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Was it that he’d stood up to her? Men never did. They were always as eager as puppies to please her. To impress her.
Bellini hadn’t tried to impress her at all.
In fact, she was pretty sure he hadn’t liked her any more than she’d liked him.
All he’d wanted was to get inside her panties.
Which was what she’d wanted, too.
Okay. So those things made him a little different, but they didn’t explain why the sex had been so hot.
A possibility nibbled at the edges of her mind, one she didn’t like, but one of the things she’d always believed in was honesty. With herself, anyway.
Cheyenne let the water wash away the last vestiges of shampoo.
She’d had the feeling that he’d held back. That he’d wanted to take her instead of letting himself be taken. Well, nothing unusual in that. There was almost always that to contend with, a man who’d let her do her thing and then try to take over, but she never let it happen and they were cool with it.
Bellini hadn’t been cool with it.
She’d sensed that need in him. The hunger to reverse their positions, to pin her beneath him and ride her as a stallion rode a mare.
But she wasn’t into me-Tarzan-you-Jane sex.
That was why she’d sneaked out of the room while he slept, because she’d known that things would be different once he woke, that he would not tolerate having control wrested from him again, and the amazing thing was that the thought had not so much frightened her as it had…
As it had excited her.
“Crazy,” she said, as she shut off the shower. Totally, completely crazy.
Why would a woman want to be taken? Want to give herself up to a man’s touch, his body, his control? Why would a woman want to bend to a man’s domination? To anyone’s domination?
Been there, done that, thank you very much—and what was the point in reliving what had happened hours ago with a stranger in a cheap motel room?
Dr. Will was right about one thing.
What mattered was getting on with your life.
And she was doing exactly that.
The ranch in Texas. That was getting on with your life, wasn’t it? Maybe she wasn’t in such demand as a model anymore. So what? She’d made a fortune, a veritable fortune starting when she was seventeen, and she’d had the brains to invest it wisely. She was twenty-nine now, and she had one huge pile of dough.
Cheyenne wrapped herself in an oversized bath towel and stepped onto the heated bathroom floor. She dried off briskly, hung the towel on the rack and reached for her hairbrush.
She had not spent her money on drugs or clothes or bling. No fancy cars. No Manhattan townhouse.
Instead, she’d turned it over to the smartest broker she knew and she’d watched it grow.
The result was that she owned this condo as well as a small house on a lake in upstate New York where she kept her beloved pair of Thoroughbred horses.
She’d purchased them on a whim—amazing, because she wasn’t given to whims, but she’d been on a shoot at a horse farm in Kentucky and a stable hand had spoken casually about a pair of horses kept in a small barn by themselves. He’d said that they didn’t win races, that one had some kind of hoof problem and the other was off its feed.
“Bad investments,” the guy had said, and shrugged.
“So what happens to them?” Cheyenne had asked, because, right away, she’d had a bad feeling.
“The owner will cut his losses.”
“How?”
“Best of all worlds? Sell ’em to a riding academy. Otherwise, who knows? Dog food factory. Or maybe, you know, they’re insured for a lot of money.” He’d given her a sideways glance. “Sometimes, horses like them just, you know, they just get real sick…”
“Would the owner actually…”
The guy had looked at her as if she were an idiot. And she had to be, to ask the question. The answer was, he would. Of course, he would. She knew that better than anyone. There’d been a horse in her childhood, a sad, broken-down creature, her best friend, her only friend…
An hour later, she’d been the owner of a pair of horses. She’d shipped them to her place in upstate New York.
And fallen in love with them both.
She’d gotten them excellent veterinary care, hired a boy who loved horses to look after them. She’d spent every possible weekend with the animals, nursing them back to good health, winning their trust and, in turn, trusting them in ways you could never trust people. The horses calmed her, it was as simple as that, and when she’d stumbled across an article in a magazine about equine therapy, even though she’d discarded as pure BS all the mumbo jumbo shrinks proposed for dealing with emotional trauma or childhood disorders or whatever you wanted to call simply not sucking it up and getting on with life, the idea that working with horses could help troubled kids made sense.
