Hot Touch (12 page)

She shook her head at him wretchedly. “It’s almost over. I checked ten minutes ago.”

His eyes grainy, Paul quietly opened the doors to the large-animal section. Someone had dimmed all the lights except the one over the gazelle’s stall. Wolf lay just outside its open door, his head on his paws.

The tip of his tail fluttered in greeting, but he seemed weighted down by the impending presence of death.

Paul walked softly to the door and stopped, his throat twisting.

Caroline knelt beside the gazelle, her fingers brushing tenderly over the tiny, fine-boned head. Anna had removed all the tubes.

“You’re free now,” Paul heard Caroline whisper in a gentle voice. “There. Go home. I feel it, yes. Go home. No more pain, no more fear. Yes, you’re safe. That’s right, you’re not old and sick anymore. Go on, go on. Yes, I see the light, I see it.”

What did she see? What did all this mean? Paul shook his head. It was just the way she talked to animals, commiserating with them as if she knew what they felt. It was part of her technique.

Caroline rested her forehead against the gazelle’s neck. Her other hand tightened on the animal’s shoulder, then stroked tenderly.

“Good-bye,” she murmured. “It’s wonderful. I
understand
. You’re not alone anymore. Good-bye, sweetheart, good-bye.”

After a long, tortured moment, Paul whispered, “None of us has to be alone, unless we want it that way.”

Caroline looked up slowly, her eyes limpid with sorrow but also glowing with awe. It was the most amazing sight, and he stared at her as if he’d just glimpsed heaven. What had she seen?

“Some creatures are meant to live and die alone,” she said, and the light faded from her eyes.

He sighed in disagreement, knelt beside the gazelle, and checked the silent artery in her neck. He caressed the gazelle’s head. “Others will be born to take your place,” he promised gruffly. “We won’t let your kind disappear.”

Caroline made a crying sound. “I wish I were a healer.”

“Shhh. You were her friend. You kept her from being afraid tonight.” He held his hand out. “Enough. You need to rest.
Allez.
”

She took his hand and wobbled upright, exhausted from the hours she’d spent by the gazelle. Paul led her from the stall, but she stopped so that she could look back one more time.

“I see that you’re very cynical about these things, just the way you told me you were,” he said gently.

She ducked her head in chagrin and walked ahead of him, her movements hampered by fatigue and stiffness. When she stumbled leaving the building, Paul caught her by one elbow.

Before she could protest he swung her up in his arms. Shocked, she clasped the front of his shirt desperately and held on. “This isn’t necessary, doc.”

“I owe you one,” he said simply. “Relax.”

The comfort in his voice pushed a button inside her; she rested her dried, matted hair against his shoulder and was asleep by the time he reached the house. Her childlike response flooded his chest with tenderness, but again a perturbing question ate at him—would he ever understand this complicated woman?

Once inside the house Paul hesitated at the base of the staircase. Then, his decision made, he carried her
up to his room, put her on his bed, and sat down beside her.

“What?” she asked groggily as soon as her body settled on the unaccustomed luxury of his big, comfortable mattress.

“Sleep,
chère
, sleep. You can go back to your own bed tomorrow. I’ll sleep there tonight.” He ran his fingertips over her face, studying her in the darkness, coaxing her to be still.

A languid shudder ran through her. “The things you do with your touch”—she said the words vaguely, but with a thread of worry—“cause trouble.”

“For both of us,” he agreed, and quickly sat back. Paul grasped her feet and removed her wet jogging shoes. Then he clamped a hand on her knee and squeezed for attention. “Get undressed,
chère
. Don’t lay here and catch cold.”

“Okay.” She rolled over on one side, curled her hands under her chin, and went back to sleep.

“Caroline,” Paul whispered in exasperation. When there was no answer, he reached around her and unfastened her fashionably baggy trousers.

She stirred a little when he anchored both big hands in the floppy material around her ankles. He knelt by her feet and gracefully whipped the trousers down her legs. Gasping, she flopped over on her back and tried to jerk her feet away from him.

“Doc? Doc Belue! Blue! Paul!”

