JEZEBEL'S BLUES

by Ruth Wind

  Because, the truth was, he didn’t just like the novels of this man. They had been his anchors through the hard years after he’d left home, a way to hang on to the smells and sounds and even the people of Gideon, a place he loved and hated in equal portions.

  Much as Jacob Moon did. Jacob, too, had run from this little hellhole of a town, run when he was young, just as Eric had done. But every book he’d ever written was set in a mythical town everybody knew was Gideon.

  He looked at Celia, who had wrapped a lacy, long-fringed shawl around her shoulders. Her hair was caught under the edges and as he watched, she shook out a soft black dress. Even from across the room, he could see her eyes light up.

  What was her story? he wondered now. What had drawn her back to her father’s roots, to a town in the middle of nowhere she’d never lived in? What was she looking for?

  With a shock, he heard the deep curiosity in his thoughts and combined with the sharp hunger he’d felt a little while ago, that was a bad sign. Mind your own business, he told himself.

  A woman like Celia could only bring trouble. Lord knew he’d already had his share. Setting his jaw in determination, he turned his attention to the manuscripts and lost himself in another world, a world that didn’t have at its center a compelling woman he could never possess.

  * * *

  By nightfall the water level had risen again. Celia crept down the stairs to check, gritting her teeth against the thought of snakes as she counted steps. This morning, the twelfth step down had been covered with water. Now the eleventh had disappeared, as well. The candle flame flickered over the narrow sea trapped in the stairwell, dancing like a lantern on a ship’s prow over the ocean.

  From the top of the stairs, Eric spoke. “Come on back up here, sugar. There’s nothing you can do.”

  For a moment, she paused, thinking of all the things buried now below the ravaging river. “She’s ruined all my grandma’s things,” Celia said and looked over her shoulder at him. “Jezebel has ruined it all.”

  “Come on back upstairs, Celia,” he repeated, holding out one big hand toward her. “You’ll just make yourself sick thinking of it.”

  His voice was gentle and persuasive. Celia climbed the stairs and took his hand. His palm was smooth and hard, and his fingers engulfed hers. Despite the tangled ribbons of scars on his flesh, there was a strength that seemed to promise comfort.

  She looked up to his face and found him watching her with an oddly understanding expression as she climbed up to stand beside him.

  “Are we going to die?” Celia asked.

  He hesitated, then lifted his free hand to brush a strand of hair from her face. “No,” he said finally, the word a bass rumble in his raw, dark voice.

  Celia didn’t care if it was a lie. All at once, she didn’t care about anything except the puzzling gift of him standing there in front of her with his lonely eyes and beautiful face and seductive voice.

  With a sudden ferocity that shocked her, Celia wanted to kiss him. She wanted to taste the full shape of his mouth against her tongue, to feel the prickles of his beard against her chin; wanted to feel his strong arms envelop her.

  And for an instant, she thought she might. His body swayed infinitesimally closer; his eyes darkened and swept over her mouth.

  Then he abruptly straightened and let go of her hand. “You’re some kind of woman,” he said, then turned and went into the room.

  Celia followed, carrying the candle, a strange tingling running through her body. Eric dropped to the floor beside the window, plucking his harmonica from his pocket to draw a few restless notes through it.

  Celia took a breath and settled on the bed. What had just happened? Was it her wishful imagination or had he almost kissed her? And if so, what had made him stop? She certainly wouldn’t have resisted.

  But there would be no answers from him, even if she’d known how to phrase them delicately. He had closed himself off visibly, erecting the barrier she’d come to recognize over the past twenty-four hours—an abrupt, thorough withdrawal that fairly bristled.

  She picked up her novel, but realized she was sick of reading and digging through trunks and eating. The flood had passed from an exciting phenomenon to a terrifying one in just a few hours. She was scared.

  Ignoring the warning signs of Eric’s retreat, Celia spoke. “I always wanted to come to Gideon,” she began. “It seemed like everything safe and normal was here—my grandma and people who’d lived in one place all their lives and knew each other since kindergarten.”

