Lynn Michaels

by The Dreaming Pool

  Gage leapt forward and caught her shoulders in his hands. She moaned as her body sagged and she toppled backward against him. His hands couldn’t support her, so he hastily looped his arms under hers. But the sudden, unexpected drag of her dead weight knocked him off balance.

  As he tried to twist them to the right to avoid the sharply curved iron arm of the settee, his right foot struck the potted lavender hibiscus. The hand-painted Oaxacan planter went over on its side and crashed on the floor a second before Gage lost his equilibrium and keeled over backward with Eslin on top of him.

  Just before he hit the floor hard on his tailbone, he managed to wriggle his right arm free of Eslin’s and fling it behind him to break the fall. Eslin landed heavily between his legs, her right hipbone gouging his right inner thigh. He bit his lip, tasted blood on his tongue, but thanked God he hadn’t absorbed the blow an inch or two higher. Sitting up, he gently held Eslin against him. Asking in a voice higher than hers if she was all right wasn’t quite the tactic he’d envisioned for regaining her favor. Neither was making a spectacle of them, but that couldn’t be helped. From the atrium below, Gage could hear the raised murmur of curious voices and the hurried staccato of footsteps on the stairs.

  Won’t this be an interesting scene to explain, he thought, as he looked down at Eslin, her body half-twisted, between his legs. Her ankles were crossed, her skirt modestly draped over her knees, her dark head tipped back against his chest. Her left hand lay palm up in her lap; her right, fingers curled, rested against the inside of his throbbing right thigh.

  She was no longer a dead weight. In fact, she felt very light, very soft, very good—very, very good—on top of him. His throat tightened as he gazed down at her parted lips and her fluttery, half-closed eyes. He thought again of Sleeping Beauty and the Frog Prince and wanted more than anything to kiss her. He would have, too, except for the footsteps drawing closer and his certainty that a kiss wouldn’t waken her because she hadn’t fallen asleep—she’d fainted.

  “My God! What in hell have you done to her, Gage?”

  With a wryly puckered smile he looked up, as his mother, Blaine Aldridge, Ethan, and Gerald Fitzsimmons came to a startled, domino-like halt five or six steps shy of the gallery. It was Rachel, her eyes widening as her right hand flew to the diamond-and-sapphire broach winking on the bodice of her periwinkle-blue silk caftan, who’d gasped the question at him. Wedged behind her between Ethan and puzzled-looking Aldridge, both dressed in black evening clothes, loomed Gerald Fitzsimmons. The satin lapels of his dark-blue dinner jacket gleamed in the reflected amber light cast by the chandelier in the gallery. So did his silver hair and the wary frown on his bearded face.

  “Believe it or not, Mother,” Gage told her simply, “absolutely nothing.”

  “Oh, of course not.” Ethan moved a step closer to the gallery and thrust his hands on his hips. “I suppose she fainted and you were conveniently coming downstairs in time to catch her, right?”

  “As a matter of fact that’s exactly what happened,” Gage confirmed, “though I thought at first that she’d fallen asleep rather than—”

  “ ‘Scuse me, Ethan.” Fitzsimmons shoved his brother out of his way and took the remaining steps to the gallery two at a time.

  “Oh, Gage …” Rachel moaned, closing her eyes and slowly shaking her head as she raised her right hand to her temple.

  “Oh, Gage, indeed,” Ethan agreed angrily. “Why couldn’t you have just left her alone?”

  “If I had,” Gage retorted sharply, as Fitzsimons knelt beside Eslin and picked up her right hand, “she probably would’ve gotten a concussion when she hit the floor. She fainted, brother dear.”

  “She what?” Rachel asked sharply as she pushed past Ethan onto the gallery.

  “Ridiculous.” Fitzsimmons frowned at Gage, laid Eslin’s hand in her lap, and rose to intercept Rachel. “She’s fine,” he said, as he laid his hands on her shoulders and added in a low voice, “She’s simply fallen asleep.”

  “Ohhh…”Rachel breathed. “Are you sure?”

  There was just a hint of worried disbelief in his mother’s voice as she peered around Fitzsimmons at Eslin’s still form. From her drawn-out, almost reverent “Ohhh” Gage figured that Rachel knew about Eslin’s “naps.”

