She poured fresh coffee for both of them and unplugged the pot. “I wouldn’t be a man for anything,” she said thoughtfully. “A fourteen-year-old boy having to prove himself… When I think of how horrendous it was to lose my own virginity, and I was twenty and thought myself in love—and a man is under so much onus to have all this experience beforehand. We talk so much of women’s lib, when so little has changed for the men in our culture. It’s really not at all fair…”
“Well, now you’ve got me diverted.” he said with mock disgust. They both sat at the kitchen table with their coffee, Loren with one leg curled under her, half leaning against the wall just as he was. “Horrendous, Loren? How did that word just happen to slip out? You said it was your sex life that kept your marriage together for as long as it did.”
She’d forgotten telling him that. She stared into the dark liquid of her coffee for several moments, all too aware that certain truths did “slip out” when she was with him. When she glanced back up to meet his eyes, she considered how impossible it would be to lie to him. “It did keep us together,” she said quietly. “From Hal’s viewpoint. He wanted me, and because of that…I stayed in the marriage longer than I wanted to.”
He, too, was silent for a moment, but his eyes never left her face. “And it was really because of that you stayed celibate for so long, wasn’t it, Loren? Because you were afraid it would be an issue of having to pretend again with another man.” His voice was low and filled with too much understanding; she stirred restlessly. “There’s no pretending with us. There never will be.”
“Buck—”
“I think it’s damn near close to a miracle that no other man ever bridged your defenses. So much warmth, so much passion…” His tone hardened possessively. “Three days. A blood test, then three days,”
Loren’s head jerked up, and she set down her cup. “No.”
“Are you going to listen?”
She sighed unhappily.
“The only job I was ever fired from,” he growled, “was at Leeds Diecast. My uncle’s company. I was seventeen, working there for the summer. I came to work in a black leather jacket, on a motorcycle, if you get my drift, and no one could get me to do anything so ordinary as punch a time card without my making a federal case out of it.
“My parents were both academics, professors at the University of Michigan. I must have gotten the brashness from my uncle. At any rate, he was a bachelor and the only one who ever volunteered to take me on. God knows where he got the patience. At least by the time I got out of college, a few of the sharp edges had been sanded off. Not much. He and I held World War III for a year. The next year, I started listening instead of talking. The third year, he retired, and six years ago I made the last payment on the business to him. It’s mine, free and clear. In fact, it’s double the size it was in John’s reign, and I’m damn proud of it. Managing and marketing were the tricks—never mind. Since you just turned pale yellow, I know darned well you’ve got the drift.”
He wrenched up from the chair and stalked to the living room, returning with his hand clenched around the neck of the wine bottle, glaring at her strained features. Two glasses clattered down from the cupboard, and he splashed wine into both. “I never intended to deceive you, Loren. The first time I saw you, I was in that bar to meet an old friend; it used to be a place to ‘slum’ when I was the kind of teenager I told you about. But every time I tried to tell you I wasn’t on the unemployment line—”
“I understand,” Loren said honestly. She had cut him off every time he tried to talk to her; it was rather insane. She had rushed in trying to be tactful, trying to assure him that his unemployed status didn’t alter the essential respect she felt for him as a man. It seemed very funny suddenly. She picked up the wineglass and met his eyes over the ruby liquid. Every muscle in his body was taut, the green eyes aflame, the crescent scar oddly white with tension. “I feel rather foolish…”
“No, you don’t. Your stomach’s all tied up in knots because you know what’s coming. Money does make a difference, Loren. We both know it.”
“Of course it does,” she agreed lightly. “We all prefer filet mignon to Hamburger Helper.” She glanced at him again. “Buck, you’re rather…intimidating when you’re angry,” she remarked absently.
“Come over here.” He motioned her to his lap.
She shook her head.
Then he shook his and got up, moving over her like some menacing giant, his arms pinning hers to her sides. The lips that touched hers were petal-soft. Her throat arched back automatically, her eyes obediently closed. She took in all of him, the texture of his lips and his taste, the song of take me already starting in her bloodstream. She felt the leashed control in his body…
When he leaned back up, he just looked at her. “You see,” he said vibrantly. “You see, Loren. I’d like to offer you a nice indecent affair, but it just won’t work. You’ve got your life all tied up in knots like a pretzel, and I won’t settle for crumbs. As a marriage, however impetuous, I think it will work. I’ve never had the least urge to propose to another woman. You don’t find love and the ability to live with someone—the desire to live and grow with someone—in everyone you meet. You’re natural with me; I feel myself with you.”
“Buck—”
“I want time with you. I want your energies. I want you next to me when I wake up in the morning, and I want to know that you’ll never have to go into that bar alone again. Your job—that’s your business, your choices. The rest I can make my business with a ring on your finger, rights that don’t come with an affair. Your house, Loren, repaired and restored. Your grandfather can have care if you want, companionship if you want. Angela can have the luxuries. The money is nothing to me, Loren, except that it will take the pressure off you—”
He stopped for breath, staring at her, studying her, and she lowered her eyes, taking a long sip of wine. “Perhaps you’d like to take me home now,” she said brightly, and rose quickly from the table, then sat back down again, removing the thick pair of socks he’d given her to keep her feet warm. The holes in her own socks winked back at her; it wasn’t as if everything she owned was threadbare, but the image was there. It really was so very funny…and all she could think of was the generations of Shephards who’d solved all their problems with money, who had solved none of their problems with money…
“No. I won’t take you home.”
