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She licked her lower lip slowly, her gaze never leaving his face. "Maybe .. ." She hesitated, blinked, and Jack got the sudden feeling that now it was she who was afraid. She started to look away.
Without thinking, he touched her chin and gently but firmly forced her to look at him. "Maybe what?" "Maybe we could ... fall in love again." Jack didn't know what he'd been expecting her to say, but it sure as hell wasn't that. He'd known her for a long time, since they were both kids running around his daddy's cotton fields, and never?not once?had she ever told him she loved him. Oh, she'd shown him. In the early days, before the horror and the war, she'd shown him all the time. But never had she voiced the words. As a young man, he'd waited, aching inside, to hear the simple sentence. And now here she was blithely wondering if they could fall in love. Again.
He shook his head. "Where would we even start?" She smiled. "Jack." His name sounded soft, and blurred, and filled with exquisite promise. "We already have."
We already have. Tess said the simple words and held her breath. Fear washed through her, made her heart hammer
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in her chest. Now, waiting for his response, she felt naked and vulnerable and almost dizzy with longing.
Please, she thought desperately, please don't turn me away. Please ...
"We have to go slow," he said quietly. "I'm not too ... trustworthy."
A river of relief rushed through Tess. A smile trembled on her lips. "Anything, Jack ..."
He shook his head, frowning. Regret and shame darkened his eyes. "I've let you and the girls down so many times."
Love poured through Tess, filling every corner of her soul with light. She knew how much that confession had cost him.
"Oh, Jack." She leaned toward him, brushed the hair from his eyes with cold, shaking fingers. "Maybe we've hurt each other."
Their gazes met and held. Beside them, the candle sputtered.
"I need time, Lissa," he said quietly. "I've spent a long time trying to fall out of love with you, and frankly, it scares the shit out of me to think of going back."
"I don't want to go back to another woman's past. I want to go forward ... into a future that's all ours."
"Christ, Lissa." He squeezed his eyes shut and ran a shaking hand through his hair.
Tess stared at his mouth and felt a sharp, almost painful stab of longing. Kiss me, she thought. Now, before I break my promise . . .
But he didn't move, didn't seem even to breathe.
God, how she wanted him to kiss her right now. She'd dreamed of it constantly since that day on the schoolhouse steps. Like a child reaching for the forbidden piece of candy on the counter, she strained forward. Wanting, needing.
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And still he didn't move.
"Jack ..." His name was a whispered question, a proposal. "Make love to me, Jack."
"Aw, hell." His voice sounded raw and defeated as he opened his eyes and looked down at her. Slowly his hands slid around her neck and up the sides of her face. His fingers burrowed into the golden mass of her hair and pulled her inexorably toward him.
Their lips touched. The kiss was slow and hesitant, filled with the quiet, desperate longing of a man who'd been in love alone for so long, he couldn't believe in anything else, and a woman who'd never been in love at all. It seemed to go on forever, until Tess was dizzy and her body tingled all over. The hunger in his kiss, the need, filled Tess to overflowing and stole the breath from her
lungs.
Then, slowly, he drew back and looked at her. "God,
you're beautiful."
She drew a shaky breath and smiled. "So are you."
His hand glided down her throat, moving slowly, as if he were savoring the velvet-soft feel of her flesh. His fingers slipped under the thin lawn of her nightgown and glided over the swell of her breast. She shivered at the heat of his touch.
"Mama? Are you in there?"
