Wild in the Moonlight (10 page)

He felt her responsive shiver—but she recovered too darn fast. “Nothing but enjoy the feast. Or…how about if you pour the wine? It's red. I know you're supposed to have white wine with fish and chicken, but I didn't have any around…and red is so much more potent, don't you think?”

Another glossy, sultry smile, another tip of the lashes. He thought, I'll be lucky to make it through dinner without throwing her on the table and going for it. “Yeah, I like red better than white, too. Hey…”

“Yes?”

Somehow he had to buy some time. He was more than willing to let her have her way. But first he wanted to understand what had motivated all these sudden wicked tactics of hers—not that he wasn't enjoying them. Just that he figured a few minutes of distracting conversation was a good idea. “I was thinking how crazy it was that we've been together every day, yet I never asked you what you did. I mean, I know you moved here after a divorce and set up your herb business. But what kind of work did you do before that?”

“Work?” The question obviously startled her, be
cause momentarily she forgot the sultry-smile, big-eye thing.

“Yeah. I mean, for a living. Were you into some kind of different career before this?”

There went the last of the provocative smile and the hip sashaying. It wasn't as if she didn't still look sexy as hell, and then some, but as if she stopped planning it.

She handed him dishes, one after the other, and he carted them to the table. Within minutes they were eating. A half hour later they were on the last bites and their second glass of wine.

“I was a physical therapist,” she told him. “I didn't have any kind of formal specialty or anything fancy like that. But I mostly worked with kids. Kids who'd been in accidents, lost a limb or use of a limb. Tough road, to get a little one physically and emotionally prepared for life again, after going through a trauma to that extent.”

Cameron shook his head, no longer stalling or playing games. He was fascinated by everything she'd been telling him. “Wow. I can't believe you never mentioned this before.”

“There was no reason to. I'm not doing it now.”

He hesitated. He could see in her face there was more here. He sensed Violet kept the “more” to herself for reasons he couldn't fathom. So he pressed. “You quit because you burned out on it?”

“No. Not exactly. Kids tend to hate physical ther
apy. Actually, adults do, too. It's not fun. It hurts and it's hard work. And especially for children who've been through a life-changing event, they feel confused and angry about what's happened to them. Anger, fear, frustration. I can't explain this, but that's exactly why I loved the work—at the time. Have some more wings, Cam.”

“I couldn't eat another bite. So you really liked working with children, huh?”

She snapped her fingers and jumped up. “I'll bet I can coax you into eating one more thing. How about a little dish of vanilla-bean ice cream? With a little drizzle of raspberry rum sauce over it?”

“Whatever you can handle, I can handle,” he said.

She shot him a look. By then the sun was skating down the horizon, turning the treetops a velvet green and the sky a silky azure. One cat opened her eye at the word
ice cream
but otherwise the herd was snoozing at a distance, too lazy to even beg.

“Well then, hon, I'll just dish you up a big dollop of trouble,” Vi promised him.

As if she hadn't done that from the second he met her. Right then, though, Cameron wasn't willing to be completely diverted from the bone he was determined to pick. “So…why aren't you still doing the physical therapist thing?”

He saw a sudden flash in her eyes, the slightest stiffening in her shoulders. “Because when I came home, I started the Herb Haven.”

Which didn't answer his question in the slightest. “And that's obviously gone great for you,” he said smoothly, “but you weren't inclined to find work as a physical therapist in White Hills? Or weren't there any PT jobs here?”

“No. There's probably work. There's a good-size clinic in White Hills. I just—”

“You just what?” He smiled at her as he poured her another glass of wine.

“I just decided that maybe I should stop working with children for a while. Do something else. Everyone doesn't stay in the same job forever.”

“No, they don't. In fact, I never got it, why people felt obligated to find one career and stick to it. What's so wrong about liking change? Wanting to do new things, see new horizons?”

“Exactly. People don't have just one dream,” she said defensively.

“They sure don't.” Yet he was almost sure that Vi still did have that one dream about working with kids. Not because he had extrasensory perception. But because there seemed a haunted unhappiness in her eyes, a tension.

“Change is fun,” she agreed. “What's not to love about new challenges? Doesn't everybody need to stretch their minds? Not fall into a rut?”

“That's really true…but, damn, I have the hardest time imagining you falling into any kind of rut. You bring a sense of fun and adventure into everything
you do. Other people get bored. You seem to find a spirit of fun in everything.”

