He took a deep breath, then added dryly, “In your estimation, Miss Bennett, does all of the above make me a reasonably sane, self-preserving male?”
“No.” Troy was torn between laughter and bemusement.
“Then obviously I consider the slippery edge of danger to be just my kind of place.”
She stared at him for a moment, then said suddenly, “I was supposed to be mad.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“You’re a devious—”
“Hush,” he interrupted severely. “You’ll ruin my image of your ladylike self if you call me what I think you were about to call me.”
“Ladylike?” Troy viewed him with real astonishment. “Are you trying to be funny?”
“Not at all. After much thought and very careful scrutiny, I’ve come to the conclusion that you, Miss Bennett, are what used to be termed a lady. The word has become rather shopworn, I’m afraid, so please understand that I mean it in the old-fashioned sense.”
Troy leaned an elbow on the back of a nearby chair, inwardly pleased—though astonished—and trying not to show it. “I see. Thank you. Are you—in the old-fashioned sense—a gentleman?”
Dallas winced. “I was afraid you’d ask something like that.”
“Well?”
He stared at her for a moment, then said slowly and quite calmly, “If I weren’t at least some variation of a gentleman, Miss Bennett, I wouldn’t be experiencing so many sleepless nights or taking quite so many cold showers. Because I would have tried my damnedest to—uh—coerce you to—uh—give in to that spark between us.”
“That sounded like a very careful speech,” Troy murmured.
“I’m glad you noticed.”
“Of course, I noticed. I’ve also noticed your…restraint these last days.”
“And?” he asked with an exaggerated puppy-dog-hopeful look.
“I commend you.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Well?”
“Can’t you do better than that?”
Troy gave him an innocent look. “Come now, Mr. Cameron. If I threw myself into your arms and—uh—wantonly gave in to that spark you mentioned, you could hardly continue thinking of me as a lady, could you?”
Dallas looked suddenly disgusted. “I seem to have boxed myself in.”
“I’d say so.”
He frowned for a moment, and then the frown abruptly cleared. “Ah—I have it. A change of strategy here.”
“Yes?”
“Marry me.”
Troy’s mouth dropped open. She knew it was open, and she couldn’t seem to do a damn thing about it. Dallas didn’t appear to notice.
In the reasonable tone of one who’d found the solution to a difficult, tricky problem, he explained, “It’s the best answer, you know. You will preserve your ladylike virtues in my eyes and I’ll be able to go back to taking hot showers. I’m not so sure that I’ll get any more sleep, but—”
“You’re out of your mind,” Troy said blankly.
“Now, that hurt,” Dallas told her, clearly aggrieved.
Off-balance and totally flustered for one of the very few times in her life, Troy tried to make sense of her own thoughts. She hastily revised her earlier conclusions about obsession versus taking her home to meet Mother. Dallas was completely serious, and she knew it.
It was one of the most unnerving realizations she’d ever had. Almost inaudibly she murmured, “Dallas, I never said marriage or nothing….”
“I know you didn’t,” he interrupted calmly. “In fact, you said something along the lines of ‘someone’s going to have to get me pregnant first.’ I’m entirely willing to trap you, you understand, but that method presents a hell of a conflict.”
“Oh?” she managed weakly.
He nodded solemnly. “Since you’re an old-fashioned lady, and I’m a variation of an old-fashioned gentleman, that method is actually ruled out from the start. Also I’m all for planned parenthood, and I’d really prefer to begin our marriage with two rather than three.”
“Oh.” She seemed addicted to the inane syllable.
“So I think”—Dallas remained solemn and reasonable “—that my idea is best.”
“Uh…oh?” Great variations on the one-syllable theme, Troy! she thought in self-disgust.
“Yes. Marry me.”
Troy managed somehow to shake off the spell. “Is that a command or a proposal?” she demanded, her voice not nearly as angry as she would have liked.
Very softly Dallas said, “Am I the only one who’s suffered these past days, Troy? Am I the only one who’s spent sleepless nights after cold showers?” His voice deepened suddenly. “Do you wake up in the middle of the night the way I do, aching inside? Do you toss and turn in your lonely bed the way I do, with nothing to hold on to?”
She turned away suddenly, going over to the fireplace and staring blindly up at the lithograph hung above the mantel. His questions were echoing inside of her, torturing her with the promise of what could be. Didn’t he realize what he was doing to her? Troy asked herself.
As if he’d read her mind, Dallas answered the unspoken question.
“Can’t you see what we’re doing to each other? Dammit, I know I promised not to pressure you, but I can’t take much more of this, Troy.”
“You said you just wanted to get to know me,” she told him almost inaudibly. “You promised. An empty promise?”
“Troy….”
Slowly, reluctantly, drawn by the plea in his voice, she turned to face him. And she saw something in his eyes that stopped her heart.
“The promise was made in good faith,” he said gently. “But I’ve discovered that…love isn’t a very patient demon.”
