She nodded, sharp and short. “All right.”
“What shall we play?”
“Poker.”
“Poker?”
At his astonishment, the smile became genuine, and just like that, his knees almost gave out beneath him. She drew herself up, mock-offended. “You don’t think I look like the poker type?”
“No.”
“What type do I look like?”
Mine.
He cleared his throat. “I believe I’ll reserve comment on that one.”
“Coward,” she said. “It’s a bit late to retreat into tactful silence, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid I’m fresh out of playing cards.”
“Oh, I have some.”
“You do?”
“You don’t think those are all clothes in those trunks, do you?” She flew to the first one and flipped open the top. It held neatly wrapped packages, as ruthlessly organized as hospital supplies.
She didn’t hesitate. She moved two square boxes, pulled out a small rectangle, replaced the two, and lowered the lid in less time than it would’ve taken to snuff a candle. She waggled the small box at him. “See?”
“How’d you know which one it was in?”
“They’re all color-coded, of course,” she said, as if pointing out the obvious to the slowest dullard.
“Of course,” he murmured.
Color-coded. Cripes. He’d considered himself well prepared, carefully controlling every aspect of an expedition, double and triple-checking until Matt threatened to murder him by choking him on his own lists, but color-coding?
She lifted her skirts as though to sit, giving him just a glimpse of white-clad ankle, and then apparently thought the better of it. She dashed back to his makeshift bed, inspected all the blankets briefly before selecting the flimsiest one, and snapped it into place beside the trunk. She lowered herself to the blanket and, after smoothing her skirts into perfect array and placing the deck square in the middle of the trunk, looked up at him expectantly. “Well?”
He didn’t bother with a blanket, just plopped right down in the hard-packed earth, making sure the width of the trunk was between them, a small barrier but better than nothing.
“Is there enough light, do you think?” she asked. The simmering dusk muted his vision.
“Don’t tell me you packed a kerosene lamp, too.”
“No, but—”
“This shouldn’t take long.”
“No,” she agreed quickly. “It shouldn’t. Would you like to deal?”
“Certainly.” The small box that held her cards was rosewood, inlaid with a two-toned star, polished to a gloss that approached the shine on her hair. He brushed his fingers across its surface. It was slick against his thumb, so perfectly smooth it seemed unreal. “Where did you learn to play?”
“Where do you think?”
“Doc?”
“You seem surprised.” She reached across the table and tapped the top of the box, reminding him of his duties. “He loved to play. It wasn’t something he just picked up after he could no longer go in the field, was it? I assumed he’d always been so fond of the game.”
“Yes, he was.”
He opened the box. The cards inside were well used, the edges soft, the colors muted. He dumped them out and began to shuffle.
“Exactly,” she said. “What did you think we did all the time together?”
The cards spewed up. “I don’t.” Please, Lord, be merciful and never let me think of what they did together.
“Oh, let me,” she said, reaching for the scattered rectangles.
“I can do it,” he insisted, and dove for the cards and the meager distraction they offered.
Night had fallen an hour ago, spurring Kate to dash out to the yard and, over Jim’s protests, dig two candles from one of her trunks. Jim had suggested that they could simply quit and go to sleep, but Kate maintained it would be most unsporting of him to take advantage in such a way. She was rusty and he must give her a fair opportunity to recoup her losses.
And so, eight hands later, he sat across from her in a puddle of soft candlelight, perhaps fifteen twigs piled in front of him like a miniature fire waiting for a torch. Kate had no more than a half dozen twigs before her, arrayed in military precision on top of the trunk. She kept adjusting them, nudging them further into alignment that was already perfect, as she inspected the cards she held in her other hand.
The motion kept drawing his attention to her hands. He couldn’t recall noticing her hands before. No surprise, he thought wryly; there was plenty else to attract his attention. Now he couldn’t seem to think of anything else. Her fingers were long, tapered, the nails softly shining. They moved like quicksilver, movements blurring into a suggestion of grace like a hummingbird’s wings.
He could remember her mouth, the feel of her beneath his hands, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t recall if she’d ever touched him. It seemed a horrible oversight if she hadn’t, a gap in his knowledge and his memories that he wanted far too much to fill.
“I think that I…” she hesitated, inspecting her cards with as much fierce concentration as she’d studied the map at the Rose Springs. Her mouth pinched up and lines speared between her brows, so different from her usual smooth expression that he’d be willing to bet he was the only living man who’d ever witnessed it. “Hmm…” She flicked one twig out of alignment, rolled it back in. “I see, and raise.” She nudged two sticks into the small pile between them.
“See and call,” he snapped out in an instant.
Her gaze flew up to him, then back to her cards. Seconds eased by as she deliberated; the only sound in the old shed, the scrape of the twigs as she adjusted their position. Flickering, delicate motions, a dance over the pieces. His vision hazed, cleared again.
“Stop it!” He slapped his hand on top of hers, stopping it in mid-motion.
She startled, her hand jerking beneath his. “What?”
