Home by Morning (21 page)

Jess took another drink from her own glass. Tears stung her eyes, and she rummaged through her pockets but couldn’t find a handkerchief. She believed Cole, but it was all so hard to accept, so difficult to conceive of treachery like that from her own sister. “I feel like—it’s like we’re talking about a stranger. This isn’t the sister I remember. It can’t be. Amy wouldn’t do that.”

“That’s what I thought, too. We were wrong.”

“Do you love her?” Her words came out as a whisper.

He closed his eyes for an instant, as if trying to decide which answer was best, a lie or the truth. “I tried to convince myself that I did.”

She swiped at the corners of her eyes with her thumb. “It certainly seemed like it. Those new cameo earrings she showed me, the ones she’s still wearing, didn’t come from a casual friend.”

He shifted in his chair. “I bought them for her the day I moved your stuff from the hotel to this office. I…well…”

“Well?”

“I felt guilty because as soon as I saw you at Granny Mae’s your first day back, I knew I was just kidding myself. Then when she got sick and I saw her lying there in that cot, before I knew about the telegram, I felt like the biggest heel on the face of the earth. After all, everyone else loves Amy. Why didn’t I?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I never got over you. And if I’d thought it would do any good, I would have paid the devil an admission price to walk through that hell I traveled, just to get you back.”

A flush of annoyance overtook her again. “Really? You didn’t try very hard. As soon as you thought the going was tough, you jumped from me to my sister. The damage is done,” she said, taking a bigger drink from the glass clasped in her hands.

“Come on, Jessica, how hard did
you
try?” His eyes looked like chips of blue ice. “I don’t deny that I’ve got plenty of regrets. If you can tell me you don’t, then you’re not the woman I’ve always believed.”

She felt her cheeks grow hot. “Of course I have regrets. But we’re not the same people we were before. At least I’m not, and I don’t think I ever will be again.”

“Because of me.”

“Well, no, not completely because of you.” The wailing children, their worn mothers, the drunken fathers, the defeated, abandoned old people—their ghosts never left her.

Silence opened between them.

“Maybe we’re not the same,” he said at last, the hostility drained away. “It could be that we’re better.”

Her head came up. “Better—how?”

He left his chair and crouched on his haunches in front of her. “We’re a little wiser now. Maybe we appreciate each other more.” He was so close, he smelled so familiar. She noticed fine lines that fanned out from the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there before, the same strong jaw and broad brow. No one and nothing else had ever filled her heart quite the way he had. Unable to stop herself, she leaned toward him and brushed the backs of her fingers against his hair.

He took her hand and kissed it, lingering over her wrist with his lips.

The feeling, tempting and yet somehow forbidden, nudged the spell that grew around them. “Cole, no.” She tried to pull her fingers from his grasp. “We’re not going to do this again. You might have reached a decision about Amy, but she and everyone else still think you’re her suitor. You have to wait until she’s better and then tell her it’s over. Otherwise, you’re just—just a
philanderer
.”

He looked up from her hand, and the seconds passed. Then he pressed his forehead to her knees. “No, I’m not, Jess. I’ve been bamboozled, and so have you. But I’ve waited long enough for you—years—and I don’t want to wait anymore.”

Tears burned her eyes again, and she stroked his hair. Amy, her own sister, had connived and lied to both of them, and the truth was there on the table for her to see. “But suppose that makes our actions no better than Amy’s…”

He lifted his head, and she saw the angry, raw flame that burned behind his icy gaze. His voice was low and rough. “Bullshit. You’ll just get a nosebleed walking that high road.”

Reaching up, he tugged lose the ribbon on the end of her braid where it rested in front of her shoulder. Then he pulled her out of the chair into his embrace. They toppled to the oval braided rug that covered the pine flooring, her skirts tangled around her legs, trapped beneath him and trapping her. His kisses pelted her face like raindrops during a late-summer storm, moist and warm and as welcome.

She wrapped her arms around him, simply unable to resist a moment more.

Anger still twisted through her, fury over what her sister had done, and on a lesser scale, toward Cole for his seemingly effortless recovery from their derailed love affair. Yet, overriding that was the wanting, her desire for him, and the love she’d forced into a corner of her frozen heart. When his lips touched her mouth, her icebound objections and high-minded ideals melted away, freeing that love.

They reached for each other with a restless urgency she hadn’t known for over two years. Beneath the fabric of his shirt she felt hard muscle and bone, honed by a lifetime of physical labor. Heat radiated from him.

