A Loving Man (5 page)

She jerked open the door, pinned him in the bald light and said, “Look. I’ve been attracted to guys before, okay? You’re not the first.”

“Okay,” he answered slowly as she began to pace across the worn linoleum. Rose was struggling with her past and fear of the future. The war fascinated Stefan.

“You need new linoleum. We can make you a deal on floor coverings since you’re going to need so much. Our paint sale is still on, too. This whole place could use two coats of outside paint. We give discounts when you buy twenty gallons or more at the same time. This old place will soak up the first coat. You’ll need plenty of caulking, too.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you for the suggestion.” Stefan tried not to smile. He enjoyed watching her, this tall, lithe woman whose loyalty to her father and friends ran deep.

She placed her hands on her hips and studied him. “If you haven’t been with a woman in a long time, how can you kiss like that?”

Stefan pushed away from the wall and moved toward her. He placed his hands on either side of the kitchen counter, bracketing Rose’s hips. He couldn’t resist stroking that soft curve of her hips with his thumbs. She was so perfect, so feminine, a delicate flower and quite possibly a very passionate woman. If she made love with the vitality she applied to everything else, he might not recover. “Like what?”

The little quiver passing through her body pleased him. She was fearless, though, eyeing him defiantly. “You’re too close and you know it. You’re sucking up all my air.”

“You can suck up mine,” he returned, enjoying the warmth of her body close to his, the fragrance of her skin, her hair.

“I know a woman who would be perfect for you,” Rose whispered shakily. “Sophisticated, feminine, very good conversationalist. Maggie White is not married, her children are grown and she’s a marvelous cook. She’s very
attractive and always wears dresses—sometimes long, flowing ones—with just the right jewelry—sometimes dangling earrings, and men seem to love being with her. She’s very trendy and worldly. You might want to meet her. I can fix you up…. What’s so funny?”

He ran a fingertip over the freckles on her cheek. “Do you always talk so much when you are nervous with a man?”

She shivered again, but refused to look away. “You’re standing too close and you’re not wearing a shirt.”

Stefan pressed his case; Rose needed to admit to herself that she was a very sensual woman—attractive, desirable—and that she, too, was simmering. He wanted to remove himself from the “bud” bin, where she tossed the other males in her life. “You have seen men without shirts before, surely.”

“I’ve got a hard day tomorrow. Big paint sale and sure to have plenty of customers. I’m leaving,” she said unevenly after a long pause. She swallowed and locked her gaze with his.

Stefan sensed that she was forcing herself not to look at his body. He nodded and stepped away from her. “As you wish.”

She did not move. “I feel…I feel as if you could devour me.”

“I could,” he answered curtly, truthfully. “But I would expect you to do a certain amount of devouring on your own.”

“I’m athletic. I run every morning that I can. I play ball. Men usually think of me as a tomboy,” she whispered, trembling now, her hands gripping the counter behind her.

“I don’t. I think of you as a desirable woman.”

She took an unsteady step away from him, then another,
and at the door she turned to stare at him. “You’ll get over this. Most men do. I’ve been referred to as ‘macho-woman.’ Summer will end, and you’ll be gone.”

When Stefan continued to look at her, she shook her head and closed the door behind her. After her headlights faded into the night, Stefan stood a long time, alone with his thoughts and his hunger for Rose.

In the morning, his mother patted his cheek. “You had a restless night. And up so early, hammering away downstairs. It has been a long time since you have wanted to be near a woman.”

“We only have a short time before my stove arrives.” Stefan picked up boards and hurled them out of the open back door. “She calls me ‘bud.’ Like I am a brother. She wants to introduce me to a woman more suitable. Am I a man, or an old cooking pot to be passed around?”

“Some old cooking pots can be quite in demand.” Yvette tossed an apple to him. “I wondered when you would come to life, and it appears that now you have.”

