There and Now

by Linda Lael Miller

  Toward sunset, when people were packing up their children, blankets and picnic baskets, the hooves of a single horse hammered over the plank floor of the bridge. The rider paused on the road above the creek bank and called, “Is Doc Fortner here? There’s been a man cut up pretty bad, over at the mill.”

  Jonathan waved to the rider. “I’ll get my bag and meet you there in ten minutes,” he said. Then, after giving Elisabeth one unreadable look, he disappeared into the orchard, headed toward the house.

  Elisabeth finished gathering the picnic things, feeling much less a part of the community now that Jonathan was gone. She was touched when Trista came to say goodbye before leaving with Vera’s family. “I’ll see you tomorrow, in church,” she promised. “Could I have a kiss, please?”

  With a smile, Elisabeth bent to kiss the child’s smudged, sun-warmed cheek. “You certainly may.” She was painfully conscious of how short her time with this child might be and of how precious it was. “I love you, Trista,” she added.

  Trista gave her a quicksilver, spontaneous hug, then raced off to scramble into the Piedmonts’ wagon with Vera. Carrying the picnic basket, now considerably lighter, and the blanket, Elisabeth turned and started for home.

  Although Jonathan had left a lamp burning in the kitchen, its glow pushing back the twilight, he had, of course, already left for the sawmill. Elisabeth shivered to think what horrors might be awaiting him in that noisy, filthy place.

  Taking pitchy chunks of pine from the woodbox beside the stove, Elisabeth built up the fire and put a kettle on for tea. Then, because she knew Jonathan would be tired and shaken when he returned, she filled the hot-water reservoir on the stove and put more wood in to make the flames burn hotter.

  His clothes were covered with blood when he came in, nearly two hours later, and his gray eyes were haunted. “I couldn’t save him,” Jonathan muttered as Elisabeth took his bag and set it aside, then began helping him out of his coat. “He had a wife and four children.”

  Elisabeth stood on tiptoe to kiss Jonathan’s cheek, which was rough with a new beard. “I’m so sorry,” she said gently. She’d set the oblong tin bathtub in the center of the kitchen floor earlier, and scouted out soap and a couple of thin, coarse towels. While Jonathan watched her bleakly, she began filling the tub with water from the reservoir and from various kettles on the stove. “Take off your clothes, Jon,” she urged quietly when he didn’t seem to make the connection. “I’ll get you a drink while you’re settling in.”

  He was unbuttoning his shirt with the slow, distracted motions of a sleepwalker when Elisabeth went into the dining room. Earlier, she’d found virtually untouched bottles of whiskey and brandy behind one of the doors in the china cabinet, and she took her time deciding which would be most soothing.

  When she returned to the kitchen with the brandy, Jonathan was in the bathtub, his head back, his eyes closed. His bloody shirt and trousers were draped neatly over the back of a chair.

  “You were telling the truth,” he said when she knelt beside the tub and handed him a glass, “when you claimed to be a guardian angel.”

  Elisabeth wasn’t feeling or thinking much like an angel. She was painfully, poignantly conscious of Jonathan’s powerful body, naked beneath the clear surface of the water. “We all need someone to take care of us once in a while—no matter how strong we are.”

  “I half expected you to be gone when I got back,” Jonathan confessed, lifting the glass to his lips. He took a healthy swallow and then set the liquor aside on the floor. “I figured you might not want to be here, without Trista to act as an unofficial chaperone.”

  Elisabeth couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “I don’t think I want to be chaperoned,” she said.

  Jonathan’s chuckle was a raw sound, conveying despair and weariness, as well as amusement. “Ladies must be very forward where you come from,” he teased. Elisabeth could feel him watching her, caressing her with his gaze.

  She made herself look at him. “I guess compared to Victorian women, they are.” She reached for soap and a wash cloth and made a lather. Jonathan looked pleasantly bewildered when she began washing his back. “The term ‘Victorian,’” she offered, before he could ask, “refers to the time of Queen Victoria’s reign.”

  “I deduced that,” Jonathan said with a sigh, relaxing slightly under Elisabeth’s hand.

