Walk in Beauty

by Wind, Ruth

  It was much more difficult than she had imagined to lie here in his living room and know, only yards away, he slept in a bed that smelled of him, his hair tousled and his mouth soft in sleep. It would be so easy to get up and go to him, to slip off the twisted gown she wore and crawl below the covers with him, touch him and kiss him gently until he awakened. She knew he would welcome her, that he would turn and pull her close to the heat and elegance of his skin. And then he would kiss her…

  With an aggravated sigh, she threw off her blanket and put on her robe. She wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight. She remembered there were books in the kitchen. She’d just make a cup of tea and read for a while—all night if necessary. Anything had to be better than this.

  Creeping quietly through the sleeping house, she went to the kitchen. The overhead light was a harsh fluorescent, and she groaned as it flickered on. A fat candle sat on the table beside Luke’s tobacco and cigarette papers. She reached for the candle, but found the tobacco in her hands instead. With a wave of longing, she lifted the bag to her nose and took a long, hungry whiff.

  Alarmed, she put it back down and lit the candle, then flipped off the overhead light. Better.

  Her restless sense of arousal began to fade as she heated water and found the mugs and tea. Amid the stacks of books and magazines, she found a promising thriller and settled at the table with the comfort of the very hot tea at her elbow. Her father, an Irish immigrant, had insisted tea could cure almost anything. While there were exceptions, Jessie had found it could come close.

  She tried to read, even managed to turn a page or two without having the faintest idea what had transpired on the page. Disappointed, she put the book aside, and her attention fell on the pouch of tobacco again.

  She bit her lip. Smoking was a stupid habit. She’d been free for two months. Well, seven weeks. Actually, only three if she counted the cigarette she sneaked at a friend’s house.

  Progress, though. She was making progress.

  Her hand crept of its own accord over the table and caught the bag. She opened it and touched the tobacco inside, a familiar sense of irritation running along her nerves. They’d invented fat-free cream cheese, for heaven’s sake—couldn’t they come up with a safe cigarette? Like tea, cigarettes didn’t disappoint a person. They were there when you needed them.

  Too bad they killed you.

  Biting her lip, she pulled the pouch open. Dieters were allowed to backslide sometimes. One slice of cheesecake didn’t mean the diet had failed. One cigarette, particularly since she would never, ever smoke in front of Giselle again, wouldn’t mean she’d failed, either. She took out a paper, trying to remember how Luke rolled them.

  A little noise in the other room made her jump, and she dropped everything guiltily, pushing it all away from her. One of the cats raced into the kitchen, chasing a knitted ball, and started when he saw Jessie. She chuckled to herself and bent over to push the ball for the creature.

  With a sigh, Jessie picked up the cigarette makings again, shaking her head even as she rolled it. The first one was a little lumpy and strange looking, so she tore it apart and started over. At least this little quandary had taken Luke out of her mind. Maybe if she smoked a cigarette, she’d feel more capable of handling the whole situation.

  The second one she rolled turned out much better. She held it for a moment, her noble side trying to convince her weak side that she could still turn back. It wasn’t too late. This cigarette could be torn apart just as the first one had been, and Jessie would be triumphant over her silly habit once again.

  The weak side won. She put it in her mouth and bent over the candle, a kind of giddy excitement filling her. It was so evil—and so good—to smoke.

  The cigarette caught and Jessie inhaled, slowly, savoring the sharp, acrid bite of the smoke in her lungs, and blew it out with a gusty sigh of enjoyment.

  “Now there’s a sound that would curl the Surgeon General’s hair.”

  Jessie choked a little and, coughing, whirled to find Luke standing negligently in the doorway, one arm braced against the arch. His chest and feet were bare, his long legs clad in a pair of black sweats that rode low on his hips. His chest was burnished and brown, his stomach flat. A line of black hair ran down his belly. Dazzled, Jessie stared at him and felt a wave of longing so intense, it nearly made her ill. She told herself it was the cigarette.

