Authors: Sandra Chastain
“Ed might have been assuming too much,” she explained, “but I could do a lot worse. He’s honest and dependable, and he’s offering me a secure future. In Arcadia that’s considered an admirable trait.”
Sam removed his fingertips from her neck and took her hand in his. “I can’t do much about your future. I don’t even know what mine is, but if it’s honesty you want, then listen to this. I want to make love to you. I think you want the same thing.”
“You want to make love to me?” Andrea was incredulous. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“You’re the one who wanted honesty, darlin’. Tonight, tomorrow, whenever. As friends or something more, I’m going to make love to you, Andrea. We’ve been struck by lightning, and we can’t change that. We might as well accept it for as long as it lasts.”
“ ‘For as long as it lasts’? No way, José. I’ll never let that happen again.” She started to get to her feet but was caught by Sam’s big hand and pulled back onto the seat beside him.
“You tell me to accept the honesty of the fine citizens of Arcadia, but you can’t accept a simple truth, one on one. All that acceptance sounds good, doesn’t it, so long as it isn’t you that has to do the trusting.”
“But, Sam, you don’t understand.”
“Who hurt you so bad, Chief, that you’ve scurried down this rabbit hole and pulled the town over you?”
“The ‘who’ doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “Let’s just say that he was a traveling man, like you. Even the farmer’s daughter learns sooner or later.”
Sam lifted Andrea’s hand and turned it palm-up, placing light sweet kisses on the soft skin. “My mother used to do this.” he whispered between kisses. “She’d say, ‘Let me kiss it and make it well.’ Maybe we could do that for each other.”
“How could we possibly make each other well, Sam? We’re so different. You …”
“Need somebody to hold me sometimes too. Kiss me, Andrea, darlin’?”
But she was saved from her decision by the
clatter of Otis’s truck as it turned in and rattled wildly up the drive. It bounced from one rut to the other, took a sudden swerve, and headed straight for the corner of the house where they were sitting.
“Look out!” Sam yelled, coming to his feet. “He’s going to hit the house.”
Sam leapt from the porch, dragging Andrea with him as Otis hit the corner with a crash. The truck sliced away the brick supports, bringing down part of the roof. It fell across the truck and buried it in debris. When the truck finally stopped, it was nose-to-nose with the bed Sam had been sleeping in.
Sam picked himself up from the ground where he’d dived and looked around. Andrea was surveying the damage in amazement. Mamie’s house had withstood fire, lightning, and at least three generations of occupants. Yet in one swift move Otis had demolished the entire bedroom end of the building. The hurt Sam felt was so deep that it was almost a physical pain. His grandmother’s house—his mother’s dream—his home, wounded.
In the midst of the silence they heard a matter-of-fact monotone voice repeating over and over, “Sam, Sam, Sam, I think we’re stuck in here.”
“ ‘We’?” Sam and Andrea sprang into action, pulling away the rubble, wrestling broken lumber and plaster away until they reached the truck. Inside, apparently unharmed, was Otis Parker, staring straight ahead as though he were watching a movie at the drive-in.
“You idiot!” Buck growled from the passenger seat.
“Are you two all right?” Andrea asked, trying to get a good look at her father.
“Believe so.” Otis looked around in stoic surprise. “Made a little mess here, didn’t we?”
Sam forced open the door and pulled Otis out, helping him over to a flooring beam where he sat down. “What happened?”
Andrea watched her father wince as he slid across the seat, extending the cast before him.
“Well, I had to pour on the coals to get her up that hill, and she just got to moving too fast to stop her. Is Buck all right?”
“I’m all right, you idiot. It’s Sam’s house you’d better worry about. Why the hell didn’t you stop?”
“Oh, I tried. No brakes.”
“I thought you got brake parts last week,” Andrea said. She wasn’t at all sure that Buck was all right. He hadn’t yet tried to stand.
“Did,” Otis agreed. “There they are, right there in the back. Been meaning to get around to putting ’em on. You aren’t going to have me arrested, are you, Sam?”
It took the better part of an hour to get Otis’s truck backed out of the house and survey the damage, damage that would take most of Sam’s money to repair. So much for the taxes. That had been a wild dream anyway. Now that too was gone. Finally Andrea was able to convince Buck to let Sam help get him home.
