The Best Way to Lose (6 page)

“I can carry them down for you tomorrow,” Trace said.

“No.” She turned from the mantel, which would have been bedecked with garlands of holly in another week. The drink glass was clammy and cold with moisture. Pilar set it onto an empty coaster, not liking the feel of it, and rubbed her hands over the snug-fitting long sleeves of her dress as if needing warmth. “I don’t think I’ll be wanting to celebrate Christmas this year.”

“I suppose not.” He swirled the cubes in the amber-colored liquor and watched their spinning.

Pilar looked up to the brilliant chandelier, the dangling crystals multiplying the light
from its candle-bulbs. She blinked her eyes in an effort to ease their wretched dryness. There was such an aching void inside her that she wanted to cry.

“What’s the matter with me?” She murmured the question, then bit at her lip. Turning, she cast a silently beseeching look at Trace, as if he might be able to provide the answer. “I’m a woman who’s just buried her husband. I should be crying my eyes out, yet I haven’t shed a tear—not once.”

After an initial stillness at her confessional rush of words, Trace set his glass on the table next to hers and slowly approached her. They’d spent the better part of the last three days together, but this was the first time she’d shown that she felt any closeness to him because of what they’d been through.

“Sometimes it hurts too much to cry.” His gray eyes darkened with a gentle light as he brought his hands up to cup the rounded points of her shoulders.

For so long, Pilar had been denying herself the physical comfort so many had attempted to offer her, rejecting such contact. Now she was unconsciously seeking it. Her hands seemed to automatically curve themselves to his middle. She felt the life flowing in the hard flesh beneath the jacket material and the heat of a living body.

“But I want to cry,” she insisted, feeling the many threads of control snapping one by one. A trembling started, the vibrations growing
stronger until she began to shake visibly with her pain. “Why can’t I cry for him?” Her breath was coming in little sobs. “Why can’t I cry for myself?” She closed her painfully arid eyes as the dry sobs shook her shoulders. She beat her head against the point of his chin. “Why? Why?”

There was a sudden collapsing of all the bonds of restraint and she swayed into him, letting her head rest against the side of his jaw. The contents of the soothing words he murmured were unimportant; it was the sound of his voice that mattered, and the human arms that held her close. His hands rubbed and stroked her as if trying to massage away the empty ache within.

His body absorbed the shuddering force of hex silent crying while the molding pressure of his hands urged her closer. The powerful desire to comfort her was slowly being overridden by the sensation of her firmly round breasts and the slim saddle of her hips imprinting themselves on his flesh. Raw hunger, too long stifled, began to surface with a gnawing strength that ate away at his sense of decency and discretion.

He turned his mouth into the side of her hair near her temple, moving to seek the intimate feel of her skin. It tasted warm and sweet, scented with some elusive fragrance. Her head was tipped back, making it easy for him to follow the patrician curve of her cheekbones down to the corner of her lips.
When his mouth rolled onto them, her lips seemed to soften under the possessive warmth of the contact.

It was a fleeting response, too casual and too indifferent, not at all what he needed to satisfy the urges that had been with him too long. When she would have turned away from his kiss, Trace spread his fingers into her hair and cupped her head between his hands to hold it still.

Shocked by the blatant, driving passion of the hard mouth eating at her tips, Pilar tugged at his forearms and struggled to break away. The protesting sounds from her throat were muffled by the smothering pressure of his kiss. Her heart pounded wildly in panic. One minute she had known only comfort in his arms. There had been nothing to warn her of this aggressively sexual assault. On top of all the emotional torment she’d been through, it seemed too much.

In desperation Pilar clawed at his face with her fingernails. An inch-long set of red lines made parallel tracks in his cheek where her nails had raked at his flesh as he jerked his head away and grabbed at her hand.

With a quick twist, she slipped free of his hold and backed away warily—especially with the steely glitter of his gaze swung back to her. Tentatively she drew the back of her hand across her throbbing lips. She was trembling, but less from fear and more from a bitter anger.

“I was told you had no respect for
anything.” She was breathing hard. “I never guessed how true that was.”