  The cigarette. She looked at it in her fingers, then back to Luke. “Are you going to scold me and make me put it out?”

  “I’d rather take a bone from a pit bull.”

  “Good.” Jessie took another drag, and a familiar wave of dizziness tingled in her veins. “Ah,” she said, “now the poisons are kicking in.”

  He took a mug from the cupboard and made himself a cup of tea from the water still in the kettle. “Something tells me you weren’t really ready to give up your bad habit.”

  She shook her head. “If I could smoke like you do, just a couple of cigarettes a day, I’d never give it up.”

  “‘One man’s pleasure is another man’s poison,’” he recited, settling across from her.

  The unfamiliar toxins made her stomach roll, and she stubbed it out. “That’s enough. When I do it, I’m never sure why.”

  He pointed to the pouch. “Will it bother you if I smoke one?”

  She smiled ruefully. “No.”

  “You couldn’t sleep, either, huh?”

  “Got tired of trying. Too many changes, too fast, I guess.”

  “Yeah.” Deftly, he scratched his thumbnail over a kitchen match. “I was in there remembering all kinds of things I’d forgotten.”

  “Like?”

  His gaze met hers, then shifted away as he sipped his tea. He inclined his head. “I don’t know. Boris. That tent we had. Some of the places we saw…lots of things.”

  “Me, too,” she admitted quietly. In this still, candlelit room, it was somehow natural to remember the good times.

  “How’s your dad, Jessie?”

  She shrugged. “Fine. He got married four or five years ago—has a three-year-old child. I don’t see him very much, though.”

  “Don’t you want Giselle to know him?”

  Jessie thought about it for a moment. “My father and I went through a lot together,” she said. “Now we’re like people who were thrown together in a war—we have this shared and painful history that’s just easier not to remember. I remind him of my mother, and that’s hard for him.”

  Luke studied her for a moment with that perceptive stillness she found so unnerving. Abruptly, he chuckled. “He sure wanted to kill me at one time, as I recall.”

  Jessie laughed in agreement. “It wasn’t you, exactly. He couldn’t believe I’d drop out of college and go wandering all over the country with a carpenter.”

  “I didn’t understand it then,” Luke said, “but looking at Giselle, I can see why he wanted you to finish college.”

  “I know. I understand, too.” She frowned and glanced toward the window, where snow gathered in the corners of the little panes. “But it was the right choice for me to drop out. I wanted to paint, and that wasn’t something he approved of, either. It wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for our wandering.” She looked at him and heard herself say, “Everything I am now somehow comes from that time.”

  The conversation was curiously peaceful, a recognition and honoring of the good her time with Luke had given her—but she was suddenly afraid it might lead them down paths she didn’t wish to take.

  Luke evidently had no wish to take those paths, either. “You know,” he said, glancing around his cluttered kitchen, “I’m so settled now that I can’t imagine wandering like that anymore. I couldn’t do it.”

  “Me, either.”

  “We were so young,” he mused, then roused himself, tapping the ash from his cigarette. “At least you settled someplace you’d never lived. I haven’t left Colorado Springs for years.” He lifted his eyebrows quickly, as if the admission embarrass
ed him. “I never used to be so set in my ways. Now I want my coffee just right in the morning, my newspaper unruffled, and work to start at eight.”

  Jessie shrugged and leaned her elbows comfortably on the table. “Humans are all creatures of habit. We have to develop routines so that we’re free to manage the rest of our lives.”

  He grinned. “So maybe I’m not an old fuddy-duddy, eh?”

  Jessie thought of his farm-fresh eggs and laughed. “Eccentric, maybe, fuddy-duddy, never.”

  “Eccentric?”

  “I thought Giselle was going to get you on the eggs. You still don’t buy them in the grocery store?”

  Reluctant amusement hung around his mouth. “Hey, I’ve come a long way. Eggs and chickens, though—can’t eat ‘em if I think about the poor things all caged up in those factories.”

  He leaned back in his chair. Jessie found her gaze washing over his long brown torso, catching at that slim line of hair low below his navel. A thickness filled her belly, and she thought of her vision of going to him in his bed.

