Kisses From Heaven (8 page)

He drew down the wispy panties and finally stood up to take off his jeans, his other clothing. His eyes never left hers; she was trembling with the sudden separation, her own eyes like dark silver.

Her blood seemed to still for that moment he stood towering over her, before he came down to her again. She had never felt quite so small, so vulnerable. In his clothes, Buck gave the illusion of power, of strength; without them, his flesh took on the truth of those characteristics. A blend of the most primitive emotions seemed to swamp her mind as he slid down next to her again, as she saw the fierce, dark need in his eyes, as he drew her close once more.

Tremors shook her body at the sudden total awareness of intimacy. Like shock waves, the graze of his bare, hard thighs against her own, the feel of those thighs against the smooth palms of her small hands. She could feel the building tension in his every muscle, and her hands courted those shock waves, danced with danger. He shifted slightly, and she shifted with him. The thought of any further separation was intolerable. As if he understood, his mouth captured hers yet again, his tongue-play increasingly erotic, and she returned a pressure equally explosive as she learned what pleased him. She wanted desperately to share in a way she had never understood sharing before. Her palm glided over his hip to his abdomen to more intimate flesh. He stopped moving, and a shudder took his body, then his lips softened on hers, their pressure suddenly tender. “Loren. You’re so small. If I hurt you…”

“You couldn’t,” she whispered back. So sure. Rationally, perhaps she was not so sure, but her emotional instincts already had the answers. He was impossibly tender for a man of such physical power and size; his touch had more giving than taking.

“My sweet lover,” he murmured as he took her lips again…and again. Her throat released little erratic sounds; a silken sheen of moisture was beginning to coat both their skins. His hand stroked the length of her over and over, each time teasing closer to the feminine core of her. Her nails dented his back when he touched, invaded…“Please,” she murmured helplessly.

Her skin was on fire; the dark desire in his expression pulsing through her bloodstream. She could feel restless tears in her eyes when he moved over her, soothing her with soft love words, and then he was within, filling her to her soul. The silken seduction was completed; neither of them wanted to dally any longer. It was a fierce climb up, a splintering of the senses, a wild, uncontrollable feeling of soaring. Explosive shudders echoed over and over in Loren’s body, she heard Buck’s hoarse cry.

He held her cheek to his chest for a long time afterward. Loren felt drained, even bewildered by the explosiveness released in her own body. Buck kept stroking, stroking…until her breathing became normal, until she became conscious again. The fire was sputtering in the stove, the daylight fading rapidly; there was a soft quilt beneath her.

“That was a mistake, you know.” Buck’s palm lingered on her throat, then arched her neck back so he could see her face. Sleepy and flushed, her features seemed different after lovemaking, and the look in his eyes was possessive, taking in the unique and intimate loveliness that he had brought out in her. “Definitely a mistake,” he growled. “You just lost the option to back out, Loren. I’ll never let anyone else touch you.”

She half smiled, shaking her head just slightly at his nonsense, still bemused by his loving. He kissed her forehead gently. “You love me, little one.”

“I love you,” she agreed. It wasn’t hard.

“I don’t know how you managed celibacy for all this time, Loren, but you certainly weren’t cut out to be a nun.” He shifted, sitting up to draw on his shirt, clearly amused at the sudden color in her cheeks. “In fact, it doesn’t make sense,” he said gently. “Did that ex-husband of yours leave scars, or have you still been caring for him all this time?”

He got up, motioned her sternly to stay on the floor as he put on his jeans. He went into the kitchen but returned just moments later with two glasses of dark red wine. She accepted hers, taking just a short sip, wanting very much to give him an honest answer to his question without quite knowing what to say. It had been important to her in her marriage that she please Hal sexually, and from his responses, she believed she had. But her own responses had been of a different nature, and until now she had always seen herself as loving but not particularly passionate. She had needed no outlet for what she didn’t believe she possessed, and she had always had dozens of places where she could expend other kinds of love from her family to her men at the plant…

“Loren? Is it memories?” he probed.

“No, nothing like that,” she assured him finally. “It was more…just having to put some needs out of my mind, Buck. Responsibilities always interfered with forming certain relationships…”

“Yes,” he murmured as he bent down to add wood to the stove. “We’re about to talk about that, Loren. We’re about to talk about a lot of things.”

