Seduced (10 page)

“He's in the cabin.”

She leaned over and nudged him with her shoulder. The sensation, heavy and sweet and gone too fast. “Tell me about your other brother. Gavin?”

He shook his head as if he could deny the memories, but then they just came rolling out of that cave, undeniable and real. “He was very patient. Very quiet. An excellent hunter.”

Her sudden wry grin distracted him and he nearly sliced off his thumb. “He was going to the Seminary near Alexandria before the war.”

“Why did he fight for the South?”

Words unformed and thick stuck in his throat like mud.

“Did you have slaves?” she asked.

“No,” he coughed. “No, but Gavin feared a too-strong federal government would destroy state’s rights to govern themselves.”

“And why did you fight?”

“Because everyone else was?” He tried to make a joke but she didn't laugh. He stared out over the clearing, the black patch in the center. “The history of our country should not be written in the blood of slaves. It is an abomination.”

“Without slaves there will be no cotton,” she said.

“Then there will be no cotton. It won’t be the end of this country.”

“It may be the end of the South,” she said and he could not argue. “You don't speak of the war,” she whispered. “You and Steven.”

“It makes for terrible conversation.” For a moment the only sound was the scrape of their knives through the rabbits. It was bloody work and she sat shoulder to shoulder with him. “Mostly it was just marching. So much marching.”

“You weren't in many battles?”

“Plenty.” There'd been a time he'd tried to memorize all of them. Fredericksburg, the Mud March, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg. After the Battle of the Wilderness and the fire . . . he stopped counting. He just kept marching. Loading his rifle, firing at the men he was supposed to kill, burning fields, destroying railroad tracks—and always, always marching.

“Were you injured? Ever?”

He shook his head, wishing he could understand why. He turned to find her gaping at him. “You are so . . . ”
Damned
, he thought she might say. Or maybe she'd curse him because those fields he'd burned might have been hers, those men he killed might have been kin. “Lucky,” she said.

His head pounded, his hands shook. “Is that what you call it?” he asked, taking his gun and leaving her surrounded by what he'd killed.

“Are you hunting again?”

He nodded, staring out at the forest, anywhere but at her.

“Take me with you,” she said.

“You want to hunt?”

“I should learn.”

“You're a fine shot.” He remembered those three bullets in her husband.

“But a terrible tracker.”

“You plan on tracking in Denver?”

“I plan on learning everything I can to survive.”

He wanted to deny her, reject her company, but she already had the rabbits inside for her sister to string up for the smokehouse and her hands washed, and she was back on the porch with Jimmy's rifle before the words were formed in his mouth.

And then she was with him, beside him, her arm brushing his, making the nerves there sizzle awake. He'd thought in all his years marching through war that he'd seen all sides of pain. But the pain she wrought was new.

“I am sorry I let you go into the cabin with him that night,” Cole said. “I knew . . . I knew he was going to hurt you.”

“You tried to stop me.”

He shook his head, unable to let her believe that. “No, I didn’t. If I hadn’t wanted you to go in there, you wouldn’t have gone in. But I wanted whatever information he had about my brother. And that you got hurt —”

He couldn't look at her, this beautiful woman, who’d had means and background. She'd probably gone to church every Sunday, just like him. Perhaps she'd had dreams of family, of children and legacy. Her soul had at one time been as clean and pure as his.

And he'd handed her a gun. How did he fail to make the effort to save her soul from this terrible blackness in his? Why did he damn her this way?

“Are you angry?” he asked.

“About what?”

“About what I made you, handing you that gun?” He stared at the grass at her feet, the worn toe of her boot. She would need new ones before next winter.

A killer. I made you a killer.

“I’m grateful.”

He flinched away from her words.

She stepped closer until he was suddenly looking into her eyes. They were blue, the color of the sky at home over the orchard at twilight. They would absolve him of his sins, those eyes, should he allow it.

“I’m grateful,” she said again. “That’s all you made me.”

He turned away, gun in hand, to kill more things.

