Page 29 of The Winter Husband
The truth hit him like a falling tree.
He would never last the winter without kissing her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lucas spent the rest of the day in a daze. He went through the motions of work, fixing the latch on the door, eating the midday meal, plunging into the woods with a hatchet to clear branches from a felled pine. No amount of crisp air could flush the scent of roses from his head. Returning to the cabin in the twilight, he braced himself for the sight of her. Inside, she strode about the place like nothing happened, chattering nonsense about the stew she’d made, like she hadn’t overturned his world with a smile. He kept his head ducked and answered her questions with none of his own. Yes, he was hungry. No, it hadn’t started snowing again. Yes, they had enough wood. He wolfed down the stew to have an excuse for not conversing. He had to get out of this house, away from temptation.
When she sat down across from him with all the grace of a dove alighting, he took a last spoonful of dinner and then bolted up from the table.
“Lucas, stop.”
He already had one hand on his deerskin coat.
“Yesterday, you asked me to read to you.” Marie gestured to a book lying on the hearth chair. “I’ve picked out a story for tonight.”
Her gaze was soft, uncertain. He avoided it by focusing on her long, lovely throat, wondering what that soft skin would feel like under the pressure of his mouth.
No, absolutely not, I can’t stay.
That’s what he meant to say. But the words that came out of his mouth were, “All right.”
A spark lit her eyes. Hope? Delight? The look was a hunter’s arrow, a kill shot.
“Sit, then,” she said, her voice rising in pitch. “I’ll join you in a moment.”
He shuffled to the hearth like a damn schoolboy under a pretty teacher’s spell. The pull he felt toward her made it hard to breathe. Dropping into the padded chair, he let his legs sprawl toward the fire. He would listen for a while, he told himself, and then use the excuse of exhaustion to leave.
Her skirts rustled as she moved about the room, clearing his bowl and spoon before slipping into the seat at the other side of the hearth. He fixed his attention on the shifting color of the flames and tried not to think about the smile that had unhinged him as surely as a winter squall had yanked the latch off the front door. Pages rustled as she opened the book. She started to read, her speech strained, the cadence awkward, but after the turning of a page or two, her voice relaxed. The tale of the giant Gargantua unfurled.
She sounded rapt, absorbed in the story, so he turned his head slightly to observe her unawares. He’d seen Marie dressed in ribbons at Madame Bourdon’s salon. He’d seen her in a linen shift with a knife stuck in her garter. He suspected the version of Marie now before him was the tutored convent girl, her legs tucked up on the seat’s edge as she sat canted on one hip. Her long braid hung over one breast. With her free hand, she toyed with the curled end. In his mind, he unbraided the plait and spread the silky cascade over a pillow. He pressed his nose into its scent.
Suddenly, she stopped reading.
“It’s the end of a chapter.” She looked up with hesitation. “Do you want me to go on?”
He hadn’t absorbed a word she’d said, but he knew the cadence of her voice would haunt his dreams.
“No.” He stood up and rounded the chair to put something solid between them. “I stoked the fire in the barn stove. It should be warm now, so I’ll be off—”
“Lucas?”
Like a gulp of hot brandy, the sound of his name on her lips.
She said, “I’ve been thinking.”
Not as much as I have.
“By the sound of that wind,” she said, “I assume there’s another storm coming?”
“There’s always another storm coming.” On the way back to the cabin, he’d watched a dark belly of clouds shadow the western sky. If his instincts were right, this storm would last for days.
“Then perhaps,” she ventured, “you should sleep in the cabin tonight.”
He tightened his grip on the back of his chair. A rivet dug into his palm, but not so painfully that he could forget about the bed in the other room, the sea of furs, an image of Marie sprawled among them, her arms upraised—
No.
She was just scared, thinking of the opossum.
