Loving Jessie (19 page)

The camera felt right, so much a part of him that he was hardly aware of it in his hands, moving automatically through the steps of framing the shot, focusing and shooting. For the first time in months he felt whole, as if a part of him that had been missing had finally slipped into place again.

And that night, for the first time since he’d asked Jessie to marry him, the nightmare came back.

It felt strange to share the bedroom that had been hers since childhood. Jessie sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed and stared at the bar of light visible under the bathroom doorway. In a few minutes Matt would come through that door. She felt a sudden giddy surge of nervousness. It was ridiculous. They’d been married for a week, had shared a bed every night—and a good part of the days, for that matter. Her skin warmed at the memories, but the nerves remained. It felt different now, here in the room where she’d slept since she was a girl.

Eventually they would probably move into her grandfather’s room at the end of the hall, but his things were still in there, and she wasn’t looking forward to the task of packing everything away. If she’d known how…strange it would feel to have Matt move into her room, maybe she would have gritted her teeth and dealt with the melancholy task.

“You know, when I was sixteen, I was dating Angela Delveccio.” Jessie had been so absorbed in her thoughts that she hadn’t heard the bathroom door open, and the sound of Matt’s voice made her jump. “We were in al
gebra together, and every week, I’d go to her house for a study date.”

He was standing in the doorway, one shoulder leaning against the doorjamb, a fluffy, primrose-yellow towel wrapped around his hips. He looked large and male and just a little dangerous.

“Her parents let us study in her room as long as we left the door partially open. I guess they figured that would keep us from getting into trouble.”

“D-did it?” she asked.

“Even at sixteen, it’s hard to jump a girl’s bones when her mother might walk by at any minute.” But his smile had a wicked edge that made her suspect that Angela Delveccio’s bones had probably been thoroughly jumped somewhere other than in her bedroom. “But I used to have fantasies about that bedroom.”

“About her bedroom?”

“Yeah.” Matt pushed away from the doorjamb and padded barefoot across the floor to her dressing table. Long fingers sifted through the items scattered across the polished wood, pausing to lift a bottle of perfume to his nose, brushing across the plush softness of a blusher brush.

Watching him, Jessie felt a liquid heat pool low inside her. He looked almost aggressively masculine, standing there in nothing but a towel, his fingers moving among her things. Lust, she thought. That was the only word for it. This heat, this need, this hunger she felt when she saw him. It was good old-fashioned lust.

As if feeling her eyes on him, Matt turned. Leaning one hip against the dressing table, he kept those electric-blue eyes on her as he rubbed his hand across the thick mat of dark hair on his chest. Jessie’s mouth was suddenly dry.

“Angela’s room was all pink and pretty, and it smelled like powder and perfume.” His fingers trailed lower, following the line of hair that cut across his flat stomach. Jessie forgot how to breathe. “It smelled like girl, and I used to fantasize about the two of us all alone in that pretty room, about having her there on that pretty flowered bedspread.” He ran his thumb just inside the edge of the towel, loosening it so that it dipped lower across his hips, barely concealing the rigid length of his erection.

“There…there’s flowers on my bedspread,” Jessie managed to say. He hadn’t even touched her, but her whole body was humming with need.

“I’d noticed.” He gave her that slow, wicked smile that melted her bones. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in making an old fantasy come true, would you?”

The towel dropped away, and Jessie’s breath left her on a soft sigh. She had to swallow twice before she could find her voice. “I’m not Angela Delveccio.”

He crossed the room in three long strides, his hands hard and urgent as he pressed her back against the floral bedspread, his body taut as he came down over her.

“Angela who?” he asked against her mouth.

Common wisdom had it that the first few weeks of marriage were often difficult, fraught with strain as the newlyweds worked to adjust to the reality of sharing their lives. Matt had read enough pop psychology to know that there was supposed to be tension, quarrels, maybe even a few tears. He was supposed to be suffering from the sudden curtailment of his legendary bachelor freedom. But it was difficult to feel curtailed when he was so damned comfortable. Hard to long for the empty impersonal surroundings of his apartment when he was surrounded by the warmth and welcome of a real home.
Difficult to mourn solitary TV dinners and fast food when Jessie took such delight in cooking every night. Impossible to feel any nostalgia for all the endless hours, days, weeks, years he’d spent alone when he now had someone to share his life with.

