by Beverly Bird
“I was engaged,” she said suddenly.
The confession jolted him from his own miserable thoughts. She wouldn’t look at him, he realized. She found something inordinately fascinating about the barn door.
“To be married?” By some stroke of pure luck, he managed to keep his voice mild. But something clenched hard and painfully inside him. Something jealous and male. Something possessive when he had no right or reason to possess her, because she was so steadfastly holding her heart back from him. And God help him, but he was the man he was. And he felt that her body was only half of the bargain.
“Uh...how long did that state of affairs last?” he finally asked cautiously.
“Four months.”
“Who broke it off?”
“He did.”
That surprised him. “Why?”
“He said I was frigid, among other things.”
Joe felt his jaw hang. “Sexually?”
“What other way is there?” she snarled.
“Emotionally,” he told her.
“Well, I guess that goes hand in hand with it.” She pressed her hands to her face. Her cheeks were burning. “Satisfied? He was it. The only one. I spent the first several years after I left Texas just...surviving. I spent the last part knowing better than to try again. Accepting what I am.”
“Well, you’re not frigid,” Joe said.
Not with you. Not with an honest and simple Amish farmer who led with his heart and said what he meant, she thought wildly. A man who—unless she badly missed her guess—was trying to get her to say I’m falling in love with you.
Was she? No, she thought, no. She didn’t know how. Especially since Bobby had let her down, she’d been incapable of it. But Bobby hadn’t really let her down. At least, he hadn’t had much to say about it. God had just gone waving wands again.
Joe got out of the buggy. Kim sat frozen, afraid to move now. If she had an ounce of sense in her head she would go straight to the house. She would just stay away from him. That was safest.
He opened her buggy door. “Are you coming?”
“Yes. No.”
He waited.
“You do something to me,” she admitted, her voice breaking.
“That’s a start.”
“Stop it, Joe! Just stop it! Asking me to trust you...I can’t do that overnight. Maybe I can’t do it at all.”
Yes, he thought, that would indeed be a major milestone.
“Especially now,” she continued desperately. “With Susannah... You’re asking too much.”
“All I’m asking is that you accept help and comfort where it’s offered.”
“That’s not true,” she said fiercely. “If that was true, you wouldn’t have asked me about Mark!”
So now the fiancé had a name. Fine. He would live with that, too.
“Just checking to see how sheer the drop is,” he explained. “Before I jump.”
Then, for all intents and purposes, he jumped. The hell with it, he thought. He’d lived his whole life cautiously, thoughtfully. Maybe it was time to take what was offered to him, and consequences could be damned.
He caught her around the waist and lifted her from the buggy. And he kept finding proof of things he’d suspected from the start. His big hands nearly did fit around her waist. Before she could argue further, he put her on her feet, her back against the barn wall.
“This was your suggestion, as I remember,” he said, just before he captured her mouth.
She couldn’t think when he kissed her. She couldn’t be practical, couldn’t be smart. The slow, sweeping penetration of his tongue, his finesse, she thought crazily, made her bones turn to warm sand.
She managed to plant her hands against his chest and push him back a little. “You,” she gasped.
“What about me?” His mouth went to her neck, sliding to a spot beneath her ear. She shuddered.
“Turnabout is fair play, Joe,” she managed to say. “Maybe I need to know, too.”
He drew back to look into her eyes. “Do you?” he asked. That, he thought, would be a very good sign.
She couldn’t quite answer. She gave a little nod.
“Sarah,” he said. He’d actually said her name, and she hadn’t dashed down from heaven to wail her betrayal. There had been no bolt of lightning. He caught Kim’s mouth again. She thumped him in the chest.
“Just Sarah?” she demanded. She should have expected it, but it shook her.
He lifted one shoulder, spoke against her mouth, pausing to nibble. “I met her when I was a teenager. I married her right away.”
“Just Sarah?” she cried again. “Then us?”
Us, he thought. He liked the sound of that. It was a word she’d used so rarely. “Kimberley,” he said patiently.
“What?”
“Please shut up.”
It was overwhelming. Terrifying. What kind of man was he?
An honest one. A good one. A man who led with his heart, but his head was never too far behind.
She shut up, because if she really considered the magnitude of what he had just said, along with all those other things—I never did this with Sarah—she knew, beyond a doubt, that she would run screaming for the nearest highway out of town. And at the moment, there was the matter of his mouth. It made her want to stay.
He had captured her hands—maybe so she wouldn’t push him away again—and he held her arms pinned to her sides. He leaned into her and kept up with the slow, relentless meeting of their lips. It seemed easier to simply accept, she decided. To enjoy. To savor.
Something weak went through her body, a slow loosening. Just when she reached the point where she doubted she could stand much longer, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her inside. He kicked the door closed behind them.
“Performed like a true Neanderthal,” she muttered.
He smiled.
