by Beth Andrews
Her body hummed pleasantly. For her, it was the best of both worlds. She got the joy of intimately learning the secrets of his face—and, when he finally woke, she knew he would give her all the physical pleasure she could ever desire.
Odd, she thought as if from a great distance, that she didn’t use this time to try to talk herself out of any further intimacy. But somehow this interlude didn’t seem to violate anything that really mattered.
It definitely wasn’t a surrender to loneliness or fear on her part. She hadn’t gone to him, looking for a crutch. He had come to her. This time, she was providing the strength—for whatever reason, his dreams tortured him, and he had come to Penny for relief.
And, with Ellen gone until midday tomorrow, at the “camp-in” at Bell River, this night posed no threat to his vow, either. He would give 100 percent to Ellen, whenever she needed him. But right now, she didn’t.
Tonight he didn’t have to be a father first.
Penny didn’t kid herself. Whatever they found together tonight, it would not survive the coming of daylight. He’d actually said the words, straight out. Just one night. For just one night, he wanted to take some comfort from a woman who was both a lover and a friend.
She appreciated the honesty more than he could ever know. She didn’t want to be lied to. She didn’t want to be any man’s fool.
The lightning crashed outside, and thunder rolled. But in here, Max slept on.
She got out her sketch pad, which she kept by the bed always, and flicked on the low-wattage bedside lamp. It wasn’t bright enough to disturb him, but it allowed her to see well enough to draw.
Over the next few minutes, she made several attempts to catch whatever subtle magic made him both angel and man, both tender and tough. She missed every time and kept flipping to a new page, annoyed, but eager to try again.
It must be in the lips. No—it was in the gentle hollow where the cheekbone met the eye.
No. It was the chin—the perfect proportion, that square jaw ending in the surprise of the rounded, dimpled chin. Strength without ego, power without brutality.
No. Maybe it was the brows...
She sighed, leaning back against the headboard and shutting her eyes. Either it really was magic, or it was elusive beyond her ability with a sketching pencil.
“Hey, there.”
She turned, and Max’s eyes were open. He still looked sleepy, like a little boy. But she knew the power of the naked body under that sheet, so softly molded to his torso. The warm, low buzzing she’d had inside her ever since he arrived intensified slightly, and she put her hand on her belly, as if she could feel it through her skin.
Lightning flashed, but farther away now, so that it was just an opalescent shimmer against his skin, not the white strobe it had been a few minutes ago.
“Hi.” She smiled. “How are you feeling?”
“Fabulous.” He arched his neck, stretching the muscles awake. He twisted to look above the bed, toward the window. “It’s still raining. How long did I sleep?”
“Not long. About an hour, I guess.”
He widened his eyes. “Not long? That’s an entire hour wasted. I had plans for that hour....”
He lifted on his elbow, but as he closed the distance between them, his chest encountered the sketch pad she’d let fall on the bed between them. It made a crinkling sound. He paused and angled back so that he could retrieve it.
“Oh, I should move that...” She felt suddenly too self-conscious to allow him to look at it. “It’s just—”
But he’d already looked. He saw, of course, that the first sketch was a picture of him, drawn from just above, and to the side...a picture of a very handsome, naked man, sleeping with only a thin sheet to cover his trim, muscular body.
He turned the page. Then again. And again. Over and over, the same man, the same sheet-draped body. Sometimes the face dominated, as she’d tried to capture his essence. But sometimes the body was her focus...that beautiful, powerful body....
For a minute she couldn’t find any words. It looked obsessive. It looked like the fixation of a woman in love.
“You have a...a difficult face to draw. It’s very interesting, artistically speaking. I mean, if you’re interested in form and shadow...that angle where your cheek and your jaw...”
She gave up. “You’re very beautiful,” she said. “I couldn’t help trying to see if I could capture it in a sketch.”
He leaned over her, his naked chest brushing against her shoulder, and the rain-washed scent of him teasing at her nose, and set the pad down on her nightstand. When he rolled back to his side of the bed, he caught her by the shoulders and rolled her over with him.
She wasn’t quite on top of him, but close enough. She could feel the contours of his legs, the jut of his lean hip bones, the already-rigid length of his arousal. The buzzing inside her became a swarm, and things in her midsection seemed to be shifting blindly, contracting and relaxing, swirling, agitated, as if searching for another arrangement of parts.
Their faces were only inches apart. “I’m beautiful?” His eyes were tilted up, filled with both seduction and laughter. “Have you looked in a mirror lately, Penny Wright?”
She laughed breathlessly. She wasn’t beautiful, but he made her feel that way. All this swirling inside made her feel more alive, more vibrant, as if she must be rosy and glowing.
“No,” she said. “Not really.”
His arms tightened, pulling her closer, until her breasts touched his naked chest. “You don’t know what you’re missing.” He lifted his head and kissed her neck, moving across her skin with a slow, trailing heat.
If she was going to stop this—she was going to have to stop it now. Later—even a few seconds from now—would be far, far, too late.
