He didn’t ask this time. He tugged the shirt above her breasts and took her into his mouth. When he bit her lightly, she gasped and offered yet more. He took it all and, in the taking, took care to give her pleasure.

  “Johnny . . .”

  It was barely a whisper . . . an impassioned plea . . . another man’s name.

  Logan froze. Something heavy and cold settled deep inside him. Something hollow and cutting. Something painfully real to remind him she was responding to another man.

  He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter. But it did. It mattered a lot.

  And it was something he simply couldn’t bear.

  CHARADE

  Cindy Gerard

  FOUR

  Carmen struggled to catch her breath. Heat shivered through her body in delicious, mind-stealing waves as Johnny sucked and tugged and made sweet love to her breast. She felt limp and liquid, totally immersed in sensation and in the feel of his large, strong hands clamped possessively at her waist.

  She hadn’t known it could be like this. She’d never dreamed she could feel so much. Or that a man could want her the way this man was wanting her now. Nor had she imagined the power he’d have over her when it finally happened.

  She felt suspended somewhere between heaven and earth, flying free with uninhibited desire, ready to give herself body and soul.

  It was intoxicating, this longing, this insatiable craving for more of anything and everything he wanted to do with her. She wanted it to go on forever. She wanted to believe it would, wanted it so badly that when he stopped, she fought the notion that something had very abruptly, very definitely changed between them.

  Dazed with desire, she slowly opened her eyes. What she saw in his confirmed what she’d been trying to deny. He wasn’t with her anymore. He was as still as silence beneath her. His face was as hard as stone. The blue flame in his eyes had cooled to glacial hardness.

  Like awakening from a warm, seductive dream to a cold, empty bed, she felt suddenly vulnerable, excruciatingly exposed. She searched his face for answers. Nothing but expressionless, icy silence met her gaze.

  “What it is? Are you hurting? Oh, dear God, did I hurt you?”

  “No. You didn’t hurt me.” He drew a deep breath and set her away from him. “Carmen . . . look, I don’t think this is such a good idea,” he said flatly.

  In slow, deliberate motion, he covered his eyes with his forearm rather than look at her. Disguised as a gentle dismissal, it was nonetheless an arrow that found its mark and pierced her heart.

  On this July morning that promised a day as hot as any Texas summer day could be, the room chilled by several degrees. Slowly, in a wounded daze, she eased away from him. Stunned and suddenly embarrassed, she tugged her sleep shirt down over her hips. The tremors that had begun to shake her body made the simple task difficult.

  “I—I’m sorry,” she murmured, at a loss to know what to do, what to say.

  “Yeah, well, I guess that makes two of us.”

  If he’d struck her, he couldn’t have hurt her more. He was sorry. And she was a fool.

  She shut her eyes as her mind cleared of passion and painted a vivid picture of what had just happened between them.

  What had she been thinking? This was exactly what she’d been determined to avoid. She’d let her compassion for his pain get in the way of her common sense. She’d let her needs and her desire for him override her resolve to avoid a one-night stand, a one-night stand that in this harsh light of morning, he’d decided wasn’t worth the effort.

  Her stomach clenched when she thought of the way she’d practically attacked him, willing to give herself to him completely.

  But he’d seemed so different when he’d reached for her. The bold, brassy, don’t-give-a-damn Johnny hadn’t been making love to her. A needy, sadly vulnerable, soul-touchingly lost man had turned to her in the most elemental of ways. She’d reacted instinctively. She’d read something in the way he’d looked at her, something in the way he’d touched her that had led her to believe he was finally seeing her for what she was: A woman he could love. And that he could be the man she could count on to treasure the love she could give him.

  She’d been wrong. What happened between them had been physical. Nothing more. Nothing meaningful. And when he’d stopped to consider who he was with, weighed the outcome, he’d opted to beg off.

  How he must pity the poor little sex-starved goody-two-shoes. Sick with self-loathing, she swung her feet to the floor, driven by a violent urge to run away.

