The Longing (27 page)

Amelia nodded and welcomed her husband, her
future.

Pleasurable pressure filled her as Kyle
slowly began to join them as husband and wife. She cupped his firm
hips and felt his muscles flex beneath her palms as he tried to
hold back. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel dirty. She didn’t feel
violated. She felt reborn!

He moved, gently at first, his face a mask of
concentration that changed to confused surprise as he pushed and
she welcomed him with ease.

His arms trembled as he held himself still,
the question growing in his eyes. Amelia lowered her lashes and
pulled him closer, deeper, until her own passion mounted beneath
his rolling hips and she soared toward the wondrous sensation she’d
experienced earlier.

Kyle groaned and she glanced into his face.
He looked different with his jaw slack and his eyes glazed with
passion and Amelia knew he was as open and vulnerable as she was in
that moment. Everything tightened inside her and she cried out.
Kyle lunged, the sound of his voice filling her ears as he followed
her into that blissful moment of release.

Their breathing mingled with the sound of the
falls and the splash of water on the rocks below. Soft light
slipped through the rock ceiling and brought out the auburn strands
in his brown hair as their hearts slowed to normal. Amelia pushed
her fingers into the thick strands at his temples, holding his head
between her palms, and looking into his sated eyes. “You have no
idea what this meant to me,” she whispered.

His gaze locked with hers, his unspoken
question brimming in his eyes. She knew he was waiting for her to
tell him, to offer an explanation, but thick, choking shame filled
her throat and cut off her words. Her hands slipped from his hair
and fell to her sides as she lay beneath him feeling too unworthy
to even touch him.

Kyle’s lashes lowered, but she glimpsed the
pain in his eyes as he withdrew and lay on the bed he’d made for
her. He turned onto his back and covered his eyes with his arm,
then didn’t move a muscle or make a sound for so long, Amelia’s
fear nearly swallowed her.

“I loved him,” she said quietly, not wanting
him to think the worst of her character. She knew now that what
she’d felt for Richard had only been infatuation, but at seventeen,
she’d believed it was love.

The roar and splatter of the falls suddenly
seemed intimidating as she lay there waiting for Kyle to ask
questions, to ask why, to hear her apology for keeping the truth
from him.

He laughed instead—the mirthless, bitter
laugh of someone who suddenly realizes he’s a fool, the
unsuspecting victim of a cruel joke he’s played on himself.

Kyle
pressed his forehead to the front door, loath to go inside and face
Amelia. He’d spent two grueling evenings trying to act as if
nothing had changed, but in his heart, everything had changed.

He had thought making love would be the
beginning of their marriage, but it felt like the end. The shame in
Amelia’s eyes had confirmed Kyle’s suspicion, but it wasn’t
Amelia’s lack of virginity that had been tearing him up inside.
Sure, he’d been surprised, disappointed even, but he hadn’t thought
less of her because of it. It was that she’d
lied
about
being afraid, that in her need to conceal the truth, she’d let him
make a fool of himself.

He’d been so relieved when he’d finally
turned Amelia’s nervousness to laughter. It hadn’t mattered in that
moment what it had cost him in pride to ask Duke for his handcuffs.
Making Amelia laugh had been worth it. For her, Kyle had held back
and experienced the beauty of making love slowly, of watching a
woman explore his body as if she’d never touched a man. When she’d
cried out with pleasure, his body rejoiced, but his mind repelled
the truth as he followed her over the edge in a state of shock and
disbelief.

Perhaps it was selfish of him, but he had
wanted to introduce his wife to the act of lovemaking. He had
wanted to teach her about intimacy and passion. Kyle had owned
Evelyn’s friendship, but she’d given her passion to his brother.
Catherine had only allowed his friendship. Kyle wasn’t willing to
settle this time. He wanted it all. Companionship. Passion. Trust.
A woman who could commit herself to their marriage body and soul
without betraying him by keeping secrets.

Still, Kyle had been keeping his own secrets,
and maybe the real crux of his problem was his own guilty
conscience. It was eating a hole in his gut and he couldn’t stand
it any longer.