He’d argued all the way, but Andrea noticed that he allowed Sam to help him to his bedroom easily enough. She didn’t follow them, leaving Buck to Sam’s ministrations while she changed into a pair of crisp white shorts and a faded T-shirt.
Later, as Sam closed Buck’s bedroom door and wandered out on the porch where Andrea was sitting, she voiced her concern. “Is he really all right?”
“I think so. He’s just a bit shaken.”
Sam sat down on the steps beside her and glanced across her yard to the cornfield beyond the fence. Not a leaf moved. The sticky late-afternoon heat lay over the house and yard like a plastic umbrella, closing out the air. He tried not to see Andrea’s long tan legs, legs that brought the unbidden picture of another kind of heat to mind.
At the edge of the porch a wide strip of yellow-orange flowers spilled over the straw-covered flower beds. He recognized those flowers. He and his mother had lived in an apartment once where the previous tenants had left a window box of the perky little blossoms. His mother had laughingly called them Merry Golds. He whispered the name out loud without knowing he’d spoken.
“Yes,” Andrea said, “my mother grew them when she and Buck were first married. We’ve been planting them there ever since. I always like to think that a part of her is still here.”
“What happened to her?”
“She left. When I was two years old, she packed her bags and left.”
“I don’t understand. My mother never left me, not even when things were bad. Though I don’t know if being dragged through every rinky-dink oil town in the West is saying much.” Sam stood up and walked into the yard.
Andrea rose, gave a look back at the house, and
followed him. “You and your mother, and Buck and me. Funny, isn’t it, how things work out.”
They crossed the yard and walked up the hill and down into the apple orchard, leaving the house behind them. Worry over Buck being in another accident, the talk about her mother, and memories of David had set off a chain reaction of regret. Andrea was near tears. She felt them welling up in her eyes, and she was glad that it was almost dusk.
There was a breeze, now that the sun had dropped over the top of the pine thicket, and the shade beneath the huge old tree limbs was quiet and cool. Tiny green balls of fruit dotted the limbs. A chorus of tree frogs and katydids filled the silence.
“Andrea?”
Sam had come up behind her. She could feel his presence as though an invisible thread had been spun between them. He touched her shoulder.
“I’m sorry that my good memories spark bad moments for you.”
“Not your fault, Sam. I have insecurities of my own. I just don’t usually let anyone know.”
He turned her around and lifted her chin with his rough fingertips. “Andrea, you’ve still got Buck. I don’t have anybody. Now my house is hurt too.”
“I know, Sam. I’m sorry.”
“Andrea, love, please, I need you to hold me. Let me hold you. Let us comfort each other,” he said softly.
“Yes.” She moved into his arms and pressed herself against him. For a long time he just held her, caressing her back and her arm. He didn’t kiss her. He nuzzled her cheek and murmured
low comforting words that made holding each other seem right. He needed to be held. She understood that need. With that sudden truth, she accepted the knowledge that she wanted this man, his tenderness and his strength.
“It feels right,” he said in a low tight voice, “being close. But I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then don’t,” she whispered as her legs turned to water, and she allowed him to draw her down to the ground. Sam’s arms moved from her back to her shoulders. He was on his knees, facing her. She felt it again, that invisible blanket of sensation that wrapped around her whenever he touched her. Except now the blanket was surrounding him too.
His hand left her shoulder and played lightly down her neck. He skimmed the tops of her breasts through the soft cotton of her shirt, never relinquishing the intensity of his gaze.
Then his hand was underneath, lifting the shirt, touching her bare skin. His gaze followed the path of his fingertips. Her heavy breasts were encased by sheer lace that accentuated the full peak of her nipples.
Sam didn’t talk anymore, and neither did Andrea. She knew that all along she’d been fighting the attraction she felt. She’d convinced herself that Sam’s coming to town had only rekindled the memories she’d suppressed, memories of loving David and the pain of losing him.
But it wasn’t David who filled her mind. Nor was it the sudden loneliness. She was being forced to examine the everlasting sameness of her life, not as security, but as an escape. Sam stayed on
the move, and she remained in one place. But their motives were the same. They both wanted to be safe.
