“My father was an intelligent man, sometimes too intelligent. He was also afraid of losing you.”
“It wasn’t true, none of it was true.”
“I know.”
“He confessed what he had done to you, too, then, before he died.”
“He didn’t have to tell me; I always knew. It took time to accept his reasons for saying it, but I always knew.”
“Then you went away for nothing.”
“No,” he said, his voice deep. “It wasn’t for nothing.”
She swung toward him, and a flash of lightning, coming closer, showed her face blue-white and filled with pain. “I didn’t want to take your place with your father, I only wanted to share it. I didn’t want to steal your position at Staulet Corporation or take over here at Bonne Vie. Everything came to me by default because you were gone.”
“If I had stayed,” he said, “would everything now be the same?”
There was silence for the space of a heartbeat. In it were a thousand unspoken things.
Finally she said, “I don’t know, but everything wouldn’t have been so wrong all these years.”
“No, it might have been worse. What happened between us that afternoon in the gardener’s shed might have happened again. And if it had, if my father had been forced to stand and let it happen, it would have killed him. He worshiped you. You were his shy young bride who had brought him youth and hope, plus something more I never quite understood but was like a secret sin. He was entranced with you. I wasn’t sure he could live without you.”
“But you could?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came to him. He could not say it, could not make that simple agreement that would cut them free of each other.
Instead he said in slow reflection, “Do you remember the gardener’s shed and the way it rained? It was almost like this evening with the thunder and lightning and the wind.”
“It wasn’t at all like this.” Her voice was taut as she moved away from him. “For one thing, it wasn’t evening, it was afternoon. For another, we could see the sea waves instead of just little wavelets slapping in a pond.”
“But you’ll have to admit there was water and a bare shelter like this.”
“It was a shed with bamboo walls and a tin roof, not a temple of stone, and it smelled of insecticide and gasoline engines.”
“If we listen, we can hear the palm trees around the pool like those around the shed.” He stopped at her shoulder. The wind flapped the hem of her light robe, fluttering it against his legs with a soft movement that seemed to both cling and repel.
“Those around the shed were taller,” she said, “and closer.”
“There was the storm.”
“It nearly drowned us, blew us away, instead of holding off.”
“We had been quarreling.”
“We haven’t been quarreling now.”
“Haven’t we? I thought we had been at odds for more than twenty years, always silently quarreling.”
“I was married then.” She made the reminder in a quiet voice.
“And now you’re not. That much I’ll admit is different.”
She looked up at him. “The only thing that’s close to the same is the two of us, and even we’re different, older and more experienced, less driven by feelings we don’t understand and so can’t control.”
“That may be, but you can’t deny that you remember.”
“No. I’d never do that.” Her voice was shaky but forthright.
“In that case, are you sure we’re so different?” he whispered, and leaned to touch his lips to hers.
She didn’t resist him; there was a bittersweet poignancy in that fact. Her lips were sweet, so sweet. As he lifted his hand to her face, her skin was soft and resilient over the fragility of her bones. She moved against him, lifting her hands to clasp them behind his neck.
Her compliance might have been from gratitude or even pity, but he didn’t care. He caught his breath and held it deep in his chest as he tasted the moist and tender inner surfaces of her mouth and held her warm, yielding body to him. He saw the play of lightning against his closed eyelids and felt the dull percussion of thunder in his blood. The wind swirled her hair so that it touched his face with a silken caress, and the delicately enticing scent of Paradise that was so much a part of her mounted to his brain. He felt dazed with the wild beat of his heart and the too sudden appeasement of strained longing.
He wanted her, God, how he wanted her. But not on the gritty floor again, not in a wet and hasty tumble where anyone could chance upon them. He wanted her in the privacy of his room and the comfort of his bed, and with undisturbed eons to learn the thousands of tiny details he craved to know about her body and its pleasures, about her feelings and the intricate processes of her mind. He would have liked the security of trust, but failing that, he would settle for no less than locked doors and thick walls and a long night.
Bending, he caught her up with one arm under her knees and the other across her back. He strode from the folly with its serene Buddha back across the bridge and over the lawn toward the house. Lightning flickered with silver fire and thunder rumbled closer as he mounted the steps to the lower gallery. Crossing it, he pushed through the double doors that Riva had left ajar.
The downstairs bedroom Noel used opened immediately to the right inside the hall. It had been redecorated since Cosmo’s death and all of the paraphernalia of the sickroom banished. The massive mahogany bed and armoire that Cosmo had preferred had been consigned to a guest room, exchanged for a rosewood set by the old New Orleans furniture-maker Seignouret, which had belonged to Noel’s mother. The colors of royal blue and gray, with touches of red, that had been paired with the antiques gave the room an updated, masculine look without making it seem too modern.
The single lamp glowing on a marble-topped table beside the bed cast no more than a mellow glow in the vastness of the room. Still, as Noel placed Riva on the high mattress of the bed, she turned and stretched out her hand to turn it off. Regardless of how dim the light, it was too bright. It was not modesty that prompted her; rather, it seemed that the tie that bound her to this man, the desire that stretched between them, was too tenuous to withstand the glare. In the dark they could be more the way they had once been and less the way they had become.
