Give Me Tonight

'I rarely bother thinking about the past. And no, I don't waste time regretting things. I've paid for my worst mistakes two or three times over.' He noticed the hollow at the base of her throat, revealed by the parted edged of her robe, and ducked his head to nibble at the delicate spot.

'Why the sudden interest in sin and atonement?' he asked, his voice muffled. 'Remembering some schoolroom prank you never got caught for? You hid the teacher's chalk, I'll bet. Or whispered with your friends in the middle of geography-'

'Never,' she said, relieved at the change of subject. She let her head fall to his shoulder, enjoying the plundering of his mouth. 'I was always well behaved.'

Deftly he unfastened the tiny buttons at the throat of her nightgown, one by one, moving down to her breasts. 'I've heard differently, Adeline.'

'Don't believe a word of it. And besides, you were probably no angel either.'

Ben grinned. 'I was always getting suspended.'

'Troublemaker.'

'Mmn-hmn. Once I hid a snake in Mary Ashburn's desk.' He chuckled lazily. 'She pulled it out when she reached for her pencil '

'How mean!'

'Just-a little garden snake. Hardly worth all that screaming. '

'Why did you do it?'

'Because I liked her.'

'Your courting has improved.'

'Practice,' he said, his hand slipping underneath the folds of her nightgown, and she grabbed at it to stop his explorations.

'With many women?'

'Not as many as you seem to suspect. Haven't we talked about this before?'

'You said you'd tell me sometime about why you're so liberal in your ideas about women. About the one that had such an effect on you-'

'What makes you so sure it was one woman?'

'Intuition. Was it someone you were in love with?'

'In a way.'

'Did you think about marrying her?'

Ben's face changed, and he looked uncomfortable, wary, perhaps a little bitter. 'Addie, I'm not ready to talk about it.'

'She hurt you, didn't she?'

Despite his irritation, Ben laughed ruefully at her persistence. And her accuracy. 'Why is it so important?'

'I know hardly anything about your past. There's so much about you I don't understand, and it bothers me that you know so much more about me than I do about you. You're a puzzle. Why are you the way you are, and why-'

'Whoa. Before I explain anything. I'd like to point out I sure as hell don't understand everything about you. '

'Was she important to you?' Addie asked, ignoring his attempt to sidetrack her.

'At the time, I thought she was everything.' Ben rested his head on the back of the sofa, looking up at the ceiling. 'Have you ever wanted something so much you would have gone to hell and back to get it? And once you had it, the tighter you tried to hold on, the less of a grip you had? She was like that. I'd never met anyone so elusive. The more distant she was, the more I wanted her. '

Addie was surprised to feel a stab of jealousy. Suddenly she wasn't certain she wanted to hear about his desire for another woman, but at the same time she burned to know about the mysterious past he talked so little about.

'Who was she?'

'The daughter of one of my professors at Harvard. Her father was one of the most brilliant men I'd ever met. Very New England-aloof, intelligent, dynamic. Sometimes when he spoke, his words just burned through your mind-God, the things he said were radical. Startling. There was a lot of that in his daughter, the same brilliance, the same intelligence. I'd never heard a woman talk like she did. He'd let her study the same things his students did, let her say and do anything she wanted. She was smarter than most of the men I knew-a woman with an education. Having been raised in a small town near Chicago where they'd barely heard of such a thing, I was fascinated.'

'Was she beautiful?'

'Very.'

Addie's jealousy doubled. Beautiful, intelligent, fascinating. 'She sounds perfect,' she said tonelessly.

'I thought so for a while. It was maddening, never knowing where I stood with her. One minute sugar wouldn't melt in her mouth, and the next she'd fly into a rage for no reason. Sometimes she was just plain crazy, taking chances, dragging me into wild adventures. I was either deliriously happy or miserable around her.'

'Why was she so wild?'

Ben's gaze was distant, as if he were concentrating on elusive images. 'There was no place for her. She'd been given the opportunity to become exotic… different… and then everyone kept trying to put her in a place she didn't belong. Including me. She was a bird in a cage, flying against the bars over and over again. I wondered why she couldn't act more like other women, why she wanted to talk about things that only men… ' He paused and looked at her, his eyes unreadable. 'You should understand.'

Addie nodded imperceptibly.

'But she didn't have your strength,' Ben continued. 'She had no hope of finding a way to fit in. I watched her suffocating, and I didn't understand why. I thought the only way to help her was to try to change her. The tighter I held on, the worse it was. I loved her, and she felt the same about me. But everything I wanted from her-marriage, a child, a life together-all of that would have been a prison. She wanted no part of it. '

Ben took a deep breath and let it out slowly, amazed at the sudden lightness in his chest. It was the first time he'd ever talked about that part of his past. He hadn't planned to tell Addie, but now it made sense to unburden himself to her. Who else was capable of understanding? Who else could begin to know the kind of struggle it had been?

'How did it end?'

'She… ' Ben cleared his throat and stopped. He couldn't get the words out. Addie said nothing, waiting patiently, although inside she wanted to scream with the need to know. 'She found out she was going to have a child,' he muttered, his eyes flashing with guilt and remembered pain. 'My child. I insisted we would get married. It was only a few weeks until graduation, and I already had plans to go back to Illinois and get a job at my father's bank. She was miserable, I was thrilled. I wanted the baby. I wanted her. And the day after she told me, she nearly killed herself having the child aborted. When I found out what she'd done, I wished she had died along with the baby. I never saw her again.'

Addie's heart was filled with compassion. 'How did you manage to get through the rest of the semester?'

'Money in the right pockets. My father was determined to have his son graduate from Harvard. No price was too high to pay. I didn't care one way or the other. I was numb.'

'I'm so sorry about what she did,' Addie murmured. 'About the baby.'

'Part of it was my fault. I would have used the baby as a chain and manacle to keep her with me-'

'No. She should have talked to you about it. You would have helped her find a way to deal with it. She should have trusted you. You would have listened to her.'

'No. I was different then.'

'Not that different. Nothing will make me believe you would have ignored a plea for understanding. You wouldn't have made her life a prison.'