His chin-length hair fell forward as he looked down at her. “Jessica,” he muttered, “Jess, it’s always been you.” He took her mouth in a kiss that warmed her from within, as if hot nectar had infused her veins. With one hand under her neck, he unbuttoned his shirt. Then he reached for her hand and sandwiched it between his own and his fast-thumping heart. “Always in here.”

She couldn’t suppress the soft moan inspired by the feel of his warm, bare skin and hard-thumping pulse beneath her palm. Their previous, interrupted explorations of intimacy now stacked up to create a feverish hunger that was both mature and years in the building. As society dictated, and perhaps despite what Powell Springs might have assumed that long-ago summer when Adam had come upon her and Cole beside the creek, Jessica had maintained her virginity. For twenty-seven years, through youthful temptation, through schooling and her work. She had never wanted or even considered giving herself to any man but Cole.

She had never loved any man but Cole.

His big hand slid up her rib cage and covered her breast, her thin shirtwaist a flimsy barrier, and her body rose to meet his touch.

Jessica knew almost everything modern medical knowledge and experience had to offer about a human body as a machine. How its heart pumped blood, how its organs worked, how it sustained itself and reproduced. But as a vessel of deep, emotion-driven desire, she was unversed.

As Cole’s impatient fingers worked at the buttons of her blouse and her combination beneath, his lips and tongue plied hers, hot and slick and seeking. Time and the grim specters of sickness and death receded to a distant corner of her mind, banished by his ministrations. He bent his head to her neck and throat, leaving a trail of warm, moist kisses that focused her senses to an exquisite sharpness. Her head was filled with the scent of him, part male, part whiskey, with a trace of night air that lingered on his clothes.

She traced her fingertips along his face, reading the faint stubble of his beard, the strength of his jaw, the soft skin on the back of his neck that was protected from the weather by his hair. With seemingly no effort, he had her out of her blouse and skirt, and they laid in a heap beside them. He nudged her shoes off as he ran his hands down her legs, pushing her stockings out of his way.

Unfettered by a repressive modesty she would have felt with any other man, she wound her fingers in his hair and pulled his lips to hers again to answer his wordless demand for surrender. Tomorrow and what it might bring didn’t matter at this moment—the world could roll on around them. They were stopped in a place that time and circumstances could not reach.

The hard length of him, pressed against her thigh, left no question about his intentions.

Cole unbuttoned and reached into Jessica’s white cambric combination. It was silly female underwear that reached her knees, but it obligingly opened down the entire length of her torso. Her smooth body, fragrant with spice and dark wood, was full and womanly.

Outside, within the confines of the shop grounds, Roscoe, Cole’s dog, began barking. Cole raised his head, listening for a moment. Roscoe kept up such a furious ruckus that Cole almost interrupted his exploration of her scented smoothness. The dog didn’t usually bark like that unless a stranger approached. The doors weren’t locked, but the paddock was under this apartment’s window. Briefly, he considered going to look. But one look at the softness laid bare before him, and the fire in him raged. He abandoned the idea. The damn-fool mutt had probably cornered some night-dwelling critter. He just hoped it wasn’t a skunk.

“No woman is as beautiful as you, Jess,” he uttered against her neck. “Not a single one.” His hand drifted over her belly and down lower, lower, to the place that even her underwear could not hide from him. She squirmed under his touch.

In one grand sweep, he pulled her into his arms and carried her to the closed room that held the bed. Balancing her, he turned the knob and kicked open the door. A break in the clouds sent a shaft of silver-gray moonlight over the quilt, as if beckoning them to this place. Beyond the window, the streetlight cast shadows on the walls of bare-limbed trees that had shed their leaves.

He put her on the bed and pulled off his shirt while she watched. “Tell me,” she murmured plaintively. “Tell me again.”

He knew what she meant. Kicking off his boots, he unbuckled his belt and ripped open the fly of his jeans. He shucked the pants, then climbed onto the bed beside her, where she lay with her hair in a cloud of waves spilling over her pillow. “I love you,” he said, taking her into his embrace once more. “I have always loved you.”

In the midst of everything that had gone wrong with the world—war, disease, loss, and suffering—and between them, his statement was life-affirming to his own ears. A toast to this moment he’d waited for half his life, and a tribute to the woman who had owned his heart for just as long.

The graze of her fingertips along his hip sent blood pounding to every part of his body, and he rolled toward her, putting one leg between hers to give him easy access to her sweetness. Desperate heat and urgency rode low in his belly, demanding satisfaction. But he had to wait, he had to make sure that Jessica was pleasured first.

He ran his hand up the inside of her smooth thigh until he reached the slick, sweet warmth that wept for his touch. At the same time, he took the tight bud of her nipple into his mouth, brushing it with his tongue.

