by Diana Palmer
Unexpectedly his eyes lifted to hold hers. Whatever he’d seen there must have told him what he wanted to know, because he’d made a sound deep in his throat and stood up. He seemed to vibrate with some violent emotion. Suddenly he’d bent and slipped his arms under her knees and her back and lifted her off the sand. His eyes stared into hers as he slowly, exquisitely, brought her upper body to his so that her breasts flattened gently in the thick hair that covered his broad chest. His skin was as cool from the breeze as hers was hot from the feelings he aroused in her virginal body. She’d stiffened at the shock of the contact.
“No one is looking,” he said roughly. “No one gives a damn. Put your arms around me and come closer.”
It was shocking, the need she felt. She obeyed him, forgetting her shyness as she ached to feel his body against hers. She remembered burying her hot face in his throat, drinking in the scent of him, feeling his heavy, harsh pulse against her bare breasts as his arms tightened and he walked toward the water with her.
“Wh…why?” She choked.
“Because I’m so damned aroused that I can’t hide it,” he said half angrily. “The only escape is right into the ocean. Or don’t you feel it, too, Barrie? A burning deep in your belly, an emptiness that wants filling, an ache that hurts?”
Her arms contracted and she moaned softly.
“Yes, you feel it,” he breathed as he began to wade into the water. His face slid against hers and his mouth suddenly opened as it sought and found her parted lips. She didn’t remember the shock of the water. There was nothing in life except that first, burning sweetness of Dawson’s hard mouth on her lips, nothing more than the feel of him in her arms, against her bare breasts.
Vaguely she was aware that they were in the warm water, that his arms had released her so that he could pull her into an even more intimate embrace. His long legs tangled with hers, and for the first time, she felt the force of his desire for her. They kissed and kissed, there in the water, oblivious to the whole world, to the line of hotels above the shore, the other swimmers, the noise on the beach.
He moved her, just enough to let his lean hand find and swallow one swollen breast. His tongue eased into her open mouth. His free hand lifted and pulled her, fit her exactly to the hard thrust of him. And she almost lost consciousness at the stabbing ache of pleasure he kindled in her trembling body, there in the water, there in the blue ocean….
She fell asleep with the memories deep in her mind. Unfortunately, those sweet memories merged with some that were much darker. Dawson had finally gained temporary control of himself, and left her alone in the sea to recover from their feverish embraces. But all through the evening meal with George, he’d watched Barrie with eyes that made her feel hunted. The idiotic way she’d smiled at him and encouraged his watchfulness could still make her cringe. She’d thought he was falling in love with her, and she was doing her best to show him that she already felt that way about him. She’d had no idea how he was interpreting her shy flirting.
But it had all become clear after she’d gone to bed that night. The sliding door on her balcony had opened and Dawson had come through it. He’d been wearing a robe and nothing else. Barrie remembered the sweep of his hand as he tore the sheet away from her body, clad only in thin briefs because of the heat and the failing air-conditioning. Her body had reacted at once to his eyes, and even the shock and faint fear hadn’t robbed her of the desire that was all too visible to a man of Dawson’s experience.
“Want me, Barrie?” he’d whispered as he threw off his robe and joined her on the bed. “Let’s see how well you follow up on those teasing little glances you’ve been giving me all night.”
She hadn’t had the presence of mind to explain that she hadn’t been teasing him. She wanted to tell him that she loved him, that he was her life. But his hands on her body were shocking, like the things he whispered to her in the moonlight, like the feel of his mouth surging over her taut breasts while he made love to her as if he were some demon of the night.
If she’d been the experienced woman he thought her, it would have been a night to remember. But she’d been a virgin, and he’d been completely out of control. She remembered the faint tremor in the hands that had gathered her hips up to the fierce thrust of his body, his cry of pleasure that drowned out her cry of pain. He whispered to her all through it, his body as insistent as his mouth, his hands, until finally he arched up as though he were on some invisible rack, his powerful body cording with ripple after ripple of ecstasy until he convulsed with hoarse, fierce cries and his hands hurt her.
