He was still heavy with desire for her, and the only heat in his body seemed centered in the one place that could bring no ease. Every primitive instinct screamed for him to finish what he had started, but he could not do it. In the mass of contradictions that were his emotions, it was supreme irony that though his body had betrayed him, it was his mind that kept him now from completing the betrayal.
Turning inward, Luke gave himself to the interior battle and pushed the sight and smell and feel of her from his consciousness. She did not exist. She was not here. He was alone as he had always been. Only that nonsensical repetition allowed him to keep a grip on sanity and bring him back to some semblance of what he had been before.
When the chill in his soul had become no more than a tiny sharp point of pain and his body felt a cold that was of the purely physical realm, he found the world again. His eyes moved to the dying fire, little more than embers, around the familiar solid comfort of the cabin and, at last, to the form huddled on the sofa.
Joey lay where he had left her. She was dressed again and had managed to pull the edges of the blanket up around herself, he could see by the steady rise and fall of her chest and by the soft looseness of her body that she slept, a small mercy granted to them both.
It took all his will to compel his stiff body into motion, to toss more wood mechanically into the embers so that they would not die entirely by sunrise. It was morning already, he tilted his head with awareness of the coming day, though it was still several hours from dawn. Time enough, perhaps, for her to recover and for him to lock himself away beyond any hope of succumbing to her again.
He stopped above her, hovering there and regarding her with forced dispassion. The soft hills and valleys of her body, which he had begun to discover and explore, were forever barred to him. The gentleness of her features in repose, all the serious care and determined pride eased away by sleep, had become no more than another pretty face. The sweet mystery that Joelle Randall might have been to him would remain unsolved.
Luke bent down and gathered her into his arms, not smelling her or hearing her breathing or feeling her softness. He carried her across the bleak silence of the cabin and into the last room leading off the kitchen, where his bed lay. He undressed her carefully, wrapping her in a faded nightgown, folded and long unused, gleaned from one of the drawers. Her exhaustion was such that she did not waken, he could not have borne that when it took every ounce of strength he possessed to ignore her sweet, fragile nakedness under his hands.
The combined heat of fire and stove lent the room enough warmth to keep her comfortable throughout what remained of the night, she did not stir as he nudged her under the sheets and pulled the covers over her body. Once, as he threw the last blanket over the bed, she rolled her head against the pillow, her eyes fluttered, and the moan that came from her parted lips was filled with melancholy. Luke bowed his head and did not hear it. He turned away into the darkness and left her to her dreams, dreading his own.
She would wake and know the coming of dawn and find herself again; for him, there would only be night.
Chapter Seven
The unsullied light that flooded through the sheer curtains of the window by the bed woke Joey slowly, warming her face with the gentlest of caresses. She stretched luxuriously, half-awake, savoring the light that traced across her cheek. She couldn’t quite remember what today was, or what she had planned, but she could already smell the wonderful breakfast Mrs O’Brien was making up in the lodge kitchen, and the sheer sensuality of the moment made her reluctant to think about much of anything.