Tender Absolution

  “I have to be creative,” he’d told her when she mentioned the general mess. “I can’t be bothered with trivial things.” He was joking, of course, but Carlie had taken it upon herself to pick up the clutter around the studio, clean the kitchen and bathroom, and vacuum the carpets. She couldn’t bear to work in a pigsty.

  Rory didn’t seem to notice. However, he was adamant that she model for him when he was doing an advertising shoot for local merchants or creating his own portfolio.

  Rory had told her time and time again that she was wasting her time on the wrong end of a camera.

  “Thousands of girls would die for what you’ve got,” he said as he set up the studio for a shoot. Mrs. Murdock was coming in with her two-year-old son and her border collie. “The camera loves you. Look at these—” He waved pictures he’d taken of Carlie, showing off her high cheekbones and blue-green eyes. “The face of an angel with just the hint of the devil in those eyes of yours. I’m telling you, Madison Avenue would eat these up.”

  “I like to take pictures, not pose,” she’d replied, though the idea of modeling held more than a little appeal.

  “So spend a few years in front of the lens. Make some bucks, give it your best shot before you grow old and fat, or God forbid, fall in love.” Rory was a tall man, thirty-five or so, with a dishwater-blond ponytail that was starting to thin and streak with gray. His face was perpetually unshaven and he never wore a tie. “Now, do we have any Christmas props? These pictures are a Christmas gift for Mrs. Murdock’s husband, even though Christmas is what—seven months away?”

  “Five,” Carlie said. “I’ll check the upstairs.” She climbed the rickety staircase and opened a door. The attic was sweltering and dusty. She dug through some boxes and came up with several sprigs of fake holly, some red candles that had already melted a little and a stuffed animal that looked like a reindeer. She even uncovered a rolled backdrop of a snow-encrusted forest.

  Carrying the box downstairs, she blew her bangs from her eyes. “There’s not much,” she admitted as the front bell chimed and Mrs. Murdock strolled into the reception area. She held a perfectly behaved border collie on a leash and her dynamo of a two-year-old son was wearing a white shirt, red-and-green plaid vest and black velvet shorts. Red knee socks and black shoes completed the outfit.

  She offered Carlie a tired smile. “I know this won’t be easy,” she admitted as she licked her fingers and tried to smooth a wrinkle in her son’s hair. He jerked his head away with a loud protest. “Jason’s in the middle of the ‘terrible twos,’ but my husband would love a picture of him with Waldo.” At the moment Jason was tugging hard on Waldo’s leash and the dog was sitting patiently.

  Carlie led the entourage back to the studio where Rory was adjusting the light.

  Mrs. Murdock’s prediction was an understatement.

  Jason pulled at his bow tie, cried, pitched a fit and generally mauled the dog, but both the collie and Rory were incredibly calm. By the end of the shoot nearly two hours later, Carlie’s patience was frayed, Mrs. Murdock had lost her smile and Rory wasn’t convinced any of the shots he’d taken would be satisfactory. “Keep your fingers crossed,” Rory suggested as they locked up for the night. “I’d hate to go through that all over again.”

  The thought was depressing. “I’m sure at least one of the shots will turn out,” she said, hoping to sound encouraging.

  “If today was December twentieth, I would worry. As it is, we still have a lot of time for retakes.”

  Carlie groaned inwardly at the thought. She drove home in her hot little car and felt positively wilted. Sweat collected at the base of her neck and dotted her forehead, and her clothes, a black skirt and white blouse, were wrinkled and grimy.

  Wheeling into the parking lot, she nearly stood on the brakes. Ben’s truck was parked in the shade of a larch tree and he was leaning against the fender, arms crossed over his chest, as if he had nothing better to do.

  He glanced up when he saw her and shifted a match from one side of his mouth to the other. His lips twitched in what one might consider a smile.

  She cut the engine and climbed out.

  “Thought I might find you here,” he said, taking the match from his mouth and breaking it between two fingers.

