"All right."
They sat down on the blankets, and she handed him a bun, sticky with honey and currants. He ate half of it in one bite. It was lucky she was well acquainted with the appetites of big, hungry men. She'd brought plenty.
He grinned in appreciation of the delectable treat. "How do you keep managing to smuggle so much food to me without anyone noticing?"
"My mother's gone a lot."
"I noticed. Where does she go?"
"Out to Adam's place. My sister-in-law isn't feeling well."
"Is she seriously ill?"
"No." She smiled. "It seems Adam was busy again before he left for Cambridge."
He raised an eyebrow in question.
"I'm going to have another nephew."
"You're so sure it's a nephew?"
Bennie licked a drop of honey off her thumb. "She's sick."
"From what I hear, that's not uncommon."
"My mother was very ill for five months with each of my brothers." She tapped her chest. "With me, nary a day. So far, it's been the same with every one of my sisters-in-law. None of them felt well, except when Hannah carried Sarah."
"I've never heard of such a thing."
"Hannah says that Jones men bedevil women from the beginning."
"But doesn't your mother ever notice how much food is missing?"
Bennie grimaced. "She's used to my appetite."
"Your appetite?"
"Mother's despaired of ever teaching me to eat like a lady."
"Why would you want to? Picking at your food, wasting away like you've got some dread disease. I've never figured out why women put up with it."
"Why do women do any silly thing? To catch a husband."
The glint in his eyes was wicked and satisfied. "There's something to be said for a woman who can enjoy life and food in full measure."
She grinned and sank her teeth into her bun.
"You have honey by your mouth."
"Where?" She stuck her tongue out to one side, attempting to get it. "Here?"
"No. Here." It caught her completely by surprise. He leaned forward in a motion so natural and casual she thought he merely meant to point it out. But then he licked her, his tongue sliding quickly across the corner of her mouth and just along the edge of her upper lip. He sat back before she had a chance to respond.
"Mmm. Sweet."
Openmouthed, she stared at him.
"It's gone," he said cheerfully.
Snapping her mouth shut, she scrambled to her knees. "I have to go."
He put his hand on her arm to stop her. "Why?"
Outside, the soft patter of falling raindrops began. A crisp wind blew in through the window, finally sweeping away the heavy, heated air, bringing the fresh, metallic scent of rain.
He glanced out at the sky, and when he returned his gaze to her, his eyes were dark and intent. "No thunder this time," he said softly.
She was caught, held motionless by the velvet in his voice and the gentle warmth of his hand on her arm. No, she mouthed.
"I miss the thunder."
Oh, Lord. If only she could be sure that the thunder was all he wanted. If only she was completely convinced he was not her enemy. And if only she had the faintest idea how to handle a man like him.
"I have to go!" She jerked her arm away and jumped to her feet.
"Why?" His voice rose, his frustration clearly evident. He got up and planted himself in her way. "Why? Why do you miss the idiot so much? I would think most women would be happy to find out the man they slept with wasn't simpleminded!"
He blocked her path, his big form seeming to take up even more space than it usually did. Why did she never seem to remember the overwhelming impact of his physical presence? And why did she, who was so used to large, powerful men, seem completely unable to accustom herself to this one?
The refreshing breeze cooled the back of her neck, rustling the fine hairs there. It lifted Jon's hair away from his face, leaving the beautifully sculpted features clearly evident—the straight nose, the jutting jaw, those strange pale eyes, now lit with fierce intelligence. There was nothing fine or thin about his face; it was all strength and forceful masculinity.
"Lord, you're so beautiful," she whispered helplessly.
"So what!" He gestured to his face. "So some accident of nature gave me these features. What does it matter?"
"Women must throw themselves at your feet."
"It's not generally been my desire to have women at my feet."
"I'm sure they'd be happy to throw themselves at other parts of your anatomy too."
"So maybe they threw. That doesn't mean I caught."
She gave a small snort of disbelief and made a move to go around him. He sidestepped quickly to stop her.
"Beth." His voice was barely more than a whisper. He cupped her cheek in his palm. If so much about Jon—Jonathan—had changed, his touch was the same: reverent, tender, almost heartbreakingly gentle. "There have been very few women."
"You can't expect me to believe that."
His thumb swept down, barely touching the corner of her mouth. "I learned very early that the act, without any affection, any understanding, was empty, brought no more lasting satisfaction than any other bodily function. No more important than a sneeze. But my job has left very little time for any affection to grow. And, since I began this charade, there's been no way to allow any woman to get close to me at all."
"I don't know who you are."
He rubbed lightly, tempting her to turn her head and take his thumb into her mouth. "You know me better than you realize."
Jon, Jonathan—one was as bad as the other. In any role, he made her weak, wanton, prone to forget anything but the way he made her feel. There was no denying the heat in his eyes when he looked at her, and it made her feel pretty and seductive and utterly feminine. It was a heady temptation.
She tried again. "I have to go."
"It's raining. You'll get wet."
"I've been wet before."
He leaned closer, breaching the distance she'd put between them. "I know."
