Diana Palmer - Wyoming Winter

“Have fun?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said, grinning. “It was a great movie. We had dinner at the fish place. I love their fries.”

“They’re good,” he said, nodding. He cocked his head. “Going out again?”

She shook her head. “He’s very nice, but he hates picket fences,” she said.

He moved closer. She was putting on a show, and he knew it. She was in pain. “Daughter,” he said gently, “there’s a reason for everything, a plan behind whatever happens to us. You have to let life happen. You can’t force it to be what you’d like it to be.”

She smiled and hugged him. “And we can’t get involved with people who aren’t like us. I know all that. It’s what he said, too.” She closed her eyes. “It still hurts.”

“Of course it does. But pain passes. Everything does, in time.”

“Yes. In time,” she agreed.

* * *

BUT IT DIDN’T PASS. Every time Rod mentioned J.C., Colie felt it like a stab in her heart. She knew that J.C. was totally wrong for her. It didn’t help. She wanted him. Loved him. Hungered for him.

She went to work, came home, cooked and cleaned, read books, went to bed. She got up the next day and did the very same things. But she felt as empty inside as a tennis ball.

* * *

SHE DIDN’T KNOW IT, but J.C. was having the same problem. Every day, he went to work and was haunted by the soft twinkle in a pair of loving green eyes. He was used to women who wanted him. But one who loved him...that was new. It was frightening.

Could he take her and walk away afterward? Could he not take her and live? He agonized over it.

His boss, Ren Colter, noticed his preoccupation while they were inspecting a downed fence on the edge of the property.

“That tree needs to come down,” Ren remarked.

“I’ll tell Willis,” J.C. replied. Willis was the foreman.

“What’s eating you?” Ren asked suddenly, and from the standpoint of the friend he’d been for years. “You’re not yourself.”

“Just a few sleepless nights, that’s all,” J.C. lied.

“Umhmmm. And it wouldn’t have something to do with Colie Thompson...?”

J.C.’s pale gray eyes flashed. “Listen, just because I took her to a movie...!”

“Oh, can it,” Ren said shortly. “You’ve been mooning around here for a week, like a ghost trying to find a place to haunt. I hear she’s doing the same thing.”

“She is?” J.C. asked.

The other man’s expression was like a statement. Ren chuckled. “You have to take the path to see where it leads. Ask yourself, are you happier now?”

“No.”

“Then why don’t you do something about it?”

J.C. clenched his jaw. “Her father’s a minister and I don’t want to get married.”

“You don’t have to propose just because you take her out on dates,” was the reasonable reply. “Do you?”

J.C. sighed. “It will complicate things.”

“Life is too short to avoid complications.”

J.C. studied him. After a minute he laughed shortly. “I guess it is, at that.”

* * *

COLIE WAS JUST getting into her old beat-up pickup truck in the parking lot of the law firm where she worked when a big black SUV pulled into the spot beside her.

She turned and J.C. was getting out of it.

He stopped just in front of her. He looked angry, conflicted, worried. He drew in a breath. “The hell with it,” he said curtly.

“What?” she began.

He pulled her into his arms and bent his head. “We’ll take it one day at a time,” he whispered as his mouth burrowed softly, slowly into hers.

She would have questioned him, but a shock of pleasure ran the length of her body and left her trembling. She reached up and held him, hung on for dear life, while he made a five-course meal of her soft, eager mouth.

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS A long time before J.C. lifted his head. The kiss had filled a hollow place inside himself that he hadn’t even known about. Colie’s face was flushed, her pretty bow mouth swollen, her green eyes soft and drowsy with feeling. It puzzled him that she didn’t kiss him back so much as she allowed herself to be kissed. Perhaps, he thought, her other boyfriends hadn’t cared about foreplay. He was used to experienced women who didn’t care much for it, either. They were usually so hungry, so eager, that they just went at it.

He gave one last thought to his suspicions about her, but Rod was a rounder and he was a minister’s son. J.C. figured that Colie was probably as sexually active as her brother, but she put on a good show for her father. She certainly wasn’t protesting.

J.C. had her so close that she could feel how aroused he was. She’d never felt a man like that, but she was a great reader. She knew from her romance novels how men’s bodies changed when they wanted a woman. It thrilled her that J.C. wanted her so much.

She didn’t want to discourage him, but she wasn’t sure how she was going to live with what he was certainly going to want from her. She’d lived a moral life, she’d never put a foot wrong. And yet here was temptation and sin, wearing blue jeans and dying for her.

She sighed. “That was nice.”

“Nice.” He chuckled, looking around as he moved a step back. “Lucky thing that there isn’t much traffic on this side street at this time of the day.” He leaned close. “I was starving.”

“I noticed,” she whispered, and flushed.

He ruffled her hair. “I’ll come get you in an hour. Long enough for you to serve something up for your father and Rod?”

“Oh, yes,” she lied. She’d manage something. There were leftovers that she could reheat. “Where are we going?”

“To Jackson Hole,” he said with a grin. “I’m going to take you to a nightclub. Got a flashy dress?”

Her face fell.

Damn! He’d forgotten. Her father wouldn’t be encouraging that sort of thing. She probably didn’t own an evening gown.

“Change of plan,” he said abruptly. “Wear jeans and we’ll hit a casino over near Lander. I’ll teach you how to play the machines.” He grinned.

She laughed. “I don’t own an evening gown. I guess it showed, huh?”

“We’ll have to do something about that,” he began.

“No, we won’t,” she replied curtly. “I pay my own way. Just in case you were thinking you’d buy me one.”

His eyebrows really arched now. “It’s just a dress...”

“I pay my own way,” she repeated. She had a stubborn look on her face.

He recognized it, because he had one just like it. He chuckled. “Okay, Miss Independence. We’ll do things your way.”

She smiled. “Fair enough. I’ll be ready and waiting.”

She was still flushed. He loved her reaction to him. No coy withdrawal, no teasing; she just went in headfirst when he touched her. It boded well for the future. He had one slight twinge of conscience, but it passed quickly. She was old enough to know the score, and he was certain he wouldn’t be her first man. Why did that disturb him? It was stupid. He’d never been the first man.

“I’ll see you in an hour,” he told her.

“Okay.”

She watched him leave. She got into her old, beat-up truck that guzzled gas and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. She looked...loved. Her breath caught as she relived the hungry, passionate kiss, the first of its kind she’d ever had. She was in love with J.C. And he must feel something for her, because he’d come back when he said he wouldn’t.

She smiled all the way home. She only stopped when she had to tell her father she was going out with J.C. and saw the disappointment and sorrow on his face.

* * *

ROD WAS STILL away when she got ready for her date. She’d fixed a meager supper for her father. She wasn’t hungry. Excitement robbed her of any appetite.