Man From Tennessee (16 page)

So it was not impossible, then, to talk for two and a half seconds. She closed her eyes and huddled down in the seat for the last of the ride, finally almost too tired to care that she was soaked and cold and frightened. She was not wanted and he was still angry, and she hadn’t even an inkling of an idea how she was going to cope, the thread of her heartbeat saying she simply couldn’t.

When the Jeep stopped again her eyes flickered open. They were home. No lights shone from the shadowed house and there was no sign of life, but the rain was finally dwindling to sporadic sprinkles, and the clouds shifting above were letting through the light of a crescent moon. She felt a sense of relief so intense that she simply closed her eyes for a moment, her limbs finally feeling like dead weight, and she was barely aware that Kern had gotten out until the passenger door opened beside her.

Obediently she turned her legs out, and just as obediently she told her mind to unfold the rest of her body, to get out and walk. All systems balked inside, as though to say, Sorry, Tish, we’ve just had enough. Large hands suddenly reached in and pulled her out, and for one insane minute she felt her forehead suspended to his chest as if that were her only contact with reality.

“You’re worse than a basket case!”

“You can’t hit a lady when she’s down,” Trisha murmured vaguely. Limbs like water were shifted and she found herself carried again, unable to protest, her eyes insisting on staying closed. She was dipped down so that his hand could reach the door handle, and then they were out of the endless moisture—dry, warm and close in the back hall. He set her tentatively on her feet, one arm still supporting her under her shoulder. “If you can stand for just a minute, Tish, I can get a lantern. We’re out of power at least until tomorrow…”

“Of course,” she murmured, “I’m perfectly fine.”

It sounded good, but the moment his arms left her her knees promptly buckled. Before she could fall she was swooped up again.

“They don’t seem to work,” she told him, apologizing faintly.

“You’re making it damned difficult, Tish,” he murmured in her ear. “You know damn well I still feel like murdering you.” But it really no longer sounded that way. And it really no longer felt that way as he carried her blindly through the house, groping at doorways up the completely black darkness of the stairway. His grip before had been rough, communicating anger, dominance and a kind of frightening awareness of the physical power of the man. But that same power now was simply holding her, sheltering her. The limpness in her mind and body she no longer minded, stopped trying to fight it, curling to the safe haven of his chest.

The mattress suddenly met her back. Vaguely she was aware of his hands tugging at her jeans, shrugging them off her. She was shivering again suddenly, aware of him in a different way. He leaned over her to work at the buttons on her shirt, fumbling with the wet material. Then with exasperation he arched up and pressed a swift kiss on her lips. “You know I’d never hurt you,” he murmured. The blouse ripped open, the buttons an effort he was not willing to make. From a long way off she knew she was shivering violently, and then a warm blanket was curled around her, her hair smoothed back with his palm, and another kiss brushed on her lips before he got up from the bed. “I’ll get you warm, Tish. I’ll be right back.”

And he was there again soon, though by the time he curled next to her, snuggling the blanket over both of them, she was asleep, only instincts guiding her to move her body back into the warmth he offered.

Trisha woke once for a drink of water and a second time for a call of nature. She remembered neither, and her first real awakening to reality was reluctant, a shaft of blinding sunlight hot on her sleep-laden eyes. Lazily she turned from it, burrowing back into a pillow, vaguely aware in some gray netherworld that every muscle ached, that her body simply craved sleep forever, and that nothing could conceivably feel as good as the coolish soft sheets and downy pillow.

“Tish. Wake up, love. Just to eat. You can go back to sleep, I promise.”

“No.”

Vaguely she heard the faint velvet chuckle, muffled from where her head had burrowed beneath the pillow. The cocoon of sheet was gradually stolen from her body, and then two palms snuggled at the sides of her neck, smoothing out the muscle cramps that even sleep had not been able to penetrate. Her eyes blinked open into the pillow as the gradual massage took in shoulders and spine, stealing to her sides where just the edge of her breasts were available to his hands. It was such an incredible effort to move, yet she curled just a little so that his hand could massage her breast, what he obviously wanted to do, and then did, kneading a pulsing rhythm into the firm flesh until her sluggish heartbeat changed rhythm…

She groped startling awake then, jerking away with wide eyes to lean back up against the headboard, feeling completely disoriented as she stared warily at Kern.

