by Tory Cates
Malou was mesmerized by the display. His back, bathed in the golden light of the fire, was magnificent. It was the leanly muscled back of the modern dancer he had reminded Malou of at their first meeting. His body, spare and strong and limber, suited him and thoroughly unsettled her.
He fished out a shirt of unbleached muslin, soft and pale from many washings and dryings in the sun, and slipped it on. As it fell to just below the tops of his legs, he stood and unceremoniously unbuckled his jeans. They dropped away to reveal a dancer’s long, muscled thighs and calves. His grace and ease of movement confirmed the impression. They also signaled to Malou that Cameron Landell was a man who had long ago lost any self-consciousness he might ever have had around women.
Before tugging on the dry jeans, he turned to her. “Do pardon me,” he asked again. “But modesty will have to goeth before I getteth pneumonia.”
“Please, carry on,” Malou replied as if the sight of such a gloriously sculptured male body were one she was treated to every day. Cam, hopping from one foot to the other, quickly slipped into the slightly baggy jeans.
“All I need now is a blade of hay sticking out of my mouth,” Cam said, appraising his countrified outfit. Malou silently disagreed. The soft, loose clothes flowed around his torso, emphasizing its grace and subdued power. “Now you,” he commanded.
Malou shook her head. “No. Thanks. I’m fine.” She bit off the words as she pulled the quilt a bit more tightly around herself. Unlike him, she had an ample supply of self-consciousness to deal with.
“Please, I’ve already told you that you have no reason to play the prim primatologist with me. Off with those soaking clothes.” He turned back to the trunk. “Surely we can find something in here for you too. Why should I be the only one dressed like a hayseed?” He ripped into the trunk, pulling out a cotton dress. “This looks like it would do.”
Malou was unable to resist the delicate garment. Even its smell was alluring. Rather than the musty odor she’d expected it to exude, the dress was fragrant with the scent of cedar from the trunk lining and the lavender and dried mountain laurel blossoms that had been packed away with the clothes. It had been handmade of a fine, powder blue cotton, its front lovingly worked with an intricate pattern of tucks and embroidery. The embroidery had all been done in ivory, so that the effect was one of understated elegance rather than contrived busyness. The skirt and long sleeves both flared out with an abundance of soft drapes.
“Go ahead, put it on. It’ll be warmer than those damp things you’re wearing,” Cam urged. “Here, I’ll hold up the blanket and you can change in absolute privacy.” He took the quilt from her and held it up with his arms stretched over his head so that his view was entirely blocked. Malou hesitated for a moment.
“Hey, I’m not Hercules. I can’t hold up this temple to your modesty all day.”
Malou shucked off her damp shirt and shorts, relieved to have their clamminess away from her skin. She wondered if she dared remove her bra and panties as well. The warm, dry feel of the fire against her bare skin answered her question, and she stripped them off too. Standing there, naked before the flames, she became acutely aware that only a thin quilt separated her from Cameron Landell. She glanced over. The quilt rose and fell beside her with the deep, steady rhythm of his breathing. Firelight played across the cold-stiffened tips of her breasts, gilding them in gold. The tops of her thighs and the gentle curve of her stomach were also traced in the flickering light. Lost in shadow were the full underslopes of her breasts, the indentation of her navel.
A disturbing thought made itself known—she wanted Cam to see her. She wanted his gaze, for one brief moment, to travel over her breasts, her waist, her thighs. She wanted the quilt to fall away, and to stand naked before him. Horrified by the blatant sexuality of such impulses, Malou rubbed fiercely at herself with the towel almost as if she were mortifying her traitorous flesh, then swiftly pulled the pale blue dress on over her head. It floated over her body like a cloud grazing a mountaintop. She hurriedly buttoned the tiny carved mother-of-pearl buttons at the wrists and the back of the neck as if she could seal off the frightening desires raised by the man inches away from her.
