“Ohh…” Devon breathed. Something inside her chest-her heart?-grew huge and began to ache. Her eyes misted over.
How it happened, she didn’t know, but somehow, then, she was sitting on the bed in the midst of all those pink and yellow blankets, and the baby was nestled in her arms, instead. She was cooing to her and rocking, softly laughing, and didn’t know or didn’t care that there were tears running down her cheeks.
It was like stepping into a time capsule. From the moment Eric pushed open the door and switched on the light, he was fifteen years old again, coming home from school, getting off the bus and jogging up the lane, making straight for the bunkhouse. Throwing his backpack down on the narrow bed, reaching up to take the key to his inner sanctum, his darkroom, from its hiding place above the wall heater beside the door.
It had been his dad’s idea to turn the back half of the bunkhouse into a darkroom, the part that included the bathroom with its water supply and drainage system to accommodate the mixing and disposal of chemicals. It had been years since they’d actually housed a hired hand in the bunkhouse, Mike had pointed out, and besides, it would be a whole lot more comfortable-and less expensive-than trying to convert the old root cellar and tornado shelter under the house, which had been Eric’s initial plan.
Eric had insisted on paying for the renovations himself, out of the money he’d earned working summers for his mom and the sale of 4-H project animals, money that was supposed to have been saved for college. He’d been arrogant, he remembered, about the fact that he’d paid for it with his own money. It was only now, looking back, that he realized how much help on the project he’d gotten from his dad-and his mom, too. And that they hadn’t said a word about him spending his college fund. Had he ever even thanked them, for any of that? Probably not. The thought made him feel itchy with guilt.
The bunkhouse was cold as a meat locker. He turned on the heater, and while the shoebox-shaped bed-sitting room was slowly filling up with warmth and the smell of burning dust, he felt above the heater, without much hope, for the key. Incredibly, it was still there. He felt a knot take hold in his chest as he fitted it into the lock, turned the knob, opened the door, flicked on the light. Sucking in a breath, he slipped the key into his pocket and stepped into the murky red gloom.
It was all there. Everything too large and bulky to take with him when he’d left home the summer he’d graduated high school, the drying racks and counters and shelves he and his dad had built out of scrap lumber and plywood from the local builder’s supply store. There were even some packages of paper and chemicals, almost certainly long expired. And more than a few spiderwebs, not to mention dust, but not nearly as bad as he’d expected. Which made him wonder if his mom might have been keeping the place up all these years. That thought was another knot…another guilt.
Methodically then, he began to move among the racks and counters, waving away cobwebs, blowing off dust, sorting, counting, rearranging, setting to rights. And while he did that images paraded through his memory-mostly black-and-white; he hadn’t been equipped, then, to process color-images taken with his old Pentax, his first SLR camera, given to him by his mom and dad on his thirteenth birthday. Images of Mom on her tractor, Ellie feeding baby calves, Dad at his computer, Aunt Gwen-well into her nineties and still wearing jeans-with her apron full of the eggs she’d gathered. Caitlyn on the swing, sticking her tongue out at the camera. School friends, wild geese flying, the tornado that had passed just to the north one spring. He saw the images the way he’d seen them for the very first time, floating in a pan of water, barely discernible shadings on white paper, gradually taking shape, becoming darker…clearer…sharper…while he held his breath and his heart trip-hammered in the excitement of each new discovery, each tiny moment in time now captured forever, each little miracle, like a birth happening right there in his developing trays. He thought it was the way he’d always seen the world-a series of images, flat, like photographs, composed, framed and developed in his mind, frozen and preserved and filed away forever in his memory.
Until Susan. Until he’d held her hand and watched the life fade from her eyes. Until they’d placed her baby in his arms, wet and covered with her mother’s blood. And he’d known that this was life. Not a photograph, and not forever, but all the more precious for being so fragile and so fleeting.
The reality of that had hit him on that day, for the first time not in his head, but in his heart. In his guts. And he had known he would never be the same.
God knows, he wished he could be. God knows he’d been a much more carefree Eric, watching the world through the lens of a camera rather than feeling its pain in the pit of his stomach.
God knows he wouldn’t be aching now for the damaged little girl he knew in his heart must be somewhere in the lost memories of a beautiful woman named Devon O’Rourke.
