"And this?" He slipped the strap of her gown over her shoulder and rested his hand, all gentleness, on the top curve of her breast.
"Lovely," she whispered. "Just... lovely."
"I'm not going to stop," he said.
"I don't want you to," she said, pulling his head down so that his lips touched her nipple. "I want it to happen, I want." The words all ran together.
His breath drew heavier. "You want what?" After so much resistance, he wanted to hear it from her.
"You," she said, roughly pulling his head down again, the movement of her arm tilting her breast upward.
She felt the heat of him through her gown, smelled the rain in his still-damp hair. No time now to evoke the protection of her own special ghosts, and she pushed the thought of them to the outer reaches of her mind. There would be time enough for that later.
He touched her slowly, reverently, beginning at her lips, his finger lingering at the corner of her mouth and picking up a thread of wetness, feathering his fingertips down, swirling them slowly across her shoulders, spreading them flat on her sternum, then spiraling them around and around each breast, reverently touching each nipple and kissing it, too, and down to the silvery marks on her abdomen, leaving them to slowly tip the mossy growth below and quest there, seeking what he eventually found.
The ache started in her abdomen and radiated in waves to her legs, everywhere. Somehow he shed his clothes and they fell back upon the bed, his weight pressing her into the rumpled sheets.
Cassie felt skinful, full in her skin. His fingers tingled her, burned her, found her, filled her. Ah, the pleasures of the skin, she thought, because his skin pleasured her as much as her own. The textures of it—soft and crinkly around his eyes, full-muscled in his upper back, downy with hair on his chest and tight abdomen. Their lovemaking found its own rhythm, now faster, now slower, not fast enough, then, for him, reaching a shuddering climax, leaving him gasping above her.
And when he calmed, he nestled his head against her shoulder and said in a low voice, "I should have waited for you."
Before she could speak he had begun again, slowly, carefully, lovingly retracing the pattern. He kissed her nipples, and he wrought exquisite sensations with his fingers. She floated along on the ecstasy, delighting in the wonder of it, experiencing the beauty of one body responding to another. When he reached his peak again she rejoiced, but still it did not happen for her.
"Cassandra," he said, his mouth against her hair, "can't you?"
All the beauty, all the joy of giving, all the happiness he had brought her was not enough. Not for him, and not for her.
She remained silent, but she wanted to cry. This wonderfully thoughtful man wanted for her what she could not do. And she didn't want him to think he was less than he was, for in truth, she was the one who was less. She was unable to give herself to a man in the way he wanted.
"It's not your fault," she said unevenly, sliding away and swinging her feet over the side of the bed.
"Cassie," he said as he reached for her hand, but adroitly she twisted away, bent swiftly and picked up her robe and slid her arms into it. Before he could speak again, she left the room.
John shook his head to clear it. He'd always regarded all women as mysterious, with their cycles like the moon and the secret processes that went on inside their bodies, not to mention in their heads. But this woman with her silences and capriciousness and her frightened withdrawals must be the most mysterious woman of all.
He got up and went after her.
"Cassie, come back to bed," he said, thinking that if he were to find out anything about her, it would have to be there. It was the only place where she even halfway let down her guard.
"I think that would be a mistake, don't you?" She melted at the sight of him, so real, so beautiful, so there.
"No, I do not," he said firmly. And then, without warning, he unceremoniously picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, where he placed her on the bed.
He turned off the light. She hesitated for a moment, then rolled close to him until she rested on her side facing away from him. They lay for several minutes listening to each other breathe. Outside, the rain still fell, but there was no more thunder.
"How long has it been, Cassie?" he said finally.
"How long has what been?"
"How long without a man?"
"Aren't you overstepping your bounds?" she snapped. In the dark, he couldn't see her face.
"I don't think so. I'm not a one-night stand, you know. I'm going to be around for a while. I don't just want a warm body to lie with on cool mountain nights. I'm aiming for an honest-to-goodness intimate relationship. Which we can't have if we go on this way. So, how long?"
