Shameless (The Contemporary Collection) (2 page)

He came from nowhere. One instant she was alone, the next, the dark shape of a man moved from behind a tree directly in her path.

She crashed into a chest like a rock wall. Hard arms reached to enclose her, holding her even as the man rocked back on his heels. She shoved away from him, used that momentum to spin out of his grasping hands. Two racing steps, three. She was caught from behind. She tripped, staggered off balance. Her legs tangled with the taut, muscular thighs of her attacker. A soft oath feathered in a warm exhalation over her wet hair, then they were both pitching forward into wet darkness.

He dragged her against him and twisted his body even as he fell. She landed in a rigid embrace, her cheek cushioned on a well-padded shoulder. For a stunned instant she lay unmoving, while the knowledge percolated through the fire in her brain that this man was not, could never be, her husband.

She drew a breath so hard it rasped with a harsh ache in her throat. In the same moment, she wrenched against the strong arms that held her.

“Be still,” came the quiet and deep command at a level with the top of her head, “or I just may let you stay lost.”

The timbre of his voice sent a ripple of alarm through her. She knew it, could hear it echoing, vibrating in her mind down long, aching years. How many was it? Nearly fifteen.

She had known this man was home again, everyone in Greenley knew it. He had been at his father's funeral, of course, but she had not attended. Of course.

“Reid Sayers,” she said, the words no more than a whisper.

He was silent so long she thought he had not heard. Then he spoke in dry tones. “I'm flattered, or maybe stunned is a better word. I wasn't sure you would recognize me at the best of times.”

“The last time we met was all too similar,” she said, her voice tight. “Will you let me up?”

“No.”

His answer registered in her mind as unequivocal, and with a slicing edge that had not been there the last time she had exchanged words with him. “You always did enjoy being mysterious,” she said. “Unfortunately, I'm in no mood for it. Are you going to show me the way home, or are we going to spend the night here?”

He shifted, and the folds of a voluminous rain poncho settled across her. She shivered as she was enveloped by the heat of his body trapped under the waterproof material. His grasp tightened in reflex as he said, “Suppose I told you I intended to take up where we left off?”

“It's too late.”

Did he hear the faint quiver of doubt in her voice? How could he, when she was not certain herself of that flash of reaction? She wasn't afraid of him. She had felt many things, from scorn to hate and embarrassing flares of sheer yearning, but never fear.

“Maybe,” he said in pensive consideration, “and maybe not. A woman who has just tried to kill her husband could be capable of a lot of things.”

“How did you know—” she began, then stopped as she saw how it could have been, must have been.

“I heard the first shot and came at a run in time to see the others. Yes, I did follow you. And you're right — I could have stopped you long before this.”

His voice was a deep, disturbing murmur under her ear. She did her best to ignore the sound while she concentrated on the meaning of his words. She said, “But you didn't. You waited until you thought I was desperate, though what you hoped to gain is more than I can see.”

“Is it now?” he asked, settling her closer against him. “Actually, I thought I might not need to intrude on what looked to be a successful escape. However, letting you wander around all night soaking wet seemed to be carrying noninterference a bit too far.”

“Besides which, the opportunity to crow over me was too good to miss.”

“The thought,” he said deliberately, “had not occurred to me, but now you point it out, I don't mind if I do.”

The tone of his voice sent alarm jangling along her nerves. She pushed against him, trying to lever herself out of his hold.

It was a mistake. In an effortless flexing of muscles, he rolled with her, turning her onto her back within the confining poncho. He allowed his weight to settle upon her, pinning her in place. One of her arms was caught under him. He captured the other at the wrist in a painless but unbreakable hold.

She shuddered as she felt his male heat drive the chill from her body. In the space of a moment the wetness of her clothing seemed to steam against her skin. Her breasts were pressed against his chest, his thighs held hers apart, and the hardness under the zipper of his jeans nudged the softness at the apex of her legs.

She strained upward, digging in her heels as she tried to throw him off. The movement brought their bodies into closer, more fervent contact. She felt him stiffen, heard the soft, abrupt intake of his breath. She went still.

From inside her there rose a sweet, piercing ache that she had not felt in years. Fifteen years, to be exact. With it came an emptiness that was all too familiar, one that Keith had never been able to fill.

It was infuriating. It was astonishing. It was frightening.

Caught in the vortex of her own emotions, she lashed out at the man who had forced her to face them. “You always were good at taking advantage, you and all the other male members of your family.”

His sigh lifted his chest, and she could feel the definition of his taut muscles. It did nothing to help her concentrate on what he was saying.

“Still harping on that old tale? I would have thought you were old enough by now to have a little tolerance.”

“For your Yankee great-grandfather's misdeeds?” she inquired tartly. “But I would have to extend it to you, too. And you know what they say about falling acorns.”

“Good thing my great-grandfather wasn't a tree,” he answered in dry amusement.

“He still cheated my great-grandmother, and took advantage of her in other ways.”

“I never heard that she complained. Only her husband — and her descendants.”

Reid Sayers's great-grandfather had, nearly a hundred years before, been a lumberjack new to the South, looking for opportunity. He had found it when he met Cammie's great-grandmother, Lavinia Greenley. Justin Sayers had enticed the poor wife and mother into a torrid affair. Before it was over, Justin had finagled three hundred acres of prime land from Cammie's ancestress, and Lavinia's husband was dead.

It had been a scandal whose echoes still sounded in Greenley, not the least reason being that Justin Sayers had stayed in the community, had prospered and left descendants. To call the division between the Sayers and Greenley families a feud would have been melodramatic, but the coolness and lack of social contact was real.

“Lavinia Greenley was not the complaining kind,” Cammie said stiffly.

