CHAPTER 5

Dinner was ample and delicious, and when Lorna and Jim had cleared away the dishes and were once more seated before the cheerful open fire, she lay relaxed and at ease. Jim was reminded of her saying that she was like a cat in her love of creature comforts. There was something feline in her grace, and in the complete relaxation of her mood, as she lay watching the fire.

“Aside from the Jennie Haneys, and the Marthys, the snoopy Storekeeper, the razzle-dazzle of the summer visitors from the flatlands, this is a most marvelous spot for a gal like me,” she said slowly. It was as if she was talking to herself aloud. “It’s a lifesaver, a career saver. I shiver when I think what might have happened to me if I hadn’t come up here three summers ago, because of a story I read in the Sunday magazine of one of the Atlanta newspapers. The moment I saw the place, I knew it answered my problem.

“I bought this cabin for a song. Marthy thought she’d stuck me, and she was chortling wickedly that she had found a woman fool enough to pay three hundred dollars for a beat-up old summer cabin. But, as I began to build on to it, adding the bedroom and bath, and when I put in the light and water plant, and all the rest of it, she felt sure she had been the sucker, and she’s hated me ever since. Of course, her hatred worries me so much I scarcely sleep more than ten or twelve hours a day for grieving about it.”

Jim grinned, studying Lorna, puzzled to find anyone so sleek, so smoothly sophisticated in such a setting. “I’ll have to admit that it’s a surprise, a delightful one, to find a woman like you in a place like Ghost Creek,” he said.

Lorna nursed her drink, cupping the glass between her two hands, her eyes on the amber-gold contents. She looked up at him at last, when the silence had grown long, and her eyes were wary, curious. “I wonder if I can trust you,” she said at last.

Color touched his face, and his eyes were frank. “About that I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I’d say you might trust me about as far as you care to—no further.”

She moved one hand in a slight gesture of dismissal. “Oh, I wasn’t talking about sex.” She disdained the word. “We’ll come to that later—I think. You’re damned attractive, you know.”

“Thanks,” said Jim. “So are you.”

“I’d show you the way to go home if you didn’t say that. No, I meant whether or not I could trust you with the real reason why this place is a life saver to me. There are really two reasons. One, I’m damned sure I’m not going to trust you with. The other one, perhaps.”

“That’s up to you, of course.”

“We might begin by your telling me what you’re doing up here—aside from starting out on a walking trip this time of the year and winding up in the Indian maiden’s cabin,” she drawled. “Nice winding up, by the way. But what are you doing away from the courtrooms and such?”

Briefly, succintly he told her, and when he had finished, she stared at him, puzzled and curious. “But Jim, suppose every lawyer who ever lost a case, or a client, just said the hell with it and lit out for the wide open spaces?” she protested.

“Would that be bad?”

“Well, I’ve always heard lawyers are pretty necessary in the modern scheme of things,” she pointed out, and was immediately serious as she went on, “Surely you’re not planning to throw away all the years of preparation any man makes before he’s admitted to the bar, and the career you planned, just because you lost one case and your client went to the chair? Jim, that’s idiotic.”

Stubbornly, Jim’s hands clenched about his glass, and his bitter eyes were on the fire. “I haven’t had time to do much thinking about it,” he admitted. “The execution took place in November. The day after Thanksgiving. Nice touch, don’t you think? Gave the wife and children something to remember next time that joyful day rolls around. And in time to spare them the bother of getting ready for Christmas.”

There was such savage bitterness in his voice that Lorna sat erect and put down her glass and leaned towards him. “That’s hellish, of course, Jim and I can understand how you feel. But it’s a thing that could have happened to any lawyer. You’re being silly to let it wreck your whole life. Why not make amends, since you feel that’s what you have to do, by going back and taking up your job again and setting yourself more determinedly than ever to seeing that justice is done for your other clients?”

He shook his head and gulped his drink. “Maybe some day, though now I think not,” he told her, his voice grating, harsh. “I never want the responsibility of a man’s life on my conscience again.”

Lorna’s mouth twisted slightly. “Remember what I told you about consciences? They’re damned hard to live with, until you beat them insensible,” she reminded him.

