The Bridal Arrangement
Page 13
He loved this woman. And he couldn’t help himself any longer. He folded back the covers, hiked himself up on an elbow and simply watched her sleep. His wife.
Her breasts were so pale, her areolas so deliciously pink and delicately pebbled around the tip of her nipples. Even as she slept, they knotted into tight little beads.
He glanced up, saw that her eyes were open, watchful.
“Good morning, Mrs. Savage.” His hand moved automatically to her breast, drawn, as his gaze was drawn to her eyes.
She stretched and pressed into his hand. “Good morning, Mr. Savage.”
They shared a smile then, one full of longing and memories and discoveries they’d made in this bed. He’d made love to her again after that first time. After he’d gently bathed the signs of her virginity from her thighs, he’d taken her again before he’d let her sleep. And now he wanted to do it all over again.
“I trust you slept well.” He watched her face, loving the glazed look in her eyes as he played with her breast and she responded with the sweetest sigh, the most seductive little shiver.
“What time is it?”
He lowered his mouth to where his hand had been. “Close to ten.”
She scrambled to sit up. “My chores—”
“Done,” he informed her, and pushed her down to her back again.
“Oh. Well…but you must be hungry.”
“Oh, I am. I was thinking about breakfast in bed.”
She may be an innocent, but she was quick, and she was beautiful when she was coy.
“Breakfast,” she said, luxuriating again in the touch of his mouth to her breast. “In bed?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. And you don’t even have to do anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Just lie there,” he murmured, moving over her, then moving down, nibbling, caressing, tasting as he went. The slender curve of her jaw, the delicate slope of her shoulder. The delicious tip of her breast that he couldn’t seem to get enough of.
“Lee…”
“Shush. Let me. Just let me.” He looked up her body, held her startled, excited gaze as his mouth cruised along her skin, to the hollow of her navel, then nipped lightly at her hip point.
He watched the fire kindle, then burst to flame as he tunneled his hands under her bottom and tilted her to his mouth.
“Let me, Ellie. Let me love you like this.” He brushed his lips across her curls, feeling her tense and shiver and yearn.
He told her how beautiful she was, how perfect, as he pressed a kiss there…there where her heat was the sweetest. There where she was most sensitive, most vulnerable. There where he knew he could please her most. He wanted to take her over in a way she would never forget, in a way that would claim her absolute trust, in a way that would shatter her with pleasure.
Only he was the one who fell apart. It was a beautiful thing. The way she tasted. The way she moved. The way she moaned and cried his name when she splintered into a million fragmented pieces.
But if she was shattered by the experience, he was obliterated, bound, tied forever to the wonder of her trust, the openness of her responses. She was still coming down when he moved slowly up her body and held her while she wept softly in his arms.
And he knew. For the first time he truly understood what he was holding. In his arms he held the power to make him more than he was, more than he’d ever been. And it humbled him.
She turned in his arms then, and with her gaze intent on his, rose to her knees, took him in her hands. And destroyed him.
He bucked involuntarily against the acute, intense pleasure as she lowered her head. If he hadn’t given over his heart to her before, he would have handed it to her on a platter in this moment.
“Ellie…” He dragged a hand over her tangled hair. “You don’t have to.”
“Oh, but I do. I have to. I want to. I need to,” she whispered softly, and touched him with the tip of her tongue. “Let me. Let me…”
And he was lost.
Nine
Ellie breezed around the kitchen, hurrying to finish the dinner she’d prepared and tuck it into the oven. She wanted everything done before Lee came in from the south pasture range. She planned to feed him well. Later.
That done, the only thing on her mind was finding the bottle of wine she had ordered from the Stop and Shop for their wedding night and never had the chance to share with Lee—with her husband.
She felt the blush as it warmed her breasts, then rose to color her face before it disappeared into her hairline.
He couldn’t keep his hands off her. He’d told her so. She laughed, joyful and disbelieving, and caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror that hung beside the wall phone. Hugging herself, she twirled around in a circle, remembering the way he’d looked and everything he’d said when he’d left her.
“I have to go do something,” he’d said right after lunch as he’d dragged her back into his arms by the kitchen door and kissed her until she thought she’d melt from the pleasure and the pressure of his hot strong body pressed against hers.
“I have to…do…something. Just for a little while. Just long enough to check the black mare—and because I won’t be able to leave you alone if I stay here.”
“I’m not asking you to leave me alone,” she’d assured him, then smiled when he’d pressed his forehead to hers and groaned.
“All the more reason to go.” Another quick, tender kiss. “If you don’t have the sense to shove me away, then I’m going to have to be the one to make the rules.”
“I could go with you,” she’d suggested brightly.
“No,” he’d said on a deep chuckle. “You could not! Leave it be, woman. Get some rest, because I promise you, you’re going to need it for what I have in mind for later tonight.”
Well, she thought saucily, I’ve got a little something in mind for tonight, too.
