Chapter 4 #3
“I wasn’t talking about myths. Though you look like one with flowers in your hair.” Gently he touched a petal near her cheek. “‘There be none of Beauty’s daughters/ With a magic like thee/ And like music on the waters/ Is thy sweet voice to me.’”
It was a dangerous man, she knew instinctively, who could smile like the devil and quote poetry in a voice like silk.
His eyes were the color of the sky just before dusk, a deep, dreamy blue.
She’d never thought she was the kind of woman who could go weak just looking into a man’s eyes. She didn’t want to be.
“I should go back. I have a lot of work to do.”
“You work too much.” His brow rose when she turned her head aside and frowned. “What button did I push?”
Restless, more annoyed with herself than with him, she shrugged. “Someone always seems to be saying that to me. Sometimes I even say it to myself.”
“It isn’t a crime, is it?”
She laughed because his question seemed so sincere. “Not yet, anyway.”
“It’s not a crime to take a day off?”
“No, but—”
“No’s enough. Why don’t we say ‘It’s Miller Time?’” At her baffled look, he spread his hands. “You know, like on the commercials.”
“Yes, I know.” Hooking an arm around one upraised knee, she studied him. Poetry one moment, beer commercials the next. “Every now and again, Hornblower, I wonder if you’re for real.”
“Oh, I’m real.” He stretched out to watch the sky. The grass was cool and soft beneath him, and the wind played lazily through the trees. “What do you see? Up there?”
She tilted her head back. “The sky. A blue one, thank goodness, with a few clouds that should clear by evening.”
“Don’t you ever wonder what’s beyond it?”
“Beyond what?”
“The blue.” With his eyes half-closed, he imagined . . . the endless sweep of stars, the pure black of space, the beautiful symmetry of orbiting moons and planets. “Don’t you ever think about the worlds up there, just out of reach?”
“No.” She saw only the arc of blue, speared through by mountains. “I suppose it’s because I think more about worlds that were. My work usually keeps my feet, and my eyes, on the ground.”
“If there’s going to be a world tomorrow, you have to look to the stars.” He caught himself. It seemed foolish to pine for something that might be lost. How odd it was that he was thinking so much of the future, and Libby so much of the past, when they had the here and now.
“What movies and music?” he asked abruptly. Libby shook her head. There seemed to be no order to his thought patterns. “Before, you said you liked movies and music for fun. Which ones?”
“All sorts. Good or bad. I’m easily entertained.”
“Tell me your favorite movie.”
“That’s difficult.” But his eyes were so intense, so earnest, that she picked one at random from her list of favorites. “Casablanca.”
He liked the sound of it, the way she said it. “What’s it about?”
“Come on, Hornblower, everyone knows what it’s about.”
“I missed it.” He gave her a quick, guileless-smile that no woman should have trusted. “I must have been busy when it came out.”
She laughed again, with a quick shake of her head, a brightening of her eyes. “Sure. Both of us must have had pretty full schedules in the forties.”
He let that pass. “What was the story?” He didn’t care about the plot. He only wanted to hear her talk, to watch her as she did.
To humor him, and because it was easy to sit by the water and daydream, she began.
He listened, enjoying the way she told the tale of lost love, heroism and sacrifice.
Even more, he enjoyed the way she gestured with her hands, the way her voice ebbed and flowed with her feelings.
And the way her eyes mirrored them, darkening, softening, when she spoke of lovers reunited, then pulled apart, by destiny.
“No happy ending,” Cal murmured.
“No, but I always felt that Rick found her again, years later, after the war.”
“Why?”
She had settled back, pillowing her head on her folded arms. “Because they belonged together. When people do, they find each other, no matter what.” She was smiling when she turned her head, but the smile faded slowly when she saw the way he was looking at her.
As if they were alone, she thought. Not just alone in the mountains, but totally, completely alone, as Adam and Eve had been.
She yearned. For the first time in her life, she yearned—body, mind and heart.
“Don’t.” He said the word quietly as she started to scramble to her feet. The lightest touch of his hand on her shoulder kept her still. “I wish you weren’t afraid of me.”
“I’m not.” But she was breathless, as if she’d already been running.
“Of what, then?”
“Of nothing.” His voice could be so gentle, she thought. So terrifyingly gentle.
“But you’re tense.” With his long, limber fingers, he began to rub at the tight muscles of her shoulders. He shifted, and his lips skimmed over her temple, as cool and stirring as the breeze. “Tell me what you’re afraid of.”
“Of this.” She lifted her hands to push against his chest. “I don’t know how to fight what I’m feeling.”
“Why do you have to?” He skimmed a hand down the side of her body, astonished by the grinding need in his own.
“It’s too soon.” But she was no longer pushing him away. Her resolve was melting in a flood of hot, hammering need.
