Tenderness (8 page)

Wade felt a surge of pleasure. She overwhelmed him, driving all logical thought from his mind. She melted back into him as
if it were the most natural thing in the world. He struggled against the passion she aroused in him. Her body moving softly
against his was seductively dangerous to his self-control. He breathed in the scent of her, a faint antisceptic and woman
scent, mingling with the clean night air. His chest rose and fell with his breathing. He hoped desperately to control the
part of him that would embarrass both of them if she became aware of it.

“Here it comes,” Wade said almost welcoming the sheet of wind-driven rain that hit them. “Are you scared of storms?”

“Sometimes.”

She turned her face to his shoulder. His back and bowed head were to the wind and the slicker shed the rain that pounded them.
He held her tightly against his chest in a protective, sheltering way. She could feel the beat of his heart. She couldn’t
remember ever being held this close to anyone except her brother and sister. Like all young girls she had had her dreams.
One of them had been to wonder what it would be like to be held by a lover. Of course, she admonished herself, Wade Simmer
was not her lover, but just a man taking care of her because he admired her father.

The thunder and flash lightning rolled and crackled over them, and with it came the heavy downpour that lasted for what seemed
a long time. When the deluge finally let up, a gentle constant rain continued. Jesse rested against Wade in sweet comfort
while the rain curtained them and bestowed upon her a sense of belonging, enriching her faith in this man she had known for
less than twelve hours. The rain gradually receded until it became a light drizzle, then stopped.

Jesse moved her face back to look into his. Water from his hat brim spilled down on the slicker when he tipped his head. Moisture
clung to his lashes and ran down his cheeks. They were a breath apart, so close she could see the shine of his eyes as they
moved intently over her face. Seconds slipped by and he said nothing. As the quiet between them stretched, and the horse carried
them onward, Jesse blinked at him in confusion.

When they came, his whispered words were a shock that caused her heart to make a frantic leap.

“Jesse.” He said her name softly. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to kiss you.”

“No!”

“I… won’t bite you.” He knew the words were stupid, but it was too late to take them back.

They looked at each other for a long while before he lowered his head slowly, giving her time to turn her face away. Jesse
was mesmerized. She knew what was about to happen but was unable to stop it. He brought his mouth down on hers; his lips were
wet with rain but warm and gentle. He brushed her lips with his, lightly, like the wings of a butterfly. It wasn’t enough.

“God help me!” It was a groan that ended as his lips, hard and intense, found hers again, covering, taking control, feasting
on her mouth as if it were a warm ripe peach.

Never before had she felt quite like this. Never had she known this melting, letting-go sensation that now invaded her innermost
being. The sudden joy was startling, and yet so lovely it was breathtaking.

Why couldn’t she think?
Now his lips were playing with the corners of her mouth, tracing a path to her eyes and then back to close over hers. Their
lips met with an eagerness and familiarity that was unique for two who had not been lovers. Her senses commanded her to move
back out of his embrace, but her body ignored the order, remained pliable, and molded itself against him. She could feel the
steady thumping of his heart and feel the hard muscles and bones of his chest and arms.

A warning crept into the back of her mind. She knew she should have found his kiss distasteful, but it was wildly exciting,
deliciously sweet. Her sanity argued, this is madness! For once she refused to listen to that inner voice and delighted in
the wondrous warmth, the sensation of his lips on hers, to the feel of arms encircling her, to his strength, to the masculine
smell of his skin, to the roughness of his cheeks.

“Damn! Damn! Damn!” Wade groaned in frustrated agony and pressed his cheek tightly to hers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do
that.” His voice was husky with regret.

“I don’t know what possessed me to let you—” Her lower lip trembled. She was glad he couldn’t see her face. “I’m not… I don’t…
go around kissing strange men.”

“I know that,” he said quickly. “It was my fault. I should have resisted. But you’re enough to tempt a saint and I’m sure
as hell no saint.”

She was aware of the heavy beat of her heart and his. His mouth had had the bittersweet taste of tobacco. Her nose, when pressed
to the roughness of his cheek, had caught the whiff of smoke. These scattered thoughts floated through her mind as her eyes
focused on the space between the horse’s ears and her mind fought for something casual to say.

“Why don’t you have a mustache?”

“Too much work.”

