“Why can’t you?”
“Because I’ll just start crying.” A rueful smile trembled on her lips, her sapphire eyes haunted. “You wouldn’t be able to hear me then, anyway. Oh, Kern, just leave it-you know it’s best…”
The tray slid from between them as he shoved it to a distance. Both his arms lifted in front of him, simply suspended in thin air, waiting. The distance was so short to the cradle of his body; tears were already helplessly falling as he pulled her onto his lap, rocking her like a child, smoothing back her hair. “I couldn’t bear it when I found you gone, Tish. I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t. And when I saw you at camp, looking so dragged-out tired and so beautiful in the rain, I wanted to kill you for risking coming here, for being so close to the fire. If something had happened to you…”
“I had to know you were all right. I had to…” The tears choked in her throat. Her whole body was shuddering, curled into the circle of his arms. “All they’d say on the television was that the fire was west of the Smokies. What else could I do?” The tears finally lessened, and she cupped her palms tightly over her eyes.
“What else could you do?” he repeated dryly, and very gently shifted her to face away from him, his legs cradling both sides of her. Tugging the sheet to her waist, he pressed a kiss in the hollow between her neck and shoulders again. “Since you don’t give a hoot in hell, Tish, there wasn’t a reason for you to do anything. You left, didn’t you?” he whispered. “Put your head down. No, never mind.”
His fingers had started to knead her scalp but abruptly changed course. Before she could protest she found the rest of the sheet twisted from her and a bed of white linen made over the plush carpet. “Kern, please don’t,” she said helplessly. “Please-I don’t want this.”
“Yes, I know.” He untangled her from the tense curl as if she were clay to be remolded, and then he molded. Both his hands worked the length of the back of her right leg, then the left, working out tension, working like a sensual, possessive drug. Kern’s touch, the label on the drug, and the addiction she already knew she couldn’t fight. “You left the first time because you didn’t want this. Then I could understand, Tish. I rushed you into marriage; I rushed you into bed. I wanted to give you the patience you seemed to need so badly, but as soon as I touched you… I wanted you so badly. And to see that look of fear in your eyes…I know I hurt you, Tish, but I never, never meant to…”
A flush like fever warmed her skin as his hands strayed up, kneading at the firm curve of her hips and the base of her spine. Her eyes closed again, urging back tears of a different flavor. She felt, in his touch, in his words, the loving she had been so sure wasn’t there. He crouched over her, straddling her thighs as he worked the length of her back, smooth long strokes that vibrated with emotion from his hands.
“And you’re going to tell me that you left this time because you didn’t want this,” he murmured. “That’s all it could have been, Tish, because the rest was fine. You know it was. You love the land like I do and you took to the life. So you need more than a house, and there aren’t any buyer positions in seven-story department stores, but you’ll never convince me that really mattered. You were so happy that day we flew over the land. You took to decorating my mother’s room, and you knew you could take on that shop you said you wanted once…”
His mouth suddenly followed his hands, his lips caressing the long stretch of soft skin, his arms cradling the sides of her. Her body went silk for him, liquid silk.
A radiant feeling of life was in her flesh and she craved to touch him…
“So this time you loved the life, Tish, and that left only us. You care. It showed in your jealousy of Rhea. It showed the morning we talked in my office. And we still share the same dream-you would never have come back and worn yourself out working in that fire otherwise. And I saw you at that waterfall, Tish, before we made love. So that leaves us sex, just like it left us before. You want to tell me that you don’t want to be touched-not by me. There just isn’t any chemistry, is there. I just leave you neutral…”
Kern turned her beneath him, straddling now the front of her thighs. The tenderness in his eyes was touched with despair, a pain she could hardly bear to see, and there was anger in his voice she knew graveled over that pain. “You’re lying to yourself, Tish, not to me! I can just look at you-there’s need in your eyes right now, desire. Your pulse is racing like white-water rapids; your flesh gives in my hands; your breasts are already swollen and I haven’t even touched them…”
Gently her fingertips stroked his chest, soothing. “I love you, Kern,” she said softly. “I love it when you touch me. I always did. The only reason I left was because I thought you didn’t want me!”
He leaned over with his lips parted to say something, but she pressed her fingertip to his mouth to stop him, shaking her head, the barest sheen of moisture in her eyes. “I knew you wanted me-in bed. That didn’t mean you wanted me as a wife again, Kern, someone to share your time and your problems and, yes, our old dreams. If you’d asked me here, perhaps I would have read it all differently, but you didn’t ask. I was just forced on you because of your mother. So you wanted to make love to me-and, God, I wanted you to-and we did, Kern, and then I asked you. You said you’d never ask me to stay again-”
“I was trying to tell you that I said it all when I married you, Tish.” Kern almost growled as he leaned over her. “That that was a commitment for all time as far as I was concerned, but that I would never, never force or rush you into anything again. The choice had to be yours. I couldn’t ever again live with forcing you into something you weren’t ready for or didn’t want.”
“But I thought it had to come from you,” she whispered, “because I was the one who failed you before.”
His eyes clouded, his palms cupping her face. “Tish, you never failed me in anything,” he said softly. “You were just young. I could have done it differently…”
“I never wanted you different and I never blamed you, Kern…” Like the waste of the fire, she felt the waste of so many years without him, so many years she could have loved him, been loved. She wound her arms around his neck and pulled him to her. Fiercely their lips met, an odd trembling in his body that communicated to her own, was matched in her own. If she had finally lost inhibitions with him at the waterfall, it was still nothing like now.
She reached for him in joy, caressing his neck and chest and back. It was all such riches-the way his heartbeat surged beneath her fingertips, the way his body was so beautifully male, his hard-muscled thighs no less arousing than the grainy skin of his tanned neck. A new rhythm kept beating inside, building; she didn’t want to give in to it yet. She wanted to savor the sensual sweetness of just freely loving him, and there was no part of him she didn’t want to touch, to learn all over again in loving…
He understood so well, loving her body with the same wonder that she loved his. But it was not the same. She could touch so easily, but not be touched so easily-there was a spot in the V of her throat where she could not bear the stroking caress of his lips. Her breasts had swelled before he touched them, but the languid lick of his tongue made her senses feel like velvet. Her back arched for closeness, rhythm inside beginning to sound in her ears, blocking out day and place and sunlight. The brush of his beard in the hollow of her stomach, and-
“No more, Kern, please…”
Sensations swarmed her senses. His lips covered the pleading in her throat, but he would not give in yet. His palm smoothed its way down her throat and breast and navel, to the silky down between her thighs until the rhythm was the only thing in her bloodstream, a surging love that craved completion.