Colton by Marriage Read online

  “Honey Creek is my home, Sheriff. I’m not about to let anyone make me afraid to walk around my home,” she declared fiercely.

  “I’m not asking you to be afraid, Ms. Kelley, I’m asking you to be sensible. Cautious,” he tagged on when she continued looking at him as if she found his choice of words offensive. “There’s a lot to be said for ‘better safe than sorry,’” Wes told her.

  “She’ll be sensible,” Duke chimed in, solemnly making the promise for her.

  Wes nodded. “I’ll hang on to this for now,” he said, indicating the envelope on his desk.

  “Keep it,” she replied, her voice rather cool and formal. “I was just going to throw it away anyway.”

  “I’ll get back to you on this,” Wes said, then added, “we’ll find out who’s behind this, Susan.”

  “Yeah, we will,” Duke added his voice to the promise as he strode out of the one-story building that had been the sheriff’s office for the last fifty-some years. It was hard to say exactly to whom he was addressing his words, his brother, Susan or some invisible force he meant to vanquish.

  Right now, Susan was fit to be tied and would have wanted nothing more than just to walk away from Duke Colton, but she couldn’t. She’d left her car parked in front of Duke’s house and he was her ride back. She had no choice but to hurry after him.

  Oh, she knew she could ask someone at the Cookhouse to drive her to the Colton Ranch so she could get her car, but she really didn’t want word getting back to her mother or her father about this. Neither of them knew about the notes and the flowers and she wanted to keep it that way. She didn’t want them worrying.

  She also didn’t want her mother finding out that she’d gone to see Duke for any reason. The way her mind worked, her mother would be sending out invitations to her wedding by nightfall if she suspected that there was something going on between them.

  Right now, Susan thought as she wordlessly plunked herself down in the passenger seat of Duke’s truck, the only thing going on between them was anger. At least there was anger on her part.

  She stole a look at Duke’s chiseled profile as he turned the ignition on and his truck’s engine coughed to life. On Duke’s part, she was willing to bet, there was nothing but complete ignorance of the offense he’d just committed.

  Typical male, she thought. Her anger continued to smolder and grow, like a prairie fire feeding on shoots of grass and tearing a path through the land.

  Pressing her lips together, she stared straight ahead at the road and said nothing.

  She’d been quiet the entire trip back to his ranch. Not that he actually minded the quiet, Duke thought, but it seemed somehow unnatural for her. The girl was nothing if not a chatterbox.

  Which meant, if he remembered his basic Women 101, that there was probably something wrong. Or at least she thought that there was.

  Nothing occurred to him.

  Duke debated not staying quiet about her silence. The purpose of this trip back was to reunite her with her car. Once that happened, then she’d be on her way. And out of his hair, so to speak.

  And it wasn’t as if he was given to an all-consuming curiosity. Pretty much most of the time, he couldn’t care less if he knew something or not. Rabid curiosity was not one of his shortcomings.

  So exactly what was it about this slip of a girl that made things so different? That made him behave so differently?

  The question ate at him.

  Duke saw his house in the distance. They’d been on Colton land for a while now, all traveled in annoying silence.

  A couple of more minutes and he’d be home-free, he told himself. He’d pull up his truck beside her prissy little sedan, let her get out and then she’d be gone. And he could get back to his work and anything else he felt like getting back to.

  The problem was he didn’t feel like getting back to work. He felt like—

  Startled, Duke abruptly clamped down his thoughts. There was absolutely no point in letting his imagination go there. He had no business thinking about that. It wasn’t going to happen. Moreover, he definitely didn’t want it to.

  Liar.

  Five minutes, just five more minutes and he’d be at the house and she’d be unbuckling. And then—

  Oh, hell.

  Duke turned toward her. Her face was forward and her features were almost rigid. He stifled an inward sigh. So much for letting sleeping dogs lie.

  “Something wrong?” he asked her in a voice that was fairly growling.

  She made no answer, which told him that he’d guessed right. Something was wrong. He found no triumph in being right, only annoying confusion because he hadn’t a clue what was sticking in her craw. “All right, what’s wrong?” he demanded, sparing her a second look.

  He heard her sigh.

  That makes two of us, honey.

  Still facing forward, Susan pressed her lips together. It had been eating away at her all the way back to his ranch.

  The reason she hadn’t said anything was because she knew damn well that it wouldn’t do any good. It would be like banging her head against a wall. Men like Duke Colton didn’t learn from their mistakes. And the reason they didn’t learn from their mistakes was because they didn’t believe they made mistakes.

  He’d probably say something like, she was being too sensitive, or imagining things.

  Or—

  But if she didn’t say anything, she silently countered, she was going to explode. The man needed a dressing down.

  She shifted in her seat and looked at him. “I don’t need you to make promises for me.”

  Duke silently cursed himself for saying anything. He was better off with her not talking. But now that she had, he had to respond. It was going to be like picking his way across quicksand, he just knew it. “What are you talking about?”

  She might have known that he wasn’t aware of his transgression. Nobody probably ever challenged him. At least no woman. “You told the sheriff that I’d ‘be sensible.’”

