And there was only one way to do that.
Holding her as they danced had set off hundreds of tiny brushfires inside him, making it hard to think clearly, Kissing her in the darkened corner of the hotel ballroom proved to be as powerful an experience now as it had been years ago.
She was softer than he remembered, more yielding, and when he suggested taking a room she put her hand in his in a manner so trusting that he recalled a time when she would have trusted him with her life.
Through high school and college she'd managed to steer clear of this ultimate involvement with him, and now, when he wanted to hurt her, she came to him willingly.
This wouldn't be seduction, the fiery mindless coupling he'd wanted. This would be a communion, the sacred coming together of two people who'd loved each other for a very long time.
Soft lighting bathed the room and brought out the pale gold highlights in her hair. She looked younger, more nervous, more eager than he'd expected – not the harried businesswoman who'd told him her expectations went beyond what he could give her.
He leaned against the mantelpiece and lit a cigarette in a blatant ploy for time and noticed that her hands shook as she unpinned her hair.
That should have pleased him but it didn't.
She sat on the edge of the bed and slipped off her high heels, then walked over to where he stood and rested her head against his chest. He threw the cigarette into the fireplace, then touched her hair, her cheek. She lifted her face to his, and he brought his lips down to meet hers and found himself drowning in the sight and smell and sound of her.
As they fell upon the bed, he knew it would never work, knew he'd been a fool to think it would. Nothing on earth could break the connection between himself and Sandra. He knew that now beyond any doubt. If he had any decency left inside him, he'd stop before he hurt her any more than he already had.
He'd stop while his impending marriage still had a chance.
She lay diagonally across the bed, her champagne-colored slip tangled around her hips, the lacy cups of her bra as delicate as angel's wings against her skin. Leaving her would be the hardest thing he ever did – and the finest.
He pushed away from her and stood over the bed. His shirt was open to the waist; his chest heaved as he tried to slow his breathing.
Say it, damn it. Just say it and get the hell out of here.
He buttoned his shirt and tucked the ends into his pants, ignoring the way they strained against his body.
"Wish me luck, Sandy," he said, his words like razors ripping his throat. The hazy glow of passion was beginning to fade as she realized something terrible was about to happen. "Wish me luck, because I'm getting married next month."
He was out of there before he had a chance to change his mind.
So now, seven years later, as he lay in bed next to her, watching her sleep, lost in the wonder of this unexpected good fortune, he wondered if the magic they'd finally shared was the beginning or the end.
#
Sandra's first shock the next morning was the brilliant sunshine streaming through her uncurtained bedroom window. She'd been deep in a dream that was unconscionably erotic, and she'd buried her head in her pillow to hang on to those glorious sensations just a little longer, but the bright light awakened her as effectively as any alarm clock.
Not that her alarm clock was working. She opened one eye and peered at the small clock on her nightstand. It still read 11:42 a.m., Friday.
They day Hurricane Henry had come to visit.
The day she bumped into Michael McKay in White Castle.
The day –
She opened her other eye.
It wasn't her pillow she'd been nuzzling; it was Michael's chest. She raised up on one elbow and noted a slight soreness in her thighs and upper arms. If the luxurious, well-used feel of her muscles was any indication, those erotic sensations had been no dream.
What on earth had she done?
Next to her, Michael cleared his throat. "It's about time," he said, looking over at her. A shock of thick black hair fell across his brow, and he pushed it away with the back of his hand.
Even with the harsh, uncompromising sun shining directly on him, he looked wonderful. The random strands of silver, the laugh lines encircling those dark eyes – on him, they were terrific.
"I didn't know you were awake," she said, pulling the sheet up over her breasts. Daylight was proving to be a lot harder to navigate than darkness had been.
"I've been awake a long time," he said. "I had a lot to think about."
He sat up and rested his back against the headboard. The sheet fell down around his waist, and her gaze followed it. He grinned and shrugged.
"It happens," he said. "Watching you sleep wasn't easy."
Sandra Patterson, noted for her quick wit in all situations, had absolutely nothing to say.
He reached out and took her right hand. "Come back here, Sandy," he said, his voice low and full of promise. "Let me see the woman I loved last night." He seemed to relaxed, so casual, as if what had happened between them was no more earthshaking than watching the evening news.
Tears stung her eyelids, and she pulled away from him and stood up, wrapping the pale yellow sheet around her body as she did.
"It's no use," she said, fumbling with two ends of the sheet as she tried to tie them together. "I can't make small talk with you, Michael. I can't banter. I can't flirt. This never should have happened."
The stupid sheet refused to cooperate with her and she awkwardly tried wrapping it around her torso so she could flee.
Michael, totally naked, got up from the bed and approached her. He was so long, so lean, so incredibly well-proportioned, that her hands stopped fumbling as she watched him. He seemed unaware that he was fully aroused, but she couldn't imagine how he could ignore that fact.