She put her hand up, and slid her fingers between the skin of her neck and his lips. “Max,” she said softly. “I think we should talk first.”
He drew his head back. A frown had appeared between his brows. “You’re not saying...you’re not saying you don’t want this.”
Her heart hammered its own response, but she shook her head, knowing he’d need a clear, unambiguous green light. He wasn’t the kind of man who would claim a prize he hadn’t won.
“You know I want this,” she said. “I just hoped we could talk first. I hoped you would tell me what happened tonight. It was another bad dream?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“But why? What are these dreams that can hurt you like that?” She put her head on his chest, and listened for his heartbeat. Before, it had been racing like an electronic toy spiraling out of control. She’d actually been afraid for him and had wondered whether even the orgasm he so clearly needed could possibly be safe.
To her great relief, his heart drummed with a calm but powerful rhythm. “You don’t have to tell me, if you’d rather not.”
For a minute, she thought he would choose not to, just as he had in the past. But then, under her ear, she felt him inhale deeply. He laid his palm against her hair and stroked it softly, as if she were a kitten.
“Two years ago, I worked for an architectural firm out of Chicago. Alexander and Floyd. They’re one of the biggest. My main job was site consulting. I traveled all over the world, checking out locations. One of those trips took me to Mexico. It should have been simple. I’d been on a dozen trips to Mexico already. But this time, I got an invitation to dinner. Someone I didn’t know, but who said they knew one of the VPs at Alexander and Floyd. I had a strange feeling about the meeting, but I went anyway. And, as I told you the other day, I should have listened to my gut. There was no dinner, no man who knew the VP. I was taken hostage.”
She felt her body jerk slightly, startled. She’d known it was something bad. But kidnapped...
“How terrible,” she said. But she didn’
t lift her head. She didn’t want to interrupt his flow of words.
He stroked her hair soothingly—though she had the feeling it calmed him as much as it did her. Rhythmic, gentle, controlled.
“It was all about money, of course. I was nothing to them, personally. I wasn’t rich enough, but Alexander and Floyd was. So, essentially, I was just the kidnappers’ product. They owned me now, and they intended to sell me back to my company.”
She tightened her arms around his waist. Still his heart beat normally. But she wasn’t sure hers still did. “What happened? Did they agree to pay?”
“Not at first. I didn’t know what was going on, of course, not at the time. But when I got back to Chicago, Alexander explained that they’d been required to negotiate. The asking price was so high...no one ever pays the initial offer...the stockholders would mutiny....”
“Oh, my God.” She closed her eyes, thinking of the jackals who could make those kinds of cold-blooded calculations while a man was being held hostage. Stockholders? “How long were you there?”
“About two months.”
She finally had to look at him. Two months... Two months away from his family, not knowing whether he’d ever see his child again. She lifted her head and met his gaze. It was dark, but not haunted and lost, not like when he arrived tonight.
“How bad was it?”
“It could have been worse,” he said. “But it could have been better.”
She shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t pass me off with meaningless half statements like that. What happened?”
She wanted to know.... But more than that, she wanted him to talk about it. He had all these dodges ready on the tip of his tongue. All these canned phrases that he had undoubtedly used for two years now, to avoid letting anyone know the truth. He probably told himself that stoicism was strength. That a refusal to brood and wallow and whine was courage.
But the dreams said otherwise. The dreams showed that stoicism was just denial dressed up in a fancy name. The dreams proved that a refusal to brood was a refusal to process. A refusal to face pain consciously would inevitably drive that pain to find its outlet in the subconscious.
In the dreams.
“Where did they keep you?”
“In a basement. It was dirty and cold, and it reeked of gas and oil and power tools. But the hardest part was that it was dark. It was always, always dark. Day or night, it was all the same. It’s more difficult than you think it will be, doing without any way to visually orient yourself. You lose your sense of reality, somehow. You hear things. See things.”
She shivered, but she let him go on.
“You could get to the point you almost hoped for one of them to come, because they brought a flashlight. It was almost worth it, just to remember where the walls were, and where the ceiling was. It can give you a strange sort of vertigo, having no way to be sure you still know which way is up, which way is down.”
“But couldn’t you feel your way to the walls? Couldn’t you at least touch the floor?”
“No.” His eyes clouded slightly. She had to fight the urge to put her hand on his heart again, like a stethoscope, just to be sure. “No. There were chains that were attached to the ceiling. In the middle of the room. I’m sure you’ve seen it in movies. I had. I just didn’t understand that things like that weren’t just film props. That they existed in the real world, too. And that real people—normal, everyday people—could find themselves hanging from them, in rooms like that.”
She was going to cry. She fought it hard, knowing how absurd and pointless and just plain not helpful her tears would be. But she couldn’t stop them. They hung at the bottom of her eyes, stinging, for several seconds. And then they spilled over, down her cheeks and onto his bare, taut belly.
There was more. Of course there was more. The men would have been angry, frustrated that their requests for money were being thwarted. There would have been beatings, punishments... Maybe no food, no water, no time out of chains to let the blood return to his hands...
