He rose from the ground and loomed above her. “Let me save you the task of tricking me into telling you what I think about your point. Women don’t fall in love, Miss Worth. They fall inwant.Now, there’s some food for your hungry little analytical mind, isn’t there?”
She met his blazing gaze straight on. “A veritable banquet.”
He didn’t miss the oh-so-slight tilt of her beautiful lips. No doubt she thought she would win their verbal sparring.
He vowed she wouldn’t. “Eat hearty.”
“I shall stuff myself until I cannot hold another bite.” She crossed to the buckboard and deposited the basket in the wagon bed and her parrot on the seat. “And when I am hungry again, I assure you, Mr. Montana, I shall come back for more.”
He picked the blanket off the ground and joined her by the buckboard. “The kitchen is closed.”
“Ah, but the cook often forgets to lock the door.”
He stepped nearer to her, close enough that her breasts touched his chest. “You’d be entering at your own risk. The cook needs fire to work. It’s hot in there.” Slowly, he raised his hands and curled them around her hips. “It might melt you.”
Exquisite heat flashed through her.
The second he saw her flush, he set about showing her just how hot the fire really was.
His lips came down on hers hard. His tongue slid deeply into her mouth, then he withdrew it only to thrust it between her lips again and again and again. Each time he entered her mouth, he pulled her toward him. His hands kneading her bottom, his thighs pressing against hers, he circled his hips upon hers in a rhythm he knew her body would recognize and imitate.
Theodosia began to move. Against him. With him, to the cadence he’d set. She trembled. She rocked and wavered.
He felt her soften in his arms. His lips still molded to hers, he lifted her off the ground and gently sat her in the wagon. Drawing away from her, he smoothed the tips of his fingers across her forehead. “In this mind of yours are a thousand things. Lessons you haven’t forgotten. It’s time you learned another. Where there’s heat, there’s fire, Miss Worth. Fire burns”—he slid his fingers to her breast and traced the stiff circle of her nipple— “and it melts.”
Still shaking with unappeased desire, Theodosia watched him mount and urge his stallion back to the road. She longed desperately to call out a crushing comeback that would end the encounter in her favor.
But for the first time in her life, words failed her. Roman Montana had beaten her soundly.
Chapter Seven
Theodosia padded her sleeping palletwith every article of clothing she’d brought to Texas, but she could still feel the rocky ground beneath her. She’d never been given to cursing, but as annoyed as she felt now, several colorful epithets shot through her mind.
Across from the fire a few feet away, sitting upon his own pallet and leaning against a birch tree, Roman watched her struggle. “Something the matter, Miss Worth?” He laid down the sheet of paper he’d been studying and stuck his pencil behind his ear.
“Something the matter, Miss Worth?” John the Baptist repeated, then threw water every which way. “Where there’s heat, there’s fire, Miss Worth.”
Theodosia squirmed away from a rock pressing into her hip, only to move herself into a cluster that jabbed at her side. “You chose this spot out of pure spite, Mr. Montana. We have passed a multitude of grassy fields, leaf-strewn woods, and flowered meadows, and yet you deliberately stopped here in this—this boulder-filled pit to spend the night.”
“Boulder-filled?” Roman clicked his tongue. “That is a very poor choice of words, Miss Worth. The rocks around here aren’t any bigger than my fist. And this is not a pit. It’s a dried-up creek bed.”
“Nevertheless, you went out of your way to find the most unwelcoming site possible. And I assure you that I know why you did.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that you do. Hell, you know almost everythingelseabout me, don’t you?” He picked up the paper again, upon which he’d written the amounts of the savings he had in the eight different towns.
“Not only do you remain piqued over the fact that I learned a bit about your past this afternoon, but you also seek to prove to me that you have no consideration toward me whatsoever,” Theodosia continued, still shifting on her lumpy bed. “You knew I would have a wretched time trying to sleep on rocks—”
“Sleep in the wagon bed.”
“It is too small, and you know it.”
“Then get up and push the rocks away.”
“I have already attempted the process of elapidation, to no avail.”
Rubbing his chin, he stared at her. “Elapidation?”
“Elapidation is the clearing away of stones.”
