"I can see where you might be intimidating to some men. You're attractive, vocal and successful. But so am I. So you don't threaten me in that way."
"Maybe it would be better if I did," she mused. Her tone was bittersweet, her expression sad.
Sawyer pulled himself up straighter.
"Why do you say that?" When, after a hesitation, she simply shrugged, he reached over and turned her face to his.
"Tell me why. What's so awful about our being involved with each other?"
"Nothing's so awful about it," she said, raising her chin to free it from his fingers.
"I'm just not sure I want to be involved with anyone right now." "You enjoy being alone? Are you a loner at heart? Was Jack's presence that much of a strain that you don't want anyone else in your life?"
"It wasn't a strain. It was just... disappointing."
"That's an enlightening comment."
She searched his eyes for mockery and saw none.
"What do you mean?"
"The only way you could have found your marriage to Jack disappointing was if you'd had hopes for something better." His voice gentled.
"We hope for what we want. Faith. What was it you wanted when you got married?"
She dropped her eyes.
"I don't know."
"Sure you do. You just don't want to talk about it. Maybe you don't want to think about it, but maybe it's time you do."
"Why?" she asked, annoyed as she raised her head. Sawyer was putting her on the defensive, and she was prepared to fight.
He didn't blink.
"Because if you're pregnant, you'll have to think about it. You'll have to think about lots of things you might not want to." He paused, watched the fight fade from her face, lifted his hand and stroked her cheek.
"Have you thought about being pregnant?"
She swallowed. Still, her voice came out a shadow of itself.
"I'm trying not to. I don't think I am."
"Would you want to be?"
"I don't know."
He ran his thumb along her jaw and spoke very quietly.
"Yes or no.
Would you want it? "
"I don't know," she insisted.
"Don't you want to be a mother?"
"Yes, but I'm not sure I want it now."
He dropped his hand to his lap.
"Did you want it with Jack?"
"I used birth control when I was with Jack."
It was an evasive answer, but he let it ride.
"Did Jack want it?"
"Sure." She took a breath, a lot easier now that he'd dropped his hand. She had trouble thinking when he touched her.
"Babies went along with marriage, and he wanted it all. We used to argue a lot. I kept telling him the timing was wrong. It would have been hard for me to have a baby while I was in law school, and the law firm wasn't wild about the idea of maternity leaves, and then when I went out on my own, I had the full responsibility of a practice on my shoulders. I tried to explain to Jack that the timing was wrong then, too."
Sawyer wasn't buying into the bad timing theory.
"You told me there were ways to do it. When we talked about it last week, you said that a woman can have a career and a baby."
"She can."
"But you didn't have a baby with Jack."
"I didn't want one with Jack!" Faith cried, then stopped short and hung her head. She took one deep breath, then another. The truth hurt, still it slipped from her tongue.
"It wasn't the timing. It was him.
If I'd had his baby, I'd have been locked to him, and early on I knew that wasn't right. By the time I graduated from law school, I think I knew Jack and I didn't have a future. And what my own instinct didn't tell me, my exposure to family law did. Kids don't make a marriage right. They don't make a bad marriage better. They may hold two people together who'd otherwise have split, but it's doubtful whether those people are happy, and if they're not, it's tough on the kids. " She studied the fire in the hopes that it might soothe her guilt.
"So that's it. I didn't want a baby with Jack."
"Would you want one with me?"
Her eyes shot to his. His features were golden and strong, but his look was cautious and, in that, vulnerable. She wanted to lie. She wanted to say that she didn't want a baby with anyone, but it wasn't true. For his openness, he deserved the truth.
"If I were to have a baby," she said in a near- whisper, "I'd want it with you."
A shudder ran through him. He sucked in an audible breath, closed his eyes for a minute, tried to get a rein on the flare of desire that accompanied the shudder.
Watching him. Faith was confused.
"You want a baby?" she asked in that same near-whisper, then went on in a fuller voice. "If you wanted a baby, why didn't you have one with Joanna? She would have been a wonderful mother."
It wasn't the thought of a baby that made him shudder, as much as the thought of Faith having his. But he couldn't say that. It was too soon, even for him. He took several slow, deliberately calming breaths.
"I could say that the timing wasn't right for us, either.
Money was an issue. I didn't want a baby until I could afford to raise it with all the things I never had. " But he'd never pictured a baby with Joanna's face the way he did now with Faith's. Nor had he ever before been shot through with desire at the thought of impregnating a woman.
He didn't say a word of that, yet his expression was telling.
"Don't look at me that way," she begged. She felt it, too, the desire, and it made her uneasy.
"Don't hope for it, please. Sawyer? You'll be disappointed."
But he didn't think that was possible. He didn't think Faith could disappoint him even if it turned out that there was no baby. She was incredibly bright and soft and vulnerable, and she wasn't half as sure of herself as she let the world believe. He knew she could be the best lawyer, the best wife, the best mother in the world. He also knew she could be the best lover, and though he'd made her a promise that he intended to keep, he wasn't averse to lobbying for his cause.
Coming up on his knees, he took her face in his hands, lowered his head and began his crusade.
-INo, Sawyer " Faith whispered, but the last of the sound was taken by his mouth. She flattened a palm on his chest. Within seconds, it was clutching a handful of his sweater, because seconds were all it took for her to feel as though the earth were being swept from under her.
His mouth was hot velvet, stroking hers inside and out. His silken tongue found dark, hidden depths to plunder. His large hands held her head in a vise that was gentle but unyielding.
