True to the Law (18 page)

Tru pressed her hand to her mouth as she yawned. She set her glass aside, but she didn’t get up. She was physically tired but still too alert to find sleep. She shifted in her chair to get more of the stove’s heat and reached for
Oliver
Twist
. It dropped like a stone the moment she heard the back door open.

“Tru?”

Her heart was in her throat as she shot to her feet. “Stay right where you are, Cobb Bridger!” She picked up the lamp and started for the kitchen. “What happened to knocking?”

“I did.” He crossed himself. “Swear.”

Tru had only one free hand to set on her hip, but she used it effectively. He was already turning to hang up his coat and hat by the time she cornered him. “Not very loudly.”

“Loud enough, I thought. When you didn’t answer, I tried the door. It wasn’t locked. I thought that meant you were expecting me. Was I wrong?”

“It’s never locked.”

He stepped into the kitchen at the same time he asked, “Do you want me to leave?”

Did she? Hadn’t she just been thinking about him? Tru raised the lamp higher. The glow from it highlighted his features and burnished the gold threads in his hair. After he’d taken off his hat, he’d swept a hand through his hair, but it was still tousled. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to smooth it or give it a proper yank.

“Let me take that,” he said, reaching for the lamp. “It doesn’t look steady.”

It wasn’t. Tru realized her hand was trembling.

Cobb lifted the lamp and slipped past her. “That’s better. Now you can rest that hand on your other hip.”

That was when Tru understood she was posed like a teapot. She blew out a long breath and lowered her hands to her sides. “Do you want to sit down?”

“Yes. The parlor?”

“You know how I feel about—”

He turned back the wick on the lamp. The flame sputtered, then was extinguished, and the kitchen was blanketed by darkness. “Better?”

“Hardly,” she said.

“Give it a moment.”

She followed the sound of Cobb placing the lamp on the table. She could make out the darker shadow that was the breadth and length of him. “Close your eyes,” he said, and his voice was very close to her ear. Tru didn’t move, but she did close her eyes. She felt his lips brush her temple and wondered that he had found that sensitive spot without searching for it. Tru placed a hand on his chest. “I don’t think—”

“Don’t think,” he said. He kissed the hollow below her ear.

Tru tilted her head away but that merely made a present of her neck. Cobb did not require a light, she realized, not when he had the tracking instincts of an Army scout. A shiver sprinted up her spine. He responded to it by slipping an arm around her back and pressing her closer.

“The parlor?” he asked again.

“All right.”

Cobb swung her into his arms. Her arms flew to his shoulders for purchase as her feet were lifted out from under her.

He carried her into the parlor and lowered her onto the sofa. He followed her down, sitting near her knees as she angled herself more comfortably but also away from him. Cobb set one hand on the back of the sofa and the other on the arm, creating a loose cage about her shoulders. He leaned forward. “Do you want me to close the curtains?”

Another ember popped in the stove. Firelight slipped between the vertical bars of the grate. The glow threw hulking shadows onto the wall, but inside this room, she and Cobb were largely invisible. “Leave them,” she said. What she meant was,
I don’t want you to leave me
.

Tru realized she was holding her breath. In her mind it was as if Cobb was suspended above her, hovering, watching her, waiting. She searched his face. His expression remained maddeningly remote, and then she realized he was also holding his breath.

Tru lifted her face. She cupped his roughly stubbled cheek in her palm. Their breaths mingled, and then she touched his lips and his breath was hers. He came with her when she leaned back into the curve of the sofa. His arms folded around her shoulders, slipped under them. He cradled the back of her head in his hand. His fingers stroked soft, golden strands of hair.

That first kiss tempted Tru to want more. The tentative nature of it faded into certainty, and she claimed the corner of his mouth, then his jaw, and finally touched the tip of her tongue to his ear. The sound that he made at the back of his throat was hers, she thought. She was responsible for that.

Slipping one hand between them, Tru tugged on the belt of her robe. Her fingers tangled with Cobb’s as he moved to help her. He yanked the belt from around her waist and tossed it over the back of the sofa. He slid his hand under her robe. Her cotton nightgown was an insubstantial barrier to the heat of his palm. His thumb made a pass at the underside of her breast.

Tru felt her nipple stand erect. The fabric of her gown brushed against it as she shifted. Pleasure rippled through her. She could not get close enough to him. She opened her mouth wider and deepened the kiss.

Cobb followed her lead, matching her hunger because it was real for him, too. He hadn’t lied when he told her he had been thinking about her mouth. Hell, he was envious of the fork she put between her lips, jealous of the crumb of apple tart that lingered at the corner of her mouth, and damned resentful that it was her tongue that darted out to lick it away and not his own.

Trouble, he reminded himself. Deep trouble. And then he surrendered to it.

Tru felt a change in him. She couldn’t have said that he was holding himself back before, but she knew it now. Whatever he had been resisting was gone. She slowly raised one knee. It pulled her nightgown taut until she tugged on the fabric. He ran his hand up and down her leg from ankle to knee, each pass a bit longer, a fraction slower, than the one before. When he finally crested her knee, his palm glided with infinite care down the slope of her inner thigh.

Tru sucked in a breath as he released her mouth. She thought she might have said “please,” but the word sounded guttural and unintelligible to her own ears. She might have said anything, meant anything.

Cobb laid his hand over her mons. Her hips jerked once, and then she lay still. He watched her face, her eyes. Her splendid mouth parted. He saw the tip of her tongue peep out. She was concentrating. Good.

Cobb slipped a finger between those other moist lips. She was slick with dew. He opened her wider. She made a little sound, bit her lower lip, but her eyes remained on his, and when his finger went inside her, she shivered in a way that had nothing at all to do with the temperature.

