Mackinnons #02 For All the Right Reasons (46 page)

She smiled, looking down at him with such love in her eyes, a feeling of ripeness filling her and giving her absolute peace. She reached up and smoothed his hair, tucking the strands back in place, giving special attention to a cowlick that had a mind of its own. Then she traced the shape of his brows, his nose, his mouth. So hungry to learn everything about him, every little secret of his body, every detail. He closed his eyes, giving her license to roam at will, and she did.

When she sighed and rested her chin on her arms that were folded across his chest, he opened his eyes, content to simply look at her. She had unbelievable eyes, and Lord! what hair—past her waist, it was fragrant, silky, cool to the touch and now, wrapped around his body like a cocoon. Suddenly it struck him. She had a lovely face, a shapely body, and the most delightful openness and honesty he had ever seen assembled in one woman. Yet as far as he knew, there had never been a man in her life, at least no one serious. He found himself pleased as much as curious. “How come you never married?”

“Because I wasn’t willing to settle for half a loaf.”

“That kind of thinking is a bit risky, isn’t it? You could have ended up with no loaf, like a leaf that waits too long to drop and finds itself frozen on the vine.”

“‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’”

“Am I supposed to have heard that before?”

She nodded.

“Who said it? You?”

She laughed. “Apparently I remember the year we studied Shelley better than you do.”

“You were always better than me at that sort of thing.”

She trailed her fingers through the hair on his chest. “We break even then. There are some things you’re better at.”

He gave her a sideways glance. “Such as?” She stretched like a cat again, then rubbed her nose against his. “Keep doing that and you won’t get any sleep tonight.”

“Some things are worth losing sleep over,” she said. “‘I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning.’”

“Did we learn that in school, too?”

“Nope, church,” she said, tapping him on the nose with her index finger. “Proverbs.”

“I was never good at quotes. Why don’t we pick something I’m good at?”

“Okay.”

“Your pick,” he said.

She trailed a slow finger across his chest. “You want me to tell you or show you?”

He grinned. “Show me.”

And she did.

Afterward, he held her close to him for a long time, until she rubbed her nose sleepily against him and said in a groggy little way that was seductive as all get out, “Alex, if I beg for more, could we save it for tomorrow?”

She was still asleep the next morning when he awoke. He dressed then came to stand beside the bed, content just to look at her relaxed features, so tranquil and golden, framed in a square of early morning sunlight. He had walked among the stars with her last night. He wondered if it could ever again be that good, and saw no reason why it wouldn’t. As he turned away, the sun passed behind a cloud, absorbing the room’s light, filling it with grayness and shadow.

* * * * *

Over the weeks that followed, Katherine never knew such happiness. Was there ever anything so wonderful as to go to sleep at night, wrapped in the solid warmth of someone you loved? Not unless it was waking up each morning and looking down at the raw beauty of a man when he sleeps, the warmth of the sun making his skin look all warm and buttery. He was like ywo pieces of warm toast she wanted to crawl between.

The coming together of their marriage had worked wonders around the camp as much as it had between them. Alex’s new-found energy, his cheerful spirits were like a whirlwind of energy that soon had the men singing as they worked, and Alex swore it was the reason why Molly Polly chunked fewer pieces of wood at Wong.

Every morning Alex arose before dawn and dressed quietly, kissing her cheek before he went downstairs. Wong always had breakfast ready and he ate with Adrian before he saw to the day’s business with all the enthusiasm of a child with a new toy. He made rounds, talking to each of the men, discussing their problems, their needs, then he went over the accounts with Adrian, turning in his orders for supplies. He visited the logging sites, putting on his own calked boots and picking up a wood mallet to drive wedges into saw cuts to spread them apart and keep the saw blades free. Other times he put climbing irons over his boots and climbed to lofty heights to work with the toppers. And at night, when he came home, Katherine would sit down at the table with Alex and Adrian, listening to Alex as he asked about her day and told her about his. Because of his newfound enthusiasm, his willingness to share his life, words like pickaroon and springboard and cant hook and peavy head became a living, breathing language to her, while loggers’ jobs and lingo like undercut, deacon seat, peeler, bindle, and tin pants became tools she used expertly to converse with the men, understanding the jobs they risked their lives to perform daily.

