Jennifer Greene - Man From Tennessee

He was there, in the shadow of the doorway, perhaps a hundred yards away. All in black, the sling gone. She couldn’t see his face or any of him clearly. But she knew it was Kern. She dropped the blossom, instinctively digging her hands in her pockets again. It was an effort to switch off that deliciously sensual mood and convert it to a cool, polite smile. “Kern?”

He started walking toward her, his eyes meeting hers in the darkness. A knot tightened in her chest. He looked so damned primitive, black on black, his eyes glinting silver. As he came closer, she was desperately trying to come up with some polite, safe conversation.

But he didn’t talk. He just kept coming. Like the night closing in and an illusion of slow-motion time, he walked right up to her. The fingers of his left hand threaded through her hair and gently tugged. Her face was raised to moonlight, her lips already parted in shock.

He blocked out the stars, moon and sky when his head bent to hers. His arms cloaked her chilled skin in vibrant warmth. His lips were soft, tantalizingly sensual next to the bristling texture of the beard. Her neck arched back, cradled in his left hand, her breast pressed against his chest.

It was so completely unexpected. She was still trying to think of polite things to say, still trying to pretend that the mountain night hadn’t touched her with the promise of old dreams. His lips brushed hers, over and over, and then sank in thirstily. Her mouth was the vessel, open to the erotic exploration of his tongue, the sensual touch firing a strange ache and longing inside. For just a moment she was someone else, not the painfully inhibited Trisha who had fled from Kern’s bed. She was just a woman, lost in the chilled night air, reaching out from loneliness to the one person who knew all about loneliness.

“Tish…”

The soft lips left hers, trailed to the sensitive skin of her neck. His fingers roamed slowly from the nape of her neck to her shoulder, gradually seeking the silky skin of her throat beneath the blouse’s fabric. She heard a murmur escape from her lips and felt a frightening weakness as if she needed to hold on. Her hands found his waist, pressed into his flesh, and suddenly her heart was beating rapidly. He smelled so warm. None of it made sense. Confused, she tried to draw back.

“No, no. Not yet, Tish,” he murmured. His mouth covered hers just as his palm covered her heartbeat, then edged just inches over to claim the uptilted orb of her breast. Voltage shocked through her at his touch. Her breasts were small; suddenly they felt huge, almost painfully swelling in response. Her fingers dug into his skin and suddenly his head lifted from hers. Silvery dark eyes studied her.

She shivered, heard a low moan in the distant trees that reminded her of old fears…of failing him. Of a hundred embraces that had ended in disaster, even if they had not been quite like this one. But to put herself in that place again… She jerked back, clutching the collar of her blouse together.

Her voice quavered. “I don’t believe you did that.”

“And I don’t believe how much you’ve changed.”

She bit her lip as he followed her back into the house. Only in the dimly lit kitchen did she glance back at him. He just stood in the doorway, his one hand loosely massaging the back of his neck as if he were tired. But the look in his eyes wasn’t at all tired. The look in his eyes frightened her. He knew she had responded; he knew it wasn’t the same.

She pushed her hair back from her face and turned from him. If she were home, she would have had a cup of tea. After what just happened, she wondered shakily if he stocked any of the mountain-made whiskey.

She had had no dinner, but lunch had been eaten late on the road, and she knew she couldn’t handle food right now anyway. She just needed something to put her to sleep, to settle her nerves. Grateful for his Lowery upbringing, Trisha found not whiskey in the cupboard but the finest Cognac. “Do you want a glass?”

He nodded silently. She poured for both of them, handed him his glass and then backed deliberately to the counter by the door. There was less than an inch of fluid in her glass. She gulped half of it, staring out the dark window, and then moved resolutely toward the door.

“We’re going to talk about it, Tish.” His voice was low, as gentle as it was unmistakably a warning.

“No. Please, no.”

She took two more steps toward the door but his rapid pace beat hers. It was Kern who pushed the swinging door so she could pass through. A halo of light from the living room lit the hall. “I’ll get your suitcase.”

“I can get it.” The green bag was still by the front door, carted in when Trisha had brought Julia’s things.

Kern ignored her, snatching it up with his left hand, motioning her up the stairs. His features were taut, and she moved ahead of him, an absolute mess of confusion inside. What exactly had he wanted to talk about? Kisses? Divorces? She swallowed, and asked, “Are you supposed to be lifting anything?”

“There doesn’t seem to be much in this anyway.”

“One uncrushable dress and a nightgown. I didn’t need much for a day-and-a-half drive,” she said lightly.

The spare bedrooms were directly at the top of the stairs. At the far southern end of the house was the huge master bedroom that would have been theirs. She paused between the first two doors. “I don’t know where you’d like me to stay.”

“There’s a choice of three.” She didn’t at all appreciate the humorous tone in his voice. Still, he stepped ahead of her to switch on the light on the eastern bedroom and set her suitcase down on a chair. “Rhea will have put clean sheets in here. She stayed when I had the concussion.”

“Yes.” Trisha moved to the window, thinking of the other woman taking care of Kern when he was ill. Kern bent to switch on the lamp by the four-poster bed and then moved to the door to switch off the glaring overhead light.

“I’ll check on Mother.” In the shadows she could still see the outline of the scar on his forehead, the way he held his right arm up parallel to his waist as if it were still in the sling. “I’ll be downstairs for a while if you need anything else.”

“Thank you. I didn’t expect…”

His eyes homed in on her slim figure, the golden hair disheveled as much from his own fingers as from the wind. “What didn’t you expect?”

She took a breath. The word came out awkwardly, before she had the chance to think. “Kindness.”

“But then you never did, Tish,” he said evenly. “As I said, we’ll talk about it. But not now.”

She let out a breath when the door closed behind him. In a few minutes she moved, flicking on the light in the adjoining bath. She had a nighttime ritual, as most people did. Her outfit was folded meticulously and placed in the suitcase, the dress taken out for the morrow and hung up. Her face was washed, a violet wisp of a nightgown put on, her hair brushed smooth. Her personality these days demanded order. There would be no rest until everything was put in its place. An idiotic habit, perhaps, but then for a long time loneliness had created insomnia. As she switched off the lamp and curled under strange sheets in the strange room, the neatness habit mocked her. Kern had been messy as all hell at night, his clothes stripped and left wherever they landed when he had been in a hurry to join her in their bedroom.

She sighed, closing her exhausted eyes deliberately, curling her leg just so and her shoulder in a certain pattern to assure sleep. A lump was lodged in her throat, an anguished knot of too many memories in that other bedroom. One short embrace in the night didn’t change that. Only a fool would read something into a few simple kisses. She’d been exhausted, disoriented, not herself, she told herself wearily. Yet the question plagued her long into the night. Did he actually still want her?