The Bridal Promise. Virginia Dove

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СКАЧАТЬ owe her more than I can ever express. So don’t think you’ve got any right to chastise me for having left,” she went on. “I don’t feel I owe you any explanations for my way of life. But please, know this: I would have given anything to have stayed home.”

      Time seemed to stretch to the snapping point before he gave her a rueful half smile. Her heart broke as she saw she had been right. It never really reached his eyes.

      “You’re not the little girl you were the last time we stood in this house,” he said, shoving his hands into his back pockets. “Mistakes were made. I should never have touched you. I knew that, and I take full responsibility,” Matt declared. “I was robbing the cradle but I just couldn’t help myself.” He looked away from the woman she had become.

      “However, all that doesn’t change the fact that you left. You are no longer a part of this world,” Matt said coldly. “There are no bright lights here. There is nothing left for you but some stone markers in the cemetery.” The very idea served to make him angrier. He turned back to face her. “What is here in Spirit Valley that could possibly make you want to stay?”

      The look of pure longing she couldn’t completely disguise caused them both to blush. The unguarded moment increased his fury. Wanly, she started to move toward the door. Then Perri stopped, turning in frustration and maybe even some fear. Like that night twelve years ago, there was nowhere to run.

      “Let’s just find out right now, shall we,” Matt whispered as he moved across the room and reached for her. He held her jaw firmly in his hands, those long fingers biting lightly into the back of her neck. His palms burned her as they slowly moved down her shoulders to her arms, just before his fingers gently circled her wrists.

      “Do you taste the same now that you’re all grown up, darlin’?” he asked lightly. “I’ve been meaning to find out ever since you got back into town.” In seconds he had the answer for himself as he ruthlessly pulled her to him and his mouth took hers.

      Perri’s shocked intake of breath opened her mouth under his and Matt took full advantage of her surprise. His tongue probed decisively as he cuffed her wrists to the small of her back with one hand.

      The electrically charged air seemed to light a spark within her Perri had long assumed to have died. She tried desperately to breathe into her burning lungs. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had had a moment to think about it, or even if he hadn’t molded her firmly to him. She would have opened for him anyway. She hoped that realization could remain her secret, and not a part of the battering her pride was about to take.

      For Perri couldn’t completely stop herself from responding as his tongue suggestively moved in and out of her welcoming month. Matt couldn’t have made his intent more clear. She couldn’t have made her assent more apparent. She melted against him and tried not to moan as he played with her mouth, delicately nipping at her lower lip.

      Matt was the one who abruptly ended the kiss. He picked up the conversation right where he’d left off.

      “You do taste the same,” he said gruffly. “I like that. So that’s what we have here,” he declared as he caged her face in his hands. “Heat. That’s all it can be between us, Perri. Just heat.” He allowed himself one more brief, hard kiss before he released her, none too carefully. She struggled to regain her composure as he nonchalantly turned back to the window to check the sky.

      “That’s all I have left for any woman. So, if you’re as agreeable as you seem, we could have a good time before you leave.” He turned back to face her, his smile more than just a little arrogant. “But don’t expect love from me, hon. Certainly not for you,” he added. “It’s all been burned away.”

      Perri’s embarrassment grew as he blatantly considered her before starting for the door. It was as if nothing of any importance had happened between them. “Matt,” she called, frozen to the spot where he bad left her.

      He paused without turning around.

      “I never got to tell you how sorry I was to hear about Cadie and the babies.”

      He walked out without a word.

      

      Matt was down the stairs and out the front door, his pickup making a fast retreat before she even came close to getting her breath back. “Well, that went really well,” she muttered. Perri sank to the bed and rapidly worked the window open. She needed air. Immediately.

      So much for the calm. ladylike approach. She couldn’t have made a bigger fool of herself, if she had thought it out with both hands for two weeks. Perri rested her head against the cold metal of the window screen, inhaling the mingled smells of metal, rain and wet grass. For the longest time she couldn’t move. She just stared at the yard.

      It was ridiculous. He’d just kissed her senseless and walked out. Perri wondered if he’d even paused long enough to shut the front door. “I’m good at strategy and logic,” she muttered. “I’ve got tougher clients back in Manhattan to deal with on a daily basis. I’m known for never falling apart.”

      Perri stopped. It had come to this—she was justifying herself to a pecan tree. This from a woman who always kept it together. A woman who had never permitted herself to test the endurance of another love.

      “This is getting me nowhere,” she whispered. Perri had to move. She couldn’t continue to sit there as daylight burned away.

      Out the door of the bedroom and halfway down the stairs. she paused and looked around at the beloved old place. Gannie’s windows needed cleaning. She made a mental note to take care of that first thing. The dusty windows, more than the laying of flowers by a gravestone, caused her to feel the punch of knowing the old woman was truly gone.

      Her gaze drifted into the living room as she sank down onto one of the steps. Through the rungs of the staircase she could see the memory box she had made as a gift her sophomore year in high school.

      Inside the memory box, the gold railroad spike needed polishing; but the silver-plated engineer’s watch didn’t look quite as tarnished. It gleamed softly in the stormy light, as if just waiting for its owner to descend the stairs and retrieve it, along with his favorite pipe. It was almost as if the Rock Island Line still had some muscle in the old Indian Territory. She had chosen each of Gannie’s treasures for the display with great care, the year before her world had fallen apart.

      A picture of Miss Vienna Whitaker and her son, Matthew Lawrence Ransom, hung on the wall by the entrance to the living room. It had been taken in front of the tiny graveyard just outside and down the rise from the front door. Perri had stopped there on her way to the house, placing a single rose on a worn, white marker that said Stone Baby 1889.

      Devoid of trees or bushes, with a gate that still stuck at the last, the skeletal, white iron fence and small arch sheltered thirty-one graves. It had served as a final resting place only until the town had been incorporated. Now, it was part of Perri’s inheritance and therefore, her responsibility.

      The porch, the pictures, the miniature graveyard, the memory box: so many things that softened the heart. So many symbols of everything she had ever hoped and dreamed of maintaining. Everything she had, at one time, thought she would miraculously have a chance to treasure now was hers by right. Now that the heart had gone out of the dream.

      Perri slowly dropped her forehead onto the arm covering her knees and did what she’d been too proud to do that night twelve years before. She cried her eyes out. “Oh, Gannie,” she sobbed СКАЧАТЬ