The bread was in the oven, the potatoes washed and jacketed in foil, and the salad made. Buck prepared the steaks. The dinner took twice as long to prepare because he kept stopping every few minutes to touch her. He had brushed her hair himself, had forced a pair of his socks over her derelict mismatches so her feet wouldn’t be cold on the kitchen floor. She set the dishes on the coffee table in the living room because the kitchen was too cold, and by the time they sat on the carpet across from each other, Loren felt a permanent flush on her face. She had never felt quite so beautiful, so cherished, never so cossetted.

It had become dark outside, the way night pops down like a curtain in winter, and the lake outside was like ink, still and black. There were no other lights or signs of people around anywhere. They might just have been in a universe of their own making. The steaks steamed fragrantly, and butter was melting on the baked potatoes; she could not remember a dinner that looked or smelled as good. She was ravenous, and Buck served her a ridiculously large portion of steak—almost as large as his own.

“You
are
aware I’m half your size,” she said teasingly.

“I’m aware of every inch of you,” he scolded back wickedly, and then his smile faded, and he poured her a little more wine. “You really haven’t given me much choice but to marry you, Loren.”

She thought he was teasing. “Are you trying to spoil the first illicit thing I’ve ever done in my life?” Her smile disappeared when she saw his expression. “You can’t possibly be serious!”

“So we haven’t known each other very long.” He took a bite of steak, his eyes boring straight into hers. “You know the core of the man, Loren. Well enough to have made love with him. Well enough to have said you love him. Have you changed your mind?”

She set down her knife and fork and curled up her knees, her hands in her lap. “Buck,” she said despairingly.

“Did you lie, Loren?”

“No.” She shook her head. “But that has nothing to do with it…” This tough, craggy-featured man had very soft eyes, at least where she was concerned. Or always had. But suddenly, those eyes took on a hard jade fire that seared, and the jaw set in lines that didn’t give. She felt stunned, the world suddenly knocked for six.

“I know all about your family, and your responsibilities, Loren. We’ll get to that. But we’ll stay with the two of us for another minute or two.” When he saw she wasn’t eating, he speared a piece of steak and held it in front of her lips. He motioned to her twice before she took it. “I knew you weren’t ideal affair material from the moment I set eyes on you. In fact, you’re rotten affair material, Loren.”

She found another tidbit of steak in front of her mouth before she’d finished swallowing the first. She swallowed, shook her head—but the fork stayed in front of her lips. “Buck…” Her parted lips were force-fed the steak; she glared at him.

“Apart from your character, half-pint, I’m not going to be satisfied with being squeezed into your busy schedule. It wouldn’t work, Loren, an affair. You said it yourself; you run yourself into the ground until there’s nothing left over. There’s no time for loving in your life. Or did you think you were just going to be able to walk away after today?”

She swallowed the steak and this time firmly pushed aside his hands. “No,” she said quietly, “but I thought you would, Buck. I knew what I was risking when you came into my life. I knew my responsibilities and that I didn’t have the…right…to a relationship. Love doesn’t really conquer all; I’m not seventeen anymore. I wanted…my minutes with you, whatever we could have. But when I go home tonight, it’s to Gramps and hiding bottles and Angela and the house. Then there’s my job, the four hundred–plus men, Frank, the extra paperwork…I can’t change that, Buck—”

“I can.” He motioned to her plate. “Eat, Loren.”

But she no longer felt hungry. Buck wasn’t angry, but there was control with a capital
C
on his features, in the way his fork stabbed the steak, the way his eyes pinned hers, the way his jaw was set, and in the tension in his shoulders. Had she asked for so much? she wondered fleetingly. She had reached out to the one man who had touched her in so many years; was it so wrong to put everything aside on the promise of moments—when she didn’t have any more than moments to offer?

He stood up, towering over her as he picked up their two plates. “Just stay sitting. I’ll bring the coffee. I want you to listen—”

“Buck, I really think I’d better be going home,” Loren said miserably.

