She whispered his name, the sound urgent and ragged.
He whispered hers back as he eased inside her, gritting his teeth against the silken feel of her, fighting for control. But control was lost. And he honestly didn’t care. In the moments before he felt her convulsing around him and his brain shut down, he was aware of nothing beyond the woman who made it impossible for him to hold back and the white-hot heat that melted the lock on his soul.
Chapter Twelve
The light from the hallway spilled across the bed. In that soft glow, Greg eased his weight off Jenny and rolled to his side. With one arm beneath her head, their legs tangled and their breathing ragged, he let his hand roam from her breast to her belly.
For a fleeting instant, he found himself wishing the child she carried was his. In the next heartbeat, he felt himself go still.
He didn’t know which shook him more. The unexpected thought, or the way the protectiveness he felt toward her had gotten all knotted up with physical desire.
He was in unfamiliar territory here, caught up with something that felt utterly foreign and wholly capable of moving beyond his control. Feeling distinctly threatened by that, he told himself the only thing he really felt was guilt. Sex had never been part of the deal.
He could tell by the sudden tension in Jenny’s body that reality had hit her, too—and that she felt no more certain than he did about what they had just done.
The phone beside the bed gave a quiet ring.
The tension in her supple muscles increased.
Being the only doctor for miles, he never had the luxury of ignoring a ringing phone.
“Stay where you are,” he said, and raised up to reach across her.
Jenny heard Greg’s deep voice rumble above her as he answered the call. But the uncertainties waiting to be felt had barely piled up when she heard him say, “Sure. I’ll tell her,” before he offered a remarkably normal-sounding goodbye and hung up.
He eased back to his elbow, his arm still under her neck. With her head tucked toward his chest, he could see nothing of her expression.
“That was Claire.” With the tip of his finger, he nudged back the fringe of hair around her ear. “She said she knew I had plans tonight so she invited you over to work on the festival.”
He’d forgotten all about Amos until just then. It seemed he’d forgotten pretty much everything. His intention to keep his hands to himself. His common sense.
Jenny blinked at his beautifully muscled chest, not quite able to meet his eyes. “Does she want me to call her?”
“Only if you can’t make it.”
She gave a little nod.
His voice dropped. “Are you all right?”
Jenny wasn’t sure if she was or not. She felt shaken to the core by the need she’d felt for him. As the cold light of reality shed it’s painfully bright light on their intimate position, what disturbed her more was his mental withdrawal from her. She’d felt it as surely as she did the weight of his heavy thighs trapping her leg. Yet his tone held nothing but concern.
She lifted her head, forced a faltering smile. “Sure,” she lied, desperately hoping it was just insecurity making her imagine the vaguely shuttered look in his eyes. “You?”
His glance swept her face. Leaning down, he gently kissed her forehead. “Yeah,” he finally said, but the distance was still there.
The void around her heart suddenly opened again. Desperate to hide the effects of that awful empty sensation, she kept her tone as light as she could. “Then, you’d better get up and get dressed. You’re going be late if you don’t.” She glanced at the clock on his nightstand, grateful for the excuse to turn from his quiet scrutiny. “You don’t want to keep Amos waiting.”
Jenny curled away from him as she sat up, the sheets falling away. With her back to him, she reached for her sweater, pulled it over her head without bothering with her bra. Grabbing his pants, she handed them to him and reached for her panties and jeans.
She could practically feel his hesitation.
“Are you okay if I go?” he asked quietly.
The concern in his voice sounded suspiciously like obligation. It was bad form to bolt from bed after making love with a woman. But the last thing she wanted was for him to stick around because he felt he had to. Or, worse because he was feeling sorry for her. She hadn’t exactly begged him to take her to bed, but she’d come close.
“Of course I am.”
Bedclothes and khakis rustled as Greg threw back blankets and pulled on his pants. Jenny kept her back to him while she fastened her jeans. But he had the feeling it was far more than modesty preventing her from facing him. The spontaneous combustion in the kitchen had revealed needs she hadn’t wanted him to see, needs she didn’t feel comfortable with even now.
The guilt jerked harder, along with a sharp tug of responsibility for the woman totally messing up his peace of mind. He really had wanted to make things better for her. Now it seemed he’d just made them worse.
He reached toward her, only to let his hand fall when he realized she might pull from his touch. “I’d never intended for that to happen, Jenny.”
His quiet words froze her where she stood. She didn’t want to hear him apologize. Having him say he was sorry he’d made love with her was just a little more than she could handle just then.
Frantically searching for the brave smile that served her so well, she turned before he could.
“I hadn’t, either,” she told him, handing him his shirt. “Let’s just blame it on hormones. Okay?” She motioned to the clock on her way to the door. “You won’t have time for dinner, but you should go soon. You don’t want be late meeting Amos. And I need to get ready to go to Claire’s.”
He’d always known what to say to her before he’d married her. Now he hadn’t a clue.
