Born in a Small Town Page 21

  She’d known it would be him, and yet still she felt a ripple of purely sexual response to his presence.

  “Can we talk?” he asked, creases seemingly worn overnight between his brows. “Don’t say no. Please. I just need to understand.”

  Wordlessly Melanie stood aside, letting him pass her, his big body so close she smelled aftershave and the chill of the air.

  He walked to her sewing table and touched the silk. “Beautiful,” he murmured, then turned to face her. “Like you.”

  “I’m far from beautiful,” Melanie said uncomfortably. “I’m…rather ordinary.”

  “Not to me.” His voice had the texture of sandpaper. “Tell me why you won’t take a chance on me.”

  “I told you.” She didn’t move from her stance by the door. Her hands were squeezed together painfully. “From the very beginning I told you. I’ve spent my whole life never belonging anywhere. I will not live that way again, and I won’t do that to Angie.”

  “Your childhood was so unhappy?” Kevin asked in that same voice, the one that would have scraped her palms if she could have grasped it.

  “Unhappy?” Strangely, she felt taken aback.

  “Not entirely. Of course not. But I hated the moves—”

  He interrupted. “Were your parents happy? Did they love each other? You?”

  “I…yes,” she whispered, then repeated more strongly. “Yes. They were excited about a transfer. A new place. Sacramento? They talked about day trips to gold-rush ghost towns and the Sierra Mountains. Germany? The Alps, the Rhine, beer fests.” The child in her still resented the sparkle in her mother’s voice as she’d tried to coax her eldest daughter to share their anticipation. Yet the adult Melanie couldn’t help reluctantly seeing Kevin’s point: that perhaps she was blanking out the happy times and focusing entirely on her childish fear of the unknown, her certainty that she would never make a new friend. She continued, “I’m glad I saw the Alps and skied at Squaw Valley. But I would have traded all our adventures for the chance to grow up feeling secure, knowing I’d have a best friend to whisper with at school, that if I got lost…” She stopped, knowing how nonsensical that sounded.

  “Knowing I wouldn’t get lost just walking home.”

  Of course, he heard what she hadn’t finished saying. “You did get lost.”

  “Yes. In… I don’t remember where.” She didn’t want to remember, had never even asked her mother about the episode. “All I know is, nobody spoke English and a strange man was following me, and…” She had been terrified. “I had bad dreams for years.”

  A frown gathered on his brow. “You won’t marry me because you had nightmares as a child about being lost in a strange place.”

  “No! That isn’t why I won’t marry you!” He was deliberately misunderstanding. “You lied to me. How can I marry a man I can’t trust?”

  Kevin swore. “Melanie, I will never lie to you again. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.”

  “You already have,” she said starkly.

  “Give me a chance.”

  How she ached to do just that! To gamble that he would never lie again, would try to make her happy.

  “A chance to do what?” she asked, just above a whisper. “Take me to dinner again? Or put a wedding ring on my finger?”

  “Can we at least keep seeing each other?” He was begging and, typically for a man, was angry to have to be. “We don’t need to make decisions about the future now.”

  “Which is certainly your preference.” Hearing her own waspish voice, Melanie wished she could snatch back the spiteful remark, make it unsaid. That had been her anger speaking.

  Kevin stalked toward her, his face darkening. “Dammit, Melanie!” he said between clenched teeth. “Is considering a change of career in your thirties evidence of instability? Unreliability? You seem to have found your vocation rather late in life for you to be sneering at me.”

  “I didn’t mean…” Melanie faltered.

  “Didn’t you?” he asked softly. “I suggest you watch yourself. You’re going to stifle your daughter.”

  Her chin shot up in outrage. “Don’t you dare criticize how I choose to raise my child.”

  Still in that silky voice, he said, “Is that what I would have gotten as her stepfather, too? Butt out?”

  Actually she’d thought how wonderful it would be to have someone like him to consult, to offer another perspective, to lean on those days when parenting was so terribly lonely. But her temper wouldn’t let her admit it.

