by Lisa Kleypas
“You’re home early—”
“I don’t want to talk, and I don’t want to answer questions. Where is that maid? Did you manage to hire anyone who doesn’t drag his or her feet?”
“Did you have an argument with Damon?” Lucy asked patiently, knowing that he did want to talk, or he wouldn’t have put on such a performance when he came in. Heath’s door slamming was always an announcement that a conversation was in order.
“Damon,” Heath said in tones of purest disgust, “Damned right I had an argument with him.”
“You don’t have to use that language,” she reproved.
“I thought he understood what I was trying to do. But today I realized he’s not the man I thought he was. After months of working on the same side, for the same purpose, he stood in that office, talking like a stranger—get the door, she’s here with the whiskey.”
“Would you mind talking to me about this first?” Her only answer was a steady blue-green glare. Lucy sighed and went to the door. “Thank you, Bess.”
“Mrs. Rayne . . . ,” the maid whispered, regarding Heath’s tall, lithe form as he paced back and forth like an agitated panther, “are you going to be all right? Should I—”
“Everything’s just fine,” Lucy said, pasting on a reassuring smile, taking the small silver tray from the other woman. “Why don’t you finish the decorations while Mr. Rayne and I have our discussion?” As Bess nodded apprehensively, Lucy closed the door with her foot and set the tray down on her dressing table. “She’s only been working here a week, Heath. She’s not used to your temper, and it frightens her, so if you’d try to control—”
“She’d better learn to get used to it, or she can go to work for someone else.” Heath poured himself a drink and interrupted his sneer long enough to take a healthy swallow.
“What has Damon done to make you so angry?”
“Damon doesn’t give a damn one way or another about the issues we’re struggling with. It’s all a mental exercise with him. He looks at something, picks out the points for and against it, and he goes with the side that has the highest score. Right and wrong—just a mathematical equation to him. I’ll be damned if I can work with that!”
“I’m sure that’s not true. I’m sure he has integrity and honor—”
“Like hell he does!” Heath finished the whiskey and poured another with a careless tilt of the bottle. Lucy had never seen him drink so much in such a short amount of time.
“What did you argue about?”
Suddenly all the fight and anger in him seemed to ebb, and he shook his head, taking another swallow of the biting liquor. His fingers were wrapped tightly around the glass. Lucy remained silent, sitting down on the edge of the bed and watching him as he drank the rest of the second glass of whiskey. He was in pain. She was helpless to do anything for him until he let down some of the walls. Ask me to hold you . . . here are my arms, ready to wrap around you. Here is my heart . . . just ask.
Heath stood by the window, silent in his self-imposed isolation. He took a deep breath and shook his head again, lifting his shoulders in a helpless shrug. “Today . . . ,” he started, and the rest of his words just dried up, unwilling to be voiced. He strode over to the whiskey bottle, but Lucy made it there before him and laid her fingers across his outstretched hand.
“Don’t have any more,” she said, looking up at him. He saw something in her eyes that made him release his hold on the bottle. Slowly he withdrew his hand and went back to the window, but not before she had seen the flash of misery in his expression. She was shaken by the urgency of her need to comfort him. “What happened today?”
“Bad news.”
“Reconstruction?” She couldn’t think of anything else that could have affected him so strongly.
“What else?”
“Heath, don’t make me guess. Tell me.”
“We had finally made some progress. Until today, the federal government was loosening its control over the South. They decided to start with Georgia . . .”
“Yes,” she hurried in to fill the silence, “I know a little about it. Georgia and a few other states were readmitted to Congress.”
“And the military rule was lifted. At last. And I thought the rest of the South would be allowed to follow. And then the war would really be over. No more soldiers in the streets. No more arbitrary rules and military commissions. We would be given back our land. We would get our rights back as citizens . . . rights we’re entitled to.” Heath sighed and leaned his forehead against the window frame.
“But now that Georgia is free of federal control, all of that will happen.”
“No,” he replied tersely. “Today Georgia dismissed at least half of the state legislature. The government took it as an open act of rebellion.”