Jessica moaned and arched against him, giving herself to the utter flood of sensation. Their youthful explorations had been nothing like this. The yearning had been nothing like this. Fear of discovery and self-consciousness had inhibited her. Now she felt neither.

Cole groaned against her neck when Jessica reached down to wrap her hand around the hot length of him, and she reveled in his response. All that was female in her surged to life, as if awaking from a years-long slumber. He pushed her hand away and muttered, “Not yet, honey. Not yet.”

He played her slick, sensitive flesh with the deftness of the most skilled musician coaxing music from an instrument. Her nerves drawn as tight as the strings of that instrument, each stroke of his hand sent vibrations shivering through her, building the crescendo. He murmured in her ear, only part of which she grasped. When she could stand no more, he pushed on, driving her to a frenzy of sensation that she had never experienced before. She pushed against his hand to meet the waves of spasms that wracked her. Her cry in the darkness was smothered by his kiss.

Shifting his weight, in the moonlight he hovered over her, then covered her body with his own. She closed her arms around him and felt him probe unerringly toward the center of her that even now, still quivered with the aftereffect of her climax.

It took every ounce of Cole’s flagging self-control to keep from burying himself in Jessica’s welcoming heat. He had thought of this moment a hundred times since he’d first set eyes on her again, even though he hadn’t known it would occur. He gave a tentative nudge against her and heard her small, sharp gasp.

“I can’t change my mind now, Jess,” he warned raggedly.

“No, no—please don’t stop.”

“I swear I’ll try not to hurt—”

But she lifted her hips to meet his, forcing him to become one with her. She closed around him like a warm glove, like a scabbard for a sword, one that would fit no other but the one it had been made for. He withdrew and thrust again, relishing the delicious agony building in him. Jessica’s movements complemented his, putting them both on a blade-sharp precipice of desire. At last they were flung into an abyss of emotional passion, of two hearts and souls joined, now and for all time. His release shook him to the core of his being.

He pressed his head to her shoulder, limp and breathing like a winded horse. He felt her smile against his cheek.

“What?”

“You’re really quite a man, Cole.”

He smiled too. “Was I what you expected?”

She hugged him and he rolled her over so that she lay on him. “Better than I dreamed. And I dreamed about this many times.”

“So did I. I couldn’t help it, I love you.”

She put her hand to his cheek. “Not as much as I love you.”

Jessica lay with her head pillowed on Cole’s shoulder and one leg thrown over his. She felt she could finally explain to him why she had left the job which, ultimately, had cost her so much.

“I began to realize that I wasn’t making any real difference in those people’s lives. I kept patching up the same ones, if they lived, and fighting the same problems in others.” They had made love once more, and then both had fallen into deep sleep, exhausted and sated. Now the magic of their night together was nearly over. In her sitting room, the clock struck six-thirty. “It didn’t matter how hard I worked, or how hard I tried. There were so many factors I couldn’t overcome. At first I didn’t think I could leave. But then, despite, well, everything, I knew I couldn’t stay. There was no joy left in my work. Only a feeling of abject futility. So I suppose I ran away from it.” She told him about her month in Saratoga Springs and her self-imposed isolation from the world.

“And now? You aren’t still going to Seattle, are you?” He stroked her bare arm and played with her fingers as they spread across his chest.

She turned her face toward the window. “I don’t dare think farther ahead than one day. This responsibility I have, taking care of this town, is even less predictable than the duty I had back East. There, I knew I was battling ignorance and inhumanity. Here my enemy is a mystery, a virtual unknown.”

With agonizing reluctance, she disentangled herself from the warmth of his arms, sat up, and perched on the edge of the mattress.

“Jess, wait. Don’t go yet.” He was too tall for the bed, and yet he looked so right there. It wasn’t hard to let her imagination picture him there every night, and waking up with him every morning. Seeing him in the low dawn light, his long hair tousled, his big frame lying back against the pillows, she thought he’d never looked so handsome and appealing.

She sighed. “I have to get back to the infirmary. I have work to do. As long as this crisis lasts and I’m the only physician here, these long hours will go on. Even though the rate of new infections has just begun to drop off, I’m still fighting an uphill battle. And for all I know, it could get worse again.”

He sat up too, and began pulling on his clothes. “I guess I’ve got to go, too. We’re wrangling a herd to put on the train late tomorrow afternoon. Will you come to the ranch for dinner after?”

She tensed, pausing with one arm in the blouse she had pulled from the wardrobe. “That’s not a good idea, Cole. Not yet. High road, low road—Amy has to face the consequence of her actions and you have to tell her why you’re ending your courtship. She’s not well enough for that.” And Jessica wasn’t sure she was ready for whatever might follow after.