He’d pulled on an old pair of cutoffs; not bothered with anything else. He had the nerve to look not only wide awake but rested, the gray look of exhaustion gone and only a faint tinge of shadow remaining beneath his eyes. He radiated an awareness of her and a determination in the way he stood watching her that struck a chord of panic within.

“We’re going to spend the day in bed,” he drawled lazily. “But it’s been more than fifteen hours since either of us has had anything to eat. Now there’s a hunger and there’s a hunger, Tish, you can choose…”

“Kern…” There was a tray, she saw, on the floor.

“I built a fire for the coffee. There’s no power yet. That left bread and canned goods, but the coffee won’t stay hot forever. This is a one-shot choice, bright eyes, because just like you, the inclination is to sleep another twelve hours or so.”

Hunger suddenly gnawed at her stomach. Avoiding his eyes, she reached to cover herself with the sheet, awkwardly draping it over herself as she stumbled first to the bathroom where she found a pitcher of water. Something else he must have done whenever he had gotten up. The splash of moisture on her face helped, but she groaned when she looked in the mirror, grabbing for a brush. The golden hair was rain-softened and shiny, but hopelessly curly and unmanageable. Without makeup to cover the shadows, her eyes looked huge sapphires. It was just not the way she wanted to look, facing Kern again, with the sheet trailing behind her like a child playing house. She felt defensive and awkward, and it certainly didn’t help that she knew she had slept naked, curled to him the entire night.

He was crouched by the tray when she came back in, but he rose as she crossed the room. It was only when she had kneeled down on the carpet beside the tray that she heard the click of the lock behind her. She whirled around in time to see the key buried in the pocket of his cutoffs.

“That’s called nowhere to run,” he said deliberately.

“I’m not
running
anywhere,” she said, snipping back. “I left, Kern; there’s a difference.”

“The hell there is!”

She drew in her breath when he loomed closer, but he only crouched down again. The feast was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a plastic container of berries, lukewarm coffee served in paper cups. Sunlight streamed on all of it as they ate across from each other, the vibrations shooting across the little tray as if it were a magnetic field in a lightning storm, but their appetites were affected not at all. She was starving, so was he; nothing in heaven or hell could have tasted better.

When she was done, she crouched over to take care of the paper plates and empty cups, not looking at him. “I need to go out, Kern,” she murmured awkwardly.

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. I need to…” She faltered when his eyes finally captured hers. It wasn’t really a bathroom she had in mind but the road, but she couldn’t look at him and lie. She never had been able to.

“Need to,” he repeated gently. “Need to, Tish…what about want to? Tell me what you want to do…”

She shook her head, wishing desperately that the horrible, drained sensation would leave her, the weariness of so many days of stress that a few simple hours’ sleep simply hadn’t cured. “I can’t talk about it, Kern. Please…” she pleaded softly.

“
Why
can’t you?”

“Because I’ll just start crying.” A rueful smile trembled on her lips, her sapphire eyes haunted. “You wouldn’t be able to hear me then, anyway. Oh, Kern, just leave it—you know it’s best…”

The tray slid from between them as he shoved it to a distance. Both his arms lifted in front of him, simply suspended in thin air, waiting. The distance was so short to the cradle of his body; tears were already helplessly falling as he pulled her onto his lap, rocking her like a child, smoothing back her hair. “I couldn’t bear it when I found you gone, Tish. I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t. And when I saw you at camp, looking so dragged-out tired and so beautiful in the rain, I wanted to kill you for risking coming here, for being so close to the fire. If something had happened to you…”

“I had to know you were all right. I had to…” The tears choked in her throat. Her whole body was shuddering, curled into the circle of his arms. “All they’d say on the television was that the fire was west of the Smokies. What else could I do?” The tears finally lessened, and she cupped her palms tightly over her eyes.

