by Ruth Wind
But the truth was, he’d nearly tripped down the steps in his haste to get away this morning—tripped like a gangly fourteen-year-old who suddenly couldn’t think of anything to say. When he had first seen her, his eyes had filled with a hungry appreciation any woman who wasn’t a complete idiot would recognize. It had pained her a little, and she knew she’d given him what her daddy would have called a ‘a dirty look.’
And then Eric, flustered, had turned to flee, nearly tripping on the stairs. It made him seem so vulnerable that Celia had been thinking about him all day. As old-fashioned as it was, she was taking him brownies to make up for being mean.
Thick evening fell, turning the sky a purply silver above the cottonwoods and pines as she walked. Hidden just beyond her field of vision, Jezebel sang softly to the gathered birds drinking from her skirts. Aside from the chiming of crickets and the occasional call of a bird, the world along this narrow country road was still.
Celia found herself slowing, feeling every pore in her body open to the warm, cottony air, to the nectar of silence no city could ever hope to reproduce. As it had so many times since she’d finally accomplished her dream of coming here, a swell of joy overtook her. Never before had she felt as if a place embraced her, as if the land itself welcomed her into its bosom. Only in Gideon.
Home at last.
She had never been to Laura Putman’s house, but a discreet inquiry at the grocery store had narrowed it down to only three possibilities. She passed the first with a wave to an old man who smoked a pungent pipe. He nodded and puffed.
As she approached the second house, several hundred yards farther on, she heard the mournful notes of a harmonica floating in the air. Her nerves rustled. She knew the sound of a harmonica would now always remind her of Eric.
She slowed her steps even more, listening. The notes were poignantly sad. They conjured up slow marches through rainy graveyards and widows cloaked in black and something even deeper and wider and more sorrowful yet. It pierced her clear through.
The house was an older bungalow, in need of paint but otherwise sound. As Celia turned up the swept path, she saw Eric. He sat in a kitchen chair on the wooden porch, shirtless and barefoot in the warm evening. When he spied her, he played two or three more notes, watching her come up the path, then put the harmonica down.
She climbed the steps in his silence, and when it was clear he wouldn’t speak, she held out the brownies. “I brought you something.”
He eyed the plate, then took it from her carefully, a little shyly. “Thank you.”
His hair gleamed with a fresh washing, falling in casual disarray around his face and neck in glossy black waves. A single curl rested against the rise of a muscle in his shoulder and Celia resisted the urge to smooth it back into place.
“Have any luck finding your sister?” she asked.
“No.” The word was nearly a growl.
Celia saw his throat move as he swallowed his worry. All locked up tight behind the walls, she thought. Impulsively, she reached forward to touch his arm. “It’ll be okay, Eric.”
At her touch, he flinched, then yanked his arm away in an almost violent gesture. “Go home and leave me be, would you?”
Her first instinct was to whirl around and do exactly that. Let him brood alone. But that was pride speaking. Another part of her, one she didn’t dare put a name to, saw how frightened he was.
She knelt next to his chair. He kept his head bent, as if refusing to look at her would make her disappear. Celia simply waited, absorbing some of the terror that seeped from behind the walls.
After a few minutes, a little of the fight left him. His shoulders eased, and he touched the brownies on the plate with one finger.
Celia lifted her head to the crook of his elbow. His jaw tightened, and he didn’t move. His gaze was fixed firmly on the brownies. He needed conversation, the ordinary give and take. It didn’t matter what she said, only that she gave him a chance to let go of some of that worry.
“You know,” she began, “when you showed upon my doorstep in that storm, I was really afraid you were a serial killer or something.”
He glanced at her quickly, a smile flickering momentarily over his lips before he could wipe it away.
Encouraged, Celia settled next to him more comfortably. “On my way here, I was thinking that I love this place. I wish more than anything that I could have grown up here.”
