by Margaret Way
* * *
There was no opportunity for Ava to speak to Varo. Lunch was served, and Luke had recovered sufficiently to leave his sickbed. She could see he wasn’t altogether happy with salad Niçoise and seared Tasmanian salmon escalopes. No starters. There was, however, a lemon tart to save the day.
Siobhan gave him lots of sympathy, thinking someone had to. The Argentine had a hard impatience etched on his stunning face. Ava was trying to hide some upset. “It’s a wonder you weren’t concussed,” she said in a show of solidarity. Her tone was sugary at times, even cloying.
Luke frowned. “Perhaps I am.” His injury was still hurting. He would need another couple of painkillers. He had to ready himself for a little talk with his wife. In his head he was tweaking it. All a man had to do was stick to his guns.
“One never knows,” Siobhan pondered, looking towards her silent hostess. “When I was little I toppled head-first off a trampoline. Everyone thought I was fine but I had a concussion.”
Luke didn’t respond. He was always bored with problems outside his own.
Ava had to stop herself from sighing aloud. Siobhan was overdoing the sympathy. Was it deliberate? She could see Varo stir restlessly. The sooner Siobhan was on her way the better. She had flown over in her father’s helicopter. Siobhan was Outback born and bred. A woman of the land. She would make a grazier cattleman an excellent wife. Of course she had been in love with Dev for years. Still was. Ava had been reminded of that constantly, with Siobhan’s questions about the honeymooners. Ava hoped Siobhan would get over Dev soon. There had only ever been one woman for Dev. That woman was his wife.
CHAPTER NINE
VARO offered to drive Siobhan to Kooraki’s airstrip, which seemed to cheer her immensely. She blushed.
Ava, however, spoilt the twosome by saying she would come too. After Siobhan had flown off home she would suggest to Varo they go for a drive. Maybe back to Malyah Man, as he appeared to be active. She was desperate to know what the barely perceptible change in his manner was all about. But it was there. The familiar easy charm hadn’t been as much in evidence over lunch, although he had responded to all of Siobhan’s thirty or so questions. One might have thought Varo came from an unknown part of the planet about which Siobhan knew nothing…
“All right, then. Goodbye.” Siobhan smiled up into Varo’s handsome face. “I expect you will be going home soon, Varo?”
“No, no—not soon,” he responded, drawing out the soon, knowing Siobhan was storing up all she had seen and heard for relaying her family.
His response cut the goodbyes short.
Siobhan climbed into her Bell helicopter and in no time at all ascended into the wild blue yonder.
Ava looked at Varo, asking rather hesitantly, “Would you like to go for a drive?”
“As you wish,” he answered smoothly.
It wasn’t the answer she wanted. “Is something wrong?”
“Why would you think that?” he parried.
She gave a short laugh. “I’ve seen you in different moods, Varo. Sometimes I allow myself to believe I know what you’re thinking.”
“So what am I thinking now?”
A sudden uncharacteristic anger took hold of her. Her eyes flashed like jewels. “It’s Luke, isn’t it? What did he say to you?”
“What could he say?” Varo shrugged, not knowing which way to go with this. He would be so glad to be rid of Selwyn. He was even glad Siobhan O’Hare had flown off home.
“He sees you as a rival,” Ava said hotly. They were, she realised with a shock, on the verge of their first argument. “Please don’t answer my questions with a question, Varo. He said something to upset you. That seems clear to me. He may not have exhibited that side of him, but Luke is an extremely possessive man.” Even the words in her mouth tasted bitter. “You didn’t get into a fight, did you?”
Varo’s voice was amused and disgusted. “Believe me, Malyah Man struck your husband the blow. I didn’t have to do a thing.”
“So you’re not going to tell me?” Ava said. Her whole body felt as if it was going into a dejected slump.
He couldn’t help touching her cheek. Her skin was as soft as a flower petal. He could smell the scent of her skin. Wound up as he was, he still wanted to take her in his arms, hold her body in an arc of intense pleasure tautly against him. Instead he said, “Let me get you out of the sun. We can’t afford to bake your beautiful skin.”
