Pilar snorted. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to lie?”
“I think there were many things my mother didn’t teach me,” Chris said softly. “Such as how to say no to persuasive gunslingers. Pilar, I think I’m weakening. Two more days of this and I won’t be able to say no to anything he asks of me.”
“I have an idea Ty knows that.”
“Well, I have to be strong. I am not going to give into him and that’s final. No matter what he says to me, no matter how he looks at me, I’m not going to give into him.” She looked at Pilar with great sadness and worry in her eyes. “But if he kisses the back of my neck one more time, I’m lost.”
Pilar turned back to her biscuits with a smile on her face.
Chris succeeded in staying away fr
om Ty for the rest of the day but that night he asked her to take a walk with him.
“I didn’t ask you to run off with me, Chris, just take a walk,” he said when he saw her lips form the word ‘no.’ “I swear I won’t touch you since I know you can’t trust yourself with me, but at least—”
“Can’t trust myself with you! I most certainly can trust myself with you. I could spend the rest of my life on a tropical island with you and still resist you,” she lied.
“That’s great,” he said with a grin. “Then you can go with me into the moonlight right now.”
Chris knew she’d talked herself into a corner and so she appealed to Pilar for help, but Pilar refused to go with them, saying that her arm hurt too much. Of course it hadn’t hurt while she’d pounded dough, but now it was too painful for her to even move.
Reluctantly, Chris started walking up the little trail toward the spring, Tynan behind her.
“Are we competing in a road race or are you afraid to walk beside me?” he asked.
She stopped and turned toward him. “Of course I’m not afraid to walk with you. It’s just that you don’t realize how slow your sore leg makes you.”
“Is that it?” he said, smiling in a knowing way. He took her arm in his. “Then maybe you should help poor little invalid me,” he said.
They walked together for a few moments, Chris trying to stay away from him in spite of their locked arms.
“A few weeks ago, I couldn’t get rid of you. Every time I turned around, there you were, demanding that I take off my shirt or shoes, and the first few times I saw you, you weren’t wearing a stitch of clothing. Now, you’ll hardly get near me.”
“That was before,” she said, looking straight ahead.
“Before the night in the logger’s cabin? Before the night we made love and had such a wonderful time?”
“It wasn’t such a wonderful time to you. You told me you wanted nothing to do with me, that I was just one of many women to you.”
“Maybe I was a little hard on you that night, but you scared me to death with your talk of marriage and kids. Can’t you forget that and we could start over? We were getting on so well until you decided you just had to put that noose around my neck.”
She pulled her arm away from his. “I don’t want to put a noose around your neck. Marriage is different. It’s for two people who love each other and I stupidly thought that’s what we did that night—made love. I was in love with you or I wouldn’t have done that…I wouldn’t have let you touch me. But it wasn’t love to you. You don’t love me, you never have. You got what you wanted, but I didn’t.”
She turned away to hide her tears.
He pulled her to him, turning her so that her face was buried in his chest. “Chris, I don’t think I’ve ever had a woman in love with me before, and I have no idea what it means to be in love. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to hurt you. Maybe you just think you’re in love with me because I can handle a gun and I’m not like anyone you ever met before and—”
She looked up at him. “I’ve met hundreds of gunslingers and hundreds of outlaw criminals and I resent your telling me that I don’t know my own mind. I can tell you that—”
She stopped because Tynan kissed her, hungrily drinking from her lips, caressing her back, pushing her hips into his, trying to envelop her with his hard, hot body. Chris knew she wouldn’t last long if he continued touching her.
“Please don’t,” she whispered when his lips moved to her neck. “Please don’t touch me. I can’t bear it. I can’t resist you.”
“I don’t want you to,” he said as his teeth took her earlobe.
It was when his lips touched the corner of her eye and he tasted a salty tear that he stopped. Abruptly, he drew away from her. “Go on then,” he said with suppressed anger in his voice. “Go back to your cold bed and stay there alone.”
Chris’s tears began in earnest then and she fled down the steep, dark path to the cabin. Pilar didn’t say a word as Chris fell down onto the pallet beside her.