She glowed for a second, then jumped up on him again, all flustered. “All right. That's enough being nice to me. About time we talked about you. In fact, I've been wondering—”

“No,” he said mildly, not responding to her words but to her actions. He suspected that she was about to make a deliberately catastrophic amount of noise, banging around the kitchen—an effective way to cut off any further serious conversation. “Let's leave the dishes for now. How about if we take the ice cream out on the porch swing and see if we can scout up a breeze?”

Typically, she was willing to do anything to get out of dishes so she agreed. She bought out the ice-cream dishes, not little dishes, like she'd claimed, but major masterpieces with her fancy sauce. The smell of rum was wildly sweet and strong, adding to the other nectar smells of the evening. He exclaimed over the dessert. She laughed. Yet it was Violet who spooned one bite and then put her dish on the ground.

Before he could ask another personal question—and, for damn sure, before he could get her to talk about her work with children again—she suddenly stole his dish, too. Set it on the ground in the sun, next to hers. And plopped in his lap.

A guy always hoped to win the lottery, but he didn't expect it. Her fanny nestled in his lap, as if
seeking the exact weight and pressure that would drive him crazy. She found it easily. Before he could even breathe, her arms had swooped around his neck. For all that sudden impulsiveness, though, she leaned closer and only offered him a whisper of a kiss. The graze of her mouth against his was soft, light, silky.

“Hey,” he whispered. “What's happening here?”

“You don't want me to kiss you?”

“Oh, yeah, I do.” And all his control buttons snapped. The power outage of '03 had nothing on this moment. He'd waited and waited and waited to taste her again, and here she was, warm and willing and almost bare, obviously intent on inviting him to take what he'd been craving for the past two weeks.

So he let her test him with that teasing little kiss of hers and then came back, pirate fast, with another kind of kiss entirely. He didn't want her lips; he wanted her whole mouth, her tongue. He didn't want a sweet sample; he wanted saliva and combustible heat. He wanted her heart pounding. He wanted her eyes to open wide with awareness and worry—not
bad
worry, but he was definitely tired to hell of her thinking she was safe around him. He wanted her to know that she wasn't safe. And neither was he.

He got everything he wanted and then some. When her lashes shuttered open, she looked dazed and more than a little shook up. “Well,” she said faintly, on the gust of a pale breath. “I guess you
did
want to kiss me.”

But he couldn't come up with any more easy smiles. “You really thought I didn't?”

“You didn't seem to have any problem walking into your own room all these nights. You didn't even try to—”

“Seduce you?”

“I don't need to be
seduced,
Lachlan. I'm a grown woman. But I just didn't understand what the deal was.”

“Neither did I, chére.” He pushed back a strand of hair that had sneaked free from all those clips holding it back. “I knew I wanted you. I knew you were willing to make love with me. But I kept having the bad, bad feeling that you were going to regret it.”

That startled her. “Why did you think I'd regret sleeping with you? I never said—”

“I know you ‘never said' anything specific. But you only said you were willing to make love when you pegged me as the kind of man who wouldn't give a damn about you, wouldn't stick around.” When she tried squirming and doing her flutter-the-hands thing, he gently cuffed her wrist. “The fact is, I do care. I do give a damn. And nothing I understand about you, sensed about you, made me believe you were being truthful. If you want a short fling, trust me, Vi, I'd be happy to give you one. But I can't buy it. That you're going to be okay to just hit the
sheets and then go our different ways the next morning. Or the next week.”

She took a hard breath. Then pushed off his lap and stood. So did he. As if the porch had suddenly become unbearably claustrophobic, she suddenly vaulted down the porch steps and started walking. So did he. Restless or not, it was still tepid hot, still too humid to breathe. She didn't run any farther than the deep shade of the maple, and then she turned on him.

“You want to know the deal, Lachlan? It's that I have skinny tubes. That's the deal. The whole deal. The chance of my ever having kids is mighty unlikely.”

Aw, hell. The minute she blurted that out, Cameron wanted to slug himself. God knew how he'd missed it, because immediately he realized she'd given him a ton of clues. Her reproducing plants so wildly. Her endless herd of cats. Her not going back to a profession with children. The way she mothered the two girls who worked for her. He even remembered—now, too damn late—the funny look on her face when she'd first said she didn't need birth control. “That's about as unfair as it gets, chére,” he said softly.

“More than unfair. I never wanted fancy things. Forget the riches and jewels and all that. I just wanted a house and kids and a man to love.” Her head shot up, her eyes jewel bright. “And you're
wondering what that has to do with our making love.”

“No. I wasn't wondering anything. I was just feeling bad for you.”

“Yeah, well. The thing is…maybe there was a time I wouldn't have been comfortable with casual sex. But that was then. And this is now. I've been alone since the divorce. That's three years.”