“I’m through,” she announced, feeling chastely invulnerable now, covered from her neck to below her knees.
Cam lowered the improvised curtain, and the pang of desire that had attacked him the first moment he’d seen her turned now into an undeniable ache. Silhouetted against the fire, the thin material of the dress might just as well have been a puff of smoke. He was stunned by the womanly fullness of her breasts, the curve of her waist, the flare of her hips where they melted into those impossible legs. His mouth went dry, and a spasm of need twisted within him.
“Well, what do you think?” she chirped. “Are we the Hayseed Couple of the Year?”
Cam reached out unsteadily, the quilt trembling in his hands. “Here,” he said, wrapping it around her shoulders. “That dress can’t be very warm. You don’t want to catch a chill.” Malou looked up at him, puzzled. Her face sparkled from the cleansing shower of the rain and glowed from the heat of the fire. Her hair, usually blown dry into a straight, elfin cut, had dried naturally into soft blond waves that curled like petals around her face. And some diabolical force had swollen her lips beyond even their usual tantalizing fullness.
He weighed the urgency driving at the most primitive part of himself against the dangers of involvement. Especially with someone who had just become a business associate of sorts. Especially with someone whose honor he had promised not to compromise. The balance tipped agonizingly toward denial.
“Dinner.” He pronounced the word as if it were the answer to all their problems. “I’m starving.” He turned Malou in his arms and headed her out toward the kitchen, grabbing the kerosene lantern as they went.
As Malou walked away from the light and heat of the fire, she felt that she’d been cast out from both. Had Cam seen it all in her eyes? Felt it in the staccato pound of her heart? Had he known how much she’d wanted his kiss? His touch? Had he known and chosen to withhold both?
Dinner was a slapdash affair pulled from the first couple of cans that Cam opened. Neither of them had any appetite. It was certainly clear, as he barely picked at the food before him, that Cam had not been in any state even close to “starving.”
He left his plate and stood for a long time at the pump, working the creaking handle until water ran clear and sweet into the earthen jug he slipped beneath the trickle. Malou followed his lead and mixed a bit of the scotch in with the crystalline water. The smooth, warming taste fit the evening perfectly. Even more welcome was the way it untangled a few knots of the tension snarling up inside her.
They took their drinks and sat in front of the fire, listening to the hypnotic drum of rainfall on the roof and to the unsettling progression of thoughts through their own minds. It was warm in front of the fire, far too warm for the quilt. Malou shrugged it off.
“You know . . .” Their voices bumped together. Out of the long, thought-filled silence, they’d both managed to speak at once.
“Go ahead,” Cam said, far too aware of the flash of color that had brightened her cheeks and the way her eyelashes had swept downward to mark those cheeks with dark crescents. And far, far too aware of the soft jut of her nipples, so clearly outlined beneath the diaphanous fabric. Christ, he felt like a teenage boy confounded and controlled by hormonal urges.
“It was nothing,” she demurred. “Just wondering if you’d ever been married or any of that stuff.”
“Nothing, eh?” he taunted her. “No, never been married. What about you? Ever gone in for any of ‘that stuff’?”
She shook her head.
“Any serious contenders lurking about? Jealous lovers poised and ready at this very instant to storm the cabin and blast my head off in a hot-blooded crime of passion?”
Malou smiled. “No, the lovers I’ve had haven’t been of the hot-blooded, passionate variety.” She felt bold and some
thing of a fraud even talking about her “lovers” with Cam.
“What fools they must have been.”
Whose fault had that been? she wondered, thinking back over her amorous history. Always, it seemed, experimentation and curiosity had been much larger factors than desire. She’d invariably been the one to swiftly end the brief affairs, escaping before the entanglements became so damnably complicated. Never, not until Cam’s kiss that morning, had she felt anything close to passion. She reached for her glass.
Cam felt his blood surge within him as her lips parted slightly, firelight playing over her moist bottom lip.
