Heartbreaker (Page 37)

One morning Michelle remained at the house to work in the office; she was alone because Edie had gone grocery shopping. The telephone rang off the hook that morning, interrupting her time and again. "

She was already irritated with it when it jangled yet again and made her stop what she was doing to answer it "Rafferty residence."

No one answered, though she could hear slow, deep breathing, as though whoever was on the other end was deliberately controlling his breath. It wasn’t a "breather," though; the sound wasn’t obscenely exaggerated.

"Hello," she said. "Can you hear me?"

A quiet click sounded in her ear, as if whoever had been calling had put down the receiver with slow, controlled caution, much as he’d been breathing.

He. For some reason she had no doubt it was a man. Common sense said it could be some bored teenager playing a prank, or simply a wrong number, but a sudden chill swept over her.

A sense of menace had filled the silence on the line. For the first time in three weeks she felt isolated and somehow threatened, though there was no tangible reason for it. Hie chills wouldn’t stop running up and down her spine, and suddenly she had to get out of the house, into the hot sunshine. She had to see John, just be able to look at him and hear his deep voice roaring curses, or crooning gently to a horse or a frightened calf. She needed his heat to dispel the coldness of a menace she couldn’t define.

Two days later there was another phone call and again, by chance, she answered the phone. "Hello," she said. "Rafferty residence."

Silence. Her hand began shaking. She strained her ears and heard that quiet, even breathing, then the click as the phone was hung up, and a moment later the dial tone began buzzing in her ear. She felt sick and cold, without knowing why. What was going on? Who was doing this to her?

Chapter Eight

Michelle paced the bedroom like a nervous cat, her silky hair swirling around her head as she moved. "I don’t feel like going," she blurted. "Why didn’t you ask me before you told Addie we’d be there?"

"Because you’d have come up with one excuse after another why you couldn’t go, just like you’re doing now," he answered calmly. He’d been watching her pace back and forth, her eyes glittering, her usually sinuous movements jerky with agitation. It had been almost a month since he’d moved her to the ranch, and she had yet to stir beyond the boundaries of his property, except to visit her own. He’d given her the keys to the Mercedes and free use of it, but to his knowledge she’d never taken it out. She hadn’t been shopping, though he’d made certain she had money. He had received the usual invitations to the neighborhood Saturday night barbecues that had become a county tradition, but she’d always found some excuse not to attend.

He’d wondered fleetingly if she were ashamed of having come down in the world, embarrassed because he didn’t measure up financially or in terms of sophistication with the men she’d known before, but he’d dismissed the notion almost before it formed. It wasn’t that. He’d come to know her better than that. She came into his arms at night too eagerly, too hungrily, to harbor any feelings that he was socially inferior. A lot of his ideas about her had been wrong. She didn’t look down on work, never had. She had simply been sheltered from it her entire life. She was willing to work. Damn it, she insisted on it! He had to watch her to keep her from trying her hand at bull-dogging. He was as bad as her father had ever been, willing to do just about anything to keep her happy.

Maybe she was embarrassed because they were living together. This was a rural section, where mores and morality changed slowly. Their arrangement wouldn’t so much as raise an eyebrow in Miami or any other large city, but they weren’t in a large city. John was too self-assured and arrogant to worry about gossip; he thought of Michelle simply as his woman, with all the fierce possessiveness implied by the term. She was his. He’d held her beneath him and made her his, and the bond was reinforced every time he took her.

Whatever her reason for hiding on the ranch, it was time for it to end. If she were trying to hide their relationship, he wasn’t going to let her get away with it any longer. She had to become accustomed to being his woman. He sensed that she was still hiding something of herself from him, carefully preserving a certain distance between them, and it enraged him. It wasn’t a physical distance. Sweet Lord, no. She was liquid fire in his arms. The distance was mental; there were times when she was silent and withdrawn, the sparkle gone from her eyes, but whenever he asked her what was wrong she would stonewall, and no amount of probing would induce her to tell him what she’d been thinking.

He was determined to destroy whatever it was that pulled her away from him; he wanted all of her, mind and body. He wanted to hear her laugh, to make her lose her temper as he’d used to do, to hear the haughtiness and petulance in her voice. It was all a part of her, the part she wasn’t giving him now, and he wanted it. Damn it, was she tiptoeing around him because she thought she owed him?

She hadn’t stopped pacing. Now she sat down on the bed and stared at him, her lips set. "I don’t want to go."

"I thought you liked Addie." He pulled off his boots and stood to shrug out of his shirt.

"I do," Michelle said.

"Then why don’t you want to go to her party? Have you even seen her since you’ve been back?"

"No, but Dad had just died, and I wasn’t in the mood to socialize! Then there was so much work to be done…"

"You don’t have that excuse now."

She glared at him. "I decided you were a bully when I was eighteen years old, and nothing you’ve done over the years has changed my opinion!"