Lover in the Rough by Elizabeth Lowell Read Free Book Online Page A

business of yours.”
    “You don’t believe that, do you?” asked Chance quietly.
    Reba stared at him for a long moment, eyes clear and hard. Then she shook her head slowly, sending dark blond hair whispering over her cheeks. “No, I don’t believe that. But I’m damned if I know why. I don’t know you, Chance Walker. And when I’m with you, I don’t even know myself.”
    “You keep taking words out of my mind,” he drawled. “Shall we get to know each other by playing Twenty Questions over lunch?”
    Reba couldn’t help smiling at the idea of sharing a child’s game with a man called Chance. “All right. Me first, though,” she added, gathering up her hair as she spoke and twisting it expertly into a coil.
    “Why?” he asked, amused.
    “You’re bigger and a lot tougher than I am. I need whatever advantage I can get.”
    He put his hand on her cheek and looked at her searchingly. “Don’t be afraid of me, chaton .”
    Sensing the vulnerability beneath his quiet words, she turned her face and kissed his hard palm. “I’m not afraid of your strength. It’s your questions that I’m uncomfortable about.” She smiled at his startled look. “Don’t you have things you’d just as soon not talk about?” she asked, searching his clear, oddly colored eyes.
    His hand moved from her cheek as his face changed, all expression gone. He was again a stranger, hard and utterly assured, invulnerable. “Did you have any particular area of questioning in mind?” he asked, his voice uninflected.
    Chance’s black moustache didn’t disguise the harsh lines of his face or the unflinching intelligence that appraised her. Compelling, dangerous, a Tiger God hewn out of uncompromising stone.
    “No,” she whispered.
    Stillness pooled in the room for a long moment, then the coiled intensity slowly seeped out of Chance. He touched her cheek. “Yes, there are things I’d rather not talk about.”
    “And they’re the only ones that matter, aren’t they?”
    “Do you have a jacket?” he said calmly. “There’s a cool wind blowing outside.”
    Reba thought of repeating her question until she remembered his cold words to Todd. Keep pushing, you’ll get there. She wouldn’t push. Not yet. Pushing a man like Chance was not only dangerous, it was futile. She might as well go push a mountain. When he trusted her, he would talk freely.
    That is, if a man like Chance Walker ever trusted anybody. But he had to, for without trust nothing was possible, not pleasure, not friendship, and certainly not love.
    With a feeling close to fear, Reba realized that she wanted to know all of those things with Chance, and more—things for which she had no names, only a hunger as deep as the one he had revealed to her when he kissed her in the moon shadow of the dunes. The thought of such wanting was a shock to her, and the implications frightening.
    “I seem to have lost my comb,” she said casually, but the hand holding her hair had a fine tremor in it.
    Chance smiled and reached into the pocket of the tailored charcoal wool slacks he was wearing. He held out his hand to her. On his palm was the simple jet comb that had held her hair in place. “This one? Or”—he reached into the pocket of his pearl-grey chamois shirt—“this one?”
    His left hand held the polished ivory comb that she had worn in Death Valley. She looked up at him, remembering the night and the dunes where she had felt safe enough to let down the barriers she held against the world and cry in his arms until she was too weak to stand. Then his kiss, and the world falling away as they held each other and discovered needs and possibilities she had never before known.
    “The jet, I think,” Chance said when Reba didn’t speak. He fitted the comb into the shining mass of hair coiled on her head. He stroked her hair. “It’s a shame to imprison such beauty. But there are compensations.” His teeth moved delicately along the curve of her ear.
    She closed her