HOW WOULD SHE feel if she were being forced?
Her fingers hesitated over that one button and did not squeeze it through its loop.
“No,” she murmured, nearly whispering, “I don’t know what I want. I know what I sense, but. . . at this moment you are only a sensation to me. Strong sensation . . . without substance.”
With that she gave him the gift of time; her fingers fell away from the button. Outside, whistling wind swirled around the lighthouse, caressing it, and carried away the obligation she would have pressed upon him with that one button.
Jake pressed his hand over his mouth as though to wipe away the desire she’d aroused in him. Then he folded his arms as if to keep holding himself back, and said, “I’m no poet, but I know a bad rhyme when I hear one.”
“What’s that pretending to mean?”
“It means this sensation you talk about . . . it’s—”
“Dangerous?” She stepped nearer, almost destroying the gift. “Like you’re dangerous? You said you were.”
“I wish I hadn’t,” he breathed. “Seems you like it.”
Abbey smiled, and then she even laughed. “I suppose I do. Fools are like that, Jake. It takes a fool to make pioneer stock, and those are the people I come from. Please. . . don’t hate me.”
This moved him, if nothing else had. He caught her hand as she raised it to push back a stray curl. “I don’t hate you,” he insisted. It seemed important to him that she believe that. “But I don’t care to be confused, and you confuse me.”
She tipped her head, knowing the firelight would catch the line of her chin. “Abbey,” she said softly.
His hand grew suddenly moist around hers. “Abbey . . .”
A smile was her reward to him, and his to her was an expression of regret. For the moment, at least. Yet again—how many times now?—he drew away from her very deliberately. “I’ll make some coffee.”
She gave him a simple nod. “I’ll drink it.”
He swung his arms again, quaking with frustration and arousal, perhaps even buried anger. No, not perhaps. Definitely.
He was right, she knew. Very right and wise to resist the magnetism between them. She knew that. In fact, she realized that until this moment she’d been fighting the sting of common sense. Impulse had gripped her and she had let it take hold. What if he’d been an ordinary man and not as strong as he apparently was? What if he’d given in to her seduction, and what if nature made itself known upon them in the form of a child? Jake was a man of passions—that much was plain. Would the prospect of fathering a child stop him from being with a woman he didn’t know, a woman who put herself before him this way? That wasn’t nature’s habit; the male of the species didn’t bear that burden. Then what was it she had seen in his eyes?
Jake was slamming around on the other side of the bottom stairs. Pots clattered, venting anger and the sexual frustration that still buzzed between them. No . . . it hadn’t gone away.
After a moment he emerged from the hidden side of the tower’s inner shaft, carrying a battered coffeepot. He hung it on the hearth hook and swung it in over the fire, trying to stay busy.
“I have to leave here by one o’clock,” Abbey said, making conversation.
“You’re not leaving anywhere until that blow dies down. Then, be assured,” he warned, “I’ll pitch you out.”
His eyes flared with the promise, but there was also curl of a grin on his lips. Sheets of rain slashed against the window, making his point for him, and a roll of thunder pressed the point home.
The coffee filled the air with aroma before they spoke again, and even then Abbey had to force her words to come out. Perhaps he found it hard to trust her as much as she trusted her own feelings. Yes, that was it. . . . she would have to earn his regard.
Licking her lips, she tried a new approach. “Why are you on Nantucket?”
“It’s none of your business, Abbey,” he said from where he huddled on a stool near the fire.
She bobbed her eyebrows scoffingly. “I mean, where are you from?”
He tugged at his collar, then sighed, deciding the question was harmless enough. “Ohio, originally,” he said. “Then Georgia. Then Kansas . . . then New York . . . then here.”
“And did you run lighthouses in Texas?” she asked, her tone making it clear that she was prying again, even though she had said she wouldn’t.
“Very funny,” he muttered.
“I mean only to ask what your real trade is. Do you have a skill?”
His hair flickered in the firelight as he shook his head. “Nothing specific. I do jobs as they come along. This one . . . came along.”
“Tell me about the pub. You said your cousins run it. Do you help there also?”
“I’m part owner. But I don’t often work the pub. I’ve got the light to keep me busy.”
“What were you doing on the docks?”
He struck her with an impatient glare, apparently tired of her questions. “Getting a fresh stock of whale oil to run this jack-o’-lantern, that’s what.”
“I’m just asking, Jake.”
“You’re interfering.”
“Abbey,” she encouraged. “Say my name again.”
“No. Don’t play games. They’re—”
He stopped himself, but he was too late. They both already knew what he had almost said.
She rose from her chair and crossed the dim floor of the light, house, through the golden firelight to his side. As he gazed up at her, she murmured, “Dangerous. Like you.”
Jake Ross stared up at her, and slowly—so slowly—drew himself up from the fireside stool. His height matched hers, then passed hers, giving him those few inches that made her tilt her face up slightly to keep the gaze from breaking. Once again he became a tallow-haired taper burning in the dimness.
His fingers moved upward to find her hair. Gradually his hand lost itself in the long twist of amber that hung over her shoulder.
“Soft,” he murmured. The fire crackled in punctuation. His eyes caught its orange glow.
Together, as a single bell struck by two hammers, their hearts chimed. The simmering Abbey had felt within her rose to effervescence. His head slowly dropped, tilting gently, until their mouths met once again, but this time with a tenderness that resonated through them both. There was no force, no surprise, no anger. Only the triumphant flutter of something awakening that had been asleep for too long, waiting for the two of them to arouse it.
The intrigue still moved between them—Abbey was dully aware of it as she lost herself in the movement of his lips, the moisture of his mouth, the soft fleshy involvement that quickened their pulses.
He drew her closer, and she sagged against him. Her eyes drifted closed until only a slit of firelight blurred to remind her that this wasn’t a dream. He was right. . . this was insane.
Strangers, yes. Two strangers, so physically attuned as to reduce each other to bare passion. Abbey had never heard of such a thing, neither in fairy tale or myth, but she had felt very much the lioness as she encroached upon his domain, looking for the hot-blooded victory she now felt.
His arms slipped farther and farther around her until she was drowning in him, her spine bent back like a reed into the wind.
Incendiary. Fire. Everywhere. There, in the stone hearth, and here, between lonely hearts.
There are some things a man and woman can’t stop. A match, once struck, must flare and burn. Where love was, there could be no knowing. Passion had no answers.
Jake clutched Abbey’s upper arms until the pain made her gasp, and he gasped, too, but in a different kind of pain. With all his strength of being, he pushed her away and threw himself across the narrow curved space toward the other side of the hearth. He caught himself on the mantel and gripped it with both hands, his fingers going white as he squeezed and squeezed.
Rain and wind slashed at the stone obelisk of Great Point. Some things a man and woman can’t stop—
And some they must.
“God’s oath,” Jake moaned. “God’s oath . . .”
“Jake,” Abbey murmured, taking a fatal step toward him.
He flung himself away from her, going around the long way, under the spiral staircase to the lighthouse door. He yanked it open and dragged it shut behind him, and was gone in a howl of wind.