Caroline could feel all their eyes on her, but she refused to look at them. Instead she ducked her head to hide the incipient tears and found her face pressed against the warm, hair-roughened muscles of Matt’s chest. It was all she could do to hold back a sniffle. Matt’s hands were hard around her upper arms, but his grip didn’t hurt her.
“Go on, now. All of you. Daniel. Close the door.”
Daniel must have sensed something amiss—indeed, with her sprawled facedown and unmoving across Matt and Matt telling him to leave them alone and close the door, it would be hard to think otherwise. Daniel ushered his nephews and brothers from the room without comment. When she heard the click of the door closing behind them, Caroline’s shoulders sagged. Matt’s grip on her arms gentled, becoming more comforting than confining.
“Go ahead and cry, if you want to. Your guilty secret’s safe with me.” His words, soft and only faintly teasing, were addressed to the top of her head, as her face was still buried in his chest.
“I never cry.” The protest was muffled and then entirely spoiled by a watery gulp.
“So you’ve told me.”
“I broke the pitcher and bowl.”
“They can be replaced.”
“And the bread burned.”
“We’ve all eaten burned bread before. If you cut off the worst parts, ’tisn’t bad.”
“And I didn’t make enough porridge.”
“Now that,” he said, and she could hear the humor lacing the words, “you should be ashamed of.”
He was teasing her, she knew he was, but she couldn’t help it: despite her best efforts, she burst into noisy tears.
21
“Here, now. I was but teasing you! I thought to make you laugh, not cry!”
Despite Matt’s protest and her own mortification, Caroline could not seem to dam the flow of tears. She gulped and gasped and sobbed, weeping until it seemed there must be no more moisture left anywhere in her body. After a few futile attempts, Matt gave up trying to cajole her out of her blubbering. Instead his arms came around her, and he settled her more comfortably against him while she wept away all the pent-up sorrows of the past two years. That he was a man, and naked beneath the bedcoverings, never even occurred to her. In the explosion of her grief, he was simply Matt.
“ ’Tis all right then, poppet. Go ahead and cry.” Matt’s murmur made Caroline burrow closer. Her hands found his shoulders and curled over them, and she held on to him as though for dear life. What she had told him was true: she never cried. There had never seemed much point in it. Her father, dearly beloved as he had been, had had no patience with feminine emotionalism, and even as a child Caroline had learned not to cry in front of him. With her mother dead when Caroline was twelve, there had been nobody left in the world for her to run weeping to. Consequently, she had learned to keep her tears to herself. But something, perhaps the cessation of fear, or the new security she had found, or the Lord alone knew what, had ripped the lid off years of accumulated sorrows. For the life of her, she could not stop crying.
It was probably healthy. But if Caroline had had her wish, she would have wept her woes away anywhere but on Matt’s chest.
But if wishes were horses, why, then, beggars would ride. Caroline did not get her wish. She cried in Matt’s arms until she was sure no more tears would come. Then she cried some more.
“There, poppet. There, now.” Clearly he had had some experience in dealing with tears. He patted her back, his hand warm even through the layers of her blue silk dress and underlying shift. He smoothed the tangles of inky hair from her hot and soggy face, murmured to her soothingly, and let her cry. Hazily Caroline wondered at his expertise, then realized with a gulp and a hiccup that he was probably treating her exactly as he would treat five-year-old Davey in a similar case.
“I’m not Davey!” Her indignant protest was rendered considerably less potent by the strangled sob that punctuated it.
“Believe me, I’m well aware of that.”
There was a measure of dryness to his voice that filtered through to her after an incomprehending moment. Hiccuping again, she at last managed to bring her tears under control. For a while longer she lay unmoving, limp and exhausted from the expenditure of so much emotion. Gradually awareness began to return. To her horror, she discovered that she lay almost full length against him, with luck to thank far more than good judgment for keeping her off his splinted leg. One hand clung to his neck while the other splayed across his chest. Her ear rested squarely over his heart. She could hear its steady beat beneath her cheek.
Her breasts, belly, and thighs were pressed tight against the warm strength of his body, which was bare to the waist as his movements during all the commotion had twisted the quilt about his hips and legs. The smell of man was in her nostrils, the salty taste of his skin—flavored perhaps by her tears?—was on her tongue. His arms were around her waist and shoulders, holding her close while his hands wandered freely over her hair and exposed cheek and down her spine. And yet—there was no feeling of revulsion. Her skin did not crawl, her stomach did not heave, her body did not shudder.
In fact, except for a certain mild embarrassment, she was glad to be held so. She felt so wonderfully—safe.
“I suppose now you’ll consider me a watering pot too.” The chest hairs into which her right cheek nestled tickled her lips as she spoke. Above her head she sensed rather than saw him smile.
“You were provoked,” he said.
That handsome admission caused her to lift her head to look at him. As she had thought, he was smiling, an amused smile tinged with kindness that lent a devastating warmth to his eyes.
Caroline blinked, dazzled. Then she stiffened. The realization of what was beginning to happen to her frightened her. Dear Lord, what she was feeling was a jumble of attraction, liking, and—and wanting. For Matt—for a man!
