Help Wanted: Husband? by Darlene Scalera

Author:Darlene Scalera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

He sank back down into the chair as if needing support.

She mugged an expression of Oops! “Took you by surprise there, huh?”

Always, he thought. Aloud, he said, “Your husband…he didn’t…”

“He did, yes, but his idea of lovemaking…” Her face became solemn. “I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I must say, if that was what he considered great sex, I’m surprised the woman he was sleeping with didn’t shoot him before her husband.”

His smile was a slow curve. It broadened into a soft chuckle, a velvety sound that made Lorna swallow hard and wonder how she had dared to ask such a thing of any man…of this man. Still she kept her chin proudly raised and her gaze constant on this man she’d just asked to make love to her. Funny thing was, here, her body flowering with life and the farm breaking into bloom, her request seemed only one more natural act in a sequence of life and death and anger and lust and love. As natural as the bees flitting from blossom to blossom, bringing life to what otherwise would remain sterile, wither and die.

She laid her hand on the slight mound of her stomach. She didn’t want to go back to what she’d been before—alone, sterile, afraid. It didn’t have to be love. She’d waited so long for love, she’d fallen for the first man who’d professed it—she was that hungry. No, she didn’t want love. She wanted fulfillment. She wanted to feel the physical pleasure so tauntingly promised by her late husband but never delivered. She wanted to satisfy the yearning she had either denied or dreamed about for so long. Her desire, awoken, would no longer sleep.

“Lorna.”

She heard her name in his breath, and she wasn’t sorry she’d asked him. She looked into those wicked blue eyes. She was scared, scared to death. But she wasn’t sorry.

Those blue eyes stayed steady on her. “That’s not what you want.”

“It is.” Her answer was calm; her stare brave. Yet she couldn’t eliminate her hesitation when she asked, “Do you want me?”

Surprise again flashed in his eyes and was followed by his velvet chuckle once more. But when he spoke, the laughter wasn’t in his eyes. “I’m not what you want.”

She looked at the man opposite her. The man who’d taught her to sift the dirt between her fingers and knead it with her toes, to celebrate the sun and the soil and the ache of a long, hard day’s work. The man who tilled her land as if he had finally come home; who touched the bleeding end of a new-pruned limb as if he too were in pain. He would never tell her he loved her, would never promise to stay, and had made aggravating her into a high art form. He had taught her to laugh. She saw the best friend she’d ever had.

She looked into his eyes that hid everything. “You’re everything I need.”

If he was a man who gave his heart away, he would have given it to her right then, forever.

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