“Don’t you?” She curled her arm around his neck, her fingers resting inside the neck of his shirt.
“You’re the one who hasn’t wanted to talk.”
“I know.” She sighed. “I should have talked with you from the beginning, but each day I put it off, it became easier not to face some things. Easier, here, in this cottage with you, to let things go unsaid. But I watched you trying to work through all the knots of what’s happened. I know where you’re headed, Sullivan.”
“You think you know where I’m headed, but I’m telling you right off, sweetheart, you’re headed nowhere away from me.” Panic skittered in his chest. “We’ll talk now. And then we’ll go for a walk down the beach and come back here and go to bed. And then, Maggie, we’ll…” He stopped.
“See?” Her eyes were gently sad, luminous with knowledge as he gripped her chin tightly. “We’ll what, Sullivan? Make love? You weren’t going to say that, were you? Because that’s not what it would be for you, would it?” She stroked his neck with her palm.
He couldn’t answer. He’d let things slide too long. He’d let the wall between them grow too high, too thick, and now they were on opposite sides, and he had to find a way to break through to her or he might never have another chance.
Too late, too late.
The words echoed in his brain as if she’d spoken them to him. “Listen. I’m not letting you go. You can’t. No way.” He sought refuge in reasons. “Callahan or Jackson might come after you. I’ve been worried about that from the day they posted bond.”
“I know you have.” Her voice wrapped him in golden sunshine.
“And Royal might try to contact you, influence your testimony.”
“Royal would never do that.”
“He could try.” Sullivan slid her forward, facing him, her legs parting around him.
He figured she meant that Royal couldn’t affect what she would say, not that he wouldn’t try. It was a sure bet Royal would try if he thought he could get away with it.
Sullivan wasn’t going to give him a chance to get near Maggie, much less try to talk her into anything. “You’re staying put, sweetheart. Right here where you belong.” He’d settled it. That was that. “Whether we call what we do together making love or call it something else doesn’t matter. They’re only words.” He’d settled that issue, too.
A fleeting thought of the time in the hospital when he’d thought names didn’t matter, either, slashed across his mind, but Maggie’s question chased the idea away.
“If they’re only words, why can’t you say them? Shh…” She placed her fingers gently against his lips. “Of course they matter. That’s why you aren’t saying them. You’ve tidied up the loose ends to your satisfaction. I watched you do it, Sullivan. In your mind we have a comfortable arrangement. As long as you see it like that, you can avoid the fear that it will be more than you want to risk.” She leaned her head against his chest, rubbing her cheek across the fabric of his shirt.
“What’s wrong with comfortable?” he said. “It’s worked so far.”
“Because I want more than that,” she whispered against him. “I want your heart and soul, and you won’t give them. I want your trust, unreservedly. I want the kind of no-holds-barred, Maggie, your - instincts - are - as - good - as - mine trust, and you can’t give that. Can you?” she challenged.
He repeated what he’d said so long ago. “Trusting isn’t easy for me, Maggie.” Watching the sandpipers skitter across the sand, he sighed heavily.
“Nothing worthwhile is ever easy,” she murmured.
“Isn’t what we can have good enough for you?”
She slipped her arms under his shirt and around him. “No. Because without trust, we have nothing. A time will come when it will be important for you to believe in me and to trust me. I can’t live waiting for the axe to fall, waiting for you to call court into session and judge me. People make mistakes, Sullivan, and without trust, they can’t get past those mistakes. Without trust, there will always be a wall between us.”
“I would never sit in judgment on you, sweetheart. How could I?” Sullivan shifted, settling her closer, sliding his thumb under her bathing suit and gently over the still-bandaged area of her back.
“Because you’re what you are.” She leaned into his touch, arching her spine, and then dropped her arms and took his hands and placed them at his sides. “What if I confessed to you that I had told Royal we were going to Seth’s Landing? Before we went?”
“But you didn’t,” he said confidently. And felt doubts settle like dust on him. Tried, even now as he thought about Paul Reid’s face, not to ask. Wouldn’t.
“What if I did?” Maggie watched Sullivan’s face carefully, seeing the telltale darkening of his eyes. “You would always have that in the back of your mind—the possibility that I had betrayed you—because that’s how you would interpret it, wouldn’t you?”
“How can I know what I’d think? It never happened.”
“A large stone in the wall between us, and you’d add other stones, day by day, Sullivan.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Of course you would. You couldn’t help it. And without the kind of proof you require, evidence that someone else might have revealed Reid’s meeting with you, you would always hold me responsible for his death.”
“Someone was responsible.” His eyes were thoughtful, the blue deepening.
“I know. And I want that person punished as much as you do.”
“Then I don’t see a problem.” He frowned at her, clearly struggling with the truth of what she’d said and yet not wanting to lose what they had.
“I couldn’t live with your suspicion, the mistrust, your doubt around me all the time. We’d start leaving things unsaid. Haven’t we already fallen into that pattern?”
“We can change.” There was no conviction in his voice.
“Can we, Sullivan? I don’t think so.” Melancholy drifted through her like a hint of autumn. “I think maybe we doom ourselves to repeat the mistakes we’ve made before, over and over.”
