Little Love Affair (Southern Romance Series, #1) (7 page)

“Please,” she whispered.

His reserve broke in a rush. His arm wrapped around her waist and he pulled her close, bending his head to kiss her.

H
is lips were warm and soft. In the moment before he kissed her, Clara had pictured herself standing up on tiptoe to press her lips against his. She wanted to do so desperately, but she could not seem to remember how to move, or even how to breathe. Now, as he bent his head to hers, she felt herself sway against him. Her fingers clasped around his and she stretched up to meet his mouth. The heat of his palm was burning against her back.

She did not expect the bolt of heat that shot through her. The touch of his body against hers was warm, solid. She did not realize she had moved until both of her arms were twined around his neck to pull him closer, and she clung to him as if she was drowning. The whole world had faded away, and there was only his mouth against hers, one hand sliding up to her neck to cup the side of her face and her skin on fire with his touch.

When they drew away from one another, Clara could not have said how much time had passed. It seemed an eternity and yet too soon. She wrapped her fingers in the front of his shirt, looking up to meet his brown eyes.

“We shouldn’t do this,” he murmured.

His voice sent a thrill through her, running over her skin, sparking a low heat in her belly and lower. She caught her breath at that and saw his eyes darken with desire. His fingers were splayed against her back, holding her close. She could feel his heartbeat through the thin fabric of his shirt, the linen soaked against his skin, and for a moment she was overwhelmed with the desire to press her lips against his throat where the cloth parted. She let her breath out in a little sigh, and he groaned, made to pull away from her.

“Don’t go.”

“If I stay, I’ll do things we’ll both regret.” He shuddered as she flattened her palm against his chest.

“Are you sure?” She leaned closer, smiling, and brushed her lips against his.

“Very sure.” His fingers clenched against her back.

“No.” Clara traced a finger over his skin. “Are you sure we’ll regret it?”

“Woman, you will be the death of me.” He caught his breath in a laugh and stepped back, running his fingers through his hair. His breath coming hard.

“Jasper.” She wanted to say his name, and she felt a smile grow on her face, unstoppable, when he looked over at her.

He could hardly hold himself away from her. “This would ruin you,” he murmured.

“I don’t care,” she whispered back. She did not, in this moment, she cared for nothing but the touch of his lips again. “I don’t. Please, Jasper.”

“Don’t say that,” he whispered. “Don’t say my name, Clara. I can’t bear it.”

She turned away, heart pounding. She wanted to run into his arms and away from him, too. She was terrified, yearning, desire and fear tumbling over one another in her chest. The red of the farmhouse showed faintly between the blowing branches of the willow, rain coming down in sheets.

There was no going back yet.

She did not want to go back. It was more than desire, she realized. She longed for the touch of his skin against hers once more, but more, for the first time in her life, she understood the feeling others had described to her. It was something she had never expected to find. She had thought she was immune to it.

How could it feel like both the storm and the haven? And how could it take every ounce of self-control she had built up over the years and scatter it to the winds? Clara turned, hardly realizing what she did. Her fingers were on the buttons at the front of her bodice, unhooking each slowly. She did not have to look down to know that the lace of her chemise showed, along with the swell of her breasts. She kept her eyes fixed on Jasper’s, watching him clench his hands to keep from moving towards her.

He did not move until she sat, skirts billowing around her, but then he was at her side in a moment, kneeling on the carpet of leaves and moss and cupping her face between his hands for a kiss.

He laid her out on the ground gently, hand behind her head to cushion it. He was hesitant, bracing himself on his elbows, and Clara left the buttons of her dress half-unbuttoned to reach for him and pull him down on top of her. One hand slid along his ribs, the other tracing down the muscles of his arms, and she opened her mouth for his kiss, hearing a gasp and a moan—her own voice.

She had not known she would ever be so wanton. She heard stories of women undone by poor behavior and wondered at it; and now she could not have stopped her hands from questing over his body any more than she could have stopped the rain from falling. The buttons of his vest sprang open and Jasper groaned as she let her fingers play over his skin.