  “If I thought you were the man I wanted to marry, I would have trusted you to be Angie’s father. So the point is moot, isn’t it?”

  He visibly flinched, a muscle jerking in his cheek.

  Shame cooled her anger. “I’m sorry.” She made herself say it. “That was cruel.”

  “I would have been good to Angie.”

  Her throat closed. “I know,” she whispered.

  Kevin reached out and gripped her arms. “I don’t want to lose you, Melanie.”

  She felt as if she was saying goodbye to any chance of romance or marriage. The man she’d thought she wanted wouldn’t be Kevin. Could she really promise forever to someone kind and steady, who liked to stay home evenings and watch football, who probably had a paunch and no curiosity about the world beyond the Elk Springs city limits? No. After Kevin…no.

  She was weakening and knew it. Deliberately she remembered one apartment where she’d lived with Ryan. The cockroaches and the freezer that incessantly needed defrosting, and the neighbors who had angry visitors at strange hours. The elementary school down the street with graffiti-covered walls and no grass.

  Or the last move, when she’d just painted the kitchen a soft lemon yellow and made curtains. But Ryan had come home, grinned triumphantly and announced, “I’m on my way up, baby!” and they’d had to pack everything they owned that night. The twelve-hour drive with Angie crying in the back seat and Melanie with no idea where they’d sleep that night or what the new apartment would look like.

  Kevin saw both her weakening and her ultimate decision on her face, because he let out a low animal sound and pulled her to him. His kiss was desperate, hungry.

  She melted into the kiss, grasping the front of his parka to hold on as her knees buckled. Anger and regret seemed to have burned away the restraint that had kept their kisses polite. Now his tongue forced its way into her mouth, and she tangled it with hers.

  For one moment Kevin lifted his head. His eyes were nearly black, his skin seeming to be stretched taut across his cheekbones, his whole face blazing with intensity. “I need you,” he said in a raw voice that made her tremble inside. “Don’t do this to us, Melanie.”

  Her every nerve ending was alive. She could not seem to pull back from him, though the hard thrust of his body against her belly made his desire plain.

  Heaven help her, but she needed him, too, if only this once. “I want you,” she managed, though tremulously. “I can’t marry you, but…I do want you.”

  Another guttural sound, and he’d lifted her onto the sewing table and laid her back on the peach silk. A pin pricked her, but it felt unimportant, nothing compared to the hands lifting her shirt and unfastening her bra to free her breasts. Nothing compared to the hard smooth wall of his chest beneath her palms as she slid them under his sweater. Nothing compared to his hot urgent mouth, to the way her thighs parted to urge him closer.

  His mouth on her breast was another sensation of such clarity that she wondered dizzily if she had ever really felt sexual need before. Her back arched and she made muffled sounds that should have embarrassed her. She was the one tugging at his buckle, trying frantically to free him from his jeans, though he still wore his parka.

  Perhaps he had more presence of mind than she did, because he pulled back long enough to shed some clothes and to peel her jeans from her legs. For a moment she was chilled and her knees clenched together; what was she doing, desperately trying to couple with a man on her cutting table? On top o
f a precious bolt of shot silk?

  But the moment he ripped his sweater over his head and she saw his bare chest and shoulders, pale red-gold hair shimmering against an expanse of tanned skin, muscles moving smoothly beneath, the rush of sexual heat seared her inhibitions. Once he put his mouth against her calf, kissed and nipped and then trailed it higher, she lost any last ability to resist.

  With a moan, she parted her legs again, silk fisted in her hands at her sides, and begged him to…no, not kiss her there, not this time. This time, she wanted him inside her.

  He must have been carrying condoms, because suddenly he was putting one on with shaking hands. Then he rose over her, blocking out the world. Her fingernails bit into his shoulders as he thrust, a long slide that stretched her in ways she’d forgotten, or never experienced, she didn’t know. She only knew that having him buried inside her was painful and exquisite, and she didn’t want him to leave, even to pull back. He smothered her protests with kisses and pulled away only to surge deep inside her again. And again and again, until her body convulsed in pleasure so intense she understood at last why this moment was called “the little death.”

