Liz Ireland (19 page)

“Stay here,” he commanded her.

She wasn’t about to do that. “I’m going with you.”

“You won’t be any damn use.”

She squinted at him in a fury. “Never mind that, just hurry.”

With no time to argue, he slapped the reins and the horse bolted down the street. They flew down the road toward the McMillan farm, yet the way had never seemed so long. Ellie’s breath was caught in a tight ball in her throat.
Please don’t let anything have happened to Roy’s place,
she prayed silently, over and over. And as they came ever closer to the farm, and the smoke still remained in the distance, she knew that her prayer had been answered.

Yet Roy’s face only grew more grim.

“What is it?” she asked in a voice tight with alarm. “It can’t be your farm, can it?”

“No,” he gritted out, slapping the reins again. “It’s Uncle Ed’s.”

The small house was fully ablaze by the time Roy pulled the wagon to a quick halt a hundred yards away. He jumped down and tossed the reins to Ellie. “Drive the wagon back to where the others are.”

Ellie turned toward the other wagons they’d passed on the way in and nodded in agreement.

“And for heaven’s sake, stay back,” he yelled after her, feeling a flash of dread that something might happen to Ellie or her baby. She shouldn’t have come at all, but damn it, he couldn’t push her off the wagon.

Several residents who lived in the vicinity had already arrived on the scene and the women and children had formed a bucket-line leading from the well to the house. At the bottom of this line was Isabel, and at its head, dousing the house with water, was the Reverend Jenkins. Ike and Leon O’Mara were running livestock out of the barn and emptying out the chicken house, both of which were, as yet, safe. Men, including Ed and Parker, wielded shovels to toss dirt and old snow through windows and doors. They worked frantically, diligently—and hopelessly.

Anyone could see that the old house couldn’t be saved. The structure was already an inferno. Flames from the roof licked the waning afternoon sky and sent fiery bits of ash floating through the air. Even while he worked to save the house, Roy could catch Ed’s worried gaze flicking back in the direction of his orchard.

“Don’t worry,” Roy said to him. “The orchard’s far enough away. If we can just get the flames under control….”

Ed shook his head. “I’m worried about your mother.”

Roy pivoted, and saw immediately that it wasn’t the orchard, but Isabel, who had been the object of Ed’s worried glances. More surprising still, he caught sight of Ellie dashing around with a shovel, a muffler wound round her face, heaving dirt through a broken window.
What in tarnation did she think she was doing here?
It was dangerous, foolish, irresponsible….

As he looked on in horror, a section of the roof collapsed, sending an explosion of embers billowing outward. Several shrieks of surprise went up, and men with shovels hopped back to avoid the fiery cinders.

Ellie stood her ground.

He muttered a curse and ran over to her.

“I told you to stay away from the fire!”

His bellowing didn’t break her stride. “But I can help!” She sent a spray of dirt toward a window through which plumes of black smoke blew back at her.

“The house is gone,” he told her. “Don’t risk your life.”

He was about to force her to at least go back with the women in the bucket-line, when suddenly her green eyes above her muffler widened with fear. “Roy, look!”

The wind was carrying fiery ashes from the collapsed roof closer to the barn.

Ellie took off running toward the outbuilding, and other men followed. The fight was now on to save the barn, and the bucket-line stretched and concentrated on wetting down its roof. Roy felt relief just to move a few yards away from the raging heat and smoke devouring the house, to be able to look away from the blazing torrent consuming the place where he’d grown up.

What must Ed be feeling, seeing so much of his past disappear in smoke?

What must Isabel be thinking, watching the house where she’d spent so many unhappy days go up in flames?

Roy felt a gargantuan lump building in his throat as he worked alongside the others, and felt hot tears sting his eyes.

He’d lost sight of Ellie right after she’d run to the
barn, and not until the building had been doused with water did he slow down enough to look for her. At first he couldn’t spot her in the confused tangle of people dashing about the property, but then he spotted her near the head of a second line that had formed, creating a V running from the well to the barn. Her face was strained as she heaved the heavy wood bucket Isabel had handed her to the next person in line, but she was as fast as any of the volunteers.

