Somewhere battles raged. Somewhere Northerner fought Southerner, and the nation ran with the blood shed by her youth. Blood washed over Kansas and Missouri as if some shared artery had been slashed, but for tonight, Kristin didn't care.
She was alive in his arms, feline and sensual. She was learning where to touch him, how to move with him and against him and how to leave the world behind when she was with him. No drug and no liquor could be so powerful as this elation, so sweet, so all-encompassing.
That night he slept. She stared at his features, and she longed to reach out and touch them, but she did not. She decided that even his nose was strong, long and straight, like a beak against his features. His cheekbones were high, his forehead was wide and his jaw was fine and square beneath the hair of his beard. She wondered at the fine scars that criss-crossed his shoulders and his chest, and then she remembered that he had been with the Union cavalry before the war, and she wondered what battles had done this to him. She longed to touch him so badly…
She reached out, then withdrew her hand. He was an enigma, and he was fascinating. He drew her like the warmth of a fire, and she was afraid. There was so much she didn't know about him. But her fear went deeper than that, for she sensed that though he cared he would never stay. He liked her well enough. He could even be patient with her temper and her uncertainties. He could be careful, and he could be tender, and he seemed as immersed in this startling passion as she was.
But she sensed that he would not stay, could not stay. Not for long. Worse, she sensed that he could never love her, and that she could fall in love with him all too easily. Already, she thought, other men seemed to pale beside him.
Other men… if any remained when the carnage was over.
She walked to the window and looked out at the night. The moon was high, and the paddocks and the outbuildings looked so peaceful there, rising against the flatland. She sighed. For the rest of the country the war had begun when the first shots had been fired at Fort Sumter back in April of '61, but Kansas seemed to have been bleeding forever, and Missouri along with it. The Army of Northern Virginia had defeated the Army of the Potomac at Manassas twice, while along the Mississippi the Union troops were faring a bit better. The North had won the Battle of Shiloh, and just last April New Orleans had fallen to Union troops under Farragut.
It should matter, she thought. It should matter to her who lost and who won. She should care. At Sharpsburg, Maryland, by Antietam Creek, both sides had suffered horribly. She had been in town when the list of the dead had arrived, and it had been devastating. The papers had all cried that the single bloodiest battle of the war had been fought there, and that men had slipped in the blood, and that bodies had fallen on top of other bodies. All she had seen was the tears of the mothers, the sweethearts, the lovers — the families of boys who had left to join the Union Army and the families who had sons fighting with the Confederacy. She had looked for Matthew's name, and she had not seen it, and she had thanked God. But then she had felt the tears around her, felt the agony of the parents, the sisters, the brothers. And yet sometimes it felt as if the real war were remote here. Here the war had been reduced to sheer terrorism. Men did not battle men; they set out to commit murder.
Here it had become a question of survival. All she wanted to do was survive.
She shivered suddenly and realized that she had come naked from the bed and that the night air was cold. She turned and saw that Cole was awake. His eyes were caught by the moonlight as he watched her. They glimmered curiously, and again she wondered at his secret thoughts. Then his gaze fell slowly over the length of her and she realized again that she was naked, and that his very eyes could touch her like a caress.
"Are you all right?" he asked her.
She felt as if she were going to cry, and she didn't know why.
"I was just thinking about the war," she said quietly.
Something covered his eyes, some careful shield. "It seems far away right now, doesn't it? Then again, I don't think we're even fighting the same war as the rest of the country here." There was a harsh bitterness in his tone, and she suddenly felt cold, as if she had turned him against her, or as if she had even made him forget she was there. But then his eyes focused on her again, and they were rueful and surprisingly tender. "Don't think about it," he told her. "Don't think about the war. You can't change it."
She wanted to say something, but she couldn't find her voice, and so she nodded.
"Come back to bed. It's late," he said. Even when he whispered, his voice was so deep. It entered into her and became the wind again.
She forgot about the war. She forgot about the rest of the world. His voice, his beckoning, had that power over her. Her stomach fluttered and her nipples hardened, and she felt she had to cover herself quickly. She had become so bold, so brash. She was standing here naked as a jaybird, and they were talking, and she should have the decency to reach out for something and cover her nudity.
But she did not. She straightened and tossed back her head, and her hair, golden fire in the moonlight, tumbled down the length of her back. She walked toward him. If nothing else, perhaps they could have honesty between them. She honestly wanted him. She wanted these
nights. She wanted the way she felt in his arms, wanted this ecstasy that seemed sweeter than life itself.
She came, he thought, very slowly, very sinuously. She allowed a natural sway to come into her walk, and she moved with a feline grace and purpose that set his blood aflame. He was glad that covers lay over his body, for his response to her was instant and instinctive. He clenched his fists at his sides and waited for her. Waited until she stood above him. Then he reached out, pulled her down to him and held her in his arms. He savaged her lips, groaning with the sweet, aching pleasure of it.
He had never thought it could happen, but he had found an oasis with her. He had known she was beautiful, like a sunrise, like the corn that had grown endlessly in the fields before they had run with blood. He had known that he wanted her.
He had not known how badly, how completely, he would come to need her.
Her eyes were a distant sea that claimed him, and the golden skeins of her hair were webs that entrapped him and brought him softly into a dream of paradise. He could not love her, but he could want her, and he did. He hungered for her, as if he could not be filled. She sated him completely, but then she touched him again, or she moved, or she whispered, and he wanted her again. He had taken her from innocence and he had set the woman within her free, and though she came to him with sensual grace, she held on to something of innocence too, and he wondered at that gift. He had to touch her, had to run his fingers over the fine, delicate beauty of her face, had to press his palms against the lush curve of her breast. He had to breathe in her scent.