David continued to shake his head uncertainly and begin several sentences he never completed.
She felt him slipping away from her and fought back creeping panic.
“What is it, David? Are you still carrying around some weird picture of yourself that your wife’s stupid reaction branded into your mind? Are you afraid I might have the same reaction?”
His mouth thinned to a straight, hard slash. He rocked himself back and forth with his hands on the edge of the dock.
“That’s it, isn’t it, David? That’s why you never let me get a real good look at you in the light.”
She reached out to lay her hand on his cheek and gave a slow shake of her head.
“A waste of time, love. I know perfectly well what your body looks like. I’ve known that right from the day I worked the cramps out of your leg and felt the outline of the scars beneath your slacks. When we made love in the dark, my fingers, my lips painted a very clear picture of every lovable inch of you in my mind. Your wounds might once have looked pretty scary. Perhaps in your mind, they still do. Even if they did, it wouldn’t matter to me. But believe me, David. They don’t anymore.”
To prove it, she proceeded to describe the location and appearance of each of his fading scars. His gaze never wavered from hers as she spoke, but his hand moved down to double-check the fading evidence of his injuries.
“You’ve got to forgive yourself for not being physically perfect. I love you as you are. I’ve only known you as you are. And I could never ask for anything better in a man. Listen to me, David, your body excites me. I want it. I don’t think I can ever get enough of it. Come on, my darling,” she challenged. “Sweep away all those old ghosts. Climb out of the water and show yourself to me in the bright sunlight.”
She was so sure he’d do it. So sure she’d won.
Seconds went by.
A minute? An hour? She couldn’t tell. The longest wait of her life.
“I see.”
The black desperation that had hovered behind her shoulders since she’d begun speaking to David finally rushed over her. Hot moisture stung her eyes.
“You can’t bring yourself to trust me, can you? I’ve long been ready to trust myself to you, David. I’m not sure that’s true anymore. I don’t want a man who can’t see what’s truly important about himself.”
She struggled to her feet and turned from him so he wouldn’t see the tears threatening to overflow.
“Get this through that rock-hard head of yours, my love. It’s not your disability that keeps you from me. It’s your ridiculous belief that your physical weakness—which isn’t all that great now—somehow makes you less of a man.”
She wasn’t sure he was still listening behind her. Maybe he’d swum away. Maybe she was talking to the wind.
She forced herself to speak louder through a constricted throat. “Holding on to that stupid idea is wrecking our chance for happiness. Can’t you see that, David? Can’t you let yourself see that?”
No sound from the water in back of her. She knew it wasn’t medically possible, but it felt as if her heart were shrinking away to nothing inside her.
“All right, Commander. Just remember that you called our breakup. I didn’t. This time I won’t come back.”
David watched Cara’s retreating form. His heart seized up.
What she’d said was true. Suddenly it was all blindingly true.
He’d gone to Colombia with her, not just for the chance to get back into action and prove he might still be good for something. Right from the start his heart had recognized the woman who could make him whole in the most important sense of the word.
He’d trusted his SEAL buddies with his life. Cara Merrill had taught him to trust her with more than his life, with his heart and soul.
With every step she took away from him, the walls she’d knocked down began to close in on him again. He couldn’t make it without her. He knew that better than he’d ever known anything.
Damn the idiotic pride that had driven away the woman he loved. How could he have been so stupid, and so cowardly, not to recognize before now that he’d let the absurd notion that he could be nothing if not a SEAL rule his life for so long?
Terrified that it might be too late, he heaved himself up on the dock and clambered to his feet.
She’d already made it almost to the top of the steps.
“Cara, wait.”
His shout echoed from the mountains, growing fainter and fainter until the sound of it died.
If she didn’t stop, he’d live the rest of days in flat, black loneliness. And he’d have no one to blame for it but himself.
She halted and turned slowly, as if afraid of what she might see when she looked back his way. As she took each downward step, he steeled himself for her first good look at him up close.
She set her foot on the dock. His pulse set up an anxious pounding in his ears. Rationally he knew that the reaction no longer made sense, still, he couldn’t help but hold his breath. He needed her desperately, but the slightest sign of repugnance on her face would instantly kill off all emotion for good.
Her hesitant smile grew into a grin as her watery gaze raked his naked body from head to foot and back again. He expected that very personal inspection to linger on his mangled leg. Instead, the intimate scrutiny came to a halt at his middle. And brought about his perfectly obvious reaction to her.
She halted a whisper away from him. He could plainly see that her misty blue eyes shone with nothing but love and desire. All for him. Only for him.
