out.
But it was nonsense. She’d talked about it in therapy. She could handle that fear. Because it wasn’t rational, and she was a very rational woman. Which left only the question of sex as sport. “I’m not the kind of woman who does things like that,” she said emphatically. She took honey from the cupboard, leaving the door open.
Paul noticed that she had considered.
She said, “Want some toast?”
“Sure. Things like what?”
“Casual sex.” She popped two slices of rye bread into the toaster.
“I wasn’t thinking casual,” Paul said. Though he’d accepted his share of invitations from eager women, the idea of “friends with benefits” slightly offended him. Sex was sex, friends were friends, lovers were rare. “More of a—” he sought for the right words, and found some he thought would appeal to her pro-therapy, talk-everything-through outlook “—healing experience.”
“Like last time,” she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “when you rejected me in the morning? I haven’t forgotten, you know.”
“Rejected you?” He frowned, eyebrows drawing together.
“You said it would ruin our friendship or something like that.”
Paul considered. “I do kind of remember that.” What had been in his head? he wondered now. Probably his inherent dislike of denigrating friends to “friends with benefits.” But why hadn’t he wanted more with Cameron, a real relationship? At the time, she would have made an excellent girlfriend.
Now, since the subject had come up, it was beginning to occur to him that he wanted to know Cameron as a lover. Again. He had some memories of the night they’d spent together, but they were mostly visual. “I think it would make you feel better,” he said, unable to keep from smiling. Feeling mischief sweep over him. “If it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll do it again. We’ll do it until we cure—” he found he couldn’t utter Graham Corbett’s name “—your affliction.”
“I’m not afflicted.” Spinning back toward the toaster, she banged into the open cabinet door and cried out. She swore, it hurt so much.
She heard Paul get up from the table and bit down tears.
He turned her around and said, “Let’s get you some ice. Looks like you’re going to have a shiner.”
“Great,” she gasped through the pain.
Spontaneously, he kissed the tip of her nose. But then his lips drifted to her cheek, down to her mouth.
At first, she did not respond, and he was about to move away when she began kissing him back.
He could smell the bread toasting, but he’d lost all interest in food.
She kissed him. She felt his mouth open slightly, and so did hers. She felt the tip of his tongue caress her lips. She whispered, “Okay.”
Paul let her body settle against his, touch everywhere, let her feel what was happening to him because of her. His mind spun, seeing the teenage tomboy she’d been, the vulnerable person she still was inside, the lover he didn’t really know.
I SHOULDN’T BE doing this, she thought minutes later in the bedroom. Abandoning the toast which had popped up, they had gone straight to her bed.
What if this wrecked her relationship with Paul?
Well, maybe that would be for the best. It would be better if Cameron had nothing more to do with any member of the Cureux family—not midwife and love-potion brewer Clare, not her antiseptically skeptical obstetrician ex-husband David, not witch-in-waiting Bridget and not Paul.
But Cameron liked Paul. And he was a friend, a friend who didn’t mind if she woke him in the middle of night to drive Mariah to the vet because she’d eaten a tampon. She sometimes thought Paul would do anything for her. When she someday had a relationship with a man, she wanted it to be someone who would open up to her, talk to her about everything. But that wasn’t Paul. Their friendship wasn’t the talking kind but the being-together kind.
And sometimes she really wished she knew what went on in his head, what he really felt, the unspoken things.
And he wasn’t talking now.
He took off her clothes, and she liked this. It felt strangely…forbidden. Tossing his own T-shirt to the floor beside Mariah, he gazed down at Cameron. “You are fantastically beautiful.”
“What?” Her jaw actually dropped, and she found herself trying to assume a persona, trying not to be aware that she was naked and he was looking at her, clearly intent on only one thing. Having her.
She quavered. The air felt so revealing. It swam between them. She reached up to his jeans, and he gently caught her wrists, placing them back against the sheets. “Slower,” he said, and she felt the power of his intense maleness, his oppositeness from her.
He came down to her, to kiss her lips, to touch her face and her jaw.
Cameron believed herself to be jaded. During the years before Beatrice’s pregnancy and birth, before she’d acquired her own terror of pregnancy and birth, she’d had some wildness. Encounters on the spur of the moment, a live-in boyfriend who’d been not very nice in the long run. Certain words from the mouths of men made her laugh, generally promises that they were going to send her to a yet unknown Eden of ecstasy. They had often made themselves ridiculous to her, and through her work she often found them unworthy of respect, earning only her contempt.
But Paul, in this minute, seemed a fairy-man, a god-man, a pagan creature who was pure desire and impervious to ridicule or derision. She realized, acutely, why they had never done this again. It was too much, too perfect, too close to what-should-be. Too utterly terrifyingly near her ultimate desire in a lover.
His body was beautiful, and she tried again to touch, this time, his shoulders.
He let her, briefly, then removed her hands from him again as he kissed her throat, her heart, her breasts…
Myrtle Hollow
CLARE CUREUX sat in her cabin, drinking the herbal infusion that would relax her, allowing her to sleep after the birth she’d just attended. Few people in Logan County chose homebirths these days. It used to be a choice of poverty, but now the indigent had help from the government to go to the hospital.
Ladonna Naggy’s homebirth had been an educated choice. Ladonna had attended Yale, studied biology and was thinking of becoming a midwife herself. Bridget had come along to this birth as Clare’s assistant, and Ladonna and her partner, Michel, had given birth to a beautiful son. Everything had gone right. Bridget had talked less than usual—this was something Clare had counseled her daughter about, because chatter could distract and irritate a woman in labor. Yes, Bridget was learning; after all, she had two children of her own.
Clare knew she herself was unlike other women, though she shared many of their experiences. Sixty-seven years old, divorced, mother of two, grandmother of two. She was a midwife and an herbalist, and some people called her a witch.
Clare was Irish on her mother’s side, of Caribbean descent on her father’s, her paternal
