Chapter 9
Scarlett pulled on her coat as she marched up the walkway determinedly. Once inside the smokehouse, however, no Rhett was in sight.
She knew he had to be there somewhere and quickly rounded the corner to the back room, pushing open the thin door to reveal the man in question standing above the wide bench, his form backlit by a kerosene lantern and the remains of the fire, leaning against the outside wall with one arm, and the other arm—
Dear God.
His pants were undone and pushed nearly to his knees and he was holding himself by the … by the.. the root … of himself.
And appeared to be mid-thrust.
She retreated and stumbled and almost fell as her back hit the doorway.
"What—" she said, and put her hand over her eyes, then dropped it almost immediately. "Why—"
A mild discomfiture flitted across his face before he smoothed it over, pushing that fallen lock of hair off his forehead at the same time. "Pardon me. I wasn't expecting company." He dropped his hand and Scarlett watched in spite of herself as - it - bobbed for something so heavy, in complete and utter defiance of gravity.
He caught her interest, of course. A corner of his mouth rose as he lifted his eyebrows and then he turned ever-so-slightly toward her, improving the view. "Again, my apologies. I was merely—"
"I know what you were doing, you unrepentant goat." Furious color flooded her face. "You're meddling with yourself and you should be ashamed."
"There is no shame on my part. Although there should be considerable on yours," he retorted, cool and crisp as a spring breeze.
"Why should I be ashamed of your depravities? Is that what you've been doing up here on your trips all alone?" She started to pace, no small feat in the tiny space, before whirling on him.
Righteous indignation overcame her.
"Did you never consider what consequences your actions might have? You'll be no use to any of us at all if you make yourself go blind, Rhett!"
He laughed loudly, and heartily, which only made certain parts bounce more. It went on and on until he coughed before managing to compose himself.
"If that were true I would have gone blind—let's see—about two years ago, I imagine. Well, then, if not when I was fourteen." He laughed again.
"Oh, Scarlett. Despite all you've been through you are still so inconceivably young you somehow manage to wring my heart. Which means I am left to wring my own …" he lowered his hand and made a suggestive movement.
"You hush your filthy mouth and— and stop that."
He shrugged and dropped his hand, but made no movement to cover up.
Of course, he displayed no abashment. What else did she expect? She couldn't help but take in how the white of his shirt contrasted against the dark sinews of his thighs. She'd always admired his large, powerful legs. But that was neither here nor there.
She crossed her arms over her chest. "It's disgusting. Wade has been spending his days here."
"Not back here," he gestured behind him. She noticed for the first time that he'd made up a type of bed on the bench, she saw, and there was a box of wood and other tools and various items stacked neatly under it. "Only I am allowed here."
"And our food—" she gestured weakly in the direction of the smoking hickory shelves in the main room.
"There's more than one type of starvation, Scarlett," he said, and the hint of raw need in his tone did not go unnoticed.
Scarlett glanced down again in spite of herself. Nothing had changed. "Would you put - it - away, please?"
"Why, if I am not quite done with it?"
"It's unseemly," she managed to sputter, the color flying high in her cheeks.
"Yet you've waited a good amount of time to protest 'its' appearance. I've seen you watch me when I am dressing, and undressing. I'll let you look closer if you wish. To satisfy your curiosity, if nothing more. No need to worry, it's all in order."
So that's how he's going to be!
"Well, you watch me too, don't think I don't know it. And considering what you do with your," she gestured at his midsection "order, spreading it all over Atlanta and whatnot, who could blame me for wondering if it's— " she searched for the proper wording. "Still in one piece, for want of a better phrase."
Scarlett began pacing again."You've been coming out here twice a day and yesterday it was three after you came in on me in the bath—oh." She stopped abruptly.
Oh.
He scrubbed his hand over his beard, having the grace to look a tad, but only a tad, chagrined. "I'll be the first to admit that this arrangement is far from perfect, yet our current situation has considerable constricting limitations," he drawled.
"No men to beat at cards, no women to bed," she jeered. "Those are your concerns while we try to survive? I pity you."
"No willing women to bed," he corrected, and she didn't know what to say to that. Rhett ran his hand through his hair and sighed. Yet still did not pull up his damn pants.
"I have remarked on it previously, but as usual you paid no heed; you understand so little about the nature of men. You asked me before if I could not withhold myself, and the simple answer is no, I cannot. Not to dredge up unpleasant history, but do you still not understand why I had to move out of the room that we so briefly shared as man and wife?"
"You acted as though you didn't want to be around me if we weren't doing that. And gentlemen are supposed to be able to do withhold—"
"I do hate to belabor the point but we have previously and quite thoroughly ascertained beyond any shadow of a doubt that I am no gentleman."
