Sunburst (9 page)

“This was my favorite tree as a kid. I figured if you were a climber, you wouldn’t settle for less than the best.”

A few branches parted long enough to disclose a bright pair of blue eyes looking down at them, interested. “You sound nice.”

“We are nice,” Kyle assured her wryly. “Mind some company?”

“Heck, no!”

Erica blinked. One minute she was definitely on solid ground and the next Kyle’s hands had hooked around her waist from behind her. “Kyle!”

“Get that first handhold, beauty.”

“But I’ve never climbed a tree. And this one—”

“You’ve
never
climbed a tree?” Kyle said incredulously. “What did you do the whole time you were a kid?”

“Shopped for clothes…” Erica’s hands fumbled for a hold on the branch. Kyle’s hand cupped her buttocks for one last heave upward that struck her as distinctly intimate. She turned around to glare at him. The little one was giggling. “Played with dolls. Played school. Kyle—”

“Deprived childhood, it sounds like to me.” He was right behind her, motioning which branches to take, shielding her body with his own so that the only place she could fall was against him.

“Exactly how high did you have in mind?” she wondered aloud.

“Heaven.”

Joanie Calhoun burst into chuckles. Breathless, Erica kept climbing into the leafy haven, until she came on a level with the little girl. Joanie was a blonde with big blue yes. She was wearing jeans that could have used a wash, and she had lined up a trio of apple cores on a limb next to her. Where a single branch swayed slightly in the breeze, Erica could see the arched roofs of the barns and a long, undulating field of wheat. She’d been lower in a plane.

“Mom said you were the guy who lived in a tree as a kid,” the little girl said interestedly.

“I came close, I’ll have to admit that. Best place to escape from your troubles that I ever found.”

Joanie concurred. The two appeared to agree on a great many things. Erica was captivated by the way Kyle handled the child, as he maneuvered up and behind her, then motioned. Erica shook her head emphatically. Kyle bent down, with feet braced against two forked limbs, and hauled her up against him, still talking to the little girl. In a moment, she was wedged in the cradle of his thighs and chest, his arms loosely supportive under her breasts. For some insane reason, she was comfortable.

“I wasn’t going to like you,” Joanie told him. “Mom said you made stuff out of wood. I kept thinking you’d be the kind to cut down a tree like this, just to make some dumb stuff. I think you should leave a tree a tree…”

“I would cut off a toe before I’d touch this oak,” he promised her, “but I hear you, Joanie. A tree’s a special thing. Every culture that’s ever existed has had a concept of the Tree of Life, and all people—no matter how different they are—have a special feeling for the trees of their land. But when I make something out of wood, I don’t think of it as destroying but as creating.”

“I don’t get you,” the little girl said flatly.

“The tree would die someday in the cycle of nature. But when something is made of its wood, that thing can last—much longer than that tree might have lived, much longer than it would take one of that tree’s acorns to grow to full size. We’ll skip the boring stuff we need from wood, like floors and furniture—but what about music, little one? Guitars and violins are made from wood; those instruments last and in turn create something that lasts—music. So that tree keeps living on, just in a different way—you understand?”

They both understood, the man and child, with their mutual affinity for trees. Erica leaned back against her husband and felt his arm tighten under her breast, as aware of her as she was of him. With his free hand, he brushed a wisp of hair from her cheek and then let the hand linger in the curve of her shoulder.

Her two companions refused to tire of their subject, Kyle willingly expanding into folklore. The oak had always symbolized strength and protection. Rowan was used as a charm against witchcraft. A witch, on the other hand, could turn herself into an elder in a pinch; if you cut an elder branch it was said to bleed. People used to believe that ash cured rickets; the willow symbolized lost love; yews represented everlasting life. “Now the hawthorn tree’s a very special one,” Kyle added. “If you bring its blossoms into the house, you’re risking a death in the family. But if you sit under a hawthorn in the middle of summer…you might just fall under a fairy’s spell.”

“You don’t believe that,” said the little girl, who had clearly believed every word. “Mom would say that was ’stitious.”

“Superstitious?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Hmm.” Kyle shook his head, gently smiling. “I guess I must be ’stitious then, because whenever I make something out of oak, I get this good feeling. Like the house it’s going to will have just a little more protection against storms, against trouble…”

“Really?”

