Vivian's Return

by Cooper-Posey, Tracy

  Vivien swallowed against the sudden dryness in her throat. “Going somewhere?” she asked casually. “Taking Jenny out?”

  His gaze remained steady upon her. “Been running off your temper again, Vivvy?”

  Vivien didn’t answer. An answer that wouldn’t give anything away didn’t form quickly enough in her mind. Faking it, she merely raised one brow and stayed silent. He could make of it what he liked, she thought.

  In the early evening darkness his white shirt seemed almost luminescent. The jacket dropped across the shirt front as he lifted his hand away from his hip and held it up, palm outwards. Peace. “I came to talk.”

  “What about?” she responded instantly. It sounded cold and she was glad, for her pulse had begun to race in reaction to his statement. Talk could cover a lot of ground, as she knew from experience. Particularly, talking with Paul had always been a very sensual process, for he related most of his meaning through touch. It was an unconscious thing, possibly inherited with his genetic makeup but it had always fascinated her for it showed how truly uninhibited he was about his thoughts and feelings.

  She doubted he would be so relaxed with her, now. The same control he had been exercising over his reactions when dealing with her would probably kill any tendency for touching, too.

  Paul stood up. “I thought we might talk about this afternoon, now we’re both cooler.”

  “I have a date,” Vivien replied. This time, it was the truth. Jack, the relief pilot, had invited her to dinner. The manner of his invitation had made it very clear that he was asking because they were both visitors to the town.

  Paul smiled. It was a predatory, studied smile. “So have I,” he said. “This won’t take long.”

  She had already considered the dangers of avoiding him, so she barely hesitated before nodding. “All right,” she agreed. “Where? Here?” She waved toward the car. She didn’t bother offering the use of her motel room. There was no way she was going to invite him into a room that had such intimate connotations. Besides, if she knew him well at all, she knew he would want to be outside somewhere. He didn’t like being inside a room when emotional or important issues were at stake.

  Paul looked up into the indigo sky. “The night is too nice. Let’s just walk.”

  She nodded, containing her smile. “I’ll get a jacket,” she said, reaching for the key, which still sat in the door lock.

  “No need,” he said, from behind her and his jacket was dropped down over her shoulders. Instantly she was enveloped in warmth and the scent that was uniquely Paul’s. She could identify that scent among a hundred others. It brought tumbling into her mind flashes of the past—happy ones, joyful, even sad, but they all included Paul.

  Vivien swallowed back the sudden pain in her throat and looked up at Paul in the near darkness. She felt very close to tears. All those happy times and good memories and here they both were, behaving like virtual strangers. Such waste.

  “What’s wrong, Vivvy?” Paul asked and his voice had abruptly gentled.

  She wanted to be honest, to be direct. This sort of subterfuge had never been part of her nature and with Paul she had never had to learn the art. But to declare her true feelings would be so utterly unfair to Paul. He had his own life now and dumping her heart on him would be purposeless. She’d had her chance and blown it. Now it was her job to remain silent.

  “Nothing.” She shook her head. “Let’s walk.” She moved around him and slipped out through the narrow aisle between the cars to the open ground beyond, sliding her arms into the jacket and her motel key into a pocket.

  They got as far as the motel swimming pool—an irregularly shaped, curving expanse of water that shone iridescently blue through the underwater lights, lapping soothingly at the terracotta tiled surrounding. The sight and sound of the water halted them both as effectively as anchors and in mutual, silent agreement, they sank down onto a couple of the sun lounges provided for guests.

  Vivien curled her knees up to her chest, for extra warmth, hugging them to her with her sleeve-encased hands. A wave of Paul’s warm scent enveloped her. Other memories, almost subliminal but stronger than the rest, rose to the surface of her mind. The scent evoked a hundred different moments of them making love. All the memories were brief glimpses, snatches, made up of feelings more than images. They emerged all at once, a rich composite of moments that, like a patchwork quilt, formed a warm blanket of sensuousness around her.

  Paul sat sideways on the lounge, facing her, knees apart, one hand resting on his thigh, the other resting on the top frame of the lounge.

  “Are you here to score points off me, now?” she asked. “Have you changed your mind after today?”

  He looked away for a second, then back at her and shook his head a little. “As tempting as it is, I won’t descend to your tactics. I came to see if I can salvage my bid for the Coastwatch contract. I want you to reconsider your position. I want you to see how biased any reports you make about today’s incident will be.”

  “Why is the contract so important to you? Your company is running fine without it. You’re not going to go down the financial gurgler if you don’t get it.”

  “I can’t deny that, although the contract would be a healthy boost to the cash flow.” He shrugged. “Pride, maybe. Principle.”

  He’s lying. The voice spoke clear in her mind.

  “The need to be right, yet again?” Vivien added dryly.

  Paul stared at her. “I thought you didn’t want to turn this into a personal point-scoring exercise?”

  It wasn’t his response but the minute silence that had preceded it that bothered her. The consideration and control wasn’t the Paul she knew.

