by Ruth Wind
When they'd completed a full round of steps, Ben paused, pinning her with his look. He slid his hands over hers, creating a subtle, delicious friction. His gaze steadily probed Heather's. His palms were firm and supple and strong, and the sensation he created with his simple movement was one of the most erotic Heather had ever experienced. When the music ended with a shout from the other dancers, she was shattered out of her reverie and snatched her hands away, but her gaze was still fastened upon his. He reached up to touch her face, cupping her chin, and his lips edged toward hers. When at last they closed on her mouth, Heather felt a flush of something new within her—something she didn't want to examine. She sighed against his lips, warm and strong, with the feel of his mustache a delightful accent to the sensations flooding her senses.
Except for his hand on her chin and his lips on hers, no part of their bodies touched at all. Heather almost stepped forward to him when she remembered where they were—in the very room where she'd met James. Flustered, she pulled away. "I'm not ready for this," she whispered in consternation.
Ben took her hand. "Maybe not," he said, his voice husky. He smoothed a wisp of hair away from her face. "I have lots of time." Glancing over his shoulder at the people beginning to show the high spirits of good beer and a good time, he added, "I think I'm ready to go get something to eat. Do you think you've been here long enough?"
"Oh, yes. I just needed to make an appearance. We can go now."
"How do you feel about pizza?"
Heather smiled, feeling herself return to normal. "Now, that's one junk food I love." She looked at her dress. "I want to change my clothes before we go anywhere else, though."
"Okay. It's early, yet. We can run by your house first."
She said her goodbyes and they departed. As they drove, it started to snow very lightly. "I hope this doesn't get any worse," Heather noted grimly.
"You don't like the snow?"
"I just hate to drive in it. It scares me half to death. Basically, I just don't, period."
Ben smiled. "We'll be all right." He wanted to reach out and pat her hand, but both of them were firmly placed at ten and two o'clock on the steering wheel. She leaned slightly forward to see out the windshield. At the mere sight of snow, her shoulder muscles had tensed. "Why are you so afraid of bad weather?"
"When I was seventeen I slid my car right into the side of a bridge. It turned out all right because I wasn't going very fast, but it could have been terrible. All I did was break my arm."
"Nobody likes slippery roads."
"I'm not nobody or most people," she countered stiffly. "When it gets icy, I just don't drive." A little flicker of wry humor twisted her lips into the semblance of a smile. "I don't know why they invented cars at all. I hate driving."
Ben laughed. "You just get somebody to drive you around. That's what I do."
"Is that how you got to Pueblo tonight?"
"Sure is."
"Maybe I'll see if I can find someone willing to trade time at the wheel for guitar lessons," Heather suggested, smiling.
"I have to pay John, but you're prettier than I am." Her perfume wafted over him—a scent reminiscent of cloves and cinnamon. His gaze traveled over the oval of her face to the pale flesh just below her ear. The dress left a good portion of her shoulder bare, and without conscious thought he reached out to touch the vulnerable spot. Beneath the satiny texture of her skin, a muscle hard with tension resisted his fingers. "God, woman, you're as wound up as a cat."
"I never sleep well when I'm having my nightmares."
"What kind of nightmares do you have?" He rubbed the muscle absently, taking pleasure in simply touching her, in watching the snow-muted light play over her medieval-looking face.
"Just one." She swallowed. "But I don't like to talk about it. No offense."
"None taken." He slid his fingers up her neck to the curve of her jaw. He knew from the papers that James had committed suicide, and he had a hunch her nightmares had something to do with that. But three years was a long time for a widow to grieve.
She pulled into the driveway of a sturdy brick home. Along the side lining the asphalt, three panels of wide glass brick broke the solid facade. "You have a fortress, here."
"They definitely built these houses to last."
"I would have pictured you in something different," Ben commented as they climbed out of the car.
"Really?" She smiled faintly, cloaked in the odd distance she sometimes adopted. "Like what?"
