“Except you.” Randy faced him again. “He worships the ground you walk on.”
“Yeah, well, that admiration is a bit misplaced. He’ll understand that when he’s older.”
“He will always love his grandpa. And all you have to do tomorrow is give him orders to sit still, and he’ll do it—for you. Just tell him it will help you if he’s very, very well behaved.”
Jake smiled sadly. “I’ll do my best.”
“He’s such a good and loving little man. He’s just full of vinegar and sass—like someone else I know. And right now I need that someone’s arms around me.”
Jake smiled sadly. “Maybe that someone needs your arms around him.”
Randy couldn’t help the tears that came then. “Jake, I can’t do this anymore! I can’t pretend to be strong about this. This is different from when you left to chase after outlaws in Oklahoma,” she wept. “At least then you had your guns and your skills and the ability to fight back.”
Jake walked over and reached for her. She took his hand, and he led her to the bed. “This time we just have to fight back a different way,” he told her. He sat down on the bed and pulled her onto his lap.
“You can’t lose your temper on that stand tomorrow, Jake,” Randy reminded him.
“Peter has made sure I am well aware of that.” Jake kissed her hair as he held her tight. “Let’s not talk about tomorrow, mi esposa. Let’s talk about tonight. Let’s pretend there is no tomorrow.”
He pressed a big hand to the side of her face, and Randy met his lips. They kissed hungrily, almost savagely, as he laid her back on the bed. They didn’t bother turning down the covers. There wasn’t time. It seemed as though there wasn’t near enough time for anything—for this, for talking, for looking at each other, for touching, for remembering, just for being.
Jake pushed open her robe, and they kissed…desperately.
They touched…desperately. In moments they were both fully undressed and on the bed making love…desperately.
Randy grasped the bed rails as her husband took her. He seemed to be everywhere on her body, having intercourse with her, then stopping to kiss his way down her body to her belly, her legs, running his tongue inside her until she gasped in a climax, then back to intercourse, taking her…desperately.
Randy thought how strange it was that they seemed to have come full circle. He started out a wanted man, and their first time was just as desperate thirty years ago in a covered wagon somewhere on the plains of Nebraska…or was it the Dakotas? Maybe Wyoming. She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t think at all.
Now this. It had all come around to this. In a sense, he was a wanted man again, and it was tempting to think about running again…but now there was a whole great big family to think about. Back in that wagon all those years ago, they never dreamed it would come to two children and four grandchildren with more on the way—an adopted son—a fifty-thousand-acre ranch…all from that one night in a covered wagon when they were so much younger.
Jake moaned as he climaxed inside of her with several hard, pulsating pushes, and she whimpered his name. She kept her legs wrapped around him.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered, grabbing him around the neck and kissing him wildly.
“My God, Randy, I love you so damn much,” he groaned. “I’m hurting you. I’m so afraid this is our last time to be together like this that I’m moving too fast and not being gentle enough.”
“No!” She kissed his neck, his throat, his chest. “I want it to hurt. I want to remember this.”
He met her mouth again, searching deep until he was swollen yet again with the want of her, the desperate need of her, the aching realization that this truly could be their last chance to do this—after all the years; after all the other separations and all the worry and all the gunfights and all the running and all the places they had lived and all that homemade bread he loved coming home to; after the past four years on the J&L when, for the first time in their married lives, they thought they could be happy and at peace the rest of their lives; after that lovely time at the line shack.
Randy grasped the headrails again as he raged inside of her, and she arched up to him as though she couldn’t get enough of him. Jake finally slowed down and rocked against her in the way he knew, stroked her in the right places until he felt her climax intensely yet again, the pulses pulling him deeper so he took her harder again, licking at the tears on her cheeks, keeping hold of her bottom with strong hands in an almost forceful crush she couldn’t have gotten out of if she’d wanted to—and she most certainly did not want to.