Man From Tennessee

by Jennifer Greene

  “The hell there is!”

  She drew in her breath when he loomed closer, but he only crouched down again. The feast was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a plastic container of berries, lukewarm coffee served in paper cups. Sunlight streamed on all of it as they ate across from each other, the vibrations shooting across the little tray as if it were a magnetic field in a lightning storm, but their appetites were affected not at all. She was starving, so was he; nothing in heaven or hell could have tasted better.

  When she was done, she crouched over to take care of the paper plates and empty cups, not looking at him. “I need to go out, Kern,” she murmured awkwardly.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do. I need to…” She faltered when his eyes finally captured hers. It wasn’t really a bathroom she had in mind but the road, but she couldn’t look at him and lie. She never had been able to.

  “Need to,” he repeated gently. “Need to, Tish…what about want to? Tell me what you want to do…”

  She shook her head, wishing desperately that the horrible, drained sensation would leave her, the weariness of so many days of stress that a few simple hours’ sleep simply hadn’t cured. “I can’t talk about it, Kern. Please…” she pleaded softly.

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because I’ll just start crying.” A rueful smile trembled on her lips, her sapphire eyes haunted. “You wouldn’t be able to hear me then, anyway. Oh, Kern, just leave it-you know it’s best…”

  The tray slid from between them as he shoved it to a distance. Both his arms lifted in front of him, simply suspended in thin air, waiting. The distance was so short to the cradle of his body; tears were already helplessly falling as he pulled her onto his lap, rocking her like a child, smoothing back her hair. “I couldn’t bear it when I found you gone, Tish. I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t. And when I saw you at camp, looking so dragged-out tired and so beautiful in the rain, I wanted to kill you for risking coming here, for being so close to the fire. If something had happened to you…”

  “I had to know you were all right. I had to…” The tears choked in her throat. Her whole body was shuddering, curled into the circle of his arms. “All they’d say on the television was that the fire was west of the Smokies. What else could I do?” The tears finally lessened, and she cupped her palms tightly over her eyes.

  “What else could you do?” he repeated dryly, and very gently shifted her to face away from him, his legs cradling both sides of her. Tugging the sheet to her waist, he pressed a kiss in the hollow between her neck and shoulders again. “Since you don’t give a hoot in hell, Tish, there wasn’t a reason for you to do anything. You left, didn’t you?” he whispered. “Put your head down. No, never mind.”

  His fingers had started to knead her scalp but abruptly changed course. Before she could protest she found the rest of the sheet twisted from her and a bed of white linen made over the plush carpet. “Kern, please don’t,” she said helplessly. “Please-I don’t want this.”

  “Yes, I know.” He untangled her from the tense curl as if she were clay to be remolded, and then he molded. Both his hands worked the length of the back of her right leg, then the left, working out tension, working like a sensual, possessive drug. Kern’s touch, the label on the drug, and the addiction she already knew she couldn’t fight. “You left the first time because you didn’t want this. Then I could understand, Tish. I rushed you into marriage; I rushed you into bed. I wanted to give you the patience you seemed to need so badly, but as soon as I touched you… I wanted you so badly. And to see that look of fear in your eyes…I know I hurt you, Tish, but I never, never meant to…”

  A flush like fever warmed her skin as his hands strayed up, kneading at the firm curve of her hips and the base of her spine. Her eyes closed again, urging back tears of a different flavor. She felt, in his touch, in his words, the loving she had been so sure wasn’t there. He crouched over her, straddling her thighs as he worked the length of her back, smooth long strokes that vibrated with emotion from his hands.

  “And you’re going to tell me that you left this time because you didn’t want this,” he murmured. “That’s all it could have been, Tish, because the rest was fine. You know it was. You love the land like I do and you took to the life. So you need more than a house, and there aren’t any buyer positions in seven-story department stores, but you’ll never convince me that really mattered. You were so happy that day we flew over the land. You took to decorating my mother’s room, and you knew you could take on that shop you said you wanted once…”

  His mouth suddenly followed his hands, his lips caressing the long stretch of soft skin, his arms cradling the sides of her. Her body went silk for him, liquid silk.

