Seduced (16 page)

“Don’t,” he breathed. “Don’t look away from me.”

He took her hand and put it at his neck, where she felt not just the searing heat of his skin, but the throb of his heart. “We are together in this,” he said.

Together in this. It was as if a bell had been rung in her chest, and the words vibrated through her. She looked back at him, seeing the high color in his cheeks, feeling the pant of his breath.

No longer content to lie there and be touched, she pulled him down to her for another kiss.

It was wild this time, and that matched her desire fully. He sucked her tongue into his mouth, his hand swept from her breast to her hip and he rolled her toward him, and he kept her there with an arm against her back. She could not hold him hard enough, close enough. The clothes between them were too much of a barrier and she pushed her hand up under the bottom of his shirt, spreading her palm wide against the smooth skin of his back.

He hissed and kissed her as if he wanted to devour her.

The muscles of his back danced under his skin.

His hand dropped to her leg and he began to pull up her skirt.

“Cole.” Steven’s voice was as sharp as a gunshot across the meadow, and Cole stopped. Melody felt like screaming. He broke the kiss and pressed her head to his neck.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

Dying of mortification, she thought, but nodded.

“Give us a second, Steven,” Cole said, and she risked a look under his arm at Steven, only to find him standing there with Annie.

She groaned and buried her face in Cole's neck.

He got up and helped her to her feet. The weight of three people watching her was overwhelming, and scalding tears of embarrassment burned behind her eyes. Head down, mortified, she gathered the clothing that had been scattered.

Cole helped, smiling all the while.

“This is funny?” she asked.

“A little.” He winked at her and she wanted to smack him. “My brother is going to scold me.”

“That . . . that is all you have to say?” She glared at him. “This wasn't enough
more
?” She spat the word as if it were poison. And it was to her.

His face got hard, but she would not apologize. He knew her intentions.

“It wasn't the right more,” he said.

She walked away from him, the clothes clutched in her arms, forcing herself to hold her head high as she walked past Steven and her sister.

Inside, she put the clothing down on the table and waited for Annie to arrive with her worry. Frantic, she tried to focus herself by folding the clothes.

“What are you doing, Melody?” Annie asked from the doorway. “What scheme is this?”

“There is no scheme—”

“Stop lying to me!” Annie was undone, shaking, blushed with fury.

“I proposed.”

“Marriage?”

“Don’t worry, he rejected.”

Annie’s gasp was censorious and shocked. Another lifetime ago, Melody would have rolled her eyes. But now she felt too used to play her part in this scene. “Then what was that?”

Melody shook her head. She was making a mess of the folding and so she stopped, her hands limp and useless on the table. “I’m not sure.”

“You’re more than just your assets as a wife. Or a whore.”

Melody flinched at the word from her sister’s mouth. “I know that, Annie. But I got carried away. I’ve heard it happens.”

“Have you been carried away with Cole before?”

“No. Calm down, Annie, I am fine.”

“Steven will make Cole do the right thing.”

“It was a kiss, Annie. That’s all. Don't be such a prude.”

“You think I disapprove of sex. I only disapprove of how you use it to secure a future neither of us want!”

“I want it!” she cried, and then bit her lips, shaking her head.

“What are you talking about?”

“I want this life. I want this clearing and this work. I want a family. Children.”
And Cole.

But he would not marry her.

“But . . . what of Denver?”

“Denver is your dream, Annie. Not mine.”

“And you would go behind my back to make sure it doesn’t happen?”

“I’m sorry,” she sighed.

“Sorry?” Annie cried. “As if that makes it okay? I thought you saw me, Melody. I thought you knew me, but you are just like Mama and all the rest—”

“Annie . . .?”

“This is so like you. To believe you know best because I couldn’t possibly be able to keep us safe. I couldn’t possibly want something besides orbiting your much brighter star. I couldn’t possibly have an idea about our future,
my
future. You would rather put yourself at risk than trust your odd, crippled sister—”

“That isn’t it!”

“Stop lying to yourself and to me.”

