Memory's Embrace

by Linda Lael Miller

  Rain pounded ominously at the roof of the wagon, as if to add weight to his argument. She heard the thunk of his boots on the wooden floor and felt the heat of his flesh through the flannel of her nightgown, even though they weren’t touching. Her bottom flexed and then tingled, and she tried to tuck it in a little further. “If you were a gentleman—” she began, desperate now.

  There was a clink of glass and a whoosh of breath and the lantern went out, leaving them in complete darkness. Keith laughed. “A gentleman? Me? Who ever suggested such a thing?”

  “Certainly not I,” observed Tess, trying to melt into the wall.

  He laughed again, and then he crawled into the bunk beside her, stretching out with a sigh. He was naked, and every muscled line of him was hard and warm; he was touching her now because the bed was so narrow that even if he’d tried to avoid contact the task would have been impossible.

  Tess didn’t think he was trying, anyway. Her senses leaped, her heart beat a little faster, and the tingling spread from her bottom into every part of her, even her toes, a certain treacherous warmth following in its wake.

  “Let’s talk,” Keith said, after some moments, and from the shifting of his body, Tess knew that he had cupped his hands behind his head.

  “About what?” she snapped, angry at herself, at him, at the world.

  “Free love,” he answered, with a smile in his voice.

  Tess was tired of being goaded about that. She sat bolt upright, in her fury, and looked down at him. It was so dark that she couldn’t make out any of his features. “All right!” she burst out furiously. “So I didn’t have the courage to try it!”

  Keith gave a raucous shout of laughter and enclosed her in his arms, pulling her down so that she rested stiffly on his broad chest, her head on his shoulder. The ring he wore around his neck made a painful circle on her cheek and she shifted to get away from it.

  “You loved her,” she said, staring up at a ceiling she couldn’t see.

  There was a long, dangerous silence; she felt his arm, curved beneath her, stiffen slightly. “Yes. I loved Amelie,” he finally admitted, in a gruff voice that said he still did.

  Tears pooled in Tess’s eyes; she was glad it was dark and Keith couldn’t see them. Soon—perhaps even the next day—they would reach Portland. He would be lost to her then. But Amelie, even though she was dead, would be with him forever, kept alive by the beat of his neart and the ring that hung from that chain around his neck.

  I hate her, thought Tess.

  “Did you ever make love to Amelie?” she asked, rash because it was dark and because she hurt so badly.

  Another silence. She had made another mistake; he was angry. But he finally answered. “No. God knows, I wanted to. Waiting was hard. But she was pure and sweet—”

  Pure and sweet. Tess was wounded to the core. Amelie had been “pure and sweet,” too virtuous to touch before the wedding night, an angel to be cherished and set upon a pedestal. While Tess, on the other hand …

  He seemed to sense her feelings. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said gently.

  “What way?” she hedged testily. Even now, his hand squeezed her right buttock, through the soft flannel, and she wanted him. She hated herself for wanting him.

  “Amelie was a different sort of woman,” he tried to explain, albeit lamely.

  “Virtuous,” said Tess venomously. “Certainly above free love.”

  He laughed, still kneading her bottom with his hand. “Free love. The very mention of it would have sent Amelie into hysteria.”

  Tess’s throat tightened; she didn’t speak because it would have hurt and she was in enough pain as it was. Besides, she couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t hateful.

  “Tess.”

  She wouldn’t speak to him, she wouldn’t.

  “Touch me, Tess.” His voice was not imperious; if it had been, she would have sat up again and slapped him silly. “Please, touch me. Make me forget.”

  He was being unfair. He was asking one woman to soothe him while he loved another, dreamed of another. And yet Tess could not deny him. She shifted, so that she was kneeling in the rumpled bunk beside him. She drew back the blankets, stroking the body beneath with her hands.

  She felt his muscles flex and ripple as she ran featherlight fingers over his chest, his powerful midsection, his thighs.

  “Oh, Tess,” he groaned distractedly, “why do I need you so much? Why?”

  Her hands moved—she hadn’t planned to do it, oh, she truly hadn’t—and closed around the magnificent pillar of his manhood.

  Keith’s cry of surprise and pleasure was beautiful to her; he stiffened and moaned her name.

