Kitabı oku: «The Baby Quilt», sayfa 4
He’d drained the glass of lemonade she’d left for him on her well-scrubbed pine table and was leaning back in one of its straight-backed chairs when she returned and set everything on the table beside him. He was following her every move. She could feel it. But she didn’t let herself meet his eyes. She focused only on the fabric covering his biceps. She’d noticed the snags before. What she hadn’t noticed was the tear in the seam.
“I’ll fix your shirt for you,” she said, leaning over so she could lift his sleeve and see how far up the scrape went.
“Don’t bother. I have another one in the car. Wait a minute,” he muttered when he felt the sleeve scrape his sore skin. “I’ll just take it off.”
Before she could say a word, he’d bent his dark head and grabbed a handful of fabric between his shoulder blades. Seconds later, he dragged the garment over his head.
Emily swallowed hard as he dropped it to his knee. Until two years ago, Daniel had been the only man she’d seen in any state of undress. He’d worked hard and ate well, but his thin build had not been what one would call impressive. Justin’s…was. His shoulders were broad, every corded muscle in his tapering back and carved arms beautifully defined.
She’d seen pictures of statues depicting such beautifully proportioned men. She’d even seen pictures of men themselves in ads for skimpy underwear, though the first few times she’d encountered them while flipping through magazines at Mrs. Clancy’s and at the grocery store, she’d nearly turned pink with embarrassment.
The image of a half-naked man no longer startled her as it once had. Mary Woldridge, a checker at the market who’d become her friend, even said she was no fun to watch at the magazine rack anymore. The real thing, however, was rather disturbing. So was the four-inch-wide swath of bruised, raw and abraded skin that ran from Justin’s biceps to the top of his shoulder. Little splinters were visible between the streaks of blood that had dried and crusted in places, any one of which could have caught on his sleeve with his movements and caused a fresh jolt of discomfort.
He would have been terribly uncomfortable working with Mr. Clancy. But it was the thought of how he’d been hurting while he’d shielded her and her child that had her reaching to touch the skin below his reddened flesh.
“You’re already bruising,” she murmured. “Does it feel like you chipped bone?”
“I don’t think I did anything like that. It just feels a little sore.”
She met his eyes, sympathy in her own as she straightened. She needed more light.
Justin watched her turn away, the soft fabric of her dress shifting against her slender body as she moved across the room. The dress itself was modest to a fault. Demure, he supposed, though it wasn’t a word he recalled ever having reason to use before. The sleeves nearly reached her elbows and her delicate collarbone was barely exposed. But the memory of how she’d looked with the wind molding that fabric to her body had been burned into his brain. All too easily, he could picture the fullness of her high breasts, the curve of her hips, her long, shapely legs.
Thinking of how exquisitely she was shaped beneath that formless garment had his body responding in ways that were not wise to consider in such an intimate space. So he forced his attention to what she was doing as she turned back to the table and touched the match she struck to the wick of the oil lamp she’d set there. Moments later, a bright glow illuminated her lovely face. That light gleamed in her hair, adding shimmers of platinum to shades of silver and gold as she replaced the glass chimney and positioned the lamp near the jar of vividly colored flowers.
With the scrape of wood over scarred pine flooring, Emily tugged a chair next to his and sat down beside him.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?”
He held up the thumb of his left hand. “Just a couple of slivers. I can get them if you have any tweezers.”
She reached toward a gauze pad. “I have a needle,” she told him, pulling out the one she’d brought and sterilizing it in the wick’s flame. “You have them in your arm, too. Here,” she murmured, replacing the chimney once more. “Let me see.”
His bare chest was terribly distracting. Trying not to think of how incredibly solid it had felt, she took his thick wrist and moved his hand closer to the light. With his hand resting palm-up on her table, she could easily see two fine slivers of wood in the pad of his thumb.
His hands distracted her, too.
They were strong, broad and long-fingered. Good hands. Capable hands. Yet, they were nearly unblemished. There were no calluses, no scars, no healing scratches. Only the fresh-looking scrapes and nicks he’d earned that afternoon.
Fascinated, she started to touch the smooth pad at the base of his fingers, only to pull back as if she’d touched fire the instant she realized what she was doing.
