In a Stranger's Arms (32 page)

The fight seemed to leach out of her. “What else am I supposed to think? I know Lon set a trap for you, but that doesn’t excuse how fast you went for the bait.”

“There’s a whole lot more to it than that, Caddie. And I promise I’ll tell you all about it in good time.”

He would, too. Once he sensed there was a possibility she could forgive him, he’d tell her everything. For now, he must convince her to give him one last chance to make her happy. Or die trying.

“I promise you, I’ll never willingly go within a mile of Lon’s wife ever again. I swear it wasn’t any hankering for her that took me up those stairs a while ago. You’re the only woman I want, and I’ve been a damned fool to pretend any different.”

He bent his head, brushing his cheek down her ear and the slender line of her neck, along the elegant contour of her bare shoulder. There it came to rest.

“Can you blame a man who’s never known love for not recognizing it when it coldcocks him right between the eyes?”

Beneath his bandages, his palms grew clammy. Though he tried to still them, his knees trembled. He’d been plenty scared on the eve of several battles, but never like this. Caddie’s answer mattered more to him than anything in this world or the next.

If Del Marsh had suddenly risen from the grave and come between them, Manning feared he might kill the man all over again. Damn the consequences. And doubly damn his soul.

Did she dare give her heart to a man who could make the iron ramrod of her pride melt into a pitiful puddle? The notion frightened Caddie worse than the fiery fall of Richmond.

Looking back, she realized her marriage to Del had been a lot like the war. They’d waged their battles of will with no outward show of violence, not even angry words. There had been victories and defeats just the same, occasional truces, renewed hostilities and escalating bitterness. In the end, they’d both lost.

There had to be a better way. Could she and Manning both find victory in mutual surrender?

She couldn’t find the words to ask him—wasn’t sure she had the courage to speak them, anyhow. Instead, she settled for nuzzling his crisp dense crop of hair with her neck. When he turned his face and pressed his lips to the base of her throat, she could not hold back a keening, quivering sigh that betrayed her longing for him. Her mouth hungered for his kisses with the kind of hollow ache that had lodged in her stomach during the bleak days after the Confederacy fell.

But she would not kiss him or beg him to kiss her. That one stubborn nub of pride restrained Caddie. If Manning cared for her the way he made it sound, was it too much to hope he’d finally scale or smash whatever barrier held him back from her?

The waiting became sweet torment as Manning hovered behind her, laying siege to her exposed neck and shoulders with his lips and the tips of his fingers. Caddie shut her eyes, the better to concentrate on the wonder of his touch. Fiber by fiber, he eased the tight knots that anger and hurt had tied in her flesh, telling her in a language deeper and truer than words how precious she had become to him.

He left her with no choice but to believe.

With every runaway lurch of her heart and every stormy gust of her breath, her craving to touch him grew. Memories of their first time together broke free of the wards she’d placed on them—riding roughshod over judgment and propriety.

Why a man of such fierce restraint should provoke such wildness in her puzzled and frightened Caddie. But confusion and fear only whetted a sharper edge on her recklessness.

Just when she was sure she could stand it no longer―certain she must scream or swoon, or turn and plant a scorching kiss on Manning—he spun her toward him. Their lips collided and Caddie could almost picture a shower of sparks exploding around them.

No woman who’d been kissed the way Manning kissed her now could entertain any serious doubts about his desire or her desirability. The mellow taste of hickory and the sweet tang of lemonade mingled on his breath without the faintest taint of moonshine. If he cut loose now, there could be only one excuse.

Passion.

At last Manning gathered his shattered composure and pulled away from her.

Caddie clung to the lapels of his coat.

“If... you’re about to lecture on morals...” She gasped for air. “Or warn me that we shouldn’t go any further... so help me, I’ll pick up those dishes and throw them at you!”

A smile lit Manning’s face, even brighter and warmer than the special ones he reserved for the children. He laughed like Caddie had never heard him laugh before—as if he wasn’t holding anything back.

“Oh, Caddie-girl.” He took her face in his bandaged hands with a gentleness that bordered on reverence, but the fire in his eyes said he wanted her in a way that was anything but sacred.

Or maybe it was sacred, after all.

His voice hushed to the soft murmur of distant waves breaking against some lonely stretch of Low Country shore. “I know I already asked you to marry me, but we both meant something different back then. Now I need to know, are you willing to let me be a husband to you?”

Caddie drew a deep breath to fuel her reply, then found her throat too constricted to speak.

Perhaps Manning misread her hesitation. “I know I can’t take Del’s place, and I don’t want to.”

She pressed her finger against his lips to hush such talk. The last thing she wanted him to do was take Del’s place, but now wasn’t the time to go into all that. Sometime, though, when she felt a little more secure in his love for her and hers for him. Right now they were a pair of wobbly foals, just finding their feet after a difficult and dangerous birth.

In her desire to reassure him, she found her voice again. “You don’t need to take
anybody’s
place. You’ve made your own place in my heart and my children’s.”

His gaze wavered before hers. Had she misspoken?

