When Somebody Loves You (33 page)

“Oh, no.” She shook her head vehemently. “No you don’t. You’re not going to add me to your list of transgressions. I don’t belong there.”

“I
am
going to leave you. You know that, don’t you?”

Silence fell between them, weighted with layers of anger and regret and doubt.

“So who’s asking you to stay?” she challenged tightly, her pride showing.

She stalked away from him, hugging her arms around her middle. “You know what your problem is, Dursky?” she threw back over her shoulder, then stopped and rounded on him, her eyes filled with pain and fury. “You’re no different from any other man in this male-dominated, macho-intellect society you’ve helped to create. You’re never going to accept the fact that you do not have the power to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders,
broad
as they may be. You are not responsible for the condition of a society that breeds the violence in the streets of Detroit, or any other city. You can’t move mountains and you can’t make all wrongs into rights.”

She drew herself up a little straighter. Unintimidated by his scowl, she squared her shoulders. “And you don’t have the market cornered on every sin or weakness known to mankind. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that the rest of us aren’t perfect either? My demons may not be as big and bad as yours, but I’ve got them just the same. You aren’t the only one hiding out. I’m hiding, too, behind a comfortable little dream that I needed to come home to rebuild Shady Point. You want to know the whole truth?” she asked angrily, raking the hair back out of her eyes. “I thought maybe, just maybe, if I could make things the way they used to be, my father might love me enough to come home.

“So you see,” she continued, ignoring his surprised expression, “you aren’t alone in your weakness. And you are
not
responsible for me. I will not live and die by your good graces. I know my own mind. I knew exactly what I was getting myself into when I took you to my bed. And you’d do well to remember that.
I
took
you
to
my
bed. You didn’t take me to yours. It was my decision. My choice. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let you shoulder the responsibility for what happened between us. If I hadn’t wanted it to happen, it wouldn’t have. And if I wanted you to stay, I’d ask you to.”

Her eyes flared with fiery pride as she leveled her parting shot. “So you can leave here with a clear conscience, Dursky. You’ll have to look a little harder for an excuse to pummel yourself with another fistful of blame for all your fabricated sins. I refuse to give you even a thimbleful of guilt to add to your overflowing cup. The only thing you’ve done to hurt me is to demean what we’ve shared by infusing it with that guilt.” Tears burned her eyes. She fought them and met his hard stare with her head held high. “But I’m a big girl and I can handle it. And as I believe I’ve already mentioned, I can take care of myself.” She whirled away, leaving him staring after her.

Adam didn’t follow her into the cabin. He grabbed the ax and headed for the woodpile.

An hour later, the pain in his back almost overshadowed the ache in his gut. He tossed the last split log on the pile, then mopped the sweat from his face and neck with the shirt he’d discarded.

He loved her, dammit. Her spirit, her anger, her trust.

But so what. She needed a young man who could share her vision and her burdens, not an old one whose confidence was shattered and who would be a burden himself. She needed a man to give her babies and enhance her life, not a sterile cynic who would wallow in the injustices life had dealt him and drag her down because of them.

Swearing, he sank the double-edged blade into the chopping block with a resounding
thwack
. Her fiery speech hadn’t fooled him. She accepted the fact that he had to go and was trying to make it easy for him by driving a distance between them as sharply as he drove the steel into the dry cedar. The very least he could do was help her make the break by staying the hell away from her. Where in the hell was a rescue team anyway?

The shadows had lengthened and melded into darkness by the time he turned to the cabin. A dim light flickered in the window. He watched it for an eternity, longing for something that could not be, before he shrugged into his shirt. Not bothering with the buttons, he gathered an armful of wood against his chest, ignoring the bite of the cleanly cut edges that creased his bare skin.

He climbed the stairs slowly. With each step he resolved to hold at bay the need to take her into his arms and love her until right and wrong ceased to matter. But when he opened the door he was enfolded in the warm fire she’d kindled, and by the invitation in her eyes. All was forgiven.

“Come over by the fire where it’s warm,” she said.

He stood very still, his arms full of wood, his chest full of want, amazed by her capacity for giving.

She was standing by the hearth, bewitching and beautiful, dressed in nothing but her old flannel shirt and the fragrance of her just-washed skin.

Dragging his gaze away from her, he crossed the room to drop the wood in the woodbox. He brushed his palms on his thighs, lost the battle, and turned to her. She raised her unbandaged hand to push the hair back from her eyes. The unbuttoned placket of the shirt fell open. He clenched his jaw and feasted his eyes on the pale, supple flesh exposed beneath it.

She made no pretense as to how she wanted the remaining time between them to be shared. “Not everyone is granted this gift we’ve been given,” she said. “We’ve known from the onset this time was special, and temporary. I accept it. Let’s not waste another minute on regrets and recriminations.” She took a step toward him and held out her arms. “Come make love to me, Adam.”

How two people, in such a short span of time, could reach so many impasses was a mystery to him. With her blistering assessment of his self-image, she’d denied him his guilt and shunned his regret. And now, she offered him her love. The tight fist of tension that had gripped his chest relaxed its hold as the fight left and his love for her entered.

