Shameless (The Contemporary Collection) Read Free Page A

great-grandmother, and took advantage of her in other ways.”
    “I never heard that she complained. Only her husband — and her descendants.”
    Reid Sayers's great-grandfather had, nearly a hundred years before, been a lumberjack new to the South, looking for opportunity. He had found it when he met Cammie's great-grandmother, Lavinia Greenley. Justin Sayers had enticed the poor wife and mother into a torrid affair. Before it was over, Justin had finagled three hundred acres of prime land from Cammie's ancestress, and Lavinia's husband was dead.
    It had been a scandal whose echoes still sounded in Greenley, not the least reason being that Justin Sayers had stayed in the community, had prospered and left descendants. To call the division between the Sayers and Greenley families a feud would have been melodramatic, but the coolness and lack of social contact was real.
    “Lavinia Greenley was not the complaining kind,” Cammie said stiffly.
    “Apparently not. I've often wondered about that.” His tone, as he went on, was pensive and a little rough. “I used to wonder sometimes, too, if she was at all like you. And what you would have done in her place.”
    Her breath lodged in her throat. She had never dreamed that Reid Sayers thought of her at all. It was disarming, and oddly painful, to know that he had pictured her as Lavinia. Without stopping to consider, she said in stifled tones, “Did you see yourself as Justin?”
    “Who else?”
    The taut sound of his voice reverberated in the rain-drenched night that surrounded them. His face, as he hovered above her, was scant inches from hers in the darkness. She could feel the brush of his warm breath across her cheek. His scent surrounded her; it was compounded of fresh night air, a whiff of some woodsy after-shave, and his own warm masculinity, yet with an undertone of wildness that stirred an answering fierceness.
    The muscles of his abdomen hardened. His biceps, under her neck, knotted. He drew breath with a soft, hissing sound of tightly leashed control.
    Above them the wind sighed in the treetops. Raindrops pattered on the leaves and also on the glazed material of the poncho that covered them. They gleamed darkly in his hair and dripped in a slow warmth from his face to her forehead. Their touch was like a caress.
    Cammie knew with abrupt and shocking clarity that if she moved so much as a finger, if she drew too deep a breath or allowed an eyelash to flicker, he would lower his head and press his lips to hers. If she did more, if she lifted her arms to circle his neck or opened her legs even a fraction farther, he might take her there in their nest of wet leaves.
    Drifting through her mind, not quite formed but compelling, was the urge to shift, to move, to press against him in wanton invitation. Appalled by it, yet unbearably enticed, she held her breath.
    Somewhere behind them a dead tree limb, made heavy by the steady rain, released its hold with a crack. It fell to the ground with a soft thud.
    A shudder ran over Reid. He breathed a quiet imprecation, then abruptly levered himself up and away from her. Surging to his feet with lithe ease, he reached down and pulled her up to stand beside him. He whipped his poncho from around his shoulders, swirling it around her and pulling it closed over her breasts.
    “Let's go,” he said in a toneless command, “before I do something we'll both regret. Again.”
    Their passage through the woods was swift and sure. The man at Cammie's side never hesitated, seldom slowed, never stopped except to help her over a fallen log, a shallow branch or creek. He could not have been more at home, it seemed, if he had been moving across his own living room.
    The poncho Cammie wore was so long that it nearly dragged on the ground. She tripped over it several times before she snatched up the excess material and bunched it in her hands.
    Reid Sayers caught her each time she stumbled, almost as if he could see in the dark, or else had a