An Accidental Woman (36 page)

The sensation was so strong that she closed her eyes, put her head back, drew in a breath.

“Your body's working,” he whispered against her throat, “so I'm thinking that the problem is emotional. I'm thinking that you feel guilty doing this.”

She did, indeed, but his knuckles were lightly chafing her breasts, taking away her breath in the process, and suddenly she didn't care about the other. She might die of guilt in the morning, but she wanted this now.

Taking his face in her hands, she kissed him. Immersing herself in the novelty of it and the pleasure it brought, she pushed guilt away, pushed fear away, until all that remained was the feeling. She focused on that—on the heat, the tingling, the sense of being feminine. She kept it up while he removed the rest of her clothes—focused on the feeling—and it was so intense that she was suddenly the impatient one, pushing away his clothes just to get him closer.

If he was unusually slow or gentle or careful, she didn't know it, because she loved what he did. It had been so long, and she had been so frightened. But the fullness was there, the rising inside, and if the orgasm she had was different from the ones she'd had before the accident, she couldn't say that it was any less satisfying. It was a miracle.

And even if she hadn't climaxed, she would have reveled in his. His entire body shook with the force of it. It was the best thing that had happened to her since wheelchairs with mag wheels—which was what she told Griffin when his wristwatch beeped at five the next morning.

Griffin was not pleased.

“What would you call it?”

“The best experience of my life,” Griffin said. They were lying face-to-face, now, though they hadn't been for long. She had spent most of the night on her stomach, with pillows comfortably arranged.
Stretches the muscles,
she announced in the way she had of needing to remind him that she was disabled. He didn't care how she slept, as long as it was with him, and in truth, he found her backside as exciting as her front. Of course, now he could see her breasts. They had an immediate impact on him. He reached out to touch, thought twice about it, pulled back. “Can't do this now. Gotta get up.”

Defying him, she touched his chest.

He held her hand still. “I have a plane to catch.”

She pulled her hand free, wrapped it around his neck, and brought him close for a kiss, and it fired him up all over again. He was as hard as he had been the night before—as hard as he had ever been. He whispered her name in a last attempt to stop, but she wouldn't allow it—and how could he stop? She wanted him. If she wanted to call it sex, fine. If she wanted to call it a
thing,
that was fine, too. Yes, he had to catch a plane, but satisfying her was more important.

And so pleasurable for him. And so easy. She might not be able to move her legs, but he could move them. He brought one up over his hip, opening her, and he quickly filled that space. He loved how tight she was, loved the sensual way she moved her upper body. He loved the catch of her breath, the shuddering sighs, the guttural little sounds she made when the heat rose in her. It was all he could do not to come a dozen times in response, but he waited, waited, held back until she peaked first, before letting go himself.

He wanted to lie there with her and enjoy the afterglow, but he did have a plane to catch. So he scooped her up and took her into the shower. Doing this was important to him.
I can't stand in the shower,
she had said, another of those roadblocks she had tried to throw in his way, but he knocked it down like he had the issue of dancing. The grab bars that lined the shower stall offered a perfect little ledge for propping her up while he soaped her, while she soaped him, while they kissed and touched and, incredibly, made love again. Then he wrapped her in a towel, set her out of the stall in the displaced shower chair, and let her watch while he hurriedly dressed.

“I am so late,” he said, hopping on one leg to put a sock on the other, “but it was worth every second.”

She looked flushed, sated and pleased.

He tugged on his jeans. “I guessed it would be that way the first time I laid eyes on you—no, even before that. I felt it on the phone.”

“You did not,” she chided, but she was smiling widely.

“I did. There was something between us right from the start. You are unique, Poppy.”

She patted the arm of her chair. “I am that.”

He wasn't going to deny that part of it. Pushing his arms into the sleeves of his shirt, he fastened two buttons while he chose his words. Then he put his own hands on the arms of the chair and put his face level with hers. “This chair is part of who you are. I have no problem with that. I don't see that it interferes with anything I want in a woman.” He kissed her nose. “I love you, Poppy.”

He wouldn't have minded if she had cried then. As helpless as he had felt when discouragement made her cry, tears of happiness were okay.
They were appropriate, along with a smile, a hug, and a kiss, not to mention a return of those three words.

There was none of that, though. Her smile faded. Her eyes grew sad.

He steeled himself. If she planned to say something about her disability, he would clobber her. “Poppy . . .”

Tears did come to her eyes, but they weren't tears of happiness. She shook her head slowly and pleaded in a whisper, “Don't say that. Don't spoil this.”

“I was hoping to make it even better,” he teased, desperate at least for a smile. “I haven't ever said those words to a woman before. It's momentous, don't you think?”

Still she didn't smile.

Pushing up, he finished buttoning his shirt. He brushed his teeth, scrubbed his hair with a towel, combed it first with his hands, then a brush. All the while, she was silent.

