The Wall: A Vintage Contemporary Romance

by Thea Harrison

  I have the same kind of wall, though, don’t I? Sara asked herself candidly. Haven’t I been hiding behind my image for six years, being, with the few friends that I have, the Sara Bertelli in private that I am in public? And aren’t I even right now playing out a certain role, hiding from Greg who I really am, afraid that he won’t understand that other part of me? That’s what it is: I’m afraid that Sara Bertelli will scare away the chance of a real relationship. She’s blocked so many before. She’s isolated the plain and simple Sara Carmichael in me until that part of me nearly died away. But they’re both a part of me, both the public and the private. They both express in different ways who I am inside. The one can’t die without the other. And Greg is only seeing a part of me now, but at least he’s seeing the truth. He just isn’t seeing the whole.

  “I don’t agree with you,” she said quietly. He had been watching intently the expressions that had flitted across her face, and hadn’t been able to interpret them. “I don’t believe we’re all strangers from each other. For the most part, yes, I’d have to say that I’ve closed off my personality from much of the world, letting them see the package on the outside,” and she gestured down at herself, “but not the person on the inside, and I think you have too. But I also believe that there comes a time when one can say, ‘Yes, I will be totally honest and completely open with this person, because I want this person to accept me for what I am, all the faults and feelings, all the quirks and qualities that make up what I am.’ It’s hard, though, and some people never really make it. The reason why is that they don’t open up completely, and so they aren’t giving themselves totally to the relationship. I can understand that. Total honesty leaves one totally vulnerable. It leaves one open to rejection, because there are no guarantees. The other person can back away for whatever reason is considered valid, and it would leave a scar so open and raw in the one that it could virtually cripple the emotions for life. It’s frightening, isn’t it? But, you see, the little unpredictable starts in a person, and the mistakes, and the inconsistencies that you’re talking about, they don’t really matter in the long run, if the core of the person is known and loved.”

  Her voice was melodious in the suddenly silent room. She felt Greg’s silence and utter stillness from where she was. She felt his tenseness, and his complete concentration on what she was saying. She felt the urgency, and the inexplicability of it struck her, but she didn’t question him. She merely finished what she had to say and calmly stood up to clear away the plates for dessert. How Greg took her words was up to him. She had communicated herself as best she could.

  In the kitchen, she stacked the dishes in the sink and went about the motions of starting coffee. The silence in the other room was beginning to bother her. She wished he would say something, anything. She wished he would open up, tell her about himself—not the mundane everyday occurrences and events, but tell her why he was so closed off. She wanted…she didn’t want to think about what she really wanted.

  The coffeemaker was burbling and she started to dish up the fruit salad. A noise from the doorway had her turning, turning very slowly, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to see what was there. Greg stood immobile in the doorway, and he looked at her briefly, rigidly. There was a light jacket clenched in his hands. Sara had just enough time to register shock, then he was saying, “I need to take a walk. Hold my coffee for me.”

  That was all, as simple and unadorned as his other statements. He was gone, out of the back door and into the darkness, before she had time to react. She sat down slowly on one of the stools by the butcher block table. It was, she suspected, going to be a long evening.

  Beowulf came and leaned against her knee, whining softly, his large eyes anxious. Sara smiled at this and patted him on the head. She worked from the front to the back area behind his ears, scratching in the places he especially liked, easing his troubled doggy mind. He sighed, sniffed a bit at the floor by her feet, and settled down for a snooze. She watched him for a long time, noting the restless nose, the twitching tail. He whined once or twice, picturing, no doubt, some running rabbit, some past glorious chase. How simple life was for him! she mused. Life, for him, was to be enjoyed in a mad, dashabout way. He would gallop through his early years, trot happily through his middle years, and walk sedately at the last of his life, by his master’s side. Greg was steady, gentle and firm with the dog. Beowulf had no worries beyond the enticing smells carried on an afternoon’s breeze. How marvellously simple and carefree!