Erica leaned her head back to look at him. He was entertaining the child, but she could feel the depth of commitment in him, a commitment based not on superstition, but on his love of the craft he’d taken on. She thought of the sunburst, of the love that went into that work, of the skill that came from the heart. And she thought of the days he’d once spent poring over dry profit and loss sheets, something he’d been very good at but that had never really involved the core of the man she was coming to know. “Why did you leave all this?” she whispered to him.

His arm tightened around her. “Because I was eighteen and running. Because I was ashamed of all the wrong things.” His eyes hovered intensely on hers, dark blue as the sky above took on evening shadows through their leafy ceiling. He hesitated, and she knew he meant to explain that…but they were interrupted by a bubble of laughter from below.

“Kyle McCrery, you get down from there! I’ll be darned if I finally
do
get dinner on and there isn’t a soul to serve it to but Leonard. I should have
known
better than to send you out after Joanie! You haven’t changed a whit since you were a kid; the very first tree you see… Poor Erica’s probably scared out of her mind, and as for you, miss…” She scolded the three of them like children as they followed her back to the house.

Kyle unlocked the door, and Erica stepped inside the dark house. Automatically, she slipped off her shoes and then fumbled for a lamp switch, pleasantly weary and a little bit numb from the homemade wine Martha had kept pouring for her. The small light flooded the couch where Kyle had spent a lonely night the evening before, and something chilled inside her, something she had been trying hard not to think about.

She turned. Kyle was still standing in the doorway. His hands rested loosely on his hips, and his blue eyes were intense on hers. Very quietly, he came toward her until he could place both his arms around her shoulders and press his forehead to hers.

“You want to talk about last night?” he whispered.

She shook her head. It was just there, so suddenly, a too-warm feeling as if she were about to melt inside. His sun-warmed flesh and his strength, the hair whose texture she loved, the energy that vibrated from his body, the scent of him.

“We have to, Erica.”

She shook her head again.

His thumbs gently caressed the sides of her cheeks, his fingers tilting her face up to his. “You locked me out last night; you’ve never done that before,” he whispered. “If I come upstairs, I’m going to make love to you, Erica. You know that.”

She did know it, and drew back. She’d loved him, climbing that crazy tree. She’d loved hearing him laugh with Leonard, seeing him tussle with the Calhoun kids; she’d ached for him as she began to understand what raw and frightening beginnings he’d had as a child. Yet nothing could obliterate the memory of their abandoned lovemaking in the wheat field, followed only hours later by his rejecting her love as if it meant nothing to him. It wasn’t that she loved him less or wanted him less, but doubt about his feelings for her made her draw back into the shadows of the room, not comfortable looking at him.

“Erica…” His face hardened, the blue eyes turned haunted.

“You said there was no love without choice. I didn’t understand, Kyle…except that you made a choice the day you married me, and quite obviously you don’t feel the same now—”

“And you don’t either,” he said swiftly. One hand slowly raked through his hair. “We’re not kids anymore. That’s the point. I was trying to talk about
your
choices,
your
feelings. Trying to force you to let out some of the resentment you must have felt since we moved here. Maybe I was even trying to get you angry so you would finally tell me what you were really feeling—but I didn’t mean to hurt you, Erica.”

“But I’ve told you how I feel. A thousand times.” In the wheat field, in their work, in their living together. To Erica, her feelings were so clear.

“Perhaps,” Kyle said quietly. “And perhaps you told me only what you thought I wanted to hear. You’re a beautiful, loving lady. Sweet, soft as silk, as elusively radiant as an opal. You’d do almost anything to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.”

He sucked in his breath at her silence, a stark, bleak look in his eyes. His voice hardened. “Erica, I know you. I believe I know how you feel, even if you don’t have the courage to say it. I’ve been there, exactly in your shoes. And I don’t want you living the way I lived for too many years. Trying to love, feeling resentful—”

Trying to love, she thought bleakly. Not really loving? Was it possible she had been blinded by her feelings for him so long that she’d never seen his own feelings changing?

“Erica, we’ve both changed,” Kyle said quietly. “I feel so much at fault. At eighteen I wasn’t a very honest man. Not honest with myself, not honest with you, at least not about the things that mattered to me. I’m not proud of that. But I can’t be less than honest anymore. Part of that is admitting we didn’t have the relationship we thought we had…”

“No,” she choked out, and headed for the stairs. If they talked any further, she was afraid he would say out loud things she couldn’t stand to hear. She wasn’t ready to walk out on their marriage. She was terrified that was what he really wanted, that he was trying to tell her he had only believed he loved her.