“Don't feel you have to say anything,” he remarked. “Telling a person you love him is big stuff. I wouldn't want you saying it unless you felt it, which clearly you don't right now. I just wanted you to know how I felt.” He glanced at his watch and swore softly. “I gotta go.”

* * *

It wasn't that he and Poppy had broken up, just that he had wanted her to say those words. Okay, he knew she had hang-ups about the accident. But as a couple, they had something good going, something special. And he was human. He wanted to be loved, too.

She might love him. Or she might not.

Needing to protect himself in that very dark early morning—needing to reclaim the Griffin he had been before he had ever heard Poppy's voice—he drove Buck's truck to the marina where the Porsche was stashed. He greeted Sage with an enthusiasm she had probably never known, and once he was on the highway, he put his foot to the floor.

He was pulled over going eighty-five, and though the state trooper
wasn't much older than he was and might have appreciated love-life problems, Griffin took his ticket like a man. When he returned to the road, he drove sanely.

* * *

She had satisfied Griffin. The thought of that brought relief. Brought a sense of
triumph.

On the other issue, the issue of taking care of two little girls, well, she wasn't Heather. Not many surrogate mothers could be as good as that. But she was doing okay at it, for a paraplegic.

On her way home, she stopped by the cemetery and told that to Perry Walker.

He didn't answer.

But then, he was there and she was here.

* * *

Sleep? He didn't need sleep. His bed was lonely and cold. Sleep only caused him to lose focus, and when he lost focus, he thought of Heather, and then his heart positively ached. He couldn't explain the yearning he felt—couldn't explain the sadness that threatened to turn him inside out. Anger was easier to bear than the sadness, so he hid behind that. Heather had kept secrets. She had kept him in the dark. She had betrayed him. That was cause enough for anger.

This—this focus on tapping—was therapeutic. Flatlanders assumed it was mindless work—make a hole, stick in a spout, hang a pail, get syrup.

Mindless work? They had no idea. First off, you had to know where to make a hole. If it was too close to an old hole, you wouldn't get anything worth boiling. If it was drilled straight in, you wouldn't get the force of gravity. And if you agonized over it, you'd take so long that you wouldn't have half the trees tapped by first run.

Micah worked fast. One look and he knew whether a tree needed one tap or two, and he knew just where those taps should be. Using a power drill, he made a hole that angled slightly up as it went in, so that the sap would drip down. He knew how deep to drill and not come out with the darker shavings that meant he'd hit heartwood. Heartwood was no good. Sap came from sapwood, and the shavings from that were light.

Once the hole was made, he inserted the spile and tapped it in. He knew how hard to tap and did it with an economy of motion. He used a fitting-assembly tool to quickly and efficiently attach the drop line to the lateral line, and he didn't linger at it. Once the connection was made, he moved on to the next tree.

For the past three years, he had done this with Heather. He drilled, and she tapped while he made the fitting to the lateral line. They had worked well as a team, moving from grid to grid with remarkable speed. Her enthusiasm matched his. He had never thought of tapping as a chore, because having her there made it fun.

There was no fun this year. What he felt instead was out-and-out anxiety. The sun was high, the snow was thinning, and the crows were cawing up a storm. These were the signs. He could see them, could feel the sap rising. Another couple of days and it would flow. He would bet money on that. And here he was, just putting in the first of the spiles.

A gruff voice startled him with a loud, “Hey.”

He looked around fast. Billy Farraway stood not a dozen feet off. His boots were unlaced and planted wide in snowshoes of the ancient wood type. His jacket was undone, but at least he'd had the sense to wear a hat. Granted it was his hunter's hat and cocked far back on his head. The old man would catch his death one of these days, Micah knew. Then again, he was a hardy old nut. He must have gotten the longevity in the family,
along with the height. For a man who bent over most of the time, he was surprisingly tall.

“Hey,” Billy repeated.

“What're you doing up here?” Micah asked gently.

“Just taking a look.”

“You should be down at the lake.”

“I heard you were alone. You won't finish in time if you're alone.”

Micah turned back to his tree. He drilled a second hole, well to the side and higher than the first, and tapped in the spile. He reached into his tool belt for fittings. “You shouldn't be here, Billy.”

“Because my brother forbid it? That was lots of years ago. Isn't it time to let go of the past?”

Micah snorted and muttered a facetious, “Maybe I could, if I knew what it was.”

“You don't know? You don't
know?”

Micah didn't—not about Heather, not about Billy.

“Well, I'll tell you,” Billy said, “because it's time, it's time. Your father imagined I was coveting his wife, and there was never any truth to it; we were just friends, but he was a jealous man. Know what set him off? I cried at her funeral. Hell, someone had to. You were in shock and Dale was angry—angry she had the gall to leave him, like she asked for that cancer. Once she was gone, he needed someone to blame, and there I was, her friend, like I'd conspired to disrupt his life. So he blamed me for that and for every other little dream he'd ever had that wasn't about to come true. He blamed me, said I was no good, said he didn't need me, said he'd shoot me on sight if I came up here again, so I didn't. How long's he been dead now?”