She waved her hands in the air. The silence behind her was so intense that for all she knew she was talking to the cabinet. She said to it, conversationally, ‘I make myself crazy. I can’t-imagine why anyone would want to be around me.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he sighed. The chair scraped across the floor as he rose to his feet.
She whirled around at the sound and stared at his harsh, downbent expression, and her own was blanched with terror and pleading. Her whisper came out strangled, ‘The first time I ever-well, you know—I couldn’t help thinking that it was some huge, awful mistake. I was hopeless at it, I didn’t get the point, I just felt—weighed down and thought that if this is what it takes to propagate the human race it’s a wonder our species didn’t die out ages ago… .’
His head had lifted.,His gaze fixed on her as she rambled almost into incoherence. Then she had a thought for how utterly ridiculous she sounded and stumbled to a halt, and her already gibbering brain went into a deep freeze as she watched a dark colour wash over his hard cheekbones, and his grey eyes take fire.
‘Yvonne?’ Her name, on his lips, was a question.
She said shudderingly, ‘Oh, help.’
One fierce stride took him to the edge of the counter. He was opening up his arms, and she shot into their welcome like an arrow to the gold.
The impact of chest upon chest could have been a little easier. She wasn’t sure whether he staggered, or she had, or maybe the earth had moved just a little…
He crushed her to him and buried his face into her chestnut hair. No, the earth hasn’t moved, you idiot, she told herself. She was moving, everywhere, in violent, involuntary, teeth-chattering shivers. She felt stricken with pneumonia, racked with chills, raging with fever, and was dead certain she would sustain structural damage.
She felt the deep, hard breath he dragged into his lungs,and then he was quiet, his body held in perfect control. He brought up one hand to cup the back of her head, under the fall her hair, and he pressed her face into the side of his neck.
‘Shh,’ he whispered, soothing her shivering back long calm strokes of his other hand. ‘Slow down, baby. Quiet down.’
She groaned, appalled, overcome, reduced. ‘I c-can’t stop—I can’t h-help it—’
‘It’s all right,’ he murmured. He spread his long legs apart and rocked her a little. ‘You’re here now. It’s OK.’
Was it‘? Was it OK? Her hands were clenched in the shirt material that covered the small of his back as she considered. It didn’t feel OK to her. It felt so powerful and mind-destroying that she thought she might break apart into tiny pieces flinging outwards from a centrifugal force.
‘Maybe this isn’t a good idea,’ she whispered into his neck, burrowing into him like a small animal desperate for cover. ‘I’m not exactly known for them. I should have come earlier or not at all. I don’t know why I waited so long; I’m always fighting—’
His hard, large torso moved, the tight strength of his hands on her felt as though he would break through her bones. ‘Do you regret it already?’ he gritted harshly.
‘I don’t know!’ she cried with the force of all the confusion inside her.
The hand cupping the delicate curve of her skull twisted into her hair, and he yanked her head back to glare into her wide eyes. He growled, ‘You came because you wanted to. You’re here because you want to be here. Don’t you dare try to tell yourself anything different.’
‘Well, yes and no,’ she said weakly. She wasn’t at all sure she should be saying such things to him. It was too graceless, too exposing, and yet the words flooded from her mouth ungovernably; they were an explanation and a barrier to the consequences of her own actions, the consequences she didn’t want to think about. ‘I didn’t want to want it. That’s the point. It’s a worry and a complication.’
‘A—worry and a complication,’ he echoed queerly, his grey eyes blackened with such a severe onslaught of internal fury that she flinched in miserable reaction and half expected him to strike at her. Then, amazingly, he hunched his shoulders and hugged her to him with an eloquence of expression so outside the range of her expectations that she shuddered anew and moaned, a short, tiny betrayal of vulnerability. She heard herself and was shocked, and clamped her throat muscles into abrupt silence.