  All the same, she was very grateful not to be living that kind of life. She wanted all the pleasure and the pain that her own life would give her. She felt a brief spurt of compassionate affection for the dog’s simple mind, and then forgot it. It slipped away as easily as the summer days slipped into autumn, leaving behind perhaps a gentler and more understanding view for the animal’s confinements and liberties, for his unswerving loyalty to his master.

  She poured herself a cup of coffee and, finding herself in need of serenity and some sort of comfort, went into the den and put on some music. She picked classical and then looked through Greg’s other albums, curious to see if he had any of her own. He had several; in fact, he had the greater part of her work, and she felt touched by this somehow. It seemed that without even knowing it, he was attracted to that other part of her personality. She curled up on the couch and tucked the ends of her dress neatly around her. Beowulf settled on the floor, having followed her closely into the next room.

  After a while she put some logs on the fire and was soon staring deeply into the flames that were constantly shifting and changing. The fluid movement of the yellowish-red fire was mesmerising, hypnotic. It freed her mind from troubling thoughts and left her relaxed and mellow.

  When Greg came quietly into the room to sit beside her, she didn’t even start.

  As if they had never stopped having an easy conversation, she asked him idly, “What do you do for a living, Greg?”

  Silence for a while. She felt him relax as the warmth of the flames seeped insidiously into his chilled limbs. A quick glance showed that his hair was ruffled and blown about his rugged face. A reflective mood seemed to have settled over him, and he looked to be more at peace with whatever had been bothering him. She reached out a hand and his strong cold fingers closed over it.

  “I was a criminal lawyer for several years,” he said quietly, leaning back against the couch and closing his eyes. “I also inherited some money, and have been retired from the actual court practice. I’ve written two books, one on the American criminal justice system, and the other on the political structure hampering the justice system.”

  “It sounds utterly fascinating, and a little frightening,” was her response. She looked at him, realising how much of his personality was wrapped up in the lawyer part of his life. It affected his whole thought processes. His mind was so clear and sharp and quick. She shuddered to think of his formidable intelligence used as a weapon. “Did you defend or prosecute?”

  “Both, eventually. My last case was defence.” His replies were brief, but not necessarily dampening. He was just being as simple and as straightforward as he had always been, getting quite devastatingly to the heart of the matter.

  “Do you think you’ll ever get back to it?”

  “No.” He turned his head as it lay on the back of the couch and looked at her. His dark brown eyes caught the glow of the fire, and it made them brighter than usual, like twin dark flames. Sara could see into the depths of the colour, and it wasn’t as dark as she had thought, but instead a honey shade, warm, compelling. “Sara, I—”

  She spoke at the same time. “Greg, there’s something you must know—” They both stopped and just looked at each other. Her heart began to thud in slow pounding strokes. His fingers were lightly stroking her wrist; he must feel her heart race, feel how fast her pulse was going now.

  Then he was saying huskily, “No. No, we’ll talk later. But now, Sara, I’ve got to kiss you, I’ve just got to, I—”
He shook his head impatiently, hauled her over to him in an abrupt manner, wrapped his arms around her tightly and brought his mouth down on hers.

  An emotion swept over her so strongly that she was carried away by its tide. She didn’t even struggle. This was what had been started, she thought hazily, this is what I wanted all along. Something came to her then, and she struggled both to sit up and to clear her mind enough to be coherent. “Greg, I’ve got something to tell you,” she began, but was effectively cut off by another deep, long, mind-weakening kiss.

  “Not now, Sara,” his voice came to her, spoken low against her temple, roughly, urgently. He was pleading with her for something and she didn’t know what. With every caress, every movement to pull her bodily closer, he was telling her an immensely important message without words. He needed her. He needed her now, tonight. Tomorrow faded away like morning mist. He wanted her physically, yes, she could feel that, but emotionally he needed her.