“Clara.” His mouth was moving on the skin of her throat, hips driving against hers, and she bit her lip to feel his hardness through the layers of her dress.

Their legs twined together as they moved, her hands tracing over his back and down the rippling muscles in his arms, then rising to cup his face as she drew him back up for a kiss. One of his hands cupped her breast gently, thumb rubbing over the nipple, separated from her skin only by a layer of fine linen; Clara heard herself gasp again, and her hips moved up to meet his.

“Don’t stop,” she whispered when he slowed.

It was the wrong thing to say. His eyes closed and he bent his head. One hand clenched against the ground before he rolled away, onto his back.

“Jasper?”

“Don’t say my name,” he whispered again. “We can’t do this.”

“Why not?” She knew the reasons and asked it anyway, daring him to speak it.

“Because your family would never allow you to marry me. Because I would never dishonor you.” Trembling, he reached out to lay his palm against her face, and his thumb brushed against her bottom lip. When she turned her face to kiss his hand, he drew it away quickly. “Clara, if I stay here with you now, I
will
dishonor you.”

“It’s not dishonor,” Clara whispered, and he looked at her gravely.

“You know that not a single person in this town would call it anything else. I would be killed, Clara, and you would live the rest of your life shamed for it. I could never allow that.”

“I’m not a child,” Clara said passionately. “I’m a woman, Jasper, and I’m choosing this.”

“What of the future? What if...” His breath caught. “What if you were to bear my child?”

He was right, damn him. She turned her face away, eyes squeezed shut against tears. She could see the boy in her mind’s eye: Jasper’s dark eyes and her fair hair, toddling unsteadily between them in the fields. She thought she had not known love until Jasper kissed her, and it was true—but she had not known, either, the wave of protectiveness she felt to think of her child. Whatever consequences she could face for herself, she could not bear that a child might face them as well.

She bent her head in acceptance, loss swirling in her chest.

“You should go,” she whispered, wanting to be kind and knowing that any moment of weakness would lead her back into his arms.

He nodded, his face never flickering.

“You’ll never see me again.”

“No,” Clara whispered. She turned away, trying to compose her face, fingers working on the bodice of her gown. “Stay until your friend can travel. I would never be the reason a man dies. But you and I...”

“I shall not speak to you,” he promised her. “I won’t even look at you. Clara...I would kiss you goodbye, but I swear I cannot. It would be too much.”

Clara bent her head. She could not look back at him, not when she was biting her lip so hard she thought it might bleed.

“Go,” she whispered. She heard the branches rustle and she buried her face in her hands and counted to one hundred. When she looked around, Jasper was gone—and she rested her face on her knees and sobbed.

A
ll he could think of was her skin and her lips and the arch of her back, and it drove him mad. Jasper growled, low in his throat and clenched his hands. He needed to focus.

There were more important things to worry about than kisses, he knew that. The fever was not improving. Horace’s skin was an unhealthy shade of grey, a sheen of sweat clinging to his forehead, and he was so far gone that he did not even protest when Jasper lifted him to pour the willow bark and yarrow tea down his throat.

When he peeled away the bandages, it was all Jasper could do not to show his horror. In one short year, he had seen enough to know what despair could do to a man. He knew that Horace must believe he could recover. When he was lucid, no matter how weak, Jasper would be as confident as any priest. It had become difficult to know when Horace might emerge from his fevered dreams.

The wound was growing puffy, flushed and angry, and Jasper swallowed at the hint of red lines beginning to trace away from it. He knew of that, as well, and his memories were laced with horror. He had seen men put maggots on their own flesh to eat away the rot, and balked at it. Now, he realized, he was desperate enough to try. He would try anything.

His hands shook as he cleaned the wound, and he realized he was making babbling noises, the same sort one might make to an infant, cooing and murmuring as Horace tossed his head in pain. It was a small mercy that he was half-asleep, for Jasper must scrape the wound of anything that looked infected, pouring boiled water and laying the yarrow leaves neatly before binding it once more.