She would have felt safer with the explosive heat there had been the first time he’d kissed her. She could have dealt with the need they’d shared last time here in the barn. But she didn’t know how to deal with this tenderness. He crossed to the hay bales. He was kissing her again. It was so dark in here, she thought. She wondered how he could see where he was going. Especially if he hadn’t consistently carried women into this barn before.
Don’t think about that.
He didn’t lay her down on the bales so much as they sank onto them together. Cleaving and entwined. Her legs encircled him without her conscious thought. There was no deliberate decision this time to get rid of those suspenders, that shirt. She sought his heat, his skin, with blind intent, and made a small, whimpering sound when she found it.
Only one, he thought. Of course there had been Susannah’s father, too. But what he shared with her was special. Mark had thought she was frigid. So, obviously, that man had never found the depths below her surface.
He had. He had reached that part of her. She didn’t know it yet, but she was his.
He left her, untangled himself from her, to undress her this time. This time he wanted to see, to appreciate. He understood that it was a way of claiming, just as it had been to watch her eyes as she went over the edge the last time. Then he had needed to know that he had done that to her, for her, with her. This time he wanted to take a moment with all the physical barriers gone. He would leave her nothing to hide behind.
He eased her jacket off her shoulders with exquisite care. She reached for him.
“Touch me,” she pleaded.
“I wilt.”
“Now.”
“Later.”
“I hate your patience.”
“I love your determination.”
Her heart stuttered, shied back. But she made no protest when he pulled her sweater over her head. She just watched him warily. Her eyes narrowed a bit, but she lifted her hips to let him slide her jeans down her hips.
They got tangled over her boots. He got them off and the jeans, too, then he slid his hands back up her body. Slowly. Wonderingl
y. This time he fully appreciated that the scrap of silk at her hips matched perfectly with the pale peach lace that hid her breasts. He found that fascinating. He thought that he could live without her appliances, but he certainly liked her lingerie.
He finally leaned over her again, but this time, instead of taking her nipple through the lace, he pulled the lace down. He felt a shudder go through her. Even as he suckled, his hand slid under the silk at her hips. Down one side, to the other, sliding that away, too.
Her bones seemed to have melted. Something was wrong here; something was different. She. felt it, but couldn’t do a thing about it. He was stripping off so much more than her clothing. She knew it, and knew that with that mind of his, he must be fully aware of it. He was doing it deliberately, maybe making a point again, taking some sort of stand. She needed to stop it, but didn’t come to the decision in time.
He caught the front clasp of her bra and snapped it free with practiced expertise he couldn’t possibly possess. He smoothed the fabric aside. His mouth moved from one nipple to the other, nuzzling, his tongue smooth then rough, his teeth gentle.
Her back arching, she came up off the hay. Needing, no longer caring that she was the only one who was undressed. By the time his hand cupped black curls, by the time his work-roughened fingers found the center of her, it no longer mattered. She would have given him anything, any edge, all her soul.
His mouth was moving, roaming. She was unaware of tossing her head from side to side. She didn’t hear herself begging.
It filled him, made him strong, confident, determined. His tongue traced her ribs, dipped into her navel, found places he had never entirely examined on a woman’s body before. There were little hollows inside each of her hipbones. They tasted like secrets and shadows. Still, he slid lower, until his name came from her throat again on a torn breath.
Leave me something, she thought. But his tongue dipped into her and that was when she went wild. Her nails raked across his shoulders. She could have been trying to stop him or urge him on. Not even she was sure. She knew only that the sound coming from her throat was something close to a sob when he finally eased away from her and removed his own clothing.
Then he was back, without warning, without hesitation, driving into her hard. It was stunning, shattering, and she felt herself unraveling almost immediately. But then he went still, keeping her on the edge. Her arms were flung out to the side. He caught each of her hands and held them tightly, watching her.
For a long time he just stayed that way, sheathed inside her, until his blood pounded and it was almost unbearable not to move again. He’d make damned sure there was nothing like this back in California, he thought, that no one could need her or reach her the way he could.
He finally started moving inside her, slowly then faster, gently then harder. And as he had the last time, he lowered himself to her and kissed her again because it was imperative. He let go of her hands to brace himself on his elbows, and she wrapped herself around him.
For a moment, just a moment, she was his, body and soul.
“Why did you do that to me?” she asked a long time later, when she could speak again. They’d eased up to sit against the highest bales in the back of the pile, shoulder to shoulder.
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Grunting and beating my hands against my chest seemed a bit much.”
She laughed too easily, then sobered. “Joe, if we’re going to keep this up, we need to be more careful. I didn’t...I’m not...I don’t take those pills.”
Joe went still. A moment before, everything inside him had been fire. Now it was ice. A moment before, there had been an odd mingling of peace and triumph. Now his heart roared. He chose his next words carefully. “I thought they were a fairly common thing in the anner Satt Leit world.”
