This Side of Heaven (21 page)

“Caroline …” For all Matt’s flickering smile, he sounded strained.

“I told you, I’m not afraid of you.” Her hands moved slowly down his chest to flatten one on top of the other as she rested her chin on them. Her palms tingled from the slight abrasion of his chest hair against them. The sensation was as unexpected as it
you would do me harm, Matt Mathieson. I know you for the fraud you are.”

“Elizabeth has been dead for nigh on two years. Before that she was ill, really ill, from the time of Davey’s birth.”

For a moment Caroline could not fathom what that had to do with anything. Then the sense of what he was trying to tell her hit her. Her eyes widened, and her chin came up off her hands.

“Are you telling me that you’ve not—that there’s been—that you …” Her outspokenness was not quite equal to framing the question she had in mind. But he seemed to know what she meant.

“I’m not the kind of man to play a wife false.”

Caroline caught her breath. The notion that he had not loved a woman for over five years was unbelievably seductive. When she exhaled, the sound was a soft sigh.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” There was a rough edge to his voice.

Caroline nodded, her eyes rapt as she watched his face slowly darken from the hot blood rising beneath his skin. She could feel the new tension in the hard-muscled body beneath her. The heat of him burned through her clothes to sear her skin. Her breasts swelled and hardened against his chest—and the sensation startled her. Eyes very wide, she simply stared for a long, speechless moment into his.

“Caroline, if you have any sense at all, you will get off this bed. Now.” The words were forced through his teeth. His hands had moved away from her altogether,
to lie flat against the mattress at his sides. As he spoke his fists clenched.

Her gaze locked with his, and her lips parted. Her body began a hot, sweet clamoring the likes of which she had never in her life even imagined she could feel—and then she took fright and rolled off the bed.

Her knees were not quite steady as she got to her feet, her back turned to him so that he could not see the full extent of her discomposure. She could feel his eyes on her, hear the rasp of his breathing.

“I’ve work to do, if you’ll excuse me,” she said without looking around. Then, in the hardest move she had ever made in her life, she walked, spine straight and head held high, from his room.

Not until she was safely in the kitchen did she permit herself to acknowledge that her hands, like her knees, had begun to shake uncontrollably. She just barely made it to a chair before she had to sit down.

22

“C
aroline!”

Matt was annoyed, and that annoyance was expressed in the deafening volume of his roar. He had called her at least a half dozen times since his stomach had told him that it was time and past for lunch, and had gotten absolutely no answer. Had he not been certain, by the rattling of pots and the thud of a log dropped on the kitchen fire, that she was belowstairs, he would have been out of his head with worry. As it was, he was growing angrier by the minute.

“Caroline!”

The shout was made with enough force to hurt his throat. Coughing, Matt glowered at his open door, sure that this time she would appear. But though he waited, and waited, she did not.

“Caroline!”

The growling of his stomach reminded him that it was past noon, and he had had nothing to eat all day. But there was nothing he could do but shout for her and wait, fuming, for a response. His helplessness heaped fuel on the fire of his fury. Confound the woman, just because he’d had a momentary lapse of judgment was no reason to starve him! So he’d found her attractive, and made the mistake of letting her see
it! She’d been attracted to him too—he was no green lad not to recognize the signs—so she need not behave as if he’d insulted her by a bodily response to her person that was beyond his conscious control. If he had had control of it, she could be sure that she was the last female in the world he would have allowed himself to respond to. She was a member of his household, his kinswoman by marriage, and a pert, bad-tempered, troublesome chit besides!

Fiend take her! Where was she?

“Caroline!”

If she had but known it, he was as appalled by what had sprung to life between them as she obviously was. Since Davey’s conception in a moment of devil-inspired weakness, he had deliberately turned his back on the desires of the flesh. Recognizing lust as his besetting sin, as well as the author of most of his earthly troubles, he had vowed not to succumb to temptation again.

