Ashes and Memories (32 page)

“Have you been to the doctor?” she asked, struggling against the overwhelming urge to comfort him.

“Emma, just leave me alone.” He grabbed an open whiskey bottle and turned it up, drinking deeply before continuing, “I appreciate your concern, but I am perfectly fine.”

She’d never seen him like this, out of control, his face contorted with a mixture of outrage and something bordering on panic, so different from his usual arrogant self-assurance.

“You’re destroying yourself,” she couldn’t stop herself from blurting out. “Why won’t you let me help? Something’s eating away inside you. I know it.”

“There’s nothing inside me,” he assured her. “I’m dead inside. I made sure of that.”

He lifted the whiskey bottle, and Emma placed an impulsive hand on his arm, stilling him. His glare should have been enough to send her running from the room, but she could not allow him to push her away, not now, not when she sensed how badly he needed her.

She felt the muscle beneath her fingers go rigid. “Maybe you wanted to kill your ability to feel, but you haven’t been successful. That’s the problem, isn’t it? You do feel and you don’t want to.”

“Damn you!” he growled, jerking away from her.

The anger and pain in his eyes touched her soul and brought tears to her eyes.

“Damn you,” he whispered. The fire went out of his eyes and all that was left was a deep, bottomless hurt.

Turning away from her he paced back and forth across the room.

“You think that by putting this room back in order you’ll be putting your life back in order,” she accused. “But whatever is wrong with you will continue to destroy you unless you turn and face it instead of running away.”

He stopped before the painting of his home that hung on the wall over his desk, smiling bitterly. “Longwood. I thought about that house every day for eight months, the land, the tree shaded lake. Sometimes I could smell the honeysuckle. It was the only thing that kept me sane.”

He laughed without humor, turning the bottle up and drinking again before placing it on the desk. “My how happy they were to get their hands on one of Mosby’s officers. They couldn’t execute me, you see. Mosby had already put a stop to that by retaliating in kind the last time they executed captured rangers.”

“You were in prison,” she whispered, the words torn from her soul. Daddy had talked about traveling home in his mind when the confinement and the loneliness became unbearable. She wanted to tell Reece she understood, but she dared not. He might stop talking, and she knew instinctively that talking was the very thing he needed.

“We weren’t regular soldiers. We were guerillas, harassing the Union flanks, capturing public property, executing one brazen mission after another and leaving them to scratch their heads in confusion and embarrassment.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was so soft she could hardly hear the bitter words. “They were really happy to capture me.”

The agony and hatred in his expression and the dread in Emma’s own heart made her want him to stop, made her wonder if reliving the past was the best thing for him after all. But she wasn’t even sure he remembered she was there. He had gone to a place deep inside himself where his personal demons lived, and all she could do was stand by helplessly while he came to grips with whatever was tormenting him.

He went to the pile of debris, bending to pick up the portrait Emma had seen before of the woman who looked like Reece.

“This is my mother,” he told her, his voice soft with pain. “That’s all there is of her now. By the time I got home, Longwood had been burned to the ground. All that was left of the house was a rectangle of columns, twenty of them, and a pile of rubble taller than me. The way I heard it a group of deserters stopped by the house. They murdered everyone -- my mother, my grandfather, my wife. Then they set fire to the house. I wasn’t there to stop it. I couldn’t stop it.”

Without thinking, Emma took a step toward him. He tensed and raised a hand to ward her off, and she stopped, her heart pounding as she fought against the tears behind her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry. Bu*t you can’t blame yourself for that.”

“No. I was fighting for a cause I believed in. I played to win. I was a good soldier, decorated for bravery, promoted in the field. I did everything right.
Other men play games for sport
, my father used to tell me,
you play to win
. I did. I played to win, only -
 

“Only what?”

“All that time. Eight months in that hell they called a prison. I guess they decided to make me pay for the whole damned war.”

His words chilled her. Emma closed her eyes, trying to imagine what imprisonment must have been like for this man.

“I was so young and green,” he went on. “I’d never experienced that kind of hatred, not even on the battlefield. At first I thought I might get used to it, become inured to the pain.

“They try to humble you immediately. We were so damned proud, so sure of ourselves. They hated that stubborn southern pride and they meant to break it. I meant to keep it. They’d taken everything else I had. You have no idea what it’s like to be dependent on someone else for every morsel of food you eat, for every drop of water you drink, for the privilege of washing your face in clean water. For life itself. It’s demeaning, degrading, the helplessness, the hopelessness. The only thing I had left was my pride, and they wanted that, too. And in the end I gave them what they wanted. I couldn’t take it any more.”

“You survived, and that’s what matters,” Emma insisted, surprised she could speak past the constriction in her throat. She tried to imagine Reece stripped of his pride, but she couldn’t. It was so much a part of who he was. To lose it must have nearly destroyed him.

“I should have died first,” he told her. “I wanted to die. Yes, like your father. I wished they would kill me because I was too much of a coward to take my own life. That was before I understood that there are worse things than dying.”

“You can’t believe that.”

“I broke!”

He slammed his fist on the desk, turning to glare at her, and what she saw in his eyes chilled her to her soul.

“Don’t you understand? I couldn’t take it any longer, the games, the beatings. I gave them what they wanted. I begged them to stop because I couldn’t face.... They stopped beating me after that. But somehow the silence, the shame, was worse.... And the only thing that kept me alive was thinking about going home, about my family waiting for me.”

“You loved them very much.” It was all she knew to say. He flinched at her words, and she sensed that he had shut himself off from her. He had turned aside all her attempts at solace. She didn’t know if she had anything else to offer him. To have been through so much and then to return and find his family and home gone would have been enough to destroy most men. He’d coped with it the only way he knew how, by getting angry, and that anger had probably kept him alive. But now it was time to let go of the anger before it destroyed him.