  Eric looked at her but didn’t speak. It was encouragement enough. “When we visited, I loved to listen to my grandma’s stories—she knew the history of everyone in town. It amazed me. We never stayed anywhere longer than a year.”

  “So now you’re here,” he said. “Not so safe, after all, is it?”

  Celia frowned. The flood hadn’t really changed anything in her heart, she realized. “Yes, it is. And maybe it wasn’t safety I was looking for as much as stability.”

  He grinned, a devastating, devilish half grin that put a teasing light into his dark blue eyes. “Come on, Celia, admit it—you came here looking for the place your daddy loved so much.”

  “Loved?” Celia echoed with narrowed eyes. “No. He loved his books and he loved my mother.” She folded her hands neatly in her lap. “Sometimes, if he wasn’t too busy with those other things, he loved me. But I think he hated Texas. If he’d loved it, he would have let me stay here and grow up like a normal person. I begged him often enough.”

  Eric opened the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he had carried in his backpack and poured a little into two paper cups. “Go ahead,” he rasped when Celia shook her head. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  Celia accepted the offering and tasted it experimentally. The heat she expected, but not the sweet, smoky undernotes. She looked at it in surprise. “It’s good,” she said, and took another sip.

  For some reason, her reaction pleased him. The look on his face was reluctantly admiring. “Thought you didn’t like whiskey.”

  “My mother drank Scotch.” She rolled her eyes. ”Lots of Scotch. I thought all whiskey was the same.”

  “Nope.” He poured a little more into each of their glasses and replaced the cap. “I don’t know what exactly drove your daddy away from here, Celia, but he loved Gideon.” He gestured toward the neat pile of original manuscripts near the bed. “Every word he wrote, he wrote about this place. And he wrote about it the way a man writes about a lover—he understood everything about it, every little nuance.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about him,” Celia said, sipping again. A calm warmth spread over her spine, welcome and relaxing.

  “You started it, sugar.” He grinned, then winced and touched the cut on his lip. “I kinda got the impression you wanted to talk.”

  She had. She did. All afternoon she had watched him surreptitiously as he reverently leafed through her father’s manuscripts. “You really love his books, don’t you?”

  “When I left home,” Eric said slowly, “there were some very hard years when I had to learn how to get along with the world. It wasn’t easy.” He took a breath and paused so long, Celia thought he wouldn’t go on. He didn’t tell this story often. “Whenever I got so homesick I was ready to pack it in, I’d just read one of his books again and I’d feel okay. Until the next time.”

  “But what makes it sound like Gideon to you?” she asked. “I keep looking and I haven’t found the Gideon he was writing about.”

  With a secretive smile, Eric picked up his harmonica and began to play. The notes were slow and rich and made her think of the river winding through town on a late summer afternoon. As Eric played—and it was playful, not serious—she could see thick, yellow sunshine pouring through cattails and gnats hanging in whirling clouds above the lazy water, and she could taste sweet tea and mint on her tongue.

  When he put the harmonica down and sipped his whiskey, she said, “How do you do that
?”

  “Do what?”

  “Make me see pictures when you play that thing.” She frowned at him. “I’ve heard ‘Amazing Grace’ a thousand times and I never saw pictures in my mind before this afternoon.”

  His amusement increased. “What did you see, Celia?”

  She recalled the picture in perfect clarity—a simple clapboard church, painted white, with a congregation assembled outside it, a sunny Sunday morning. “Never mind,” she said more sharply than she intended.

  Eric laughed. The sound was as rough and deep and dark as his voice. It rumbled in the air and settled in Celia’s shoulders, then ran softly through her body. As if he’d touched her with seductive fingers, she felt quivers in her breasts and in the small of her back and along the backs of her thighs.

  She put her glass down precisely. “I’d like a little more, please.”

  Eric obliged her. “It’s the blues,” he said.

  “What?”