‘Dear lord,’ he was saying, savagely, absently to himself. ‘I don’t think I’ve actually hated anyone before. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone the way I want to hurt the man who did this to you. A worry and a complication; my God, you have absolutely no idea why you came here tonight, do you? You don’t even know what you’ve been fighting. No wonder it took you so long, no wonder you’re in such a state. I thought you were teasing me. I’ve wanted to strangle you countless times this last week, and ended up taking it out on everyone else instead, because I was afraid that if I blew up at you I really wouldn’t be able to remember when to stop.’
‘I felt as if I couldn’t seem to do anything right,’ she whispered. One corner of her brain said, Stop confessing so much, stupid, but still she couldn’t help herself. Still the need for reassurance came shining out of her words. Her pride had got her into so much trouble that she’d left it at the door. ‘The death scene; today with Richard. I’ve tried so hard to get it right, and I don’t know what else to do.’
His sigh was a heavy reply, gusting through the feathery hairs at her temple. ‘Then I couldn’t have made a bigger mess of things had I tried,’ he said in grim self-disgust. ‘Yvonne, don’t argue for once, don’t fight what I tell you, just listen to me. Your performance has been exemplary. You’ve gone from giving nothing to giving more and more every time you get in front of the camera. You’re giving so much, it humbles me. For the first time in my career I don’t quite know what to do with it all. I’ve misplaced my objectivity; I’m straining at the edge of a creative crisis. I nearly killed Richard today for what he was doing to you because I misplaced Hannah and her husband, and I forgot that the real man would never be capable of doing to you what Hannah’s husband did to her. I don’t know how I’m going to look him in the face tomorrow.’
Her mind shot back to what: the actor had whispered to her in the barn, and it was the one thing she couldn’t bring herself to confess to him, the one thing she suspected he wouldn’t be able to hear.
‘Richard,’ she said instead, darkly and with a covert wisdom, ‘laughed at me. He told me war stories of his previous films which far outweighed your loss of temper, and then went whistling off to his supper without a care in the world. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste any more time agonising over his finer sensibilities; the man just doesn’t have any.’
She held her breath, and waited, and nearly sagged with relief at her success when his taut posture relaxed, the powerful muscles shifting fluidly against her torso, and he emitted a dry ghost of a laugh.
‘Speaking of suppers,’ he murmured, his touch moving to the shell curve of her ear to finger it with a delicacy that made her shudder, ‘you should eat something.’
He could think of food at a time like this? She gritted her teeth and growled, ‘I’m not hungry.’
He didn’t move. Why did she feel as if a thousand-watt jolt of electricity had just coursed through his body?
‘No,’ he breathed in a sultry croon, ‘but you will be.’
She pulled back her head, searched the heated glitter in his eyes, and snapped in warning, ‘Don’t try to shove anything down my throat. I’ll eat when I want to, and not a moment before.’
She must have read the message wrong; she must have misunderstood, for he smiled in slow, ferocious anticipation, and said simply, ‘OK. Iet’s go to bed instead.’
She froze, not quite able to accept the evidence of her own ears, and stared at him, rabbit-like, caught in the twin glare of approaching headlights.‘
He let her go and strolled languidly over to the door, and locked it. His movements were shattering, deliberate, she was overcome with anxiety and disappointment. Whatever
she had expected to happen in coming here tonight, this definitely wasn’t any part of it. If anything, from Adam, she had expected more-finesse.
He walked back over to her, and the fulminating expression on her angular face was almost enough to make him smile. He put an arm around her slim shoulders and said quietly, ‘Come on, then.’
Well. She had made her choice, hadn’t she? She would just have to put up with it. If nothing else came out of it, at least tomorrow she wouldn’t be so eaten up with the obsession that had dogged her footsteps for what felt like an eternity now. Still, it was a worry and a complication. .
She turned, pliant as a doll, and walked with him down the short hall to the darkened bedroom.
Adam led her straight to the bed without bothering to turn on the light. The only illumination was diffuse, silvery, the far-away weakened overspill from the light still shining in the kitchenette. She turned her huge, overwrought eyes to his shadowy figure. She heard everything—the whispery brush of his jeans as he walked, the slight, almost negligible friction of their shoes on the carpet.
