The question caught her off guard. “Not if it means losing who I am.”
“I want to marry you because of who you are,” he declared. “Why would I want you to change?”
“That’s what marriage does. It changes people.”
“Not if they fight it.”
She had no ready answer for that. She was beginning to weaken and he knew it. She could read the gleam of triumph in his eyes. With his hands resting on her thighs, with his masculine scent luring her, all of the old yearnings were beginning. Heat flooded her body and made her reason vanish. She had wanted Jordan Adams as far back as she could remember. She had ached for his touch, hungered for just one of the wicked kisses that he seemed to share so freely with other women.
“You’ve never even kissed me,” she murmured without thinking.
She hadn’t meant it as a dare, only as an observation, but Jordan was quick to seize the opening. His hands, softer now than they had been when he was working his father’s ranch, but still strong, cupped her face. His thumbs gently grazed her lips until they parted on a sigh of pure pleasure. His mouth curved into a half smile at that and, still smiling, he touched his lips to hers.
The kiss was like the caress of warm velvet, soft and soothing and alluring. It made her head spin. The touch of his tongue sent heat spiraling through her, wicked curls of heat that reached places she was certain had never before been touched.
“Oh, Jordan,” she murmured on another sigh as he gathered her close and deepened the kiss until she was swimming in a whirlpool of sensation.
In her wildest imagination she hadn’t known, hadn’t even guessed at the joy a mere kiss could bring. This was Jordan, though, the man she’d always believed to be her other half. If she had known his touch would really be like this, she would have fought for him long ago. She wouldn’t have waited, patient and silent, for him to wake up and notice her. She would have overcome her shyness, shoved aside all of her fears of rejection and tried to seduce him.
If only she were more than a means to an end, if only he really, truly loved her, she would say yes to him in a heartbeat, if only to guarantee that incredibly rare moments like this would never end.
When at last he released her, Jordan looked almost as dazed as she felt. His hands lingered on her face as if he couldn’t bear to break the contact.
“Was that a yes?” he asked.
Kelly listened to her heart and heard yes repeated over and over. Her head, though, was louder. “No,” she said with more regret than she’d ever felt about anything she’d ever done.
“But...”
She touched a finger to his lips. “Don’t argue. This isn’t about all the clearheaded, rational arguments you can mount. It’s not about bullying me until you get your way.”
Jordan looked as lost as if she’d been talking about astrophysics. “What, then?”
“Think about it,” she advised him, hiding a grin at his confusion. “I’m sure it will come to you eventually.”
Now that he’d really, truly kissed her, now that she knew the first faint stirrings of all the passionate possibilities in his arms, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to bear it if it didn’t.
3
“He is clueless,” Kelly declared to Jordan’s sister-in-law Jessie a few weeks later.
Kelly hadn’t been around when Jessie’s marriage to Erik Adams ended with his tragic death in a ranch accident. Jessie had been pregnant with Erik’s baby at the time. By the time Kelly had returned to Los Pinos, Luke, the oldest of the Adams brothers, had delivered the baby during a blizzard and he and Jessie had fallen in love and married. Whenever the two of them came home to White Pines with their daughter, Jessie slipped away for a visit and the kind of girl talk they rarely got elsewhere. Over the past months, Kelly had come to consider her a good friend.
“For a man widely regarded as brilliant, I think his synapses regarding women short-circuited sometime around puberty,” Kelly added as she kneaded her bread dough with a ferocity that had Jessie grinning.
“You love him, though, don’t you?” Jessie teased. Regarding Kelly intently, she reached over to still her flour-covered hands.
Kelly gazed into blue eyes filled with concern and sighed heavily. Eventually she drew in a calming breath and shrugged. “Depends on when you ask.”
“I’m asking now.”
“Now I’m exasperated, annoyed, perplexed and bordering on murderous.” Her temper flared up all over again. “He actually thinks I’ll pack up Dani and move back to Houston. Wasn’t he even awake during my marriage to Paul? Did he miss every single one of the opinions I expressed about the city during the entire drive from Houston back to this ranch? Has he been oblivious to how hard I’ve worked to make a go of this place? Can’t he see how I love it?”
“Maybe he can see that the work is wearing you out. Maybe he just assumes a wife should want to live where her husband lives,” Jessie suggested. “There is a tradition of that sort of thing. Whither thou goest, et cetera.”
“Well, times have changed. I’ve been there, done that. I’m perfectly happy right here.”
“You look exhausted to me.”
“So what? I didn’t say it was easy. I said I loved it. Every little improvement I’m able to accomplish around here gives me a deep sense of satisfaction. How can I give that up to go be some socialite wife?”
“It doesn’t have to be an either-or situation. Compromise,” Jessie said.
“He used the same word, but he doesn’t know the meaning of it,” Kelly said with conviction. Jordan was the kind of man who knew exactly what he wanted and assumed the rightness of it. Control was second nature to him. He was more like his father in that respect than he