“What’s the matter?”
With a sheepish smile, she ducked her head and went to work on his thumb, deftly slipping out a sliver with the needle and wiping it onto a gauze pad. “Your hands are very smooth. I’ve never seen a man’s hands that weren’t scarred and callused from years of work. Except maybe Dr. Fisher,” she amended, thinking of the kindly old physician in Hancock who’d delivered Anna. The other sliver joined the first. “But I can’t honestly say I paid any attention to them. Yours are the only ones I’ve noticed.”
“Is that good or bad?” He posed the question mildly, absorbed as much by her lack of guile as her brisk efficiency when she dabbed on peroxide with a cotton ball, then blotted at the bubbles. “No calluses, I mean?”
“There are some who would say that soft hands mean a person is idle. But Dr. Fisher is a very busy man. And you work with your mind.” She tipped her head, still looking intrigued as she finished with dabs of antibiotic cream. “Your hands don’t look soft, though. And they didn’t feel that way at all.”
“They didn’t?”
Emily kept her head down as she slowly wiped a bit of cream from her own fingers. “No,” she murmured, but she would give him no more than that. Her last observation had slipped out before she considered what she was saying. He didn’t need to know she could still imagine how comforting their solid, masculine weight had felt against her back when he’d wrapped her in his arms. He didn’t need to know how drawn she was by their strength. How drawn she was by him.
“I’m relieved to hear that.”
She thought he might be smiling—the way he had when he’d teased her about her chain saw. But he wasn’t smiling at all. He was watching her as if he knew very well she was thinking of his hands on her body. And she was. Though until his glance slowly wandered to her mouth, she hadn’t considered that he might have been thinking of that, too.
She wasn’t comfortable with the awareness shimmering between them. That was as obvious to Justin as the faint tremor in the breath she drew and the chips of sapphire darkening in her eyes. He wasn’t all that comfortable with it himself. But it was there, thickening the air, snaking through his body and washing wariness over Emily’s fragile features.
Pressing her hand to her stomach, she blinked twice and reached for the peroxide to continue with her task.
Clearly flustered, trying not to look it, she promptly knocked it over.
“Oh, mein!” She gasped, bumping the bottle again as she snatched for it. Solution spilled over the edge of the table. It pooled on the wood, splashed on his pants.
“I’ve got it.” Catching the bottle before it went over the edge itself, he turned it upright and saw her grab a towel.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured, mopping at the wet spot on his thigh. “I wasn’t paying—”
“It’s okay. Really.” Catching her wrist, he stilled her frantic motions. “It’s okay,” he repeated, ducking his head so he could see her eyes. “Honest. No harm’s done.”
“I’m not usually so—”
“Emily.” Beneath his fingers, he could feel her pulse, its beat as frantic as a trapped bird’s. Incredibly with her mouth inches from his, his own didn’t feel much calmer. “You don’t need to be nervous with me.”
“I can’t seem to help it.”
His glance swept her guileless face. There wasn’t an ounce of cunning in this woman. Nothing false or deceptive about her. She didn’t seem to have any natural defenses at all.
Deliberately ignoring the urge to tug her closer, he slipped his hand from hers. “What was that you said?” he asked, thinking she needed to protect herself better if she was ever going to make it on her own. “What language?”
All she’d said was “Oh, my.” Emily told him that as she pulled back, handing him a towel for his pants, and made herself focus on wiping up the table. “It’s Pennsylvania Dutch.”
She must have been even more rattled than she’d thought to have reverted to the only language she’d heard spoken until she was six years old. She rarely spoke the old German dialect at all anymore. Except to Anna once in a while, so she’d know something of her heritage. She’d learned English in school and had spoken it most of her life, but she’d worked hard over the past two years to pronounce her words the same as her neighbors. She didn’t want to be different. She wanted to belong.
Desperately.
Something like caution entered Justin’s deep voice. “Isn’t that what the Amish speak?”
“In their homes and to each other. In the Old Order communities, anyway,” she said, returning her attention to his abraded arm. “But they speak English, too.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I was Amish,” she said, gently wiping antiseptic over his scraped skin. “And we were Old Order.”
