MEREDITH AND CY were married a week later in a small, intimate ceremony in the local Presbyterian church, with Myrna, Mr. Smith, and Blake for witnesses. Afterward Blake and Mr. Smith returned to the house with Myrna while Cy and Meredith boarded a plane for Canada, where they were to spend a brief weekend honeymoon at Lake Louise in Alberta.

“I wish we could stay longer than this,” Cy told her regretfully as they stared from their balcony at the towering Canadian Rockies looming over the valley where their hotel was located.

“So do I,” Meredith agreed. “But we’ve both got our little chores to attend to.” She smiled up at him, her eyes full of joy. Last week Dr. Bryner had run tests, and since they’d proved inconclusive, he’d had her come in again the day before the wedding. Just as they were getting ready to go to the church for the ceremony, the doctor had called them with some not unexpected but wonderful news. Meredith was, indeed, pregnant.

“It isn’t too soon, is it?” he asked, concerned for the first time that he’d forced her into a decision she had the right to make for herself.

“Don’t be absurd.” She slid her arms around his neck, feeling the immediate response of his body to her nearness. They’d been very circumspect before the ceremony, preferring to wait for further intimacy until they were legally married. This was the first time he’d even touched her since the night she’d agreed to marry him.

“You might not have been as willing to give up your responsibilities if I hadn’t take the choice away from you,” he said quietly.

“Oh, Cy.” She sighed, smiling against his mouth as hers teased it. “Do you honestly think any job would stand a chance when I could have you?”

His teeth ground together and his eyes closed as she kissed him. He didn’t deserve this, he thought as he half lifted her against him. He didn’t deserve such devotion, such headlong love.

“I’ve hurt you so badly,” he breathed.

She nibbled at his lower lip. “Kiss me better,” she whispered, deliberately brushing her thighs against his in a sensuous sweep. “Love me.”

His eyes blazed down into hers, dark with feeling. “With my body, I thee worship,” he whispered.

“Cy!” She closed her eyes and moved against him, her body throbbing with kindling desire as she felt him go rigid with arousal. “Yes,” she whispered, shivering. “Yes, now you can….”

He laughed through his own urgency. “You aren’t suppose to notice that,” he bit off against her feverish lips.

“Who could miss it?” She teased at his mouth. “I’d have to be numb.”

“Meredith…” he lifted her, despite her protests, and carried her back into their bedroom, his mouth covering hers hungrily.

They undressed each other with hands that barely fumbled even in their haste, so intent on getting closer that reality began to blur around them until they were in a sensual world of their own.

He spread her out across the green-and-gold coverlet, his eyes adoring the soft evidence of her condition: the swollen fullness of her pretty breasts, the growing darkness of her taut nipples, the faint swell of her belly.

“Did you look like this when you were carrying Blake?” he asked, tracing her stomach with reverent fingers.

“Yes,” she whispered, smiling sadly. “I’m sorry you missed it. But this time you’ll be with me all the way.”

He nodded, but there was a deep regret in his eyes as he sprawled beside her, his hair-roughened torso poised just above her while he gazed at her nudity.

She reached up and touched his cheek. “Cy, don’t look back. It’s in the past, where it should be. You have no reason to resent Henry now.”

“At least he cared about you, took care of you,” he said reluctantly. “I’m grateful for that.”

She drew his hand to her breast and held it there. “I love you,” she said softly. “We have the rest of our lives, and a beautiful son. And another child on the way.” She touched her stomach and smiled. “You can walk again. The bitterness and hatred are all gone. So many blessings, Cy,” she said, searching his eyes. “So much to be thankful for.”

“All right,” he replied. “I’ll stop dwelling on the past.” He bent toward her parted lips. “Touch me,” he whispered as he took them.

She followed the thick arrowing of hair down his chest to his flat stomach and lightly drew patterns in it, feeling his powerful body tense and arch.

“No,” he groaned. “Not…like that, sweetheart.”

Her eyes opened and looked into his as he took her hand and taught her what to do, watching her the whole time with the muscles in his face cording like drawn rope.

“I never taught you, did I?” he asked.

“No one ever did,” she emphasized, loving the feel of all that tense masculinity under her fingers. “We never had time for foreplay, in the old days.”

“We’ve got time now,” he whispered, bending to her breasts. “I’m going to be good to you, little one. No rough loving. Tonight it’s going to be the way it was the night we made the baby, all velvet and blues.”