"Since I've been here," she finally said in a small voice. "Almost two years."
"Didn't you want—?"
She considered this. "Yes, for a while," she said.
"A little? A lot?"
She shifted uncomfortably. "A lot at first. Then not so much. As though that part of me no longer existed."
"I'm going to help you find it again," he said, tracing the whorls of her ear with a fingertip. She loved the whisper of his finger on her ear.
"Not possible," she said, her voice muffled by the pillow.
"Well, I'm going to have a hell of a good time trying," he told her, and then he was shifting himself across her, lying on the other side of her, gazing into her eyes. Their eyes had adjusted to the dark, and a thin ribbon of light from the front room illumined her face.
"Would you mind taking off that robe?" he said politely. "I very much prefer making love to naked ladies."
She couldn't help smiling. After she obliged, he tugged it from under the bedcovers and threw it across the room.
"Why did you do that?"
"So I can watch you walk nude across the room in the morning."
She cuddled up to the strong, solid bulk of him. It seemed strange to feel sexual.
"And now, shall we try it again?"
Let him do with me what he will, she thought helplessly.
And so he did.
* * *
Morning. Gray fingers of light climbing the far wall, because they had never pulled the curtain across the window. Tigger meowing to come in the house, and Bertrand scratching to be released from the guest room. Memory also knocked, and Cassie opened the door.
She lay on her back in the early morning quiet and pictured Kevin. She always thought of Kevin first thing in the morning. And Rory. Kevin, his tawny hair tousled over his forehead, his morning growth of beard rough against her breasts. Rory, waking before they did and running in rosy from sleep to pounce on their bed, knocking pillows to the floor. Laughter. Tickling. Giggling. So different from now, and so long ago.
But this was John. Oh, Kevin. Oh, Rory. Oh, Cassie, what have you done?
Trying not to roll over on his side of the mattress, she slid carefully out of bed and retrieved her robe across the room. John hadn't seen her walk nude across the room after all. It occurred to her that she should have had some feeling about that, but she felt no humor, no sadness, no anticipation of next time, nothing.
She went to the hearth to check on the raccoon. It was asleep. She nudged open the guest-room door and Bertrand shot out, his feet scrabbling on the floor. When he hid himself under the couch, she put the box with the raccoon in the guest room and closed the door. Then she let in Tigger, who wound around her feet. Finally, she went into the bathroom and washed her face and brushed her hair and teeth. She slipped on a plum-colored shift before hanging her robe on the door hook, the scent of last night's lovemaking wafting from its folds.
Then she took her dulcimer from its shelf and sat with the case in her lap, thinking longingly of Kevin and his thoughtfulness in having it made for her, stroking the fine leather and watching the sun come up over Pride's Peak.
It came to her in bits and pieces, the song. A chorus first, a rhythmic cadence. Then a word or two about the way people li
ve their lives in tiers—tears, a possibility of a play on words here—one tier as a child, the next highest as a husband or a wife, the next as a parent and finally as a grandparent. Before she could lose it, she whipped the dulcimer from its case and strummed a few chords. She rummaged in Gran's desk for a scrap of paper and jotted down the words in almost indecipherable chicken scratches. The chords she would work out later—no, now, it would have to be now, because later she might not remember—oh, it had been so long since she had been able to write her music.
John heard the notes from the bedroom. Groggily he reached for Cassie's warmth, but she wasn't beside him. Then the fog of sleep halfway retreated, and he thought, That's Cassie making that music.
Puzzled, he pulled on his pants and shook his hair out of his eyes. He opened the bedroom door slowly so he wouldn't disturb her. And when his gaze fell upon her, he saw her in profile against the sunrise over the mountain. He was staggered at what he should have realized long ago.
But he couldn't have known because he had always considered her face as a whole, two different but beautiful sides to it, a highly individual kind of face. In her pictures, on television, she had always been photographed from one side, the right. And her face had once been rounder, without those lean planes beneath her cheekbones.
