Love, Come to Me(17)

She stared up at him with reluctant concern, her skin pale and translucent in the cold light of the moon. Suddenly, Heath looked at her in a new way, without tenderness or friendly amusement. No one in the limited scope of Lucy’s experience had ever switched from one mood to another with such ease. The lazy, laughing stranger had turned into quite a different man, whose expression was bitter and his eyes sharp. Bewildered, she let her hand drop from his arm.

“You can,” he said roughly. “You damn well can.” In a swift movement he caught her wrists in his and dragged her to the space between two buildings, pulling her into a space of frightening darkness. The peaceful, familiar street seemed to disappear, and she went rigid with fear.

“Don’t!”

His arms were tight around her, his breath hot against her neck. “Go ahead,” he muttered. “Scream and kick . . . that would bring the whole lot of them down here, wouldn’t it? I don’t give a damn, honey. I don’t care . . . I don’t . . .”

His mouth, ferocious and greedy, bore down on hers so hard that it hurt, and Lucy struggled against him wildly. The night surrounded them in a flood of velvet, suffocating her with blackness. Desperately she took a handful of hair, grasping the close-shorn thickness at the back of his neck, and then his kiss gentled, the painful pressure of it changing into the sweet, searching warmth that she remembered from before. He was using her to soothe a hurt, she realized, and gradually she stopped fighting him, her gasps changing into sporadic sobs.

She stilled and began to lean against him, out of pity—yes, out of sympathy and nothing else. Then his arms loosened and slid around her in a different way, protective, sheltering. His head bent deeper, his mouth beginning to play on hers expertly. Lucy moaned in her throat as she succumbed to the pleasure of it, responding to every touch and stroke of his tongue, her mind going blank as she became a stranger to herself. Her hands clenched in the silken hair, and the ends of it curled around her fingers. Gently—oh, so gently—he curved her body to his, and his warm hand slid down the line of her back with a caressing touch before coming to rest on the upper rise of her bu**ocks. Her body was wedged into his as if they had been made for each other. Her br**sts thrust against his chest. Her h*ps fitted snugly into his, so closely that she could feel the powerful outline of his arousal. He pulled her even harder against his body, his anger changing into pure desire.

“This is wrong . . .” she gasped as his mouth left hers and slid down the fragile outline of her throat. She tilted her head back and let it fall to his shoulder. While his lips marauded the delicate skin of her neck and the shallow depression underneath her jaw, she began to realize that he knew things about her she had not been aware of. He knew how to make her feel things she had never felt before, and all of it was forbidden. He had no right to do this to her, just as she had no right to encourage it. “Stop,” she whispered, her nostrils filled with the scent of him, her body clamoring for her to let him do whatever he wanted. His mouth returned to hers, both of his hands cupping around her head as he took one last, devouring kiss. Then his chest rose and fell with an unsteady sigh, and he let go of her.

“It’s not my fault,” Heath muttered, while Lucy retreated until her back was against the wall of the building. Her heart was hammering almost audibly. His voice was thick and heavy, the sound of it curling around her in the darkness. “I can’t help it any more than you can. So don’t follow me again, or you know what to expect.”

Motionless, she stood there, her palms pressed to her racing heart.

“Go back to your father,” he said harshly. “And to Daniel. Go on.”

She stumbled back to the street, her feet moving faster and faster as she fled back to safety.

Lucy could not understand or get rid of her secret fascination with Heath Rayne, who was now known around town simply as “the Confederate.” The less she saw of him, the more she thought and wondered about him. She thought that he deliberately tried to avoid her, for he never came into the store during the hours when she was helping her father, and he never even looked at her when they happened to be in the same area. Perhaps it was better that way.

Rumors spread around Concord very quickly about him, for the subject of Heath Rayne was a continual source of interest. He was reputed to keep fast company. Mrs. Brooks said that she and her husband had seen the Southerner in Boston escorting a well-dressed woman, while some of the more reckless and younger Concord men reputedly went with him to a dance hall in Lowell and came back reeking of spirits and cheap perfume. The general opinion was that Heath Rayne was a hotheaded hell-raiser who had come up North to stir up trouble. No one knew the answers to the two most important questions about him: who was he and what did he do for a living? He didn’t seem to have any sort of occupation, but he seemed to have quite an adequate amount of money, for he was always superbly dressed and generous with a dollar.

Then there came a long silence about Heath, for the simple reason that he went to Boston for undisclosed purposes and stayed there for more than two months. The weeks passed by slowly while the talk about him burned out for want of fuel. Although his gray horse was being kept in the centrally located livery stables, which surely meant that Heath would return, Lucy began to think that she would never see him again. Putting him out of her mind, she devoted herself to concentrating on her duties as Lucas Caldwell’s daughter and Daniel’s fiancée, keeping busy with her involvement with the Ladies’ Tuesday Club and the Concord Female Charitable Society as well as her literary clubs and meetings. Whenever it was possible Daniel took her to a dance, since there was a new one held nearly every week by a different organization.