A Durable Fire

by Robyn Donald

  ‘What do you want to do about it?’ Her fingers moved up the back of his head, revelling in the damp thickness of the hair.

  ‘Stay here with you and make love to you for several years,’ he said, ‘but I suppose our separate and collective responsibilities will put paid to that scheme. Do you feel up to marrying me?’

  ‘Do I feel up to heaven?’ she returned dreamily. ‘No, but when it’s offered to me I’d be stupid not to take it. There is one thing, though, Kyle.’

  He lifted his head and looked down into the perfect flushed face.

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘If I marry again I lose my income. All I get is enough to keep Felice. Dan left the money in trust for her.’

  For a long moment he stayed silent, looking into her face with a cool watchfulness that chilled her heart. ‘So?’ he asked softly.

  She touched his mouth with a fingertip, but it was unresponsive. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Well, you won’t be getting a rich widow for a wife,’ she said deliberately, because it had to be said. ‘I’ll come to you with nothing.’

  The smoky eyes had hardened to granite as she spoke, but her last few words made him close them as if he was in pain. ‘Are you trying to pay me back for the insults I flung at you?’ he asked raggedly. ‘Do you think it matters to me whether you have any money or not? God knows, I’m not poor. And I’m afraid I’m a jealous man. If you brought jewellery that your—that had been bought for you by your first husband I would refuse to let you wear it. Save it for Felice. From now on you’ll have only what I give you.’

  ‘And Felice?’

  He reacted to her whispered query with a twisted smile. ‘Oh, I like her,’ he said wryly. ‘She has guts and style, like her mother. I couldn’t hate a child, or be jealous of her. We understand each other, Felice and I.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said thankfully, and smiled a little ruefully. ‘I’ve been jealous these last few days of my own daughter. It’s a horrid sensation, believe you me.’

  He grinned. ‘Good, serves you right. That haughty touch-me-not air you wore was like a red cloak to a bull.’ His head turned, he listened, then got to his feet, pulling her up with him. His arms slid behind her shoulders; he stood, staring down into her face with a kind of devouring thankfulness. ‘It doesn’t worry you at all, does it?’ he said softly. ‘You’ll give up everything for me.’

  ‘Everything but Felice,’ Arminel said soberly, aware that, far-sighted as ever, Dan had planned for this contingency. That puzzling proviso in his will had been drafted to ensure that if she married again it would be for love, not his money. And in her happiness she spared a thought for him, hoping that wherever he was now he would be as happy as she was.

  ‘I don’t expect you to give her up,’ said Kyle, releasing her to pick up the clothes they had discarded. ‘Come on, you shameless wench, get dressed before someone sends out a search party for us. You may not give a fig for your reputation, but I do.’

  She laughed, watching unashamedly as he pulled on his shorts, draped his shirt over his shoulder. Then, reluctantly, and taking some considerable time, because he insisted on helping her, she wriggled back into her bathing suit.

  Much later that night, when an ecstatic Felice had been finally tucked up in bed, and Karen had rather coyly taken herself off, they sat on the wide terrace and watched the moon come up through the coconut palms and listened to a lovesick dove crooning its sweet monotonous call. Arminel lifted her head from Kyle’s shoulder and asked carefully,

  ‘How is your mother going to react to my arrival on the scene, darling?’

  ‘She knows how I feel about you,’ he astounded her by answering. ‘She won’t be particularly surprised.’ He drew her back to him, his fingers gently smoothing the curve of her cheek and jaw. ‘She only disliked you because she could see the potential for trouble you brought with you. She knew you were wrong for Rhys; after a few days she realised that I was attracted to you. She wasn’t very happy about that, either. Being an astute woman she knew that I was in trouble, and it didn’t warm her heart towards you.’

  ‘Does she know . . .?’

  ‘How can she? And if she guessed, why should she blame you? Had I been able to keep my hands off you nothing would have happened. It was my lack of self-control. That was why I was so cruel to you. I couldn’t hide from my guilt. You may have forgotten, but when I came into your room that night you begged me to go away. I almost raped you.’

  ‘The operative word being “almost”,’ she said drily. ‘I seem to remember that you received considerable cooperation before too much time had passed. If I’d had any sense I’d have left Te Nawe as soon as I realised I was falling in love with you, but I thought that because you seemed to hate me I was quite safe. And it was such a bitter pleasure to be-in the same room as you that I couldn’t bear to go.’