He studied the perfect apple, which reminded him of Rose’s breasts and the taste he had not managed. “Stop scowling, Stefan,” his mother said. “You move too fast and you frighten her. Have patience. Let the pot simmer a while. At breakfast, it was easy to see how wary she is of you. Your arm brushed hers and she jumped. A woman likes to choose her own course. Especially a woman like Rose, who has managed by herself for quite some time. Patience, Stefan.”

By noon, Estelle had complained of his bad mood and had left to pick up cleaning supplies in Waterville. While Stefan cooked on the simple farm stove, he longed for his own stainless steel range with ovens and warming shelf.
Remodeling the house, making it livable, kept his body tired, but his mind still prowled through his images of Rose.

By early afternoon, his mother was cheerfully doing laundry in the new washer and dryer, which had just arrived. Stefan made his daily call to check on the restaurants and was a little disappointed that business was running smoothly without him. Yvette peered around the corner and folded a towel as she smiled at him. “So much like your father. He couldn’t believe his business could do without him.”

Stefan remembered all the times he’d wanted his father to be at home. “Have I missed so much of my daughter’s life?”

“No, but you have missed much of your own. You are only coming awake now, with this girl, Rose. You are only now realizing how lonely you’ve been. This summer will be good not only for Estelle, but for you, too, I think. You have not played since you were a very small boy. Perhaps it is time.”

Stefan considered the raw blisters on his hands, the ache of his muscles and the hunger of his body. “Perhaps. Do you think Estelle misses Louie?”

Yvette laughed gaily. “No. But she doesn’t want you to think that you have had your way. She wishes you to know it is her choice. You cannot keep Estelle from becoming a woman. Look outside.”

Stefan frowned at the teenage girls and boys who were talking with Estelle. She looked like any country girl, healthy and laughing and flirting a bit, too. Stefan’s head began to hurt. Memories of his daughter circled him—first a tiny baby, then a toddler and now she was a woman. “Since she was twelve, boys seem to be all around her. I’m losing her.”

His mother shrugged. “It is life. It is not something you can stop. You did the right thing to try Estelle’s dream for the summer, Stefan. You always do the right thing for your family. Perhaps it is time you started thinking of doing what is best for you. You sacrificed much too early for your father’s demands, and for that I am sad. I tried, but Guy feared failure so much, and he did want the best for you. He loved you.”

“Yes. And you.” He had often wondered how his mother could bear such a cold man, but then bits of tenderness that he had seen filtered back to him. A woman could change a man, but could a man change a woman?

“Y
ou should see what the house looks like now. I didn’t know Daddy was a carpenter. We’ve only lived there two weeks and, already, he’s got the kitchen the way he wants it, and the house is perfect. Grandma and I had the best time at a farm auction, bidding on furniture and household things. We went to the church bazaar and to yard sales for the rest. We bargained—can you imagine that? And we traded things. Just like Grandma used to do in her village. Grandma says the best things are those that have been well-loved and she’s right. They’re all just great—homey and worn and soft. I’ve got a kitten, Jenny Linn bed and a homemade quilt just like any other country girl,” Estelle said as Yvette and Rose knelt, digging carefully to uproot starts from around the abandoned log cabin.

The old cabin was falling apart, the barn no more than rusted sheet metal and broken, weathered gray boards. But some long forgotten homestead woman had loved plants
and Rose enjoyed Yvette’s delight when showing the rustic cabin, overgrown with scarlet climbing roses and circled by peonies and violets. The lavender bed had started most of the herb gardens in and around Waterville. The overgrown azalea bushes hid rabbits, and the field of daffodils and tiger lilies had long lost their blooms. After a hard day at the store, Rose hoped that “flower rustling” in the evening with her new friends would relax her. She’d lost too much sleep and it was Stefan Donatien’s fault.
He had set her sensors humming and she felt as taut as a bowstring. If she were a paint can and he touched her, she’d explode.

Yvette carefully dug the daffodil bulbs and placed them within the dampened newspaper for the trip home. “Stefan appears to have a certain amount of excess energy. He works long into the night and he is up before my chickens.”

