Wild Enough For Willa

5

Willa de Mello was afraid of the dark, afraid of going to sleep, afraid of bad dreams. Especially when there was a big bad wolf lounging in the stuffed armchair right beside her.

So, she lay in the dark and wondered how in the world she would get away from Luke McKade. Not that she was really worried. For all his macho bravado, the big, oversexed lug was a pussycat…at least compared to Brand.

She’d known he wouldn’t force her to do it. Not if she didn’t want to. A man like him lived for challenges. He was so conceited he truly believed it would be child’s play to win her, before he bedded her.

Willa was a cat lover. Thus, she understood predators. Cats liked to stalk and wait, to play a bit with their prey. They savored the chase, anticipating the treat. In his mind the treat was a yellow-haired party girl. A lot of men had been fooled by her hair color and sexy looks.

Ha! This was one lady who wasn’t about to serve herself on a silver platter to another oversexed rogue, even if he had paid a thousand dollars for the meal. Under different circumstances, he might have been fun. Not tonight. But Brand, what he’d nearly done, had changed Willa forever. Willa’s secret agenda was a matter of life and death.

Not that McKade wasn’t attractive, if a girl went for tall dark and disturbingly handsome and rich and powerful, which did have a certain appeal to a fan of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters’ novels. But Willa was way too disillusioned and in way too much trouble to take on a new man, especially another know-it-all bully who thought the worst of her. All her life she’d been misunderstood. If her appearance didn’t get her into trouble, then her wacky responses to life and literature did.

What she’d been looking for was someone who believed in her, who accepted her—who respected her, who saw past her sexpot, dumb-blond good looks. She’d known she had to have a man who didn’t mind a woman who was a little different. A man who didn’t expect her to be a deb or a Martha. Here in Laredo, the highest class debs were known as Marthas and Marthas were the equivalents of New Orleans Mardis Gras queens. And Willa had thought, until tonight’s rude awakening, she’d found such a man in Brand.

Desperate moments. Wild impulses. Reckless deeds.

She was used to this sort of thing. Like a cat, she would land on her feet.

It isn’t just you anymore though. You can’t keep flying by the seat of your pants, Willa dear.

Her conscience always had Mrs. Connor’s voice. Dear, soft-spoken Mrs. Connor had been her favorite art teacher at Trinity Elementary. Mrs. Connor hadn’t minded if she hadn’t colored in between the lines, if she’d drawn her own pictures instead. When all the other kids had been coloring red apples on apple trees in their workbooks, Willa had drawn an upside down orange tree floating on a cloud because there had been an orange grove right in her backyard. And sometimes, when she’d lain under her favorite orange tree and stared up at the branches, she’d seen clouds floating above her tree.

If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Connor, Willa wouldn’t have majored in art in college. She wouldn’t have become the biggest success in her class by going on to the grand career of painting T-shirts for a living. Of course, real artists despised her. Or, at least, Willa imagined they did. But she did make a good living. Which was more than a lot of real artists could say.

If things were half as bad as McKade described, you were in a heap of trouble tonight, girl.

Willa always talked back to Mrs. Connor.

Tied to a bed in that vulgar, uncomfortable costume? Who me? McKade probably ripped it off some other woman and then embellished what happened to exaggerate his own importance and humiliate me.

As if he read her rebellious thoughts and saw through her denial, McKade grumbled and shifted his large body in that chair that was much too small for him. Poor boy. He probably wanted to attract her attention, so she’d feel sorry for him and invite him to bed.

Ha!

Not that she wasn’t grateful. If it hadn’t been for him, there was no telling what might have happened to her. But Willa didn’t have the sort of mind to dwell on such things. She believed life was an adventure. She believed in destiny, that everything that happened was supposed to happen—and all for the best. One didn’t have to understand. One had to accept and go on.

But tonight…Brand…

If half of what McKade said was true, and deep down she knew it was, tonight things had gone way too far. Well, she was safe now, or she would be when she got out of town and escaped McKade.

Soon.

Willa was warmhearted and irrational. High drama was her forte. From birth she had been a handful, getting herself into more mischief than ten curious little girls.

Was it any wonder? After all, she’d barely been five before she was the tragic heroine of a grand adventure. Her adoring parents, both every bit as whimsical and reckless as she, had been swept off their yacht in a stormy sea only seconds after they’d lashed poor Willa to the mast.