“Apparently not. I've often wondered about that.” His tone, as he went on, was pensive and a little rough. “I used to wonder sometimes, too, if she was at all like you. And what you would have done in her place.”

Her breath lodged in her throat. She had never dreamed that Reid Sayers thought of her at all. It was disarming, and oddly painful, to know that he had pictured her as Lavinia. Without stopping to consider, she said in stifled tones, “Did you see yourself as Justin?”

“Who else?”

The taut sound of his voice reverberated in the rain-drenched night that surrounded them. His face, as he hovered above her, was scant inches from hers in the darkness. She could feel the brush of his warm breath across her cheek. His scent surrounded her; it was compounded of fresh night air, a whiff of some woodsy after-shave, and his own warm masculinity, yet with an undertone of wildness that stirred an answering fierceness.

The muscles of his abdomen hardened. His biceps, under her neck, knotted. He drew breath with a soft, hissing sound of tightly leashed control.

Above them the wind sighed in the treetops. Raindrops pattered on the leaves and also on the glazed material of the poncho that covered them. They gleamed darkly in his hair and dripped in a slow warmth from his face to her forehead. Their touch was like a caress.

Cammie knew with abrupt and shocking clarity that if she moved so much as a finger, if she drew too deep a breath or allowed an eyelash to flicker, he would lower his head and press his lips to hers. If she did more, if she lifted her arms to circle his neck or opened her legs even a fraction farther, he might take her there in their nest of wet leaves.

Drifting through her mind, not quite formed but compelling, was the urge to shift, to move, to press against him in wanton invitation. Appalled by it, yet unbearably enticed, she held her breath.

Somewhere behind them a dead tree limb, made heavy by the steady rain, released its hold with a crack. It fell to the ground with a soft thud.

A shudder ran over Reid. He breathed a quiet imprecation, then abruptly levered himself up and away from her. Surging to his feet with lithe ease, he reached down and pulled her up to stand beside him. He whipped his poncho from around his shoulders, swirling it around her and pulling it closed over her breasts.

“Let's go,” he said in a toneless command, “before I do something we'll both regret. Again.”

Their passage through the woods was swift and sure. The man at Cammie's side never hesitated, seldom slowed, never stopped except to help her over a fallen log, a shallow branch or creek. He could not have been more at home, it seemed, if he had been moving across his own living room.

The poncho Cammie wore was so long that it nearly dragged on the ground. She tripped over it several times before she snatched up the excess material and bunched it in her hands.

Reid Sayers caught her each time she stumbled, almost as if he could see in the dark, or else had a sixth sense about her progress. He released her just as quickly.

Cammie was uncomfortably aware of him as he moved beside her. In some deep recess of her being she anticipated his touch when she faltered and missed its support when he removed it. She didn't want to feel that way, didn't want to feel anything except, possibly, a decent gratitude for his rescue. It was disturbing.

There had been a time, long ago, when she had mooned over Reid Sayers with a secret passion as intense as it was foolish. She had watched him from a distance, enjoying the way his sun-bleached blond hair grew from a peak on his forehead, the sense of fun that leaped so easily into his face, and the crinkles that appeared around the rich blue of his eyes as he smiled. She had liked watching him move, the play of the muscles under the brown skin of his shoulders and arms, the strength of his legs exposed by cutoff blue jeans.

He had been some three years older, and impressively more mature than the boys she went with to the movies, skating, or picnicking. To her, he had seemed sophisticated, experienced. Above all, he had the inevitable allure of things that are forbidden.

There had been moments when she had seen Reid and herself as the star-crossed lovers of some ancient fable. She had imagined that the two of them would come across each other one day when they were alone, and would know in an instant that they were meant for each other. They would be united in marriage, putting an end to the discord that had been festering between the families for nearly a hundred years. Such silly daydreams.

It had not happened quite the way she pictured. She had been swimming off the end of the boat dock at her family's camp house on the lake. Reid had been staying with friends at the camp next door, a fact she had known very well. She had not expected him to surface in the water beside her, however, or to close in on her so they were treading water with their noses practically touching and their legs brushing together in the warm currents of the lake.

“What are you doing?” she had gasped, like the startled virgin she was then.

His answer had been simple. “I saw you down here and couldn't resist joining you. Or this.”

His arms had closed gently around her. The sunlight gleamed like molten gold in his hair as he bent his head, brushing his lips over the drops of water caught on her eyelids. Then he kissed her, his mouth warm and sweet on hers, caressing, questing, questioning.

For an instant she had flowed toward him in a response as strong and natural as breathing. Their bodies had melded, fitting together with precision and grace, like two sculptures carefully constructed by a master craftsman for the express purpose of being joined.

His hold tightened as his chest expanded in a breath of wonder. His lips brushed hers, learning their smoothness, their gentle contours, their delicate edges and moist, innocent corners. He tasted her, the tip of his tongue gently abrading; sweetly, tenderly invading. He sought the sinuous, guileless touch of hers. Finding it, he applied gentle suction. Blindly he brushed his hand over her breast beneath the thin, wet material of her bathing suit. Settling with exquisite care around that firm globe, he tested its tender fullness, its fit in his palm.

Pure, unrestrained desire jolted through her with the force of a lightning bolt. She was unprepared for it, unaware that such internal heat and upheaval was possible. In that same instant, she felt the firmness of his arousal against her thigh, sensed his barely controlled need.

She panicked.

In unreasoning fear she pushed away from him. She shouted something at him, though she was so upset that she didn't know then, and never remembered afterward, what she said. Swirling in the water, she turned and struck out for the dock, reaching it in a few short strokes. She scrambled up the ladder on the side and ran for the camp house as if the hounds of hell were after her.