  Alarmed, she stood up, nearly knocking over the chair in her haste. “Guess I’ll make another stab at getting some rest. I have a long drive tomorrow.”

  He carelessly stubbed out his cigarette, watching her. Candlelight flickered yellow over the surface of his liquid eyes. Jessie couldn’t move, couldn’t even take her eyes from him. It seemed impossible that she had wanted to touch him again—just one more time—and now here he was. If she wanted to, she could reach out and stroke that long muscle in his arm.

  He stood up and slowly rounded the table. Her breath caught, and she told herself she should slip away now, make some light excuse and go back to the couch. Her feet expressed the hesitancy, for she found herself backed into the counter as he moved toward her.

  “You don’t really want to go,” he said, as he touched her hair, brushing it away from her face, “any more than I want you to.” With one hand, he took her elbow and urged her closer to him. “In there, in my bed, all I could think of was touching you.” He captured her hand and put it on his chest. “You want to touch me, too, Jessie. Touch me.”

  Jessie caught her breath as his thighs touched hers, and almost against her will, her hand splayed open on his chest. “Yes,” she whispered, staring at the path her fingers made over his smooth skin. A familiar weakness struck her hips, and she swayed forward to press her forehead into the warmth of his bare torso.

  He groaned, abruptly pulling her closer, locking their bodies into full contact. His hands roamed over her back and threaded through her hair, restless and gentle and urgent all at once. Against her cheek, she could hear his heart pounding and she clutched him, touching his back and ribs, renewing her long-stored knowledge. He bent his head and buried his face against her neck. “Oh, God, Jessie. If you knew how many times…”

  With a low sound, he tipped up her chin and kissed her. Not gently. Not sweetly. It was the rough, deep kiss of a starved man, and Jessie heard a moan come from her throat as she met the thrust of his tongue, the raw embrace of his lips, the ungentle and ungraceful tangle of mouths too long unmet.

  He pressed her against the counter, and through the sweats and her robe, she could feel his arousal, fiercely pressing into her. Something within her broke free in that instant, and she grasped his hips to pull him closer, opening her mouth to the full thrust of his tongue. She drank deeply of his exquisite mouth, feeling like she’d never believed she would feel again, vividly, vibrantly alive.

  She found her hands in his hair, on his face, on his arms and back and waist—wherever she could reach him, touch him, feel him. As if he could not drink deeply enough, he caught her head in his hands and dipped again, suckling and plunging and tasting. His fingers stabbed through her hair and curled around her ears.

  Once Jessie had believed that a single kiss from Luke could put to shame the entire course of another man’s lovemaking. She found that hadn’t changed. He used his lips and tongue and hands and focused so utterly upon a kiss it nearly—

  Suddenly he lifted his head to take a ragged breath, still holding her head between his hands. His eyes blazed, liquid and nearly black in the low light. He stroked her neck and ears, almost roughly, and traced her cheek with the same urgent touch; then he placed another kiss upon her mouth, holding her gaze. “Damn, Jessie,” he said in a ragged whisper. “Why did you leave me?”

  For a minute, his words didn’t sink in. She felt drugged with the feel of him, so long and hard and fierce. Blindly, she shoved him away from her. “You know why.” She stumbled away, pushing her hair out of her face. Horrified at the way she’d lost it, she simply stared at him for a minute, trying to catch her breath.

  She covered her face with hands that traitorously wanted to pull him back again, consequences be damned. “Luke...this is impossible!” she whispered, desperately. “This is what I was afraid of—We can’t start again. We nearly destroyed each other.”

  He reached for her, taking her arm. “Jessie—”

  “No, Luke.” She broke away again. “We can’t! Think about it. It’s not about us anymore. This time we might destroy our child as well. I can’t live with that. Can you?”

  “Jessie, people grow, change—”

  She set her mouth. “Not enough, Luke.”

  His chin lifted in a display of spurned male pride, but Jessie saw in his eyes the wound her words had delivered. Before she could weaken and make amends, she rushed from the kitchen for the second time that day.