  Bathing him was so sensual an experience that Elisabeth’s head was spinning, and the warm ache between her legs had already reached such a pitch that it was nearly painful.

  “You know, of course,” Jonathan told her, leaning back as she began to wash his chest, “that I mean to take you directly from here to my bed and make love to you until you’ve given me everything?”

  Elisabeth swallowed. Her heart was beating so hard, she could hear it. “Yes, Jon,” she replied. “I know.”

  He took the soap and cloth from her hand and, after watching her face for a long moment, set about finishing his bath. Elisabeth left the kitchen, climbing the stairs to his bedroom.

  As soon as the door closed behind her, she began undressing. She had barely managed to wash and put on a thin white eyelet chemise she’d found when Jonathan entered the room.

  His dark hair was rumpled, and he was naked except for the inadequate towel wrapped around his waist. Thunder rattled the windows suddenly, like some kind of celestial warning, and Jonathan went to the fireplace and struck a match to the shavings that waited in the grate. On top of them, he laid several sticks of dry wood.

  Elisabeth trembled, shy as a virgin, when he turned down the kerosene lamps on the mantelpiece, leaving the room dark except for the primitive crimson glow of the fire. He came to her, resting his strong, skilled hands on the sides of her waist.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Heat was surging through Elisabeth’s system, and she could barely keep from swaying on her feet. “For what?” she managed to choke out as Jonathan began to caress her breasts through the fabric of the chemise.

  He bent, nibbling at her neck even as his thumbs chafed her covered nipples into hard readiness for his mouth. “For being here, now, tonight, when I need you so much.”

  Elisabeth gave a little moan and ran her hands up and down his muscled, still-damp back. He smelled of soap and brandy and manhood. “I need you, too, Jonathan,” she admitted in a whisper.

  Jonathan drew back far enough to raise the chemise over her head and toss it aside. His charcoal eyes seemed to smolder as he took in the curves and valleys of her body, bare except for the rhythmic flicker of the firelight. He let the towel fall away.

  She hadn’t meant to be bold, but he was so magnificent that she couldn’t resist touching him. When her fingers closed around his heated shaft, he tilted his head back and gave a low growl of fierce surrender. With one hand, she pressed him gently backward into a chair, while still caressing him with the other.

  “Dear God, Elisabeth…” he moaned as she knelt between his knees and began kissing the bare skin of his upper thighs. “Stop…”

  “I’m not going to stop,” she told him stubbornly between flicks of her tongue that made his flesh quiver. “I haven’t even begun to pleasure you.”

  He uttered a raspy shout of shock and delight when she took him, his fingers entangling themselves in her hair. “Lizzie,” he gasped. “Oh…Lizzie…my God…”

  Elisabeth lightly stroked the insides of his thighs as she enjoyed him.

  Finally, with a ragged cry, he clasped her head in his hands and forced her to release him. In a matter of seconds, he’d lifted her from the floor so that she was standing in the chair itself, her feet on either side of his hips. He parted her with the fingers of one hand and then brought her down onto his mouth.

  There was no need to be quiet, since they were alone in the house, and that was a good thing, because such pleasure knifed through Elisabeth that she burst out with a throaty yell. Her hands gripped the back of the chair in a desperate bid for balance as Jonathan continued to have her.


  She began to pant as her hips moved back and forth of their own accord, and a thin film of perspiration broke out over every inch of her. She could feel tendrils of her hair clinging to her cheeks as she blindly moved against Jonathan’s mouth.

  When she felt release approaching, she tried to pull away, wanting her full surrender to happen when Jonathan was inside her, but he wouldn’t let her go. Gripping her hips in his work-roughened hands, he held her to him even as the violent shudders began, making her fling her head back and moan without restraint.

  He was greedy, granting her absolutely no quarter, and Elisabeth’s captured body began to convulse with pleasure. The firelight and the darkness blurred as she gave up her essence and then collapsed against the back of the chair, exhausted.

  But Jonathan wasn’t about to let her rest. Within five minutes her cries of delighted fury again rang through the empty house.

