Free Man of Ice by Diana Palmer

you think I’d know after last night?”
    She glanced warily ahead where Leslie was riding. “Last night you were holding back,” she said.
    “Yes, I was,” he admitted. “You’d just had a nightmare and you were terrified. I didn’t want to make it worse. But even this morning,” he said heavily, averting his eyes to the horizon. His broad shoulders rose and fell. He couldn’t bring himself to admit that even the hungry kiss he’d started to share with Barrie hadn’t been able to arouse him.
    Barrie noticed his reticence and kept her silence. She glanced around at the budding trees. Spring was her favorite season, although it certainly came later to Wyoming than it did to Arizona, even if May was basically the same in both places. Closer than the budding trees, however, was the irritated way Leslie Holton was glaring back at them.
    “We aren’t fooling her, you know,” she said suddenly, and lifted her eyes to search his. “She thinks we’re pretending.”
    “Aren’t we?” he asked with a bitter laugh.
    She supposed they were. Only it hadn’t felt like pretense that morning on her part.
    “That was a bald-faced lie,” he murmured after a minute, and the saddle leather creaked as he reined in his horse and turned to look at her. His eyes were level and penetrating. “Suppose we try.”
    She felt her eyes widen. “Try…?”
    “What you suggested last night. Or have you already forgotten where you put my hand?” he asked outrageously.
    “Dawson!”
    “You should look shocked. That was how I felt.”
    “That’s right,” she agreed, “pretend it was the first time a woman ever offered you any such thing!”
    He managed a wistful smile. It had been a very long time since he’d been able to laugh about his body’s lack of interest in women. “I can’t,” he admitted.
    “That doesn’t surprise me.”
    He drew up one long leg and wrapped it around the pommel, straining his powerful muscles against the thick fabric of his designer jeans. He leaned against it to study her, pigtailed and wearing similar clothing, jeans and a loose shirt. “You don’t wear revealing clothes around me.”
    She shrugged. “No. Because I don’t have to fight you off.”
    He cocked an eyebrow inquiringly.
    She grimaced. “Well, men come on to me all the time, and I don’t want any sort of physical relationship. So I flaunt my figure and flirt and talk about how much my family wants to see me get married and have a big family. You’d be amazed at how fast they find excuses to stop seeing me.”
    He chuckled. “Suppose someday a man calls your bluff?”
    “That hasn’t ever happened.”
    “Hasn’t it?”
    She realized what he meant, and her cheeks burned.
    “I don’t suppose I even bothered to tell you that I’d never seen a body more perfect,” he continued quietly. “Barrie, undressed, you could pose for the Venus de Milo. I’m not sure that you wouldn’t make her jealous.”
    She wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or a dig, because their relationship had shifted in the past two days.
    “I mean it,” he explained, so that there wasn’t any doubt. “And if I were still the man I was five years ago, you’d need a dead bolt on your door.”
    She searched his eyes. “I suppose at one time or another someone’s ventured the opinion that your problem is mental and not physical?”
    “Sure. I know that already. The thing is,” he added with a faint smile, “how to cure it. And you seem to have a similar hang-up.”
    She shrugged. “From the same source.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    She traced around her pommel. “The obvious solution…”
    He swung his leg back down and straightened as Leslie, missing them, came back to find them. “I’m not capable,” he said shortly.
    “I wasn’t offering,” she muttered. She glared toward Mrs. Holton. “Of course, she would, in a New York minute!”
    He cocked an eyebrow. “Maybe I should let her try,” he said cynically. “She probably knows tricks