For the Love of God (16 page)

Her legs were tangled with his as her hands roamed over his sweater-covered shoulders, feeling his muscles flex and ripple beneath the ribbed knit material. His mouth rolled over her parted lips while his tongue lightly traced the sensitive inside corners, drawing a moan from her throat.

“Your kisses are like wine, Abra,” Seth murmured into her mouth. “Intoxicating and smooth, ‘gliding over lips and teeth.’”

And he drank of them again, but Abbie was certain she was the one who was drunk with love for him. It was a shattering experience to be helpless with longing, desperately needing what another person had to give. She strained closer to the raw heat of his body, hard and aroused against her side. His mouth was on her lips, her throat, her ear, her neck, wildly delighting her wherever it touched and tasted.

His fingers were on the buttons of her blouse, deftly slipping them free from the stitched holes, surely working their way downward. Briefly her flesh was exposed to the coolness of the air until his hand warmed it, spreading his heat and making it hers.

Then his head was turning to look at the
feminine beauty he had exposed. Abbie felt no need to conceal her body from his gaze. She loved him and his desire was for her. She wanted him to be pleased with her—with all and everything that made her unique.

“You have lovely breasts, Abra,” he declared thickly. “Lovely.”

His hand cupped a creamy breast in his palm; his stroking fingers evoked an intimate pleasure so intense it was like pain. His mouth came down to ease the ache and make its own tactile exploration of the hills and valleys and hardened peaks of her breasts. She was a tightly coiled spring inside, wanting to absorb him into her flesh and needing the absolute closeness of love’s consummation.

“Love me, Seth,” she whispered, her fingers curling into the faint dampness of his hair. It was less a request for physical possession and more a prayer for emotional commitment—that it be as beautiful and meaningful to him as it was to her.

He dragged his mouth roughly across the hollow of her throat, a groan coming from deep inside him. “Abbie, don’t ask that of me,” he protested.

“But—” The sharp ache of rejection choked her voice, stabbing her with remorse.

“It can’t be,” he insisted with a trace of hard-jawed anger. “Not for you and me.”

His hands pulled her blouse closed, firmly crossing the material. Then he gathered her
hard into his arms, flattening her breasts against his chest and burying his face in her hair. The tautness of his long body was pressed into hers, making its male angles intimately felt. It was almost torture to have him so close and know there would be no satisfaction. Abbie wasn’t sure why. Her thoughts were too muddled with unfulfilled desires to make anything clear. She clung to him.

“Abbie.” Seth released her name in the middle of a long, heavy sigh. “I want you. I’m not pretending to deny that.”

“Neither am I,” she murmured rawly.

A sound, something like weary laughter, came from him. “What am I going to do with you, Abbie?” The rhetorical question he muttered only confused her more.

The telephone, positioned on the table at the end of the sofa, rang shrilly, almost in her ear. Abbie stiffened with a guilty start, as if the caller could see them locked so intimately in a prone position. There was a moment of indecision while she debated whether to answer it or let it ring. Seth took the decision from her, loosening his arms to let her go.

“You’d better answer it,” he advised with husky reluctance. “It could be important.”

She moved away from him to sit up shakily, partially turning her back to him. On the fifth ring, she picked up the receiver while the fingers of her free hand fumbled with buttons on her blouse.

“Hello.” She heard the breathlessness in her
voice, caused not from exertion but from the softness of love.

“Miss Scott?” a woman’s voice demanded.

An icy chill ran down her spine as Abbie recognized the voice as belonging to the same woman who had called the parsonage the other night.

“Yes.” She was stiff and wary. “Who is this?”

“This is Mrs. Cones. I’m trying to locate Reverend Talbot. Is he there? It’s urgent that I talk to him,” the woman stated.

Abbie pressed the receiver to her chest and glanced over her shoulder. Seth was sitting and raking a hand through his hair. “It’s a Mrs. Cones,” Abbie whispered. “She wants to talk to you.”

His head lifted, as if scenting trouble, then a blandness stole over his features as he reached out a hand to take the phone. “I’ll talk to her.”

“Just a moment,” Abbie said into the phone.

“He’s there? I thought as much.” The woman sniffed in a haughty way.

