by Sandra Brown
When his arms closed around her, she grasped handfuls of his shirtfront and clung. Her insides were in chaos, tossed about and tumbling with what she didn’t know yet was arousal. She knew a compelling urge to gravitate toward him. The need to touch his body with hers was an obsessive desire she could barely keep under control. She both craved and feared the impulses he had awakened her to.
He pulled back regretfully, kissed her moist lips tenderly, then separated himself from her and put hateful space between them. His hands returned from her back to rest on either side of her face. Her eyes were closed and when she raised the heavy eyelids, it was with a lassitude that had invaded her entire body.
“Are you all right?…”
Now, in the chilly hospital corridor, she answered him as she had twelve years ago on a warm balmy night after that first kiss. “Yes, Rink, I’m all right.”
Rink, too, seemed caught up in a memory. He gazed down at her for a long time before he brusquely turned away and said, “We’d better go.”
Chapter 4
She’s so pretty.”
“So are you.”
Laura Jane’s hands stilled on the filly’s neck as she lifted her dark liquid eyes to Steve, who had spoken with soft fervency. “Do you really think I am?”
Her expression made him curse himself. She was vulnerable, took everything literally. He shouldn’t speak aloud the things he thought. Her feelings were fragile and could be easily shattered.
He levered himself up from the hay-strewn floor of the stall, bracing his weight on his good leg. “You’re very pretty,” he said tersely and turned away from her, leaving the stall.
Putting space between them was becoming necessary more frequently. She had no idea what her nearness, her flowery scent, the warm smoothness of her skin did to his senses. Had she known the responses she elicited from his body, she would have been terrified of him.
Ha hauled a saddle from the tack room wall. Rink had told him that afternoon that he wished to ride the following morning, and Steve wanted everything to be perfect. He knew the reason for Rink’s apparent dislike of him. The man wasn’t blind. Nor was he insensitive. Rink would recognize longing when he saw it. Steve knew his desire for Laura Jane was as evident as a neon billboard hanging around his neck.
He didn’t blame Rink for his suspicions. Laura Jane was his sister, a very special sister who had required special care all her life. If Steve had had anyone in his life like her, he would have been as fiercely protective as Rink was.
Still, he couldn’t help loving her, could he? Love wasn’t something he had gone looking for. He hadn’t expected to ever love anybody. But he did and he missed Laura Jane every moment of the day that she wasn’t with him. She was standing close beside him now as he applied saddle soap to the saddle. Each time his elbow moved with the sawing motion of his cloth, it almost touched her breast.
He bent to his task with renewed vigor and tried not to think of what her breasts would feel like beneath his callused hands or how soft her throat would be beneath his lips.
Laura Jane, vaguely disappointed that Steve hadn’t gone on talking about how pretty she was, had patted the foal farewell and followed him. “Is your leg hurting?”
Without looking up, he answered. “No. Why?”
“Because you’re frowning, the way you do sometimes when your leg hurts.”
“I’m just working hard, that’s all.”
She moved closer. “I’ll help you work, Steve. Let me help you.”
He moved away from her, ostensibly to get another rag. His blood was pounding. She was so sweet, so sweet, but the feelings she aroused in him were far from sweet. Around her he felt like a slavering savage within touching distance of the sacrificial virgin. “No. You don’t need to help. I’ll be through in a minute.”
“You don’t think I can, do you? No one thinks I can do anything.”
His head came up quickly and he dropped his polishing cloth. “Of course I think you can.”
He saw the hurt on her face, the pain in her dark, fathomless eyes. She shook her head and her soft brown hair swished over her shoulders. “Everybody thinks I’m stupid and useless.”
“Laura Jane,” he groaned miserably and placed his hands on her shoulders. “I don’t think any such thing.”
“Then why won’t you let me help you?”
“Because this is dirty work and I don’t want you getting messed up.”
With a childlike need to trust, she peered up at him. “That’s the only reason? Promise?”
“Promise.”
He didn’t release her as he should have, but kept his hands on her shoulders. Her upraised face was bathed with the soft amber glow of the stable lights. She looked like an angel except for the flame burning steadily in her eyes. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought that flame had a carnal origin.
“I know I’m not bright. But I’m smart about some things.”
“Of course you are.” God! Her lips were soft and moist and pink as they formed her words. He wanted to taste them. What he’d give to press her close, to feel that beautiful dainty body against his hulking, scarred, deformed one. It would be like applying a healing balm to his aching body, his aching spirit.
“I notice things. For instance I know Rink isn’t happy. He laughs and tries to act happy, but his eyes are sad. He and Caroline don’t like each other. Have you noticed that?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder why.” Her face wrinkled with concentration. “Or maybe they like each other very much, but are trying to make everyone think that they don’t.”
Steve smiled at her perception. That had been the conclusion he had drawn after eating brunch with them that morning. They looked ready to either fight or love. He thought the scale tipped strongly in favor of the latter. He chucked Laura Jane under the chin. “You may be right.”
