by Anne Stuart
He knelt by the edge of the pool a few feet from her still body, and dipped his arms into the water, sluicing it over his chest, his face, running his hands through his thick black hair, the moonlight gilding the drops of water that clung to his body. Then he looked at her and the polite Randall was gone, the one with the immaculate suits, the perfect hair, the banked emotions. The man kneeling there was the man who had fought for her in the past, who had stripped away the veneer of civilization to the savage beneath. He knelt there, waiting. Waiting.
She rose slowly, unconsciously graceful even in her state of tension. The water reached only partway up her long legs, and she stood there in the silvery moonlight, her eyes meeting his, despair and inevitability washing over her in the wake of the water that was quickly drying in the soft breeze.
“Come to me, Maggie,” he said, and his voice was husky with pain and wanting. Husky like someone else’s shattered voice. She moved toward him, mesmerized, hating herself, stopping just out of reach of his long arms.
She looked at him, wanting him so much she felt sick with it. One more step and there’d be no question, no turning back, no room for second thoughts or doubts or distrust. One more step and her betrayal of Mack Pulaski would be complete.
She stopped where she was, and the night breeze was cold and clammy on her skin. “Did you pay Bud Willis twenty thousand dollars to kill my husband?”
Everything stopped. Their heartbeats, their breathing, the wind in the trees overhead, the faint ripple of water. The universe stopped—breathless, shattered—for a long, suffocating moment.
Randall rose to his full height, his lean, wiry body outlined against the moonlight, and she couldn’t see his expression. “That’s what Bud Willis told you when he was dying.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.
“Yes.”
“And you believed him.” Still not a question.
At that point she didn’t know what she believed. Everything was so wretched, so horrible that the only way to make it better would be to make it even worse. “Yes,” she said.
He sighed, a soft, despairing sound, and the wind rustled through the leaves in answer. The tension left his shoulders. “Get out of the pool and get your clothes on, Maggie,” he said, turning and walking away from her.
She stood still, unmoving. “Why?”
“We’re going to Damascus.”
“I thought it was too far—”
“Siberia isn’t too far,” he broke in, and his voice shook with a pure, clean rage. “I’m taking you to the nearest airport and dumping you. I’ll find Flynn myself.”
“The hell you will.” She quickly emerged from the water and scooped up the dusty shirt she’d discarded and pulled it around her. “You’re not dumping me anywhere, Randall. You’re going to answer my goddamned question.”
After pulling on his clothes he whirled around, and to Maggie’s disgust she found herself cowering as he stalked her, moving across the tangled garden like an angry jungle cat. “You didn’t ask me a question, Maggie,” he said in a low and furious voice. “You listened to what Bud Willis had to tell you and you passed judgment. No hesitations, no doubts.”
“The man was dying,” she cried. “Why would he lie to me?”
“So he could die the way he lived. Making people miserable. You think he was going to do you favors after you helped him fall sixty feet onto a concrete floor? You think revenge wouldn’t be any part of his motivation? You stupid, pathetic fool.” Disgust warred with the anger that shook him.
“Then tell me the truth,” she said, shivering in the night breeze, the loose shirt flapping around her body. “Did you pay Bud Willis to kill Mack?”
He moved then, coming within inches of her, and his body radiated heat and rage and something that in a less cynical man she would have called disillusionment. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Damn you, try it!” She reached up and caught the loose folds of his damp khaki shirt, but he twisted out of her grip.
“No. I’m not going to tell you a goddamned thing,” he said bitterly. “You’re going to spend the rest of your life wondering. Now get dressed.” He turned away from her, the set of his shoulders radiating contempt, and something finally snapped.
She’d seen too much death that night, too much death in her thirty-four years. She’d lost Mack, her one real chance at happiness, and she’d lost Randall, over and over and over again. She stood there, watching him walk away, a thousand doubts unresolved, a thousand questions unanswered, and she began to shake.