“I don’t like them anyway,” she said lamely, turning her head and moving it slightly away from him.

Jesse sat still, dazed, aware that Wade no longer held her tightly against him. Coldness was seeping in where she had been
so glowingly warm before. With shaking fingers she adjusted the wet shawl on her head.

“Looks like the rain is over.” Wade spoke as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “That’s the Lesters’ ahead. Grandpa
put a lantern on the porch.”

Too late, too late. The refrain echoed in Wade’s brain as he rode home through the rain-soaked woods after he left Jesse at
the Lesters’. His insides churned and twisted painfully. He couldn’t even excuse himself on the grounds that he hadn’t known
what was happening, would happen if he kissed her. From the beginning he had known. The first time he had looked at Jesse
Forbes through the field glasses he had known that he would have to be very careful. And knowing that, he had gone full tilt
ahead, paying no heed to the warning signals.

Jesse was so far above him they didn’t even breathe the same air, he reminded himself sternly. His brain knew that, but his
body and his emotions lacked that understanding. What he needed was to go to Knoxville and visit a woman he knew who was skilled
in giving him relief. After visiting her, he didn’t give her another thought until time for the next session, and she didn’t
expect him to.

The frenzy of his obsession with Jesse frightened him. He had tried all day to analyze his feelings. It was not that he was
desperate to get her into bed—although he had to admit that he had thought about how it would be to bury himself in the soft
warmth of her body. It was more than that. Never before had he wanted someone to belong exclusively to
him,
care for
him.

Even now he could smell the clean, sweet scent of her, see her eyes as calm and serene as a mountain pool one moment and sparkling
with laughter the next.

She could destroy you, you idiot!

Wade was disgusted with himself and vowed to stop thinking about her. He had done foolish things in his life but never any
quite as foolish as kissing the doctor’s daughter.

Still, the warmth that had settled inside him and the odd feeling of belonging when she returned his kiss were the most pleasurable
moments of his life. He allowed himself the luxury of imagining how it would be if she were in his kitchen, standing at the
stove, waiting for him. She would have a sweet smile on her pretty mouth and her dark hair would be loose and hanging down
her back.

Damn, damn. In one short day she had turned his life upside down.

The smell of coffee roused Jesse. She identified it and became aware that she was snuggled down in Granny Lester’s featherbed.
She turned on her back and found herself looking out on a clear morning. She stretched luxuriously. Then a clatter of iron
brought her full awake. She sprang out of bed and scrambled into her clothes, brushed and pinned up her hair, and hastily
made the bed. She glanced around the small room where the neat iron bedstead was now spread with a patchwork quilt, then walked
barefoot into the kitchen. Granny stood at the cookstove stirring a pan of raw-fried potatoes.

“Morning.”

“Hit’s goin’ to be a fair day. Mr. Lester says there ain’t a cloud in the sky. Sleep good? Bed not too lumpy?”

“The bed was wonderful.” Jesse had not slept well. Her mind would not release thoughts of Wade Simmer and the devastating
effect of his kiss. As she washed her face and hands and dried them on the towel that hung on a nail above the wash bench,
she strove without much success to put him out of her mind. “What can I do?”

“Ya can sit. Mr. Lester is comin’. I heard the gate swing shut.” Jesse stood behind the high-backed kitchen chair feeling
awkward at being waited on by this elderly woman with the goiter that was choking the life out of her. But knowing the pride
of the hill people, she waited quietly.

The screen door banged behind Grandpa Lester. He set a dishpan on the wash bench and poured water from the bucket over a small
skinned animal in the pan.

“Caught us a possum, Mrs. Lester.”

“We ain’t had a possum in a coon’s age.” Grandma Lester wiped her hands on her apron and went to peer into the pan. “It’ll
be plumb larrupin’ fer Sunday dinner. Got to let it stand a day and night in salt and sody water,” she explained to Jesse.
“Ain’t nothin’ better ’n possum and sweet ’taters.” Granny went back to dishing up fried potatoes, white milk gravy and buttermilk
biscuits.

Jesse’s stomach did a slow roll at the thought of eating the possum and she gave thanks silently that she’d be spending the
next night with the Baileys.

After they were seated at the table and Grandpa Lester had said the blessing, he announced that the “boy” had come early this
morning with Jesse’s buggy.

