Free Seduced by Molly O'Keefe Page B

long. Tears burned behind her eyes but she blinked them away, not wanting to be blinded to any of this beauty.
    I killed him
, she thought, unable to even think his name in this beautiful place in fear he would ruin it.
I won't have to suffer another moment of pain with that man.
    “Melody?” It was Cole, standing over her with a string of trout over his shoulder. “Are you all right?”
    How ridiculous to be found here like this, but she couldn’t be bothered to care.
    I'm free.
    “Did you fall?” He glanced over his shoulder, panicked. “Do you need your sister?”
    “No,” she answered, smiling because she wanted to and not because she was terrified not to. “I'm fine.” She flung out her arms, her fingers brushing the soft flower heads, the green damp stems. A honeybee hummed around her head, landed on her finger and buzzed away.
    “Melody,” he said, all stern concern.
    She shook her head at him. “Don't,” she said. “I've been living terrified and small for years. But not right now. Right now, I am not scared at all.”
    Do you understand
, she wanted to ask?
Do you understand how beautiful it is to lie here in the dirt and flowers and look at the sky?
    Something happened under the skin of his face, something strange, as if the muscles holding his mouth in stern lines, keeping his eyes narrowed, they all just gave way and she saw for a moment all the fear he still lived with, the heavy weights of grief and regret.
    “Do you remember what you were like before the war?” she asked.
    He shook his head.
    I’ve only remembered the worst of myself, tracing every moment of bad fortune back to some horrible deed in my past. But there was more to me. I'm sure there was.
    The sun gave him a halo. And she had no illusions that he was an angel.
    We are all just human
, she thought.
Trying to survive
.
    She wished he would lie down in these flowers with her. He needed it.
    “Come on, Melody,” he said, wrapping his hand around hers, his other hand at her waist as he pulled her up out of the grass and flowers. “You should be resting.”
    Inside Annie clucked over her, their fight forgotten, and Melody was sent to bed.
    In the morning they all talked about her head injury and told stories about soldiers they'd known who'd been hit in the head and couldn't remember their names, or could only sing instead of speak.
    And she agreed with them. I was not myself, she said.
    But she knew the truth.
    That was the day she found herself again; like a diamond, hard and unbroken beneath all the rubble.
     
    MELODY SLEPT. WOKE up and slept all day and the night again. She woke up the following morning to the roar of her stomach and the smell of her body and decided to make biscuits. A lot of them. And then it was time to do some wash. And take a bath.
    Steven slept as well, his back turned to the otherwise empty room. After dressing, she grabbed the bucket and went out into the clearing for water. Only to be brought up short by the sight of Cole, to the left of the barn, shirtless and shaving, looking into a mirror propped up in a tree.
    His skin was surprisingly dark, stretched taut over thick muscles. He lifted his arms and the muscles in his belly clenched and released. He had hair on his chest and a thin line of it on his belly. He was lean, no fat on him.
    There were no scars on his body. He turned away to pick something up from the ground and she saw his back was clear too.
    She had not seen a man returned from the war quite so unscathed.
    He must have caught sight of her because he grabbed the shirt hanging from a branch and pulled it over his head.
    “I didn’t see you there, Melody,” he said. His face beneath the dripping water was red. He was embarrassed.
    You are a man
, she thought. The tightening in her stomach, not quite painful, but not at all comfortable, not sexual in any way. Just precisely, exquisitely aware.
    Since the war she'd been afraid of men, of the potential threat of them. Just days ago she'd