by Diana Palmer
“You never did.”
He eased down onto the bed, shoes and all. He looked up at her quietly. “Help me undress. I can’t sleep in my clothes.”
She stared at him while the soft plea made her flush.
He held out a big hand. “Come on, chicken,” he said with a faint smile. “Tat, I’m drunk,” he reminded her when she hesitated. “I can’t get hard. If I can’t get hard, I’m no threat.”
The flush got deeper.
He laughed huskily. “And all these years, I thought you’d had one man after another,” he said. His face twisted. “Damn me for what I did to you!”
She didn’t understand the anger. She didn’t understand his change of attitude. She didn’t really trust it, either.
“Don’t,” he said, seeing the debate going on in her mind. He shifted and winced. “Help me, Tat. I just want to sleep.”
She moved closer to the bed. Hesitantly, she pulled off his shoes, and then his socks. He had beautiful feet, for a man.
He sat up. She dropped down onto the bed beside him, still wary. He pulled her hands to the buttons of his shirt. He stared into her wide eyes. “Take it off,” he whispered, his voice like deep, soft velvet.
She felt her heart run wild. It had been years since she’d been this close to him, since he’d wanted her this close.
“Come on,” he whispered again, coaxing her fingers to the first button while his mouth hovered just above her eyes.
The tone, the proximity, got to her. She worked buttons out of buttonholes, noting the thick hair that covered his bronzed chest as she pushed the shirt back over his broad shoulders. There was a raised place just to the left of his breastbone, where he’d been shot when he lost his eye. It was hardly noticeable now.
He felt his body going taut as the shirt fell off. Her eyes were so expressive. She loved looking at him. He loved letting her. He was getting aroused, despite his protests to the contrary. So many years. A lifetime.
“You can...do the rest, I’m sure,” she said, and tried to get up.
“No, I can’t.” He smoothed her cold hands to his belt. “Help me, Tat,” he whispered.
He lay back down. When he did that, she relaxed, just a little.
She managed a shaky smile. “I’ve never undressed anybody except myself,” she blurted out.
She unfastened the belt and pulled it out of the loops, noting the expensive leather it was made of as she dropped it into the chair beside the bed. She hesitated.
He pulled her hands to the fastening of his slacks. “I can’t sleep in my best clothes,” he said gently. “Keep going.”
“Rourke...”
“Shhh,” he coaxed. His hands smoothed hers down on the fastenings. “Just a little more. That’s it. Now put your hands under the waistbands and pull. That’s all you have to do.”
His voice was seducing her. She shouldn’t. She should get up and run. She was embarrassed and nervous. Her hands were shaking.
“You can’t be...that drunk,” she began.
“Hold on to that,” he said softly, and he lifted his hips and pushed both waistbands down.
She was looking at him without realizing what she was seeing for several shocked seconds. During them, he slid out of his slacks and boxer shorts and lay back down on the bed, his eyes on her wide-eyed, shocked face as she looked and looked.
He laughed with pure delight. He was aroused. Very aroused, despite the liquor. Her eyes were enhancing what was already a magnificent hunger. He shifted on the clean sheets and groaned softly.
“I’ve dreamed of this,” he whispered huskily. “Of letting you look at me like this, feeling your eyes on me.”
She was too shocked to reply or even to try to leave.
“Tat, at your age, you’ve surely seen photographs of men like this, even if you haven’t seen the real thing,” he chided.
“Well...yes,” she said in a choked tone.
“But...?”
“None...none of them looked like...like that,” she whispered, fascinated. “You’re...you’re beautiful,” she blurted out.
His face changed. He shifted again on the sheets and shivered.
“I should... I should...go,” she choked.
One long arm snaked gently around her waist and pulled her across him and down on the bed beside him.
He wasn’t aggressive. He didn’t demand. He unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it aside. His fingers went to the front catch of the lacy little bra and unfastened it. He moved it away and looked at her beautiful, pink-tipped breasts, the crowns hard.
“You were beautiful at seventeen like this,” he said quietly. “But you’re more beautiful now.”
She couldn’t even manage words. Her heart was beating her to death.
“What...are you going to do?” she asked with helpless apprehension, because she knew that she couldn’t stop him, didn’t want to stop him. She was almost shivering with a hunger that had eight years of abstinence behind it.
“I’d very much like to put my mouth on your breast and suckle you until I made you come,” he whispered. “The way I did when you were seventeen. Remember, Tat?” His voice was soft and sensual as he looked at her bare breasts. “You were shocked at first, and after you went over the edge you cried. I kissed you and moved on top of you. I had your lacy little panties halfway down your legs and my pants unzipped. And we heard footsteps.”
She was trembling. “Yes.”
“I hurt like hell. I never thought I could stop, even then.” He drew in a long, unsteady breath. “I lived on that night for years.”
“Before or after you started going through beautiful women like tissues?” she asked with weary cynicism.
He wasn’t going to get into that. “You don’t understand what it was like,” he said quietly. “Have you ever wanted someone so much that it was like physical torture to be near them at all?”
Her head rocked on the mattress. “Not really,” she confessed.