A scorching heat burned her cheeks at the accuracy of the woman’s vile imagination. Abbie avoided looking at Seth as she rose from that end of the sofa and handed him the phone. She moved to the center of the room using both hands to button the rest of her blouse and smooth the dishevelment of her clothes.

“This is Reverend Talbot speaking,” she heard Seth say into the phone.

Not wanting to hear even one side of the conversation, Abbie walked to the window to
stare at the falling rain. She rested a hot cheek against the coolness of a glass pane and blanked everything from her mind.

When Seth’s hand touched her shoulder, she was brought back to a world of awareness. There was a slight movement of her head to acknowledge his presence, but she didn’t turn from the window.

“I’m sorry that happened, Abbie,” he said.

“It’s all right.” But the words made her hurt inside, and it was evident in the flatness of her voice.

“Wait a minute.” His fingers dug impatiently into her shoulder and forced her to turn at right angles to the window and partially face him. “I’m apologizing for the phone call—not for anything else.” Although her expression changed little, the dull green flecks in her hazel eyes brightened visibly. His gaze narrowed on them in satisfaction. “Not for anything else,” Seth repeated for emphasis.

“I’m sorry about that phone call, too,” Abbie admitted, because it seemed the safest comment to make. There didn’t seem to be any point to reiterating her feelings for him. She had already expressed them very explicitly, both by word and deed.

The hand on her shoulder eased its pressure but continued to hold her. “Do you want to know why I chose that particular section from the Bible?”

“Why?” Perhaps his answer would tell her what she wanted to hear.

“Because I wanted you to see it’s a book of love and passion, suffering and caring, but mainly it’s a book of love,” he explained. It was a subject she was intimately familiar with, since its richness filled her. “Don’t look at me like that, Abbie.” A muscle leaped along his jaw, revealing an inner strain for control.

“Like what?” It seemed no different to Abbie than the way she’d always looked at him.

“Like—” His mouth came down to crush her lips in a fiercely possessive kiss. It took her breath and made a mockery of her normal heartbeat. When he pulled away, his mouth was edged with tautness and his blue eyes glittered with turbulence. His voice fell somewhere between a groan and a curse. “I’m made of flesh the same as you are, Abbie.”

“I think I’ve always known that,” Abbie admitted as she leaned back against the coolness of the window to study him. “I just kept letting the collar get in the way.”

“You think I haven’t known that,” Seth murmured dryly, including a slight shake of his head with the reply. His hand moved over her shoulder in a restless caress. “There’s a lot we need to talk about, Abbie, but I don’t have time now. Mrs. Cones called because her mother is in the hospital, very ill, and her father—the woman’s husband—is overwrought. I promised I’d come sit with him for a while so I have to leave.”

“I understand,” Abbie assured him, smothering her regret that he had to go now.

“Will you wait for me after church tomorrow?
We’ll have Sunday dinner together here or at the parsonage. It doesn’t matter, just as long as we can have the privacy to talk,” he said.

“I don’t think the parsonage is a good idea.” Neither place was exactly wise but Abbie suggested, “Why don’t we eat here? I can put a roast in the oven so dinner can be ready when church is over.”

“That’s fine.” His glance flicked past her to the falling rain outside, then returned to sweep her face. There seemed to be struggle going on inside him. “I have to leave now,” Seth stated with grim determination, and kissed her hard before turning away to walk swiftly to the door, as if he thought he might change his mind.

He grabbed his jacket from the hall tree and opened the door, pausing to look over his shoulder at Abbie standing by the window. His mouth twitched with a quick, hard smile, then he was walking out the door, pulling it closed behind him.

Abbie followed the line of people shaking hands with Seth as they left the church. When it was her turn, she placed her hand in his and felt his grip tighten in firm possession. There was an added vibrancy in his blue eyes, an interest meant for her alone.

“Good morning, Miss Scott.” He faintly drawled the words, as if mocking the formality.

“Good morning, Reverend,” she echoed his greeting, a responding smile playing with the corners of her mouth. Abbie was conscious of others listening to their exchange, some critically and some with simple curiosity.

