Dearest Enemy

by Alexandra Sellers

  He had strolled over to the drinks table, and now he picked up the nearly empty bottle of Scotch. “Ouch,” he said. He looked around in the direction the cat had gone. “Will she survive?”

  “I think so. She didn’t drink all of it. Some of it she sat in.”

  “Very sensible.” Math crossed back to the sofa and sank down into it, laughing with her, and somehow all the joking had only served to increase her awareness of him.

  Nervously she got out of the chair and walked over to where her towel still lay on the stool in the inglenook. She picked it up, bent forward and ran her fingers through the fall of hair. Behind her a soft light went on.

  “Come here.”

  It was softly said, even gently, hardly a command at all. Yet something in the tone made her go still, and the nerves just under her skin began chasing each other up and down her back. She turned because she was incapable of resisting the impulse, and looked over her shoulder at him.

  He smiled. His eyes were warm in the lamplight, the lids drooping a little as he watched her. “Come and sit here,” he said, indicating the sofa beside him. He held up a silver comb. “I’ll comb the tangles out.”

  If she sat beside him she was a goner. She came over, turned and settled down in a lotus position in front of his knees. His hands on her shoulders gently drew her farther back, his knees opening as he tucked her between his legs. Oh, great. Out of the frying pan, straight into the inferno. His hands were on her scalp now, threading through her hair, drawing it down onto her shoulders.

  She was surprised it wasn’t standing on end, so electric were his fingers. Even her eyelashes felt the charge as his touch radiated down her face and neck, over back and arms, across her breasts and stomach and legs. Nervously she shifted and extended her legs.

  She was wearing soft brown cotton leggings under her cream-coloured cotton sweater, and her feet were bare. As Math began to run the comb through her wet hair, she wiggled her toes. The glow of lamplight was a cocoon around them, for the room was in shadow now as the sun set behind the mountains.

  His feet were on either side of her, strong, muscled, with curling black hair around the ankles. In the clasp of his legs she felt small and secure, as she hadn’t felt since...oh, for years. She wondered absently if his toes were as sensitive as her scalp seemed to be.

  Too late, she realized he would probably notice her still slightly damaged ear and the little bald patch. He paused to take a drink, and then he leaned forward behind her and a second later was handing down her sherry glass. She took it gratefully, glad to give her restless hands something to do, hungry for the false courage alcohol would give her.

  When he had finished, he set down the comb and dropped his hands lightly onto her shoulders and began a slow massage of her neck. Elain closed her eyes and dropped her head forward while his touch tingled through her. She knew where this was leading, and she should get up and go, but somehow she couldn’t. She was starving for his touch, and it was impossible to force herself away from the feast.

  When he had massaged her neck and shoulders and upper arms into melted honey, she turned and knelt in the embrace of his knees, putting her arms around his waist and dropping her head into his black-robed lap.

  She put her cheek straight onto his aroused flesh, and sat back with a gasp. It was mostly sheer surprise, but Math’s hands grasped her upper arms and held her. “It’s all right,” he said steadily. “Elain, it’s all right.”

  Maybe, but she was shaking like a frangipani in a hurricane. How far she had come without realizing it! She’d thought she was dabbling in the shallows, sensually aroused herself perhaps, but Math physically unmoved. How wrong could you be? Yet he’d only touched her shoulders! And she hadn’t touched him at all! And yet—

  He drew her up against his chest and bent and kissed her, his mouth soft and delicate against hers. “Where the bee sucks,” he whispered, kissing her again, “there suck I,” and though she wasn’t at all literary, she understood that he meant her mouth was a flower.

  Everything affected her physically now—his touch, his voice, his words, his intent, even the wet weight of her own hair against her scalp and neck. When his mouth pressed hers again, she moaned.

  “Nothing you don’t want,” he whispered. “Nothing you’re not ready for.” Oh, God, what had she got herself into? When he saw her...

