“Your stitches, when you’re in a hurry, are too big. You need to work on them.”
Blair opened her mouth to speak but closed it. She wanted to tell him that her stitches were perfect, but she realized that that wasn’t the issue here. He wasn’t going to allow her to feel sorry for herself. With a smile, she looked at him. “Will you show me how?”
“I’ll show you how to do anything,” he said, with a look that made her feel very warm, then he resumed washing her. “Those men were fools. No man who’s sure of himself would be afraid of any woman. It just took you a while to come home to me.”
“Home. Home to my sister’s fiancé,” she sighed.
Leander was quiet for a moment, washing her hand, soaping it, clasping her fingers with his. “I guess if I had a brother and all the women were after him, and none of them wanted me, I’d be jealous too.”
“Jealous! I am not—.” She had never thought of it before, but maybe she was jealous of Houston. “She’s everything I ever wanted to be. I didn’t want to be a doctor, I had to be one. What I wanted to be was like Houston and keep my gloves clean. She has so many friends. She had you.”
He didn’t even look up as he began to wash her right arm. “No, she never had me.”
Blair kept on talking. “Houston does everything so well. She has an easy way of making friends. People for miles around love her. If Houston’d been leading the Southern troops, they would have won the War Between the States. No one can organize quite the way she can.”
“She certainly organized you. Organized you into taking me off her hands.”
“You! Oh, no, that just happened. That was entirely my doing. Houston was innocent in that.”
“Blair,” he said softly, “the night of the governor’s reception, I was going to tell Houston the engagement was off.”
“Off? I know you said something like that, but you surely didn’t mean it.”
He paused in washing her. “I don’t know Houston at all. I don’t think I ever did, but I can see things in you that I think are in Houston, too. Houston just covers whatever she’s thinking with those damned white gloves of hers. For some reason, she decided when she was a kid to marry me. I wasn’t a person to her, just a goal. Maybe it was like you and medicine, except that your goal was right. I think Houston wanted a reason to back out of our engagement because she had begun to see it wasn’t going to work.”
“But you didn’t see her the night Mr. Gates told her I was to marry you.”
“What if you’d studied medicine for years, and then found out the sight of blood made you faint? That carbolic gave you hives?”
“I would have…died,” she said at last.
“I think I gave Houston hives. We got so we could barely stand each other. We never talked, never laughed, and she curled her lip if I tried to touch her.”
“I can’t imagine that!” Blair said in genuine horror.
Grinning, he began to wash her upper chest, his hands sliding around her neck and up her cheeks. “Maybe part of her realized that you and I were right for each other, and that’s why she sent you out with me.”
“But she just wanted to see Taggert’s house and—.”
“Now, there’s a laugh! The lovely Miss Ice Princess Houston Chandler never backed down for any man in her life, but from the first time she set eyes on Taggert, she began to thaw. Remember the time we saw him in town, and he stopped and leered at Houston? I didn’t realize it then, but I should have been jealous, that is if I had been in love with Houston as I was supposed to be. But I remember being more curious than anything else.”
“Taggert,” Blair said. “I can’t imagine how any woman could want that awful man.”
“He was certainly ready to risk his life to help us,” Lee said. His slick, soapy hands were sliding lower down her chest. “Frankie’s gang thought you were Houston. They demanded fifty grand for ransom. Taggert not only brought a gun, he brought money.”
Blair didn’t hear what he was saying because his hands slid over her breasts. She lifted her arms to entwine with his, leaning back against the tub, enjoying the sensation of having him touch her.
He moved to stand before her, then lifted her from the water, her wet skin sticking to his. “I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said.
Leander seemed to be particularly adept at removing his clothing because by the time he’d carried her the three steps to the couch, he was bare. His first passion was spent, and this time he seemed to want to do little more than explore her body. Blair felt as if she were being tortured. He knocked her hands away when she reached for him and only allowed himself the pleasure of touching all of her body with his hands, his mouth, rubbing against her skin with his until she was nearly senseless with desire.
When he moved on top of her, she was clutching at him, but he was infuriatingly slow, refusing to hurry, taking his time with long, slow strokes. By the time he began to move faster, Blair was in a frenzy, feeling that she might explode from wanting him so badly.
When at last the peak came, it was such that she was sure for a moment that she had died. Her body ached and trembled, quivered, as she clung to Lee.
He pulled back, smiling at her. “I knew we’d make a great team.”
She was serious as she said, “Is lovemaking the only reason you wanted to marry me?”