  A radiant feeling of life was in her flesh and she craved to touch him…

  “So this time you loved the life, Tish, and that left only us. You care. It showed in your jealousy of Rhea. It showed the morning we talked in my office. And we still share the same dream-you would never have come back and worn yourself out working in that fire otherwise. And I saw you at that waterfall, Tish, before we made love. So that leaves us sex, just like it left us before. You want to tell me that you don’t want to be touched-not by me. There just isn’t any chemistry, is there. I just leave you neutral…”

  Kern turned her beneath him, straddling now the front of her thighs. The tenderness in his eyes was touched with despair, a pain she could hardly bear to see, and there was anger in his voice she knew graveled over that pain. “You’re lying to yourself, Tish, not to me! I can just look at you-there’s need in your eyes right now, desire. Your pulse is racing like white-water rapids; your flesh gives in my hands; your breasts are already swollen and I haven’t even touched them…”

  Gently her fingertips stroked his chest, soothing. “I love you, Kern,” she said softly. “I love it when you touch me. I always did. The only reason I left was because I thought you didn’t want me!”

  He leaned over with his lips parted to say something, but she pressed her fingertip to his mouth to stop him, shaking her head, the barest sheen of moisture in her eyes. “I knew you wanted me-in bed. That didn’t mean you wanted me as a wife again, Kern, someone to share your time and your problems and, yes, our old dreams. If you’d asked me here, perhaps I would have read it all differently, but you didn’t ask. I was just forced on you because of your mother. So you wanted to make love to me-and, God, I wanted you to-and we did, Kern, and then I asked you. You said you’d never ask me to stay again-”

  “I was trying to tell you that I said it all when I married you, Tish.” Kern almost growled as he leaned over her. “That that was a commitment for all time as far as I was concerned, but that I would never, never force or rush you into anything again. The choice had to be yours. I couldn’t ever again live with forcing you into something you weren’t ready for or didn’t want.”

  “But I thought it had to come from you,” she whispered, “because I was the one who failed you before.”

  His eyes clouded, his palms cupping her face. “Tish, you never failed me in anything,” he said softly. “You were just young. I could have done it differently…”

  “I never wanted you different and I never blamed you, Kern…” Like the waste of the fire, she felt the waste of so many years without him, so many years she could have loved him, been loved. She wound her arms around his neck and pulled him to her. Fiercely their lips met, an odd trembling in his body that communicated to her own, was matched in her own. If she had finally lost inhibitions with him at the waterfall, it was still nothing like now.

  She reached for him in joy, caressing his neck and chest and back. It was all such riches-the way his heartbeat surged beneath her fingertips, the way his body was so beautifully male, his hard-muscled thighs no less arousing than the grainy skin of his tanned neck. A new rhythm kept beating inside, building; she didn’t want to give in to it yet. She wanted to savor the sensual sweetness of just freely loving him, an
d there was no part of him she didn’t want to touch, to learn all over again in loving…

  He understood so well, loving her body with the same wonder that she loved his. But it was not the same. She could touch so easily, but not be touched so easily-there was a spot in the V of her throat where she could not bear the stroking caress of his lips. Her breasts had swelled before he touched them, but the languid lick of his tongue made her senses feel like velvet. Her back arched for closeness, rhythm inside beginning to sound in her ears, blocking out day and place and sunlight. The brush of his beard in the hollow of her stomach, and-

  “No more, Kern, please…”

  Sensations swarmed her senses. His lips covered the pleading in her throat, but he would not give in yet. His palm smoothed its way down her throat and breast and navel, to the silky down between her thighs until the rhythm was the only thing in her bloodstream, a surging love that craved completion.

  “I love you, Tish, I love you, I love you…”

  Her voice echoed the chorus, the song in her heart, the rhythm of passion rich in her blood and in her skin. When he moved over her, she felt his love, his cherishing in every motion he made. He took her with such sweet fierceness that she lost Tish completely, became part of Kern, their limbs and minds inseparable.