  Vivien swiveled to face him, resting her shins against the arm of the sun lounge. “Maybe I just want to see you react like a human being for once, instead of the robot I’ve been dealing with for the past week.”

  “You don’t,” he assured her coldly. “Not really. Getting even with a robot doesn’t provoke as much guilt.”

  “I’m not trying to get even with you.”

  “You are. Even if you think you’re not, it doesn’t change the fact that you came back here to finish the business that lies between us and rightly or wrongly, that means balancing the score. You left because I wouldn’t cooperate with you, so you blame me.” He lifted the hand on his thigh and gave a very Gaelic shrug. “It doesn’t matter if that is the way it really was, or not, it’s how you feel.”

  “You have no idea how I feel,” Vivien responded and was alarmed at the way her voice wobbled. She was growing angry, despite her best intentions to stay remote and unattached and her anger grew because Paul was right. She recognized he was right as he spoke the words and she saw the truth in them. She did want to get even for all the hurt and pain she had suffered because of him and she hated herself for that want. “You never did know how I felt. You were too busy flying your damned planes to notice. I’m surprised you even showed up here tonight. Then, maybe I’m not. If it’s a threat to your flying, you’ll expend any effort, won’t you?”

  Pain flitted across Paul’s face, so quickly Vivien thought she had imagined it. She caught her breath. Is that what she was trying to do here? To get him to respond honestly, as he used to?

  Impassively, he replied, “You always were direct, weren’t you? No quarter given—straight through the heart.”

  “You mean you still have one?”

  “What is it you want from me, Vivien?” he asked and this time there was life in his voice. “What will satisfy your need for revenge?”

  She winced at his selection of words.

  “Is it that you want me to cut out my heart and lay it at your feet? Is it that primitive?” he asked. “You want my blood? Because if that is it, I can assure you that I’ve already shed enough blood for you.” He hesitated a moment, then ground out harshly, “You left me when I needed you.”

  “You didn’t need me at all,” Vivien shot back. “You had your flying—that’s a
ll you’ve ever needed. You made your choice. You hobbled out of hospital with a walking cane, straight back into the pilot’s chair. You bypassed me. So don’t tell me you needed me, because I know that that’s just a way of trying to make me feel guilty and I don’t need you to make me feel guilty. I felt guilty for years and for no reason at all.”

  “I was buying the damned business for god’s sake! Why do you think I refused to buy that Tiger Moth? I was going to run the business, ground myself. Damn it, I was going to quit flying for you, Vivvy. I was going to stop flying....” Paul halted and looked down at the ground and brought his hand up to rub at his forehead, suddenly awkward.

  Vivien stared at him, horrified. She had wanted honest reactions but she had not expected this. “Why?” she whispered, her voice almost soundless. “I never asked you to quit flying. I would never have asked you to do that.”

  After a moment he lifted his head to look at her once more. “No. That was my choice,” he said hollowly.

  Vivien felt bitterness thread through her compassion and through the raging guilt. “And why are you telling me now?” she asked. “Is this your form of revenge?”

  He looked away then and she knew that she was right. So he had lied about not wanting revenge. Vivien lingered over the mental accusation for a moment, unable to prevent putting herself into Paul’s shoes.

  Revenge had not been the reason she had returned to Geraldton—or so she had thought. It was only the knowledge that she loved him and that she could never have him that had provoked the ancient longing for revenge in her heart. Revenge for all the old hurts for which she had lost any chance of retribution...until now. Was that what had happened to Paul? Had he lied when he’d told her he didn’t love her anymore, as he had lied about his need for revenge? Vivien narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. If he could exact his clever revenge then it was only justice that she get the same chance.

  “You may not love me anymore,” she told him, “but you’re not indifferent to me, either—not the way you were pretending this week.” He couldn’t be, not if he needed to hurt her. “So I’m going to have my revenge too.”

  Paul brought his gaze back to her face. The skin between his brows wrinkled with puzzlement and suspicion. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage?” he asked. “Why do you think I came here tonight?”

  “Don’t worry about your assessment,” she assured him. “I’ll be as fair as I can and if I think that that’s not fair enough, I’ll ask my boss to send someone else to do the job. Your contract is safe from me.”

  “But I’m not?” He half smiled. “What are you going to do? Break my arms and legs?”

  “I could hogtie you to a verandah post so you couldn’t fly,” she said, deliberately paraphrasing his earlier threat. “But that seems a little dramatic.” She looked at him. “You think you’re impervious, now, don’t you? You think I can’t get at you.”

  “Vivien, you’ve already done your worst and I lived through it.”

  Vivien uncurled her legs and sat on the edge of the lounge, facing him, her feet between his. She leaned very close to him, close enough to feel his warm breath on her skin. “I love you, Paul. I still love you, after all this time. And I’m not going to do a damned thing about it.”

  His gaze was locked with hers and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to react but then his eyes closed and he held them shut, tightly, for an endless aching moment.