  He spared her a glance. Funny how her face seemed to glow when she got excited about something. “Well, won’t you be?”

  Didn’t he understand anything? “Whether I will or won’t be isn’t the point—”

  Damn but women should come with some kind of a beginner’s manual. Something like A Guide to Women for the Non-Insane.

  “So what the hell is the point?”

  She did have to spell this out for him, didn’t she? Susan could feel her temper fraying and growing shorter and shorter.

  “The point is you have no right to think you can speak for me. You don’t know the first thing about me.”

  “I’ve known you all your life,” he snapped indignantly.

  He actually believed that, didn’t he? she thought incredulously.

  “No, you’ve been here all my life. In Honey Creek,” she pointed out. “But you don’t know anything about me, Duke.”

  This time the sidelong glance was more of a glare. “I know you like picking fights.”

  “I’m not picking a fight,” she cried, exasperated. “I’m making a point.” You big, dumb jerk. Don’t you even know the difference?

  Duke snorted. “Seems like the same thing from where I’m standing.”

  God, but there were times when she hated being right. He was being obtuse. “Because you’re not paying attention.”

  “When you say something worth listening to, then, I’ll pay attention,” Duke told her in his cold, offhand manner.

  She suddenly shut her eyes. “What color are my eyes?” she asked him.

  Approaching his house, Duke looked at her. Now what was she doing? “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  Susan kept her eyes shut. She intended to show Duke how wrong he was in terms that even a thick-headed idiot like him could understand.

  “If you ‘know’ me like you claim, you’ve got to at least know what color my eyes are. You were just looking at me a second ago. Okay, come on, tell me. What color are they?�
��

  He was really beginning to regret this good deed he’d undertaken. “This is stupid,” he told her between gritted teeth.

  Susan was not about to back off. “What color?” she demanded again, then laughed. She’d proven her point. “You don’t know, do you?”

  She heard him huff and half expected a cuss word to follow.

  Duke surprised her.

  “They’re brown,” he finally told her. “Chocolate brown. Warm and soft when you look at a man. Warm,” he repeated, “like the inside of a pan-baked brownie fresh out of the oven on Christmas morning.”

  Stunned, Susan slowly opened her eyes to make sure she was still sitting next to Duke Colton and that someone else hadn’t slipped into the driver’s side in his place.

  “Lucky guess.” The two words dribbled out of her mouth in slow motion. There was absolutely no conviction to them.

  “Like hell it was,” he retorted.

  Finally home, Duke pulled up the hand brake, put the manual transmission into Park and turned off the ignition. His engine sighed audibly before shutting down. Getting out of the cab, he rounded the hood and came over to the passenger side.

  He opened the door for her. Then he took her hand and, rather roughly, “helped” her out of the truck.

  To be honest with himself, he wasn’t exactly sure who he was angry at. Her for stirring up feelings he wanted no part of, or himself for having these feelings in the first place and for not being able to rein them in the way he’d trained himself to.

  After that numbing fiasco with Charlene—first the affair and then her suicide—he’d sworn to himself that he wasn’t going to get caught up in any kind of a relationship again. Women just weren’t worth it. A few minutes of pleasure in the middle of weeks of turmoil and grief was what it usually amounted to. Hell, it just wasn’t worth it.

  And then she came around, this naive little girl-next-door with the heart-shaped face. Looking at her, he would never have thought that she could get under his skin, but she had.

  He still didn’t understand how or why. He was ten years older than she was. Ten damn years. She was only seven years old when he’d had his first woman. Seven years old. Just a baby, nothing more.

  What was he doing, having feelings for someone who was so young? Yet, there it was. He had feelings for this slip of a thing. Feelings he couldn’t seem to cap or harness.

  Feelings that threatened to tear him apart if he gave in to them even a little.

  Yeah, like he had a choice, Duke silently mocked himself.

  He bracketed her arms with his strong, calloused hands. But it was his eyes that pinned her in place, his eyes that held her prisoner.

  “I know everything there is to know about you,” he told her angrily, biting off each word. “I don’t want to, but I do.”

  Pulling her into his arms, he didn’t give her a chance to say anything in reply, whether to challenge him or perhaps, just possibly, to admit to having feelings for him herself, the latter being a long shot in his estimation.

  Susan didn’t have time to say or do anything except brace herself because, in the next second, Duke’s mouth came down on hers and the world, as she knew it, exploded.

  It most definitely stopped turning on its axis.

  Chapter 10

  Duke only meant to kiss her. It was a way of venting his feelings for a moment. Maybe he even meant to scare her away by showing her the intensity of what he was feeling.

  If that was his intent, it backfired. Because he wasn’t scaring her away. If anything, kissing her like this had the exact opposite effect.

  And worse than that, he somehow managed to lose himself completely within his own attempt at a defensive maneuver.

  She tasted sweet, like the first ripe strawberries of the summer. More than that, she caused the spark within him to burst into flame, consuming him. Making his head swirl and causing his thought processes to all but disintegrate.

  What was going on certainly wasn’t logical.