“That about covers it, yes,” he quipped as he lifted one foot and pulled the trousers off, then did the other. “Or
uncovers
it.
Dieu!
”

She crossed her legs and clasped her hands over herself. “I didn’t have time for panties.”

Paul stared down at the spot her hands covered, then at the pale, luscious hips unmarred by evidence of lingerie. He got up and slung a blanket over her, then stood beside the bed frozen with control, his fists clenched.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I’m not mad at you. I’m just trying to remember all the reasons why I shouldn’t want you.”

“Then I’m not sorry,” she murmured, her voice strained. “There’s nothing I’d like better than to be held in your arms. Just to be held … to share what we feel about the gazelle. That’s all I ask.”

She sat up, her lower body covered by the blanket and her upper body still covered by her shirt. Paul almost groaned when she held out her arms to him. “I swear,” she said tearfully. “I don’t want to seduce you, because I know you’d resent me for it later. Can’t we just be friends for a minute?”

He was tortured by the desire to offer comfort of many kinds. Lost in this vulnerable moment, he could make love to her without thinking; it would be so easy to finish undressing her and give her the tender passion she seemed to need, at least for the moment.

Paul shut his eyes and told her fiercely, “I don’t want to start something that someone else would get to finish. After you go back to California I don’t want to sit around here wishing that I could kill whoever you make love to.”

She cried out with a tormented sound that surprised him. He looked at her as she slid from his bed, grabbing for her pants.

“Don’t leave,” he amended as she wrapped them around herself like a skirt. “Dammit, Caroline, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s all right,” she said in a choked voice. “I wasn’t thinking straight. It’ll be better if I go to my own room.”

He grabbed her shoulder and looked down at her grimly. “If you wanted the same things I do, I’d put my arms around you and never let you go.”

She shivered under his touch. “What things do you want?”

“I’m a one-woman man and I want a one-man woman.”

“A one-man woman who’d be content to stay here at Grande Rivage.”

“Right.”

“Sorry,” she said, her voice breaking. “I can’t do it.”

He cupped her chin in one hand. “What? Be a one-man woman or live here in Louisiana?”

“Which is most important to you?”

“Both,” he said immediately.

“No options, eh?” she asked wearily, then took a ragged breath. “Okay. I’ll make this easy for us. I can’t do either.”

He let go of her and stepped back, his posture rigid. “And I can’t play the field the way you do. I wish I could be modern and say ‘What the hell? Who cares?’ But I can’t. I want commitment. I’ve never gone into a relationship where I didn’t hope that it’d lead to marriage.”

“Then why aren’t you married?”

“There’s someone special out there, and I’ve been waiting to find her.”

“You’re very old-fashioned. Good luck.”

“Don’t you ever feel that way, Caroline? That there’s someone worth waiting for?”

She shifted from one foot to the other and rammed her free hand through her hair. “I … damn. It’s late. What’s the point in this discussion?”

Before he could answer she gave him a kiss on the cheek and said raggedly, “I admire old-fashioned attitudes.”

Then she turned and ran from his room.

When Frank trucked everyone deep into the swamp for four hellish days and three bug-bombed nights, she grew so desperate to see Paul and hear his voice that one afternoon Wolf began whining in shared anguish.

We go home to Master
.

Not yet, Wolf. Master would be angry
.

Bad you? Bad Wolf?

Yes. He’d think we were both bad
.

Wolf slept under her cot that night, and she hung one arm over the side so that her fingers could tangle in his ruff. Caroline dreamed wistful dreams about seeing Paul again.

When she woke up the next morning, Wolf was gone.

After she calmed down Frank and the director, she took a truck and made the long drive back to the plantation along muddy swamp roads. Caroline parked by one of the barns and climbed out gratefully. The muggy air had turned her neatly creased hiking shorts and crisp T-shirt into something resembling Paul’s accordion.

She walked up behind Paul as he stood by the panther’s fence, watching Cat stare at a tawny female cougar. Wolf lay at Paul’s feet, facing her direction. His eyes became sly slits and he seemed to smile.

Master wants to see you
.

Caroline couldn’t concentrate on rebuking him because she was too intent on studying Paul from head to toe. He stood with his long legs braced and his arms crossed over his chest. His jeans and shirt were sweat-stained; his laced boots were covered in mud.