  “Now you’re ready for me,” he informed her in a husky voice as he lowered her to his lap and then stood, carrying her to the bed.

  Elisabeth’s two releases had been so violent, so all-consuming, that she was left with no breath in her lungs. She lay gasping, gazing up at Jonathan as he arranged her in the center of the bed and put two fluffy pillows under her bottom.

  He lay down beside her on the mattress, slightly lower so that he could take her nipple into his mouth while his hand stroked her tender mound.

  “Jonathan,” she managed to whisper. “Please—oh—please…”

  Jonathan spread her legs and knelt between them, parting her to give her one more teasing stroke. Then he poised himself over her. He had played her body so skillfully that in the instant his shaft glided inside her, she came apart.

  While she buckled under the slow, deliberate strokes of his manhood, her head tossed back and forth on the mattress and she sobbed his name over and over again.

  Her vindication came when the last little whimper of satisfied surrender had been wrung from her, because that was when Jonathan’s release began. She toyed with his nipples and talked breathlessly of all the ways she meant to pleasure him in the future. With a fevered groan and a curse, he quickened his pace.

  “I’ll put you back in that chair again,” she told him as he moved more and more rapidly upon her, his head thrust back. “Only next time, I won’t let you stop me….”

  Jonathan gave a strangled shout and stiffened, his eyes glazed, his teeth bared as he filled Elisabeth with his warmth. She stroked his back and buttocks until he’d given up everything. He sank to the bed beside her, resting his head on her breasts.

  A blissful hour passed and the fire was burning low before Jonathan rose on one elbow to look into her face. “Stay with me, Elisabeth,” he whispered. “Be my wife, so that I can bring you to this room, this bed, in good conscience.”

  She plunged her fingers into his dark, freshly washed hair. “Jon,” she sighed, “I’m a stranger. You have no idea what marrying me would mean.”

  He parted her thighs and touched her brazenly in that moist, silken place where small tremors of passion were already starting to stir again. “It would mean,” he drawled, his eyes twinkling, “that I would either have to put a gag over your mouth or move Trista to a room downstairs.”

  Elisabeth blushed hotly, glad of the darkness. It wasn’t like her to carry on the way she had; with Ian, she’d hardly made a sound. But then, there had been no reason to cry out. “You’re a very vain man, Jon Fortner.”

  He laughed and kissed her. “Maybe so,” he answered, “but you make me feel like something more than a man.”

  She blinked and tried to turn her head, but Jonathan clasped her chin in his hand and prevented that.

  “Don’t you think I’m—I’m cheap?” she whispered, only too aware of Victorian attitudes toward sex.

  Jonathan got up and fed the fire, and then Elisabeth heard the chink of china. Only when he brought a basin of tepid water back to the bed and began gently washing her did he reply. “Because you enjoy having a man make love to you?” He continued to cleanse her, using a soft cloth. “Lizzie, it was refreshing to see you respond like that.” He set the cloth and basin aside on the floor, but would not let her close her legs. “Did you mean what you said about the next time I sit in that chair?”

  Elisabeth’s face pulsed with heat, but she nodded, unable to break the link between his eyes and hers. “I meant it,” she said hoarsely.

  At that, he kissed her, his tongue teasing her lips until they parted to take him in. “I meant what I said, too,” he told her presently, moving his lips downward, toward her waiting breasts. “I want you to be my wife. And I won’t let you put me off forever.”

  God help us, Elisabeth thought, just before she succumbed to the sweet demands of her body, we don’t have forever.

  Elisabeth felt like a fraud, sitting there in church beside Jonathan the next morning, pretending to be his sister-in-law. Maybe these good people didn’t know she’d spent most of the night tossing in his bed, but God did, and He was bound to demand an accounting.

  All she could do was hope it made a difference, her loving Jonathan the way she did.

  After the service, she and Jonathan and Trista went home, the three of them crowded into Jonathan’s buggy. He saw to the horses while Elisabeth and Trista went inside to put a fresh ham in the oven.