“If you had, you wouldn’t be here now,” he said. All at once, he leaned back in his chair and flipped the thin plastic film covering the brownies. “How’d you know I have a weakness for caramel and pecans?”
Celia shrugged. “I didn’t,” she admitted. “Tell me what it was like when you were a child.”
He mulled the question, chewing with obvious enjoyment. “Wasn’t a whole lot different, I guess. The people are a little bit better educated now, maybe, but not much.”
Darkness had fallen. Eric said, “Why don’t you hop up and turn on the porch light? Switch is just inside the door.”
Celia did as he asked, but nothing happened. He gave her a rueful smile. “I forgot.”
“Me, too.” With a shrug, she settled back onto the porch railing. Their knees were inches apart. “How much longer before they get the electricity back on?”
“Won’t be long now.” He licked caramel from his thumb and extended the plate. “Have one. You’re a good cook, Celia.”
“Thanks.” She leaned forward to take a brownie. “Where are your parents, Eric? You talk about your sister, but never them.”
He took his time choosing another brownie from the plate and picked a pecan half from the top before he spoke. “I never knew my daddy,” he said at last. “Don’t even know who he was. Laura tried to find out a few years ago, but nobody would talk. Mama never married him.”
Celia didn’t know exactly how old he was, but she’d guess his age to be thirty or a little more. Back in the days of his early childhood, women did not bear children out of wedlock, especially not in small towns. “That must have been hard for her.”
A soft smile touched his mouth. “No, she didn’t care what they thought. I think she really loved my father, whoever he was, and figured if she couldn’t have him, at least she’d have us.”
“So where is she now?”
“Last time Jezebel threw a temper tantrum, she took my mother with her.” He set the plate of brownies aside. “I was six years old, and the house we lived in was down there on the other side of the river. It always flooded a little every spring, but that year, it just didn’t stop raining.”
Celia remembered the expression of dread that had crossed his face sometimes as he viewed the destruction wrought by the flood. “You were only six?”
“Mama pushed me and Laura up on the roof and we hung on for hours and hours and hours. She was with us for a long time, singing and telling us to pray. And then, all of sudden, she was gone.”
“Oh, Eric. I’m sorry.”
“Seems silly when I think about it with my head, but you know, I never really have stopped missing her. With this flood and Laura gone, I’ve been thinking about her a lot.”
A part of Celia was surprised at the tumble of words spilling from him, and yet it was exactly what she’d hoped for. “What was she like?”
Eric shifted, picked up his harmonica and fiddled with it. “She was pretty,” he said. “And she liked singing. A long time ago, she sang sometimes at the Five O’Nine, at a time when white women didn’t do that much.”
“She must have been brave.”
“Stubborn, more like.” He grinned and gave Celia a rueful lift of the eyebrows. “Runs in the family.”
She smiled in return. “That should give you some faith in finding your sister.”
He took a breath and blew it out, then touched the bridge of his nose for an instant. “Well, it does and it doesn’t. I don’t know why the hell she’d leave this house when she knew the river was rising. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Do you have other family here?”
“An uncle. We lived with him after Mama died, but he’s an old drunk—Laura wouldn’t have bothered with him. He’s a mean old son of a—” He inclined his head. “Sorry.”
“I’ve heard a swear word or two in my life.” A clear picture of his life was emerging. The child of a mother who would have been unkindly regarded, orphaned and sent into the care of an uncle who cared little for him.
Celia reached out to take one of Eric’s scarred hands in her own. “No wonder you like my daddy’s books. They’re written about your life, aren’t they?”
He looked up sharply, his eyes nearly black in the shadowy light. For a long, long moment, he simply stared at her, his hand loose in her own, his expression hard and unreadable. The hollows below his cheekbones gave him a hungry look, and Celia reached out with her other hand to touch the darkness on his face, hoping to somehow erase it.
Still his gaze didn’t waver. Celia heard his call for her, a call coming from someplace deep inside of him. She leaned forward, surprised at her boldness, and for the second time, she kissed him.
