Shameless (The Contemporary Collection)

by Blake, Jennifer

  He shifted, and the folds of a voluminous rain poncho settled across her. She shivered as she was enveloped by the heat of his body trapped under the waterproof material. His grasp tightened in reflex as he said, “Suppose I told you I intended to take up where we left off?”

  “It's too late.”

  Did he hear the faint quiver of doubt in her voice? How could he, when she was not certain herself of that flash of reaction? She wasn't afraid of him. She had felt many things, from scorn to hate and embarrassing flares of sheer yearning, but never fear.

  “Maybe,” he said in pensive consideration, “and maybe not. A woman who has just tried to kill her husband could be capable of a lot of things.”

  “How did you know—” she began, then stopped as she saw how it could have been, must have been.

  “I heard the first shot and came at a run in time to see the others. Yes, I did follow you. And you're right — I could have stopped you long before this.”

  His voice was a deep, disturbing murmur under her ear. She did her best to ignore the sound while she concentrated on the meaning of his words. She said, “But you didn't. You waited until you thought I was desperate, though what you hoped to gain is more than I can see.”

  “Is it now?” he asked, settling her closer against him. “Actually, I thought I might not need to intrude on what looked to be a successful escape. However, letting you wander around all night soaking wet seemed to be carrying noninterference a bit too far.”

  “Besides which, the opportunity to crow over me was too good to miss.”

  “The thought,” he said deliberately, “had not occurred to me, but now you point it out, I don't mind if I do.”

  The tone of his voice sent alarm jangling along her nerves. She pushed against him, trying to lever herself out of his hold.

  It was a mistake. In an effortless flexing of muscles, he rolled with her, turning her onto her back within the confining poncho. He allowed his weight to settle upon her, pinning her in place. One of her arms was caught under him. He captured the other at the wrist in a painless but unbreakable hold.

  She shuddered as she felt his male heat drive the chill from her body. In the space of a moment the wetness of her clothing seemed to steam against her skin. Her breasts were pressed against his chest, his thighs held hers apart, and the hardness under the zipper of his jeans nudged the softness at the apex of her legs.

  She strained upward, digging in her heels as she tried to throw him off. The movement brought their bodies into closer, more fervent contact. She felt him stiffen, heard the soft, abrupt intake of his breath. She went still.

  From inside her there rose a sweet, piercing ache that she had not felt in years. Fifteen years, to be exact. With it came an emptiness that was all too familiar, one that Keith had never been able to fill.

  It was infuriating. It was astonishing. It was frightening.

  Caught in the vortex of her own emotions, she lashed out at the man who had forced her to face them. “You always were good at taking advantage, you and all the other male members of your family.”

  His sigh lifted his chest, and she could feel the definition of his taut muscles. It did nothing to help her concentrate on what he was saying.

  “Still harping on that old tale? I would have thought you were old enough by now to have a little tolerance.”

  “For your Yankee great-grandfather's misdeeds?” she inquired tartly. “But I would have to extend it to you, too. And you know what they say about falling acorns.”

  “Good thing my great-grandfather wasn't a tree,” he answered in dry amusement.

  “He still cheated my great-grandmother, and took advantage of her in other ways.”

  “I never heard that she complained. Only her husband — and her descendants.”

  Reid Sayers's great-grandfather had, nearly a hundred years before, been a lumberjack new to the South, looking for opportunity. He had found it when he met Cammie's great-grandmother, Lavinia Greenley. Justin Sayers had enticed the poor wife and mother into a torrid affair. Before it was over, Justin had finagled three hundred acres of prime land from Cammie's ancestress, and Lavinia's husband was dead.

  It had been a scandal whose echoes still sounded in Greenley, not the least reason being that Justin Sayers had stayed in the community, had prospered and left descendants. To call the division between the Sayers and Greenley families a feud would have been melodramatic, but the coolness and lack of social contact was real.

