by Gayle Wilson
Finally his hands found the full, unrestrained softness of her breasts, cupping under their weight, holding her, still gentle, carefully controlled. She heard the depth of the breath he took. Trying to maintain that control. “Kate,” he whispered.
“I know,” she said. This was not what he had intended—not what he’d promised—but it was what they both wanted.
His thumbs swept across the sensitive swell of her breasts, across nipples hardened with her own desire, taut with the promise of his caress. And then back. No demand. Only need. A need she shared.
She moved closer, putting one knee on the bed beside his narrow hips—leaning against him, letting him support her—and then the other knee on the other side, so that she was kneeling above him now
His hands shifted under her shirt. Behind her now. Holding her. Pulling her to him, to be locked against the wall of his chest. She eased down into his lap, put her head against his shoulder, and was held in his arms like a child. His size seemed to give her permission to feel fragile, permission to be vulnerable, and she no longer needed to fear that vulnerability. He was certainly strong enough to protect her.
His hands slid over her spine, moving under the thin shirt, soothing out tension and fear. “It’s all right,” he promised. “Everything will be all right.”
She eased her body away from his, only far enough to look into his eyes. This was inevitable. Their relationship had been building to this for days, weeks. Months, she acknowledged. Long months when she had only looked at his pictures, had dreamed about him.
“Make love to me,” she whispered. She hadn’t intended to ask him that. She had hoped that he, too, would be aware of the inevitability of this, but she was afraid that he might have meant to do exactly what he had promised. She knew now that to be held was not what she wanted from him tonight. Not all she wanted.
His hands had stilled. He held her, unmoving, apparently trying to read what was revealed in her features.
“Please,” she added.
“Are you sure, Kate?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been as sure of anything in my life,” she admitted. “I want you to make love to me.”
Something shifted in the taut lines of his face. It was not a smile, but a softening, a relaxation of tension, perhaps. Relief that the restraint he had promised was not what she needed from him? Relief that she, too, needed something else? Something very different from the control he had been seeking.
“I want to see you,” he said. Already his hands were tangled in the loose fall of her shirt, helping her ease it off over her head. The curling tendrils of her hair were caught up briefly in the fabric, and when the shirt was off, they fell back against her neck and shoulders in a mass of shampoofragranced confusion. Unthinkingly, she raised her hands, running her fingers through the disordered strands, pushing them up and away from her face.
“Don’t move,” he ordered softly.
Surprised by the tone of the command, which she had instinctively obeyed, her eyes sought his. He wasn’t looking at her face. His gaze was instead on her breasts, thrown into prominence by her raised arms, their small peaks thrusting upward as if seeking…
She knew exactly what they were seeking as she watched his lips lower to touch against one and then the other. She held her breath, feeling his against her skin, warm and damp and feathering over the too-sensitive flesh she had exposed for his touch. Because she had wanted him to touch her there. Had wanted him for such a long time.
His mouth fastened over one nipple. His tongue mimicked the motion his thumbs had begun, slowly across and then back. She could feel her skin tightening in response and wondered what that movement felt like against his tongue, wondered if he could know what he was doing to her.
Her breath caught, a small half sob of sound, like a child fighting the onslaught of tears, struggling now for her own control. Her hands deserted the wild profusion of her curls. She lowered her head over his dark one, which was still bent to allow his mouth its torturing contact with her body. She put her lips against his hair and then turned her face so that its silken caress was under her cheek. Her breath shivered out in small, audible gasps. His mouth was suckling, pulling and releasing in a pulsing rhythm, slow and strong. Too strong. Too demanding. The pulse was echoing somewhere in her body. Low in her belly. Demanding. Aching. The sweet, age-old ache of desire.
“Please,” she whispered again, her mouth moving against the coal-black softness of his hair.
His lips hesitated, the rhythm he had created broken. In the silence between them, she was aware again of the slightly sobbing quality of the breath she drew into lungs hungry for air. Had she forgotten to breathe as he touched her? Or did her body need more air, like a furnace that demanded oxygen for the fire he had ignited?
When he didn’t move, his stillness too prolonged, she put her hand over the back of his downturned head, cupping the smooth roundness of his skull and then moving down the strong column of his neck.
Suddenly, he fell back against the mattress, carrying her with him, her body lying on top of his. With the change in position she was very aware of how much he wanted her. The evidence of his desire was blatant through the thin material of his worn jeans, straining upward into the soft cotton knit of her shorts. So little between them. But she wanted nothing between. Nothing between the hair-roughened skin of his chest and her bare breasts. Nothing between the small convexity of her belly and the ridged muscles of his. Nothing between…
His mouth found hers. It was open, waiting for him. His tongue invaded. Seeking. Demanding. His hands were against her back. Despite the damage Jack had inflicted, they drifted again with sensuous grace over the slender, contoured planes of her body. Touching her shoulder blades, covered by skin that shivered into his caress. Along the ridge of her spine. Big hands slipping into the waistband of her shorts to curl over her bare bottom.