  Somehow she was lying on the sofa, and he was sitting between her open legs, her left leg behind his back, her right across his lap, and he was stroking her, not gently at all, her thighs and her midriff and her shoulders and arms, and she was arching and crying out for more. He ran his hands up her thighs, slowly, waiting for a protest, but she wasn’t capable of it. His thumbs met at her centre, and he stroked up, then over her abdomen, under her sweater, up to her breasts, around to her sides and down again. Over and over, until she was drunk on sensation.

  She knew what was coming, but she could not push him off, could not stop him by a word, a look, a touch, as his arms slipped under her back, lifted her up and began to slide the sweater over her head.

  He dropped the cream cotton to the floor, paused and looked into her sleepy, half-lidded, desirous eyes. Jeez, Elain, you might have warned a guy! She heard the echo distantly in her head. But she could do nothing, say nothing; she could only wait to be touched and taken if that was what he wanted.

  He bent down, and his mouth pressed the racing pulse at her throat and slowly, slowly, followed the line of her breastbone down to the centre of the plain, serviceable bra she always wore. Then she felt his hands meet between her shoulder-blades, and took in a gasp of air between her parted lips.

  “Math,” she whispered, and he went still. She saw his jaw muscles clench as he swallowed and found control.

  “Too much?” he asked softly. “Stop?”

  She closed her eyes, unable to speak, then opened them again. His gaze was so dark, something to drown in, oh, and she wanted to drown! “Math,” she breathed again, and he carefully undid the clasp of her bra and gently drew it away from her body.

  A little chill slithered down her spine, fear counteracting desire as nothing else could have done, and she watched as he looked at her bared breasts, and she saw nothing in that black gaze but desire.

  She moaned helplessly and bit her lip, and then he bent his head and kissed her breast, and the next thing she felt was the heat of his hand encircling her damaged breast and the damp of his mouth enclosing her nipple.

  “What are you doing?” she cried, wildly, for while she had imagined he might be able to ignore it, this was beyond understanding. “What are you doing?”

  He raised his head and smiled at her. “What is it, my love?” he whispered. “Can’t I kiss your breasts?”

  “Not that one!” she cried like a child.

  He lifted his hand in surprise, glancing down and then back up at her face. “Not this one? Why?”

  “Because it’s ugly. It’s deformed. I’m ugly,” she said, choking on the truth but knowing she must face it.

  He leaned up over her, in that one second losing control, and kissed her passionately and deeply on the lips, as if to crush the words into nothing. Then he lifted his face and looked at her, almost angry. “You are not ugly,” he said hoarsely. “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Your breasts are beautiful and your body is beautiful and your face is like a flower. And I want you.”

  “Still?” she asked, her voice high and unnatural.

  “Always,” he said roughly. “What do you mean, still?”

  Her eyes fell before the blaze of passion in his. “I was afraid—I thought—when you saw this...” Her voice cracked as she fought for control in a whirlwind of feeling. “I was burned. It’s a skin graft.”

  He went still. “And what did you think I would do when I saw it?” he asked, and there was a look in his eyes that almost frightened her now. She swallowed, and did not answer him.

  His eyes on her, his hand slipped up her ribcage and firmly
embraced her breast again. Then he dropped his head and once more she felt the heat of his mouth around the nipple. But this time there was no fear between that touch and her body, so that when his tongue moved on her flesh it was transformed into pure sensation. She shuddered with the knowledge of her new-found freedom. Her back arched then, and she cried out, and he heard surrender in her cry.

  His left hand grasped her arm so tightly it hurt, and he held her till she opened her eyes and looked at him. “That’s it?” he asked. “That’s all of it?”

  “All of what?” She could hardly speak, so drowned in the newness of sensation was she.

  “There’s nothing else you’re afraid of?”

  “No...what do you mean?” What was he talking about? Why didn’t he make love to her, if...

