Twin of Fire

  The cabin was on a slight hill in a clearing in the forest, mountains on all sides, tall trees a few yards from the cabin. The grass was laced with wild rose bushes that were just beginning to bloom.

  A sound on the stair behind her made her turn. Lee was just coming up with a tray in his hands, the smell of the food making her mouth water.

  “I thought I heard you,” he said, smiling at her and looking with interest at her bare legs below the shirt. Blair self-consciously slipped back into the bed and Lee put the tray across her lap.

  He removed the cloth that covered the food. “I’m afraid there’s no fresh food, but we have everything that’s ever been canned or preserved.” There was ham and bacon, cheese, peaches, corn muffins, and a tiny dish of wild strawberries.

  “It’s a feast and I’m starving,” she said, and started to eat with gusto.

  Lee lounged across the foot of the bed and watched her with a steady intensity that began to make her blush. She was more than aware that now all obstacles to the wedding night were at last removed.

  “How long did I sleep?” she asked, mouth full of food.

  Lee removed his pocket watch in a slow, easy way that made her pause in her eating. He looked at it, then put it on the little table next to the bed, as if he had no intention of putting it back into his pocket.

  “Fourteen hours,” he said.

  Blair stuffed a corn muffin into her mouth so fast that she nearly choked. “You said that this was your father’s cabin. Have you been here often?”

  Leander began to unbutton his shirt, taking his time over each button, then slowly pulling it out of his pants. “Since I was a kid,” he said.

  His eyes on hers were intense and serious—and the way he was looking at her through his lashes was making her nervous. She began to eat faster. “Did you come up here for elk?”

  Lee, his eyes never leaving hers, began to unbutton the placket of his trousers.

  It didn’t take a second glance to show that he was wearing no underwear. Blair’s hand began to tremble.

  Lee stood and let his trousers slip to the floor.

  Blair looked up at him, her eyes on his, her hand halfway to her mouth with a piece of bacon, while he bent toward her and removed the tray and bacon, and set them on the floor.

  “You’re not Houston now,” he said.

  For a moment, Blair was afraid of him. She’d fought him every minute for the past few weeks, and she’d felt so guilty about what she’d done to her sister that now she couldn’t really believe that it was all right to give in to him.

  Lee bent toward her and she moved backward until her head came into contact with the headboard. Part of her wanted to move away, but the other part—the biggest part—would have died before moving.

  Very gently, Lee’s lips touched hers. He didn’t press her or touch her in any other way. There was just this lovely man with this magnificent, nude body bending over her and kissing her.

  Blair started sliding down in the bed, or perhaps running down into it would better describe it, rather like butter melting. Lee stayed with her, bending as far as he could until he lost balance and fell on top of her.

  From then on, there was no more slowness. Blair opened her mouth to his kiss, and Leander became like a wild man: kissing her with passion, his hands tearing at her hair, running all over her body, ripping the shirt from her. Blair was caught by his passion. For weeks, she’d wanted him, and now he was hers to touch and hold, to help her get rid of this ache that had been caused by holding back for too long.

  They clutched each other and rolled on the bed together, their mouths eating at all the bare flesh they could find, hands seeming to multiply, for they were everywhere. Blair had images running through her head of all the times she’d seen Leander and wanted to touch him. She remembered his hands tying delicate knots in surgery, and she’d wanted those hands to touch her. There were times when she’d watched him walk, and she’d thought of his body moving on top of hers. Now, she ran her hands down his back and over his buttocks, so firm and small and beginning to move in a way that made her sure that she was on fire.

  He seemed to sense when she was ready, and when he entered her, she gave a little scream and Lee’s mouth came down on hers, and she drew on it hungrily.

  His movements became rapid and she matched his speed with her own, clinging to him with her hands, mouth, legs. And when he began to move harder and faster, she stiffened, lifting her hips to his, allowing him more access to her body.

  And when they finished, Blair again screamed and her body jerked into a spasm of passion as Lee collapsed onto her. Minutes later, Blair relaxed, and for a moment, her body trembled as she clung to him, keeping her legs tight about his waist, determined to never let him go.

  They lay together for several minutes before Blair began to relax and released the death hold she had on Lee.

  She caressed the damp curls about his neck, running her fingers over the muscles in his shoulders, feeling his skin. He was so new to her, yet, in a way, it was as if they’d always been together. There was so much about him that she didn’t know, so much that she wanted to learn.

  He raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. “Down-stair’s I have a hip bath and water heating in the fireplace. Like a bath?”

  For a moment, she looked at him, in the light from behind his head, and she realized how precious that head had become to her. Was it just her idea or was he actually the best-looking man in the world?

  “Keep looking at me like that and you won’t get a bath before next Tuesday.”

  Lee lifted one eyebrow at Blair’s mischievous smile, wrapped her in a blanket and carried her downstairs to the first floor. One end of the cabin was dominated by an enormous stone fireplace flanked by two large windows. The other end contained a kitchen that was littered with dirty dishes, the survivors of Lee’s cooking binge. The long walls were stone to about three feet, logs above that, with several windows here and there.