Her heart began to beat again, slowly, heavily, its rhythm unsteady. Her feet were rooted to the floor, her body frozen. She wanted to question the word, the emotion, but couldn’t somehow. It hung there between them, suspended in midair by disbelief. Troy swallowed hard and fastened onto another word, one she could say aloud. “Demon?”
Dallas set the chamois bag down neatly in the center of his desk, then crossed the room to stand in front of her. “Demon,” he murmured. “A persistently tormenting person, force, or passion. In this case, all three. You’re my demon, Troy. And the love I feel for you is a force and a passion too strong to fight.”
“You barely know me,” she whispered.
“I know enough.” His hands lifted to rest on her shoulders, as if he needed to touch her. Blue eyes looked down at her with an honesty that she could not question. “I know that you could easily belong to a careless, jet-setting crowd, interested in nothing but your own pleasure—but you don’t. You pack more hours into a week than it was ever meant to hold, and you spend those hours helping people. You love children and animals, and they love you. You have a quick temper, a quick laugh—and a quick tongue.”
He was smiling down at her with an odd, whimsical tenderness. “You’re vulnerable on one hand because you care for people, and cynical on the other hand because you’ve learned the empty value of empty promises.” His smile faded, the blue eyes probing. “And you’re not afraid of love, but for some reason, you’re afraid of loving…me.”
Troy stared up at him, silently marveling because he was totally comfortable with his own masculinity; so much so that he could admit love without hesitation or excuses, but with an odd kind of freedom she only vaguely understood. She looked at the strikingly handsome face and felt a surge of hope that no amount of reason could dispel.
“Why are you afraid of loving me, Troy?”
She tried to ignore the hope, tried to use reason. “It’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible,” he told her fiercely, his hands tightening on her shoulders.
“This is!” she cried.
“Why? Dammit, why is it so impossible?”
“Because if I love you, you’ll take over!” Dimly Troy wondered if she was making se
nse; she pushed on because something was driving her to say it all now and get it over with. “I won’t be in control of my life anymore! You’ll ask me to give up at least a part of my work, and because I love you, I’ll give it up. And that’s wrong—wrong.”
“Because you love me,” he murmured very softly.
For a moment Troy thought that he had heard only that, but then she realized that he had heard everything—even what she had not meant to say. She tried to step back, but his hands wouldn’t release her. A little voice inside her head sneered at her for being unable to say except by accident that she loved him.
“I needed to hear that,” he said. There was a small, raw flame in his blue eyes. “Because now I know it isn’t impossible. Now I know we can make it work.”
“Dallas—”
He cut her off quickly, determined to say what he felt so strongly. “Troy, you’re afraid that I’ll use your love, that I’ll use emotional blackmail to force you to give up the part of your work we both know I’m uncomfortable with. Yes?”
She nodded silently.
“I won’t,” he said flatly.
Troy stared at him for a moment, and then stepped back; this time he didn’t stop her. She began wandering aimlessly around the room, needing the space and the activity to help her think. Evenly she said, “We’ll play Let’s Pretend for a moment, all right?”
“All right.” He was watching her intently.
“Let’s pretend we—we get married.”
Dallas nodded silently, realizing that this was not the time to respond to her words with a wholehearted “Let’s not pretend; let’s do it!” even though it was what he wanted to say.
“Now I average going out at night on a job about twice a month. Could you live with that?”
“I’d have to, wouldn’t I?” he answered quietly.
Troy shot him a quick, searching look. “What about if we decided to start a family?”
“You wouldn’t go out on a job; your own common sense would prevent you,” he said in a tone of absolute certainty.
She looked at him again, then absently unfastened the heavy tool belt and dropped it on the desk as she paced past. “During pregnancy, you’re right,” she said. “What about after?”
Dallas hesitated. “You’re crossing bridges before we come to them.”
“I have to.” She stopped, swinging around to face him. “I have to, Dallas. Because once we begin, there’s no going back. I don’t believe that marriages should end up in divorce court, and I don’t think you do either.”
“We won’t end up there, Troy.”
“Famous last words,” she said bleakly.
In two quick steps he stood before her again, swiftly pulling her against him. His arms were hard, yet gentle, holding her in an embrace meant to comfort, to reassure. “Sweetheart, don’t do this to yourself,” he said huskily. “Don’t you understand that the most important thing in the world to me is that you be happy?” He fumbled for words, trying desperately to make her see that it simply wasn’t in him to deny her anything—even things that hurt him or made him fear for her. “I would never ask you to be less than you are.”
Troy took a deep breath, the cool, spicy scent of his cologne sending her senses into a dizzy spin. “What about those two million years of instinct you mentioned earlier?” she whispered.
“I’ll fight the instinct. Although,” he added wryly, “I don’t expect it to be easy. You’ll have to help me, sweetheart. And you’ll have to be patient with me.”
The warmth spreading through her, Troy realized dimly, was a combination of several things. The oddly tender endearment that sounded new on his lips. The security of his embrace. The love and understanding she could feel in him. Her own love rising up within her in spite of her inner attempts to deny it.
