Cloud Waltzer

by Tory Cates

  Archer hauled down on the rip cord, opening a huge panel at the top of the balloon. “Bend your knees and hang on!” he commanded, clamping an arm around Meredith and pulling her to him.

  As the trapped air spilled out through the gaping hole, the basket dropped, landing with a bone-jarring impact. The last thing Meredith could remember was the feel of Archer’s arms around her and the sight of the sere New Mexican earth rushing up to meet her. Then blackness closed in.

  Chapter 8

  As Meredith fought her way into a groggy consciousness, the first thing she saw was her great-grandmother’s vanity. For several disoriented seconds she thought she was back at the family estate in Chicago. That misapprehension depressed her far more than the dull throbbing in her head.

  “Thank God, you’re awake.”

  What was Archer Hanson doing sitting on her bed in Chicago? Meredith wondered as her jammed mental gears slowly began to engage again. What would her mother say when she found him here? Even in her befuddled state, Meredith knew the answer to that question: NOOFUD. It was her childhood shorthand for her mother’s ultimate condemnation—Not One of Us, Dear. Only Chad Allbrook, of any of the boys she’d ever brought home, had escaped the condescending putdown. His family history was as monied and illustrious as her own, even though the Allbrook money was more a matter of history than Chad would have cared to admit.

  Her eyes were as blank as a Kewpie doll’s. Looking closer, though, Archer saw something in their fathomless blue depths. He saw fear. What, he wondered, haunted this vibrant woman he was coming to care for with such surprising intensity?

  “Meredith, are you all right?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Archer pulled her to him. “Come on, we’re going back to the hospital. The doctor said you’d come around, but we’re not taking any chances.” Archer gently swung her blue-jeaned legs out from under the bedcovers and, kneeling beside her, tugged a pair of socks onto her feet.

  NOOFUD, indeed, Meredith thought, the heartbreaking tenderness of Archer’s gesture filling her with love. This man was worth a hundred Chad Allbrooks. Anger at her mother’s snobbery and petty tyrannies finally broke Meredith free of the daze she’d been in.

  “Archer,” she said, her voice sounding rusty. “I’m fine. A bit stunned, but I’m coming around. What happened?” Slowly the gears in her brain were meshing.

  Archer rose and stared into her eyes. The frightened vacancy was gone. Relieved, he sat beside her. “How much do you remember?”

  She strained for the elusive fragments of memory. “I remember most of the flight.” She bit on her lip in her effort to fish the lost bits out of a foggy pool. “I remember most everything until you pulled the rip panel cord.”

  “After that,” Archer filled in for her, “we made what amounts to a crash landing because we had to get down before we ran into those power lines. I grabbed for you, but somehow when we hit ground, you banged your head. Thank God, the chase crew saw our dilemma and they’d already radioed for an ambulance. You were out all during the ride to the hospital. Do you remember coming to in the emergency room?”

  Meredith shook her head. There was no recollection inside it of any emergency room.

  Archer smiled. “Too bad. You were the very model of the assertive woman telling the doctor in no uncertain terms that neither were you going to remove your clothes, nor were you going to stay at the hospital. You were going immediately home, with all your clothes intact. He checked you out and said there was no indication of any damage. So he released you, provided that there would be someone with you who could bring you back in if you hadn’t come around completely in the next couple of hours. I volunteered and Phil brought us back here.” Wryly, he added, “Where all your clothes, except your shoes and socks, remained as intact as you’d ordered they be.”

  Archer gently lowered Meredith back onto her pillow. “But that’s enough thinking for the time being. I want you to just lie back and rest. Don’t go to sleep, though. The doctor warned against that. Just relax and I’ll go try and rustle us up something to eat. You hungry?” he asked, tucking the sheet up around Meredith’s shoulder.

