On Love's Own Terms (11 page)

“Nobody knows that better than…” Chris’s voice cracked, and she quickly cleared her throat. Her expressive artist’s hands trembled slightly as she lifted the lid off the small, loblolly pine box sitting on a corner of the desk. She removed a cigarette and, hesitantly, offered it to Bonnie.

“No, thank you,” she refused curtly.

Chris’s slender fingers encircled the slim silver lighter that she took from the pocket of her drafting smock. She inhaled deeply, as if the smoke would give her the courage to speak. “I never had any nesting instincts that I can recall. Marriage. Motherhood. It always sounded like a regular Cinderella crock...”

“Then you met Luke?” Bonnie prompted cynically.

“In college.” Chris’s gray gaze focused on the nearest wall.

Bonnie looked in the same direction and immediately noticed the evidence of another accomplishment. Framed and centered among his personal photographs and professional awards hung his engineering degree. Sadness shimmered in Bonnie’s amber eyes. Here he’d finished school, and she’d never had an inkling. What else didn’t she know about the man who possessed her soul?

“It was the last semester of my graduate program at Georgia Tech,” Chris continued slowly. “Luke had enrolled in order to complete his engineering credits, and we had some classes together—most of them related to environmental design and energy conservation techniques in the construction field.”

Chris paused, puffing nervously on her cigarette, then shrugged her shoulders. “Coffee after class. Late-hour study sessions at the library during finals week. He’d just started his own company, and I needed a job after graduation.” Her voice thickened with emotion. “Our professional goals were so similar that I was fool enough to begin fantasizing—”

“I don’t want to hear this—this saga of your affair with Luke,” Bonnie interrupted, her tone defensive.

“You
need
to hear it,” Chris insisted, extinguishing her cigarette with sharp stabs in the heavy glass ashtray. “You need to know the truth.”

“Why?” Bonnie demanded vehemently.

“Because…” Chris’s words were strangled in a heartbroken sob as her brittle control snapped under the stress.

Bonnie reacted instinctively, hurrying around the corner of the desk to embrace the desolate young woman. She desperately wanted to hate Chris Miller. Yet their shared sorrow prevailed over her wounded pride. Hadn’t she also shed similarly tortured tears because of this man?

“You were the ghost who slept between us in his bed,” Chris accused brokenly. “When he reached for me in the middle of the night, he was really reaching for you. I knew it from the beginning but…”

Bonnie held her close and let her cry, understanding completely. Chris eventually composed herself and moved out of Bonnie’s arms, putting some necessary distance between them. “He was so tender, such an incredible—” She broke off, her sigh laced with sadness. “But you already know that.” She lowered her head, her hair falling like a dark velvet curtain across her fragile face. “He hasn’t touched me since the day that Darlene announced you were coming home for the wedding.”

Bonnie swallowed the apology that had automatically come to mind. Old habits died hard. But she
wasn’t
sorry and damned if she’d say she was! When she finally spoke, her voice was husky with hurt. “You’ll have him back Sunday night—hopefully none the worse for the wear.”

“I’ve submitted my resignation,” Chris murmured. “It’s effective Monday morning.”

A twinge of relief sputtered through Bonnie before shame smothered it. If both of them left, Luke would be alone. “Where will you go?”

“Houston. I’ve been accepted as a junior member of a major firm there. They are setting some very exciting design trends in the industry. When I sent slides of our various projects with my letter of application, they said my work shows promise.”

“From what I saw today, they’re right,” Bonnie offered graciously.

Chris smiled wryly. “As the architect of my own disaster, the least I can do is salvage what’s left and build something decent from it.”

“Luke will miss you, I’m sure.” Bonnie was surprised to realize how sincerely she meant that

“He’s already forgotten that I exist, except in a professional sense,” Chris rebutted softly. She squared her shoulders. “Thank you—for listening and for letting me love him.”

Before Bonnie could reply, the heavy door swung open and Luke entered the office.

“If I’m interrupting an important discussion, point me in another direction.” He crossed the room and stopped beside Bonnie, waving the typewritten pages and addressed envelopes that he held. “But if this is strictly a gab session, you’re the ones who will have to relocate. These bids are begging to be signed, sealed and delivered.”

