Holiday Confessions

by Anne Marie Winston

  Still, her tone was calm and her words were prosaic when she cleared her throat and spoke. “It was wonderful to have company,” she said. “I didn’t realize how solitary I am until I moved here. And I’m determined to change that.” She chuckled. “Even if I have to start with a dog.” Then her tone changed as she slid her hand free. “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “Feather.” She sounded rather chagrined. “She’s sitting by the door. I believe she thinks she’s going with me again.”

  “Feather, come.”

  Silence. Great. It was going to be a repeat of dinner last night. He tried not to feel hurt. After all, from Feather’s point of view, he was the one who had replaced her.

  “I’d love to have her stay again,” Lynne said hesitantly, “but I know you’d like her here with you.”

  “Yeah, but I want her to be happy…”

  “She’ll come around.” Lynne’s hand touched his shoulder lightly, rubbing a small, comforting circle. At least, he was pretty sure it was meant to be comforting. In reality, every nerve cell in his body leaped to life again at the feel of that small, warm hand.

  Relationships had been on the back burner for a number of years now, but his new neighbor with the sexy voice and soft skin was getting to him in a way that was impossible to ignore.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like women, he told himself. He liked them a great deal. He’d loved one once. But after the accident in which he’d lost his eyesight, he’d been unable to believe she would want to stay with him forever. Dumb as it seemed in hindsight, he’d pushed his fiancée away, had isolated himself behind a wall of self-pity and insecurities.

  It had taken him several years of counseling and healing to become comfortable with who he was now, to become convinced that a loss of sight didn’t equal a loss of manhood. And by the time he’d figured it out, Kendra had moved on. He’d gone to see her one day—only to learn that she’d married. She’d answered the door of her new home and he’d felt great about the opening of the conversation, until she told him she was married.

  There hadn’t been much to say after that.

  He’d left with the taste of defeat in his mouth, and the knowledge that he’d lost her due to his own stupidity. Since then…since then he’d had a few dates with a few very pleasant women and one hilarious disaster of a blind date. Which, in his case, took on a whole new meaning.

  But of the more normal dates he’d endured, there had been no one memorable, nobody who had made his mouth water and his pulse race. It had been easy to immerse himself in his law practice, until Lynne DeVane had moved into the apartment across the hall less than a week ago.

  And now?

  He had no idea what she looked like, but she was memorable, all right. And it wasn’t simply sexual, either. Her wry humor tickled his funny bone. She was direct and thoughtful, and she loved his dogs. She didn’t even mind dog hair as a fashion accessory, which made her damn near perfect all by itself.

  But there was no denying the attraction he felt. They felt. Because he was sure it affected her, too. The odd pauses, the pregnant silences, the electric sense of possibility that flowed between them…oh, yeah, she felt it, too.

  She made his pulse race and his mouth water with just one whiff of the warm scent that clung to her skin. Her husky laugh made his whole body tingle, and the warmth of her hand made him wonder how it would feel on him.

  Yes, it had been a long, long time since he’d felt this drawn to a woman, since he’d felt compelled to seek her out and explore the charged atmosphere between them.

  But there was no question that he did now. And he knew exactly what he was going to do about it.

  “So,” he said, “after the tour of the battlefield, we’ll go to the visitor center. Might as well start you out right from the very beginning.”

  “The beginning of my Gettysburg education?” There was laughter in her voice.

  He nodded, smiling back. “The beginning of your life in Gettysburg.”

  “I like the way that sounds,” she said with great satisfaction. “My life in Gettysburg.”

  Four

  She would enjoy herself today.

  Lynne pressed a hand to her stomach the next morning, hoping to squeeze the butterflies that were frantically fluttering around in there into submission. She checked her backpack again to be sure she hadn’t forgotten anything vital, then glanced at the clock. One minute to go, if Brendan was punctual, and she’d bet her last dime that he was.

  There was no need to be so nervous. It wasn’t really a date. Just a neighborly excursion. He was grateful to her for her help with Feather and wanted to pay her back for dinner.

  It was a date. At least, it certainly had sounded like that when he’d offered his tape and his company. And then he’d planned the entire day. She suspected that as she got to know him better, she’d find a hard-core take-charge kind of guy beneath those dark suits and elegant ties that looked so good on his tall, solid frame.

  Right on time, a sharp, definite knock sounded at her door. The butterflies all sprang into action.

  She crossed the room and pulled the door open. “Good morning.”

  Feather pushed past her, and Brendan bent to fondle the dog’s ears. “Good morning, and good morning. How’s my girl?”

  She was pretty sure he wasn’t addressing her in the second sentence. “She ate breakfast and seemed content this morning. I really enjoy having her around.”

  “Good.” His smile was broad with relief. “I worry that she’s going to think I’m abandoning her.”

  Lord, but the man was potent. And it wasn’t just that smile, although it sure didn’t hurt.

  She’d thought he looked good in a suit, but today, in a burgundy sweatshirt and faded denim jeans that clung to his strong thighs, he took her breath away. His shoulders looked a mile wide beneath the sweatshirt, and he’d pushed up the sleeves to reveal muscular forearms covered in silky dark hair.