“And what of your jealous lovers?” she asked, liking the intimacy of the question, the casual ease she’d managed to imitate. “Certainly there must be more than a few of those lurking about.”
“And why ‘certainly’?”
“Well, because . . .” How had he managed to turn her question around so that, once again, she was the one under scrutiny? She wished she were better at the dodges and feints of conversation between men and women. More practiced at coming up with saucy one-liners. Instead she had to keep resorting to the truth. “Because of your position, your money, and besides, you’re no troll. And don’t duck the question.”
“No troll, eh? Thanks for the stunning evaluation.” Cam raked her with a mocking grin. “Hmmm, I don’t know what to tell you, Malou. There have been women in my life, probably too many in my more boisterous youth, but fewer and fewer as the years go along. I suppose the turning point came a couple of years ago. I’d just finished a project and turned the developed land over to the builder. He staged this huge, gala affair and invited every San Antonio notable he thought could get him an inch in the society columns.
“I ended up with what is generally regarded as San Antonio’s most beautiful woman on my arm, squiring her to the event of the year. Should have been a moment of glorious triumph, right?”
“The elements sound right,” Malou agreed, peeved at herself for the twinge of jealousy that shot through her at the thought of San Antonio’s most beautiful woman on Cam’s arm.
Cam shook his head. “At the time I was halfway through a John Grisham novel, and the whole night all I could think about was that book and how much I’d rather be home reading. From then on I always asked myself one question before I went out. Would I rather be home reading? I was amazed at how often the answer was yes. Why are you laughing? Do you prefer the indefatigable stud ever ready for any action from any corner?”
“No,” Malou countered. “I’m laughing because that’s the exact question that’s kept me happily at home tucked in bed many a night. I just didn’t think that a man like you would ever ask it of himself.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“I’m far from disappointed,” Malou answered, noticing that, somewhere in this totally unexpected conversation, the knot in her stomach had untied itself. She no longer felt strangled by intricacies she didn’t understand. Cam no longer seemed like such a menacing mystery. “So, you’re a Grisham fan. Who else do you read?”
“Name the author, I’ve probably tried him or her at one time. Books, they were my salvation. Everyone I grew up with was always looking for a way out. Most of the kids found it in drinking, drugs, sniffing glue, fast cars, whatever made them forget for a little while. I was lucky. I turned on early to books and nothing else afterward ever came close to that high, the ability of the printed word to put you into whatever world you chose.” Cam stopped himself with a self-deprecating chuckle.
“Doesn’t exactly fit my image as the ruthless developer with no social conscience or thought for anything other than that almighty bottom line, huh?”
Malou winced inwardly as he verbalized exactly what she had expected him to be. “So you hung out with a fast crowd when you were a kid.”
“Fast?” Cam repeated. “Not really. Where I grew up, that was the only speed there was. You still don’t have the complete picture of what the boyhood of Cameron Landell was like, do you?”
“I suppose I don’t. Why don’t you fill me in? How about some basic stuff like, where did you grow up?”
“I’m flattered that you can’t guess.”
“Flattered?” Malou echoed, liking the companionable ease that had sprung up between them.
“Yes, my part of the world is not exactly renowned for the melodiousness of its accents. Come on, try to guess.”
Malou cocked her head one way, then the other, as if she could find a clue to his place of origin if she studied his face hard enough. “I don’t know, but you have a decided Mediterranean look to you.”
“Swarthy, eh?”
“Well, something that would suggest you have ancestors lurking somewhere who were not unfamiliar with the taste of olive oil.” That “something” Malou jestingly referred to was his eyes, which had gone meltingly soft in the firelight and were causing visions of Venice in the moonlight to disturb her thoughts.
“Now, let’s see,” she said sternly, corraling her thoughts, which had been wandering down gondola-patrolled canals. “I’m a scientist. I should apply a little deductive reasoning to this problem.”
“You’re doing pretty well so far. My maternal grandmother came right off the boat from Naples.”