Not that it was all smooth sailing, of course. There was Jessie’s disgusting habit of not only waking up early but waking up in a good mood, but there were worse things than waking up with his arms full of soft, purring female. And then there was the music problem. His taste ran to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, with a few side trips to Sheryl Crow and old rock and roll. Jessie’s idea of classical music ranged from Hank Williams to the Partridge Family. Integrating their CDs required tact and diplomacy, childish squabbling and a great deal of laughter, and somehow ended with the two of them making love on the floor in front of the empty hearth.

Though he’d picked up his cameras again, Matt wasn’t sure where his professional life was going to go from here. The only thing he was sure of was that he wasn’t going back to his old job. Let someone else take pictures of the world’s disasters, record the tragedies and the pain. He no longer had the stomach for it. He had enough money put aside to allow him to take his time in deciding where to go from here, and, in the meantime, Jessie was thrilled when he told her he would take the pictures of her grandfather’s book, and it gave him a chance to try his hand at something a little different.

If he needed something more to occupy his time, Gabe was still willing to take advantage of his free labor, and when he wasn’t pounding nails or hanging wallboard, there was always the old Chevy to offer a distraction. He figured that, at the rate he was going, the restoration
would be finished sometime in the next twenty years or so, and that was okay.

He had a new wife, a new home, a new beginning. Life was good.

It would have been damn near perfect if it hadn’t been for the fact that the nightmares were back, worse than ever. He’d half started to believe that they were fading, that his mind was healing just as his shoulder had done. He wasn’t sure what had triggered them. Maybe it was picking up the camera again. Maybe it was some sort of cosmic attempt to balance the fact that the rest of his life seemed to be falling into place.

Whatever the reason, three or four nights a week, he jerked himself awake, a thin film of sweat coating his body, his heart pounding, his mind full of half-remembered images, memory and dream so tangled together that he couldn’t separate the two. He would lie there, staring into the darkness, listening to the gentle rhythm of Jessie’s breathing, feeling the soft curves of her body pressed against his, and remind himself that
this
was what was real. That other place, the one he saw in his dreams, was gone, a part of the past. He wanted it to stay there.

Knit one, purl two. Or was it knit two, purl one? Jessie squinted at the soft mass of cream-colored wool in her lap. According to the woman at the yarn shop, you were supposed to be able to tell the difference between knitting and purling just by looking at the stitches, and they
did
look different. The problem was, she wasn’t sure which was which. Was the knit stitch the sort of outie-looking thing or the kind of innie-looking one? And was she supposed to purl on top of the knit or knit on top of the purl?

Catching her tongue between her teeth, she edged the
tip of the needle into a stitch and looped the yarn over it before sliding it back through. Well, it was a stitch, anyway. She held the work up to the light to contemplate her progress. Was ribbing supposed to have those little holes in it? She poked uncertainly at an empty loop of thread several rows back and tried to remember what she was supposed to do with a dropped stitch.

She lowered the would-be sweater to her lap, relaxing her cramped fingers around the needles. The woman at Purl’s Knit Shop had sworn that this pattern was simple enough for a rank beginner.
Nothing but stockinette stitch
and a little ribbing
, she’d burbled cheerfully.
You could
practically knit it with one hand tied behind your back
. Maybe she would try it that way, Jessie thought morosely. This was what she got for letting her imagination run away with her. Standing in the yarn shop, surrounded by all those plump skeins of yarn in a rainbow of colors, she’d had a vision of herself sitting by a cozy fire, needles clicking rhythmically away while Matt relaxed with the paper. Never mind that the late-October weather was too warm for a fire or that, when Matt bothered with a paper, he preferred to skim it during breakfast. She’d been seduced by the romantic domesticity of the image and had spent a truly appalling amount of money on yarn for a sweater for Matt. Maybe she could convince him that the little holes were part of the pattern.