She could feel his breathing beginning to deepen, his hips straining upward into hers as his hands pushed her body downward. Their mouths released, and his slid, opened, across her cheek, a pulling sensation, dragging against her flushed skin. His lips touched the dampness of the curling tendrils that gathered at her temple and then moved to her ear. She turned her head, accommodating, seeking whatever intimacy his touch suggested he wanted. The warmth of his breath first, softly stirring against the outer fold of the sensitive channel. His tongue moving inside. Caressing. Tantalizing. Hot and wet.
He breathed her name again, so close, speaking it into the small, ivory cavern of her ear. She allowed her knees to slide away from him, lowering herself, millimeter by millimeter, her desire fusing now with his. She could feel the heat of his body through the barrier of their clothing. No barriers, she thought again. No barriers of any kind. Not tonight.
She was more aware of his breath, slipping out in small aching gasps almost over her ear. The other sound was subliminal. She would have ignored it, not unheard but unacknowledged, had she not felt the sudden stillness of his body beneath the bonelessness their lovemaking had reduced hers to.
She felt the change and wondered, and then into her head came the belated recognition of the sound she, too, had recognized. The same sound that had echoed into the darkness of the mansion each time she had come here—the small, crystal teardrops of the glass chandelier touching together in the draft created by the opening front door.
Chapter Thirteen
“What the hell?” Thorne said. His voice was almost soundless, a breath, but with the shocked whisper there could be no doubt that he had heard and recognized the same noise that had finally penetrated her desire-drugged brain.
She sat up, pushing away from him. Suddenly she was aware that she was half-naked and cold. Cold with her separation from the solid warmth of his body. Cold with fear.
Thorne still lay motionless on the bed, the pale fabric of the coverlet he was lying against a frame for his darkness. Dark hair and shrt, black eyes holding hers. She knew that he was listening. Both of them l
istening, without breathing. Listening in the eerie silence of the old house whose night sounds he would be infinitely familiar with.
There was nothing else. No other ghost of noise drifted, almost but not quite soundlessly, upward to the second floor.
“Elliot?” she whispered.
Against the ivory of the counterpane the dark head moved once, a negation, but that movement seemed to free Thorne from whatever spell had held them motionless. His body began to lift, and she scrambled off the bed to stand beside it on legs that trembled. Thorne touched a button on the speaker phone, and she finally remembered to take a breath. The cops had arrived quickly enough the night he called them to pick her up. The first night she had come here. So long ago.
Then, suddenly, Thorne’s long fingers were turning the phone. “Son of a bitch,” he said, the words again only a breath, the comment made to himself and not to her. At what was in his voice, her stomach roiled, moving upward toward her throat from the cold, hard knot of fear that had begun to grow within it.
He picked up the receiver then and put it to his ear, but given the silence that surrounded them, she already knew. There was no dial tone. There was no longer any connection between the mansion and the outside world.
“The line’s been cut,” he confirmed, and the coldness in her stomach shifted and reformed, enlarged and blossomed, threatening to engulf her.
He pushed her shirt into her hands, which were trembling so much it was hard to put it on. Before she had the crumpled material completely in place over her body, Thorne had grasped her arm, drawing her away from the bed and toward the shadows of the hallway. She resisted, knowing that the danger they faced was below. Surely they were safer here in the upstairs darkness.
“We can’t go down there,” she protested, still whispering.
“There’s someone inside. We have to get out.”
Thorne pulled her out into the hall, not toward the curving central stairs they had climbed together, but deeper into the dark bowels of the vast house. They hurried, moving almost noiselessly over the carpeted hall, passing closed doors. The farther they got from the streetlights, the darker the interior of the mansion became. She ran into him when he began to slow.
“Stairs,” Thorne warned, the command almost silent. He released her arm, placing her hand on the smooth wood of the stair railing. She heard him move in front of her, and she knew she had no choice but to follow him.
The kitchen was lighter, more open, as it had been the night they had sat at the table and talked. Thorne didn’t give her time to enjoy the openness, a welcome contrast to the claustrophobic narrowness of the walls on either side of the steep stairs they had just descended. He pulled her across the room. Awakened from some puppy dream, startled and confused, Charlie barked once, the sound echoing, too revealing. The shock of the unexpected noise paralyzed her, like a thief discovered in the act. By that time Thorne had the door open. He turned back to grab her hand, drawing her out into the nowsafer blackness of the urban night.
He led the way unerringly through the small grounds that surrounded the mansion. Behind them, she could hear the echoing frenzy of Charlie’s barking increase. Then the sounds faded as they rounded the front corner of the house. The gate was open again and beyond it stood her car.
“I have a phone,” she gasped, the words ragged from lack of breath. It was only after she had spoken that she realized how ridiculous that comment was. They didn’t need a phone. In her earlier panic that something might have happened to Thorne, she had not only left the folders in the car but also her keys. All they had to do was to reach the Mazda, get in and drive away.
She led the way to the sidewalk, but it was Thorne who moved automatically to the driver’s side. She stood by the passenger door, breath sobbing, from physical effort now and not desire, waiting for him to release the lock that would let her in. Looking down into the car, she realized with shock that the folders she had piled on the passenger seat were no longer there. But when Thorne’s fist pounded once on the roof of the car, his expletive soft but expressive, she became aware that they had a more immediate problem than the disappearance of those files. -
“Locked,” he said.