Mistake. Oh, mistake. He thought he couldn’t take it one more second, those brisk, little movements spawning lewd images of her fingers drumming on his belly, lower still.
But touching her, even on the back of her hand, was a thousand times worse. Her skin was warm, impossibly fine, as tender as a new petal. Her knuckles bumped into his palm, a delicate impression that scalded him with possibilities.
“Wh—” She cleared her throat and tried again. “What?”
He had to force his hand to move, peeling each finger away one by one. “Sorry.” The hand now; lifting it felt like it suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. “It’s just…the drumming. It made me twitchy.”
Her scowl was a brief flicker, there and gone. He wanted to grab her by the shoulder and shake the expression out of her. Did she really think that smooth and cool was better than animation and life? She wasn’t Dr. Goodale’s remote hostess anymore.
“It annoyed you, did it?”
“Yes.”
Deliberately, she began drumming against the trunk, nails clicking, smile bordering on smug.
“I believe I called,” he said through his teeth. It would serve her right, he thought, if he told her exactly why her fidgeting disturbed him.
“Oh. Of course.” She fanned the cards on top of the trunk. “Two pair.”
She was a fair poker player. Her composure allowed her to bluff with relative ease, and she certainly had no compunctions about lying.
But try as she might, there was one thing she couldn’t overcome.
The cards liked Jim Bennett.
Always had. His father and brother hated that he’d always been lucky when they’d been the exact opposite. He’d been no more than twelve when they tried to draw him into the games, thinking that he could win back part of the fortune they’d squandered. But he understood even then that it was a trap…the moment one depended upon Luck was the moment she turned against you.
He tossed down his own hand. “Full house.”
Blinking, Kate twisted around to inspect
his cards.
“Ah…” The sound was very low, but could only be considered a snarl.
“Now, now, don’t whine,” he chided.
Color flooded her face, dusky in the low light.
“You cheated.”
“I most certainly did not.”
“But…but…”
“Come now, be a sport.”
Heat flashed in her eyes. “Now whoever said I had to be a sport!” she snapped.
It was as much animation as he’d ever seen in her. He sat back and contemplated her for a moment. “You hate losing.”
“Of course not, I merely…” She paused, then blew out a breath. “I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. There. You know my secret. It’s terribly unladylike and not at all kind but truly—when I was in school, all my friends refused to play games with me.”
He leaned forward on his elbow, the candlelight casting a conspiratorial oval around them. “What’s the worst thing you ever did to win?”
“I couldn’t—”
“Tell me.”
“I sawed halfway through my best friend’s croquet mallet so it would break in the middle of our championship match.”
He laughed, thoroughly and heartily, the sound swelling up in the small room.
“Oh!” She pressed her palms to her cheeks. “I can’t believe I just told you that. What you must think of me.”
And just like that, their companionable mood ended. They both knew what he thought of her.
“Well,” he said. “We’d best get to sleep.”
“Oh, no!” she said, dismayed. “Just one more. It’s only sporting.”
He should say no. The rising simmer of a desire that he neither wanted nor knew how to manage should tell him that much.
“Please?” She didn’t wheedle. She was too sure of her wiles to wheedle. She merely smiled at him and waited, skin gleaming like pearls in the candlelight, looking up at him through her lashes so her eyes looked mysterious and promising, luring him in.
Say no. The wiser part of him was flimsy, growing weaker all the time. If there was a man on earth who could say no to sitting across from a beautiful woman in the soft light, watching her move and speak and smile, breathing in air that was replete with seductive potential—well, there was not a man on earth who could.
“All right.” He bent to gather up the cards.
“Let me.” She was quicker than he, sweeping them toward her in a wide arc. The cards flashed in her hands, a competence born of long practice. “Whew. It’s getting warm in here, isn’t it?” She reached up and flicked open the top button of her blouse. The collar released immediately, lace sagging loose and lush against the pale wedge of skin revealed. She fanned herself, blowing the lace aside, giving tantalizing glimpses of more.
So, that would be the approach now, would it? He was surprised that she hadn’t tried it before now.
He’d no intention of falling for her attempts at distraction. That didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the show in the process.
She leaned forward on her elbows, squeezing in with her upper arms, and her breasts swelled into the slight opening. And just like that, his brain shut down.
“Are you ready?” she said brightly.
“Huh?” He blinked, coming back to the present as if swimming up through murky water. She’d dealt without him realizing it and had her cards fanned neatly in front of her, amused eyes peeking flirtatiously over the top. He snatched up his cards and thumbed them open.
He threw down a card. “I’ll take one.”
“Only one?” Somehow she’d opened another button. He was sure of it; there hadn’t been that much lovely bosom exposed before. He started plotting ways to draw out the game, wondering just how far she’d go. “I would have thought you’d take more,” she purred.
He swallowed hard. “You did?”
“Hmm.” She delicately ran a fingertip down the curving edge of her hand of cards. “You always struck me as the kind of man who’d take a risk. Who’d go for broke, as it were; who’d reach for all he could.” She reached up with her free hand and plucked the pins from her hair. It tumbled free, a rich, glorious spill that captured the candlelight for its own. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “After a long day, the pins start to hurt.”