He stared at the post on the bed for a moment. “Yeah, I know,” he conceded. He stood at the bureau mirror and used both hands to comb back his hair. “At least I can give you a ride to the high school.”

“That I accept,” she said, smiling. After she’d brushed her teeth and washed in the tiny bathroom, he borrowed her Colgate tooth powder and used his finger as a brush.

In the parlor, she picked up her black leather bag, then they both went downstairs. Cole snagged her coat from the coat tree and held it for her before grabbing his own jacket and hat. They walked outside into the early light and stood for a moment on her stoop. The town was still quiet, and soft mist dampened the air. The last brown leaves lay wet and defeated along the sidewalk gutters, and there was no birdsong to be heard. No traffic rolled past her door, although these days it moved like a wounded animal, even at noon.

Taking her chin between his thumb and forefinger, Cole tipped her face up to his own. “I won’t be able to do this when I drop you off. Imagine what those women volunteers would say.” He kissed her with all the passion he’d shown upstairs the night before, jarring her resolve to remain professional and preserve her personal ethics about their relationship. His warm breath fanned her face and she felt she could have stood there all morning, letting his lips take hers. The spark of unvarnished joy that he had kindled in her heart last night—the first she’d felt in a long time—burned a little higher, a bit brighter.

When he drew back, she looked into his blue eyes and saw the same raw flame burning there. He was so hard to resist.

“Damn, Dr. Layton, we’d better go before I change my mind about all of this and take you back upstairs.”

She laughed. “You mean play hooky? I never did that in my life.”

“Maybe you ought to start,” he replied. Glancing down, he noticed that one tail of his shirt still hung loose and he tucked it in. Jessica caught herself making the very unladylike wish that she could reach into the front of his pants like that.

They walked to the dew-covered truck parked in the yard of his blacksmith shop next door. Just as he was about to help her in, she heard a male voice.

“Fornicators! Aren’t you
ashamed
?”

Jess jumped and was startled to see Adam Jacobsen approach them. His clothes were rumpled, so different from his usual crisp appearance. Where had he come from?

Beside her, Cole stiffened like a wolf confronted by an enemy. “What the hell do you want, Jacobsen? And why is it every time I turn around, you seem to be there, minding everyone’s business except your own?”

Adam didn’t reply to the questions, but looked them up and down with contemptuous self-righteousness. His hair stuck up in a couple of places and dark circles accentuated the fierce anger in his eyes. “To have fallen so low. I should have known your baser instincts would eventually come out again.” He glared at Jessica. “To fornicate with the man who is your sister’s betrothed.” He spoke in a melodramatic voice that reminded Jess of his father at his most rabid moments in the pulpit. But her hands and stomach turned to ice in the face of this ugly confrontation.

“Watch your mouth, Jacobsen. You’re jumping to a conclusion that you can’t prove. Just take yourself down the road, or I’ll help you on your way,” Cole warned.

“And
you
,” he went on, pointing at Cole. “Even now, Amy, a fine woman of good character, a shining moral example in this community, is lying helpless in her sickbed, and this is how you repay her trust and devotion?”

Cole knocked away Adam’s index finger. “Don’t point at me. And mind your own business,” he repeated. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you don’t leave, I’ll forget about that Bible you hide behind and kick your ass up into your skull.” He stepped closer to Adam and nudged him with his shoulder, making him lurch backward.

Adam’s contorted face flushed the angry red of a throbbing boil. He stepped forward again, his voice shaking with fury. “Don’t you threaten me! I’ll personally see to it that neither of you can ever hold up your heads in this town again!”

Jessica, unnerved by his behavior, almost expected to see him begin foaming at the mouth.

“To think that I asked you to marry me. You’re nothing but an educated tramp!”

Jessica gasped at his vitriolic insult.

“You son of a bitch!” Cole grabbed Adam by his lapel with one hand and pulled back to swing with his other, but Jess grabbed him. He’d put his weight and shoulder behind the punch, but she was able to throw off his aim.

“Cole, no! He’s not worth it!”

Adam escaped Cole’s grip and danced out of range, his eyes shining with an almost fanatic gleam. “Just you wait!” He turned and walked away at a rapid clip in the direction of his own house. He glanced over his shoulder once or twice, as if to make sure Cole wasn’t chasing him.

“Oh, no,” she groaned, watching him go. “That horrible man! He’ll tell everyone about this.”

Cole was flushed too and drew several deep breaths, then locked his fist in his other hand. He watched Adam’s retreat. “I know he’ll try to make trouble, but what’s he going to tell? That he saw me helping you into the truck? We know what happened last night, but he really doesn’t. He’s just making dirty-minded assumptions. As usual.”

