So Kern had packed Julia off with Mr. Michaels, out of harm’s way and in safekeeping. Her heart was suddenly singing. They were all right, both of them…
Rhea moved off and Trisha switched jobs. The drinks were poured but the last mountain of sandwiches, almost impossibly, was gone again. It was time to make more. Someone set a lantern down on her table, a beacon of welcoming light as the night darkened.
Her hands kept moving but the smile on her face suddenly stilled. All right. She knew almost for certain that he was well; she was not nearly as certain that she could actually face him. It would be altogether easier on both of them for her to just slip away again…
“Hey, sweetheart, we have any more sugar stored anywhere?”
Sugar and dry cream. It hadn’t taken even the first hour to know where supplies were stored.
Well, in a while she would go. She was caught up in the scene, the tales of horror and the tales of heroism, the faces so exhausted, laughter without complaining, a community caught up in its cause. The discomforts were mounting: mosquitoes and aching limbs, the smoke smell burning in her eyes after so many hours of it, sticking clothes and light-headedness from sheer exhaustion. But there was joy, too, at being needed. It was her cause, her country, too.
“One more group coming in. Should be the last. Hey, has anybody looked straight up recently? Clouds!”
And there were restless white-gray swirling patterns low in the night sky. Trisha’s hands served a dozen more makeshift dinners, but her face kept flickering up. A breeze suddenly whispered through the camp, tossing up a paper cup and sending it soaring.
“That has to be the last group,” Rhea said wearily from behind her. “And it’s nearly midnight, high time. I didn’t see Kern, Trisha. You want to ride out with me?”
“No, I’m fine. But thanks, Rhea.”
Only a half dozen people were left after that to handle the last of the cleanup. The Red Cross cleared out and the tents were being taken down; paper plates and cups had to be stacked in boxes, the food organized. A sudden gust of wind brought the first hint of dampness-and a joyous shout from one of the men. Rain would destroy the last threat of fire, bring relief from the heat and oppressive haze; they all understood.
The sky seemed to hesitate, and then it happened. Drip to sprinkle to spray to downpour. Trisha dropped the folded blanket in her hands and was helplessly caught up in the laughter of the rest. From adults with weighty responsibilities one minute to children the next-they were all the same, punch-drunk tired, arms spread wide to embrace the rain, tongues out to lap up the taste.
Trisha’s blouse soaked to her skin, the cool liquid dribbling down her neck, down her breasts. Her hair was matted to dark gold, her face raised to the dark sky for the blessed freshness. Like silk on her skin, just like silk. The others forgotten, she inhaled the new fresh air, her eyes closed in sheer sensual enjoyment…
The fingers that clenched her arms bit. Trisha’s eyes blinked open, lashes too matted with rain and mascara even to see. Her heart lurched, recognizing Kern.
His shirt gaped almost to the waist, smudged with soot and grime and torn. He smelled of sweat and smoke, and Trisha had never seen such hollows beneath his eyes, such a white pallor of exhaustion beneath his tan. The rain pelting down matted his hair; even his beard and shaggy brows were dripping. Black coals for eyes seared down to her face and the fingers clenching her shoulders half shook her. “What are you doing here?”
She drew back, almost frightened by the towering rage that vibrated from him.
“Don’t you pull that trembling act with me! If I had you alone right now-”
“Kern…” Her voice was soft to his roar. She had expected anger when he saw her again and perhaps she was even prepared for it. But that was hours before, when she wasn’t limb-aching tired, emotionally strung out herself. The rain kept streaming down on both of them, but what a moment ago was blessedly cool now chilled. Soaked, wary, exhausted, Trisha trembled and raised her hands to release his from her shoulders.
“We ready to get moving, Kern?” someone called out from behind them.
“Right now,” Kern snapped back, but he was still staring at Trisha. Her eyes flickered, scanning his features for any sign of tenderness, but the dark night and rain blurred his expression.
“You have to drive the others,” she said awkwardly.