Pleased to have her first deduction confirmed, Malou directed, “Okay, speak a few words and I’ll analyze the inflections.”
“The gingham dog and the calico cat, side by side on the table they sat . . .”
“Oh, that’s good,” Malou broke in, delighted to hear one of her favorite childhood books being quoted. But as delightful as the quote was and as surprising as it was that Cam had it stored away, it did little to aid her inquiry. “You know, your voice is like a newscaster’s. You don’t particularly sound as if you belong anywhere.”
A triumphant grin spread across Cam’s face, lighting his features with a boyish glee.
“Now, don’t gloat,” Malou chided him. “Smugness does not become you at all. I know,” she blurted out in a moment of inspiration. “Where else on earth do none of the people really belong where they are? Where they’re all from somewhere else—California!”
Cam burst into full-throated laughter at Malou’s guess. “Me?” he gasped between howls. “A beach boy?”
Malou smiled, unable to resist the contagion of his mirth. As attractive as she found him in general, he was irresistibly likable right now, crumpling up with good-natured amusement. “Okay, bad guess. Let me try again. Somewhere in the Midwest? Chicago?”
“Let me give you a little help . . .” Suddenly Cam’s whole demeanor changed. He threw back his shoulders and pulled open a few buttons to expose more of his chest. He spread his legs so that he dominated more of the couch. His full lips dipped down into a tough-guy sneer, and then he spoke. “Dis here’s more like duh way I grew up tawkin’. It ain’t real preddy, but id’s duh only way duh guys on duh street’ll unnerstancha.” His accent was nasal and unmistakable.
“The Bronx?” Malou whispered, barely able to countenance the thought.
“The same,” Cam confirmed her guess. Then, as if he’d suddenly returned to his senses, he straightened up in the chair and quickly buttoned his shirt. He took a long drink, emptying his glass, then went to the kitchen for a refill.
Malou was still flabbergasted when he came back in with the bottle of scotch and topped off her glass. “You grew up in the Bronx?” she asked, still not believing it.
“Toughest part.” He took a long drink and looked at her for a long, hard moment. “We didn’t start off there. At least my mother didn’t. She came from a wealthy family. She was the one who kept me from developing an accent. Or taught me to switch it off when I wanted to.” He settled back onto the couch and placed his drink on the floor beside it, where it sat ignored as Cam unfolded the latest unexpected aspect in his makeup.
“From what I can gather, my mother was fairly wild in her younger days. Resisted her family’s efforts to ship her off to some nice safe Ivy Le
ague college and insisted on going to NYU right in the heart of New York City. Back in those days, the thing for slightly wild college girls from rich families to do was to hang out at the jazz clubs.
“That’s where she met the old man.” Cam’s tone shifted dramatically with the mention of his father. It was not a positive shift. “He played alto sax. And he was good. He still played a little now and then when I was young, and even as a kid I could tell he was good. But he lost his lip.”
Malou inclined her head toward Cam in a gesture of puzzlement.
“That’s what horn players call it when they lose whatever it was that made them special on their instrument. My father lost his to drinking.”
Malou was caught by surprise by Cam’s casual tone, which contrasted so starkly with what he was revealing.
“But I’m getting a little ahead of the story. Or what I’ve been able to piece together, anyway. Seems my rebellious mother fell in love with this sax player and married him. Her family had a fit and told her that she would be disinherited if she didn’t have it annulled. Then, right in the middle of this drama, my father enlisted and ended up in a USO band. For the time being, my mother went home to Connecticut and lived with her family.
“My father was sure that in time my mother’s rich family would forget about disinheriting her, and her family was sure that she would forget about my father. But neither one of them forgot anything.”
Cam stopped and looked off into the flames as if he could see his parents’ sad history being played out there. Abruptly, he glanced over at Malou. “This is strange. I’ve hardly thought about any of this stuff for twenty years, and I’ve never talked about it with anyone.”