  Vivien felt the pain herself. It wasn’t just the vulnerability of confessing her love—that was a transitory indignity. It was the knowledge that her confession had stirred the old feelings within him, fanned the almost dead coals. She had even delivered a little hope, then with her next breath had taken it away from him. It was like placing a glass of water in front of a man dying of thirst and telling him he could never touch it. He could look and remember what drinking his fill had felt like but that was all.

  Whoever had said that revenge was a dish best served cold had known what they were talking about. This revenge, tied up with all the hot emotional packaging, hurt like crazy.

  When Paul opened his eyes once more, Vivien could see the evidence of her revenge in his tightly drawn skin and the furrow between his brows.

  “It hurts, doesn’t it?” she whispered.

  “I never meant to hurt you,” he said hoarsely.

  “Well, you did. Nothing has changed, has it? You’re still flying and I’m still on the ground, watching and waiting. But I’m only going to put up with it for another week and then I’ll be gone again. This time, I won’t ever be back.” She stood up quickly, feeling her control beginning to slip. She hadn’t had much practice at this sort of thing, after all. She extracted her motel key from his jacket pocket, slipped his jacket off and dropped it into his lap.

  Paul stared up at her silently.

  “Have a great night out with Jenny,” she told him and whirled away, racing back to her room before the tears blinded her altogether.

  Chapter Four

  Dating.

  Such a small word, yet some of the most heart-rending experiences could be associated with it.

  First dates. The most traumatic kind.

  The first date in Vivien’s life had been with Paul. It was only years after, after her second first date, that Vivien had thought to label the outing as a “date”. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, her first date with Paul set an impossible-to-match standard that had left her picky and dissatisfied with every date she’d had since. Not that she’d had dates by the score—but the few times she had capitulated, she had lived to regret it. It seemed that most men who were persistent enough to claim her agreement to a date just didn’t have Paul’s flair for the dramatic.

  Or maybe they simply didn’t have access to the resources that Paul had at his fingertips. For Paul, on their first date, had turned the entire Western Australian coastline into their personal, private playground.

  He’d said on Tarcoola Beach that he would find her and he did. That night he had phoned her, catching her by surprise. Galloway was not a typical name in Geraldton but there were at least three of them listed in the phone book. Either Paul had rung all three until he’d struck lucky, or else he’d tracked down her address too.

  “Hello, Vivien Galloway.” His voice on the phone seemed more vibrant, more alive, if that was possible. It sent a shiver down her back, for it seemed to caress her ear with sensual promise.

  “You never told me your name,” she said, realizing abruptly that she had been thinking of him simply as him. In her mind that was enough, for he was the only man who had occupied center stage since that morning. All other males had slipped past her consciousness with Teflon smoothness. Even her father’s normally challenging presence had not intruded very deeply.

  “I’m Paul Levissianos.”

  She rolled the name around mentally. “Hello, Paul Levissianos.” From the corner of her eye she saw her father’s shaggy, leonine head come up a little, the big nose lifting inquisitively. “You found me,” she said into the phone.

  Her father stood up, shutting his book and walked quietly out of the room. Bless him.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “I didn’t know what to think,” she admitted. “I don’t know you.”

  “I’ll have to change that, then. You’ll come out with me? Tomorrow?”

  “All day?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I don’t know.” Vivien thought of her father, waiting in the next room, giving her privacy.

  “Do you need to check with your parents?”

  “It’s not like that. They don’t expect me to check in with them every time—”

  “Would it make you feel better if you did?”

  “Yes.” She let out her breath.

  “Then ask them.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll pick you up at six.”

  “In the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here?”

 
“Where else would I pick you up?”

  “Well, here is obvious...but...it’s just....”

  “What?” His voice was patient but she heard a mild amusement in his tone.

  “It means you’ll have to meet my parents.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “It would be to most boys I know.”

  There was a small silence and Vivien knew she had made a mistake. Paul Levissianos was not a boy. She had a hard time imagining him as young as the kids she had gone to high school with. He was a man and none of the old high school standards applied.

  But before she could apologize for her error, Paul said, “I’m going to be a part of your life for a long time, Vivien. I might as well meet them now.”

  It was the last thing she had expected him to say and she cast about for a response, flummoxed. “How do you know that?” she demanded finally.

  “I feel it. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she breathed. For she did feel it. It was a feeling of inevitability, of rightness and total trust.

  “Six, tomorrow morning, then.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t forget your swimsuit and bring your wet suit, just in case.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just you. That’s all I want.”

  Vivien felt her heart beat a single heavy beat before scurrying onwards. “Did you mean...?”

  “Yes.” His voice was low.

  “But I don’t... I haven’t....”

  “I know. Don’t be afraid of me, Vivien. I would sooner cut my throat than hurt you. Do you believe that?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “You will,” he assured her. “Sleep well, Vivien Galloway. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Good night,” she murmured.

  He hung up and the severed connection gave her a twinge of regret. She wanted, no, she needed to keep talking to him. He seemed to know her better than she knew herself and she wanted to find out more. She wanted to find out why.