Wild Midnight (30 page)

She couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell him how she ached to hear his words of bitter defeat, which were so unlike those of the reckless, dangerous man she knew. They were joined together in this moment of mutual pain more closely than she could have ever wished.
 

She slid her arm over his chest and lowered her face to him, hearing his heartbeat slowly, matching the thudding of her own. And no matter what he said, she knew he was kind and good and brave. She hadn’t been wrong.
 

“I love you,” she whispered. She knew that she had to do more than speak it, she had to show him.
 

He heard her soft words and he stiffened. His long, powerful body stiffened even more as her lips trailed down the slightly rough line of hairs that led from the indent of his navel to the flat, smooth masses of scars that began there.
 

“You’re crazy—who would love me?” he gasped. “Ah, sweetheart—
don’t
!” His fingers dug into her hair at the touch of her warm, caressing lips.
 

“I love you because you’re beautiful,” she murmured. She touched him, healing him with her love, her lips kissing the hard, velvety smooth shaft of his flesh softly. “You’re beautiful here, and you always will be. And not just because I love you.” Her mouth followed her words, adoring him, feeling him grow and swell with his potent response.
 

He made a broken, gasping sound. “Rachel, don’t—please don’t.” He ran rough fingers through his hair in desperation. “Damn, I’m begging you!”
 

“And I’m loving you.” She put all of her feeling for him in her ardent caresses. “Don’t you want me to show you how beautiful you are and how much I want you?”
 

When she lifted her head to smile at him he grasped her leg quickly to pull her to straddle him. His gold-flecked eyes were wild with desire and agony, features contorted. “Rachel, sweetheart,” he rasped hoarsely. “Oh, yes ... oh, God!”
 

She was positioned over his body, feeling him trembling with wanting her. She wanted to show her love for him so desperately it overrode her awkwardness. He seized her hips with feverish hands and lunged into her with a fierceness that made her cry out.
 

He was so splendidly masculine as he allowed her to make love to him that she sobbed out her joy. He would never be less than a magnificent male for her or for any other woman, but she would never share him if it was humanly possible. As he helped her to meet his rhythm his hands stroked her, loving her, delighting in her breasts, the silky smoothness of her arms and shoulders and hips, and then finally pulling her down to cover her mouth with his own in a kiss that exploded with fervent passion.
 

There was no time for words, only their desire. But Rachel repeated them breathlessly in her mind and into his devouring mouth—
I love you, I love you—
until they spun out of time and earthbound reality and together found what they were so desperately seeking.
 

Afterward what they shared touched them so profoundly that they lay clasped together for a long time, their legs intertwined, his arms around her tightly, their lips touching, sharing their warm exhaustion.
 

“Are you happy?” he murmured softly into her hair. She could not see his face because she lay with her own nuzzled against the wet column of his throat, breathing his earthy scent. But his eyes were hooded, thoughtful, even sad.
 

She was still dreaming. “Yes, oh yes,” she murmured. The nightmare was gone; they had buried it for a while.
 

But he knew it still existed. “Go to sleep, love,” he told her. He kissed her hair softly and whispered to her until she closed her eyes, knowing that he held her safe.
 

It was bright blazing morning sunlight when Rachel woke, and it seemed as though the live oak trees outside the bedroom windows were filled with a thousand woodland birds joyously singing. For a few minutes she lay blinking, staring up at the ruffled canopy over the unfamiliar bed, telling herself that she was in Beau Tillson’s house at Belle Haven. Then memory unrolled the incredible events of the night in her mind and she examined them disbelievingly. The marsh. Darla Jean and her brothers. They had tried to kill her. Then, finally, she came to what Beau Tillson had revealed to her in this room in the darkness as she lay in his arms. And how she had told him that she loved him.
 

The knock on the door came again.
 

Rachel put her legs over the side of the bed and then realized she was naked. She clutched her head with both hands, suddenly uncertain as to just what to feel. She had gone to sleep holding the man she loved. Where was he?
 

She saw a man’s belted cotton robe at the foot of the bed and knew he had left it for her. She slipped it on quickly. There was definitely a delicious odor of coffee and bacon in the air, and she guessed he was downstairs fixing breakfast. The sunlight looked late, perhaps noon.
 

Rachel opened the bedroom door to a large, impassive black woman holding a breakfast tray in her hands. As they stared at each other she remembered that Belle Haven had a cook. She’d heard the Butler sisters mention her.
 

“Miz Rachel, hit’s a sweet morning, how you feeling?” The musical Gullah lilt was strong and almost unintelligible to Rachel. The cook said something more Rachel could not fathom, and looked at her with liquid, sympathetic black eyes.
 

“Mister Beau,” the woman repeated softly, “he done call the gennelmun to come take you home. He wait downstairs bye ‘n’ bye—so you come when you fix eatin’ your breakfas’.”
 

Rachel hurried past her to the hall and then the top of the staircase that descended to Belle Haven’s front hall. She understood someone had come to take her home. And Beau Tillson had called him?
 

She leaned over the mahogany railing and down into the lower hall and Jim Claxton, his broad-brimmed straw Stetson hat in his hands, looked up at her.
 

But who will reveal to our wakening ken
 

The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
 

Under the waters of sleep.
 

The Marshes of Glynn
 

Chapter Seventeen

“Rachel, dear,” her mother said, “you have drawn a great deal of money from your trust account.” Elizabeth Goodbody’s words were accompanied by a firm, no-nonsense kiss on her daughter’s ivory cheek as Jim Claxton bent to pick up two pieces of elegant Mark Cross leather luggage.
 

The commuter flight from Charleston was over an hour late because of thick fog all along the coast. The DeRenne County airport had closed down immediately after the small jet landed, and now it was as though the disembarking passengers emerged from a milky wall of fog as they approached the chain link fence at the Arrivals gate and the people waiting for them.
 