  He sure as hell hadn’t meant to push this up to the next level.

  But he had, and he could feel Susan’s willingness to have this happen. Could feel the way she was yielding to him, silently telling him it was all right to press on. Given that, it was impossible for him to stop. Hell, it was hard for him to maintain control, not just to take her out here, with the warm sun as a witness and the hot July breeze caressing her bare skin.

  The only thing that did stop him was that someone might ride by at the worst time and the last thing he wanted was to embarrass her. Nor did he want to share with that passerby what he felt certain in his heart was a magnificent body.

  So, as he continued pressing his lips urgently against hers, drawing his very reason for existing out of the simple act, Duke scooped her up in his arms and took the three steps up to the porch.

  He didn’t keep the front door locked. It wasn’t so much that he trusted people as that he knew he had nothing worth stealing. Someone would have to be a fool to risk coming onto the Colton Ranch solely for the purpose of breaking into his house. There was nothing to be gained by that.

  Elbowing open the door, he carried Susan inside, then closed the door with his back. Only then did he allow her feet to touch the floor.

  His pulse was racing and he could have sworn that there were all sorts of fireworks, crafted by anticipation, going off inside him. Who would have ever thought—?

  Duke drew his head back.

  He’d stopped kissing her. Was it over? Had she done something to make him back away? To suddenly change his mind?

  Because she’d thought…

  Determined not to come so far only to have it abruptly end, Susan rose on her toes, framed the handsome, chiseled face between her long, slender hands and kissed him.

  For a moment, she felt a surge of triumph. He was kissing her back. But then that triumph faded because he drew his head back again. This time he took her hands between his, holding them still.

  His eyes delved into hers. Susan struggled to catch her breath.

  “You sure?” Duke asked, looking straight into her soul.

  Susan didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to stop. She had never felt like this before and she just wanted that feeling to continue. Wanted it to flower and grow until it reached its natural conclusion. Until he made love with her.

  So instead of answering him, she started to kiss Duke again. But for the second time, he took her hands in his. His eyes were deadly serious as they pinned her in place and he repeated his question.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she breathed, her pulse doing jumping jacks. “I’m sure.”

  Well, he wished he was. But he wasn’t. Wasn’t sure at all that this was the right thing to do. All he knew was that he really wanted to be with her, wanted to make love with this fresh-faced young woman and experience that incredible feeling that ultimately defied all description.

  He hadn’t been with a woman since he had broken things off with Charlene and she had killed herself. Hadn’t thought it worth the trouble to get to that point with a woman. Duke didn’t believe in paying for sex, and getting sex any other way required putting in time. Setting down groundwork.

  He wasn’t interested in doing that. Wasn’t interested in getting tangled up with another woman.

  He really had no idea how this had managed to happen so quickly. And with a woman—a girl—he’d never even thought of in this particular light.

  But he was attracted to her, there was no denying that. And he wanted her. There was no denying that, either.

  She made his blood rush the way he couldn’t remember it rushing in a very long time.

  Susan struggled to keep from losing consciousness. She’d never, ever felt like this before. Never experienced passion to this level before. Never experienced the desire to go the distance and find out just what there was about this ultimate bond between a man and a woman that was so seductively compelling. An eager curiosity propelled her on.

 
Her relationship with Linc that brief time when they’d attempted to be more than just friends was the only other time she’d even contemplated being intimate with a man—and the moment that Linc began kissing her, she’d stopped contemplating and wound up pushing him away. There’d been no bright, swirling lights, no surges of heat coupled with all but unmanageable desire. There had only been the deep, bone-jarring sense of disappointment.

  That wasn’t what was going on here.

  This was a whole brand-new brave world she was entering.

  The excitement she felt at every turn was almost unmanageable. It fueled her eagerness. They moved from the front hall into the living room area.

  When she felt Duke’s strong, sure hands on her, touching her, being familiar, caressing her with a gentleness she hadn’t thought he was capable of, it almost completely undid her.

  She wanted to know what those hands felt like on her bare skin.

  Her own hands were shaking as she began unbuttoning his shirt. She knew what she would find underneath the material and the excitement of that knowledge was making her fumble.

  Damn it, he’s going to figure out you’re a novice before he gets to the last part. She upbraided herself, telling herself to slow down, to be calm.

  She couldn’t calm down.

  One of the buttons got stuck and she tugged at it to no avail, feeling inept. “Having trouble?”

  Was he laughing at her? No, Duke wasn’t laughing at her she realized, raising her eyes to his face. He was smiling.

  Really smiling.

  She couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen Duke without at least a partial scowl on his face.

  Having no experience at lying, she went with the truth. “I’m not used to doing this,” she murmured, feeling somewhat embarrassed at her ineptitude.

  The smile on the rugged face deepened. “Good,” she thought she heard him say.

  The next moment, he helped her take off his shirt, then proceeded to do the same with hers, employing a great deal more ease than she had used.

  There was no time for hesitation, no time for thought. No time to contemplate whether she was going to regret this later. The only thing Susan knew was that she didn’t regret it now, and now was all that mattered.