She blushed again thinking about it. Then she took another long look in the mirror. She liked what she saw. She saw a woman, not a girl. She saw a wife, not an obligation.
And when Lee walked into the house an hour later and found her waiting for him, naked in the middle of their bed, the room flickering with the light of a dozen candles and a chilled bottle of wine sitting on the side table, she knew that he saw her that way, too.
“Ellie.”
That’s all he said. That’s all he had to say. She opened her arms, opened her body and welcomed him home.
He lay panting and spent, spread eagled on his back in the middle of a wild tangle of sheets. Ellie sat beside him, her hands folded prayer-like under her chin, a grin as wide as the sky lighting her face.
“How did you…where did you… Good night, Ellie. How did you know how to do that?”
She laughed. “You didn’t like it?”
He groaned. Then he laughed, too, huge and happy and utterly wasted. “I’m not sure. Maybe we ought to try it again.”
She hit him with a pillow, then squealed when he reached for her. They were both laughing when he dragged her beneath him. “Talk. I mean it. Where did you learn about that?”
She groped for the side of the bed, tugged the book out from beneath the mattress and shoved it under his nose. “Page thirty-four.”
With a frowning glance he set her carefully aside. When he opened the book, he blinked long and wide at the page in question, checked out the cover, looked at her smug little smile, then back at the page again.
“Where did you get this book?” he asked with an amazed laugh.
She tucked her feet beneath her bare bottom and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “I sent for it.”
When he just stared at her, she shrugged. “Momma belonged to a book club. She used to get books on cooking and quilting and gardening…and things. They just kept sending ads. When…when I realized we were going to get married, well, I figured…I wanted to know how to make you happy. This book caught my eye.”
He laughed again, delighted, then with a wicked grin, handed it back
to her. “So…” He reached out, toyed with a shining ribbon of hair that curled over her left breast, “are there any other pages in there that you found noteworthy?”
“Actually…” Looking thoughtful, she thumbed through the pages, opened the book wide, studied a picture, tilted it sideways, studied it some more, then showed it to him. “I was kind of thinking that this looked interesting.”
He didn’t even look at the book. He just looked at this woman, this amazing, inventive, brave and sensual woman he had the good fortune to call his wife. “I so love a resourceful woman,” he murmured as he pulled her to him. Then he tossed the book over his shoulder and showed her a little resourcefulness of his own.
He wanted to take her somewhere. It hit him while he was out checking fences about nine o’clock one morning a couple of weeks later. She needed a honeymoon. In her entire life she’d rarely been farther than Bozeman, and she needed to go someplace special. Someplace she would love and absorb and remember. As Lee rode down the lane toward the house, he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it sooner.
Because he’d been so enamored with his wife, that’s why. For the past two weeks he’d been completely consumed by her vast and delightful intelligence, her charming lack of guile, her extreme enthusiasm. She was bright and funny and had a wicked spark of mischief that made him laugh and reminded him that she wasn’t the only one who had been missing a vital piece of her life. He’d been missing something, too—and he wasn’t altogether convinced that he deserved to wake up each morning and feel such a rich, rare and indefinable warmth fill his chest when she snuggled her warm little body up next to his in bed.
It felt so good, and sometimes he couldn’t help but wonder what he’d done to deserve it. In the next thought he would try very hard not to be angry with Will and Clare. They had done what they’d thought was the best thing for her, but it was clear to him now that in the process of sheltering her from a world that they wouldn’t allow to corrupt or scar her, they hadn’t cultivated and encouraged her boundless imagination.
She could have been so many things. He smiled, thinking about how she was making up for lost time now.
One midnight he’d awakened alone and gone looking for her. He’d found her outside. She was wearing her white gown, dancing barefoot in the starlit meadow, her fiery mop of long, tangled curls flying about her cherub face like angel hair in the moonlight. When she’d realized she’d been discovered, she’d laughed, held out her arms and damned if she hadn’t had him dancing with her…and making love under the stars.
She’d coaxed him into that old claw foot tub with her more than once, too, where she’d fed him chocolate and strawberries and pressed butterfly kisses to his face with the soft flutter of her lashes.
She took him to so many places he’d never thought he’d had in him to go. He’d discovered emotions; he’d discovered needs. He’d discovered the capacity to give in ways that stunned him; he’d discovered the ability to take and hold and trust the love she offered—and that had been the biggest surprise of all.
So, yeah, he wanted to take her somewhere, to show her how happy she made him. Because she did make him happy.
It was almost too much to digest, sometimes. He’d never figured he was entitled to this much goodness. In fact, he’d conditioned himself all of his life to live without it.
Even now, past experience raised its ugly head on a regular basis with a pat, conditioned reminder. Something that seems too good to be true probably is. And who ever said you were entitled?
No one. No one had ever said he was entitled to anything. And what he’d found with Ellie did seem too good to be true. More and more often he had to fight to outdistance the creeping sensation that not only was it too good to last, it was too rich to count on.