Rose carefully slipped her trowel beneath a cluster of lavender, gently easing the roots from their rich earth mooring. Stefan Donatien had cost her sleep. She didn’t want the warmth his touch had brought. She didn’t want that throbbing deep inside, aroused by the memory of his kiss. Though Yvette and Estelle were regular customers at the paint store, he hadn’t appeared; he just might have taken her suggestion about Maggie, a woman more suitable than Rose. Exactly why would a man like Stefan Donatien take a second look at her?

Why would he move so fast and so certain?

How could he look so warm and simmering, so intimate as he stood near her?

Stefan’s trial separation of Estelle and Louie seemed a good game plan for Rose to employ, too. Stefan would get over any notions he had after a time and everything would settle down into the comfortable zone she preferred. She knew she couldn’t afford any unexpected sexual develop
ments, not when she was just sliding safely into midlife’s home plate. She’d already paid high prices for believing in love and romance. Whatever Stefan was offering, she couldn’t afford to take. She didn’t trust him, rather she didn’t trust her startling reaction to him—as if she wanted to grab those wide shoulders and hold tight to see where the ride would take her.

Well, she had tried that with Mike, in a desperate effort to find romance. She’d had all the heartbreak she wanted in this lifetime. She tried to change the topic from Stefan, because he occupied enough of her thoughts already and her senses started jumping just at the mention of his name. “Dad and I are going to start shingling the roof next week. He is feeling better.”

Her father seemed almost boyish when he talked about Yvette; he no longer seemed to mull the past. Yvette fascinated most of the men in Waterville and the barbershop gossip had changed from crops and machines to current feminine fashions. In the grocery store, older women were humming and bright and cheerful, the result of more attentive husbands. In the post office, the scramble for new catalogs was fierce, the demand for soft flowing dresses increased. The local dry goods store started ordering more dress fabric and sewing machines were whirring. Yvette and Estelle fitted easily into the community. Stefan seemed apart and distant; his tense argument with the cook at Danny’s Café about the correct cooking of pasta had started an immediate scandal. The cook went on strike during dinner hour, and as a result, Stefan was immediately banned from Danny’s, which had already excluded him from the men’s morning coffee group.

“My dad is grumpy,” Estelle noted as Yvette was silent, her floppy straw hat hiding her expression. “It can’t be Louie, because he hasn’t called for some reason. It can’t
be business, because according to the office secretary everything is just fine. He works late every night to keep the business running smoothly, and on top of problems. I don’t know what his problem is apart from that, but he’s not talking. Sometimes he just sits on the front porch and stares into the night. He looks so lonesome, sitting there alone. Sometimes I think that if he didn’t have us to cook for, he’d just sit there forever.”

Rose stilled; “alone” meant Stefan hadn’t taken up with Maggie, because she never let a man be alone until he was wrung-out and used up. Rose inhaled and her hand trembled on her trowel—but then there was plenty of Stefan to use up.

“Some things are private,
ma chérie,
” Yvette returned gently. “I’m so happy our new friend is helping us. This flower rustling is so much fun. Your
papa
is also having fun, I think, on that old tractor, plowing that field so early this morning. And he adores that old pickup. It’s really his first chance to enjoy something he should have been allowed to do as a teenager.”

Estelle stood and shaded her eyes against the mid-May sunlight, staring toward the farm road. “What’s going on?”

Rose pushed herself upright, then reached to help Yvette rise to her feet. They watched a flood of piglets tear across the field; Zeb Black, a burly farmer, hurried behind them, panting and trying to catch his breath. Rose rubbed her hands together. “This calls for action.”

“Count me in.” Estelle grinned. With her black, gleaming hair in a ponytail and wearing a T-shirt and shorts and joggers, she looked like any farm girl. “Let’s go!”