She glanced back at Buck when she rose again, taking the wineglasses to the sink. He was dying for an argument; she had the feeling he wished she were a man he could take on with his fists. But she wasn’t a man and she had no intention of arguing with him.
She washed the glasses, put them away and left the room, bending to fold the handmade quilt on the floor. It had come from a closet, she remembered, but when she opened the closet door, the shelf was too high. Buck came from behind her, taking the quilt out of her hands, the look in his eyes a detailed reminder of what they’d done on that quilt. “Everything in its place? Now try to put on your coat, Loren. Do it. See what happens.”
She reached up, very swiftly, and kissed him. His cheeks felt rough from the hours without shaving, and her fingers lingered gently as she looked up at him with sad eyes. Every muscle in his body tensed, and then he jerked away from her, breathing heavily.
“Would you like to tell me why I have the impression you plan on never seeing me again?” he said furiously.
“Because that’s the way it has to be,” she said simply, and looked around vaguely for her coat. It wasn’t in the living room or the closet. She’d given it to Buck when she came in. She retraced her steps to the kitchen, found it on a wall hook and was putting one arm through a sleeve when he stormed in behind her.
“So you have some idiotic prejudice against money. Perhaps with reason. That doesn’t change anything between the two of us. You didn’t give a hoot in hell what I had or didn’t have when we made love, now did you?”
“No,” she agreed, buttoning he
r coat and slipping out of the back door to bring in her boots. The rush of freezing air brought a welcome numbness to her cheeks. “It matters now.”
“Why? Exactly what has changed?” he demanded.
“Nothing yet.” She watched him grab for his coat, almost flinching at the violent way he snatched for it. “But it would change, Buck. No one keeps me, and I won’t play Galatea to your Pygmalion. I could see what was coming. You’d solve all my problems for me, would you? It’s so damn easy when you have money—”
“A hell of a lot of your problems would be solved with money,” he snarled.
“That’s just it. It’s like buying love. Like buying a perfect peach and watching it spoil. I know you don’t understand, but I’ve seen all too much of it in my life.” Her tone was rational and quiet. She sighed at his implacable expression, and then simply turned and walked out into the cold, feeling the salt sting of tears in her eyes.
The ground was uneven and slushy, barely lit by the moonlight and stars. Through her tears, the ground looked silvery gray; the shadows of trees menacing. He was at the car door ahead of her, in time to see her in and slam it. When he slammed the door on his own side, the entire car shook. “So you’re all done, just like that, Loren? How does it feel—a one-night stand? I got over liking that scene a long time ago, but maybe for you…”
It hurt; he’d meant it to. She didn’t answer until they were out on the open road again, it took that long before the lump in her throat would dissolve. It took the same length of time for him to stop racing as if he were driving in the Daytona 500 and smooth the car down to a decent purr on the road. “I love you, Buck, and I loved our time together,” she said finally, very, very softly.
“I wasn’t talking about buying you, Loren. I was talking about lifting the burden of family and financial responsibilities from your shoulders. And not out of the ‘goodness of my heart.’ Out of selfishness. Because I want you to myself, time with you. If you can’t see the difference between that and ‘keeping’ you…”
“It sounds good, but you’re really talking about taking me over, Buck. The debt would just accumulate; you couldn’t get out free and clear, and it would change how I felt about you. It wouldn’t be freedom to love, but obligation, cluttering up whatever real emotion exists, destroying it. You don’t know me well enough to be that sure you want a lifetime with me, Buck. But I know myself. I don’t regret a minute of this afternoon, but I would. It would stop feeling like love and start feeling like an exchange—sex for money.”
For forty minutes, they drove in silence, her last words echoing, leaving a bad taste in her own mouth. She could feel the first pangs of withdrawal stabbing through the numbness; he was withdrawing from her already, and he was next to her. She could still feel the imprint of his hands on her body, still feel the desire to curl close to him, still remember exactly what he looked like naked, leaning over her.
When he pulled into the driveway and stopped the car, there was a cold, unreadable expression on his face. “You’re a fool, Loren,” he said in a low voice.
She took a breath to control the burning swell of tears just behind her eyelids and reached for the door.
He snatched her first, grasping at her shoulders to half wrench her across his lap. Ignoring the shudder through her body, his fingers threaded roughly in her hair, molding her scalp to force her mouth to his. His lips meant to punish, and they did, with a savage pressure that bruised and cut where his teeth grazed against her soft flesh. As rough as he was, as raw, she could feel an eruption of sheer sexual desire rip through her, just as rough, just as raw. She felt an urge not to tame the primitive onslaught but to encourage it, to meet him on whatever ground he wanted to play. It wasn’t Buck she was rejecting but his moneyed world.