“Oh, Heath . . . oh, no.” She stared at him in disbelief. “They’ll come down so hard on the state—”
“They already have. Georgia’s been thrown out of Congress, and it’s been put under military control again. Do you know how far back that puts the whole South?”
“I know that the state legislature must have had some idea of what would happen if they dismissed all those people.”
“They’ve had all these changes rammed down their throats too fast to swallow! They need to be eased into it . . . they . . . they’re trying to hold onto their pride. For years they’ve had no voice, no control over what’s happened to them. I’m not excusing what they did, but they need to have some kind of say about the decisions that affect them. Georgia is just as much a part of this country as Massachusetts or New York, and Georgians deserve the same rights. And they’ll never get them. Every time the federal troops withdraw, something like this is going to happen, and they’ll be put back under the national government’s thumb. It’ll never be over.”
“Heath—”
“I left because I couldn’t stand to see it,” he continued, ignoring her attempt to break in. “The frustration . . . I could feel it wherever I went. It was in the air we breathed; there was no way to get away from it. We were beaten . . . but there were a few hopes . . . maybe it would be all right. Maybe we could get on with rebuilding our lives . . . maybe all that Lincoln said about lending a helping hand to the South was going to be true—”
“If he had lived—”
“But he didn’t, and we got Johnson, an incompetent fool, and Grant, who doesn’t give a damn about anything so long as no one bothers him about his stock manipulations. The minute the war was over, thousands of Northerners came down to the South to loot and scavenge, and they’ve done it for years, over and over again. We’re the only Americans who’ve ever lost a war and been occupied by the enemy. There’s only so long you can hold still for that before you start to fight back in the only way you know how. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a good way or not, just as long as you’re doing something—”
“I know,” Lucy said quietly. “I know that you want to speak in defense of your people, and that you want to help each side understand the other. But you can’t expect Damon to be a voice for the South.”
“I didn’t ask that of him. I only wanted a moderate editorial. Nothing radical—”
“And he refused to write it?”
“Oh, he wrote it all right. He couldn’t be more in agreement with the federal government, and he damn well said so.”
“Did you try to reason with him?”
“It would be less painful to butt my head against a brick wall. He wasn’t about to budge.”
“And you exploded,” Lucy said ruefully.
Heath went over to the whiskey and poured himself another drink, his sideways glance silently daring her to offer a word of protest. Wisely Lucy kept silent. “I told him I’d write the editorial myself. He said he’d leave the paper if I did.”
“Heath.” Lucy felt sick at the thought of all his plans, all his hopes, disappearing so quickly.
“I can’t run this editorial the way it is now, Cin,” he said thickly, tossing down
the third drink. “I’d be betraying everything I believe in. And I can’t ignore the whole thing. That’s what the paper is for, to take on issues like this.”
She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them, her mind and heart in turmoil. What could she do? What could she say to him?
A sharp, explosive sound startled her as Heath threw his glass into the fireplace. It shattered into hundreds of glittering shards, causing a whirl of sparks to fly up from the crumbling log. Flinching, half-frightened by his anger, she returned her gaze to her lap.
“Tell me how to help you,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t know how.” She was aware of him walking towards her, she felt the coolness of his shadow cast over her, saw the dark shine of his boots as he stood in front of her.
“I don’t know either,” he said huskily, his accent intensified by the liquor. “All I know is that I’m sick of all of it. I’m tired of fighting to gain an inch of headway, when nothing’s going to stop the tide. I’m tired of making decisions. I left the South . . . because I was tired of being defeated . . . oh, God, Cinda, there are things . . . I haven’t told you . . .” With a sigh he dropped to his knees and buried his head in her lap, his hands tangling in the scented silk of her skirts. Lucy froze. She heard a quiet, broken sound, and she looked down at his golden head with panic and astonishment. Careless, taunting, hot-tempered Heath Rayne, with his head in her lap and his fingers clutching the folds of her dress.
