Love, Come to Me(4)

She remembered Daniel’s homecoming after the South had surrendered. Through her joy she had noticed that he seemed tired and so much older, his gaze dark and warm, but no longer twinkling.

“Daniel!” She called his name eagerly as he stepped off the train. She had loved him for years with the adoration a child would have given him, but now she was seventeen, and she wanted him with all the warmth and passion of a woman. And though his family and all his friends were there to greet him, he turned to her first.

“Lucy, is it really you?” he asked, opening his arms, and she ran to him with an exuberant smile of happiness.

“Did you get my letters? Did you read them? Did—”

“I read every one of them.” He bent down and kissed her swiftly. “I kept every single one.”

She remembered Daniel as he had proposed to her, his arms warm and firm around her, the softness of his mouth on hers.

“It won’t be right away,” he said. “We’ll have to wait a year or two while I get established at the railroad company.”

“But I want you now—”

“There are too many things I want to give you. Wait for me, Lucy. Give me your promise that I won’t lose you to someone else.”

“I’ll wait forever,” she told him, with tears shining in her hazel eyes. “You’ll never lose me . . . I’ll be yours as long as you want me . . . as long as you love me.”

Three years, three frustrating years of belonging and not belonging. He was not ready to marry her yet, and there was no sign that he would be ready soon. In the meantime, she would have given him anything he wanted of her, everything she had to offer him, but they had never made love. A gentleman to the core, he would not take her before their wedding night. He was a man of honor, and honor had a stronger hold on him than passion. Restless and troubled, she clung to him in supplication.

“Daniel . . . tell me you love me. Stay with me tonight... stay.”

He brushed warm, questioning kisses on her forehead, his mouth pressing at her temple, caressing her cheeks and the fragile skin underneath her eyes. She sighed, quieting against the warmth of his body. “Shhhh . . . ,” he whispered, cradling her head with his hand and pressing her face against his shoulder. “Go to sleep . . . sleep . . .”

Heath’s turquoise gaze traveled over her features slowly. Lucinda Caldwell, slumbering in his arms. He shook his head in wonder. By a stroke of fate, all his well-thoughtout plans had just been rendered unnecessary. Who would have thought she would have landed in his grasp so easily? He cradled her helpless form, testing the feel of her in his arms. She fit perfectly. So small, so deliciously small, and surprisingly voluptuous.

He had wondered about how she would look this close—what her skin was like, what shape her eyebrows followed, how long her eyelashes were. Now the answers were right in front of him, and his curiosity was more than satisfied. He had seen her before, often enough to know that her smile was merry and full of charm, and that she walked across the street with a lively step. Now he knew details that he suspected no one else had been privileged to know—the natural shape of her body, the smooth, perfect paleness of her skin, the freckle on her left breast.

She looked impossibly young, with tear-marked cheeks and baby-fine skin. Her mouth was inviting; for all that, it was too wide and too strongly set. Her eyebrows were dark and slanting. The combination of those uncompromising features and a round face gave her the appearance of a determined child. The more Heath looked at her, the more fascinated he was. How could any man resist the vulnerability, the sweetness, the contrasts of that face?

Lucy turned over and moaned, aware of a terrible ache in her head as she endeavored to open her eyes. Squinting, she peered through the dimly lit bedroom to the closed window curtains. A streak of daylight peered around the edge of the curtains, betraying the fact that it was morning.

“Father?” she asked thickly, aware that someone was entering the room. “Am I . . .” Her voice died away as she realized that the intruder was not her father, and she remembered what had happened the day before. Her face went white. “Oh! You are . . . Mr.—”

“Heath Rayne,” he said, approaching the bed with a light tread. She shrank away from him immediately, jerking the covers high under her chin and looking so much like the caricature of an outraged virgin that the corners of Heath’s mouth twitched.

“Don’t tell me you don’t trust me, Lucinda. For the way I exercised such commendable restraint last night, I deserve a medal, not suspicion.” Before she could move or protest, his hand curved over her forehead, nearly engulfing her skull as he measured her temperature. The tip of his thumb lightly grazed the throbbing pulse at her temple before he removed his hand. She didn’t like the way he touched her, as if he owned her. “A fever. No surprise in that, considering all that happened yesterday.” Comfortably he settled his long-limbed body into a nearby chair.

It took her a few minutes to pull together her scattered thoughts. “You pulled me out of the river—”

“That’s right.”

“I . . . I didn’t even thank you.”

“Wasn’t much trouble to pull a little thing like you out.”

“But you’re a Southerner. And I’m a—”

He looked at her with mock dismay. “And you think that a Southerner wouldn’t extend a hand to someone who needs it, even if that person’s a Yankee?”