Suddenly the lights came on in the mansion behind her. She glanced back at the house through the bars of the surrounding fence. The chandelier in the foyer, which she had never seen lighted before, was blazing out into the dark stillness.
“Come on. Across the street,” Thorne ordered.
She turned back in time to see him sprint toward the darkened hulk of the mansion that was being renovated. She followed, rounding the front of the Mazda as the porch light came on behind her.
Thorne seemed to melt into the shadows of the ruined house that loomed out of the darkness before her. She had always thought his vision must be more acute than normal because of the way he lived, and now she realized that their very lives might depend on his ability to negotiate in the blackened interior of the silent, ghostly ruin.
He was waiting for her beside the opening where the front door had once been. His damaged hand closed around her wrist, and despite the fact that she had known instinctively that he wouldn’t leave her behind, she jumped with the shock of that unexpected contact.
“Upstairs,” he breathed, his mouth pressed against her ear.
From the street came the sound of footsteps, unmistakable in the surrounding night. Thorne drew her into the foyer. She wondered briefly about the safety of climbing the stairs that loomed before them, about the safety of walking on the upper floors, but she had seen the workmen there. And would she and Thorne be safer to stay below? To wait for whoever was following them, for whoever was working, fairly successfully now, to keep the sound of his pursuit hidden?
Her tennis shoes made no noise on the wooden risers, and surprisingly, for such a big man, Thorne moved almost as silently, guiding her again with unhesitating certitude into the darkness at the top. She could barely see, following him blindly, forced to trust his superior night vision.
She thought once that she heard someone moving behind them, but the fire-damaged beams of the structure might have produced that sensation. Just as they might be revealing their progress, she acknowledged ruefully. Thorne guided her around workmen’s paraphernalia, leading her ever toward the back of the house.
They climbed another set of dark, narrow stairs, up to the third floor now. The hallway they ran down was becoming brighter, and when she looked up, she realized why. The door it led toward had, like most of the outer doors, been removed, and the passage ended in a view of the night sky beyond the sagging banister of what must have been the back stairs of the mansion.
As she watched, a figure moved up those stairs into the dim illumination provided by the backdrop of moon-touched sky—a man, silhouetted suddenly within the framework of the missing door.
A flash of light exploded out of that darkness. She flinched before its brightness even as she realized the powerful beam wasn’t directed at her. Its intensity had pinned the man moving ahead of her down the hall. Thorne’s hand raised in automatic response, trying to protect himself from the glare.
“Kate?”
She identified the speaker immediately, although she could see nothing beyond the glare of the flashlight. Kahler, she realized. My God it was Kahler. And the police? Even as she thought it, she realized there had been no sirens, no arriving patrol cars. Only Kahler.
“Are you all right?” Kahler asked, shifting the light slightly to include her figure within its illumination. “He hasn’t hurt you, has he?”
“I’m all right,” she said automatically. Why would he think Thorne would hurt her?
“You don’t have to be afraid, Kate. Everything’s under control,” Kahler went on, his voice reassuring.
“What the hell’s going on?” Barrington’s voice, as coldly furious as the night she had first walked into his house. “What were you doing in my house?”
I picked up a few tricks of the trade, Kahler had
said the day she had found him inside her apartment, and she realized Thorne was right. It had to have been Kahler who had entered while they were upstairs. There was no one else. At Barrington’s question, the flashlight had been refocused, its powerful light again directed at Thorne’s face.
“It’s over,” Kahler said, his voice as cold as Barrington’s. “Finally, you’re going to pay for what you did.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Thorne said. He had lowered his head, his hand still shielding his eyes. “Get that damned light out of my face,” he ordered.
“You couldn’t leave Kate alone. Maybe because of your hatred of the media, but whatever you intended tonight is not going to happen. You’re not going to hurt her.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Kate came here because—” Thorne’s voice stopped suddenly, whatever he intended to say deliberately cut off, and she wondered why. Because he had realized that Kahler was jealous? That telling him why she had come tonight would only make him more angry?
“Because you tricked her into trusting you,” Kahler said. “Because she believed what everyone else believed about you. Because she doesn’t know what you really are.”
“And you do?” Barrington asked. His tone had changed, anger overlain by a rigid control and by an emotion she couldn’t read.
“I know exactly what you are. A murderer. A fine, highly respected, sanctimonious murderer.”
“Kahler,” Kate said, a protest. She could sense the unraveling fury in his voice, and thankfully, with her interruption, the beam of light came back to her.
“What are you doing here, Kate?” he asked. “Didn’t you get my message?”
“What message?” she asked.
“About the lab results. The results on the physical evidence from Garrison’s office and from the sheets I took off your bed. The hair and fiber samples.”
He said it as if it should mean something to her, but it didn’t. In all that had happened, she had even forgotten about the sheets he had taken from her apartment that night. The realization that he seemed to be implicating Thorne Barrington in that break-in and in Lew’s murder began to filter into her head.