Chris gazed at him, her somber gray eyes an eloquent study in grief. “I was just leaving.”

“Good-bye, Chris.” It was the first time that Bonnie had said her name aloud. It would also be the last time. “Good luck.”

One bruised but unbeaten angel made her exit. One woman remained, standing by her man for a little while.

* * * *

“This doesn’t
remotely
resemble a shopping center!”

“I never said it did.”

“You
promised
that you’d take me to the grocery store.”

“But I never said when.”

Bonnie and Luke sat in the cab of his pickup. He’d parked atop a grassy knoll overlooking a cup-shaped hollow filled with redbuds, dogwoods and other trees in full bloom. Towering pines spired from the center of the dale while the late afternoon sun hung like a gold piece over the horizon, baking the countryside in its quiet heat

After a dozen legitimate delays, they’d finally left his office. She’d thought they were going grocery shopping, then returning to Rebel’s Ridge for dinner. Obviously a mistaken assumption on her part since, instead, he’d driven straight to this beautiful but virtually deserted area on the far eastern edge of Atlanta.

She eyed him suspiciously when he slid his arm around her shoulders and drew her closer to his hard frame. “Am I being waylaid, by any chance?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?” His hand grazed her breast, not entirely by accident judging from the devilish grin deepening his dimples.

“I think you just did.” Curling her slim, bare legs beneath her, Bonnie nestled contentedly against Luke, marveling anew at the exquisite physical fit that always left her feeling a little delirious. His breathing was steady, regular; he was completely relaxed and she hated to make waves.

What possible difference could a couple of stolen hours make in the scheme of an entire week? It was all they had—much more than she’d expected, yet not nearly enough. Surely, somewhere in Dixie’s sprawling, sophisticated capital there were fully stocked supermarkets that kept late hours. Weren’t there? Just to be on the safe side, she raised her head to ask him.

His eyes were closed, and she could almost count the individual dark lashes lying against his prominent, sun-bronzed cheekbones. In repose, his face lost none of its vitality but gained a slight measure of vulnerability.

She shifted her position carefully so as not to disturb him, then studied him in sleep. How and when had he gotten that tiny white scar which extended the cleft under his chin? The cab grew warmer as the day neared dusk, and she wondered who’d shaped the sideburns waving damply around his ears. Did he ever remember those horribly uneven trims she used to give him when they were too poor to pay the price of a decent haircut?

Bonnie rested her head against his chest, her sigh tinged with untold regrets. If she hadn’t become pregnant, would they have married anyway? Or would they have drifted apart and found other partners, as childhood sweethearts often do? These were questions without answers, yet she couldn’t picture herself with anyone else but Luke.

His arm tightened around her shoulder, and she knew that he’d awakened. When she reached up and touched his hand, their fingers entwined as securely as moonflower vines taking hold in spring. A woodpecker
thunked
on a dead elm somewhere off in the distance while, nearby, the peepers sang sharp and ceaselessly.

“It’s peaceful around here this time of day,” he said. “Why don’t we stretch our legs a bit?”

“I’d like that,” she agreed softly, tucking her purse under the seat.

They both climbed out on the driver’s side, and Luke locked the doors. As far as she could see, no power lines or billboards spoiled the natural beauty of the surroundings. Holding hands, they started down the gentle slope, leaving the sun’s last hot light as Bonnie followed his sure-footed lead along a path canopied by the trees.

She ducked under a swaying gourd, scooped out and hanging by a thin wire from a sycamore branch—home for some fortunate family of purple martins. “Do you come here often?”

“Whenever life starts going its own way instead of my way,” he admitted as they left the shelter of the woods and walked across a clearing toward a narrow creek. He crouched beside the stream, took out his pocketknife and cut a sprig of new watercress from a clump growing in the clear rill. When he stood, he put away the knife, tucked the greens into his shirt pocket, then shrugged. “Whenever my dreams start drying up.”

Bonnie went to him, alarmed by the note of defeat she heard in his normally vigorous voice. Had something bad happened at the office? There had been so many phone calls and conferences—maybe he’d lost an important bid to a competitor.

Confused, uncertain of how best to comfort him because she didn’t know the actual source of his despair, she reached out and smoothed his breeze-tousled hair off his brow.