“Erica—”

His hand closed on her wrist; she jerked free. “All I want is for things to be as they were, Kyle.” When he loved her. To hell with the beach house and the luxuries, but at least she’d never doubted his loving her when they lived in Florida. “If we can’t have that, there just isn’t anything else to talk about.”

He was silent then, making no move to impede her climbing the stairs…alone. For a moment, she saw anguish carved in stark ashen color in his features, but she saw it through a blur of tears. Not wanting him to see the tears, she averted her face and escaped to the loft.

Outside, a dismal little mist of rain fell, and a blustery breeze kept snatching leaves and hurling them at the windows. “Now listen, you two,” Morgan said humorously as he pushed aside his dinner plate and looked at both of them. “It’s raining, so there’ll be no work tonight. I think it’s time we all got out of here for a little while. Let’s head for a movie.”

Erica glanced up from her plate at the suggestion, though it had no appeal for her. She had made every effort these past three days to work herself into the ground, and at the moment she was physically and emotionally exhausted. Neither she nor Kyle had mentioned the word
divorce,
but emotionally she felt as if she were hanging on to life by a fraying thread.

Kyle was as tired as she was, having spent every waking minute completing the roof of the new building. Abrupt and short with everyone else, he had simply been quiet with Erica. He outworked every man employed by him with a drive and single-minded determination that struck her at times as frightening; he was barely willing to stop for sleep. She worried that he wasn’t sleeping…

And in the meantime, there was Morgan, who could visit a quadriplegic in the hospital and walk out two hours later without ever having mentioned illness. Why bother with “how are you” when a fool could see the answer was “terrible”? He made no mention of the fact that Erica and Kyle were avoiding each other like wary kittens in the same territory, and simply stepped in as if he enjoyed having the floor, a born entertainer.

And if the idea of going out to a movie had no appeal, suddenly it occurred to Erica that neither was it fair for Morgan to be continually thrust into their own pervasively glum atmosphere. She stood up from the dinner table. “We could see what’s on,” she suggested, handing Morgan the newspaper before she started stacking the dishes.

He found a romantic comedy that sounded campy—exactly Morgan’s cup of tea. “Unfortunately, it starts in twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes!” Erica cast an appalled look at her faded jeans. The blouse had once been a good one, a tailored, formfitting, dark crimson cotton, but there was a worn spot on the shoulder. Having showered just before dinner, she had simply snatched the first thing she found in the closet, in a hurry to have dinner ready and be prepared to work again afterward.

“You look fine, sweetheart, and you know it,” Morgan admonished. “Isn’t the idea for the lady to show off her figure with the clothes she puts on? More than successful, those jeans…”

She made a face at him. The idea of getting out had begun to seem more appealing, almost enough to put life into her features after days of numbness. And the men were hardly decked out in finery. Morgan’s black turtleneck had a few years behind it, and Kyle’s simple work shirt was old and soft, a honey color that rivaled his tan.

“So get some shoes on,” Morgan scolded.

“I am! I am!” She scooted up to the loft for a pair of sandals, slipped them on and hurried back down with a hairbrush in her hand. From the hall closet, she snatched a raincoat, and on her way through the kitchen, she put the broiler pan under water to soak.

“Come
on!
”

“I
am!
”

Morgan was holding the door open, letting in torrential blasts of rain, and she hurried toward him, only now realizing that Kyle was not part of the hustle. She turned with a questioning look toward him.

“No, I’m not going,” he said quietly. “There’s work I have to get done. Nothing that you need to be involved in, Erica.”

That changed the option suddenly. Though she would have said no if Kyle had asked her one on one, Morgan’s being there made it possible for the two of them to be together without friction. But going with just Morgan… The brightness faded a little from her eyes. Her purse slipped from her shoulder and she snatched at it. “Listen, why don’t you two go, then?” she suggested. “Perhaps I can do whatever you planned on, Kyle, and there are really a thousand other things I have—”

“You go, Erica.” Kyle spoke quietly, but his jaw tightened as if he were impatient with the subject.

More loyalty he didn’t want? Or was she being irrationally sensitive? Yet a simple decision had somehow turned into something absurdly complex.