  “Have you been waiting long?”

  Shaking his head he glanced at his watch. “A few minutes.”

  She couldn’t stop the wild beating of her heart. He looked much the same as the last time. Again he wore faded blue Levi’s, but this time a white T-shirt stretched across his chest. His gaze was lazy when it touched hers. “I wondered if you wanted to go for a drive. Up to the lake or something.”

  “I thought you’d forgotten all about me.”

  Again the sexy smile. “Forget you?” He let out a silent laugh. “Is that possible?”

  “It’s been a while since I heard from you.”

  “I’ve been busy.” He leaned one hip against the truck’s fender and waited. “So what do you say?”

  “Just let me grab my suit.”

  The apartment was empty and Ben waited downstairs while Carlie dashed into her room, stripped out of her work clothes and threw on a one-piece sea-green swimsuit. She couldn’t believe that he was actually waiting for her. Her heart pounded as she stepped into a pair of shorts and a sleeveless blouse with long tails that she tied under her breasts. She ran a brush over her hair, touched up her lipstick and was back downstairs in less than ten minutes. She felt breathless and flushed as she wrote her parents a quick note and let Shadow inside.

  Once they were in the parking lot, he unlocked the truck and held open the passenger door for her. She climbed into the sun-baked interior and wondered why, after hearing nothing from him for the past few days, he’d decided to pick up where they’d left off. Or had he?

  With a roar the old truck started and Ben eased the Ford into traffic.

  “Did something happen?” she finally asked.

  His brows fastened together as he squinted through the windshield. Frowning, he reached across her, into the glove compartment and extracted a pair of sunglasses. “Happen?” he asked, sliding the shades onto the bridge of his nose.

  “Well, I just figured that you didn’t want to see me again.”

  “You figured wrong,” he said with a trace of agitation. He stopped for a red light, rolled down the window and rested his elbow on the ledge. “Besides, I thought I should make sure that I wasn’t stepping on Kevin’s toes.”

  She nearly dropped through the seat. “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “Nothing. But I wanted to double-check.”

  “Double-check? This is my life—” she began, but held her tongue. It didn’t matter anyway. Obviously Kevin understood how she felt and Ben was here with her now. Still, the thought galled her.

  As they drove through the outskirts of town, Ben fiddled with the dial for the radio and found a station that mixed old songs with newer recordings.

  “I thought that didn’t work.”

  “Fixed it.” He sent her a quick glance as they approached the sawmill. Ben’s expression changed and his jaw grew hard as the truck sped along the chain-link fence surrounding the yard. Thousands of board-feet of lumber were sorted according to grade in huge stacks and a mountain of logs waited to be milled. Trucks, many bearing the logo of Fitzpatrick Logging, roared in and out of the yard and men in hard hats waved to the drivers.

  Cranes hovered over huge piles of logs and forklifts carried planed lumber from sheds. The shift was changing and men sauntered in and out of the gate. They laughed and smoked, shouted to friends and brushed the sawdust from their shirts and jeans.

  Kevin’s sleek Corvette was parked in the lot between the dusty pickups and station wagons.

  “So why don’t you work at the mill?” she asked, sensing him tense as they sp
ed past the activity at the sawmill.

  “Don’t you think two Powells bowing down and paying homage to H.G. III is enough?”

  “It’s a good job.”

  “I prefer the hours at the Bait and Fish.”

  She slid a glance in his direction and noticed the way his hands gripped the steering wheel—as if he were going to rip it from its column.

  “You don’t like the Monroes much, do you?”

  “I try not to think about them.”

  She lifted a brow and he caught the movement.

  “Okay. It’s like this. I just don’t appreciate the way Monroe does business. He lives in a mansion in some ritzy neighborhood in San Francisco, sent his son to private schools, flies into Gold Creek in a company helicopter once, maybe twice a week, does some rah-rahing and claps a few men on the back, then speeds back to his country club for eighteen holes of golf before he plants himself in the clubhouse. Like some damned visiting royalty.”