“Hey,” he said gently. Hell's bells, those tears were welling up. And yeah, of course he knew she cried at the drop of a hat. Only, damn it, this time she had reason to cry, a terrible huge reason to cry, and that was way different from seeing her cry at a Kodak commercial. He scooped her close, stroking her back, feeling her shudder back a real sob, afraid that she was going to do it seriously to him this time—cry until they were both drenched.

“I don't want a husband,” she said fiercely.

“You don't have to have a husband.”

“I've been trying to scare men away for three years. And doing a
great
job of it.”

“You're great at being ditsy,” he reassured her, and stroked, stroked, stroked. “But maybe you don't have to work at it quite so hard. It's not like every man wants kids—”

“I
know
that. But I also had a husband who took off the minute he found out I was…flawed. Yes, he wanted kids. And so did I. But we could have made other choices—like adopting or fostering. That's
when I realized it wasn't as simple as just being about kids. It was about his seeing me differently, seeing me as less of a woman. My feeling like less of a woman.”

He stopped stroking. “Wait a minute. What kind of horse hockey is this?”

“It's not horse hockey, Lachlan. You asked me what the deal is, and I'm telling you. In the beginning I just didn't see a reason to get into all this. It wasn't your problem, wasn't your business. But you asked so I'm telling you. I want to get into casual sex. With you. I want to know for sure that you're leaving. That you're going back to your own life. That I don't have to worry about how you think about me as a woman, deep down. How you—”

Damned if he was going to let her finish another idiotic sentence. Enough was enough.

V
iolet felt completely bewildered when Cameron suddenly grabbed her. She'd been trying to seriously talk to him. She was all riled up and upset that the whole crappy story about her skinny tubes had come out. She'd never wanted Cam to know. It was fine the way it was. Good the way it was. He thought of her as a whole, sexy woman—she knew he did. She didn't want him to see her differently, and she'd been afraid all along that he would if he knew the whole blasted picture.

Yet suddenly his arms swept around her, tighter than a noose, and his mouth swooped down on hers, slapped hers, crushed hers…then almost immediately
lightened. Slower than honey, a taking kind of kiss became a wooing kind of kiss. A coaxing, wooing kind of kiss suddenly became an ardent, I want you need you have to have you kind of kiss. His tongue found hers. His hands sieved into her hair. She felt his long, hard body throb against hers, and suddenly she was trembling from the inside out.

He was going to take her. She knew it in the flash of an instinct, a burst of heat and fear and excitement streaking through her pulse. Right here, right now, right under the deep, dark shade of the maple. No one was around, and the sun was setting fast now, but heaven knew strangers and neighbors both drove by and drove in at all hours.

It was as if he didn't care. Didn't notice.

And then neither did she.

She'd never felt like this. As a young girl, she'd dreamed incessantly all that tedious stuff about the prince who'd find her, who'd make her the center of his world, who'd slay dragons for her. But obviously she'd grown up. There were no fairy tales, and she'd wanted a flesh-and-blood guy and not a fake prince anyway. But Cameron…oh, Cameron.

He pushed at clothes, buttons, zippers. Heeled off his shoes, lifted her out of hers. No one had ever swept her away like this. Made her feel as if he couldn't breathe without her breath, couldn't survive without touching her, couldn't live. Without having her.

His eyes were open on hers, intense, unrelenting. Yet his mouth kept coming, even as he swooped her down to the ground on their makeshift nest of clothes. A car went by, maybe saw them, maybe didn't.

Pagan kiss followed pagan kiss, each more fierce and wild than the last. A button dug into her spine. Grass tickled. Her hair tangled—her darn long hair was always tangling—yet only one thing mattered to her. Cam. And what they seemed to be creating together.

When he suddenly lifted his head, she tried to say something, but the way he looked at her dammed all the words in her throat and her heart was suddenly hammering, hammering. “I
love
you,” he said roughly. “
Love,
Vi. Do you hear me?”

Again she tried to answer, but he moved so fast. One instant he was taking her mouth, the next he'd twisted around, all naked and bronzed and bare, and started over completely at the other end. He kissed her right foot, from arch to toe, then worked his way up. Kisses wreathed from ankle to knee to the inside of her thigh to the core of her, and when she was gasping for breath, he flipped her over. He kissed her fanny; bit softly, tenderly, then laved a silken path up her spine to the nape of her neck. Then flipped her again.

His tongue dove into her mouth, mated with hers, even as he reached down. He wrapped her legs
around his waist, intimately tight, and then dove in, drove in, taking her high and tight and intimately. Desire suddenly developed sharp teeth. Need clawed at her, ached through her. The need for completion, but even more, the need to love. Him. To be loved. By him.

