Part of the Bargain Page 3

  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 retre
ated 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?”

  Libby gaped at him, appalled. Had he interceded only to torment her himself?

  Jess’s eyes were contemptuous as they swept over her. “What’s the matter, Lib? Couldn’t you bring yourself to tell your married lover that the welcoming had already been taken care of?”

  Rage went through Libby’s body like an electric current surging into a wire. “You don’t seriously think that I would… That I was—”

  “You even managed to be alone with him. Tell me, Lib—how did you get rid of my father?”

  “G-get rid…” Libby stopped, tears of shock and mortification aching in her throat and burning behind her eyes. She drew a deep, audible breath, trying to assemble herself, to think clearly.

  But the whole world seemed to be tilting and swirling like some out-of-control carnival ride. When Libby closed her eyes against the sensation, she swayed dangerously and would probably have fallen if Jess hadn’t reached her in a few strides and caught her shoulders in his hands.

  “Libby…” he said, and there was anger in the sound, but there was a hollow quality, too—one that Libby couldn’t find a name for.

  Her knees were trembling. Too much, it was all too much. Jonathan’s death, the ugly divorce, the trouble that Stacey had caused with his misplaced affections—all of those things weighed on her, but none were so crushing as the blatant contempt of this man. It was apparent to Libby now that the lovemaking they had almost shared, so new and beautiful to her, had been some sort of cruel joke to Jess.

  “How could you?” she choked out. “Oh, Jess, how could you?”

  His face was grim, seeming to float in a shimmering mist. Instead of answering, Jess lifted Libby into his arms and carried her up the little hill toward the house.

  She didn’t remember reaching the back door.

  “What the devil happened on that dock today, Jess?” Cleave Barlowe demanded, hands grasping the edge of his desk.

  His younger son stood at the mahogany bar, his shoulders stiff, his attention carefully fixed on the glass of straight Scotch he meant to consume. “Why don’t you ask Stacey?”

  “Goddammit, I’m asking you!” barked Cleave. “Ken’s mad as hell, and I don’t blame him—that girl of his was shattered!”

  Girl. The word caught in Jess’s beleaguered mind. He remembered the way Libby had responded to him, meeting his passion with her own, welcoming the greed he’d shown at her breasts. Had it not been for the arrival of his father and brother, he would have possessed her completely within minutes. “She’s no ‘girl,’” he said, still aching to bury himself in the depths of her.

  The senator swore roundly. “What did you say to her, Jess?” he pressed, once the spate of unpoliticianly profanity had passed.

  Jess lowered his head. He’d meant the things he’d said to Libby, and he couldn’t, in all honesty, have taken them back. But he knew some of what she’d been through in New York, her trysts with Stacey notwithstanding, and he was ashamed of the way he’d goaded her. She had come home to heal—the look in her eyes had told him that much—and instead of respecting that, he had made things more difficult for her.

  Never one to be thwarted by silence, no matter how eloquent, Senator Barlowe persisted. “Dammit, Jess, I might expect this kind of thing from Stacey, but I thought you had more sense! You were harassing Libby about these blasted rumors your brother has been spreading, weren’t you?”

  Jess sighed, set aside the drink he had yet to take a sip from, and faced his angry father. “Yes,” he said.

  “Why?”

  Stubbornly, Jess refused to answer. He took an interest in the imposing oak desk where his father sat, the heavy draperies that kept out the sun, the carved ivory of the fireplace.

  “All right, mulehead,” Cleave muttered furiously, “don’t talk! Don’t explain! And don’t go near Ken Kincaid’s daughter again, damn you. That man’s the best foreman I’ve ever had and if he gets riled and quits because of you, Jess, you and I are going to come to time!”

  Jess almost smiled, though he didn’t quite dare. Not too many years before the phrase “come to time,” when used by his father, had presaged a session in the woodshed. He wondered what it meant now that he was thirty-three years old, a member of the Montana State Bar Association, and a full partner in the family corporation. “I care about Cathy,” he said evenly. “What was I supposed to do—stand by and watch Libby and Stace grind her up into emotional hamburger?”

  Cleave gave a heavy sigh and sank into the richly upholstered swivel chair behind his desk. “I love Cathy, too,” he said at length, “but Stacey’s behind this whole mess, not Libby. Da
mmit, that woman has been through hell from what Ken says—she was married to a man who slept in every bed but his own, and she had to watch her nine-year-old stepson die by inches. Now she comes home looking for a little peace, and what does she get? Trouble!”

  Jess lowered his head, turned away—ostensibly to take up his glass of Scotch. He’d known about the bad marriage— Ken had cussed the day Aaron Strand was born often enough—but he hadn’t heard about the little boy. My God, he hadn’t known about the boy.

  “Maybe Strand couldn’t sleep in his own bed,” he said, urged on by some ugliness that had surfaced inside him since Libby’s return. “Maybe Stacey was already in it.”

  “Enough!” boomed the senator in a voice that had made presidents tremble in their shoes. “I like Libby and I’m not going to listen to any more of this, either from you or from your brother! Do I make myself clear?”

  “Abundantly clear,” replied Jess, realizing that the Scotch was in his hand now and feeling honor-bound to take at least one gulp of the stuff. The taste was reminiscent of scorched rubber, but since the liquor seemed to quiet the raging demons in his mind, he finished the drink and poured another.

  He fully intended to get drunk. It was something he hadn’t done since high school, but it suddenly seemed appealing. Maybe he would stop hardening every time he thought of Libby, stop craving her.

  Too, after the things he’d said to her that afternoon by the pond, he didn’t want to remain sober any longer than necessary. “What did you mean,” he ventured, after downing his fourth drink, “when you said Libby had to watch her stepson die?”

  Papers rustled at the big desk behind him. “Stacey says the child had leukemia.”

  Jess poured another drink and closed his eyes. Oh, Libby, he thought, I’m sorry. My God, I’m sorry. “I guess Stacey would know,” he said aloud, with bitterness.

  There was a short, thunderous silence. Jess expected his father to explode into one of his famous tirades, was genuinely surprised when the man sighed instead. Still, his words dropped on Jess’s mind like a bomb.