He drew back from her, his hands clenched tightly on her shoulders, and then he pulled open his door. She could see his hands were trembling even more than her own. “I won’t call you,” he said harshly. “You call me, Loren, the next time you want a one-night stand. You want to give it away free and clear, with no strings attached…well, don’t waste it on a stranger.”
He stalked ahead of her to open the kitchen door. She walked up the stairs and then past him, too shaken to even look at him, and heard the door slam behind her. She was alone, a single light left on in the kitchen, the household obviously long asleep. She was “free and clear” to burst into tears, but the release was denied her, as if all her emotions had been buried in a dark box in her heart that had no key. A lump in the back of her throat was trying to choke her.
Her knees suddenly weak, she sat down at the kitchen table, cradling her head in her hands. She could not get over the horrifying feeling that she’d just made the worst mistake in her life and had no way to take it back.
Chapter Nine
It was past eight when Loren drove into her yard. With a weary sigh, she opened the back door of the van and reached in for an armload of papers to take into the house, hardly noticing the hint of crisp air that smelled distinctly springlike. The slush was long gone, and April only a few days away; a few trees were thinking about bursting into leaf, and the grass already had a lush softness of early spring.
Wielding her purse, folders and keys, Loren slammed the van door with her hip and made her way to the kitchen door, wishing she had a free hand to rub the aching spot at the nape of her neck. In the dusk, there was no one to see her, and the total exhaustion etched on her features gave her a fragile appearance. Her workload had been impossible these past few weeks, even when she stayed late and brought work home, and she had launched a spring cleaning in the house as well. Every minute of every day had been filled, but there was a continual, aching awareness that Buck hadn’t called and was not going to call. No matter how many times she convinced herself that she’d been both honest and right in what she’d told him, there was a lonely ache inside of her that just refused to lessen. Her weight had slipped five pounds, and unless there was a reason to make the effort, the ready smile and quick comeback she was famous for simply didn’t happen.
Thinking of what to make for dinner and how to wedge in the paperwork between the dishes and bed that night, Loren’s step almost faltered on the stairs. She had to pull herself together, stop driving herself. She opened the door and promptly frowned as she set down the papers on the counter.
Every light was on in the kitchen, an unexpected and tantalizing aroma of beef stroganoff wafting from the stove. The counters were spotless; there were no dirty dishes waiting for her; the floor gleamed. More startling was the man standing at the stove with a wooden spoon in his hand. He was as small as her grandfather, but oddly spiffy in gray slacks and a starched white shirt, over which he wore a body apron. On the safer side of sixty, he sported a cane in one hand; he was stirring with the other. A pair of puppy-gentle eyes lifted to hers. “Miss Shephard?”
She nodded, not exactly sure what to say.
“I’ll have dinner for you in about ten minutes. We’ve just been waiting for you to come in. I’m Rayburn, of course.”
“I see.” She didn’t see at all, watching as he deftly handled the pair of pots on the stove. The puppy-gentle eyes spared her another shy smile.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the job,” he offered warmly.
“The job,” Loren repeated faintly.
“Your grandfather and sister are waiting for you in the dining room.”
She resisted the urge to repeat that as well, instead removing her coat as she watched him, and finally giving in to his gently motioning hand to disappear into the other room. The dining room had been transformed; a white linen tablecloth graced with silver unearthed from locked drawers, not to mention the crystal and hand-painted china that were a legacy from past generations, a candelabrum in the center of the table… Gramps was in a suit and Angela in a low-cut red blouse; they were seated across from each other, all dressed up and like twin Cheshire cats.
“All right. What on earth is going on?” Loren
said wearily.
Rayburn entered the room, again very gently motioning her to sit, his apron removed. She found herself sitting and then served as well, her plate heaped with asparagus in a marvelous cheese sauce, beef stroganoff, a tossed fresh spinach salad with a tangy dressing. Homemade bread was still steaming on the plate, cut in wedges. In her own glass, there was wine while the other two clearly held ice water, and again she looked up blankly at Rayburn, who stood patiently at her side. Something seemed to be expected of her.
“It looks wonderful,” she said obediently. It wasn’t hard to say, looking at the table.
“I love him!” Angela crowed when Rayburn returned beyond the closed door to the kitchen. “I just love him! He’s so…butlerish. I can hardly wait to tell David. It’s just like it used to be when Mother and Dad were alive!”
Gramps was looking at Loren. “Admit it’s nice, to come home and be able to relax for a few minutes, Loren,” he said quietly. “Just eat your dinner while I explain.”
When she’d walked in the door, she’d felt too tired to eat, much less cook, yet when she took the first bite, her appetite miraculously perked up, and she found the second and third bites going down while she listened. Jim Rayburn had a bad hip and consequently could not find work. An army pension was enough to keep him in adequate spending money, but would not in itself pay for living expenses. He had no family still living; after his discharge from the service, he had worked as a clerk, later as a cook. In exchange for a roof over his head, he was more than willing to both cook for the Shephards and do some basic housekeeping. “To take the load off you,” Gramps finished.
“You look like hell lately,” Angela added cheerfully.
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