She turned away, picking up her needle again. When she turned back, she frowned at his biceps. “You have one here that looks awfully deep.” Apology touched her eyes even as she began picking at the stubborn splinter. “I’m sorry if it hurts.”
He didn’t get the feeling that she was avoiding the subject. She was simply concentrating on what she felt was more important—something he found oddly touching since what she was concentrating on was taking care of him. With her wielding that needle, he didn’t want to distract her, either.
She’d certainly distracted him, though. He knew next to nothing about the Amish. What he did know was limited to what he’d absorbed through the media, mostly in the form of an occasional newspaper article or magazine feature and one old movie. Mental images had already formed of bearded men in black suits and hats and women in dark dresses and white caps that covered their hair. The strictest of them, the Old Order, lived as they had a hundred years ago, driving buggies, plowing their fields with horses. They had no telephones, no electricity. And they had as little as possible to do with “the English,” which he understood to be everyone who wasn’t one of them.
Emily’s simple dress had a row of little flower-shaped buttons down the front, utterly rebellious by Amish standards, he supposed. Unsophisticated and old-fashioned by his. But as he listened to the drip of the pump on a leaf in the sink and gritted his teeth against the sting in his arm when either the needle or the splinter made its presence felt, it now made sense to him why she was so comfortable working without electricity. There wasn’t any. The refrigerator and stove were run on fuel from the tank he’d seen outside. It made a certain amount of sense, too, why there were no vehicles on the property—and why her husband had been so unfamiliar with machinery. She was living the only way she’d ever known.
She’d told him earlier that they had moved here a couple of years ago. But they would have arrived knowing only their own ways and, in a place as rural as this little corner of Illinois, they wouldn’t have been exposed to anything startling in the way of change. Nothing startling to his way of thinking, anyway.
He couldn’t believe how totally, completely different they were. Yet, even as that thought occurred, he was equally conscious of the freshness of her scent and its subtle effect on certain of his nerves. He was aware of her touch, too, the gentleness of it as she rested her fingers against the side of his arm as if to hold his arm still—or to soothe the discomfort she was inflicting.
It wasn’t wise to be drawn by the way she flinched every time she thought she hurt him. And he had no business wanting to slip the rubber band from the bottom of her braid and slowly unweave all that incredible hair.
“There,” she finally said, looking enormously relieved when she’d picked out the last of the splinters and bathed the abrasion with antiseptic. Applying a couple of gauze pads, she taped them in place with the efficiency of a field nurse and gathered the supplies from the table. “Now, I’ll get you something to eat. Are you sure you don’t want me to fix your shirt?”
“Positive,” he muttered, dragging it back over his head. It was one thing to be intrigued by her. It was another matter entirely to be as conscious of her as he was. He couldn’t deny his curiosity over how she had come to be where she was, but he couldn’t just sit there watching her fluid movements while she waited on him. He needed to do something. Anything to keep from wondering if she had any idea what it did to a man to know he affected her the same way she did him.
He figured he might as well go to work on her tree.
Chapter Four
Emily swept the glass shards from the floor while Justin headed to the storage shed for a handsaw to cut off the limb hanging inside. He hadn’t said much, other than that he might as well clear the sink since she’d need to use it, but he’d seemed edgy to her. Restless, perhaps, the way men got when a pouring rain kept them inside and away from their chores. Being stuck the way he was, she could hardly blame him for feeling tense.
Taking her cutting board and two fist-size tomatoes to the table, she started slicing. She was feeling a little unsettled herself. She had been ever since his hand had closed over her wrist and she’d found herself close enough to breathe in the scents of musk and citrus clinging to his skin. The crisp clean scent would have been his aftershave lotion, she supposed. The rest was just him.
She closed her eyes, drew a deep breath.
She’d been a married woman. She had a child. She’d been raised on a farm, for heaven’s sake, so she was far from naive about sex. Where she’d come from, the subject hadn’t been spoken of with the casual abandon she’d encountered in magazines and on television in the past couple of years, but she’d still known long before she’d left Ohio about the concept of physical attraction.
