Lacy by Diana Palmer

Author:Diana Palmer [Palmer, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Adult, Western
ISBN: 9780373771578
Google: xO6LZ9sqgd8C
Amazon: 0373776330
Goodreads: 255628
Publisher: HQN Books
Published: 1991-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Cole felt Lacy trembling and he felt bad, he seemed to never get on the right foot with her. He'd hurt her again. He didn't know what to do, what to say, to make things right.

"I won't leave Marion," Lacy said shakily. "This.. .isn't necessary. You don't have to pretend that you mind if I leave."

He lifted his head, looking down at her with hard, glittery eyes. "But I do mind. I always did."

"You didn't even write."

"What could I have said?" he asked quietly. "That I felt like some kind of animal after I'd finished with you, and you cried and.. .bled..." He let her go abruptly and moved away, anguish in every line of his body.

Lacy was startled by the action. "It was my first time," she said, hesitant to talk about something so intimate even with her own husband. "I had a married girlfriend in San Antonio, who...explained it to me. It's unpleasant for some women. I was simply unlucky."

"In more ways than one. If I'd been more experienced, it might have been easier for you." He leaned his shoulder against the wall, unable to look directly at her. "I couldn't take that again," he said heavily. "I didn't go after you because I thought you'd never want me to touch you, and I still wanted to." "You didn't say that."

His broad shoulders rose and fell. "How could I? You didn't know what I was, what the war had made me. You didn't know that I wasn't a whole man anymore."

"That isn't true," she said huskily. "You're more man than I've ever know in my life, and I loved you! If you'd been missing both your legs, it wouldn't have mattered—and even then you would have been a whole man!"

He risked a glance toward her, recognizing the truth in her eyes. He drew in a slow, unsteady breath. In his posture, in his working clothes, he looked like an old-time cowboy, right down to the battered Stetson and the stained leather chaps.

"There could only be the two of us," he began finally. "No children, ever. And in bed..." He turned his attention back out the darkened window, to the faint silhouette of the flat horizon. "In bed, it would still be uncomfortable and embarrassing."

"Why?"

"Because I don't know how," he said shortly, glaring at her. "Don't you remember?"

"Most people don't know how at first. They learn."

"Do they?" he scoffed. "If you ever saw me in the light, you'd run screaming for San Antonio," he said harshly. "You'd hate yourself for ever letting me touch you in the first place!"

"Rubbish!" she shot back, furious with him. "You're scarred. So what? You can walk and work and your brain is still in good order. As for a child..." She swallowed, because it hurt that there wouldn't be one. "It's very possible that I'm barren, did you consider that? Some women never conceive. I might have been one of them."

Hope, like a tiny candle in the darkness, was beginning to kindle deep inside him.

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