This time she felt no surprise. His mouth met hers halfway, and it shocked her again with its tenderness. He tasted of chocolate and tea and midnight. It was all too easy to fall into that taste. She traced the corners and edges of his lips with her tongue and let her fingers fan open upon the planes of his face. At his jaw, there were tiny shifts as he moved to open his mouth, and against her index finger, his lashes swept down.
After a moment, he made a low, dark sound and swept Celia from her awkward perch into his lap. His fingers threaded through her hair. “Celia,” he whispered against her mouth, “you’re so sweet you’re driving me crazy.”
And then he kissed her again, thoroughly and deeply, leaving no doubt in Celia’s mind about his area of expertise. His naked chest met her fingers, and she sighed at the silky, supple feel of his flesh under her palms. She explored the rise of muscles and the length of his upper arm, moved toward his neck and hair and explored them, as well. And all the while, Eric kissed her as if he could not drink deeply enough, as if the brush of their tongues and the press of their mouths were all that anchored him to life.
After a time he lifted his head and looked at her, looked hard into her eyes, and with one hand, he traced the curve of her cheek, the line of her jaw, the swell of her lip. He shook his head infinitesimally. “I’ve never met anybody like you, Celia.” He swallowed, and his hand slipped into her hair, smoothing it away from her forehead. Beneath her, his legs were hard, and against her hand, his heartbeat rushed. “I’m not much of a talker, but you’d never believe that when I’m with you.”
A wave of tenderness washed through her, and she buried her hands in his hair. It was thick and cool and smelled of shampoo. She leaned forward to rub it over her face, and as she did so, Celia felt Eric’s mouth fall into the hollow of her throat.
It was searingly unexpected. She stiffened at the instant, urgent bloom of her nerves. “Eric,” she whispered.
“I know,” he murmured, his voice rumbling through his chest into hers. He planted a trail of kisses over her neck, and his hands moved with sudden purpose. “I know you think I oughta quit.” He suckled hard at a spot just below her ear and a shimmer of sensation rocketed through her limbs. “Is that what you were gonna tell me?”
His drawl had slowed to a raw, dark-molasses rhythm. “You gonna tell me to stop, sugar?” His fingers teased the sides of her breasts and skittered away as his mouth slid along her jaw, as moist and slow as his voice.
Celia had no words. Her body was curiously taut and limp all at once, and she clutched his shoulders urgently, needing to somehow return his touch.
As his hand teased back to her breast, skimming over the aroused tip to the square, loose neckline of her sundress, Celia shifted against him and settled her mouth on his neck. She imitated the movements he had made, drawing circles with her tongue over his throat and suckling his earlobe and biting lightly at his jaw.
Where he’d been teasing and controlled, now he grew urgent. He tipped up her chin roughly to take his kiss and she could feel the hard thrust of his tongue. Against her hip, his erection was fierce and hot, and he moved against her almost unconsciously as he covered her breast with his hand, stroking restlessly through the cloth. A soft, deep noise rumbled through his chest.
Urgently, he pushed the strap of her dress from her shoulder and slid the fabric from her flesh. When his fingers plucked the bared tip, an electric shimmer bolted through her. She gasped aloud, clutching at him.
His mouth slipped over her jaw, over her throat and the swell of her breast. He uttered her name in a ragged voice.
Celia thanked the darkness that covered them, thanked the moonless sky as she helplessly let her head drop back against the crook of his elbow and felt his mouth fall on her breast to tug with feverish pressure at her nipple. A wildness built within her and she moved against him restlessly, grasping his silky big head in her hands, whimpering softly into the thick night.
And as if he could not get enough, he lifted her back to him, pressed her bared breasts against his naked chest and took her mouth with bruising, wild intensity. Celia could not think for the shimmering in her limbs, the heat pooling between her legs and deep in her belly as his tongue thrust and slid between her lips and over her tongue. His hands gripped her back and held her hard against the rigidness of his hunger.