  “Kern?”

  Lazily Kern opened his eyes, inches from her own. They shared the same pillow, lying face-to-face, and Kern’s arm was draped over her shoulder. “I keep thinking about the fire,” she murmured. “I keep thinking of you close to it, if it had been our land, if…”

  Gently she was tugged closer, sheltered next to his chest. “It started high, that was the problem,” he said quietly. “The sparks shot down, starting dozens of little fires. Anyone who could run, walk or crawl came to help, Tish, but not to play hero or try to do the firemen’s job. The area’s been so dry, and more sparks could have fallen. People were working as lookouts, to make sure that when one fire was out it stayed out.”

  “And that was what you were doing? You weren’t any closer than that?”

  “Mmm.” His eyes closed again, and Trisha rose up on one elbow, tugging at his beard. His lashes shuttered open again in response, but there was a deliberate effort not to meet her eyes. His gaze fell instead on the bare flesh in front of him. “The beard has to go,” he murmured as he rose up to kiss the tender hollow between her breasts. And it was tender, roughed from his love-play. “We can’t have you bruised, bright eyes…”

  “You were in the thick of it, weren’t you?” she asked suspiciously.

  “No one was hurt beyond the two in the beginning. Oh, cuts and scrapes, of course. The destruction could have been much worse.” He sounded as interested in talking fires as he would have about shuttling to the moon. She shivered all over when one finger stroked the hollow in her throat, and he looked up at her with a wicked smile. “You just can’t stand that, can you?” He leaned up to kiss the spot, one, two, three soft kisses, and then arched back, watching the goose bumps with satisfaction. “You’ve got one or two other little spots that seem to make you forget all about…”

  “Kern!” Her flush made him chuckle, and she curled closer to him, slowly stroking the flat of his stomach that was just as susceptible to her touch. “I’ll find out,” she promised, as she nipped tiny bites into his shoulder. “Maybe not from you, Kern. Sooner or later you’ll have to unlock that door…”

  “But not now.” He leaned over her, pinning her gently to the pillow, his eyes glinting devil-fire mischief on hers. “We need rest. We’ve both been up for more than two days straight with only a few hours’ sleep in between.”

  “Rest,” she repeated innocently. “And that’s why you insisted on a day in bed, Kern?”

  “It certainly is.”

  “For another minute and a half,” she suggested as she ran her fingers gently down the slope of his back, urging him to her with the promise in her eyes.

  “For thirty seconds,” he amended as his lips came down on hers.

  Chapter Ten

  Five women were gathered in the living room: Trisha and Rhea, a woman named Lotto, who was one of the ranger’s wives, and two local women with the soft twang of Tennessee in their speech. The quilting frame had all but temporarily destroyed the living room’s decor, but the pattern was nearly done. It was Trisha’s design and she called it “night song.” The colors in the quilt were the colors of the mountains-vibrant greens and dark browns, the lemon of sun and the clear blue of a summer sky.

  The shop Trisha had wanted was more than a possibility. The shop space she’d found to rent was ideal in location, and she’d spent weeks searching out local women who might be interested in selling their wonderful quilts and rugs and needlework. But this one quilt was hers, and the laughter and joy that had already gone into it was reflected in the clear sapphire brightness of her eyes, in the smile that never seemed to leave her these days.

  “Patricia!”

  Her head jerked up from the needle at the surprising virulence in Kern’s tone. Her giant stood in the doorway with the flap of an envelope in his hand, glowering directly at her.

  “Would you mind coming here for a moment?”

  “Whoops. I’d tread lightly,” Rhea whispered teasingly next to her.

  Trisha chuckled, divesting herself of threads and needles and patches and chair legs. The smock she wore was pale pink, loose and cool for the late August day, and open to show the creamy smoothness of her throat. Kern was already stalking back to his office, expecting her to follow, which she did, curious, more alert than annoyed at his unusually domineering attitude.

