Jezebel's Blues (6 page)

She let go of his left hand and picked up his right. But when she started to talk again, he reached through the darkness to touch her mouth. Her hands stilled for an instant, along with her words.

He’d meant only to stop the flow of commentary, stop it as gently as he knew how. But his fingers registered the plumpness of her lower lip and he found himself exploring the curve, feeling her breath sough moistly over his fingertips. He traced the bow on the upper lip and the luscious swell of the lower, moved slowly from corner to corner.

She caught his palm and pulled away, but not before he imagined exploring the same path with his tongue.

“Eric,” she whispered, half in protest, half in longing.

It was the longing that aroused him to an almost uncomfortable point—and also made him draw away. “I’m sorry, Celia.”

She caught his arm as he rolled away from her. “You won’t get any sleep on the floor.” She eased away from him and tugged a blanket over her shoulders, turning her back as she nestled into the pillows. All he could see was her slight, feminine form and a fall of ice-colored hair.

He lifted a hand to reach for her, hungry all at once for the warmth of another person cradled against him, a warmth he’d not known in a long time. He wanted to tuck her close, wrap himself around her and go to sleep.

Instead, he grabbed an extra pillow and pressed it against the hollowness in his chest, knowing—even if she didn’t—that he was not the kind of man she ought to be messing with.

* * *

Celia awakened to silence. No rain. For a long, long moment, she simply listened. And from beneath the silence, another sound penetrated her fuzzy morning brain. She opened her eyes, as if seeing could help her hear more clearly. Finally, she placed the sound.

Birdsong. There were birds out there! She turned toward the window in excitement.

It was only then that she became aware of the strange array of soft weights surrounding her. One pressed against her shoulder, another, her hip. Yet another anchored her ankles.

Slowly she shifted. Eric’s forehead was pressed into her shoulder and she felt the silkiness of his curls against her neck. In sleep, his face lost its expression of wariness and the lines around his mouth eased, making him look very young and vulnerable.

The warmth upon her hip was his hand, and across her ankles was one bare foot.

She didn’t move. It was as if he’d gravitated toward her as he slept, tentatively reaching for comfort without demanding anything in return. The thought made her heart constrict oddly, even more than the butterfly brush of his fingers on her lips last night.

Who was he? Behind the mask of toughness, beyond his gravelly, hard voice, who was the man inside? She touched his hand lightly, tracing a slender scar over the rise of tendons and bones. Such a big hand. The spread of his fingers covered her from the bend of her waist to the top of her thigh.

Last night his groan had pierced her. It had carried an edge of anguish and loss, like the cry of a wolf standing helpless over a wounded mate.

Who are you?
she thought again.

Tiny stirrings in his arms and across his foot told her he was edging toward awakening. She closed her eyes, instinctively aware that when he discovered himself curled around her, he would feel exposed.

But he didn’t immediately awaken. A low sound of contentment escaped his mouth and he moved closer, his hand circling her waist. Comfortably, he rubbed her stomach and threw a leg over her thighs.

Celia froze. He burrowed his face into the curve of her neck, stroking her shoulder with his rough-bristled chin. She could feel his forehead against her jaw and the tiny brush of his eyelashes a little lower. She held her breath.

As his fingers roved in a lazy, open-palmed circle over her torso, tiny buds of curiosity and desire grew plump on the stems of her nerves. She wondered what would happen if she shifted ever so slightly into his arms, wondered how it would feel to have his big body over hers, wondered what taste his lips would carry.

But what if he awakened?

Closing her eyes tight, she shifted as if in sleep, turning her back to him, hoping he
would
awaken and think her still lost in her own slumber.

Instead, he dropped his arm closer around her, tugging her firmly into the curl of his hard, long body. A mercurial wash of hunger burst through her veins. His forearm crossed her breasts and his hand cupped her shoulder.

The quicksilver desire expanded. Her breath seemed an airy, lost thing, unnecessary in the quiet morning with the heat of Eric surrounding her, enveloping her. Against her fanny, she felt his hard and unmistakable arousal and she clenched her teeth to control her instinctive need to move against it.

