month.â
A car barrelled past, breaking the moment. A horn blared, and someone called out, laughing, and with that small interruption, Cullen stepped out into the sweltering stillness of early evening and strode across the road to a dark green four-wheel drive. When the vehicle pulled away, Rachel gave in to the compulsion to step out onto the pavement, under the overhang. The humidity had become unbearable, and it registered somewhere in the recesses of her mind that she needed a long, cool drink. Badly.
A distant rumble sounded. The unmistakeable smell of rain hitting parched, dusty pavement wafted on a hot gust of wind as the truck accelerated down the main street and out of town. Rachel touched her palms to her cheeks and closed her eyes. She was trembling, her hair clinging damply to her brow and nape. I must be coming down with something, she thought dimly. Or maybe itâs the time of month
Or maybe it was that she suddenly felt more lonely than sheâd ever felt in her life. Lonelier even than when Adam had walked out on her and sheâd spent two weeks of the holiday theyâd planned to take together staring at a tropical sea, unable to believe her husband didnât love her.
She closed her eyes on a familiar burst of pain. Correction. He did love her. That was the supreme irony, and the one fact she still hadnât come to grips with After three years of what Rachel had considered a perfect marriage, heâd suddenly met someone. She still remembered his exact words. Theyâd burned into her, sinking to the centre of her being. âI love you,â heâd said, âbut I canât stay with you. Iâve met someone, and I canât get her out of my mind. I donât know what it is that I feel, but I canât bear to be in the same room with her and not touch her.â
Water slammed onto the tin roof of the covered way. Rachelâs eyes snapped open at the violence of the sound. After only a few seconds the guttering overflowed, and a shift in the wind drove the rain under the shelter, pelting her with big, stinging drops. She knew she should move away, but the pounding rain after the still heat of the day was somehow cathartic. Stepping closer to the edge of the pavement, she lifted her face, tasting the rain in her mouth, the cleansing coolness of it. The salt.
She wasnât crying. It was the rain wetting her cheeks, and not the weak, useless tears sheâd given up long ago.
And the tremors moving through her body were from the shock of dealing with Cullen Loganâs uncompromising maleness. SomehowâGod knows how, for heâd gone out of his way to be cool and abrasively dismissiveâheâd stirred something in her that sheâd thought had been burned away for good, a sexual need that was more intense, more overwhelming, than any she could ever remember feeling.
It shook her that she could feel a sexual response to any man other than the man sheâd chosen to marry. Maybe she was reacting naively again, but she knew her own nature. She was naturally intense and single-minded, and her feelings had always run deep. Sheâd learned to guard her emotions over the years and didnât trust easily, which was one of the reasons her failed marriage had hit her so hard. When sheâd made her vows, theyâd been the old-fashioned âtil-death-us-do-part kind.
Logically, she knew that two years had passed since her marriage had effectively ended, that she was still human, still female. Sheâd expected to participate in sex in order to satisfy a man she could come to love sometime in the misty, uncertain future. But not now. Not with this burning immediacy. And certainly not with a manâa strangerâwho didnât even like her.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Rachel looked blankly around, finally becoming aware of just where she was and that she was wet through. Thankfully, the street was deserted. Anyone
Marquita Valentine, The 12 NAs of Christmas