“What would you have done differently?” Emma asked, careful to keep the emotion out of her voice. “What would you have said if they’d been there when you got home?”

Reece shook his head, his words soft and bitter. “They weren’t.”

“No, they weren’t,” she agreed, “but what if they had been? What did you imagine would happen?”

In his mind, Reece stood before Longwood again. Only this time the house was intact, the roses blooming in his mother’s garden. The door opened and his mother stepped out. She smiled at him, just as Sarah rushed past her and flew into his arms. And he knew that everything was going to be all right. He was home.

But when Sarah leaned back in his arms to smile up at him, he realized it wasn’t Sarah at all but Emma, and the comfort he drew from her embrace and the love in her eyes drove away the darkness and made him whole again.

Reece clutched the edge of the desk. He shook his head, and the fantasy evaporated. The breath rasped in his chest as he forced himself back to the present, back to reality.

“Tell me,” she urged gently. “What would it have been like?”

“My mother would have been waiting for me at the door,” he said, though he didn’t know why he felt compelled to play this pathetic game of hers. “And Sarah. I would hold her in my arms and.... They would have made a fuss over me. The house would smell like roses and my grandfather’s pipe. My mother’s roses bloomed nearly year round.

“I would take a long, hot bath and put on clean clothes for the first time in months. I would eat a real meal. I’d thought of that first meal every day, every time I ate that tasteless gruel we were so happy to get.”

“Your mother would have been so glad to see you.”

She’d taken a step toward him, and he wanted to back away, wanted to make her stop, but the power of her words and the memories they stirred were far too seductive.

“Yes,” he whispered, closing his eyes against the pain that threatened to overwhelm him.

“And Sarah.” Tears clogged her throat as she thought of the woman he had loved, the woman he still grieved for. “She would have put her arms around you and told you she loved you.”

The air rushed into his lungs on a gasp at the feel of her hand on his back. A tremor ran through his body but he couldn’t move away, as much as he wanted to. Some dark force held him immobile.

“Yes,” he whispered. “After dinner I’d have sat in the parlor with Grandfather. We would have talked about --”

“About war?” she asked, her voice tentative, her hand still resting against his back.

“About honor and loyalty and.... Of course, he would know... he would know the minute he looked into my eyes.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “He would have seen a young man who had been through a war and had fought his way home. He would have been so glad to have you home, nothing else would have mattered. He would have wanted you to survive.”

“Maybe,” he conceded. He knew Grandfather would have wanted him to survive, but at the cost of his honor? “Maybe in time I would have been able to forgive myself. We’ll never know, will we? Because it didn’t happen that way. I never saw them again and I never want to feel that kind of pain again.”

“You feel it every day,” she told him.

“No. I put it behind me once and I can do it now. I’m just... I just have to get control, and I will.”

“And then what? Every day you kill a little more of yourself because you are afraid to live again, to let yourself feel. The life you’ve built isn’t real, can’t you see that? None of it matters.”

She took his hand and he turned to look at her, mesmerized by the determination and compassion in her eyes. She pressed his palm against her cheek, and he drew a convulsive breath at the longing that flashed through his soul. He wanted so desperately to believe she could save him.

“I’m real, Reece,” she whispered. “I love you, and I believe in you.”

His eyes misted with tears, and he managed to beat them back, but the emotion that churned inside him nearly overwhelmed him. He took her by the shoulders, holding her away from him. Closing his eyes, he struggled for control, struggled against the yearning that welled up inside him.

He’d opened his soul to her and she’d seen into his heart, past his every defense. She understood more fully than he would have imagined possible, and her understanding terrified him. If he touched her, if he kissed her, if he made love to her, he feared he might lose himself forever.

Straining toward him, she kissed his neck, her soft, full breasts pressed against his chest, and he tried to steel himself against the desire that surged hot and demanding through his body, mingling with the unbearable emotions that had already broken through his control until there was nothing left but a terrible vulnerability.

He’d been bombarded from too many directions in too short a space of time, and he could not erect even the most rudimentary defense, not against Emma, not when he wanted to lose himself in her almost as much as he feared it.

Her arms encircled him, and he folded himself around her, holding her inside himself, clinging to her with the intensity of a drowning man. And he felt as if he truly were drowning, drowning in despair, and only she could save him from the current pulling at his soul.

Her unbearable softness absorbed his pain and drained the bitterness festering inside him. Nothing existed outside her sweet body and her soft, warm lips beneath his.

He undressed her slowly, wanting it to last, wanting it to never end. He needed her, God help him he needed her, her softness, her strength, the forgetfulness he knew he would find in her arms.

She undressed him, stripping away his clothes as she had stripped away the hurt.

Gently he drew her to the day bed in this room where his past had caught up to him, where his greatest fear had become reality.

He explored her body with his hands, his mouth, his own body, committing every nuance to memory, filling his senses with her essence. He wanted to capture her spirit and hold it in his heart forever, to believe if only for a while that she truly loved him, that nothing else mattered.

She was the only warmth, the only light in his life. She was his reality, his hope.

Save me
, he wanted to beg her.
Take me from this darkness
. But he could not speak the words. Instead he asked her with his body and she seemed to understand.
 

She opened beneath him, taking him into herself with a soft, breathless sigh, yielding and conquering at the same time.

Their joining connected more than bodies. Souls merged together, melding into one -- one heart, one body, one being. And he found a kind of forgetfulness he’d never known before, a soft forgetfulness that came from filling his soul with something other than rage.

He trailed kisses along her jaw line to her mouth and down her throat. Moving, always moving. Touching, always touching, stirring her body and stripping away her defenses. She denied him nothing, and he gave her a pleasure that transcended the physical act of love.