  She nodded, luxuriating in the rare sensation of being taken care of. She tried to remember another time when she’d felt so deliciously looked after. She couldn’t. Even when she was a young girl, she’d been the one who’d done the looking after. She remembered struggling upstairs on the maid’s day off with a tray she was barely big enough to lift and tiptoeing into her mother’s darkened room. Julianna’s face had been a tiny dot of white framed by her dark hair. Her eyes were covered with a moistened white cloth. That was how Meredith remembered her mother—always with a moist cloth over her eyes, forever shielding them from the light, the burdens of everyday life, from reality.

  Just as Meredith was sinking into the infinitely cozy feeling of being taken care of for a change, and Archer was getting up, she was jolted back into full alertness by a delayed realization—Archer was here, in her apartment.

  Archer felt her jerk against the sheets and saw the panic swim again into her eyes. He easily guessed its cause and sat back down. “It’s all right,” he soothed. “Whenever you feel up to it, you can tell me what happened to Aunt Adrianne.” He stroked a few dampened wisps of hair back from her forehead, then trapped one of her slim, pale hands between his. It had turned to ice. “Don’t worry about anything right now except clearing the cobwebs out of that beautiful head of yours.” He leaned over to kiss her. The bed shifted beneath Meredith as he rose.

  She stared at the ceiling. From her tiny kitchen came rattling noises as Archer hunted through her drawers and cabinets.

  “Surely you have some coffee somewhere out here,” he called to her.

  “It’s in the cabinet to the left above the sink,” she answered, her voice a monotone. The decision she’d been trying to postpone had been forced on her. There was no way she could evade the inevitable any longer. Archer was too good a man for that.

  “I’ve found your pot. Now give me a hint about where you hide your coffee filters.”

  “Underneath the counter. Second shelf from the bottom.” There was a weary resignation in Meredith’s voice as if she were at long last putting down a heavy burden. She listened to the cabinet door squeak open and heard Archer shuffle through its contents.

  “All I’m finding here is a photo album.”

  “Look at it,” Meredith instructed. Her whole body tensed up as she listened for the rustling of pages. The sound came. Then stopped. It was followed by silence.

  “Who is this?” Archer asked.

  Meredith couldn’t force the words out of her constricted throat to answer.

  “This isn’t you, is . . . My God, it is! Meredith, what was wrong with you? Were you sick?”

  She braced herself, looking down from the ceiling into Archer’s questioning eyes. He stood at her doorway, the album open in his hands. Everything she had expected—the shock, the disgust it hid, the disbelief—they were all there.

  “Yes,” she answered, her throat dry, her tongue lifeless. “I was sick, but I didn’t know it at the time.”

  “What was it?” Archer came into the room, filling it with his steady, masculine presence. “You were emaciated. How could you not know you were sick?”

  “That was my sickness, Archer.” Meredith paused, took a deep breath, and fighting back the powerful impulse to simply bury the truth, to lie and say she’d had some rare wasting disease, she spoke the awful words, “I had anorexia nervosa.”

  Archer had read about the disorder. He knew what it was. But he couldn’t reconcile the bizarre symptoms, the pictures he held in his hand of a sad, skeletal girl, with the woman he was coming to love. None of them belonged together. “But you’re over it, right? You’ve recovered?”

  “I’m a fairly normal weight now, if that’s what you mean,” she answered, knowing that the worst part of her revelation still lay ahead of her.

  “Does this have anything to do with
why you didn’t want me coming over? Why you forbid me to see you, to see all of you?”

  Meredith nodded. Archer went to her side. She shrank from him. She’d won whatever feeling he had for her through deceit. Now it was time he knew who she really was. “Yes, I invented Aunt Adrianne as a way of keeping you from the truth. I didn’t want you to know about me. About what I was . . .” She stumbled, but made herself finish. “What I am.”

  “And what’s that?” Archer asked gently. “A person who’s had a problem? Meredith, we all have. All of us, myself included, have our dark corners where we hide our secrets, our fears, our vulnerabilities. That’s no reason to keep the world at arm’s length forever.”

  Meredith shook her head with an increasing force. Archer had to know, she had to make him understand. He deserved that much at least. “You don’t understand. I’m still the same person in those pictures. That’s why I keep them: to remind myself that it could all start again. I still have to fight with it every day. Every time I run into a setback, a rejection, I start thinking that maybe it’s because I’m overweight. That of course no one likes an undisciplined slob. With just a little shove, I could go right over the edge again.”