  “He’s rich.”

  “So that gives him the right to use the sweat of people’s backs to pay for his yacht harbored in the marina?”

  “That’s the way it works.”

  “At least Fitzpatrick has the guts to stick around Gold Creek,” Ben said as he shifted down and turned onto an abandoned logging road that curved away from the lake and switchbacked through the forested hills.

  “I thought we were going swimming at the lake.”

  “We are.”

  “Unless my sense of direction is way off, we should be driving toward the setting sun instead of away from it.”

  He laughed then and the anger that had been radiating from him since they passed the sawmill faded. He touched her lightly on the back of her hand with strong, callused fingers. “Trust me.”

  Her heart flipped over and she knew she’d trust him with her very life.

  They drove slowly, past fir and maple trees that allowed only a little of the fading sunlight through a thick canopy of branches overhead. Dry weeds brushed the belly of the truck as it labored up the steep grade. The radio began to fade and Ben snapped it off as the forest gave way to bare hills that had been stripped of old-growth timber. The scarred land looked as if it had been shaved by a godlike barber who took huge cuts at the remaining stands of old growth. Where the land had been logged, nature was taking over. A fine layer of grass and brush, dotted with a few scrub trees, began to reclaim the rocks and soil between the rotting stumps. Farther on there was evidence of reforestation, small fir and pine trees planted by man and machines to replenish the forest and provide the next crop of timber for another generation of loggers and sawmill men.

  “The lifeblood of Gold Creek,” Ben observed wryly.

  It was the truth, whether he meant to be sarcastic or not. For generations, Gold Creek had depended upon its rich stands of timber. Though the town had been optimistically named during the gold rush when a few miners had discovered glittering bits of the precious metal in the streambed of the brook that flowed into Whitefire Lake, timber was the real gold in the area. The fortunes of men like the Monroes and the Fitzpatricks had been founded and grown on the wealth of the forest.

  Ben drove until the road gave out and he parked in a rutted, overgrown lot that had once been used as a base for the machinery that winched the trees up the hillside and a parking lot for logging trucks that had hauled the precious timber back to Monroe’s mill.

  He grabbed a backpack and slung it over his shoulder. “Come on,” he said and she climbed out of his pickup. They left the truck and followed a path that was flanked by berry vines and brush. Eventually the forest resumed and Carlie struggled against the sharp incline. She was breathing hard as they passed through shaded stands of trees that had never been touched by a chain saw. Birds flitted through the trees, while squirrels scolded from hidden branches. The earth smelled cool, and far in the distance she heard the sound of water tumbling over rocks.

  “Where’s the river?” she asked.

  “No river. Gold Creek.”

  “Clear up here?”

  “Has to start somewhere.” They continued to climb and Carlie’s legs began to ache. “You know, I’m not really dressed for mountain climbing,” she said as the back of her heels began to rub in her tennis shoes.

  “It’s just a little farther.” He grabbed her hand and helped her through the woods. She tried not to concentrate on the feel of his fingers twining with hers.

  “What is?”

  “A place I heard about at the store.”

  “You’re not taking me fishing, are you?” she teased, but he didn’t answer, and the warmth of his hand over hers was as secure as a promise. They hiked for another twenty minutes before the forest began to thin. The trees eventually gave way to an alpine meadow, complete with a profusion of wildflowers blooming between thin blades of sun-bleached grass. Butterflies fluttered in the dying sunlight and bees droned lazily.

  Still holding her hand, Ben led her through the knee-high grass to the head of a spring where clear water spilled into a small ravine and washed along the rocks as it tumbled downhill.

  “Gold Creek,” he said.

  “I thought the creek started at Whitefire Lake.”

  “Technically it does,” he agreed, “and if you look on a map there’s probably another name for this particular brook, but since all this water rushes down to the lake and runs out to feed Gold Creek, I’d say this is where it all starts.” Leaning down, he ran his fingers through the water.