He wondered what prayer Clara’s mother used with comfrey, and winced. He could not think of Clara, not when the very image of her smile set his pulse racing. He was hard in a moment and ready to stride down the hill, consequences be damned, to find her and claim another kiss, and another, and another.

Dammit
.

If it had been the right thing to leave her there, the honorable thing, why did he regret it so much? That was the sort of thing the pastors preached about. It had made sense, once, just like all the oaths he swore to defend his people from the Union. None of it—
none
of it—made sense any longer.

A low cry of pain caught his attention, and he looked back from the fire to see Horace’s face screwed up in a grimace. If it weren’t for Horace, Jasper reflected, he would not be alive for any of it to make sense in the first place.

He did not even remember where they had been when they met. It was some useless fight, not on one of the grand battlegrounds history would remember. Not, of course, that glory seemed all that glorious any longer. Even one fight taught you that no war song came close to the truth of it. Still, his family didn’t know that, and as he lay bleeding on the sodden ground, gasping for air, Jasper thought that he would have liked them to think he died with honor, in a grand meeting of two armies. It might give them some measure of comfort, perhaps.

He first saw Horace through the smoke and a low morning mist, and Jasper could not forget the stab of fear when he first saw the man’s shape emerge from the haze. Horace was young, clear-eyed even though he was streaked with blood, gazing around the battlefield as if his soul had broken in two. But his hands were still wrapped around the barrel of a musket, a bloody bayonet affixed to the end, and when his eyes met Jasper’s for the first time, Jasper was quite sure he was meeting the gaze of a Union soldier. He was sure he was going to die, and he was glad that his family would not know he had survived the battle, only to be cut down while he lay wounded.

All that was left, it occurred to him, was to appeal to whatever honor a Union soldier might have. His fingers fumbled beneath the opening to his shirt, and the man’s eyes flickered. He relaxed when Jasper pulled out a silver cross, closing one numb hand around it.

“Make it quick,” he whispered.

At that, at last, the man moved. The bayonet was dropped, and he knelt at Jasper’s side, pushing the ruins of his coat aside. His fingers probed at the wound, eliciting a cry of pain, but the man only nodded, pleased by what he saw.

“You’re lucky,” he said simply, and Jasper managed a laugh that was half-gasp. “The wound in your arm is shallow enough, and this one ripped the skin, but not all the way to your bowels. You’ll live, if we can get you to the camp.”

“They’re gone,” Jasper croaked back.

“No.” The man shook his head. “They’re not far. Come.”

How far he coaxed Jasper that morning, Jasper still did not know. His legs shook with exhaustion, and he retched with pain more than once, but when the mists had cleared, they were in the camp proper. Jasper vaguely remembered a beleaguered nurse trying to tell Horace that there were not enough beds, and yet the next thing he knew, he was on a thin mattress and there was sun on his face.

A thin, old army blanket felt like paradise to him, and it was only later—watching the others in the camp—that he realized how strange it was to have a blanket at all. To have food, as he always had. Even saving Horace’s life now, Jasper thought, could not repay that debt, and it was becoming clear that Jasper could not even do that much.

He must ask for help, and he could not. To walk into that town was to consign himself to death, and that would do nothing for Horace, and there was only one person he could trust. His steps carried him out of the cabin and down the hill before he could think, across the half-threshed fields and to the shadow of the farmhouse. There was no guard dog to sound the alarm, and Jasper had the faint urge to bang on the door and tell them that they should have protection. How would they know if dangerous men were crossing their fields at night?

It was more amusing if one considered that their idea of dangerous men was likely Confederate soldiers. Unless it was less amusing.

Jasper stared up at the windows. One of them would be Clara’s, for in a house this big there would be no reason to put the sisters in the same room. The loss of the family hit him afresh. It always ran under the surface, in the quiet grief of the girls’ mother, and in the steely determination Clara had acquired far too young, but here, in the empty shell of what should be a bustling family house, Jasper at last saw what they had lost.