He had wanted to follow, certain she was lying to him, not understanding why, but most of all, not understanding the tears that threatened to spill across her cheeks, the tightly reined-in pain he felt was about to pour out of her. What had Pablo done? What had he said to make her shake so? To make her look at him as if all hope were gone?
Before, he would have just demanded that she tell him; he would have threatened, hectored, sent bolts of lightning zigzagging down the ravine, but this evening, on this night of revelations, having touched her thoughts, having felt her mind touch his, something in her eyes, in her pallor, had kept him from even voicing a question.
Pablo would never have dared to come to this mountain if Melanie hadn’t been there, if she hadn’t been alone. He knew better. Why today? And why did it make him feel nervous, uncertain? His uncle was of no more significance than a fly in a windstorm. Less, perhaps. He could swat him away easily. The man was so trapped in the guilt he so thoroughly deserved that nothing Teo could do or say would ever make him whole again.
But Pablo had said something. Teo had felt the measure of danger in the older man’s twisted thoughts.
The fire caught and he stared at the flames, mesmerized by the memories of the past, the impossibilities of the future.
Everyone in Loco Suerte was aware that Pablo had helped Teo’s father to persuade him to forswear the mountain’s safety for a day, to take him into town, to the movies in the city, he’d said. And everyone knew that he’d handed Teo instead, to the men from the PRI.
No one but Teo and Pablo knew how he had screamed his uncle’s name when the white-coated men had restrained him, chaining him for all intents and purposes, and then pumped him so full of drugs that his mind was totally stripped and his thoughts had felt on fire, his control shattered by their devices and their greed.
Strangely, the part that always seemed to bother Teo the most was that he and his uncle had never seen the movie. If only the man had taken him to the show, let him watch in innocent oblivion, and then given him away, perhaps he wouldn’t feel so bitter. As it was, even the smallest of joys, the most mundane of promises, had been broken.
And who gave a damn about the tears in Pablo’s eyes after the men who talked with him had walked up to his nephew and jabbed a hypodermic into his arm? Pablo had left him to them, hadn’t he? Wasn’t that what he had to remember now?
His beloved uncle, Pablo. No better than his father, Ernesto. No worse than his mother. Pablo, his last living relative. One of the damned.
The important thing to remember tonight was that Melanie had mentally touched him twice. He still reeled from that experience. Craved even more. If she opened to him again, he vowed, he would proceed slowly, softly, not swamp her like some crazed fool eager for something he’d hadn’t understood or recognized.
The flames heated his face and his hands and he remembered how Melanie had buried her face in Chris’s sunlit hair. If Chris weren’t long asleep now, he would do the same. He understood that need for some kind of affirmation, some kind of proof that life was a good thing.
Melanie…? he quested, probed gently, but received no mental answer. He knew she was in the kitchen, could feel her leaning against the glass doors looking out at the star-studded night. He could sense an indecision in her, a question, but beyond that couldn’t break through her tower-strong walls.
As if sensing he was trying to reach her, he felt her move from the kitchen, tensed as she pushed open the door to the living room. He slowly turned to look at her. He felt his breath catch in his chest. She was so incredibly lovely.
She crossed a good half of his living room before faltering, then stopping, almost as if something she read in his face kept her from coming any closer.
Suddenly he didn’t want things to be the way they had been. He didn’t want to steal into her room in the middle of the night, like some thief taking what he could, then slipping away, disappearing. He wanted all of her, wanted her to come to him. Needed her to seek his company. But, of all things, he couldn’t ask this. It was not something one could ask.
She stood perfectly still, apparently waiting for him to say something. Anything.
“What did Pablo say to you?” he asked again, gently this time. “I can tell he frightened you. What did he want?”
She flushed bright with color for a second, then paled alarmingly. Her pallor was such that he pushed to his feet, ready to go to her.
She opened her mouth, perhaps to tell him what Pablo had said, then a terrible sorrow washed over her face and she shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said. He thought he’d seen misery before, but now suspected he’d only caught reflections of it. Her face was a study in confusion and pain.
“You can’t…what?” He almost didn’t want to hear her answer. His heart began pounding too painfully in his chest. He felt like he couldn’t breathe. Don’t say it, he wanted to command. Don’t tell me you can’t stay.
“Teo…?” she said, making his name a question, as many times in the night she’d made of it a benediction. Another of the chains around his heart snapped loose, making him feel off-balance, free but frightened of the freedom.
When he didn’t say anything, only waited to hear what she wanted, she raised a hand to her forehead, touched it lightly, then smiled crookedly. A tear escaped from her eye and snaked down her cheek. She didn’t try to brush it away.
“I…I…could we sit in front of the fire for a while?”
“Of course,” he said. He almost marveled at how cool his voice sounded, how calm. He felt anything but. Melanie…
She wiped the tear from her face and moved closer.
“I can draw a sofa over,” he said, and half wondered at himself for offering. And, for the first time since she’d come to his home, come into his life, he realized that he’d always done, not asked. Was it because there was such a fine line between asking and pleading, pleading and begging?