"I'm not sleeping with you because I'm the only woman here," she retorted indignantly.
"The fact of the matter is you are sleeping with me, which is not helping matters."
"You know what I mean. I won't have relations with you merely because I am the only woman available."
"My darling wife," Rhett said, and she hated being called his wife in that snide manner, but hated the weariness in his voice more. "I don't recall asking you to have relations with me."
Her face pinkened. He had not, truth be told. "I beg your pardon."
"Dear God, but you are blind." He ran both his hands through his hair this time in apparent frustration, then appeared to be considering something.
"I propose another deal," he said as he proceeded to tuck himself back into his pants. Scarlett squashed the unexpected flash of disappointment, but not before he caught it, judging by his smirk. He sat down on the bench and gestured for her to join him, which she did reluctantly.
"Perhaps it will work because the first one has, and contrary to your track record, you haven't broken it, at least not yet."
She could have argued that he'd been hardly 'decent' for the last few minutes but decided to let that pass.
"So the deal is this: nothing confessed between us while we are stuck on this mountain can be used against each other in the future."
Her brow furrowed. "How would I use it?"
"Do you have to ask? I know you because you think like me. You're a complete opportunist and use everything you can. Especially with men, and whatever fondness or attraction to you they might express. During the war, you sank your claws into every suitor you had once you knew you had them, with no regard for the damage you wrought. I'll not share my true feelings with you only to be taunted and laughed at; or worse, utilized unilaterally in your favor."
"I never 'sank my claws' into anyone who didn't want," she fumbled, "to be clawed. And that's what you're afraid of? That I would laugh at you?"
"Isn't that what you're afraid of?"
"You laugh at me all the time."
"I pretend to laugh at you all the time because I know how you despise it. But yes, since you've asked. My deepest fear is to be played for a sap by a conniving woman," he said, amused derision in his eyes.
"Your honesty is enchanting, as always."
"Don't take it too lightly, it may be closer to the truth than you know. We have agreed, yes?"
She nodded reluctantly.
"Go ahead then, tell me your greatest fears."
Some meaning hovered beneath the surface of his words; Scarlett felt the edges of it but couldn't get a hold.
She sighed heavily. "You know them. To be hungry and poor …."
"Beyond that."
"My children suffer, my folks starve and get thrown to the winds for want of a home."
"And beyond that?"
"People will carve me up my entire life for who I am and what I've done and I will never—"
"Yes?" He sat forward.
"Find any peace or happiness or—"
"Yes?"
"Love," she whispered. "To love someone who loves me in return, I suppose. Isn't that what all women want in their hearts?"
"But what if you had that already?"
"What do you mean?"
Rhett's expression changed. "Don't you have that already, is what I meant to say." He leaned back and crossed his legs at the ankles in an unaffected gesture as if they were discussing candidates for office. "The baffling longevity of your feelings for a most happily married man almost guarantees he would have to return your feelings in some manner, even though he obviously is not willing to change his life in the least little bit for you—"
"Oh, do shut up," she muttered. Shockingly, he did not.
"And even knowing this you turned me out on the town, thinking it would serve us both fine as I can afford to buy any number of women whose charms are at least equal to yours—"
"Now you've done it." She jumped up and turned to go, then turned back to give him a piece of her mind first.
"For the record, Ashley Wilkes isn't 'most happily' anything. He's sad, gloomy, and useless. Furthermore, he'd actually have to have some initiative, not to mention live in the present and not an imaginary past, to be happy.
"Yet it hardly matters how he feels about me. I have tired of his ineptitude and I don't think I care that much for him anymore. Not that way, even if he is the only person left who's known me all along and still thinks the best of me, and sees me as good and fine, and soft and innocent as I once was, before everything."
Comprehension dawned in his eyes, but she paid it no mind as she turned her face away.
"He will always be my best friend, my oldest friend if nothing more. If it's any of your business, thank you very much." She stuck her nose in the air and proceeded to the exit.
"Miss Melly thinks you are good and fine." She glanced back at him and saw he was drumming his fingers on his thigh in a deceptively nonchalant movement but his eyes were keen and beading on her.
Scarlett huffed. "She would." She reached for the rickety door but he leaned over and shut it again.
"When did you come to this earth-shattering revelation concerning the only man you would ever love?"
"It started on the train trip home if you must know. I was thinking about how we had enjoyed the resort and how it wouldn't have been that enjoyable with him, because he has no gumption, now are you satisfied? He has no gumption and if it were up to him he'd have probably hauled nothing but a load of books up this mountain, and perhaps half a sack of tea, if he made it at all." She continued despite his blank countenance.