  How had she missed seeing just how big he was over the past few days? She was nearly six feet herself, and she barely reached his jaw, so he had to be close to six-six.

  “Are your parents tall?” she blurted.

  One dark eyebrow quirked upward in an expression she’d seen a number of times before, as if he wasn’t quite sure how the conversation had taken such a turn. “My father is,” he said. “My mother’s only average height, but she has three brothers who all are over six feet.” He stretched out a hand and touched her shoulder. “You’re pretty tall yourself. Where did you get the height?”

  “My father. My mother is only five-two.” She tried to laugh. “It’s not easy being the tallest girl in the class until you’re in high school. I was taller than my older sister before we were even out of elementary school.”

  “I like tall women,” he said. “My high school girlfriend was the captain of the basketball team.”

  “I never played basketball.” She wasn’t touching that first line with a ten-foot pole. “The coach was always after me to come out for the team, but I just wasn’t interested. I was a dancer. For a long time I dreamed of auditioning for one of the big ballet companies. But finally I accepted the fact that no one can really use a ballerina who is taller and heavier than all the men who have to do lifts with her.”

  “You’re not heavier than any man I know.”

  “Um…Brendan? Without being rude, may I ask how the heck you would know how much I weigh? I could be three hundred pounds for all you know.”

  “Not a chance.” The hand that was touching her shoulder clasped the fragile joint, and as before, she was immediately wildly aware of how big his hand was, of how much of her skin that hand could cover if he stretched his fingers wide. “You’re skinny,” he pronounced, tracing his thumb over her collarbone and sliding it up to caress the line of her jaw. “In fact, I’d say you’re almost too skinny.”

  “I am not!” If he had known her when she was modeling. And then she noticed the grin hovering around the edges of
his chiseled lips. She balled her fist and lightly made contact with his shoulder. “You’re teasing me.”

  “I might be.” The grin grew broader. “Just about had you, too.”

  Just about had you. She was almost sure that he registered the double entendre nearly as quickly as she did. His hand stilled, and she wondered what he was thinking. She was having a hard time keeping her mind out of the gutter. How would it feel to have those lips on hers? To have those hands sliding over her body, pressing her against his large, hard form?

  “I wish I could see your face,” he said in a low, intense tone.

  “Why?” She was breathless, the butterflies inside sucking all the oxygen away from her lungs.

  He turned his palm to cradle the side of her face. “I’d give anything to know what your lips look like.”

  Her pulse stuttered and sped up even further. Before she could think of all the reasons why it was a bad idea, she reached up and took his index finger in her hand, then placed it on her lips.

  Silently he traced her lips as she stood, mesmerized by the strangely intimate sensation of having him touch her face. He slid his finger around her lips, then moved down her chin, lingering for a moment in the slight cleft that she had always despised. Then he continued, tracing along her jaw and back to her ear, where he circled the fragile shell and then tugged lightly at her earlobe, exploring the three small studs he found there. She shivered, a thrill of excited nerve endings, and he left her ear to sweep back over her head. She’d done her hair up in an intricate variation of a French braid that she particularly liked because it held the straight, slippery strands of her hair in place well for long hours, and he lightly ran his hand over it, then found the bundled length of it contained in the knot at her neck. He slipped his hand beneath the coil of hair and cupped her nape. She felt herself sway toward him, but before she could complete the motion his hand was moving forward again, up to her temple, across the wide span of her smooth forehead and down the small, straight slope of her nose. He smoothed over her eyebrows and brushed her eyelashes lightly as her eyes fluttered closed—

  And then his hand was gone. She opened her eyes to see him turning away.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ve been wondering.”

  “You’re welcome.” Her voice sounded so normal, compared to the feelings still rioting through her. Chief among them was intense disappointment. She’d wanted him to kiss her, she acknowledged to herself. She was pathetically, ridiculously infatuated with her neighbor of less than a week—and he, while he might be interested in her as a willing female, certainly didn’t seem to suffer the same effects that his mere presence gave her.

  “I’ve found that if I ask people to describe themselves, they’re usually astonishing unhelpful,” he said. “I get a much more accurate picture by touching.”

  So he did this frequently. Or, if not frequently, at least occasionally when he was getting to know someone.

  It’s like Braille for him, she told herself. It didn’t necessarily mean anything more. It was just his way of learning a little more about me. Only fair, really, since I know what he looks like.

  She felt as deflated as a hot-air balloon on the ground. “Well, now you know. Nothing out of the ordinary.” She grabbed her backpack. “Are you ready to go?”

  His eyebrows had done that quirky thing again at her pronouncement, but he didn’t comment. “Sure.”

  She led the way down to her small SUV. After a moment’s hesitation, she asked, “Where should we put the dogs?”

  “They can go in the back together, if you put down a blanket to keep the dog hair from getting ground into your upholstery,” he said. “Is there any way to keep them from being tossed forward if we were to have an accident?”

  “I have a cargo net that stretches from side to side right above the back seat. Will that work?”