For an endless time she lay in his arms, afraid to move for fear he was soon to awaken, yet afraid not to for fear she would explode with the hunger he’d kindled so innocently. It shamed her oddly to feel the rigidness of her nipples against the loose clasp of his arm, and she knew he’d awaken and feel it and know…

His hand moved as if in time with her thoughts. His fingers slipped over her shoulder and traced the line of her collarbone and neck. Her heart thudded as he stroked the flesh above her blouse, then moved inexorably over the swell of her breast to that shamefully rigid peak. Her breath ceased as he expertly teased the sensitive flesh, and then gently settled his huge, broad palm over her breast, cupping her as if to gauge the fit of one to the other. Judging by the exquisite kneading of his fingers, it was a fit that pleased him.

Celia could stand no more. “Eric,” she protested, her voice strangled and almost unrecognizable.

“I’m not asleep,” he said, and his mouth opened on her neck, hot and fierce.

A shock of sensation rocketed over her again. His tongue, silky and warm, lashed her neck and Celia made a half-strangled noise of arousal and protest.

From a dozen points in her body, a whirl of explosions went up. His hair splayed over her jaw, cool and silky in contrast to the heat of his mouth on her neck. His fingers plucked expertly at her breast, and against her fanny, he pressed his rigid erection. His thigh moved restlessly over hers.

“I felt you wake up,” he said in his raw voice. “You didn’t get up. You just stayed here and let me touch you.” He moved closer and sucked her earlobe into his mouth. “Don’t you know any better than to tempt a hungry man, Celia?”

His voice. So dark and ragged and raw. His voice alone made her want to turn and push him down and turn his taunts to her advantage. She wanted to straddle him and disrobe and torment him the way he was tormenting her.

The lustiness of her thoughts stunned her. Miss Celia Moon, teacher of algebra and calculus, mild mannered and disgustingly practical, wanted to
straddle
this rough-edged stranger?

She grabbed his hand in panic and ducked her head away from his questing mouth. “Stop, Eric,” she said, a catch in her voice.

Instantly he released her. One moment she was wrapped with him in a heated tangle. The next, she was alone and cold on the bed. She lay there for a minute, flushed with embarrassment and aching with the imprint of his hands.

There was no place for him to go. After a moment, Celia turned to look at him, standing by the open window, his arms braced on the sill, head bent against the pale light of morning. His hair was impossibly black, alluringly tousled. She followed the line of his muscled shoulders down his back, over the firm, delectable curve of his rear end, down his long, long legs.

The whistle of a magpie sailed in through the window and Celia jumped up. “It really has stopped raining!” she cried. The clouds overhead were thin, even growing wispy in places. A sense of jubilation rose in her chest. “Thank God.”

As if on cue, the magpie she’d heard swooped close by the window, a twig with battered leaves in its mouth. Celia laughed. “Everything that happens around here has biblical overtones,” she said, delighted.

He said nothing, and she turned. His dark blue eyes were bleak, his mouth set in hard lines. She touched his chest. “What is it?”

Jaw drawn tight, Eric shook his head, and for a moment, Celia thought he was going to erect his walls of protection. Then he looked at her and before the opaqueness could hide it, she saw the loneliness in his eyes, a yearning of such intensity it nearly broke her heart.

This time, she didn’t wait for him, nor did she care that her father would write this scene in just this way.

She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his broad body, pressing her face into the soft flannel over his chest. After an instant of hesitation, his arms dropped around her, held lightly, loosely, as if he were afraid to accept what she offered.

A dozen things ran through her mind as she hugged him. Things she should say, like
everything is going to be all right
. Things she should do, like rock him back and forth in the ancient rhythm of comfort.

Instead she just stood there, still and calm, letting him absorb the warmth of her body, the warmth he’d so tentatively sought as he’d slept and couldn’t accept when he awakened.

He was the loneliest man she’d ever met. She didn’t know how she knew that or why he’d come to this point. It didn’t matter.

She held him. For now, for this moment, it was enough.

* * *

As the hours of the morning passed, it was plain the storm had passed. The sky cleared of even wispy clouds, and the floodwaters began to recede with almost astonishing speed.