  He reached out and snagged her wrist. “Carmen . . .”

  In agonized silence she waited, not daring to look at him. She didn’t want to see the pity in his eyes.

  “You think you want this,” he said finally, in a controlled, emotionless voice, “but I promise you that you really don’t. I’m not what you need. And I’m a hell of a lot less than you deserve. I never should have let this happen.”

  Somehow his attempt to shoulder the blame cut deeper than his rejection. She closed her eyes, squeezing back the threat of tears. She wasn’t going to add to her humiliation by letting him see her cry.

  “It’s all right, Johnny. You don’t have to make excuses. And you don’t have to explain. You were hurting. I was here. It’s that simple.”

  She saw it all with brutal clarity now. She was a warm body. A healing heat. Nothing special. Merely available—like so many others.

  “Any old port in a storm, and all that,” she added, working too hard to dodge the pain that came with the realization. “Don’t worry about it, okay? It’s no big thing.”

  She rose, and this time when he would have stopped her, she forcefully pried his hand off her wrist.

  “I’ve got to go.” She walked on unsteady legs to the door. “Get some sleep. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  Logan made a decision somewhere after dawn, a time that had almost been destructive. Whether pride played a bigger part in his decision than nobility, he wasn’t sure. Certainly it had hurt to hear himself called by another man’s name. He only knew for sure that if it took every ounce of resolve, he was not going to use Carmen. She’d been used enough. And he’d done more than his share of using already. Dallas sure as hell didn’t deserve her, but neither did she deserve losing the intimacy and trust Logan had almost taken from her this morning. Bottom line, those emotions weren’t his to take.

  Yet when he thought of the way she’d responded to him, he ached in places that had nothing to do with the beating he’d taken. When he recalled the look on her face when he’d all but thrown her out of her own bed, he hurt in places that had nothing to do with physical pain.

  He could have told her the truth then. He should have told her. But he’d lain there, listening to her shower, then faking sleep when she’d come back into the bedroom to gather clean clothes. And then he’d let her leave without offering a word of explanation.

  He’d thought he could take without giving.

  She’d proven him wrong.

  He’d thought he could experience without involvement.

  She’d blasted that foolish notion to hell and back.

  He’d tasted her passion. He’d felt the burn of her desire. And if there’d been one truth implied or spoken between them this morning in her bed, it was that she should have far better than he was capable of giving her.

  So he was going to leave her alone, knowing that if he tried to lose her memory in a thousand women in the future, he would be haunted forever by her wild, uninhibited responses, her reckless yearning, and her sweet innocence. And forever he’d wish she’d been making love with Logan Prince this morning, not Johnny Dallas.

  Precious and rare was the sense of total union they’d shared. He’d been completely lost in her, submerged and sinking deeper into a realm of sensation that for the first time in his life had more substance than cynicism, more sharing than greed.

  The real thing. He’d held it in his hands. He’d felt it in his heart.

  He’d watched it walk away.

  As he lay there, wondering at his motives and questioning his sanity, he realized he had to get out of her life. This entire charade was beginning to reek of lunacy anyway. His thoughts might be a little muddled where Carmen was concerned, but he was beginning to think a little more clearly in other areas.

  He must have been insane even to propose trading places with Dallas. His only defense was his physical condition. Pain played games with the mind. He’d been looking for an escape and the bluff had provided the most direct route. It had also turned out to be a disastrous one.

  Long after he was sure Carmen had left the apartment, he rose from her bed. Long after he realized she’d been right that he was starting to feel better, he placed a call to Ben.

  By the time he hung up, his suspicions were confirmed. Things weren’t working well on that end either.

  Ben had been frantic and so damn glad to hear from him, Logan had thought the man was going to cry. As Ben had so bluntly phrased it, “This Prince-and-the-Pauper routine may have played well for Mark Twain, but it’s not cutting it for Prince Enterprises.”