  “What do you want me to do?” she whispered gently. “Tell me how to please you.”

  He made a soblike sound. “What I did—Tess, oh, Tess—please.”

  What he had done to her. Of course. She bent her head and her hair spread over him in a silken fan. At her first nibbling taste of him, he arched his back convulsively and cried out.

  “D-Did I hurt you?” Tess asked, frightened.

  He laughed, a hoarse, pain-filled sound that belied his answer. “No. God, no.”

  Relieved, she went back to him. His groan and the tangling of his hands in her hair gave her a fierce sensation of triumph, of joy. Something within her sang as she pleasured Keith, growing more and more bold as he began to writhe beneath her and call her name over and over again.

  Finally, with a savage upward thrust of his hips, he stiffened and shouted something garbled and senseless and hoarse, and it sounded as though he was weeping as he sank, shuddering, back to the mattress. Tess followed him, ruthlessly holding him prisoner even in his defeat.

  “No,” he pleaded finally, on a ragged, forced breath, “please—”

  In those moments, Tess understood the mysteries of power. She knew why people sought it, fought for it, died for it. She was not going to give it up.

  “Tess,” he choked out.

  She was greedy for the power, hungry for the pleasure that his pleasure gave her. “I want more of you,” she released him to say. “Much more.”

  He moaned, in submission, in anticipation, in hopeless defeat. She tongued him until he was hard again, shifted him somehow until he was above her, beautifully vulnerable. She nipped him and savored him, sampled him and consumed him, and she soared on the wild joy of his surrender.

  When, at last, he pleaded, she drove him into an insanity of satisfaction, glorying in his cries. Cries of her name, and not Amelie’s.

  Much later, when Keith lay on his back, his breathing under control again, Tess reached to touch his face, knowing what she would find. His flesh was wet with tears.

  “Why?” she pleaded. “Oh, Keith, tell me why you’re—you’re crying?”

  Keith caught her wrists in strong hands, forced her fingers from his face. And then he rolled away, laying stiff beside her, using his broad back as a barrier.

  She was desperate to reach him, for she sensed that it was not anger or hatred that had undone him this way. but something else. “Keith?”

  “What?” he fairly croaked the word.

  “Are you one of those men who can’t let other people see them cry?”

  He laughed raggedly and sniffled. “No. It’s fashionable in my family.”

  “Then, what—”

  “Why the hell did you have to come along, Tess?” he broke in, in a raspy whisper, rolling onto his back and then his side, so that he faced her now. “Why?”

  Tess bristled; she didn’t know what else to do. “What an inane question! It isn’t as though I saw you in a crystal ball or something, you know, and said to myself, ‘Well, here’s this crazy peddler, throwing things at God and jumping into creeks because he doesn’t have any better sense than to stand in campfires. It ought to be easy to louse up his life. I’ll just set right out to do it’!”

  “Damn it,” he hissed, “I was happy! I didn’t need anybody!”

 
; “That’s no way to be happy,” Tess pointed out reasonably. “Besides, you weren’t. You weren’t at all. You were hiding. You were running. As far as I’m concerned, you still are.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, what the hell do you know about anything?”

  If he hadn’t been angry before, he was angry now. And that was perfectly all right, because Tess had worked up a fury of her own. “I know how to make you crazy!” she replied acidly. “I know how to turn you inside out!”

  The silence that followed was long and it was awful. And it gave Tess plenty of time to regret what she’d said. She was about to say that she was sorry when he suddenly bit out, “That trick works both ways, woman.”

  Tess tried to melt into the wall again and had, of course, no more luck at it than before. “Good night,” she dared to say.

  “Good night, hell!” Keith snarled back, and wrenched her onto her back. “I’ve got plans for you. And we’ll see who makes whom crazy, who turns whom inside out!”

  Tess pulled the quilt up to her chin. “Leave me alone.”

  He laughed and got out of bed to light the lamp. Overwhelmed at the sight of his nakedness, despite what she had done in the dark, Tess wrenched the quilt all the way up over her head.

  Keith tore it away again and pulled her out of bed to stand before him, trembling with fury and passion, her hair a wild tangle around her face. He looked at her in bafflement and desire, but not in anger, not now. “Come here, Tess,” he breathed. “Come to me.”

