Kisses From Heaven (6 page)

“Would you like me to build a fire in the living room?” he asked.

“Oh…yes!” And then she frowned. “But I don’t know about the flue, Buck. There’s wood out back, but—”

“You haven’t tried the chimney out this year?” he guessed. “Well, we’ll test a little paper first.”

So with paper and twigs, they built a crazy little fire that gave off more light than heat. The excellent wine was served in water glasses. Loren’s skin took on a warm hue by the firelight, and with her legs tucked under her, she felt very tiny next to Buck’s long, stretched-out legs. He’d taken off his sweater, opened the throat of his dark charcoal shirt. “You were so good with Gramps,” she said softly as she sipped the wine. “Perhaps that’s part of it, that so much of his life has changed and he has nothing he can
do
anymore, what with old friends dying around him and he himself not feeling vigorous enough for real activity.”

“Your sister said you tried a sanitarium for a while.”

“My sister’s answer to everything is to make someone else take responsibility,” Loren answered dryly. She took another sip of wine and rolled the dry flavor of it on her tongue. “It didn’t work, and he wasn’t happy, and that took the last of Gran’s insurance money. There’s never any problem except for his Fridays. The day just holds bad memories for him…perhaps too many memories,” she brooded softly, and looked up. “Your aunt Emma?”

He set his wine down on the marble hearth and then did the same with hers. Watching him, she shivered, almost anticipating the hand that suddenly reached out to span the few feet between them. She had the option to take the hand or not, of course; she had the option to say no again… She met his eyes for only a moment, a grave uncertainty in hers, and then took his hand. Easily, he drew her close, enfolding her between his legs with her back nestled against his chest. He handed her back her wine and took his own, brushing a soft kiss in her hair as he did so. “I have no aunt Emma,” he said gently.

“Oh.”

“My last name is Leeds, not Smith.”

“You were offended when I introduced you to Frank.”

“Furious,” he agreed dryly.

She tilted her head back, smiling at him, but the smile faded. “I never really meant it as a game, Buck. I meant it as a gift…that I really didn’t care if you had a cent or a job or were white collar, blue collar, or whatever. Honestly, it hasn’t mattered to me. Not when I first met you, and not now.”

He hesitated. “Drink your wine, Loren.”

She did, leaning back against him, watching the little play of fire spark and sizzle and finally die down. He finished his wine long before she did, and from behind her he started a slow massage with his fingers at the nape of her neck, at the spot that continually ached after a long day. His fingers were firm and sensual and gentle-strong, but it was the graze of his thighs on both sides of her that forced her eyes closed. It was a unique sensation, to feel on the brink of danger and totally cossetted at the same time. Perhaps it was even sweeter because she really didn’t care who he was or want to know anything about his past; she knew all she needed to know about him to be helplessly aware that she was falling in love with him. He was interfering, and he refused to listen to what he didn’t want to hear, and he was too damned good at divining what was really in her mind. It wasn’t right or sane or reasonable…but the tender first shoots of loving were there, as real as fear and daylight and fever and spring.

He took the empty glass from her, and she shifted, waiting. He held her head against his arm for a moment, looking down quietly at her, his fingers smoothing back a wisp of hair from her cheek, over and over. “I’m not sure, Buck,” she admitted in a low voice.

“Your hands are trembling.”

“It’s been too long. I don’t even remember…”

“We’re not going that fast, Loren. There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he whispered next to her ear. His lips followed the whisper, brushing the petal-smooth skin of her cheek. Tentatively, her arm reached up, her fingers exploring the faded crescent scar near his jaw, the shape and texture of his face, and then splaying in his thick dark red hair. When his mouth finally came down on hers, she welcomed the grazing soft pressure, her tongue waiting for his. His arms closed around her like velvet. She was aware of every inch of him, as if the world had suddenly crystallized around the two of them: his thigh and heartbeat, the threaded pulse in his throat, the hard tension in his stomach and the power of his arousal, blatant in spite of the layer of clothes. His giant form dwarfing hers suddenly caused an involuntary tremor of fear.

