Yankee Wife (14 page)

Lydia whirled, realizing he thought she'd come bearing the worst possible news. “Devon's holding his own,” she said quickly, to reassure him. “It's you I've come to see about.”

His handsome face looked haunted in the weak light of the fire and the single lamp burning on a table next to the cabin's one window. “You shouldn't have left the house on a night like this,” he said coldly. “You might have run into trouble.”

Lydia sighed, draping her cloak carefully over the back of the one chair the room boasted and then plucking at the folds of her skirts and giving them a good shake in front of the fire. “If I were afraid of trouble, Mr. Quade,” she said lightly, “I'd never have dared to travel west in the first place.”

He looked at her for a long time, his throat working, then muttered, “Are the girls all right?”

She smiled. “Charlotte and Millie are behaving like little women. You should be very proud of them.”

He turned his profile to Lydia, standing beside her on the hearth, gazing into the flames as though they held him in some grim spell. “Devon is the best friend I've ever had,” he said after a long and pensive silence. “When we were little, I used to take his whippings for him, when he got into trouble. I couldn't stand to see him hurt.”

Lydia's heart tightened. She edged a bit closer to him, felt the heat of his body as surely as that of the fire before them. “Whippings?” she whispered, as injured by the thought of Brigham's pain as if the blows had struck her instead.

He grinned slightly, though there was certainly no joy in his face, and no humor. “I think those trips to the woodshed really
did
hurt Pa more than they did me,” he said. “His heart just wasn't in it.”

Lydia was only mildly pacified. “But he let you accept your brother's punishment?”

Brigham took a poker from its holder and stirred the embers in the grate. “I made sure Pa thought I'd been the one to do the mischief,” he explained. “And lots of times, I had been.”

Folding her arms, Lydia turned to Brigham. “I hope you don't believe in disciplining children in that primitive fashion,” she said. “I could not stand by and see Charlotte or Millie struck.”

He sighed. “Don't worry, Lydia,” he responded. “Neither could I. And that's probably the reason they run from one end of this town to the other like Indians on a raid.”

She never knew what accounted for the action, but Lydia let her head rest against Brigham's shoulder for a moment. The contact was orchestrated by a flash of lightning so close that its golden brightness glared in the room. For the length of a fluttery heartbeat, Lydia was unsure whether the combustion had come from within her or without.

Brigham turned to her, took her shoulders in his hands, gazed down at her in consternation, as if trying to formulate a scathing lecture behind those tarnished-pewter eyes of his. Then, with a low, strangled sound, he wrenched her close and kissed her.

The lightning broke its own rule then, striking for the second time in a single place. Lydia's spirit caught fire as Brigham's lips molded hers, prepared them for the fierce invasion of his tongue.

Lydia felt closed places within her tremble tentatively and then grind open, like stone doors in the ruins of some ancient castle. She didn't protest, couldn't have protested, as Brigham's hands cupped her buttocks through her skirts and petticoats, lifted her slightly and dragged her against him.

His masculinity seemed, for a short, breathless stretch of time, to be the home of the lightning that heated her skin and blinded her by the very intensity of its fire.

“Go back,” he gasped, thrusting her away from him, gripping her face now, instead of her firm bottom, which still quivered and tingled from the hold he'd taken earlier. “Go back to the house, Lydia. Right now.”

Lydia knew very little in those moments; her emotions were churning and her mind was as muddled as if she'd been drinking hard cider. Despite the ferocious, burning aches opening like lakes of lava inside her, she did not think of giving herself to Brigham. She merely wanted to hold him, to be held by him, and temporarily turn her back on a treacherous and uncertain world.

She shook her head. “I'm staying,” she said, and slipped her arms around Brigham's waist. He kissed her again, kissed her until she was too dizzy to stand.

“Lydia,” he murmured, his voice ragged and harsh.

Lydia raised her hands to his shoulders, spread the fingers wide to feel the straining muscles beneath his shirt. Then she found his heartbeat, thumping against her palm, and a new excitement possessed her.

She began to unbutton Brigham's shirt, and he groaned a senseless protest but did not lift his hands to stop her.

Pushing the fabric aside, Lydia laid her cheek to the place where his heart pounded against his flesh, as if seeking some union with her, her own pulse. The coarse down covering his chest offered a strange comfort, one she couldn't have defined, and at the same time engendered even greater needs.

He dipped one arm beneath her knees, the other like a steel brace at her back, lifted her, held her close against his chest. “You shouldn't have come here,” he said.

Lydia didn't know whether he meant she shouldn't have come to the cabin or she shouldn't have come to Quade's Harbor, and she didn't care. She was under a greedy enchantment, and she wanted as much of Brigham as he would allow her. Her tiresome New England practicality had been thrust into a dark closet of her spirit, imprisoned there, and she had no desire to free it.

Brigham's gray eyes revealed both pride and pleas. Then, with another moan, he mastered Lydia's mouth with his own.

When the kiss ended, he laid her lightly on the quilt-covered bed. His touch was passionate, yet every bit as gentle as if he'd been handling the most precious, fragile porcelain in existence. Slowly, he undressed her.

When Lydia wore only firelight and the chill of a rainy night, Brigham began taking off his own clothes. Unlike the other masculine bodies she had viewed, his was whole, unscarred, and beautifully muscled. He was so magnificent that Lydia dragged in a deep breath and nearly choked on it.

He lay on his side next to her, his hand cherishing her breasts, each in turn, fondling the nipples until they were hard and eager. He caressed her neck and the underside of her chin, and then teased the flat expanse of her stomach, making the flesh leap and quiver beneath his fingertips.

Lydia closed her eyes and arched her head back as he ventured deliciously, dangerously, near the moist delta where her femininity was awakening. The sensible part of her raved and paced inside its closet, protesting, but Lydia did not, could not, heed the warning.

