Only 03 - Only You

away. “No! Stop! You said a kiss, and I kissed you just the way you said you liked it, didn’t I? I’ve kept my part of the bargain. Please, stop. Reno, please. ”
    Slowly, very reluctantly, Reno lifted his head. The lingering, sensual release of Eve’s nipple from his mouth sent a helpless wave of response through her.
    He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth against an involuntary groan. The hand he had pressed between her legs was surrounded with the kind of fire he had never drawn so quickly from any woman.
    He flexed his fingers, savoring Eve’s passionate heat, drawing a cry that wasn’t wholly fear from her flushed lips.
    “Why should I stop, gata ?” Reno asked huskily,watching her. “You want it damn near as much as I do.”
    His hand moved again, and again she cried out, for her pantalets had no center seam. There was not even the frail barrier of cotton to dull the sensation of his hand curved possessively around her.
    Eve grabbed Reno’s wrist, trying to drag it from between her legs. She couldn’t. He was much stronger than she was.
    “You said you would stop if I gave you an honest kiss,” Eve said, raggedly. “Wasn’t that an honest kiss? Wasn’t it?”
    The desperation in Eve’s voice was unmistakable, as was the sudden stiffness of her body and the hard arcs of her nails digging into his wrist.
    Yet at the same time she was a fire surrounding Reno, luring and burning him with each caressing instant.
    “If that kiss had been ‘honest,’ I’d be hilt deep in you right now and you’d be using those sharp little daws on me in a different way, and we’d both be loving every last bit of it,” Reno said flatly.
    “Is that the only honesty you know?” Eve demanded. “A girl giving herself to every man who wants her?”
    “ You wanted me .”
    “And now I don’t! Are you going back on your word, gunfighter?”
    Reno took a deep breath and called himself twenty kinds of fool for wanting the expert little cheat from the Gold Dust Saloon. He thought he had been teased by the world expert, one Savannah Marie Carrington. She had tied him in sexual knots and then dragged promises from him before she would let him so much as kiss her hand again.
    But each time the promise she really wanted—a settled life in West Virginia—wasn’t forthcoming,she had buttoned her bodice with calm fingers and left him. It hadn’t been that easy for Reno to turn passion on and off. Not at first. But he had learned. Savannah Marie was a good teacher.
    “I didn’t promise to stop,” Reno said coolly. “I just said we’d negotiate after one kiss. Offer me something, gata. Offer me something as interesting as this.”
    Reno’s hand moved once more, pressing against Eve, caressing her. Again she tried to push him away.
    “The mine,” Eve said. “The Lyons’ gold mine.”
    “Spanish treasure?”
    “Yes!”
    Reno shrugged and bent toward Eve again.
    “I already won that, remember?” he asked.
    “Just the journal. It’s no good to you without the symbols,” she said quickly.
    He paused, watching her through narrowed eyes. She might have been eager for his kisses earlier, but now she was eager only to be free of his touch.
    Abruptly Reno removed his hand from Eve. He was damned if he would allow himself to be teased into wanting a girl more than she wanted him. That was the kind of mistake a smart man never made more than once.
    “What symbols?” he asked skeptically.
    “The ones Don Lyon’s ancestor carved along the trail to mark dead ends and dangers and gold and everything else that would help.”
    Slowly Reno moved back, giving Eve more room. But he was careful not to get beyond arm’s reach of her. He had seen Eve move. She had an unsettling speed, every bit as fast as a cat.
    “All right, gata , talk to me about Spanish gold.”
    “My name is Eve, not cat,” she said.
    She grabbed the camisole that Reno had tossed aside and yanked it on.
    “Eve, huh? Somehow I’m not surprised. Well, my name isn’t Adam, so don’t try feeding me any apples.”
    “Your loss, not mine,” she muttered. “I’m told my apple pie is the best to be found west of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line, and maybe south of it as well.”
    Hurriedly Eve fastened the camisole with fingers that were unusually clumsy. She knew she had just had a narrow escape.
    And she was grateful that gunfighters kept their word.
    “I’m more interested in gold than I am in apple pie,” Reno