She took a step toward him, tremulous, and he let his body and mind relax, but only for tonight. For her. She was afraid, her storm phobia running wilder as the storm increased.
Tonight she needed him.
Gently, he drew her into his embrace and held her. She trembled, though he didn’t know if it was from fear of the storm or his nearness. He hoped it was the latter and then chided himself for wanting too much.
Her warm breath against his neck sent a shiver through him.
He needed her more.
He brushed his lips over the top of her hair, ever so lightly.
How did he, without sounding like a lunatic, tell her that some part of him had connected to her that day in the gristmill and again at her family gathering, and even now, he instinctively knew his presence made her stronger just as she was a balm to the emotional bruises he’d suffered in Kentucky?
“I don’t want you to be afraid. Storms are beautiful.”
He stroked a hand over her back, the stretchy camisole fabric shifting beneath his touch. He was careful, respectful, not to slide his hands beneath the shirt. He understood now why he’d walked away that night when he’d desperately wanted to stay. Loving Carrie would be the destruction of Hayden Winters.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CARRIE HAD NEVER been so glad to see another person in her life, and she didn’t have to examine the reasons to know her feelings were more about seeing Hayden than needing a refuge in the storm.
He’d come back, and suddenly the vague sense of embarrassment that had plagued her all week disappeared like afternoon fog. Hayden had known she’d be anxious in this weather, and he’d come to offer his calm, reassuring support. She didn’t know why. She didn’t care why.
She was, after all, a romantic fool who read Byron and Keats and sobbed at the end of Nicholas Sparks movies. If her thoughts drifted in the direction of romance, Carrie let them. She was wise enough to know Hayden was in Honey Ridge on business and anything between them would disappear when he left.
For now, she was glad he’d come back.
Long into the noisy, bumpy night, they sipped too much coffee, snacked on pita chips and tried to watch television. When the thunder boomed and rattled the windows, he snuggled with her on the couch, holding her, smoothing his long writer’s hand up and down her back until she found herself wishing and waiting for that usually dreaded sound.
When the electricity flickered, kicking off the cable and threatening total blackness, they’d lit some candles and gotten out the Scrabble board. She’d been so nervous about the thunder, he’d beaten her quickly.
His mind clearly was not in the game, either. Something else troubled him. She’d been so thrilled to see him and so nervous about the thunderstorm that she hadn’t noticed at first.
Now she did.
He was distracted. His usual polished charm seemed dulled, and for a man who thrived on stormy nights, he was oddly disinterested in nature’s fury. Frequently, while she pondered a new word, he zoned out and stared into space.
Trounced again, she folded the board and began dropping the letter tiles into the velvet bag. “Is everything all right with you?”
Hayden’s smoky eyes grew cautious. “Of course. Why?”
“You seem...pensive. Worried. Did something happen on your trip?” She wasn’t prying. Not technically. Even if he didn’t want to share where he’d gone or why, she cared that he was troubled.
Hayden’s expression searched hers. She saw shadows hidden in his eyes, and for a few long seconds that neared the point of awkwardness, he didn’t respond.
Maybe she was prying.
Leaving the table, he poured another cup of coffee, held the pot aloft until she shook her head, too jittery already. When he returned, Hayden set the cup on the table without drinking and went to the window.
“Come look,” he said, and she was disappointed that he hadn’t answered her question.
Because of his celebrity, she understood his need for privacy, at least in theory. She respected it. But they were friends, weren’t they? And friends were there for each other, the way he was here for her tonight.
“The storm is passing,” he said softly. “You’ve lived through another.”
She didn’t know if he teased or was serious.
She went to stand beside him. The windowpane radiated coolness, and drops of water drizzled down like silvery angel tears.
He tucked an arm around her waist. “If you watch when the lightning flickers, you can see the outline of the ridge. It’s beautiful.”
Protected, safe, she swallowed her fear of lightning and watched the flickers, wanting to share what he loved. She leaned into his side, felt him accept her weight. She wanted to share other things, too, including his heartaches.
“What’s wrong, Hayden? You can tell me.” And with all her courage, she admitted, “I care.”
His breath made disappearing clouds on the glass. Quietly, without looking at her, he said, “Nothing to worry about, Carrie. I went to visit my mother. We had...a disagreement.”
“I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
“Tired. That’s all.”
Fatigue rode his shoulders like boulders, and a kind of mournful sorrow emanated from him. Something she couldn’t quite put a finger on. All she understood, and she understood it to her marrow, was that Hayden was sad.
She stroked a hand over the small of his back, offering comfort as he had for her. “Anything I could do to help?”
“No.” He sighed in one long, weary huff. “We’ll work it out.”
There was something false in his solemn words. She waited for an explanation, but when it was not forthcoming Carrie’s manners would not allow her to press any further. A man had a right to his thoughts, to his family privacy, to share or not.
A fist of regret squeezed beneath her breastbone.
For him, for his terrible aloneness.