“Would the two of you quit fighting over my company?” Morgan complained humorously.

“Nut,” she retorted, as she finally pulled up her collar and headed out the door. It was a nasty evening. The wind had a bite to it; the rain was spattering down from a cold, black sky. Morgan snatched at her hand to hurry her to his Porsche, and when she settled breathlessly in the seat and glanced back at the house, Kyle was at the window, a still, tall form without expression, his face in shadow.

For a moment, there was the sharpest pain in the region of her heart. Kyle had already turned away as Morgan started the engine, and the unfamiliar sound of such power in a car distracted her from the intense ache of loneliness she felt, both from within her and from the look of the man she was married to.

“This is luxury!”

“You’ll be spoiled, I guarantee it.”

She tried to be impressed with the car, to please Morgan. The seats had a soft, velvety feel, and the chrome up front glittered beneath wet street lamps as they sped along. The Porsche appeared to take corners on a dime and certainly swallowed the road, making Morgan grin like a small boy showing off. On one curve, his shoulder inevitably brushed hers, and gradually it occurred to her that she was actually alone in the car with Morgan, as if she were single, on a date.

His aftershave was pervasive in the closed car, and his profile was outlined as the glow of street lights spilled in to silhouette it—a very good-looking Roman profile with just the slightest hint of extra flesh beneath his chin. The black turtleneck emphasized his blondness, and she saw a rather cruel cut to his mouth she hadn’t noticed before. The gleam in his dark eyes she had always seen as softness now seemed something else.
Predatory.
It was nothing unnerving, just an awareness of how Morgan might actually be on a date, his seduction plans too carefully masked by the charm of the hours before. She shivered.

“We’ll have you warm in a minute. But I can hardly believe we have to turn on a heater at the end of July.”

There was a crowd in front of the small movie theater as Morgan’s car pulled up. She stepped out of the car automatically, and Morgan chided her for it. “I still happen to like opening car doors for a lady. You’ve obviously been married too long, sexy.”

She laughed, but perhaps that was the beginning of a rather silly feeling of unease. His arm went around her shoulder to protect her from the windy rain as they waited on line, and though it was just a normal affectionate gesture, she felt disquieted again. There was a little contretemps when she pulled out her change purse to pay for her ticket, and she gave up, finally. The idea of her paying actually seemed to offend him. At the popcorn counter, they had a prolonged debate over candies—still another strangeness. Chiding herself for her oversensitivity—this was
Morgan
—she followed him into the theater as the lights were dimming.

Once the movie started, she managed to relax. The story was exactly what had been promised—a man who bed-hopped was finally caught by a Little Miss Priss type. Priss was, of course, sexy as hell once she took off her glasses; the hero never knew what hit him. The story didn’t have a shadow of realism to it, and the theme was antiquated, but it did have humor and warmth and lightness…abetted by Morgan, who provided a whispered running commentary next to her. “Do you believe that fool?” he hissed in her ear. “No one could be that stupid.”

“The worst rakes always fall like gangbusters,” she whispered back. “You just know how happy you could be being led around on a leash, sweetheart.” She had taken off her sandals and had her legs curled under her, which was the way she always watched movies. Morgan’s shoulders filled the adjoining seat, and he had one leg crossed over the other; he was a husky man who took up space. He’d insisted she hold the popcorn that she hadn’t wanted in her lap, and he continually reached for it. She shifted regularly. His fingers invariably brushed her thigh or stomach in the dark before they found the container of popcorn. She was sure he was unconscious of it, but she was all too aware of these intimate contacts.

When the lights went back on, Morgan groaned his displeasure over the ending. “He should have ditched her. My God, he had a terrific life before he got involved with her.”

Erica shook her head with mock gravity. “He was wearing himself out, undoubtedly would have died at an early age.”

“Too much sex never killed anyone,” Morgan assured her wickedly. The comment ended as a whisper in her ear because he was helping her on with her coat.

“Who’s talking about sex? He deserved to be murdered, a slow boil in oil. One of those jilted women was going to get smart.”

