He told himself he would only talk to Belle. Here in this room he could handle anything. With all these people standing around, he could control himself. But then she bolted, rushing outside, and Rand hesitated, knowing that out there the darkness and the moonlight and the cold would conspire against him.
He should not go after her.
Christ, don't go.
But then he had the other thought, the most powerful one of all.
She is the mother of your child.
Before he knew it, he was hurrying across the parlor, into the front hall, wrenching open the door. The freezing air hit him with the force of a blow, burning through his lungs, shivering across his skin, and he had the brief thought that it was a good thing Lillian had taken up the potatoes yesterday. Tonight was the killing frost, he knew the smell in the air, the taste. He stood on the porch, searching the yard, the shadows, trying to find Belle, wondering if she'd even bothered to take her coat.
From inside the house the piano sounded. They were starting. He heard the harsh tones of Mr. Horner, heard the rise of voices. They rumbled, muffled, in his ears: "Me, May, Ma, Mo, Moo"—the practice scales. A horse whinnied from the row of wagons. Rand followed the sound with his gaze.
He saw her then. She was leaning against the wagon. The moonlight stole the color from her, she was nothing but a spot of pale in the darkness, a movement of shadow and light. She had forgotten her coat, and she hugged herself against the cold, her head tilted to look at the sky. She hadn't seen him yet, he realized, and for a moment he had the strange, disconcerting thought that she was waiting for him.
But she wouldn't be of course. The only question was why she hadn't run off for home without him. Almost as if she'd heard his thought, her chin came down, and she stepped away from the wagon and toward the horses.
Then she saw him and stopped, and the look she gave him was colder than any killing frost.
But he stepped down the stairs anyway and walked across the yard, past the other wagons, until he was only a few feet away from her. She didn't budge. Didn't even flinch.
"The party's inside," she said.
"Are you all right?" he asked quietly.
She laughed bitterly, softly. "I'm fine."
"Are you sure?"
Her mouth tightened, she gave him a quick glance, and then looked away, focusing her gaze on the porch beyond. "Go away, Rand," she said. "Leave me alone."
He hesitated. "Belle—"
She jerked back to look at him. "Things are fine just the way they are," she said, and there was a desperation in her voice that tugged at his heart, made him feel inexplicably sad. "I only came back for Sarah—just Sarah. I hoped . . . you'd be gone. I didn't come back to start things again."
He nodded. "I know."
She went on as if she hadn't even heard him. "I figured—I don't know, I thought—you'd be married by now."
"Is that what you wanted? For me to be married?" he asked even though he thought—knew—he didn't want to know the answer.
She licked her lips. "Yeah," she said, but there was a touch of hesitation in her voice, as if she were trying to convince herself she believed it. She swallowed; her mouth moved as if she were trying to fight back tears. "But I see I was just a few months too early."
He didn't pretend to misunderstand. "You mean Marie."
"She's the one, isn't she? She's who you're goin' to marry?"
No. I don't know. "Yes."
She laughed slightly, looked up at the sky. The movement sent her profile into relief, he saw the shadows from the house play across her features, the short, straight nose, the slight overbite, the angle of her cheekbone. The moonlight reflected off the wetness in her eyes. "Well, that's good," she said. "She seems nice. You'll be happy with her."
"I hope so."
"Mama must be overjoyed."
"She likes Marie."
"I guess everybody does." She looked at him and— incredibly—she smiled. It was weak, he saw it tremble even in the moonlight, and it surprised him. But not as much as what she said next. "I'd like to get to know her better. If we're goin' to be . . . related, I s'pose I should."
Her words took his breath and twisted his heart, and he looked at her and saw again the change. He'd expected defiance and anger. What he got was acceptance —and the strange, foreign sense that she wanted him to be happy, that it didn't matter to her with whom he made a life so long as he was content.
class=Section3> It shocked him even more than what she'd said, and once again he remembered that first kiss six years ago, the way she'd curled her arms around his neck and urged him closer, the way she touched her lips to his, and he knew that girl would never have let him go like this—not ever so easily. The girl she'd been would have tried to hold on to him, would have seduced him because
class=Section4> he was so easily seduced, would have smiled at him and cajoled him with a word, would have made him forget Marie even existed.