Cassie stopped strumming the dulcimer when she saw John standing there. She was so involved in the creation of her song that she hadn't noticed him when he stepped out of the bedroom. She caught her breath at the astonishment on his face, and in that moment she knew her secret was out.
It all fit: the mountain dulcimer, the goose quill, her retreat to a place where virtually no one could find her.
"Cassandra," he said unevenly. "You are—you must be—Cassandra Dare!"
Chapter 6
"After the accident," Cassie said matter-of-factly over pancakes, "I couldn't work. I didn't want to go on tour. I couldn't write songs anymore. Nothing anybody said about it made the slightest difference. I didn't have the heart to go on. So I left L.A. in that Toyota Camry that sits out there in the shed. I walked onto a used-car lot and told the salesman to sell me a vehicle that would carry me as far as the Great Smoky Mountains, and I paid cash for it. So here I am."
"Your song—the one about homeless people—was a tremendous hit, but you were nowhere to be found," said John. "Every time I turned on the TV, someone was talking about the mysterious disappearance of Cassandra Dare. You vanished after your accident."
John studied her soberly and with a sense of unreality, still unable to believe the truth that Cassie Muldoon was none other than the multitalented singer, musician and songwriter who over the past decade had captured the public's attention with her whispery soprano voice and her mountain dulcimer. The idea that this quiet, frightened Cassie Muldoon and the poised and confident Cassandra Dare were one and the same was so incredible that John could hardly grasp it.
Cassie shrugged. "'Where the Heart Is' was only a hit because Morgana Friday used it as the theme song in her documentary All the Way Home." She stood abruptly and carried her plate to the sink; John, unwilling to relinquish the subject, followed her.
"I've seen Morgana Friday's film," he said. "It's a striking statement about an important social issue. All the Way Home won major awards and was nominated for several more. That's mostly because of your song, Cassie."
"Morgana's a great filmmaker. I doubt that my song had anything to do with it."
"Don't sell yourself short," John retorted. When he saw the frozen expression on Cassie's face, he was afraid he'd been too abrupt. "All the Way Home is a sensitive film that deals with the issue of homelessness," he continued more gently. "You should see it."
"Maybe someday I will," said Cassie. Morgana had sent her the DVD, but she'd promptly misplaced it. She didn't have anything to play it on anyway.
"I mean what I say about not selling yourself short."
Cassie's only response to his compliment was a quick evasive smile. Sensing that John was becoming too thoughtful, Cassie said on impulse, "Let's leave the dishes and go for a walk in the woods. Just after dawn is the most beautiful time."
So together they crossed the clearing, which was damp and cool in the morning mist, and entered a trail that twisted through the forest. Rough-barked gray-brown tree trunks glistened with moisture. Here and there dead fallen branches blocked their way; John bent and tossed these aside. Green edged upon green, downy moss and lichen contrasted with glossy leaves, and gently uncurling fern feathered against gnarled tree roots. Birdsong sparkled in the thin morning air.
They walked separately until John took her hand. Cassie didn't object. Their entwined fingers seemed natural and right.
"So when are you going back to L.A.?" he asked.
"Never."
He hadn't realized until that moment how much he wanted Cassie to be a continuing part of his life. That would be impossible if she insisted on staying on Flat Top Mountain.
"Why?" he asked very quietly.
Her eyes held a faraway look, as if she were seeing scenes that he couldn't. "Here, I have a life of honesty and simple values. There, the world gets complicated."
"It wouldn't have to be," he said. "You could change it."
"No," she said, and John sensed a vast silence in her. He treasured the stillness of her spirit, and yet, he felt—no, he knew—in his heart that she was capable of retaining that stillness no matter where she lived.
"You're lonely here," he said softly. "You can't deny that."
"There was a time when it didn't bother me," she said, her eyes fixed steadfastly on the trail.
"When was that?"