  She did—she could do nothing else—and he kissed her, deeply, thoroughly. The spell was cast. When he removed her nightgown and flung it aside, even when he knelt and buried his face in her, she could not protest.

  He enjoyed her until her knees were weak, until she trembled, until she tangled her hands in his hair and sobbed his name into the night. And when she could stand no longer, he laid her on the bed, her legs held apart by the broad strength of his body lying prone on her own, and enjoyed her again.

  Chapter Eight

  HARBOR HAVEN WAS NOT THE FORMIDABLE, GRIM STRUCTURE Asa had feared it would be. No, it was a pleasant brick building, flanked by towering pine trees, overlooking Portland’s busy harbor.

  His heart pounded as he made his way up the wide flagstone walk and through the front door, beating out a litany all its own. Livie-Livie-God-let-her-know-melet-her-love-me.

  There was a broad-faced woman minding the reception desk, and she looked up at Asa, when he approached, and smiled. Good. This was a friendly place, a gentle place.

  He asked after Miss Olivia Bishop and was led to a sunny room with windows looking out over the blue, blue water. She sat staring blankly, her body small and wasted now, her once-rich mahogany hair streaked with gray, her thin hands folded in her lap.

  “Don’t expect much now,” warned the kindly nurse who had brought Asa to that room. “She doesn’t speak to a soul—not even her daughter.”

  A fist clasped Asa’s innards and squeezed until he was breathless. Still, he rounded Olivia’s wicker invalid’s chair and crouched. “Livie,” he said softly.

  Her hazel eyes were circled by dark smudges of misery, but there was a flicker of recognition in them.

  He took her hands, cautiously, tenderly, into his own. “Livie, I’ve come to take you home with me.”

  Olivia’s lovely mouth, now thin and colorless, moved slightly, and then her hands rose slowly, slowly, to cup his face. “Asa,” she said, in a dreamer’s voice. “Oh, Asa.”

  Asa Thatcher wept without shame, kneeling now, his head in Olivia’s lap. “Livie,” he sobbed. “Oh, my Livie—”

  “There, there,” she said softly, her hands moving tentatively in his coarse hair. “Don’t cry, my darling—you’re here. Oh, Asa, if I’m dreaming, I won’t be able to bear it—”

  Asa recovered himself somewhat, lifted his head, placed trembling hands upon her precious face. For a moment, he, too, needed reassurance that this was not a dream. “I should have married you long ago,” he said hoarsely. “Long, long ago. Will you forgive me, Livie? Will you marry me now, today?”

  “Yes, Asa. Oh, yes.”

  Asa’s joy and relief were so great that he could not contain them; he wept again, noisily this time, caring not a whit that Livie’s nurse was looking on. Let the whole world see him thus, a broken man who could be mended by only one woman.

  Tess was tired and her knees were still wobbly from the shameless, searing passion of the night before. The sun had been golden at the crack beneath the wagon’s door before Keith had let her sleep. Oh, she hated him for the paces he’d put her through—again and again he’d driven her to gasping release without ever actually taking her—but she loved him, too.

  The ridiculous wagon came to a stop in front of Harbor Haven, Keith put the brake lever in place with a motion of his left leg and smiled down at his indignant passenger.

  “I hate you,” she said.

  “I hate you, too, dear,” he replied sweetly. “Except when you wrap your legs around my head, that is.”

  Tess sprang down from the seat and glared up at him. “You might have a little respect,” she fumed. “A little decency—”

  He tipped his stupid bowler hat and smirked at her, but the expression in his eyes was tender. “I’ve got some things to do,” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken. “I’ll come back for you in an hour or so.”

  “You needn’t come back at all, Keith Corbin! If I never see you again—”

  Keith sighed. “I know, I know. If you never see me again, it will be too soon.”

  “If you will just give me my bicycle and my camera, please. And my valise.”

  He arched an eyebrow, the reins still in his hands. “What are you going to do, put your camera and valise in the basket and wheel the bicycle through the halls of Harbor Haven? If you do, I guarantee they’ll nominate you for membership.”