“He probably saw us kiss. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

He turned to look at her. “Did he really ask you to marry him?”

“Yes,” she said in a weary, disgusted voice.

“And?”

“What do you mean, ‘and’?”

“What did you tell him?”

“I guess I never really refused outright. But I told him I wouldn’t make him a good wife. He had it all planned out—he even expected us to go to heaven together. He assumed I would give up medicine and devote myself to his job. Can you imagine me organizing basket socials and quilting bees?”

Cole released his fist and gave a short, humorless laugh. “No.”

“I told him I couldn’t see that, either. And anyway, I realized you were right about him.” He shot her another I-told-you-so look, which she acknowledged with lifted brows and a resigned shrug. “For some reason, though, he began to assume I’d accepted. That was part of the argument you interrupted last evening. I told him we’re
not
engaged. But I wonder why in the world was he out here at this hour.”

Cole thought for a moment, remembering a couple of things that made cold worry settle in his gut. He nodded toward the passenger seat of the truck and she let him help her in. “Be careful around him.” He didn’t want to frighten her, but he figured she should hear his suspicion. “I think he might have been here, watching, all night.”

She stared at him. “But that’s ridiculous. It’s—it’s creepy!”

“Yeah, well, remember who we’re talking about, Jess. Didn’t you notice he was wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday? And while we were upstairs, I heard Roscoe barking his head off. I think he was barking at Jacobsen. That’s why he seemed to appear out of nowhere. He was already here.”

He saw Jess shiver. “Watching?”

“Yeah. To see who came and left, and when. Or anything else he might spy.” He walked around to the front of the truck and gave the stiff crank a couple of hard turns to start it. When it rumbled to life, he climbed in and fiddled with the choke.

“I’m not afraid of him. He can’t hurt me, and I can’t let his threats get in my way.”

“Just the same, be careful.” Looking out the windshield for a moment, he then took her hand where it lay in her lap. “Jess, if anything comes of last night because of him or anybody else, I want you to know I’ll be right beside you. I’m not sorry or ashamed about anything we did.”

Jess faced him and squeezed his hand. Once again, he knew that she could see the truth of his words because she was looking right into his heart.

For now, that would have to be enough to get him through what lay ahead.

To Jessica, the following two days passed much the way others had since the epidemic began. A blur of sick patients, dying patients, and convalescing patients gave her the sense of time standing still. Her only real indication of time came from sunrises and sunsets.

She had no idea where Adam was, but she was grateful that he’d stayed away from the infirmary since that horrible morning when she’d last seen him. If anyone noted his absence, it wasn’t mentioned.

She hadn’t seen Cole, either, but she knew he was probably busy getting the horses ready for the train.

Health dispatches she received from the Red Cross and other sources spoke of the global proportions of the catastrophe, although it was noted that for the most part, newspapers tended to whitewash the situation, if they mentioned it at all. Doctors and nurses were felled as commonly as their patients, and some areas around the country were left to fend for themselves. Some of her volunteer nurses had ended up occupying sickbeds themselves. What would become of Powell Springs if she got sick?

Due to a mix of guilt and lingering anger, Jessica visited Amy’s bed as infrequently as possible. At first it wasn’t difficult because her sister slept most of the time, and after a couple of brief examinations, Jess was satisfied that Amy was definitely growing stronger. But as she grew stronger, she began to ask questions of the nurses.

The day after her confrontation with Adam, Jessica was tending a patient when she heard Amy ask, “Where is Jessica? Why doesn’t she come to see me? Where is Cole?”

She stood on the other side of the sheets that had been erected to create separate patient cubicles. Like a coward, she sped away toward her desk before anyone noticed her presence. But she knew she was only delaying the inevitable. Yes, blood was thicker than water, but Amy’s blatant betrayal, masked by what Adam had called “good character” and “a shining, moral example,” overrode her filial affection.

Birdeen Lyons tracked her down. Her head was wrapped in a white towel, approximating the look of a British nurse. “Jessica, Amy is asking for you.”

Jess glanced up and shuffled the papers on her desk. “Thank you, Birdeen. Will you tell her I’ll see her soon?”

The woman nodded and tottered off toward Amy’s bed.

Late that afternoon, she was still putting off the visit when Horace Cookson came into the infirmary. Jessica spotted him first, standing just inside the door to the makeshift hospital, unwilling or unable to take another step. Jess hurried forward to greet him. Although he wore his mayor’s clothes—the crooked tie, the vest missing one button, the rumpled suit coat, shiny at the elbows—he appeared so much older, so
gray-faced
, she worried that he’d finally succumbed to the illness that had taken his wife and son.