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doing?” he growled. “I’m making a pass at you. What does it feel like?”
    She gaped up at him, fascinated, frightened, her body trembling as if he’d stripped her and was stroking her naked skin. “You’ve never touched me…” she whispered.
    “You’ve never wanted me to,” he reminded her. His hands slid down her body to her buttocks, pressing her hips into his in an intimacy that she should have protested, but didn’t—couldn’t. “Until last night.”
    “I didn’t,” she protested weakly.
    “You were so jealous of Melody, you could hardly see straight,” he accused tautly. His hands pressed her closer to his blatant masculinity. “As if you had a damned thing to be jealous of…come here!”
    Even as he spoke he bent his head and for the first time she felt the hard, warm crush of his mouth over hers. The mustache tickled and his lips were roughly insistent, forcing her mouth to open, to admit the sharp, deep penetration of his tongue. She felt it teasing hers as his hands moved up, sliding under the blouse to caress the softness of her bare back.
    She gasped and a long, shuddering moan slipped from her throat as her fingernails involuntarily dug into his big arms. He smelled of smoke and saddle leather and expensive cologne, and his big body was damp where she was riveted to it. It was incredible, to be making love in broad daylight, to be kissed so passionately, held so intimately, by John….
    “Kiss me back,” he ground out against her trembling lips. “You wanted to touch me earlier, do it now. Stop holding back, damn it!”
    The words were like a dash of cold water, penetrating the fiery mist of passion. She looked up into a face hard with passion, into silvery eyes that glittered with new, barely leashed hunger.
    She shook her head as if to clear it. “No,” she whispered, disbelieving. Her mouth hurt from the hungry pressure of his, her knees felt like rubber. “No, we’re…just friends….”
    He took her hand and pressed it, palm flat against the furious shudder of his heart, breathing heavily as he watched her face. “Feel what you do to me,” he growled, “what you’ve always done to me. Just friends? Like sweet hell, we are!”
    “No!” She dragged herself out of his arms, her eyes as wild as her hair as she moved out of his reach and stood trying to catch her breath. “I won’t let it happen, I won’t!”
    “It already has,” he said curtly. His eyes slid over her rigid body, up over the pointed tautness of her breasts, taking in the accelerated breathing that caused her chest to rise and fall unevenly.
    With a cry of mingled shock and outrage, she turned and ran for her horse. This wasn’t happening, it couldn’t be, not with John; not with the only man she trusted. What he was offering was too sudden, too unexpected.
    “Madeline!” he shot at her.
    She was already astride the little mare, her eyes wild as she looked at him.
    “It’s too late to run from it,” he said quietly, his gaze dark and steady.
    “Oh, no, it isn’t,” she said in a choked voice. “I won’t see you again, John.”
    “You will,” he said softly. “Because what we just had wasn’t enough—for either of us.”
    With a muffled curse, she whirled the mare and urged her quickly into a gallop, the wind tearing through her hair. Never, she thought wildly, never, John Durango! She closed her eyes against the memory of his hard, expert mouth, against remembered pleasure. The horrible thing was that he was right, it hadn’t been enough….

Chapter Four
    M adeline walked around in a daze for the rest of the morning, wondering at the lightning change in her relationship with John. She was confused by her own reaction to him, by the vague hungers he’d created. She thought she was frigid after her brief, disastrous relationship with Allen. She’d thought she was immune.
    Allen. She hadn’t thought about him in a long time, but the hurt came back with diminished force as she sat over