“We don’t have to make the same mistakes.”
He tried. She would always grant him that. He’d made an effort.
“But we would. Without utter, absolute trust in the other person. Can’t you see how the poison would spread? It would be a Seth’s Landing of the soul. I won’t accept that. I won’t let us destroy each other that way, the poison seeping into every look, every nuance of tone.”
She leaned forward and kissed him, her lips a benediction and a farewell.
She felt his lips move against hers, and he was kissing her back as he hadn’t kissed her since the morning she’d woken up in his arms and they’d made love, the blending of their bodies more than a coming together of skin and passion.
But that had been an illusion.
She slipped off his lap and stood up. His hair had grown so shaggy during the weeks she’d been in the hospital. She’d been meaning to trim it for him, but she’d put that off, too, wanting to keep things as they were for as long as possible.
The circles under his eyes had disappeared and the long grooves down his cheeks weren’t as prominent. They would never completely disappear, though.
Sullivan Barnett would always have the look of a passionate ascetic, burning and intense.
But those bright eyes would no longer burn for her.
“I’ve learned what loving is, Sullivan. It isn’t easy, it isn’t just the lure of sex. But when love is right, when it’s built on trust, it can survive anything. What you’re offering is a living arrangement with wonderful sex, nothing more. I’m offering something special to you, Tin Man. Myself. Everything I have to give. But I want something back. I want you, your heart and soul. I want it all. Or nothing.”
If she stayed, they would destroy each other.
And so she walked away from him, knowing she had no other choice.
*
Chapter 15
« ^
&nbs
p; As Sullivan watched Maggie’s curves in the satiny-smooth green swimsuit walk away from him, he didn’t believe she would leave him. Not now. She was upset, not fully recuperated. Loss of blood was affecting her thinking. Anesthesia aftereffect.
He went on another list-making spree.
Confident that he could coerce her into staying with him if necessary, he followed her more out of curiosity than any real fear she was planning to leave him.
How could she? She wouldn’t be safe. She had to know, he muttered to himself as he strolled after her back to the bedroom, that there was no way under the sun that he would let her leave while he thought she was in danger.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she was folding the clothes he’d brought from her apartment. Yellow and red shirts, a pink one he’d bought to replace the Seth’s Landing shirt, a green one he’d seen hanging in a store window and bought for her the day they’d driven to Tampa so that he could go through court records.
There was no hesitation in her capable hands as she stacked the shirts into a pile. Maggie at her most determined.
“All right. This charade has gone far enough, Maggie. You know I won’t let you leave.” He was calm. He’d had a lot of practice achieving calm during the days and nights at the hospital. He took the stack from her.
“I’ll buy new clothes, you know,” she said in a cool little voice he’d never heard her use before. Not with him, not with anybody.
His mouth dropped open.
It wasn’t the tough-cookie voice she’d used with him the first time he’d seen her, nor was it the drop - dead - where - you - stand voice she’d thrown at the cop in the parking lot when she’d returned from Seth’s Landing.
Resignation, when he’d grown accustomed to sass.
Oh, he didn’t like this voice. It scared the hell out of him.
Wearing nothing but that sleek green suit and the skin he couldn’t get enough of stroking, she just sat and looked at him, not moving, waiting for him to return her shirts.
Cut high on the legs, her suit—he’d bought it, too—went right up over her hipbones. Her legs were a long sweep of satin skin from those green cutouts down to ankles he could encircle with his thumb and forefinger, with room to spare.
Sitting on his unmade bed in a clutter of reds and greens and yellow, her face bright from the sun he’d made her sit in after coming to the cottage, she looked like a carnation in an English garden.
“Maggie,” he began again in earnest, “you can’t go back to your apartment. For your own good, you need to stay here where I can take care of you until you’re fully recovered. You’re not, you know.” He stacked the shirts on the computer table.
Her chuckle barely made a dent in the grave repose of her face. “For my own good, Sullivan, I have to leave. It’s not good for me to be here with you.” She said it slowly, as if she needed to make sure that she remembered.
He leaned against the table and crossed his arms. “I made it good for you once, sweetheart. I can do that for you again. Anytime. And I will. It would be my pleasure.” He looked at her steadily, let her see the intent in his eyes. “And yours.”
Her face went a delicate shade pinker and she looked more like a sweet flower than ever. He knew she was remembering the things they’d done here, in this room, on this bed. “I know,” she admitted in that cool little voice that slithered through his blood. “You can. Because I want what you can make me feel when you take me with you into the dark and beyond. But not if that’s all there is.”
“That’s why…” He glanced at the bed and back at her.
“Yes, Sullivan,” she said, the teasing he would have normally expected from her absent as she echoed him. “That’s why we haven’t … haven’t, whatever. The whatever would become nothing more than … anonymous sex,” she said finally, her cut going right to his heart and slashing.
“It wasn’t like that before. It wouldn’t be like that now.”
“For me it would be.” Her sunshiny voice was muted. “You know what you mean to me.” He grabbed her arms, and shirts went bouncing off the bed as he kneeled next to her, planting his elbows on either side of her and caging her in his arms.
“Do I?”
