Ciji Ware (38 page)

Ah, but she had come here
today
. And what a glorious day it had been! Despite her having been raised as a hothouse flower by a domineering mother, she’d tramped the woods without complaint, laughed at his jokes, and appeared genuinely interested in learning about his work. A bout with a few mosquitoes didn’t send her into a sharp decline as it would most women of his acquaintance. She was courageous in more important ways, too. It took real moxie to abruptly pull up stakes in New York to spend a year exploring the world of blues and jazz. He wondered when he’d tell her that it was his favorite music and always had been.

As the cool water washed over his body, Sim luxuriated in his recollection of the day, last week, when Daphne suddenly materialized at the cottage to inform him that she’d returned to Natchez. The vision of her mass of curly blond hair, backlit by the kerosene lamp near the bed and visible through the screen door as he approached from the meadow at dusk, was etched in his memory like a favorite photograph.

He absorbed the sight of his semi-aroused condition. You could fool the mind, but you couldn’t fool the body, he mused. And hers was so lovely… honey-colored, like her hair. He found himself speculating on what the rest of her was like beneath clothing that had also touched
his
skin…

He abruptly turned the cold tap on full blast, letting it engulf his head and run down his back. Then he swiftly soaped, rinsed, and toweled himself dry, directing his thoughts to photographic subjects like aperture settings and shutter speeds.

The
lady’s still licking her wounds from her
last
encounter
with
a
man.

But that was two years ago. As for himself, he’d put a decade between his own personal disaster with Francesca and this lovely April day. Surely, by now, he was fit company for a woman who’d intrigued him from that first arresting moment he’d glimpsed her playing a harp and singing in that husky voice of hers inside the cool, elegant parlor of a Mississippi plantation house.

Sim donned his bathrobe once again, assailed by sudden doubts. Was he honestly ready for a serious relationship with Ms. Daphne Duvallon—and all the complications that would entail? He knew that if he advanced beyond simple friendship today, this could be no casual affair. For reasons he couldn’t even explain to himself, he knew intuitively and positively that Daphne was not merely a ship he’d pass in the night.

Cinching his bathrobe tightly around his waist, Sim yanked back the curtain, the swiftness of his motion startling Daphne, who was sitting on the daybed dabbing antiseptic on her ankle.

“Squeaky clean?” she asked finally as he stood rooted to the spot.

“Yep.” He took a step toward the bed. “Show me your mosquito bites,” he commanded.

Slowly she raised her eyes to meet his gaze, and bit her lip. In that instant, he knew instinctively that she was feeling every bit as sexually charged as he was. Her dark eyes widened and her lips parted slightly, just as they had when he held her in his arms on the dance floor the first night he’d taken her to Biscuits and Blues.

“They got me everywhere,” she revealed, her glance never wavering from his.

“Here. Let me help.”

He held out his hand and she placed the plastic bottle of antiseptic into his palm without looking away. “See?” he said, pointing to a spot under his ear. “Everywhere, too.” He sat down beside her on the bed and searched for some cotton swabs in a first-aid kit he’d stowed in the bottom of the duffel. “Show me the ones you couldn’t reach,” he demanded gently.

“On my… back. They bit me right through my shirt!”

“Me too. Show me.”

He had absolutely no idea whether she’d comply with his directive, and when she turned her back to him and unbuttoned the front of the oversize shirt, he felt his heart hammering in his chest. She discreetly lowered the shirt from her shoulders and employed it as a shawl, revealing her upper back only. “See them? About halfway down to the right of my spine?”

And what a lovely spine it was, he thought. Her fragrant skin was still warm from her shower. She had a tiny mole in the middle of her back adjacent to several small red marks where he began to dab antiseptic. Slowly, and with a sense that every move should be savored like a sip of fine wine or a taste of caviar, he patted the saturated cotton ball against the small swellings and then leaned forward to blow each spot dry.

“How’s that feel?” he asked, leaning close to her left ear, riveted by the golden skin on her shoulder now dimpled with goose bumps.

“Mmmmm,” she said, and Sim knew she had her eyes closed. “Not as itchy.”

“How about this one at the base of your neck?”

“Uh huh. And there’s one at the bottom of my spine.” She lifted the hem of the shirt while pushing down the edge of the drawstring pants.

He patted both spots with icy antiseptic and then blew them dry.

“Oh, God! Here’s another one,” she offered, raising her forearm and pushing the cotton sleeve up to her elbow.

He repeated his ministrations. Again, gooseflesh.

“Let’s see that ankle.”

“I already did it.”

“I’ll give it a second dose.”

She modestly returned his dress shirt to her shoulders, holding it closed over her bosom, and shifted on the bed in order to face him.

“That’s the worst spot,” she groused good-naturedly. “I must have gotten ten bites down there when I stuck my feet into the creek. Duh-umb.”

Sim slid his hand over the arch of her foot. Her skin felt warm there too, and wonderful to the touch. “Ah… I see,” he murmured. “There’s one… and there… and…”

His fingers now encircled her slender ankle while his other hand attended to the mosquito bites. She was watching his every move. Slowly her glance shifted and he found himself staring into dark eyes as brown as espresso. The look flickering behind her lashes contained the kind of wariness and desire he’d seen in female birds at the beginning of the age-old dance that always ended as instinct had forever dictated.

“Sim?” He didn’t answer, but merely continued to gaze into her lovely, questioning face. “What about you?” she whispered.

“Are you inquiring about my mosquito bites?” he asked softly, “or the rest of me?”

She paused, carefully considered his question, and replied, “Of course I mean your mosquito bites.”