They stood in silence, hands on each other’s backs, watching the flickers and flashes and hearing the patter of the soft rain left behind by the tumultuous clouds. Occasionally, a far-off rumble, like a belly laugh, promised the worst had passed.
“I brought you something,” he said.
The switch in topics caught her off guard. She tilted her head back to look at his profile. So strong and distant. So haunted.
Hayden was a complicated man who touched a place deep in her heart. She wondered if anyone really knew him.
“Something besides the gardenia?”
“I was going to give it to you later, but—” he turned from the window and started toward the door “—it’s in the car.”
She regretted the loss of his strong, steady hand against her body. “Don’t get struck by lightning.”
From the doorway, Carrie watched him dash through the rain to his car, touched that she’d been in his thoughts during his days away.
How long since a man, other than her daddy or brother, surprised her with a gift?
Hayden loped up the step, shook the raindrops from his hair and came inside, holding a small box.
Puzzled and pleased, she reached out, but he shook his head. “This is a sitting-down gift.”
She laughed lightly. “Am I going to faint?”
His handsome mouth curved in response “I hope not. We got through the worst of the thunderstorm. I think you’ll survive this.”
He handed her the square box and Carrie lifted out a silver chain, similar to the one she’d lost at the mill, only this one bore a delicate bird clasp.
She drew in a soft gasp. “Hayden, this is...exquisite.”
“Let me.”
Kneeling in front of her, he lifted her foot to his upraised knee. A longing stirred deep in her belly. Like Prince Charming and Cinderella, she thought, onl
y Carrie’s glass slipper was a dainty ankle bracelet, and her Prince Charming wasn’t here to take her away.
But she didn’t let her thoughts go there, to the time when he’d be a memory. Now was far too pleasant, too tempting and lovely.
“This is exquisite, Hayden, much nicer than the one I lost. You shouldn’t have.” Even while she tried not to read too much into the gift, she was wonderfully pleased.
He shrugged away her objections. “My fault you lost yours, so I thought it was only fair I replace it.”
“I’m the ninny who fell through the floor.”
“My idea to explore the mill. You wouldn’t have been there to fall if not for me.”
“Silly.” But the gift touched her, moved her, heated that place in her heart where he’d taken up residence.
“I would have bought it anyway, Carrie.” His warm fingers lingered on her cool skin, his smoky, haunted eyes on hers. “The moment I saw it, I thought of you.”
Her pulse skittered, slid and finally caught a rhythm again. She wasn’t the kind for glib words, but, oh, her heart was on fire. Did the man have any idea what he was doing?
* * *
HAYDEN LOOKED INTO soft brown eyes and wondered what he was doing. He’d promised not to let his thoughts run wild. He should have reserved the bracelet for another time when he was rested and less vulnerable.
Buying the chain had not been, as he’d implied, a casual discovery. He’d searched, stopping at several jewelry stores until he’d seen this one with the small winged bird—a sparrow perhaps, the perfect complement to Carrie’s unique natural beauty.
His hand lingered on her ankle a few more seconds until he realized his blood raced and his thoughts headed toward dangerous ground. He wanted more. He wanted her. But an affair would never satisfy the feelings boiling in his chest, and if he was honest, asking that of her seemed shallow and empty, an insult to this thing that stirred between them.
He felt things for Carrie he didn’t know how to control, emotions that would get him into trouble.
A man in his situation could not allow emotions to run his life. Only by focusing on the goal could he continue to succeed, and yet, lately, the goal had blurred until he wondered if he was slipping away.
Slowly, he lowered her foot to the multicolored area rug. To torture himself, he caressed her ankle one last time before rising to his feet. “I should head back to the inn.”
She rose with him, glancing toward a round wall clock over the sofa. “You must be exhausted.”
“I am.” That was the only excuse he had for wanting to stay here with Carrie the rest of the night. Admitting he’d been to see Dora Lee had made him feel vulnerable, and yet he fought the wildly insane desire to tell Carrie every ugly detail of his life.
The real Hayden needed her and was on the verge of trusting her, a scary proposition. Because he’d inherited his mother’s twisted DNA, he was destined to remain at a standoff between what he needed and wanted and what had to be. No kid should have to worry about going crazy and hurting someone he was supposed to love.
“The storm is over,” he said softly, wishing it wasn’t. Wishing he had an excuse to stay. “Will you be able to sleep now?”
Her voice was subdued as if she too felt the pull. “Thanks to you.”
For the life of him, he couldn’t muster a witty reply.
“Thank you for the bracelet.” She smiled the sweet smile he’d thought of often in Kentucky. Clean and pure and real.
“My pleasure.” That much, at least, was honest. He loved the way the chain looked on her ankle, and knowing he’d put it there filled him with some sort of primal, possessive machismo. He’d marked her as his.
He shook his head, ridding his thoughts of the sweet, fulfilling fantasy. Those were the things he’d write in his books. They weren’t reality.