She felt as though this moment had been bearing down on her since the beginning of time; as though she'd been created to make physical music under this man's hands and mouth, like an instrument.

Brigham knelt between her legs, gently gripped her ankles, set her feet so that her knees were high and apart. Then he fell to her belly, kissing the taut-satin skin, teasing her navel with the tip of his tongue.

It was a scandal, and Lydia loved it. Her skin was moist with perspiration, her heart was racing, and her head moved from side to side as though in a fever.

When Brigham burrowed through the silken shelter guarding her womanhood and boldly took her into his mouth, she cried out in pleasure and thrust her hips upward off the bed. Brigham nestled his hands beneath her bottom, held her firmly to his lips, and continued to enjoy her.

A storm of ecstasy raged inside Lydia's supple body as she twisted from side to side, forward and back, reveling in the merciless flicks of Brigham's tongue and the drawing of his lips. She strained higher and higher off the bed, desperate to maintain the fevered link between them, an ancient and almost continuous cry coming from the depths of her being.

Still supporting her buttocks with one strong hand, Brigham raised the other to caress her breasts while the tempest thundered wildly within her. Her cries became frantic, the motions of her body more desperate still, and then, with a strangled sob, she fell in trembling relief to the mattress.

She lifted her arms to Brigham, fully expecting to take him inside her, to give him what remained of her innocence as a loving gift, but instead of taking her, he lay beside her again and fitted her close against his frame.

“Brigham,” she whispered, in a despair of wanting.

His lips moved, warm and firm and soft, against her temple. “Not tonight, love. Not when your feelings are out of control this way.”

Lydia's soul shriveled a little, out of loneliness and disappointment, but her reason rejoiced. Brigham's assessment of her mental state had been correct; she was not in her right mind. She had moaned and pitched under his fingers and his tongue like a wanton, raised herself to him like a sacrifice, sobbed in glorious surrender while he satisfied her.

And she'd done all this because she was overwrought, because she'd come to love Devon as a brother and he was so grievously hurt. She'd wanted to give Brigham comfort, as well as take it from him, but it wasn't a choice she would have made in the cool light of good sense, and she knew it.

She began to cry softly, trying hard not to make a sound, but Brigham knew. He caressed her cheek with one callused hand, wiped away her tears with the rough side of his thumb.

“It's all right, Lydia,” he said hoarsely, holding her blessedly close. “I went too far, I know, but things won't go any further.” He kissed her again, unromantically, on the bridge of her nose. “I'm sorry.”

Lydia thought of the way her body had flown while Brigham loved her, and recalled how her very soul had seemed to soar free of her body during those wicked, violently joyous moments while she had been totally his.
Don't be sorry
, she pleaded, in silent grief. She had no excuse to offer, and couldn't have uttered a word even if she had.

Brigham just held her after that, and the experience was like medicine to her troubled spirit. She had always given comfort, though in less intimate forms, of course, but she'd rarely received it herself. In a way, for all its tender peace, the protection of Brigham's strong embrace was headier and more glorious than his bold lovemaking.

Presently, however, it occurred to her that such intercourse between a man and a woman was, by its very nature, reciprocal. She reached out to touch him, brazen in the sudden intensity of her curiosity, and was startled to feel his manhood straining, hard and imperious against her palm.

He gave a strangled cry when she closed her hand around him, the sound hissing through his teeth as if she'd held a hot coal to his flesh. He swore deliriously and curled his fingers around her wrist to free himself.

“I'm trying to be a gentleman,” he breathed, after a long interval of deep, ragged breathing. “But if you do that again, I won't be held accountable for my actions. Is that understood?”

Lydia's eyes widened at the note of dangerous sincerity in his voice, and at the same time she wanted to find out what she was missing. If it was more of what he'd just taught her, and better, he wouldn't have to worry about being a gentleman because she wouldn't be a lady.

“I never knew it felt like that,” she marveled.

Brigham groaned, like a man in the throes of cholera, and moved away from her slightly. “Please, Lydia,” he pleaded. “Don't talk about it anymore. I already feel as if I've got a lighted stick of dynamite between my legs.”

The sudden return of her inhibitions gave her the impetuousness to sit up, turn her back and reach for her clothes, which were lying in a heap beside the bed. Her face went crimson and her lower lip trembled. How on earth would she face Brigham again after the way she'd acted?

His hand closed gently over her right shoulder. “I need a wife,” he said, in a tone that might have been warmer instead of coolly practical. “My daughters need a mother, now more than ever. I'm asking you again, Lydia—marry me.”

It took all her strength to rise from that bed, walk to the fireside and begin dressing herself. She knew Brigham was watching her every move, but there was no helping that, because the cabin had only one room and a loft, and there was nowhere to hide. “I know I came here on the agreement that I'd marry for my keep,” she said, her voice shaking. The tragic truth was that it was all she could do not to return to that bed, surrender to Brigham again, tease him until he finally took solace in her body. “But for the first time in my life I have to go back on my word. I can't be your wife, Brigham.”

She heard the rope springs of the bed creak as he sat up, and turned her back swiftly, her motions frantic as she tried to dress.

When he spoke, he was standing so close that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her nape. “Why not?” he demanded quietly.

Lydia bit her lower lip, and her eyes filled with tears. She could not turn around, could not face him. “Because I won't have a husband who doesn't love me,” she whispered when she found the force inside herself to speak. “It would be better to have none at all.”

Brigham didn't touch her, nor did he reply. She felt him turn away, unable or unwilling to offer her the one shining thing she wanted most in all the world. In the moments that followed, she grieved bitterly for the dream he'd offered and then taken away.