by Merry Farmer
The pressure of sensation blossomed to fullness, and Sarah cried out as waves of pleasure hit her. Heat radiated through her, spreading from and focusing back on her core, still so filled with him. The magic of that moment, the feeling of being with him, part of him, was the most beautiful thing she had ever known or ever would know. As the fevered pitch of orgasm steadied out into sated pleasure, she smiled.
Roy wasn’t done. When he felt her come undone and sigh against him, he lifted her and twisted her in his arms to come face to face with her. His eyelids were heavy with desire, the light of love as hot as the longing of his body pressed against hers. He kissed her, pouring his whole heart into their meeting. The tension of his unspent desire wrapped around her loose, liquid satisfaction and renewed her passion.
He tipped her back to lay on the bed again, keeping his mouth entwined with hers as long as he could. As soon as she was settled and spread beneath him, he wasted no time joining with her. His thrusts took on a whole new energy. The tender, responsive lover she knew him to be gave way to the bold, demanding man she ached for. He plundered her with a possessiveness that excited her. She held him with her arms and legs, reveling in the feeling of him seeking his own release. He could go on seeking as long as he wanted as far as she was concerned. The sounds he made as he grew close filled her with joy.
All too soon he groaned and tensed as his release crashed over him. She smiled and swallowed a laugh of pure delight as he slowed and grew heavy over top of her. Just knowing he’d come, for her, inside of her, was bliss. She squeezed him tighter, proud that her man was so strong and so virile.
He sank beside her, rolling to his side and then to his back. His chest heaved as he drew in deep, satisfied breaths to recover himself. They were both hot as August, but Sarah didn’t care. She wanted to hold him, feel him and smell him and taste him together there with her. She rested a hand on his chest, hardly remembering a time when she’d been so happy.
A few beats later he moved, stretching an arm to rest above his head.
“Oh.” She pushed herself up to look down at him. “Do you have to go?”
The smile that spread across his face and into his eyes caught hold of her heart.
“No, Sunshine, I do not,” he said. “I don’t have to go anywhere and no one’s gonna make me.”
It took a moment for the full impact of his words to hit her. When it did she smiled with such abandon that her body began to heat up all over again. He didn’t have to leave. Nobody—not Mr. Sutcliffe or anybody else—was going to come chase him away. He could stay with her.
She rested beside him, unable to keep a giggle from escaping. At last, after so long, Roy was spending the night with her.
Chapter Eight
The night was filled with lovely dreams that floated straight out of heaven and into Sarah’s heart. She wasn’t sure if she was waking or sleeping when Roy roused her in the hush of early morning to make love to her again. The house seemed to hold its breath, listening like a voyeur to the happiness that she and Roy found in each other’s arms.
Sarah’s joy was so complete that when she blinked her eyes open as sunlight streamed around the cracks of her closed curtains and saw Roy lying next to her, it took a moment for reality to set in.
As soon as it did, she gasped and sat bolt-upright.
“Oh, no!” she whispered, pressing her fingers to her still-swollen lips.
“Everything all right, Sunshine?” Roy asked. He raised a lazy hand to trace the lines of her back.
“You shouldn’t be here, Roy,” she said, gathering the bedclothes to clutch around her chest. “It’s morning and I’m a guest here. And what if folks see you leaving Mr. Bell’s house so early?” Her heart raced at the thought of how people would stare, how Miss Jones and her friends would glare.
Roy laughed, soft and gentle and deep in his chest, and pulled her down to kiss him. His mouth was warm and her lips were still tender from the night before. She could have kissed him for hours, especially when he rolled her to her back and slipped his hand between her legs.
“Let folks think what they want,” he said. “I don’t mind. Today is my day, and it’s gonna be yours too.”
“It is?”
He nodded and kissed her. “I’ve got the hotel opening today.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’m gonna be there with Miss Jones and them.”
For a heartbeat his expression hardened. He propped himself above her. “I don’t think you should spend time with that lot anymore,” he said.