Now what? She took the bottom edge of her T-shirt in shaking hands and would have lifted it over her head, but he forestalled her. ‘Don’t undress,’ he murmured. ‘Just lie down on the bed with me.’
What was this? He kicked off his shoes; she followed suit. Then he lay down on the bed, on his back and stretching out his long length with a weary sigh, and his head turned on the pillow towards her. She stared at the shadowy glimmer of his eyes as he held open his arms.
She was too weak to remain upright. She went down to him like wax. She was too rigid to relax. She tried to force her frozen muscles into compliance and broke into another involuntary rash of trembling.
He guided her untidy head to rest on his shoulder. She curved her body to fit to the length of his. She struggled to find something to say, found nothing but a roaring emptiness inside her head, and started to breathe unevenly.
He rested the side of his cheek against her forehead, his arms wrapped firmly and without urgency around her quaking body, one hand splayed along the long line of the side of her neck. His little finger rested on her collarbone, the forefinger touching her ear, the thumb rubbing slowly across the soft skin beside her bewildered mouth. He was so big; he could snap her with one careless flick of the wrist.
‘Just relax, baby,’ he murmured peaceably. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’
She lay beside him, her mind in a rabid, compulsive whirl.
Long, silent moments ticked by, and he did nothing to her. He was a tired and overworked man, and by the very stillness of his posture she suspected he had probably gone to sleep.
As first nights went, it was certainly an unusual one. She wondered if she was disappointed really, and thought that probably she was, but the feeling. was overshadowed with a sense of relief. ‘So much for overwhelming passion; so much for her over-active imagination.
His shoulder was a broad, warm, comfortable pillow. She snuggled into it, rubbing her cheek against his fragrant shirt, and listened to the steady, unhurried beat of his heart. Gradually she adjusted to his large presence; gradually her tense, unstable limbs quietened and relaxed.
After a long time, she shifted to get into a more comfortable position, moving with careful stealth for fear of waking him. She fitted herself more snugly around the contours of his body. One of her legs was flush down the side of his, his body heat filtering through the material of his jeans and keeping her comfortably warm. The other leg she bent at the knee and hitched up over him, the length of her inner thigh lying across his hips. Her arm was flung across his wide chest, and she rested her narrow fingers in the hollow of his neck.
He didn’t move at all. He hardly seemed to, be breathing. Why, this had actually evolved into quite a delightful experience, succumbing to the sensuality of sharing his bed, the animal comfort of his body, the soft and gentle permeation of co-existing side by side with him. She was languid, drugged with the evidence of him, suffused with a heaviness that drooped her eyelids.
Maybe she was too heavy, she thought sleepily. Maybe being draped all over him like a wet dishrag was uncomfortable for him. She shifted as if to pull away, and the weight of her thigh rubbed against his crotch.
He groaned and went rigid. ‘Don’t move.’
She froze in surprise. He wasn’t asleep? The trailer was air-conditioned but the skin of his neck underneath her fingers broke into a sweat.
‘I thought I might be too heavy for you,’ she whispered.
‘No,’ he grunted briefly, but he sounded as ‘if he was in agony. ‘You’re perfect, but just don’t wiggle any more, OK?
‘OK,’ she murmured. She loved the feel of his hand lying along her face and tilted her jaw under the broad width of his palm. God, his heat had increased until he felt as if he was burning up.
She had never been held in such a way. She had never been cuddled with such a quality of feeling, his very comportment a statement of intimate recognition, the posture of his body an indication of intense awareness of every line and hollow of her own body, and a depth of knowledge for the weight distribution of her muscles. He was perfectly disposed, perfectly arranged for her physical comfort. It made her feel—cherished.
Her breathing was deep and even, her lips parted slightly. She started to drift.
Then he lifted his hand and stroked her face. His touch was light, gentle, beautiful.