The first touch isn't much more than a token. It's kind of like a hello. The words echoed in Sawyer's mind, but they held no relevance.
He and Faith had been exchanging tokens all day, looks and glances that were as expressive as any kiss. Same for hellos. He felt as though they'd been through hours of foreplay. Light tokens and gentle hellos were beyond him now.
That didn't mean he was rough. He could never be rough with Faith. She was too much of a woman for that, and besides, a good deal of his pleasure de pended on hers. If she'd been quiescent beneath his hungry mouth, he'd have pulled back. But she was responding to his kiss, opening her mouth, offering her tongue, and while she wasn't aggressive about it,
he didn't want that, either. Time enough for aggression once they were familiar lovers. For now, he liked taking the lead. It fed a very masculine need, and the fact that Faith didn't cut down that need as being macho or vain or archaic turned him on all the more.
If she was dynamite professionally because she knew when to stand firm, she was dynamite personally because she knew when to give. Even now, she was offering him the slender column of her neck, the graceful curve of her shoulders, the fullness of her breasts, which continued to surprise and please him. She was offering him her breath in short, wispy gasps, and the occasional tiny sound of excitement that slipped unselfconsciously from her throat.
She was offering him herself, and she'd warned him of that. She'd made him promise to be the one in control even when she wasn't. With a low groan, he dragged his mouth from hers. Slower to follow were his hands, which were splayed just under her breasts and didn't want to leave the warmth they'd found there. He forced them to. Sitting back on his heels, he brought them to his thighs and spread them there, and while the hardness of his limbs was nowhere near as appealing as Faith's warmth, they were something solid to hold.
"Disappoint me? Ahhh, Faith." His voice was hoarse, his broad chest working hard to still the thudding of his heart.
"You couldn't disappoint me. Not in a million years. It keeps getting better.
Incredibly. Better. "
Faith was too stunned to say much for a minute.
When she came to her senses, she was aware of wanting another kiss, of wanting much more than that. Need was snaking through her, coiling at certain spots, hurting. In a self-protective gesture, she wrapped her arms tightly around her middle, and though the tightness countered the hurt some, it did nothing for the chill of being out of Sawyer's arms.
Groping for the sleeping bag that lay not far away, she pulled at its strings, artlessly unrolled it and dragged it around her shoulders.
It was a shield, protecting her from the intensity of his dark brown eyes. She still felt exposed, but that was her own doing and she sensed it was inevitable. Sawyer got to her. He touched her in places no man had ever touched before, and she let him do it.
"I think," she said in a slow, wavering breath, "that we need to put up a fence between us, something we can't see through."
Sawyer's lean mouth turned at the whimsy.
"It wouldn't do any good.
I'd know you were there, and I'd want you just the same. "
Despite the intimacies they'd shared, the words were strange coming from him, Faith thought. Over the years he'd complimented her, said she was gorgeous and sexy and that he loved her, and she'd said similar words to him, but all in the good-natured way of friends. She couldn't get used to the idea that the joking was done, that the words and thoughts and feelings were for real.
"It's so strong," she whispered mostly to herself, then raised her eyes to his. "Why is that? Is it because we've been without?" She caught herself.
"I mean, I've been without.
Maybe you haven't. "
He twisted to reach for another log and one- handedly added it to the flames. As he watched it settle in and catch fire, he said, "It's not that. I've been with two women since Joanna, each for a night and neither one of them was particularly necessary or memorable." "Why did you go with them? Was it just for the physical release?"
"Honestly?" He looked at her quickly, then looked back at the fire. It was easier to say something he wasn't proud of when he didn't have to risk seeing disappointment in her eyes.
"I did it because I thought that was what I should be doing. I was a single man again. Right and left, friends were slapping me on the back, winking, making ribald jokes, speculating on how good I was probably getting it. It wasn't that I'd sleep with a woman because someone else expected me to, but after a little while, I guess the expectation became my own. I was beginning to think something was wrong with me because I wasn't panting after everything in skirts."
A self-deprecating smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He drew up a knee and rested his forearm across it. "I used to do that. Way back, before Joanna, before Nam. I pretty much screwed my way through high school. I figured that I'd make up sexually for what I didn't have mentally. When it came to getting the girls, I was way ahead of the guys who drove around in their little red Corvettes." His smile vanished, his pose lost its indolence, and his voice dropped into a chasm of pain. "Then came the war. Once I took that hit, I wasn't thinking of sex. I was thinking of surviving. And when I realized that I would, I began thinking about life itself and the gift that it was. I began thinking that I owed it to someone upstairs to do something more than take a cheerleader under the stands during halftime." He took a deep breath. "Just about then I met Joanna at the VA hospital. Maybe because of where and why we met, sex was never one of our big priorities."
Though he'd intimated as much before. Faith had trouble reconciling the potently masculine man before her with a relationship weak in sex.
"Did you ever cheat on her?"
"No."
"Did you ever want to?" "No. Even after I was well, I had other things on my mind besides sex. I guess that's how it's been ever since. I have a comfortable life. My work is exciting. I convinced myself that if there was a right woman for me, she'd come along and I'd want her, and until that happened, I wasn't going to spend the goods just for the sake of the spending." He thought back to all he'd said.
"So yes, I've been without, but no, that's not why it's so strong between us."
Faith wanted to find a reason. She wanted to put a label on the need she felt so that it wouldn't be quite so frightening.