“Bett?”
Through a sleepy fog, Bett opened her eyes, reaching automatically for Zach when she saw his face so close to hers.
“No, sweetheart. Up,” he whispered.
“Pardon?”
Zach, for some strange reason, was dressed. Jeans, a dark sweatshirt, sneakers. The room was still shrouded in the charcoal fuzziness of predawn; she could barely make out his shaggy brown hair and crooked smile. The same fuzziness muddled her brain as Zach, speaking in whispers, urged her into a robe and slippers, then down the stairs.
At the front door, she was sufficiently awake to at least open her mouth. She was not generally in the habit of walking out the front door in yellow scuffs and her long yellow cotton robe. Zach kissed her just then. Zach kissed her very, very thoroughly.
By the time she surfaced, he was herding her toward the pickup. “The babies-” she protested vaguely.
“Billy took the babies yesterday morning. Don’t you remember?”
Sort of. There’d been two nights and a day before the raccoons had changed from reluctant feeders to guzzlers. She couldn’t let Billy take them until she’d been sure they would survive.
Last night, though, she’d fallen asleep like a zombie; she only vaguely remembered Zach carrying her upstairs. Now, she regarded her husband with a definitely sensual smile. “You seem to be kidnapping me.”
“You bet your bare toes I am.” He tucked her in the curve of his shoulder for the drive, aware that he’d woken her from sleep she still needed, but not caring as much as he should.
Something had clicked in his head during the past few days. Elizabeth, so insensitive to Bett’s feeling for animals, to something so integral to her daughter’s nature. Elizabeth, criticizing Bett so very subtly on half a dozen fronts, always well-intentioned. Elizabeth, forever and with all good intentions, interrupting every moment of closeness between them.
Zach had never intended to complain about the inconveniences Elizabeth’s stay was causing for him. He not only cared about his mother-in-law, but also accepted Bett’s feeling of responsibility for her welfare.
But Liz should never have made the mistake of hassling Bett.
Very complicated issues had been reduced to utter simplicity. As simple as breakfast. Twenty minutes later, he had a small fire going at the edge of the woods by the pond. Bett was staring at him with increasingly bewildered eyes, her soft hair fluffed around her face in a haphazard halo. Wearing yellow inevitably made her appear as fragile as a daisy. Bett was, at times, very fragile. Scrambled eggs were cooking in the iron frying pan; Bett was curled up on the sleeping bag with an old blanket around her shoulders; and dawn’s pale, silvery colors were peeking through the woods.
“So.” Bett was groping for conversation. “You just suddenly felt like a picnic at five o’clock in the morning.”
Zach spooned eggs onto a paper plate and handed it to her, along with a plastic spoon. Finding plastic forks had proved difficult. “You’re going to need this energy,” he commented.
“I am?”
His eyes flickered to hers. “When you’re all done, I’m going to make love to you so long and so hard you won’t know what hit you.” He frowned, staring at her. “Hard isn’t the right word. I don’t want you to misunderstand. I want an hour with you, in complete silence. I want you open for me. I want to bury myself inside your softness.”
Her lips formed a startled O that never materialized aloud. A moment ago, they’d been talking about breakfast. She tried to swallow a bite of food, staring at her husband.
Zach looked the same. His brown hair was still the color of chestnuts, all disheveled, his sideburns getting a little long. His skin still had the whole summer’s sheen of bronze in it. He was moving casually, his walk lithe and easy, to the pond, where he crouched on his haunches to rinse out the frying pan.
Maybe he hadn’t just said all that, she thought fleetingly. Maybe she’d imagined it. Because there was nothing specifically different in the way he looked that could account for an instant, vibrant, delicious tingling in every erotic nerve ending in her body. As he strode back toward her, his eyes seemed to burn into hers with an intense, deliberate flame.
“Eat,” he scolded.
Ah, yes. For that energy she was going to need. She took another bite, not the least interested in food. Zach kicked sand on the embers of the fire with the side of his boot, served her the last of the coffee from the thermos and took the few items involved in his cooking project to the back of the pickup.
The sun was just peeking over the horizon; the smell of dew surrounded them; the pond waters, pearl gray, were like glass. It was a silent world. She watched Zach as he moved about soundlessly, strong and tall and very, very male. Zach smiled so readily. But Zach was not smiling when he looked her way.
“Bett?” His voice was curiously gentle. He took the half-eaten breakfast from her hand. When he scooped her up, yellow blanket and all, she was not surprised. Zach was doing an unforgivably good job of making her feel like a princess, a princess captured by a pirate. Not that she really believed that, but she gave in to the odd, vulnerable feelings inside, that fragile, trembly rush. She nestled her cheek against his chest as he climbed into the cover of the trees.
“Are you angry?” she whispered suddenly.
His lips fleetingly brushed her forehead. “No.”
“You are,” she said hesitantly.
“Not,” he promised, “with you. And you are the only one on my mind at the moment, Bett.”
He stopped walking at the crest of the hill, where in spring there was a bed of wood violets and the sun shone down in long, dusty ribbons through the leaves. In early fall, there were no flowers, just the bed of green like a spongy cushion beneath the blanket as he laid her down. She could smell the fresh dampness of morning, the promise of a sultry Indian summer day that hadn’t yet arrived. A golden leaf fluttered down here and there in the stillness. The shade was dark and private.
A cool flush touched her skin as Zach knelt beside her, his fingers threading through her hair as he drew her face close, close enough to lower his lips to hers. “You’ve been keeping secrets from me,” he murmured. “I don’t like that, two bits. I don’t like that at all.”
“What secrets?”
His lips swept over hers again, denying her question, his tongue probing between her parted lips, stirring a crazy flurry of emotions. His mouth left hers at the very instant she’d become addicted. He trailed kisses along her profile, so fragile and light she might have imagined them. His fingers were just as gentle untying the sash of her robe, parting the lapels, slipping inside. “When you’re unhappy,” he murmured, “I want to know about it. Some problems are solvable and some aren’t, sweet. I don’t give a damn. I want to know.”
“Zach, I don’t have the least idea what you’re ta-”
His blue eyes blazed into hers. “After all this time, if you really think there’s something you can’t tell me, Bett, you’ve got a long lesson coming to you.”
“But I never-”
Zach was too intent on engraining the lesson to explain. Her robe was in the way. It had to go. He could feel the shiver vibrate through her body when it was gone. She wore some kind of nylon nightgown that crinkled in his fingers as he swept it up and off, baring her sweet ivory flesh to the morning coolness. She needed warming. He had no intention of letting her catch cold.
He reveled the feel of her bare skin against his sweatshirt and jeans, the tease of clothes between them. His hands swept up and down her flesh, searing in warmth wherever he touched, creating fire with the friction of his hands that were never still. “Don’t you ever hold out on me,” he murmured. “You don’t wear a mask, not around me. You put on coverings for the rest of the world, but not for me.”
“Zach-”
“I want you like hell,” he whispered. “Open, Bett. All of you.”