CHAPTER 11
For a minute Harden just stood staring at his brother, looking as if he hadn’t heard a word. Then he began to laugh, softly at first, building into a roar of sound that echoed down the long aisle.
“It isn’t funny,” Evan glowered at him. “My God, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. There are plenty of men who are celibate. Priests, for instance…”
Harden laughed louder.
Evan wiped his sleeve across his broad, damp forehead and sighed heavily. “What’s so damned funny?”
Harden stopped to get his breath before he answered, and lit a cigarette. He took a deep draw, staring amusedly at his older brother.
“I never bothered to deny it, because it didn’t matter. But I ought to deck you for passing that old gossip on to Miranda. I gave her hell upstairs for what she did. I had no idea she was supposed to be helping me through my first time!”
Evan cocked his head, narrowing one eye. “You aren’t a virgin?”
Harden didn’t answer him. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth. “Is that why she went on that spending spree in town, to buy sexy clothes to vamp me with?”
“Yes. I’m as much help as Mother, I guess,” Evan said quietly. “I overheard her telling Miranda that you’d never get over Anita.”
Harden frowned. “When?”
“At the reception, before you left on your honeymoon.”
Harden groaned and closed his eyes. He turned to the barn wall and hit it soundly with his fist. “Damn the luck!”
“One misunderstanding after another, isn’t it?” Evan leaned a broad shoulder against the wall. “Was she right? Are you still in love with Anita?”
“No. Maybe you were right about that. Maybe it was her time, and Mother was just a link in the chain of events.”
“My God,” Evan exclaimed reverently. “Is that really you talking, or do you just have a fever?” he asked dryly.
Harden glanced up at the lighted window of the room he shared with Miranda. “I’ve got a fever, all right. And I know just how to get it down.”
He left Evan standing and went up to the bedroom, his eyes gleaming with mischief and anticipated pleasure.
But the sight that met him when he opened the door wasn’t conducive to pleasure. Miranda was fully dressed in a pretty white silk dress that was even more seductive than the nightgown she’d discarded, and she was packing a suitcase.
She turned a tearstained face to his. “Don’t worry, I’m going,” she said shortly. “You don’t have to throw me off the place.”
He closed the door calmly, turned the lock, and tossed his hat onto a chair before he moved toward her.
“You can stop right there,” she said warningly. “I’m going home!”
“You are home,” he said evenly.
He swept the suitcase, clothes and all, off the bed onto the floor into a littered heap and bent to lift a startled Miranda in his hard arms.
“You put me down!” she raged.
“Anything to oblige, sweetheart.” He threw her onto the bed and before she could roll away, he had her pinned against the disheveled covers, one long leg holding her thrashing body. She fought him like a tigress until he caught her wrists and pressed them into the mattress on either side of her head.
Her hair was a dark cloud around her flushed face as she stared up at him furiously, her silver eyes flashing at him.
“I’ve had enough of damned men!” she raged at him. “It was bad enough having Tim tell me I wasn’t woman enough to hold a man without having you rub my face in it, too! I have my pride!”
“Pride, and a lot of other faults,” he mused. “Bad temper, impatience, interfering in things that don’t concern you…”
“What are you, Mr. Sweetness and Light, a pattern for perfect manhood?!”
“Not by a long shot,” he said pleasantly, studying her face. “You’re a wildcat, Miranda. Everything I ever wanted, even if it did take me a long time to realize it, and to admit it.”
“You don’t want me,” she said, her voice breaking as she tried to speak bravely about it. “You showed me…!”
“I had a cold shower, remember,” he whispered, smiling gently. “Here. Feel.”
He moved slowly, sensuously, and something predictable and beautiful happened to him, something so blatant that she caught her breath.
“I want you,” he said softly. “But it’s much, much more than wanting. Do you like poetry, Miranda?” he breathed at her lips, brushing them with maddening leisure as he spoke. “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely, and more temperate…’” He kissed her slowly, nibbling at her lower lip while she trembled with pleasure. “Shakespeare couldn’t have been talking about you, could he, sweetheart? You aren’t temperate, even if you are every bit as lovely as a summer’s day…!”
The kiss grew rough, and deep, and his lean hands found her hips, grinding them up against his fierce arousal.
“This is how much I want you,” he bit off at her lips. “I hope you took vitamins, because you’re going to need every bit of strength you’ve got.”
She couldn’t even speak. His hands were against her skin, and then his mouth was. She’d never in her wildest dreams imagined some of the ways he touched her, some of the things he whispered while he aroused her. He took her almost effortlessly to a fever pitch of passion and then calmed her and started all over again.