  “Positive.” Fitzsimmons gently turned her and pointed her toward the stairs. “Why don’t you go back downstairs while Gage and I sort this out?”

  “Yes, Mother, why don’t we?”

  As Ethan came forward to take Rachel’s left elbow, he shot Gage a look that said they’d be discussing this later. Gage only smiled wider.

  “You’re sure she’s all right?” Rachel resisted Ethan’s insistent tug on her elbow and half turned to frown at Eslin.

  “She’s fine, Rachel,” Fitzsimmons repeated, “you needn’t worry. We’ll be down soon.”

  His mother cast a last, woeful glance at Gage, then sighed and let Ethan lead her away. Still looking perplexed, Blaine Aldridge followed. Once they’d disappeared around the curve in the main staircase below the gallery, a glowering Fitzsimmons returned to Eslin’s side.

  “What was all that for?” Gage asked as Fitzsimmons dropped to his right knee beside him. “She’s no more asleep than I am. She fainted.”

  “I thought it best not to tell your mother that”—he paused and bent his left elbow on his raised knee—”until I find out why she fainted.”

  He closed his big hand into a fist. The gesture was as threatening as the expression on his face, and Gage didn’t doubt that he’d meant them both to be exactly that—threatening.

  “I’m sick and tired of being everybody’s favorite choice for bad boy of the year,” he replied tersely. “I told you what happened.”

  “Tell me again.” Fitzsimmons flexed his thick, strong fingers. “In detail.”

  “I was coming down the stairs when I heard this sound—a sigh, or a whimper, I’m not sure which. I stopped, looked around, saw Eslin standing by the grill, and called her name. She didn’t answer, even though I called to her a couple of times. I came over to her—”

  “Did you touch her?”

  “No. I was thinking about it, in fact I’d just stepped behind her when she just—fainted.”

  “Hmmm,” Fitzsimmons said, almost to himself, “fascinating.”

  He and Mr. Spock loved that word. The quiet, pensive way he always said it reminded Gage what it was about this man—besides his ambivalent attentions to his mother—that he didn’t like. It was his cryptic and condescending manner.

  “So what do we do now?” Gage asked, his voice sharper than he’d intended. “Just sit here like this until she comes to?”

  “Unless you’re in a hurry to get downstairs, that’s exactly what I’d like to do.” Fitzsimmons stopped fiddling with his beard and bent his elbow on his knee again. “There may be no physical reason for her fainting, and if there isn’t, I’m really loath to disturb her.”

  Reluctant though he was to participate—however indirectly—in one of Fitzsimmons’s psychic experiments, he was even more reluctant to move.

  “Fine with me,” he agreed. “I’m in no particular hurry.”

  “I didn’t think you were.” Fitzsimmons smiled a slow, catbird smile. “Though I doubt Blaine Aldridge will like it much. He seems very anxious to speak with you, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you were the reason he caught the red-eye from New York last night.”

  He made the observation amicably enough, but it was still a leading remark that set Gage’s teeth on edge and reminded him what else it was that he’d never liked about Gerald Fitzsimmons—his penchant for playing psychiatrist outside his office.

  “Let’s leave off with the ‘doctor is in’ routine, shall we? For your information Mother told him about Eslin over the phone. She’s the reason he came.”

  As Gage said her name, Eslin drew a deep breath and stirred slightly against him. The unconsciously sensual writhe of her body against his sparked an instantaneous and
involuntary response from him. He glanced down at her, saw that she was still semiconscious, and smiled. He hoped it would be a very long time before she came to.

  “I was Eslin’s legal guardian, you know,” Fitzsimmons said gruffly. “I consider her my daughter.”

  No, Gage didn’t know, but he was careful not to let his surprise and curiosity show in his eyes as he raised them from Eslin’s face. “So?” he asked pointedly.

  “So keep in mind,” Fitzsimmons replied, “that it’s my daughter you’re ogling.”

  “For a man who sleeps in my mother’s bed every time my brother and I go out of town,” Gage told him flatly, “you’ve got a helluva nerve.”

  “That’s none of your business,” Fitzsimmons retorted stiffly. “Your mother and I are adults—”

  “So am I,” Gage cut him off roughly with a quick nod at Eslin. “And so is she.”

