The Cutting Edge Read online

  “Yes,” she breathed. “I need you so much.” She needed to be as close to him as she could get, to reaffirm her life and freedom in the mingling of their bodies. This night wouldn’t answer her questions, but it would help to banish the week of nightmares and desolation. She needed him to make her whole again.

  Without another word he rolled atop her, parted her legs, and slid deeply into her. She cried out wordlessly, at both the shock of his entry and the fierce pleasure she felt at their joining, at the moment when they ceased to be two separate beings. He comforted her with a rough murmur, drawing her legs up to wrap them around his waist.

  Their lovemaking wasn’t prompted so much by passion as it was by a need to come together, to give and receive comfort, yet before long Tessa was gasping as his slow movements wrung new heights of ecstasy from her body. His hands stroked and soothed and excited, and his kisses were so deep and hungry that she was unable to breathe, but breathing wasn’t important any longer. The only thing that mattered to her was the man she loved, and in that moment she didn’t care what happened.

  “I love you,” he groaned against her throat. “Tessa!” He gasped her name urgently and seized her hips, lifting her up to meet him. She cried out, too, shuddering with the force of her pleasure and accepting his.

  There was silence afterward, but she was content. He lay heavily in her arms, his body damp with sweat, and instead of moving away he pushed himself closer against her. He turned his face into the softness of her neck, murmured something unintelligible, and went to sleep. Tessa held him in her arms, staring at the ceiling in the darkness, wondering why she had asked for his lovemaking, wondering if it had solved anything at all, or only made her thoughts more complicated.

  His heavy weight bore down on her, pinning her to the bed, but she wouldn’t have moved him for anything. She couldn’t regret inviting his lovemaking. It had soothed a deep, crippling pain in her heart. She had been left lost and bewildered by his sudden desertion, and his passion had reassured her that he had really wanted her. She could trust his physical need for her, if not his emotional one.

  With his actions that day he had offered her a clear choice, though he probably hadn’t meant to give her any choice at all. Her lips moved in a small, resigned smile. Brett Rutland was an autocratic, arrogant, dominating male. Any woman who lived with him would have a constant struggle to keep their relationship balanced. She wanted to be that woman. She could be that woman, because Brett had given her the opportunity—if she made the choice to live with him.

  She could either trust him or not trust him, and she still felt too confused, too emotionally battered, to rely on herself to make the correct decision. The only thing she didn’t doubt was her love for him. That was odd, because she had always thought that love had a limit, that there was a point in any relationship where love could die. That had certainly been her experience with both Will and Andrew, and at the time she had been certain she loved them. Yet had she? What she felt for Brett so far surpassed anything she’d felt before that it made her doubt her own emotions, or at least her ability to read them. Life hadn’t always been easy for her. As a young child she had had to accept her father’s desertion, and not so many years later the death of her mother. But somehow she had skated around the edges of those emotional disasters, preferring to look at the sun instead of the shadows. The ultimate party girl, that was her. She hadn’t been malicious, but still she had slipped away from any relationship that could have touched her deeply, that could have made her care.

  Until she met Brett. His character was so intense and powerful that he had overwhelmed her frothy defenses, and at the same time she had been challenged on a very personal, feminine basis by his cool control. Given their particular personalities, it had been inevitable that she would fall in love with him, truly in love for the first time in her life.

  He had hurt her more than she had ever thought she would be able to accept from any man, yet it hadn’t killed her love for him. She loved him despite everything, and she wouldn’t be getting over it.

  Welcome to the big time, Tessa, she told herself in aching realization.

  A long time later he stirred in her arms and lifted himself higher against her. Tessa felt awareness tighten his muscles, and gently she stroked her palms over his powerful back.

  His voice was a low, sleep-roughened rasp of sound, quiet in the darkness that surrounded them. “Have you slept?”

  “No,” she murmured, her voice still as rough as his. They were a pair, she thought absently. They both sounded like frogs.

  Several minutes passed in silence, while his hand moved slowly, exploringly, over her hip and side. “Any regrets?” he finally asked.

  “About this? No,” she answered slowly.

  “What have you been thinking?”

  “That I still love you. That I still hurt. That I still don’t know what to do.”

  He sighed. “It isn’t easy, is it? Loving. Hell, I didn’t even know what it was.”

  In the quiet, warm darkness, she felt better able to talk to him than she ever had before. There was only his voice, and the warmth of his body, with no outside distraction to break her concentration. She wanted to concentrate on him, to learn everything she could about this man; she knew him physically, but now she needed to know all the little things that would give her the key to his thoughts. “You love your parents, don’t you? Your home? There’s your horse, your dog, your first-grade teacher… .”

  A low laugh rumbled through him. “No, I never loved my first-grade teacher. As for the ranch…I don’t know if it’s love. The ranch is a part of me. I can’t separate myself from it; no matter where I am or what I’m doing, it’s there in my head.” He paused for a moment, as if considering the matter. “Horses and dogs…I’ve had my favorites, but I can’t say that I’ve ever loved an animal. My father…yes, I love him. I owe my life to him, and it wasn’t easy for him to take care of me.”

  “Your mother died?” Tessa asked gently.

  “I don’t know. She gave me away when I was a week old. She may still be alive, but it doesn’t much matter. There’s no connection between us now, no curiosity, or sense of need. There never has been. Tom is my natural father, but he wasn’t married to my mother. He was working in southwest Texas when he met her. She was a rancher’s daughter, and he was just a hired hand, a drifter, but she was wild and looking for a way out, trying to kick the traces. They would meet in an old line shack.”

  Tessa lay spellbound, caught up in the tale he was telling her in a low, slow voice. She felt as if he were finally giving her the key to himself, unlocking a portion of that private part of his mind.

  “She got pregnant, of course. I imagine she could have gotten an abortion, if she had wanted to risk the back-alley operations they had then, but she chose to have me. I was probably the ultimate gesture of rebellion. It caused an almighty scandal, but she refused to tell her folks who the father was, refused to go away, refused to hide herself until after I was born. Tom tried to get her to marry him, but she refused that, too. Ranch life was exactly what she was trying to get away from, and that was all he could offer her. It was all he knew.”

  He was silent then for so long that Tessa feared that he wasn’t going to tell her any more. She touched his hair, sliding her fingers through the tousled, tawny silk. “And when you were born?”

  “When I was born, she named me, nursed me for a week, then got in touch with Tom and told him to meet her at the line shack. She took me with her to meet him, handed me to him, and walked away. That was the last time he saw or heard from her. She never went back home, just kept on going.”

  “So your father raised you by himself.”

  “Yeah. He left Texas that day, too, because he was afraid her parents would take me away from him if they knew she hadn’t taken me with her.” In the darkness, she could feel his grin against her skin. “Can you imagine a rough ranch hand lugging a week-old baby cross-country, not knowing the first thing abo