her eyes he saw grief for the little life they’d lost, for the life they’d never had together, even the life they might never have. But this moment was theirs. No one and nothing could take it from them.
“Yes.” He answered the question she hadn’t asked, except with her eyes. “Yes.”
In a single motion he nearly ripped her nightclothes from her body. Before the emerald silk could pool at her feet, he swept her into his arms to stalk the length of the room. Laying her gently on the bed, he straightened to tear away his own clothes.
She watched him. As buttons ripped from their moorings, her gaze raked over every inch of exposed flesh. Next his belt was flung away. The snap at the waist of his trousers opened, the zipper growled. As if by magic, trousers and boots and every shred of clothing were gone from him.
He towered over her, all six and a half manly feet of Jericho Rivers. So handsome, so aroused, so ready. He wanted her. He needed her more than he’d ever wanted, ever needed, before. Yet with all the strength and reason he possessed, he waited.
Maria understood. She must set the pace. Allowing herself one last worshiping look, she opened her arms, whispering, “Make me feel real, Jericho. Teach me to be glad I’m alive.”
Then he came down to her. There was no seduction, no foreplay. The time for that had passed. Maria Elena wanted what he wanted. She needed what he needed—his body joining with hers, stroking hers, hard, fast, deep. Over and over again until their bodies lifted and arched seeking even more.
He didn’t think of hurting her. He didn’t feel her nails tearing across his shoulders and down his chest. He only heard her whisper yes, and yes, and yes, as he gathered her wrists in his hands and pinned them over her head.
With her hands held captive as she arched to meet the power of his thrust, he bent to kiss her breast. Yet despite their madness, his suckling was as gentle as their mating was fierce.
Her breasts were fragrant from the bath oils for which the Inn at River Walk was famous. Their flavor gathered in his lungs, on his skin, and his tongue. Flavors and scents that banished the acrid memory of explosives and fire. There was no car, no young thief, no burned hulk. Only a man and a woman. Only Jericho and Maria Elena.
When he bent to suckle for the last time, he felt the first beginning shudders clasping him. Then she was struggling to free her hands, but only to draw his mouth to hers. Only to mate with him with lips and tongue, as she had with soul and body.
This had begun out of unfathomed need. As coupling in animal heat. As lust. As sex. But it was cleansing passion and abiding love that drew them to its splendid conclusion.
As she wrapped him in that splendor, giving of herself even as she took from him, she was his friend, the center of his universe. His reason for living.
The woman he loved.
His wife.
Four
Jericho woke with the dawn, out of habit and custom. As he had before, he sat by Maria’s bed watching her sleep, while memories swirled through his mind. Not just memories of the night, but of their years as children and teens in Belle Terre.
In the pall of those long-ago memories, a smile bearing no trace of humor or joy twisted his lips and turned his eyes to seething pits. He’d known Maria Elena Delacroix almost all his life. And loved her passionately and hopelessly for nineteen of those years. Sometimes, as now, he suspected he had loved her even longer.
During the night, they’d roused, showered together and made love again. Now, as she slept, with her drying hair rippling over the pillow, in spite of telltale marks of intemperate passion, it was the innocence of a frightened girl he saw. An exquisite young girl eager to be accepted, eager to be liked.
But that was before she truly understood what it meant to be a Delacroix. Especially in Belle Terre. Before she discovered she would never be forgiven for the perceived sins of any number of distant grandmothers, aunts, and cousins. Before she realized that being smarter and more beautiful than the other girls of Belle Terre Academy, and a Delacroix, was an unforgivable combination.
The first time he’d seen her, she was a scrawny little thing, with changeable gray eyes too big for her face, and a wealth of shiny hair as black as sin. She was just ten, a brand-new student at the academy. More than a little lost and confused, and totally overwhelmed by the affluence of her new surroundings. He was eleven, almost twelve, a veteran of six years at the private academy.
While she was unbelievably tiny, he was already the biggest kid his side of high school. So, on her first day, when she’d fumbled unfamiliarly with her locker, spilling her new books all over the hall, it seemed natural that he would pick them up, then offer to carry them as he showed her to her first class.
That was the beginning of “Jericho and Maria.” Out of a simple courtesy that was second nature to a tenderhearted boy, grew a unique friendship that forged a lasting bond.
There were repercussions from the beginning. Some vicious teasing, hate-filled remarks. Later, he understood that his classmates were parroting parental attitudes. A few of the boys scoffed at him for liking any girl. But especially the new girl, whom everyone seemed to be certain shouldn’t be attending the academy at all.
But even at eleven, almost twelve, Jericho had liked her smile. He liked the serious gaze that always seemed to find him, no matter where he was or what he was doing. He liked pretty Maria and her eyes and her smile more than he hated the teasing.
He knew she was different from the other girls. He knew there was something more than the unspoken class system of the proud Southern town that set her apart. But Jericho’s mother was a Yankee and a maverick, the only black mark against the most aristocratic Rivers name. In her own words, Leah Rivers didn’t give “a cup of tea in hell” for the townfolk’s preoccupation with whose father was who and had what. She didn’t care whose long-lost ancestor had signed what document or led what cavalry charge where. She found the deadly serious celebration of family connections and claim of old money foolish and intolerably arrogant.
In an inexplicable peculiarity of the cliquish Southern town, this very disdain made Leah Rivers one of Belle Terre’s most respected women. Because she practiced her beliefs, judging people by their own accomplishments, Jericho never understood the parroted slurs. It was a classmate who enlightened him, whispering behind a shielding hand a tale of half truths and embellished lies of what the Delacroix women had been nearly a century before.
It was then he’d visited his grandmother. His father’s mother, Grandmère Rivers, as she preferred to be addressed. More than an equal and a match for her daughter-in-law in brutal frankness, this proud and patrician old lady was, nevertheless, the revered ruler of society in Belle Terre. But, as she warned him in the course of their talk, even she couldn’t control the misguided cruelties and injustices of prejudice.
He was thirteen the day of their talk, and admittedly naive. But before she was through, he understood the facts, the myths, the foibles, and the pain of the wealthy Southern gentleman’s penchant for keeping a mistress and even a second family. He understood that once it had been a common, expected social institution.
Grandmère had saved the Delacroix women for last. With her back ramrod straight and her chin tilted, she’d spoken of a family of daughters. Girls of lesser means, noticed first for their comeliness, then their innate soft-spoken gentility. Traits that became consistent as their name and beauty became legend.
They
