Luke didn’t notice the intensity of Carla’s regard. Standing with his back to the flames, he watched the veils of raindrops glittering with reflected fire against the limitless backdrop of night. From time to time he sipped coffee from his cup. Other than that, he made no movement. He neither spoke to nor looked at Carla, yet the silence wasn’t uncomfortable, merely an extension of the shared silences they often enjoyed while he ate a late dinner or helped her clean the big coffeepot and measure out coffee for the following morning.
"Why?" Carla asked without warning, as though only seconds had intervened since Luke had stood with her and looked out over the late afternoon on the promontory half a mile up September Canyon.
Not turning around, Luke answered in the same way. "Why did I grab you three years ago?" He laughed roughly. "Hell, schoolgirl, you’re not that naive."
"And I’m not a schoolgirl anymore. Didn’t Cash tell you? I went to college year-round so I could graduate in three years."
Luke said nothing.
Carla persisted, unable to help herself, needing to know about the night that had changed her life, the night that apparently had scarred Luke, too. "Why do you regret what happened so much?"
For a long time there was only silence and the sinuous dance of fire and rain.
"It was the sweetest offer I’ve ever had," Luke said finally. "You deserved better for it than I gave you. You deserved slow dancing and candlelight kisses and candy wrapped in fancy foil. You deserved a gentle refusal or a gentle lover, and you got… me."
Carla was too surprised to speak. She watched.
Luke’s shoulders move in what could have been a shrug or the unconscious motion of a man readjusting a heavy burden.
"There was nothing gentle or civilized in me that night. I wanted you until I shook with it I’d wanted you like that for years. When you seemed to want me, I lost my head."
Luke turned, snapped his wrist and sent the dregs of his coffee hissing into the fire.
"It’s just as well," he continued. "Once I was sober I’d have hated myself for taking you. You were so damned innocent. It was better mat some other man got to be your first lover. At least he didn’t hurt you."
"What?"
Again Luke laughed roughly as he bent over the coffeepot, refilling his cup while he talked. "If your lover had hurt you, it would have made the front pages – ‘Cash McQueen Avenges Kid Sister.’ But there weren’t any headlines."
"Not surprising. There wasn’t any lover, either."
Luke’s head snapped up. For the first time since they had come to camp he looked directly at Carla. Firelight outlined his shocked expression.
"Are you saying that you’re… that you haven’t…?"
"You needn’t look at me like I just fell out of a passing UFO," Carla said uncomfortably. "Has it ever occurred to you that all the studies saying half or two-thirds of girls have lovers before they’re married also means that between one-third and one-half of the girls don’t? What’s so shocking about that?"
"One-third of you are saving yourselves for marriage, is that it?" Luke asked as he set aside the coffeepot and straightened up again.
Carla shrugged, but Luke didn’t notice. He had turned his back to the fire again – and to her.
"1 don’t know what their reason for waiting is," Carla said. "I only know mine."
Silence, a sip of coffee, then Luke asked slowly, "What’s your reason?"
"The flame isn’t worth the candle."
"What?"
"More pain than gain," Carla said succinctly. "You see, the older I get, the more I realize that I don’t like men being close to me. Not like that. Breathing their breath. Tasting them. Not able to move without touching them. Close."
Slowly, as though pulled against his will, Luke turned around to face Carla again. He looked at her for a long, taut moment before he said, "You had a funny way of showing it that night in the dining room when you gave me the sweetest dessert a man ever had."
The memory of those few, incredible moments in Luke’s arms went through Carla like lightning. She tried to speak but was afraid to trust her voice. She licked her lips, looked away from him and tried again to talk.
"It’s different with you," she said huskily. "It always has been. I can’t…help it That’s just how it is."
Although Carla tried to speak casually, her voice trembled. The honesty of her words hadn’t come without cost; but then, neither had Luke’s confession that it had been desire rather than contempt for her that had driven him three years ago.
Abruptly Luke turned away and began prowling the perimeter of the overhang as though he were a cougar measuring the dimensions of its captivity. Half a creature of fire, half a creature of night, wrapped in the elemental rhythms of rain, Luke was a figure born from Carla’s dreams. Unable to look away from his lithe, powerful, restless movements, she simply sat and watched him with a soul-deep hunger she couldn’t disguise.
And then he turned and looked at her with a hunger as deep as her own.
13
Slowly Carla came to her feet. Without looking away from Luke she skirted the fire, scarcely aware of the flames, for it was the golden blaze of Luke’s eyes that consumed her. Motionless, waiting, every muscle taut with his inner struggle, he watched her slow approach. He knew he should turn away from her, walk out into the rain and keep on walking until the heavy running of his blood slowed. He shouldn’t stay rooted to the land while she came closer to him. He shouldn’t watch with eyes narrowed against the pain of wanting and his whole body rigid from battling his endless hunger for the girl who could arouse him with a word, a look, a breath.
The girl he had promised himself he would never take.
Carla stopped only inches away from Luke. She looked into his eyes until she could bear no more. She leaned forward, speaking his name in a voice as murmurous as the rain. When there was no answer, she raised a trembling hand to his cheek. The gentle touch of her ringers made him shudder as though he had been brushed by lightning. She felt the violent currents of restraint and passion coursing through him as though they were her own. She knew if she touched him again there would be no more turning back for either of them, no more frustrated desire, nothing but the sweeping reality of a man’s hunger and a woman’s answering love.
Where once the depth of Luke’s passion had frightened Carla, it now sent wild splinters of sensation through her. She had never felt the sweet violence of her own sensuality with any other man. She doubted that she ever would – not like this, her body shaking as she reached toward the man she had loved before she understood what a man needed from a woman who loved him.
Delicate fingertips traced Luke’s dark eyebrows, the blunt Slavic thrust of his cheekbones, the knife straightness of his nose, the heavy bone of his jaw, caressing him as she had a thousand times in her dreams. When she touched his mouth he made a raw sound and she trembled. That, too, had been part of her dream, his wanting her until he would feel the same tearing pain at not having her that she felt at being separate from him.
"Love me," Carla breathed against Luke’s mouth. "Teach me how to love you."
"Baby," Luke said hoarsely, shuddering, unable to force himself to step back from her. "Don’t do this to me. I’ve wanted you too long."
"Please, Luke. Oh, please, don’t turn away. I’ve dreamed of you for so many years."
Luke looked down at Carla’s haunted eyes and trembling lips and suddenly knew that he could no more turn away from her now than he could walk out on his own skin. With that bittersweet realization an odd calm swept through him, a feeling of potency and certainty combined. In no longer battling himself he had redoubled his own strength. That was good. He wanted that extra control. For Carla, not for himself. For Carla he wanted to be the kind of lover he had never been with any woman.