Her voice was so quiet that it made the ice in his blood thicken like an ancient glacier, freezing him where he knelt.
“After all we’ve been through, how can you think of walking out? You saved my life, Maggie. I saved yours. We belong together now. Remember?” He was shouting.
“Yes. But do you?” she whispered.
“Of course I do.” He thumped the bed for emphasis. “For your safety, I’m not letting you leave,” he said furiously, thinking of her being vulnerable to Callahan and whoever he got to do his dirty work. “It’s not safe for you out there.”
“There’s safety—and safety.”
He remembered her similar assertion about trust.
“And it’s not safe for me here.” She held her hands palm up. “I’m not staying, Sullivan. There’s no way you can make me.”
“I’ll handcuff you to this damned bed if I have to, before I’ll let you out there where they can get to you.”
“Oh, right. I can see you doing that, Sullivan.” She laughed, her amusement tinged with that resigned melancholy. “You would never hurt me.”
“Don’t try me, Maggie,” he said, as angry with her as he’d ever been in his life.
Cool little Maggie in that strip of shiny fabric thought he wouldn’t lift a finger against her, when he outweighed her by almost eighty pounds and was more than a foot taller than her foolhardy self. Well, Maggie wasn’t going anywhere except right here.
“It wouldn’t matter whether I pushed or not. You wouldn’t hurt me.” Utter security rippled in her voice. “Not under any circumstances. You wouldn’t hurt me unless you had to in order to save my life. You see,” she said softly, “that’s what I mean by trust. I know you, and because I do, I give myself to you in trust that no matter what we do together, here in this room or anywhere else, you will not harm me. I don’t have to think it through and figure it out, run that trust against a checklist of your past behavior, my suspicions. And you can’t give me that kind of trust back. That’s why I have to leave.”
“It’s Royal, isn’t it? This is all about that slick-talking, fancy-dressing cop, right?” he protested. “That’s what this is really about. You’re more loyal to him than you are to me. Even now when he’s indicted, and Callahan and Ryder are going to testify against him, you’re giving him a pass. It’s all about Royal, isn’t it?” he said in cold fury, ice inside and out.
“No. It’s about me and what I need. It’s about you and what you have to figure out about yourself. I told you a long time ago that you’d be better off figuring out what’s going on in your own head and not digging around in mine.”
“I know what I want. You, here, in my bed where I can keep my eye on you.” Echoes from the past ran in dark red streaks through his brain, and he shook his head, driving them away.
She stood up and scooped the shirts up, dropping them into a navy suitcase. Moving past him, the point of her hipbone grazing his cheek as she passed, she went to the bathroom and returned with her arms filled with the basket of lotions and perfumes she’d had him bring from her apartment. All those fragrances had tinged the cottage with her scent, so that he could follow her from room to room and know how recently she’d been there.
She dropped the basket into the suitcase and clamped it shut. “Are you going to drive me back to town, or do I have to walk? I will, you know,” she added softly. “You’ll wake up and I’ll be gone. It’s that simple. I want to go. You have to let me, Sullivan.”
She was right.
Even though there was no way under the sun he’d let her go, he had to.
He was capable in the darkest part of his nature of keeping her exactly where he wanted her. He could have done it. Her confident assumption that he would wake up and she would have escaped wasn’t worth a hill of beans.
She had no idea what he was capable of. What he could do.
He could have kept her captive.
But she made it impossible.
Because she knew he wouldn’t use force against her. Because, damn her wide brown eyes to hell, she trusted him. Even to keep her safe, he couldn’t force her to stay where she didn’t want to be. She was, after all, not an appendage or a possession he could order at will.
She was Maggie, who’d always, her fears to the contrary, known her own mind and heart.
He drove her back to town.
As she unlocked her door, he pushed past her. “Wait a damned minute.”
He wasn’t letting her go into that place until he’d checked it as thoroughly as he could. She watched him, her eyes enormous in her face. The pink bloom in her cheeks had wilted before they’d driven over the bridge and off the island.
When he’d checked every square inch, bolt, lock and picture back, looking for anything, everything, he started over. Hidden microphones, cameras—he didn’t know. But he would give her the benefit of the only skills that she would accept from him right now.
Finally, when there was nothing left to check and she stood mute and determined at her door, waiting for him to leave, he did. He stood there, staring down at the top of her hair, where she’d stuck a plastic comb. He memorized the shape and texture, each curlicue in the plastic.
He stood there looking at the damned silly plastic froufrou and couldn’t leave, after all.
“Well, Maggie, I couldn’t make you stay at the cottage. Let’s see how successful you are at making me leave. I don’t mind if you handcuff me to your bed. I’ll be your guest any time you want me. And you will, Maggie. You’ll want me. And I’ll want you. But you’ll be here and I’ll be at the beach. There’ll be all this wanting between us. Think about how it will be lying in your narrow bed.”
“Oh, Sullivan, don’t. Besides, it’s a double bed.”
“It’s going to feel like a single bed as the nights go on, Maggie. Will you dream about all that wanting between us going to waste? You in your double bed alone, me in mine?” He was fighting with every weapon he was allowed to use, and he could tell, despite the catch in her voice, that he was losing.
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