by Ann Major
God. He was driving himself crazy.
He jumped a foot when the telephone rang.
Usually he let the machine answer.
But he picked it up, glad for the distraction.
Six
Hesitantly Chandra leaned closer to the mirror, and as she did so, her image grew huge. Her lovely, enlarged face looked back at her sadly, questioning, as she raised a shaky fingertip and traced the shape of her mouth, still swollen from Lucas’s kiss.
She lingered a second longer, and then, moistening her lips with her tongue, she pursed them and brushed them teasingly against the mirror.
The glass was cold.
Lucas’s mouth had been hot and fierce and demanding, his arms crushing her.
So why had he rejected her?
Alone and miserable in her blue-tiled bathroom, her breath misting the glass, Chandra began to twist and untwist her yellow hair as she surveyed her pale features in the steam-clouded mirror, trying to find some fault in them. She rubbed the mirror with a towel.
A lone, glistening tear trickled from the corner of her eye down her pale cheek. She let her yellow hair fall to her shoulders. Always she was examining herself, trying new hairdos, new expressions, different postures, hoping for some tiny clue of recognition as to who she might be, hoping for a memory, a name, an image—anything other than those scary blue flashes.
Even before Lucas’s rejection, she had felt erased. Formless. Shapeless. As if she was nobody.
But his rejection had left her too dispirited to even try to fight the amnesia. She was wondering why Lucas had returned from his office so dead-set against her. In that first instant when he’d seen her in his shower, his eyes had recognized her and adored her.
She couldn’t be mistaken about that.
Yet after his passionate kisses and incredible kindness that morning, he had returned from his office determined to reject her.
Something had happened to him after he’d left her. Something that made him warier of her. And she hated that. For she wanted only to please him. All afternoon she had worked to make his homecoming special, to offer her thanks with a home-cooked meal and scented candles and friendship. But he had been hostile and rude and had gone out of his way to avoid her and reject her offerings.
Why?
If the argumentative exchanges with Lucas had left her feeling tired and very drained, that final rejection had finished her. She had been getting stronger every day. But now she felt almost as weak and depressed as she had the first day.
Wearily she leaned down and ran her bath. Then she pulled off her shirt and jeans and slipped into the tub. The warm water and foamy bubbles both soothed her and sapped what little remaining strength she had. She bathed quickly, then toweled herself off and put on the white diaphanous nightgown and the bed jacket Lucas had laid out on her bed.
She was so exhausted when she crawled into bed that she fell asleep the moment her head sank into the downy pillow, only to be jarred awake minutes later by the telephone on her nightstand. Impulsively she answered it at the exact moment Lucas did.
“Broderick here.”
Without preliminaries a man said, “Damn it, Broderick. Have you found her?”
Chandra shot bolt upright in her bed, her knuckles whitening as she gripped the receiver. She knew without knowing how she knew that they were talking about her.
The other man’s familiar voice made her shiver with horror.
“Damn it, no!” Lucas replied with a note of exasperation. “And don’t call me at home. It’s too dangerous.”
Lucas’s receiver clicked, but the other man stayed on the line a few tense seconds longer, breathing heavily, as if he sensed she was there. Then he hung up, and so did she.
Did Lucas know who she was? He had seemed familiar to her all along, and she’d registered that look of instant recognition when he’d first met her.
Yet he’d sworn he’d never met her before.
Nothing made sense.
But then lies never did.
Could this mean his sons—
No. She would never believe Montague or Peppin were involved in anything other than helping her.
She got out of bed and went to her balcony. The lights in the aqua pool were on, so the rectangle gleamed like a jewel. The lawn was dark as it sloped down to the bay. In the moonlight, she saw two heavily built armed men, keeping to the shadows as they prowled the grounds. One of them stopped, his hand automatically going to his shoulder holster as he turned to stare at her.
And then she knew.
Her heart began to pound as she backed slowly into her bedroom and shut and locked the glass doors.
Lucas had lied.
Not only that. He had made her his prisoner.
Knowing she would never be able to sleep, she raced to his bedroom. She pushed the door open and rushed inside before she lost her nerve.
He flushed with guilt and angry surprise as he glanced at her from his desk and found her staring at him, wide-eyed, with her white gown floating around her hips because she had stopped so abruptly.
He wore pajama bottoms only. The sight of his dark bare chest with those odd scars and his muscular arms sent a shiver through her.
She seemed to have a similar effect on him. The moment he saw what she was wearing, his dark expression grew charged with desire. His heated gaze ran from her face down her body, which was clearly revealed by her nearly transparent nightgown. And as he looked at her, again she felt as if he were already her lover, as if he’d made love to her hundreds of times, as if they belonged together always.
She tried to remind herself how cold he’d been all evening. But he excited her. Underneath her doubt, some truer part of herself believed he was the one man who would never hurt her.
Vaguely she noted that his computer was on and that his briefcase lay open. Dozens of documents and files spilled from the briefcase all over his keyboard and cramped work space. When she walked toward him, her gown swirling seductively about her hips, he jammed several papers into his briefcase and snapped it shut before he jumped up. Suddenly she was curious not only about his mysterious caller and the strange men prowling outside, but about the contents of that briefcase.