“Loren?” He laid her so gently on the carpet, half reclining next to her, his palm warm at the ivory hollow of her throat. She gazed up at him with luminous eyes, both of her arms resting loosely around his neck, answering his unspoken question. Her whole body was left vulnerable to him. He waited until that little flutter of fear passed; she could feel his eyes compelling her to stay open for him, to hide nothing from him. His palm stroked over her breast, down to her waist, then along the smooth stretch of hip to her thigh. She could feel a curling inside like a spring tightening when his palm caressed the gossamer of her stocking; yet her legs moved instinctively to close together. The little denial appeared to mean nothing to him; he kept stroking her thigh, firmly enough to radiate heat, finally a consuming heat, insistent, demanding…

She tensed when his hand came back to her throat, urging her neck back so he could drink of her sweet mouth again. Crushed against him, Loren felt a longing begin to spiral with his kiss; the weight of him seemed strangely familiar to her soul, strangely…right. When he drew back up again, the room seemed darker, and his eyes seemed darker, and her lips felt bruised, possessed. Taken.

Slowly, his palm caressed her torso again, down to the waistband of her skirt. The buttons of her blouse loosened one by one, and in one smooth movement he had enfolded her to him to unclasp the back of her bra. He didn’t touch. Instead, his fingers reached up to stroke and comb through her hair until she felt like crying; it was as though he was deliberately trying to torture her.

“Loren?”

She didn’t want him to ask her permission. And how did he know? They were secrets she barely remembered herself, the places where she knew control would slip, where it mattered very much that she trusted him. His palm stroked down to her abdomen, and like a schoolgirl she covered it. No. She completely changed her mind. Just…no.

He didn’t move. He was breathing above her, his eyes dark on hers. She knew he would stop. To say she didn’t trust him when she knew all she had to say was no… Her hand lifted, rested on the nape of his neck, and she drew his mouth down to hers with a sweet moan of fever. When his palm started a kneading motion on her breast and she felt the soft flesh swelling for him, the blood rushed through her veins like wildfire. A potent rhythm surged from the base of her stomach, and her thigh rubbed against his erotically of its own volition.

He shifted, and his hands molded her hips, rocking her against him in the same rhythm. Her hands slipped beneath his shirt, raking down the firm slope of his back. She felt wild inside, frantic, too warm, too close to him, and not close enough…it was a physical pain, after the long years of denial. “So sweet,” he murmured. “Lord, I want you, Loren. I never intended…”

She forgave him the lie. Perhaps he even believed he hadn’t intended to go so far. She knew better and had known it from the start. They were old enough to know that a struck match meant flame, to recognize the potential for flame every time they looked at each other. “I need you,” she murmured back. His mouth found hers again…and again, and again. She did need him, his strength and his warmth, his passion and his unique, fierce gentleness. It was nothing like it had ever been with Hal; she had never envisioned anything like this with any man. She teased as he did, her palm smoothing down his chest to his ribs, gliding over his hip to his lean, hard thighs. She felt the explosive pounding in his chest, heard his breath quicken… They were lost…or perhaps found.

The back door slammed in some other universe. Loren couldn’t have cared less. She felt a stinging little slap on her bottom that was intended to reverse that. Still, her lips lingered on his throat, her fingers still grazed inside of his thigh… He slapped again. “
Dammit,
Loren.”

His eyes were glazed, and his voice was furious; those huge fingers of his fumbled impossibly with the buttons of her blouse. She refused to help, loving the look in his eyes, hating the interruption she knew was coming…but there was a rich promise in seeing the evidence of her own feminine powers. He was all but coming apart at the seams.

“Loren? I came home early. The movie was an absolute bomb. Listen, I…oh!”