“But I got to,” she replied, lowering her eyes to watch the path her fingers traced on his chest. “I made a promise.”
“To who?” Roy frowned.
Sarah shrugged. “To Mr. Sutcliffe, to Miss Jones and them.” She glanced up to meet Roy eyes. There was no joy in her decision, but it was hers and hers alone. “To me too. They got so much to teach me and I promised to stick with it ‘til the end. And, well, I wasn’t a very good student last night.”
Roy’s uneasy frown melted into a grin. “Oh, I think you were very good last night.”
He scooped down to kiss her, but she pressed her palms against his chest, fighting a grin.
“But I was not very respectable.”
“Forget respectable,” he said, stealing a kiss. “You were born for loving.”
She couldn’t hold back her giggle. Her heart was too light. She wound her arms around Roy’s back, pulling him closer. He sighed hungrily as their mouths met, exploring each other with the full force of desire. He was hers and she didn’t ever want to let him go. She reached between them to stroke his already stiffening length. The hotel opening was hours away. They had time for-
A knock on the door froze the blood in her veins. She gasped as Mr. Bell called, “Sarah, are you up?” from the hall.
Roy held stock still on top of her. His pulse pounded against her chest. His eyes went wide.
“Yes, Mr. Bell, I’m just getting up now,” she called.
Together she and Roy inched slowly to a sitting position, careful not to make the bed squeak.
“The hotel opening is in a few hours,” Mr. Bell continued from the other side of the door. “I didn’t think you’d want to miss that.”
“No, sir,” Sarah replied.
“I’m about to go down and make breakfast. How do sausage and cornbread sound?”
“They sound very nice.”
There was a small pause.
“There’s plenty for you too, Roy,” Mr. Bell added.
Hot shame flushed through Sarah. She and Roy exchanged wide-eyed looks. The glow in Roy’s eyes was caught somewhere between shock and amusement.
Roy cleared his throat. “Um, yes, sir, Mr. Bell,” he answered.
“I’ll just leave you two to pull yourselves together then.” There was a lilt in Mr. Bell’s voice that sounded like laughter. “Oh, and Roy?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Angus McGee showed up on my doorstep this morning. He said that someone had left a ladder propped against the back of my house. He took it down and brought it around to the porch, so you’d best not leave the way you came in.”
“Uh, no, sir, I won’t.”
Mr. Bell’s chuckling was clear as he stepped away from the door. His footsteps sounded on the stairs.
“Oh,” Sarah said, too panicked at being caught to think of anything else.
Roy cracked into a grin, a grin that rumbled into sheepish laughter. He sagged in her arms, resting his forehead against hers as his shoulders shook.
“I reckon we were a might loud,” he said.
“Do you think Mr. Bell heard us?” she whispered, horrified at the thought.
Roy nodded. The bright sparkle in his eyes only grew brighter. He kissed her again, pulling the breath right out of her lungs, but not the embarrassment.
“You gotta get out of here!” she exclaimed, leaping off the bed. She scrambled to find his clothes from the night before. “Mr. Bell knows. Mr. McGee knows.
Half the town will know in no time! What will they say?”
Roy rolled off the bed. “Calm down, Sunshine,” he said, taking his clothes as Sarah thrust them at him and putting them on. “No one’s gonna mind.”
“Yes, they will, Roy!” she contradicted him, rushing to throw her own clothes on. “Gossip may be a sin, but it’s everywhere. Rumors will fly and folks will talk, and before long,” she gasped and froze midway through tying her drawers, “before long the same thing that happened to Mrs. Reynolds will happen to me. I’ll be alone.”
Roy tucked his shirt into his pants and shrugged into the suspenders. “It will not, Sunshine. And you will not be alone. I promise you.”
She shook her head and grabbed his shoulders to steer him towards the door. “What if Mr. Sutcliffe said the same thing to Mrs. Reynolds?”
“I am not him,” Roy protested.
“But folks is still folks. You never know.”