“Your back…”

He smiled against a hard nipple, feeling her arch as he drew on it with his warm mouth. “Remind me to read you a passage from the book I bought on backache,” he whispered. “It mentions the beneficial massage of lazy, rhythmic lovemaking.”

“Really?” she whispered.

“Really.” He moved slowly until she was beneath him, his forearms catching most of his weight as he brushed his body against hers. “See how exercise pays off?” he whispered, watching her shiver with the incredibly sensual caress.

“Oh…yes!” she gasped. “But wouldn’t it be better…for you…on your side?”

“Maybe. But I want you under me this time.” He held her eyes while his powerful leg parted hers so that his hips could settle between them. “Help me, little one,” he whispered, feeling her body move to accept the fierce arousal of his. “Join us.”

She trembled all over from the sheer sensuousness of his husky deep voice, the slow teasing of his body. She arranged her hips to accommodate him and started to close her eyes when she felt him begin the exquisite process of filling her.

“No,” he said huskily. “Open your eyes.”

She blushed as her eyes met his. “Watch me while we make love,” he said, his voice as slow and tender as the movements of his hips as he teased and probed and withdrew. He bent, brushing his mouth over the parted curve of hers. “Yes, like that. We’ve never watched each other this way before.”

“There was never…enough time,” she said, gasping as he deepened the slow movement.

“Never like this,” he agreed. His breath caught. His jaw tautened as he looked down into her eyes. “I want to drag my mouth over your breasts,” he said unsteadily, “but I can’t do that…and watch your face. I want to see your eyes when…you lose control.”

She shivered with pleasure. He was possessing her now, almost totally. She had to stop herself from tensing, because he was more potent tonight than he’d been in a long time. Her nails bit into his powerful arms as he hung just above her lips.

“Relax, now,” he whispered, sensing the contraction of her muscles. “Just relax. You can take all of me. Slowly, my darling. So slowly.” He brushed his mouth with tender reverence over hers and lifted it so that he could see the torment building in her wide eyes. “Like the blues, deep, slow rhythm that climbs up from the depths and shoots like lightning to shatter against the night. Yes,” he breathed as she began to move to the rhythm of him, tiny sobs tearing from her throat as her body gave in to him completely.

He gasped, too, at the shock as she eased the way for him and he felt the complete union of their bodies all the way up his spine.

“All…the way,” he bit off, his hips moving now with short, sharp stabs that were slow and smooth even as they aroused. His fists clenched by her head on the pillow and his face began to contort. “Oh, God, baby, all…the…way…now!”

She couldn’t answer him. The terrible, sweet rhythm had her in its coils, too, and she answered him with her body, measuring it to his as the rhythm deepened to unimaginable oneness. She felt him as she never had, felt the agonizing completeness as they reached with painful slowness to grasp a thread of pure electricity and then gave themselves to the staggering jolt of fulfillment.

In the back of her mind, she heard his hoarse groan at her ear, felt him convulse helplessly over her. She went with him, into the maelstrom, into the heat, laughing brokenly as she fell into a hot, black oblivion where ecstasy was the only occupant.

She couldn’t breathe. A heartbeat was shaking her body, and she was drenched in sweat. She opened her eyes, feeling thick hair against her tender breasts, powerful legs brushing abrasively against her own as he moved with a slow, predatory laugh.

She managed a weary smile for him, her hands possessive as they touched his hard face, his damp, unruly hair.

“I love you,” he whispered, and it was in his eyes, in his face.

He’d told her that he’d never said the words before. Tears stung her eyes. “I’d have known already,” she whispered back. “But it sounds like sweet heaven.”

“Yes. Say it to me.”

“I love you,” she obliged lazily. She reached up and nibbled his mouth with her teeth, smiling at his instant response. “Do it again.”

“Optimist,” he chided.

But she knew better. She smiled wickedly and moved her hips, very gently. His response was instant and intense, and she laughed. “One man out of twenty,” she reminded him, gasping as he reacted slowly to the teasing words and movements.

“Is capable of multiple orgasms,” he finished for her, his eyes sparkling as he bent again to her mouth. “I can. Can you?”

“Oh, yes,” she sighed with pure delight. She smiled under the warm crush of his mouth. “All night.”

“When you’ve had enough, whisper uncle,” he said into her open mouth, and she laughed.

It was almost dawn when she whispered it, and by that time he was exhausted, too. They slept in a tangle of bare arms and legs and didn’t wake until well after dark.