“Listen to me. Perhaps . . . perhaps you are right. I didn’t trust your plan, not because of your leg, but because I’m not you. I do not want what you want, and you’re right, I did go behind your back, but it hardly matters. He said no.”

“Only you would say it hardly matters,” Annie whispered. “As if betraying me was nothing worse than a punch stain on a gown.”

She could feel her sister’s anger and it was far more than a sulk. Melody felt miniscule. Too tiny to be seen. They would leave and in Denver she would go numb, and at this moment that sounded better than staying and being hurt.

“Perhaps it’s best if we left soon,” Melody said.

“Perhaps it is,” Annie snapped, the fight far from over.

“WE APPRECIATE YOUR kindness,” Annie said later that night as they ate supper on the porch. The sunset was a blaze of pink and orange over the mountains. Melody put down her fork, unable to eat. “But we think it would be best if we left. Soon.”

Melody heard the scrape of plates and forks stop as Cole and Steven both turned to stare at Annie and then at her.

“We would like to leave tomorrow.” Annie nodded. “Two days at most.”

Melody's blood vessels carried fire and remorse. Her skin, she knew, was red as a cherry, and she could do nothing to stop it but lift her chin and stare right at the sunset, hurting her eyes.

“That is what you want?” Steven asked, as if the answer might change.

“It would be best. We have our future to think of.”

Yes. Our beautiful future of numb loneliness.
Melody felt the food she’d eaten well up in her throat. It did not matter that numb loneliness was what she wanted.

“Melody?” Steven asked. Finally she turned, and both of the men were staring at her.

Cole’s silence was damning. His eyes unreadable. He sat there . . . impervious.

Your darkness that matches mine
.

She would find someone else. Someone who didn't require so much of her. Who didn't make her laugh and cry and want things that were beyond her reach.

“I want to leave,” she said.

“Cole.” Steven stared daggers into his brother. “You will allow this?”

Cole nodded. “It is her choice.”

“Do you see?” Steven barked, angrier than she’d ever seen him. “Do you see what comes of love? This is not our life before the war, brother. You don’t get to be romantic about this.”

Cole was silent.

Love? Melody shook her head. Love was making a mess of all of them.

Steven blew out a long breath and hung his head. “All right, I guess . . . tomorrow Cole will fill a barrel at the seeps. The next morning he will take you to Denver. The money from the oil, combined with what we agree on for Lilly, and what I will pay you for saving my life, will buy you a house. Money left over from that, if you are careful, will last you a while.”

“I plan to seek work with one of the doctors in town.” Annie’s eyes were alight in a way Melody had never seen.

“I know Dr. Meadows; I will write you a letter of introduction,” Steven offered.

As they talked about this doctor, Melody stared down at her hands, at the blisters that had callused after the planting, until she was unable to pretend to be indifferent any longer.

When she looked right at Cole it was to find him silently watching her.

You will let me leave? Just like that?

His gaze was unreadable and she forced herself not to manufacture his thoughts. If he could not tell her what he thought, than it did her no good to try and guess.

I do not want to go
. But she had so few means with which to control her life.

“I am not hungry,” she said, and took her plate into the cabin.

After dinner there was no music. Steven and Cole went out to the barn, and bitterness brewed between Melody and her sister.

“You should have made the plans all along,” Melody said, running her cracked and blistered fingers against the smooth buttons of her dress.

“What plans?”

“The plans for us. You are far more capable than I am. Far more—”

“Stop.”

“No.” She turned toward her sister, lost in the shadows on the far side of the room. “It's true. I have only ever wanted a home. A family. You are the one with ambition.”

“There will be a home for us in Denver,” Annie said. “And I let you make the plans, Melody, because you were so much more fearless. And I was so used to not speaking up.”

Melody nodded, though the ache in her chest would not go away.

She said nothing else as they dressed for bed, through the quiet hush of Steven and Cole returning from the barn, the crackle of someone stirring the fire.

And now, in the silent cabin, she felt her future pressing in on her. Suffocating her. Did Annie feel like this every time Melody made a decision for them? Did this resentment and frustration crackle through her?