“You don’t have to stop telling me the details,” she said. “I’m crying because I’m angry, not because I’m frightened. I’m crying because I want to kill them, and I can’t.”
He smiled, and he put his hand against her cheek. “I knew you were fierce, under all that little-girl exterior.”
“I can be,” she said. “If anyone hurts the people I care about...”
She stopped, realizing that she’d probably said more than she should.
But he didn’t seem alarmed by it. He moved his thumb softly behind her ear, and the sensuality of that small motion was oddly distracting.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know, Penny. But I hope we won’t have to waste tonight talking about Mexico. The truth is, I don’t care very much about all that right now. For the first time since it happened, that basement seems a million miles away and a million years ago.”
She found that hard to believe. How could anyone be strong enough to put such a thing behind them?
“There are just a few hours left of this night.” He reached down, put his hands under her arms and raised her up where he could look straight into her eyes. “Let me use them doing something beautiful, instead of reliving something ugly.”
She nodded. In this position, she could tell that his desire had never abated. He was as firm and ready as he had been since waking.
She flicked the sheet back, baring his body to the dimly lit room, so that the fading storm could shimmer on every magnificent inch of him. She moved her legs so that she straddled him. He groaned softly and slid down, so that they no longer touched hip to hip, but so that she knelt just below that beautiful chin she’d spent so long trying to understand.
He lifted her nightgown and pulled it over her head. Then he put his palms on her bottom and tilted her forward. He smiled and murmured softly, and she realized they were so close she could feel his breath touch her most tender places.
“Max.” She tried to lean over and reach the nightstand. “We can make love safely,” she said. “I have condoms.”
She started to explain why she had them—because after what happened to her mother she would never, ever risk having unprotected sex. But she didn’t bother, partly because she knew he didn’t really care, and partly because she was having trouble breathing, which meant that forming words was difficult.
“Good,” he said, but he didn’t let her reach the drawer. He brought her back to his lips and then pressed in with his palms, so that she rocked forward and met his mouth. She felt his tongue move into her, and she cried out as different parts of her body simultaneously liquefied, stiffened...and caught fire.
“Condoms are nice,” he murmured as he used his palms, and his tongue, and his lips, to guide her into a subtle, torturous rocking motion that made her want to scream for more.
“But I’m afraid we won’t be needing them for a long, long time.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WHEN PENNY WOKE, the sunlight was as bright as a mountain of diamonds. Oh—how late was it? She started to check the bedside clock...then remembered it had toppled off the nightstand hours and hours ago.
And with that, the memories flooded in, hitting her with a heat that was almost physical. Her body flushed and tingled, and she became aware that, under her light covering of sheet, she was completely naked.
She was also alone.
“Max?” She got no response. She lay completely still for a few seconds, listening, trying to discern whether there was any movement in the house—the shower, or the faucet, or even the light sound of a bare, male foot across her hardwood floors.
But the house was silent. The sunlight streamed across the bed in brilliant white bands, spotlighting the empty place, rumpled sheets and cockeyed pillow where Max had been...but was no longer.
The night was over.
She sat up, clutching the sheet to her breastbone with both hands, and shivered slightly, her body remembering. She wondered, numbly, whether it would ever forget.
No. She shook off the melancholy that hovered around the edges of her heart. She wasn’t going to be sad already.
She had known what she was doing. She’d understood that they had plucked last night out of real life, the way you might pluck a diamond from the walls of a mine. It was beautiful, and it was a joy—and while it might have been forged by extreme pressures deep in that gritty earth, it could never be fully integrated back into the rock and soil from which it came. It would always be a thing apart.
But for those delicious, life-altering hours, she had held the diamond in her heart, and she planned to hold its afterglow as long as she possibly could.
She swiveled, tossing the sheet aside and putting her feet on the floor. Now that she faced the nightstand, she saw that the clock had been restored to its regular position. It stood on her sketch pad, which was open—to a sketch that she could tell in an instant wasn’t her own.
She slid the clock aside and pulled out the sketch pad. She held her breath without knowing why, as she realized the drawing was of Penny, herself.
In the sketch, she lay asleep. The perspective was tricky, but effective. She must have been lying on her left side, but at some point had tilted three-quarters of the way toward her back and had thrown her arm over her head. Her face was turned toward her elbow, so that it was drawn mostly in profile. The sheet covered her, but had slipped a little, exposing one breast—represented in the sketch by little more than a curve, a point of darkness in the center and a shadow beneath.
The picture was breathtaking. No one had ever sketched her before. She hadn’t known anyone who liked art enough to bother. But she should have known Max had talent. Ellen’s own abilities must have come from somewhere, and an architect would have been trained....
Even so, the sketch moved her, almost to tears. The woman here was far, far more beautiful than Penny could ever hope to be. She was both vulnerable and strong, both tender and erotic. Her deep peace and physical ease told anyone who looked that she had been deeply, repeatedly satisfied by the lover who watched her sleep.