Damn Astor Cooper. Why couldn't she just die and be done with it? What a cruel bitch she was, hanging on to him with her invisible threads when she was nothing more than a shell. She may have been a lovely woman in her time. Savannah imagined her as being sweet and demure and gracious. Everything she wasn't. Respectable, the perfect wife, the perfect hostess. But Coop's wife was nothing now, and she could give him nothing but heartache. Her mind was gone. Only her body lived on, functioning automatically, tended by nurses.
I could give him something. I could give him everything, Savannah thought, absently smoothing her hands down her wrinkled silk tank.
Like she had given Ronnie Peltier everything?
She tightened her jaw at the bitter inner voice, tightened her hold on the lilac branch. She'd had sex with Ronnie because she had wanted to, needed to. There was nothing to feel guilty about. Not the way she had offered herself, not the way she had given herself, not the greedy, insatiable way she had taken him.
"It's what you were made for, Savannah… You always want it, Savannah…"
That was the truth. The truth that had been burned into her brain night after night. She was a born seductress, built for sin. There was no use fighting her true nature.
She hadn't fought it tonight. The scents of sex and Ronnie's Aqua Velva aftershave lingered on her in testimony to the fact. They hadn't even made it to his trailer house before succumbing to their passions. Savannah had made him pull his truck in around back of the old lumber yard and climbed on him right there on the bench seat of his Ford Ranger. Ronnie made no protest, asked for no explanations. That was what she liked about young men-they were uncomplicated. There were no moral millstones weighing down Ronnie Peltier. He was perfectly willing to drop his Levi's and just go at it for the sheer fun of it.
Arousal and shame grappled for control within her, twisting, struggling against each other, and tears rose in her eyes, blurring her vision of Coop as he sat writing.
"Damn you, Conroy Cooper," she mumbled, hating the feelings writhing inside her, and directing that hate at Coop. It was his fault. If she hadn't fallen in love with him, if he weren't so damn noble… He was the one who made her feel like a whore.
No. She was a whore. She had been born a whore and trained to perfection. Cooper made her ashamed of it.
Crying silently, she pushed herself away from the lilac bush and sidled along the house like a thief. She pressed herself against the clapboard siding and crept along to the edge of the French doors, where she pressed her face against the glass.
Cooper straightened his back slowly, wincing as he set his pen aside. His brain felt numb and empty, like a sponge that had been wrung out by merciless hands. The analogy struck him as one last drop of inspiration, and he started to reach for his pen again to scribble it down when a movement at the French doors caught his peripheral vision.
" Savannah?" He mumbled her name to himself, straining his eyes against the darkness that cloaked her features. Of course it was. She would come to him now in contrition, as she always did after one of her little blowups. And he would take her back and comfort her. They had gone through this cycle before. Savannah was a creature of habit. He frowned at the thought that her habits included self-inflicted torment and degradation.
She fell into his arms the second he opened the doors, sobbing like a child. Cooper folded his arms around her and rocked her and murmured to her, his lips brushing softly against her wild mane.
"I'm sorry!" she cried, grabbing handfuls of his shirt in her fists. "I'm so, so sorry!"
"Hush," he whispered, his voice low and smooth and soothing. "Don't cry so, darlin', you're breaking my heart."
"You break my heart," Savannah said, aching so, she felt completely raw inside. "All the time."
"No," he murmured. "I love you."
"Love me." She drew a shuddering breath and whispered the words again and again as scalding tears squeezed through the barrier of her tightly closed eyelids. "Love me. Love me."
Wasn't that all she had ever wanted? To be loved. To be cherished. And yet she gave herself away time and again to men who would never love her. Confusion boiled and swelled inside her, and she cried it out against Cooper's solid chest, wrapping herself in his warmth, anchoring herself against his strength. She felt so lost. She wanted to be strong, but she wasn't. She wanted to be good, but she couldn't. The only thing she was good at was sex, and that wasn't enough to make Coop forsake his vows.
"Hush, hush," he whispered, rocking her.
She smelled of sex and cheap cologne. She'd been with another man. He was neither surprised nor dismayed for his own sake. He didn't expect fidelity from Savannah. She was, by her own definition, a harlot. It saddened him, though, in a deeply fundamental way. Savannah was in many ways the embodiment of the South, he thought. Beautiful, wanton, stubborn, victimized…
"… Cooper?"
Savannah leaned back and looked up into his face, her fists still wound into the fabric of his shirt. He blinked at her, his thick blond lashes sweeping down behind his spectacles, clearing the glaze from his too-blue eyes.
"Damn you," she snarled, pushing herself away. "You're not even listening to me! You're off with her in your mind, aren't you? Off with Lady Astor. Pure, chaste Lady Astor."
"I wasn't," he said calmly. He went to the desk, dismissing her, and went about the business of putting his notebook and pen away, tamping out the last of a good cigar that had gone to waste.
"You'd rather she were here," Savannah said bitterly. "She wasn't off fucking Ronnie Peltier eight ways from Sunday tonight. No, she's sitting over at St. Joseph 's, pretty as an orchid, dumb as a post-"
"Stop it!" Cooper's voice tore like thunder through the air. He wheeled and grabbed her by the arms and gave her a rough shake. He caught himself before he could shake her again and reined his temper in with an effort that made him tremble.
"Damn you, Savannah, why do you do this?" he demanded, his voice harsh, his fingers biting into the flesh of her arms. "You beg for my love, then you make me want to hate you. Why can't you just take what I can give you and be happy with that?"
"Happy?" she whispered bleakly, looking up at him, her heart in her eyes. "I don't know what that is."
Cooper closed his eyes against a hot wave of emotion and pulled her against him, holding her tight.
"Don't hate me, Coop," she said softly, sliding her arms around his waist. "I do enough of that for both of us."
"Shhh… Hush…" He brushed her hair back from her cheek and pressed a kiss to her temple, then to her mouth. "I love you," he said, the words barely more than a breath as his lips brushed against hers. "I love you."
"Show me."
The hall clock ticked away the seconds of the night. Savannah listened to it in the stillness as she lay curled against Cooper's side. He was asleep, breathing deeply, one arm still holding her close. He looked older sleeping. With his vitality turned off, his athletic energy refueling, there was nothing left but the face that had weathered fifty-eight years of life.
For just a moment she imagined he was her father lying there, alive, holding her next to him. Jeff Chandler would have been fifty-eight if he had lived. And for a moment she allowed herself to wonder what her life would have been like. How different she might have been. She might have been the famous one of the Chandler sisters. She might have been an actress or a fashion designer. And Laurel… Laurel might not have needed to fight so hard for justice.
Poor Baby. Guilt nipped her as she thought of the way she'd left Laurel at Frenchie's. She really should have been home now, seeing to it that Laurel was getting some rest. Seeing to her sister's recuperation was her job now. But she had needed this time with Coop. Time without fighting, without words, with nothing but love between them.
There was never anything less than gentleness in his lovemaking. He was always so careful with her. No hurry. No frantic grappling. No rough urgency. Tenderness. Reverence. As if every time was her first time.