Seeing Ellie, the woman he’d been willing to dismiss weeks ago as scheming and deceptive, toiling impassionedly alongside Isabel, the woman he’d written off for years as being cold and heartless, he felt his own heart swell uncomfortably in his chest. Isabel, a woman who looked for all the world as if she’d never lifted anything heavier than an embroidery hoop, and Ellie, eight months along in her pregnancy, labored as quickly and tirelessly as the youngest and strongest among them. And with more heart.

With the unity of movement of a school of fish, the fire-fighting citizenry sensed when the barn was safe and turned back toward the house—a blackened, blazing skeleton now. Nothing would be saved, but the property wouldn’t be safe until the last of the flames were extinguished.

Many stayed till the bitter end, and the faces of Ed’s neighbors and the expressions of sympathy of those who had come out from Paradise held both relief and sorrow. Fire could and often did kill; this time they had thwarted its deadly efforts. But the flames had taken a house that had stood for over thirty years, one that had been a vital part of Paradise’s history.

As people retreated back to their wagons, they could only speculate on what had caused the blaze. Had he not banked the fireplace properly? Left burning cinders in his oven?

Ed looked more distraught than Roy had ever seen him. “Thank God no one was hurt,” he kept telling Roy. “I worried about all those people so near that fire.”

“’Most all your neighbors came,” Roy observed.

Parker, beside them, nodded. “There were nearly forty people here. Someone from every house hereabouts, I would say.”

He and Ike were getting ready to go back to the farm. “You could come with us,” Parker suggested to his uncle. “We’ve got plenty of room.”

Ed shook his head. “I’ll get by here. I want to look after things.”

But mostly, he was looking after Isabel, who was still standing by the well.

Parker nodded, then turned to Roy. “See you back at the house.”

Roy nodded, distracted. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen Ellie in ages. His heart drummed heavily in his chest.

Where was she?

Parker and Ike set out for their farm on horseback.

“I bet it was that oven of his,” Ike speculated. “He keeps that thing blazing all autumn long, and you know your uncle—absentminded.”

Parker nodded, then frowned. Up ahead, he could hear the sound of a rider coming right toward them, but it was so dark he couldn’t discern who it was. No doubt someone coming to see about the fire. But wouldn’t the folks heading back toward town have told the rider that it was all over?

The question was just running through his head when suddenly a large white horse came barrelling into sight—and atop the impressive animal was Clara!

“Christmas!” Ike exclaimed as Clara just missed galloping headlong into him.

Parker wheeled his horse and thundered after her, calling her name. They’d travelled several hundred yards before he could catch up to her, and when he did, her eyes looked into his frantically. She sawed on her reins, causing her horse to rear. Parker couldn’t tell if she was thrown or simply slid off the horse, but he dismounted quickly to check that she was all right.

“Clara,” he said, bracing her by her shoulders, “what’s happened?”

She still had a wild-eyed look about her, and her blond hair was flying in all directions. He’d never seen her so out of sorts. For that matter, he’d rarely seen her on horseback.

“I rode all the way from my granny’s,” she said, her chest heaving for breath. “We saw the smoke!”

“Ed’s house burned to the ground,” he informed her. He still held her because she looked as though she would collapse without some support. And no wonder! Her grandmother lived almost twenty miles away.

“I thought for sure it was your house—I was wild with worry!”

She looked wild. Smiling, he clasped her to him in a tight hug. “You shouldn’t have come all this way by yourself.”

As she looked into his eyes, her bow lips turned down in their old familiar pout. “Oh, I know, you’ve got that Fitzsimmons woman to worry about you now. But I just had to know that you were all right. I guess I just…”

She closed her mouth before she could say more.

“You just what, Clara?”

Shaking off his grip, she stepped back and put her hands on her hips. “I just love you, if you must know!
Heaven only knows why.
My
house could have burned any time in the past year and I doubt you would have come running to see that I was okay.”