Suddenly she didn’t have to worry anymore about what to say to him, because the words were tumbling out of her mouth too fast to keep them in. She bent over him, stroking his hair, murmuring to him softly, urgently. “Of course you’re tired . . . you’ve been working so hard . . . of course you are. I know you haven’t told me everything . . . it doesn’t matter.”
“I left because it won’t stop . . . until their spirit is broken . . . I couldn’t stay to watch it.”
“No . . . no, of course not,” she soothed, making no effort to argue or reason with him. Later would be the time for reasoning and making sense out of it all. Now he was tired and defeated, and he just wanted a few hours in which he didn’t have to think about anything. She remembered how that felt, how it had been that night after she had run to him after Daniel had rejected her. Heath had been there to help her, letting her draw from his strength. Did she have enough strength to sustain him in the same way?
“I couldn’t help . . .”
“Shhhh . . . everything will be fine.”
“You don’t understand what it was like—”
“Yes, I do. I understand,” she said, resting her cool fingers on the back of his neck.
“No . . . I went back, I saw . . . they were all there . . . Raine . . . Raine was there too. Clay had been wounded—his back just . . . gave out. They needed me. I could have helped. I would have taken care of all of them . . . I wouldn’t have touched her. I wouldn’t have.”
“Heath?” Lucy asked, her breath disturbing his tawny hair as she bent over him. “Who is Raine? Who are you talking about?”
He only shook his head, catching at her small hand and pressing the back of it against his scarred temple.
Frowning sharply, Lucy wondered what had gone on between him and Raine, whoever she was. Love? Hate? She struggled to accept the fact that in the past he might have loved another woman deeply, given her all that he had not given Lucy. Maybe it had been Raine. Lucy had not known until now how deeply jealousy could be felt.
“She wouldn’t admit . . . she needed me . . .” He wiped his sleeve across his eyes in a gesture that caught at her heart, and then he dropped his head back into the comfortable hollow of her lap. She was silent as she listened to him, torn between hoping that he would go on and not wanting to hear any more. “She never did. ”
Lucy rubbed her knuckles across his temple in a hesitant caress.
“I wanted you,” he said, his voice soft and singed, “the first time I saw you. Did I tell you that?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“It was raining. You were crossing the street. You took longer than everyone else, because . . . because you were picking your way around all the little . . . puddles. I wanted you.”
“Heath—”
“After I found you at the river, you kept calling me Daniel . . . but it was me. It was me holding you—”
“I knew it was.”
“But you kept . . .” He sighed and then fell silent, his head and arms becoming heavier in her lap as he relaxed. Lucy knew that if he passed out, she would never be able to get him up onto the bed. The thought of having to call someone else to help her galvanized her into action.
“Heath, sit up here and let me help you off with your boots.”
“No . . . you don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do, because you’ll never get them off by yourself.”
Mumbling a curse, Heath relinquished the warm softness of her lap and pulled himself up onto the bed, holding one foot out for her to take hold of. She grasped the boot firmly and tried to work it off, finding that Heath’s effort to help by wiggling his toes hindered her progress considerably. After struggling for a few minutes, one boot came off, and then the other.
“You probably haven’t eaten anything all day,” she fretted, watching as Heath allowed himself to sprawl on the mattress with outflung arms.
“No.”
“So this is what happens when you fill an empty stomach with a pint of corn whiskey.” She crawled up beside him and undid his necktie. “I’ve never seen anyone drink that like it was water. I told you not to have any more.” As she scolded him gently, she went through the laborious process of undressing him. “Here, pull your arm out of that sleeve—”
“I can’t.”
“Heath, if you would just try—”
“I can’t. You didn’t unbutton it.”
“I’m glad you don’t drink very often, because I wouldn’t like having to do this for you all the time—”
“You’re not very good at it,” he said, clinging possessively to a lock of her hair as she tugged the hem of his shirt out of his pants.