  Tess wavered, shading her eyes from the bright, rain-washed sunlight with one hand. “Well …”

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” he repeated, with the patience of a man speaking to a drooling dullard. And then he drove away, with everything Tess owned in the back of his stupid wagon.

  She turned and hurried up the walk to the familiar door of the brick hospital, despairing as she went. How was she going to earn enough money to keep her mother here and support herself as well? How? Tears of regret smarted in her eyes. Derora had been right; she should have sent that wire, collected her share of the reward. If she had, she would still be pure and her mother would be assured of proper care.

  Inside the hospital, Tess thrust aside all thought of the mess she’d gotten herself into and approached the desk.

  The nurse, Miss Elmore, smiled at her. In fact, she beamed.

  “Your mother isn’t here,” she said.

  The first stop Keith made was at the telegraph office, and the message he dictated was terse, blunt enough that even his thick-headed brothers could be expected to understand.

  After that, he sent a more polite missive to his banker, requesting funds. Since the bank in Port Hastings had a telegraph of its own, the reply came almost immediately.

  PRIVILEGES SUSPENDED ON THIS ACCOUNT.

  Furious, Keith crumpled the message that had been hand-copied before his disbelieving eyes and rattled off a retort that made the squirrelly clerk squirm in his swivel chair.

  “We can’t say that in a wire!”

  Keith paced the rough-hewn board floor, his hands in his trouser pockets. And even as he paced, the telegraph began to click out a new message, which the red-faced clerk hastily copied down.

  When the clicking stopped, after what seemed like a long time, the squirrel set down his pencil as though it had the weight of a sledgehammer and mopped his brow with a bright red handkerchief. “I don’t believe this,” he said.

  Keith knew that the message was for him, instinct had told him it was. Impatiently, he reached over the high counter and tore the sheet of paper from its pad.

  STAY RIGHT
WHERE YOU ARE, YOU LITTLE SON-OF-A-BITCH.

  I’M ON MY WAY TO PORTLAND TO KICK YOUR ASS.

  REGARDS, JEFF.

  Keith wadded the paper and flung it. It bounced off the clerk’s forehead. “How come he can say things like that over the wire if I can’t?” he demanded.

  The clerk shivered. “I guess you can, if you want to,” he conceded.

  “Good,” said Keith, calming down a little, smiling even. His message was two words long, and it made the clerk groan, but he sent it.

  “I’ll lose my job for this!” he complained.

  Almost instantly, a reply came in.

  THANK YOU BUT I LOVE MY WIFE. ADAM AND I WILL JOIN YOU TOMORROW, GRAND HOTEL. YOU KNOW THE ROOM NUMBER. JEFF.

  It became a game then. Indulging in an evil smile, Keith leaned against the counter and dictated this answer:

  I WANT ACCESS TO MY MONEY, YOU BASTARDS.

  AND HAVEN’T YOU GOT ANYTHING BETTER TO DO THAN HANG AROUND THE BANK?

  YOU ARE BOTH IDIOTS. THIS COSTS MONEY, DAMN IT.

  WILL ADVISE BANK AS REQUESTED. WILL ALSO LOOK FORWARD TO BREAKING YOUR NECK. ADAM.

  YOU’VE GOT IT TO DO, BIG BROTHER.

  DO IT I WILL, LITTLE BROTHER.

  By this time, the clerk was in a highly agitated state. “Mr. Corbin, I really must insist—”

  Keith took pity on the fellow. He paid what he owed for his share of the telegraphic argument and said, in parting, “I’ll be in the Corbin suite at the Grand Hotel. When you hear from my bank again, send a messenger right away.”

  The clerk’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his skinny throat. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  As Keith was opening the door to leave, the telegraph started clicking again. He paused, waiting, a half-grin on his face.

  “M-Mr. Corbin?” The clerk called to him with anxious reluctance. “The party in Port Hastings wants you to wait in the woodshed.”

  Keith laughed, shook his head, and walked out. But his jovial mood faded away as he drove his mule and wagon toward the Grand Hotel. Going there, as ordered, went against his grain, and sorely so. But he had no money left, to speak of, and he could stay in the suite his mother kept for nothing, putting his meals and Tess’s on her account.