  “Meredith,” Archer pleaded passionately, “it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to let your past control your future. It’s over. You can start living now. We . . .” Archer’s words tumbled out with an increasing intensity. “We can start planning a future together.”

  She looked into his brilliant, searching eyes and was filled with a despair so profound that she couldn’t speak. She saw such dreams, such life, such force there, and knew she could never be a part of any of them. She clasped her arms around her knees and rocked forward, burying her face. Try as she might to stifle the sobs welling up within her, she couldn’t. She shuddered beneath Archer’s encircling arms as the tears she couldn’t keep dammed up within her burst loose.

  Archer hugged her to him in silent comfort, letting her cry out her anguish.

  Finally, in gulpy, choked words, Meredith told him the full truth as she saw it. “It can never be. Not with me.”

  “But why?” Archer demanded.

  “Don’t you understand?” she pleaded, looking up, her cheeks glazed with tears. She pointed to the open photo album. “That crazy woman is still inside of me. She’ll always be there. That’s why I never wanted you to come over here, to see me without clothes on.”

  “Why?” Archer probed, trying to fit the pieces together. A sense of urgency drove him. He knew that what he said, how he responded to Meredith’s revelation, was crucial. That any hope they had of a future together depended on it. “Did you think I’d be shocked? Repulsed?”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “Meredith, all you’ve told me about is your past. Let’s not make it part of our present and future together. Please, angel. You deliberately left it behind you when you left Chicago; let’s do the same thing now.”

  “You still don’t understand,” Meredith moaned forlornly. “I hid my home, my body, my past from you because, deep in my heart, I believe that none of them are good enough. That I’ll never be good enough. I was in therapy for a year and even that didn’t get rid of my feelings of inadequacy. And it does no good to have someone tell me that I’m crazy. That I have a good figure and am an all right person. That’s the worst of it really, having someone tell me that it’s all in my mind. I know that and hearing it just makes me feel even more inadequate. I feel even more undisciplined and self-indulgent and hate myself even more for not being able to even control my own thoughts. Can you possibly understand what I’m saying? What I am?” she pleaded with a heartbroken bereftness.

  Archer grabbed her shoulders and made her face him fully. “Listen to me, Meredith. I understand what you’re saying. I’d never tell you that what you believe is ridiculous. The strongest power on earth is the human mind. That’s where we create the worlds each one of us lives in.”

  Archer’s understanding was an unimaginable relief to Meredith. The final truth gushed out. “I don’t think I’m good enough for you. I’m not pretty enough or strong enough or . . .” A fresh flow of tears washed away Meredith’s words.

  “I can’t tell you that you’re strong enough,” Archer said, encompassing Meredith in his embrace. “I don’t know that. But I can tell you in ways that no therapist ever could that you’re more than pretty enough.” He groaned out under the load of his mounting desperation. “If there’s nothing else on earth I can prove to you, I can prove that.” He captured her chin. Tilting it up to him, he channeled a gaze of burning intensity between himself and Meredith. He wanted there to be no doubt whatsoever that she was filling his sight, his mind, his heart.

  Meredith met his gaze with a tentative wariness. Her lashes clumped around her storm-darkened eyes in teary spikes. Archer’s grip of gentle iron and his unfaltering gaze told Meredith that there was nothing and no one else in the world on his mind. That realization forged an empathic link between them. In that moment nothing existed beyond the smoldering ice of Archer’s eyes, the savage Viking planes of his heroic face, the boundless lure of his lips. She watched as they formed words.

  “I lied. You’re not pretty at all. You’re exquisite.” Meredith’s swollen lips received his like a pillow cushioning a weary head. She tasted her own tears on his tongue as it entered her with a driving possession. He writhed in her mouth with a fury of abandonment. He wrote odes to her beauty and painted portraits of the longing it inspired across the hollows of her mouth. Her tongue flickered against his, answering his need with her own. She quivered at the depth and intensity of what they called forth in each other. It was somehow more powerful than anything they had experienced together before. She trembled, sensing that they stood together on the edge of a precipice. This time they would either join completely and unconditionally or she would lose him forever. Her heartbeat, already racing, quickened even more.

