Dancing in the Moonlight (11 page)

She blinked as if he’d reached across the table and poured the rest of their wine over her head. The soft, hazy desire in her eyes vanished with jarring abruptness, and she let out a long, heavy breath. She said nothing for several moments as if she quite didn’t trust herself to speak. When she did, her voice was cool.

“What are you doing here, Jake?”

He shrugged and sipped his wine. “Sharing dinner and a very sexy kiss with a beautiful woman. And doing my best to remember how exhausted that woman is and keep things at only a kiss, when I want far more.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t have to lie to me, Dalton, or pretend something you don’t feel.”

His laugh sounded ragged, even to him. “Here’s a little tip about men, Maggie. There are certain things I just can’t fake. I could prove exactly what I’m feeling if I stood up right now, but at this point I think that would only embarrass us both, don’t you agree?”

Maggie could feel her face heat, and her own flustered reaction made her even more angry. He had no right to do this to her—to come to her house and kiss her and say such things and leave her so stirred up.

What kind of cruel game was he playing? Did he have any idea how painful she found this, how much she hated the blunt reminder that her body could still burn with the same desires and needs she had before her world shattered?

She didn’t want this, the sweet surge of blood through her veins, the tremble of anticipation in her stomach, the heady, seductive taste of him still on her lips.

Damn him.

Damn him for filling her senses with needs and wants she had tried so hard to forget about since her injury. She suddenly ached to be held and kissed and adored, even though she knew it was impossible. He had no right to do this—to leave her restless and aroused and
needy
.

“Why are you so scared?”

She bristled. “Scared of what?”

“I’m not like your fiancé, Maggie. I haven’t turned away from you, have I?”

His words seemed to resonate in her chest. He was right. He hadn’t turned away. He had been in her face since the moment she came back to town, pushing her, riding her. Every time she turned around, there he was with that damn smile and those killer eyes and his blasted insidious charm that somehow made her forget all the reasons why she didn’t want anything to do with him.

She hadn’t asked him to take her on as his pet project,
she reminded herself. Maybe it would have been better if he
had
turned away; then she wouldn’t be left here aching and hungry.

“I told you I’m not interested in any kind of relationship,” she said curtly.

“Like it or not, we have a relationship, Maggie.”

“Only because you won’t leave me alone!”

“So you can sit around feeling sorry for yourself? Or worse, pretend you’re the same person you were six months ago and can do everything you did before, without blinking an eye?”

“Listen carefully here, Dalton. It’s none of your business what I do. If I wake up in the morning and decide I want to scale the Grand Teton, you have absolutely nothing to say about it!”

“You’re right.” He stood up and started clearing the dishes and she had to keep her eyes firmly fixed forward so she didn’t give in to the urge to see if he was telling the truth about being aroused.

“I can clear those,” she snapped.

“So can I.”

His voice was so calm, so rational as he carried the stack of dishes to the sink and started to rinse them that Maggie, conversely, felt a slick, hot ball of rage lodge in her throat.

She wasn’t helpless, damn it, and she was so tired of everyone treating her like some kind of chipped and fragile porcelain figurine.

Her stump throbbed as she shoved herself onto the crutches, but she ignored it and swung herself to the sink. All her anger and frustration of the past five
months seemed to simmer up to the surface of her psyche like viscous acid.

She burned with anger on a dozen different levels, furious with Jake for his obstinance but also livid at the world, at her own bleak future, at the relentless pain she couldn’t seem to beat into submission, no matter how hard she tried.

All of it coalesced suddenly into one big spurt of fury and all she could focus on was Jake.

“I said I can clear them,” she snapped, and reached for the stack of plates in his hand.

She jerked them away, but they were wet and slick and she was balancing by her forearms on two narrow pieces of metal. With a horrified sense of inevitability she felt them slip through her fingers and then the whole stack crashed to the floor, shattering into hundreds of pieces.

She stared at the china on the floor, jagged and broken and rendered forever useless by one single moment.