  It was all out of control when it had started. She had lost all desire to withdraw before he had even re-entered the house. All she had been doing was waiting for him to come back to her, and he had come, just as she had known he would. Whatever devil he had gone to exorcise had vanished for the moment, the wall left completely behind. His mouth was inside her blouse, searching, caressing, kissing, and she was lying back on the couch with his hard weight on top of her. He raised his head, looked into her eyes, and she knew she was seeing to the core of the man. It was a naked look, more so than any naked body could appear. She knew him in that moment and then knew herself. This was no infatuation.

  She loved him.

  Greg carried her upstairs, her head falling against his shoulder, her hair draping them both like black satin. There was no hesitation in his steps; he didn’t have to ask. He had asked her with his eyes down on the couch, and she had already given her answer, as wordlessly as he. He paused at his closed door, expression lost in the darkness, and quietly reached out a hand. He carried her in and put her very gently down on the large bed that was his. She had never been in his room, had never seen what it looked like, and she now waited in the strange darkness with an odd trembling in her limbs and a weakness pervading her mind and body.

  She couldn’t tell him the truth. She opened her mouth to tell him and she couldn’t. He undressed her carefully, with many caresses and soft tantalising kisses. Then he undressed himself, standing by the bed to shed his clothes, and Sara remembered the odd feeling from long ago, from only a few days ago, when she had seen him as being a monolith in the night. It came back to her when she saw the faint gleam of his powerful body in the near total darkness. He was strength.

  It was a night of giving.

  He was so gentle with her, as if he knew, and at the same time so urgent. There was warmth and tenderness and emotional sharing. There was intense, earth-shattering, wrenching passion.

  He stopped when he found she was a virgin. His whole body froze into a shocked stillness, and he began to say very quietly, “Oh, my God, oh my dear, sweet God—Sara!” Then he was loving her, and the world dissolved into the rhythm of his loving. Afterwards, she thought she could feel a single drop of wetness slide down her neck, where he was resting his head.

  They fell asleep.

  Greg woke her in the middle of the night; she didn’t know what time it was. She opened her eyes to darkness and the safe, delicious feeling of being held very close. Her head was on his warm hard shoulder and his arms were wrapped tightly around her. His hand was cupping her head.

  “Sara.” The whisper barely reached her, and she sensed it rather than heard it. She felt the movement of his chest come out like a sigh, when he whispered her name, and she opened her eyes. Her hand came up without her even realising her own impulse, and she was delicately tracing his face in the dark, like a blind person. Her fingers came to his lips, and he kissed each one.

  “I wish I’d been a virgin too. I wish I’d known that you were. Did I hurt you?” The question sounded anxious, and she had to smile.

  “Only a little physically and not at all emotionally,” she told him gently. “And you were a virgin in a way. It was the first time you’d ever made love to me.”

  That made him groan deep in his throat. Sara had to laugh aloud at that, huskily, and his bare arms squeezed her until she coughed a protest. He let her go for a moment, then rose above her and began to kiss her neck. She responded immediately by running her hands over his long torso in a sweeping caress. He said just one more thing. “Dear heaven, how you got to be twenty-eight years old and still be a virgin with this body, I’ll never ever know…”

  She pulled back. “I never really wanted to before.” Of course, after that, she didn’t have a chance to say anything for a long time.

  Sara woke up first in the morning.

  The curtains were pulled together, but a sliver of light still managed to slice through, and it streaked blindingly across her eyelids. She moaned and rolled over and really woke up with a shock when she came against a large warm, hard body as naked as her own. Her eyes flew open and she surveyed Greg’s sleeping form with tenderness flooding through her at the thought of the night before. Her body ached strangely, and she could no longer ignore the urge to move in an effort to relieve some cramped muscles. Carefully sliding out of bed and standing with a painful yet luxurious movement, she stood staring down at him. He was on his back, with his head turned to one side, and her heart lurched as she looked at the glossy brown hair she had stroked, the strong, graceful curve of the neck, his broad brown shoulders and the fuzz of hair on his chest. He was wonderful to look at. She let him sleep.