“I wanted you to the point of madness, Tat,” he said softly. “And I couldn’t even touch you.” He smiled, but it was a hollow smile.
“So that was why...”
“That was why.” He drew in another breath. He stared down at her relaxed body, at the taut little breasts open to his eye. “So beautiful,” he whispered.
“You...haven’t touched me,” she said.
“I know. I’m not going to.”
Her expression wasn’t easily read. “Is it...because of the scars?”
His eye went to the scars, faint white lines where that butcher, Miguel, had cut her when she was a prisoner in Sapara’s jail. His face was dangerous. “I killed him, Tat. I wish I could have spared you what happened.”
Her fingers went up to his mouth and pressed there. They were cold.
He kissed them tenderly. “Those scars are marks of honor,” he whispered. “And I want very much to kiss them. But I can’t.”
“You...can’t?”
He moved away from her, just a little, and coaxed her eyes down to the raging masculinity below his belt line.
She flushed.
“I can’t,” he repeated. “Because our first time isn’t going to be when I’m too damned stinking drunk to do justice to you.”
He sat up, tugged her up and put her bra and blouse back on. He nuzzled his nose against hers, but he didn’t kiss her. “Don’t take this the wrong way. But get out of here.”
She got to her feet. He pulled the sheet across his hips and lay back with a smile.
She didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t offering anything but a sensual experience at some point in the future. He could take her and walk away. She would die a thousand deaths.
She bit her lip. “Stanton, I’m engaged...”
He studied her
intently. “You want me,” he whispered. “I want you. How is the beloved physician going to feel when we go at each other like starving wolves?”
“That won’t happen,” she said, clenching her teeth.
The tension left his face. He looked at her quietly. “It will. And you know it. I can’t walk away from you again, Tat. I’m not even going to try. I’ll sober up in the morning.” It was almost a threat. His eye narrowed. “And when I do, there won’t be any place on earth you can go to get away from me.”
“I’m going...to be married,” she said harshly.
“To a man you neither love nor want,” he said. “You’ve never really seen how aggressive I can be when I want something. You’re going to find out.”
She flushed. The past few minutes had been entirely too stimulating. “I’m going home!”
He nodded slowly. “For now.”
She turned and almost ran from the room. He watched her, his eye full of longing as she closed the door firmly behind her. He smiled to himself.
* * *
All the way to Manaus, Clarisse kept going over the night before in her head. Rourke wanted her. It was almost unbelievable that he’d let someone convince him that she and he were related. She tried to see it from his point of view. She grimaced. If that had been reversed, if she’d thought they were related... Her eyes closed on a wave of pain. She’d have done the same. She would have wanted him to hate her, so that she didn’t give in to her hunger, so that she didn’t slip.
He’d been different last night. Tentative, when Rourke was never tentative. Then he’d treed a bar. She couldn’t recall that he’d ever done anything like that. He’d threatened the man who came on to her; he’d been violent. She’d never seen him so out of control. Why had he been drinking in the first place?
Then she remembered. She’d told him she was marrying Ruy Carvajal. Had that set him off?
And was it just that he wanted her? Could he feel something for her, too, something powerful and overwhelming, the way she felt about him? She laughed silently. No. Rourke didn’t love her. He was fond of her, of course; they had a long history. And he certainly wanted her. He’d gone hungry for eight years, so now that the barriers were down, he was full of expectation, full of plans to seduce her. She wanted him, too, but once he had her, he’d go on to the next conquest. It wasn’t that he wanted her so much, it was that she’d been inaccessible to him.
But he’d had her in bed with him, half-naked, and he hadn’t even touched her. She flushed, recalling what he’d shown her, how aroused he’d been. Surely if it had been only physical, he’d never have hesitated. Of course, he’d been drinking...
She took the glass of champagne the stewardess offered and drained the glass. It made the hurt a little easier. She’d told Rourke no. Now she was going home to get married. She’d tell Ruy when he came home. He’d said he’d be away for three weeks. She’d tell him when he got back. He would be delighted. She’d help him regain his status in his community. She’d protect herself from being tempted to give in to Rourke’s hunger. It would benefit everyone.
The stewardess offered a refill. She accepted it. She drained the second glass. She was pleasantly numb. She didn’t drink, so the champagne affected her strongly. She closed her eyes, drifting away. Rourke wanted her, at last, at long last. But all he really wanted was one night in bed with her, after which he’d walk away and probably be just as abusive, just as taunting as he’d ever been in the past. Except this time he’d have real ammunition. He would be able to taunt her with giving in to him, if she was crazy enough to let him into her bed. She’d become what he’d always accused her of being.
Her heart jumped when she remembered what he’d said to her, while they were dancing and later, in his room. He knew she was innocent. But he’d known when they were dancing. How had he known?
She closed her eyes and let herself drift away. She was going home. She would marry Ruy. Rourke would return to Nairobi. She would be safe. Yes. Safe.
* * *
What she didn’t know was that a tall, blond man with a bloodshot pale brown eye was even at that moment buying a plane ticket to Manaus.
