Tears of the Renegade. Linda Howard
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eyes, but you’re so soft there’s no way in hell you could be a real Blackstone. There’s no hardness in you at all, is there?”
Puzzled, she stared back at him with a tiny frown puckering her brow. “What do you mean by hardness?”
“I don’t think you’d understand if I told you,” he replied cryptically, then added, “were you handpicked to be Vance’s wife?”
“No.” She smiled at the memory. “He picked me himself.”
He gave a silent whistle. “Imogene will never recover from the shock,” he said irreverently, and flashed that mocking grin at her again.
Despite herself, Susan felt the corners of her mouth tilting up in an answering smile. She was enjoying herself, talking to this dangerous, roguish man with the strangely compelling eyes, and she was surprised because she hadn’t really enjoyed herself in such a long time…since Vance’s death, in fact. There had been too many years and too many tears between her smiles, but suddenly things seemed different; she felt different inside herself. At first, she’d thought that she’d never recover from Vance’s death, but five years had passed, and now she realized that she was looking forward to life again. She was enjoying being held in this man’s strong arms and listening to his deep voice…and yes, she enjoyed the look in his eyes, enjoyed the sure feminine knowledge that he wanted her.
She didn’t want to examine her reaction to him; she felt as if she had been dead, too, and was only now coming alive, and she wanted to revel in the change, not analyze it.
She was in danger of drowning in sensation, and she recognized the inner weakness that was overtaking her, but felt helpless to resist it. He must have sensed, with a primal intuition that was as alarming as the aura of danger that surrounded him, that she was close to surrendering to the temptation to play with fire. He leaned down and nuzzled his mouth against the delicate shell of her ear, sending every nerve in her body into delirium. “Go outside with me,” he enticed, dipping his tongue into her ear and tracing the outer curve of it with electrifying precision.
Susan’s entire body reverberated with the shock of it, but his action cleared her mind of the clouds of desire that had been fogging it. Totally flustered, her cheeks suddenly pink, she stopped dead. “Mr. Blackstone!”
“Cord,” he corrected, laughing openly now. “After all, we’re at least kissing cousins, wouldn’t you say?”
She didn’t know what to say, and fortunately she was saved from forming an answer that probably wouldn’t have been coherent anyway, because Preston chose that moment to intervene. She had been vaguely aware, as she circled the room in Cord’s arms, that Preston had been watching every move his cousin made, but she hadn’t noticed him approaching. Putting his hand on Susan’s arm, he stared at his cousin with frosty blue eyes. “Has he said anything to upset you, Susan?”
Again she was thrown into a quandary. If she said yes, there would probably be a scene, and she was determined to avoid that. On the other hand, how could she say no, when it would so obviously be a lie? A spark of genius prompted her to reply with quiet dignity, “We were talking about Vance.”
“I see.” It was perfectly reasonable to Preston that, even after five years, Susan should be upset when speaking of her dead husband. He accepted her statement as an explanation instead of the red herring it was, and gave all of his attention to his cousin, who was standing there totally relaxed, a faintly bored smile on his lips.
“Mother is waiting in the library,” Preston said stiffly. “We assume you have some reason for afflicting us with your company.”
“I do.” Cord agreed easily with Preston’s insult, still smiling as he ignored the red flag being waved at him. He lifted one eyebrow. “Lead the way. Somehow, I don’t trust you at my back.”
Preston stiffened, and Susan forestalled the angry outburst she saw coming by placing her hand lightly on Cord’s arm and saying, “Let’s not keep Mrs. Blackstone waiting.”
As she had known he would, Preston shifted his attention to her. “There’s no reason for you to come along, Susan. You might as well stay here with the guests.”
“I’d like to have her there.” Cord had instantly contradicted his cousin, and in a manner that made Susan certain he’d spoken merely to irritate Preston. “She’s family, isn’t she? She might as well hear it all firsthand, rather than the watered-down and doctored version that she’d get from you and Imogene.”
For a moment Preston looked as if he would debate the point; then he turned abruptly and walked away. Preston was a Blackstone; he might want to punch Cord in the mouth, but he wouldn’t make a public scene. Cord following him at a slight distance, his hand dropping to rest lightly on Susan’s waist. He grinned down at her. “I wanted to make sure you didn’t get away from me.”
Susan was a grown woman, not a teenager. Moreover, she was a woman who for five years had managed large and varied business concerns with cool acumen; she was twenty-nine years old, and she told herself that she should long ago have passed out of the blushing stage. Yet this man, with the dashing air of a rake and those bold, challenging eyes, could make her blush with a mere glance. Excitement such as she had never felt before was racing through her, setting her heart pounding, and she actually felt giddy. She knew what love was like, and it wasn’t this. She had loved Vance, loved him so strongly that his death had nearly destroyed her, so she realized at once that this wasn’t the same emotion. This was primitive attraction, heady and feverish, and it was based entirely on sex. Vance Blackstone had been Love; Cord Blackstone meant only Lust.
But recognizing it for what it was didn’t lessen its impact as she walked sedately beside him, so vibrantly aware of the hand on her back that he might as well have been touching her naked body. She wasn’t the type for an affair. She was a throwback to the Victorian era, as Vance had once teased her by saying. She had been lovingly but strictly brought up, and she was the lady that her mother had meant her to be, from the top of her head down to her pink toes. Susan had never even thought of rebelling, because she was by nature exactly what she was: a lady. She had known love and would never settle for less than that, not even for the heady delights offered by the black sheep of the Blackstone family.
Just before they entered the library where Imogene waited, Cord leaned down to her. “If you won’t go outside with me, then I’ll take you home and we can neck on the front porch like teenagers.”
She flashed him an indignant glance that made him laugh softly to himself, but she was prevented from answering him because at that moment they passed through the door and she realized that he had perfectly timed his remark. He had a genius for throwing people off-balance, and he had done it again; despite herself, she felt the heat of intensified color in her face.
Imogene regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, her gray eyes sharpening for a fraction of a second as her gaze flickered from Susan to Cord, then back to Susan’s flushed face. Then she controlled her expression, and the gray eyes resumed their normal cool steadiness. “Susan, do you feel well? You look flushed.”
“I became a little warm during the dancing.” Susan was aware that once again she was throwing out a statement that would be regarded as an answer, but was in fact only a smokescreen. If she didn’t watch it, Cord Blackstone would turn her into a world-class liar before the night was out!
The tall man beside her directed her to a robin’s egg blue love seat and sprawled his graceful length beside her, earning himself a glare—which rolled right off of his toughened hide—from both Preston and Imogene. Smiling at his aunt, he drawled a greeting. “Hello, Aunt Imogene. How’s the family fortune?”
He was good at waving his own red flags, Susan noticed. Imogene settled back in her chair and coolly ignored the distraction. “Why have you come back?”
“Why shouldn’t I come back? This is my home, remember? I even own part of the land. I’ve been roaming around for quite a while now, and I’m ready to put down my roots. What better place for that than home? I thought I’d move into the cabin on Jubilee Creek.”