“Thanks, Rose,” Zeb called as the two women ran after the five squealing piglets. “Old Mary, the sow, broke through the fence again, and those rascals just decided to
take off…chased ’em a fair piece with the pickup. Bring ’em back to me and I’ll put those little rascals in it.”

Rose caught three squirming piglets, and Estelle caught one, and Zeb seemed flustered when Yvette came to the pickup, admiring his stock. He said he didn’t want her to stand too close for fear some of the mud that encrusted them—and him—might soil her “pretty dress.”

A long-married man, Zeb flushed when Rose stared at him, disbelieving his gallant behavior when he barely noticed his tiny, silent wife. Rose was dripping in mud and so was Estelle. He smiled feebly at them, before they ran off after the last piglet who was headed for the farm pond. Estelle was shouting, obviously enjoying herself as they trapped the piglet, who ran back and forth between them. “Gotcha!” Rose yelled and dived for the squealing animal.

Victorious at last, she hugged the squirming prize to her, tripped and fell into the pond. Sloshing in the muddy depths and trying to regain her balance wasn’t easy, but she laughed, enjoying the cheers from the bank. Then something gripped the front of her sleeveless blouse and hauled her out of the muddy water. “I got him,” she exclaimed happily, hugging her squirming piglet until Zeb took him.

“Yes, you did,” Stefan said, his deep voice threaded with humor.

Riding high on her victory, Rose grinned up at him. He grinned back, looking not as foreign and stern, but with a stubble covering his jaw and wearing a dirty, grease-stained T-shirt, he looked like any farmhand, just in from spring baling. He smelled like freshly cut alfalfa, a scent that she’d always enjoyed. “This is farm life, bud. I was the best greased pig catcher at the fair in my time.”

“I can see that—” Stefan tensed as Rose threw her arms
around him and kissed him just as she would any good “bud.”

This “bud” wrapped his arms around her quickly, tugged her close and changed the kiss into a sensuous, stormy heat. She dived into the enticing, mysterious taste and the feel of his body close to hers, and tossed away everything but the sense that the inevitable had come calling. His hands trembled on her as he lifted her off her feet and continued kissing her, his mouth slanted, fused to hers as lightning danced around them and thunder roared and her senses began an unfamiliar beat.

His lips lifted slowly from hers and she shocked herself by taking one last quick kiss, then met that dark, intense gaze with her own. “I can’t breathe,” she whispered.

“I’m holding you too tight?” he whispered back unevenly, his accent more pronounced.

“Not that. You’re just sucking up all my air again. And you’ve got a definite problem,” she whispered shakily. Stefan’s hard thighs were pressed against her damp ones, his body taut and humming as he held her.

“You think I am happy about this?” he asked harshly. “That I act like a boy around you? That thoughts of you keep me awake?”

Somewhere in the distance, Zeb cleared his throat. “I’ll just be getting these little ones back to their mama.”

Stefan placed Rose back on her feet and his hot, intimate look raked down her muddy body, where her wet blouse clung to her breasts and her nipples peaked. His swallow was rough as he smoothed her damp hair from her face. “Rose,” he whispered so softly, wrapping her name in the taste of midnight rendezvous, sensual touches and heart-stopping intimacy.

When Rose pulled herself out of the daze she had just slid into, she looked to find Estelle and Yvette. She hoped
to use them to put distance between Stefan and herself, but they were walking across the field toward the plant starts. Clearly Stefan’s family had left her to fend for herself.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him.

He motioned to his pickup on the farm road. “I needed a part for the tractor and was going into town. I could not resist stopping when I saw you and Estelle acting like happy children in the field, chasing those pigs. Estelle has never looked so young and free. It was a beautiful thing to see, and to hear your laughter. You’ve become friends with my mother and my daughter. It seems that is more than I can do.”

