Free Different Dreams by Tory Cates Page A

who had just become a business associate of sorts. Especially with someone whose honor he had promised not to compromise. The balance tipped agonizingly toward denial.
    â€œDinner.” He pronounced the word as if it were the answer to all their problems. “I’m starving.” He turned Malou in his arms and headed her out toward the kitchen, grabbing the kerosene lantern as they went.
    As Malou walked away from the light and heat of the fire, she felt that she’d been cast out from both. Had Cam seen it all in her eyes? Felt it in the staccato pound of her heart? Had he known how much she’d wanted his kiss? His touch? Had he known and chosen to withhold both?
    Dinner was a slapdash affair pulled from the first couple of cans that Cam opened. Neither of them had any appetite. It was certainly clear, as he barely picked at the food before him, that Cam had not been in any state even close to “starving.”
    He left his plate and stood for a long time at the pump, working the creaking handle until water ran clear and sweet into the earthen jug he slipped beneath the trickle. Malou followed his lead and mixed a bit of the scotch in with the crystalline water. The smooth, warming taste fit the evening perfectly. Even more welcome was the way it untangled a few knots of the tension snarling up inside her.
    They took their drinks and sat in front of the fire, listening to the hypnotic drum of rainfall on the roof and to the unsettling progression of thoughts through their own minds. It was warm in front of the fire, far too warm for the quilt. Malou shrugged it off.
    â€œYou know . . .” Their voices bumped together. Out of the long, thought-filled silence, they’d both managed to speak at once.
    â€œGo ahead,” Cam said, far too aware of the flash of color that had brightened her cheeks and the way her eyelashes had swept downward to mark those cheeks with dark crescents. And far, far too aware of the soft jut of her nipples, so clearly outlined beneath the diaphanous fabric. Christ, he felt like a teenage boy confounded and controlled by hormonal urges.
    â€œIt was nothing,” she demurred. “Just wondering if you’d ever been married or any of that stuff.”
    â€œNothing, eh?” he taunted her. “No, never been married. What about you? Ever gone in for any of ‘that stuff’?”
    She shook her head.
    â€œAny serious contenders lurking about? Jealous lovers poised and ready at this very instant to storm the cabin and blast my head off in a hot-blooded crime of passion?”
    Malou smiled. “No, the lovers I’ve had haven’t been of the hot-blooded, passionate variety.” She felt bold and something of a fraud even talking about her “lovers” with Cam.
    â€œWhat fools they must have been.”
    Whose fault had that been? she wondered, thinking back over her amorous history. Always, it seemed, experimentation and curiosity had been much larger factorsthan desire. She’d invariably been the one to swiftly end the brief affairs, escaping before the entanglements became so damnably complicated. Never, not until Cam’s kiss that morning, had she felt anything close to passion. She reached for her glass.
    Cam felt his blood surge within him as her lips parted slightly, firelight playing over her moist bottom lip.
    â€œAnd what of your jealous lovers?” she asked, liking the intimacy of the question, the casual ease she’d managed to imitate. “Certainly there must be more than a few of those lurking about.”
    â€œAnd why ‘certainly’?”
    â€œWell, because . . .” How had he managed to turn her question around so that, once again, she was the one under scrutiny? She wished she were better at the dodges and feints of conversation between men and women. More practiced at coming up with saucy one-liners. Instead she had to keep resorting to the truth. “Because of