Greg sat in Charlie’s truck in front of Amos’s old farmhouse with his wrists draped over the wheel, staring at a pasture he didn’t really see. He had no idea how he’d thought he could live with Jenny without wanting her. He was a healthy, red-blooded male with a normal, healthy libido. She was an attractive, desirable woman whose spirit intrigued him, whose body drove him wild and whose smiles warmed his heart.
Having made love with her, knowing how she moved beneath him and the little sounds she made when he’d caressed her, only made him want her more.
Were she anyone else he’d been that attracted to, he would have had no qualm adding a little mutually fulfilling sex to their relationship. They would be together for a couple of years, and as good as they’d been together that one time in bed, sex would be incredible with her. But the situation was different with Jenny.
She wasn’t the sort of woman who could have a physical relationship and walk away from it unscathed. The fact that she had invited such intimacy between them told him her heart was involved already—and he refused to leave her feeling hurt and used the way Brent Collier had.
He sat back, ran his hand down his face. His relationship with her seemed to get more complicated by the minute, but he had no intention whatsoever of complicating it any further by letting her think they could possibly have a real marriage. From now on, he’d keep his hands in his pockets and do nothing else to take advantage of how truly vulnerable she was right now. The last thing he wanted was to shake her trust in him.
With Amos standing on his porch, hollering at him to come on in, he didn’t let himself wonder why he wanted that trust so badly.
Jenny had thought before that it would just take time for her and Greg to find their way around each other. She’d even thought they were making headway—before she’d let her emotions ruin everything.
There was no mistaking the need they both felt to get past what he’d never intended to have happen. Or the subtle distance he put between them. At the clinic they managed well enough. But on nights he didn’t have other commitments or weekends when she wasn’t at Claire’s, he either stayed later at the clinic than usual or worked on the festival booths in J
oe’s garage.
Greg was a man who filled needs where he could. She didn’t know if he’d simply been born with an amazing natural generosity, or if he filled those needs because doing so answered a need in him. She had no idea what that need might be, since he seemed to have very few. But he did it with nearly everyone. He did it with Amos and Lorna and with the kids he coached in the spring. He did it with Charlie. What he was doing for her was truly extraordinary, far beyond the scope of anything anyone else had ever done for her before. But she knew he hadn’t taken her in because he wanted to be part of something. And she knew without a doubt that he didn’t want the commitment her heart was beginning to crave.
That didn’t stop her from loving him, though. Or from worrying about him—which was exactly what she was doing a few hours after he’d been called out to tend an elderly patient with breathing problems in North Stratford.
The night was miserable. Windy, cold and wet with the kind of driving rain that made it nearly impossible to see. She knew how dangerous the winding mountain roads could be in the dark. Especially when a person drove too fast, and Greg had definitely been in a hurry when he’d left.
He finally had his black SUV back, the one he’d been driving the night he’d shown up on her grandma’s porch, drenched and in pain. The vehicle looked safe enough. It was as rugged as Joe’s Jeep and had new tires. And Greg had told her that the accident the night he’d met her was the only one he’d ever had. Still she worried. As he’d pointed out, she did it well. When a person was good at something, she might as well perfect it.
Or so she was telling herself as she paced the living room in her blue robe and fuzzy slippers a little after two o’clock in the morning.
She’d paced another lap from the entry to the middle of the living room when she heard his key in the lock.
Greg stepped inside and glanced up the stairs. The light in the upstairs hall was on, but the rest of the house was dark.
Dripping on the entry rug, he closed the door with a soft click and hung his raincoat on the coat tree by the mirror so it could drip on the rug. As he did, he heard the shuffle of feet in the living room.
He had been up since six o’clock the previous morning, driven what felt like a thousand miles on the rounds he’d taken for Bess so she could take his rounds Thursday, and just put on another sixty to North Stratford and back. A headache brewed at the base of his skull from lack of sleep and the glare of headlights on the winding pavement, and he had to leave at the crack of dawn for a four-day rural medicine symposium. Yet at that moment he was aware mostly of the odd sense of comfort he felt when he saw Jenny standing there.
She’d waited up for him. He’d never had anyone do that for him before.
“How is your patient?” she asked, her arms crossed over her long robe.
“One of her nieces set her oxygen too low. She’ll be fine.”
She held his eyes, shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
Anyone else might have thought her response terribly unsympathetic. But Greg knew she wasn’t thinking of his patient just then. She was thinking of him and of how often his services were called on for problems that weren’t problems at all, or for situations that were but which easily could have been avoided.
He was more drawn than he wanted to admit by her caring.
Knowing she needed her rest, he motioned toward the stairs. She moved ahead of him, her steps seeming almost weary, then turned when they reached the top of the landing.
She shouldn’t have stayed up, he thought. In the glow of the overhead light, she looked pale and tired herself.
“You don’t need to wait up for me when I’m called out like this, Jenny.”
“I know.” She gave a small shrug. “I just wanted to.”
That touched him, too. “But it’s really not necessary.”