It was the sweetest kind of pleasure to feel him get the fabric away from her hot skin, and then to feel his own hair-roughened body intimately against her own. It was all of heaven to kiss and be kissed, to touch and be touched, to let him pleasure her until she was mindless with need.
“Evan said…you were…a virgin,” she whispered, her voice breaking as she looked, shocked, into the amused indulgence of his face when the tension was unbearable.
He laughed, the sound soft and predatory. “Am I?” he whispered, and pushed down, hard.
She couldn’t believe what she was feeling. His face blurred and then vanished, and it was all feverish motion and frantic grasping and sharp, hot pleasure that brought convulsive satisfaction.
She lay in his arms afterward, tears running helplessly down her cheeks while he smoked a cigarette and absently smoothed her disheveled hair. She was still trembling in the aftermath.
“Are you all right, little one?” he asked gently.
“Yes.” She laid her wet cheek against his shoulder. “I didn’t know,” she stammered.
“It’s different, every time,” he replied quietly. “But sometimes there’s a level of pleasure that you can only experience with one certain person.” His lips brushed her forehead with breathless tenderness. “It helps if you’re in love with them.”
“I suppose you couldn’t help but know that,” she said, her eyes faintly sad. “I always did wear my heart on my sleeve.”
He nuzzled her face until she lifted it to his quiet, vivid blue eyes. “I love you,” he said quietly. “Didn’t you know?”
No, she didn’t know. Her breath stopped in her throat and she felt the flush that even reddened her breasts.
“My God,” he murmured, watching it spread. “I’ve never seen a woman blush here.” He touched her breasts, very gently.
“Well, now you have, and you can stop throwing your conquests in my face—Oh!”
His mouth stopped the tirade, and he smiled against it. “They weren’t conquests, they were educational experiences that made me the perfect specimen of male prowess you see before you.”
“Of all the conceited people…” she began.
He touched her, and she gasped, clinging to him. “What was that bit, about being conceited?” he asked.
She moaned and curled into his body, shivering. “Harden!” she cried.
“I’ll bet you didn’t even know that only one man out of twenty is capable of this….”
The cigarette went into the ashtray and his body covered hers. And he gave her a long and unbearably sweet lesson in rare male endurance that lasted almost until morning.
* * *
When she woke, he was dressed, whistling to himself as he whipped a belt around his lean hips and secured the big silver buckle.
“Awake?” he murmured dryly. He arched an eyebrow as she moved and groaned and winced. “I could stay home and we could make love some more.”
She caught her breath, gaping at him. “And your brother thinks you’re a virgin!” she burst out.
He shrugged. “We all make mistakes.”
“Yes, well the people who write sex manuals could do two chapters on you!” she gasped.
He grinned. “I could return the compliment. Don’t get up unless you want to. Having you take to your bed can only reflect favorably on my reputation in the household.”
She burst out laughing at the expression on his face. She sat up, letting the covers fall below her bare breasts, and held out her arms.
He dropped into them, kissing her with lazy affection. “I love you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry if I was a little too enthusiastic about showing it.”
“No more enthusiastic than I was,” she murmured softly. She reached up and kissed him back. “I wish you could stay home. I wish I wasn’t so…incapacitated.”
“Don’t sound regretful,” he chuckled. “Wasn’t it fun getting you that way?”
She clung to him, sighing. “Oh, yes.” Her eyes opened and she stared past him at the wall, almost purring as his hands found her silky breasts and caressed them softly. “Harden?”
“What, sweetheart?”
She closed her eyes. “Nothing. Just…I love you.”
He smiled, and reached down to kiss her again.
When he went downstairs to have Jeanie May take a tray up to Miranda, Evan grinned like a Cheshire cat.
“Worn her out after only one day? You’d better put some vitamins on that tray and feed her up,” he said.
Harden actually grinned back. “I’m working on that.”
“I gather everything’s going to be all right?”
“No thanks to you,” Harden said meaningfully.
Evan’s cheeks went ruddy. “I was only trying to help, and how was I to know the truth? My God, you never went around with women, you never brought anybody home… You could have been a virgin!”
Harden smiled secretly. “Yes, I could have.”
The way he put it made Evan more suspicious than ever. “Are you?” he asked.
“Not anymore,” came the dry reply. “Even if I was,” he added to further confound the older man. The smile faded. “Where’s Theodora?”
“Out feeding her chickens.”
He nodded, and went out the back door. He’d said some hard things to Theodora over the years, and Miranda was right about his vendetta. It was time to run up the white flag.
Theodora saw him coming and grimaced, and when he saw that expression, something twisted in his heart.