  “No man has hurt you? You aren’t afraid of making love with me?” She was too far gone to understand any of this.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t...want to, once you saw...” she tried to explain again, but no other word got past her lips. As though what she said had cut through a cord of superhuman control in him, his arms were suddenly around her, rough with uncontainable passion, and his mouth smothered hers as he pulled her against him.

  “Elain,” he whispered. “Elain, I thought—” Then his mouth was against her neck, her breasts, his arms pressing and stroking her as he drew her body up to the caress of his lips.

  Her leggings came down her legs in one wild sweep, and then his hands and his mouth enclosed her centre, and she cried a high, hoarse cry of passionate surprise at the newness and strangeness of the world she had entered.

  She lost track of time, of everything except sensation. Then he was naked above her, naked in a glowing, staggering beauty that rocked her to the core, and he lifted her and set her on himself. She cried out with the pain of the newness of what happened then, and heard his voice break on her name as if it were a precious, secret word.

  There was nothing in her experience to guide her. He was her only guide, and surely and certainly he led her and drove her through a savage, uncharted world, where she found the wildest, most unimaginable pleasure. He lifted her and kissed her and moulded her and pushed her until his hands and his mouth and his driving, pulsing body were the whole world, wild and sweet and drowning her in pleasure.

  At last he drew her up against him, her arms around his neck, and the passion in his eyes burned her till she was almost unconscious with her own passion. “Kiss me,” he commanded then. “Kiss me, Elain.”

  She pressed her mouth to his, kissing and sucking his lips, licking him with her greedy tongue, her hands pulling his hair, her mouth running along his cheek to his ear. “Math,” she whispered, and then, “Oh, Math!” Because he was powerful and thrusting inside her and calling her name.

  She put her mouth over his, and the sound of her name on his lips burst inside her in another flowering eruption of sensation, deep within—as deep as the flooding of his own uncontrollable pleasure, as rich as the forest at the dawn of the world.

  Chapter 10

  Later she lay in his arms on the sofa, enclosed and safe. She snuggled against his chest, slightly awkward. “I’ve never done that before,” she said softly.

  “I know you haven’t,” said Math in a tone that said he had been surprised. “How did you manage that?”

  “I—I thought no one would...”

  “You thought no one would...?” He waited, but she did not continue. “Would what? Want you?” he asked incredulously.

  Elain nodded mutely.

  He leaned back and gazed down at her. “How could you imagine that no one would want such a beautiful, sexy woman as you are? And how is it no one has managed to convince you otherwise?”

  She smiled disbelievingly. “Do you think other men are like you, or like—” She broke off. “Do you think other men are like you?” she repeated, not knowing how to explain.

  “If you mean do I think other men find you unbearably desirable, the answer is, unquestionably. But don’t let that go to your head.” His arm tightened around her. “Because none of them can have you.”

  “Greg said...Greg didn’t want me when—” Elain took a deep breath. “After he saw me naked,” she finished. And suddenly Greg was nothing but a stupid memory. She saw how foolish she had been to allow one ugly moment to poison her life. She snorted on a laugh. “Mind you, he was a high school football hero. He went off to some American college on a football scholarship and graduated in push-ups or something.”

  “I rest my case,” said Math. His arms around her, her back against his chest, he cupped his hand possessively over her breast. Suddenly she felt tears burn her eyes. To have felt cold for so long, and now to feel so safe!

  “Thank you,” she said, and he heard the tears in her voice and tilted her head up. Then he bent and kissed her wet cheek. His own eyes were suspiciously wet, and she said, “Why are you crying?”

  “Am I crying, my darling? I suppose it’s because of the vast plain of difference between what I imagined and the truth.”

  “What did you imagine?”

  “You trembled so desperately that morning when I wanted to make love to you in the fortress. I thought someone had done something to make you hate sex.”

  “You thought I’d been raped?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What were you going to do?”

  “Take as long as it took.”

  She remembered the control she had sensed in him, and knew that he spoke the truth. She would have been safe with him. He would not have lost patience, he would have waited.