“What were you working on?” she asked, surprising herself with the calm in her voice.
“Nothing.” His voice was too crisp, too sharp. “I thought we already said good-night.”
“Lucas, who are those armed men outside? Are you keeping me…prisoner?”
His turbulent gray eyes grew hard. “Damn it. I hired them to make sure no one bothers you while you’re here.”
“I’ve been here for days without guards.”
“I hired them to protect you.”
“Why now? I don’t understand.”
“Why now?” His eyes fastened on her face. “Because I didn’t know about you till this morning. My kids rescued you out of a public hospital parking lot. You were doped up and badly injured. You say somebody tried to kill you. You say you’re scared they’ll try again. And you ask me why? My reasons should be perfectly obvious. Anybody could have seen you get in my car. I don’t know a damn thing about you or who might be after you. All I know is that you or my kids might be in danger.
“Also,” he continued, “there’s a guy making a name for himself killing Texas lawyers. In fact, he just blew an associate of mine away in Houston.”
“I—I’m sorry about your friend, Lucas,” she murmured.
“I received a death threat from the bastard—or from a crazy prankster pretending to be him—today.”
She stared at him in mute horror.
Just for an instant his voice softened. “Now do you understand why I hired the bodyguards?”
The faint tilt of her head was barely perceptible.
“Good,” he whispered. “I’m glad that’s settled.”
“Lucas, if you knew who I was…would you tell me?”
The merest fraction of a second passed before he answered. “Of course.” His vo
ice was smooth, easy, and yet there was another element in it. “Why do you ask?”
“Who called a while ago?”
This time there was no hesitation.
“It was a wrong number.” His eyes burned into her, daring her to challenge the lie.
When she didn’t he said, “Now would you go to bed?”
* * *
Later, in her bedroom, Chandra was dreaming she and Lucas were in a strange land and about to be married. Their silken costumes were exotic. A curtain of brightly colored beads hung in a doorway. All the women wore long gowns and veils. She wore a golden veil and golden bracelets, and Lucas was smiling at her, his gaze filled with warmth and love. But just as he was about to place the ring on her finger, his face changed and he was someone else. Someone with fierce black eyes and hate in his heart.
Then she was in another place and another time. It was almost as if she was another person. She was hiding from Lucas in a closet. He was in a room with tall ceilings. Dozens of vases and bowls held dying roses. People in black with long faces filed conspiratorially out of a library as Lucas dragged her out of a closet. The black-robed people nodded as he carried her away and locked her inside a dark, airless space. She began to scream as she realized he was going to bury her alive.
She cried Lucas’s name again and again and woke to find herself in his beautifully appointed guest bedroom, its lilac colors bleached silver in the moonlight. She got up and, feeling cold, ran swiftly to open the doors. She stood in the draft of warm air, staring out at the bodyguard on the beach.
The night air was heavy with humidity. The tide had come in and the surf was rushing across the sand all the way to the rocks. She watched the water for a long time, but it did little to calm her. Her forehead and upper lip were beaded with perspiration as she shivered in terror from the residual horror of her nightmare.
“Hey, hey” came Lucas’s gentle rasp from her doorway.
She had turned even before he spoke, because she had sensed he was there.
Their gazes met. In the silver light his harsh face was as unreadable as stone. Still, she felt that shock of recognition, and the electric excitement he aroused so easily rushed through her and mingled with her dread of him.
“It’s only me,” he murmured.
Again he was shirtless, and she stared at the brown chest covered with thick black hair. Still shaking with fright, she was struck by how strong and unyielding he was, and by how much she wanted to be held in his dangerous arms.
“Lucas—” Her mind swirled with all the fearful questions in her heart.
Again she felt that they had a past together, that they were more deeply involved than he was willing to let on.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded.
“You were there,” she whispered. “In my nightmare. You are one of them.”
“No,” he began hoarsely. “I’m not.”
But she backed away from him, shivering, even as she longed to run to him and beg him to kiss her.
She forced herself to say, “You were plotting with them to kill me.”
“No, oh, God,” he whispered, reaching for her and cradling her body against his.
The sea breeze was ruffling her hair, sending long strands of the stuff against his cheek and throat. He smiled at her, his eyes kind as he stroked her cheek and smoothed her blowing hair. As he continued to hold her, she gradually relaxed. All night she had wanted this. Forever she had wanted it. If he knew who she was and wouldn’t tell her, so be it. If she had to die, his arms were where she wanted to be.
With a helpless sigh she circled his neck with her trembling hands and whispered brokenly, “Not you. Please not you, too.”
“I wasn’t there.”
She looked at him and saw that he burned with desire. The darker image of him looking hard and ruthless in that rose-filled foyer in her nightmare flashed into her mind.
“You were in a room filled with dying flowers.”
He whitened, and she sensed there was more than an element of truth in her dream. And yet—His eyes were kind.
“Hold me,” she whispered. “Just hold me.”