“Wait a minute. There’s no need to poker up.” His arms tightened around her, one hand coming up to rub along the smooth softness of her cheek. “I’m not going to hurt you, you know. There’s no need to look at me like I suddenly turned into Oliver Cromwell.”
“I’m not afraid of Oliver Cromwell,” Caroline responded, feeling her instinctive resistance start to melt. It had been so long since someone had held her in a comforting, nonthreatening way—how long? Since her mother had died? “Or, for that matter, of you.”
“Then perhaps you’ll tell me why you suddenly looked at me just so. Did horns pop out on either side of my head?”
“No.” Caroline had to smile a little at that.
“Then what?”
“I wish you would let me go.”
“I will, presently. In fact, if you tell me you truly wish it, you may get up now.”
“I truly wish it.”
“Liar.”
It was a soft word, and she could hear his smile through it. She didn’t see the smile because, out of fear that he would be able to read in her eyes how very accurate his assessment of her was, she ducked her head. ’Twould be for the best that she pull away from him, right that very instant. She knew perfectly well that he would let her go. Matt Mathieson, she knew as surely as she knew her name, was not the man to hold a woman against her will.
But then, if she were very honest with herself, she would admit that she was not being held against her will at all.
“I must go and see the boys off to school.”
Although she made no move to do so. Lying against him, she absorbed the smell of him, the taste of him, the feel of him. His chest was bronzed and darkened with hair, his pectoral muscles rising and falling, rising and falling. She lay quiescent against his chest and watched, fascinated, the interplay of work-hardened muscles that rippled with every breath.
“Daniel will see to them. They managed to get to school quite adequately before you came, you know.”
“Yes.”
Her answer was abstracted, her attention caught by the sheer rugged beauty of the naked masculine torso upon whi
ch she rested. Never in her wildest dreams would she have imagined that she would find a man’s nudity intoxicating.
“Caroline.”
Some few minutes had passed since they had last spoken. Matt was taking deeper, more deliberate breaths.
“Mmm?”
His stomach was flat as a board and ridged with muscle. Like his chest, it was roughened with dark hair, and it undulated when he breathed.
“Perhaps you should get up, after all.”
When the sense of that registered, her eyes slid up to his, surprised. The smile was still there for her, but there was something else in the blue depths, something that glittered with bright fire. It hit Caroline then that what she had been feeling, that sudden, intense pull of attraction, had not happened to her alone. He felt it too. It was there in his eyes, this time without mistake. She’d seen a similar hard masculine gleam enough times in her life to know what it portended.
Only this time, because the man looking at her so was Matt, she felt no disgust, nor even fear.
Because he was the man he was, he was making no move to do anything save look at her. In fact, his arms had deliberately loosened about her. He wanted her, the expression in his eyes made that abundantly clear. Yet he was prepared to let her go, had even urged her to leave him.
Perversely, this had the effect of keeping her right where she was. If anything, she lay more fully against his chest and adjusted herself so that she could easily look up at him, luxuriating in his masculinity and the wonderful effect it was having on her body. After Simon Denker, she had not thought to feel anything like this ever again. She had supposed that the the part of her that had been designed to enjoy and respond to a man had been killed forever.
“Caroline …” For all Matt’s flickering smile, he sounded strained.
“I told you, I’m not afraid of you.” Her hands moved slowly down his chest to flatten one on top of the other as she rested her chin on them. Her palms tingled from the slight abrasion of his chest hair against them. The sensation was as unexpected as it you would do me harm, Matt Mathieson. I know you for the fraud you are.”
“Elizabeth has been dead for nigh on two years. Before that she was ill, really ill, from the time of Davey’s birth.”
For a moment Caroline could not fathom what that had to do with anything. Then the sense of what he was trying to tell her hit her. Her eyes widened, and her chin came up off her hands.
“Are you telling me that you’ve not—that there’s been—that you …” Her outspokenness was not quite equal to framing the question she had in mind. But he seemed to know what she meant.
“I’m not the kind of man to play a wife false.”
Caroline caught her breath. The notion that he had not loved a woman for over five years was unbelievably seductive. When she exhaled, the sound was a soft sigh.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” There was a rough edge to his voice.
Caroline nodded, her eyes rapt as she watched his face slowly darken from the hot blood rising beneath his skin. She could feel the new tension in the hard-muscled body beneath her. The heat of him burned through her clothes to sear her skin. Her breasts swelled and hardened against his chest—and the sensation startled her. Eyes very wide, she simply stared for a long, speechless moment into his.
“Caroline, if you have any sense at all, you will get off this bed. Now.” The words were forced through his teeth. His hands had moved away from her altogether, to lie flat against the mattress at his sides. As he spoke his fists clenched.
Her gaze locked with his, and her lips parted. Her body began a hot, sweet clamoring the likes of which she had never in her life even imagined she could feel—and then she took fright and rolled off the bed.
Her knees were not quite steady as she got to her feet, her back turned to him so that he could not see the full extent of her discomposure. She could feel his eyes on her, hear the rasp of his breathing.