Angela stopped dead with her hand in midair as if she had been just about to brush back her fluffy blond hair. Buck and Loren were sitting by the hearth, undeniably together, but by then all the buttons had been conquered. Loren was sitting on her bra and Buck was finishing his glass of wine in a single gulp.

“Well! I mean…I think I’ll go upstairs to bed now,” Angela said hastily. Her sassy smile clearly offended Buck.

He raised himself up with a scowl and grabbed for Loren’s hand, nearly wrenching her arm from its socket as he pulled her up next to him. “I’m taking your sister out for a while,” he said flatly to Angela. “Bill’s sleeping, but you stick around.”

“Sure.”

Angela hastily disappeared, but Buck was still pulling Loren. He went first to the closet for her coat and his, stalked through the kitchen, grabbed the bottle of wine, corked it one-handed, buried it on the top shelf of a cupboard Bill Shephard couldn’t see without a chair, and propelled them both into the freezing-cold night before he released her aching wrist long enough to allow them both to put on their coats.

“Do you know how old I am?” he demanded harshly, but she could see the good humor beginning to return to his eyes as he reached down, gruffly shoving her hands away so he could button her coat himself. “It’s your fault, dammit. I never did intend for anything to go that far, not in your house. I like
privacy.
Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve been caught in a compromising position?”

“How long?” she asked obediently, trying not to laugh.

“Never.”
He buttoned his coat then and grabbed for her arm as if he thought she were about to protest against going with him. But she wasn’t. “I’m not going to touch you,” he promised her rigidly. “I just want you to
myself
for a while. Any objections?”

“You’re beginning to hurt my wrist,” she said mildly.

So he released her wrist, opened the car door and urged her in much more gently, locking her side as if he were still afraid she was planning a getaway. When he got in on his side, he fumbled for the ignition key and started the engine promptly. “I’ll take you home whenever you want to go, you know.”

“We seem to be having a rather major argument here. The problem is that only one of us is arguing,” she said dryly.

He drew in his breath, and suddenly the corners of his mouth lifted. He put the car in gear and raised his arm to the side so that he could see to back up; his fingers reached out to tug at her rusty hair. “You weren’t a hell of a lot of help,” he said gruffly. “Somehow I was having a difficult time getting your attention. If you were counting on me to have all the control…”

“I was.”

“Well,
don’t.
”

“I certainly won’t,” she agreed, her tone so irreverent that he glanced at her again and finally chuckled. His hand snaked down and covered hers, and they drove awhile in silence. Loren was suddenly very tired, and it felt good to rest back against the seat with her head back, her hand nestled in his, the night all around them.

“Are you really so sure?” he asked her finally.

She smiled, her eyes half-closed. “Buck, I’m scared out of my mind. I don’t give love easily—surely you’ve figured that out by now?”

“Loren…”

She rested her cheek on his chest. “Take me where you live,” she murmured sleepily. “I’ve already half pictured it in my mind. A one-man apartment, a very big bed and a very small kitchen…” She didn’t notice him begin to stiffen beside her as she lazily described the kind of place she thought he must live in. Sensitive to his pride, she made a point of downplaying any image that connoted lack of wealth, or any negative reaction on her part to unmade beds or expectations of nothing beyond hamburger in the refrigerator.

Her eyes were closed when he made a U-turn; they’d stopped talking. She was still curled up next to him, trying desperately to talk herself into a state of wakefulness after a day that had begun at six. His chest was so warm, his collar soft against her forehead, and all the sexual vibrations lay quiescent in a lazy, somnolent feeling of anticipation, not to be hurried.

She didn’t open her eyes until he stopped the car and then was shocked into wakefulness all too quickly. They were home—her home. And there was a strange almost-pallor beneath Buck’s complexion in the dark, his jade eyes avoiding hers.

“What’s wrong?” she asked softly.

“Everything. You’re tired. I’m tired.” He got out of the car and opened the door on her side. “I started to talk to you tonight and got sidetracked. Now all I’ve got in my damned head is making love to you.”

