“I know.” She sat next to him, but not quite touching. “I have a grandchild to protect.”
“I see.”
But she could tell he didn’t see at all. Just weeks ago, his uncertainty might have made him snap at her, but now he seemed more contemplative than irritated. Was he beginning to trust her?
“Do you remember that I told you my marriage was breaking up?”
She felt herself tensing. “I remember.”
“It’s my fault. I just want you to know that if you’re thinking about… seeing me.”
“All your fault?”
“Ninety-nine percent. I blamed her for my own shortcomings and didn’t even realize it.” He braced his forearms on his knees and gazed at the rushing water. “For years I let myself believe I’d have become a world-famous epidemiologist if I hadn’t been forced to marry so young, but it wasn’t until after she left me that I figured out I was kidding myself.” He clasped his hands together, those strong, healing hands that had served as the gateway for both birth and death in this county. “I would never have been happy away from these mountains. I like being a country doctor.”
She was touched by the depth of emotion she heard in his voice and thought he might finally have rediscovered a part of himself that he’d lost. “What about her one percent?”
“What?” He turned his head.
“You said you were 99 percent to blame. What about her one percent?”
“Even that wasn’t really her fault.” She didn’t know if it were a trick of the light or a reflection from the water, but his eyes seemed full of compassion. “She didn’t have many advantages when she was growing up, and she never had much formal education. She says I always looked down on her because of it, and she’s probably right—she is about most things—but I think now she might have made it easy for me to look down on her because, even though she’s accomplished more than most people could in two lifetimes, she’s never thought much of herself.”
Her mouth snapped open, but then she shut it. How could she refute what was so patently true?
For a moment she let herself contemplate how far she had come in her life. She saw all the hard work and self-discipline that had been necessary for her to become the woman she’d wanted to be. As if from a distance, she viewed who she was and found she liked what she saw. Why had it taken her so long to accept herself? Jim was right. How could she have expected him to respect her when she didn’t? In her mind that accounted for more than one percent of the blame, and she told Jim so.
He shrugged. “I guess I don’t much care what the number is.” He picked up her hand, which rested on her thigh, and ran his thumb along the ragged edge of one of her fingernails, then up over the ridge of her wedding band. He didn’t look at her, and his voice held a soft, gravelly note that was filled with emotion. “My wife is so much a part of me, she’s like the breath coming into my body. I love her very much.”
His simple, emotion-filled statement shook her, and her words snagged in her throat. “She’s very lucky.”
He lifted his head and gazed at her. She recognized the moisture gathering in the corners of his eyes as tears. In thirty-seven years, she had never once seen her husband cry, not even the day they’d buried Cherry and Jamie.
“Jim…” She slipped into his arms and found that old familiar place that God had created just for her out of Jim’s bone and muscle and flesh. Feelings she couldn’t express choked her, making her brain fuzzy, so that the next words she spoke weren’t what she’d intended at all. “You should know I don’t sleep with men on the first date.”
“Is that so?” His voice was husky.
“It’s because I started having sex when I was too young.” She drew away from him, looked down into her lap. “I didn’t want to, but I loved him so much that I didn’t know how to say no.”
She glanced up to see how he’d taken her statement. She didn’t want to throw more guilt in his face; she merely needed him to understand how it had been.
His smile held a hint of sadness, and he brushed the corner of her mouth with his thumb. “Did it turn you against sex for life?”
“Oh, no. I was blessed with a wonderful lover. Maybe a little clumsy when he got started, but it didn’t take him long to get it right.” She smiled.
“I’m glad to hear that.” His thumb trailed over her bottom lip. “You should know right now that I don’t have a lot of sexual experience. I’ve only been with one woman.”
“That’s nice.”
He pushed her hair back from her face on one side with his fingers. “Did anybody ever tell you you’re beautiful? A lot messier than my wife but still a traffic-stopper.”
She laughed. “I couldn’t stop traffic if I had a red light in the middle of my forehead.”
“That just goes to show what you know.” He took her hand and drew her to her feet. As his head dipped, she realized he was going to kiss her.
The brush of his lips was gentle and familiar. He kept his body away from hers so only their mouths touched, along with their hands, which were linked at their sides. Their kiss quickly lost its gentleness and grew urgent with passion. It had been so long for them, and there was so much they needed to express that lay beyond words. But she loved his courtship and wanted more time.
He drew back as if he understood and regarded her with glazed eyes. “I—I have t