“We were flower rustling,” Rose explained shakily, as Stefan carefully took a clean white handkerchief and began methodically wiping her face, holding it gently with one hand. She heard herself talking and knew it was because she was so nervous, her skin heating as he touched her. “It’s an old custom here for new homemakers in Waterville to take a piece of this beautiful old home-place to theirs…an inheritance, so to speak. Taking those starts thins out the bulbs and lets the plants grow better. Sometimes people come out here to separate the plants and start them at another place on the farm, like those willows over there. It’s a family sort of thing to do. You know, like Grandma Granger did when she was a girl, and like Mom and Dad did when they were dating, and like— Lily of the Valleys are pretty down in that hollow…little white bells on dark broad leaves—”

“Why did you kiss me?” Stefan asked softly. His intimate study of her face, her eyes, her cheeks and mouth took away her breath.

“You were there,” she answered truthfully. “It seemed right after catching the pig. I had to celebrate somehow.”

“I would like to carry you off and feast upon you,” Stefan said raggedly. “Do you not know how seductive you are—part girl, so innocent, and all woman?”

“‘Seductive?”’ Rose circled the thought. “You’re mistaken. Not one of my—”

“They were blind fools,” Stefan said passionately. “I do not want to hear about them.”

His command shifted Rose’s unsteady emotions into simmering anger. In her lifetime, no one had spoken sharply to her, or ordered her. “Oh, you don’t? And I don’t like your tone. Take it back.”

Stefan blinked as if she had reached out and struck him. “Take what back?”

“That high-handed order, like you were a general or something.”

He was silent for a moment, his expression darkening. “Perhaps I speak too formally to you. I was born in this country, but sometimes my upbringing—some schooling in France—emerges when I am…emotional. My father spoke thus—very proper—when he was…emotional.”

Stefan shook his head as if a new thought had entered it and he wasn’t certain of it or himself. He started again. “You arouse me. I do not like that I am so susceptible to your touch, but I am. You think I like to think of you with other men?”

Rose held up her hands. Stefan was volatile and cruising off into areas of her life that even she didn’t want to examine too closely. “Let’s get back on course. There’s nothing between us. There isn’t going to be.”

“Is that so?” Then Stefan reached out one hand, curled it around the back of her neck and tugged her close. She pushed at his chest and then, failing to dislodge herself, stood staring defiantly up at him. “So you decide what is to be, do you not? You open yourself to no one, especially
me. I am too old, you think? I am not suitable? You wound me,
ma chérie,
” he said in a scathing tone, his accent more pronounced.

“Do you have to be so darned open about what you’re thinking?” she demanded and realized that Stefan’s other hand had settled firmly on her bottom, caressing it, as if her curves pleased him. Stefan was the first man to look at her like that, to touch her as if he had all the time in the world to enjoy her. She began to shiver, her nerves dancing as if they needed to lock on to an anchor—

Suddenly Stefan bent, picked her up on his shoulder and carried her to the pond. When he tossed her into the water, it was cold, and mud sucked at her feet as she struggled free. Rose didn’t think; anger pushed her out of the pond. She ran at Stefan, who was walking back to his pickup, and hit him with a linebacker’s tackle.

He went down in the field grass, turned, grabbed her and pinned her beneath him. Rose frowned up at him, her wrists clasped by his hands. Stefan’s grin flashed; he lowered his head and took her mouth in a devastating kiss. It was a rough, hungry kiss, and not the kind that she could stop—if she’d wanted to, if she weren’t grabbing him with her arms and legs and wrestling him beneath her to have more of that fiery, wide-open hunger. She raised up once to look at him, to stop the whirling furnace, and Stefan stared back at her, his dark expression just as wild and fierce as she felt. Then he looked down at her breasts, to the buttons that had opened to reveal her lacy bra. His body hardened beneath hers, and in the next second that dark, heated gaze was slowly easing away from her face, from her lips, and rising to Yvette and Estelle who were standing near them. Yvette was trying to hide a grin and Estelle was staring down at them, her expression shocked.
Her mouth moved once and no sound came, and then,
“Daddy! Just what are you doing?”