Ava didn’t say anything until they were almost at the Jeep. “I don’t want to go back to the house, Varo,” she said in a strained voice. “Not with Luke there.” This time her voice registered her disdain.
“So we go for a drive.” Varo held the passenger door, waiting for her to get in before he closed it.
He took his time walking around to the driver’s side. Luke Selwyn’s disclosures had shocked him to the core. He couldn’t deny that. At the same time he couldn’t accept them either. His beautiful Ava not wanting children. Let alone cruelly terminating a pregnancy. He couldn’t imagine the overriding guilt a woman might feel. But the Ava he knew seemed utterly guilt-free. One part of him wanted to tell Ava what Selwyn had said; the other part urged him to remain silent. Selwyn could be an utter scoundrel, a pathological liar. His reasoning would be if he couldn’t have Ava no one else would. He couldn’t bear to see Ava upset, the lovely colour gone from her face. But he actually feared he would do more harm than good confiding in her.
“So, where to?” he asked, putting the vehicle into gear.
She touched her slender fingers to her forehead. “Blue Lagoon,” she said jaggedly. “We can sit on the bank beneath the trees. I know you’re finding it hard to talk to me, Varo. And I know there’s a reason. Luke told you something about me that has you terribly disappointed in me. In all fairness, don’t you think you should tell me so I can defend myself?” she appealed to him.
Varo turned a grave face to her. She had a point. “I could be doing entirely the wrong thing, Ava,” he said after a moment’s consideration, “but I need to ask you. Have you ever been pregnant?”
Ava felt her heart jump in her breast. There was a long and awful ringing silence. Luke had told Varo she had fallen pregnant at some time? She literally couldn’t speak she was trying so hard to control her outrage. “Excuse me—would I have kept that from you?” she demanded, fully communicating her anger.
“I don’t really know, Ava,” he answered quietly. And he didn’t. He wasn’t by nature a judgemental man. And this was the woman he loved. “It is, after all, your business. I can understand if you had a miscarriage you might not like to talk about it. The memory could be too painful.”
Ava was torn between bursting into tears and ordering him to stop the vehicle so she could jump out. “You hit Luke, didn’t you?” she accused him. “Not that Luke wouldn’t have had it coming.”
“Would a jaguar swat a fly?” Varo returned bluntly. “I certainly wanted to—but, no, the rock fell away from the sandstone pillar. I watched it. For a split second it was stationary in mid-air, and then it dropped with a satisfactory crunch on your husband’s head.”
“My husband?” That hurt. Ava stared straight head. “He’s my husband now?”
“He is your husband,” Varo pointed out quietly.
“And you’re my lover?” she asked with surprising fierceness. The writing was already on the wall. She was going to lose Varo. One way or another Luke had seen to that.
“I’m very seriously involved, Ava. We both know that.” He turned off the main track, driving too fast towards the chain of lagoons. But what was in their way? These were the vast empty plains. Varo sensed she wanted to get out of the Jeep. He was finding it desperately confining himself.
“Involved? Is that the precise word?” Ava was losing the battle to keep her voice steady
. “Not in love with? No? You prefer involved?”
“You haven’t answered my question.” The expression on Varo’s striking face was unreadable. “I can understand if you kept it from me. You weren’t sure how I would deal with it. How I would react.”
“How you would react?” Ava exclaimed, her lovely face suddenly flushed with blood. She closed her eyes tight, shaking her head from side to side.
Varo believes Luke, that miserable, beastly liar. Don’t men always stick together?
Luke was out to harm her in the most horrible way. He knew she had fallen in love with Varo. How could she hide it? Even she knew there was a special glow about her. Now she had to suffer for her perceived betrayal. She could picture the two of them talking out in the desert. Luke playing the tortured husband to the hilt. Varo feeling horrified and let down because she had kept such an event from him. She could see the residual anger still in Varo’s brilliant eyes. If he hadn’t actually made a physical attack on Luke he had erupted, not far off it.