  “Lavinia Greenley was not the complaining kind,” Cammie said stiffly.

  “Apparently not. I've often wondered about that.” His tone, as he went on, was pensive and a little rough. “I used to wonder sometimes, too, if she was at all like you. And what you would have done in her place.”

  Her breath lodged in her throat. She had never dreamed that Reid Sayers thought of her at all. It was disarming, and oddly painful, to know that he had pictured her as Lavinia. Without stopping to consider, she said in stifled tones, “Did you see yourself as Justin?”

  “Who else?”

  The taut sound of his voice reverberated in the rain-drenched night that surrounded them. His face, as he hovered above her, was scant inches from hers in the darkness. She could feel the brush of his warm breath across her cheek. His scent surrounded her; it was compounded of fresh night air, a whiff of some woodsy after-shave, and his own warm masculinity, yet with an undertone of wildness that stirred an answering fierceness.

  The muscles of his abdomen hardened. His biceps, under her neck, knotted. He drew breath with a soft, hissing sound of tightly leashed control.

  Above them the wind sighed in the treetops. Raindrops pattered on the leaves and also on the glazed material of the poncho that covered them. They gleamed darkly in his hair and dripped in a slow warmth from his face to her forehead. Their touch was like a caress.

  Cammie knew with abrupt and shocking clarity that if she moved so much as a finger, if she drew too deep a breath or allowed an eyelash to flicker, he would lower his head and press his lips to hers. If she did more, if she lifted her arms to circle his neck or opened her legs even a fraction farther, he might take her there in their nest of wet leaves.

  Drifting through her mind, not quite formed but compelling, was the urge to shift, to move, to press against him in wanton invitation. Appalled by it, yet unbearably enticed, she held her breath.

  Somewhere behind them a dead tree limb, made heavy by the steady rain, released its hold with a crack. It fell to the ground with a soft thud.

  A shudder ran over Reid. He breathed a quiet imprecation, then abruptly levered himself up and away from her. Surging to his feet with lithe ease, he reached down and pulled her up to stand beside him. He whipped his poncho from around his shoulders, swirling it around her and pulling it closed over her breasts.

  “Let's go,” he said in a toneless command, “before I do something we'll both regret. Again.”

  Their passage through the woods was swift and sure. The man at Cammie's side never hesitated, seldom slowed, never stopped except to help her over a fallen log, a shallow branch or creek. He could not have been more at home, it seemed, if he had been moving across his own living room.

  The poncho Cammie wore was so long that it nearly dragged on the ground. She tripped over it several times before she snatched up the excess material and bunched it in her hands.

  Reid Sayers caught her each time she stumbled, almost as if he could see in the dark, or else had a sixth sense about her progress. He released her just as quickly.

  Cammie was uncomfortably aware of him as he moved beside her. In some deep recess of her being she anticipated his touch when she faltered and missed its support when he removed it. She didn't want to feel that way, didn't want to feel anything except, possibly, a decent gratitude for his rescue. It was disturbing.

  There had been a time, long ago, when she had mooned over Reid Sayers with a secret passion as intense as it was foolish. She had watched him from a distanc
e, enjoying the way his sun-bleached blond hair grew from a peak on his forehead, the sense of fun that leaped so easily into his face, and the crinkles that appeared around the rich blue of his eyes as he smiled. She had liked watching him move, the play of the muscles under the brown skin of his shoulders and arms, the strength of his legs exposed by cutoff blue jeans.

  He had been some three years older, and impressively more mature than the boys she went with to the movies, skating, or picnicking. To her, he had seemed sophisticated, experienced. Above all, he had the inevitable allure of things that are forbidden.

  There had been moments when she had seen Reid and herself as the star-crossed lovers of some ancient fable. She had imagined that the two of them would come across each other one day when they were alone, and would know in an instant that they were meant for each other. They would be united in marriage, putting an end to the discord that had been festering between the families for nearly a hundred years. Such silly daydreams.