  It wasn’t that Dallas wasn’t giving it his best shot. It wasn’t even that Ben couldn’t handle the specifics of the Kramer-Carmichael merger, or a hundred other major and minor decisions bound to come up in the course of a month. Instead it was something that neither of them had been able to anticipate, but should have guessed.

  Preston Prince was coming home three weeks early, and he was demanding an audience with his son.

  Assuring Ben he needed just a few days more to give his face time to heal and then he’d step back into character, Logan hung up; he knew what he had to do.

  He stood in Carmen’s shower, letting the spray and steam ease some of the aches from his body while another ache built in his chest.

  He had four days. In four days he’d lose his freedom. Significant as that may have seemed when this charade began, the real significance was outweighed by another factor.

  In four days he was going to lose Carmen.

  Letting go of something he’d never really had shouldn’t seem like such a loss. Yet it did. In spades.

  He reached for the faucets and twisted them off. For a long moment he stood there staring at the shower stall as water dripped in his eyes and the bitter taste of self-pity welled up in his throat. He quickly swallowed it back, along with his cynical pride.

  Oh well. At best it had been a long shot. He told himself he’d have probably tired of the game long before the month was over anyway.

  With a deep, weary sigh, he shoved back the shower curtain and reached for a towel. Knotting it at his hips and avoiding looking at himself in the steamy mirror, he stepped out into the hall—and directly into a waist-high version of a clinging vine.

  Catching his balance with a hand against the doorjamb, Logan looked down on the shining black hair covering the head of a little boy who had clamped short, sadly slender arms around his thighs like a pair of vise grips.

  “What the—”

  “Oh, dear.”

  He snapped his head up at the sound of Carmen’s voice.

  Their gazes met and held for a speaking moment. Her dark eyes revealed how hurt she felt. In silence, he tried, with a look, to tell her he was sorry. But looks weren’t going to help any more than words would set it right.

  Pride made her lift her chin. She graced him with a small smile. I’m a survivor, it said and it’ll take a lot more than a busted-up cowboy with testosterone flooding his brain to get me down.

  He prayed to a God he hadn’t given much thought to of late that she was as tough as she’d like him to think she was.

  “Juan,” she said, turning her attention and her energy to the business of prying the little boy away from Logan’s legs. “Honey, let Johnny go.”

  Juan wasn’t about to budge. The child clung like a seasoned rider on the back of a bronc. When it became apparent he wasn’t going to let go, Carmen tried to reason with him.

  Dropping to her knees, she spoke slowly and patiently to the boy. “Juan, you’ve got to be careful. Remember what I told you? Johnny was in an accident. He’s not feeling so good. Honey, you’ve got to let go.”

  If possible, the little arms tightened their grip around his thighs.

  “Juan, Johnny can’t walk if you don’t let him go.”

  As exasperating as the situation was, Logan felt an oddly disturbing pang of compassion for the child. He didn’t have a clue as to what to do. He’d never been around children. For that matter, he hadn’t ever really given them much thought. The thought that struck him now, though, was that he felt like an anchor and this child was adrift at sea.

  “I’m sorry,” Carmen whispered, looking up at him. “He was so worried about you when I told him you’d been hurt.”

  Her gaze drifted quickly over Logan’s bare chest, where beads of water from his shower still pearled in springy curls. His heart pounded heavily at her sweeping, visual caress.

  “I’m glad to see you’re up. Are you . . . are you feeling better?” She stared at the towel knotted at his hips before quickly looking again at his face.

  “Yes. Much better. The shower made me feel almost human.”

  He couldn’t help but notice the deep flush on her cheeks as her gaze darted again to his chest, to the slipping towel, then back to the boy.

  “Good. That’s good. If you could just let him know you’re okay, I think we could get him to let go—at least until you put some clothes on.”