She felt his terror. It stoked her anger. Or maybe it was just easier to be angry than to know she had brought this fear back to him again with her words. “You thought anner Satt Leit women all ran around mating like jackrabbits,” she corrected harshly.
“No, I thought—”
“I already told you I don’t do this as a matter of course!” she interrupted.
He caught her hand. He twined his fingers with hers just as she was thinking of running, of getting away from him. She had already started to scramble to her feet. He pulled her back.
“Don’t run from me,” he said quietly, but his voice was anything but calm. “I don’t know your world, Kimberley. Not very well. You’ll have to forgive me a few preconceived notions. They have nothing to do with you personally.”
She hated it when he was so reasonable. When he made her anger and panic seem senseless and immature. Which they were, she thought, closing her eyes. She could feel herself beginning to tremble.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I suppose worrying about it now is a little like closing the barn door after the horse is gone.”
“Not entirely,” she contradicted, her throat suddenly dry. “The way things are going, there could still be a few ponies left.”
He gave her hand a quick squeeze. “Whatever you’re comfortable with, then.”
That was when she understood.
He wouldn’t do anything about birth control because it was—must be—against his religion. Sarah must have taken the pills in defiance of the ordnung. Sarah had done it because to conceive would mean risking her life. She, on the other hand, came from mainstream America and could be expected to do it as a matter of course.
“Damn you!” She jerked her hand away from him.
“What?” Joe sat up fast, confused.
“You must have thought I was manna from heaven, landing in front of your house that way. A woman you could have without torturing yourself over her. You could have me without fear of the consequences, without having to tangle with all those sticky issues you haven’t managed to come to terms with yet!”
His face bleached of color. This time she did get to her feet and he let her go. “Do you honestly think that little of yourself?” he demanded.
She knew from his voice that he was angry now, too. “I was convenient.”
“And I’m not ignorant!” he roared.
His voice echoed around the barn. Kim stared at him, hugging herself, fighting tears...again. When had she become so prone to cry? But it hurt, she thought. It hurt a lot. It hurt when she had long considered herself above feeling pain over what people might want from her, or why they might want it.
“You,” Joe said more quietly, “have a few preconceived notions of your own.” But his voice still vibrated with anger.
“I—” she began.
“Do you think we’re all hicks? ‘Jackrabbits’?” He used her word. “Mating without care? Without caution?”
“I never—”
“Your pills are only one way, one method. We have a few of our own.”
“But Sarah—”
“Sarah needed something foolproof,” he said harshly. “And apparently there’s no such thing.”
Kim paled, feeling like a fool. Of course that would be true. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t need you and your pills! I just needed to feel again. Period!”
She had to turn away from the look in his eyes. “Well, at least the kid would be German and Irish, right?” she said thinly, shakily, just trying to lighten the tension she’d caused. Then she froze as she heard her own words.
Joe stared at her back as she went stone still. His heart had just begun quieting, and now it exploded again. The rage that erupted in his blood was like nothing he had ever felt before.
“Is that why you’re not taking those pills?” His voice nearly vibrated. “Have you been using me? Is that what all this has been?” Was that why she had so steadfastly refused to give him anything more than her body?
Kim spun round again, horrified. “No! No! I never thought about it until just this second!”
She was shouting, she realized distantly. Because what she was suddenly thinking was
so horrible, so...well, twisted, she thought helplessly. Conceive one child to save the life of another? Why not? Unless she was mistaken, it had been done before. But not without a media frenzy. Not without a countrywide debate about the morality of it. Without people arguing about whether it was a perfect solution or an unconscionable wrong.
Joe finally got up off the hay bales. She couldn’t quite read his expression in the murky darkness of the barn, couldn’t tell if that deep anger was still there, the rage that had made his voice go so dangerous for one moment.
“But if it’s already happened—” she began.
“That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?” he interrupted.
He was still angry, she thought.
“Why do I feel I’m just being bounced along here, out of control?” she whispered. “Like...like something, some big giant hand, is...is pushing me places I wouldn’t ordinarily think of going?”
His face softened. He closed the distance between them, catching her shoulders, pulling her close to his chest. “It’s called God’s will, Kimberley.”
She thought of Susannah’s illness, of his wife’s passing. “Is that supposed to be comforting?”
“There are those who would think so.”
“This is not something we should even be discussing,” she said frantically.
He wondered which part of their conversation she was referring to. As he was learning to do with her, he waited.
“I can’t marry you, so it’s impossible.”
He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. His heart cringed with instinctive hurt, but his lungs gasped for a breath of relief. He honestly had not thought in any such terms. He wanted her. He wanted her to stay. He’d found something with her he couldn’t easily let go of. If she conceived from what they had been doing, somewhere he would find the strength and the courage to deal with that. It was the way of his life.
“We’re not at all alike,” she continued.
“No,” he said hoarsely, absently.
“We’re like apples and oranges. We’re from two completely different worlds.”
“That’s true. But it’s nothing that has to be dealt with right now.”