“Stop the Jeep, Varo,” she said furiously, and then made a huge attempt to lower her voice. “I want to get out. It seems you don’t know me at all.”
Varo ignored the order. He threw out a strong restraining arm across her breasts. “Sit still,” he said tautly. “We’re almost there.”
Even the birds seemed to be singing melancholy songs. Ava stalked away from Varo down to the water’s edge. This beautiful lagoon had always calmed her. Here she and Varo had sunk beneath its glittering emerald surface to steal heavenly kisses out of sight. She looked for a long time at the glorious flotilla of water lilies that steeped the lagoon in so much beauty. Nut grass and little wildflowers of flashing colours wove a sweet-scented tapestry, cloaking one area of the pale ochre sands. She had always thought this particular lagoon cast a primeval spell, but today it couldn’t calm the tumult of her mind.
What else did Luke say while he was at it? She had been unfaithful? Not once but several times? Of course he had forgiven her. He could even have gone the whole hog and suggested he might not have been the father of the child? The child that never was.
She wouldn’t put anything past Luke.
“Ava!” Varo called to her.
She turned back to where he was standing, in the shade of a line of feathery acacias. Such a wonderfully charismatic man. She loved him with all her heart. It was a hot, sultry, breezeless day. Shade would be welcome. Earlier in the day she had heard a series of muted thunderclaps that just as suddenly stopped. It was possible they would have a short, sharp afternoon shower. It might even be accompanied by a burst of hail. There were a few big, tumbled clouds appearing on the horizon in a peacock-blue sky.
“Let’s sit down,” Varo said, not knowing how to proceed exactly if Ava wouldn’t confide in him. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.”
Ava sighed deeply, thinking the wonderful harmony that had existed between them was as good as wrecked. She gave a raised right hand gesture, almost signifying defeat, and then sank onto the warm dry sand, drawing her legs up and clasping her arms around her jeans-clad knees.
Varo put out his hand, turning her head to him. His long fingers had a life of their own. They caressed the satin smoothness of her cheek and jawline. “Talk to me,” he urged quietly.
Ava jerked her head away more forcefully that she’d intended. Her long blonde hair broke out of its clasp, spilling down her back and over one shoulder. “About what?” she asked bleakly.
“The truth. That’s all I ask,” he replied gravely.
Her eyes were gleaming with unshed tears. Luke had pushed all her buttons. He knew how she would react. Wind her up and let her go. “Which implies you believe I haven’t been entirely honest with you?” she countered angrily. “For that matter, have you been entirely honest with me, Varo?” She was going out on the attack she was so overwrought. “Have I learned everything I need to know about you? You’re nearly thirty years of age. You’re not only a striking-looking man—a man who would compel the eyes of women—you’re a man of strong passions, sexual vigour, high intellect. It’s inconceivable you haven’t had many affairs these past years, which you naturally don’t want to expose. It’s even possible you could have fathered a child and not known anything about it. It has happened countless times before today.”
Varo too felt anger spurt into his veins. Anger Luke Selwyn’s disclosures had caused to erupt. Now this! “Don’t insult my good name, Ava,” he said curtly. “I won’t allow it—even from you. If a young woman had fallen pregnant to me she would have known to come to me. I would never desert such a woman, the mother of my child. However, no such woman exists. I’ve had my affairs. Of course I have. But I had come to believe I had never truly been in love.”
“Past tense?” she said bitterly.
“It’s not me I wish to talk about, Ava,” he said, trapping her hand and holding it fast. “I have been entirely honest with you. I am, I hope, a man of honour. I was brought up to be. You are changing the subject.”
“The subject being that I was pregnant to Luke?” she said hotly. “I lost my baby and I neglected to tell you about it? What is it you want me to say?”
“I’ve told you. I only want the truth.”