  ‘Oh, my lovely lady,’ he groaned, pulling her across to lie in his lap. ‘Why do you think I didn’t send you away? You were a constant torment, one that I couldn’t do without. At night I would pace the floor, imagining you closing those sleepy blue eyes in ecstasy as I made love to you, and I would find myself savagely, bitterly angry with Rhys, because you laughed with him and let him touch you. I don’t think I was sane after the first minute I saw you. You looked at me with a kind of shock, your eyes dilated, your lips trembling, and I felt my whole body clench.’

  They kissed, and kissed again, seeking and finding, until the hot tide of desire threatened to overwhelm them and Arminel broke the embrace, murmuring, ‘No, no, dearest. Not now. Not here.’

  ‘Mm.’ He groaned, his mouth travelling down the smooth arc of her throat. ‘I don’t know that I want such a sensible wife.’

  She laughed softly, holding his head against her. The skin of his face was hot, his open mouth erotically disturbing, and she shuddered, feeling again the warmth and hunger deep in the pit of her stomach. ‘Sensible?’ she muttered into his hair. ‘I don’t feel at all sensible now. But darling, we must be.’

  ‘Yes, I know. When will you marry me?’

  She looked into his eyes, smiled softly and said, ‘I feel married to you now.’

  The grey eyes narrowed. Beneath his lashes she could see leaping points of light as they swept her face, lingering with mocking thoroughness on the slightly swollen lips and glazed, dreamy gaze. ‘Oh, do you?’ said Kyle as he slid his hand beneath her breast and turned it to cup the soft fullness. ‘Just as well, my lady, because I feel very much married to you. But no more worrying, hmm? You’ll find that my mother will accept you without any recriminations at all. You may not be exactly what or who she had in mind for a daughter-in-law, but she’s known for a long time that her only hope of acquiring a wife for me was for me to find you again.’

  He was probably right, and at the moment she didn’t care all that much anyway. The way she felt now, she could deal with a hundred mothers-in-law and come off triumphant.

  ‘Had you planned never to marry?’ she asked in a soft, awed voice.

  ‘Not if I couldn’t have you. And I was quite sure I didn’t want the sort of woman you’d shown yourself to be.’

  ‘I suppose not. Money-hungry, greedy, shallow and pro—’

  ‘Hush,’ he said before he silenced her by the simple method of covering her mouth with his. A long time later, when the trembling in her limbs was made worse by the same trembling in his, he said with painful honesty, ‘What else could I think? You’d appeared from nowhere engaged to my brother, but although you wanted me you wouldn’t break it off with him. You tempted me and taunted me and drove me out of my mind, told me you loved me—and then only a month after you’d left me my mother was reading out the report of your marriage to a man who was old enough to be your father and a millionaire twenty times over. I hated you because you’d made a fool of me. Why did you marry him, Arminel?’

  Quietly, holding him tenderly, she told him about that flight across the Tasman, and the mixture of compas
sion and exhaustion and desolation which had brought about that marriage. Her affection for Dan was clear in her tones; not even for Kyle was she going to conceal just how much he had meant to her, in spite of that jealousy he had spoken of.

  ‘He knew you better than I ever did,’ he said when she had finished, his voice harsh with self-condemnation. ‘Did he love you, Arminel?’

  ‘Yes, my poor Dan.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I grew to become very fond of him.’

  ‘Poor devil. And I thought I lived in hell! It must have been refined torture for him to love you and know that he had only your affection.’

  Arminel could have wept for this evidence of his compassion for the one man he had cause to resent. One day she would tell him why Dan had made that stipulation in his will about remarriage, but not now.

  For the moment it was enough that in spite of his jealousy there was enough compassion to make her first marriage no longer a taboo subject. She would not have to watch every word she said, or teach Felice about her father in secret.

  ‘Oh, I love you,’ she whispered, pressing tiny fevered kisses across the stark line of his cheekbone. ‘I love you so much that I’ll never be able to show you. I Worship you, I adore you. . . .’

  ‘Hush,’ Kyle muttered, a smile creasing his cheek. ‘Shameless creature! How do you think I feel about you? As though all skies are dark without you, as though you are all that I need to live, the breath in my body, the blood in my veins, the other part of me. After all these years of being incomplete I’ve found the one person who makes life anything more than a weary procession of days wearily endured. And to think that when I saw you again I believed I hated you!’