How stupid I was to think I needed to care for her. She is a thousand times more capable than I am.

Melody threw off her blankets.

But it wasn't enough. She still couldn't breathe. Denver loomed in her mind.

Melody stood and grabbed Annie’s wrap from the nail near the door. She would go outside, say goodbye to Lilly. The garden. The view from the porch.

The other room was cozy in the last of the crackling firelight, and she was surprised to see Cole sitting up at the table, watching the flames. Silently they stared at each other, her heart pounding so loudly she was sure he could hear it. She was sure it would wake up Steven and Annie.

Cole stood from his chair, his shirt untucked and unbuttoned, as if he’d been distracted while undressing. Firelight danced over the skin of his belly and chest, and her fingers twitched with the desire to touch him. To slide her hands around his muscled rib cage to his back.

He crossed the small distance between them, walking out of the firelight and into the shadows. His nearness made her ache, and she was aware of the slickness between her legs. How her lungs couldn’t quite gather in enough air.

“Follow me,” he breathed. He turned for the door, lighting the lamp and gathering blankets as he went.

Her heart pounded with victory. Her fingers went numb.

He meant to compromise her. She wasn't stupid. This wasn't goodbye. And she would be compromised.

But when Cole followed up whatever liberties he took—and she allowed—by coming up to scratch, it would mean marrying a man who would always be disappointed. Who would always want something from her that she did not know how to give.

Am I that strong?
she wondered.

If it meant staying in this meadow and not going to Denver, she would do it. She would be compromised, insist he do the right thing and then suffer the consequences of marriage to a man she was doomed to disappoint.

She thought briefly of Annie, of their diverging paths, of an uncertain future, but she found she had to make this choice, here and now, for herself. Annie would go to Denver and she would stay.

For her own happiness.

She’d done wrong things before. Bad things. Scandalous things.

But following Cole out that door and across the clearing to the barn, she felt no guilt.

Inside the small cave Cole put down the blankets and the lamp.

Behind him, she put her hand to his back, felt the muscles under his shirt bunch at her touch. Growing bolder, she put both hands against his shoulder and reached forward to his chest to grab the neck of the shirt and pull it down his arms.

“Melody—”

He turned, but she didn’t give him a chance to talk. On tiptoes and still too short, she reached to kiss him, tugging him to meet her halfway. His lips, their surprising voluptuousness, were perfectly familiar after just a few kisses. She’d kissed Christopher a hundred times, and while she'd enjoyed it, she had no memory of his lips, no impression. Ten years from now she would remember the surprise of Cole’s lips. He tensed as if to push her away, but she’d been here before and knew what to do when a man would try to be reasonable, when she needed him unreasonable.

She dropped Annie’s wrap from her shoulders and stepped into Cole’s chest, her breasts pressed against Cole’s naked chest through the thin lawn of her nightgown, and she gasped at the sensation, the liquid rush of desire that flooded through her.

His hands gripped her elbows and she twined her arms around his neck, giving him no chance to push her away. She kissed him as she liked to be kissed. She licked at his lips, and when he didn’t let her in, she took his lower lip between her teeth and nipped at him. He jumped and then laughed, a low rumble. Her tongue swept in, laying claim. He dropped her elbows and eased his hands into her hair. She braced herself to be pushed away, but instead he tilted her head, finding a better angle, and when his tongue swept into her mouth, it was deep, rough. And she tasted something different in him. In them, perhaps. Something wild . . . but resolute.

Her hands skated over his flesh, across dips and valleys, muscle and the fur of his chest. A thousand variations on a masculine theme and she had never, ever enjoyed touching someone so much. Her fingertips brushed the skin just over the tops of his pants and he flinched away from her. Again, laughing.

For such a serious man he sure found kissing to be joyful.

His thick, calloused fingers tugged loose the three small buttons at the top of her gown. Cool air touched her chest, the curve of her breasts, the tops of her arms. He stepped back and pushed the rest of the gown off her body. She knew her body was pleasing, though it was thinner than it had ever been and she had muscles where before she’d only had soft, round flesh. But Cole gazed at her like she was heaven solidified.