by Ann Major
In the next instant, he had her against the wall where he kissed her until they were breathless. Then he picked her up and carried her down the narrow ledge. She clung even when he had to stoop to enter a low-ceilinged grotto.
He laid her down. There in that sheltered darkness, on a bed of cool wet sand, he stripped her. Gently he kissed every part of her, her throat, her neck, her breasts, before he made love to her. It didn't matter that he came from a brutal world that she couldn't understand. It didn't matter that she could never truly be his. Nothing mattered but having her again, and experiencing the glorious explosion of ecstasy he craved.
Chapter Nine
Wrapped in Nicholas's strong arms, Eva lay beneath him, her beautiful face aglow.
He’d fought the passion that bound him to her and lost. His rage was gone. His heart was filled with awe. How had he endured the long years without this, without her? How would he survive the long years ahead without her?
They had only to day—at most perhaps the next day and the one after that. A week—tops. The rest of his life to be lived in less than seven days.
Then she would be gone.
Nicholas put one hand on either side of cheeks and with careful deliberation kissed her eyelids, the feathered black tips of her densely curled lashes, the tip of her nose, the lush contours of her mouth.
She was strawberry sweet. Dangerously dear.
She opened her languorous eyes. For a few seconds they remained deliciously remote before she focused on him. "Nicholas," she whispered.
"Yes, chere."
She touched his brow, smoothed back the black lock with the strands of silver from his brow. "I've made so many mistakes."
"So have I."
"If I'd only taken the trouble to really understand you." She paused. "Maybe—"
"Don't," he whispered. "No regrets..."
"I want to know everything about you," she persisted.
He smiled. "All the secrets of my scandalous life?"
She laughed. "Everything. All of them."
"There are too many to tell."
"Just one then. Why did your father kick you out when you were a teenager?"
His face tightened. She was digging deep. He swallowed hard to maintain control. "Why do you want to know about that?"
Softly Eva brushed her lips against his cheek. "Because that's when everybody said you went bad. You never told me anything, and I was just a baby when it happened. All I've ever heard were the rumors. I can't believe they were true."
He tensed and pulled away. Staring into the darkness, his thoughts whirled backward in time.
Dimly he heard her say, "You don't have to tell me. Not if you don't want to."
He didn't want to talk about it, but her gentle tenderness had breached his defenses. As always her kindness was like a balm healing his soul.
His hand closed around a rock so hard it sliced his callused palm. "Which of the rumors did you hear?" His voice had roughened with the effort it took to restrain his ancient resentments.
"That your father caught you in bed with your stepmother. You were only seventeen to her twenty. Was it true?"
Raw hurt boiled up in him as he remembered how lost he'd been when his father had thrown him out. His father should have at least listened to his side…
Nicholas's voice was tense. "Well, at least, you've got the ages right. I’d never lived around a woman, and I resented it when my father married Louise. He changed after he married her. He’d been bitter with me, spending his nights with the bottle on a downstairs couch. After Louise came, he was always laughing." Nicholas paused. “I never felt that I mattered to him.”
"They hadn't been married very long when it happened. One night she called me into her bedroom to look for her earring that she said had fallen between the wall and the bed. She had the sheets pulled over her, and I didn't know she was naked beneath them. My father came up the stairs, and she threw off the sheet and started screaming. He caught us like that and assumed the worst. She told him that I tried to force her to make love to me, and he took her word instead of mine. He grabbed a belt and would have beaten the life out of me if I hadn't run. Later, when he changed his will in favor of her baby son, I figured out her motive. Sweet Seclusion came from my mother. I never saw my father or my home again."
Tears of empathy sprang into Eva's eyes, and Nicholas clutched her to him. He told her of the wretched years that followed, how he'd drifted from one menial job to another, how he'd been picked up for vagrancy, how he'd been too wild, how he'd attempted and failed at college more times than he could count. I would have starved if I hadn’t had a talent at cards.