  Between his legs Eslin stirred and writhed against him a second time. Groaning silently, Gage clenched his jaw as she arched her spine and the small of her back pressed against the already taut fly of his tan corduroy trousers. His throat tightened and began to ache, and he wished to God, as she stretched and rolled her shoulders against his chest, that Fitzsimmons would go the hell away.

  “I think she’s coming around,” Gage said, his voice rough edged and very deep.

  Either Fitzsimmons hadn’t noticed or chose to pretend that he hadn’t. As Eslin stirred again and murmured something under her breath that Gage couldn’t quite make out, Fitzsimmons leaned forward and picked up her small left hand and rubbed it. Though Gage wasn’t sure he could trust himself to look at her again, he drew a deep breath, inhaling the scent of her delicate, flowery perfume, and did so. Her eyelids were fluttering slightly and a half-troubled, half-bewildered frown wrinkled her forehead and the corners of her mouth as she rolled her head slowly from side to side, her dark hair rustling against the front of his pale-yellow shirt. It looked as if she were struggling to waken. Then suddenly she bolted upright.

  Wide eyed, she twisted toward him and clutched his left forearm with both her hands. “He’s watching.”

  Her voice was a breathless whisper. Her overbright violet eyes were fixed on his face, but her pupils were dilated, and Gage had a feeling she wasn’t looking at him. An icy chill crawled up his back.

  “Who?” he asked. “Who’s watching?”

  “Byrne…”

  She didn’t say it, she breathed it in a low, throaty voice that was more a keen than a moan.

  Roughly, Gage pushed himself upright and grasped her shoulders. “Where?”

  “I don’t know.” She covered her face with her hands, drew two deep breaths, and then looked up at him, her hair falling in tousled waves around her pale face. “I don’t see where, I just see—him—watching.”

  Gage let go of her and leaned back on the heels of his hands. His gray eyes narrowed and his head turned—dubiously, Eslin thought—to one side. Blinking at him, she felt the blood drain from her face, and with it, the last fuzzy dregs of the vision that had engulfed her as she’d looked down at the fountain. The shuttered, wary mask that had clamped suddenly over his features hurt her far worse than the death grip he’d fastened on her shoulders, and even though it was obvious, she couldn’t keep from saying in a small, hollow voice, “You don’t believe me.”

  From the corner of his right eye Gage watched Fitzsimmons rock back on his heels, raise his left hand to his chin, and bury his fingertips in his silver beard. Goddammit, he wished he’d go away. If he and Eslin were alone, he might be able to muster courage enough to tell her that he did believe her because he’d felt it himself for days, a vague, someone’s-looking-over-his-shoulder unease. He wanted desperately to tell her the truth about himself, but there was no way in hell he was going to in front of Fitzsimmons.

  “Look, it isn’t that,” he began, pushing himself up on his left arm as he raised his right hand to her elbow.

  As he leaned toward her, Eslin felt something hard slide up the small of her back. His left knee, she realized, as she glanced down and saw where she was—on the red-tiled floor between Gage’s legs. In a flustered rush of confusion and embarrassment she twisted her gaze and her body away from him and saw Fitzsimmons smiling at her.

  “Oh, Doc.” She sighed gratefully, lifting her hands to his as she tried to stand up.

  “Hadn’t you better sit a minute or two longer?” He closed his big, warm palms around her cold, still trembly fingers. “You fainted, you know.”

  “I did not,” Eslin lied, she hoped convincingly. She knew she’d fainted all right, she just didn’t know why or what exactly had happened to her while she’d been unconscious—and she wasn’t about to discuss it with Doc or anyone else until she’d had a chance to reflect on it as alone and as far away from Gage Roundtree’s seductive presence as she could get. “I’ve never fainted in my life,” she finished firmly.

  “You’ve never heard that there’s a first time for everything?” he asked, frowning as he helped her up.

  “Not this time,” Eslin maintained. “Not for me.”

  As Fitzsimmons eased her to her feet, Gage stood and hastily buttoned his tan corduroy blazer over his belt buckle,

  Except for a slight touch of vertigo Eslin didn’t feel bad standing up. But once the dizziness passed and the real world settled back into place around her, the riotous voice of the fountain bubbled up from the atrium, filling her ears and her mind with the sound of watery laughter, which frightened her.