Luke caught her wrist and brought her palm to his mouth. His tongue leisurely traced each line before boldly invading the space between her fingers. “Don’t leave me, Bonnie,” he murmured roughly against her tingling skin. “Stay and let me love you.

“I’m here,” she asserted, answering only for the moment. Her breath quickened when their bodies came together. “I’m here, Luke.”

A gentle wind whispered through the pines. They linked hands, four becoming two. They kissed, two becoming one. A division of love. Strengthening them both. Wreaking havoc with her senses.

She tasted the honeyed demand of his tongue and felt the urgent strain of his need. Yet he didn’t hurry. Lowering his head, he savored the satiny curve of her neck. First one side. Then the other. She shuddered, her knees weak with wanting, as he fed her desire with his hungry mouth.

The cicadas chirped anxiously, echoing her heartbeat. And still, he didn’t hurry. Reclaiming her parted lips he slowly sipped of her sweetness, then gradually drew her tongue into an erotic duel. When he freed her hands, she slipped them beneath his cotton shirt and her fingers trailed along the hard length of his spine. Hooking his thumbs under the straps of her sundress he slid them off her shoulders and exposed, for his eyes only, her softly scented flesh, aching now for his soothing caress.

Scuttling pinecones seized his attention. Glancing toward the stand of trees across the gurgling brook, Luke smiled. “We have company.”

“Oh, no,” she groaned. Imagining the worst— innocent children or giggling teenagers—Bonnie huddled shamefaced against his shirt front “Do something,” she whispered frantically. “Chase them away.”

“Be still,” he warned quietly. “They’re crossing over.”

Listening to the footsteps splashing in the stream, she could hardly breathe. He chuckled and she cringed. Had he forgotten that she was standing there bare-breasted, for heaven’s sake? She squirmed, reminding him of her embarrassing predicament, and he curved her closer to his body.

“Very slowly now, turn your head,” he murmured.

Timidly, she complied and peeked sideways. A wisp of relieved laughter escaped her throat when she saw the white-tailed doe and her spotted fawn munching clover near the edge of the clearing.

“We’re trespassing,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Moving cautiously so as not to frighten the feeding deer, they backed out of the clearing. The doe raised her head once, her unblinking brown eyes watching their retreat through the twilight.

Luke kissed the tip of Bonnie’s nose, smiled and slipped the straps of her sundress up onto her shoulders. Gazing wistfully at the rugged set of his features, she felt a twinge of disappointment at the thought of returning to the real world so soon. As if he’d read her mind, he steered her away from the path leading up to the road.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Where I should have taken you in the first place.”

The cabin sat in the middle of a second, smaller clearing.

“Another monument to your edifice complex?” she teased.

“To tell the truth, I bought the hollow with the intention of clearing it for my cluster development.” He held her hand as they neared the log house. “But the abstract showed that this place was a nineteenth-century coach stop. It gave me such a sense of history, I just couldn’t bring myself to destroy it.” He grinned ruefully. “You’re not the only one with an overactive conscience.”

“It tilts!” Bonnie exclaimed, eyeing the support lintel above the front door and the sloping planked floors inside.

“There’s a list to it,” Luke agreed as he lit a candle and placed it in a brass holder. “It’s not likely to fall down around us tonight, though.”

While sparsely furnished, the one-room cabin was quite cozy. The two windows were clean, and the neatly hemmed canvas curtains he’d hung over the bottom panes insured their privacy. He had used a concrete mixture to replace the original rock and mud chinking in the dovetailed walls, which gave off a wonderful old timber aroma.

“No electricity?” Bonnie kicked off her sandals.

“Not a volt.” Luke set the candleholder on the oak chest.

“No running water?” She shrugged out of her sundress.

“Not a drop.” He pulled his shirt off over his head.

“No telephone?” Her half-slip and bikini panties fell in a satin pool around her bare feet.

“You’re the only one I’m talking to tonight.” His jeans and shorts landed in a heap atop his abandoned loafers.

“How perfectly authentic.” She folded back the bear paw patterned quilt before climbing into the four-poster rope bed. “But tell me, aren’t you violating your builders’ sacred oath, ‘the whole planet is a potential shopping center,’ by restoring this place?”