The Talk of the Town (21 page)

Roxie stopped cold. What in tarnation was she saying? She chanced a look at Luke. He was staring at the toe of his shoe, his face the expressionless mask she so hated. Thinking she should have her mouth taped permanently shut, she finished on a shaky whisper, “But of course it wasn’t you.”

Moonglow glossed his dark hair as he shook his head. “The last thing I would ever do is bring another unwanted child into the world.”

Sorrow spun a web within her soul. She wished she could tell him she was sorry, that she hadn’t meant to be so insensitive, but she somehow knew an apology would simply make things worse. The past held such a grip on the present, at times it seemed to her to be a deathlock.

Luke understood Roxie’s disquiet and the reason for it. The need to comfort her overrode any dejection he himself felt whenever he thought of his past. He leaned back on his elbows, crossed an ankle over his bent knee, and said with lazy intimation, “As far as I can recall, I never heard a word about you from any of the boys. You were obviously one of the saintly girls who held out for marriage.”

A searching look told her he wasn’t simply trying to be valiant. He appeared very much at ease. A bit of her own tension diminished. “With a family like mine, I had little choice,” she said lightly. “You’ve seen how protective my brothers can be. When I was a teenager I felt positively smothered.”

“You bring a lot of it on yourself,” he said.

“How?”

“You just have that way about you. You look as if you need protecting, need someone to look out for you.” Luke refrained from suggesting that he be that someone.

Tension rebounded, redoubled in force. Roxie gazed up at the milky band of stars that now stretched across the black sky and wondered whether she could tell him. The decision was pre-ordained. If she wanted any sort of real relationship with him, she had to expose her vulnerabilities. She had to risk the hurt and disappointment to gain the joyful contentment that only being loved by the one you love can bring.

“I think maybe you’re right,” she said at last. “Even when I went to college, people always seemed to watch out for me. But then, it was a small women’s college, the kind where you know everyone on campus and they all know you. Sometimes I felt like I was still in high school.”

Luke could sense the buildup to something important. Willing himself to sound casual, he remarked, “You said you worked in St. Louis after college.”

“Yes, I kept books for a dress manufacturer.” This was her moment, but Roxie wasn’t at all certain how to proceed. In the end, she tossed her hurt out with a saucy, “That’s where I fell from sainthood.”

He said nothing, for which she was grateful. Having made the plunge, she decided to go ahead and swim. “He was my boss. And he was everything all the boys back home had never been—cosmopolitan, sophisticated, cultured. I tumbled completely.” She grimaced. “A bad choice of words but highly accurate. Because the company forbade involvement between employees, all our meetings were clandestine, hurried. It was only after I was well and truly involved that I learned he was married. And not to just any woman, but to the daughter of the company’s owner.”

It cost him no little effort, but Luke managed not to spit out the crude descriptives with which he was castigating the man who’d hurt her so.

“Of course I instantly broke it off.” She laughed, a sour little laugh that left a bad taste in her mouth. “But my attack of scruples didn’t last long. When he swore to me that he would leave his wife for me, that we would be married as soon as his divorce was final, it all started up again—the meetings, the rushed gropings. I hated myself. But I loved him, or thought I did. So I continued to see him.”

She hung her head. Her hair shimmered golden in the darkness. Luke longed to brush it back with a soothing hand, to comfort her within his embrace. But, of course, he did neither of those things.

“It went on for almost another year,” she continued in a voice so low it was difficult to hear. “He kept telling me that he was going to leave his wife just as soon as he’d saved enough money for us to live on, that he and his wife had separate bedrooms, that he’d hardly touched her since we met.”

Roxie drew a breath that burned her lungs. “Then one day his wife came to his office. She was a pretty thing, petite, well-dressed. And she was obviously, heavily pregnant. I felt sick, shamed, and hurt. I wasn’t able to cope, so I quit my job and I came home.”

It took all her courage, but she raised her eyes to his. “Oh, Luke, don’t you see? I let it go on for almost a full year after I knew he was married. How can you possibly think I’m good or sweet? Now you must think I’m little better than a—”

Luke shushed her in the swiftest, most effective way he knew. He wrapped his arms around her, lowered his head, and silenced her with a kiss.