At first his arms were gentle, but gradually they wound around her tightly until their bodies seemed to flow into one another and become one.
He had held her before. Many times.
She reached up and pressed a warm kiss against the hot skin of his neck. She felt his savage indrawn breath as male need raged through him. He buried his fevered lips in her hair with a hungry kiss that set her entire being aflame.
Without a word she began to explore his neck and throat with her mouth.
“Kiss me. Love me,” she begged.
Unable to stand, they collapsed to the floor, their pulses beating together. She lay on the carpet, staring up at him as he silently tore off her clothes and then his own. When she was naked, his callused hands roamed from her breasts to her waist to her thighs, exploring, caressing, already knowing exactly what would most please her as if he was very experienced with her particular body. And she had that same instinctively accurate knowledge about him.
Soon she forgot everything except the pleasure of his delicately flicking tongue and his fingers moving urgently between her legs.
Her hands trailed over his hair-roughened chest, sensuously stroking ever lower down the length of his flat belly. She felt too aroused to ask him about the long scar on his torso. And as her fingers closed shamelessly around him, he swore, then groaned as he caught her waist and flipped her over onto her back.
Then he was on top of her, straddling her, his great dark body hot and hard and pulsating. His fingertips again stroked her inner thighs. She felt his thumbs skimming the satin folds between her legs, opening her like the petals of a rose.
As surprised as he, she cried out when he encountered the unexpected painful barrier.
“I’ll stop,” he offered hoarsely, desperately, “if you want me to.”
“No.” Her voice sounded as fractured as his. “Don’t stop.”
“But you’re a virgin,” he whispered. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“To me it does.” He pressed his lips to hers.
Arching her body to his, she cried out when he lowered his head to her breasts before sliding down the length of her until his open mouth was pressing against her most heated flesh. Then he began making love to her slowly while she moaned and twisted beneath him. Only when her knees clamped around his head did he quit kissing her and haul her underneath him again.
“Oh, God,” he said, looking into her eyes. “You’re beautiful.”
She locked her arms around his neck. When he drove into her, her cry was filled with both rapture and pain. He whispered passionate endearments. After a while he slowly sank deeper. Then he began rocking harder and faster in a dreamlike, frictionless rhythm that was as old as time.
A rogue wave exploded on the beach below the white mansion, foam and spray shattering against the sand and racing up the beach to the bluff.
She felt carried away on a similar dark tide. The journey was like that great wave, swelling and swelling and then bursting into thousands of geysers before dying. And afterward, when she lay spent in a sated stupor of delirium and ecstasy, with his warm perspiring body sprawled heavily across hers, she clung weakly to his waist, tracing her trembling fingertips through his damp hair, never wanting him to let her go, never wanting the wondrous feelings she had for him to end.
When he recovered, he lifted her into his arms and carried her into his bedroom.
They did it in his marble shower because he had been fantasizing, ever since he’d met her there. This time he used a condom. With the warm water streaming down upon them, he braced her against the wall, entered her and then commanded her to wrap her legs tightly around him. His hands cupped her buttocks as he forcefully took her a second time.
“This is what I wanted the first instant I saw you,” he growled.
Wit
hout a single reservation she urged him deeper. “Me, too.”
Chandra felt as if she was in the middle of a swirling kaleidoscope of sunlight and brilliant hot colors as once again she was filled with him and felt the same building joy. And when it was over she was filled, as well, with the same unbearable and utterly illogical knowledge that tonight was not the first night they had made love.
But how could that be when she’d been a virgin?
Exhausted, they slept, their bodies intimately tangled beneath the sheets. In the middle of the night, he teased her awake by stroking her earlobe with his tongue, by trailing more kisses from her delicately arched feet up the curve of her thighs. But this time his lovemaking was softer and slower, and the pleasure she found in him indescribably spiritual. And again, he remembered to protect her.
When she awoke, a rosy light was sifting through his windows. How strange she felt, wrapped in his arms. She didn’t care if she’d forgotten her life, as long as she’d found him. She felt so gloriously alive. Even though she was shamelessly naked beside him, she was not at all embarrassed.
She traced the gold design of his heavy cotton bedspread with a fingertip. Then she turned on her side and savored his nearness. His dark face seemed relaxed, almost content. With a sigh she melted against the heat of his long body.
She remembered how he had looked last night, with his silver eyes on fire for her, with his mouth heavy with sensuality. Slowly the bizarre realities of their situation returned. Her knowledge of him ran too deeply for them to have been strangers. And yet he swore he hadn’t known her before.
He had posted armed bodyguards outside his house. He had talked cryptically about her to a man whose familiar voice terrified her.
Very carefully, so as not to awaken him, she untangled herself from his arms and legs and got out of bed. The room was shadowy as she glided to his closet and removed his terry robe. She had intended nothing more than to return to her room, but when she stumbled in the darkness, she bumped the corner of his black lacquered desk and saw his half-open briefcase. She stared at it, suddenly too curious to leave.
Her gaze flicked across the room when Lucas stirred. He had not opened his eyes.