“Yes I would have.”

She laughed mirthlessly. “I doubt it. You’ve been too busy with that Fitzsimmons woman to notice anybody else. But I notice
she’s
not here.”

“She’s back at Ed’s.”

Clara’s smirk disappeared. “Oh.”

“But she wouldn’t have galloped twenty miles to check on me.”

Clara kicked her toe in the dirt. “Then what do you want to go and marry her for?”

Parker smiled. “I don’t.”

Her lips twisted in disbelief. “Then why did you buy her a ring?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then who—?”

Chuckling, Parker reached into his coat, pulled out the tiny box he’d been carrying with him since he bought it, and dangled it in front of her. “You never asked me who it was for.”

“You said it was going to be for the woman you were going to marry!”

He stepped forward and pulled the ring out. “I said if she’d have me.” Slowly, he took Clara’s hand. “Will you, Clara?”

Her eyes rounded as she saw the ring being slipped on her finger, and then, slowly, tears formed in them. She looked back up at him, her lips still parted in disbelief. “You mean…you bought it for
me?
”

He nodded.

“And all this time you’ve just been carrying it around? Waiting?”

“Uh-huh.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she let out a howl of dismay. “Ooooh! I ought to kill you for this!”

He laughed, and pulled her into his arms. “Marry me first. Then you can kill me.”

As his head dipped down for a kiss, she whispered, “I’ll marry you, Parker McMillan. But be prepared to suffer!”

He laughed. “You don’t have to worry about me suffering—your mother will see to that.”

At first, seeing his house in flames, Ed had felt as if the very earth were being torn out from under him. His family’s house, the place where he’d first met Isabel, where his brothers had lived and died, where he had gone on alone for so many years…it just disappeared before his eyes.

Now, staring at the charred skeleton, he felt strangely composed.

Isabel, on the other hand, sobbed with anguish. “I’m so sorry, Ed. Sorry we couldn’t save it.”

He put his arm around her and pulled her to his side, pressing his lips to her temple. The soapy smell of her soft hair had given way to acrid smoke, yet to him right now it was a sweeter scent than perfume. “It’s all right, Izzy. No one was hurt.”

She blinked up at him through tears. “But you’ve lost everything!”

“I’ve got my barn, my orchard.” He looked into her face, feeling an almost unbearable tenderness overwhelm him. “But I’ve got a confession to make.”

She looked alarmed. “What?”

“Every tree could have burned down, right down to the last cooked apple, and it wouldn’t have mattered one whit to me as long as I have you, Izzy.”

She sagged against him a little then. “Oh, Ed—who ever knew you were such a romantic fool?”

“Not me,” he said, chuckling lightly. “Not me.”

“What are you going to do now?” she asked.

“I guess I can sleep in the barn.”

“Nonsense,” she said, straightening. “You’ll come back to Paradise with me.”

His eyes narrowed. “People will talk.”

“I don’t care two cents about what people say.”

He looked into her lovely blue eyes and knew it was true. “Then again…I suppose I know a surefire way to stop the gossip.”

She grinned. “What’s that?”

“Marry me, Isabel.” Her eyes registered wariness, and he added in a rush, “Marry me and let’s start over. New house, new life together. I know you’ve been married twice, but never to a man who loves you as much as I do. Never to a man who’s waited almost thirty years to win your heart.”

Her eyes were wet with tears, and she nestled her head against his chest. “You didn’t have to wait. You had it long ago.”

For some reason, hearing those words moved him as nothing else that evening had. More than his burned house, more than the idea that forty good people had pitched in to help him. “Then…?”

She looked lovingly into his eyes. “Of course I’ll marry you, Edward McMillan. It will be an honor.”

He was so flooded with feeling he didn’t know how his legs continued to hold him upright, except that having Isabel’s love made him strong. And complete. And as happy as a man had a right to be.

E
llie leaned against the chicken coop, more emotionally than physically exhausted. They had all soldiered so valiantly against the fire, and yet Ed’s house was gone.