Alex felt changes in himself. He saw changes in her. Daily, he heard the effects of both in the songs, the jokes, the high morale of the lumberjacks who preferred to call themselves timber beasts. Never had Alex been so pleased with his life, so comfortable. Never had he felt so guilty.

Katherine was everything he could hope for in a wife, and more than once he saw the wisdom in his decision to marry her. Katherine complemented him. She brought out the man in him and soothed the beast. He thought of her eagerness as a foil for his steady plodding. She brought to his retiring ways, life, beauty, and vitality. She was enthusiastic and responsive, with a sort of breathless wonder, and she was to him like a cold drink from a free-flowing well on a hot summer day. Maybe she wasn’t the woman he had always fancied himself in love with, but he was comfortable with her. And he had married her. That’s where the guilt came from. It ate at him sometimes, and he wondered if he would ever be able to deal with it, short of confession—something he could never do. He could never tell Katherine the truth, that he had married her because of a mistake, because Adrian threatened and forced him to see what it would have done to her if he had not. Even when he had the chance to tell her the truth, the day she had asked him on the ship, he had let the opportunity for cleansing his soul slip away. She had asked for the truth. He had fed her lies—not blatant lies, but covert ones—little half-truths. Was it as he claimed, to protect her? Or was it to protect himself? It was hard to live with, this constant fear of carrying truth in a glass, spilling it while trying not to.

There were times while he was thinking about the many ways Katherine pleased him when thoughts of Karin would creep forth. He had as much difficulty bringing thoughts of Karin here, as he had picturing her as his wife. It was like forcing his foot into a shoe that was too small.

He remembered Karin as smart, ambitious, and at times selfish. Her nature was slightly rebellious and she was confident in her judgment. She didn’t particularly need him, for she was too independent and daring, with an attitude of self-sufficiency. There had been a time he appreciated those qualities in her, appreciated them because he knew she wouldn’t be the kind of woman to demand much of him—as long as he had the money to keep her in the style she fancied herself entitled to.

But with the passage of time, and probably influenced by his marriage to Katherine, he realized that what he had first called independence was nothing more than her refusal to be influenced by those she had no desire to be influenced by, and what he had called confidence was more a blustery attitude; what seemed daring was a form of obsessive competitiveness, which he understood well, since Adrian had that same quality. That wasn’t to say he suddenly found fault in Karin, for realizing she lacked some of Katherine’s admirable qualities didn’t diminish the qualities in her that had so seduced him in the past. Karin, he recalled, was no longer his, simply because she never had been. At one time he felt she belonged to him, but now he saw that was because no one else had come along to attract her attention. Using Katherine as a gauge to go by, he knew there had been little emotional depth in his relationship with Karin—knew as well that his feelings for her had ebbed long before he wrote that letter.

There had been much conflict with Karin, and he wondered if the intense emotional quality coming from that conflict had for years masked itself as love, for he believed now that he had never loved Karin in the true sense. What he had felt lay somewhere between worship and adoration. To him Karin had been as fine as porcelain, a fragile ornament to be treasured. He had been spellbound by her, held for years in a border zone, caught between the boundaries of illusion and reality. The stamp of Karin in his mind was the epitome, the ideal of womanhood he had formed in his impressionable years when the visual qualities outshone those of a deeper nature. He could remember watching Karin sitting on her front steps when she was sixteen. She was brushing her long, golden hair, her face as perfect in form and color as the face of a bisque doll. He had stared at her in awe as she caught her polished curls back into a blue satin ribbon and tied it into a perfect bow. When he thought of Karin, he thought of beauty and perfection, something he now saw as shallow and one-sided. He could remember so many of the things he had adored in her: the dainty way she tossed her curls, the soft sound of her voice, the sweet, floral scent of her, the flawless perfection of her appearance. But there was no warmth, no life in these mirror images that flashed before him, no feeling of intoxication when he saw the doll-like image of her.