It was that girl he'd expected tonight.
Instead he had the woman of yesterday.
And she was more compelling than ever.
Run away. Run. Run. But he couldn't. God help him, he couldn't run away. Couldn't look away. Because Belle was again that woman, and she was both familiar and strange—a woman he wanted—needed—to know. The realization brought his fear into sharp, bitter focus. It hovered between them; he saw it in the shadows on her face, in the intensity of her eyes. It crept into her stance and her mouth and shimmered on her skin.
His control was slipping away, falling from his grasp. He thought of all the things he didn't know about her, all the things she'd been and done and seen the last six years, all the ways she'd looked.
And then he thought of the things he did know about her: the way she felt, soft and hard, yielding and solid. He thought of the clean, astringent scent of soap. He thought of the heated wetness of her mouth and the heavy satin of her hair.
He thought of how much she'd loved him once.
It broke him.
Before he could think, before she could react, Rand surged forward. He took her face in his hands, ran his fingers over her jaw, touched his thumbs to her mouth. He heard her gasp of shock with some part of him, felt her shudder—with pain or fear or passion, he didn't know, didn't care. He held her tightly, so tightly he knew she couldn't move or protest, molding his hands to her face, plunging his fingers into her hair, lifting her chin. He felt her breath against his skin, heated, moist, and it pulled at the desire he'd kept buried for six long years, the desire that had haunted his dreams and had him waking, wet and hard, in the middle of the night, wanting and knowing he shouldn't want, needing and knowing he couldn't have.
She made a sound, and he bent and took it from her. Brushed his lips across hers, feeling the softness of her mouth, a softness that tingled on his, that made him want to force her lips open to find the sweetness he knew was there. He wondered what she would taste like tonight—apple cider and gingerbread or sweet coffee— and found that he wanted none of those. He wanted just the taste of her alone. Just that heady, humid taste he'd kept in his memory all these years.
The thought made him almost insane with longing. Rand deepened the kiss, pressed her mouth open, touched his tongue to hers—
She jerked away. He heard the sharp, desperate sound she made in her throat, and with a start Rand realized she was shoving at him, pounding her palms against his chest. He dropped his hands, sluggish and dazed from the force of his desire. She scrambled away from him; he caught a whiff of soap just before she slipped beneath his arms, and he grabbed for her, suddenly panicked that she would run, needing her to stay.
"Belle," he gasped, but she was already beyond his reach. Blindly, his heart pounding in his ears, he spun around. "Belle—please. Please. Don't go."
She stopped, twisted to look at him, and her eyes were dark and fathomless in the shadows, her expression bleak. He felt her fear; it shivered between them, stabbed him with unrelenting shards of memory. It had
all ended on a night like this, after all. A night with a killing frost. "I'm sorry," he said hoarsely. "God, Belle—"
She stepped back as if his words frightened her. "No," she said slowly, her voice a mere whisper. "Don't do this to me again. I can't ... I don't want to care about you, don't you understand? I don't want to care."
Then, before he could answer her, before he could do anything, she turned and ran away from him, stumbling, to the house without once looking back. He heard the sudden tones of the piano crash into the darkness as she opened the door, and then he heard it slam shut behind her, leaving him standing alone, in cold silence.
The darkness reached for him, and he recoiled from it, told himself she was right, that it was better this way, that he should never have kissed her, or reached for her, or wanted her. It would be better for them both if he kept his distance, if he didn't remember the way things had been before. If he didn't remember the sheer brilliance of her smile, or the way she made him laugh, or the love she had for life that always made his dream of leaving Lancaster seem somehow—unnecessary, unimportant.
He should not remember those things.
No, he should not.
But he did.