"Before you came."
"And now?"
"It's different," she admitted.
He curved his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. "It's going to keep on being different," he told her.
"For a while. Until you have to leave."
"No, Cassandra. Longer than that."
She darted a quick disbelieving glance up at him. "You're not thinking of moving here permanently?"
He shook his head. "I can't do that. But you could go with me."
"I don't even know where you live."
"My house is near Los Angeles." There, it was out. Would she make the connection to the man who had bombarded her with letters and emails?
She didn't pick up on it. "I'll never go back to the West Coast. I won't move off this mountain."
Could he change her mind? What would it take? He turned those questions over in his mind.
Their circuitous path had taken them back to the clearing where Cassie's house stood, to the area behind it where her gardens were planted. Here the sun, higher now in the sky, had melted away the dew and the moisture from last night's storm.
Cassie seemed determined to change the subject. "Over there—" she pointed "—that's marjoram, with the little green leaves. And that's the thyme flowering, and on the other side, sage. The sage has already gone to seed."
He loved hearing her talk. He let her ramble on as he considered the situation. This was a woman who had given up a glamorous and exciting life to become a recluse on Flat Top Mountain. If he pushed too hard, she probably wouldn't have any trepidation about giving him up as well. That was the last thing he wanted at the moment.
Today Cassie looked carefree and at ease. Had last night done that for her? He'd thought at the time that his heartfelt lovemaking hadn't done enough. This morning the silken profusion of her hair swirled in the sunshine as she bent this way and that to check on her plants. No wonder he hadn't recognized her sooner—as Cassandra Dare, she'd worn her hair in a chaste knot at the nape of her neck, and her fingers, clasping her goose-quill trademark, had blossomed with rings. This ethereal and yet earthy creature no more resembled the famous singer and songwriter Cassandra Dare than he did.
His feelings for her rose like a lump in his throat; suddenly he wanted to touch her more than anything in the world.
"And this—this is lave
nder," she was saying from the midst of the lavender bed, its plants low and bearing pale purple flowers. She didn't know he had walked up behind her until she felt his arms around her.
"And this—this is Cassandra," he murmured lazily into her ear, his breath tickling her earlobe.
She laughed lightly. "Thank you for introducing me," she said.
"You have a lot to learn about yourself," he said.
"And you're going to teach me, right?"
"It's a rotten job, but somebody has to do it," he said solemnly, but she could hear the smile behind his words.
She closed her eyes as his hands moved to her breasts, touching lightly. She leaned into him, lifting her weight off the leg that always hurt a bit, and she arched her neck to give his lips access to the long sensitive tendon in her neck. Her eyelids drooped sleepily, heavily, unresisting, and as his hands slid lower, down the warm curve of the abdomen, a new rhythm arose within her, an exquisite pulsing along her veins.
And then, down, down, he was lifting her and turning her so that they glided smoothly into the lavender, and she sank unresisting into the young shoots. Their thighs and shoulders and buttocks crushed the tender leaves beneath them so that the rich aroma perfumed the air. Overhead, the sky shone so piercingly blue that it hurt Cassie's eyes.
His hands went around her face, his wrists meeting under her chin so that his fingers enclosed her face in the shape of a heart. The silence around them was crystalline in its purity. John inhaled the scent of her hair, gently skimmed the tip of tongue across her lips in wonderment, then hungrily closed his mouth over hers. And he was moaning into her mouth, and she was rocking against him, and her dress rode up over her hips, and then her nipples sprouted beneath his fingers.
"Take the dress off," he whispered as he helped her, bunching it into a pillow for her head. He shed his clothes so that it was just the two of them in the lavender, free in the wind-washed mountain air, with the bright blue sky above.
She found his body absolutely beautiful. The variety of his colors in the bright sunlight, the bronze, the pinks, the browns, the mauves. She wanted to explore every part of him, first with her fingers, then with her tongue, to see and touch and taste.
Through Eyes of Love Page 6