And so far he had not. Resisting Elizabeth had been no challenge. She had held scant appeal for him for years; only a shamefully strong physical hunger for a willing female body, even
her
willing female body, had brought him into her bed to conceive his sons. Afterward, when he realized the true measure of the depth to which his carnality had caused him to sink, he was sickened at his own degradation.

“Caroline!”

Yet in the eyes of God and man, Elizabeth had been his wife. That had precluded him from taking any other woman to his bed. It shocked him now to realize that he had been six years celibate. Six years without
the comfort of a woman’s flesh enfolding him! His wife was two years in her grave; he should look about him for another, and then he could indulge his one vice until it no longer bedeviled him.

’Twas an obvious solution, but his mind rebelled at the thought of saddling himself with another wife. His experience of marriage had been such as would put any rational man off it for life.

“Caroline!”

Yet he had never really intended to remain celibate for the remainder of his days. Perhaps, in the winter, when he was healed and there was less work to be done, he would make a trip to Boston. Loose women could be had for the price of a coin in the larger township, and he could appease the hidden baseness of his nature with no one whose opinion he cared for being any the wiser.

After all, he was a single man again. ’Twas not so very great a sin.

And between them, his brothers and Caroline could look after John and Davey very well.

For six years he had denied himself. Caroline was beautiful, and very, very feminine. No wonder her attraction for him was so strong.

But he was older now, far older and far wiser than he had been fifteen years before when he had wed Elizabeth. Then he was a randy youth with far more sexuality than sense. Now he was a man, who knew that all acts, for good or ill, must be paid for. If he allowed his body to rule his head where Caroline was concerned, it would cost him a mouth-watering cook, an indefatigable housekeeper, a skilled nurse, and a mother-figure
for his sons who came with no strings of permanency attached. The only other way to acquire such a paragon would be to wed one. And that he would not do.

“Caroline!”

But demon lust, now that time and circumstances had conspired to rouse the sleeping beast, would not, he feared, rest again until it was slaked. He would just have to keep his personal cross under tight rein until he could get away to Boston and rectify the problem.

The devil of it was that in his present invalided state there was no escaping Caroline. She would be in daily close contact with him until he healed. For his sanity’s sake, it was necessary to convince her, and himself as well, that the heat that had flared between them had been the natural result of too great a degree of physical proximity, and nothing else.

He desired her simply because she was a woman; certainly he did not desire her because she was Caroline.

If she would only condescend to come upstairs, he would tell her that. And in so doing would completely banish from his mind the knowledge that her skin had felt just as he had imagined it would: like the velvety soft petals of a white rose.

“Caroline!”

Suddenly she was there in the doorway, her face cold and stiff as she carefully did not quite look at him. The fine white skin of her face no longer bore the faintest trace of tears. Her elegantly modeled features were composed, and her soft pink lips were firmly compressed into a no-nonsense line. Her crow-black hair, which her weeping had left in a most appealing
disarray, had been freshly brushed and confined in a thick knot at her nape. But if, as appeared to be the case, she had done her best to render herself plain, she had not succeeded. Despite her scraped-back hair and deliberately thinned lips, she was delectable. His body responded to her presence quite independently of his mind.

Thank the Lord for the protection of the quilt, that she could not see! Feeling a guilty heat steal up his face, Matt willed the embarrassment away.

“It took you long enough!” he grumbled, his mind focused more on his problem and its source than on what he was saying.

That earned him a fulminating glare. As she stood there slaying him with her eyes, it occurred to him that she’d changed her gown as well as her hairstyle since that morning. The blue silk that had felt so smooth under his fingertips had been replaced with a gown of dark green serge. Though slightly overlarge, it was becoming, as were all her clothes, no matter how outlandishly they were colored or styled. But he imagined that this particular garment would feel scratchy to the touch. Which, of course, was probably why she had chosen it.

Not that the changed dress, which was clearly intended to rebuff, was necessary. He would not be touching her again. But she could not know that until he told her so.

“I’m not an animal, or a child, to be coerced by a shout!” Her voice was as hostile as her eyes. Her fingers were clenched so tightly on the edges of the tray she carried that her knuckles showed white.