Sarah Hostetler had turned the color of an inflamed cow udder every time Amos Beiler had spoken to her. And Emma Lapp had confided that she’d felt urges toward her Eli for a year before he started pairing up with her at Sunday evening singings. Emily supposed she’d felt that attraction with Daniel at one time, too.
She just hadn’t ever felt it all that strongly before.
The knife barely missed her finger.
Muttering at herself, she pushed the meaty slices aside and snatched up the other tomato. There was something else she understood. She needed to pay attention to what she was doing before she did anything more embarrassing than what she’d done by dumping peroxide over the man’s pants. And what she needed to concentrate on right now was what she was going to feed him before Mr. Clancy showed up and helped him with his car so he could leave. Justin struck her as a man with a hearty appetite. After all, it took a lot of fuel to sustain a body that big. And he had gone for hours without anything to eat.
Wiping her hands on her towel, she turned to her refrigerator. The best she could do in a hurry was prepare him something with the chicken she’d fried yesterday. There was plenty left. She’d been too tired last night to have much more than a drumstick and drink a glass of milk before she’d fallen asleep after nursing Anna. It would be good to use it now so it didn’t go to waste.
She’d just decided to serve the chicken cold with a salad, since it was too hot for much else, anyway, when she heard Justin’s heavy footfall on the front porch. A heartbeat later, the screen door groaned open and she heard him start inside.
From over her shoulder, she saw him glance toward her bedroom, then hurriedly reach behind him to catch the door. Anna was sleeping. Apparently, remembering that, he crossed the living room with little more than a squeak of old floorboards and walked into the kitchen carrying a three-foot-long handsaw.
“This should work,” he said, sounding as if he were talking more to himself than to her. “It’ll make a little bigger mess in here, but it’ll be quieter than using the chain saw outside. The branch on the porch is too heavy to move without cutting it up first.”
Leaves rustled as he shoved back the greenery and found the juncture of limb and branch. Propping one hip on the counter, he leaned toward the wall and dragged the saw a few inches out on the limb to score it before pushing forward to cut.
“You’ve done that before,” she observed.
“Not in years. I used to hang around with the gardener in boarding school.” With the grating sound of metal biting wood, he took a half-dozen strokes and angled himself to get a better line. “Every once in a while he’d let me do something other than haul his wheelbarrow around for him.”
Emily moved automatically, pouring cream into a bowl, adding a bit of sugar and vinegar. Dividing her attention between her task and the concentration etched in Justin’s brow, she leaned against the heavy pine table and began beating the mixture with a whisk. Beyond her, eggs boiled in a pan on the stove, steam rising in a cloud.
“You liked plants?”
“I liked the bugs in the plants.” His left hand braced the limb, his right worked the saw. “We used to hide them in the counselor’s desk. The gardener put me to work in exchange for not telling anyone what I was doing.”
Though it was hard to picture him so young, she couldn’t help the smile that touched her mouth. Boys would be boys, it seemed, no matter where they were raised. “You must have lived a long way from the city. To go to boarding school, I mean.”
“Actually, Stanton Hall was ten miles from my parents’ home.”
“In Chicago?”
“Boston. The Hall had educated three generations of Sloans. My parents wouldn’t hear of sending my brother or me anywhere else before shipping us over to Harvard.”
She’d read of boarding schools. She’d read of Boston, too. And she’d certainly heard of Harvard. The combination conjured an image of something proper and wealthy, but she couldn’t imagine sending a child away from their parents to teach them. To be away from the family would be so hard on a child. And a mother. “That must have been difficult, being away from your parents when you were young, I mean.”
Justin gave a shrug, catching the motion partway when his scraped shoulder reminded him he might not want to do that. He actually hadn’t minded going away to school. It had been infinitely easier than listening to his well-bred parents’ icy, horribly civilized arguments. To this day, he was sure the only reason they were together was because the other refused to cave in first and file for divorce. Tenacity ran strong in the Sloan family.
“It was tradition. My parents are very big on it.”
“Is it tradition in your family to do the same kind of work? I mean, are your father and brother lawyers, too?”