And God help him, he missed them.
She felt shattered. As if someone had sent her heart and soul flying into a thousand pieces and left her there, just an empty shell in the bright gaiety of a room she didn't want to be in, the center of laughter she wanted no part of. She heard the whispers around her, knew the others were retelling the old gossip—the scandal of the sinful love between Belle Sault and her stepbrothers. She could almost hear the hushed murmurs—"She had an affair, first with Cort and then with Rand. Why, it was immoral"—and she knew they were wondering why she'd raced out just now and why Rand had followed her and not returned. She wanted to go home, she wanted to run away, but she couldn't. Not because she gave a damn what they all thought of her but because leaving like that would only be admitting that she cared, that the stories they told were true.
She would never give them the satisfaction. Never.
So she sat there, studying black notes that jumped all over the page, feeling the bruising of her mouth and the grip of his fingers on her face. She sang along, trying to remember words that kept flitting out of reach, tasting the sweetness of apple cider from his lips and the heated salt of his skin.
She felt cold and hot and unsteady; it was all she could do to focus on Mr. Horner and pretend she understood what he was saying. And when they took a break for apple cider and gingerbread, she saw Lydia bend to Paula and smile, and Belle knew the rumors would be flying again, even though Rand's name was already linked with Marie's.
You don't care. You don't care. And it was true it didn't bother her when they talked about how careless she was; she didn't give a damn if they spoke in scandalized tones about how she spent every night playing cards in a tavern or drank like a man. She didn't even care if they spent hours speculating on where she'd been for six years and what she'd had to do. Those things couldn't hurt her.
But the rest—the rest could. She remembered the rumors from before, the stories that both Cort and Rand had been in love with her, that they'd fought each other for the chance to have her. The rumors had only grown worse when Cort died that summer. It had been a tragedy; Cort died only two months after his father, after Rand came home from Cleveland for Henry's funeral. They'd been grieving anyway, and Cort's death had . . . Well, it was a terrible time, and the gossip had only made it unbearable, had turned the innocent race that killed him—a fun, spontaneous game between brothers —into an old-fashioned duel for her hand. A duel Rand had won.
She'd been called many things then. Cort was reckless and volatile, quick to fight over any slight, real or imagined, but everyone liked him, and in their search for someone to blame, she was an easy scapegoat.
And though the lies that she was responsible for her stepbrother's death had hurt, what hurt worse were the words they'd used to describe her relationship with Rand. The most precious thing in her life, the thing she treasured above all else, had been turned into something twisted and sordid.
And it hadn't helped that Rand believed it too.
Belle swallowed, tried to push the thought out of her mind, along with the memory of the night it had all disappeared. She tried not to hear the words that came echoing back from that time, but they were there anyway, tormenting her, hurting all over again. "I don't want you, don't you understand? I don't want you."
That night, too, had only started with a kiss. A kiss that held—despite its roughness—something more, a sweetness just beyond her grasp, a joy she knew she could find if she only reached for it.
That was what scared her now. Because reaching for that sweetness had ruined her life six years ago. Loving him, trusting him, had brought disaster.
Belle's heart raced, her throat grew tight. Too well she remembered that November night, the cold look in his eyes, the revulsion in his face, the way he'd turned from her. It was as she'd told him, she couldn't live through that again.
It frightened her that even those memories hadn't killed the love she felt for him. She hadn't managed to destroy that feeling in all the lonely nights she'd been without him, all those dark days she'd spent nursing the memory of his betrayal, the way he'd rejected their friendship as if it were nothing, the way he'd rejected her. He had taught her not to trust him, and she had learned the lesson well.
She had not forgotten that. She might still love him— she couldn't seem to help herself—but even love wasn't enough to make her trust him again.
The thought gave her strength, the words became her litany. Belle recited them over and over in her mind, letting them grow stronger as the singing died and the others began milling around. And as the minutes passed, she felt calmer, more in control.