The bed shifted as Noel lowered himself to lie beside her. He reached out to touch the tender curve of her cheek, his fingers warm and caressing. With his thumb, he brushed the smooth surface of her lips so that the sensitive edges tingled. He trailed the back of his knuckles along the line of her jaw and down the curve of her neck, pausing to test the steady throbbing of her pulse at the hollow of her throat. Then he bent his head to press his warm lips to that gently frantic beat, at the same time brushing his hand lower, gliding across her breast and down the sloping indentation of her waist.
On a ragged indrawn breath, he caught her to him, holding her close with his face against her neck as he rocked her slowly in his arms. “I’ve dreamed of this,” he said in a rough whisper, “so many times. So many times.”
Riva could feel the swift pace of the blood in her veins and the sweeping wave of a flush moving over her so that she felt heated, incandescent with longing. The feel of his body against hers, hard and powerful and protective, made her feel reckless, uncaring of the consequences these moments might bring. In the tension that shivered through his muscles, she could feel his restraint, the rigid control he held on himself, and she was aware of a fierce and perverse yearning to make him discard it.
She slid the palm of one hand over his shoulder, kneading the long ropes of muscles under the fine cotton sleeve of his shirt, and turned her face to meet his mouth as she pushed her fingers through the crisp hair at the back of his neck. With her tongue, she traced the chiseled formation of his lips, then gently, delicately explored the line where they came together, the polished edges of his teeth, the sweet and tender interior surfaces.
Pleasure burge
oned inside her, settling heavy and urgent in the lower part of her body. She moved closer, kicking off one slipper and sliding her cool, bare foot over his ankle and hooking around it to hold herself more firmly against him. She was lost and she knew it, awash in sensations and old memories. It was the same between them, beautifully, wonderfully the same. Yet there was a difference, too, and the difference was that they had the maturity to approach this moment with care and to appreciate its rarity.
Noel did not lose control but rather relinquished it with grace and without regret. At the same time, he unleashed a tender assault upon the defenses with which Riva armored herself, tearing them away one by one as he stripped away the clothes that covered them.
“I want you, God, how I want you,” he said, his voice rich and low, vibrating deep in his throat as he loosened the belt of her robe and pushed one sleeve down her arm. He cupped the round globe of her breast that he had uncovered, tasting the rose-peach nipple, abrading it with his tongue in sinuous play before he went on. “Say you want me.”
“I want you,” she whispered, and to prove it arched toward him.
“I’ve missed you,” he said, his breath warm and moist on the flat plane of her abdomen as he smoothed the silken skin there with his lips through the silk of her robe before he slid it down in order to reach bare flesh. “Say you missed me.”
“I’ve missed you so much.” The words were a soft cry, aching with truth. With trembling fingers, she reached to fumble with the buttons of his shirt, releasing them from their holes.
“No one has ever made me feel as you do,” he whispered, his voice husky with an echo of amazement for that admission.
Without prompting, Riva replied in the same tone, “It’s the same for me.”
He bunched the robe in his hand, pulling it away from her thighs and calves and from under her before tossing it aside. There came the rustle of cloth as he stripped off his shirt, then unzipped his pants and skimmed out of them. Easing close once more, supporting his weight on one elbow, he put his hand on the softly curling mat at the apex of her thighs and held her with his warm strength for vital seconds, before slowly and with infinite care he sought for the moist and heated center of her being.
Thunder boomed outside, rumbling closer, and beyond the windows that opened onto the gallery and the terrace the wind sighed and sang in the live oak trees. It seemed to Riva that the growing storm was in her blood, a vital part of her, and when it broke she might be swept away. She was wary of the violence she sensed in it, but at the same time she strained toward it.
“We loved each other once,” Noel said in tones so compressed they seemed a part of the wind, “but I never heard you say it. Will you? Now?”
“I…” she began, then stopped as her voice caught in her throat.
“Say it,” he urged in the darkness, “even if it isn’t so.”
She whispered the words in soft compliance and reached out to him, touching the firm, resilient length of him, seeking to return the tremulous pleasure that bloomed inside her. He drew in his breath with a hissing sound and, feeling her joy, let the silence surround them until, with a soft cry, she flung herself against him.
Lightning flashed against the windows as he rose above her. It tinted his hair with blue fire and outlined his shoulders in gold. And then as he sank into her, Riva closed her eyes tightly against the jolting excess of ecstasy. Clutching his arms, she lifted her hips to meet him, engulfing him, striving toward a promised completion.
Strong, he was so strong, endlessly enduring, and he moved with such flawless rhythm to the surging beat of the blood inside her. Their breaths rasped and caught; their limbs grew slippery with perspiration; the beating of their hearts canceled out the thunder. Time stretched backward, drawing them closer, pulling the moment closer around them. Tighter and tighter.
The perfect instant took them unaware, splintering, multiplying, exploding in a chain reaction that seemed to fill the dark night with its magic. They collapsed upon each other, rocking each other and murmuring soft, incoherent words as they sought for breath, pressing their mouths together in mindless mutual gratitude for the liberation of overwrought senses. And in the impending quiet they heard the rush and flow of the rain.