The blade stuck, drawing a quick, quiet oath and a scowl for the break in his pacing. “They are,” he told her, getting his rhythm back. “But my father practices a different kind of law. He’s in estates and trusts.” Which was precisely why Justin hadn’t chosen that specialty himself. He respected his dad. He just hadn’t wanted to work with him. “My brother’s a judge.”
“Your younger brother,” she prodded, more in conclusion than question.
“Older. I’m the youngest.”
That seemed to perplex her.
“Mrs. Clancy thought you might be the oldest,” she said over the steady tap of metal against the brown ceramic bowl. Dismissing the observation, she lifted the whisk to test the consistency of whatever it was she was concocting in the bowl. “What’s the difference between what you do and what your father does?”
“He handles peoples’ personal assets. I handle business matters for companies. Mostly mergers.”
“Mergers?”
“Of companies,” he explained, willing to keep up the conversation as long as she was. He’d wanted a diversion. Between the topics and his task, he’d gotten his wish. “Sometimes companies want to combine their resources to expand their market or purchasing power.” Leaning in a little more, he worked the saw more quickly, the fresh smell of pitch scenting the air. “Sometimes one company is stronger than the other and they want to absorb the competition. Take them over, you know?” he asked, seeing her frown.
“I guess you could say that what I do is negotiate,” he concluded, thinking he’d lost her. Her exposure to the world of business was probably even less than to the world beyond the farm. She’d told him herself that she knew nothing of law when he’d mentioned helping her turn in her crooked handyman. “That’s basically why people hire lawyers to begin with. To get them what they want, or to make sure the other side doesn’t get more than it should have.”
Two more strokes of the saw and the limb gave a crack. One more and it broke away completely. When he looked over at her, she was still frowning as she lifted the wire whip again.
“It seems strange that people should have to hire someone to transact their business for them. Can’t people just sit down and talk through what they want to do?”
There it was again, he thought. That innocence that bordered on naiveté. “It’s not that simple,” he murmured, shifting his weight to lower the thick, eight-foot-long branch to the floor.
“Why not?”
“For one thing, you’re dealing with more than just people.” He spotted a stack of neatly folded brown grocery bags wedged between the wall and the refrigerator. Snagging one, he returned to the sink. A few large pieces of broken glass were precariously wedged in the window frame. They’d become an exploding snowball of shards if they fell out and hit that galvanized gray sink.
“There are filings with regulatory agencies and government approvals to contend with. You have stocks that can take wild swings and sink a deal before the financing can even be put together. You’re reorganizing an entire corporate structure.
“I just completed a case like that,” he told her. He’d pulled his part of the huge megamerger together in record time, too. And timing had been everything because certain players could have caused the deal to fold at any point. “Something that involved couldn’t have been accomplished without legal expertise.”
She didn’t looked impressed.
Not that he was trying to impress her, he assured himself. It was just that the enormously complicated transaction had been a real coup for him. It had also greased his way to becoming a partner a full year ahead of his personal schedule.
Glass clicked against glass as he dropped a couple of saucer-size pieces into the sack and added bits of twig. The satisfaction he should have felt with his accomplishment wasn’t there. He kept waiting for it. Expecting to feel it. Since the day he’d left a much smaller practice and joined the firm six years ago, he’d kept his sights on his goal, paid his dues, bent his life to the firm’s collective will and now, finally, he could begin to reap the rewards. He loved the challenges he worked with. There was no greater high than pulling off what others said couldn’t be done. But even last night at the dinner the senior partner had given to welcome him into the inner circle, all he felt was the same restless sensation that had driven him from his condo a little after six o’clock that morning.
Moments ago, he’d been aware of the bubbling of the water on the stove and the soft padding of Emily’s sneakers as she’d moved from fridge to cabinet to table. Now, he heard nothing but the boiling water and her silence.
She hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. He was sure of it. He’d been talking about stockholders. She knew livestock. He’d talked mergers. She knew mulch. From the way she stood by the table watching him, he was dead certain she hadn’t understood a thing he’d said.
“Your work doesn’t make you very happy, does it.”
He didn’t know which confounded him more, the observation or the sympathy behind it.
“I didn’t think it did,” she said, before he could contradict her. “When you talk about your work, the muscles in your jaw jump.