  * * *

  For a stunned moment, Luke didn’t move. His body ached with furious arousal. Caught in that chaotic heat, he briefly considered the notion of going after her. He’d follow her and cover her with himself and kiss her until she let go of the walls she erected. She wanted him as badly as he wanted her.

  Instead, he blew out the candle with a furious breath and stalked into his room, closing the door firmly against temptation. He went to bed but didn’t sleep. His hands burned with the lingering feel of her hair against his fingers. He could smell her perfume on him, taste the flavor of her on his mouth, feel the lingering impression of her unbound breasts against his ribs.

  He shifted uncomfortably, wishing his anatomy would get the message—there wasn’t going to be any relief tonight. The only thing that made him feel better was that he knew Jessie, too, was shifting and turning in her own thwarted desire. Fair was fair.

  She had come undone in his arms, returning his kiss with fervor and hunger, her hands questing.

  There were two Jessies, always had been. One was a cautious, careful survivor, wary of entanglements and anything remotely unpredictable. That Jessie was coolheaded, businesslike, no-nonsense.

  But there was another Jessie, the one who had dropped out of college to wander with him, the one who crept out of her father’s house to seduce him in his tent on the beach under a full moon, the one who had kissed him with such hunger a few moments ago.

  He remembered once driving down the coast of California for a visit with her father. It was summertime, ungodly hot, and they’d both been exhausted. Luke suggested they take their lunch down to the ocean and cool off before going on.

  They found a secluded spot, but it meant negotiating the rocky slope toward the beach. It was treacherous, steeper than it looked, and the cautious Jessie fretted a little over his safety. She came down behind him, carefully.

  A sudden gust of wind swept upward, cool and invigorating. Luke whooped, standing up to feel it on his sweaty body. Behind him, he heard Jessie make the same kind of noise and he looked back.

  She stood on a precarious outcropping, her toes curled around a rock. The wind blew so hard, her hair whipped out behind her in a nearly straight line.

  “Jessie!” he shouted in warning, but the wind took his words. And as he watched, she suddenly reached down and tugged her blouse over her head and lifted it up in the wind like a flag, closing her eyes to the sun and wind, as if drinking them in. She hung on the ledge in a pair of jean shorts and
a scrap of lace. He’d been struck with a sense of her power in that instant, as if the wind and the crashing sea were responding to her, this wildly beautiful woman hanging between sky and earth. On the beach below, they made love with untamed abandon, then laughed at themselves afterward with a sort of sheepish joy.

  With a growl, Luke pulled the pillow over his head. He was never going to make it through the next day. She had to get out of his life, or get in it. Living on the edge like this would drive him—

  To drink. The words crawled into his mind like a black snake, sinuous and unspeakably evil.

  His arousal dissipated instantly. Maybe for once the cautious side of Jessie was right. Maybe she understood things he didn’t. Maybe what was between them was so fierce and volatile, it would destroy both of them.

  And in the process, it would destroy Giselle.

  He couldn’t let that happen. He would let it go, let her go. Better empty peace than the rage and pain. that had once nearly consumed him—and Jessie, too.

  Chapter Seven

  In her dream, Jessie was painting a scene from the past—she and Luke in a field in Oregon. She filled her brush with greens and dabbed them on the enormous canvas, but they kept slipping off, falling into puddles on the floor. She looked down at the pools of green around her feet and realized she’d been trying to paint the same thing for a long time. In her dream, she frowned and wondered why she kept trying; she shouldn’t be wasting so much time on one painting. There were other subjects she wanted to explore. But almost against her will, she dipped her brush again in the soft green on her palette and tried again.

  “Jessie,” came Luke’s voice into her sleep world.

  She stirred, realizing with relief that her dream was just that—only a dream. But just as she realized it, the paint on her brush stuck to the canvas. Eagerly she sketched a watercolor blur for the field, feeling jubilant.

  “Jessie, it’s time to wake up. We have to get to the meeting.”