  It had not happened quite the way she pictured. She had been swimming off the end of the boat dock at her family's camp house on the lake. Reid had been staying with friends at the camp next door, a fact she had known very well. She had not expected him to surface in the water beside her, however, or to close in on her so they were treading water with their noses practically touching and their legs brushing together in the warm currents of the lake.

  “What are you doing?” she had gasped, like the startled virgin she was then.

  His answer had been simple. “I saw you down here and couldn't resist joining you. Or this.”

  His arms had closed gently around her. The sunlight gleamed like molten gold in his hair as he bent his head, brushing his lips over the drops of water caught on her eyelids. Then he kissed her, his mouth warm and sweet on hers, caressing, questing, questioning.

  For an instant she had flowed toward him in a response as strong and natural as breathing. Their bodies had melded, fitting together with precision and grace, like two sculptures carefully constructed by a master craftsman for the express purpose of being joined.

  His hold tightened as his chest expanded in a breath of wonder. His lips brushed hers, learning their smoothness, their gentle contours, their delicate edges and moist, innocent corners. He tasted her, the tip of his tongue gently abrading; sweetly, tenderly invading. He sought the sinuous, guileless touch of hers. Finding it, he applied gentle suction. Blindly he brushed his hand over her breast beneath the thin, wet material of her bathing suit. Settling with exquisite care around that firm globe, he tested its tender fullness, its fit in his palm.

  Pure, unrestrained desire jolted through her with the force of a lightning bolt. She was unprepared for it, unaware that such internal heat and upheaval was possible. In that same instant, she felt the firmness of his arousal against her thigh, sensed his barely controlled need.

  She panicked.

  In unreasoning fear she pushed away from him. She shouted something at him, though she was so upset that she didn't know then, and never remembered afterward, what she said. Swirling in the water, she turned and struck out for the dock, reaching it in a few short strokes. She scrambled up the ladder on the side and ran for the camp house as if the hounds of hell were after her.

  Her parents and their guests were gathered for drinks on the screened porch on the north side of the camp. Cammie had been able to slip in on the east side unnoticed. In her room, she had stripped off her wet bathing suit and wrapped a towel around herself. Then she flung herself down on her bed, crying out her humiliation, bewilderment, and utter, soul-wrenching despair. She hated herself for exposing her inexperience. She hated what Reid must think of her for running like a rabbit. She hated him for making her lose her cool. Most of all, she hated him for destroying her half-formed fantasies.

  Reid had remembered; his words back there proved it. The thought was not a comfortable one, even now. Somewhere inside her the consternation and humiliation of that day lingered.

  Did he really regret kissing her all those years ago? But why should he? It had, perhaps, been a natural enough impulse for a young man at the height of his sexual drive. She was the one who had created a scene and turned the episode into a tragedy in her mind.

  Before today there had been no opportunity to even guess at what Reid had felt then. He joined the army almost immediately afterward. She had heard that he qualified as a Ranger, that elite troop of near-superhuman soldiers whose job it was to infiltrate enemy positions ahead of the advancing army. Later there had been rumors of the CIA and some form of covert operations in Central America and then in the Middle East. Then, just a few weeks ago, Reid's father had died, and he came home.

  Cammie had been so preoccupied with thoughts of the past that she didn't notice the light shining through the trees until she was close enough to see that it came from the windows of a house. She halted, standing with the rain spattering down on the poncho that covered her.

  As Reid paused, turning back to face her, she said in accusation, “This isn't my car.”

  “It was closer.” The words had a clipped edge of impatience, as if he had expected her objection but was still irritated by it.

  “I can't go in there.”

  “Don't be ridiculous. You need dry clothes and something hot to drink. I promise I won't molest you.”

  “I never thought you would!” There was anger and a trace of embarrassment in her tone.

  “No? I'm amazed. What then? It's just a house; it won't contaminate you.”