“Sunshine-” he started.
She opened the door and pushed him into the hall before he could protest further. “Go, Roy,” she said. “Before anyone sees you.”
Roy sighed. “All right, I’ll go.”
“Good!” She breathed in relief.
But instead of going, he swept her into his arms and reached to cradle the side of her face. She dared to meet his eyes.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have picked such a busy day to climb up into your room. I knew full well that I had the opening today and that folks would be out and about. I just couldn’t resist.”
“Oh, Roy.” She forced herself to smile.
He brushed a strand of hair back from her cheek and held her flushed face in both of his hands. “I love you, Sarah Sunshine, and there ain’t nothing that anyone out there can say that would make me change my mind about that.”
“Really?” A lump caught in her throat. Maybe her story wasn’t so much like Mrs. Reynolds’s after all.
“Really and truly.” He kissed her again, a definitive mark at the end of his promise. Then he stood and stepped back. “Now I’d best be going before Delilah comes looking for my head.”
“I suppose you’d best.”
Roy smiled at her as though she was a daisy, stole one last kiss, then rushed across the hall and down the stairs.
Sarah listened to him say good morning to Mr. Bell, then rushed back into her room before her kind host could catch her in her knickers. She shut the door behind her and leaned against it, pressing a hand to her racing heart. She squeezed her eyes shut and said a quick prayer that no one would see Roy as he left. If he had any sense, he’d leave through the kitchen door.
Her imagination wouldn’t let her be as she finished dressing and brushed her hair. All it took was one rumor to ruin a life. Look at Mrs. Reynolds and Mr. Sutcliffe. They coulda been married for twenty years with a pile of children if it weren’t for a rumor. That, she thought as she rolled on her stockings, was why it was so important to stick with Miss Jones and learn to be respectable. Even if Miss Jones was-
She stopped with a gasp, blinking at the opposite wall. “Miss Jones spread that rumor!” she whispered to the empty room. “That’s what she’s got to atone for.”
The thought settled uneasily on her shoulders as she wrapped herself in the new shawl Roy had given her. Was she was putting her trust in a woman who’d broken up two people in love? The notion distracted her all the way downstairs and into the kitchen where the scent of sausage and sweet cornbread waited for her along with Mr. Bell.
“Good morning, Sarah,” Mr. Bell greeted her with a smile that both teased and encouraged her.
“Morning, Mr. Bell,” she answered through her troubled thoughts.
“Your Roy came through here. He’s a fine fellow.” Mr. Bell’s cheer faltered when he saw the look on Sarah’s face. “Is everything all right?”
She started to reply that it was, but no words came out. Instead she gripped the back of her chair at the kitchen table and tilted her head to the side.
“Mr. Bell, how long have you lived in Cold Springs?” she asked.
“Let’s see.” Mr. Bell scratched his head and set a heaping plate of breakfast on the table for her. He crossed to hold her chair out for her. “About twelve years, I think.”
Sarah sighed with disappointment and sank into her chair.
“Was that the wrong answer?” Mr. Bell asked, joining her at the table.
“No, sir,” she said. “It’s just that, well, I was thinking about Mrs. Reynolds and Mr. Sutcliffe and what all happened to them when Mrs. Reynolds got out of her contract.”
“Oh, I see.” Mr. Bell reached for his coffee as if he was going to need it. “Worried that history will repeat itself?”
Sarah blinked in surprise. “Yes, sir, I am! How did you know?”
A compassionate smile spread across Mr. Bell’s handsome face. He sipped his coffee and leaned back in his chair. “It’s hard not to worry about things going wrong when we’re so close to getting what we’ve been dreaming about, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is!” She breathed out all of her tension. “I just keep thinking, what if Miss Jones was the one who started that whole mess? Here I’ve been so intent on learning from her, becoming respectable like her, but I’m beginning to think that she ain’t respectable at all.”
“I can’t say I disagree with you.”
“You know what happened then?” Sarah’s brow rose in expectation.