She thought if a person could die of pleasure, she’d be dead ten times.
Who cared if he walked away? How many times did a woman have a chance to make love with a man like this, a man who looked like he ought to be on a record cover or in an ad for a motorcycle?
And not only that. He needed her—she could feel it. Not just physically, but in the very heart of him. It was his soul that urged her closer, urged her to kiss him, urged her now to move against him in greater invitation, move her breasts against his chest to make him moan softly, move her hips against his rigidness to make him clutch at her fanny.
All at once, Eric grabbed her tight and pressed her head into his shoulder. Celia felt the same trembling in his limbs she’d felt the day he left the farmhouse. It shivered in his arms and legs and deep in his chest. He held her so hard against him that she could barely breathe. His jaw was pressed into her forehead, his arms wrapped all the way around her.
“Lord have mercy,” he whispered.
Celia tried to move, about to answer him, but he kept her pressed to him so tightly, she felt a sheen of sweat break on their flesh, across her back where his forearms rested, on her arms where his wrists bent around her, against her breasts where they pressed against his ribs.
Slowly the ferocity of passion passed. The whirring roar of noise in her ears quieted until she could hear his breath and the rhythmic chirp of crickets in the bushes and the slowing of his heart against her body. The trembling in his limbs eased, and with it came a loosening of his hold on her. Gently, he pulled her dress back into place.
His words, when they came, shocked her. “Celia,” he said in a ragged voice, “please go.”
A rigidness had crept into his body. Celia stood up, puzzled. “Eric—” she began.
He cut her off, his dark head bent. “Please, Celia.”
So without a word, she turned and went down the stairs, walking into the night without fear, leaving Eric Putman behind on his porch.
By the time she reached the farmhouse, her calm had broken, and she sank down on the steps to bury her head in her arms. Her body ached with the lingering traces of his lips and hands, and her breasts were heavy with unfulfilled need.
Once or twice in her life she’d been infatuated. As a teenager, she’d spun endless fantasies about an Austrian boy who had helped in the gardens. In college, there had been a long-term but rather hollow alliance with a fellow teaching student. She’d often dreamed of finding the kind of passionate relationship her parents had shared, a passion so deep, it barely left room for chi
ldren.
The instant Eric had walked through her door, she’d known he was the kind of man who could awaken her in that way. She hadn’t expected she would awaken him in return.
Now she didn’t quite know what to do. She didn’t know what would happen if she gave in to that passion with Eric, didn’t know how she would feel when his restless feet carried him away from Gideon again.
A wave of hunger clutched her middle as she thought of his fiercely demanding touch. Maybe it would be worth it. Maybe this was her only chance to know what it was like to be carried away on a tide of overwhelming sexual passion. Maybe once she found out what it was like, she could settle in and find that farmer who’d be content to raise his children in Gideon.
She swallowed in fear and with heady anticipation; fear because she might just find herself burned completely raw in that fire; anticipation because she knew it was too late to draw back now. It had been too late the minute he had appeared on her porch in the storm.
Chapter 8
Eric awakened the next morning to the call of a noisy magpie in the tree outside his window. A jay joined in the squabble, which was then augmented by the chittering of a squirrel. At last came the reason for their noise: a long, annoyed meow.
He shifted, untangling himself from the sheets. Bright, golden sunlight streamed into the room as he slipped into a pair of jeans and wandered out onto the porch.
Sauntering down the road, his tail in the air, was the neighbor’s cat. The jay trailed behind, hopping from tree to tree to scream warnings to hapless mice and sparrows about the monster in their midst. The cat paused and swiveling his big head, glared at the bird with fierce and sleepy green eyes. His tail twitched dangerously. The blue jay sat on its perch for a moment, shrieking, then with a flap of wings, headed for safer ground. The cat, obviously satisfied, settled on the edge of the road to lick his paws.
