“T-tell you what?” she asked, every warning system in her body going on red alert. He was frightening her. Her sweet, gentle Matt was frightening her. The idea itself was enough to make her tremble.
“Dammit, Sarah,” he shouted. “Why didn't you warn me?”
“Matt!” she cried, twisting in his grasp. “Stop it! You're hurting me!”
“Oh yeah? Well, how do you think I feel right now? I've just been informed that if you're caught consorting with me, you'll be considered a pariah and cast out of your society. Why the hell didn't you warn me, Sarah?”
She looked up at him with bleak eyes, the fear instantly gone and sadness filling up the space inside her. “Would it have mattered?”
“Yes!” He released her abrupdy and stepped back, squeezing his eyes shut and raking his hands through his hair as pain and confusion twisted inside him. “No … I don't know.”
His last words came out on a strained, tired whisper. What would he have done differently? Would he have stayed away from her from the start? Could he really have prevented himself from falling in love with her?
“What difference will it make to you?” she asked quietly. “You're from a different world. You will go back to that world because it's where you belong.”
“Oh, I see,” Matt said sarcastically, letting his pain goad him. “You just wanted a little fling. I looked like a nice, safe guy to have a lit tie adventure with, right? You took one look at me and figured I'd never stick around —”
“No!”
“What? Have I got the word 'fickle' tattooed on my body somewhere or something?” he asked, forcing a dry laugh.
“No!” Sarah said, miserable. She could barely look him in the eye. A little adventure was exactly what she had wanted. She hadn't bargained on getting so much more. She had certainly never considered that Matt would end up getting hurt. All along she'd thought only her own heart had been at risk. “I never counted on falling in love with you.”
“You just wanted to sleep with me,” he said, the bitterness in his tone as caustic as acid.
Sarah reacted without thinking, slapping his face hard. “How dare you,” she said, her voice trembling just above a whisper. “How dare you say such a thing to me.”
She turned away from him and through her tears stared at the hand she'd struck him with. Never in her life had she raised a hand to anybody. Now in anger she'd hit the man she loved. Shame throbbed inside her in a physical ache. Shame and despair and heartache. She ran for the relative darkness of the barn, stopping just inside the door, welcoming the coolness and the absence of bright light. For a moment she just let those things absorb her. She breathed in the sweet scent of hay and the mustiness of cobwebs. She listened to two cats playing in the straw of Otis's stall.
“Sarah?” Matt s voice came to her through the haze of her suffering, sounding higher than normal and strained. He cleared his throat and shuffled his feet on the cracked concrete of the barn floor. “Sarah, I'm sorry.” He sniffed and cleared his throat again. “I shouldn't have said that.”
“I came to you out of love,” she whispered, tears spilling past the barrier of her lashes and rolling down her cheeks.
“I know. I know you did,” he murmured, hurting more from the pain he'd inflicted on her than from anything she had done to him.
Trembling, he slid his arms around her and pulled her back against him. He brushed his cheek against the top of her head, encountering the stiff gauze of her
“I wanted to know what it was to be in love,” she said. “Was that so wrong of me? I knew in the end you would go back to the city and I would be left here to my life, but I fell in love with you. Was it so wrong of me to want to hold on to that for a little while?”
“No.”
'I don't think there can be sin in loving someone,” she said shakily. “Only joy and pain.”
Blinking against the sting of his own tears, Matt turned her in his arms and held her close. Love, the most complex of emotions. Sarah had reduced it down to its simplest elements: A time of joy and a time of pain. Was that really all they were to be allowed? It seemed so little when he had waited so long. He wondered if Sarah felt as cheated as he did. She sounded resigned. He would go back to “the world” and she would remain here, and their love would fade into pain, then into memories. He ached with emptiness just thinking about it. That was the way it would be, though. Even as he wondered if she would go with him if he asked, he knew her answer. She had already given it to him. She wouldn't leave her way of life, wouldn't leave her family.
“What happens now?” he asked. “I don't want to get you in trouble with your people.”
Sarah felt her heart crack. What had she expected him to say? Had she really expected him to ask her for a future? He couldn't change who he was and, no matter how often she had dreamed of it, she couldn't either. There was her family to consider. She couldn't shame them, couldn't leave them. The thought of never seeing them again tore her apart. Then there was the world to consider. What would the big world do with the like of her? She had seen the way it had battered Matt. It would chew her up and spit her out. Matt would tire of her eventually; her novelty would wear off. He was quick to defend her now, but the fact of the matter was she would likely embarrass him if she were transplanted into his world.
No. She'd known all along what they had was this time, the here and now.
“No one knows about us,” she said, hating the need to hide their love. “What we have between us is ours alone. I don't want to give it up, not until I have to.”
Matt tightened his arms around her. “Me neither.”
He wanted to cling to her every minute they had left. He wanted to store up the feel of her and the taste of her and her sweet scent so that when the end came he would have something to take with him. The injured pride that prodded at him to walk away couldn't hold a candle to his desperate need to take as much love as Sarah would give him.
He turned her in his arms and bent to kiss her. Sarah met him halfway, just as hungry to gather memories, to stockpile them for the long nights ahead when all they would have was longing for a touch, the memory of a kiss, the ache of a missing corner of a heart. Their mouths clashed and dueled greedily, insatiably. Each framed the other's face with trembling hands, trying to memorize the texture of skin, the angle of bones. They took deep, thirsty kisses, drinking in flavors and feelings and each other's tears, and heat flared through them in the flash fire of sudden and desperate passion.
Matt tore his mouth away and crushed her against him in an embrace that attempted to imprint his body with the outline of hers. His gaze settled on the bales of hay stacked in tiers beside the aisle and on the heavy woolen horse rug that lay folded over the door of a stall. Within minutes they had the rug spread on a wide flat section of bales and they knelt facing each other, snatching kisses and unfastening buttons.
Too eager to go through the process of undressing, they merely uncovered essential areas. Matt's shirt fell open so Sarah could stroke her hands over the hard panes of his chest and tease his flat nipples through the fine dusting of curling black hair. The bodice of her dress fell down around her hips, baring her breasts for his gaze and touch.
Carefully, he lay her down on their makeshift bed, his mouth trailing reverent kisses from her mouth to her throat to her collar bone, savoring every delectable inch of her When his lips, warm and wet, closed over her nipple, she let out a sound of desperation. Her fingers tangled in his short, thick hair, pressing him closer, urging him to nuzzle and nurse.
After a long moment he raised his head just enough to study the sweet bud of flesh, watching it pucker as the air cooled the heat his mouth had generated. He brushed a thumb across the distended peak, wringing a gasp from her and causing her to arch against the pressure of the hard thigh he had wedged between her legs. Then he bent to the task of giving her other breast equal treatment, sucking, nibbling, laving her nipple with his tongue, relishing the sweet taste of her and the way she offered herself to him with nothing held back. He took what she yielded, seeking to satisfy his own selfish needs and to give her all that was in his heart, as well
Settling his mouth on hers once again, he knelt between her legs and worked the fly of his pants with fingers that fumbled in their hurry. Breaking the kiss, Sarah reached between them and did the work herself, popping the