"He's weak. I can't respect a man who's that weak and indecisive and, to be honest, he never would have dug sardines out of the frozen ground just to see me smile—"
She stopped, assailed by the mental image of Rhett, with chaos reigning all around him, smoke and fires and oil cars exploding along with the wail and noise of panicked people, kneeling in the icy and miserable mud, risking frostbite to bring her what amounted to a small surprise.
Something about it tugged at her mind and her heart. What an extraordinarily impractical thing to do, and Rhett was unfailing, no, fiercely practical in such situations. He should have been running away from the danger, or at least working to obtain more substantive food.
Instead, he had eschewed all that just to bring a gift to the wife with whom he no longer shared a bed in a true marital sense, or even appeared to like that much.
She regarded him with a frown. It was all rather nonsensical, but before she could consider it further he grabbed her shoulders and kissed her again, stumbling back into the makeshift bed and bringing her with him.
Suddenly they were horizontal. He held her tightly against him but to her disappointment did not go further.
"What if I were to tell you—and keep our deal in mind when I say this— that if there were a hundred women here there is a good chance you would still be the one I chose?"
Scarlett wondered if she'd heard him correctly. Her mind went involuntarily to a certain red-headed woman who had been the bane of her existence for some time.
"Be still my heart. A good chance among a hundred women? What about a hundred and one?"
"I made that statement not without a great deal of trepidation, Scarlett, and you are aware of the saying about gift horses and mouths, are you not?"
It had become a labyrinth of a conversation with twists, turns, and offshoots; danger no doubt lurked ahead, but she forged on.
"You would choose me?"
He nodded, but barely.
"And yet if I don't you will continue to—" She slid her hand down his body with unprecedented boldness, stopping a few inches short of her goal, but her meaning was clear.
He nodded, this time into her hair.
Fallen women served several pragmatic purposes in society, ones that ladies did not discuss. Yet it was one thing to deny a husband who had other means of recourse, but to deny a man as virile as Rhett in this situation—it seemed quite possibly cruel. Also unfeeling, and somewhat irresponsible. And Scarlett was a very responsible woman.
It had nothing to do with how he affected her, she told herself. Nothing at all.
He was watching her in the flickering light. She dropped her eyes and gave a short, quick nod.
"Am I to assume this means you are willing to resume our connubial relations?"
"Yes but as before, there are consequences to consider."
His face shut down.
She hurriedly spoke. "I've been thinking about it, not that much, just a passing thought really, and I suppose I wouldn't mind too much a little boy who looks like you."
Rhett looked up, and a slow grin spread across his face.
"As long as he doesn't act like you," she amended.
He only grinned wider. Impossible man. She stifled a giggle as she knotted her fingers in his shirt, the coarse hairs underneath calling to her.
"But being pregnant here would be so difficult, with no doctor available if something happened, and morning sickness would be unbearable with all I have to do—"
"I will make sure that doesn't happen."
"I thought you were making sure before." She couldn't contain the sharpness of her tone.
"Yes, nothing is guaranteed, you understand, but having said that I will make sure harder. Perhaps I wasn't as motivated before."
She knew it. She'd always known. Her eyes felt hot with immediate repressed anger, but she couldn't accuse him of not trying at all, or he would get started on the reasons she ejected him from her boudoir again and she didn't want to go through all that.
"Fine."
"Done. We will resume the marital relationship and not use what we have shared against each other. Do you want to shake hands?" A barely discernible enthusiasm laced his words.
She looked at his hand, the hand.
"I'll take your word." She shuddered lightly.
"And I'll take yours."
"Are we not going to—" She gestured back at the makeshift bed.
"Eager, are we? Oh, we haven't time for that right now. The children will be awake any moment. And I refuse to hurry, after waiting this long. Sorry to disappoint, my dear, especially when you are so obviously chomping at the bit." He leaned forward and trailed his lips along her neck. "I will make it worth your while."
Irritated, she pushed him away. "Don't bother. Did it mean that much to you, really, or has this all been an act? Back in the day, you didn't seem that moved by the whole thing most of the time."
Rhett dug in his pocket between them and pulled out his handkerchief, discreetly wiping his brow. He was sweating, and it was far from hot in the room. His voice, however, was deliberately casual.
"Whatever do you mean?"
"You liked to joke a great deal but kept a kind of," her brow furrowed, "of distance, I suppose. If you were ever tender or ardent the next minute you'd be the opposite and I could never really drop my guard, not knowing when you would change."
She felt pinned by his penetrating gaze. "Go on."
"Well, that's it. You appeared to be using a curb bit and I wondered what would happen if you ever let loose—" She stopped short but knew with an inward groan that it was far, far too late.