“Your parents aren’t with you?” Seth observed with a questioning inflection in his voice.

“No. They went out of town today—to Missouri to visit some friends,” she explained.

“I hope you’ve fixed a good Sunday dinner then.”

“I have,” Abbie assured him, fully aware that
his comment was a subtle reminder they would be sharing it together. It was written in the way he was looking at her.

Then he was releasing her hand to greet the next ones in line and Abbie moved on. At the base of the steps, she angled to the edge of the sidewalk, removing herself from the flow of people leaving the church. She lingered there to wait for Seth.

The Coltrain sisters spied her as they came down the steps in a glaring mismatch of colors—Isabel dressed in pink and Esther in bright orange. The two sisters were inseparable, yet they seemed determined to establish their own individualities, hence their clashing clothes. Abbie smiled a greeting as the pair converged on her.

“Good morning,” she said, noting the excitement in their faces.

“We saw you in church and we were hoping we’d have a chance to speak to you,” Isabel rushed.

“Yes.” Esther echoed her sister’s words and leaned closer to Abbie to whisper conspiratorially, “We mailed the you-know-what to a company in New York.”

“The reverend gave us the man’s name. He’d already talked to him personally about us and the man wanted to see—what we’d done. Isn’t that wonderful?” Isabel nearly giggled like a giddy young girl.

“It certainly is.” Abbie didn’t have to pretend to be happy for them. She was hardly a judge but
she had enjoyed the novel they’d written and felt certain a publisher would like it, too.

“The reverend said it might take two months before we hear what the man thought about—it,” Esther explained. “But…” She hesitated and glanced at her sister.

“Esther and I have another idea,” Isabel spoke up. “But we aren’t sure whether we should start on it until we’ve found out about the first. We could just be wasting our time.”

“Yes, and we wanted to ask you what you thought we should do,” Esther finished.

“If it were me, I’d go ahead and start working on it,” Abbie replied, and their faces lit up.

“Do you hear that Esther?” Isabel declared. “I just knew she’d say that. Didn’t I tell you?”

“If we didn’t have you and the reverend to talk to about this, I think Isabel and I would bust,” Esther insisted, ignoring the “I-told-you-so” challenge from her sister.

“You’ll do the typing on this one for us, won’t you?” Isabel inquired anxiously.

“Of course, I will.” She could hardly refuse.

“You really are a wonderful girl,” Esther said, and squeezed Abbie’s hand. “And you shouldn’t pay any attention to all that talk going around. Those people spreading it are just nasty busy-bodies who don’t have anything better to do.” She didn’t appear to notice the sudden tension that whitened Abbie’s face as she turned to her sister. “We have to get home, Isabel.”

“Yes. Now that you’ve agreed that it’s the right thing to do to start on another one, we have
a lot of research we need to begin. We don’t mean to rush off,” Isabel explained. “But you do understand.”

“Of course.” But it was a somewhat absent response Abbie gave as the two women hurried away.

Abbie had known her relationship with Seth had stirred up a lot of idle gossip. It was to be expected when a local minister was involved. Some of the remarks that had gotten back to her had been unfair and unkind. She had always been more concerned about all the talk affecting Seth’s standing in the community rather than her own. But Esther’s comment seemed to indicate Abbie was the one being maligned, and she was absolutely helpless to do anything about it. It did little good to tell herself she shouldn’t be bothered by vicious gossip, because she suddenly was.

The stream of people coming out of church had ended, although the doors remained open. There was no sign of Seth, but Abbie assumed he had gone to change out of his robes. The church grounds and parking lot were virtually emptied of people and cars. She felt rather conspicuous standing near the bottom of the church steps and decided it would be more discreet if she waited inside the door.

As she entered the church she heard voices coming from the pulpit area. She recognized Seth’s among them and was drawn across the small entry area by an inner need to see him. Seth and three other men were standing by the
front pew. Abbie noticed he was still wearing his black robe. She had no intention of intruding or even eavesdropping. The three men were members of the governing board, so Seth was obviously discussing some church business with them.

Before she could turn away to wait near the front doors, she heard one of the men mention her name. She was held motionless, frozen by a kind of dread. Against her will, Abbie listened to what they were saying.