"Like a house of trees." He grinned and was rewarded with a genuine smile.
He followed her into the darkened living room and stayed close to the door until she flicked on the lights. With his luck, he would stumble into some priceless heirloom.
"It'll only take a moment for me to change," she said. "Make yourself at home."
"All right."
In her bedroom, Heather paused a moment to catch her breath. Her cheeks were hot and her stomach seemed alive with electricity. She turned on a small crystal lamp on her dresser. In the full-length mirror, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glowed with blue excitement. Beauty, she thought with a smile. Ben Shaw had given her some beauty.
Behind her in the living room, she heard him talking softly to the birds. Amadeus answered cheerfully and even Peter, bad-tempered as he was, chirped in reply. She moved toward the door, beginning to unfasten the button at the top of her gown, then remembered with dismay the complicated ties at the back. Her words to the seamstress about ladies' maids came back to her mockingly.
Briefly she considered not changing her clothes, after all, rather than ask Ben for assistance; but the thought of struggling with the same problem later, decided her. "Ben?"
"Yes?"
"I need a little help, if you wouldn't mind."
He appeared from around the corner, a rakish expression tilting his mustache. "Sure thing, little lady." An unruly dark wave of hair fell over his forehead and he brushed it away. Heather felt the wattage in her belly leap.
"It's, um, these ties in the back." She turned to show him. She felt his approach in the change that suddenly rippled over her body, as if he carried a chemical aura of tinder that kindled her inner cells. She licked her lips. "If you'll just untie those, I can probably manage the rest." She lifted her braid and pulled it over one shoulder.
He lifted his hands to the ties and did as he'd been asked. "Is that all you wanted?"
Heather nodded, unable to speak.
Ben stepped closer and placed his hands on her shoulders. The smooth pads of his fingers on her bare flesh jolted her and she started. He tightened his fingers slightly. "Relax," he murmured into her ear. The moist and heated air of his breath drifted over the delicate skin below her ear. When he flickered his tongue over the lobe of her ear, Heather gasped. For one fleeting second, a warning signal flashed in her mind, a sound like a smoke alarm, but his breath flowed over her skin and she couldn't move—not yet. In a minute, she promised herself. In a minute or two she would bring them both back to reality.
As if weighted, her eyelids slipped shut and she swayed back, leaning into his chest. A languorous thudding pulsed heavily in her lips and belly and breasts. Ben's mouth moved over her neck and whispered over the corner of her jaw, and his hair brushed her shoulder as he circled her waist with his hands. His voice, as dark and sweet as molasses, dripped in her ear, speaking her name. He pulled her tightly against him.
She knew she should stop him now, as she felt the slow heat migrating through her limbs. Instead she found herself lifting her arms to touch the deep-gloss waves of his hair, delighting in the springy texture that leaped to embrace her knuckles. Ben pressed kisses along her cheek, his tongue, bold and searing, flickering out at intervals to tease the corner of her eye or the sweep of her cheekbone. She dropped her head backward to his shoulder. He moaned softly, a lazy sound that vibrated through her bones like currents of electricity that consumed her to the core.
He moved his hands with agonizing slownes
s, embracing her quivering belly and rib cage, where he stopped to caress the length of each bone as he passed it. At last his palms gained the lower swell of her breasts beneath the pearls and heavy velvet. He paused and shifted Heather in his arms so that she was half turned toward him, braced in one powerful arm while he left his other hand where it lay, gently resting below her breast.
"Look at me, Heather," he demanded in a gravelly voice.
Her eyelids fluttered open. His sultry mouth took hers, his gaze trapping Heather's in a mesmeric spell. As if drawn by a magnetic field, his hand gravitated to cover her breast, finding and stroking the taut peak that seemed to strain toward the heat of his palm.
It was the most erotic, consuming moment of her life. His half-opened eyes probed hers, his tongue plundered her mouth and his hand performed an exquisite dance of expert sensuality over her breast. She imagined she could hear the sizzle of unleashed voltage and gave herself up to him, all reason overcome. No moment, past, present or future, mattered save this one.