"You wondered? Dare I say hoped?"
Scarlett lifted her chin. "I merely entertained the possibility."
"And did you entertain the possibility with Charles or Frank?"
She snorted. "Hardly."
"Why hardly?"
Oh! He'd started pulling a thread and he wouldn't be happy until the entire garment was a ball of yarn laying at his feet.
"It's not as if I wanted either of them to let loo—" Too late she caught herself. Much, much too late.
"So you wanted me to 'let loose'. Why do you think that is?"
"Well, I didn't exactly think it would be disgusting if you did it, no. It's nothing to get conceited about."
"Ah," he said, and pure delight lit his dark eyes. "So you did not anticipate as adverse a reaction with me as you had your other husbands, if I 'let loose' so to speak? Correct me if I am wrong."
She pressed her lips together hard and shook her head.
He was enjoying this, the reprobate, and just about hitting his stride.
"And it seems as if you might have anticipated this letting loose idea, and I have to assume–"
"Enough."
"Oh, it is not enough. I'm just getting started. Tell me, did you ever think of your little gentleman letting loose?"
Her brow furrowed. He always had to bring it back to Ashley. Always Ashley, even after she'd admitted her lessening attachment to the man!
And how exactly had this conversation turned around on her? She'd caught Rhett in a mortifyingly compromising position and all he did was stuff himself back in and casually button up his pants, not hesitating five seconds before commencing this interrogation. He was incorrigible!
He must have seen something in her face because every nerve in his body seemed suddenly on high alert despite his usual expression of bland tranquility. She'd watched him so closely for the last several weeks she could see the muscles practically jumping under his skin.
"We had a deal," she sulked.
"And I am adhering to it. My question does not pertain to any recent revelations." His digging-in expression meant he would not let her out of this. "Answer me."
"I don't —I've never thought much about Ashley that way, not really, and I certainly don't now." She frowned slightly as a faded dismal memory of a hopeless afternoon in a wintry orchard came back. "But if he ever did let loose, even for a moment, he'd probably feel horrible about it almost instantly, and apologize for not treating me like a lady, and then mope around and wail about not being a gentleman and refuse to do so much as look me in the face for weeks—"
A loud bark of a laugh interrupted her tirade, yet all amusement drained from his face.
"You tell on yourself, my dear."
Oh, foot.
"It was a long time ago, before you and I were married, even before Frank."
"But not before Charles. Or his wedding, for that matter." His mouth became a tight line.
She looked away. "I wasn't married."
"Ah so during the war, or at Tara."
"You have your secrets, Rhett Butler. Am I not allowed a few of my own?"
He appeared as if he might buck up for a moment, then seemed to change tactics.
"As fascinating a subject as the little gentleman actually losing a bit of his ironclad control with you might be, I don't want to ruin my humor and lose this train of thought by dwelling on it at this point in time. Although, be assured I will question you about it in the future."
Scarlett had no doubt he would do just that.
"Back to the matter at hand; are you telling me that I'm the only man you've ever anticipated 'letting loose' with you in, erm, such a delicate, not to mention mutually unclothed situation?"
"Probably. I can't think of any others at the moment." Scarlett shrugged, more than done with the conversation, and convinced it would only get worse for her the longer it went on. "I'm not like you and don't go around imagining having relations with every member of the opposite sex I run into on the street, for the love of all that is holy; but no, to answer your question, no, you are the only one. Now I'm sure you're going to be absolutely insufferable —"
Her words were cut short as he swept her up in yet another all-consuming kiss. It ended far too soon. She felt absolutely disheveled, yet he'd regained composure and appeared ready for a walk in the park as he straightened his cuffs in that signature easy way and rose from his seat.
"Thank you for visiting me in my own inner sanctum, my dear."
"I'm being dismissed now that you've obtained your agreements, I see."
"Yes, but we'll talk more later. There is much to discuss."
Make a meal out of all this, as well as her discomfort, would he?
"Do we have to talk it to death? Why can't we just get on with it and be done—"
"Your impatience is gratifying, but I've already explained I will not be rushed. You have expressed curiosity. A curiosity I intend to satisfy," Rhett eyed her up and down, "completely. And repeatedly, as long as time allows."
She found herself at a rare loss for words. He flashed a wolfish grin, then waved his hands at her in a shooing motion. "Off with you now."
This time it was Scarlett who marched out the door, slamming it behind her.
OOOOooooOOOOoooo
A/N Hello lovelies! I got stuck three thousand words into The Force and this chapter wrote itself. I hurried it for the weekend! Hope you enjoy, and drop me a line if you have a minute. I need all the encouragement I can get. Cheers, misscyn