The rough texture of his fingers touching her breast through the lace sent shivers of desire through her, and she trembled. With each stroke of his fingertips the trembling intensified. Sam lifted his gaze, and she saw the plea in his eyes as he caught her chin with his other hand. Then with a groan of anguish, he kissed her. She couldn’t hold back a whimper as she swayed against him, following his body willingly to the warm, thick grass beneath the trees. And the kiss she returned was wrought with a need that closed out the orchard and everything else in her world.
Rolling over, he pulled her on top of him and locked her against him. His tongue was more demanding than his hands, and he plundered and examined every part of her mouth. At last, tearing his lips away, he lifted her, shifting her upward so that he could reach her breasts. Arching her back, she offered her body to him so that he could work from one aching nipple to the other. She wanted to feel his mouth on her—here—now, not in her bed as she’d imagined during the hot sleepless hours she’d paced her bedroom floor.
“Andy? Are you out there?” Ed Pinyon called out from the yard below.
“Hell!” Sam stiffened and rolled over, thrusting Andrea away as he sprang to his feet and rushed forward to meet whoever was moving up the hill in their direction. Andrea caught her breath and lay in unsated misery for a moment before she realized what he’d done. Certainly he was as
aroused as she, yet he’d gone forward to intercept their intruder, giving her precious moments to put herself back together.
She sat up, lifting her breasts to hook the bra that had come unfastened sometime along the way. Damn Ed Pinyon for coming after her. “Damn and thank you,” she whispered shakily. She knew that she was being every kind of a fool, but she wished for one true, wild moment that her rescuer had been too late.
Deliberately she rubbed her eyes. Anybody would be able to tell that there was something wrong. She hoped only that she could convince her audience that she’d been crying.
“Andrea, I came as soon as I heard.” Ed covered the distance between them in a few steps and took her hand. “Are you all right?”
“I think so, Ed. Thank you.”
Ed put a possessive arm around her, ignoring Sam’s presence. “You should have called me. What’s
he
doing here?”
“He helped me get Buck home, Ed.”
“I knew this man was trouble. I don’t want you to have anything else to do with him, Andrea.”
“Now just a minute, Ed, this wasn’t Sam’s fault. It was Otis who crashed through Sam’s house.” Andrea tried unsuccessfully to move out of Ed’s embrace.
“Of course it is. He doesn’t belong here. He’s either a criminal or a con artist. I was content to let you have your little fling, until this happened. Now I want it stopped. It’s becoming an embarrassment.”
“Let me go, Ed.” Andrea was shocked. She had
no idea that Ed was still nursing the mistaken idea that he had any control over her actions.
“Let her go, Pinyon,” Sam said quietly. “Now.”
There was a long moment when Andrea wasn’t sure that Ed would comply. She felt the silent anger in his grip and saw the deadly fury in his eyes. Nobody ever crossed Ed. Nobody ever had a reason to, until now. And she knew that being forced to back down wasn’t something Ed would forgive.
Ed dropped his arm. He shot a wicked look back at Sam. “All right. Perhaps I am overreacting. I suppose I should thank you for bringing Andrea and Buck home, Farley,” Ed said, but his tone didn’t match his words.
Andrea stepped back and moved past Ed down the hill. “Too bad about the damage to Mamie’s house,” he went on, falling in behind, “but it doesn’t matter. I’m going to tear it down anyway.”
Sam stopped. “Tear it down?”
Andrea heard the shock in his voice and realized what she’d done by not telling him the truth. She should have warned him, prepared him.
“Sure. Didn’t Andrea tell you? I’m going to claim Mamie’s house at the tax auction. Who else would want it?”
Sam walked past Ed to a point where he could face Andrea, disbelief on his face: “You knew, Andrea?”
“Well, yes, but …” Andrea felt her heart flutter as Sam’s expression turned to ice.
Ed smiled, shook his head, and let out an I-told-you-so sigh.
Sam turned and started down the hill.
Andrea shook off her anger at Ed and hurried after Sam. “Wait, Sam. I knew he planned to turn the place into an equipment storage area. But that was before you … before I … You weren’t going to stay, and I didn’t think it would matter,” she said softly.
He stopped and turned back to her.
“It matters.” His voice was tightly controlled, not completely masking the depth of his pain.
And then he was gone, disappearing into the gray of the late afternoon like a lean shadow.