  She held Kevin as he moved a final time, as he groaned and she felt the ripples deep inside her. For a timeless moment, Melanie floated in a blissful sea of physical satisfaction, of tenderness, of love.

  And then another pin pricked her hip, and this time she felt it, so sharp she knew it had drawn blood.

  Just as she knew nothing had changed. She couldn’t let it—not for her sake, and not for Angie’s.

  But for just a few more minutes she could revel in his weight on her, his warmth, the slam of his heartbeat, the way he murmured her name. For just a few more minutes she could pretend that this was the first time.

  Not the only time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HIS CROSS-COUNTRY SKIS whispered on the snow. His rasp of breath was the only sound in a world cloaked in white. No, not entirely. To one side, a whirr made him turn his head in time to glimpse a flash of brilliant blue wings against the white and deep-green backdrop.

  Scott had recommended this trail, a long easy rise to a ridge where, he promised, Kevin would see the valley and the town of Elk Springs spread out below him. Kevin had canceled his morning classes and counted on being alone.

  His muscles ached pleasantly, his lungs expanded to take in deep drafts of cold air. Another sound, and he saw the brown rump of a deer bounding away at the sight of him. This was where he was happiest—alone, in the woods. His mother used to shake her head and swear he would have been one of those unshaven mountain men if he’d been born in another century. He’d thought she might be right. He had never needed other people in the way even Scott had.

  The idea of “other people” skimmed Kevin’s mind, took form and face, a tumble of dark hair, passion-clouded eyes, soft mouth, breasts as white as snow. Kevin gritted his teeth and tried to wall her out. In this solitude he could unclutter his mind, understand what was most important to him.

  Of course he instantly saw Melanie again, this time as she told him with quiet finality that no matter what had just happened, she still couldn’t marry him. She didn’t even know if it was a good idea to keep seeing him.

  “It hurts,” she had said, in a small husky voice that cracked. “I’m so tempted to let myself love you and forget what it might mean. Maybe Ryan and I would have stayed happy if I hadn’t hated our life so much. Maybe I soured our marriage with my unhappiness. I won’t go through that again. I won’t, Kevin. Don’t ask me.”

  Trying to leave the memory behind, he skied faster, planting the poles with vicious stabs, driving himself in a near sprint. He wanted to be angry, contemptuous of a woman who wouldn’t take risks. But how could he? They’d had great sex. Okay. Otherwise, all he was offering her was an open-ended future that must read to her like a rerun of her first marriage. He’d said it himself: Park Service housing was often pretty seedy. It was usually miles from the nearest town, making a long bus ride for schoolchildren. Friendships evaporated the moment you were reassigned.

  It was the perfect life for a man who craved solitude, shunned commitment, cared more about the health of an acre of forest than why his neighbor suddenly looked hungover every morning and why only one car was now parked in their driveway.

  It was the worst possible life for a woman who craved community, longed for ties of friendship and family, wanted neighbors who knew one another’s business.

  They were what they were. Clearly not meant for each other.

  Kevin was racing now, muscles burning, his breath near sobs. He was where he loved to be. This was all he needed. Anguish filled his chest. Slamming pulse, lungs frantically snatching at oxygen. Heart breaking.

  He burst from the trees. A last steep crest covered with new-fallen snow lay before him, a sky as huge and achingly blue as any he’d ever seen arching above it. Making a crosshatch with his skis, leaving behind V prints, he climbed with scarcely broken stride. This was what he needed. All he needed. All he’d ever wanted.

  With a harsh cry he topped the ridge and saw the spectacular sweep of country beyond. The high desert land, dusted with snow far below him, stretched as far as his eye could see, broken only by the meandering Deschutes River and the new—in geologic terms—lava cones that made the soil rust red.

  And by the town sprawled below the forested foothills. Elk Springs.

