Ash sat down a couple of feet away and started removing food from the basket. She’d thought of everything, down to a plate and utensils, a neatly folded linen napkin, and a jar of cool tea.
“Go ahead,” he said calmly, studying the food instead of Charmaine.
“You can eat first,” she said almost shyly. “You must be hungry.”
Ah, she was putting it off, delaying the inevitable, and that was unlike her. “I don’t have all day. I’ll eat, you talk.”
“It’s about this . . . marriage.” She said the word marriage as if it truly pained her, as if it tasted bitter in her mouth.
“What about it?” He picked at the chicken.
Charmaine sighed, and Ash lifted his head to look at her instead of the food. Why did she have to be so beautiful? If she were ugly or even plain, maybe he could rouse some indifference. If she didn’t look so damned delicate, maybe he wouldn’t feel the need to protect her. If she didn’t look so fragile, maybe he wouldn’t be so certain she didn’t belong on this farm.
“We really haven’t had time to discuss any . . . details of our relationship.”
“Details?”
Charmaine sighed deeply, frustrated and slightly indignant. What did she expect of him? That he could read her mind? Hell, he almost could. She hated it here, she hated him, she was looking for a way out.
“Last night you said you had no intention of staying, so why are you still here?”
She fidgeted and bit her bottom lip before answering. “I don’t know. What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re asking me?”
He ate while Charmaine hemmed and hawed and said a lot of nothing, mostly about how they hadn’t had time to get to know one another properly, and managing the entire time not to look him directly in the eye. When he’d finished the meal she brought him, which only took a few minutes, he repacked the basket, wiped his face and hands, and moved to sit beside his wife.
“Charmaine.” He took her chin in his hand and made her look at him. “Say it. Spit it out. Nothing you say will surprise me, I promise you.”
“Marital continence,” she blurted, and then she turned an alarming shade of red.
“What?”
She took a deep breath before speaking, lifted her chin in a pose that was almost defiant. “There’s a higher union to be known in a truly modern marriage than that of . . . of the physical relationship. A husband and wife can and should be spiritual partners rather than . . . rather than. . . . ”
“I lied,” Ash said as he dropped his hand from her chin. “You can surprise me.”
“I should have Howard send along a selection of manuals explaining the benefits of a pure marriage.”
“No, thank you.”
“He explains things much more clearly than I can.”
“Wonderful.”
“It’s for your own good.”
Hell, he could tell she believed it. Her eyes were wide and clear and true, and as blue as the spring sky on a cloudless day. “My own good,” he repeated.
“It’s a well-known fact that seminal fluid comes from the brain,” she said primly. “It’s best not to waste such a precious commodity, but rather to conserve it so it can be expended more constructively, in thought.”
“I should be a genius,” he muttered.
“What?” she leaned forward and just an inch or so closer to him.
“Nothing,” he said more clearly. “What you’re saying is that you don’t want me to touch you.”
“Well . . . yes.” She squirmed on the hard ground. “I didn’t think you would object.”
“You didn’t?”
“Last night you didn’t . . . I mean, you slept on the floor and you didn’t . . . You don’t even seem to like me very much.”
“It’s not exactly been my lifelong dream to spend my wedding night with an unwilling bride who cried herself to sleep,” he interrupted harshly. “And it’s not that I don’t like you, Charmaine, it’s just that you’re not exactly the kind of woman I’d planned to marry.”
She intended to stay? He should be angry, but he found there was a touch of relief somewhere deep inside that he couldn’t deny. So she wasn’t practical or hardworking . . . so she was as flighty as his mother had ever been. . . .
“I’m sure there have been other women in your life.” She spoke with a no nonsense tone, but a becoming blush rose to her cheeks. “I know how difficult it is for men to contain their animal impulses. But it’s for your own good, I promise you. You’ll thank me, one day.”
Maybe, but not for this.
“Eventually I’ll want children,” he said.