He disappeared into the kitchen as if he hadn’t heard her. She knew he had. Restlessly, she got up, stretching muscles suddenly taut with tension. She wandered to the bare panes of glass that overlooked the lake. A March wind was frothing up little silvery waves; clouds were ghosting across the night sky.

In the window’s reflection, she saw Buck walk back into the room, carting two cups of coffee to the little table and then standing, hands on hips, looking at her. She felt a sudden, mortifying awareness of the faint soreness she felt from his possession of her. She was his. Rationally, she knew better, but emotionally she was so conscious of that single physical truth that she felt the sudden blister of tears in her eyes.

“What matters is that I have you close,” Buck said quietly, coming from behind her to pull her gently against his chest. At first her back was rigid and then not. It was a hug of warmth she could not deny herself. “That’s all that matters, Loren. The only chance we have to build something together is if we have time together. That’s easier than you know, but your pride is in the way, Loren—”

She half turned to him, brushing wearily at her eyes. “Buck, I can’t believe you’re serious—”

“For a beginning, the name is Bartholomew Leeds,” he said grimly. “Bartholomew Arthur Leeds. All the same, you call me anything but Buck and I’ll have you over my knee with a hairbrush in two seconds flat.”

He wanted her to smile, so she did.

“See this?” He pointed to the crescent-shaped scar near his jaw. “Where do you think I got it?”

“A fight,” Loren guessed.

“A fall out of a tree when I was six. I don’t tell anyone else that either,” Buck said flatly. “The scar on my forehead was from a bike crash. The first actual fight I ever had was with a girl, and she won. I was eleven. It set my ego back years…”

Her eyes cleared with genuine amusement as she listened, both of them carting dishes to the kitchen. He had a reputation as too smart for his own good by the time he’d reached junior high school; since he looked tough, he played the part. He told a half-dozen tales where he came off as less than victorious, a swaggering Mr. Cool with the confidence of a wrinkled carrot was the image he projected to her, one she knew could not have been entirely true.

“There were six of them that talked me into it. I wasn’t even sure I knew what a red-light district was. I was only fourteen. The rest of the gang were sixteen or over—”

Loren wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “You didn’t
really
lose your virginity to a prostitute? I thought that only happened in books…”

“I don’t think we’ll dwell on that—”

“What did she look like? What did she do? Where was it, Buck?”

He shook his head at her. “I would like to move past fourteen, nosy; it was hardly the best of experiences. I wouldn’t even have brought it up, but I was trying to build trust, Loren. To show you there is nothing I’m not willing to tell you.” He shook his head again with an amused grin for her obvious fascination with the topic. “If you will let me continue with this riveting saga—”

She poured fresh coffee for both of them and unplugged the pot. “I wouldn’t be a man for anything,” she said thoughtfully. “A fourteen-year-old boy having to prove himself… When I think of how horrendous it was to lose my own virginity, and I was twenty and thought myself in love—and a man is under so much onus to have all this experience beforehand. We talk so much of women’s lib, when so little has changed for the men in our culture. It’s really not at all fair…”

“Well, now you’ve got me diverted.” he said with mock disgust. They both sat at the kitchen table with their coffee, Loren with one leg curled under her, half leaning against the wall just as he was. “Horrendous, Loren? How did that word just happen to slip out? You said it was your sex life that kept your marriage together for as long as it did.”

She’d forgotten telling him that. She stared into the dark liquid of her coffee for several moments, all too aware that certain truths did “slip out” when she was with him. When she glanced back up to meet his eyes, she considered how impossible it would be to lie to him. “It did keep us together,” she said quietly. “From Hal’s viewpoint. He wanted me, and because of that…I stayed in the marriage longer than I wanted to.”

He, too, was silent for a moment, but his eyes never left her face. “And it was really because of that you stayed celibate for so long, wasn’t it, Loren? Because you were afraid it would be an issue of having to pretend again with another man.” His voice was low and filled with too much understanding; she stirred restlessly. “There’s no pretending with us. There never will be.”

“Buck—”

“I think it’s damn near close to a miracle that no other man ever bridged your defenses. So much warmth, so much passion…” His tone hardened possessively. “Three days. A blood test, then three days,”

Loren’s head jerked up, and she set down her cup. “No.”