Having Baby in her life when she was a kid had helped her. Not for long, but for a while.
Cheyenne switched on her hair dryer, bent at the waist, brushed and dried her hair until it was a fall of shiny black. Then she stood straight, pushed the slightly damp locks away from her face, and stared at her reflection in the mirrored wall.
Her appraisal was dispassionate, that of a pro for the product she sold.
A long, lean body. Up-tilted breasts. Curved hips. Long legs.
Her hair was straight and glossy, her cheekbones razor-sharp. She had thick, sooty lashes, a nose that was, as one photographer had gushed, more interesting than perfect, and a wide mouth above a determined chin.
The body was Mama’s: a small-town beauty queen who ended up with a pocket full of failed dreams.
The rest was her father’s: a reservation Romeo with failed dreams of his own.
Not that she’d ever seen her father, but in her sober moments, that was how Mama had described him. Black hair. Thick lashes. Proud nose. Full mouth.
“Fell for him while I was workin’ in a diner near Fort Laramie,” she’d said in her whiskey-rough voice. “Easy on the eyes. Looked like Cochise musta looked in his day.”
Cheyenne had heard the Cochise comparison endless times and when she was ten or eleven, she’d foolishly pointed out that Cochise had been an Apache and her father, according to Mama, had been Cheyenne.
Mama, drunk as usual, had backhanded her.
“Smart ass kid,” she’d said.
“Oh, sweetie,” she’d sobbed the next day when she saw Cheyenne’s black eye, “I’m so sorry,” but by then Cheyenne had learned apologies were meaningless whether they were for beatings or for being warned to make Mama’s latest boyfriend happy…
“What in hell are you doing?” Cheyenne demanded of her reflection.
That was all history.
She had escaped Wyoming, escaped Mama, escaped the life she’d been born to and created her own life, one that she, alone, controlled.
And she was wasting time.
The Horse Sense fundraiser started in less than an hour. The timing was bad—she’d stayed in Wilde’s Crossing a day too long—but until almost the last minute, she’d toyed with the idea of baling on the fundraiser and then she’d realized no, she couldn’t do that. The Horse Sense board was counting on her to greet guests and convince them to open their wallets and give generously to the foundation.
She knew she wasn’t a real supermodel anymore, but nobody outside the business did.
She had to get dressed, look glamorous, and get into the mood to be Cheyenne McKenna, whose face had graced magazine covers.
Plus, she wanted to see the expressions of the people on the Horse Sense board when she told them she was giving them a ranch and she’d foot the cost of reconstruction.
Just thinking about it made her smile.
She took a dress from its hanger, a long fall of silk in shades that ranged from the palest blue to the deepest sapphire, and let it slither down over her head.
No thong. No bra. No panty hose. Not with a dress like t
his. No accessories except a pair of deep blue Manolos with icepick heels, and a rhinestone clip to hold her hair back from one side of her face. Add a flick of black-as-midnight mascara. A dusting of blusher on her cheeks. A slick of bright red lip gloss.
Cheyenne looked in the mirror and smiled.
She looked the way she was supposed to look. Like a million bucks. Like a magazine ad. Like everyman’s dream come to life.
Would she bring in lots of donations?
She hoped so.
And then, just as the doorman phoned to tell her the limo that had been sent for her was waiting at the curb, she had one last, unexpected thought.
What would Luca Bellini say if he saw her like this?
Would he lift her in his arms, carry her away, strip the dress from her and do all the things men wanted to do to women? Those things that gave men power and made women helpless. Touch her breasts. Put his hand between her thighs. Clasp her wrists, push her against a wall, force her to accept his domination?
She waited for the rush of nausea that always accompanied such images…
And felt, instead, breathlessness, a melting of her bones, a sensation of heat low in her belly.
Cheyenne gave herself a mental shake.
Then she grabbed a small silk purse, tucked two hundred bucks, a comb, her keys, her iPhone and her lip gloss inside, and set off to face the world.
CHAPTER FOUR