She felt no such pleasure. Her body felt torn and violated. She was almost sick with the pain that had never seemed to stop. When he pulled away from her finally, exhausted and sweaty, she winced and cried out, because that hurt, too.
She wept, curled into a ball, while he got to his feet and put his robe back on. He’d looked down at her sobbing form with eyes she couldn’t see, and she didn’t like remembering the things he’d said to her then. His voice had been as brutal as his invasion of her, and she’d been far too innocent to realize that he was shocked and upset by her innocence, hitting out to disguise his own stark guilt. It could have been so different if he’d loved her. But in the darkness of her dream, he was a bird of prey, tearing at her flesh, hurting her, hurting her…
She didn’t realize that she’d screamed. She heard the door open and close, felt light against her eyelids, and then felt hands shaking her.
“Barrie. Barrie!”
She came awake with a start, and the face above her was Dawson’s. He was wearing a robe, as he had been that night. His hair was damp from a shower, and her mind reverted to the night she’d spent in his arms in France.
“Don’t…hurt me…anymore!” she whispered, sobbing.
He didn’t reply. He couldn’t. The terror in those eyes made him sick right through to his soul. “Dear God,” he breathed.
Four
BARRIE saw his face contort and as she came back to awareness, she noticed the room around her, the light fixture overhead. “It’s…not France.” She choked. Her eyes closed. “Oh, thank God, thank God!”
Dawson got up from the bed and moved to the window. He moved the curtain aside and looked out into the darkness. He wasn’t looking at anything. He was seeing the past, the horror in Barrie’s eyes, the pain that he’d caused.
Barrie sat up. She noticed his lean hand clenching the curtains. It had gone white. He looked beaten, exhausted.
She swallowed hard. Her hands went to her pale cheeks and smoothed over them and then pushed back the tangled dark hair that fell over her breasts. She was wearing a long cotton gown that completely covered her except for her arms and a little of her slender neck. She never slept just in her briefs these days, not even in summer.
“I didn’t realize that you still had nightmares about it,” he said after a minute. His voice was dull and without expression.
“Not very often,” she said. She couldn’t tell him that most of them ended with her losing the baby, crying out for Dawson. That hadn’t happened tonight, thank God. She couldn’t bear for him to know it all.
He turned away from the window and moved back to the side of the bed, but not close. His hands closed in the pockets of his robe.
“It wouldn’t be that way a second time,” he said stiffly.
Her eyes widened in fear, as if he’d suggested seducing her all over again. The realization infuriated him, but he controlled the surge of anger. “Not…with me.” He bit off the words, averting his face. “I didn’t mean that.”
She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. The sound of the fabric sliding against her skin was abnormally loud. She glanced up at him and the memories began to recede. If she was hurting, so was he. He couldn’t fake the sort of pain she saw in his drawn face.
“Haven’t you even been curious since then, for God’s sake?” he asked. “You’re a woman. You must have friends, people you could ask. Surely someone t
old you that first times are notoriously bad.”
She smoothed one hand over the other. Her body slumped with a long sigh. “I can’t talk to anyone about it,” she said finally. “I only have one best friend. And how could I possibly ask Antonia, when she’s known us both for years? She wouldn’t need two guesses to figure out why I was asking.”
He nodded. “You were a virgin. You needed time to be properly aroused, especially with me, and I lost control much too soon,” he added. His eyes searched her face grimly. “That was a first for me. Until you came along, there had never been a woman who could throw me off balance in bed.”
Her face lowered. It was an accomplishment of sorts, she supposed.
“I damaged both of us that night,” he said gently. “Until I had you, I genuinely thought you were experienced, Barrie, that you were only teasing on the beach when you had to be coaxed into removing your top.”
That brought her eyes up to his, shocked. “But I would never have done such a thing!” she protested.