No sooner would he start brooding, though, and he’d see her. Like now. As he loped down the lane on Bud, he spotted her in her garden, fiery bright hair and busy hands—and a negative thought didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of denting his optimism.
She was sitting with her back to him in the middle of the freshly turned earth that he’d tilled for her just yesterday. Getting ready to plant those zinnias she’d been so anxious to get into the ground, he thought with a grin as he reined in and looped the reins over a fence post.
She was so deep in concentration that she didn’t hear him walk up behind her. With a smile of anticipation, he dropped to one knee, wrapped his arms around her and pressed a kiss to her hair.
She jumped as if he’d shot her, then tore at his arms as if he’d bound her in barbwire. Her eyes were wild, her hair flying around her face as she frantically scrambled away from him on all fours.
“No-no-no-no-no-no.” A desperate, ragged whisper, a disjointed, murmured chant.
He backed off immediately, a warning shot firing through his head as she knelt there, agitated, combative, shaking her head from side to side. “No-no-no-no-no.”
Seizure?
His heart rate doubled. “Ellie?”
“Sorry-sorry-sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Sorry.”
He glanced quickly around, saw what he hadn’t noticed before—her bucket of seed packets was scattered all over the ground like shards of colored glass. The garden hose was running, cutting a snaking river through her carefully cultivated plot.
Panicked, and afraid for her, he went to her.
She crab-walked farther away. “No-no-no-no.”
He stopped abruptly as Doc’s words came back to him.
Keep your distance. Don’t try to restrain her. Just give her room.
He clenched his fists to his sides. It hurt. Dammit, it hurt to see her like this. Her eyes were glassy and vacant, her movements unnatural yet oddly choreographed as she sat there, hands in motion, moving her head slowly from side to side, seeing but not seeing him, speaking but not speaking to him.
“No-no-no-no-no. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry…”
“Ellie. Sweetheart. Can you hear me?”
“No-no-no-no-no. Don’t-don’t-don’t-don’t. Sorry-sorry. I’m s-s-sorry.”
He’d never been so scared in his life. He’d never felt so helpless. But he made himself stand. Made himself stay right where he was, which was too far away.
His heart hammered as if he’d been running uphill, as a stiff breeze cooled the sweat that beaded on his brow, at the small of his back. And all he could do was stand there. Watching, worrying, agonizing over what was happening to her and pained at his utter and absolute uselessness.
He checked his watch, was debating a call to Doc when she drew in a deep breath and became utterly, disconcertingly still.
For another moment he did nothing, said nothing. And then he couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Ellie?”
She sat back on her hip, lifted her hands to her face. For a long moment she just sat there and then slowly she raised her head. Her face was smudged with the dirt from her garden. Her fingers were caked with it. She looked lost. And confused. And a deep breath away from falling apart. “Lee?”
He wasn’t conscious of moving, but in the next moment he was on his knees in the dirt beside her, touching a hand to her hair, soothing her with quiet words. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
She swallowed several times, slowly licked her lips. “I…I…”
“Shh, baby, it’s okay. I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Let’s go to the house, okay? Let’s get out of the sun and get you to bed.”
A tear tracked slowly down her face, cut a pale thin trail through her dust-smeared cheek.
“Lee…” With trembling hands she reached for him. His heart broke for the helplessness and hopelessness in her voice.
“I know, princess. I know.”
He picked her up, cradled her in his arms and carried her to the house and up the stairs. He slowly undressed her and put her to bed. After he’d gotten a cold cloth for her head, he convinced her to take the medication that would lessen the headache that he knew would follow.
Her tears were silent and hot as they fell against his throat. Her breath was irregular and ragged.
Not one word of complaint. Not one word of self-pity. Just a silence that was as heartbreaking as her tears.
Finally she slept.
He left her long enough to take care of Bud.
And then he returned, sat in the corner in the rocker and watched over her.
He thought about all the things that made her Ellie: her wonderful smiles, her buoyant enthusiasm, the little quotes she’d framed and hung here and there around the house. One in particular, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, struck a very deep cord.
“He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.”
He’d thought he’d known fear until he’d found her there. In the dirt. Lost. Alone.
He’d thought he’d known fear.
He’d been wrong.
But she knew. She surmounted fear every day of her life.
Just last night she’d confessed one of her deepest, darkest ones.
“It’s the uncertainty,” she’d said, snuggled in his arms after they’d made love. “It’s knowing that I’ll lose time that I’ll never get back. I hate giving in to it. And even though, intellectually, I know I can’t fight it, it still feels like a failure on my part some how.”
“Ellie—”
“I know, I know. It’s just hard to see past it.”
She’d been quiet for a long time as she lay against his side, threading her small fingers through his chest hair.
When she spoke again, her voice had been childlike and hesitant. “I used to try to not be aware of things. Like my heartbeat. Or my breathing. Or even blinking. I was afraid that if I was too aware, I might see or feel whatever it is that’s inside of me—and it would think I was inviting it. Asking it to come out.