AT DINNER STEVEN pulled out a crock of honey, golden and perfect. Melody clapped like it was Christmas morning.

“You've been keeping secrets,” she cried.

“I forgot about it,” Steven said. He did not smile, but his eyes were bright. An improvement over what he'd shown before.

“It has been a long time since we've had honey,” she said, burning her fingers on the hot biscuits because she simply couldn't wait.

Annie did the same, the heat from the biscuits steaming her glasses, and she giggled. Actually giggled, and then as if she'd burped at the table, she clapped a hand over her mouth.

The sight of her sister so delighted made Melody giggle, too—the sound awkward and foreign like a duck barking, which made Annie drop her hand and laugh, and soon they were both wiping their eyes, holding their stomachs, in a true fit of gaiety. Like one of a million they'd had as girls, laughing so hard and so long they forgot what was so funny in the first place.

“Ladies,” Cole said, his dark, rich voice cutting through their laughter, “the honey.”

Shrieking, they used their fingers to wipe the table where the honey had dripped down from the biscuits. And then they licked their fingers.

It was decadent and girlish at the same time. And she had another strange flash of happiness. A sense that given sunlight and food and staying in the same place for a time, they would recover from all their wounds.

The happiness, so rare, made her giddy. Light.

A feeling she hadn’t had in years.

And then she noticed Cole, sitting in the doorway, his plate on his knee, watching her with narrowed eyes.

Awareness sizzled up her spine.

Slowly, breathlessly aware of his eyes on her, she slipped her thumb from her mouth.

Cole's hands were slack around his plate. His gaze so warm against her skin, she felt as if she were too close to the fire.

“Would you like some?” she asked, tipping the honey crock toward him.

“No. Thank you.”

His voice was like a touch of a hand across the nape of her neck, and it had been a long year, a long awful year since that had felt anything but terrifying.

In one horrible swollen moment, she was taken back to the easy ripe days when touches felt
good
.

Those stolen kisses, the frenzied caresses, the heated whispered words with Christopher, the scandalous behavior that brought all of it on—she’d liked it. All of it.

She’d gone to her wedding night with Jimmy a very experienced virgin. She doubted she was the only girl sending her fiancé off to war with more than just a goodbye kiss. So she knew that what Jimmy had done was not . . . not the only way it could be done. Pain was not the only result when a man and woman came together. There had been pleasure with Christopher.

And Cole’s attention created an echo of that pleasure now. Faint and dim, but a ripple under her skin nonetheless.

“Get my saddlebags, would you?” Steven asked, and Cole grabbed the leather bags from the pegs by the door.

“I just remembered I picked these up at the post office last time I was in Denver,” Steven said, pulling the two books from his saddlebags. He handed Annie the book of poetry, which caused Melody's bookworm sister to nearly fall over herself with excitement.

“You like to read?” Steven asked. Annie nodded so hard her glasses slipped down her nose. “You’re like Cole, then. There was never a book he didn’t love.”

“This one might be the first,” Cole said, holding up the second pamphlet. “
Water Drilling Techniques in Oil Prospecting?
”

“If we’re to be oil men, we'd better learn to do more than just gather it from seeps.” Steven dug further into the bags. “This is for you.”

He handed Cole a box, inside of which was a harmonica. In Cole's hand it glimmered in the firelight.

“You learned to play?” Cole asked. He stared at the instrument as if it was an old friend he thought he'd never see again.

“No.” Steven shook his head. He was still pale, but he’d been sitting up for dinner. “I was going to teach myself. Or, in my better dreams, it was a gift for you when you arrived.”

“You play?” Melody asked, and Cole nodded. He wore no hat and his sleeves were rolled up; he’d been taking down trees in the forest and sawing them into logs. Sawdust clung to the fine hair on his arms and the sunlight caught it and made him look like he’d been rolled in gold dust.

He held the silvery harmonica like a lover. The way Christopher used to hold her. And in a sudden spasm her body
remembered
. The echo of pleasure became a cacophony. Her skin remembered kindness and passion. Her breasts, between her legs, she remembered what being touched and stroked and held so gently felt like. The memory was like a hard rain on parched soil.