Feint
…
counterfeint.

In nature, the female of the species affected disinterest until the male proved his intentions. Even so, he briefly wondered if he hadn’t mistaken mere friendliness for desire… No, he assured himself. She would have allowed him and his mosquito bites to fend for themselves. She’d just offered to—what?

Let’s just see what the lady intends
…

He shrugged his bathrobe from his shoulders and allowed it to pool at his waist. He pointed to his exposed back. “I’ll match you, bite for bite.”

“Well, we’ll just see about that, won’t we?” she declared softly.

Daphne changed places on the bed and rather primly, Sim thought, set to work soaking a new piece of cotton in the antiseptic and dabbing it on the itchy bites on his back. He felt himself relax while she administered first aid to far fewer mosquito bites than she had certainly suffered.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” he replied, laughing softly. He turned to face her, drawing one leg beneath him on the bed as she had. “I have a confession to make.”

“What is it?” she asked warily.

He gently took her chin between his fingers. “For a while now I’ve been imagining you in my bed… and now… here you are.”

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Here I am.”

“And I’ve imagined… I’ve
been
imagining,” he amended, “making love to you in all sorts of beds, beginning with that gigantic four-poster at Monmouth Plantation—”

“I remember,” she said solemnly.

“And here in this cottage, on this skinny little mattress,” he continued, patting the white cotton bedspread. “And if those damn mosquitoes hadn’t interfered, even in the woods near the creek.” He paused, allowing time for his next words to sink in. “But, I know from experience that it takes quite a while to recover from certain kinds of wounds and so I—”

“May I say something?” Daphne intervened.

Sim merely nodded, feeling as if he were watching a skittish warbler through his camera lens. If nothing else, he was a patient man. He’d learned that skill while waiting on mountain ledges and in leafy jungles and knee-deep in swamps until the object of his interest was ready to show itself.

Daphne smiled faintly and then, to his surprise, trailed a piece of cotton from a spot beneath his ear to the base of his neck where she had apparently discovered another mosquito bite “I blush to admit it,” she said, her repressed Southern drawl creeping into her speech, “but a few of those very same notions have crossed my mind.”

“I thought… I
hoped
they might have. At least you’re willing to admit it.”

“Sim, do you remember our first dance at Biscuits and Blues?”

“Do I ever.”

“You’ll never know how tempted I was that night to… well,
you
know,” she murmured with a self-deprecating laugh. “I
am
a recovering magnolia, after all, but I do try these days to… to be a straight shooter.”

“And so?”

“So part of me says ‘What in the world are you doing, Daphne, sitting on this guy’s bed? He always moves on, and you’ll get your heart broken… maybe for real, this time.’”

“For real,” Sim murmured. “What a sweet thing to say.” Actually, he was tremendously touched. “And what’s the other part of that conversation going on in your head?” he asked, lightly combing the fingers of one hand through her caramel-colored hair.

“Another part of me says… ‘in for a penny… in for a pound,’” she replied. “You said that night, before I left to go back to New York, that you wanted me to come to your room at Monmouth Plantation… to see where this… this…
electric
thing we’ve got going between us might lead.”

Sim allowed both hands to fall gently into his lap. “That may have been a bit premature on my part,” he allowed, “but I couldn’t help it. I meant exactly that. Later, I realized that it was asking too much of you to fly on faith like that, given… well, given the short time we’d known each other, and considering what had happened to you before.”

“That’s right,” she said, nodding. “As of today, we’ve only known each other a little under a
month
?

Sim heaved a faint shrug. “You know something, though? The oddest thing of all was that after you’d gone—and then didn’t answer my email right away—I-I felt a terrible sense of bereavement… as if a friend of long-standing had simply flown out of my life.”

Daphne appeared startled by this confession. “I felt a bit like that myself, but did my best to ignore it. I didn’t want my decision about coming back to Natchez to have anything to do with you or any other man—or my mother. I wanted it to be purely about doing something that was good for
me
, Daphne. I hated the fact I was dragging myself to rehearsals in New York and dreading each day in a profession I’d worked so hard to be part of.”

“And
I
hated the fact you’d left Natchez,” he replied, gently clasping one of her hands between his two. “I checked out of the hotel the next day and asked Bailey if I could camp in his woods.” He glanced around their cozy nest. “He immediately insisted, of course, that I make Caroline’s cottage my headquarters. I think he made the offer as much for having company to drink mint juleps as for anything else.”

“And you’re going to stay here for… how long?” she asked quietly.

Sim knew that everything hinged on the answer to this very legitimate question.

“At least a couple more months. Then I’m scheduled to go back to San Francisco to prepare the photographs and write and edit the text of the Audubon book.” He released her hand and reached up to smooth a strand of hair from her forehead. “There’s no denying it, Daphne. As I said that night, we are definitely geographically challenged here, but other people have coped with this stuff while they figured things out.”

Daphne stared at him wordlessly for a long moment. Then she said, “I’m beginning to believe that there are no guarantees in this world. Just stupid—or intelligent—risk-taking.”

“That’s… exactly what I’ve been thinking too,” he marveled. He sought her gaze once again and said, “I haven’t had a serious relationship with a woman in a decade. A few flings, I admit, but nothing even remotely like this. So what’s happening here is all pretty new territory for me too, you know.”

“All I can do is go by my instincts, Sim, just as I did about my decision to come back to Natchez.” Surprising the hell out of him, she reached up and gently cupped his face in her hands. “It’s kind of a moment-by-moment deal, you know?” she murmured, leaning closer. “And most of it scares me to death.”