It was nonsense, their dissection of the movie, but it lasted until they reached the car. The rain had stopped, but the wind was still tugging at anything not bolted down. Wisps of paper fluttered in the air, and the clouds were restless above, skimming across the night sky. Morgan had grabbed her arm and had it captured in his, his head bent a little to the wind as they walked. Now he opened the door and helped her into the Porsche, tucking in the hem of her raincoat, which had been trying to trail. “Do you mind if we just drive for a little while?” he asked her abruptly as he got in on his side.

Between a physically tiring day and the emotional weariness of too many before it, Erica was exhausted. “Of course I don’t mind,” she said softly. Morgan had been doing his best to entertain her and chase away the doldrums; she could hardly say no. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. Her aching muscles echoed another kind of ache inside. She had a sudden picture in her mind of Kyle working alone all evening, his eyes narrowed in intense concentration, his jaw set the way it did when he had his mind totally on what he was doing.

She suddenly recalled the first movie she’d gone to with Kyle, during which he’d hidden those shoes she invariably took off. She remembered his disgusted “I guess I’ll have to carry you,” which he had proceeded to do to her intense embarrassment, kissing her every third step out into the darkened night until he made the mistake of stumbling, and one of her shoes popped out of his pocket…

Morgan stopped the car, and her eyes opened. They were nowhere, the town lights behind them. It was just a side road cradled on both sides by huge oaks and maples, their branches overhanging the pavement, wet and glistening. “Could we walk for a bit?” he asked.

It was past time to be home, but Morgan was already out of the car, waiting in front of it for Erica to join him. The night breeze was rippling the black turtleneck, and his blond hair was silvery in the moonlight. She felt a shiver of worry that seemed too ridiculous to voice, and stepped out of the car, leaving her purse on the seat. They walked along the side of the road for a while, both silent, the breeze lifting Erica’s hair in sensuous swirls that tickled her throat. She dug her hands into her pockets and walked with her head down, watching the gleaming stretch of black road ahead, inhaling the sharp woodsy scents around them. She was almost unconscious of Morgan until he stopped. “Erica?”

She tilted her head up to look at him. His tone was oddly pleading, as if he were begging her to notice him. The darkness touched odd shadows on his face so that he appeared to be in pain, his cheekbones stark and his eyes in hollows. “What’s wrong, Morgan?” He had been quiet for an age—Morgan who was so rarely quiet—and she had been so immersed in her own world that she had barely noticed. Inside her, guilt stirred, for the friend Morgan was to Kyle and for how little the two of them had given back to Morgan since he came here.

“Erica, just let me hold on to
someone
… God, don’t take this wrong…” The thread of anguish in his voice seemed to come out of nowhere, startling Erica far more than when he claimed her shoulders, pulling her close.

He talked of Marissa, whom he’d been seeing the previous spring. Erica had heard the name before; Morgan had even made a rare admission months before that he cared for this woman. In spite of all Morgan’s playing around, Erica had understood that there might have been marriage potential there, until he’d brushed off talk of that—and the lady—when he visited in June. It was his own fault that he’d lost her, and the breach was irretrievable, but he was taking hard the loss and the loneliness.

“Erica…” His cheek nestled in her hair as he rocked her to him. The strain in his voice evoked the compassion that was so much a part of Erica’s nature…yet his hold on her shoulders was so tight that her neck ached and her hair was pulling taut. She was touched that he had turned to her, and she hurt for him. Still, there was something alien, a sense of wrongness because breast and chest were pressed together, thigh and thigh…but she didn’t know what to do. Not to offer comfort was unthinkable. To move away might be interpreted as rejection.

“Erica?” His head finally tilted back from hers, and she thought he was releasing her. She offered a soft smile to the dark, anguished eyes above her.
You’ll find someone else,
she wanted to tell him, but it seemed better to offer it in silence. The caring presence of a friend was worth more than platitudes. The moonlight touched the delicate bones of her face, etched silvery streaks in her hair blowing behind her. She felt very small and very feminine in the velvet night. There was nothing but a lonely road surrounding them for miles. Her tentative smile abruptly died when she saw Morgan’s head bending in slow motion toward her.

His lips touched hers once, then deepened the kiss. For seconds, she was totally still. The shock seemed to stop the flow of blood in her veins. She understood that he only needed to hold someone for a moment, that he really didn’t mean anything by it. But it was not exactly that kind of a kiss. His mouth pressed harder, his hunger and urgency unmistakable, and when his hands started an exploration, so skilled, so knowing, so quickly finding the supple, smooth sides of her breasts…