His fingers were shaking.
She was overcome with drowsy astonishment, and turned to kiss them into steadiness. He dragged the callused tips over the lush velvet of her lips, and then with quite exquisite care insinuated his forefinger into her mouth. She murmured a wordless enquiry, her lips parting as naturally as the petals of a flower unfurling, her strengthless head lying back along his arm.
His finger rubbed along the moist interior of her lower lip. The pleasure of it was incredible. It did the strangest things to her, all over her body. The tip of her tongue touched him, delicately, involuntarily. His finger probed deeper, stroked the length of her tongue, back and forth, rubbed along the hard ridges of her teeth.
Her breathing started to become a ragged struggle. She was a boneless mass of sensation, while he had become even more rigid than ever, his arm around her back crushing her against the side of his body, his hard cheekbone digging into her forehead. His pulsebeat had started a jack-hammering in her ear; his Lips were parted in great audible gasps as he moved his finger in her mouth.
She loved it, she really did, but it was making her crazy. She wanted his finger to continue its torturous caress, but she found she wanted his mouth on hers more. She found she wanted his mouth more and more. Instinct made her lips clamp around the length of his finger and she sucked him hard and quick, and then thrust him out of her mouth.
He groaned aloud, and erupted like a spewing volcano.
Suddenly she was flat on her back, and he had heaved over her. He held himself planted on his hands and knees on either side of her body, his heated gaze ravishing the curves and lines of her face. His taut expression was primeval.
Then his head swooped down. Just his head. Just his lips, fastening hotly over hers and slanting open, and his tongue piercing her to the quick, ‘just what she wanted.
Her head raised off the pillow as she kissed him back. Her whole torso curved to meet the fierce demand; she raised herself up on her elbows, hands clenched into the bedspread. She was straining, trying to pierce herself even further, wanting to impale herself on the source of her agony.
He pulled away from her, and she fell back on the pillow and cried, ‘Don’t—’
Don’t go, don’t stop.
His face was anguished. He squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth, and after a moment he was able to look at her; the eye contact was searing. He laid a hand around the curve of her throat, and his ravening gaze shot down the length of her reclining body.
‘Yvonne,’ he whispered hoarsely, fingering the collar of her top, �
�take off your T-shirt.’
‘What?’ She hardly knew what he was saying to her. She raised her hands and tried to entice his body down to hers. Then she raised herself up, and slowly pulled the top over her head.
He clenched his fists into the material of the bedspread on either side of her head, staring down at her. She shook all over, shocked by the erotic savagery in his gaze; he growled deep in his chest, ‘Oh, God, your breasts are so lovely. I’ve waited too long to touch them. Please, may I?’
The savagery and the pleading; the passion and the control; the physical and the verbal; the patience and the desperation. He was fused, undeniable, all things and all men at once, a coalition and an autocrat.
She lay displayed to him in all her finery and foibles, her chestnut hair whirled around her head, the massive eyes hooded, the expression on her face amazed and slumbrous, her lips swollen and beautiful, the curve of her breasts generously rising to precise, upraised peaks.
She would give herself to him, or she would get nothing at all. She ran her tongue around her dry lips, a victim to the fever he had perpetrated, hit by the running lava in her veins, trapped by the escaping passion. ‘Please, Adam,’ she whispered unsteadily. ‘Please take me.’
His eyes flared up to hers, and his handsome face shook with the realisation of what she gave to him. And then came tenderness, a realm of it vast enough to build an entire kingdom on, to flourish in forever.
And then he came down to her, and he took her with such complex and minute dexterity, with such unrelenting, shuddering, rhythmic force, with such consummate stamina and finality, that when he came to the end of his endurance and shot forth her name in an exultant hawk’s cry she arced and flooded with the immensity of completion.
She was entranced. She was entrenched.
They lay together in a naked tangle of trembling limbs, and she had no thought at all for fighting her way out of the bodily snarl.
The Winter King Page 12