“Kyle?”

He spun toward Amelia, who stood behind him
with an empty laundry crate under her arm and a worried expression
on her face. “Are you all right?”

He shook his head, knowing he was going to
confess everything, that he was going to lay himself bare and ask
her to do the same. Then, God willing, they might stand a chance of
reconciling, of living together with respect and friendship, and
maybe something more someday. “We need to talk,” he said, dreading
the painful discussion ahead of them.

Her face paled, but he pushed open the door
and waited for her to step inside. The parlor was dim after the
bright sunshine, and Kyle caught the toe of his boot on the rocker
leg as he passed it. He stumbled and cursed, but kept himself from
sprawling across the pretty little oval rug Amelia had placed in
front of the rocking chair.

“I’m going to move that back into the
corner,” she said, setting her crate on the floor between the sofa
and chair.

“It’s fine there. I just wasn’t paying
attention.” Indecision filled her expression and Kyle sighed.
“Forget the chair, Amelia. I have something to tell you that’s
going to be difficult for both of us, and I don’t want to be
distracted by a damned chair. Maybe you should sit down, though,
while we talk.”

Instead of sitting, she stepped behind the
parlor chair and rested her hands on the back as if it would shield
her from what he was about to say. “Are you trying to tell me that
you want me to leave?” she asked, her voice unsteady. “I can stay
with Mama if you don’t want me here.”

Regret consumed him, made him ache because
his cool silence had allowed her to think he didn’t want her. He’d
just needed time to ease the shock and sort through feelings.

He met her eyes. “I don’t want any more
secrets between us, Amelia. They’ll only cause problems later
on.”

Her face flushed and she lowered her eyes. “I
was only seventeen, Kyle. I believed he was going to marry me, but
I learned too late that he didn’t want a small-town girl.” She
looked at him, her eyes filled with regret. “I’m truly sorry. At
our wedding reception you said it mattered whether your bride was
pure. I should have told you right then and there, but I was
afraid. I needed to marry you. Now I need you...in other ways.”

He needed her, too. That’s what scared him so
much. Somehow Amelia had cracked open a door he’d sworn to keep
closed. Not only had she rearranged his home and his daily routine,
she had invaded his life and shaken him wide awake. As much as Kyle
wanted to keep Amelia at arm’s length, he felt an intense need to
pull her close, to hold her and protect her and make her laugh
again. But he wouldn’t make her laugh today. He would break her
heart and it was going to kill him to do it.

Kyle rubbed his eyes, having no idea how to
explain his own stupidity and express his regret, so he simply dove
in. “Your father and I had words the night he died,” he said,
deciding to get right to the heart of his confession. “If I had
known your father had been having chest pains, I never would have
gone to see him, Amelia. But I swear I didn’t know. The night your
father collapsed, I’d stopped by his mill to ask when he was going
to pay me for the timber I’d sold him. He’d been putting me off for
three months, and that night he claimed he still couldn’t pay
me”

“He probably
couldn’t
, Kyle. We both
know that everything Papa had was mortgaged to the bank.”

“I wasn’t aware of his financial situation
that night any more than I was aware he was ill. I’d heard he just
made a large deposit at the bank. I needed the money he owed me so
I could pay for the new sawmill I’d ordered.”

“Who said he’d made a deposit?” she
asked.

“Richard.”

“What? How dare he share Papa’s personal
information! There wasn’t any money in Papa’s accounts. I verified
it myself.”

Her anger surprised Kyle and he held up a
hand to calm her. “I’m just repeating what I’d heard that evening.
Richard had been drinking, but his comment was sincere and it made
me wonder if your father was railroading me. He’d been acting
strange and I wasn’t sure what to think anymore. He’d even been
undercutting prices to take business away from the smaller
mills.”

“Given his financial situation I would think
Papa was probably trying to save his business from going
under.”

“At the time I thought it was his way of
keeping me from expanding my own mill.”

“Oh, Kyle. You didn’t accuse him of that?”
When Kyle didn’t answer, her shoulders drooped. “Papa would have
never held you back or cheated you out of money. He thought the
world of you. How could you even think such a thing about him?”