Heat flashed through her, as sudden and sharp as lightning. One more inch, one more second, and she'd be lost. Dashing to one side, she tried to flee this man she seemed unable to resist.
He caught her, hauling her up against his body, holding her softly but securely to him. "What is it?" he ground out. "You liked the simpleminded lout? You thought you could handle him? You don't know what to do with a man who can match you?"
"Yes! He was simple and uncomplicated and easy to be with. He didn't keep secrets and hatch plots and twist me up until I don't know what's right or wrong! And he didn't hurt me!"
The light in his eyes went flat, his shoulders drooped, and he let her go so abruptly she stumbled. Stepping aside, he allowed her to pass.
She hitched up her skirts and fairly slid down the ladder. Rain splattered in her face when she tugged open the door, but she paid no mind. The chilly water soaked quickly through her thin summer clothes and ran down her temples. She splashed through the puddles in the yard, but still she ran, heading toward home—heading toward safety.
***
The rain had only lasted an hour or two, but it had washed the air clean of dust and stench and suffocating heat. The leaves on the trees shone wet, bright green. Birds hopped around on the ground, snatching at bugs and tugging at earthworms.
And Bennie stood in the middle of the muddy yard, staring up at the window in the loft.
There was no excuse for it. There'd been enough food in the basket she'd brought that morning to keep him fed the rest of the day. His wound needed the minimum of care. He was completely out of danger.
The only possible reason for her going up there was simply that she wished to see him again. It was silly, it was foolish, it was quite probably downright stupid— and she was going to do it.
He was by the window again, all stillness and power. The new sunlight bathed his naked chest in gold. Bennie took one
look at him and knew she was lost.
"Hello," she ventured when she reached him. He had his hair pulled back, knotted with a piece of twine, and his brooding profile faced out the window.
He wouldn't look at her, he'd decided. He'd watched her striding across the wet ground. She moved like no woman he'd ever seen, sure, decisive. And he knew that if she came up to the loft, he couldn't look at her. For every time he did, he did things he'd promised himself he wouldn't; he forgot every lesson he'd ever learned about restraint and self-preservation and control.
But as soon as she got close to him, he caught a whiff of lavender, underlain with the faintest hint of womanly skin. He hadn't counted on that. He still wouldn't look at her, for his sake as well as her own. For when she'd said that he had hurt her, he'd felt the sickness in his gut; it was like taking a punch he hadn't known was coming. He couldn't do that to her again.
He felt her fingers lightly following the scar on his side, his badge of honor—hah! his badge of shame— from the battle that had taken Sergeant Hitchcock's life.
"Was it so terrible? The battle, I mean?" she asked.
When he looked down at her, Bennie saw it again: that terrible, bleak despair that glazed his eyes.
"Yes."
She rubbed the scar, as if smoothing away the hurt. "My brothers were there. None were hurt, though. Henry has been back here since, on leave. He said it was glorious."
"It's not." He turned away from her. "I was like him when I was young. You get into something, sure you're doing the right thing for honor and glory and country." He shut his eyes and leaned his forehead against the fist braced over the window. "Then you're in this situation, and every choice you can make is wrong, and you don't know how you're going to live with the one you choose."
"How do you?"
"You don't. You just hang on to the only thing you have left."
"Which is?" she whispered, unable to bear his pain, unsure she wanted to know the answer, but compelled to try and understand this man.
"Loyalty."
He was no more than a foot from her, but he was suddenly so far away, closed into himself.
"Will you bring me some more clothes tomorrow? A shirt?" he asked.
Her throat closed. "You're leaving?"
He nodded.
"All right," she agreed, knowing it would be useless to protest. "Is there anything else you need?"
You! he wanted to shout. But there was no way he could drag her into the darkness with him. She belonged in the sunshine, with the wind tangling those wild curls and her music lifting to the sky. "No."
"I'll leave you alone, then," she said, and turned to go.
Surely he could give himself this much. He could have one simple afternoon of sunshine to take with him, back to the cold.
"Stay," he said softly.
Her eyes were wide and wary; she was like a forest creature confronting a man for the first time, drawn by curiosity, repelled by danger. Finally she nodded her agreement.
Carefully avoiding touching each other, they settled back down on the blankets. Bennie smoothed her skirt —she'd changed into a dark green one after her soaking that morning—over her knees and tried to think of a relatively harmless topic of conversation.
The silence between them seemed awkward. She felt nervous, and unsure. He was watching her, she knew, but she couldn't chance looking up and getting lost in his eyes again. When he'd been only Jon, silence between them had been easy and companionable. Now it seemed empty, and she searched for something to fill it.
But nothing she could think of seemed harmless. The hell with it, she thought recklessly. She squared her shoulders and forced her gaze up to meet his.
"How did you end up here?"
One corner of his mouth lifted. "I rode a horse."
"No, I meant—" She stopped. "What happened to your horse, anyway?"
"I turned him loose. He'll find his way back to Boston. Someone in the company will take care of him."
"But how will you get back?"
"I'll manage." One knee was bent, his forearm propped on it, his hand dangling loosely. "You were about to ask me something?"
"I meant, how did you end up here? At this place in your life?