God knows he wouldn’t be thinking of that woman every waking moment, thinking of her and remembering the feel of her heartbeat banging against his chest, the weight of her across his lap, the warmth and softness of her feminine places a delicious pressure on his masculine ones, and the taste of her still in his mouth…
He jumped, as something thumped against the bunkhouse door, as if he’d been guilty of the action itself rather than just the thought. He lunged for the darkroom doorway and got there as the outer door burst inward, and there was Devon, cheeks flushed, eyes wild and hair flying. She was holding in her arms what looked like a bundle of bedding.
His heart dove into his socks.
“I’m…sorry,” she panted, “I…didn’t know what else to do. I tried…everything. I fed her, and she didn’t want any more, but she was still crying, and…I couldn’t…” Her face crumpled. “I don’t know what’s the matter with her.”
By this time Eric had relieved Devon of her burden and was peeling off the enormous comforter that completely engulfed the carrier-seat. “Let’s hope you haven’t smothered her,” he muttered dryly, before he thought. He could have bitten off his tongue when he saw Devon’s features freeze in a look of pure horror. He threw her a lopsided but reassuring smile as he tossed the comforter onto the bed. “Hey, I’m kidding. She’s fine. Sound asleep.”
“Really? Are you sure?” Her voice was cracked and fragile.
“See for yourself.” He turned the carrier and edged it closer to her. They both gazed in silence at the baby’s plump pink cheeks and delicately curled fingers, her mouth still making sucking motions as she slept.
Devon let out a long breath and closed her eyes. “Oh, God. I feel like such an idiot.”
“Hey, it’s okay.” He glanced at his watch. “My fault, in fact. Didn’t mean to desert you. Guess I lost track of time.”
“Why do you suppose she was crying like that? Did I do something wrong?” Green eyes, bright with worry, searched his across the carrier seat.
Under that stark appeal, Eric’s chest tightened. “Who knows why?” he said gruffly. “Babies cry.” Then he asked, “Did you burp her?”
She clapped a hand to her forehead. “Oh, God-”
“Hey, look, it’s no big deal. Obviously.” He turned abruptly and set the carrier on the floor beside the bed, then reached around Devon to close the door. In her haste to sidestep out of his way she lurched awkwardly, and he put a hand on her arm to steady her. He heard a sharp hiss of breath.
Heat engulfed him. His lungs felt sticky with his breath. He glared at her. “Forgot your hat and gloves again, I see.”
She didn’t answer, except to lift a hand to her head, as if to verify that what he’d said was true. When she lowered the hand again, somehow it came to rest on his arm.
Neither of them said anything. Both of them looked down at her hand, resting there on his arm. In the silence, Eric could feel his body rocking with the impact of his pulse. Just when he thought he would have to act or be suffocated by his own self-restraint, he felt the almost indiscernible lift of her shoulders, then a small sigh.
“It’s still there, isn’t it?” she said sadly.
Chapter 12
H e couldn’t pretend not to understand. He shook his head and breathed a soft affirmation.
“I was hoping…” she lifted her head and gave it a little shake, and he braced himself to meet her eyes “…it was, I don’t know…some kind of crazy fluke.”
“Temporary insanity.”
“Yeah…”
He snorted. “It is, you know.”
“Insanity?” Her lips quivered, and twisted when she tried to keep them from it. The look of utter desolation on her face tore at his heart. “It is-I know it. I don’t know what else it could be.” She would not meet his eyes. “I’ve never felt anything like it before. I know I can’t let it happen. I can’t. But, dammit…” She clamped a hand across her mouth, muffling the rest.
“But…what?” Something made him say it, lowering his face closer to hers.
He could barely hear her whisper, “But, I do so want it to.”
His heart ached, trembled, thundered within him. He could remember experiencing such emotion only twice before in his life. Ironically, once for a birth and once for a death. Which, he wondered, was this?
“You want me-” he whispered, and could not go on.
“Yes-God knows why…beyond all reason.” She said that angrily. “I want you-” her voice broke, then, and she tilted her face upward, defying her own resolve…tempting his beyond all reason “-to make love to me. Only-” with a hand covering her eyes she rushed to deny it “-only I know we can’t. I know it. It’s unthinkable. It’s-”
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