“Come with me,” he rasped. The sun dropped so fast, as if understanding they needed privacy, yet the darkness so stealthily brought voyeurs. Crickets. Frogs. Lightning bugs. Cats. And then the moon.

Their moon.

She saw his face above her, so sharply honed, so full of passion and emotion, even as she could feel herself losing any last ounce of control. Love reeled through her, whipped through her senses and heart.

“
Now,
Vi,” he said.

She came with him, feeling as if she were freefalling from the top of the sky. But not alone. She fell with Cam, wildly, from the heart. Even minutes later, even hours later, she couldn't shake the flushed, joyous sensation of feeling totally complete. Totally whole. As if she were the most powerful woman ever born, woman with a capital
W,
the woman she'd always wanted to be.

Cam's woman.

And at that moment she couldn't imagine feeling any other way.

 

Cameron couldn't sleep.

It had to be well past two in the morning. They'd
eventually made it to her bedroom, dozed for a while, wakened to make love all over again. Now, oddly, he was more wide awake than a hoot owl. She was lying in his arms, damp, warm, draped all over him—or he was draped all over her. Who cared who was doing the draping as long as every inch of his skin was touching every inch of hers?

His eyes were used to the darkness now. He kept staring at the silver moonlight flooding in the open window, the quiet stir of curtains, the pale light falling on that strangely austere bedroom. “Vi,” he whispered.

“Hmm?”

He'd been pretty sure she was awake, just not positive. Her voice was sleepy, sated, content—but awake. “
Chére,
are you absolutely positive about the infertility?”

She didn't stiffen in his arms this time, which told Cameron that she was okay talking about the subject with him now. The trust was there. For him. For her. “Let's put it this way,” she said with a wry touch of humor. “Originally I learned everything about sex from Simpson—which means that I learned almost everything wrong. From the time we were in high school, Simpson made me think that a guy had to get off or he suffered terribly. That guys couldn't wait. That sometimes girls made it and sometimes they didn't, but overall, that Real Women did.”

“As in…it's the woman's fault if she doesn't have a climax?”

“Yup. I can't believe I swallowed a lot of the things Simpson used to tell me. And on the baby subject, he really believed that it must be the woman's fault if she couldn't get pregnant, if the guy was virile.” She sighed. “Some things he didn't have completely wrong. He had his sperm checked. And they were all aggressive little swimmers. I was the one with the skinny tubes.” She snuggled closer. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I didn't want to tell you about all this, but…somehow it's opened my eyes to just air it all out. It's obvious to me now what I was doing with the lavender. I needed to create something that was totally my own, something that came specifically from me. And I guess I did go a little batty with enthusiasm.”

“A little?”

He heard her soft chuckle in the darkness. “Okay. So I went hog wild. But the thing is—I never thought all my experiments would take. I thought most of them would miscarry, you know? Why should they work? I was a novice at this, no more than a closet gardener. It just seemed to be luck, that everything I touched reproduced with no problem. It was so ironic.”

“Ironic in what way?” He stroked that long hair,
knowing she'd be annoyed in the morning she hadn't braided it, but loving it loose.

“Ironic, because all I had to do was love it. And nurture it. And it thrived.” She sighed. “Same with cats. I took in one stray barn cat three years ago. He was starved, crippled. I didn't think he had a chance of making it, and the next thing I knew, he'd miraculously turned into a she-cat and had kittens on me.” She stroked his neck, as if somehow instinctively knowing where he liked being touched most. “My mom had this theory, raising kids.”

“Which was?”

“Which was that everybody's powerful in some way. We just have to clue in to who we naturally are. My mom taught us girls that each of us had something in our nature that we needed to listen to, develop. For me, I thought it was to be a mother. To grow and raise and nurture. To feed. To caretake. That's part of what was so hard. Knowing I couldn't have kids. I'd just always been programmed to believe that was a natural part of me.”

Cameron hesitated. He'd never been afraid of wading into touchy waters, but this time, he desperately wanted to say the right thing. It's not like he knew anything about infertility. Or that he had any way to make her loss any less painful. But he had to find something right to say. The jerk she'd married had made her feel less than a woman, as if she were less than whole because of those “skinny tubes.”

“
Chére,
I think you were a born nurturer. Just like your mother said. But I don't think that's just about children. It's about everything and everyone around you. Always will be. Although…”

“Although what?”

“Although I think there's a definite danger you could get overrun by cats.” There, he'd made her smile. “If you started adopting elephants…well, the potential problems boggle the mind.”