  “I’m glad it wasn’t that way,” he said.

  * * *

  In the night she awoke beside him. A full moon poured liquid light over the big bed through the skylight in the peaked roof, but she felt that the light came from her own eyes, as if she were seeing in the dark. The world was magical, new-made, and she was wide awake in it, a creature who had been born with the world.

  She slipped from under the duvet and padded softly from the room. She had never slept naked, not once in her life, but she was naked now, and as she glided through moonlight and moonshadow, beautifully insubstantial, she felt that the moon had accepted her as one of her own.

  The sitting room was awash with light, and the full moon was perfectly framed in the skylight. Elain lifted her arms above her head and pirouetted, raising her face to the moonglow, dancing to the subtle night music she heard within.

  An owl hooted, and she knew why. She understood the creatures of the night, fellow worshippers of the moon goddess. The night was alive around her. She crept to the window and looked out at the dark, mysterious colours, the softly moving shadows. Up on the hill, the tower of the fortress was starkly white and black, half in its own shadow, glimmering with an unreality that made it seem alive. She was still for a moment, unbreathing, watching, and wished she could be out in the night with the owl’s hoot and the fox’s cry, the dew-dampened grass and the insect song.

  Poets talked about the first day, the first morning of Creation, of light arising from darkness. Yet what mystery there was now, in this night like the first night. Surely the Great Mover who had decreed Light had also decreed Darkness. Surely this beauty had never been, even at the first, merely the absence of day, the failure of the Light?

  She moved to the fireplace and stood looking down at the sofa. A shiver of memory brushed up her back, and she saw Math’s face, felt his dark, passionate gaze, and then she melted again within. Gently, lightly, her hand brushed the soft, worn leather of the sofa back, and as tendrils of sensation trembled along her nerves from her fingertips, she closed her eyes.

  The owl hooted again. “Thank you,” she whispered in her own night cry. “Oh, thank you.”

  It was as she was turning away from the sofa that her gaze fell on the bookcase where she had knelt a few hours ago, another woman in another lifetime. She stepped closer, smiling, only vaguely remembering that woman she had once been, untransformed
by love. Moonlight played on the books, and she saw a shadow where she had replaced a book hurriedly on the shelf...in the moment when Math had come in and she had turned to meet life.

  The dust jacket of the book had come half-adrift; that was what was causing the shadow. She stepped over to the case and pulled the book out again. Wounds Which Bleed Profusely, by Taliesin. She opened the back cover and tucked the dust jacket straight, then frowned down at it. What curious tricks moonlight could play....

  Elain straightened and flicked on the lamp that stood on the bookcase. But it was not a trick of moonlight. Over the name of the author, Taliesin, was a photo of Math.

  * * *

  The moonlight had moved by the time she returned to the bed. As she slipped in under the duvet, Math’s body heat made her feel how chilled she had become even in the warm night, and she gently slithered closer to him.

  “Mmm?” he murmured drowsily, his arm warmly encompassing her as he drew her close against him.

  “Nothing,” she whispered.

  “Mmm.”

  What luxury there was in the warm body of another self. She snuggled against him, smiling. He stirred then, as if her cool flesh had brought him to consciousness. “Trouble sleeping?” he murmured.

  “No...Math?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Are you Taliesin? The writer?”

  “Mmm.” He yawned and snuggled against her neck.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Another yawn suffused him. “I’d have got around to it, I guess.”

  “You’re famous, aren’t you?”

  He opened his eyes, and his hand tightened against her waist. “Not really. Is it a problem?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’d have got around to telling you about it tomorrow, as it happens. There’s something I’ve been thinking about.”

  “Oh, tell me now!”

  He yawned again. “No. Go to sleep,” he said heartlessly.

  Elain turned in his arms till she was facing him, her nose buried against his neck. She breathed in his sleepy male scent with pleasure and pushed at his shoulder. “What have you been thinking about?”