It made no sense for them both to lose sleep. She didn’t seem to understand that was all he was saying, though. A pang of hurt shifted through her eyes, something she quickly tried to hide with her injured smile as she stepped back.
“I won’t keep you up. ’Night,” she murmured, and turned down the hall.
Within seconds she’d slipped into her room and closed the door.
It was clear to him by her expression that she thought he’d simply rejected her concern. With the distance he’d kept between them the past week, her reaction wasn’t entirely illogical.
He wanted nothing more than sleep. He had to be up in less than four hours to drive to Montpelier for the start of the conference at nine o’clock, and each passing second robbed him of the rest his body craved. But he hated the hurt he’d seen in her eyes. He hated more that he’d put it there.
Even with fatigue clawing at him to drag him to his bed, he moved down the hall and stopped at her door. Something inside him wanted nothing more than to gather her in his arms and ease that hurt away. He did want her concern. It was beginning to scare him just how very much he did want it. And her.
He’d touched his hand to the knob. He didn’t know if it was simply acknowledging what she might mean to him, or the unexpected realization that he’d let her get that close that made him hesitate. But in that moment, he could practically feel his sense of self-protection crumbling. Unnerved by the sensation, unprepared for what he’d just begun to understand, he dropped his hand from the knob.
Jenny heard the muffled sound of his fading footsteps on the runner in the hall. She’d all but held her breath when she’d heard him outside her door. Hearing him walk away now, the quiet click of his door closing, she dropped her robe at the foot of her bed and sank to the edge of the mattress. Feeling as tired and dispirited as she had in weeks, she crawled beneath the covers and curled into a ball.
Emergencies like tonight aside, she knew the reason Greg worked late and stayed away so much was because she was there. She hated the way that made her feel. This was his home, and her presence was driving him from it.
The knowledge tore at her as she shifted positions to ease the slight ache she suddenly felt in her lower back. There had to be something she could do to make their situation better. Some way to let him know that she would do anything to get back the ease they’d once had with each other.
She knew he had to leave early in the morning. So there would be no time before he left to set things right. But as soon as he returned, she would sit him down for a nice friendly conversation and hope for the best. Or she was thinking as fatigue pulled her into sleep.
The ache in her back woke her a while later and she shifted again. It nagged off and on until the pain itself seemed to shift and she woke hours later with what felt like the worst period of her life.
Four days had felt like forty.
Greg dropped his travel bag on the entry floor and glanced at the note Jenny had taped to the entry mirror.
She was at Bess’s. She also asked that he call her there when he got home.
Figuring she was involved in yet another project, he told himself he’d call from the clinic after he grabbed something to eat. It was afternoon and all he’d had was the hotel’s complimentary coffee and the apple he’d grabbed from the basket on the reception counter when he’d checked out.
He hadn’t left the closing dinner for the symposium last night until well after midnight. Dr. Cochran, the physician who would be taking his place in Maple Mountain, had attended also, and the two of them had shared war stories long after the formal functions had ended. Ed, as his colleague had asked to be called, had mentioned an article on a children’s respiratory virus in The New England Journal of Medicine that Greg hadn’t yet read. Since the publication was in his office at the clinic, he’d figured he would get it and read it that afternoon.
He’d downed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and was on his way back to the door when he again caught sight of Jenny’s note.
He wasn’t sure what made him decide to call now rather than wait. But he turned into his study, picked up the phone on his desk, dialed Bess’s number and
started flipping through the bills and mailers Jenny had stacked for him.
“Hey, Bess. It’s me. Is Jenny there?”
A moment’s silence preceded his nurse practitioner’s quiet, “She is.”
“She asked me to call when I got back.” Picking up a catalog for hiking equipment, he absently flipped through it. “Tell her I’m going to the clinic for a few minutes, then I’ll be home. Okay?”
“Actually—” he heard her reply, her tone oddly hesitant “—rather than go to the clinic, why don’t you come over here. I’ll tell her you’re on your way.”
He’d just started to throw the catalog into the wastebasket. It landed, forgotten, on the desk instead. Something didn’t feel right.
“Is Jenny okay?”
“Physically she’s fine,” she assured him. “Just come over. This isn’t a conversation we should have on the phone.”
It wasn’t that something wasn’t right, he thought. Something was flat wrong. He could feel that certainty sink into his chest as he left the house, heading out the back door rather than the front because cutting through the woods in back took a block off the distance to Bess’s house, and it was faster to walk than to drive.
He’d barely emerged from the shade of the dense trees and started up the gravel road when he looked toward Bess’s yellow cottage with its huge, thriving garden. Bess, impossible to miss in her cherry-red sweats, was already on the porch. Seeing him head toward her, she moved to the gate of her white fence.
“She’s inside helping me make applesauce,” she said, meeting him there. In the quiet of the beautiful fall day, the latch clanked as she lifted it to pull the gate open. “There’s something you should know before you see her, though. Physically she really is fine. But she miscarried.”
Suddenly rooted to where he stood, his glance jerked to the house. He jerked it right back to the woman closely watching him. “When?”
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