  Logan gripped the towel, knotting the corners in his fist before it slipped past the point of total exposure. It wouldn’t do for either of them to witness the physical evidence of what the look in her dark eyes was doing to him.

  He glanced down at the child and, after a moment’s hesitation, surprised himself by touching his other hand to the boy’s hair. Juan craned his neck, looked up at Logan with huge black eyes filled with far too much trust. They looked achingly troubled and claimed ownership of wisdom far beyond their years.

  Shaking off that puzzling thought, he forced a smile. “It’s all right, Juan.” His voice sounded curiously gruff, even to his own ears. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m okay. Even if I look a little dented around the edges.”

  The child continued to stare up at him and, after a long moment of indecision, lowered his head and clung even tighter.

  Confused, completely out of his element, Logan let his frustration show. “What the devil’s going on here?”

  Carmen’s gaze swung to his, a perplexing frown on her face. He could see from her expression that he’d made a major blunder. Whatever connection Dallas had to this child, it was binding. His continued ineptness at handling the boy’s distress would give him away before he had the chance to tell her the truth about who he was. And the truth was the least of the debts he felt he owed her.

  Carefully prying the small arms from around his legs, he faced the child squarely. “Come on, Juan. I’m okay. You think old Johnny would let anything bad happen to him? That wouldn’t work, now, would it? If I let anything happen to me, I wouldn’t get to see you, now, would I? And that would never do.”

  The scrawny arms relaxed. The pinched frown on Juan’s face, however, stayed in place.

  What the hell did kids react to, anyway? Logan wondered in frustration. Then he thought of Ruby. More than a housekeeper, more often than not his only family when he was growing up with a mother and a father who were rarely present, Ruby used to make him cookies when he was a kid. Ruby and her cookies had pulled him out of many a blue funk. Surely that time-honored tradition still held some clout.

  “Come on, partner. I’ll bet Carmen can find you some cookies while I get my pants on. Right, Carmen?” he asked, praying he’d said the right thing.

  Evidently he had, because while she still looked at him a bit oddly, she was smiling.

  She touched Juan’s shoulder, getting his attention. “Johnny’s right, Juan. I’ve got your favorite. How about some chocolate-chip cookies and a glass of milk?”

  It looked as if the cookies were going to do the trick. After giving Logan one last, measuring look, Juan let go, put his small hand in Carmen’s, and let her lead him toward the kitchen.

  Logan stared after them, wondering what had just happened, remembering Dallas’s explanation of Carmen’s generosity: . . . if a lost child needed mending . . .

  Juan must be one of those lost children he’d been referring to.

  After he’d dressed in another pair of Dallas’s faded jeans and a dark cotton T-shirt, Logan made his way slowly into the kitchen to join them. Juan was well into his glass of milk. By the telltale crumbs on the plate in front him, he’d evidently polished off a fair share of cookies to boot.

  Carmen sat at the table beside him, watching him, her hands wrapped loosely around a coffee mug.

  Logan eased into a chair, quietly assessing the situation. As if he’d been waiting for that move, Juan scooted down from his chair and slipped to Logan’s side without uttering a sound. After staring silently up at Logan for several long, searching moments, Juan leaned against him, his small hands resting on Logan’s thigh.

  Totally at a loss, Logan looked to Carmen for guidance.

  She wasn’t about to give it. As quiet as Juan, she watched and waited.

  It seemed there was nothing left for him to do. Feeling clumsy, but driven by compassion, he eased his arm around the boy’s small shoulders and gave him a brief, solid hug.

  The silent communication must have been the reassurance the child needed. He looked up into Logan’s eyes and smiled. A big, trusting, contented smile that put a lump in Logan’s throat and spread an unfamiliar warmth through his chest. Instinct took over then. He ruffled the boy’s hair then turned to Carmen.

  “You’ve got a man here who could go for some milk and cookies too. How ‘bout it?” he added when she just sat there, tears gathering in her eyes, a sweet smile of praise spreading over her face.