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  “She actually said that?” Jess demanded, unable to keep the scorn out of her tone.

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose you agreed.”

  “Like I said, I wasn’t happy about the situation—not happy at all. And you didn’t give me a good reason for staying away. At least not one that I could accept.”

  She began tapping her foot. “Let’s not go into that again. And besides, we did not have an ‘engagement.’ At best, we had an understanding.”

  He lifted a hand slightly, conceding the point.

  “Then your telegram came. I thought of everything that had happened and what Amy told me. You didn’t come home and you’d met that man, Andrew Stafford.”

  “Stavers, and I didn’t—”

  “Whatever his name was. Yeah, I started to feel like that trout.”

  She frowned at him, but it wasn’t an outright scowl this time. His statement of the facts was beginning to gel in her mind and freeze her heart.

  “Riley left to join the army, and Susannah was pretty gloomy. So was I, under the circumstances. Amy became our bright spot. She kept us company.” He lifted his shoulders helplessly. “I started courting her. And before I knew it, I knew she was expecting us to marry.”

  “You didn’t waste any time, did you?” she observed tartly. “Did you ever think to write me to ask me about the telegram you received?” Her words still had a sharp edge, but his gaze on her was level and uncompromising.

  “A dozen times, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Did you think to write to me about the one you got?”

  She arched a brow and gave him a brittle smile. “Yes, but I didn’t think it would be very satisfying. I was so hurt and angry, I just wanted to shout at you. I’m not sure that I’m not still angry.”

  He drained his glass. “But here we are, Jess. At the end of a long road we never meant to travel, brought here by someone who wanted her own way. And I guess she didn’t care who she hurt to get it.”

  Jess took another drink from her own glass. Tears stung her eyes, and she rummaged through her pockets but couldn’t find a handkerchief. She believed Cole, but it was all so hard to accept, so difficult to conceive of treachery like that from her own sister. “I feel like—it’s like we’re talking about a stranger. This isn’t the sister I remember. It can’t be. Amy wouldn’t do that.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. We were wrong.”

  “Do you love her?” Her words came out as a whisper.

  He closed his eyes for an instant, as if trying to decide which answer was best, a lie or the truth. “I tried to convince myself that I did.”

  She swiped at the corners of her eyes with her thumb. “It certainly seemed like it. Those new cameo earrings she showed me, the ones she’s still wearing, didn’t come from a casual friend.”

  He shifted in his chair. “I bought them for her the day I moved your stuff from the hotel to this office. I…well…”

  “Well?”

  “I felt guilty because as soon as I saw you at Granny Mae’s your first day back, I knew I was just kidding myself. Then when she got sick and I saw her lying there in that cot, before I knew about the telegram, I felt like the biggest heel on the face of the earth. After all, everyone else loves Amy. Why didn’t I?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I never got over you. And if I’d thought it would do any good, I would have paid the devil an admission price to walk through that hell I traveled, just to get you back.”

  A flush of annoyance overtook her again. “Really? You didn’t try very hard. As soon as you thought the going was tough, you jumped from me to my sister. The damage is done,” she said, taking a bigger drink from the glass clasped in her hands.

  “Come on, Jessica, how hard did you try?” His eyes looked like chips of blue ice. “I don’t deny that I’ve got plenty of regrets. If you can tell me you don’t, then you’re not the woman I’ve always believed.”

  She felt her cheeks grow hot. “Of course I have regrets. But we’re not the same people we were before. At least I’m not, and I don’t think I ever will be again.”

  “Because of me.”

  “Well, no, not completely because of you.” The wailing children, their worn mothers, the drunken fathers, the defeated, abandoned old people—their ghosts never left her.

  Silence opened between them.

  “Maybe we’re not the same,” he said at last, the hostility drained away. “It could be that we’re better.”

  Her head came up. “Better—how?”