  His gaze didn’t hunt for the horizon or study the petite lava cones that looked like scoops of ice cream dumped on the flat landscape. He was too busy seeking out familiar landmarks. His gaze didn’t pause at the community-college grounds above town, the high school on the other side, the redbrick public-safety building where his brother’s wife was chief of police. There, that stretch of green, was where he and Melanie had walked along the river at night, where he had kissed her. He couldn’t make out individual houses, but he found her neighborhood, her street.

  Always before, when he drove into town—any town—for groceries, on the way back to the park he would leave behind with relief the last stoplight. He’d shake his head and wonder why anyone would want to live there.

  Today, for the first time in his life, he looked down on a town and saw home. He stared until his eyes burned and he had to blink hard.

  Would living in that old house with Melanie be so bad? She had a big yard with bird feeders and a tire swing—he remembered with fondness a tire swing his father had hung from an old elm that had probably long since been felled by disease. He had always wanted a dog, something that wasn’t possible when you worked in the national parks. He had a feeling Angie would back him on that one.

  He could commit to setting up the four-year program at the college. Kevin admitted to himself that he was getting a kick out of teaching. And he’d always enjoyed the challenge of planning new displays or programs. When this one was up and running like clockwork…well, that was years away. Maybe he’d still be content. Maybe Melanie would be willing to consider a move then, when Angie was grown or nearly so.

  Leaning on his poles, Kevin bowed his head. His solitude and the wilderness weren’t enough anymore. Every time he went hiking or cross-country skiing, he wished Melanie was with him.

  And Angie. He wanted to be a father to the kid, the kind of father she’d never had. He could tell she had liked it when he helped coach her soccer team. She’d never given any sign of resenting him.

  Lifting his head, Kevin looked down at Elk Springs, spread beneath him like a topographic map he could touch. His heart swelling in his chest, he wished he was there and not at a dreamlike distance looking on.

  Right this minute it seemed to him that was what he’d spent a lifetime doing: looking on as other people lived. Maybe that was what his discontentment this past couple of years had been about. Not the abuse of the wilderness by the great American public, but his own loneliness. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to know why his neighbor was hungover, hadn’t wanted to talk about the wife who had gone for good, because if
he looked too closely, he’d see himself: someone who came home to an empty soulless house at night, who preferred a canopy of stars because it had a glory his own life lacked.

  Maybe he’d come to Elk Springs looking for more than space to think, a clearing to rest his head at night for a while. Maybe he’d been looking for home.

  Why hadn’t he realized sooner that he had found exactly what he needed and wanted most?

  With sudden decision, Kevin swung his skis back the way he’d come and shoved off, crouching to take advantage of the steep downward slope. He hadn’t quite figured out how to convince Melanie of his change of heart—but he couldn’t wait to start trying.

  MELANIE CLANGED the lid back onto the garbage can. She could have hand-washed the crumpled stained silk—but she didn’t want to. Discarding it felt symbolic, as if she had put into the garbage can her own foolishness, as well as a bolt of fabric.

  Hurrying back into the house she’d thought was still empty, she bumped right into Angie.

  “Oomph!” Holding her daughter up, Melanie staggered against a kitchen chair. “Oh, my gracious! I’m sorry! Are you all right?”

  Angie blinked. “I think so.”

  “You’re home from school.” Brilliant.

  “It’s three-thirty,” the eight-year-old pointed out with irrefutable logic.

  “Is it really?” Her gaze went to the clock on the stove. “The day’s flown.” Liar, liar, pants on fire. Actually the day had crept on hands and knees. She had started cutting out the Edwardian dress for a customer, using a lemon-yellow silk, instead. Her concentration had been so poor she’d made several mistakes that wasted fabric and twice stabbed herself with pins, bleeding on the silk, besides. It was a relief to call it quits.

  Angie dropped her book bag on a chair and headed for the refrigerator. “Is Kevin coming to dinner?” she asked, taking out the milk. “He hasn’t been here all week.”