She couldn't.
"Don't run again, Sandy."
"I'm not running anywhere."
"You're trying to."
She tugged at the ends of the sheet. "All I'm trying to do is tie this damned thing around me."
"Let me."
His hands covered hers, and she began to tremble. "Please, Michael. Don't."
How could she sound like that, so soft, so yielding, when all she wanted to do was forget this had ever happened?
His large fingers brushed against her skin as he took the ends of the sheet from her. Her breasts seemed to be swelling to meet his hand, her body yearning toward him in a way she couldn't control.
If he touched her, she would be lost.
"Breathe, damn it," he muttered, fumbling around just as she had. "The phones don't work, and I don't know CPR." He threw the left corner of the sheet over her right shoulder. "Maybe you should cut a hole in the middle and stick your head through it."
The nervous tension, the embarrassment, the sharp edge of desire exploded into laughter. Real laughter. The first laughter they'd shared in a thousand years.
She sat down on the edge of the bed. "I didn't want any of this, Michael," she said when the laughter faded. "This is the last thing I ever imagined happening to me at this point in my life."
He didn't need to know how many times she'd wondered about him, fantasized about him, dreamed about him. No man had the right to know those secrets.
"You think this was part of my master plan, Sandy?" He sat down next to her, still naked. Still hard.
"You're the one who showed up at my door. Obviously you had some kind of plan."
That wonderful, tough-street-kid grin of his was back. "Sure I had a plan, but it was all in the interest of being a concerned neighbor."
"You're not my neighbor."
"A concerned friend."
She looked away. "You're not my friend," she said softly. "You haven't been my friend for years."
"You're wrong." The seductive sound of his voice drew her gaze back to his. "Despite everything, we've always been friends. No one knows as much about me as you do. No one ever will." He stroked her
hair gently, and memories of hot summer nights and lazy afternoons and a thousand impossible dreams filled the room around them. "We were friends long before we became lovers."
She shook her head. "We stopped being friends the night Kathy and Tom got married."
"I'd waited so long to get back at you," he said, "but when it came down to it –" He shook his head. "I couldn't."
She remembered the way he'd walked out on her, leaving her on that rented bed, feeling more vulnerable and used than if they'd actually made love. "You mean you didn't plan it that way?"
Believing he had planned it that way was the one thing that had kept her pain at bay and fueled her anger.
"No, Sandy. What I'd planned to do was make love to you, then walk out." He smiled, but his eyes betrayed him. "I found out I wasn't as big a bastard as I thought."
"I suppose I should thank you for that?" She turned away and looked out the window. His words had changed the balance between them and, if possible, made her even more vulnerable than making love with him had.
The bed tilted as he swung his legs over the side. "Look, I admit I was lousy to even think of doing something like that, but give me a break, Sandy. I stopped before I really hurt you." There was a long silence. "That's more than you did for me."
How enraged he'd been the night before she left for college. Her sensitive, understand Michael had towered over her with all the fury of a jilted almost-lover.
Her scholarship – the miracle that had dropped into her lap at the eleventh hour – had opened up a world she had only dreamed about. A world of opportunity that had never been possible for her mother was now hers for the taking.
The chance to matter, to hold her future in her own hands, to shape it and mold it into something that could make her valuable, keep her secure – Michael had wanted her to toss all of that away because he couldn't wait.
He was the product of a working-class family who lived paycheck to paycheck and never planned beyond the next union raise. Sure, he had his dreams – romantic, foolish dreams of happily-ever-after that had nothing to do with reality as she saw it. A reality based on a need for security and independence that had been ingrained since childhood.
Now she understood the terror of a young man up against the unknown that threatened to rob him of the girl he loved, but that was little comfort to the children they had once been.
"More than anyone, you should have understood," she said, picking up a loose thread at the top hem of her sheet. "You knew what I was up against, Michael. You knew how important it was for me to go to school."
"What about the other times we tried, after you had your degree? What the hell were the reasons then?"
"I was a fool," she said quietly. "How's that for a reason?"
Sandra had loved the man but hated what he was. He'd seemed aimless, without ambition, always running off to Rome or London like some ridiculous overage hippie. So much had rested on her shoulders back then – both her mother's expectations and her own – that she hadn't understood what was of real importance.
Her own insecurities had forced her away from the one thing she honestly wanted: Michael McKay.
He didn't say anything. Who could blame him? Years after the fact, most of this didn't matter a damn.
"Not much of an excuse, was it?" No matter how many time-travel movies Hollywood turned out, a woman still couldn't go back and set the past to rights.
He stood up abruptly, reached for his jeans, which were on the floor near the window and slipped them on.
"I was in love with you, Sandy." He bent his knees slightly and zipped the fly. "You were everything in the world to me." When he looked down at her, she saw clearly the shadow of the boy he'd been, and her heart ached for all the mistakes they'd made. "I would've worked my tail off for you, to keep you safe, to send you to school. You never gave me the chance."