His chest lifted in a deep and visible breath that seemed to wipe all expression from his face. “There’s no excuse for my behavior just now,” he admitted stiffly. A nerve twitched in his cheek. “So I won’t attempt to make one. But believe me—I regret this as much as you do.” She had wanted comfort and he had shown her lust. The knowledge disgusted him far more than she knew.

“You regret!” In the face of his irreverent treatment of her, Pilar was outraged by his lack of contrition. “I want you to leave! Now! This very minute!”

There was a second when Pilar thought he would protest being ordered out of the house that had been his home. After surveying her with a long, measuring look, Trace turned on his heel and walked out of the parlor. She heard his footsteps on the stairs, and suddenly her knees felt very weak.

She sank into the nearest chair and pressed a hand to her lips. She could still feel the sensation of his hard, cruel mouth rocking across them, so forceful and demanding. Her eyes began to fill with tears—tears she hadn’t been able to cry before, but this time no sobs accompanied her spilling of pain.

When Trace came down the stairs, he was dressed in the same clothes he’d worn the day he arrived, and the duffel bag was on his shoulder. He headed straight for the front door.

“Trace?” Cassie’s voice was filled with question. “Where do you think you’re going?”

He paused, his glance sliding past her toward the parlor. “I’ve been away from the river too long. You know how it is, Cassie.”

“I know how it is with some, Trace, like my Oggie. But you—you’re seeking the danger and excitement of the river for some other reason. It doesn’t bring you any peace.” She eyed him with a shrewd and knowing look, her glance darting to the two faint red lines on his cheek. “What have you done this time, Trace? You’re running again.”

“I was born to trouble—you said it yourself,” he reminded her with a twisted smile. Then a grimness settled over his features. “He asked me to look after her. I guess you’re going to have to do it for me.” His thumb caressed her cheek for an instant, then he pulled it away and headed for the front door.

Cassie watched him walk out the door, so tall and straight—and alone. She was troubled for him. Trace had matured into a fine figure of a man, strong and intelligent. The aimless life he led was such a waste.

A heavy sigh came from her when the door closed. She supposed it had been wrong to hope Elliot’s death might be good for his son. Slowly she walked to the parlor, wondering if anything would ever turn Trace around and prod him into making something of himself.

When she entered the parlor, Cassie observed Pilar hastily wiping the tears from her cheeks. “Trace has left.”

“Yes, I know.”
Pilar’s voice was husky and stiff. “He stayed for the funeral. What more did you expect?” She was brittly flippant and derisive.

“Don’t misjudge him,” Cassie cautioned. “Trace isn’t as shallow as he might seem.”

“I’m really not interested in discussing him.” She swung away, agitation rippling through her. “It’s been a long day. I think I’ll go to my room and read for a while.”

As Pilar started to leave the room, Cassie noticed the two glasses sitting on a table. “Now where did those come from?” she declared with a trace of exasperation. “I thought I’d carried everything out to the kitchen.”

“That one’s mine.” Pilar picked up the one sitting on the coaster. “I’ll take it upstairs with me. Alcohol is supposed to be a depressant. Maybe it will help me get to sleep.”

It was a brisk night, typical of early December weather in the South. The long walk into town did nothing to ease the self-derision that hounded Trace. Nor did it erase the memory of the way it felt to hold her in his arms. Just for a little moment he’d gone crazy with wanting her—and that’s all it had taken.

A neon sign blinked an invitation from a building just ahead of him. His steps slowed as Trace approached it, pausing to snap the smoldering butt of his cigarette into the gutter. When he walked inside, the air was stale with the smell of beer and tobacco smoke.

It was a small bar, a little dingy, a little
rundown. Most of its patrons were sitting in chairs or on bar stools positioned to give them a view of the television set on a high shelf behind the counter.

The stool at the near end of the counter bar was at a bad angle to the television set, so it was empty, Trace walked over to it and propped his duffel bag against the wooden bar, then climbed onto the stool, digging a hand into a side pocket to lay some money on the countertop.

The bartender backed grudgingly toward him, unwilling to look away from the car chase on television. He threw him a quick glance, then looked back at the screen. “Yeah, what’ll it be?”