  Archer felt the tremor of fear that rippled through her. He lay her back against the pillow and pulled the covers away, revealing the striped T-shirt and jeans. “Roll over onto your stomach.”

  Meredith sought out his eyes. There was a stern loving there that would broach no protest. She complied with his request.

  “Now, take off your shirt.”

  The time of decision was at hand. She could cling to her secretive obsessions forever and doom herself to a loveless life of solitude. Or she could, with Archer’s help, struggle to rid herself of her irrational fears. Facing the mattress, she shrugged off the striped T-shirt. Archer’s hands found the fastener of her bra. A drowning voluptuousness surged over her as he freed her breasts and pushed the straps aside.

  “You’re tense,” he commented as his large hands spanned the frail cage of her back and began a skillful massage. With unerring accuracy, his fingers found tightened bands of muscles and bunched nerves and unloosened them. Meredith purred with feline contentment as the strong, supple fingers wove patterns of relaxation into the fabric of her back.

  “Now your legs and bottom,” he instructed in a hoarse voice.

  Meredith paused, her luxurious sense of ease stiffening as she considered Archer’s order. But no, she couldn’t turn back now. Couldn’t sentence herself to a solitary life with only her mental hobgoblins for company.

  Archer pulled the sheet up around her. She twisted over beneath its cover and shucked off her jeans and underwear, shoving them out onto the floor, then rolled back over onto her stomach. She tucked her arms underneath her, bracing herself against the inescapable exposure.

  Archer lifted the sheet away. A gasp slipped from his throat. Trembling before him, against the background of the rosy mauve sheet, was a slender ivory band of inexpressibly lovely curves. Nothing he could say would be worthy of such alabaster splendor. He bent over and kissed her back precisely at the point where it began to rise into the womanly swell of her buttocks.

  The honeyed touch of his lips sent delicious charges of electric warmth sp
iraling through her. They melted the icy nervousness that had tried to claim her. Feathering kisses up her tingling spine, Archer’s hands began their narcotizing mission. He kneaded the springy muscles at the back of her thighs with a rhythmic insistence that sent sheets of flame pulsing through their throbbing juncture. With his thumbs working along the inside of her thighs, he gradually parted them.

  Meredith felt her face burn at this newest unveiling. But her aching need for him was far too urgent to even consider retreating now from his plundering touch.

  His fingers raked lightly along her thighs, propelling messages upward to her melting core. They teased her with fleeting passages, then withdrew, sending a spasm of need shuddering through her. His flickering touch tantalized the backs of her knees, the large muscles at the backs of her thighs, before it reentered the torrid zone it had left flaming.

  The warm vapor of his breath fell over her spine. As his lips caressed each tingling vertebra, his hand slid along the cradle of her womanhood until, to Meredith’s gasping relief, he found her moist innerness.

  Feeling the magnitude of her womanly dampness, Archer rejoiced, happy in the knowledge that soon all restraints separating them would be removed. His voice was thick with wanting when he spoke. “Let me see you now.”

  The thought flashed through Meredith’s mind: This will be the first time. Never before had she been brave enough to show herself to a man. Never, not even with Chad, who’d been only too happy to leave her in the prison of her compulsive modesty. If she were ever going to break through, now was the time. Holding her breath, she slowly rolled over. She thought her heart would surely burst in the following seconds. Seconds that passed like frozen, crystalline hours as Archer’s eyes began to gaze at all of her.

  Stupefied, Archer consumed and was consumed by her pale beauty, feasting on it like a heavenly banquet. He shook his head in rapt wonderment.

  Meredith relaxed, seeing the obvious pleasure he was taking in the sight of her. A tiny hope flickered in her that maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t as loathsome as she’d always believed.