Caroline sighed at the way sorrow mingled with reckless excitement inside her chest. She knew now just how far gone she was. She wanted this sweaty, dirty, troublesome man with a terrifying certainty.

The cougar rolled over on her back and waved her front paws at Cat playfully.

Cat hissed at her.

“Dye her coat black,” Caroline offered simply. “He’ll mate with her if she doesn’t look so alien to him.”

Paul turned quickly, surprised. For a moment he held her eyes with a charged gaze full of potential, and she believed that he was glad to see her. Then he
seemed to remember that she was as alien to him as the cougar to Cat.

“You’re dressed normally for once,” he observed, nodding curtly at her shorts and top.

“I can be as ordinary as the rest of the world when I want to be.”

He looked down at Wolf and commanded, “Go back. Now. Do what she tells you to do and behave.” He dismissed Wolf with an angry gesture toward Caroline.

She almost cried at the way Wolf slunk to her, his nobility gone, absolutely humiliated by his master’s unexpected harshness. She felt as if she’d been dismissed the same way.

“Dye the cougar black,” Caroline repeated, her voice weary. “It’ll make Cat think she’s one of his kind.”

“You know a lot about deceiving males, eh?”

She drew her chin up and eyed him proudly while little rivulets of pain curled around her rib cage. “I know how to make them do what’s best for them.”

“You mean what’s best for you.”

“I thought we were discussing panthers.”

“No more trips home the past two weekends. Why not,
chère
?”

“That’s none of your business.”

His eyes hardened even more. “Best you go home next weekend. I have company coming.”

“Oh? Ordinary people actually visit you here in the bog?”

“Nothing ordinary about this visitor.”

“I can’t go home. We’re filming next Saturday.”

“Then at least be polite to her—or I’ll take your air conditioner away.”

She arched one red-gold brow jauntily but a knot of worry grew in her stomach. “I’d never turn my wicked California tongue loose on your mother.”

“Not my mother, no. A good friend. A good woman. And her son.”

Caroline put her hands on her hips and drawled, “Well, Sheriff, you don’t have to worry none about us
bad
women. We’ll keep to the saloon and leave the respectable family folk alone. Ceptin’, of course, when we has to step out to buy more paint fer our faces and garters fer our tawdry thighs.”

He almost smiled at her nonsense. Then he gritted his teeth and forced the humor away.

“Eat with the crew while she’s here. I’ll be using the kitchen, and I want privacy.”

Caroline clenched her fists but said lightly, “So be it. When I want to leave the house I’ll push the air conditioner out of my bedroom window and crawl through the opening. You won’t have to see me at all.”

“
Bien.
”

“
Beans
to you too, doc. Are you even going to introduce me to her?”

“Why should I?”

“If she bumps into me some night on the way to the john, I don’t want her to think I’m a ghost. I prefer to spook people for better reasons.”

“She won’t bump into you. She’ll be staying upstairs.”

“Oh?” Caroline was surprised that she could continue bantering with him, considering the dread closing around her throat. “Then the only
bumping
will be the headboard of your bed?”

His eyes flashed a warning. “Not with her son here. Us old Southern boys have a code of honor.”

She sighed grandly. “Too bad Sherman’s not around to remind you whose honor won the Civil War.”

“Yeah. Burned down Atlanta lately, Yank?”

“I’m from out west,” she quipped.

“West, north. It’s all Yankees. No difference.”

She fluttered an imaginary fan before her face. “Why, suh, you fo’get my
fine
southern heritage on Mama’s side of tha family.”

“It is a fine one. Damned fine.”

She dropped the invisible fan and the accent. “Tell it to the kid everybody called
Scary Carrie
. Tell it to the teenager who was willing to do anything to make boys forget the way her face looked.”

The subtle shift in his expression from anger to compassion caught her off guard, and she had to fight to keep the tears out of her eyes.
What are you trying to do, girl? Make him start liking you again?

He took a step toward her, looking troubled. Breathing hard, she took a step back. He gestured vaguely, as if trying to sum up some question of immense importance to him.

“Is that why … why you don’t want just one man now? You have to keep proving that someone can love you?”