“Just once,” he whispered raggedly as he closed the distance between them, “I wish I could resist you.”

She moved easily into his arms. “And just once,” she said on a wistful sigh, “I wish I could have come to you in satin or silk instead of this worn flannel.” Her fingers skimmed the marks the wood had left across the warm skin of his chest.

He held her against him like a dying man embracing his last sunset. Threading his fingers through her hair, he cupped her head in his hands and tipped her face to his.

“You
are
satin. . . .” he murmured against the hair at her temple. With trembling hands he brushed the flannel from her shoulders.

She stood naked before him. He went down on one knee and pressed his open mouth to her belly, moistening the velvety skin with his tongue. With a slow, hungry caress, he committed to memory the slight curve of her hip, the gentle thrust of her upturned breasts, the tautness of her distended nipples. “You are silk. . . .”

His accolade was a whisper against her tingling flesh as he gathered her in his arms and laid her down before the fire. “And you could come to me in sackcloth,” he added as he lowered his mouth to the soft, warm part of her that pulsed with wanting and that he ached to fill, “as long as you come to me.”

Always before this night, their lovemaking had been overshadowed for him by guilt, by regret, by the desperate knowledge that the same twist of fate that had brought them together would also break them apart. Because he now knew he loved her, because he knew that by leaving her he was giving her the chance to make a better life without him, the inevitable parting became less painful to contemplate.

He couldn’t promise her forever, but he could give her the night. What he couldn’t say with words, he said with touch. What he couldn’t heal with apologies, he soothed with the reverent caress of his mouth. His lovemaking was at once gentle and intense. The fencing that had been a standard part of their love games was over. He took her to the limit and back again.

Her face was flushed from the stunning depths of his passion, her eyes still misted with ecstasy’s tears as she bent over him. Her hair sheathed his thighs and chest, and he groaned as her untutored mouth and small, thrilling hands made the sweetest love he’d ever known.

The next morning, his scent was on her skin, mingling with her own delicious fragrance as she leaned over him to pour another cup of coffee. Her hair was wild, tangled. The beautiful damage had been done by his hands the night before and added to that morning. He thought he’d never get his fill of seeing her this way.

Their eyes met and held. “Come here, Joanna.”

He held out his hand and led her to the rocker before the fire, where she curled up on his lap and let him hold her.

The rocker creaked like the ticking of a clock as they watched the fire and let their thoughts drift.

“You asked me the other night how I got used to the solitude.” Her voice was soft against his chest. “I’ve been thinking about what it must have been like for you, coming from the city. It must have been difficult. I’m used to long winters when the snow is so deep and it’s so cold out that weeks go by and you never see another human soul.”

“Where I came from when I arrived here,” he said, “had less to do with geography than it did with state of mind. I’d already isolated myself from everything that had been important to me. I’d spent a month in the hospital healing from the gunshot, another month in my apartment licking my wounds and flirting with Jim Beam and making life a living hell for everyone in the precinct. They’d put me and my attitude behind a desk until I was ‘fully recovered.’ In my sergeant’s words, when I wasn’t chewing ass like a bear with a thorn in its paw, I was staring into space in a catatonic stupor.” His chest expanded with his deep sigh. “In short, I was as useless to the department as I was to myself.”

She ran her hand across his shoulder in a soothing caress. “He was a wise man to give you time to heal.”

He laughed abruptly and hugged her tight. “When he cut me loose and I turned in my badge and gun, I’d never been so scared in my life. He was forcing me to face my demons alone. No work, no buffer of any kind between me and myself and my attraction to the bottle.”

“Yet you let it alone.”

“Yeah,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “I did.” He tucked her head under his chin and idly stroked her hair. Their unspoken thoughts ran parallel. They were thinking of John.

“He needs you, Jo. And if you’ll stop and think about it, you need him too.”

“He knows where to find me.”

He sighed and rested his chin on the top of her head. “He could help take care of you if you’d let him.”

“No one takes care of me, Dursky. You ought to know that by now.”

“Remind me of that next time I tie your shoes.” He felt her smile against his skin. “What will you do if you lose the lodge?”

She was quiet for a long moment, then she shrugged. “I had a good position in a relatively prestigious advertising agency in St. Paul. They told me when I left that they’d always have a spot for me. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go back there. And maybe I’ll take my shotgun to the auction and threaten anyone with a mind to bid against me.”

She snuggled closer, savoring what she suspected would be some of her final moments with Adam. The lake had calmed dramatically during the past day. It wouldn’t be long before someone, Steve probably, came looking for them.

She wouldn’t cling, she promised herself. When the time came, she’d let him go. She’d let him leave with a clear conscience. She’d let him leave without telling him she loved him.

And she knew without question that he loved her too. In his absence, that knowledge would take the edge off the pain of living the rest of her life without him.

Quickly wiping a damning tear from her eye, she manufactured some innocuous question and was about to ask it when she heard the roar of an approaching motorboat.

Their gazes collided. The closed look in his eyes said it all. She felt a sense of loss that was paralyzing. It was over. Reality had arrived.