Reeling from the toe-turning impact of that astounding discovery, he reached out and pulled her to him. His mouth met hers, his tongue delving in to meet hers in an ecstatic sensuous dance. Between bursts of soft laughter and gasps of pleasure, a chorus of I love yous tumbled from their lips.
She glanced down at his manhood standing stiffly at attention between them.
“Since you’re evidently so pleased that I came back, I guess I’ll have to demonstrate exactly how I react to the sight of you naked.” The soft huskiness of her voice told him her thoughts were traveling down the same engrossing road as his. “Doesn’t seem fair that you should be standing there as bare as a newborn babe, while I’m burdened with all these clothes on a hot summer day.”
That got hotter by the second as she rectified the unequal clothing situation.
Stepping back to him, she laid her hands flat on his torso just above his navel and snaked her hands sinuously up his chest to circle them around his neck.
Quickly and happily he ran up the white flag to that loving and overwhelming assault.
Together they fell to the smooth warm wood of the dock and loved each other as if they’d spent a lifetime apart and couldn’t bear to wait another second to reunite their bodies.
Their intimate sharing ended in a ruffle of chuckles and soft laughter at the frantic hurry of their lovemaking.
David looked at the most beautiful woman in the world, who lay beneath him, and shook his head.
“I’ve been such a damn fool.”
“Yes, you have been,” she readily agreed.
He laughed again. He’d done more laughing in the relatively short time he’d spent with her than in the past couple of years.
He cut off the laughter. Time for that later. He had work to do. The most important work of his life.
“When I thought I’d never see you again, Cara, I felt so...so...” He shook his head helplessly, unable to come up with the word. “You can’t imagine.”
“Yes, I can, David. It was the same for me.”
“I need you, love. Not for anything to do with taking care of me medically. I need you in my life. I need you to fill my days. To fill my nights.” His voice cracked. “I need you so much it should terrify me. It doesn’t. It feels exactly right.”
“The way I need you doesn’t scare me a bit, either, David. It comes with loving you.”
His hands tenderly cradled the face that would continue to haunt
his dreams for as long as he lived.
“Marry me, Cara. You’ve got to marry me.” If she didn’t, nothing else he ever did would mean a damn thing.
Before she even spoke, he could read her answer in the flash of elation sparking into her eyes. It felt to him as if her whole trembling body smiled up at him, setting him alight with joy right down to the soles of his bare feet.
“Of course I’ll marry you, my dearest love. But you’d better be real sure that’s what you want. You know how I am with promises. I can’t seem to let go of them. I warn you here and now that I’ll hold tight to our wedding vows forever.”
“I’m banking on that, my darling. And I vow here and now that I’ll never let you go. And I’ll never stop loving you. Never.”
Cara smiled. “Never sounds just about right.”
She tightened her arms around him and gave him her lips. In the brilliant sunlight, their loving bodies sealed the vows of their hearts and souls.
The first book in the exciting new
Fortune’s Children series is
HIRED HUSBAND
by New York Times bestselling writer
Rebecca Brandewyne
Beginning in July 1996
Only from Silhouette Books
Here’s an exciting sneak preview....
Minneapolis, Minnesota
As Caroline Fortune wheeled her dark blue Volvo into the underground parking lot of the towering, glass-and-steel structure that housed the global headquarters of Fortune Cosmetics, she glanced anxiously at her gold Piaget wristwatch. An accident on the snowy freeway had caused rush-hour traffic to be a nightmare this morning. As a result, she was running late for her 9:00 a.m. meeting—and if there was one thing her grandmother, Kate Winfield Fortune, simply couldn’t abide, it was slack, unprofessional behavior on the job. And lateness was the sign of a sloppy, disorganized schedule.
Involuntarily, Caroline shuddered at the thought of her grandmother’s infamous wrath being unleashed upon her. The stern rebuke would be precise, apropos, scathing and delivered with coolly raised, condemnatory eyebrows and in icy tones of haughty grandeur that had in the past reduced many an executive—even the male ones—at Fortune Cosmetics not only to obsequious apologies, but even to tears. Caroline had seen it happen on more than one occasion, although, much to her gratitude and relief, she herself was seldom a target of her grandmother’s anger. And she wouldn’t be this morning, either, not if she could help it. That would be a disastrous way to start out the new year.
Grabbing her Louis Vuitton totebag and her black leather portfolio from the front passenger seat, Caroline stepped gracefully from the Volvo and slammed the door. The heels of her Maud Frizon pumps clicked briskly on the concrete floor as she hurried toward the bank of elevators that would take her up into the skyscraper owned by her family. As the elevator doors slid open, she rushed down the long, plushly carpeted corridors of one of the hushed upper floors toward the conference room.
