Hank was watching Amanda and he knew what she was feeling. The first time he’d worked with field workers he’d felt the same way. The poverty was stunning, and he had been as ill prepared for it as Amanda. Maybe this is what he’d first sensed about Amanda, that she was a person who cared. She cared about Taylor; she cared about her father, about her mother. She didn’t stand up for herself because she believed that other people were more important than she was.
“You go with Joe,” Hank said to Reva. “I have something I have to do.”
Reva knew he meant he had something to do with Amanda. “I could have sent sandwiches if I had a rich father,” she said bitterly. “She just has the money to do what we all want to do.”
“I don’t see any kids’ vomit on you,” Hank said and walked toward Amanda. He put his hand on her arm. “Come with me.”
“I have to go home,” she whispered, not looking at him. “James will be waiting for me.”
James, he thought, not “my chauffeur” or “my car.” “I’ll tell him to go. I owe you an apology and I want to give it.”
She looked up at him and she saw understanding in his eyes. She nodded. “I want to go somewhere clean and quiet,” she whispered.
He took her hand in his, not the formal taking of her arm, but the more intimate palm and fingertips entwining, and led her to his car. He told her chauffeur, who’d spent most of the day sitting in the car waiting for her, to go home and that Miss Caulden would be returning later.
Chapter Thirteen
Hank drove Amanda to the secluded area inside the trees around the little pond where he’d taken her on a picnic. He had to almost pull her out of the car, then she just stood there.
“Amanda,” he said, but she didn’t respond, so he took both her hands in his. “Talk to me, Amanda. You’ve never seen poverty like that, have you? You’ve been isolated in your pretty house and you never knew people like them existed. They’re the people who pick the crops that put food on your table. It’s the sweat of these people that puts silk on your back and diamonds on your fingers.”
She tried to pull away from him but he held her hands. “I want to go home and burn my clothes and I want my schedule back.” Tears were coming to her eyes. “Let me go, I said! I want to go home!”
As she struggled, he pulled her into his arms. “Go ahead and cry, Amanda. Cry all you want. You deserve it.”
She fought against him. She didn’t want to cry and she didn’t want to ever see him again. “Let me go. I want to go home!”
“I think maybe you are home,” he said, holding her to him, pinning her arms as she struggled. She didn’t have the strength to fight, and after a while she clung to him. He seemed so healthy. She’d seen sick people today, people who couldn’t afford a doctor. She began to cry in his arms, and he sat down, his back against a tree, and held her.
“I worry about test scores while they have no food,” she said through her tears.
He unpinned her hair and stroked it as it hung down her back. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“But my father—”
He touched his lips to hers to quieten her, and to the astonishment of both of them, it was like the setting off of a bomb. Amanda opened her mouth under his and pressed her body against his. Neither of them thought as Hank’s hand sought her breast and found it, and as Amanda felt his hand, her body went limp in his arms, opening herself to him.
“Amanda,” he whispered against her lips, “we have to stop or I won’t be able to.”
“Please don’t stop,” she said desperately. “I couldn’t bear it if another man turned me away. Make love to me. Make me feel whole and clean and as if I’m worth more than a test score.”
Hank started to say no. She was upset and emotionally spent and she might regret this in the morning.
“Please, Hank,” she whispered. “Please.”
He had once thought that if Amanda ever asked him “please,” he might do anything she wanted. He’d guessed right. He couldn’t deny her anything, and all rational thought fled.
He stood with her in his arms and walked toward the spring-fed pond. “How about a bath, baby?” He moved with her into the pond, clothes, shoes, wallet and whatever else was on their persons and all.
The cool water sobered Amanda. “Dr. Montgomery,” she said nervously, “regarding what I said a moment ago—”
He kissed her. “You can fight me or help me, but the result will be the same. You won’t be the same when you leave here tonight, Amanda.”
She was standing on the bottom, the water to her waist, and she knew by the look in his eyes that he was telling her the truth. She wondered if she’d wanted him from the first moment she’d seen him. Tonight she was going to do what she wanted to do. Tonight she wasn’t going to rely on a schedule or someone else to tell her how to act.
“Yes,” she whispered and began unbuttoning her filthy dress.
Hank pushed her hands away and deftly unfastened the buttons, then slipped the dress off her shoulders. There was an intensity in her eyes that seemed to go through him like a knife.