“And you get to ask the questions?” The bitter note rang in her voice. She loved him so much and he didn’t trust her.
“When did this happen?” he asked, feeling her anguish, desperate to understand.
At that point Ava totally lost it. She raged out of control. Her right hand—the hand nearest him—came up with the full intention of slapping his dark, handsome and arrogant face. Only he caught her wrist, bringing her arm down to her side.
“Let go of me.” She couldn’t endure his touching her. She began to struggle wildly, only he continued to hold her captive.
“Do not be frightened. I would never hurt you.” Still, there was a little flame in his lustrous eyes. “I should never have asked you this.”
“No, you shouldn’t!” She managed to get in a sharp little punch to his chest.
The thought of losing him filled her with dread. But it was inevitable, wasn’t it? She was doomed to losing the only man she could ever love. She didn’t know what was happening to her because all of a sudden she was fighting him, her face flushed, her movements frantic. Anger and hopeless desire were mixed up inside her. Her every movement held an erotic charge. Not only to her. But to him. Their desire for each other was like a powerful drug that raced unchecked through the bloodstream.
Of course with his man’s strength he triumphed. She was soon lying flat on her back, her body pinned to the sand. It felt much coarser than the velvety sand of the cave. Varo loomed over her, holding her down as easily as if she were a child.
He was breathing heavily, biding his time until the wild tumult of passion that was inside him miraculously cooled. This was Ava, and he was treating her with hard male dominance. The tiny top button of her pink cotton shirt had come undone. As she struggled so did the next. Now her lacy bra was exposed, and the shadowed cleft between her white breasts. His head was swimming. Her body was exquisite. He needed it so badly he almost felt like pleading for it.
“Are you going to let me up?” Her clear voice challenged him. This was a new side of Ava.
“The moment your anger passes,” he announced very tensely. “A woman has never attempted to slap my face before.”
“Even when you badly needed it?”
A violent hunger was washing through her. She wanted him to take her. Drive into her. Leave his brand. No way could she deny it. She was simply playing sex games. Desire was never far from them—even now, when there was so unexpectedly furious anger. The fury was actually inciting them. And it wouldn’t go away. It was pumping strongly through both of them. She thought she couldn’t stand it, but her body’s response was just the opp
osite.
Still holding her arms, Varo sought her beautifully shaped sensuous mouth. He kissed her deeply, passionately, until she stopped struggling and was quiet while his hands moved over her. She should have been shamed by her surrender. Instead her senses were so exquisitely sharpened she abandoned herself to this feverish sexual onslaught. He was immensely desirable to her. Her arms came around him. Locked.
I’ll never let you go.
The reasoning part of Varo was stunned by his intense hold on her delicate woman’s body. Only she was egging him on, glorying in his tight embrace, even if they both remained grimly silent. There were no tender words of love. Tenderness had no place here. The hunger was boundless; the opportunity to make the other suffer as they suffered…
They were naked, their limbs tangled, bodies forming, re-forming, responding to their own rhythms that nevertheless matched perfectly. Her long blonde hair was wildly mussed. Together they were caught in a tempestuous love dance with a total lack of inhibition, willing slaves to the senses. But what kept Ava from screaming out how much she loved him? What kept Varo from responding with great ardour how much he loved her? Both were stubbornly holding on to the raw hurt and confusion Luke Selwyn had sparked.
They were one body. He brushed hard against the swollen bud of her clitoris, augmenting the pleasure. Then he was buried so deep inside her she gave an involuntary cry that swiftly softened into satiated little gasps. At such a crucial point, when nothing else existed outside of the pounding waves of pleasure and excitement, she could do nothing other than cry out his name.
Varo was unable to control his own massive response, his thrusting deep, his possession of this woman total. He felt as if his whole being was going out of him into her.
Above their heads the sun filtered down through the trees. And still neither of them spoke.
When Ava was finally able to get to her feet she had to lean against him for support. “At least I know you want me,” she said, her voice low-pitched and trembling with emotion.