By now Caroline had her portfolio open and was leafing through it as she hastened along, reviewing her notes she had prepared for her presentation. So she didn’t see Dr. Nicolai Valkov until she literally ran right into him. Like her, he had his head bent over his own portfolio, not watching where he was going. As the two of them collided, both their portfolios and the papers inside went flying. At the unexpected impact, Caroline lost her balance, stumbled, and would have fallen had not Nick’s strong, sure hands abruptly shot out, grabbing hold of her and pulling her to him to steady her. She gasped, startled and stricken, as she came up hard against his broad chest, lean hips and corded thighs, her face just inches from his own—as though they were lovers about to kiss.
Caroline had never been so close to Nick Valkov before, and, in that instant, she was acutely aware of him—not just as a fellow employee of Fortune Cosmetics but also as a man. Of how tall and ruggedly handsome he was, dressed in an elegant, pin-striped black suit cut in the European fashion, a crisp white shirt, a foulard tie and a pair of Cole Haan loafers. Of how dark his thick, glossy hair and his deep-set eyes framed by raven-wing brows were—so dark that they were almost black, despite the bright, fluorescent lights that blazed overhead. Of the whiteness of his straight teeth against his bronzed skin as a brazen, mocking grin slowly curved his wide, sensual mouth.
“Actually, I was hoping for a sweet roll this morning—but I daresay you would prove even tastier, Ms. Fortune,” Nick drawled impertinently, his low, silky voice tinged with a faint accent born of the fact that Russian, not English, was his native language.
At his words, Caroline flushed painfully, embarrassed and annoyed. If there was one person she always attempted to avoid at Fortune Cosmetics, it was Nick Valkov. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, he had emigrated to the United States, where her grandmother had hired him to direct the company’s research and development department. Since that time, Nick had constantly demonstrated marked, traditional, Old World tendencies that had led Caroline to believe he not only had no use for equal rights but also would actually have been more than happy to turn back the clock several centuries where females were concerned. She thought his remark was typical of his attitude toward women: insolent, arrogant and domineering. Really, the man was simply insufferable!
Caroline couldn’t imagine what had ever prompted her grandmother to hire him—and at a highly generous salary, too—except that Nick Valkov was considered one of the foremost chemists anywhere on the planet. Deep down inside Caroline knew that no matter how he behaved, Fortune Cosmetics was extremely lucky to have him. Still, that didn’t give him the right to manhandle and insult her!
“I assure you that you would find me more bitter than a cup of the strongest black coffee, Dr. Valkov,” she insisted, attempting without success to free her trembling body from his steely grip, while he continued to hold her so near that she could feel his heart beating steadily in his chest—and knew he must be equally able to feel the erratic hammering of her own.
“Oh, I’m willing to wager there’s more sugar and cream to you than you let on, Ms. Fortune.” To her utter mortification and outrage, she felt one of Nick’s hands slide insidiously up her back and nape to her luxuriant mass of sable hair, done up in a stylish French twist.
“You know so much about fashion,” he murmured, eyeing her assessingly, pointedly ignoring her indignation and efforts to escape from him. “So why do you always wear your hair like this ... so tightly wrapped and severe? I’ve never seen it down. Still, that’s the way it needs to be worn, you know...soft, loose, tangled about your face. As it is, your hair fairly cries out for a man to take the pins from it, so he can see how long it is. Does it fall past your shoulders?” He quirked one eyebrow inquisitively, a mocking half smile still twisting his lips, letting her know he was enjoying her obvious discomfiture. “You aren’t going to tell me, are you? What a pity. Because my guess is that it does—and I’d like to know if I’m right. And these glasses.” He indicated the large, square, tortoiseshell frames perched on her slender, classic nose. “I think you use them to hide behind more than you do to see. I’ll bet you don’t actually even need them at all.”
Caroline felt the blush that had yet to leave her cheeks deepen, its heat seeming to spread throughout her entire quivering body. Damn the man! Why must he be so infuriatingly perceptive?
Because everything that Nick suspected was true.
To read more, don’t miss
HIRED HUSBAND
by Rebecca Brandewyne,
Book One in the new
FORTUNE’S CHILDREN series,
beginning this month and available only from
Silhouette Books!
ISBN : 978-1-4592-7947-6
UNBROKEN VOWS
Copyright © 1996 by Frances Hardter
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography,
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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents
He didn’t want to feel anything for her.
Letter to Reader
Books by Frances Williams
About the Author
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
HIRED HUSBAND
Copyright
Unbroken Vows Page 25