“Are you going to listen?”

She sighed unhappily.

“The only job I was ever fired from,” he growled, “was at Leeds Diecast. My uncle’s company. I was seventeen, working there for the summer. I came to work in a black leather jacket, on a motorcycle, if you get my drift, and no one could get me to do anything so ordinary as punch a time card without my making a federal case out of it.

“My parents were both academics, professors at the University of Michigan. I must have gotten the brashness from my uncle. At any rate, he was a bachelor and the only one who ever volunteered to take me on. God knows where he got the patience. At least by the time I got out of college, a few of the sharp edges had been sanded off. Not much. He and I held World War III for a year. The next year, I started listening instead of talking. The third year, he retired, and six years ago I made the last payment on the business to him. It’s mine, free and clear. In fact, it’s double the size it was in John’s reign, and I’m damn proud of it. Managing and marketing were the tricks—never mind. Since you just turned pale yellow, I know darned well you’ve got the drift.”

He wrenched up from the chair and stalked to the living room, returning with his hand clenched around the neck of the wine bottle, glaring at her strained features. Two glasses clattered down from the cupboard, and he splashed wine into both. “I never intended to deceive you, Loren. The first time I saw you, I was in that bar to meet an old friend; it used to be a place to ‘slum’ when I was the kind of teenager I told you about. But every time I tried to tell you I wasn’t on the unemployment line—”

“I understand,” Loren said honestly. She had cut him off every time he tried to talk to her; it was rather insane. She had rushed in trying to be tactful, trying to assure him that his unemployed status didn’t alter the essential respect she felt for him as a man. It seemed very funny suddenly. She picked up the wineglass and met his eyes over the ruby liquid. Every muscle in his body was taut, the green eyes aflame, the crescent scar oddly white with tension. “I feel rather foolish…”

“No, you don’t. Your stomach’s all tied up in knots because you know what’s coming. Money
does
make a difference, Loren. We both know it.”

“Of course it does,” she agreed lightly. “We all prefer filet mignon to Hamburger Helper.” She glanced at him again. “Buck, you’re rather…intimidating when you’re angry,” she remarked absently.

“Come over here.” He motioned her to his lap.

She shook her head.

Then he shook his and got up, moving over her like some menacing giant, his arms pinning hers to her sides. The lips that touched hers were petal-soft. Her throat arched back automatically, her eyes obediently closed. She took in all of him, the texture of his lips and his taste, the song of take me already starting in her bloodstream. She felt the leashed control in his body…

When he leaned back up, he just looked at her. “You see,” he said vibrantly. “You see, Loren. I’d like to offer you a nice indecent affair, but it just won’t work. You’ve got your life all tied up in knots like a pretzel, and I won’t settle for crumbs. As a marriage, however impetuous, I think it will work. I’ve never had the least urge to propose to another woman. You don’t find love and the ability to live with someone—the desire to live and grow with someone—in everyone you meet. You’re natural with me; I feel myself with you.”

“Buck—”

“I want time with you. I want your energies. I want you next to me when I wake up in the morning, and I want to
know
that you’ll never have to go into that bar alone again. Your job—that’s your business, your choices. The rest I can make my business with a ring on your finger, rights that don’t come with an affair. Your house, Loren, repaired and restored. Your grandfather can have care if you want, companionship if you want. Angela can have the luxuries. The money is nothing to me, Loren, except that it will take the pressure off you—”

He stopped for breath, staring at her, studying her, and she lowered her eyes, taking a long sip of wine. “Perhaps you’d like to take me home now,” she said brightly, and rose quickly from the table, then sat back down again, removing the thick pair of socks he’d given her to keep her feet warm. The holes in her own socks winked back at her; it wasn’t as if everything she owned was threadbare, but the image was there. It really was so very funny…and all she could think of was the generations of Shephards who’d solved all their problems with money, who had solved none of their problems with money…

“No. I won’t take you home.”

She glanced back at Buck when she rose again, taking the wineglasses to the sink. He was dying for an argument; she had the feeling he wished she were a man he could take on with his fists. But she wasn’t a man and she had no intention of arguing with him.