She walked him to the door, her hand resting lightly above the back of his elbow. Hayden battled the foolish part of him that begged to turn into her touch and stay.
Far away on the mountains, lightning flickered. Carrie crossed her arms. Hayden stepped out on the porch and looked up, feeling the wild stir in his blood.
“Come to the inn tomorrow night for dinner. Bring Brody.”
“Okay,” she said, hand still on his elbow, the warmth of her touch a balm to a troubled soul. “He’ll be happy you’re home.”
Home. Did she realize what she’d said? Or how her words started a jungle drum beating in his vagabond soul?
“Good night, Carrie.” They stood with the door open, the rain-washed smell of grass and gardenias sweeping over them.
He leaned close to kiss her. Just once. A friendly, good-night touch of warm lips. But somehow the kiss lingered and deepened until Hayden required all his resolve to trot down the step and drive away, back to Peach Orchard Inn and the dreams that haunted him almost as much as she did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
True love knows no boundaries but it crosses many.
—Anonymous
1867
HE WAS FALLING in love with her.
Thad walked alongside the spitfire redhead, both awed and bothered that he could feel something this profound for Josie Portland. Part of him winced at being disloyal to Amelia while the other part rejoiced to feel again. To have his heart beat outside his chest again.
He’d never expected this. Not with her. A fiercely loyal Reb with a hankering to draw and quarter anyone from north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Life was full of surprises.
The woods cast long shadows over the open meadow between the mill and house, and when Josie tripped on an exposed root, he caught her elbow. Her head swung his way, and his chest tightened at her beauty. The woman he’d dismissed as spoiled and selfish wasn’t shallow at all, though she did her best to hide her tenderness.
He’d told her about Amelia, and if only for a second, he’d forgotten about those final screaming moments when he’d tried to reach his family and failed. Josie helped him recall the good.
He slid his hand lower on Josie’s arm, and when she didn’t pull away, he laced his rough miller’s fingers with hers, surprised to find small calluses on her fingertips.
She sewed. She worked. She cared. He’d been so wrong about her.
“Will said you lost a beau in the war.”
She drew in a deep, shuddery breath, and he thought for a moment she’d blast him for prying. But she didn’t.
“Tom was my fiancé,” she said softly into the gray-black darkness of field and woods. “We were to be married when he came home.” Her voice dipped. She sighed. “He never did.”
Thad squeezed her fingers. It was all the comfort he had to offer. “What happened?”
Her head turned to look into the black woods as if the answer waited behind the oaks. The moon illuminated the ghostly image of her throat. Thad heard her swallow. “We don’t know.”
The worst kind of ending for a soldier and his family. Not knowing.
“Any idea where he last served? Or where he’d been?”
“Margaret heard from him last. That’s his mama,” she clarified. “He was somewhere in Georgia, if I recall.”
“And you never heard from him again?”
“Not a word in more than three years now. The army, his superiors, no one seems to know. We keep hoping...”
Thad ached for her. Her fiancé was not the only man unaccounted for after the war. Both Union and Confederate forces had lists of soldiers who’d simply disappeared. Even his cousin Will, sick in a Confederate prison, had been considered dead for months, only to be released after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
But Union prisons no longer existed, and no living prisoners remained unaccounted for. Josie’s fiancé was doubtless dead, buried in an unmarked grave far from these Te
nnessee hills.
“Since I can remember,” Josie said, “Tom Foster was part of my life. No one ever doubted that the two of us would marry except me.” She laughed softly, nostalgically. “I gave him a merry chase by flirting with other boys. But as my brother, Edgar, often reminded me, Tom was the only man who could endure my fits of temper and unladylike opinions and still find me charming.”
He found her charming and rather admired her unladylike opinions.
“Tom was a lucky man.”
She stopped in the meadow with tall grass up to her knees. Moonlight bathed her in gold, and the scent of wild honeysuckle swirled around her, a perfume as sweet as she.
“Because he endured my awful temper?”
“Because you loved him.”
“Oh.” Her mouth opened in a perfect circle. Even in the shadows, he saw the same confusion in her eyes that struggled beneath his ribs.
Then, whether from pity or selfishness, Thad did something he never expected to do ever again. He kissed a woman.
Softly, gently, he touched his mouth to hers, testing the waters and finding them warm and soft, and if he dared believe, accepting. Inviting even.
His pulse rattled. Blood rushed to his temples. He wanted to crush her to his chest.
She pressed toward him, up on tiptoe.
Thad’s stomach leaped. He pulled away, his breath coming more rapidly as if he’d trotted across the field and raced up the stairs with a load of grain on his back.
They stood together beneath the moon, each examining the other with only their eyes.
Josie touched a finger to her bottom lip. Thad’s stomach tightened, and the powerful hunger to kiss her again slammed into him.
“I should probably slap you.” There was not a speck of animosity in her statement.
“Will you?” he asked, amused and tempted.
“Only if you don’t kiss me again.”
What could he say? A man didn’t want to be slapped when the alternative was so much more pleasant.