  ‘Ah, but that was because you still thought I was the greedy unprincipled baggage who’d married for money. How could you love anyone like that?’

  Her voice was light; she had hoped to make him laugh. Instead he lifted his hand and ran his finger across the slender width of her throat.

  ‘No,’ he said harshly. ‘You still don’t understand, do you? I hated you because I took one look at you, so exclusive, cool and poised, with all the advantages of the money you’d sold yourself for, and I knew I loved you, that whatever you were, whatever you did, you held my heart and soul in fee. I wanted to kill you for being so beautiful and so damned ugly inside, and I knew all the time that I was going to end up crawling across broken glass to get to you, because it was quite obvious that the old magic was still very much there. My emotions were a very explosive mixture—desire, bitterness and contempt, and all I felt for myself was a savage derision.’ He drew a deep, jagged breath, the smoky eyes blazing into hers, his features thrown into harsh relief by the intensity of his emotions. ‘You called me a barbarian. If you’d known how close you were to the mark you’d have turned tail and fled.’

  ‘I came very close to it several times’ she confessed, shaken to her soul by his bitter revelation, ‘but I couldn’t. I told myself that it was because I wasn’t going to run again, that you had no right to drive me away from here too, but I was fooling myself. It was because no matter how you treated me, I was happier with you near me than apart.’

  ‘Darling,’ he whispered, pushing her back into the cushions, ‘my sweet lady, my only love, how can you still love me after all that I’ve done to you?’

  Her eyes teased, hiding the depths of emotion he had summoned. ‘With difficulty,’ she murmured, and then, as his mouth hovered a kiss’s breadth away from hers. ‘Oh, so easily, my love. I only had to ask myself what life would be like without you, and after I’d recovered from the panic that that thought produced, I knew.’

  When she could breathe again she confessed, ‘Yesterday, after the plane had left for Suva, I decided, quite cold-bloodedly, that I was going to seduce you. All my scruples, my pride, every sensible reason for having nothing to do with you fled when I realised you could have died. I decided I would have an affair with you in the hope that you would realise just how much I did love you.’

  She didn’t dare tell him about that other, even more irresponsible decision to have his child. But he said quietly,

  ‘And I would have taken you on any terms, once it came to the crunch. Like you, I thought fairly seriously while I lay in that hospital. Nothing seemed important except that I could have died without ever holding you again.’ He bent his head, his avid mouth searching out the contours of her breast beneath the fragile cotton lace she was wearing. And when she sighed voluptuously and wriggled down so that the hard length of his body half overlaid hers, he added, ‘Tell me, once you’d seduced me, did you plan to give Felice a small brother or sister?’

  Arminel had never thought to blush again, but at his words a scalding tide of colour washed up from her throat and she turned her head into his chest, seeking to avoid his laughing, mocking gaze. ‘How well you know me,’ he murmured, strong fingers turning her chin to his merciless scrutiny. ‘Because I would never have let a child of mine grow up not knowing its father. Had you that in mind, too?’

  Shamed, she nodded, and he laughed, and kissed her, tormenting little kisses, holding her down with the weight of his body as she struggled to get free.

  ‘You, my lovely, are totally without scruples,’ he said severely, then spoilt the effect by adding deeply, ‘I wish I’d let you do it; I’d like to be seduced by you.’

  Arminel kissed his chin, and then the pulse that beat in his throat, and then the small patch of skin at the base of the open neck of his shirt. ‘On our wedding night I shall seduce you in every way I know,’ she promised. ‘I’m not particularly experienced, but I have a vivid imagination. And love helps, doesn’t it?’

  Every muscle of the big body tensed. Kyle looked at her with such naked need that she made a soft little sound of despair, and then he relaxed and sat up, drew her up beside him and said quietly, ‘I’ll look forward to that, dear heart. We’ve plenty of time. All the time in the world, now.’

  And Arminel smiled and agreed as hand in hand they went back into the house. She did not say it, but her whole being thanked her kindly, clever Dan who had so carefully left this path open to a happiness he had never known. Together there was nothing they could not do, she and Kyle. And Felice, and those other children who would be theirs to love and care for. But for the moment, this was enough.