Then she saw Marie Scholl coming toward her through the crowd, and the fear came back, along with a hopelessness she couldn't shake, a fierce stab of jealousy over the fact that Marie was the one he'd chosen, and not her.
Belle forced herself to look up at Marie and smile as the schoolteacher came closer.
Marie motioned to the empty chair beside Belle, an anxious, concerned look on her face. "Do you mind . . . ?"
Belle's stomach flipped. She swallowed and shook her head. "Sit down."
"I'd been hoping to have the chance to talk with you." Marie sat in a swoosh of pale green silk, a drifting cloud of rosewater. She leaned forward, lightly touching Belle's arm. "I was worried when you went rushing out. Is everything—"
"Everything fine," Belle said stiffly. "It was just a little—hot—in here. I needed some fresh air."
Marie looked sympathetic. "I've always found orrisroot a bit too strong for potpourri, but Paula claims it's her favorite." She smiled, she squeezed Belle's arm tightly and then released it. "But I'm glad to see you here now. I was so looking forward to having the chance to get to know you."
"Really?" Belle couldn't help the sarcasm in her voice. She gestured at the crowded room. "Why? I figured they'd have filled you in already."
Marie looked taken aback, but only for a moment, and then she recovered with a smile. "Well, Rand was right about you. You are rather honest."
Belle bit back a sarcastic laugh. Honest, hell. If she were truly honest, she would tell Marie that just looking at her dark prettiness set her teeth on edge. Belle glanced away, toward the piano, where Mr. Horner was busy gathering the leather-bound songbooks into a neat stack. "You'd better watch yourself," she said blandly. "They're all wonderin' why the hell you're talkin' with me. 'Specially since you know the stories."
"Oh, the stories." Marie leaned closer, close enough that the scent of roses lingered in Belle's nostrils. "Well, I try not to mind Lydia much. She's a nice girl, but she has a terrible tendency to gossip."
Belle looked at her in surprise.
Marie smiled. "I think she's always been a little in love with Rand, don't you? She's just looking for a way to hurt
him. Those stories"—she made a dismissive gesture—"why, they're ridiculous. I'm only sorry she involves you as well."
"You don't believe them?"
"Of course not." Marie shrugged. "I can't imagine Rand would ever want to hurt his own brother—and the notion that you're the cause"—Marie's eyes twinkled— "well, Belle, you don't really seem like the kind of girl who trifles with men's hearts."
Belle stared at her. She couldn't help it; Marie's comments surprised her, confused her. They seemed out of place coming from Marie, in contrast with her soft, womanly prettiness. Belle would have thought Marie would be shocked by the stories, that they would offend her prim sensibilities. But Belle had not expected that Marie Scholl would have a strength of character that went deeper than her reserve. Or even that her primness hid such a nonjudgmental mind.
It must be what Rand saw in her. For a moment Belle was overwhelmed by Marie's complexity—by her scent and pretty face and the reassuring smile that so readily dismissed the gossip—and she knew it would be easy to like Marie. Easy to be her friend even in spite of Rand and the fact that he planned to marry her.
Marie laughed. "You look so shocked, Belle. Don't tell me I'm wrong. The stories aren't true, are they?"
"No." Belle shook her head. "No, they're not true." Not mostly, anyway. "It's nice to know someone in this town doesn't believe everythin' they hear."
"It's the same everywhere," Marie said. "There are plenty of Christians who don't act much like Christians. Sometimes I think there's no charity in the world anymore."
"Sometimes," Belle grinned, "I think there never was. And if you ever saw Reverend Snopes at Sunday dinner, you'd know what I mean."
Marie laughed. It was a high, pleasant sound that carried through the room, above the talk. It made Belle want to laugh along, but then she saw Rand come in the doorway, and the smile and the laughter died right out of her.
He looked disheveled, windblown, and there was a tension in his movements that filled Belle with a sinking feeling. Especially when he looked up and caught her gaze. Because the look in his eyes held more than desire, or anger, or any of the things she had expected to see.
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