"You smell so good," he said softly bringing his mouth to her neck. He left a trail of kisses over her collarbone, up her throat, and back down to the square of her chest revealed by the bodice of her gown.
All at once, she felt her gown give way, and she nearly bolted. Ben's mouth suddenly upon her own, teasing with tongue and lips, halted her. As his kiss invited her to sink back into the hazy sensuality of the moment, she found herself giving freely to him, her tongue conducting an exploration of its own, her heart pounding to the rhythm of his blood rushing through the vein beneath her fingers.
Ben left her mouth to feather kisses over her temple and ear and jaw, then falling to burn the upper swell of her bosom. He slid his hands steadily to their goal, expertly circling her small breasts with nimble fingertips.
Enflamed now, Heather took one step away from him. The crackling of electricity through her veins filled her body with a roaring noise that canceled everything except his dangerously sensual eyes—eyes that watched as she reached up with her hands to the shoulders of her dress, slipping first one, then the other from her body. She let the heavy fabric slide away, leaving only her thin lacy slip as a shield between his eyes and her breasts.
Languorously, helplessly, Ben reached toward the aroused points, his fingers caressing them simultaneously with a touch as light as a summer breeze. While she watched, her chest rising and falling with her quick breathing, he dipped his dark head to taste her rigid nubs through the silk, using his tongue to scald them with loving spirals. She gasped.
An answering groan escaped his lips and he pulled Heather roughly into the crook of his arm, pushing away the slippery material to devour the bared white flesh of her breasts with undisciplined hunger. She ran her fingers through the silky hair at his crown and arched to meet his mouth as he traced the sensitive skin of her breasts and the valley between. A wave of dizziness engulfed her, and Ben, sensing it, moved her to the bed a few feet away, pausing only a second in his ministrations to make her comfortable.
Heather slid her fingers from the hair at his neck to the lean plane of his cheek. It was exhilarating to feel the sturdy warmth of a man against her, to feel his arms securely fastened around her, to smell his heady and alien scent. She slipped her hands down to rest upon his shoulders, strong and broad beneath the fine corduroy of his jacket. She could sense the restraint he exercised, the care he used to handle her; and a little part of her sang with it. Here, she thought breathlessly, was a man of men—gentle and strong all at once.
He brought his mouth to hers and she thrilled at the unaccustomed roughness of corduroy and cotton against her chest. The kiss deepened and Heather heard a small sound escape her as he used his tongue to urge hers into the most ancient of dances, a dance he led with consummate grace. Heather pressed into him and a jolt of excitement coursed through her as she felt his arousal and realized she was the source of it.
He kissed her urgently, his mustache bristling into the tender skin of her upper lip. Heather felt the dryness of her soul fill to overflowing as she ran her hands over his back and sides, finding at last the buttons on his shirt. She freed enough of them to let her explore the heated skin below, his chest with its covering of crisp hair, and the supple flesh of his belly. A long low sound of satisfaction emanated from deep in his throat.
He paused above her for a moment, and he laid an open palm alongside her cheek. Heather flickered her eyes open at his slowed pace to find his gaze upon her. The long-lashed eyes held an earthiness she hadn't glimpsed there before, and he kissed her, still holding her gaze, taking a sweet sip of her lips. He sighed a little raggedly and slipped his hand from her face to encircle one breast gently. He looked at the swell of flesh in his hand, then back to her face and moved his hand back to her waist. "I'm not going to make love with you yet, Heather." He glanced around the room. "And I'm not ever going to do it here."
Heather blinked. Beneath her fingers, she could feel the hard pounding of his heart, and even through the layers of velvet over her thighs there was no mistaking his desire for her. She looked at his lean face, at the planes of his high cheekbones and the exotic shape of his eyes. Even as her pulse and breathing slowed and the taut sensation in her abdomen relaxed, she knew she wanted Ben to make love with her. She wanted to join with him, learn every nuance of his movements and voice and mouth. She swallowed. "I understand."