Willa had survived two days and two nights in that storm while the boat broke up beneath her. Like the ancient mariner in her favorite poem, she’d gone mad with grief and fear, but she’d found her courage, too. That was why, or so her imminently practical if ever-so-scandalous aunt, Mrs. Brown, said, “Willa’s exasperating because she can’t take life, or at least what normal girls consider life, seriously. She can’t plan for the future. She’s too busy living.” Not that the tyrannical Mrs. Brown was always so philosophical about Willa’s shortcomings.

To Willa, the moment was all. Nobody had more fun than Willa. Nobody got into more trouble. As a little girl, she hadn’t cared a fig about making good grades.

“She even fails subjects she’s a whiz in,” her teachers complained. “She could be so brilliant in math. And she’s fast when she takes a notion to be.”

But math had bored Willa. Why should a little girl waste precious life working problem after problem she already knew how to do? Especially when one preferred staring at mysterious creatures such as butterflies or pill bugs and wondering what the world was like to them? Did pill bugs have schools that were dreadfully boring with dull books and endless, repetitive exercises?

She never painted the same design twice on her T-shirts. She never cooked a recipe the same way, either.

Willa, the woman, had a fatal weakness for the wrong kind of man, the bossy, judgmental McKade running true to her type. He wanted to tie her down but blamed her for his own desire.

But surely, surely he wasn’t as horrible as Brand.

Ditch McKade. The sooner the better, said Mrs. Connor.

But he’s so cute. And he thinks I’m cute.

A girl does love to have fans.

I’d think you’d have learned your lesson.

He’s fun to tease.

With McKade on her mind, Willa drifted off to sleep and was instantly enveloped in nightmarish visions from hell.

Ever since her parents’ accident, she’d had bad dreams. Tonight, the monster was Brand. As always he was dressed elegantly. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Unaware that she clawed the sheets, unaware of Luke McKade growing alert in his dark chair, she moaned aloud.

Dreams move more quickly than reality and make connections and reveal secrets that terrify. At first, Brand was sweet and loverly—her very own Prince Charming. Then he was holding a plastic bag over her face and she was gasping, clawing holes in it to get air.

The bag shredded. Brand laughed and said he’d been trying to pull it off.

Then she told him about the baby.

“A baby?” He was smiling; that meant he wasn’t listening. “This is good, princess.”

“Oh, Brand, I’m so in love.”

He was laughing, but there was something dark about his eyes. “In love? With me? This is good. I love you, too.”

“What about our baby?”

“Willa, my princess, you’re so young.”

“You said you loved me.”

“And I do. But are you ready for a baby?”

“I’m pregnant. We have to marry.”

“Of course we do.”

She could tell he wasn’t listening.

“You’ll tell your parents?”

“The sooner the better. They’ll love you. We’ll have a huge wedding. We’ll go to Hawaii for our honeymoon. We have a house in Maui, you know. This is good.”

“We’ll be so happy…as happy as I was when I was a little girl and my parents were alive.”

She thought of all the sexy, shameful things Brand had forced her to do even when she’d told him she hadn’t wanted to. Oh, she’d tried so hard to please him. So hard, she often hated herself after they’d finished making love.

Irrational fear consumed her. Suddenly, she was running from something dark and monstrous that had a fiery green tongue.

Brand was so beautiful and golden, so rich and powerful. She had loved him ever since she’d been a little girl. He’d been so much older, he’d never noticed her back then.

If Brand was smiling, why was she terrified?

Not going to be a baby. Not going to be a baby.

Who had said that?

“Let’s get married tonight. In Mexico.” How Brand’s green eyes had sparkled.

“What about your parents? Our big wedding?”

“We’ll tell them later, my love. We’ll have a second wedding.” He’d made her drink…to toast the baby. She’d choked on the bitter stuff and then gotten woozy.

“Not good for the baby…”

“There’s not going to be a baby.”

That’s when he’d said it. Brand had said it. In Mexico. In the shack. Before he’d told her what he was really going to do.

Two men held her. She was weak, drunk or drugged, not herself in any case. Brand was ripping off her nylons, not caring that those awful men with those lust-filled eyes were watching them. She didn’t care much, either, not when she knew what he was up to. He was tying her hands and her ankles to the bed.

The baby. Don’t hurt the baby.

Brand leaned over her with a syringe. She felt a sharp prick in her left arm. His face whitened in a blinding blaze that looked a lot like a halo.

“There’s not going to be a baby. Everything will be okay. You love me, and I love you. And we’ll go on as before.”

Before her eyes a green horn sprouted from Brand’s thatch of golden curls, and his halo fell and dangled there. Brand winked at her, his green eyes sparking fire.