Tru found the buttons on his vest and fumbled with them. She tugged at his shirt, pulling it up. His undershirt and drawers impeded her quest to touch his flesh. He had on more clothes than she.

It was frustrating, but then his fingers began to stir and she could not think of anything beyond what he was doing to her. Of its own accord, her neck arched. She felt her shoulders press against the wide curve of the sofa’s arm as the small of her back lifted. She tilted her hips. It was a brazen gesture, and a helpless one, she thought—when she
could
think. Cobb had turned her nerves inside out and was exposing them to sensations both delicate and sharply edged. She no longer knew if she was offering herself or simply, selfishly, acting on the demands of her own body.

Tru stretched, feline-like. She felt her calves tighten and tingle, then just tighten. Without warning, the long, smooth muscles in her left calf knotted into a painful ball.

“Oh! Oh, my! Ahh!” Tru pushed the heel of her hand into Cobb’s shoulder and began to wriggle out from under him. He did not make it difficult for her. Although he blinked several times, as a man might if he were disoriented, he slowly sat up and slid away. Tru scrambled awkwardly to her knees, flexing her foot as she pushed at her nightgown. She could hear him breathing; it was neither loud nor labored, but measured, as though he were trying to gain control.

“No,” she said. “You don’t understand.” She scooted toward him on her knees and laid one hand on his shoulder. She used the other to knead the painful cramp in her calf. “This room. The sofa. It’s the sofa. It’s too short.”

Cobb hunched forward, and rested his forearms on his knees. She was right about the sofa. It was neither long enough nor wide enough to accommodate them comfortably or in any other sensible manner, and the floor was an even poorer alternative.

“You might have said something when I set you on it . . . but you sure as hell should have mentioned it before you hiked your shift all the way to . . . to
France
.”

Tru was still on her knees, reaching behind her to rub her calf. “All the way to France? Did you really say that?”

Cobb stood and moved to the stove. To keep his back to her, he pretended to warm his hands. “Yes. I really did.” He thought she might be smiling, but he didn’t turn to find out. It was too much just now to know if she was regarding him with the same quietly amused smile she reserved for errant schoolboys. He already felt as awkward as one.

Tru eased her aching leg over the side of the sofa and kept the other one under her. She pulled her robe closed. She remembered that he had thrown the belt over the back of the sofa, but she made no attempt to get it. “I’m sorry, Cobb. I know how it seems, but you don’t know how it
is.
”

“I should have remembered you’re a minister’s daughter.”

“It’s not for you to remember. I never forget it.” Tru flexed her foot again. “I had a cramp in my leg. That’s why I pushed you away. That’s why I said the sofa was too short. The parlor is not where we should be. My room is, and I am going there. You can come or go as you please but if you ever hope to see France, Mr. Bridger, you’ll want to follow me.”

Tru stood, tested her leg, and limped lightly toward the staircase. Halfway up the steps, she looked back at him. Firelight limned Cobb’s still figure. He had not turned away. She was not confident that he would.

Once she was in her room, Tru lighted the lamp on her night table and set a match to the kindling in the fireplace. When the flames spread, she added wood to take the chill away. She closed the curtains at both windows, lingering in front of each just long enough to see that, except for waning moonlight and the Pennyroyal Saloon and Hotel, Bitter Springs was shuttered for the night.

Tru laid her robe over the back of a chair and turned over the covers on her bed. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, she massaged her calf again as she toed off her slippers.

Creak
. Tru cocked her head to gauge the direction of the sound. Not Cobb, she thought, but the house settling. She crawled into bed but did not lie down. Putting a pillow behind her back, she leaned against the walnut headboard and drew her knees close to her chest. She sat huddled in just that posture as she reviewed what had happened below stairs. Most troubling was that she could not decide if she was feeling relieved or sorry for herself. It did not seem possible that she could be harboring both, but the uncomfortable pressure in her chest was an indicator that perhaps she was.

“Am I still welcome?”

Tru’s head snapped up. Cobb Bridger was there in her open doorway, leaning against the jamb, looking for all the world as if he had been there far longer than she had been aware. How was it that she had been alert to the settling sounds of the house and hadn’t heard him climbing the stairs?

“Yes,” she said. “You’re still welcome.”

His nod was short, almost imperceptible, but his long exhale was easily heard. He didn’t move from the doorway. “I’m sorry.”

Tru smiled faintly and remained skeptical. “Do you even know what you’re apologizing for?”

“For not trusting you. For not hearing you out.”

“I didn’t like that.”

He did not make excuses for it. “Is it enough?”

“It is.”

When she welcomed him with a smile
not
reserved for young rascals, Cobb thought she was being more gracious than he had any right to expect. He stepped into the room, shut the door with the heel of his boot, and began to remove his jacket. “How is your leg?”

“Tender where the knot was but otherwise fine.”

“Let me see.”

Cobb tossed his jacket on top of her robe and sat down on the bed. Tru lifted the quilts high enough to get her bothersome leg out from under them. Cobb inched closer. He raised her leg the few inches necessary to slide beneath it, and then rested her calf on his lap. His fingers curled under her calf and searched along the length of it. He felt her wince when he found the tender spot.

“You’re still tight here,” he said.

Tru whistled through her teeth as he kneaded the muscle. Her fingers curled in the bedclothes.

Cobb gentled the massage. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I thought I did.”

He remembered it a little differently than that, but he said, “All right. I suppose my first instinct would have been to push you out of the way, too. Do you remember where we left off?”

Tru felt a contraction in every part of her body
except
where Cobb’s fingers were working over her leg. Her throat was so tight that she could barely move words past it. “I remember.” She put her fist against her lips and coughed. “I remember,” she said in a voice that at least sounded like her own. “But I don’t think we should start there.”