter had picked him up. Then as the child quieted, Cheyenne had burst into tears, and when Cutter had tried to take her into his arms, too, Martin had summoned security. Cutter had been dragged away.

There had been even more talk when Cutter had refused to back down from the financial decisions he had made regarding Martin, and the brothers failed to patch up their quarrel.

Things had quieted down a bit when Cutter had moved to the south of France, and Martin and Cheyenne Lord, aided by loans, had settled into their vulgarly stylish marriage and endeared themselves to the city by planting a magical garden and throwing frequent and flashy parties at which the bride always served her wonderfully spicy food.

The talk had resumed, however, when the bride’s married sister, the flamboyant Chantal West, had left her husband, Jack West, and seduced Martin on Cheyenne’s front lawn. The gossips had had a field day with the rumors Chantal started about Cheyenne. Soon everybody knew that the sweet, sad-faced Mrs. Martin Lord, whose flowers grew bigger than everybody else’s and whose exotic herbs had a taste all their own, had never had a daddy to claim her. Chantal reported that Cheyenne’s mother had been a tramp who raised gators, cast spells, cooked for cowboys and slept with whichever one she took a fancy to.

It was the notorious Chantal who first made everybody aware how the weather in Houston always got warmer and how trees bloomed out of season after every Lord party. How everybody got a little crazy, too. How couples who hadn’t slept together in years would go home and make love to each other all night long.

Martin Lord, who had an obsession for upstaging his rich brother, had liked notoriety of any sort. Thus, he hadn’t discouraged his mistress from gossiping about his wife’s strange powers and scandalous past. Martin, who’d had a Texas-size ego and a mania for media attention, had gotten himself proclaimed the leading real-estate tycoon in the state. He had had an enormous import-export business as well. His wife had become a celebrity caterer and the author of five wonderful, bilingual, coffee-table cookbooks. Still, there were those who said they could see beneath Cheyenne’s beauty and sophistication to the wild bad blood that they now knew raced in her veins. Everybody said that no recipes were richer or spicier or hotter than hers. But what really made her books off-the-chart bestsellers was that rumor Chantal had started about Cheyenne’s food having aphrodisiac qualities.

The Lords had lived high. They owned a mansion in Houston’s best neighborhood, a showplace ranch in south Texas, and a villa on a high cliff in Acapulco.

They’d lived like kings. In spite of the gossips.

Right to the end.

But Martin Lord had died broke.

No.

Worse than broke.

Martin Lord had left his lovely widow and son, Jeremy, millions of dollars in debt, five million to be exact, to dangerous people on both sides of the border.

But the most dangerous enemy she had, at least as far as Cheyenne Lord was concerned, since her heart and soul were involved, was her brother-in-law whose searing wedding kiss was so well remembered. Especially by Mrs. Gilchrist whose fingernails had never quite recovered.

Tonight Cheyenne had given orders that Cutter was not to be sold a ticket to the auction; nor was he to be admitted should he dare try to make an appearance.

Still—tonight when she’d stepped out of her house and was about to get into her limousine, she hadn’t been able to ignore two rather alarming signs. A single bolt of lightning had arched over her head, scrawling a white C in a cloudless black sky. At the very same moment her magnolia tree, which had shed its last blossom the day of Martin’s death and had been barren ever since, had suddenly burst into bloom.

Cheyenne had read in these simultaneous happenings a sign.

Cutter Lord was definitely on his way.

She had slammed her door with a vengeance; fighting to catch her breath. Why was it still so maddeningly easy to remember their time on the island? Especially that moment shortly before dawn when she had cupped his face between her hands and stared deeply into his eyes, marveling at their warmth after he’d just confessed his love for her?

For her public lynching, Cheyenne had chosen to wear a skintight, black leather pantsuit and a soft black cashmere sweater that fit her like a glove. Her necklace and earrings were fashioned of serious diamonds and emeralds, a wedding gift from her husband. His only gift in seven years of marriage. Not that she had wanted another.

As the widow greeted the Jacksons, her good friends who were effusive in their friendliness, and then Theodora and Chantal West, her father’s “real” family, who were as chilly as iced champagne, Cheyenne hoped none of them noticed that her hand with the diamonds shook and that her frequent smiles were quivery as she scanned the crowd for Cutter.

Theodora, who had never before said Ivory Rose’s name aloud to anyone other than her deceased husband and then only in anger, thawed a little and murmured how sorry she was that Cheyenne’s dear mama was so ill.

Ivory Rose had suffered a stroke the day Martin had been found dead, and was confined to her bed with round-the-clock nurses, which Cheyenne was struggling to pay for.

Cheyenne’s eyes shimmered. “But I thought...that you disliked her—”

“I—I used to think so, too. But relationships are not always what they seem. I was jealous.” Theodora moved closer and put a hand on her shoulder. “I couldn’t help it. She was a free spirit. She was so much younger and so much more beautiful.”

“I really hated to leave her...so sick,” Cheyenne murmured, touched. “As soon as this is over, Jeremy and I will definitely go back to be with her.”

Theodora’s thin, cold hand lingered consolingly. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’ll miss her more than I’ll miss most people in Westville.” For one brief moment Cheyenne felt that maybe, just maybe, her father’s family might someday feel affection for her.

Then Chantal spoke. “My, my, Witchgirl.” Her soft voice was somehow more predatory than her fierce eyes. “How sweet you always are, dear sister.”

The two sisters looked at each other, saw themselves in each other’s faces and, as always, were unpleasantly jolted.

Cheyenne remembered growing up in Westville. There had been an unspoken competition between the rich and icily controlled Theodora West and her husband’s mistress, the fun-loving Ivory Rose who hadn’t minded at all that she’d had an awful reputation or that some of the townspeople thought she was a witch. Their competition had spilled over to their daughters because the two women had used them in their silent war with each other. Every school contest in which both girls entered had been a battle, and every time Cheyenne, the wild child, had bested her sister, the ranch princess, which had been often—and there had been those who said that witchcraft had given her the edge—Chantal had found some terrible way to get even.

Tonight Chantal’s color was high. As always, she was too intensely involved with Cheyenne, especially now that the spotlight was on her.

Although Chantal was flamboyantly sexy in a tight red sheath, and had never looked lovelier, she exuded a dangerous aura of resentment and insecurity because people had come to see Cheyenne, not her.

More than anything on earth Chantal wanted to be the star. Cheyenne’s stomach tightened. Chantal had married Jack and seduced Martin to get revenge. What might she do next?

Had their mothers not been such polar extremes, Chantal would have hated her simply for existing. Chantal especially resented their too-startling resemblance, perhaps because it proved their kinship. Perhaps, because having a double made her feel less special.

Still, if only their mothers hadn’t pitted them against each other, maybe they could have become real sisters.

No.

Cheyenne had given up on that dream. Never again would Cheyenne try to impress Chantal or the Wests. After tonight Cheyenne was through with being in the public eye, with caring about others’ opinions. Cheyenne would be finished with men, with love, with marriage and, therefore, hopefully, with this sister who had betrayed her twice.