“Soon?” His laugh was strained as he buried his face against her throat. “It’s already been centuries.”
“Caleb, please.” There was an urgency in her voice, a plea that was at once weak and unarguable. He knew as he felt her body vibrate beneath his that he could have her. Just as he knew as he looked down at the clouded confusion in her eyes that once he had she might not forgive him.
Need jerked inside him. It was a new and frustrating sensation. He rolled to one side and stood, and with his back to her he watched the water ripple.
“Do you drive all men crazy?”
She brought her knees up tight against her breasts. “No, of course not.”
“Then I’m just lucky, I guess.” He lifted his eyes to the sky. He wanted to be back there, spearing through space. Alone. Free. He heard the grass rustle as she stood and wondered if he would ever truly be free again. “I want you, Libby.”
She didn’t speak. She couldn’t. No man had ever said those three simple words to her before. If thousands had, it wouldn’t have mattered. No one would ever have spoken them in just that way.
Pushed to the brink by her silence, he whirled around. He wasn’t her amiable, slightly odd patient now, but a furious, healthy and obviously dangerous man.
“Damn it, Libby, am I supposed to say nothing, to feel nothing? Are those the rules here? Well, the hell with it. I want you, and if I stay near you much longer, I’m going to have you.”
“Have me?” She’d been certain her system was too weak and warm for anger. But it filled her with a flash that had her body straightening like an arrow. “What? Like a shiny car on a showroom floor? You can want anything you like, Cal, but when those wants concern me I’ve got some say in it.”
She was magnificent . . . unbearably vivid, with fury in her eyes and flowers clinging to her hair. He would remember her like this, always. He knew it, and he knew the memory would be bittersweet, and yet his temper pushed him forward.
“You can have all the say you like.” Taking both her arms, he pulled her against him. “But I’ll have something before I go.”
This time she struggled. It was pride, pride and anger, that had her jerking free. Then his arms came around her, twin vises that clamped her body unerringly to his. She would have sworn at him, but his mouth closed hard over hers.
It was nothing like the first time. Then he had seduced, persuaded, tempted. Now he possessed, not as if he had the right, but simply taking it. Her muffled protest went unheeded, her struggles ignored. Panic skidded up her spine, then slid down again, overwhelmed by pure desire.
She didn’t want to be forced. She didn’t want to be left without choice. That was her mind talking. It was right; it was reasonable. But her body leaped forward, leaving intellect far behind. She reveled in the strength, in the tension, even in the temper. She met power with power.
She came alive in his arms, making him forget who and why and where.
When he could taste her, hot and potent on his lips, no other world, no other time, existed.
For him it was as new, as exciting, as frightening as it was for her.
Irresistible. The thought didn’t come to him.
No thought could. But she was as irresistible as the gravity that held their feet on the ground, as compelling as the need that sent their pulses racing.
He dragged her head back and plunged into the velvet moistness of her waiting mouth.
The world was spinning. With a moan, she ran her hands up his back, until she was clinging desperately to his shoulders.
She wanted it to go on spinning, whirling madly, until she was dizzy and breathless and limp.
She could hear the murmur of the water, the whisper of the breeze through the pines.
There was a strong shaft of sunlight on her back.
She knew that in reality her feet were still on solid ground. But the world was spinning.
And she was in love.
The sound that came from deep in her throat was one of surrender. To him. To herself.
He murmured her name. A searing ache arrowed through him as desire veered painfully toward a new, uncharted emotion. The hand that had been roaming through her hair clenched reflexively. He felt the petals of a flower crush. The scent, sweet and dying, rose on the air.
He jerked away, appalled. The flower was in his hand, fragile and mangled.
His gaze was drawn to her lips, still warm and swollen from his.
His muscles trembled. A wave of self-disgust rose up inside him.
Never, never had he forced himself on a woman.
The idea itself was abhorrent to him, the most shameful of sins.
The reality was unforgivable—most unforgivable because she mattered as no one else ever had.
“Did I hurt you?” he managed.
Libby shook her head quickly, too quickly. Hurt? she thought. That was nothing. Devastated. With one kiss he had devastated her, showed her that her will could be crumbled and her heart lost.
He wouldn’t apologize. Cal turned away until he was certain he was under control enough to speak rationally. But he would not apologize for wanting, or for taking. He would have nothing else of her when he left.
“I can’t promise that won’t happen again, but I’ll do my best to see that it doesn’t. You should go back inside now.”
And that was all? Libby wondered. After he had stripped her emotions to the bone he could calmly tell her to go back inside? She opened her mouth to protest, and she nearly took a step toward him before she stopped herself.
He was right, of course. What had happened should never happen again. They were strangers, whatever her heart told her to the contrary. Without a word, she turned and left him alone by the creek.
Later, when the sun and shadows had shifted, he opened his hand to let the wounded flower fall into the water. He watched it drift away.