“I suppose it stresses you,” she concluded, sounding as if she didn’t often use the term as she skirted the limb on the floor and headed for the sink with the pot of hard-boiled eggs. Concern clouded her expression. “Being tense all the time isn’t good for a person, you know.”
Steam rose in a plume when she dumped the hot water down the drain. Sawdust swirled down with it. Two squeaks of the pump handle and cold water filled the pan.
“I’m not stressed.” Justin fairly muttered the claim as he watched her turn to get a couple of ice cubes from the refrigerator’s freezer and toss them into the pan to speed the cooling process. “No more than anyone else is,” he qualified. “And I’m perfectly happy doing what I do. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. And I just made partner,” he told her, getting a choke-hold on the limb to move it before she had to step over it again.
“That’s something important to you? Being this partner?”
She’d stopped beside him, her expression intent.
He was certain it was only her unexpected sincerity that caused him to hesitate.
“Yeah,” he murmured. Turning from the other questions he could see forming, he dragged the long limb past the table and through the kitchen doorway. “It is.”
It was more than important, he insisted to himself, leaving a trail of leaves as he rustled his way across her braided rag rug with the limb and down the steps of her front porch. It was the biggest thing that had ever happened to him. Beck, Wyler and Dunlap was one of the most prestigious general business law firms in the country. Being invited by that elite corp of attorneys to become an owner in the firm rather than an employee was huge. Of the sixty lawyers working there, only seven, now eight, had a say in its policies and goals. It meant his opinion was valued. It meant he’d accomplished something major.
Granted, it wasn’t as big an accomplishment as his brother, Brad, being appointed Supreme Judicial Court Judge back in Massachusetts. But he did strive to keep up the family tradition of judicial achievement. He just preferred to do it his own way—which also happened to include doing it seven hundred miles from Boston, where his parents couldn’t badger him into a bloodless marriage like theirs and his brother’s.
He tossed the branch to the ground at the side of the house, forcing aside the thought that Kenneth Beck, the senior partner of the firm, had pretty much taken over on that score. Thinking about his very proper and quietly competitive family was more than enough to make his stomach burn. Thinking about how Ken was pushing his daughter on him was enough to set it on fire.
He could hear Emily’s voice in the next room when he walked back inside. Realizing that he must have awakened her kid, he deliberately quieted his footsteps and headed for the sink to finish his project. The restive sensation working through him was so familiar, he barely noticed it as he started wiping up sawdust and tossing orphaned leaves into the paper sack—and listening to the soothing tones coming from the other room.
He wasn’t sure when the memory had been etched. In the cellar. As they’d walked along the rutted dirt road. At Clancy’s. But he could easily picture Emily running her finger over her baby’s downy-looking little cheek. He could picture her, too, as she’d looked when the baby had been fussing and she’d snuggled the infant closer. There was one picture that wouldn’t form, though. He couldn’t even begin to imagine her worried about mussing her lipstick or her clothes by giving her child or her spouse a kiss or a hug.
“I think she just wanted to change positions,” Emily said on her way back in. “It must be frustrating not to be able to turn over when you want to.”
Seeing the set lines of Justin’s strong profile, her quick smile faded.
“Please stop thinking about your work for now,” she asked, assuming that to be the reason he was still frowning. Despite what he claimed, there was no happiness in him when he’d spoken of it. “I’ve never been to a big city, but I know life is very different there. And I know that it’s sometimes hard to make the best of what we’re given to work with. But for the sake of your digestion, you shouldn’t think about what upsets you while you eat.
“Come. Sit,” she encouraged, as she finished setting out bowls and dishes. “It isn’t fancy, but it will fill you.”
She’d piled a plate with cold chicken and some of the beets she’d pickled last year. Slices of bread, store-bought because it lasted longer than homemade, sat next to a dish of her blackberry preserves. The earthenware salad bowl held crisp lettuce and tomatoes from her garden, watercress she’d gathered from the stream and a generous dollop of cream dressing thick with diced egg.
She was adding a bowl of cucumbers and onion in vinegar, a combination her mother had always kept on hand when cucumbers were available for its digestive properties, when she saw Justin reach for the soap.
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