Her eyebrows lifted. He sounded more than a little irritated about that. She shoved her hands in her coat pockets as she walked with him up to the house, shivering violently from the sudden cold after the warm car…and his warm body.

He turned the doorknob and pushed it open, but he didn’t make any move to go in. Confused gray eyes turned up to his, waiting.

“Loren, I don’t live where you think I do. There isn’t a reason in hell for it to be any kind of a problem, but I think you’re going to make it into one,” he said gruffly.

She touched his sleeve. “Buck, I’ve tried every way I know to tell you that it couldn’t possibly make any difference where you live. What you do—”

“Yes,” he said crisply. “Just go in to bed; you’re dead on your feet. We’ll sort through it, Loren. It was a damned idiotic game we started to begin with.”

Bewildered, she found herself on the warm side of the closed door, and alone. She stared out at the retreating car lights. Had she said something? Had he suddenly remembered a woman he had stashed at his place? More relevantly…was he coming back again? And wouldn’t it really be better if he didn’t…?

She turned away, took off her coat and headed up the stairs, thinking of the days ahead that would leave no time for a man, thinking of her life that simply had no room for that kind of love. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, he’d hurt her with his abrupt withdrawal. A love affair with a stranger, she thought wryly as she prepared for bed.
Loren, you knew better than that when you were fresh out of school.

It was still pitch-black outside, not yet six. Loren pulled on a pair of well-worn brown cords that fit like a second skin and then an old loose fisherman’s sweater. The knee socks, she noted sleepily, had holes in them. Furthermore, one was black and one was brown. She debated momentarily whether or not she cared. She glanced with sleep-laden eyes at the distinctly solitary bed where thoughts of Buck had kept her awake far too long into the night. Wearing the mismatched socks, she tiptoed past Angela’s closed door, splashed cold water on her face in the bathroom and ran a brush through her hair. Tiptoeing downstairs in the darkness, she saw the thread of light beneath the swinging door to the kitchen.

At the head of the table, Gramps was nursing a cup of coffee. Loren bent to kiss him good morning, and he grunted in response. They both liked their solitary six o’clocks. Loren reached above the stove for a mug, then carried the steaming cup of coffee with her to the opposite end of the table. Her grandfather automatically handed her a section of the newspaper, and she swung her legs on an adjoining chair, crackling the paper as she decided against the front page in favor of the feature section…which she didn’t seem to see.

Gramps looked old this morning, wearing a brooding look like a second complexion, his hand shaky on his cup. Most Saturday mornings he looked very much this way, yet the hangover this morning was from life, not liquor. The laugh lines in his face were more deeply indented than the worry lines, and that told Loren a lot of what she already knew about Bill Shephard. Laughter and an easygoing, careless charm that offered more than was delivered had been his chief characteristics until the world had crashed all around him. His specialty had been making promises he couldn’t keep, and he had hurt Loren as a child, had kept on hurting her until she developed a skin so tough that she no longer had to believe him to love him.

She sipped at the strong, bitter coffee, trying not to think of how the evening with Buck had ended. She thought instead about money.

Her paternal great-great-grandfather, with a third-grade education, had single-handedly amassed the original Shephard fortune—railroads, real estate, insurance and farms. Making money had been an obsession with him, and he’d sold his soul in the process. Henry Shephard had been a miser, his family still living in near-poverty long after he’d bought his first bank. But Henry Shephard, Jr., the miser’s heir, had changed all that. He, too, knew how to make money, but also how to spend it, and to him the Shephards owed the once-elegant home that Loren so loved.

Her grandfather was the only son in the family who’d survived Henry Junior. Bill had no business sense, though his dominating father had forced him into the family enterprises. By the time his father died, Bill had given up whatever other dreams he might have had. But he couldn’t force himself to acquire business acumen, so he gambled on the side, and down slid the Shephard fortunes. Loren’s Gran had died in a fall, though she would have lived with proper care—but no one found her for two days. Bill had made her promises, but those that he kept all had to do with money. Gran died alone, on a Friday.