She paled, so quickly and so completely that he was afraid she would faint.
“Where do babies fit into your pure marriage?”
“When the time comes, and I think it will be several years before we’re ready for children, we will do what we must — but no more than once a month. We’ll wait after each encounter to see if we’ve been successful.”
“Sounds like fun,” he muttered, and this time she heard him.
“It’s not supposed to be fun,” she said sternly.
“Odd, I always heard different.”
She shot to her feet. “I can’t have a civilized conversation with you. Why did I expect differently?”
He jumped up to cut off her escape. “Who filled your head with these ridiculous ideas?” She tried to step past him, but he was wider and faster and she had no chance. “You talk about the marriage bed as if it was medicine to be endured, just another unpleasant chore to undertake at the prescribed time. What about pleasure? Passion? Tell me Charmaine, have you already forgotten what it felt like to be kissed?”
“It was the dancing, and I think there must’ve been champagne in the punch,” she protested as she tried again to sidestep him.
He grabbed her, a hand on her arm and another around her waist. “I didn’t have any punch, and neither did you. At least, not after I arrived,” he whispered, and suddenly she was very still.
“I was weak —”
He silenced her with a kiss she didn’t want, found her lips with his and put a stop to her nonsense. She was stiff in his arms, unresponsive, but only for a moment. Her eyelids fluttered and closed, her lips softened, and then she melted. Her body against his, her mouth against his.
There was a maddening little noise deep in her throat that almost pushed him over the edge. She was his wife, and if she wasn’t willing now she would be in a few minutes. He could feel her falling toward surrender, and by God he wanted her.
“I’m so scared,” she whispered as she pulled her lips away from his. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. This can’t happen.” She protested, but there was pure acceptance in her eyes. “And I must say, I think it’s really unfair of you to use your experience against me,” she said breathlessly.
He smiled down at her, and then he kissed her again. Now wasn’t the time, he supposed, to tell her that he was as much a virgin as she was.
No waltz, no champagne punch, and still a simple kiss made her reel. Why now? Why Ash Coleman?
It was a test of her strength, of her convictions. Still, she’d thought herself stronger than this. He parted her lips with his tongue and then flicked it inside her mouth, and she thought her knees would buckle. She held on tight so she wouldn’t collapse and fall to the ground, and her mouth moved against his as if she’d kissed him a thousand times and knew every sensitive curve of the lips that danced over hers.
The sensations went far beyond her lips. She felt this kiss throughout her entire body, from the top of her head to her toes. He was in her blood, somehow. He made her forget everything, in some way.
Instinctively, her body fell against his. She couldn’t get close enough, couldn’t touch or feel or kiss enough.
Weak, she was wonderfully weak. . . . “Stop,” she whispered, and he did.
She couldn’t do this, couldn’t give up everything she wanted and believed in for a physical sensat
ion, for the passion and pleasure Ash mentioned so enticingly. In any case, according to Felicity the kissing was nice but the rest was dreadful. To have a part of a man’s body actually inside hers, to suffer the invasion Felicity had spoken of with such disdain . . . it didn’t sound nice at all.
“I meant everything I said.” She couldn’t make herself sound stern, as she knew she should. “I’m not ready for this. I don’t want . . . I can’t. . . . ” Drawing away slightly, she had a very good and close view of the black eye her father had given Ash. She stroked the skin around it, softly and carefully. “I’m sorry he hit you, and I’m so sorry I got you into this mess with my stupid lies.”
“If you have to be sorry for anything,” he said, kissing her once again and then stepping away, “be sorry you meant everything you said.”
She needed a little persuasion, that was all. A gentle push in the right direction.
Ash saw her, sweeping the porch with a vengeance, as he approached the house. She must feel something for him, or she wouldn’t still be here. Charmaine Haley wasn’t one to mindlessly obey her father or anyone else, no matter what kind of ceremony had taken place.