“Everyone who’s left.” His hand on her shoulder slid down to her wrist, his grip so tight that it bit into her tender skin. She shivered again, holding back when he tried to pull her behind him.
“I’m not coming, Kern. I didn’t walk here. I rented a car. Just-”
“Don’t bother. You must be basket-case tired if you think you’re getting away like that.”
“No-”
“I’m too damned tired to argue.” His mouth silenced her with raw emotion that bruised her like a punishment as he picked her up. She was vised to his chest so tightly she could hardly breathe, a fire of protest and panic racing through her bloodstream as he strode toward the Jeep with her.
Enthusiastic catcalls greeted them from the five men packed inside, even more enthusiastic when she was all but threaded through the opening and deposited onto a variety of male laps in the back, deserted while Kern vaulted into the driver’s seat.
The ride was a nightmare. A Ray and a John identified themselves; the rest of the names she didn’t catch. The rain kept pouring down on the canvas top to the Jeep and the air was all but steaming from the packed damp bodies in such a close space. She couldn’t balance without touching someone’s thigh or stomach, and the four men packed in the back with her were just as exhausted as they were momentarily boisterous, teasing the lone lady in their midst. They’d have to share her, they said. And then it was thank God she was just a bit of a package, and Kern, how did he manage at night with such a squirmer?
The Jeep was finally braked in front of the neon signs of a motel in Gatlinburg. Kern grabbed up the keys and finally looked back at her. “You’re going to keep her safe for me for a moment, boys?”
“We decided to keep her, period,” one of the men quipped and the others laughed. Kern, expressionless, simply strode off into the motel office and returned a few minutes later to hand the room key to the man sitting in the passenger seat. “I took care of your transportation in the morning, ten o’clock. And breakfast’s on the house. It’s only one room, but there’ll be extra blankets. You guys can make do.” His words were clipped, and then the others were rapidly unfolding from the Jeep, following the lead of the first from the passenger seat.
The last hesitated. “Kern, I thought you were coming with us. There’s still no power beyond the valley, is there? And the roads weren’t clear…”
“We’ll manage,” Kern said curtly. “Just go on, get out of the rain. Get some rest. We all need it.” When the door closed and the last of the men were racing for the cover of their room, Kern turned back to Trisha, huddled and shivering in the backseat. “Get up here, Tish.”
She crawled forward obediently, not willing to be bounced any more than she had to be in the crude back compartment, too tired to argue anyway, and wordlessly grateful she did not have to pass the night in a room with the five other men. It didn’t take much intelligence to gather that there were simply no rooms left in the valley. Emergency accommodations only stretched so far in the thinly populated area, and the rain would have made it that much worse.
She glanced at Kern as he started the engine and put the Jeep in gear. Her arms were huddled across her chest from the increasing chill of damp clothes, but the real shivering came from inside. Her nerves felt like rubber bands, stretched to the breaking point, an absolute wretchedness that was beyond tears and beyond trying to calm herself down rationally. There’d been three days of stress and high-powered emotions, and she simply couldn’t cope with anything more.
He didn’t talk. He glanced at her once and switched on the heater, his face almost gray-white under the few streetlights they pas
sed. They passed through the town and started the familiar climb of the mountain road. It was less than half an hour before they came to the spot where she had parked her rented car. It seemed a year.
“Kern…”
He must have seen it, too, for his answer was rapid and his speed didn’t alter. “We’re going home. If I were you, I wouldn’t argue.”
It wasn’t that. In her car were clothes and her purse-and she looked back, watching the little red car disappear when they rounded the curve. And then just ahead there was a barricade where rocks had fallen. Kern stopped the car and she saw his figure by headlights pushing aside the barrier so they could get through. A huge rock had tumbled in the road along with other debris; the Jeep vaulted over them obediently, cocked just for one minute at a tilted angle that made her clutch the seat for balance.