  Carefully, he added a short measure to his own glass before he replied. “It’s the blues that makes you see those pictures in your head. Some people do, some people don’t. But you’re one of the ones that does. So was your daddy. That’s what’s in his books, that same feeling.”

  The blues. She measured him for a moment. “Are you a musician?” A part of her prayed he would say no. Another part prayed the answer was yes, because then she could free herself from this ridiculous attraction to him.

  His eyes shuttered. “I told you already,” he said. “I don’t do anything.”

  “You must do something,” she said.

  “Nope.” He leaned back against the wall. “Just keep moving.”

  The walls had slammed into place again. Celia wondered if the answer that he was a drifter was better or worse than the one she’d been dreading.

  Then all at once, she saw the situation for what it was—a handsome drifter and a lone woman trapped together in a Texas flood. It was a scenario straight out of one of her father’s novels.

  The realization infuriated her, and she turned her back suddenly on Eric with his mysterious life and marred hands and ability to make her see pictures. A woman in her father’s books would be helpless and hungry.

  A woman in one of his novels would wonder who the drifter was and want to heal his wounds. Somehow the pair would find a bittersweet love—and then, somehow, tragedy would separate them, leaving the pair wandering alone and disconnected forever.

  Well, she’d see her father in hell before she’d play one of his characters for the satisfaction of absurd Fate.

  She closed her eyes tight. Forget it, she thought. Just forget it.

  Chapter 4

  In his dreams, his hands were whole and strong. He could see them as he curled around the body of his guitar, his fingers straight, the tips callused from the strings. In his dreams, there were no scars riddling the flesh and there was deftness in their speed.

  In his dreams, his hands were beautiful with power. But when he woke, his left was clasped in his right, each trying to ease the ache of the other. He didn’t have to move his fingers to know how stiff they would be.

  A small moan of frustration and sorrow escaped his mouth before he knew it was coming, and he leaned his head back against the wall in the darkness. Why did he keep dreaming of perfect hands? He might have borne nightmares of the accident or it’s aftermath—might even have expected them. He might have understood his guilt-ridden soul torturing him with the visions of Retta or the sound of her screams.

  Instead, his mind cast out cruel visions of his hands, whole and perfect. Each time he awakened from the dream, he believed for an instant it was true. Each morning he lost his hands anew.

  Celia’s voice, slumberous and soft, came to him through the gloom. “Eric?”

  He didn’t answer, hoping she would believe him asleep.

  “Eric?” she called again.

  “I’m all right, Celia. Go on back to sleep.”

  “You can’t be comfortable over there. Come lie down. There’s room for both of us.”

  At another time, a time when the darkness was not so thick, a time when he’d not just learned for the six-hundredth time that his hands were broken beyond repair, he might have resisted. Even as he stood up and crossed the room, he told himself it was crazy. He was crazy.

  He settled stiffly beside her, still holding his hands close to his body, where the warmth might ease the ache. A scent of patchouli and rose wafted over him, a strangely exotic scent for such a practical woman.

  Her hands, small and a little cold, surprised him. They settled over his aching fingers with gentle, firm intent. “I’ve been awake for a while,” she said. “Your hands hurt, don’t they?”

  Without waiting for a reply, she lifted one into her palm and with the other hand began to massage the aching joints with purposeful, honest pressure. “My dad had terrible arthritis in his hands the past six or eight years. He said it was from typing so much of his life.”

  Eric groaned softly at the release of stiffness and pain her fingers wrought. He didn’t question the source of relief. He settled back on the pillows, feeling tension slide away from his shoulders and neck as her quiet soothing voice rambled on like a lullaby.

  “You must have arthritis, too,” she continued softly. “You’re so young, you’ll have to make sure you exercise them every day or you won’t be able to use them at all.”

  She let go of his left hand and picked up his right. But when she started to talk again, he reached through the darkness to touch her mouth. Her hands stilled for an instant, along with her words.