Staring blankly at its blackened remains in the moonlight, she realized that a house was something she had never known. A home. Ed’s house held more memories for her than anywhere. More happy memories. She’d relived every second she and Roy had spent there a million times in her mind. As she stood there now, she tried for a million and one. Images paraded through her mind. Roy meeting her in front of the house as she rode up in the snow. Sitting in Roy’s lap at the kitchen table. Uncle Ed and all his loose catalog pages in the kitchen. She and Roy running through the orchard, playing like children. She knew she should banish such thoughts from her mind, but she couldn’t. The poignant memories would live forever in her, as fresh as yesterday.

A lone sound caught her ear, and she looked up to see Ed and Isabel leaving in his wagon. Apprehension darted through her. She’d seen almost everyone driving off, but hadn’t worried about getting back because
she’d assumed Isabel would offer her a ride back to their house in town. Now the horizon was troublingly bare.

She darted toward the house, circled it, then ran back toward the barn. To her relief, she noted one of Ed’s two horses and a mule in the stalls, munching happily on newly strewn hay as if nothing had happened. Thank heavens they were there! She at least would have the means to ride back into town.

Sizing up the two beasts, she decided to put a bridle on the old horse, who was small and knobby and appeared much more approachable than the youthful mule. She found a bridle in the tack room, then pulled the horse, Jonas, out of his stall. Slipping the bridle over his head, she prayed she would be able to get up on the horse…and stay up. That might be a problem, too.

Gingerly, she led the animal out of the barn and over to a stump where she might be able to mount him more easily. Just as she was preparing to step up, however, a deep voice called to her out of the darkness.

“Where the hell have you been?”

It was Roy. When he came close enough for her to make out his face, he seemed almost angry.

Her heart pounded uneasily. “I was right here.”

“No you weren’t,” he said. “I looked for you here not ten minutes ago.”

“Ten minutes ago I wasn’t here. I was rounding up chickens out back.”

He let out a sigh. “I didn’t look there!”

“I thought everyone had gone.” And of all the people who’d remained behind, why did it have to be Roy? She felt so emotionally vulnerable now, she wasn’t certain she was prepared to handle his quicksilver moods. “Where were you?”

“I was in the orchard, looking for you.”

“What would I have been doing there?”

He didn’t answer.

His lack of response told the tale, however. He thought she was reliving the moments when they’d frolicked through the bare trees….

The discomfiting silence stretched into an interminable minute before Roy finally said, “There’s no sense in your riding Jonas home. I can take you in the wagon.”

“It’s no trouble for me to ride back on my own,” she said. “I can do it.”

His frown deepened. “I’m sure you can. But that would leave an extra horse in town for Ed to take care of.”

She hadn’t thought of that.

He strode forward to take the reins away from her, but she grabbed his arm.

He stiffened at her touch, and she saw a bone-deep weariness in his eyes that surprised her. She was used to thinking of Roy as tireless, yet the fire must have seemed interminable to him. “You don’t need to help me,” she assured him. “I can get by on my own.”

“Certainly. But for my own peace of mind, I’m going to take you home myself.”

“Why should you worry about me?” she asked, lifting her chin. “I’m the woman you’ve wanted to drive away remember?”

She’d meant to sound haughty and removed, but even to her own ears the hurt seeped through her tone. She felt vaguely ridiculous, and dropped his arm and stepped back to hide her discomfort.

He grabbed her hand, not letting her get too far away from him. “I’ve tried to drive you away,” he agreed, his voice a rasp. “But I failed. My efforts to get you to leave Paradise weren’t any more successful
than my attempts to drive you out of my thoughts. I can’t stop thinking about you, Ellie. What I told you this afternoon was the God’s honest truth. I’ve missed you.”

Feeling some thin shell of control begin to crack, she tugged on her hand; Roy wouldn’t let go. “Please,” she whispered as he took a step closer.

“Please what?” he asked.