She screamed and screamed. Somebody else was there—a wiry, sickly looking fellow with haunted eyes and greasy, spiked red hair. Moonlight glinted off something black in his hand.

Brand dove behind her, using her as a shield.

She was staring up into stormy gray eyes. “Don’t shoot my baby!”

Gunshots. Little bits of concrete falling onto her face.

They were all gone. Except McKade looming over her, his contemptuous, piercing gaze more lustful than Brand’s or his men’s. When she struggled, McKade brandished a broken beer bottle near her face, slicing his own finger with those razor-sharp edges. A drop of his blood fell onto her cheek. Who could have illusions about such a man?

She wanted Brand, who was elegant and golden, Brand whose family was rich and famous and respectable.

By comparison, McKade was big-boned and rough, his appetites blatantly carnal.

Brand was her Prince Charming…not…

Not going to be a baby.

A tongue of green fire shot out of McKade’s mouth.

Then Brand, toppled halo and all, returned. The vision caught fire and turned the most livid shade of green.

She began to scream.

It was deliciously disconcerting to awake in Mc-Kade’s arms, her lips pleasantly smothered against the villain’s warm, wide furry chest, the very same villain who’d caused her nightmare. Brand had made her do awful things in bed. McKade, who had rescued her, had not forced her to earn that money.

Then McKade, his voice tense with the strain, said, “Not going to be a baby. What did you mean? Whose baby?”

“Nobody’s,” she lied, nestling closer because his warmth was so lovely. The last thing she would tell him about was the baby.

She was pregnant.

The powerful father of her baby, for all his surface charm, didn’t want her or their child. He would have killed her. McKade had saved her from Brand and other worse dangers in Mexico. He’d saved her baby. But McKade didn’t respect her. A man of his obvious limitations never would. And he certainly wasn’t the fatherly type.

Not going to be a baby. Oh, yes, yes. She was going to have her baby.

I saved your cute little ass.

McKade wanted that cute little ass. He’d paid a thousand dollars for it.

And he would get it, pregnant or not, if she didn’t get out of town—fast. She couldn’t go home. No telling who Brand had at her aunt’s house waiting for her to return. Too bad for McKade that her purse, her car and her money were at her aunt’s because that meant she needed his. If he was as rich as he said he was, he could get more.

McKade’s large hand stroked her hair, her back. “It’s over. You’re safe.”

Safe? When the Baineses controlled Laredo? When Brand had said he’d never let her go? When the rogue who’d found her tied up in Mexico, and bought her because he thought her cheap and awful, held her in his arms? When the brain beneath her mussed curls was spinning worriedly with ideas about how to best him?

Safe? With him? If he thought that, then he was even more clueless than she’d thought.

The impossible devil laughed, the pleasant rumble deepening the grooves that bracketed that beautiful, ever so sensual, male mouth.

Safe? She hardly knew him, but the chemistry or whatever it was that was between them was so volatile they’d almost had sex twice. She felt as if she were a delectable mouse waiting for some big cat to pounce. After Brand, she was afraid of sex.

She stared up at McKade, and was aware of harshly carved features, of his animal white smile, of that unruly lock of midnight-black hair that tumbled over his brow. A sensible woman would be terrified to bump into a man like him in a dark alley.

Sensible? Nobody had ever accused Willa of that failing.

Safe? The sooner she outwitted this beguiling devil and got out of his clutches, the better.

“Thirsty,” she whispered, shuddering against his chest so he’d go, so she could think, if that’s what her churning mental processes could be called.

He left her, splashed water into a glass in the bathroom, but returned too soon, the mattress dipping beneath his weight once more.

He lifted her into a sitting position again, holding her against his heated length while she sipped from the glass. When she’d gulped it all down, he set the glass aside and continued to hold her.

Leave. Leave.

Of course, he didn’t. His head was too thick-boned and dense for telepathy to work. Slowly, shyly, she became aware of that heavily muscled, big-boned body against hers, aware of his heat seeping inside her, aware of her nipples hardening against his massive chest. Meltingly pleasant sensations rippled through her.

She sighed blissfully. Then she caught herself.

Aware of her response, he tensed.

It was just the terror of her nightmare that made her so vulnerable. That made him feel so good…so natural. So right. She’d been shy about sex…even with Brand, only letting him because she’d loved him so much. Only playing the games he’d wanted later because she’d wanted to win his love.

Letting a man hold her like this wasn’t sex. Still, it was exciting. Her feelings were like those of a seventeen-year-old girl with a first crush. How, after all she’d been through, all he’d put her through, could she feel…It was too soon after Brand.