  He left his chair and crouched on his haunches in front of her. “We’re a little wiser now. Maybe we appreciate each other more.” He was so close, he smelled so familiar. She noticed fine lines that fanned out from the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there before, the same strong jaw and broad brow. No one and nothing else had ever filled her heart quite the way he had. Unable to stop herself, she leaned toward him and brushed the backs of her fingers against his hair.

  He took her hand and kissed it, lingering over her wrist with his lips.

  The feeling, tempting and yet somehow forbidden, nudged the spell that grew around them. “Cole, no.” She tried to pull her fingers from his grasp. “We’re not going to do this again. You might have reached a decision about Amy, but she and everyone else still think you’re her suitor. You have to wait until she’s better and then tell her it’s over. Otherwise, you’re just—just a philanderer.”

  He looked up from her hand, and the seconds passed. Then he pressed his forehead to her knees. “No, I’m not, Jess. I’ve been bamboozled, and so have you. But I’ve waited long enough for you—years—and I don’t want to wait anymore.”

  Tears burned her eyes again, and she stroked his hair. Amy, her own sister, had connived and lied to both of them, and the truth was there on the table for her to see. “But suppose that makes our actions no better than Amy’s…”

  He lifted his head, and she saw the angry, raw flame that burned behind his icy gaze. His voice was low and rough. “Bullshit. You’ll just get a nosebleed walking that high road.”

  Reaching up, he tugged lose the ribbon on the end of her braid where it rested in front of her shoulder. Then he pulled her out of the chair into his embrace. They toppled to the oval braided rug that covered the pine flooring, her skirts tangled around her legs, trapped beneath him and trapping her. His kisses pelted her face like raindrops during a late-summer storm, moist and warm and as welcome.

  She wrapped her arms around him, simply unable to resist a moment more.

  Anger still twisted through her, fury over what her sister had done, and on a lesser scale, toward Cole for his seemingly effortless recovery from their derailed love affair. Yet, overriding that was the wanting, her desire for him, and the love she’d forced into a corner of her frozen heart. When his lips touched her mouth, her icebound objections and high-minded ideals melted away, freeing that love.

  They reached for each other with a restless urgency she hadn’t known for over two years. Beneath the fabric of his shirt she felt hard muscle and bone, honed by a lifetime of physical labor. Heat radiated from him.

  His chin-length hair fell forward as he looked down at her. “Jessica,” he muttered, “Jess, it’s always been you.” He took her mouth in a kiss that warmed her from within, as if hot nectar had infused her veins. With one hand under her neck, he unbuttoned his shirt. Then he reached for her hand and sandwiched it between his own and his fast-thumping heart. “Always in here.”

  She couldn’t suppress the soft moan inspired by the feel of his warm, bare skin and hard-thumping pulse beneath her palm. Their previous, interrupted explorations of intimacy now stacked up to create a feverish hunger that was both mature and years in the building. As society dictated, and perhaps despite what Powell Springs might have assumed that long-ago summer when Adam had come upon her and Cole beside the creek, Jessica had maintained her virginity. For twenty-seven years, through youthful temptation, through schoolin
g and her work. She had never wanted or even considered giving herself to any man but Cole.

  She had never loved any man but Cole.

  His big hand slid up her rib cage and covered her breast, her thin shirtwaist a flimsy barrier, and her body rose to meet his touch.

  Jessica knew almost everything modern medical knowledge and experience had to offer about a human body as a machine. How its heart pumped blood, how its organs worked, how it sustained itself and reproduced. But as a vessel of deep, emotion-driven desire, she was unversed.

  As Cole’s impatient fingers worked at the buttons of her blouse and her combination beneath, his lips and tongue plied hers, hot and slick and seeking. Time and the grim specters of sickness and death receded to a distant corner of her mind, banished by his ministrations. He bent his head to her neck and throat, leaving a trail of warm, moist kisses that focused her senses to an exquisite sharpness. Her head was filled with the scent of him, part male, part whiskey, with a trace of night air that lingered on his clothes.