The rage inside her dissolved as suddenly as it had struck. Instead she was filled with a deep, compelling sorrow. Who would ever want these dishes now? They were nothing. Less than nothing.

She gazed down at the floor, vaguely aware of the hot sting of tears in her eyes, trailing down her cheeks.

Jake studied her for all of three seconds, then she thought she heard him murmur a low endearment before he scooped her into his arms, letting her crutches fall to the ground.

“I pushed you too hard with the clinic today and everything. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

His words—his kindness—only made her cry harder,
and she buried her face in his shirt, mortified but unable to stanch the flow. She couldn’t even say for sure why she was crying—a jumbled mix of exhaustion and pain and fear for the terrifying future.

Through it all, she was only vaguely aware of him carrying her to the living room and lowering himself to the sofa. He smelled so good, spicy and male, and his arms were a solid, comforting sanctuary.

She knew when she came back to her senses she would eventually be mortified that she had let him this close. But for now she was helpless to do anything but let him hold her while she gave in to the thunderburst of emotion inside her.

She didn’t know how long she cried out her rage and pain and grief against him.

Eventually, like the tide receding, she felt the wild storm seep out of her, leaving only exhaustion in its wake.

S
he was beautiful in sleep and seemed ethereal, delicate.

Despite her emotional outburst before she fell asleep, he knew Magdalena Cruz was far from weak. She had to be tough as nails to survive what she’d been through, both before her injury and after. What she was still going through.

But in sleep, with her dark lashes fanning her cheeks and her dusky features still and lovely, she seemed as soft and fragile as a rare, extraordinary wildflower.

Her tears had stunned him to the core. Even now, an hour after she fell asleep as he continued to hold her in the dimly lit living room, he couldn’t believe she had let down her barriers enough to let him glimpse the vulnerable, bruised woman inside the hard shell.

This opportunity to enfold her in his arms like this was a precious gift, one he knew she would never have allowed if she hadn’t been at such a low emotional ebb.

He supposed it was probably unprincipled of him to take advantage of the situation, but he didn’t care. How many other chances would he have to feel the soft rise and fall of her lungs with each breath, the stir of air against his skin as she exhaled?

He held her as long as he could, long after his arms both fell asleep. Even then, he would have been content to hold her longer—through the night if he had his way—but she began to shift restlessly in his arms. A few times she whimpered, her brow furrowing then smoothing again.

He had watched enough of his postsurgery patients sleeping in the hospital to recognize the signs of someone in discomfort. She needed a change in position, he sensed, and with regret he shifted so he could lower her to the couch.

She stirred a little but didn’t wake when he pulled a quilt in rich, dark colors from the back of a chair and covered her with it.

When he was certain she would continue to sleep, he left her long enough to return to the kitchen and clean up the broken china and the rest of their dinner dishes from the table and load them into the dishwasher, then he returned to sit in the armchair across from her.

A soft spring rain pattered against the window and watery moonlight filtered across her face.

He couldn’t seem to look away.

The depth of tenderness washing through him took his breath away. He had never been able to classify this
thing he had for her. He wouldn’t go so far as to call it an obsession; before she came back to town, he could often spend weeks without thinking about her. But then he would bump into Guillermo or Viviana and she would somehow sneak to the forefront of his mind for several days.

But now as his gaze ranged over her—as he sat in the darkened room, content to watch her sleep—the truth seemed so obvious he couldn’t believe he’d so stupidly missed it.

He was in love with her.

He wasn’t sure how or when it happened. Maybe that terrible day his father died when she had reached out past her hatred and anger to comfort him. Maybe slowly over the years as he’d talked to her mother about what she was doing and learned of the strong, courageous woman she had become. Maybe that moment he had pulled up behind her on Cold Creek Road and found her crouched in the gravel changing a tire.

Maybe like that rare wildflower he had compared her to earlier, his love for her had been growing inside him his entire life, so quietly he’d never realized it was there until it burst forth in full, spectacular bloom.