“Jody brought it over?” Jesse asked.

“Wade brung it.”

“When you said boy, I thought you meant Jody.”

“Wade brung it,” Granny repeated. “Said tell ya Hod Gordon’d meet you at Merfelds’. Boy ain’t got but one flaw. He’s dead-set
on treatin’ that darkie like he was white. Ain’t natural.” Granny’s mouth twisted in lines of disapproval.

“Now, Mrs. Lester, don’t get yoreself all flustered,” Grandpa said soothingly, then to Jesse, “Wade’s goin’ to Coon Rapids
and tell the teacher to close the school.”

“Oh,” Jesse said and busied herself with pouring sorghum onto a buttered biscuit.

“Mine is the first face the boy saw when he come into this world o’ woe.” Granny pushed the gravy bowl toward her husband
when he reached for it. “Scrawny, skinny little beggar. Looked like a skinned rat, he did. Humpt! No wonder. The woman that
birthed him bein’ what she was. But he let out a whoop when I whapped his behind and I knew sure he was a Simmer.”

“Were you a midwife, Granny?”

“Only one fer miles in them days. Brung more’n a hundred younguns in the world. Didn’t lose more’n a dozen.”

“You must know everyone around here.”

“—And their folks and their folks’ folks. Some come from good sturdy stock. Pure hickory, they is. Some’s offshoots of a rotten
vine and ain’t never goin’ to be nothin’ else but rotten like their folks. Ya ain’t goin’ to have to kill a chicken for Sunday,
Mr. Lester, now we got the possum.”

Hod Gordon was waiting at Merfelds’. He escorted Jesse on her rounds and to four additional families who had sent word that
they had sick children. Her supplies were running dangerously low by mid-afternoon, and she knew that she would have to send
another message to her father or make the trip to Harpersville herself.

No sign had been seen of her escort of the previous day. And no word about him other than an insulting remark made by Otis
Merfeld.

“Fed up with the nigger-lover already?” He whispered the words slyly when he caught Jesse alone. “Told ya not to go off in
the dark with ’im. Feel ya up, did he?”

Never in her life had she detested anyone as much as she detested Otis Merfeld, and she longed to tell him what a pitiful
excuse for a man he was. But she ignored him because his wife and his children needed her.

The hill people welcomed Jesse into their homes but seemed in awe of her; she had to work hard to make them comfortable with
her presence. By the time she reached the Baileys’, where she would spend the night, she was bone-tired, and her back ached
from bending over the beds and pallets of her patients. Mrs. Bailey’s son, Homer, a forty-year-old with the intelligence of
a ten-year-old child, was waiting to take Molly to the shed behind the house.

Jesse hadn’t counted on Mrs. Bailey’s delight in having her as an overnight guest. The supper table was covered with a rose-patterned
oilcloth and set with heavy stoneware, some pieces of which were cracked and chipped, but obviously the best she had. The
delicious aroma of roasted chicken and gooseberry cobbler filled the house. A platter of pickled pigs’ feet and a bowl of
pickled beets sat on the table alongside several dishes of relishes and jams.

“This is a regular feast, Mrs. Bailey. You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.”

“Fiddle!” Mrs. Bailey’s plain face beamed with pleasure. “Go on in the room there and wash up. Wade brung ya a satchel from
your pa.”

“Mr. Simmer went into town? Oh, I wish I had known he was going. I need more medical supplies.”

“Brought it just afore ya got here. Said you’d be needin’ what’s in it.”

The suitcase was on the bed. She opened it anxiously. On top were two dresses, two aprons, and a note from her father. Beneath
the clothes, wrapped in newspaper, were the precious medical supplies. Relief mingled with puzzlement. Wade Simmer not only
had made the trip to the schoolhouse, but had been to Harpersville. He had covered a lot of territory today unless he had
sent Jody into town again.

Jesse unfolded the note and scanned it quickly. Her father was confident she could handle the epidemic and told her that if
there was anything she needed to tell Wade Simmer. He or Jody would come for it. Simmer had assured him, he said, that she
would have an escort as she made her rounds.
So he had gone to Harpersville.
Doctor Forbes closed his letter by saying she had a nice surprise waiting for her when she got home.