He dipped for one last kiss, pulling the pearl-studded bodice over her breasts, then rose to straighten his clothes. "I'll wait out here."
Ben exited as gracefully as he could and closed the door behind him. In the dim hallway, he took a deep breath, cursing himself under his breath. All that resolve, all that caution, thrown to the wind the moment he could lay his hands on her. What was wrong with him? She wasn't one of the all-too-friendly women he met around town or on tours—a long way from it. He knew she needed caution and slow movement.
But she'd flared like a match at his touch, and the transformation of the shy, introverted woman into one of such genuine passion had inflamed him, as well. She was ready for a lover, but he didn't want her simply responding to him out of a need for sexual fulfillment. Ben wanted her to see him—not the ghost of her husband, or a fantasy man. She couldn't know or trust him well enough yet. When the moment came, he wanted the two of them to join with their eyes wide open. Because he was a man of instinct, he didn't stop to reason out his feelings. All he knew was that it was essential that they didn't rush or pretend with one another.
Rather than be caught outside her door when she finished changing, he moved down the hallway. A closed door was at the end of the passage and Ben wondered curiously what was behind it. A workroom, perhaps? He stepped toward it, moving his shoulders restlessly, an odd tightness in his neck. The pet birds, who'd been chattering at one another for the past minute, set up a racket of whistles and chirps and high protestations. A fight, Ben thought, and he grinned.
The grin faded as a puff of air whooshed in his ears, and he belatedly realized the warning of his stiff neck. He had time enough to take hold of the door handle before the edges of his vision lit with the hated halo of light.
In the dark hallway, he had little to focus upon, nothing to fasten his eyes and mind upon to ease the onslaught of the seizure, so he prepared himself for the worst. The unwelcome tingling spread through his body, blocking all outward perceptions. Just before his mind turned in upon itself, he heard Heather call his name. A moment earlier, and he might have been able to will his attention toward her. But it was too late.
His last seizure had been on the train, the day he'd first seen Heather. It had been mild, gently focused upon her medieval beauty.
This time he simply knew nothing until the halo of light blinding him grew into a sun with speckled black at the edges and Ben felt the tingling slip away from his body. Only a minute more … a minute.
When he returned to himself, he was sitting on the floor. Heather crouched near him, her huge eyes showing terror. "Are you a
ll right?"
He couldn't speak, but bile rose in his belly and he struggled to his feet, shaking off Heather's attempt to help him. His entire body trembled in the aftermath and he lurched into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. He rid himself of the bitterness and rinsed his mouth, moving carefully on rubbery legs. Every muscle in his body quivered. The look he gave his pale face in the mirror reflected the self-loathing he felt. Hell! he thought. Hellfire and damnation—
Heather's thin voice came through the door. "Ben? Are you all right?"
He had no right to leave her out there, no right to hide his shame and embarrassment behind the door while she wondered over his sanity and his health. He had to face her, once again, and apologize for his cursed weakness. A voice deep in his mind cackled at his feeble attempts at creating a normal relationship.
He faced his reflection, straightening his shoulders. No. He wouldn't cringe, not even for Heather. She could take him or leave him, as he was. He opened the door.
Heather stood in the hallway, dressed in a soft green sweater with long sleeves and a pair of jeans. The pale gold braid, still laced with velvet and pearls, hung over one shoulder. She remained silent as he emerged, limping rather obviously, and she'd arranged her features into a carefully neutral mask. "Are you all right?"
Her distant concern somehow rekindled his earlier embarrassment and thus his defensiveness. "Fine," he bit out, and brushed past her into the living room. He stood there, feeling smothered by the heavy sturdiness of the rooms around him. A part of him recognized the wash of irritability as an expected portion of his seizures, but the irritation itself swept away any sense of reason he might have summoned. "I have to get out of here," he muttered. "Can I use your phone?"