Spectacular to him, maybe. But he had a feeling she would see it as a pesky weed that needed to be plucked out at all costs.

He sighed. In love with Magdalena Cruz. Now there was a recipe for disaster. He couldn’t see any positive outcome for his poor heart. The woman was prickly and argumentative, hated anything to do with his family and was coping with a major life adjust
ment and the physical and emotional pain that went along with it.

She had told him in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t at all interested in a relationship. And if she were, he knew he likely wouldn’t even make the list of possible contenders.

He could change her mind. She wasn’t immune to him—her response to his kiss had been real and unfeigned. But a physical reaction was one thing; a softening of her heart against him and his parentage was something else entirely.

She had asked him several times to leave her alone. The decent thing, the honorable road, would be to respect her words and wishes—to back off and give her time to deal with her new disability and the challenges she faced now, before he worked any harder at overcoming those barriers she had constructed between them.

He rubbed a hand across his chest, though he couldn’t massage away the ache there at the thought of distancing himself from her. In a very short time, he had become addicted to her presence—to her sharp wit and her courage and those rare, incredible smiles.

Too addicted. He couldn’t stay away from her, he realized, even though he had a grim feeling he was only setting himself up for deeper heartache.

She had no idea how long she slept on the sofa, but when she woke, the house was dark and there was no sign of Jake. In the moonlight filtering through the blinds she could make out her mother’s slight form in
the armchair next to the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing regular as she dozed.

Memories of the evening and her own behavior rushed back, and Maggie wanted to bury her face into the sofa and stay there forever. How would she ever face him again?

Sharing a kiss had been one thing. She wasn’t thrilled about it but it was at least a memory she could live with. What came after—that raw explosion of emotion—was something else entirely.

How could she have broken down like that? She had worked so hard to keep herself under control around everyone, but it seemed especially important around Jake.

She hated that he had seen her in such a weak, vulnerable moment. She should never have invited him to dinner. It was an insane impulse in the first place and had brought her nothing but trouble.

She still wasn’t sure what had sparked her tears. One moment she’d been angry and determined to show him she could handle anything. The next, she had completely fallen apart.

In this quiet room, listening to her mother’s soft breathing and the rain wash against the window, she had no good explanation, other than exhaustion and the pain that still rode her like a PRCA broncbuster.

She shifted to ease the tingling, pins-and-needles ache in her leg, but her movement must have disturbed Viviana. Her mother’s eyes opened and she straightened in the chair.

“Go back to sleep,
niña,
” her mother said. “You need your rest.”

“What time is it?”

Viviana sat up straighter and gave a sleepy shrug. “Midnight. Maybe later. I returned after nine and you were sound asleep. Jacob, he was sitting in this chair reading a book. I told him to go home.”

Heat scorched her cheeks. Something else to keep her up at night—that he had sat here and watched her sleeping.

She supposed she should take some small comfort that he was a physician and had probably sat at the bedside of many sleeping patients. She was just one more in a long line. But somehow that didn’t provide much solace to her turmoil.

She shifted her gaze back to her mother and found Viviana studying her closely, a hundred questions in her eyes. She could just imagine her mother’s surprise at the scene she had walked in on. Finding Jake Dalton camped out comfortably in her living room must have been quite a shock, as Viviana plainly knew Maggie’s negative feelings for Jake.

Or at least the negative feelings Maggie was fiercely trying to remind herself she should be having.

She reached over and turned on the lamp next to the couch and decided to quickly change the subject, ignoring those implied questions. “How was your meeting? Jake told me Tío Guillermo is on the library board. Did you have a chance to talk to him?”

To her surprise, her usually unflappable mother blushed. “I talked to him,” she said, then called him a string of words in Spanish so unflattering Maggie’s eyes widened.

She couldn’t figure out the sudden animosity
between the two and she would have given anything to be able to get to the bottom of it. What on earth had happened to destroy their good working relationship? she wondered yet again.

“Did you convince him to come back to work?”

“No,” Viviana said shortly.