  When she entered his quiet study, he pushed at the door behind her, all but slamming it closed. “I got a letter from my mother today,” he started out heavily. “Enclosed was a letter for you, which I mistook as a letter for me-” It was all very confusing, until he handed her the sheets of paper. “It evidently followed you all over the city. First to your apartment, then to where you were working, back to your apartment, and finally to my mother’s…”

  She glanced up with a worried frown at the first line of the letter, studying Kern carefully. Her frown lifted, just a little. It had started out to be a very good act of vibrating anger, but his mouth was twitching. He was not as upset as he was trying to make her believe he was. She scanned the contents of the letter quickly:

  Patricia…you left so quickly that I didn’t have the chance to put these papers together for you…realized your state of upset…my professional opinion, to put it in the vernacular, is to take him for all you can get, Patricia…feel you should reconsider the position you took…unable to make a decision at that time…I am in the position…sign below; it will give me the authority…

  There was a postscript referring to a potential dinner invitation.

  Trisha refolded the papers from Cal Whitaker, slipped them neatly back in the envelope and tore them in half. The memory of that afternoon in his office whipped through her mind, an agony she thought she’d forgotten, and she looked up at Kern again with troubled eyes.

  Kern took the two parts of the envelope from her hands and ripped the rest over and over into little pieces, glaring at her one minute, and the next tossing the whole mess in the air so that it floated down like snow. Her eyes widened, and then he burst out laughing. “So he had a hard time convincing you to go after what was ‘rightfully yours,’ did he? Tell me about it, Tish,” Kern suggested dangerously.

  “Kern!” she sidestepped, wanting to laugh with him, as his hand reached for her but grabbed at air. She retreated two more steps as he advanced one more. “I want to tell you,” she tried to say gravely. “The day I left here I went to see him and walked out, Kern, I couldn’t…and then there was the fire. I heard about it the same night. I would have made sure he understood I didn’t want-but I forgot him, Kern, I…”

  His damned arms were so long. Behind the desk was no shield. She was caught, and before she could maneuver he had lifted her up and over and they were both
sitting in his overstuffed chair in the corner. “I thought you wanted to be free,” she said simply, kissing his cheek, his forehead, his eyelids to close down that glowering expression in his eyes. “It wasn’t something I ever wanted, Kern. I was trying to do what I thought you-”

  “To hell with that. I want to know what he thinks he’s doing inviting you out for dinner!”

  She chuckled, her fingers reaching teasingly for the buttons on his shirt, her lips brushing apologies on his throat. “Well, he’s just got that kind of ego, Kern; that’s his problem. You wouldn’t have cared anyway, would you have? I mean, you could have written him a legal brief yourself on what a frigid little wife you used to have…”

  His mouth pressed on hers, shutting off her teasing, invoking all the promises of loving they knew in each other. “You’ve burst like a flower, Tish,” he murmured softly. “So much love in you-I can’t get enough…”

  “And I’ve decided he’s right,” she murmured back, hiding her face in his neck when his fingers reached beneath the soft pink fabric to play against her skin. His fingers stilled.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He’s right,” she repeated teasingly, her eyes wide open and innocent on his as she escaped from his lap before he could catch her again. “I have every intention of ‘taking you for all I can get,’ Kern. Although I certainly don’t have money in mind!”

  “You come back here!”

  She shook her head with a radiant smile. “I’ve got a houseful of people,” she said, scolding. “But Kern…when I went into town this morning…” She hesitated and then opened the door. “You know that little creek, about twenty-minute walk from the camp? I think we should do the next one there. And for the third baby, we could go back to the waterfall again…”

  “Trisha!”

  She closed the door, singing with mischief and laughter and love inside. The four women were waiting with raised heads, demanding to know what Kern had wanted, teasing her for the flush of pink on her cheeks as she settled down to work again. The quilt was within an hour of being done. The women would go then. She could wait, to really savor the news with Kern. The look on his face had told her all she needed to know, that first startled expression rapidly changing to elation. He wanted children. Her children. And she felt absolutely exhilarated.