Chapter 11

Gentle, undemanding, a gift of solace, Luke’s kiss calmed Roxie. She relaxed within his embrace, giving herself over to him completely, taking comfort in the strength of him. Her palm pressed against his chest and her own heart echoed the erratic rhythm of his. She sighed, and her lips parted for him.

For a single heartbeat they were immobile. Time, the world, even their breaths, hung suspended in that one unending moment. Then, with a low, anguished moan, Luke’s mouth came down on hers and his tongue gained entry with a kiss that was fierce and hot and demanding.

Without so much as a token of resistance, Roxie surrendered to his demand. Her body melted against his, so warm it burned right through the thin material of her dress. Her hands wound into his hair, so soft it whispered through her fingers. She was filled with his scent, so musky and male. Her whole being was absorbed by him, enthralled, enchanted, enraptured by his kiss.

Years of restraint gave way to a tumult of passion. Wanting grew inside Luke, a huge and hungry thing as he whisked his hands over her, down the supple line of her back to the nip of her waist, the curve of her hips, and then up her sides. He’d fantasized about holding her, caressing her, but no fantasy had ever produced the dewy softness of her skin, the fragrant silk of her hair, the delicate rise and fall of her breasts with each breath she drew. She responded to his every touch with a throaty purr that spurred him on. He kissed her urgently, feverishly, thoroughly, and still could not get enough. No woman had ever tasted so sweet, felt so warm, filled him with such searing need.

Roxie thrummed to the heated delirium of his kisses, his caresses, tingling and aching and swelling until she thought she would scream with wanting him. She felt dizzy, as if the world was spinning faster and faster around her. Desire charged up her chest, consuming her as she locked her arms around his neck and arched toward him, offering herself mind, heart, soul and body.

Her abrupt action caught Luke off guard and knocked him off balance. He started to fall back but managed to catch and right himself almost instantly. But the mishap served a purpose. It broke the keenly intense spell that had bound him as tight as chains. After a stunned second, he laughed.

Still easy in his embrace, Roxie leaned back a little and looked at him. The moonlight shone silvery on his features, dark and rugged and dangerous. She reached up and smoothed his haphazard black eyebrows. His hand came to her neck, and his thumb moved on her skin in small stirring circles. She closed her eyes and let herself drift on the sweet sensation.

The summer night air blew in and she shivered ever so slightly. He tightened his arms about her and drew her closer, into his heat and his scent. She wrapped her arms around his trim waist and snuggled against him contently, feeling warmed in heart as well as body.

They sat companionably, marveling at the moon and the stars and watching the lightning bugs that dotted the dark yard with twinkling pinpricks of light. Looking up, he pointed out the constellation called Orion with its three bright stars forming the Hunter’s belt. In turn, she indicated her favorite, Queen Cassiopeia’s five-starred throne. Other stars, some famous but most nameless, winked and blinked at them from afar. Dropping his lips into her hair, he told her how often he had yearned to see the stars without bars or screens blocking his view.

She shivered again, this time from the yearning to take all his hurts unto herself, to give him an unlimited view of the stars for all time, to help him erase the past and embrace the future. His mouth felt right and good within her hair. His arms lent her more than his warmth. They made her feel safe and secure in a way that was totally new to her.

When he lifted his head, she tilted hers to peer up at him, and what she found left her breathless. Never before had she seen him without his defensive mask in place. But now she saw vulnerability and fear and desire. And, yes, love.

“Luke,” she said with a sigh.

His name was a soft endearment on her lips. Luke thrilled to the sound. He had no words in him to tell her how much. He smiled down at her. “Yes, Roxie?”

“Do you still find me fatiguing?”

“You know I don’t.”

“What then?” She blew the hint of a kiss over his mouth but skittered away before he could claim the substance of it. “What do you find me?”

“Stimulating,” he said with no hesitation whatsoever. “Stimulating and seductive.”