If she swept any harder she was going to take a layer of wood right off the porch.
“What’s wrong?” he asked as he stepped onto the porch, and her head snapped up. She hadn’t heard him coming, evidently.
“I’m married to you,” she whispered hoarsely.
This was not going to be easy. “True enough,” he said casually.
She stopped sweeping and leaned on the broom handle. “And that stepmother of yours is still angry because I brought you the last piece of pie and she was saving it for Elmo, who needs more pie in his stomach about as much as you need more dirt on that shirt.” She studied the offensive shirt and sighed deeply. “Elmo snivels more than any man I’ve ever met, filling the house with a constant wail, and when Verna chimes in it’s more than I can bear. And if Oswald suggests one more time that we all pack up and move in with my parents, I’m going to shoot him.”
“The Haley solution.”
Charmaine didn’t appreciate his comment, but her only response was a cutting glance.
“Nathan’s hiding in the barn,” she continued. “Rubbing down the grays, I think.”
“And you’re hiding out here.”
She was openly distressed, angry, and . . . confused. As confused as he was? Impossible.
Ash stepped onto the porch, but before he had taken two steps toward Charmaine she stiffened and took a step back. “You stay away from me,” she said sternly. “I won’t have any more of this afternoon’s nonsense.”
“Nonsense?”
She narrowed her eyes. “You know what I’m talking about, so don’t pretend to be innocent. I will not allow you to seduce me, Ash Coleman. I’ve made up my mind about what I want, and you can’t sway me.”
“I can’t?”
“No, you can’t,” she said, and her voice trembled, just a little.
He leaned against the porch rail and smiled at her. She was still shaken. Good. He wanted to shake up every one of her crazy notions. “And what is it again that you want?”
Ash expected another speech on marital continence and pure marriage and the conservation of seminal fluid. He expected another earful of hogwash.
He didn’t expect what he got — a wide-eyed stare with a touch of fear in it, an uncertain waver of the hand that wasn’t grasping the broom handle.
“Time,” she whispered. “I need time.”
Twelve
She had to do something and this, at least, was away from the house.
A barn had never been Charmaine’s favorite place to pass an afternoon, yet it was quiet here but for the coo and shuffle of the animals. She was rubbing Pumpkin’s legs with a burlap sack, a treat the mare seemed to enjoy immensely.
Every day she tried to find a chore that would allow her to escape the crowded house for a time. Nathan had shown her how to feed the chickens and milk the cows, a chore that had turned out to be every bit as disgusting as she’d suspected it would be. But no chore was as disgusting as spending time in Verna’s company.
Ash was giving her what she’d asked for days ago. Time. Time to think, to plan, to calm her agitated soul. Time to build a wall he couldn’t break through with a simple kiss. Simple? In her much too vivid memory there was nothing simple about it.
It had been sprinkling off and on all morning, and all of a sudden the rain came down hard. Heavy raindrops lashed against the barn’s roof and sides, but the structure was sturdy. The sound of fat, insistent raindrops against the barn was soothing. Here she was safe, warm, and isolated.
Kneeling at Pumpkin’s side, she rubbed gently with the burlap sack. The barn had an aroma all its own, but she was becoming accustomed to the smell. With a little luck she could spend an entire afternoon here, undisturbed. Verna and her sons wouldn’t miss her, and she certainly wouldn’t miss them.
They were an odd bunch. Just this morning she’d caught Verna with her ear to the wall of the kitchen as she tapped lightly against the raw wood. What was she listening for? And what did they do all day while Ash was away? Not cleaning, certainly, and Verna never spent any more time preparing the evening meal than was absolutely necessary.
She didn’t hear Ash coming. He just burst into the barn, shaking off the rain as he came through the open double doors. He hung his dripping wet hat on a peg by that door, and then he began to unbutton his soaked shirt.
Her view of him, as she peered over a bale of hay, was clear, but he obviously had no idea she was here, as his fingers worked the buttons.