She could barely move when her eyes finally opened, and her first thought was of his back. How could she have forgotten?

She sat up jerkily, her eyes horrified.

He opened his lazily and then wide, arching a thick dark eyebrow at the look on her face. “Did you think you’d killed me?” he asked politely.

“Your back!”

“My back is fine. How is our baby?” he whispered, sliding his hand over her warm belly. “We didn’t hurt him, did we?”

“He, or she, is just fine, thank you,” she said with a loving smile. She slid onto his body with a tired sigh, drinking in the ecstasy of being loved, being close to him. “I love you.”

“That goes double for me.” He kissed her hair and folded her closer. “Try to get away now.”

“I wouldn’t dare, you might let me go.”

“Never again. Not unless I go with you.” He eased her over onto her back and looked down at her tenderly.

She traced the thick hair on his chest. “But what we did last night was like dying.”

“Every time we love will be like that, from now on,” he said quietly, searching her eyes. “Because for the first time, we aren’t keeping secrets, flying false colors. We love with everything in us, no holding back.”

“Yes.” She smoothed her hands over his chest. “I’m glad I came back to Billings, Cy,” she said. “Even if it was originally for all the wrong reasons.”

“So am I. Although, if I’d known where to find you, I’d have been looking long before this. I’ve looked for years, Meredith. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped. And here you turned up, all by yourself.”

She nodded. “Out of revenge.”

“You had that.” He touched her belly. “But it backfired, didn’t it?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” she murmured dryly.

“No? Then what would you say?”

“That he or she is the product of an extremely satisfying merger between two industrial giants.”

He burst out laughing. “Well, he or she is marketable and shows a steady profit,” Cy said outrageously, gathering her smiling face in his hands to kiss it soundly.

A LITTLE OVER seven months later, Russell Lawrence Harden was born, despite a completely pink layette that his mother had painstakingly assembled.

“I told you to have the amniocentesis,” Cy murmured smugly when he was holding his son in his arms. “My father came from a line of boys, didn’t Mother tell you? Not a girl in the bunch. And it’s the father,” he added with unforgivable superiority, “who determines sex.”

“Wait until I get home and well, and I’ll show you who determines sex,” Meredith said with a challenging twinkle in her weary gray eyes.

He stood over her lovingly, his son cradled against the hospital gown they’d made him put on to hold the infant. “That would be a first,” he mused. “I almost had to get a fly swatter to keep you out of my bed this last month.”

She made a face. “Can I help it if you’re so sexy, you make my knees go weak just by walking into a room? I get turned on just listening to you talk on the telephone.”

His eyes twinkled. “Useful knowledge, that. I’ll have two new phones put in.”

“You do that,” she said with a demure smile.

Myrna Harden came in, gowned like Cy, her wrinkled face beaming as she was allowed to hold her second grandchild.

“How’s Blake?” Meredith asked her, because Blake and Mr. Smith were still at the house.

“Missing you, and very anxious to meet his new brother,” Myrna replied, crooning to the tiny infant. “Isn’t he beautiful?”

“Handsome,” Cy said with a glare.

“He’s a baby, he can be beautiful if he wants to be,” Meredith fussed.

He threw up his hands. “Oh, for heaven’s sake…!”

Meredith laughed. “Grumpy….”

“I’m entitled to be grumpy. You were in the recovery room for hours, and this is the first day you’ve had any color at all in your face. I’ve been worried.”

“I’m going to be fine,” she reassured him. “And you were with me every minute, until they took me into the delivery room,” she said, smiling at him. She grimaced a little, because she’d had to have another C-section. They’d anticipated it, though, and she’d checked into the hospital on the date Dr. Jacobson, the obstetrician, had named. “You must be tired.”

“You’re the one entitled to be that,” he said, clasping her hand as he bent to kiss her forehead. “You can come home in four days.”

“That will be lovely.”

“And Blake can read you bedtime stories,” Myrna offered.

Meredith laughed. Her eyes held her husband’s for one long, lovely instant, and then she dragged them away to watch first her son’s tiny face and then the radiant elderly one bending over it. Three of the dearest people in her world, she thought, two of them finally displayed in their true colors, long having discarded the masks that hid their pain and guilt and doubt.

“Colors,” she said absently.

“What?” Cy asked.

She just shook her head, smiling. “Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

She closed her eyes as the fatigue began to catch up with her, compounded by drowsiness from the pain medication. But when sleep finally arrived, like the sun after the storm, she dreamed of rainbows.