  After a quick shower in her own room, she dressed and, driven by some restless urge, clicked her fingers to an eager Beowulf after leaving Greg a note. She needed to clear some things up in her mind.

  She sat restlessly at the piano in her cabin, later, and played a few bars of one of her favourite songs. Why was she feeling such agony and regret this morning? Why was she wrenched with feelings she didn’t want to acknowledge?

  She was beginning to understand not just the morality of the decision to wait to have sex until after marriage, but also the emotional reasons. She had just made love to the man she loved. She loved him more than anything, it seemed. But there had been no word of love from him. There had been many tender murmurs and the memory was good, but there had not been one word of love. It must be nice, she thought sadly, to know that every morning when you got up you would see the one you love in the bed beside you. That assurance, that long-term faithfulness—she craved it. It could make for a whole lifetime full of the kind of loving from last night, manifested in different ways and not all of them physical. Now, the morning after, all she felt was loneliness. She was so unsure of him. It was the saddest feeling in the world.

  She came to a decision then, and made several calls. The first was to Barry, and Sara listened to his news patiently, with some relief. The man who had written her the crazy fan letters some time back had broken down and confessed to breaking into her house, and he was being dealt with. Also, the contract had been argued out, and all it needed was her signature. She promised him, “I’ll probably be there by this evening, Barry. See you.” Her next call was for a plane reservation.

  Some time later, after a long refreshing walk on the beach, she walked into Greg’s house, from the back door. He was there, smiling a quick greeting to her as he stood by the counter, sipping coffee. She wished she could smile back at him as she nodded in response to his offer of coffee.

  He handed it to her, and she cradled it in her hands for warmth, covertly studying his relaxed face. She said to him, her heart thumping strangely, “A slight problem has come up in my work, Greg, and I need to make an overnight trip back home to take care of it. Do you think you could possibly drive me to the airport this afternoon?”

  In spite of a cowardly impulse making her want to stare into the murky black depths of her coffee, something impelled her to watch his face for a change o
f expression. It came. His face slowly grew rigid, tense, the jaw muscles bunching spasmodically once before his expression turned to stone. His body had sprung into rigidity too, coming upright from the counter. He nodded once, briefly, swallowed his coffee, and walked with measured steps to the door of the hallway, and it was his very lack of outward response that bothered her so deeply.

  The wall had snapped up into place again.

  Chapter Seven

  Greg didn’t protest; Sara wished he had, instead of looking at her so emotionlessly. He didn’t utter a word about it, and she eventually went up to her room to pack an overnight bag with a leaden heart. She wasn’t exactly sure what had happened inside him, but she knew that if she were to walk out the door right now with all her possessions, he wouldn’t lift a finger in objection. It hurt.

  She quickly had everything she needed in a small bag with shoulder straps, and she carried it down to deposit it on the floor in the hall. Unhappiness ate at her insides, but she determinedly wore a casual, normal expression. It was hard, but she managed it.

  Lunch was unspeakable. She could barely force the food down past her resisting throat in the face of Greg’s unrelenting silence and rigidity. When she mentioned the time of the afternoon flight, all he did was nod absently, his eyes shadowed, looking as if he were far away.

  When he went into the hall to put her luggage into the car, he stopped suddenly, and she collided into his back. He turned, gripped her arm, and apologised, but his head was still facing her one overnight bag, and his apology lacked emphasis. Then he asked her sharply, “Is that all you’re taking?”

  Her eyebrows shot up, and she felt puzzlement when she looked into his face. “Of course—it’d be stupid to take anything more. I’m only going to be gone overnight, and I’m staying at my apartment.”

  He closed his eyes and, incredibly, a look of relief passed over his features. Then he started to shake his head slowly and chuckle. “What a total, stupid, idiotic fool I am!” Then he was holding her and kissing her hard, just like she had wanted all morning. He rubbed his cheek against hers and it was smooth and fragrant. She liked his aftershave. “Sara, you’ll have to forgive me for acting like an idiot this morning.”