  He’d meant only to stop the flow of commentary, stop it as gently as he knew how. But his fingers registered the plumpness of her lower lip and he found himself exploring the curve, feeling her breath sough moistly over his fingertips. He traced the bow on the upper lip and the luscious swell of the lower, moved slowly from corner to corner.

  She caught his palm and pulled away, but not before he imagined exploring the same path with his tongue.

  “Eric,” she whispered, half in protest, half in longing.

  It was the longing that aroused him to an almost uncomfortable point—and also made him draw away. “I’m sorry, Celia.”

  She caught his arm as he rolled away from her. “You won’t get any sleep on the floor.” She eased away from him and tugged a blanket over her shoulders, turning her back as she nestled into the pillows. All he could see was her slight, feminine form and a fall of ice-colored hair.

  He lifted a hand to reach for her, hungry all at once for the warmth of another person cradled against him, a warmth he’d not known in a long time. He wanted to tuck her close, wrap himself around her and go to sleep.

  Instead, he grabbed an extra pillow and pressed it against the hollowness in his chest, knowing—even if she didn’t—that he was not the kind of man she ought to be messing with.

  * * *

  Celia awakened to silence. No rain. For a long, long moment, she simply listened. And from beneath the silence, another sound penetrated her fuzzy morning brain. She opened her eyes, as if seeing could help her hear more clearly. Finally, she placed the sound.

  Birdsong. There were birds out there! She turned toward the window in excitement.

  It was only then that she became aware of the strange array of soft weights surrounding her. One pressed against her shoulder, another, her hip. Yet another anchored her ankles.

  Slowly she shifted. Eric’s forehead was pressed into her shoulder and she felt the silkiness of his curls against her neck. In sleep, his face lost its expression of wariness and the lines around his mouth eased, making him look very young and vulnerable.

  The warmth upon her hip was his hand, and across her ankles was one bare foot.

  She didn’t move. It was as if he’d gravitated toward her as he slept, tentatively reaching for comfort without demanding anything in return. The thought made her heart constrict oddly, even more than the butterfly brush of his fingers on her lips
last night.

  Who was he? Behind the mask of toughness, beyond his gravelly, hard voice, who was the man inside? She touched his hand lightly, tracing a slender scar over the rise of tendons and bones. Such a big hand. The spread of his fingers covered her from the bend of her waist to the top of her thigh.

  Last night his groan had pierced her. It had carried an edge of anguish and loss, like the cry of a wolf standing helpless over a wounded mate.

  Who are you? she thought again.

  Tiny stirrings in his arms and across his foot told her he was edging toward awakening. She closed her eyes, instinctively aware that when he discovered himself curled around her, he would feel exposed.

  But he didn’t immediately awaken. A low sound of contentment escaped his mouth and he moved closer, his hand circling her waist. Comfortably, he rubbed her stomach and threw a leg over her thighs.

  Celia froze. He burrowed his face into the curve of her neck, stroking her shoulder with his rough-bristled chin. She could feel his forehead against her jaw and the tiny brush of his eyelashes a little lower. She held her breath.

  As his fingers roved in a lazy, open-palmed circle over her torso, tiny buds of curiosity and desire grew plump on the stems of her nerves. She wondered what would happen if she shifted ever so slightly into his arms, wondered how it would feel to have his big body over hers, wondered what taste his lips would carry.

  But what if he awakened?

  Closing her eyes tight, she shifted as if in sleep, turning her back to him, hoping he would awaken and think her still lost in her own slumber.

  Instead, he dropped his arm closer around her, tugging her firmly into the curl of his hard, long body. A mercurial wash of hunger burst through her veins. His forearm crossed her breasts and his hand cupped her shoulder.

  The quicksilver desire expanded. Her breath seemed an airy, lost thing, unnecessary in the quiet morning with the heat of Eric surrounding her, enveloping her. Against her fanny, she felt his hard and unmistakable arousal and she clenched her teeth to control her instinctive need to move against it.