"Italian tiles," he said, kneeling down to touch the mosaic pattern on the floor. "Donatelli outside of Milan?"
"Try Color Tile on Route 347." She closed and locked the door, then looked at him. "Donatelli outside of Milan?"
"Forget it. Just thinking out loud." He stood and brushed the rain from his thick black hair.
"It's horrific out there," she said, tugging at the sleeves of her bulky sweater. "Only a lunatic would be out in that mess."
"You always said I was crazy."
She smiled at an old memory and caught the flash of his answering smile. "You were eighteen. A certain degree of craziness comes with the territory."
He unzipped the front of his leather jacket, and she was struck by how powerful he seemed, how much more raw and male than he had the night before in the bright lights of the White Castle.
"I'm not eighteen any longer, Sandy."
"I've noticed." She took a deep breath and reached for his jacket. "You're dripping all over the floor."
He stayed in the foyer while she ducked into the bathroom and draped his jacket over the shower rod.
When she returned he was down on one knee again, inspecting a tile near the entrance to the living room with a flashlight.
"See this?"
She knelt down next to him and looked at the sand-colored octagonal tile. It looked like the 237 other sand-colored octagonal tiles in the foyer.
"So?"
"Look closer. There's a small cross carved into the upper left. That's Donatelli's signature."
"You know a lot about ceramic tiles." Not a brilliant rejoinder, but the subject had inherent limitations. She stood up and fiddled with the belt loop on her jeans. "I'd offer you some coffee but . . . " She shrugged. "How about lukewarm apple juice instead?"
He looked up at her. "Sick of talking about tiles?"
"I don't think you came here to discuss my floor tiles, Michael." She kept her tone light, and tried to control the throb of emotion that threatened to give her away. "That is, unless you're in the ceramic tile business."
He stood up and followed her into the den, where she lit two of the candles that rested on the mantelpiece.
"You should light a fire," he said. "Then you wouldn't have to walk around wearing a parka."
She looked down at her huge cable-knit sweater and laughed. "I'd love to, but I don't know how."
Surprise showed on his face. "How the hell long have you been living here, anyway?"
"Three weeks. I can barely figure out how to work the timer on the stove."
"So nothing's changed. You never were mechanical."
"Everything's changed, Michael," she said quietly. "Everything."
He moved toward the fireplace, and she knew he was intent on getting it to work. He'd always been extraordinarily gifted in that way; anything he touched immediately sprang to life.
The analogy wasn't lost on her.
He opened the fire doors and was about to do something to the flue when she put her hand on his arm to stop him.
"Please, Michael." His head was down so she couldn't see his face. "Why are you here?"
"Would you believe me if I said I was heading down to the beach to watch the storm?"
"No."
She heard a click as he opened the flue.
"I was," he said. "Halfway there, I found myself turning the car around and heading toward Eaton's Harbor."
She said nothing. He turned and faced her, but his expression was difficult to read in the flickering candlelight.
"I remembered you were all alone," he went on. "I thought you might need help."
A momentous crash of thunder rocked the house, and she did her best to ignore it.
"I've been alone for a long time," she said. "This is nothing new."
"Alone in a hurricane?"
"Try yesterday morning."
Another silence.
This isn't going to work, she thought. Too much time had passed, too much had happened, for them to be able to pretend they were nothing more than acquaintances catching up on old times.
He moved closer, and she backed away until her spine hit the edge of the entranceway to the den.
She wasn't afraid of Michael McKay, no matter how menacing he might look at the moment with his savage dark looks in the dimly lit room.
The last time they'd been together, seven years ago, he had made her cry, but Sandra knew that wouldn't happen this time. She was too strong for that, and his power over her was seven years diminished.
He stopped a few inches from where she stood and the air crackled with more than the oncoming storm.
"I'll tell you why I'm here, Sandy."
Years of hiding her fears in the corporate battleground stood her in good stead. She met his eyes.
Before she could speak, she was in his arms and he was kissing her. Not the exuberant, spontaneous kiss of the night before, but something deeper, more profound.
One of his hands cupped the back of her head, his fingers entwined in her hair. The other rested at the small of her back, and even through the layers of clothing she wore against the cold, the heat of his body came through. His body was larger and stronger than she'd remembered; the brief contact with him the previous night had only hinted at how well-muscled he'd become over the years.
No sorry decline into the beginnings of middle age here.
He was a man, plain and simple.
A man at the height of his powers.
His tongue teased her lips, and she parted them for him. The invasion was swift and painfully sweet.
She felt as if she'd been spun into some crazy time warp, where her woman's body was being assaulted by the wild, unleashed emotions of a teenager on the verge of something beyond her understanding.
Years ago there had been a sweetly tentative side to Michael, but there was nothing tentative about him now, just as there was nothing uncertain about her response.
She wanted him.
More than her job, more than this house, more than security and safety and everything else she'd built her life around, she wanted Michael McKay.