She should stand and make her presence known, before he went any further. It would be simple enough at this point, to stand and greet him civilly and warn him before he went any further.
But she didn’t.
He peeled off the soaked shirt and hung it on yet another peg.
Charmaine’s mouth went dry. Goodness. Ash was gorgeous in the moonlight, as she well remembered, but by the brighter light of even a cloudy day he was magnificent. In spite of everything she knew and wanted and believed, her fingers itched to trace the shadows on his skin, the muscles and the furrows, the nooks and crannies.
Ash lifted one arm above his head, working out a tight muscle, and she could see his ribs outlined clearly. She wanted to run her fingers over each and every one of those bones, she wanted to lay her mouth . . . she closed her eyes tight. This could not be happening.
One eye opened slowly. Ash stood outlined in the open door, watching the rain, his back to her as it had been that first night. Their disastrous wedding night. If she was very still and quiet he would never know she was here. She sank lower behind the hay.
“We needed this rain,” he said casually, “but I was hoping to get a little more work done before it got this heavy.”
Charmaine closed her eyes. How could he possibly know she was here? She hadn’t made a sound, hadn’t uttered a single word. Ash didn’t know anything. He was . . . he was guessing.
“Well?” he said. “How long are you going to hide back there?”
She didn’t budge.
“Fine,” he said softly. “We’ll play this however you want.”
Charmaine very cautiously came up on her knees and peered over the bale of hay. Ash hadn’t moved from his station in the open doorway. He watched the rain, the way a farmer might, with contentment and more regard than an ordinary man.
Her heart caught in her chest, her blood roared, and she reminded herself of everything that Howard and his manuals had taught her. Magnetic currents, that’s all this was. A scientifically explained phenomena. Ash’s magnetism was just stronger than any she’d encountered to this point, that’s all.
It was a perfectly reasonable explanation, and still her heart raced.
“I don’t blame you for hiding out here,” he said as if they were carrying on a normal conversation. “Verna and the boys are a lot to take. I guess it doesn’t make things
any easier for you.”
Charmaine rose up slowly, brushing straw from her pale blue skirt. “Nor for you,” she said, smoothly ignoring the fact that she’d been hiding from him.
With his back to her, Ash smiled. He’d known it from the moment he’d stepped into the barn, that she was here somewhere. Heaven help him, he could sense her, he could feel her presence.
And now he could hear her, stepping closer, halting her progress while still several feet away.
He turned to watch her.
It hadn’t been easy, but he’d done as she’d asked. He was giving her time.
Right now staying away from her was impossible. She was enchantingly fair, in a plain white blouse that would have been unnotable on any other woman, and a skirt that was the color of her eyes and streaked here and there with hay. Her cheeks turned a pretty pink, as she blushed and then tried to ignore it.
He took a step toward Charmaine, expecting her to back away. She didn’t. She stood her ground and waited. The welcomed rain became harder, pounding the barn and soaking the fields outside this warm haven.
Charmaine lifted a hand as he reached her. With fingers splayed, she held that hand between them. There was no move to back up or push him away, just a frown as she fluttered that hand gently.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking something,” she whispered.
“Checking what?” He lifted his hand so that it was palm to palm with hers, almost but not quite touching.
Charmaine’s eyes snapped upward to meet his. “Magnetism,” she whispered. “This is purely scientific, I assure you.”
He joined the palms of their hands and twined his fingers through hers. “Purely scientific.”
“Yes.”
With his free hand he outlined her face and one shoulder, down one arm to her hip, and in this perusal he never quite touched her. His hand skimmed a mere inch or less from her skin and her clothing. Magnetism, she said. The hand in his trembled.
“Oh, my,” she breathed.
She lifted her free hand and did the same to him, tracing his jaw without actually touching it, skimming her palm just above his chest. Could she feel his heartbeat, with her hand not an inch from his flesh? It beat hard enough, that was certain.
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