She shook her head frantically, feeling like a trapped rabbit. But the only thing truly ensnaring her was her own desire for the man in front of her. Even when he’d shown her nothing but righteous anger and contempt, she’d never stopped wanting Roy. What chance did she have against him now that he was confessing his own weakness for her?

The answer was clear. No chance. No chance at all.

He pulled her into his arms with such ease that her feet might have been gliding on ice. Then he tilted her chin up with his thumb. “I’ve wanted to do this for weeks now,” he whispered as his mouth descended on hers.

She expected the kiss to be violent and swift and eager, like the urgent impulses swirling inside her. Instead, his lips coaxed hers tenderly into a response. Her eyes closed, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, unable to mask the flow of desire that flooded through her. Unable to stop herself from showing how much she wanted to hold him close to her, to taste his lips one more time.

She was helpless before temptation, incapable of resisting his kiss. He held her fast, but not nearly as fast as she clung to him. His tongue darted along her lips, teasing her until she allowed him full access. When his tongue entered her mouth, sliding with hers in a mating ritual, she was afraid her feet wouldn’t hold her. She felt quivery and loose, as if all her
tightly held control had finally cracked and shattered into a million pieces like a sheet of fragile glass.

Roy swept her unwieldy body into his arms as if she were featherlight. As he strode through the darkness, Ellie buried her head against his chest and didn’t question where he was taking her. She knew. She knew, and she was past caring about whether it was wrong or right, or if her pride should forbid Roy from going one step further. Pride was a distant intangible idea at the moment, while Roy’s arms holding her were astonishingly, powerfully real, as were his passion-darkened eyes and the familiar heat brewing inside her.

When he set her down, she knew without opening her eyes where they were. She’d dreamed of the little cot often enough to recognize the sweet smell of hay, the animal-sweat odor of the horses and Roy’s male scent the way she would recognize old friends.

He kissed her again, and though she lost herself in the warmth of his lips, lips that affected her like sweet, strong wine, she was also acutely aware of buttons being undone down her back. His fingers worked methodically, vigorously, and she pulled closer to him to make his job easier. When finally that task was finished, he eased the dress off her shoulders and it spilled to the floor in a puddle of wool. With a whisper of a waistband being untied, her cotton petticoat joined it. Standing now in only a chemise and her undergarments, she felt the cold air chill her, and Roy scooped up a blanket, pulling it over her as he eased her onto the cot. It felt so good to recline, even if she was anything but tired now.

Roy shed his own clothes, all of them, and lay down next to her. Ellie was sure she was blushing down to her toes, and yet she couldn’t help staring at the magnificence of him, the sheer power in his muscled
body. Though she had been intimate with a man before, she had never viewed one completely unclothed.

Her wide-open eyes swept up the rest of Roy, taking in snatches of bare flesh that tantalized and aroused her; his broad shoulders, the strong hand resting on her hip, his intent, hungry gaze that was like kindling to her desire. She twisted, nestling closer to him, amazed by the way their bodies fit together even in her condition.

He pushed her chemise back and fluttered a hand over one of her full breasts, causing a moan of need to escape her parted lips.

Roy nuzzled her ear. “I’ll be careful,” he whispered to her.

But rather than soothing her, his words, coupled with the firm pressure of his manhood against her and her recent glimpse at its impressive dimensions, begged questions she feared to ask.
How careful could they be? How did this work?

Suddenly she was as unschooled and anxious as if she had never known a man before, and, in a way, she realized she hadn’t. Not intimately. No one had ever kissed her in the shockingly sensual way Roy now went about kissing her, tending to not just her mouth but seemingly every inch of her. Parts of her that she thought pedestrian and lifeless stirred shocking feelings as his lips lavished attention on them. Her eyelids, her nose, the lobe of her ear. She gritted her teeth against sensations he could send racing through her with the merest brush of his lips.

But when his lips moved to her breast, his tongue testing and then teasing her soft flesh into a tight bud, she gave up fighting the whirlwind galloping through her. It was too much for her. All she could do was be swept along, moving against him instinctively,
reaching out brazenly to touch that part of him that moments ago had seemed so daunting. Under her hand, however, its hardness seemed more supple, almost velvety. She explored then caressed him, causing a groan almost like pain to issue from his lips.