  “Mr. Roundtree?” Eslin, turned her head over her right shoulder, but didn’t look at Gage. “Would it be possible to turn off the fountain?”

  “Certainly, but—”

  “Oh, good.” She sighed the word gratefully and smoothed her hands over her hair and then the skirt of her dress. Trying to ignore the aura of warmth and yearning she felt radiating from Gage, she smiled up at Doc. “Hadn’t you better take me down now? I am supposed to be the guest of honor.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to sit down for a few minutes?” Fitzsimmons cocked a bushy silver eyebrow at her.

  “No, thank you, I’d like to join the party.” Eslin hooked her left arm through Doc’s elbow, then froze as her fingers touched the card in her pocket.

  The Lovers. With Doc here she wondered if she should just forget giving the card back, then decided that this was probably as private an opportunity as she was going to get. Feeling Gage’s eyes on the back of her neck, Eslin turned and withdrew the Lovers card from her pocket.

  “I believe that you left this in my room,” she said, holding the card out to him.

  Beside her Fitzsimmons’s usually ruddy face blanched at the sight of the tarot card. It might as well be a pair of my Jockey shorts, Gage thought, as he took the card from Eslin and slipped it into his blazer pocket.

  “Thank you,” he said, avoiding Fitzsimmons’s gaze and concentrating on Eslin’s instead; there wasn’t a flicker of emotion in her violet eyes.

  “You’re welcome,” she answered as she led a still-thunder-struck Fitzsimmons down the stairs. Four steps below the gallery she stopped. “You won’t forget about turning off the fountain, will you, Mr. Roundtree?”

  “No,” Gage replied slowly, the bewilderment and disappointment in his voice echoing across the gallery, “I won’t forget.”

  Her lips parted, but she pressed them firmly together again and tugged on Fitzsimmons’s arm. He threw Gage a look that promised the younger man he’d settle with him later, and then continued down the stairs.

  As Gage watched Eslin flee with Fitzsimmons, he hoped he’d get to see Eslin’s legal guardian sprawl head first down the steps on his smug face.

  In the same instant that Eslin and Fitzsimmons drew parallel with the fountain in the atrium. Gage hooked his index finger over the gold-plated horseshoe nail at his throat. It could have been a trick of the light, the distance between them, or his imagination, but Gage was certain that Eslin’s steps faltered as she walked past the fountain and dis
appeared with Fitzsimmons into the sun-room.

  Her legal guardian, his daughter. I’ll sleep with your mother, but you keep your hands off my daughter—the son of a bitch. Gage let the horseshoe nail fall against his collarbone and started down the stairs.

  The muscles across his chest tightened as he thought about Fitzsimmons, and then about Eslin. She hadn’t asked how she’d ended up on the floor on top of him—she hadn’t even cared. All she’d wanted was to get the hell away from him as fast as she could. He didn’t have to be psychic to figure that one out. At the bottom of the stairs he paused and listened to the murmur of voices behind the closed sun-room doors. Good, dinner hadn’t started yet, which meant he had time for a private drink in his father’s study.

  Brushing tall, drooping schefflera fronds out of his face, Gage rounded the atrium pool and opened the metal control box built into the stone wall beneath the staircase. He pushed a round red button the size of a quarter, leaned to the left around the wall, and watched the last stream of water leap from the mouth of the rearing stallion.

  He stood there watching a last, three-ringed ripple spread across the flat green water. He wasn’t thinking about the peaty smell of wet earth, the now-still fountain, or Eslin’s reaction to it, instead he was savoring the clinging traces of her perfume and remembering the soft warmth of her body against his. His arousal wasn’t fading, it was intensifying, smoldering inside him like a banked fire fed by the erotic what-if fantasy playing inside his head.

  What if he hadn’t kicked over the pot and drawn his mother, Ethan, Blaine Aldridge, and Fitzsimmons up the stairs? What if it had been just the two of them there on the gallery when she’d wakened? Would he have taken her right there and then, made love to her on the cold red tile floor?

  If she’d given him half a chance he would have. He wanted Eslin Hillary as much as he wanted Ganymede back. He wanted her to touch him, wanted to hold her body next to his again, wanted her, wanted her—