“I was not trying to coerce you. I was trying to get you up here!”

“You’ve succeeded.” The iciness of her reply was matched by the ramrod stiffness of her spine. Matt’s eyes followed her as she marched around the bed to set the tray on the bedside table. Even all pokered up, she was a beautiful, desirable woman. He’d thought so from the first, and he thought so, with an almost painful physicality, now. Until he’d held her, all soft and warm and weeping, in his arms, he had not realized how much the ice-over-fire contradiction of her appealed to his senses. He’d wanted her that morning—dear God in heaven, how he’d wanted her!—and to his dismay he discovered that he wanted her still. The feel of her, the shape and scent of her, the sensation of her breasts pressing into his chest and her legs against his and her hands on his skin, were imprinted on his brain. The memory assailed him and made him grit his teeth.

Watching her as she angrily rattled bowl and mug, Matt exercised iron control and willed the shameful thoughts away. What he had to remind himself, over and over and over until his body was as convinced as his mind, was that any woman would do. It need not be Caroline.…

“Lift up.”

Still he was not quite prepared when Caroline turned from the table to lean over him, shoving a second and then a third pillow beneath his head as he obediently lifted it. Her scent, a mixture of spice and woman, overwhelmed him, setting his head momentarily awhirl. His loins ached; his fists clenched; in a
desperate effort to defend himself, he refused to breathe. Not while she was so near. He would not allow himself to make the same mistake a second time, especially when her intentions toward him were so clearly innocent. With the best will in the world, he could not blame his stumble on the path of righteousness on the lures of a Jezebel. From the first she had been blameless in her dealings with him. ’Twas he who must bear the onus for thinking sin.

From the look of her as she punched his topmost pillow into shape, it was certain that she wished she were pummeling his person instead. It was doubtful—no, sure, rather—that she would not listen to so much as a word he had to say. But if he could not convince himself of the innocence of his feelings toward her, it was imperative to both his comfort and peace of mind that he at least convince her. Life would be much simpler if she would continue to treat him with the same ease she had seemed to feel before this morning’s idiocy.

Knowing that it was probably a mistake to touch her, and knowing too that if he didn’t seize this chance of insuring her attention, she would in all probability plunk the tray down on his lap and sail out of the room, not to be seen again until dusk, he caught her wrist.

For a moment she jerked angrily against his hold, which he refused to release. Her eyes were as yellow as those of that blasted cat of hers; if she’d had a tail, he imagined she’d be lashing it.

“Let me go.”

“Caroline …”

“I said, let me go!”

“Will you just listen, please?” Desperation quickened his words. “I did not intend what happened this morning any more than you did. That—feeling—that arose between us was not by design on either of our parts, but rather because nature prompts men and women to desire each other. ’Tis no blame attached to you for it—or to me.”

That attempt at smoothing her down, soothing as it was meant to be, clearly missed its objective by a mile. Her eyes flashed at him; her wrist jerked again in his hold.

“Desire—you? I assure you, I do—did—no such thing.” Outrage quivered in her voice.

“If you will have it so,” he said, not wanting to fan her anger by arguing the point. “Then I will not contradict you.”

“ ’Twas you who—who …” She yanked at her wrist. Matt tightened his grip. Her face was flushed with anger, her eyes bright with it. Her brows, which were black and silky and straight, formed a displeased vee above the bridge of her small nose. As she spoke, he could see her even white teeth, and beyond them her tongue. It was the deep pink of raspberries, and shiny wet. A bolt of heat shot through him at the thought of how it might taste. Shifting uncomfortably, he dragged his eyes away from her mouth.

“Desired you?” In his befuddled state, truth was the only defense he dared trust. “Aye, I’ll admit it. Why not? You’re beautiful to look at, and made as God intended women to be made. When you threw yourself
“I did not,” she interrupted wrathfully, “throw myself into your bed! Your monstrosity of a dog knocked me there!”