  Before the fireplace was a tin tub, taller at one end than the other, now full of cold water that Lee said was from the nearby stream. As Blair stood there, feeling somewhat shy, Lee poured hot water into the tub and then led her toward it. When she still just stood there, he pulled the blanket from her and set her into the water.

  The water felt heavenly and she leaned back against the tub and let herself relax. She was aware of Lee standing over her and watching. He’d put on his trousers, but he was shirtless—and stunning: all that dark skin of his stretched over muscles hard from a life spent mostly out-of-doors.

  “I married the boy next door,” she murmured, smiling.

  He knelt at the foot of the tub. “Why did you try to make my life miserable when we were children?”

  “I didn’t do any such thing,” she said, as she began to wash her arms.

  “What do you call mud in my face, snowballs flying at me from nowhere, and the time you told Mary Alice Pendergast I was in love with her? Her mother showed my mother love notes that were supposedly from me.”

  “Because you were taking Houston,” she said softly. “She was my twin, but suddenly you were there and she seemed to like you more than me.”

  When Lee didn’t say anything, she looked up to see Ms eyes piercing into hers. He didn’t seem to believe her. She hadn’t thought of that time when they were children for years. She had hated him, hated him from the first moment she saw him. But why? Everyone else seemed to like him, and Houston adored him, but she couldn’t stand being near him. She used to leave a room when he entered.

  “Maybe…,” she whispered.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe I wanted to be your friend.”

  “But you couldn’t, since Houston’d already put her brand on me?” He lifted her foot from the tub, took the soap and began washing her, his long fingers sliding far, far up her leg.

  “You sound as if you weren’t involved, but you did ask her to marry you. You must have loved her.” Blair watched his h
ands, felt his hands.

  He began to soap her toes. “I guess I asked her to marry me. Sometimes, I don’t seem to remember having said those words to anyone. I think it was a passage of manhood. Every man in Chandler asked Houston to marry him.”

  “Did they?” Blair asked with interest. “Houston never said a word about anything like that. Only Alan asked me to marry him. All the other men were—.”

  “Fools,” he said quickly, washing her foot with great care.

  “But I’m so different,” she said, and in spite of everything she could do, tears began to form in her eyes. “I’ve always tried to be like other women, someone like Houston, soft and gentle, but instead I had to become a doctor. And then, I received higher grades than all the other students, male or female, and I could see the men’s eyes change when they looked at me. And—.”

  “You could stand a little work on your suturing,” he said, as he dropped her leg and took her right foot into his hands.

  “And whenever I beat a man at anything, he—.” Her eyes widened. “What?”

  “Your stitches, when you’re in a hurry, are too big. You need to work on them.”

  Blair opened her mouth to speak but closed it. She wanted to tell him that her stitches were perfect, but she realized that that wasn’t the issue here. He wasn’t going to allow her to feel sorry for herself. With a smile, she looked at him. “Will you show me how?”

  “I’ll show you how to do anything,” he said, with a look that made her feel very warm, then he resumed washing her. “Those men were fools. No man who’s sure of himself would be afraid of any woman. It just took you a while to come home to me.”

  “Home. Home to my sister’s fiancé,” she sighed.

  Leander was quiet for a moment, washing her hand, soaping it, clasping her fingers with his. “I guess if I had a brother and all the women were after him, and none of them wanted me, I’d be jealous too.”

  “Jealous! I am not—.” She had never thought of it before, but maybe she was jealous of Houston. “She’s everything I ever wanted to be. I didn’t want to be a doctor, I had to be one. What I wanted to be was like Houston and keep my gloves clean. She has so many friends. She had you.”

  He didn’t even look up as he began to wash her right arm. “No, she never had me.”

  Blair kept on talking. “Houston does everything so well. She has an easy way of making friends. People for miles around love her. If Houston’d been leading the Southern troops, they would have won the War Between the States. No one can organize quite the way she can.”

  “She certainly organized you. Organized you into taking me off her hands.”

  “You! Oh, no, that just happened. That was entirely my doing. Houston was innocent in that.”

  “Blair,” he said softly, “the night of the governor’s reception, I was going to tell Houston the engagement was off.”

  “Off? I know you said something like that, but you surely didn’t mean it.”

  He paused in washing her. “I don’t know Houston at all. I don’t think I ever did, but I can see things in you that I think are in Houston, too. Houston just covers whatever she’s thinking with those damned white gloves of hers. For some reason, she decided when she was a kid to marry me. I wasn’t a person to her, just a goal. Maybe it was like you and medicine, except that your goal was right. I think Houston wanted a reason to back out of our engagement because she had begun to see it wasn’t going to work.”

  “But you didn’t see her the night Mr. Gates told her I was to marry you.”

  “What if you’d studied medicine for years, and then found out the sight of blood made you faint? That carbolic gave you hives?”

  “I would have…died,” she said at last.

  “I think I gave Houston hives. We got so we could barely stand each other. We never talked, never laughed, and she curled her lip if I tried to touch her.”

  “I can’t imagine that!” Blair said in genuine horror.

  Grinning, he began to wash her upper chest, his hands sliding around her neck and up her cheeks. “Maybe part of her realized that you and I were right for each other, and that’s why she sent you out with me.”