  “Perfect,” he said. “The school teaches us to put them on the floor at our feet, but most of the graduates I’ve met disregard that because it’s too dangerous in the event of a front-end collision.”

  She popped the back and raised the hatch. Brendan removed Cedar’s harness and patted the floor inside. “Hup up.” And both dogs leaped in.

  “If we were going any distance,” he said, “I’d put them in kennels for safety, but since we’re only going a mile or so to the battlefield and then driving five miles an hour most of the time, they should be okay.”

  As she walked to the driver’s side, he trailed a hand along the passenger side until he reached the door, and they both slid into their seats at the same time.

  “Whoa,” he said as his knees practically met his nose. “Somebody a lot smaller than I am was sitting here last time, right?”

  She chuckled. “My mother rode along to help me move in. There’s a set of automatic buttons along the side of your seat. Press backward on the first one and your seat will move back.”

  “Here.” He handed her a jewel case with a CD inside. “Here’s the battlefield tour. Go out 116 toward Fairfield and Reynolds Avenue. Where we begin, is just a little way out of town on your right after you pass the Lutheran Seminary.”

  She followed his directions and easily found the correct road. Almost immediately after she turned in, the view opened up onto a sweeping vista of fields and stands of trees that sloped gently uphill at its far end. Cannons stood in occasional small formations, and along the roads she could see a number of small plaques and statues. Several miles directly ahead, a large monument with wide stone steps around it looked down over the green expanse, still lovely in early autumn. The Peace Light Memorial, he told her.

  “There should be a pull-off along the road around here,” he told her. “If you stop there, we can put the CD in and begin the tour. It’ll tell us when and where to move.”

  “How many times have you done this?” she asked him.

  He shrugged. “Less than a dozen, but enough to be pretty familiar with it. I’ve taken my folks and my sister’s family, and friends who have come to visit, and my partner’s parents and a few others.”

  “So we probably don’t need the tape,” she said dryly.

  “Well, yeah, we do.” He laughed. “I enjoy Civil War history. If you ask me to narrate, the tour might last three days instead of three hours.”

  They began the tour then, and talked little as they drove. Twice he asked her to describe a certain monument or scene for him. Frequently he added personal anecdotes from the diaries and stories of men who had fought at Gettysburg.

  She became utterly engrossed in the saga. He showed her Cemetery Hill, where the Union forces rallied after a humiliating rout on the first day of the battle. There was the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Little Round Top; names she vaguely recognized from her American history class in high school. She’d realized that walking over the grounds where so many had died would affect her. But she had never expected to be so moved by the monuments erected to honor the troops. The larger-than-life, beautifully sculpted memorial at the cemetery depicting the mortally wounded Confederate General Armistead being attended by Union Captain Henry Bingham brought her to tears as Brendan told her of Armistead’s friendship with Bingham’s commanding officer, Major General Winfield Hancock.

  Virginia’s state monument, with its clustered soldiers from different walks of life at the base and the stunning sculpture of Robert E. Lee on his horse Traveler atop the column was perhaps her favorite. “It’s said to be one of the best likenesses ever done of Lee,” Brendan said in a tone of near-reverence.

  She smiled. “You really weren’t kidding. You know a lot about this place.”

  “It’s fascinated me since I was a kid,” he said. “I was here several times before my accident, so I still remember some things.”

  “How does that work? Your memory, I mean.” She hesitated, formulating her thoughts. “Do you still have clear memories or do they begin to fade over time?”

  “I do still have memories,” he said. “But as time goes by I find they get so
rt of blurry. Imagine it as an Impressionist painting. I have the general outline and idea, but the details are going. Handwriting was one of the first things to disintegrate.”

  “But how do you sign credit cards and documents?”

  “I don’t often use credit cards. They can be double-swiped, switched or the numbers copied and I would never know. I carry cash as much as possible, and I do a lot of ordering from catalogs and shopping at places where I’ve established relationships and have a monthly account. For documents, which, as you can imagine, I do have to sign quite a bit, I have a little card called a signature guide that helps me write in a given space. If you use one often enough, your muscle memory helps you keep a consistent, legible signature.”

  There was no anger or even resignation in his tone; he was simply uttering a fact. She marveled once again at how little his life seemed to be hampered by his lack of vision. Despite the considerable changes that had been forced on him, he had overcome most problem issues with ingenuity and grace.

  Along the Emmitsburg Road, where Confederate soldiers had been urged to undertake what amounted to a suicidal effort to charge across an open field, up a hill and over Union breastworks, Brendan told her that photographs of the scene after the battle showed men lying in ordered rows where they had been cut down. “It was insane. The Union troops were massed up on the ridge ahead of you. They would wait until the Rebs got close and then they would open fire. Insane,” he said again, regretfully. He told her about Pickett’s futile charge, after which Pickett returned to Lee bitter and angry. “Lee told him to prepare his division for a counterattack,” Brendan said, “and Pickett responded, ‘General, I have no division.’”

  They got out of the car a number of times to examine monuments erected by states to honor their fallen. She cried again at the sight of the Irish Brigade’s tribute, a beautiful Celtic cross with an Irish wolfhound, one casualty of the battle, lying at its base.