“What else could you do?” he repeated dryly, and very gently shifted her to face away from him, his legs cradling both sides of her. Tugging the sheet to her waist, he pressed a kiss in the hollow between her neck and shoulders again. “Since you don’t give a hoot in hell, Tish, there wasn’t a reason for you to do anything. You left, didn’t you?” he whispered. “Put your head down. No, never mind.”

His fingers had started to knead her scalp but abruptly changed course. Before she could protest she found the rest of the sheet twisted from her and a bed of white linen made over the plush carpet. “Kern, please don’t,” she said helplessly. “Please—I don’t want this.”

“Yes, I know.” He untangled her from the tense curl as if she were clay to be remolded, and then he molded. Both his hands worked the length of the back of her right leg, then the left, working out tension, working like a sensual, possessive drug. Kern’s touch, the label on the drug, and the addiction she already knew she couldn’t fight. “You left the first time because you didn’t want this. Then I could understand, Tish. I rushed you into marriage; I rushed you into bed. I wanted to give you the patience you seemed to need so badly, but as soon as I touched you… I wanted you so badly. And to see that look of fear in your eyes…I know I hurt you, Tish, but I never, never meant to…”

A flush like fever warmed her skin as his hands strayed up, kneading at the firm curve of her hips and the base of her spine. Her eyes closed again, urging back tears of a different flavor. She felt, in his touch, in his words, the loving she had been so sure wasn’t there. He crouched over her, straddling her thighs as he worked the length of her back, smooth long strokes that vibrated with emotion from his hands.

“And you’re going to tell me that you left this time because you didn’t want this,” he murmured. “That’s all it could have been, Tish, because the rest was fine. You know it was. You love the land like I do and you took to the life. So you need more than a house, and there aren’t any buyer positions in seven-story department stores, but you’ll never convince me that really mattered. You were so happy that day we flew over the land. You took to decorating my mother’s room, and you knew you could take on that shop you said you wanted once…”

His mouth suddenly followed his hands, his lips caressing the long stretch of soft skin, his arms cradling the sides of her. Her body went silk for him, liquid silk.

A radiant feeling of life was in her flesh and she craved to touch him…

“So this time you loved the life, Tish, and that left only us. You care. It showed in your jealousy of Rhea. It showed the morning we talked in my office. And we still share the same dream—you would never have come back and worn yourself out working in that fire otherwise. And I saw you at that waterfall, Tish, before we made love. So that leaves us sex, just like it left us before. You want to tell me that you don’t want to be touched—not by me. There just isn’t any chemistry, is there. I just leave you neutral…”

Kern turned her beneath him, straddling now the front of her thighs. The tenderness in his eyes was touched with despair, a pain she could hardly bear to see, and there was anger in his voice she knew graveled over that pain. “You’re lying to yourself, Tish, not to me! I can just look at you—there’s need in your eyes right now, desire. Your pulse is racing like white-water rapids; your flesh gives in my hands; your breasts are already swollen and I haven’t even touched them…”

Gently her fingertips stroked his chest, soothing. “I love you, Kern,” she said softly. “I love it when you touch me. I always did. The only reason I left was because I thought you didn’t want me!”

He leaned over with his lips parted to say something, but she pressed her fingertip to his mouth to stop him, shaking her head, the barest sheen of moisture in her eyes. “I knew you wanted me—in bed. That didn’t mean you wanted me as a wife again, Kern, someone to share your time and your problems and, yes, our old dreams. If you’d asked me here, perhaps I would have read it all differently, but you didn’t ask. I was just forced on you because of your mother. So you wanted to make love to me—and, God, I wanted you to—and we did, Kern, and then I asked you. You said you’d never ask me to stay again—”

“I was
trying
to tell you that I said it all when I married you, Tish.” Kern almost growled as he leaned over her. “That that was a
commitment
for all time as far as I was concerned, but that I would never, never force or rush you into anything again. The choice had to be yours. I couldn’t ever again live with forcing you into something you weren’t ready for or didn’t want.”

“But I thought it had to come from you,” she whispered, “because I was the one who failed you before.”

His eyes clouded, his palms cupping her face. “Tish, you never failed me in anything,” he said softly. “You were just young. I could have done it differently…”