“Well, I’m hardly going to apologize for my lack of experience at undressing men. My goodness, you’re heavy.” It was only with determination and a great deal of effort that Lucy finished stripping his clothes off, pausing only briefly to admire the muscled slope of his torso before reaching for a pillow. “Now, if we can just get you under the covers—”
“Cinda,” he said unsteadily, “I told you . . . to act like my wife . . . before . . . but I meant only if you . . . you know I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” she murmured, vaguely startled by his concern. Had he really been worrying about that, wondering if her responses to him were manufactured out of a sense of duty? You impossible man, she thought with a sudden rush of warmth, how can you know me so well in some ways and so little in others?
Her gaze was caught and trapped by his. His eyes were brilliant with an azure smolder, the heat of a summer sky, and she felt a tender throbbing of response deep inside. He rolled over and pulled her underneath him with surprising ease.
“You need to sleep.” She put her hands against his hard, bare chest.
“No.”
His mouth crushed hers in a hot, whiskey-flavored kiss, allowing her no chance to speak. She felt the violent pounding of his heart underneath her palm, and the tentative words of refusal she had meant to say vanished like a wisp of smoke. The ragged bonds of restraint snapped. His lips, demanding and plundering, took hers. His body straddled hers as he cradled her head in his hands, and he was rough in his desperation. He held her with bruising force, kissing her as if he were drinking of life itself, like a battered survivor, clinging to the only truth he knew.
She admitted to herself at last that she loved him. Love welled through her body, filling her breasts, seeping through her throat, swirling through her head until she was dizzy. Love seemed to pour out of her fingertips as she slid her hands across his sho
ulders. Surely he could taste it on her lips, feel it thrilling inside her body. She was stunned at how much time it had taken to recognize it. Her entire life had been a prelude to this moment.
“I need you,” he groaned, and his mouth dragged over hers again and again, in intense, punishing kisses that robbed her of breath. Her lungs fought to accommodate a deep gulp of air, but her corset was as tight as a band of steel. Defenseless in his forceful grip, she offered her mouth and body freely, in an effort to show him that she was his. She would not deny him. But his desire was too savage, too elemental to pacify. She tried to unfasten the row of tiny buttons at her midriff, fumbling helplessly, but suddenly his hands were there, and he ripped the front of her dress open with a simple, savage tug. For once, her corset laces came undone easily.
Lucy twisted free of the remnants of her bodice and the binding stays, shivering as her naked breasts pressed against his hard, tanned flesh. His hands claimed her greedily, his touch lusty and sure as he rubbed her nipples into hard, delicate buds. His uneven breath feathered against her neck, and she turned her face to his, nuzzling his lean cheek with her lips, clumsily seeking his mouth. She gave a half-stifled moan as he kissed her, the sound low and resonant against his lips. They had known each other intimately, as husband and wife, countless times. He had held her with tenderness and passion, but never with such rampant wildness.
The lower half of her body was swathed heavily in mounds of clothes. Impatiently he ripped and tugged until she was freed from the burdensome mass, and her pale skin gleamed in the early-evening light. She stretched the full length of her body along his, pressing her loins against the burning, turgid swell of his manhood. “I want you,” she whispered against his shoulder. “I want to give you whatever you need . . . whatever you want . . .”
His hand glided over her hip to the soft, pulsing ache between her legs, and he slipped the tip of his finger inside her, stroking the sleek heat of her. Lucy whimpered, moving her trembling thighs apart, burying her face in his throat in unconscious pleading. She slid her damp palms over the hard-textured surface of his back, digging the heels of her hands into the flexing muscles as his fingertip explored the secret hollow of her body. Always before, he had been aware of the exquisite fragility of her flesh, and there had been an element of self-restraint in his touch, as if he had been afraid he would hurt her. Now all constraints were gone, all deliberation had vanished. He lowered his hips to her and thrust into her violently, sending shocks of pleasure through her as their flesh merged. She groaned and shifted against him, her body expanding to hold him in a firm, hungry grasp. Submerged in a wave of unending sweetness, they tangled together more intimately, chaining each other with kisses and seeking caresses. Heath hooked his hands around the backs of her knees, lifting them and urging her legs to wrap around his hips. He whispered her name as if it were a love word, and his mouth drifted through the tear tracks on her face. They would not yield their secrets. Oh, but love . . .