It was typical of her small, brisk mother to put first things first: a brief, affectionate hello followed by a reminder of Rachel’s latest transgressions. Her tightly bundled figure in silk scarf and mauve Harris tweed suit almost matched the shade of her hair. She gave Rachel a reassuring hug, but her sharp gray eyes missed nothing. Peering through the mist, Elizabeth Goodbody said in an exploratory tone, “Rachel, have you done something different with your hair, dear?”
 

“Hello, mother,” Rachel said quickly. “I want you to know the DeRenne County agent, Jim Claxton. He has been a very good friend of the cooperative.”
 

As her mother extended her hand for a firm handshake Rachel ducked back as much as she could into the surrounding mists. Elizabeth Goodbody’s lightning visit to her daughter was sandwiched between a board meeting of a school for Palestinian refugees on the West Bank and a conference on banning nuclear arms in London, and as her mother had made it plain on the telephone, she was booked on a flight leaving the county airport on Monday morning connecting in Charleston for Chicago and Canada for a world peace meeting. Her mother was spending not quite three whole days in Draytonville, and the reason for her visit was the disturbing knowledge that her daughter had violated a basic tenet of quiet, conservative wealth—drawing money out of her trust.
 

They started across the pavement to the airport’s small parking lot, the thick fog swirling around them. Rachel could feel her mother’s eyes on the back of her neck where her long red hair usually rested either in a braid or a loosely gathered knot. The money she’d taken from her Philadelphia trust fund was hers, and she didn’t really have to account to her mother for it. But her hair, Rachel thought with a very daughterly pang of apprehension, was something else.
 

“I haven’t seen fog like this in a long time, not since London,” her mother was saying to Jim Claxton in her bright, determinedly cheerful voice.
 

Since Elizabeth Goodbody had been in transit, including taxis and waits at the airport for several hours, and they knew she would be hungry, Jim had invited them out to dinner in Hazel Gardens before they drove on to Draytonville.
 

“I do hope the weather will cooperate.” Rachel could hear her mother’s voice behind her and Jim’s low assuring rumble in answer, “I’m looking forward to seeing all the work of the farmers’ cooperative, and the local people Rachel’s been telling me about.”
 

Jim opened the door of Rachel’s tiny station wagon and waited for her mother to slide into the front seat. “Ground fog burns off pretty quick around here,” he was telling her. “And it’s been warm the past few days—in the eighties. I hope you brought your swimsuit, Mrs. Goodbody. It’s been warm enough to take a dip, and Rachel’s got a nice little beach on the river right behind her house.”
 

Rachel closed her eyes as she slid down against the plastic surface of the backseat in the Toyota. It was a slip, mentioning the tidal pool behind her house, and Jim realized it, judging from the disconcerted look on his face as he and Rachel exchanged a quick glance. It didn’t matter; there would be no hiding anything from Elizabeth Goodbody. All Rachel could hope was that they could get through dinner without her having to unwind for her mother what was, after all, a tangled web of unbelievable events.
 

Rachel saw Jim’s apologetic look seeking her out in the rearview mirror, and she managed a smile. Jim had been a tower of strength the past few days, and there was no doubt he was more than a little fond of her. The present situation, she had to admit to herself reluctantly, seemed to make him very happy. Even his children liked her. She’d been to his house several times, once to take them on a picnic that had been enormously successful. Remembering her mother’s thoughtful look as Jim had bent his tall frame to pick up the luggage, Rachel could almost hear her say, “But Rachel, this young man seems very
nice
.”
 

Now, in the front seat, her mother was responding almost flirtatiously as Jim turned off the airport road and into Highway 17 southward and its glittering neon restaurant strip. “You must call me Elizabeth, not Mrs. Goodbody,” she was saying. “Friends do not use titles.”
 

Her mother launched into a cheerful account of Quaker customs—the early aversion to the English aristocracy and all forms of rank and pretense when the Religious Society of Friends was formed in the sixteenth century—and Rachel saw Jim Claxton lift his bright blue eyes to the rearview mirror, corners crinkling as he gave her a slow smile.
 

She was glad Jim thought her mother’s eagerness to enlighten him funny. She loved her mother dearly but this unexpected visit, the whole burden of having to explain what had happened here, depressed her. She wasn’t looking forward to it.
 

The Count DeRenne Inn was crowded with springtime tourists on the move from Savannah and Charleston, and the soggy interior, in spite of frigid air-conditioning, had little of the charm that Rachel remembered. Her mother, Rachel could see, was obviously tired and hungry but determined to be patiently enthusiastic about everything. When they were finally seated they were not able to get the window table they wanted, overlooking the large artificial waterfall, but as her mother pointed out, the fog obscured the view anyway.
 

“Tell me, dear,” Elizabeth Goodbody said after they had ordered steaks and salads, “are you still having trouble with the neighbor who owns the road and won’t let the good people of the cooperative plant their tomatoes?”
 

“Soybeans,” Rachel and Jim said at the same time.
 

Her mother smiled perceptively, lifting her eyebrows.
 

Rachel’s mouth was open to speak but the county agent plunged on, “Things have been settled enough to bring in tractors to get the field plowed and plant soybeans.” Under the table Jim’s big, warm hand came to rest on Rachel’s knee reassuringly. It was also a signal to let him handle this, and Rachel turned to stare at him. “The man who owns the road is Beaumont Tillson, one of the big landowners in the county and a hard man to get along with. Your daughter’s done a very good job, Mrs. Good—
Elizabeth
,” he amended. “It’s not easy to get Beau Tillson’s cooperation. But the loan the cooperative’s managed to swing has made all the difference. Even the local people are beginning to lend their support.”