Without any comment on her little speech, his eyes on the water, he handed her a bottle of whisky. “It’s good single malt Scotch, the best there is. My last bottle.”
Taking it from him, Carrie swallowed a healthy-sized amount of the smoky liquid, then took another drink and another, until Josh pulled the bottle out of her hands.
“About my brother…” he began.
Carrie waited. The whisky was making her feel better, hazy, relaxed. Leaning back on her arms, she looked at the water. When Josh didn’t say anything more, she gave a nasty little laugh. “I knew you wouldn’t tell me anything. I knew you couldn’t part with a secret.” She turned to look at him. “I must say that your brother doesn’t look much like you.”
“We’re not blood relatives. My mother married his father when I was ten and Hiram was already an adult by then.”
“Was his father like him?”
“No.” Josh took a long drink of the whisky. “I think my stepfather was a bit horrified by Hiram.”
Carrie giggled. “I can understand that. Has he always been like that?” She gestured in the general direction of the house, which was over a mile away.
Taking another drink, Josh handed the bottle back to her. “Men like Hiram are born, not created. He was born thinking he knew the right way and that it was his duty to instruct the rest of us.”
“Why do you live here on land that he owns?”
Josh was silent at that.
Carrie took a deep drink of the whisky. “I beg your pardon. That’s a question I shouldn’t have asked. I forget from one moment to the next that I’m not good enough to be part of the Greene family, that I’m merely an empty-headed little rich girl who has no right to be here.” She got up. “Excuse me, but I think I’ll go back to the house.”
Josh grabbed her skirt. “Carrie, I’d tell you, but—”
She looked down at him. “But what?” she yelled at him.
“It would make you hate me.”
This was not the answer she had expected.
Releasing her skirt, he looked back at the river. “I’ve made a mess of my life and I’ve done some things that I’m not very proud of. The children are the only thing I’ve ever done that was any good.”
Carrie remembered Hiram’s insinuations. Had Josh been a criminal? Maybe they had allowed him out of prison only if he agreed to put himself under his brother’s care and run the farm and take care of the children.
Sitting back down beside him, much closer than she had been, she took another drink from the bottle, then returned it to him. “Let me stay,” she said softly.
“More than anything in the world I’d like for you to stay, but it can’t be. This isn’t the life for you. This isn’t the life for anyone, and I can’t keep living off your money.”
She nodded, not in understanding, but in acceptance. “Josh,” she whispered, then turned to look at him, her eyes full of tears. “This is the last day.”
When he looked at her, he told himself that his life would be better after Carrie left, that she had upset him and that wasn’t good. He knew that the kids would be unhappy for a while after she left, but they’d recover, and soon the little family would be back to normal. And what was normal? His cooking? His farming? His misery, which the children reflected?
“Oh, Carrie,” Josh said, then pulled her into his arms.
The minute their lips touched, they ignited, for they had hungered for each other since they had first seen the other. Their desire for each other had started the first time Josh had put his hands on Carrie’s waist to help her out of the stage, and daily contact had increased it until the two of them were tightly strung.
Day after day they had watched each other, had looked at each other’s bodies, had broken into cold sweats at the sight of so much as an inch of bare skin. For all that they pretended to dislike each other, each of them had felt vibrations whenever the other entered a room.
The children had been well aware of the adults’ reaction to each other, the way their eyes never left the other, the way they were obsessed with each other.
Now they were alone, with nothing about them but trees and rushing water, and there was nothing to stop them from doing what they’d wanted to do since that first day: They tore at each other’s clothes.
Josh was much more experienced at removing a woman’s clothes than Carrie was at taking off a man’s, but Josh had never in his life been this eager. When he pulled on Carrie’s sleeve, it ripped away, but care for her clothing was the last thing in his mind as he stroked the bare flesh of her upper arm and put his mouth to it.
Josh tried to undo the buttons at the back of her dress, but it was easier to tear them away. When he could reach her shoulders with his mouth and he heard Carrie’s moan, he no longer thought of clothes. He thought of nothing but his own desire.
Within moments there was a flurry of garments flying through the air. There was a torn silk dress, petticoats made of yards of soft cotton, and hoops that entangled Josh, but he dispatched them quickly.