She laughed, low and throaty, and Luke could no longer keep from capturing her mouth. He kissed her and kissed her, angling his head this way and that, skimming his lips across her cheek to her ear and on down her throat to savor the smoothness of her skin, the salty taste of her, the sweet smell of her.

They broke apart only long enough to draw their breath and then fell upon each other again.

Roxie strained toward him, wishing to take in the length and the strength of him.

Luke tried to resist, tried to break away, but smoky desire held him fast.

His hands glided from her hip to her stomach to brush her breasts and then to hold them, caress them, finesse them. Her nipples stiffened against the delicate fabric of her dress, and he wondered how it would feel to fondle them with no clothing in between to restrict him. Her breath blew hot in his ear, calling his name over and over in a panting whisper that about drove him senseless.

“Luke . . . oh, Luke . . . please . . .”

He longed to tell her he loved her, tell her how good she felt, how much he ached for her. He wanted to reassure her that he would never hurt her, that he wished only to take care of her. But those were the sorts of things he could never say to her. All that he could not say he put into the fervent kisses he pressed upon her eyes, her cheeks, her lips, her throat.

Each kiss swept Roxie further into the vortex of her desires. She felt as if she’d been swept away by a tornado, swirling through a tempest of sensations. She no longer heard the leaves or the birds or the locusts symphonizing around her. She heard only the soft suction of their lips, the rasping catch of their breaths, the thundering gallop of their hearts. The slight chill in the air no longer nipped her skin. Her goose bumps rose solely from the tingling of her nerves to his touch. Her senses reeled and her body quivered, and she returned each of his kisses with a torrent of her own.

“I want you,” she groaned on a husky note. “I want you and need you and want you.”

Her impassioned words raged within Luke’s blood until he thought his veins would burst from the intensity. He wanted her so desperately, the pleasure he felt was painful. He thought of her bed that he had seen only in his imagination but had pictured with snowy white sheets and plump feather pillows against which to lay her down and kiss her until she cried and took him into her. Then he thought of his own hard, narrow bed back at the boardinghouse, and it was as if the cool breeze of sanity swept over his back. He placed his hands on either side of her flushed cheeks and pulled her from him. Her eyes shimmered in the moonlight, and her face was a milky silhouette, her hair forming an aureole around it.

“Roxie,” he whispered, regret lodging in his throat like a stone. “Roxie, we’ve got to—”

Fearing he would say what she did not want to hear, wanting this to go on and on and on into infinity, until those beautiful stars broke into a million pieces and fell from the sky, Roxie set the tips of her fingers on his lips and sighed unsteadily. “We’ve got each other, Luke,” she said, “and we’ve got the rest of the night.”

Luke kissed the pads of her fingers, lingering over each of them as if they were precious jewels. Then he lifted her hand and tenderly pressed his lips into the center of her palm. With agonizing deliberateness, he set her hand in her lap.

“We can’t,” he said, and there was a world of pain in his voice.

The heat surging through Roxie slowly banked. She sat up straight and fussed busily with her hair, her clothes. With a sinking heart she realized that her confession must have made a difference after all. His physical response had been obvious. She could only conclude he no longer wanted her because she no longer fit his image of her. She thought bitterly that she never should have told him her past secrets, that she should have let bygones be bygones. But she’d felt guilty, having him think her so perfect, so saintly. She should have let him go on believing the lie. Instead, she had knocked herself off her own pedestal.

“I guess I’ve disappointed you,” she said stiffly.

Luke inhaled deeply. Desire still clamored, hammering at his head, pounding through his veins, throbbing within his loins. He heard her, but her words scarcely made sense to his drumming ears.

“What?” he returned blankly.

“It’s because of what I told you, isn’t it?”

It took several seconds for her meaning to get through to him. When it finally did, he was stunned to realize that she could think something so completely and utterly wrong. He knew an incredulous expression came over his face as he repeated his first, stupefied response. “What?”

“It’s because you think badly of me now that you know just how far from sainthood I really am.” Roxie attempted a smile. Her mouth quivered. She sucked in her lower lip to stop its trembling. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of her tears.