After a few moments of silence and awkwardness, Eric and Celia ate a breakfast of the last toaster pastries washed down with tepid water. Then, as if by common agreement, they each retreated to separate corners. Eric played his harmonica restlessly. Celia pretended to read her book.

Toward noon, the attic began to heat up as the strong Texas sun beat down upon the shingles of the roof. Eric got out a deck of cards. “Come on,” he said as Celia poked through the provisions with a frown. “Play a hand or two of gin rummy while you eat and you won’t care so much about what you’re putting in your belly.”

She nodded at this peace offering and settled across from him to play cards.

But as the afternoon passed, the temperature climbed inexorably. Restlessly, Celia stood up to check the progress of the water. “How long do you think it’ll take until the water goes?”

“By morning we’ll be able to get out of here, I imagine.” Celia heard him reshuffle the cards. “You anxious to get rid of me?”

She heard the teasing note in his words and glanced over her shoulder ruefully, shoving wisps of hair from her face. “Yesterday you were the restless one. Today it’s me.” She leaned out the window. “I guess I just want to get out in the sunshine. Seems like it’s been raining for a year.”

Eric stretched out on the wooden floor and flipped the queen of spades over the king of hearts in his solitaire game. “We’ll see how you feel about that pretty sunshine by tomorrow noon.”

She shrugged. “I don’t mind the heat. It’s cold I can’t stand.”

“You ever spend a summer here?”

“Once, a long time ago.”

He flipped the jack of diamonds over the queen, then looked at Celia with a gleam in his dark blue eyes. “Bet you won’t like heat much by the time you get through this summer.”

She frowned. “You don’t know that. Maybe I’m naturally thin blooded and the cold makes me miserable.”

“Maybe.” He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you just don’t know about real heat.” As if his words had reminded him, he stood up and started to unbutton his flannel shirt.

When he reached for a T-shirt folded on top of his pack, Celia glanced out toward the meadow across the water. She could do without the sight of his exposed torso, thank you very much. “Is everyone in Texas a know-it-all?” she asked.

His ragged chuckle almost—but not quite—tempted her to turn around. “Don’t you know there’s not a Texan born who doesn’t know everything? ’Course, we all know a little bit of something nobody else knows.”

She pivoted, unable to stop herself. He tugged the flannel shirt from his arms, pulling the sleeves inside out, and discarded it on the bed. Absently, he touched his chest in the way men will do, as if to ascertain all the ribs were still in place. It was a gesture Celia had seen a hundred times, but as his scarred hand moved over his taut stomach and broad torso, the hunger of the morning returned full force.

She swallowed against the wash of desire, fighting it, yet staring as if bewitched. It was not just that he was so big and well proportioned or that his body spoke of time spent outside with a hammer or a hoe. It was not even the casual intimacy and comfort with which he touched himself.

It was his skin—sleek and supple, tanned to a soft copper. Every inch of his flesh gleamed with a satiny sheen. Not a single hair marred the perfection. His hand slid away from his chest, and Celia looked up to his face to find him grinning at her—a devilish, knowing grin. “Wanna help?” he asked.

“You think entirely too much of yourself, Mr. Putman.”

He cocked his head and a finger of his dark hair fell on the long, taut muscles of his shoulder. He licked his bottom lip where the cut was, and his grin broadened. Standing there shirtless, in jeans that clung to his lean hips and long thighs and everything else with indecent exactitude, he was the very personification of the kind of exterior the devil would use to tempt a woman into selling her soul. “No,” he said, lifting his T-shirt and pushing his head through. “Just that I know my area of expertise pretty well.”

Celia rolled her eyes, refusing to give him the satisfaction of asking what his area of expertise might be. She had a feeling it wasn’t the harmonica.

He laughed. “If you like the heat, sugar, I sure hate to see what the cold does to your temper.”

She lifted her hair off her neck. “I just want to get out there and plant my garden, start my summer.”

“Mmm.” He nodded. “All the same, you might want to find something else to put on. Those jeans have to be killing you.”

For a minute, she wished she had something wicked, something so skimpy he’d be sorry he’d recommended she put on something cooler. Then she frowned. Why the sudden combativeness?