“I’ve work to do, if you’ll excuse me,” she said without looking around. Then, in the hardest move she had ever made in her life, she walked, spine straight and head held high, from his room.
Not until she was safely in the kitchen did she permit herself to acknowledge that her hands, like her knees, had begun to shake uncontrollably. She just barely made it to a chair before she had to sit down.
22
“Caroline!”
Matt was annoyed, and that annoyance was expressed in the deafening volume of his roar. He had called her at least a half dozen times since his stomach had told him that it was time and past for lunch, and had gotten absolutely no answer. Had he not been certain, by the rattling of pots and the thud of a log dropped on the kitchen fire, that she was belowstairs, he would have been out of his head with worry. As it was, he was growing angrier by the minute.
“Caroline!”
The shout was made with enough force to hurt his throat. Coughing, Matt glowered at his open door, sure that this time she would appear. But though he waited, and waited, she did not.
“Caroline!”
The growling of his stomach reminded him that it was past noon, and he had had nothing to eat all day. But there was nothing he could do but shout for her and wait, fuming, for a response. His helplessness heaped fuel on the fire of his fury. Confound the woman, just because he’d had a momentary lapse of judgment was no reason to starve him! So he’d found her attractive, and made the mistake of letting her see it! She’d been attracted to him too—he was no green lad not to recognize the signs—so she need not behave as if he’d insulted her by a bodily response to her person that was beyond his conscious control. If he had had control of it, she could be sure that she was the last female in the world he would have allowed himself to respond to. She was a member of his household, his kinswoman by marriage, and a pert, bad-tempered, troublesome chit besides!
Fiend take her! Where was she?
“Caroline!”
If she had but known it, he was as appalled by what had sprung to life between them as she obviously was. Since Davey’s conception in a moment of devil-inspired weakness, he had deliberately turned his back on the desires of the flesh. Recognizing lust as his besetting sin, as well as the author of most of his earthly troubles, he had vowed not to succumb to temptation again.
And so far he had not. Resisting Elizabeth had been no challenge. She had held scant appeal for him for years; only a shamefully strong physical hunger for a willing female body, even her willing female body, had brought him into her bed to conceive his sons. Afterward, when he realized the true measure of the depth to which his carnality had caused him to sink, he was sickened at his own degradation.
“Caroline!”
Yet in the eyes of God and man, Elizabeth had been his wife. That had precluded him from taking any other woman to his bed. It shocked him now to realize that he had been six years celibate. Six years without the comfort of a woman’s flesh enfolding him! His wife was two years in her grave; he should look about him for another, and then he could indulge his one vice until it no longer bedeviled him.
’Twas an obvious solution, but his mind rebelled at the thought of saddling himself with another wife. His experience of marriage had been such as would put any rational man off it for life.
“Caroline!”
Yet he had never really intended to remain celibate for the remainder of his days. Perhaps, in the winter, when he was healed and there was less work to be done, he would make a trip to Boston. Loose women could be had for the price of a coin in the larger township, and he could appease the hidden baseness of his nature with no one whose opinion he cared for being any the wiser.
After all, he was a single man again. ’Twas not so very great a sin.
And between them, his brothers and Caroline could look after John and Davey very well.
For six years he had denied himself. Caroline was beautiful, and very, very feminine. No wonder her attraction for him was so strong.
But he was older now, far olde
r and far wiser than he had been fifteen years before when he had wed Elizabeth. Then he was a randy youth with far more sexuality than sense. Now he was a man, who knew that all acts, for good or ill, must be paid for. If he allowed his body to rule his head where Caroline was concerned, it would cost him a mouth-watering cook, an indefatigable housekeeper, a skilled nurse, and a mother-figure for his sons who came with no strings of permanency attached. The only other way to acquire such a paragon would be to wed one. And that he would not do.
“Caroline!”
But demon lust, now that time and circumstances had conspired to rouse the sleeping beast, would not, he feared, rest again until it was slaked. He would just have to keep his personal cross under tight rein until he could get away to Boston and rectify the problem.
The devil of it was that in his present invalided state there was no escaping Caroline. She would be in daily close contact with him until he healed. For his sanity’s sake, it was necessary to convince her, and himself as well, that the heat that had flared between them had been the natural result of too great a degree of physical proximity, and nothing else.
He desired her simply because she was a woman; certainly he did not desire her because she was Caroline.
If she would only condescend to come upstairs, he would tell her that. And in so doing would completely banish from his mind the knowledge that her skin had felt just as he had imagined it would: like the velvety soft petals of a white rose.
“Caroline!”
Suddenly she was there in the doorway, her face cold and stiff as she carefully did not quite look at him. The fine white skin of her face no longer bore the faintest trace of tears. Her elegantly modeled features were composed, and her soft pink lips were firmly compressed into a no-nonsense line. Her crow-black hair, which her weeping had left in a most appealing disarray, had been freshly brushed and confined in a thick knot at her nape. But if, as appeared to be the case, she had done her best to render herself plain, she had not succeeded. Despite her scraped-back hair and deliberately thinned lips, she was delectable. His body responded to her presence quite independently of his mind.
This Side of Heaven Page 16