  She traced her fingertips along his face, reading the faint stubble of his beard, the strength of his jaw, the soft skin on the back of his neck that was protected from the weather by his hair. With seemingly no effort, he had her out of her blouse and skirt, and they laid in a heap beside them. He nudged her shoes off as he ran his hands down her legs, pushing her stockings out of his way.

  Unfettered by a repressive modesty she would have felt with any other man, she wound her fingers in his hair and pulled his lips to hers again to answer his wordless demand for surrender. Tomorrow and what it might bring didn’t matter at this moment—the world could roll on around them. They were stopped in a place that time and circumstances could not reach.

  The hard length of him, pressed against her thigh, left no question about his intentions.

  Cole unbuttoned and reached into Jessica’s white cambric combination. It was silly female underwear that reached her knees, but it obligingly opened down the entire length of her torso. Her smooth body, fragrant with spice and dark wood, was full and womanly.

  Outside, within the confines of the shop grounds, Roscoe, Cole’s dog, began barking. Cole raised his head, listening for a moment. Roscoe kept up such a furious ruckus that Cole almost interrupted his exploration of her scented smoothness. The dog didn’t usually bark like that unless a stranger approached. The doors weren’t locked, but the paddock was under this apartment’s window. Briefly, he considered going to look. But one look at the softness laid bare before him, and the fire in him raged. He abandoned the idea. The damn-fool mutt had probably cornered some night-dwelling critter. He just hoped it wasn’t a skunk.

  “No woman is as beautiful as you, Jess,” he uttered against her neck. “Not a single one.” His hand drifted over her belly and down lower, lower, to the place that even her underwear could not hide from him. She squirmed under his touch.

  In one grand sweep, he pulled her into his arms and carried her to the closed room that held the bed. Balancing her, he turned the knob and kicked open the door. A break in the clouds sent a shaft of silver-gray moonlight over the quilt, as if beckoning them to this place. Beyond the window, the streetlight cast shadows on the walls of bare-limbed trees that had shed their leaves.

  He put her on the bed and pulled off his shirt while she watched. “Tell me,” she murmured plaintively. “Tell me again.”

  He knew what she meant. Kicking off his boots, he unbuckled his belt and ripped open the fly of his jeans. He shucked the pants, then climbed onto the bed beside her, where she lay with her hair in a cloud of waves spilling over her pillow. “I love you,” he said, taking her into his embrace once more. “I have always loved you.”

  In the midst of everything that had gone wrong with the world—war, disease, loss, and suffering—and between them, his statement was life-affirming to his own ears. A toast to this moment he’d waited for half his life, and a tribute to the woman who had owned his heart for just as long.

  The graze of her fingertips along his hip sent blood pounding to every part of his body, and he rolled toward her, putting one leg between hers to give him easy access to her sweetness. Desperate heat and urgency rode low in his belly, demanding satisfaction. But he had to wait, he had to make sure that Jessica was pleasured first.

  He ran his hand up the inside of her smooth thigh until he reached the slick, sweet warmth that wept for his touch. At the same time, he took the tight bud of her nipple into his mouth, brushing it with his tongue.

  Jessica moaned and arched against him, giving herself to the utter flood of sensation. Their youthful explorations had been nothing like this. The yearning had been nothing like this. Fear of discovery and self-consciousness had inhibited her. Now she felt neither.

  Cole groaned against her neck when Jessica reached down to wrap her hand around the hot length of him, and she reveled in his response. All that was female in her surged to life, as if awaking from a years-long slumber. He pushed her hand away and muttered, “Not yet, honey. Not yet.”

  He played her slick, sensitive flesh with the deftness of the most skilled musician coaxing music from an instrument. Her nerves drawn as tight as the strings of that instrument, each stroke of his hand sent vibrations shivering through her, building the crescendo. He murmured in her ear, only part of which she grasped. When she could stand no more, he pushed on, driving her to a frenzy of sensation that she had never experienced before. She pushed against his hand to meet the waves of spasms that wracked her. Her cry in the darkness was smothered by his kiss.

