She was happy. He knew she was happy, knew it in the way he knew so much else about her, felt so much of what she was feeling, bound to her by more than mere physical desire or primitive instinct. It was enough, most of the time, to keep the guilt pressed far enough back so that she couldn’t see it, so that it did not destroy the very real joy between them. Almost enough to make him forget his fears.
He had tried to tell her, once. Tried to clear away that one shadow on their happiness. She had stopped him, and he had never again found the courage. Now, as he pressed his face into her hair to inhale the compelling and unique fragrance, he let himself forget in the sheer rightness of having her in his arms.
Her eyes were bright with anticipation, the gold flecks dancing, as she stepped back to watch him open the pack. “What did you bring me?” she said with a grin. “I’ve been having this incredible urge for chocolate.
He put the box of fine imported truffles into her hands before she could finish. She sighed dramatically as she read the label. “I’m impressed! I never indulged myself this much.” She stretched up to kiss his cheek. Even so light a touch affected him profoundly, as it always did. He busied himself unloading the rest of the pack, laying out all the things he had brought for her. For the first time he wished he had a vehicle capable of transporting larger items, he wanted to give her so much more than these few small luxuries .Perhaps after the snowfalls were regular enough, he could borrow Val Cache’s single antique snowmobile, or rig up a travois.
“Music,” Joey breathed as she found the cassettes. “And more batteries.” She laughed softly “I’ll have to restrain myself, or we’ll be swimming in batteries.”
Luke dropped down behind her, wrapping himself around her like a cloak, nuzzling the soft skin behind her jaw “Never restrain yourself, Joelle,” he murmured against her. She turned in his arms and kissed him. Hard.
“I won’t. I absolutely promise that I have no intention whatsoever of restraining myself in anything.”
They were delightfully preoccupied for the next several moments, Luke groaned softly into her mouth at the inevitable result of her touch. “Unless you’re deliberately trying to torture me, I suggest you stop,” he growled, nibbling her chin. “Or there won’t be any supper until very, very late.”
“I think we have a glass of wine and a loaf of bread somewhere.” She grinned “And considering my current appetite, that should be plenty.” Her words caught on a half-stifled laugh as he swept her up, the sweet weight of her body against his heart as light as new-fallen leaves and as profound as the one word neither one of them had yet learned to say.
When she lay cradled against him, the taste of her still on his tongue and her skin cooling under his stroking hands, her voice cracked the lazy, sated silence.
“There was something I wanted to tell you, Luke. Somehow I kept getting distracted.”
He could not see her face, tucked under his chin, her body shifted, and one small hand reached down to lace through his. “I love you, Luke.”
After a while his heart resumed its cadence, and he knew he would live. But it was a very long time before he slept.
Happiness was not an entirely new thing to Joey. She knew that there had been a time when she had felt almost this happy, almost this loved and protected. But she also knew it had been in another place and time long ago, almost beyond memory. And memories had become fragile, uncertain things, like the past and future, they flickered in and out of reality, formless as ghosts.
Days or weeks or months might have passed without her knowing it, she felt the changing of the season, understood Nature’s perpetual cycle, but the counting of time by the calendar had become meaningless. Luke owned no clocks and needed none. Joey gave herself to a rhythm of life older than mankind.