They had just cleared that and turned a curve when Kern jammed on the brakes, throwing a hand in front of her to keep Trisha from falling forward. “Damn it,” he murmured as he slammed out of the vehicle again. It was a tree this time, stretched too far across the road for him to get over or around. She saw again his towering figure in the headlights trying to push the bulky obstruction, and something-finally-calmed inside. With a flick back of her hair she opened her door and ran out to help him, the rain drenching her all over again.
“Get back in there!” Kern shouted at her.
She paid no attention, trying to see in the darkness what they had to do. The trunk of the tree wasn’t so very large, but it was tall, and the little mountain of wet black branches seemed insurmountable, far too heavy to actually move for two or even four people. But they didn’t have to move it, just get around it…if they wanted to get home. And Trisha felt a momentum inside that brooked no other rational thought: she was going to get home.
Kern was pulling from the opposite side and Trisha waded in to help, involuntarily calling out when a rough sharp branch caught and scratched at her side.
“If you get hurt, I’m going to darned well murder you, Tish!”
“That was the intention anyway, wasn’t it. Kern? To murder me when we get home?” she shouted back. “Why don’t you tell me what to do instead of just glowering at me?”
Gasping, breathless, fifteen minutes later she raced back again for the cover of the Jeep with Kern just beside her. When she slammed the door she reached with both hands to lift the heavy weight of drenched hair from her face, but there was exhilaration in her expression. They had managed to move enough debris to get through, and Kern beside her sat a ridiculously long minute just looking at her before he started the Jeep again. There was just a twist of an unwilling smile guarded in that dark beard, the first she had seen since he’d found her, but it was there.
“You look like absolute hell!” he said, growling.
“Next time I’ll wear something more appropriate for a fire,” she promised lightly.
He started the Jeep. “Pardon?”
“Nothing, Kern. I don’t understand what all of this is about-why everything’s in the road-”
“A good-sized fire makes its own wind; trees start crashing into trees. There can even be an earthquake effect if it’s a good enough blaze. This one, thank God, wasn’t that bad. But bad enough.”
So it was not impossible, then, to talk for two and a half seconds. She closed her eyes and huddled down in the seat for the last of the ride, finally almost too tired to care that she was soaked and cold and frightened. She was not wanted and he was still angry, and she hadn’t even an inkling of an idea how she was going to cope, the thread of her heartbeat saying she simply couldn’t.
When the Jeep stopped again her eyes flickered open. They were home. No lights shone from the shadowed house and there was no sign of life, but the rain was finally dwindling to sporadic sprinkles, and the clouds shifting above were letting through the light of a crescent moon. She felt a sense of relief so intense that she simply closed her eyes for a moment, her limbs finally feeling like dead weight, and she was barely aware that Kern had gotten out until the passenger door opened beside her.
Obediently she turned her legs out, and just as obediently she told her mind to unfold the rest of her body, to get out and walk. All systems balked inside, as though to say, Sorry, Tish, we’ve just had enough. Large hands suddenly reached in and pulled her out, and for one insane minute she felt her forehead suspended to his chest as if that were her only contact with reality.
“You’re worse than a basket case!”
“You can’t hit a lady when she’s down,” Trisha murmured vaguely. Limbs like water were shifted and she found herself carried again, unable to protest, her eyes insisting on staying closed. She was dipped down so that his hand could reach the door handle, and then they were out of the endless moisture-dry, warm and close in the back hall. He set her tentatively on her feet, one arm still supporting her under her shoulder. “If you can stand for just a minute, Tish, I can get a lantern. We’re out of power at least until tomorrow…”
“Of course,” she murmured, “I’m perfectly fine.”
It sounded good, but the moment his arms left her her knees promptly buckled. Before she could fall she was swooped up again.
“They don’t seem to work,” she told him, apologizing faintly.
“You’re making it damned difficult, Tish,” he murmured in her ear. “You know damn well I still feel like murdering you.” But it really no longer sounded that way. And it really no longer felt that way as he carried her blindly through the house, groping at doorways up the completely black darkness of the stairway. His grip before had been rough, communicating anger, dominance and a kind of frightening awareness of the physical power of the man. But that same power now was simply holding her, sheltering her. The limpness in her mind and body she no longer minded, stopped trying to fight it, curling to the safe haven of his chest.