“I don’t mind,” he said, and hoped he hadn’t squeaked. He couldn’t tell; blood roared in his ears.
“Good.” He had to watch her mouth to make out all her words. Which only made it all the worse. Her mouth gleamed with moisture and her lips curved around the words as if they were a solid thing. “Just one? It’s not too late to change your mind.”
He shook his head, not so much a no as an attempt to clear out the fuzz. “Just one.”
She put one card on the flat surface and pushed across to him with her forefinger—slowly, her hand inching over the surface, directly toward him. “There you go.”
She didn’t lift her hand. “Aren’t you going to take your card?”
“Ah…of course.” He pinched the card by the edge and managed to slide it from her grip without brushing her fingers.
Damn it.
She pouted over her cards, her mouth drawn up in a coquette’s promise. “I think I’ll take…three,” she whispered. “One’s never enough for me.”
He’d memorized his cards in that half-second when he’d first glanced at them. Now he stared at them as if his life depended on the knowledge—not because he had any concern for his hand but just because he didn’t dare look at her again. He’d vastly overestimated his resistance. It didn’t matter that he knew very well she was simply trying to distract him, not attract him. That every move she made was calculated and there was nothing of true passion on her side. She was expert, thoroughly detached, as professional in her role as a Broadway actress.
It made no difference. It was impossible to remain immune. And so he studied the tiny printed hearts marching across his cards with the desperation of a drowning man latching onto one last, tenuous lifeline.
He bid quickly, jumping in after her declarations with a speed that bordered on rude, hoping only to get it all over with as quickly as possible. Though sleep was rapidly becoming unlikely, putting a little distance between them might—might—make it possible for him to keep his hands off her.
“Jim,” she said softly, and waited. The little hearts swam before his eyes. The silence grew awkward, then obvious.
“Jim,” she said again, and he knew there was no help for it.
Reluctantly, dreading, hopeful, he raised his gaze.
Lord. When had that happened? He could see her nipple. No, not quite, but almost…nearly…a shadow of it, at the edge of a loosened flutter of soft cotton. It was more arousing than her bare breast would have been, just that promise of it, making him suck in a breath and hold it, waiting for that cloth to slide down another fraction.
Well, no, not more arousing, he admitted ruefully. He’d still take the whole damn sight of her, gloriously naked, given the chance. Still, this was pretty darn—
“Four aces.”
Her voice clipped through his heated dreams like a torrent of ice water. “What?”
“Four aces.” She tapped her finger on the fan of cards she’d arranged across the trunk.
“Huh?” He knew she expected something of him right now; her head was tilted, her smile sweetly smug. He just couldn’t quite fathom exactly what she wanted.
“Your cards,” she reminded him. And then, when he only swallowed hard, she said more forcefully, “Your cards.”
He threw his cards down, face down. One hit the edge and flipped over as it fell to the floor, revealing a ten of hearts. “You win. The bed’s yours.”
She was on her feet in an instant, as if she were afraid that he would change his mind and insist upon another game. “I’ll just go outside and…I’ll just go outside.”
She backed toward the doorway, wagging a finger at him. “I’m not going to come back and find you’ve stolen the bed, am I?”
She answered with insulting speed. “Yes.”
“You’re right, I would. But not tonight.”
She studied him suspiciously for a moment, then shrugged. “All right, then.”
He didn’t get up, just pondered the empty, densely black rectangle where she’d been standing a moment ago. And then he reached down and, one by one, flipped over his four remaining cards. “Straight flush,” he murmured before, in one wide sweep, obliterating his final hand.
What the hell, he thought. She’d earned it.
Chapter 7
Kate had gotten up long before Jim. Hours, by the look of her. She’d piled her hair up on top of her head in a complicated arrangement of swirls and dips that showed off her long neck, the smooth pink curve of her ears. Her skin glowed, delicate rose blooming on her cheeks, her mouth—he’d no idea if the color was natural or if she’d helped things along.
She had on a different white shirt; a more severe cut, a lot less lace, every bit as flattering. But if the rest of her was as flawless as if she’d just stepped out of her dressing room, here was the slightest hint of where she’d spent the night. One lone crease dared to slash across the bodice; one wrinkle marred the crisp navy blue of her narrowly cut skirt.
She stood over him, tapping her foot—sooner or later that was going to drive him insane.
“Oh, good, you’re up. I was just about to wake you.”
With a painfully aimed kick, he had no doubt.
“Don’t you think we should get going?” she asked.
“Sure.” He yawned, ears popping. “Sleep well?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He stretched and rolled to his feet, hearing every joint protest along the way. At this rate he wouldn’t be able to move by the time he was fifty.
“Are you always so slow?”
“Yes.” As he bent to grab the limp pile of his blanket, he saw her scrub the palms of her hands briskly up and down her upper arms.
“Problem?”
“No.” She dropped her arms and held them rigidly against her sides.
A Wedding Story Page 7