"Hell, it took me seven colleges, but I finally had the sense to stick it out and get a business degree. When I graduated at the top of my class, I decided that if I could do that, I could do anything. You know the rest."
Her arms were about him, holding him tightly. She caressed his shoulders, his neck. She combed her fingers through the curling darkness of his hair.
"There was never anyone for me," he said.
"Never until now," she whispered.
She held his hand so that her slim white palm fit into his larger, darker one. Even this gentle touching of her hand in his sent a charge of electricity through him.
Her palm was fragile and soft, his roughly callused. His fingers overlapped hers by inches. He could have closed his hand and easily crushed her delicate bones. Instead he slid his hand against hers, letting the warmth of her skin seep into his as he massaged the velvet softness.
The black-and-gold onyx ring gleamed on her finger, his long-ago gift to her when she'd been an innocent girl. He stared hard at the ring she'd pressed into his hand to keep him safe when he'd left her to go to Africa. "I will wear it forever," she’d said, "when you bring it back to me."
Nicholas met Eva's gaze and saw love and trust shining there. He saw as well the beautiful strength in her heart, her belief in the possibility of their future happiness, her faith in everything that was utterly lacking in him. She was that innocent girl again, but a woman, too. A woman who’d loved and lost and yet still believed in the redeeming power of love.
He laced his fingers through hers more tightly and dragged her beneath him again.
"You feel good, Eva," he whispered. "So good, you almost make me whole." When his mouth found her lips, he kissed them briefly. Then withdrew his mouth. Staring down at her, he ached for her with his entire being. "Don't make this into something it can never be. For us there will be no tomorrow."
“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”
Pulling her close, he let her cling.
*
Eva lay on the deck, her fingers restlessly tapping the cover of her closed book. Beside her were a bottle of teak oil and a rag. She could hear Nicholas and Zak talking down below as they dismantled the transmission again, the leak having proved difficult to repair.
No tomorrow...
That meant he would say goodbye again and leave her.
For three days, Nicholas's words had haunted Eva. She’d thought of them when they’d lain under the golden sun or when they’d made love in their secret grotto or in his bed at night. Every time Nicholas touched her, every time he looked at her, she was aware that their precious time together was running out.
Nicholas was gentler with her now. Although he never spoke words of love or made any promises about the future, sometimes she caught him unawares, watching her with a poignant tenderness shining in his eyes. The moment he caught her watching him, he would look away until his old bleak mask had slipped back into place.
Only when they made love was he different. Only when he was inside her did he become vulnerable and seem to long for everything she desired.
When he crushed her to him, his face rapt, she knew a fierce happiness that he was completely hers. But always the remoteness would come back into his eyes.
Otto had not come. Nicholas was frustrated because there was very little about him
on the Internet. The lazy drifting days that were filled with fishing and swimming and reading made it impossible for her to believe they were in any real danger, yet there was constant, watchful tension in Nicholas and Zak, who never allowed her out of their sight for long.
Every afternoon Nicholas went up to the house alone and spent long hours on the phone, at his computers. He would leave her with Zak. Today she had grown so restless and bored on the boat in his absence that Zak had set her to polishing chrome and teak.
Every time Nicholas left, she begged him to take her along. She wanted to be with him, to see his house, to meet the couple and the child that lived there. He always, gently but firmly kissed her goodbye, but no matter how fiercely she clung, he stepped into the dinghy without her. The one surprise was that he allowed Victor, who liked to follow him, go along.
Sometimes Victor would stay ashore only to make a nuisance of himself by returning to the cave's lower ledge around midnight and yowling. Nicholas would have to go get him then.
Eva wondered if the reason Nicholas didn't want her to go was because he was afraid that she would try to use the sophisticated equipment to contact the outside world. Which was the last thing she wanted to do—now. Guiltily she remembered those two unanswered calls for help she’d secretly made.