4
Clarisse took a cab to her small house, the one that her parents had bought so many years ago. She’d been staying at hotels when she was in the country, when she’d brought Peg Grange here, because the memories were too stark. But she had to face the past someday. The house was part of it.
She put down her suitcase and purse and walked into the living room. She’d replaced the couch where Rourke had almost seduced her eight years ago. But the memories were still there, so exciting, so hot, that she flushed just recalling them.
It had been Christmas Eve. She was seventeen years old. Rourke had been in Manaus on a job, and he came by to pay his respects to Clarisse’s parents. He and her father had been friends, despite the difference in their ages. Her parents and K. C. Kantor had been close since Clarisse was a child, playing with Rourke when her father was stationed in Kenya.
Rourke had teased her while they decorated the Christmas tree. She’d been wearing a slinky dress that her mother hadn’t approved of, but she knew Rourke was coming by the house and she’d wanted so much to look grown-up, to make him see her as a woman.
And he had. He’d looked and looked. While they spoke, while he teased her, while they put the ornaments on the tree.
Her father and sister had been doing last-minute shopping. Her mother had been home, but a neighbor had come by and asked her to step next door and look at a small child with a fever. Maria had been a nurse and she was still the last refuge of people with little money. Reluctantly, because she knew Rourke’s reputation, she’d let herself be talked into leaving the house.
Clarisse could still see the expression in Rourke’s brown eyes, because it was before he’d lost one of them, as the front door closed behind her mother. He’d moved toward her with intent, for the first time since she’d known how she felt about him.
Without a word, he’d lifted her off the floor in his strong arms and his mouth had settled with exquisite tenderness on her trembling lips.
He brushed them softly with his and smiled when she looked at him from wide blue eyes. “You’ve never done this,” he whispered.
She shook her head.
“Lucky, lucky me,” he whispered back, and bent again to her lips. “Don’t be afraid, Tat. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”
He’d spread her out on the couch while he unbuttoned the silk shirt he was wearing and pulled it out of his slacks. She watched him like a cat, with wide-eyed wonder.
He slipped out of his shoes and slid alongside her on the long leather couch.
“Mama,” she whispered worriedly. “She won’t be gone long...”
“I’ll hear her,” he promised.
While she was worrying, his big hands went to the wide straps that held up the dress and slid them with sensual mastery right down over her soft little breasts. She opened her mouth to protest and his mouth went down right on one breast and began to suckle it.
She had to bite her lip almost through to keep back the helpless cry of pleasure as she felt desire for the first time in her life. It was more than desire. She arched up to his lips, clutched at the back of his head, where the hair was thick, and tried to bring his mouth even closer. The suction increased suddenly and she threw back her head, arched her back and climaxed in his arms.
She cried then. It shocked her that she was abnormal. But Rourke had only laughed, softly, with pure delight, and comforted her. She loved him, he whispered, that was why. It made her extremely sensitive to his lovemaking.
Her eyes had opened wide as his body slowly overwhelmed hers. He let her feel the slow, building tension of his body, let her feel it swell against her flat belly. That, too, he whispered, was the most natural thing in the
world. And how would she like to feel it inside her?
She flushed, but his mouth covered hers and she shivered, her legs parting as he moved between them, her voice breaking as she encouraged him. She felt his hands under her dress, moving the lacy little briefs down, touching her in a place and a way she’d never been touched in her life. And all the while, he fed on her breasts, working the hard crowns with his tongue. She was pleading then, begging him. His hand moved between them in a heated rush as he felt for the zipper and tugged at it with something like desperation...
And they’d heard the door open and her mother’s footsteps.
Barely in time, they were dressed and apparently putting decorations on the tree when she walked in. But Clarisse’s mother could see quite easily what had been going on. She hadn’t approved—that was obvious. She’d lectured her daughter after Rourke had left, minutes later, without a word to Clarisse or even a backward glance. That man, Maria said coldly, had a string of lovers, and he was not adding her precious chaste daughter to them! She would make sure of it.
Clarisse didn’t think of Rourke that way. Not until Rourke had been wounded soon afterward in a conflict that cost him his eye and almost his life. She’d flown to Nairobi and sat by his bedside for days, nursing him, forcing him to live, to cope with the loss of the eye. His reaction to her had been heartbreaking. He’d been ice-cold, withdrawn. He acted as if he hated her. The minute he was allowed to leave the hospital, he took an old girlfriend home with him and didn’t even thank Clarisse for being there when he needed her most.
But that was only the beginning. Later that year, he flatly refused her invitation to a party in Manuas. Even then, she didn’t get the idea. He stopped answering her letters and refused to pick up the phone if she was on the other end.
Not until the next time they met, at some fund-raiser in Washington, DC, when he was so cold and mocking about her behavior that she was certain he hated her. He called her an immoral little tramp who was any man’s. Nothing had ever hurt so much. He was the only man she’d ever been intimate with. Had her behavior with him made him think that she was any man’s, that she was immoral? Was that why he suddenly hated her? She hadn’t known. She hadn’t understood. But his hateful attitude had caused her to avoid him, off and on, ever since.