She smiled up at him and moved closer. “You think I’m smart? And pretty?”
His dark eyes roamed her face. “You’re beautiful.”
“I think you’re beautiful, too.” With fingers as flawless as china, she reached up and traced his hard cheekbone, then trailed her fingertips down to his chin.
He felt her touch on more than his face. The sensations it created rocketed straight to his loins. He sucked his breath in sharply and stepped away from her, dropping his arms to his sides. “Don’t,” he said with unintended harshness.
Laura Jane recoiled as though he’d slapped her.
“Oh, God, Laura Jane, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He reached out to touch her comfortingly but couldn’t bring himself to. She had covered her face with her hands and was weeping softly. “Please don’t cry.”
“I’m a terrible person.”
“Terrible? You’re far from terrible.” He had never felt so wretched in his life. He was damned if he touched her and damned if he didn’t. It was suicidal to show her any affection; Rink would kill him if he found out. On the other hand, how could he hurt her this way, make her feel rejected, unloved, unwanted? “You’re wonderful,” he whispered urgently. “You’re all that everyone should be.”
“No. I’m not.” She lifted her tear-streaked face to his. “I’ve loved Rink for as long as I can remember. I thought that if he came home, everything would be all right. I thought he was the strongest, most beautiful man in the world. But now that he’s home, I see that he’s not.” She wet her lips with her tongue. “You are.” Her small breasts trembled beneath her summer dress. Teardrops rolled down her cheeks. “Steve, I love you more than I do Rink!”
Before he could react, she flung herself against him, kissed him swiftly on the lips and ran from the stable.
He could count the racing heartbeats as they thudded in his eardrums. He was both elated and miserable. God, what could he do about this?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
He turned off the lights in the stable and went into his well-maintained but painfully lonely apartment at the back of the building. Flopping
down in his narrow bed, he covered his eyes with his forearm. He hadn’t felt this kind of despair since he had awakened in the army hospital to learn that he was going home… with half of one leg missing.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Rink. I didn’t see you out here.”
“It’s all right,” he said from the shadows. “This is your house.”
Caroline let the screen door close behind her and sat down on the wicker glider. She breathed deeply of the cool evening air. Her eyes closed tiredly as she leaned her head against the wicker back. “This is your house, Rink. I’m only a visitor for as long as—”
“As my father lives.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t make a reply. He was weary of arguments. “You didn’t go back to the hospital.”
“I called. They had finally talked him into a shot and it put him to sleep. The doctor said there was no reason for me to be there. Roscoe wouldn’t know one way or another. I felt I could be more useful here at home doing some business for the gin. It’ll soon be picking time and we need to make sure we’re ready.”
“I’d hate to be at the hospital when Roscoe wakes up and discovers he’s lost a day.”
Caroline rubbed her forehead as though she already had the headache his angry shouting would bring on. “So would I.”
“Does he often treat you the way he did today?”
“No. Never. I’ve seen him lose his temper with other people. I’ve gone behind him and placated them. Today was the first day I’ve been the target.”
“You’ve been lucky, then,” Rink said. “He was that way with my mother, constantly on her case about some trivial something he had trumped up. God”—he slammed his fist against the arm of his chair—“there were days when I wanted to smash his foul mouth as hard as I could with my fist. Even as a little kid, I used to hate him for making her unhappy when she had given him everything. Everything.”
He glanced up at her and she got the impression that he was embarrassed by revealing so much emotion to her. “Can I make you a drink?” he asked shortly.
“No thank you.”
He sighed in the darkness. “Sorry. I forgot. You don’t drink, do you?”
“After growing up in Pete Dawson’s house? No,” she said with a soft laugh. “I don’t drink.”
“Then I won’t, either.” He leaned over the arm of the chair where he was sitting and set his highball glass on the floor.
“No, please. I don’t mind. It doesn’t smell on you the way it did on him.”
It was far too personal a comment to make. She looked at him to see if he had read anything into what she had said. His golden eyes captured hers from across the darkness that separated them. She was the first to look away.
“Haney told me that your daddy died,” Rink said at last. He left the glass untouched on the porch.
“Yes. They found him dead one morning in a ditch on the highway. The coroner said it was a heart attack. I think he finally succeeded in poisoning himself.”
“And your mother?”
“She died a few years ago.” Her eyes were unseeing as she stared into the twilight. Her mother had been barely fifty. Yet she was a stooped, wrinkled old woman when she gratefully died of exhaustion and despair.
Rink got up from his chair and came to sit closer to her on the top step of the porch. Crossing his ankles, he leaned back and propped himself up on his elbows. His shoulder touched the frame of the glider, dangerously close to her calf. “Fill me in, Caroline. What happened to you after that summer, after I left?”
She yearned to reach down and touch his hair, to sift through the thick dark strands with her fingers. His body was long and lean, the male power within it just as evident in repose as in movement.
“I finished high school and got a scholarship to college.”
“A scholarship? How?” He yanked his head around and bumped against her shinbone with his chin. He pulled back quickly.
“I don’t know.”