With trembling hands she pulled her jeans back on and buttoned the shirt. She leaned over to pull on her sneakers, but her hands were shaking too much to manage, and she squatted there, unmoving, listening to Randall as he walked back toward her.
“Are you ready?”
His voice was heavy with contempt and something else. Was it wariness? Damn it, Maggie thought, did she deserve that fury and disgust he was showing her? Or was it all a part of an elaborate defense?
She didn’t move. Every nerve in her body was taut, screaming, ready to shatter. She stayed there on her haunches, shivering, waiting for something to break the paralysis.
It was his hand. He leaned down and caught her shoulder, and his long brown fingers were hard and painful. “Get up, Maggie,” he said in a bitter voice.
The roughness of his hand on her was the final straw. “Get your hands off me,” she screamed, but the words came out in a tortured whisper. And then she began to fight.
ten
If she’d expected gentlemanly restraint, sympathy, or a gentle subduing of her blind rage, she’d attacked the wrong person, Randall thought. One of her strong fists grazed his cheekbone, and he caught that arm, twisting it around behind her. She kicked, and he dodged, grunting in anger and pulling her arm harder against her back. She’d bared her teeth against the pain, but her other hand was flailing around, thrashing at him. A distant part of his brain knew that she was capable of a much better effort. He could still subdue her—not only did he outweigh her, but he had years more experience. But Maggie was blinded by her fury, making mistakes that would have left her dead if she’d come up against anyone else but him.
He yanked at her arm again, hearing her muffled gasp of pain, and he told himself he was glad he hurt her. Told himself that as he loosened his grip. She responded by spinning around, driving her fist into his stomach, and bringing her knee up toward his groin.
No more mister nice guy, he thought grimly, jerking out of the way of that dangerous knee. He moved, quickly, efficiently, catching both arms, spinning her around and shoving her down into the dirt, following her down and pinning her prone body with his larger one. He caught her short-cropped hair in one large hand and yanked it upward, painfully, so that she could meet his glare.
He waited, panting, for her to start bitching. But the rage had left her body, the fight was gone from her grim mouth, and she lay there beneath him, staring up at him out of eyes that he never wanted to see in her face. Lost, hopeless, despairing eyes that were, to his horror, starting to fill with tears.
He released his grip on her hair, and her face sank down in the dust as the first sobs began to shake her shoulders. Narrow, oddly defenseless shoulders lying beneath him. Maggie Bennett, who prided herself on being so strong, so self-sufficient, lay there in a huddle of misery so vast that it frightened him.
Damn Pulaski. And damn her for loving him so much that she was still tormented and ripe for Bud Willis’s sadistic games. And damn him for caring one way or the other.
He should leave her lying there in the dirt. He could call Mabib from Damascus and have him come fetch her later. If he were truly guiltless that was exactly what he’d do.
But there was a small, niggling part of him that wondered whether he could have stopped Mack’s death. And as long as that question haunted him, then he deserved a tiny portion of Maggie’s distrust.
For such a tall lady she was very small beneath him. Her
body shook, quiet little tremors made without a sound. He had a choice—walk away and let her regain her self-possession, or take her now, when she was vulnerable. Turn her over and strip off those hastily donned clothes.
He wasn’t a teenage boy at the mercy of his hormonal urges. He wanted more from Maggie than her body. The worst thing he could do right now would be to make love to her, when she was too weak and defenseless to fight him and her own needs. She hated those needs, and he was damned if he wanted to face her one more morning with that look of condemnation in her eyes. He had to leave her alone.
The back of her neck was directly beneath his mouth. It was fragile, defenseless, with her short-cropped, wheat-color hair barely brushing it. There was something so indefinably erotic about the nape of her neck, the moonlight around them, the anguish and hatred and despair still ringing in the air. They were mere inches apart.
He stared down at her body still shaking with suppressed sobs. And without conscious volition he placed his mouth against her neck.
She grew very still beneath him. He was conscious of it, even as he was conscious of the smoothness of her skin beneath his mouth, the lingering taste of water from her sojourn in the pool, the faint saltiness of sweat brought about by her rage and near hysteria. The sobs shuddered to a sudden halt, and he half expected her to gather her remaining strength and try to roll his larger body off her.