“I had to find that out the hard way,” he replied. “Maybe I used it as an excuse, too. I wanted you and I convinced myself that you’d surely had men at your age, that it had all been playacting on your part, all that coy shyness. But it didn’t take me long to realize why you’d given in without a struggle. You loved me,” he said huskily.
Her eyes closed. She couldn’t bear to hear him say it again. He’d taunted her with her feelings after that disastrous night.
She felt the bed depress as he sat down slowly beside her. His hand tipped her head back toward his, making her look at him. “Guilt will drive a man to violence, Barrie,” he said, his voice deep and soft in the silence of her room. “Especially when he’s done something unforgivable and knows he’ll never find forgiveness for it. I taunted you because I couldn’t live with what I’d done to you. It doesn’t make much sense, now. But at the time, blaming you was the only thing that kept me from putting a gun to my head.”
She hadn’t said a word. Her big eyes were locked into his as she struggled to understand him.
“I couldn’t stop.” He took an unsteady breath. “God, Barrie, I tried. I tried. But I couldn’t…stop.” He leaned forward, his head bent down, defeated. “For months after it happened, I could hear your voice in my nightmares. I knew I was hurting you, but I couldn’t draw back.”
She didn’t understand desire of that sort, pleasure too blind to feel pity. She’d never felt it, although the way he’d kissed her in the ocean had made her hungry for something. “I wanted you, too.”
He lifted his head and looked down at her. “You don’t understand, do you?” he asked gently. “You’ve never felt desire that overwhelming. Your only knowledge of real intimacy is forever embedded in pain.”
“I didn’t know you had nightmares,” she said slowly.
“I still have them,” he said on a cold laugh. “Just like you.”
Her gaze went over his face like searching hands. “Why did you come to my room that night?” she asked softly.
He moved, one long arm going across her body to support him as he leaned closer, so that his face filled her entire line of vision. “Because I wanted you so much that I would have died to have you,” he said through his teeth.
The subdued violence in the flat statement surprised her. Perhaps she’d known on some unspoken level how desperately hungry he’d been for her, but he’d never actually said the words before.
“I wanted you so much that I was almost sick with it. I came to you because I couldn’t stop myself. And it does no good whatsoever five years after the fact to tell you that I’m sorry.”
“Are you sorry?” she asked sadly.
He nodded, without blinking an eye. “Sorry. Bitter. Hurt. All the things you were. But there was more to it than just physical pain on your part.” He didn’t move. He didn’t seem to breathe. He took a slow, deliberate breath. “You never told me that I gave you a baby that night. Or that, several weeks later, you lost it. Did you think I wouldn’t find out, someday?” he concluded heavily, the pain lying dark and dull in his eyes as he saw the shock register on her face.
Her heart skipped and ran away. “I…how did you find out?” she faltered. “I never even told Antonia!”
“Do you remember the intern who attended to you in the emergency room?”
“Yes. Richard Dean,” she recalled. “He’d been a student in your graduating class. But you never saw him, he even said that you didn’t mix socially. Besides, he was a doctor, he took an oath never to talk about his patients…!”
“We met at a class reunion a few weeks ago,” he confided. “He thought I knew. You’re my stepsister, after all, he reminded me. He assumed that you’d told me.”
She gnawed her lower lip, staring up at him worriedly.
His lean hand came to touch her mouth, disturbing the grip of her teeth. “Don’t,” he said softly.
“I forget sometimes,” she murmured.
His thumb traced over her mouth gently. He searched her eyes. “He said…that you were utterly devastated,” he whispered. “That you cried until he had to sedate you.” His face drew up with bitterness. “He said you wanted the baby desperately, Barrie.”
She dragged her eyes down to his chest. “It was a long time ago.” Her voice sounded stiff.
He let out a heavy breath. “Yes, and you’ve done your grieving. But I’ve only just started. I didn’t know until Richard told me. It’s been a little rough, losing a child I didn’t even know I’d helped create.”