Mr. Bell shook his head. “I only know what I see in the woman’s behavior.”
“Oh.” Sarah lowered her eyes.
“She is law-abiding, though,” Mr. Bell conceded. “I know she deals honestly with her tenants. She always pays her mortgage on time. Plenty of folks think she is a role model.”
“She would in no way approve of what me and Roy did last night,” Sarah admitted bashfully.
“I’m sure she wouldn’t.” Mr. Bell failed to fight back a grin.
Sarah winced. “You heard us?”
“Only when I didn’t have two pillows stuffed to my ears.”
Sarah’s gut twisted in shame. “Sorry.”
Mr. Bell shook his head. “Not at all. I’d rather be awaken in the middle of the night by the sound of two people showing their love than by cries of fear and hate, which has happened to me, by the way.”
“But what if that was just, you know, lovin’?” she asked. “What if Roy turns his back on me because of a rumor.”
“He wouldn’t,” Mr. Bell answered without hesitation. When she gave him a skeptical look he went on. “I don’t know him very well, but I do know the look of love when I see it.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.” He put his coffee down and leaned closer to her. “When Roy came down here a while ago he was gracious and noble. He apologized for inconveniencing me and asked me to see to your comfort and safety. Those are the kinds of thing a man in love does.”
Sarah shifted in her chair, curiosity bubbling. “Have you ever been in love, Mr. Bell?”
He lowered his eyes, a cloud passing over him. “Yes, I have,” he said.
“Where’d she go? What happened to her?”
He raised his eyes to meet hers. A sad and mysterious smile filled his eyes. “I would never tell you a story that would corrupt your innocence, Sarah.”
She grinned. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.” He stood and returned to the stove, pouring himself another cup of coffee. “Now eat your breakfast and stop fretting about someone else’s past. You’re going to need all of your energy to stand by your man’s side at his hotel opening today.”
“Yes, I am.” The joy that Sarah thought she’d lost spread through her heart. She pulled her chair further into the table and picked up her cornbread. When Mr. Bell sat across the table from her she said, “I don’t understand it. You’re so kind and gentlemanly. Even if you lost a love, how come you never found someone else and got married?”
He laughed wistfull
y. “It’s not so simple when you’re different.”
She dismissed the thought with a shake of her head. “Well, if it weren’t for Roy, I’d want to marry you.”
Mr. Bell’s smile grew. “And I’d want to marry you too, Sarah. If it weren’t for Roy.”
For a tiny moment she was sure he meant something else entirely with those words. Whatever it was, her own happy thoughts drown it out. She was on the path to respectability, even if she wasn’t there yet. She would keep her promises to Miss Jones, but only until she could get out of it. She would support Roy at the hotel opening, and then let whatever magic was due to come to her work itself out.
Roy strode toward the hotel with Delilah’s ladder over one shoulder, doubt resting on the other. The itchy feeling that he hadn’t done the right thing by letting Sarah rush him out hung with him. She’d had that look in her eyes when he’d kissed her goodbye, the same look she’d worn every time Paul had shooed him out of the saloon late in the night, like she was making up her mind whether to run off with him or hide.
He turned the corner to cross through the alley between the saloon and the hotel and glanced over his shoulder at Mr. Bell’s house. No one in all of Cold Springs, all of the world, was as lovely as Sarah. He didn’t know why he hadn’t snuck up into her room sooner. He didn’t know why he’d left.
He’d halfway made up his mind to ditch the ladder, forget the opening, and go back for Sarah when Delilah’s cry of “There you are!” distracted him.
Delilah was already halfway up the alley and in a fit. “What the devil are you doing with a ladder?” she asked.
“I went-”
“Oh, never mind,” she brushed his answer away. “It’s already nine o’clock and we got more work to do than the planning committee for the Chicago World’s Fair! Put that thing away and come on.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He double-timed it around the back of the hotel, resting the ladder against the wall instead of storing it in the shed, then hurried back to the edge of the alley where Delilah waited.