It took her a moment to realize his response was one of pleasure.

His reaction sparked a thrilling realization. She wasn’t just an object, a receptacle for his desire, but a partner fully capable of gratifying him in other ways, too.

A few more minutes of her ministrations, however, seemed to put him on edge. Roy grabbed her hand, and when her eyes looked up his face was tense, his jaw clenched.

Flustered, she blushed. “Don’t you like…?”

“Yes,” he gritted out quickly. “Too much.”

He pulled her to him again and kissed her, hiking her chemise up to her waist and massaging her through her pantalets as he had once before. Then, to her surprise, he tugged her remaining clothes off so that she was fully exposed before him. Despite the cold, every bare inch of her felt red-hot under his sultry gaze.

His eyes were filled with awe. “You’re beautiful.”

She felt anything but, and she looked down self-consciously at her distended middle, which he cradled gently with his hand.

“Beautiful,” he repeated emphatically as he bent down to kiss her.

His voice was so raw, the embrace he pulled her into so tender, that she felt a fierce ache build in her for him. She moved against him suggestively, wantonly as his kiss deepened and his hands roamed her body.

He rolled so that he was poised against the most
intimate part of her. She moved against him, testing, tensing for the intense pain she remembered was imminent. But when he entered her there was only the delicious friction of sensitive flesh. There was only Roy gently moving against her, tentatively at first, then with swifter strokes that fueled the fiery tempest inside her. The inferno licked and crackled at her just as the flames of Ed’s house had licked the night-dark sky.

All at once she realized she was losing herself as she had before under Roy’s touch, and she gave into the abandon joyfully and eagerly. The dark world around them turned bright with color as fireworks seemed to explode within her. Moments later, Roy shuddered over her, his entire body tensed, and then collapsed next to her with his arm draped over her shoulder.

“Mmm, Ellie…” He groaned and nuzzled his head against her.

Ellie’s heart rushed into her breast, and for a moment she was so ecstatic she could hardly think. So
this
was what fired the imaginations of poets and novelists! This was the impulse that spurred musicians to ecstatic bursts of melody and the artist to spread passionate colors on canvas. After Percy, she’d been skeptical about the physical glories of love. But now poems and rhapsodies seemed to flow through her, and all her thoughts had the ringing brilliance of arias.
This
was love in its purest, sweetest manifestation.

And, amazingly, as her imagination thrilled to operatic arias and Keats and Shelley galloped through her veins, something else managed to break through her consciousness, too.

A snore.

She turned. Roy was asleep—so fast asleep that his breath came out in deep heaving snorts.

She felt her brow furrow as the cold night air settled around her, raising gooseflesh. What should she do now? Wake Roy? Try to sleep herself?

But the bed was too small to accommodate both of them comfortably, especially when Roy turned slightly and sprawled his body over more space, nudging her closer to the edge of the cot. She very nearly was sent tumbling over the side. She tensed, trying to breathe lightly in an attempt to make herself small so that she wouldn’t go rolling onto the ground.

The trouble was, she
wasn’t
small. And being squeezed like this was decidedly uncomfortable. The dead weight of his arm was heavy on her shoulder.
Her
arm was falling asleep.

Frowning at how quickly the ecstasy had evaporated, Ellie stared into Roy’s face and tried to recapture some of the poetry and music of just minutes before. She’d been so swept away, so ecstatic just to be back in Roy’s arms, to have it all end so abruptly jolted her out of her happy thoughts.

Doubts rose up in her. Especially when she tried to extricate Roy’s hand and looked down at the silhouette of her naked, pregnant body lying next to the powerful male outline of his.

Heavens, Eleanor! What have you done?

Old Louisa Sternhagen’s question startled her out of her love-fogged daze and made her bolt out of bed.

She’d given herself to Roy, heart and body and soul, and yet did he know? Did he care?