“The way you did with yours?”

Color touched her face, and her eyes were bright. “The way I did with mine,” she told him harshly.

He looked at her sharply. “And it worked?” he asked.

Her chin came up and her eyes were cool. “For me it did,” she assured him. “Now I can fight just as hard, kick, gouge, beat my way up and not give a damn whose neck I step on. In my business, you have to be tough to survive, and I intend to survive.”

Jim watched her, the question he was reluctant to frame, in his eyes.

“I’m in advertising, so get that gleam out of your eyes,” she ordered him. “I’m not a flesh-peddler in any sense of the word. I hold my job by being a damned good copywriter. I’m well up towards the top, and the higher you go, the more slippery it gets. You have to keep one eye on the fellow ahead of you whose job you want, and the other eye on the one behind you, who wants your job. It sounds a bit screwy, but you also have to keep on your toes—to be ready to kick the guy ahead of you out of his job so you can get it, the other one to kick back at the one who’s after your job. It’s a lovely, lovely profession.”

“It sounds like it.”

“But I love it. All right, so that makes me out a louse. I’m ambitious, and I’m going to get to the top, regardless of who I have to hurt while I’m doing it,” she told him. “That’s why the cabin here is so valuable to me. When I get all tensed up, with nerves screaming, I come up here, lock the door, drink myself into a coma and sleep twenty-four hours. I take the train back to Atlanta from Marshallville late Sunday night, and Monday morning I’m back at my desk, clear-eyed, ready to stand toe-to-toe with anyone who gets in my way, and slug it out.”

Jim was studying her curiously, and as though she found his gaze more than she wanted to endure, she rose swiftly, moved into the kitchen, mixed two fresh drinks, and came back to hand him one. She lifted the other in a silent salute and drank deeply.

“So now you know the secret of the cabin,” she told him. “Marthy would give her store-bought teeth to know it. She snooped and pried and prowled like crazy when I first came here, because she was sure I was meeting some man here. I’m sure the dipsomanic thing never occurred to her, though Storekeeper tries now and then to sell me some of his famous corn-squeezin’s. I always draw myself up haughtily and say, ‘But, Jake, you know I don’t drink.’ “

She drank thirstily and Jim watched her. Suddenly he smiled at her. “You’re quite a girl,” he said quietly.

“Oh, sure, a fine, upstanding young American gal and such,” she drawled, and her eyes were hot upon him. “D’you know something? If there were men like you around these parts, Marthy might have a point.”

“Well, thanks!”

She put down her glass on the table with a little thud and faced him, head erect, eyes straight. “Well, are you going home?” she demanded.

Jim got quickly to his feet, flushing at the brutality of the dismissal. “Sorry, I hadn’t realized I’d been such a bore,” he said and reached for his windbreaker.

“Because if you’re not,” Lorna said, “I won’t need any more of this liquor. It’s only when I sleep alone that I need to drink myself to sleep.”

She met his eyes coolly for the startled instant it took Jim to realize what she was saying. Then he laughed, put down his glass and pulled her up into his arms, holding her tightly, his mouth seeking and bruising her own with the intensity of his kiss.

After a long moment she drew a little away from him and looked up at him, her eyes green fire, her face white beneath its deft makeup.

“Then I take it you’re staying?” Her tone was thick with passion, but there was a mocking glint in her eyes.

“You couldn’t drive me away with a double-barreled shotgun,” he told her, his voice far from steady.

“Then what are we waiting for?” demanded Lorna, and holding his hand, she drew him with her into the tiny bedroom, where there was scarcely room for them to walk between the bed and the dressing table.

Her arms went about him, drawing him down to her, and she gave herself fully. She took his ardor with a wild abandon that was delightful but startling in its violence.

She was, as he had known instinctively that she would be, a deft and expert lover. Experienced was the word that came to him, but in the mad enchantment of the moment, he thrust it from him. He had known women before, of course, but never one who gave herself to the ardent demands of a blazing desire with such stormy passion. Time and everything else, except this tumultuous giving and taking of desire and its fulfillment, ceased to be.