Loren rose, refilled Gramps’s cup and then her own, swinging back in her chair with a leg tucked under her. Her father, too, had had a preoccupation with money, as in spending it—the yacht, the Morgan, the cottage house, and tennis courts, and jewels… Loren had barely known the glittering couple whose death in a yachting accident had orphaned her. She remembered laughter and parties and swift good-night kisses…and a thousand promises given, never kept, ranging from a piggy-back ride to a trip to the Taj Mahal. Time and love were the promises broken: money always came first.

She’d met Hal after the empire had already collapsed, and she’d been going that same obsessive road. Hal had money; having lost all of her security, the twenty-year-old Loren had clung to him as to a life preserver. Had she realized how shallow he was, how lacking in character? If so, she’d been too foolish to care. He’d promised love, and he gave her his brand of it between cocktail parties, mostly in the middle of the night. She was shattered for a long time after leaving him. There was a tormenting guilt to deal with—for hurting a man who had really done nothing so terrible to her but live by his own values: that promises didn’t mean anything, that money could compensate for love, respect, intimacy…

Bill Shephard suddenly cleared his throat. “Did he stay long last night?”

Loren blinked, folding the paper neatly. “No.” She didn’t pretend not to know whom he was talking about. “Want some breakfast, Gramps?”

“Oh, I’m not so hungry this morning.”

“Scrambled eggs? French toast?” Loren coaxed. “How about pancakes?”

“Well, maybe…” He watched as she took out a bowl and started to put the ingredients together for pancakes. “Interesting man,” he commented.

“Mmm.” The batter was blended quickly, and then she bent down for the old iron griddle that had lasted for generations.

“Got a good head on his shoulders, that man. Good sense of humor. I never did trust a man who didn’t know how to laugh.” He paused. “There aren’t many men around that you don’t buffalo, Loren.”

“How many pancakes did you say you could handle?” Loren asked as she popped small pats of butter onto the griddle and watched them sizzle.

“I hope you wouldn’t be so damn foolish as to worry about someone like me by sacrificing a chance for your own happiness.”

“I’m making them nice and thin the way you like them, and I’ve got enough batter here for a hundred.” Loren bent down, kissed his forehead and said affectionately, “Shut up, Gramps.”

She was turning from the stove with a fresh plate of pancakes in her hand when she saw Buck’s face in the glass window of the door. The sun was just peeking over the horizon behind him, a watery, lemony early March sun; his hair looked burnished in the weak light. His shoulders were huge in a dark olive jacket, and he was looking straight at her, a look that very much echoed the earlier part of yesterday evening.

She put the plate on the table and her hands on her hips, her silvery eyes echoing the end of the last evening.

He turned the knob and stepped in. “Mr. Shephard…good morning.”

Gramps turned and stood up in surprise, a welcoming smile wreathing his features. “Well, come on in, Buck,” he said jovially. “We’ve got pancakes for a hundred; Loren just said it. I can’t say I expected anyone else to be up at this hour. Loren and I are both early birds…”

“I gave up sleeping myself about two hours ago,” Buck responded. He was just unbuttoning his coat as he descended on Loren. His eyes glinted with determination. “I have to admit I’m starving.” He tilted up her chin and planted a kiss on her mouth before she could protest. “I want Loren for the day, Mr. Shephard.” But he said it directly to her. And then he turned away, reaching for a mug as if he owned the kitchen, and carted the steaming cup over to Gramps as he sat down. “She’s going to raise a pile of objections. All the chores she has to do on a Saturday…”

“Nonsense!” Gramps rose like a trout for a favorite fly. “She’s been working too hard as it is, thinks we can’t get along without her for a day. The fact is, her sister could lift a finger once in a while—”