to know her better, she’d become cool and distant, her manner warning him not to encroach on her privacy. Even so, there was something fragile and beguiling about her, something that had always intrigued him.
He trotted across the pavement and caught up with her. “Your dress is a knockout,” he said. “I heard Jennifer Rinquest say she’d kill for it.”
“It’s my grandmother’s,” Amelia replied in her usual serious manner. “The taffeta is woven with two different colors so that when the light hits it one way, it looks bronze, but from another angle, it’s violet.”
“Neat idea.”
“Yes.”
They were out of the parking lot and on Main Street now. At nearly midnight, there wasn’t a car or person to be seen. The shadows were deep between the streetlights, then deeper when Seth and Amelia turned onto the side street where her grandparents lived.
He wondered at her silence. Most girls tended to chatter, he’d found. He didn’t feel unwelcome around Amelia, but she didn’t try to engage his attention. She had a mysterious aura about her, as if she existed in a time and place that only she could see.
When the light breeze brought her scent to him, his body stirred with a hunger that startled him. Not that that was unusual—Uncle Nick had explained all about hormones and how it was with guys, but different for girls. However, this girl didn’t do anything to cause it…other than just be herself. A thought occurred to him. Perhaps the reason she hadn’t danced was simply that she didn’t know how.
“Uh, would you like me to teach you to dance?”
“No, thanks. I’ve had lessons,” she said in that soft tone that told him nothing. And she turned onto the sidewalk leading to the two-story Victorian.
He stayed with her. “You got a broken leg or something?”
She nimbly climbed the front steps, then turned with a frown. “No.”
He grinned. “Sorry. I just wondered why I didn’t see you on the floor at the dance.”
“No one asked.”
Her blunt honesty left him with nothing to say. When she sat in the old-fashioned swing hanging from hooks in a rafter, he joined her. “You didn’t have a date?”
She hesitated. “My grandmother arranged for a boy down the street to take me. He disappeared as soon as we got inside the gym.” She shrugged. “I didn’t mind. It was interesting to watch for a while. Then I decided it was time to come home.”
She must have stayed almost four hours, he realized. Long enough that her grandparents wouldn’t question why she’d come home early. He propped an arm behind her on the swing. His fingers touched the smooth skin of her shoulder, only partially covered by the cap sleeves of the dress. She was cold. He dropped his arm around her and pulled her close.
“You’ll catch a chill,” he scolded, sounding very much like his protective uncle.
“I never get sick.”
This was said with such world-weary resignation, he was intrigued all over again. What was it with her?
She looped her arms across her middle as if holding inside all that she was so he wouldn’t see. He touched her cheek, lingered to stroke the softness there, then tilted her face up to his. Then he kissed her.
The kiss was amazing, shocking, alarming, dazzling, as if stars were falling around them….
The very air went from October cool to July hot in an instant. The warmth of the stars, he thought hazily.
She didn’t caress him or even uncross her arms, but her lips…Lord, but those lips were pure liquid fire under his, hesitant at first, then moving, returning the pressure, opening to allow their tongues to meet. It was a kiss unlike any he’d ever experienced, and he’d kissed a lot since becoming cocaptain of the football team last year.
When he lifted his head and gazed down into her face, his heart thudded even harder. In the moonlight, her skin was the pure white of the marble veins he found running through the granite in the mountains. There was something so remote and unexpected about her….
He kissed her again, then groaned and pulled her closer so that they were half lying in the swing, her softness on top, pressing into him. For the first time, he knew, really knew, why kisses weren’t enough.
Her breasts were firm against his chest, her lips like cool fire dancing under his. Shifting, he pushed a cushion behind his back and lifted her so that he could slide one leg between hers. Half turning, he captured her body between his and the swing, the movement setting up a brief, wild gyration that broke the kiss.
They clung to each other and, as their eyes met, smiled. For a second, he couldn’t breathe, then they were kissing again…and touching in ways he’d never let happen with other girls.
When the need became unbearable, he pulled back enough to ask, “Where can we go?”
“There’s a carriage house,” she murmured, pressing kisses onto his chest.
He didn’t know when or how his shirt became unfastened. The cold air rushing across him brought back a measure of sanity. He held her face between his trembling hands and looked into her eyes.
Hot golden arcs of passionate intensity were visible in those moon-dark depths, along with a sweet vulnerability that reached to his soul. He realized how dangerously, desperately close to the edge they were.
“I have plans,” he said, summoning the only defense he could think of. “College. And law school. It’ll be years.”
Her expression changed in the blink of an eye, the raw honesty of passion was gone. Sense and caution returned. He felt the loss like the sharp pain of a paper cut.
She sat up and, with quick, precise movements, fitted the bodice of the old-fashioned dress into place, covering the delectable flesh he’d kissed and explored so thoroughly.
“I know,” she said in a flat tone that gave nothing away. “It doesn’t matter. Thanks for seeing me home.”
With that she was gone. He heard the click as the door locked behind her, observed her outline through the etched glass panes as she turned away. That was the last he saw of her until spring. At that time, she returned to school and finished the year, a straight-A student who looked at him with cool blue eyes that didn’t invite friendship or confidences anymore.
After graduation he left town on a construction job, then entered the university that fall. He rarely was back for more than a week at a time after that.
Rolling now to one side, then the other, his body tense with the haunting hunger from tonight and the dance long ago, Seth knew he was in for a restless night. Memories and the knowledge that Amelia was only steps away would see to that.
From that intriguing here-today-gone-tomorrow girl, she’d grown into a lovely woman, her gaze still cool, her hair a halo of curls surrounding a heart-shaped face just the way it had that enchanted evening so long ago.
For the oddest moment, he was filled with regret that they hadn’t shared everything the night of the Harvest Moon ball, when