Looking at him, she felt her mouth curve in a smile. He was sprawled asleep on the sofa, one bare foot on the floor, the other hanging over the arm of the couch. An open book lay on the back of the sofa, abandoned after-dinner reading. It had been his turn to pick the music, so something classical drifted from the speakers. He’d told her what it was, but she could only remember thinking the name had way too many vowels and sounded vaguely
Russian. Though she enjoyed harassing him about his stuffy taste in music, she had to admit that it was growing on her. She wasn’t sure he could say the same about Dwight Yoakam and Collin Raye, but he tolerated them with only an occasional wince.

His gray T-shirt had ridden up, exposing several inches of flat stomach. For a moment she contemplated the idea of licking her way up the line of dark hair that arrowed across his belly. Or maybe licking her way down. She wondered if she could get his jeans open before he woke.

Flushing, Jessie pulled her eyes away from her husband’s body and picked up the lumpy little pile of knitting. Even after almost six weeks of marriage, she was still not quite comfortable with this unexpectedly sensual side of herself. It shocked her a little that she could look at Matt and think of all sorts of interesting things she would like to do with that long, lean body. Of course, she’d already done most of them, with his enthusiastic encouragement.

It was amazing how quickly and completely everything had changed. A year that had started out with her grandfather’s illness and death was ending with a new marriage and the promise of new life. She wasn’t pregnant yet, but she probably would be soon. They were certainly putting plenty of effort into the project, she thought, smiling a little.

Jessie prodded a reluctant knitting needle through several more stitches and admitted that she hadn’t given much thought to a baby since her marriage. She still wanted a child, but, somewhere along the way, it had become a piece of a bigger picture, a picture that included her and Matt and their marriage, a future she’d never dreamed she could have. A future with Matt, she thought, feeling a funny little shock inside. It still seemed incred
ible that he’d gone from friend to husband to lover so quickly, so easily. It was hard to remember a time when she hadn’t looked at him and wanted, when she hadn’t known the feel of his hands on her body, the solid warmth of him next to her at night.

The right-hand needle slipped, and two loops of yarn slid off the tip. Jessie scowled and muttered under her breath as she struggled to pick the stitches up again, hopefully without turning them the wrong direction.
Simple
enough for a beginner
. Right. Simple enough for a beginner with an advanced degree in mechanical engineering, maybe.

“You know, I’ve seen people disarming land mines who looked like they were having more fun than you are.” Matt’s voice was husky with sleep, warm with humor.

“The rhythmic click of the needles encourages an almost Zen-like state of relaxation,” she informed him without looking up.

“Is that why your knuckles are white and your teeth are gritted so hard I can hear them grinding from here?” he asked mildly.

“It just takes a little practice,” she muttered, forcing the needle under another stitch.

“And muscle,” he said admiringly.

Jessie laughed and let her hands drop, giving him a mock glare. “Don’t you have any respect for the creative spirit?”

“Not when it looks so painful.” He looked drowsy, eyes heavy-lidded with sleep.

“Knitting just looks so…domestic. So hearth and homey. You know, like something a pioneer woman might have done.”

“Pioneer women also skinned squirrels for supper,”
he pointed out. “You planning on squirrel stew anytime soon?”

“I think I skipped the squirrel-stew class at Cordon Bleu,” Jessie said, wrinkling her nose. “How many squirrels do you suppose it takes to make a decent pot of stew?”

“I suppose it depends on how fat the squirrels are.” Matt shifted the pillow under his neck into a more comfortable position and settled a little deeper into the thick cushions.

“That reminds me, I wanted to talk to you about Thanksgiving. I was thinking I’d like to go with a very traditional menu.”

“If this is where you tell me that we’re having roast squirrel for dinner, I don’t want to hear about it.”

Jessie laughed. “No, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the Puritans cooked up a mess of squirrels for the first Thanksgiving.” She pulled the sweater pattern out from where it had been wedged in the seat beside her and tossed it on the table next to the yarn.