"Playing this role, do you mean?"
"Yes."
He picked up a long piece of hay and began to methodically break it into pieces. "Most of what I told you was true. I did go live with my aunt and her husband after my parents died. And they weren't particularly interested in me. They had several children of their own, and I was simply a reminder of their "common" relatives. It didn't seem to help that they had a son my own age, and I was always bigger than he, and could run faster, and the tutors thought I was easier to teach, and I was..."
"Better-looking?" she suggested.
"Yes." He cleared his throat. "Well, as soon as I was old enough, they bought me a commission. No cavalry for me, of course. Something slightly less expensive. Still, it was probably the best thing they ever did for me."
His voice was calm, carefully modulated. Yet, he snapped the bit of straw with more and more force. There was still some of that boy inside him, she realized, that growing man who had been so young and unwanted.
"I learned early on that I had a talent for... solving puzzles, I guess you might say. Taking snippets of information, things that nobody else seemed to notice, and putting them together. My superiors soon made use of it."
"And so you became involved in spying."
"Yes." He crushed the last piece of the hay in his palm. He opened his hand, and chaff and dust drifted down to the floor. "I really did get kicked by a horse, you know. Three years ago. When I came to, I was... muddled. Couldn't make the words come out properly. I was like that for several days.
"But I noticed, when I was like that, that no one paid very much attention to me. Because I didn't make any sense when I spoke, they assumed I couldn't understand much either. They didn't guard their tongues carefully around me, and I found out things it might have taken me weeks to discover otherwise."
He was brilliant, she realized. Enough so to carry on such a masquerade for three years and have no one ever suspect.
"So you decided to continue the ruse."
"Yes. It was quite simple, really."
Simple. To spend all that time, making his graceful body move clumsily. To veil the sparkling intelligence in his eyes under sleepy, half closed lids. To soften the lines of his face and wander around with that good-natured grin. And what must have been worst of all, to completely bury his pride, to end up in pig wallows and snowbanks, to take all the taunts and the condescension and the outright cruelty, knowing all the while he could outthink any one of them. The force of will and the concentration it must have taken was amazing.
"How did you ever manage it?"
"I thought it was the right thing to do."
She would have given a lot to be able to wipe the bleakness from his eyes. All the arguments she'd given herself to leave him the day before suddenly seemed much less important.
"Enough of that." He picked up another piece of hay and stroked her cheek with it. It tickled and she laughed lightly. "What about you?"
"What about me?"
"How did you get here?"
"I've always been here."
Had she? he wondered. Had she always been this fascinating person, unlike any other woman he'd ever met? What had made her so serene and controlled on the surface, so strong and yet so giving underneath?
"And do you always want to stay here?"
"Yes, I think so."
"You told me once that all you wanted was your family and your music."
Her mouth opened slightly, and he wanted nothing more than to see if it was as sweet as he remembered.
"You remembered," she said, clearly surprised.
"Yes. Was it true? Surely there's more. A family of your own, perhaps?"
"That's not something I could ever really have." Color bloomed on her cheeks, a delicate
, honey-hued rose that made her eyes look all the darker. "I want... someone to look at me and see me." She laughed self-consciously and dropped her head. Wild, loose curls fell around her face, each a different hue, gold and tan and brown, the colors of harvest and plenty. "See me, not just another Jones offspring like all the others, or a woman who can't quite manage to be a lady like her mother, or the one who towered over them in school and still does. I want someone to see just... me."
"Beth." He placed his knuckle under her chin and gently tipped her head back up, urging her to look him in the eye. Her own eyes were luminous, shimmering with emotion, and he knew that once again she was allowing him to glimpse beneath the surface. He was grateful for the gift, but he asked for still more. "Would you play for me again, Beth?"
CHAPTER 22
She kept her violin in the loft now. The extremes of humidity and temperature weren't good for the instrument, but it was simpler than forever trying to sneak it out of the house past her mother. And for some reason, it seemed to belong here.
She undid the leather clasps; the violin was snuggled safely in its case. The smooth wood gleamed richly, winking at her like an old friend. She lifted it out and tucked it under her chin.
He loved her concentration, the almost sensual way she took pleasure in the look and feel of her instrument. Her fingers trailed over the surface the way they had once stroked him.
Strands of hair curled tightly at her temples; the rest tumbled down her back in a luxurious cascade. The dark, shining wood of the instrument was nearly the same color as her eyes, sparkling in anticipation and enjoyment.
She tuned the instrument, frowning as she plucked strings, tightened them, and tested the tone again. Finally, she gave a brisk nod and began to play.
Before, when she'd played for him, he'd often closed his eyes, preferring to let the music wash over him without the distraction of his other senses. And too, he'd been afraid that something would show in his eyes, that she would catch a glimpse of how the music moved him, would see too much of the man beneath the role.
Now, he watched. Her fingers were strong and supple, nimble as they plucked at strings, fluid as they pulled the bow. She was totally absorbed, often closing her eyes or swaying from side to side. All the passion and emotion in her music were also clearly evident on her face. She was stripped of her surface control, all the fascinating layers of her soul laid bare.
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