He sat up and looked at her inquiringly as he turned slightly. “Don’t know?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t organize her thoughts. They had scattered like autumn leaves in a whirlwind at his touch. He was now sitting with his knees raised, his arms looped loosely around them. The dangling fingers of his left hand had but to extend to touch her leg.
He was waiting for an explanation, so she collected herself and spoke, haltingly at first. “One day the high school principal called me into his office. It was just a few days before graduation. He said I had a scholarship from a donor who wished to remain anonymous. It paid for everything. I even got an allowance of fifty dollars a month for mad money. To this day I don’t know who was responsible.”
“God Almighty,” he said under his breath. Haney had told him in one of her gossipy letters that “the Dawson girl” had gone to college (“You probably don’t remember her. She was several classes behind you. Old Pete Dawson’s girl. Anyway, she’s left town to go to school and everybody’s wondering how she managed it.”) And much later he had received a letter from Laura Jane (“Daddy told me today that somebody named Caroline Dawson has married a boy at college. He said she used to live here and that you might know her.”)
“After I got my degree, I moved back to town,” Caroline continued.
“Your marriage must not have lasted long.”
His studiously casual observation baffled Caroline. “Marriage?”
“The guy you met at school.”
She stared at him as if he had lost his mind. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Rink. I didn’t even date anybody, much less get married. To keep the scholarship, I had to maintain a B average. I studied all the time. Where in the world did you get the idea I’d been married?”
Rink, too, was shocked. Had Laura Jane made that up? No. Laura Jane hadn’t even known Caroline until she’d started working for Roscoe.
Roscoe.
A worm of suspicion entered his mind. What occurred to him was too diabolical even to contemplate. But where Roscoe was concerned… “I heard that you’d gotten married. I forget who told me.”
“Whoever it was told you wrong. I didn’t marry until I married…”
“My father.”
After a long awkward silence, Caroline asked what had been on her mind for years. “What happened between you and Marilee?”
“World War Three,” he said with a short laugh. Caroline didn’t say anything. She sat stiffly, her fingers knotting together. “It was doomed from the beginning. She didn’t want that baby any more than I did. She used it as a means to trap me into marrying her, and after Alyssa was born, we started divorce proceedings.”
“Do you ever see the child? Alyssa?”
“No. Never,” Rink said. His face was inscrutable, but the tone of his voice indicated clearly that the subject was closed. It hurt Caroline to the quick that he didn’t love his child, his only child. How could he be so unfeeling? For years after that magic summer, she had wished she had had his baby. It would have been something of his left for her, some part of him to love since he wasn’t there.
“After the divorce was finally settled—it took years—I began to concentrate on getting the airline started.”
“I’m very proud of it for you, Rink,” she said in a voice so soft and sincere that it brought his eyes up to hers.
His smile was wry. “Yeah, well, I worked like hell to make a go of it. It was something to occupy my mind and keep it off… other things.”
“What other things? Home?”
His eyes remained pinned on hers for a long moment. They were hard and piercing. “Yes,” he said shortly and stood. Giving her his back, he propped his shoulder against one of the pillars. “The Retreat. Laura Jane. My father. The gin. Winstonville was home. I never intended to leave it.”
“You made a new life for yourself in Atlanta.”
“Yeah.” Such as it is, he could have added. His house was too new, too ostentatious. It had no character or gentility. The par
ties were too raucous. The women… The women were too glitzy, too cosmopolitan, too phony. He saw through them just as they did him.
The life he led now was a charade. Not that he wasn’t happy with Air Dixie. He was. The airline was certainly something to take pride in because it had taken years of hard work to get it where it was.
But the accoutrements of success had never meant a damn to him. His roots were here, in this town, in this rich bottomland, in this house. Any other life was just pretense. He would never forgive his father for driving him away. Never.
Suddenly he whirled on Caroline. “Why did you marry him?”
She almost cowered at his fury. “I won’t discuss my private life with your father with you, Rink.”
“I don’t want to know about your private life. I only asked why you married him. He’s almost old enough to be your grandfather, for God’s sake.” He strode forward and leaned over her, bracing his hands on the arms of the glider and imprisoning her between them. “Why? Why did you even come back to this town after you graduated from college? There was nothing for you here.”
Her neck hurt as she arched it back to look up at him. “My mama was still alive. I came back, got a job at the bank and within a few months had saved up enough to get us out of that pigsty and into a rented house in town. I met your father in the bank. He was nice to me. When he asked me to come to work for him at the gin, I did. He doubled the salary I was making at the bank, which allowed me to bury my mother with some semblance of dignity.”
His breath came in rapid gusts on her face. Dark locks of wavy hair fell over his forehead. His shirts seemed never to remain fully buttoned for long. This one wasn’t now. Her eyes were on a level with his muscular chest. He was male; he was virile; he was attractive, dangerously so. She wanted to close her eyes against his appeal.
“After a while I started coming here to The Retreat to work rather than going to the office at the gin.”
“I bet you loved that, being invited to The Retreat.”