  “But she just wanted to see Taggert’s house and—.”

  “Now, there’s a laugh! The lovely Miss Ice Princess Houston Chandler never backed down for any man in her life, but from the first time she set eyes on Taggert, she began to thaw. Remember the time we saw him in town, and he stopped and leered at Houston? I didn’t realize it then, but I should have been jealous, that is if I had been in love with Houston as I was supposed to be. But I remember being more curious than anything else.”

  “Taggert,” Blair said. “I can’t imagine how any woman could want that awful man.”

  “He was certainly ready to risk his life to help us,” Lee said. His slick, soapy hands were sliding lower down her chest. “Frankie’s gang thought you were Houston. They demanded fifty grand for ransom. Taggert not only brought a gun, he brought money.”

  Blair didn’t hear what he was saying because his hands slid over her breasts. She lifted her arms to entwine with his, leaning back against the tub, enjoying the sensation of having him touch her.

  He moved to stand before her, then lifted her from the water, her wet skin sticking to his. “I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said.

  Leander seemed to be particularly adept at removing his clothing because by the time he’d carried her the three steps to the couch, he was bare. His first passion was spent, and this time he seemed to want to do little more than explore her body. Blair felt as if she were being tortured. He knocked her hands away when she reached for him and only allowed himself the pleasure of touching all of her body with his hands, his mouth, rubbing against her skin with his until she was nearly senseless with desire.

  When he moved on top of her, she was clutching at him, but he was infuriatingly slow, refusing to hurry, taking his time with long, slow strokes. By the time he began to move faster, Blair was in a frenzy, feeling that she might explode from wanting him so badly.

  When at last the peak came, it was such that she was sure for a moment that she had died. Her body ached and trembled, quivered, as she clung to Lee.

  He pulled back, smiling at her. “I knew we’d make a great team.”

  She was serious as she said, “Is lovemaking the only reason you wanted to marry me?”

  His face also turned serious. “That and your suturing.”

  “You!” she gasped, hitting at his ribs with her fist.

  But Lee moved off her. “Come on, get up. Let’s take a walk. I have some places to show you.”

  She wasn’t used to seeing him without clothing. The only other nude men she’d ever seen were cadavers stretched out on cold marble slabs. Lee looked more alive than anyone she’d ever seen.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” he laughed, taking her hand and pulling her off the couch. “Get upstairs and get dressed. There’re some old clothes in the chest at the head of the stairs. Get them on.” He smacked her firm, bare bottom as she went up the stairs.

  Blair opened the chest and began to rummage for clothes, but there was a mirror on the wall and she paused to look at herself in it. Her skin was glowing, her cheeks were rosy and her eyes brilliant. Of course, her hair, usually pulled back tightly so it wouldn’t interfere with her work, was now standing out in a wild lion’s mane about her head.

  Could it be true that Leander loved her? He certainly didn’t seem to mind her company, and he’d fought awfully hard to win her. Or did he just want a practicing surgeon-partner and an eager bedmate?

  “You’ve got three minutes,” Lee yelled from downstairs.

  “What’s my punishment if I’m not ready?” she called back.

  “Abstinence.”

  With a laugh, Blair began to dress hurriedly in heavy canvas pants and a flannel shirt. The pants were too short, but she managed to get the upper and lower halves of her body covered. The waist was so big she had to hold
it in her hand.

  Downstairs, Lee was shoving food into a rucksack.

  “Do you have a belt?” she asked.

  When he glanced at her, she released the waistband and, with an impish grin, let the pants drop to the floor. She was rewarded by Lee’s groan.

  He turned away toward the woodpile and picked up a length of rope, then went to her, knelt, and put the rope through the belt loops. As he raised her pants, he kissed her legs all the way up, so that by the time the trousers were in place, Blair was swaying on her feet.

  Lee walked to the door. “Come on, let’s go.” This time he was the one with the impish smile.

  Weak-kneed, Blair followed him outside.

  Chapter 25

  Blair followed Lee as he walked along a narrow elk trail, through scrub oak, across a meadow, as he wound up the side of a mountain. The bark of the aspens had been chewed by the elk, killing many of the trees, and they had to walk across the fallen logs. Everywhere were the droppings of the big animals that had now gone north for the summer.

  Lee pointed out a hawk to her and named some of the flowers. He seemed to sense when he was going too fast and slowed for her, holding back scratchy little oak trees to make the way clear.

  At the top was a narrow ridge, falling off on both sides, with huge fir trees going down one side, and a vista that showed miles of hazy blue mountains on the other. Lee sat down, leaned against a fallen tree and opened his arms to her. She cuddled next to him gratefully, holding his hand in hers and toying with his fingers.

  “What did the sheriff mean when he said we were two of a kind?” she asked.

  Lee had his eyes closed, the sun warm on his face. “I got into trouble a couple of times when I was a kid. I guess he’s not forgiven me.”

  Blair sat upright. “You!? You got into trouble? But you were always a paragon of virtue, every mother’s dream.”

  Not opening his eyes, but smiling, he pulled her back against him. “You know as little about me as possible. I’m not what you seem to think.”