She didn’t move. She lay there beneath him, quiet, waiting, and he knew it was too late. He wanted her too much to pull back. And she needed him too much to fight. He shifted, moving partway off her, and his hands were no longer rough and punishing. He rolled her over in the dust so that she faced him, and the look on her face shocked him. It was an expression of total, passive despair. And he knew that if he did nothing else he’d bring her back to life again, even if it meant bringing back her hatred.
Her hair was still wet from her brief swim. He gently pushed it out of her face. She didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, didn’t react at all. She just lay there on her back in the dirt, half beneath him, watching him out of emotionless eyes.
He hesitated for one last time. He’d taken advantage of her before—maybe this time he could make the supreme effort and let her go. Maybe for once in his life he could do the decent, unselfish thing.
“Do you want to go on to Damascus tonight?” He forced himself to ask it, and even to his own ears his voice sounded strained.
She just looked up at him. For a moment he wondered if she’d retreated into shock, not hearing, lost in some world where Pulaski still strutted and Randall Carter was nothing more than an unpleasant memory. But those calm, unseeing eyes focused on his for a moment, and she gave a faint, negative shake of her head.
He took a deep breath, a part of him amazed at the shakiness of it. “Do you want me to leave you here and have Mabib pick you up tomorrow?”
Again that small shake of her head. There was a streak of dirt across one of her high cheekbones. At least, he hoped it was dirt and not a bruise from his less than courteous defense.
“What do you want, Maggie?” His voice was raw and strained in the night air.
She looked up at him, out of those half-dead aquamarine eyes that still, somewhere, held a spark of life.
“I want you to make love to me,” she said in a small, distinct voice, as if she were asking for cream and sugar in her coffee. “I want you to make me forget everything. You’re good at that, Randall. Good at making me unable to think. I’ve thought too much, seen too much, hurt too much in the last few days. The last couple of years. I want to forget. Just for a little while.”
He held himself very still. “So what does that make me? A sexual Valium? Take a dose when things get too much and then deny it in the morning?”
She just looked at him with that damnable calm of hers. “You have to be careful with dangerous drugs, Randall. It would be far too easy for me to become addicted.”
A long, silent moment passed between them. “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t,” he said.
“We’re all damned.”
“I don’t buy that.”
She said nothing, just lay there, passive, waiting, knowing he couldn’t resist. She waited for a blissful haze of sexual pleasure to wash over her, knowing he could provide that so well.
But not this time. This time he wasn’t going to seduce and pleasure and please her, no matter how easy it was for him to do it. This time she was going to have to participate. He slid his large hand behind her neck, roughly, and pulled her head up toward his. He had a brief glimpse of her startled eyes before his mouth met hers. His tongue thrust past her soft lips, into the dark, hungry interior of her mouth, and his lips ground against hers. Their mouths were sealed tightly, in a suffocating bond of love and anger, and he moved his hands downward to rip her shirt apart, sliding it open to capture her naked breasts with his long, hard fingers.
She’d begun to pull away from him, but he ignored her resistance, feeling the buds of her nipples against his sensitive fingers, recognizing her arousal even as she fought it. He pulled his mouth away for a moment, taking a deep breath, and she looked up at him in confusion, her mouth swollen, her eyes glazed, her breath coming in shallow, angry gasps. There was no passivity left, only a dazed surprise.
He dropped his head again, recapturing her mouth before she could protest, his tongue forcing hers to respond. He heard a deep, answering groan from the back of her throat, and her hands had reached up to clutch at his shoulders, her fingers digging deep into his flesh, and the slight pain was just one more piece of fuel added to the bonfire of desire that was sweeping over him. Over them. Her breasts seemed to swell in his hands, pushing against them, filling them, and her hips cradled his, rocking slightly in mute need.