Every evening, Eva watched the couple walking with their small son at the top of the cliff. The man and woman had golden hair and skin, their son was slim and bronzed and black-headed. One evening when the young woman had looked down and seen her, they’d waved to each other. Perhaps because the family was forbidden to her, Eva was curious about them. She longed for female companionship, for someone different to talk to. Eva wanted to ask her what it was like to live on an island, cut off from the world with only her husband and child for company. What would it be like to rear a child with no other children to play with?
Every day as Eva's restlessness grew, so did her curiosity about his house and the family who worked for him. When would Nicholas ever think it safe enough for them to leave?
Suddenly Eva heard a child's shout and rocks sliding on the topmost ledge of the cave high above the boat where she lay. When a rock splashed into the water near Rogue Wave's hull, Eva's fingers froze on her book. Then she looked up and saw the little boy and Victor.
The child, who held up another rock, stared down at her with a curiosity equal to hers. Victor watched the boy from a safe distance. When she called up to him, the child tossed the rock, and it landed closer, splashing the dinghy.
When she heard Nicholas curse down below, she realized he was completely absorbed with his engine.
Was he her lord and master?
Tiptoeing across the deck, she loosened the knot in the painter. Then she jumped into the dinghy before it could slip away. Glancing up, she saw that the boy and cat had vanished.
Rowing across the small expanse of water to the beach, she dragged the dinghy and its oars ashore and climbed the cliff. From time to time she had to stop to catch her breath. The sun beamed down, and the northwesterly, as Nicholas called the perpetual breeze, blew her hair. The world seemed an eternity of warm hazy sky and undulating turquoise paradise. It was impossible to imagine that there could be any danger.
She was breathless when she reached Nicholas’s magnificent house with its terraces that commanded views of the sea and the island. Fig trees and prickly pears grew in an orchard on one side of the house. On the opposite side, she saw the satellite dish, antennae of all sorts, all partially concealed behind a tumble of boulders.
Behind the house, the blond woman and her dark-haired boy were walking with Victor beneath a grove of olive trees.
Victor meowed loudly when he saw Eva. Instead of coming toward her, he lay down and licked his tail.
The beautiful young woman, her face radiant with welcome, rushed up to her and smiled. "You are Nicholas's friend," she said in a softly accented voice.
"I'm Evangeline Martin."
"And I'm Teresa. This is Nickie..."
Nickie stepped forward. His white smile and black eyes were brilliant as he tentatively offered his hand. Evangeline knelt and took it, but hardly had she touched his tiny fingers than they’d flown from her grasp and he’d raced to hide behind his mother.
He was a small child, no more than six, Evangeline imagined as he peeped at her from behind his mother’s skirts and then hid again.
"He must be a handful, with all the high cliffs and the cave," Eva said.
Teresa smiled, the kindly tolerant smile of a mother. "He loves the island. We come every summer with my brother. Marcos helps me watch him when he isn't fishing."
"Oh, I thought you lived with your husband."
A fleeting shadow passed over Teresa's face as she fingered the plain gold band on her left hand.
"I'm sorry if I said something wrong," Eva said.
Teresa's gentle, accepting smile was meant to reassure. "It's all right. Would you like some refreshment after your long walk up the cliff?"
"Maybe some water."
"I have homemade wine."
"That would be lovely."
Beneath the olive trees, Nickie was dragging a white stick through the dirt to amuse Victor. While Teresa was inside, Eva watched them.
Usually Victor distrusted children, but the pair seemed to be friends. When Nickie got up, Eva realized the child’s stick was a white cane, which he tapped on the ground. Victor chased after him, leaping for the tapping cane and pawing at it.
A white cane?
Was Teresa's beautiful boy blind?
Eva was suddenly horrified the child would trip. "Victor!"
"It's all right," Teresa murmured soothingly, setting her tray with a bowl of ripe figs, a decanter of wine and wineglasses on a low table. "It's one of their favorite games. They like to play in the cave, too. There's an opening just beyond the grove. If you know the way, you can climb all the way down to the water through the cave."