It was Katherine who intoxicated him now. Katherine was like the earth he loved—rich in what she offered, enduring, consistent, self-sufficient, and capable of returning something for everything he invested.

Often he would let himself go, enjoying his new life with her, the humor, the love, and understanding Katherine surrounded him with. The times he seemed to be happiest were times of inner turmoil, times when guilt began to eat at him and wear him down—guilt and the knowledge that he still held something back, that he had not given Katherine as much as she gave him. His insides would twist at the memory of her face the many times she told him she loved him, only to hear him say, “I know,” when he knew the words she wanted to hear. Guilt, self-anger and feelings of inadequacy would temper his joy and he would turn sullen and reproachful, criticizing Katherine for her mother-hen ways, accusing her of smothering him and robbing him of his will.

These were the times he took anger at himself out on her. These were the times he made it a point to wipe his feet on the new rug she hooked that lay on the inside of the kitchen door, rather than the old one on the back porch, to only half-clean his shoes so that they left tracks on her spotless floor. Her lips tight and clamped together, she would clean up the mess, never saying a word, angering him more than any pot shattered over his head ever could. Other times he would make love to her until she cried from the joy of it, only to disappear for three or four days for a visit to one of the logging camps farther inland. And in between, there were always the times that he would get a bottle of brandy or whiskey and sit in front of the fire, staring at it in his brooding way, drinking more than he should.

Then he would go slowly up the stairs, knowing he had been wrong to betray Katherine in this way, knowing he couldn’t blame her for what had gone wrong in his life. His guilt would eat at him and he would go to her, seeking her forgiveness, knowing she was lying in her bed upstairs, always tender and willing and warm. Somehow, he made it through each day and night, wondering each time he did, how long it would be before he was either claimed by complete and total peace or ruled completely by insanity.

Chapter Twenty

Jumbo brought her a kitten. It was a scrawny little piece of fluff that she named Banjo.

“Oh, how precious!” she said, taking the tiny thing from his big calloused hands and holding it up so she could see the small owlish face that was mostly huge yellow-gray eyes. “Hello there. Where did you come from? Did you fall out of a tree?”

Jumbo laughed. “It’s one of Clara’s kittens. She had them about six weeks ago.”

“Clara?”

“That motley colored cat that I’ve seen sleeping on your kitchen window.”

“Oh, the calico. I had no idea she had kittens.”

“Eight of them. Had them in a box right behind my banjo.” He looked at the kitten. “I…well, that is, this one seemed to be the prettiest one and…aw heck, Miz Mackinnon. I ain’t very good at this sort of thing. I don’t know what I was thinking…bringing this kitten over here like this. If you’ll just hand it over, I’ll take it back. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell Mr. Mackinnon. You know, word might get out that I’m a little soft and that…”

“I won’t say a word about the kitten, Jumbo. If anyone asks, I’ll say I saw them and asked you if I could have one. But, you can’t have the kitten back. I’ve already named her Banjo.” Then she laughed. “It is a her, isn’t it?”

His face turned red. “I didn’t think to check.”

“Well, it doesn’t really matter. Banjo is a good neutral name.” She glanced around the room. “I think I’ll keep Banjo here in the kitchen where it’s warm. I’ll get Wong to help me find a box for her to sleep in.”

Jumbo was a big, brawny fellow, as tall as a fir and bigger around than a redwood. He had on so many layers of clothes he looked even larger. It touched Katherine’s heart to know someone as big as he was had such a gentle heart. Never would she forget the way he had looked when she opened the door, his hat in one hand, the tiny kitten dwarfed against his body in the other one. “Well,” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, “I guess I better be going. You’re sure you want the kitten? It won’t be no bother if you don’t.”

“Don’t you dare try to take Banjo from me now,” she said with a smile. She put the kitten on the rug, then moved to the table and a huge chocolate cake she had baked only this morning. She picked up a knife and cut a large slice that she wrapped in brown paper and handed to him.