“A bourbon on ice—and be generous.”

The drink was fixed, the money taken and change given, and all the while the bartender’s attention remained on the television show. There was some talking among the men in the bar, but it was kept low, and ceased whenever there was any dialogue. None of them paid any attention to Trace, hunched over his drink at the end of the bar.

At the commercial break he ordered another. The first one hadn’t even begun to quench the hot fires that burned inside him. He was angry at himself, and that anger turned everything sour. There was a crazy urge to hit something—a wall—anything—as if lashing out would make him feel better.

Familiar theme music began playing to signal the show’s end, and everyone in the bar
seemed to start talking at once, laughing and ordering drinks. Trace crushed out his third cigarette and resisted the impulse to tell all of them to shut up.

“Pipe down,” someone else complained for him. “The news is comin’ on.”

“I wonder if they’ll say anything about Santee gettin’ buried today,” someone else said.

Trace searched out the man who’d spoken. There was a big, husky man sitting down the counter from him, with two other fellows.

“Did you ever see the gal he was married to?” The middle one grinned. “She is one sexy-looking woman. And just about half his age, too.”

“Do you suppose the new widow will have someone to console her in her time of grief?” The first one chortled lasciviously.

“She’s got too much class for you, Frank,” the third man declared.

“Yeah, Frank.” Trace slid off his stool and walked down the bar as the three men turned, startled by his sudden intervention. He stopped in front of the one they called Frank. “She’s got too much class for you.” His mouth curled into a sneer. “So why don’t you just shut up.”

“Nobody asked your opinion.” The man frowned and started to turn back to face the bar.

Trace never gave him a chance, grabbing him by the arm and throwing a right cross that caught him on the chin. His companion shouted a protest at the unprovoked attack,
and Trace made a swing at him, but it glanced off the man’s shoulder. He barely managed to duck away from the fist aimed at his face. It clipped a cheekbone.

All his senses were instantly heightened. He could hear his heart pumping and feel the blood pounding through his veins. The rush of air in and out of his lungs was almost a drunken high. There was only one of him and three of them.

Fragments of the fight stayed in his memory—the moment when he’d buried a fist in someone’s stomach and felt the hard muscles collapse, the sight of the ring on a man’s finger just before it split his lip, the second when a blow reeled him and the floor came rushing up to meet him. Most of the rest of it was mixed up in the grunting sounds of straining bodies, his or somebody else’s, and the shouts of patrons above the blare of the television.

The wail of sirens came toward the last. One eye was so swollen he couldn’t see out of it, and there was blood in his mouth from his split lip. His legs were getting wobbly and he was having trouble just staying upright. For the moment his body had tuned out all sensation of pain.

S
omeone grabbed him from behind and locked his arms behind his back. Trace relaxed when he saw a couple of uniformed police cornering his three opponents. The voices and confusion were just a loud buzzing in his ears. A pair of handcuffs were locked around his wrists and he was shoved up against the bar. Grateful for the support, Trace slumped against it, his lungs laboring for air.

“All right! All right!” A voice called for order and quiet, piercing Trace’s dazed brain with a glimmer of familiarity. “I wanta know who started this.” He hadn’t the breath to answer, but there were plenty of witnesses to point the finger. A hand grabbed his arm to
turn him around. “All right, tough guy. Aww, hell, I might have known it was you,” the voice muttered.

Trace had to turn his head way around to focus the eye that wasn’t swollen on the man. “Hey, Digger.” His mouth curved in a weary smile. “Like old times, eh?” Trace panted between the words.

“Yeah, old times.” The aging officer nodded grimly and turned to the barkeeper. “He’s good for the damages.” Then to the others, “Anybody gonna press charges?”

There was some low grumbling in the background, but no one spoke up. Digger Jones clamped a hand on Trace’s arms and pushed him in the direction of the door.

“My gear?” Trace managed to nod his head at the duffel bag on the floor by the bar.

Digger mumbled something under his breath and picked it up. Once they were outside, he removed the handcuffs and waved Trace toward one of the patrol cars, its blue lights flashing.