She wanted sex, and she was going to get it. Hard and fast, with no frills, just a hot, fiery release that would leave her with more questions, not easy answers. And he didn’t give a damn. He pulled his head away, reluctantly, staring down at the dark hunger in her eyes, the taut, desperate need that quivered through her body. The shirt lay open around her, and her pale torso rose and fell in the night air, pale against his dark, possessive hands.
For a moment he wondered how far he could push her. He wanted to lie back in the dust, have her mouth and hands all over him, ministering to him, arousing him, pleasuring him. He wanted her kneeling in front of him, taking from him, and he knew he could make her do it that night. She’d do anything he wanted, and more, trade anything for the forgetfulness she craved.
But forgetfulness wasn’t what he was offering. It was reality, and memory, and pain and love. He levered his body away from her, then yanked her jeans apart, and the tough, faded fabric gave readily before his strength. He pulled them away from her, leaving her lying naked and in the dirt, and his eyes were fire and ice as they stared down at her. He pulled away, long enough to strip off his own pants, and then he shoved her legs apart, holding her slender ankles captive, high against his shoulders. He plunged into her, filling her with his massive strength, and he was amazed that she was as ready as he was.
They were both covered with a light film of sweat. Her hands clutched at him, then slid under the loose shirt he still wore, and her nails dug into his skin, holding tight, as he rocked against her, filling her, pulling back, then filling her again. She was shivering, trembling, her body clenching around him, and her face was pale in the moonlight.
“Look at me, Maggie,” he said, and his voice was a savage gasp of pain and pleasure. “Look at me, damn you.” He stopped moving, holding still within her, forcing her to see him.
Slowly she focused her dazed eyes on his face. Tremors were rippling through her body, her fingers were slippery on his back, her mouth was swollen and hungry. She looked at him, and saw him. She knew who and what he was, what he might have done. And she reached up and put her mouth against his, kissing him with a desperate passion that was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. His soul was lost in that kiss, and for
a moment he panicked.
He pulled away, but the loss was unbearable. He plunged into her again, and she rocked against him, capturing him. Again and again, advance and retreat, his hips undulating as the tempo increased. She was thrashing her head from side to side, her eyes glazed, her fingers clutching him, digging into him. And then she arched, pulling him to her, a small, strangled scream barely piercing the night air.
He heard the word, hissed against him, even as he plunged deep into her, giving up the last of his control, flooding her with his body, his mind, his essence, shattering inside her shimmering body and losing the last tiny bit of invulnerability he owned. “Yes,” she’d said, against his hot, straining skin. “Yes.”
He collapsed against her, unable to summon enough energy to spare her the brunt of his weight. She didn’t seem to mind. She lay beneath him, quiet, her heart slowing its headlong pace, faint tremors still stirring across her silky skin, every muscle and bone in her body pure liquid. He felt the same, with one magnificent difference. With that hissed, half-conscious word she’d given up, she’d given herself to him as she never had before. The war was over. Maggie Bennett belonged to him.
There was no guarantee she recognized that fact. But he did, and therein lay the difference. Any defiance on her part would be only a sham, and Maggie was too bright not to face the inevitable, sooner or later. Knowing that eventually she’d admit her surrender, he could deal with anything. Even the distrust that had shocked him into a blind rage. Maybe the unforgivable crime of her doubt would even out some of the cruelties he’d handed her over the years.
A quiet sound came from beneath him, and slowly, carefully he pulled away, rolling to one side. Maggie didn’t move. For a moment he wondered whether she’d once more retreated into a protective state of shock. And then a small, quiet sound came from her mouth, something that could only be called a delicate, ladylike snore.
Overwhelming emotions swept through him. Relief, delight, lust, and adoration were only part of it. He knew what it was, knew what he’d fought against giving a name to for so long. He was in love with her, had been since he’d first known her—been in love with her tangle of contradictions and stubbornness and vulnerability and self-possession. It wasn’t a generous, unselfish, sweet sort of love. It was dark and powerful and possessive, and it ruled his life. He wasn’t going to fight it any more.