The seconds ticked past. Their breathing quieted. The wind died down and the rain became a muted, steady drumming. Still they lay with arms and legs entwined and eyelids tightly closed. Noel brushed the hair back from Riva’s damp face and pressed his lips to her brow. He shifted slightly to keep his weight from her, but made no move to leave her. He drew a deep breath, holding it a moment as if he intended to say something that meant much to him.
Abruptly the bedroom door was thrust open to slam against the wall. There came a soft click and the chandelier overhead sprang into stunning brightness. Riva sprang up to see Constance with her hand on the switch she had just flipped on. Her face was mottled with the red of her fury, and in her voice as she spoke was malicious triumph. “I knew when you two disappeared at the same time I’d find you here,” she said. “There are places, you know, where what you have been doing is considered incest.”
Noel was already reaching for the overhanging edge of the bedspread on which they lay. He swept it up to cover them. Rage, no less virulent for its quietness, rasped in his voice as he spoke. “Get out.”
His ex-wife cocked an eyebrow as she countered in brittle irony, “You don’t believe me? See Leviticus: ‘The nakedness of thy father’s wife shalt thou not uncover.’ It is certainly stepmothers who are meant, for actual blood mothers are covered, or uncovered as the case may be, under a separate verse.”
Noel could have strangled Constance where she stood; the urge to do it roared in his blood with the ebb of passion. Her casual besmirching of what was between him and the woman in his arms was intolerable. Beside him, he felt Riva stir and met her imploring gaze. It was in answer to what he saw there that he grasped at the remnants of his temper and reason.
Turning on Constance again, he said, “I hardly thought the Bible your choice of reading matter.”
“It is when it suits me,” she answered.
“Then you should realize that my father is dead; therefore, Riva is no longer his wife.”
“True, but people have long memories, and some things are a matter of instinct rather than logic or law. They know what you are doing is wrong without knowing how they know, and they can be cruel.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Then you’re a fool!”
Noel held her gaze with level concentration. “Not so big a one that I fail to see what you’re doing. It won’t change anything.”
“Won’t it? I defy you to take your stepmother in your arms again without being aware that you’re taking your father’s place. Of course, that may be what you want, what you’ve always wanted.”
Riva spoke then, her voice vibrant with fury. “That’s a disgusting thing to say!”
“And disgusting to contemplate!” Constance flashed in reply as she turned her malevolence on the other woman.
“Only in your mind. There is no tie of blood between us, no legal bar.”
“I never said there was. Only the prohibition is an old one, and there are reasons for it.”
“None that apply now that Cosmo is no longer alive.”
“No, your husband is dead, and aren’t you glad!”
Riva stared at Constance with the color draining from her face. Before she could answer, Noel intervened, his grip white-knuckled on the bedspread across his legs, as if he meant to lunge off the bed. His concern was not for himself—there was little his former wife could say that had the power to hurt him—but Riva lacked his defenses. “You have no idea what you’re doing, Constance. Stay out of it, do you hear me? And now get out of here before I throw you out!”
“How charming,” Constance said, “but then some women seem to bring out the protective instinct in men. However, Riva may have lost one of her knights. She should be careful about Colorado. I d
on’t think our dearest Dante is alone in the mountains. The children and I saw him lunching with a woman before he left. She was introduced as Anne Gallant.”
Noel felt Riva stiffen as she absorbed the implications of the other woman’s words; however, he did not look at her. Instead, he flung the bedspread back from his legs. Constance’s face changed, and she backed quickly from the room, slamming the door behind her.
There was a moment of stillness. Then Riva stirred, reaching for her robe, and slid from the bed. Noel kicked the bedspread aside and reached for his own clothes.
“You don’t have to come with me,” Riva said, her voice strained.
“Yes, I do.”
There was such finality in the words that she said no more. They dressed in silence. Riva pushed her fingers through her hair but made no other effort toward repairing her appearance. When she turned toward the door, Noel, ready himself, reached to open and hold it for her.
The rain seemed to have abated, for they could hear it dripping from the roof outside in the stillness of the big old house. They mounted the stairs with slow steps and moved along the hall to the door of Riva’s bedroom. He turned the knob and pushed the panel open, but made no move to go inside.
“I’m sorry,” he said simply.
She breathed slowly in and out. “So am I. It wasn’t the way Constance tried to make it sound, I know that. We just—just needed each other. Sometimes people need someone to hold.”
If he had never loved her before, he would have then as she stood with dark shadows under her eyes and glass cuts on her face trying to make him feel better about wanting her, his father’s wife. He lifted his hands to cup her face, brushing her cheeks with gentle thumbs, caressing one corner of her mouth. “I know,” he said in soft accord. “Storms have that effect on me. They have for a long time.”
Her smile as she searched his face trembled slightly at the edges. He could feel that faint movement under his hands. Before he could follow his urge to make the trembling go away, he brushed her mouth with his own warm lips, then stepped back.
Crimes of Passion Page 136