She put a hand to her chest, suddenly overcome.

“Play for us,” Annie urged, and Cole lifted the harmonica to his lips.

There were starts and stops, a bad note that made them all cringe.

“It’s been a while,” he laughed, embarrassed.

“It sounds good no matter what,” Melody whispered.

When he started to play in earnest, his music was beauty and torture. It was laughter and tears. Everything she felt, every sad and wonderful and lonely and happy feeling was turned to bittersweet music.

She and Annie asked for more. Another one. Still another. He ran out of songs to play and began to repeat them.

Cole watched her and she let him. She just let that music pry her right open, unable to stop it, as if her ribs were a clamshell. She could listen all—

“Stop,” Steven whispered, and the music halted mid-note.

“Steven?” Cole stood up.

“No more, Cole,” Steven whispered and he rolled over on his bed, his back to them. “Please don’t play anymore.”

COLE DIDN'T FALL asleep that night. The night of the harmonica and the honey. And the women laughing.

Usually he could fall into a fitful sleep for a few hours before the nightmares woke him up, but tonight he couldn't even get that far.

Instead, when the cabin was quiet he headed out to the barn where he lit a lamp and measured and sawed logs for the addition to the barn.

Melody's horses softly nickered in welcome and reached out their noses for a pat. The horses were fine company for an insomniac.

He had not slept more than five hours a night in six years. And it was worse here.

The ghosts would not let him rest. Like moths attracted to a flame, they swarmed under the moonlight. And tonight he was doubly plagued.

Melody, her thumb in her mouth, her eyes on him. He'd been destroyed in that glance.

For days now he'd ignored his body's response to her, because she'd been so hurt. Because he owed her so much, because he'd thought it had been burned out of him. Softness, want.
Desire
. He had not thought of a woman like that in . . . years. He did not partake of the whores or the grateful widows, the desperate girls along his route to Colorado. If he was able, he would flip them some coins and try not to look in their eyes.

There had been a woman in St. Louis he’d spent dark, desperate nights with, but one morning he woke up and she was gone with his horse and all of his money.

But tonight. That honey . . . He imagined taking Melody’s hand, sucking that finger into his own mouth.

And then when he’d sucked off every last lingering taste on her fingers, he would lift that honey crock and pour it across her lips, down her neck. He’d cover her breasts with it. Trail it across her belly. He imagined her sucking his flesh the way she’d sucked her own, with her eyes closed, the purr of satisfaction in her throat.

Christ. Stop
.

His hands shaking, his blood burning through his veins, he picked up Steven’s saw and went to work, hoping that with enough effort he might be able to roll the stone back in front of his cave, eliminating the light that made it so hard to see.

Her laughter made him feel shackled. It teased him with hope of an entirely different kind of freedom.

Hours later the lamp burned out and sunlight came through the cracks near the goat’s head.

Coffee. It was time for coffee.

Stepping out into the clearing, he saw Annie and Melody standing over a tree stump with an open leather satchel.

They were a pretty sight, pretty enough to make him pause.

Melody made him pause.

She wore no bonnet and her hair was swept up into a tight knot of gold at the back of her head. The sight of her neck, the knobs of her spine pressing against her tender white skin, made his blood pound.

His hands twitched as if they had the ability to remember the feel of her waist when he'd helped her out of the flowers. The nimble strength of her, the taut nature of her skin and muscle.

He'd succeeded last night and pushed the memory of the honey and her fingers and the laughter in her eyes entirely out of his brain. It no longer existed. It never happened.

Except seeing her now, like this at dawn, the memory exploded in him like cannon fire and his defenses were destroyed.

“Cole?” Melody said, catching sight of him as he came into the clearing. “You are up early.”

I cannot sleep because of you. Because of guilt. And want. And because after all that has happened you are able to giggle over honey and lie down in flowers, smile up at a blue sky as if your soul is undamaged.

I cannot sleep for envy.