  “Why’d you bring me up here?”

  His hand stopped beneath the clear, shimmering surface. Straightening, he let the water drip from his hands and touched the line of her jaw. His fingers were cool and wet, his eyes dark with the coming dusk. “I wanted to be alone with you,” he admitted with the hint of a smile. “No Brenda. No Kevin. No parents. Just you and me.”

  “Why?” She hardly dared breathe. Her chest was so tight, she thought it might burst.

  “I thought we got started on the wrong foot the other night.”

  She swallowed against a knot in her throat. “I was starting to believe that we didn’t really get started.”

  “Silly girl,” he whispered. He shifted and the fingers that had traced her jaw moved around her neck, pulling her gently to him as his lips found hers in a kiss that was filled with wonder and youth and the promise of tomorrow.

  Carlie’s knees felt weak and she didn’t protest when the weight of his body pushed them both to the soft bed of dry grass near the water.

  She wound her arms around his neck and opened her mouth to the gentle pressure of his tongue. A curling warmth started somewhere deep in her abdomen and spread outward, racing through her bloodstream, causing her skin to tingle. He flicked the tip of his tongue against the ridges along the roof of her mouth, touching her teeth and delving farther.

  Was this wrong? she wondered, but didn’t care. Nothing that felt this right should be forbidden.

  Groaning, he flung one leg between hers and kissed her harder, pressing hot lips against hers anxiously.

  “Carlie,” he whispered when he lifted his head and stared down into her eyes. “Is this what you want?”

  “I just want to be with you,” she said, not thinking about the words, just anxious to assure him that she cared. She touched his cheek with her fingers, then ran them along the back of his neck and drew his head down to hers.

  Her lips were wet and eager as they kissed again and she didn’t stop him when his fingers found the knot at her blouse and untied the cotton fabric.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew that she should tell him no—that she should cool things off before she lost control, but she couldn’t. Her blouse parted and his hand surrounded her breast. Through the shiny fabric of her suit, he touched her, kneading the soft mound, causing her nipple to tighten.
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  Stop him. Stop him now a voice in the back of her mind cried, but she ignored the alarm and kissed him with more fever than before. She felt the cool air touch her shoulder, knew that he was lowering the strap of her swimsuit and before she could say a word, his hot lips had pressed a kiss to the top of her breast.

  A low moan escaped her throat as he tugged and the suit fell away, baring the breast to the last rays of sunlight. “So beautiful,” he whispered gently, his breath hot as he took the nipple between his lips and tugged.

  “Ben,” she whispered, her voice rising on the breeze.

  “Don’t tell me to stop.”

  “I can’t,” she murmured, closing her eyes to the feel of his callused hands kneading her flesh, the warmth of his mouth drawing hard on her nipple. Her hips raised anxiously from the nest of dried grass and desire ran hot and thick through her veins when one of his hands moved lower to cup one of her buttocks.

  Somewhere, far away, a train whistle blasted, echoing up the mountainside.

  Ben tensed, abruptly pulled away, looked down into her eyes, and with a stream of oaths rolled away from her to lie spread-eagled on the grass. He flung an arm over his eyes and said, “Get dressed.”

  His harsh words were like a slap. Feeling like a fool, Carlie adjusted the strap of her suit and rebuttoned her blouse. “Is…is something wrong?”

  Sighing loudly, he shoved his hair out of his eyes and stared up at the dusky sky. “I didn’t plan to bring you up here and seduce you.” His brows drew together in a serious line of vexation. “Oh, hell, maybe I did.”

  Her back stiffened a bit. “You wouldn’t have forced me to do anything I wasn’t ready for.”

  He glanced at her, his eyes dark and unreadable. “You don’t know me, Carlie.”

  “I know you well enough.”

  “Damn it all anyway!” He rolled over, grabbed the bag he’d let drop to the meadow floor and took her hand again. “We’d better get back. It’s getting dark and I don’t trust myself alone with you.”