And there. He'd made her really laugh now. Feeling high on those successes, he pressed toward touchier ground. “I'm relieved you went for the divorce,” he murmured, and kissed her forehead. “I'm sorry that he was such a blind idiot and hurt you. But if he hadn't had all those stupid ideas, who knows, maybe you'd have stuck with him. And then I'd never have found you.”

“You think it's fate we found each other when we did?”

Her voice was getting sleepier, her cheek rooting for just the right place on his shoulder. “Not fate,” he said quietly, bluntly. “Love. The kind of love that's actually freeing for us both. I mean—I already have two kids, so I don't need to start a formal family all over again. This is perfect. I'm a free spirit. So are you. We can both do anything, go anywhere we want. There's nothing to hold us down. Nothing to hold us back.”

She seemed to go very still when he said the
“love” word, but she didn't immediately answer. Moments later, he realized she'd fallen asleep.

That was okay, he told himself. He just wanted to reassure her that he loved her for
her.
Maybe he'd hoped she would say something to indicate she wanted him to stick around in her life. But she'd just revealed that huge hole in her heart. Rome wasn't built in a day. Maybe she needed to think about that “love” word for a while. They had time yet.

Surely they still had time yet.

 

“Girls. Could you keep quiet for a full three seconds?” Both girls whirled around in surprise at her sharp tone. She never yelled at them. She never yelled at anyone, but darn it, August had blown in on a hot, mean wind. A few days ago she'd picked up a stomach bug she couldn't seem to shake. The cats were crabby; she hadn't been sleeping; and the girls had been talking for hours about school coming, boys, clothes, boys and then more boys.

“We need to make some more insect repellent. Remember the recipe? Ten parts lavender, ten parts geranium, five parts clove—”

“Hey, I remember it, Vi, not to worry.”

“All right then, if you two'll make up two dozen of those vial—” She tried to finish the sentence, couldn't. Suddenly every smell in the Herb Haven seemed to fill her nostrils. She loved those smells. Every single one of them. Always had, always
would. But just then, she put a hand over her mouth and ran like a bat out of hell for the back bathroom.

Twenty minutes later she decided that she wouldn't die, even found the strength to fumble in the medicine cabinet for her spare toothbrush and toothpaste. She worked up a good foam as she stared in the mirror. Her cheeks were pinch-pink, her eyes bright, her hair wild as a witch's but certainly glossy and healthy. Yet over the past week, she'd found an excuse to cry every day and hurl at least once.

Of course, crying was nothing new. She cried for the national anthem and for dog food commercials. But usually her stomach was cast iron. Last night they'd had fish with a spinach sauce and peachy sweet potatoes. Nothing a normal man would eat, but Cameron, par for Cameron, ate anything she put in front of him and asked for seconds. For herself, they were old favorites, comfort foods, no matter how weird they might be for someone else. Nothing, for damn sure, to inspire an upset tummy.

If she didn't have those skinny tubes, she might fear she was pregnant.

“Hey, Violet.” Barbara rapped on the bathroom door. “We think you should go up to the house. Just forget all this. We'll make up the vials and those sachet things and handle the customers.”

“You just want to talk about boys.”

“Yeah, so? Go on. Go lie down or something.”

She didn't want to go home. Cameron was up
there packing. He wasn't leaving for another couple of days, but the lavender harvest was over and it was not as if he could get all his stuff ready in a second. Between her missed period and her upset tummy and the insanely radiant cheeks she kept seeing in the mirror, Violet kept finding the “pregnancy” word sneaking into her mind. But skinny tubes didn't suddenly disappear, so she figured she was simply emotionally upset about his leaving.

“I'm not leaving you two kids alone in the shop,” she said firmly.

Barbara opened the door, took one look and popped a bubble. “Yeah, you are.” She aimed her thumb at the house in a clear-cut order. “Go on. It's hot. Go drink some lemonade or something.”

Violet winced. “Don't say lemonade. Don't even think it out loud.”

That's it. They pushed her out. And the heat was too searing and sticky to just stand there, so she had to traipse up to the house. The back door was open, the phone ringing, but hell's bells, the phone was always ringing. She opened the refrigerator and then just leaned into the cold smoky air with a sigh.

“Oh, God. Let me waste some electricity along with you.” Cameron suddenly appeared from the dining room, shirtless and shoeless, just wearing low-slung khaki shorts and carrying packing tape. Now, though, he tossed the tape and hiked over to the open refrigerator. Faster than lightning, he dropped a soft,
lingering kiss on her mouth. “Mmm. Fresh toothpaste. What an aphrodisiac.”