I don't need this, she thought, fighting down the waves of aching memory his words called up. She'd come so far since those early days that she didn't need his old angers and fears to pull her back down. Not when so much now depended on her success.
She stood up, straightened the sheet around her and headed toward the door. "I usually eat a huge breakfast," she said, as their eyes met across the room, "but since there's no electricity and no food and no –"
"Forget it." He brushed past her and grabbed his shirt from atop the wardrobe carton. "I've got a lot of work waiting for me at home."
"I'm not trying to hustle you out of here, Michael." Her voice quavered slightly, and she hoped he didn't notice. "I just wanted you to know that –"
He slid his arms into the sweatshirt, and she watched as he inched the zipper up over that incredible torso of his. The feel of those muscles beneath her fingers, against her mouth, her thighs, was burned permanently into her sensory memory.
"I know exactly what you're trying to do. You're still as transparent as hell."
"You don't know anything about me. I'm not the same little girl who used to wait for your call and live for your smile."
He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the mahogany armoire in the corner. "Your memory's more selective than I thought. I remember doing my share of waiting on you."
"This isn't getting us anywhere. I'm going to see if I have any more juice in the pantry." She swept the end of the sheet over her left shoulder in as elegant a manner as she could manage, and turned to leave.
"You're scared, Patterson."
She turned back to look at him. "What did you say?"
"I said you're scared."
"And I say you're crazy."
"You've always been afraid to let anyone see through that shell of yours."
"And, of course, you think you can see through it?"
"I'll bet I've come closer than anyone else in years."
Sandra had always been remarkably adept at sidestepping personal questions by bouncing them back with a neat little verbal topspin that stopped her questioners cold. As a little girl, it had been necessary to shield her illegitimacy from prying friends and neighbors.
As an adult, it was part of her nature. Her high-visibility work performance, coupled with her low-profile personal life, had taken her far.
As the years went on, her illegitimacy no longer mattered. In some ways the world had changed for the better, but too late to change the woman she was.
"I don't hear you denying it, Sandy."
"You know what was. You don't know what is."
He gestured toward the rumpled bed in the center of the room. "I'd say we've made a start."
"What happened, happened. It was wonderful, but there won't be a second time." She was older now and wiser' she understood who and what he was and why it would never work.
Besides, there was too much at stake. It was no longer just her career, her future, her life; it was her mother's as well, and that was a burden few men would want to share.
She'd learned that lesson from Andrew Maxwell.
Michael followed her into the kitchen.
"You're not married, are you?"
She shook her head. "Took you long enough to get around to asking me."
"I had other things on my mind." He leaned against the doorjamb. "Grapevine said you were engaged."
She lifted her chin slightly. "Did the grapevine also say I broke the engagement?"
That wicked grin of his reappeared. "They must've missed that part."
"Don't look so pleased. That doesn't change one damned thing." She pulled the last can of juice off the pantry shelf, then looked for two clean glasses. A horrible thought formed. "Last thing I heard, my sources told me you were a married man."
"Better update your sources. I've been divorced almost four years."
She offered him a glass of juice, but he shook his head. Instead, he waited for her to pour one for herself, then took a long swig straight from the can. She tried to picture Ed Gregory from US-National doing such a thing, but Ed probably traveled with a portable wineglass in h
is glove box.
Michael was watching her steadily. "So you've been asking about me."
"I didn't have to ask. You know the old crowd. They like to spread the word on the two who got away."
Of the old group, only Sandra and Michael had left Queens and built lives that ran counter to the lives of their friends. Although, judging by the calluses on Michael's hands, she wondered if he'd just traded the subway for the Long Island Rail Road, and his old dreams for a newer, harsher reality.
"And you say you've never wondered about me, Sandy? All these years, you never once wondered?"
She hesitated long enough for him to take her into his arms.
"You never wondered where I was or what I was doing or who I was doing it with?"
"Never. I stopped thinking about you seven years ago."
You're a lousy liar."
A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. "I'm a wonderful liar. How do you think I manage to survive in the corporate jungle?"
"Maybe they don't know you the way I do. When you lie, your eyes get bluer."
"Eyes don't change color with emotion."
"The hell they don't."
"That's not logical, Michael."
"I don't give a damn. When you lie, your eyes get bluer. They also get bluer when –"
His jet-black eyes picked up an unholy twinkle and she braced herself.
"Go ahead," she said. "I can take it."
"They also get bluer when you make love."
"The room was dark. How could you know that?"
"I watched you by the light of the storm. I watched it all happen."
Her body trembled, and she leaned her forehead against his shoulder. "You're making this difficult."
"It shouldn't be. This should be the easiest thing that's ever happened to us." He stroked her hair in a way that made the intervening years disappear behind a scrim of smoke. "We've been preparing for it long enough."
Second Harmony Page 6