The mattress suddenly met her back. Vaguely she was aware of his hands tugging at her jeans, shrugging them off her. She was shivering again suddenly, aware of him in a different way. He leaned over her to work at the buttons on her shirt, fumbling with the wet material. Then with exasperation he arched up and pressed a swift kiss on her lips. “You know I’d never hurt you,” he murmured. The blouse ripped open, the buttons an effort he was not willing to make. From a long way off she knew she was shivering violently, and then a warm blanket was curled around her, her hair smoothed back with his palm, and another kiss brushed on her lips before he got up from the bed. “I’ll get you warm, Tish. I’ll be right back.”
And he was there again soon, though by the time he curled next to her, snuggling the blanket over both of them, she was asleep, only instincts guiding her to move her body back into the warmth he offered.
Trisha woke once for a drink of water and a second time for a call of nature. She remembered neither, and her first real awakening to reality was reluctant, a shaft of blinding sunlight hot on her sleep-laden eyes. Lazily she turned from it, burrowing back into a pillow, vaguely aware in some gray netherworld that every muscle ached, that her body simply craved sleep forever, and that nothing could conceivably feel as good as the coolish soft sheets and downy pillow.
“Tish. Wake up, love. Just to eat. You can go back to sleep, I promise.”
“No.”
Vaguely she heard the faint velvet chuckle, muffled from where her head had burrowed beneath the pillow. The cocoon of sheet was gradually stolen from her body, and then two palms snuggled at the sides of her neck, smoothing out the muscle cramps that even sleep had not been able to penetrate. Her eyes blinked open into the pillow as the gradual massage took in shoulders and spine, stealing to her sides where just the edge of her breasts were available to his hands. It was such an incredible effort to move, yet she curled just a little so that his hand could massage her breast, what he obviously wanted to do, and then did, kneading a pulsing rhythm into the firm flesh until her sluggish heartbeat changed rhythm…
She groped startling awake then, jerking away with wide
eyes to lean back up against the headboard, feeling completely disoriented as she stared warily at Kern.
He’d pulled on an old pair of cutoffs; not bothered with anything else. He had the nerve to look not only wide awake but rested, the gray look of exhaustion gone and only a faint tinge of shadow remaining beneath his eyes. He radiated an awareness of her and a determination in the way he stood watching her that struck a chord of panic within.
“We’re going to spend the day in bed,” he drawled lazily. “But it’s been more than fifteen hours since either of us has had anything to eat. Now there’s a hunger and there’s a hunger, Tish, you can choose…”
“Kern…” There was a tray, she saw, on the floor.
“I built a fire for the coffee. There’s no power yet. That left bread and canned goods, but the coffee won’t stay hot forever. This is a one-shot choice, bright eyes, because just like you, the inclination is to sleep another twelve hours or so.”
Hunger suddenly gnawed at her stomach. Avoiding his eyes, she reached to cover herself with the sheet, awkwardly draping it over herself as she stumbled first to the bathroom where she found a pitcher of water. Something else he must have done whenever he had gotten up. The splash of moisture on her face helped, but she groaned when she looked in the mirror, grabbing for a brush. The golden hair was rain-softened and shiny, but hopelessly curly and unmanageable. Without makeup to cover the shadows, her eyes looked huge sapphires. It was just not the way she wanted to look, facing Kern again, with the sheet trailing behind her like a child playing house. She felt defensive and awkward, and it certainly didn’t help that she knew she had slept naked, curled to him the entire night.
He was crouched by the tray when she came back in, but he rose as she crossed the room. It was only when she had kneeled down on the carpet beside the tray that she heard the click of the lock behind her. She whirled around in time to see the key buried in the pocket of his cutoffs.
“That’s called nowhere to run,” he said deliberately.
“I’m not running anywhere,” she said, snipping back. “I left, Kern; there’s a difference.”
Man From Tennessee Page 15