  It wasn't just a house. Lavinia Greenley, so the story went, had been seduced within the walls of the dark, solid structure. No other Greenley had ever stepped foot in it.

  It was a rectangular log pile of two full stories topped by a dormered attic. Built of virgin yellow pine, each great log was more than a foot thick. Chimneys of handmade brick flanked it on each side, and there were high, narrow windows that could be closed off by heavy shutters on the inside. With narrow eaves and a flat front, minus the protection of porch or portico in the tradition of homes farther north, it had the look of a place that could be held against all comers.

  The house had been built in the early 1890s by Justin Sayers. He had lived in it like a recluse behind an eight-foot-high stockade made of logs. The tall fence had fallen into ruin and been removed years ago, but to the townspeople of Greenley, the place came to be known simply as the Fort.

  Every log in the house had been taken from the land Justin Sayers had stolen from Lavinia Greenley. Every board in it had been cut and planed in the sawmill that he had established a few short miles away.

  The sawmill operation had been immensely profitable; it made him a wealthy man. Then, some years after the turn of the century, Justin had taken on a partner, a man named Hutton. Hutton worked up North in a paper mill and knew the fledgling industry. Sayers had the land, the timber, the backing, and the contacts. The two men brought in the machinery, and the paper mill replaced the sawmill.

  The paper mill, greatly expanded, still squatted at the edge of the town, jointly owned by the Sayers and Hutton descendants. Now, Reid Sayers and Cammie's husband, Keith Hutton, along with Keith's older brother, Gordon, shared the ownership of the mill. Because Reid had inherited the land and his great-grandfather's original stake in the partnership, he had the majority interest, and was therefore the controlling partner.

  Cammie glanced at the man beside her, at the bulk of his body in what appeared to be a shirt of tree-bark camouflage worn with faded jeans, at the angles and planes of his face, picked out by the faint glow of light from the house. She moistened her lips before she spoke.

  “If you could just drive me back to my car—”

  “As soon as you're warm and dry,” he agreed in tones of calm reason. “It's a promise.”

  She shook her head. “I would rather go now. I'll be fine, really.”

  He stood watching her for long moments while rain plastered his hair to his head and tracked slowly down his jaw to his neck. He too
k a slow breath and shifted his shoulders, as if abdicating responsibility. Then in a single, smooth movement, he bent to thrust one hand under her knees and the other behind her back. Lifting her high, bracing her against his chest, he strode with her toward the house.

  “No!” she cried, but it was too late.

  She struggled, bucking and twisting. He clamped his arm around her so tight that the breath went out of her lungs and her face was pressed into his neck. Suffocating, feeling the bite of his fingers, she was made aware of how carefully he had handled her earlier under the trees.

  She stopped fighting, allowed her taut muscles to relax; there was nothing else to be done. By degrees his hold eased to no more than a firm embrace.

  Reid pushed inside the back door and made his way through a wood-paneled kitchen and along a wide hallway to the foot of a rustic but carefully crafted stairway. As he paused at the bottom, she said, “If I'm supposed to be impressed by this red-necked macho force, you've misjudged me. I prefer finesse in a man. I also prefer one who asks before he grabs.”

  “Are you going to undress yourself,” he said through set teeth, “or shall I do it for you? You will note that I'm asking, though I could always do it for you.”

  Cammie searched her mind for something more annihilating to say. “And against your worst inclinations, too. Now I'm the one who's amazed.”

  “I've never forced a woman in my life, but there's a first time for everything,” he said in rough tones.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “and then you can go back to mistreating animals and children. That should suit you just fine.”

  She felt the shock of what she had said shudder through him like the unexpected lash from a whip. He would have dropped her if she had not been clinging to him with one arm around his shoulders and a hand clutching the placket of his shirt. As it was, her feet struck the lower stair step with such force that the sting burned all the way up to her knees. She wobbled, only just catching her balance by reaching for the newel post when he wrenched backward from her.