“Why not? Did you tell him how much we need his help?”

Her mother rose, not quite five feet of stiff dignity. “I do not wish to discuss Guillermo with you. I have told you before. You will mind your own business, thank you.”

She blinked at her mother’s sharp tone. Ooo-kay. That was certainly plain enough.

The subject apparently exhausted in her mind, Viviana sat back down, her features relaxing. “So tell me of your day. How was the clinic? Is not Jacob a wonderful doctor?”

She thought back to the afternoon she had spent observing as he cared for his patients, most of whom could pay him nothing. Though it pained her, she had to agree. He
was
a good doctor.

She nodded slowly, and Viviana beamed as if she had trained him herself.

“And how did you do? The work, it was not too much for you?”

“I was only translating, Mama. I was sitting most of the afternoon. Jake made sure of that.”

If anything, the afternoon had only illustrated that she was right in her decision to find another career. She hadn’t done anything strenuous, hadn’t tried to give anyone a bath or change a dressing or administer meds. Yet she was still left exhausted and aching.

How could she ever hope to work a full shift, to give her patients the care they needed?

If you’re tough enough for ranch work, why can’t you still work in medicine?

The thought whispered in her mind and she frowned. She couldn’t dismiss the logic of that. Ranch work was even more physically demanding than being a nurse.

While she had struggled with some of the things on the Luna she’d done since her return, she had found nothing impossible.

How much of her exhaustion now could she attribute to her afternoon at the clinic and how much was from the past few sleepless nights?

Definitely something she would have to devote more thought to.

“When I tried to fix Jake something to eat, he told me he ate with you.” Viviana beamed. “This I was pleased to hear, that my daughter still has some good manners.”

Maggie flushed. She wasn’t sure she considered it good manners to kiss a dinner guest with wild passion one moment, then blubber all over him the next. She hated wondering what he must think of her—and she hated worse that she even cared.

“He followed me home like a stray dog. I didn’t have much choice but to give him some dinner.”

“His mother says he is so busy he doesn’t eat very much of good food. He needs a wife, Marjorie says.”

Maggie definitely didn’t like the sudden calculating light in her mother’s eyes, and she wondered if she ought to warn Jake. Viviana and Marjorie were best friends, something she had never really been able to un
derstand, given the bitter history between their families. The two of them were likely to get all kinds of strange ideas in their heads if they put their minds to it and she, for one, didn’t want to be in the middle of it.

The thought that she and Jake might find themselves caught in the matchmaking crosshairs of two such formidable adversaries as their respective mothers was enough to strike cold fear in her heart.

“I’m not sure Jake would agree that he needs a wife.”

Her mother made a dismissive gesture, as if what Jake had to say on the subject was of little importance. “Men. They do not know what they want. Have you not learned that lesson? We have to show them what will be best for them.”

She had to smile, amused despite her sudden foreboding. “Good luck with that, then, but I’m going up to bed.”

She pulled the blanket away and she saw Viviana’s gaze sharpen on her empty pant leg. Concern flicked in her mother’s dark eyes, probably because she had rarely seen Maggie without the prosthesis.

“Sleep here tonight, Lena. You don’t need to climb the stairs tonight if you are tired. I will bring you a nightgown and your own pillow.”

“I’m fine,” she lied and pulled herself up from the couch onto the crutches. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

She moved to her mother and kissed her on the cheek, then headed for the personal Armageddon she faced every night.

The next half hour was focused on the physical challenge of climbing the stairs, her nightly med regimen and preparing herself for bed, all on the despised crutches.

At last she slid under the cool and welcoming lavender quilt in her bedroom, everything aching.

Despite her physical exhaustion, sleep seemed far away as she lay in her narrow childhood bed gazing at the soft-pastel walls and listening to the rain outside the window.

She couldn’t seem to force her mind away from Jake and the afternoon and evening in his company.

How would she ever face him again? Bad enough she’d responded to his kiss again with an eagerness that mortified her. She then compounded the humiliation by blubbering all over him.