When at last their transports had lifted them to the peak of fulfillment and their mutual crisis ebbed, they lay still, clutched in each other’s arms. Then she slid away from him, and lay relaxed in the breathless limpness of the aftermath. He propped himself on his elbow and looked down at her, his eyes delighting in the beauty his body had so completely possessed.

She looked like a gorgeous cat, sunk in a delicious languor. She opened her eyes at last, sea-green and sleepy, and grinned at him. “Boy, will I give the office hell on Monday!” she murmured and seemed to fall instantly asleep.

Jim lay beside her, too emotionally aroused to find sleep easy, and for some crazy reason, his mind went to that girl on the mountain in whose cabin he had found shelter last night, the girl who had barred him from her side by a vicious dog and a shotgun. He wondered what it would be like to possess her young, exquisite body as he had possessed Lorna’s fully mature charms. That was a thought that he put aside, ashamed that he could think of Cindy in that light. After what that old bitch, the Haney woman had said about her, knowing the suspicion and contempt in which she and Marthy held Cindy he felt that he, too, had betrayed her by even holding such thoughts about her. By the time he had reached that point in his thoughts, sleep swept over him.

In the coldest, darkest hour before the wintry dawn, Lorna awoke him. “Time you were stirring your bones, my fine friend, and hiking it down to the cabin Storekeeper’s got all fixed up for you,” she told him.

Jim stared at her in the pale-yellow light from the shaded bedlamp. “Hey, you’re not going to throw me out of this snug, warm bed into the cold? Want me to catch pneumonia?” he protested and reached for her with eager arms.

Lorna evaded him, slipping away from him as she slid to the foot of the bed and stepped out, reaching for a robe to wrap about herself.

“The man doesn’t live who’s going to see me in the cold grey dawn of the morning after, Jimmy darlin’,” she assured him, and though her voice was light and mocking, he sensed that she meant it. “I look like death warmed over after one of these little sessions. You can come back for breakfast, not before twelve o’clock, when I’ve managed to pull myself together and got my face on. Scoot, now!”

“You look beautiful—,” he protested.

“Beat it, lad—or I won’t even let you come back for breakfast,” she threatened and went out into the living room.

Swearing, he pulled on his clothes, and when he went into the living room, he found her waiting for him. Though she smiled at his angry scowl, there was no hint of relenting in her manner.

“With Marthy so damned sure I’m an abandoned woman, and a first-rate hussy, I can’t afford to have them know you spent the night here,” she pointed out. “They’ll have the cabin ready for you, and the first thing the old bitch will do when she gets up is to go out and see if you’re there. See?”

Reluctantly, Jim nodded and erased the scowl. “Sure,” he agreed. “It’s just that I was sleeping so warm and snug and in such wonderful company. You’re right, of course.”

“There can be lots of other nights, if you like,” she told him, studying him through the smoke of her cigarette.

“If I like!” Jim reached for her, but she laughed, stepped back and swung open the front door, drawing her robe about her, shivering in the icy blast of air that swept in.

“Breakfast at twelve sharp, and it might be waffles,” she promised him, and as he stepped through the door, it swung shut behind him. Then he heard the click of the key in the lock.

He stood on the steps, shivering in the bitter cold, until his eyes had adjusted themselves to the darkness, and he could see the pale glimmer of the creek, and could feel his way beside it on the trail.

A feeble light shone through a window of the cabin Storekeeper had said would be his. Jim managed to reach it, and to creep silently up the steps, knowing that sounds would carry a long way in that still, cold night. He was most anxious not to rouse Marthy and her husband and be seen coming in at this hour.

A kerosene lamp burned dimly on a rickety table, and the fire in the small sheet-iron stove had died down to glowing embers. There was a wood box full of short, thick, well-dried logs. Jim carefully fed the embers until the stove once more glowed with a gratifying warmth. He blew out the lamp, and looked through the one small window at a thin greying in the sky. Not so much the coming of light as of the fading of thick darkness. Then he tumbled into bed, and as he once more grew warm, he fell into a dreamless sleep.