“No,” she said, almost as if answering his internal question. Would that she could open up to him, really understand his thoughts.
But all she said was “Let’s sit on the floor, on the rug.”
He felt his breath catch as he realized the implications of her earlier question, the simple answer. Let’s…we…
He waited until she had settled on the thick sheepskin rug in front of the huge stone hearth before sitting down himself. He sat some three feet from her, wanting to be closer, wanting to ripple the rug and draw her to him automatically.
“I’m afraid,” she said finally.
No power on heaven or earth could have kept him from reaching across that three-foot breach to draw her close to him, to wrap her in his arms, to hold her slender form against his body.
“Shh. I’m here,” he said. The words were the same she’d spoken to him that day in the station plaza when Demo had been hurt and he had mended the bones.
A sob broke from her and she pressed her face against his chest.
“Querida, everything’s fine. You’re here. I’m here. Chris is safe.” His assurance sounded off kilter even to himself. It sounded like a challenge to fate…come and get us, we’re waiting.
He could understand why her hands convulsed around his arms, why her face pressed even tighter against his chest. But he couldn’t understand why she fought lowering her guard. He could feel the struggle, almost a war raging inside her.
“Melanie…” he said, then trailed off, hoping she would understand from his voice, his embrace what he wanted her to see without words.
She raised her head, tears drenching her emerald eyes, her lips taut with some inner fight.
“Teo…if I…”
“If you…?
“Make love to me,” she said abruptly, raising a shaking hand to his face. “Real love. All night. A forever night. Please. And when it’s over, when we’re drifting back from wherever it is we go…stay with me tonight. Please.”
For a moment he truly believed he was asleep and was dreaming. And then he understood the
most profound truth of all, that all he’d ever wanted, all he’d ever dreamed of, was hearing those words from this woman. And he understood suddenly that dreams did have a place in his life again, that the future was only what a person made of it, not what destiny dictated. And the dreams of the future could come true.
“Melanie,” he murmured before lowering his lips to hers. Even as he tasted her slowly, loving the way she molded to him, he felt a flare of raw joy infusing his veins. She had come to him, had asked him for company, for loving. She wanted him, had begged him for a night, a forever night.
She’d seen inside him and knew what he was, knew what he wanted in his heart of hearts.
Let me in, too, he called to her, pleaded with her, but though he felt her waver in her control, the block remained in her mind. He felt almost desperate to understand that she was a different woman than he’d thought her all along, and yet was afraid of what she would find, afraid of what he would.
With her hands on his face, exploring the planes of his features, tracing his eyelids, the curve of his lips, he realized that some part of him, the biggest part, perhaps, had never expected this moment to really happen. Wanting something to come to pass and having it do so were two entirely different things. From the first moment he’d seen her, he had wanted her to come to him, not to have to beg her to do so.
And now she had. Could that reality be projected onto other dreams, as well? He’d demanded she stay for six months. Was it possible that she would ask to stay longer?
His heart began beating in heavy, almost painful thuds. He, who had long since buried the dream of home and family, had been granted a taste of what family could mean. If it were to disappear now, the pain of it would surely crush him. Was his want and need of her enough to hold her to his side? Dear God, he prayed, let it be so.
She’d seen a glimpse of his thoughts, his heart. Did he dare tell her what she’d seen, what she could see? And then he realized he had never answered her with words, never responded verbally to the question that seemed to have been torn from her very soul.
“Querida…I’ll stay with you. Of course, I’ll stay,” he murmured against her arching throat.
He didn’t understand her quickly swallowed sob, didn’t know why her hands bunched in his hair for a moment as if weathering a severe storm…or as if afraid to let him go.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Teo’s admission that he’d stay with her through this one last-a-lifetime night almost broke Melanie’s heart. She longed to open her mind to him, to let him see how much this concession meant to her, how much she wanted to stay with him for far more than one night, how much she wanted to be with him morning, noon, summer and winter, sharing all of the long dark nights, the strangely beautiful mountain days.
She felt like a fraud for not telling him what Pablo had said, for not being honest with him now that she was brave enough to ask him to stay with her tonight because tomorrow she would be gone.
But there was nothing the least fraudulent about how she wanted him tonight. This would be their last time, the union that would have to put paid to a lifetime of lonely nights, nights she knew would be spent remembering their brief time together, dreams spent longing for that mental voice, that physical touch. Nights and long, long days spent knowing that she had to leave the one man on earth whom she might have been able to truly love. Did love.
Tears welled anew at the realization, the understanding that she could no longer hide from the truth. She loved Teo Sandoval. Wanted him, needed him. Loved him.
If she told him she was leaving, he would demand the reason why, and if she told him, he would vehemently deny the conclusions she and Pablo had drawn. He would, in all likelihood, lash his incredible power at the skies, misunderstand that all she was truly thinking of was his safety. Those two momentary brushes with his mind had told her far more than anything he ever could have told her verbally.
Her initial impression of him, before she’d closed her mind to him that first afternoon, had been absolutely correct. For Teo Sandoval, alone was an entirely different concept than for others. His loneliness was so acute, so ingrained, that it really was an altogether different emotion than what others might feel. And it was born of his difference from other people.