  Shifting his weight, in the moonlight he hovered over her, then covered her body with his own. She closed her arms around him and felt him probe unerringly toward the center of her that even now, still quivered with the aftereffect of her climax.

  It took every ounce of Cole’s flagging self-control to keep from burying himself in Jessica’s welcoming heat. He had thought of this moment a hundred times since he’d first set eyes on her again, even though he hadn’t known it would occur. He gave a tentative nudge against her and heard her small, sharp gasp.

  “I can’t change my mind now, Jess,” he warned raggedly.

  “No, no—please don’t stop.”

  “I swear I’ll try not to hurt—”

  But she lifted her hips to meet his, forcing him to become one with her. She closed around him like a warm glove, like a scabbard for a sword, one that would fit no other but the one it had been made for. He withdrew and thrust again, relishing the delicious agony building in him. Jessica’s movements complemented his, putting them both on a blade-sharp precipice of desire. At last they were flung into an abyss of emotional passion, of two hearts and souls joined, now and for all time. His release shook him to the core of his being.

  He pressed his head to her shoulder, limp and breathing like a winded horse. He felt her smile against his cheek.

  “What?”

  “You’re really quite a man, Cole.”

  He smiled too. “Was I what you expected?”

  She hugged him and he rolled her over so that she lay on him. “Better than I dreamed. And I dreamed about this many times.”

  “So did I. I couldn’t help it, I love you.”

  She put her hand to his cheek. “Not as much as I love you.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Jessica lay with her head pillowed on Cole’s shoulder and one leg thrown over his. She felt she could finally explain to him why she had left the job which, ultimately, had cost her so much.

  “I began to realize that I wasn’t making any real difference in those people’s lives. I kept patching up the same ones, if they lived, and fighting the same problems in others.” They had made love once more, and then both had fallen into deep sleep, exhausted and sated. Now the magic of their night together was nearly over. In her sitting room, the clock struck six-thirty. “It didn’t matter how hard I worked, or how hard I tried. There were so many factors I couldn’t overcome. At first I didn’t think I could leave. But then, despit
e, well, everything, I knew I couldn’t stay. There was no joy left in my work. Only a feeling of abject futility. So I suppose I ran away from it.” She told him about her month in Saratoga Springs and her self-imposed isolation from the world.

  “And now? You aren’t still going to Seattle, are you?” He stroked her bare arm and played with her fingers as they spread across his chest.

  She turned her face toward the window. “I don’t dare think farther ahead than one day. This responsibility I have, taking care of this town, is even less predictable than the duty I had back East. There, I knew I was battling ignorance and inhumanity. Here my enemy is a mystery, a virtual unknown.”

  With agonizing reluctance, she disentangled herself from the warmth of his arms, sat up, and perched on the edge of the mattress.

  “Jess, wait. Don’t go yet.” He was too tall for the bed, and yet he looked so right there. It wasn’t hard to let her imagination picture him there every night, and waking up with him every morning. Seeing him in the low dawn light, his long hair tousled, his big frame lying back against the pillows, she thought he’d never looked so handsome and appealing.

  She sighed. “I have to get back to the infirmary. I have work to do. As long as this crisis lasts and I’m the only physician here, these long hours will go on. Even though the rate of new infections has just begun to drop off, I’m still fighting an uphill battle. And for all I know, it could get worse again.”

  He sat up too, and began pulling on his clothes. “I guess I’ve got to go, too. We’re wrangling a herd to put on the train late tomorrow afternoon. Will you come to the ranch for dinner after?”

  She tensed, pausing with one arm in the blouse she had pulled from the wardrobe. “That’s not a good idea, Cole. Not yet. High road, low road—Amy has to face the consequence of her actions and you have to tell her why you’re ending your courtship. She’s not well enough for that.” And Jessica wasn’t sure she was ready for whatever might follow after.

  He stared at the post on the bed for a moment. “Yeah, I know,” he conceded. He stood at the bureau mirror and used both hands to comb back his hair. “At least I can give you a ride to the high school.”