“He’d been acting strange, Amelia. I didn’t
know what to think anymore.” Kyle flexed his fingers, wishing for
the hundredth time that he’d never gone to see Tom Drake that
night. “I didn’t realize how my words were coming across, but
believe me, I regret ever saying them and upsetting your father.
When he collapsed it was the worst moment of my life.”

The blood drained from her face. “Are you
saying my father collapsed over an unpaid bill?”

There was no need to respond.

“You made cruel accusations and upset Papa
because you thought he was standing in the way of your ambition?”
she asked, her voice high-pitched and shaking.

Kyle suffered her condemning stare knowing he
deserved it. “I admired your father, Amelia. I would never have
intentionally hurt him.”

She stared at him. “
You
caused this
whole fiasco. You caused Papa’s collapse. You even came to my
apartment and got me fired. All because of your damned ambition!”
She struck her fists against the top of the chair back. “My father
never would have betrayed you. You
knew
that. You were
just too concerned about your own interests to consider it.”

Knowing he couldn’t dispute her claim, Kyle
sighed. “Maybe I was. I don’t know.”

Her glare left no doubt what she thought.

“Amelia, I’m sorry.” He sighed again, but it
still felt as if he were carrying two hundred pounds on his
shoulders. “There’s nothing I can do to change what happened, but
I’m deeply and sincerely sorry for everything I’ve done that’s
brought pain to you and your family. I made a terrible mistake with
your father, and I know it.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me this before I
married you?”

Kyle’s heart jolted, and he wondered if she
was suggesting she wouldn’t have married him if she had known what
happened. “I couldn’t tell you because it would have only deepened
your pain.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.” Tears
pearled on her lower lids as she scooped up her laundry crate and
walked into the kitchen.

Kyle let her go, not because he wanted to but
because there was nothing left he could say. He’d wanted to confess
everything, to tell Amelia about her father and Catherine, to
apologize for both situations, but after seeing the pain in
Amelia’s eyes, he knew he could
never
tell her about
Catherine.

As
the month of July crawled by, the temperature soared and Amelia and
Kyle sweated through their days at the lumberyard. Though Kyle
still wanted Amelia to stay home where it was safe, he had allowed
her to do some light physical labor because she seemed to need an
outlet for her heartache. In addition to doing office work, she
shoveled sawdust, pulled slabs of scrap wood from the cut-off
table, and helped her mother in the mess hall. Shorty had finally
relinquished his cooking duties to her mother, who was slowly
learning to laugh again, but Amelia’s own laughter was painfully
absent.

Though she hadn’t put her back to him at
night, Kyle knew she needed time to work through her resentment and
heartache so he hadn’t pushed her to make love with him. There was
a vast emptiness in their relationship that Kyle didn’t know how to
fill. He longed to resurrect the adventurous, spirited side of his
wife that inspired him to laughter, but Amelia had shut that part
of herself away. She was quiet and serious, so far removed from the
sassy woman he’d married that Kyle hated it.

Even now after a rewarding, productive day at
the lumberyard, she sat in the rocking chair in the parlor, sipping
cold tea with him without speaking a word. Her hair was still wet
from her bath and it reminded Kyle of the day they sank her little
rowboat and how they’d played afterward.

Tonight he’d considered slipping into the
kitchen to tease Amelia while she was bathing, but he knew she
would have resented the intrusion, that she wouldn’t have laughed
no matter what he did. So he had sat on the sofa waiting his turn,
wondering how they were ever going to bridge her heartache and his
inability to express himself.

If he could just hold her, it would help.
Even if it didn’t soothe her discomfort, it would ease his
emptiness. Intending to pull her out of the rocking chair and bring
her to the sofa with him, Kyle stood, but the knock on the door
turned him back with a sigh of frustration.

When he opened the door, Lucinda Clark’s
brilliant smile greeted him, and after assuring her that Amelia was
home and that it was perfectly fine for her to visit, Kyle escaped
and headed for Radford’s house.