“Good morning,” he said, his hands stuffed into his pockets.
Theodora glanced at him warily. “Good morning,” she replied, tossing corn to her small congregation of Rhode Island Reds.
“I thought we might have a talk.”
“Why bother?” she asked quietly. “You and Miranda will be in your own place by next week. You won’t have to come over here except at Christmas.”
He took out a cigarette and lit it, trying to decide how to proceed. It wasn’t going to be easy. In all fairness, it shouldn’t be, he conceded.
“I…would like to know about my father,” he said.
The bowl slid involuntarily from Theodora’s hands and scattered the rest of the corn while she stared, white-faced, at Harden. “What?” she asked.
“I want to know about my father,” he said tersely. “Who he was, what he looked like.” He hesitated. “How you…felt about him.”
“I imagine you know that already,” she replied proudly. “Don’t you?”
He blew out a cloud of smoke. “Yes. I think I do, now,” he agreed. “There’s a big difference between love and infatuation. I didn’t know, until I met Miranda.”
“All the same, I’m sorry about Anita,” she said tightly. “I’ve had to live with it, too, you know.”
“Yes.” He hesitated. “It…must have been hard for you. Having me, living here.” He stared at her, searching for words. “If Miranda and I hadn’t married, if I’d given her a child, I know she’d have had it. Cherished it. Loved it, because it would have been a part of me.”
Theodora nodded.
“And all the shame, all the taunts and cutting remarks, would have passed right off her because we loved each other so much,” he continued. “She’d have raised my child, and what she felt for him would have been…special, because a love like that only happens once for most people.”
Theodora averted her eyes, blinded by tears. “If they’re lucky,” she said huskily.
“I didn’t know,” he said unsteadily, unconsciously repeating the very words Miranda had said to him the night before. “I never loved…until now.”
Theodora couldn’t find the words. She turned, finding an equal emotion in Harden’s face. She stood there, small and defenseless, and something burst inside him.
He held out his arms. Theodora went into them, crying her heart out against his broad chest, washing away all the bitterness and pain and hurt. She felt something wet against her cheek, where his face rested, and around them the wind blew.
“Mother,” he said huskily.
Her thin arms tightened, and she smiled, thanking God for miracles.
* * *
Later, they sat on the front porch and she told him about his father, bringing out a long-hidden album that contained the only precious photographs she had.
“He looks like me,” Harden mused, seeing his own face reflected in what, in the photograph, was a much younger one.
“He was like you,” she replied. “Brave and loyal and loving. He never shirked his duty, and I loved him with all my heart. I still do. I always will.”
“Did your husband know how you felt?”
“Oh, yes,” she said simply. “I was too honest to pretend. But he loved children, you see, and my pregnancy brought out all his protective instincts. He loved me the way I loved Barry,” she added sadly. “I gave him all I could, and hoped that it would be enough.” She brushed at a tear. “He loved you, you know. Even though you weren’t blood kin to him, he was crazy about you from the day you were born.”
He smiled. “Yes. I remember.” He frowned as he looked at his mother. “I’m sorry. I’m so damned sorry.”
“You had to find your way,” she said. “It took a long time, and you had plenty of sorrow along the way. I knew what you were going through in school, with the other children throwing the facts of your birth up to you. But if I had interfered, I would have made it worse, don’t you see? You had to learn to cope. Experience is always the best teacher.”
“Even if it doesn’t seem so at the time. Yes, I know that now.”
“About Anita…”
He took her thin, wrinkled hand in his and held it tightly. “Anita’s people would never have let us marry. But even now, I can’t really be sure that it was me she wanted, or just someone her parents didn’t approve of. She was very young, and high-strung, and her mother died in an asylum. Evan said that if God wants someone to live, they will, despite the odds. I don’t know why I never realized that until now.”
She smiled gently. “I think Miranda’s opened your eyes to a lot of things.”
He nodded. “She won’t ever forget her husband, or the child she lost. That’s a good thing. Our experiences make us the people we are. But the past is just that. She and I will make our own happiness. And there’ll be other babies. A lot of them, I hope.”
“Oh, that reminds me! Jo Ann’s pregnant!”
“Maybe it’s the water,” Harden said, and smiled at her.
She laughed. The smile faded and her eyes were eloquent. “I love you very much.”
“I…love you,” he said stiffly. He’d said it more in two days than he’d said it in his life. Probably it would get easier as he went along. Theodora didn’t seem to mind, though. She just beamed and after a minute, she turned the page in the old album and started relating other stories about Harden’s father.
* * *
It was late afternoon before Miranda came downstairs, and Evan was trying not to smile as she walked gingerly into the living room where he and Harden were discussing a new land purchase.
