Memory's Embrace Read Online Free PDF Page B

then, with breathtaking swiftness, devouring.
    Tess responded as instinct commanded, letting his lips mold hers, parting them for the tender and then fierce conquering of his tongue. She had been kissed once before, behind the bandstand at the IndependenceDay picnic, but it certainly hadn’t been anything like this ….
    As suddenly as he had taken her, Joel Shiloh thrust her away. His jawline was tight with annoyance, and the brisk swat of his left hand stung Tess’s pride more than her derriere.
    She glared up at him for a moment, insulted and hurt, and then stooped to gather up her hairpins, which lay on the floor of the passageway.
    Tess was so angry that tears burned in her eyes, making it next to impossible to find her hair pins. And he was just standing there, so tall and imperious, too self-important to help her.
    Her bottom still stung where he had swatted her. The nerve … the gall of him ….
    Before she realized what she was doing, Tess lunged forward and sank her teeth into his left thigh. He howled in surprise and pain, and Tess let him go, scrambled to her feet, and ran down the passageway as fast as she could go.
    He caught her easily, and she thought her heart would stop beating when his hand closed over her shoulder, tight as a vice, and swung her around. It did not occur to her to scream.
    “You little—” he began, his azure eyes flashing with some dangerous emotion.
    “I told you I would bite you and I did!” Tess blurted out, in a hissing rush. “I am not a child and I will not be treated as one!”
    Though he was struggling against it, a grin was tugging at one corner of his mouth. “No,” he said hoarsely. “You are not a child.”
    Tess smoothed her skirts and her dignity. “Then you’re sorry for striking me,” she assumed.
    “I didn’t say that.”
    Tess was maddened. “Why, you—”
    “I can’t believe you seriously expect an apology,” he broke in, in an evil undertone, “when you bit me like that.”
    “I bit you after you struck me!”
    “A minor point, Miss Bishop. Now get out of here before I lose my temper!”
    More than happy to comply, Tess turned and swept away in high dudgeon, chin up, shoulders back.
    In the kitchen, Juniper was prattling as usual, but Tess barely heard her. All she could think about was that drummer and the way he’d pressed his body to hers, the way he’d kissed her. And the way he’d thrust her away, as if in disgust, and then swatted her! What reason had he had for doing that?
    Peeling carrots with swift strokes of a paring knife, Tess blushed to remember the way she had bitten him. The way he’d howled.
    “Stop that right now afore you cut yourself!” snapped Juniper, grasping Tess’s hand and staying the motion of the paring knife. “What’s the matter with you, girl?”
    Unaccountable tears sprang up in Tess’s eyes and flowed down her face, dropping off into the fragrant curls of carrot peelings. She had bitten that man, bitten him. Like an animal. “I don’t know, Juniper,” she wailed. “I don’t know!”
    For all of the older woman’s complaining, Juniper loved Tess, and she lifted a practiced hand to the young woman’s forehead to check for fever.
    “You’s a little warm,” she fretted.
    Tess was warm, all right, but not because of any fever. Thanks to that scandalous scene with Joel Shiloh, in the passageway, she felt like a candle left too close to a stove.
    “I’m all right, Juniper,” she insisted, sniffling a little and trying to brush away her tears with an anxious motion of one hand. “Honestly, I am.”
    Juniper was not easily convinced. “It ain’t that time, is it? If it’s your misery, girl, you just get yourself off to bed and—”
    It was a misery, all right, but not the kind that Juniper was suggesting. “It isn’t that,” Tess declared, taking up the carrot she had been slashing at and peeling it in a way meant to suggest that she was competent to handle a knife.
    Reluctantly, Juniper let