His Virgin Wife: The Wedding in White / Caught in the Crossfire / The Virgin's Secret Marriage. Diana Palmer
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when she found out about it on her return. Natalie inspired defense in the strangest quarters. Her tenderness made even the toughest people oddly vulnerable around her.
“You held me,” she recalled softly.
“Yes.” His face seemed to tauten as he looked at her. “I held you.”
She felt him so close that it was like being lifted and carried away. Little twinges of pleasure shot through her when she met his searching gaze. The sensation was so intense as they looked at each other, she could almost feel his bare chest against hers. Five years had passed since that night, but it seemed like yesterday. It was like stepping into space.
“And when I lost my sight,” he continued, “you held me.”
She bit her lower lip hard to stop it from trembling. “I wasn’t the only one who tried to nurse you,” she recalled.
“Vivian cried when I snapped at her, and the boys hid under their beds. You didn’t. You snapped right back. You made me want to go on living.”
She lowered her eyes to his chest. He had the build of a rodeo cowboy, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped. His checked shirt was open at the neck, and she saw the thick, curling hair that covered him from his chest to his belt. He wasn’t a hairy man, but he was devastating without a shirt. She’d seen him like that more often than she was comfortable remembering. He was beautiful under his clothing, like a sculpture she’d seen in pictures of museum exhibits. She even knew how he felt, there where the hair was thick over his breastbone…
“You were kind to me when Carl died,” she returned.
There was a new tension between them after she spoke. She sensed a steely anger in him.
“Since we’re on the subject of your poor taste in men, what do you see in that Markham man?” he asked curtly. “He’s as prissy as someone’s maiden aunt, and in a stand-up fight, he’d go out in seconds.”
She lifted her face. “Dave’s my friend,” she said shortly. “And certainly he’s no worse than that refugee from the witch trials that you go around with!”
His firm lips pursed. “Glenna’s not a witch.”
“She’s not a saint, either,” she assured him. “And if you’re going without sex, I can guarantee it’s not her fault!” she added without thinking. But once the words left her stupid mouth, and she saw the unholy light in the eye that wasn’t covered by the black eye patch, she could have bitten her tongue in two.
“Will you two keep your voices down?” young Bob Killain groaned, as he peered around the barn door to stare at them. “If Sadie Marshall hears you all the way in the kitchen, she’ll tell everybody in her Sunday school class that you two are living in sin out here!” he exclaimed, naming the Killain housekeeper.
Natalie looked at him indignantly, both hands on her slender hips. “It’s Glenna you’d better worry about, if he gets involved with her!” she assured Mack’s youngest brother, a redhead. “Her name is written in so many phone booths, she could qualify as a tourist attraction!”
Mack tried not to laugh, but he couldn’t help himself. He pulled his hat across his eyes at a slant and turned into the barn. “Oh, hell, I’m going to work. Haven’t you got something to do?” he asked his brother.
Bob cleared his throat and tried desperately not to laugh, either. “I’m just going over to Mary Burns’s house to help her with her trigonometry.”
“Carry protection,” Mack’s droll voice came back to him.
Bob turned as red as his hair. “Well, we don’t all stand around talking about sex all day!” he muttered.
“No,” Natalie agreed facetiously. She looked at Mack deliberately. “Some of us go looking for names in phone booths and call them up for dates!”
“Can it, Nat,” Mack said as he opened a stall and led a horse out. He proceeded to saddle it, ignoring Natalie and Bob.
“I’ll be back by midnight!” Bob called, seeing an opportunity to escape.
“You heard what I said,” Mack called after him.
Bob made an indignant sound and stomped out of the barn.
“He’s just sixteen, Mack,” she said, regaining her composure enough to join him as he fastened the cinch tight.
He glanced at her. “You were just seventeen when you were dating the football hero,” he reminded her.
She stared at him curiously. “Yes, but except for a few very chaste kisses, there wasn’t much going on.”
He gave her an amused glance before he went back to his chore. He tested the cinch, found it properly tight and adjusted the stirrups.
“What does that look mean?” Natalie asked curiously.
“I had a long talk with him when I found out you’d accepted a date for the Christmas dance from him.”
Her lips fell open. “You what?”
He slid a booted foot into the stirrup and vaulted into the saddle with easy grace. He leaned over the pommel and looked at Natalie. “I told him that if he seduced you, he’d have me to contend with. I told his parents the same thing.”
She was horrified. She could hardly breathe. “Of all the interfering, presumptuous—”
“You were raised in an orphanage by spinster women, and then you lived with your aunt, who couldn’t even talk about kissing without going into a swoon,” he said, and he didn’t smile. “You knew nothing about men or sex or hormones. Someone had to protect you, and there wasn’t anybody else to do it.”
“You had no right!”
His dark eye slid over her with something like possession. “I had more right than I’ll ever tell you,” he said quietly. “And that’s all I’ll say on the subject.”
He turned the horse, deaf to her fury.
“Mack!” she raged.
He paused and looked at her. “Tell Viv she can have her friend over for supper Saturday night, on the condition that you come, too.”
“I don’t want to come!”
He hesitated for a minute, then turned the horse and came back to her. “You and I will always disagree on some things,” he said. “But we’re closer than you realize. I know you,” he added in a tone that made her knees wobble. “And you know me.”
She couldn’t fight the emotions that made her more confused, more stirred, than she’d ever been before. She looked at him with eyes that betrayed her longing for him.
He drew in a long, slow breath, and his face seemed to lose its rigor. “I won’t apologize for looking out for you.”
“I’m not part of your family, Mack,” she said huskily. “You can tell Viv and Bob and Charles what to do, but you can’t tell me!”
He studied her angry face and smiled gently, in a way that he rarely smiled at anyone. “Oh, I’m not telling, baby,” he replied softly.
“And don’t call me baby, either!”
“All that fire and fury,” he mused, watching her. “What a waste.”
She was so confused that she could hardly think. “I don’t understand you at all today!”
“No,” he agreed, the smile fading. He looked straight into her eyes, unblinking. “You work hard at it, too.”
He turned the horse, and this time he kept riding.
She wanted to throw things. She couldn’t believe that he’d said such things to her, that he’d come so close in the barn that for an instant she’d thought that he meant to kiss her. And not a chaste brush on the cheek, like at Christmas