“Go ahead, laugh,” she dared Evan. “It’s all your fault!”
Evan did laugh. “I can’t believe that’s a complaint, judging by the disgustingly smug look on your husband’s face,” he mused.
She shook her head, as bright as a new penny as she went into Harden’s arms and pressed close.
“No complaints at all,” Harden said, sighing. He closed his eyes and laid his cheek against her dark hair. “I just hope I won’t die of happiness.”
“People have,” Evan murmured. But his eyes were sad as he turned away from them. “Well, I’d better get busy. I should be back in time for supper, if this doesn’t run late.”
“Give Anna my love,” Harden replied.
Evan grimaced. “Anna is precocious,” he muttered. “Too forward and too outspoken by far for a nineteen-year-old.”
“Most of my friends were married by that age,” Miranda volunteered.
Evan looked uncomfortable and almost haunted for a minute. “She doesn’t even need to be there,” he said shortly. “Her mother and I can discuss a land deal without her.”
“Is her mother pretty?” Miranda asked. “Maybe she’s chaperoning you.”
“Her mother is fifty and as thin as a rail,” he replied. “Hardly my type.”
“What does Anna look like?” Miranda asked, curious now.
“She’s voluptuous, to coin a phrase,” Harden answered for his taciturn brother. “Blonde and blue-eyed and tall. She’s been swimming around Evan for four years, but he won’t even give her a look. He’s thirty-four, you know. Much too old for a mere child of nineteen.”
“That’s damned right,” he told Harden forcibly. “A man doesn’t rob cradles. My God, I’ve known her since she was a child.” He frowned. “Which she still is, of course,” he added quickly.
“Go ahead, convince yourself,” Harden nodded.
“I don’t have to do any convincing!”
“Have a good time.”
“I’m going to be discussing land prices,” he said, glaring at Harden.
“I used to enjoy that,” Harden said, shrugging. “You might, too.”
“That will be the day. I…”
“Harden, want a chocolate cake for supper?” Theodora called from the doorway, smiling.
Harden drew Miranda closer and smiled back. “Love one, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” she said gently.
“Mother!” he called when she turned, and Evan’s eyes popped.
“What?” Theodora asked pleasantly.
“Butter icing?”
She laughed. “That’s just what I had in mind!”
Evan’s jaw was even with his collar. “My God!” he exclaimed.
Harden looked at him. “Something wrong?”
“You called her Mother!”
“Of course I did, Evan, she’s my mother,” he replied.
“You’ve never called her anything except Theodora,” Evan explained. “And you smiled at her. You even made sure she wouldn’t be put to any extra work making you a cake.” He looked at Miranda. “Maybe he’s sick.”
Miranda looked up at him shyly and blushed. “No, I don’t think so.”
“I’d have to be weak if I were sick,” he explained to Evan, and Miranda made an embarrassed sound and hid her face against his shoulder.
Evan shook his head. “Miracles,” he said absently. He shrugged, smiling, and turned toward the door, reaching for his hat as he walked through the hall. “I’ll be back by supper.”
“Anna’s a great cook,” Harden reminded him. “You might get invited for supper.”
“I won’t accept. I told you, damn it, she’s too young for me!”
He went out, slamming the door behind him.
Harden led Miranda out the front door and onto the porch, to share the swing with him. “Anna wants to love him, but he won’t let her,” he explained. “Why?”
“I’ll tell you one dark night,” he promised. “But for now, we’ve got other things to think about. Haven’t we?” he added softly.
“Oh, yes.” She caught her her breath just before he took it away, and she smiled under his hungry kiss.
* * *
The harsh memories of the wreck that had almost destroyed Miranda’s life faded day by wonderful day, as Miranda and Harden grew closer. Theodora was drawn into the circle of their happiness and the new relationship she enjoyed with Harden lasted even when the newlyweds moved into their own house.
But Miranda’s joy was complete weeks later, when she fainted at a family gathering and a white-faced Harden carried her hotfoot to the doctor.
“Nothing to worry about,” Dr. Barnes assured them with a grin, after a cursory examination and a few pointed questions. “Nothing at all. A small growth that will come out all by itself—in just about seven months.”
They didn’t understand at first. And when they did, Miranda could have sworn that Harden’s eyes were watery as he hugged her half to death in the doctor’s office.
For Miranda, the circle was complete. The old life was a sad memory, and now there was a future of brightness and warmth to look forward to in a family circle that closed around her like gentle arms. She had, she considered as she looked up at her handsome husband, the whole world right here beside her.
* * * * *