“So choose another word and make me understand your point.”
Laurel felt as if he’d just put her back to the wall. She set her feet down hard in an attempt to stop the swing. It swayed a little crazily before it stilled. Laurel turned sideways and waited until Call looked at her. One of his eyebrows was raised. Somehow he managed to look amused and challenging at the same time.
“Can we say ‘making love’ without attaching any special meaning to it?” she asked.
He shrugged. “If you like.”
“Well, I do,” she said, and almost believed it. “All right. Then my point is that I think you gave me a taste for making love.”
“You think? You’re not sure?”
She poked him with the toe of her boot. “Youarelooking for praise.”
Call rubbed his shin. She hadn’t exactly been gentle. Still, he couldn’t quite keep the deviltry out of his smile as he asked, “So what happens now?”
Laurel hadn’t thought it through and she didn’t have an answer. “Don’t you know?”
“I don’t see us going back to the pool tonight.”
Laurel was tempted to kick him again, but she remembered that Jeremy Dodd used to yank on her braids after school and her father told her that was because Jeremy liked her. She didn’t want to lend Call the same impression. She regarded him seriously, hoping he would give her question a genuine response.
“There aren’t a lot of choices,” he said. “You can’t come to the bunkhouse and I’d rather not meet in the barn. Out of doors is fine if comfort isn’t a consideration, or if comfort is, then you’ll want to bring blankets, maybe build a fire if it’s chilly. Plus, we’d want to keep the critters away.”
“What’s wrong with the barn?”
“Besides that it smells of cattle and muck? It’s all right for a roll, I suppose, but there’s a much better chance that we’ll be surprised there, even if we’re up in the loft.”
“Yes, of course. I should have thought of that.”
“I was actually thinking we were fortunate that no one came across us at the falls this afternoon.”
So was Laurel, but she understood why she hadn’t given it a thought at the time. “I suppose that eliminates all the possibilities save one.”
Call thought she sounded more resigned than happyabout it. “You have to be sure, Laurel. Even Jelly’s going to figure out where I am at night if I’m not sleeping in the bunkhouse.”
She remembered telling him she didn’t care about that, that everyone in Falls Hollow found out everything sooner or later, but she’d said all that when she was practically daring him to make love to her. He’d asked her to reflect on it then, and he was asking the same of her now. McCall Landry wanted her honesty, but mostly he wanted her to be honest with herself. He was pointing out the quicksand. He needed to know that she saw it, too.
“I understand,” she said at last. “Nevertheless, I’d welcome your company in my bed. What happens after that will happen. People will talk. I can’t be responsible for what they think or say.”
Call wasn’t as certain that word would get around, but he felt the need to remind her that it could. Rooster would cut out his own tongue before he’d talk, and the brothers, for all they were young and titillated by the goings-on at Mrs. Fry’s house, they were loyal to Laurel and wouldn’t speak out of turn. Jelly was most likely to let the cat out of the bag, but since he didn’t often sleep in the bunkhouse, there was a chance to avoid being found out. The one person Call didn’t know if he could count on was Mrs. Lancaster. She’d encouraged Laurel to flirt, but bedding down with a man outside of marriage might cross her moral line.
“Tonight?” he asked.
Laurel pressed her lips together. There was a comfortable ache between her thighs and a sense that there was a hollow there waiting to be filled by him. It had to be filled by him. The thought that he might come to her bed this evening made her skin tingle. She felt her breasts swelling, the nipples tightening, and she was flushed with warmth.
“Tonight would be fine,” she said. Her voice, for all that she had to swallow hard before she spoke, sounded perfectly normal to her. That was good.
“Jelly’s at home,” said Call.
She nodded. “Probably better that way.”
Call didn’t indicate one way or the other that she was right. Dillon and Hank had stopped playing a while ago, but now one of them picked up the fiddle and started “Annie Lisle.” The melodic ballad drifted toward them. This time it was Call who hummed.
“Heard a version of this a lot during the war,” he said quietly when he realized she was staring at him. “’Course the words were different. ‘Ellsworth’s Avengers,’ it was called. A battle tribute song to the first Union officer killed.”
“You don’t talk much about the war.”
“No.”
