Wild Texas Rose by Martha Hix Page B

gonna burn like hell for a few hours.”
    â€œIsn’t there something I can put on it?”
    â€œMy mama used to say a kiss can make anything all better.”
    â€œDid she?” Mariah laughed, a nervous little sound. “I’m sure she’s a resourceful woman, but I had something more medicinal in mind.”
    â€œLet’s give it a try anyway.” He brought her reddened flesh to his lips, and–damn!–she tasted delicious.
    â€œYou’re not very subtle,” she murmured shakily.
    Trying to control himself, Whit stepped back. “Lois has some salve she made up. We can give it a whirl.” He reached into the bottom of a pie safe. Taking a healthy glob of the yellow goo onto the tip of his forefinger, he smoothed it over Mariah’s left wrist. “Feel better?”
    â€œI ... I think I’ll live.”
    He grinned, wrapping his fingers around her slender forearm. “Yeah, I think you will.”
    She felt so good to him. He had been going crazy all day, all night, over her. He’d tried to ignore her charms, had tried to be a gentleman monk. He’d even tried to get interested in Barbara again, but nothing had worked.
    Whit Reagor would have to be deaf, dumb, blind–and dead below the waist!–not to notice the beautiful Mariah and the signals she’d been throwing him all day. He had set out to test her, but realized he was tested past the limit.
    His cravings superceded honor, integrity, and reservations. His free hand touched her waist. Ignoring the goo on her injured wrist, he brought her hand to his chest. Did she feel the hammering of his heart?
    Gazing into the softness of her eyes, he was lost. “You’re so lovely.” He murmured, “What would you do, if I were to kiss you?”

Chapter Five
    â€œWhat’re you waiting for? Do it now! Ooooh. Mmm.”
    The former Viscount Desmont bestowed the buxom woman a smile of superiority as he shoved his member into her. Fast and furious, Joseph pumped as her heavy legs folded around his skinny back. Temperence Tullos, Mrs. Charlie Tullos, was his sweet revenge for the humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of her husband’s thugs only this morning; and now, at nine o’clock in the evening, Joseph’s self-esteem was once more intact. He was a man in control.
    He didn’t speak, but his log cabin was alive with the woman’s groaning vulgarities. His eyes closed while he playacted Temperence was his Mariah. Yet he knew she wasn’t, not really. Mariah wasn’t a cow of a woman, nor did she bathe herself in cloying perfumes, nor did she shout obscenities worthy of the lowest of classes–which he was loath to admit, even to himself, he enjoyed, though he did regret not saving himself for his bride.
    The woman-cow screamed in ecstasy, and Joseph tumbled over the brink, his climax swift. He rolled to his side, and did up the buttons of his red long-handles.
    â€œYou know, for a skinny runt, you’re not half bad-looking.”
    â€œThank you, madam.” His chest puffed from the left-handed compliment, and, Mariah forgotten, he swept his eyes across the pendulous breasts that looked as if they were ready to burst through Temperence’s thin, vein-shot skin.
    His feelings turned gleeful. What a day this had been, going from the horror of land-plunder to the pleasure of making love to this older woman of thirty, who had given him a windfall in more ways than one. Her husband and his gang had trampled his saplings and threatened his life before riding away, leaving him face-down in the orchard. That afternoon, while Joseph had raged at his predicament and searched for a method of revenge, Temperence had arrived by horseback at his door. She had not been empty-handed.
    On the floor beside him lay a bag of Charlie Tullos’s gold coins. Joseph had thought it strange, Temperence giving him money, but with some unspoken misgivings about the