The significance of what he’d called himself dawned on Caddie—a man who’s never known love. Remembering what he’d told her about his childhood, so much about the baffling man became clearer. Why he worked so hard to win her affection, then shrank from accepting it. Like some mistreated animal who snarled when you went to pet it, because it had learned to expect blows from an approaching hand instead of caresses.

She hadn’t made it any easier for him. Once bitten, twice shy, she’d been too quick to pull back.

Well, not tonight.

Her finger still lingered on Manning’s lips. Now Caddie ran it over them.

“In so many ways you’ve been a fine husband to me. Maybe it’s greedy to want more, but I do. And I want it tonight—right now.” Her lips twisted up in a fleeting half smile. “Before you think better of the idea.”

Kissing the pad of her finger, Manning glanced at the table. “The dishes?”

Tempted as she was to say they’d keep until morning, Caddie didn’t want them drawing flies, either. “We can scrape them off and set them to soak—that shouldn’t take long.”

It didn’t, either.

Caddie chuckled to herself at the zest with which they tackled the chore. The speed of their movements betrayed their eagerness for one another. When she caught Manning watching her with wistful hunger in his eyes, her knees would go weak. Meeting in a doorway, they would brush against each other in passing, making Caddie’s bosom tingle.

By the time they had all the dishes soaking, the pair of them practically tripped over one another racing up the stairs.

“My room tonight,” Caddie whispered as she tugged Manning over the threshold.

She didn’t want any unpleasant memories of the morning after their last encounter to taint her enjoyment of this one. Nor could she stand the thought that a ghost of Lydene’s strong perfume might still haunt Manning’s bed.

He couldn’t blame it on moonshine this time.

Manning’s heart hammered hard and fast against his ribs—almost as much from the dread of what he was about to do as from his potent desire for Caddie.

Everything in his conscience screamed that this was wrong. He remembered an old Bible story from the Book of Samuel, how God had cursed King David after the king sent Uriah to die in battle, so he could have the man’s wife. For the first time, Manning pitied David.

Caddie seemed to sense the struggle within him. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I won’t kick you out of the house or anything.”

It would hurt her, though. She tried not to show it, but Manning could tell just the same.

“I want to.” Surely she would hear the raw need trembling in his voice, and believe him.

Her hunger to be cherished and desired must come before everything. Even before his perverse urge to punish himself.

Manning shut the door behind him. He pictured himself shutting out his doubts, his dread and anything else that might cast a shadow over the loving he was about to give this woman.

Late-summer twilight deepened and a warm breeze wafted in the partly open window.

“In that case—” Caddie stepped toward him and began to untie his cravat “—could I get you to unfasten my dress? Some of the hooks are fearful hard to reach.”

Manning shrugged out of his coat. “I guess I could manage that, seeing as you had to undress us both last time.”

Presenting her back to him, Caddie lit a candle on top of her bureau. “May as well be able to see what you’re doing.”

She meant to keep her tone light and casual, Manning was pretty sure, but a beseeching note crept into it in spite of her. For some reason, this mattered to her.

It mattered to him, too. Manning’s fingers fumbled with the tiny hooks down the back of her dress. This wasn’t a case of all cats being gray in the dark. Caddie didn’t want just any warm male body as a substitute for the husband she’d lost. She wanted him and he must not fail her.

Turn about, they undressed one another. Only the quickening rasps of their breath frayed the edge of their intent silence. When the last of Caddie’s undergarments had parted company from her glorious body, Manning could keep silent no longer.

“I can’t believe it” He shook his head, amazed.

“Believe what?” Caddie glanced down at herself, a spasm of embarrassment contorting her features.

Manning reached out and stroked a long red-brown curl that dangled over her shoulder. “That you could be any more beautiful than I remembered.”

She couldn’t dismiss his words as flattery when his body bore such compelling witness to their truth.

Manning leaned past her to twitch back the bedclothes, then he took Caddie in his arms and eased her down onto the sheets. As a warm summer night enfolded the Virginia countryside, Manning satisfied Caddie, by touch and kiss and whispered word, that she was everything he’d ever dreamed of in a woman, and so much more than he had ever hoped to find.

He fashioned himself into an instrument for her pleasure, all his senses alert to the faintest sound or movement that might suggest what she wanted next.

He couldn’t deny that part of what she wanted was to caress him, explore his body and give him pleasure, too. Something in him tried to resist the seductive power of her touch, withholding a scrap of reason to sit in judgment on the rest of him. In the end, he could resist her no more than oil-soaked tinder could resist the kiss of the flame.

The first time they’d made love, on that drunken stormy night, he’d felt enough to pierce the thick fog of his pain and stupor, winging him away to bliss. Tonight the intensity of sensation tread a razor-fine edge past which pleasure must become pain—perhaps even death.

Leisurely at first, their kissing and fondling grew more and more fevered until they blundered together, straining for release. As Caddie whimpered and panted in his arms, her body clutched Manning in a series of delicious spasms that pulverized his consciousness into a handful of glittering dust and scattered it to the four winds.

When he woke to a pearly dawn, Manning held Caddie and stroked her hair. He didn’t give her a chance to look into his eyes, though, in case she should find some lingering regret there and mistake its cause.

“Whereabouts are you going to sleep tonight?” she teased him.

After a long simmering kiss, he replied, “Wherever you want me to.”