Knowing this, and understanding how he must now be feeling at having encountered two others with elements of his own differences, his own gifts, she knew how thoroughly he would fight to keep them at his side. She knew that feeling well. She had never been so happy as the moment when she realized that her genes had passed along to Chris the ability to share his thoughts. And she knew that Teo must have felt the same way. Scared, tingly, absolutely joyous at finding another.
For her it had been like waking up one morning after a lifetime of being the only sighted person in a blind colony and discovering another sighted person had drifted into her life. And she had never had the traumas, the agonies that Teo had suffered. How much greater his awe, his joy must be.
She was prepared to take that away from him? Yes, to save his life. Better he be alone again, without them, than to not be there at all.
God, how she wanted to tell him the truth. The reasons for her leaving. Wanted to tell him now, so he would believe the tears in her eyes, the trembling of her hands, and see the pain this was causing her. Without them, without the tears, the pain, would he believe that someone could care enough about him to want to keep him safe? Trust was a learned behavior, she thought, it didn’t come automatically.
She, of all people, knew that so well. Just as she was beginning to know him. To love him.
It was almost a relief to finally admit she had fallen in love with Teo Sandoval. But, with this admission, she also knew, instinctively, that she couldn’t tell him, couldn’t even let him begin to guess her love, because if he did, he would never let her go, would never let her save him.
With his lips upon her throat, his hands roaming her curves, molding her breasts to his broad palms, it didn’t seem to matter that she’d only realized this love for him when she knew she had to leave him. It had taken understanding that she’d brought him danger, that she was in danger of losing him, to make her realize the truth. Leaving him now, knowing how she felt about him, understanding him better than anyone else ever could or would, was the hardest thing she’d ever have to do in her life.
And it was so difficult to keep her mental guards in place. Like her body melted beneath his hands, his tongue, she could feel that carefully erected mental barrier beginning to slip, starting to erode. She struggled to keep it in place, as she’d been fighting all afternoon, all evening. If only she knew how to open without totally opening. If she could only feel him, share only those thoughts that related to the moment, to him, to this final night together. But she couldn’t do that without revealing to him that the PRI men were nearby, that she was leaving him forever, leaving…to save him.
But would she want to live without him?
She had no choice. She had Chris to think about. And Teo. Her wants couldn’t be allowed to matter now. Not with the two people she loved more than anything else in jeopardy. She knew, without having to lower her guard, that the PRI would stop at nothing to get Chris, including killing Teo, killing her. And she knew their only chance of survival—all their survival—was to get as far away from this mountain as was possible in the early morning hours.
But nothing, no amount of danger, no amount of threat from the PRI, was going to steal this night, this moment, this farewell from her.
His hands parted her blouse, exposed her breasts to his careful attention. Before, he’d used his talents to strip them both, to peel away the barriers of clothing in a tingling whisper of electricity. But, as if wanting to travel this particular journey as slowly as possible, and as enticingly, tonight he slowly undressed her by purely manual efforts.
Though there hadn’t been a time they had spent together that hadn’t been glorious, incredibly passionate and achingly beautiful, this slow, deliberate seduction
surpassed them all, exceeded every dream she might have had about him, of being with him. Or was she feeling this way because for the first time she knew she loved him, that she wanted to love him for all time?
But underlying everything, perhaps accentuating all touches, all nuances, was the knowledge that this would have to be the last time, the final chapter in their bizarre and unique relationship. Because she knew the PRI wouldn’t give up on Chris. Not until he was fully grown, and perhaps not even then—they had tried to use Teo when he was nineteen, hadn’t they?—would they back away from Chris. And she didn’t dare try to rely on Teo’s protection, when they would kill him to get to Chris.
No, she daren’t try to ever contact Teo Sandoval again. If she did, his life would again be in peril, his solitude in jeopardy. This final realization seared her and made her clutch him to her almost angrily, as if needing to deny the truth of it.
This would be the last time. The words, the understanding of them, chased around in her mind, making her desperate to lose herself in his loving, to forget tomorrow in his touch tonight. But, oh, how she ached for a tomorrow with him, a future, just a hope of promise, all the while knowing it could never be.
Never before had he allowed her to undress him, and she found herself almost mesmerized by the way his buttons wove through his flannel shirt, the way the zipper hissed as she pulled it down, freeing him. And never before had he allowed her to take such time, such exquisite pains to taste him, to feel him, to let him know her teasing fingers, her lips.
When she heard him groan aloud, the sound seeming to come from somewhere deep inside him, she tore his shirt from his arms, pulled his pants free of his legs and tossed the articles away from their bed on the sheepskin. She then pushed him back onto the rug, bending over him, aching for him, aching more for herself.
She wasn’t worried that Chris would interrupt them; she knew Teo’s mind was linked with his, if distantly. He would know if Chris woke, would know if Chris was tipping his little bed, padding out of the bedroom. Just as she would know if she dared let her guard drop.
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