"Nicholas told me." Eva sipped her wine, which was sweet and dark.
"My brother, Marcos, cultivates the grapes on the island," Teresa said.
Eva's attention was on the child and the cat. "Is Nickie blind? Wouldn't it be dangerous for him to go into the cave?"
"He's only partially blind. His doctor says in another year he can have an operation that will help him. He's spent all his summers here. Look, there they go. Nickie knows the cliffs in there as well as he knows his own room. He loves it here." There was no trace of concern in Teresa's voice.
"Do you mind if I follow them—just to make sure Victor doesn't trip him?"
Teresa shook her head. "I'll come, too." Teresa talked amiably. "I get so lonely to talk to another woman. I’m afraid I have been begging Nicholas to bring you up or pleading with him to let me come down."
"So have I."
"Nicholas can be very stubborn."
They laughed together.
Inside the cave, the cliffs were steep and treacherous, but Eva could see the path leading all the way to the sea, just as she could see Nickie and Victor snugly ensconced on a narrow ledge. As she followed the path, she saw Rogue Wave's anchor line. Inch by inch her gaze followed it from the water to the yacht.
Nicholas, who stood at the pulpit, scowled when he caught sight of her.
Quickly she took a step backward. Too quickly. Her foot hit loose shale and slipped.
A rock tumbled down the cliff and hit the water. She watched its spiraling descent to the bottom of the pool. The cliff was so steep, the path so narrow, she was suddenly dizzy. The walls of the cave seemed to sway in lazy circles. Shakily she pressed her back against the cool limestone wall and clung. Beneath, she saw the dark water. Then it blurred. Her balance was gone. Panic stabbed through her, and she screamed in sudden fear that she would fall.
She heard Nicholas shout at her not to move.
The world seemed to fade into darkness, and she imagined herself sinking down, down into that pool as she’d sunk in the river. Too vividly she remembered
how it had felt to nearly drown. Burning water had filled her throat as her body had been swept away by currents. Choking, she’d sunk deeper and deeper.
“Open your eyes. Look at me,” Teresa commanded. "It’s going to be okay." Teresa took her hand. "Let’s get you outside. I'll lead the way."
Eva opened her eyes. Teresa was so kind, so gentle, so understanding. Back at the house, Eva told her that once she’d nearly drowned, that for years she'd had a phobia about water.
“I’ve been doing so well on his boat…I thought maybe I was over it.”
"Does Nicholas know?" Teresa asked.
"He was there when it happened. He saved me."
"How odd that he would invite you on a cruise. He's usually so kind and thoughtful."
For the first time, Eva noticed how Teresa’s eyes shone every time she spoke of Nicholas.
Kind and thoughtful. Was that how Teresa saw him?
Teresa began to talk of her life on the island as well as her life away from it.
Innocently Eva asked, "Does Nickie go to school?"
"Oh, yes. Nicholas sends him to a special school every fall in London."
"Nicholas sends—" Eva's voice broke.
She could only stare at Teresa in dumb shock. Nicholas was paying for her son's education.
Nicholas. Nickie. Why hadn’t the similarity of the two names clicked? Perhaps because to Eva Nicholas was Raoul.
Teresa had said she lived with her brother, not her husband. The golden band on Teresa's hand glittered in the sunlight.
Why was Teresa living in Nicholas's house? Why did he send her son to school? Who was she married to?
Eva's imagination speculated wildly. She didn’t want to judge without the necessary facts, but her emotions ran away with her.
Nicholas had admitted to other women, to casual relationships.
But never to this. Nickie was small. He must be around six years old.
Had Nicholas found solace in Teresa’s arms when he’d returned from Africa? Was Nickie the result? At least he was doing what he could for the boy.
The world was complicated. Eva could have almost forgiven him, if only he had told her when he’d explained what had happened to him during their separation. Almost.