"Tell me now, Sandy," he said, his breath warm and moist against her cheek. "If you're going to stop me, stop me now."
But it was going to happen; she couldn't stop it from happening any more than she could stop the hurricane outside. He moved against her in a way so powerfully sexual that she melted against him.
"Don't trust me, Michael," she whispered as his hands slid under her sweater and lit fires along the ridges of her spine. "Don't trust me."
The need for revenge was small and ugly and unmistakable.
"I don't trust you." He bent over and kissed the bare skin of her midriff.
She was finding it hard to think. He trailed his tongue across her rib cage, and a violent shudder buckled her knees. She had to grip him by the waist to keep from sagging to the floor.
"I've given you fair warning," she said as she pulled the zipper on his sweatshirt and it fell open beneath her hands. "That's more than you did for me."
His chest was heavily matted with black curls. She bent her head, and as her tongue flicked against one of his flat nipples, she was struck once again by the changes the years apart had wrought.
He yanked his shirt off with a gesture almost savage in its urgency. He looked almost savage with those fiery black eyes of his glowing in the candlelight.
The smell and the feel of him were familiar, but everything else had changed. There was a wildness to him that matched the storm raging outside . . . and the storm building within.
He was the fantasy lover of her darkest desires, the image she'd conjured up on the nights when her resistance was at its lowest. He was danger when she knew she should play it safe.
His large hands were callused on fingertips and palms, and her breasts tingled at their rough scrape against her skin.
Where had his life taken him that he should have hands like that?
Laborers had those hands: carpenters and maso
ns and builders, not the boy who'd woven dreams so lofty, so ambitious that she'd almost been swept up into them herself.
But then he swept her up into arms as strong as the pounding of her heart, and she knew that no matter what the outcome, this was the night she'd been waiting for all her life.
For the first time in years, she was exactly where she wanted to be.
#
The bedroom was at the end of the hallway, a large, high-ceilinged room with cartons lined up against one wall, and a huge brass bed against the other.
A quilt of some kind was tossed carelessly across the mattress, and he laid her down on it. The windows were wide and uncurtained, and he could see the trees in the backyard bending beneath the weight of the hurricane until their uppermost branches brushed the ground.
She lay against the quilt, her body falling into a line so inexpressibly lovely that he knew he would never be able to capture it in his lifetime.
He stood at the side of the bed and watched her, aware that this was a first. A first that quite possibly could be the last.
She raised herself up on one elbow. "Michael?" Uncertainty brought her alto to a higher range. "If you've –"
Her words stopped as he took her right ankle in his hand. His fingers encircled it with room to spare. She was watching him; he could feel the prickling, burning sensation of her intense gaze.
"Close your eyes," he said.
"No."
"Do it, Sandy."
He wanted to say, "Trust me," but words like trust had no place in this new alliance they were forming. Trust had disappeared that night seven years ago when he'd had her much as he had her now and had left her dry and wanting and humiliated.
He wouldn't do that again, but how in hell could she know that?
"I'm going to watch you, Michael." His hands were massaging her calf, behind her knee, the hollow of muscle where thigh met hip. Her voice betrayed her need. "I'm going to watch everything you do."
Her words were meant as a warning, but there was a challenge in them, too, and he rose, harder and hotter, to meet that challenge.
"Then watch me, Sandy. Watch me as I make love to you, because I done waiting."
They'd both waited long enough.
~~
Chapter Four~~
Mothers warned their daughters all the time about men like this.
Cautious women kept their doors locked and the chains on.
Some women, however, never learned.
Her clothes were off and tossed over one of the boxes near the door before she could think of a reason to keep them on.
He was still standing at the foot of the bed, shirtless, his faded jeans barely skimming his hips. His body language was loose, studiedly casual, but she sensed the restrained excitement thrumming beneath the surface. She knew exactly what the sight of her naked was doing to him.
"Should I be afraid of you?" she asked, aware that she no longer was.
A low laugh was her answer.
She heard the rasp of metal against metal, then the sound of his jeans as they hit the wooden floor.
"This is the one place I thought I'd never be," he said as the bed sagged beneath his weight.
"It's not too late." The smell of his skin was disorienting her, knocking down what remained of her barriers. "You can get up and leave, Michael. It's not like you haven't done it before."
His hand covered her left breast, and her nipple rose to meet his palm.
"Not this time." His dark head lowered until his lips found and gently tugged the nipple even tauter. "Not this time."
"We have a history of stopping, you and I," she said, mesmerized by the sight of his thick dark hair as it fell across his forehead. A long, sad history of might-have-beens and rage and regret.
"We've made a hell of a lot of mistakes." He rested his head on her belly, and the old angers, the old longings, were finally replaced by something new.
"I used to imagine this," she said as he opened his arms to her. "For years after we broke up, I'd try to imagine how it would have felt to lie in bed with you, naked beneath the covers, in a quiet, sunny room with all the time and privacy in the world."