  When Jonathan appeared, just as the women finished peeling potatoes to go with the pork, he was carrying two simple bamboo fishing poles. Trista’s eyes lit up at the prospect of a Sunday afternoon beside the creek, and Elisabeth’s heart was touched. Jonathan led a busy, demanding life, and he and Trista probably didn’t have a lot of time together.

  “You’ll come with us, won’t you?” the little girl cried, whirling to look up into Elisabeth’s face with an imploring expression.

  Elisabeth glanced at Jonathan, who winked almost imperceptibly, then nodded. “If you don’t think I’ll be interrupting,” she agreed.

  The creek bank was theirs again, now that yesterday’s picnickers had all gone home, taking their blankets and scraps with them. Elisabeth sat contentedly on her favorite rock while Jonathan and Trista dug worms from the loamy ground and then threw their lines into the water.

  Trista’s laughter was liquid crystal, like the creek sparkling in the sunshine, and Elisabeth’s heart climbed into her throat. It wasn’t fair that this beautiful child was destined to die in just a few short weeks—she’d never had a chance to live!

  Neither Jon nor Trista noticed when Elisabeth got down from the boulder and walked away, trying to distract herself by gathering the wild daisies and tiger lilies that hadn’t been crushed by the picnickers the day before. She was under the bridge, watching the water flow by, when Jonathan suddenly materialized at her side.

  “Where’s Trista?” she asked, looking away quickly in hopes that he wouldn’t read too much from her eyes.

  “She went back to the house to make a pitcher of lemonade,” Jonathan answered sleepily, taking one of the tiger lilies from Elisabeth’s bouquet and brushing its fragrant orange petals against the underside of her chin. When she turned her head, he kissed her and the tangle of flowers tumbled to the smooth pebbles at her feet. “I want to bring you here,” he told her when he’d finally released her mouth, “and make love to you in the moonlight.”

  Elisabeth trembled as his fingers found the pins in her hair and removed them, letting the soft blond tresses fall around her face. His name was all the protest she managed before he kissed her again.

  By the time Trista returned with the lemonade, Elisabeth was badly in need of something that would cool her off. She sat in the grass with the man and the child, sipping the tart drink and hoping she wasn’t flushed. Trista chattered the whole time about how they’d have the trout they’d caught for breakfast, firmly maintaining that Vera and her father had certainly never caught so many fine fish in one single day.

  They returned to the house in midafternoon to eat the lovely ham dinner, and Jonathan w
as called away before he could have dessert. He seemed to be contemplating whether to leave or stay with them as he kissed Trista on top of the head and gave Elisabeth’s shoulder a subtle squeeze.

  Just that innocent contact sent heated shards through her, and she couldn’t help recalling what Jonathan had said about making love to her in the moonlight under the covered bridge.

  She and Trista cleared the table when they were finished eating, then they went out to the orchard and sat on the same thick, low branch of a gnarled old tree. Elisabeth listened and occasionally prompted while Trista practiced her spelling.

  They were back in the house, seated together on the piano bench and playing a duet that wouldn’t be composed for another seventy years or so, when Jonathan returned. He was in much better spirits than he had been the night before.

  “Susan Crenshaw had a baby girl,” he said, his eyes clear.

  Elisabeth wanted to kiss him for the happiness she saw in his face, but she didn’t dare because Trista was there and because she wasn’t entirely sure the air wouldn’t crackle. “I guess delivering a healthy baby makes up for a lot of bad things, doesn’t it?”

  “That it does,” he agreed, and his fingers touched her shoulder again, making her breasts ache. Elisabeth watched Jonathan as he walked away, disappearing into his study, and she dared to consider what it would be like to be his wife and share his bed every night.

  “Your face is red,” Trista commented, jolting her back to matters at hand. “Are you getting a fever?”

  Elisabeth smiled. “Maybe,” she replied, “but it isn’t the kind you have to worry about. Now, let’s trade places, and you can play harmony while I do the melody.”

  Trista nodded eagerly and moved to the spot Elisabeth had occupied.

  Because Trista had had an exciting weekend—the picnic, spending the night with Vera and going fishing with her father and Elisabeth—she went to bed early. Jonathan read to his daughter, then came downstairs to join Elisabeth in the parlor.