His face was averted, but she could see the pain on it. It was the first time they’d really shared grief, except when his father had died. But that had only been a few words, because she couldn’t stand to be near him so soon after the Riviera.
“Would you have told me?” he asked, staring at the wall.
“I’m not sure. It seemed senseless, after so long a time. You didn’t know about the baby. I wasn’t sure you’d want to know.”
He caught her slender hand in his and linked his fingers with it. “I got drunk and stayed drunk for three days after I got back from my class reunion,” he said after a minute. Then he added, expressionlessly, “Richard said that you asked a nurse to call me from the emergency room.”
She stared at the big hand holding hers so closely. “Yes, in a moment of madness.”
“I didn’t know she was a nurse. She mentioned your name and before she could say why she was calling, I hung up on her.”
His fingers had tightened painfully. “Yes,” she said.
He drew her hand to his lips and kissed it hungrily.
His head was bent over her hand, but she saw the faint wetness at the corner of his eye and she gasped, horrified.
As if his pride wouldn’t take that sort of blow, letting her see the wetness in his eyes, he let go of her fingers and got up, going back to stand at the darkened window. He didn’t speak for a full minute, his hand gripping the curtain tightly. “Richard said it was a boy.”
She rested her forehead against her knees. “Please,” she whispered gruffly. “I can’t talk about it.”
He moved from the window, back to the bed. He tore the covers away and scooped her up into his arms, sitting down to hold her tight, tight, across his legs, with his face against her soft throat.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered roughly. “You’re safe. Nothing will ever hurt you again. Cry for him. God knows I have!”
The tender gruffness in his deep voice broke the dam behind which her tears had hidden. She gave way to them, for the first time since the miscarriage. She wept for the son she’d lost. She wept for her pain, and for his. She wept for all the lost, lonely years.
A long time later, she felt him dabbing at her eyes with a corner of the sheet. She took it from him and finished the job. And still he held her, gently, without passion. Her cheek felt the regular, hard beat of his heart under the soft fabric of the robe. She opened her hot, stinging eyes and stared across at the dark window, all the
fire and pain wept out of her in salty tears.
“It’s late,” he said finally. “Mrs. Holton arrives first thing in the morning. You need to get some sleep.”
She stretched, boneless from exhaustion, and looked up into his quiet, watchful eyes. Involuntarily his own gaze went down to the soft thrust of her breasts under the cotton gown. He remembered the beauty of her body, years after his last glimpse of it.
She watched him staring at her, but she didn’t move or flinch.
“Don’t you want to run?” he taunted.
She shook her head. Her eyes looked straight up into his. She slid her fingers over the lean, strong hand that was lying across her waist. She tugged at it until it lifted. She smoothed it up her side, over her rib cage, and then gently settled it directly over one soft breast.
His intake of breath was audible, and his body seemed to jump.
“No,” he said curtly, jerking his hand down to her waist. “Don’t be stupid.”
She felt less confident than she had before, but there was a faint film of sweat over his upper lip. He was more shaken than he looked.
“Don’t make me ashamed. It’s hard for me, to even think of this, much less…do it,” she said. “I only wanted to know if I could let you touch me,” she finished with a rueful smile.
The cold hauteur left him. “I can’t take the risk, even if you’re willing to.” He started to move her aside, but she clung.
“What risk?” she asked.
“Don’t you know? You don’t need to find out the hard way that I can still want you.” He laughed coldly. “I’m not sure I want to know, either.”
While she was working that one out, he lifted her and placed her gently onto the pillows. He got up and moved back from the bed. “Go to sleep.”
“What if you could…want me?” she persisted, levering up on her elbows.
He looked unutterably weary. “Barrie, we both know that you’d scream the minute I touched you with intent,” he said. “You couldn’t help it. And even if I could feel anything with you, it might be just the way it was before. I might lose my head again, hurt you again.”