In a world of complex dreams, it seemed such a simple thing to dream about, and yet it had been the one thing they'd never quite managed.
They'd made promises, young Sandy and Mike, promises Sandra had found impossible to keep. He had represented the old way, the easy way, everything she had always wanted to escape. Sex was dangerous, her mother had told her, but what her mother hadn't understood was that pregnancy wasn't the only consequence.
By the time Sandra was in college, birth control was readily available and pregnancy no longer scared her; what did was the certainty that once she gave herself to Michael McKay there'd be no escape.
His hold over her would be unbreakable.
"There were ways," he said now. "Even then. If you'd really wanted it, Sandy, we could have found a way."
But she'd been so terrified of turning out like her mother, so frightened of finding her life was over before it had even begun, that she'd turned away from the one thing she wanted more than anything: him.
Foolish little girl.
"I'm glad you're here," she whispered against his cheek. "Now I can stop wondering."
He gathered her to him and eased her over until his warm, solid body covered hers completely. There was something of destiny in her surrender. The thought that this wasn't just one night, that the actions of this night would change her life forever, couldn't stop her from moving beneath him in a way that told him she was ready, more ready than she'd ever been for any experience in her life.
She took his face in her hands, molding her fingers over the strong cheekbones, cupping her palm over the square stubborn jaw. A two-day stubble tickled her skin as she brought her mouth to his. His mouth was wide, his lips soft, and she bit down gently on the lower one, savoring the taste of him with the tip of her tongue.
She was voracious in her need to know all of him, to experience all the thing she'd denied herself before she remembered the thousand reasons why this should never be.
"Love me, Michael," she said. "We've waited so long for this moment."
Love me so we can finally say goodbye.
#
Their movements were simple. The combination of discovery and reunion blended in a way that made control impossible. Just the act of sliding into her warm and willing body was enough to send him over the edge. The fact that he was able to hold off long enough to take her with him was a testament to the triumph of experience over youth.
That was one trip he wasn't going to make alone.
She kept her face buried between his chest and arm long after it was over. At one point he thought he felt tears against his skin, but maybe it was his imagination.
He didn't ask.
This coming together after so long left him beyond words. Two lifetimes of shared and separate histories were in that bed, and seven years of silence and regret.
There would be time for questions soon enough, time for letting the normal pattern of his life pull him back within its familiar boundaries.
But right now, he had a lot to make up for.
#
Michael had spotted her the moment she entered the church that morning seven years ago.
He had turned to say hello to Clint and his wife Bonnie when he caught a flash of movement at the door and a low rumble of male voices punctuated by a husky, wonderful female laugh.
She was standing in the vestibule talking to the father of the bride. Her silky dark blond hair was pinned up, and long tendrils brushed against her neck. The sharp, clear November sunshine fell across her shoulders like a mantle, and he was struck again by just how beautiful she was.
Mr. Callahan said something, and she reached out and put her hand on his forearm. Michael felt her touch clear across the church.
It was four years since he'd last seen her. Four years since the last time they'd tried to bridg
e the gap that kept them so far apart. He'd been struggling against her memory of him as a kid with no direction, no goals – the child of a bricklayer and a supermarket cashier, who would probably amount to nothing. He'd been bumming around since getting out of the service, searching for something to channel his intense energy into, something beyond the sphere of a union and a weekly wage.
He'd found it in London in the person of Wallingford, the master builder, premier stone carver of the twentieth century. At twenty-three, Michael had finally found what he was meant to do. His hands were made for the ancient craft. His soul soared with the opportunity to create a beauty that could transcend time.
Finally – finally – he had something tangible to lay at her feet, some offering fine enough to make her see that there could be a future for them.
When she said no, he didn't see it coming.
She wanted security; she wanted to set down roots, have CDs and money markets and all the other trappings of American prosperity in the latter half of the twentieth century. She wanted a man in a three-piece suit who carried a briefcase and had a string of impressive initials after his name.
He never had a chance to lay his dreams at her feet.
So on that November afternoon when he saw her standing in the sunlight in her expensive dress and her expensive pearls, laughing the laugh that had belonged only to him, he hated himself for wanting her.
He had no business wanting her.
He was engaged to a woman he cared for, determined to build himself a life that didn't include Sandra Patterson. He told himself he was happy with the career he'd chosen, with the path his life had taken.
But there was always Sandra Patterson he wanted to impress, Sandra's approval he wanted to gain.
He looked up at her as she searched for a seat. She hesitated, obviously remembering their last meeting. He smiled and made room for her.
She sat down next to him, and the air around him blossomed with the scent of French perfume. Suddenly he knew that if he ever wanted to be free of her, first he would have to seduce her.
His need for her was out of all proportion. He'd had many women through the years, and there had been few surprises. Memory and imagination had played a trick on him and turned this one woman into something no woman could possibly be. If his upcoming marriage was ever to have a chance to succeed, he would have to exorcise Sandra Patterson from his life, once and for all.
Second Harmony Page 5