She allowed her cheek to rest against his chest, suddenly tired and sleepy and completely unable to fight. Her eyelids felt made of lead and only his arms held her upright. Nature’s restorative, she decided drowsily, is sleep. And I think I’ll have some….
“Troy?” he murmured into her hair.
“Mmm?”
“Marry me?”
“Mmm….”
She felt herself drifting away. From a very great distance she heard a rumbling sound that might have been a rueful laugh, but it didn’t trouble her. She was so tired….
The ceiling was unfamiliar. It was the first thing Troy saw when she reluctantly opened one eye, and she stared up at it for a long moment in puzzlement. The light fixture was all wrong. And everything was too bright; her bedroom had a western exposure because she strongly disliked morning sun.
She forced her other eye open and continued to study the ceiling. No…still wrong. That wasn’t her ceiling. Lazily Troy considered her position, which was on her back in a very comfortable bed. Thick covers cocooned her in warmth, the arm across her stomach anchoring them in place.
Arm?
Troy pulled her arms out from under the covers; the weight across her stomach remained. Lifting her head, she craned to see that it was a decidedly masculine arm across her middle.
Without moving a muscle, reluctant to look sideways and find out to whom the arm was attached, she carefully went over in her mind the events of the night before. Everything fell into place, except—Was she in Dallas’s bed? And had she really fallen asleep more or less in the middle of his proposal?
Troy winced and let her head fall back on the pillow. She was completely dressed except for her kid boots; she must have been dead tired, because she was always uncomfortable in bed unless she slept in the buff. As it was, awareness of her clothing was making her acutely uncomfortable now.
She lay still for a moment, debating the best way to handle this. She was amazingly clearheaded after the needed sleep and, though still bemused by the events of last night, she felt much less certain than she had before that the barriers between Dallas and her were insurmountable.
If—if—Dallas could live with her work, they just might have a chance. The thought made her smile happily, inside and out. Some of her sparring partner’s determination seemed to have rubbed off on her; she was quite suddenly aware of a fierce intention to give this relationship every chance possible.
But there was still a cautious part of her that wanted to be sure of at least a reasonable possibility of success. So if Dallas didn’t strangle her for falling asleep at a rather inopportune moment…well, they’d just have to see what could be worked out.
In the meantime, Troy mused, what could she do to make things easier on both of them? It occurred belatedly to her that she’d been taking herself far too seriously—professionally and personally. She had a sense of humor, dammit. Was Dallas even aware of that?
It also occurred to her that for a woman who’d never in her life awakened in a man’s bed, she was taking it very well. Troy grinned inwardly, got her priorities in order, then rose on an elbow and gazed down at Dallas.
He was lying on his stomach beside her, stripped to the waist at least—she didn’t care to speculate further—with his face nuzzled into her pillow so that only one closed eye was visible beneath a shock of raven hair. Troy gave in to impulse and gently brushed the lock of hair back, then politely tapped on his tanned shoulder.
“Hello?”
The eye opened blearily and focused on her elbow, which was resting some inches from his nose. It was a very puzzled eye.
“Hello,” Troy repeated brightly.
Dallas lifted his head immediately, the other eye opening and joining its fellow in looking extremely puzzled. The lock of hair fell gently back over his forehead, lending him an endearingly boyish look not a whit marred by the morning stubble that darkened his jaw. And in his bleary eyes was the shell-shocked expression of a late riser forced to stir at dawn.
Troy swallowed a giggle; if he was always this reluctant to wake up, she thought, the past few days of “tagging along” with her at the crack of dawn must have been sheer hell for him!
&
nbsp; “Are you there?” she demanded.
“No,” he mumbled, pushing himself up on an elbow so as to be able to smother a huge yawn without removing his arm from across her waist. “I’ll be here in a minute.”
“Well, while you’re getting here, d’you mind if I take a shower? I hate sleeping in my clothes.”
“S’fine with me,” he managed, yawning again.
“Well?”
He winced. “Don’t throw questions like that at me in my condition. Well, what?”
“Does the referee have to ring the bell?” When he only stared at her blankly, she swallowed a giggle and elaborated. “You’ve got me pinned down here.”
“Ah.”
“Yes.”
“So I have.” His eyes were clearing.
“You have to move before I can.” She frowned suddenly. “And I’d better call home. The last thing Jamie heard from me was a raging temper; he probably thinks I’ve killed you by now.”
“I called him last night.”
Troy stared at him. “Clever of you to remember that.”
“I told you I was getting here.”
“Mmm. Well, if you wouldn’t mind moving…”
Quite suddenly, Dallas moved. He hauled her closer to him—almost beneath him—and kissed her. Several times.
Before Troy could regain her breath or do more than wonder how her arms had ended up around his neck, he was speaking in a calm voice devoid of any trace of sleep.
“I have also just remembered that you fell asleep in the middle of my proposal.”