by Diana Palmer
“But you said…” she whispered.
“I may touch you,” he murmured sensuously. His mouth brushed lazily, warmly, at her throat, while his big hands worked some magic on her back through the sweater. “Like this.” He eased his hands underneath it, against the silken young flesh of her bare back. “And this,” he added, sweeping his hands up to her shoulder blades, discovering for himself that she was wearing nothing under the sweater.
“No…” she whispered unsteadily, a protest that sounded more like a moan.
His thumbs edged out under her arms, brushing against flesh that had never known a man’s hands, and she caught her breath at the sensations it fostered.
“I want to love you,” he said softly. He eased her back on the rug, with her head and shoulders against the pillow, letting his hands move very gently on her rib cage in a silence burning with emotions.
“Bryan…” she whispered achingly.
He bent, and his mouth parted slightly as it touched hers in soft, slow movements. It was torture, the teasing, brushing touch of his mouth and hands, a delicious torment that made her heart beat violently against the walls of her chest. She had never wanted anything as desperately as she now wanted Bryan, and in a fever of wanting, she heard her own voice shatter as she cried out for his touch.
His mouth took hers violently, hungrily, pressing her head deep into the pillow while his hands taught her sensations so exquisite, she arched submissively toward them.
Once her eyes slid open to look up into his, and he smiled at the awe and emotion in them—a smile that was strangely tender and soft with triumph.
He drew her own hands to the buttons of his shirt and watched while she undid them, clumsily, because she was shaking from the lazy caresses of his deft hands.
“Here,” he said quietly, drawing her mouth to his chest. “Like this. Hard, honey, hard!” he whispered huskily as her mouth brushed against the warm flesh that smelled of spice and soap.
She reached up to draw his mouth back down to hers and felt a shudder run through him as his body moved over hers in a way that was pleasure beyond bearing.
He hurt her mouth, bruised it, as all his hard control seemed to disappear at her yielding. He drew back suddenly, and his dark eyes were smouldering with hunger as they looked down into hers.
“I want you like hell,” he said in a rough whisper. “Another minute of this and I’m going to take you. Is that what you want, Carla?”
Sanity came back in a blazing rush. She gasped at the emotions that lay raw and bruised at the harshness of his statement.
“No,” she said shakily. “No, it isn’t. Bryan, I’m sorry…”
He rolled away from her and got to his feet. He went straight to the bar and poured himself a large whiskey, downing it before he lit a cigarette—all without looking at her.
She pulled down her sweater and got to her feet, her tongue gingerly touching her bruised mouth. She felt vaguely ashamed at her abandon, and as she stared at his broad back, she couldn’t help wondering if he thought she was like this with other men. In fact, she’d never let any man touch her like that. She was at a loss to explain why it had seemed so right when Bryan had done it. Her face flamed at the memory.
“I’ll take you home,” he said coldly. “Get your coat.”
“Bryan…” she began apologetically.
He turned, and his eyes were blazing. “Get your damned coat,” he said, in a voice that froze her.
Fighting tears, she gathered her possessions and followed him out to the car.
Six
She went around in a brown mood for the next week, alternately crying and cursing her own stupidity for getting herself emotionally involved with a man who only wanted one thing of her.
In between the tears, she waited vainly for the phone to ring, jumping every time it trilled, only to find some routine caller on the other end. The doorbell only rang once in all that time, and she dashed for it, her heart racing, only to find a neighbor inviting her to a rent party for another neighbor down on his luck.
How, she wondered, could she have thought Moreland was as involved as she was? Just because he took her out a few times didn’t mean he wanted to marry her. She knew that, but had she really mistaken his objectives that much? All along, had he only been angling for a way to get her into his bed?
She could still blush, remembering the way it had been between them, that strange look in his eyes as they met hers while her body seemed to belong to someone else in her wild abandon. She wasn’t easy, she wasn’t! But, apparently, he thought so; and she still felt the whip of his anger even now, his smouldering silence as he’d driven her home and left her there, without even a word of apology. She hadn’t been crying, but surely he could have seen that she was about to. Or perhaps he had. Perhaps it just hadn’t mattered to him one way or the other.
That was the hardest thing to face; the fact that he just didn’t care at all, except in a purely physical sense.
“No date with the mayor today?” Bill Peck chided as she sat down at her desk on Friday morning with an increasingly familiar listlessness.
She wanted to pick up something and throw it at him, but she kept cool. “I was writing a story,” she reminded him. “It’s finished.”
“And it’s been lying on Edwards’ desk for the past week, where it will probably be lying this time next year,” he reminded her. “The revitalization story’s been done to death, and you know it. What’s the matter, honey, did your big romance go sour?”
She whirled, her green eyes flashing as they met his calculating ones. “You go to hell,” she flashed in a tight, controlled voice. “What I do and how I do it are no concern of yours. I don’t work for you; I work with you, and don’t you ever forget it!”
A slow, mischievous smile appeared on his face, causing her anger to eclipse into puzzlement.
“That’s my girl,” he chuckled.
She slammed a pencil down on her spotless desk. “You beast!” she grumbled.
“It’s my middle name. Now, are you finally back to normal? Business as usual?” He grabbed his coat. “Come on, we’ve got a press conference this morning. I’ve already cleared it with Eddy.”
Eddy was his nickname for the city editor, and if Eddy said okay, she had no choice. But she got her purse and camera together with a sense of foreboding. “A press conference where?” she asked carefully.
“At city hall, where else?”
She froze, desperately searching her mind for an excuse, any excuse to get out of it. Another meeting. There had to be another meeting or an interview or a picture—oh, God, there had to be something!
“I said, let’s go,” Peck said, taking her arm. “You haven’t got an excuse. I need some pix, and I can’t handle a camera with this finger,” he added, holding up a bandaged right forefinger. “I cut it on a sheet of bond paper, can you imagine?” he sighed. “Worse than a knife cut.”
“Can’t you take Freddy?” she asked hopefully.
“What’s the matter?” he asked with a sideways glance. “Afraid of him?”
She knew exactly what he meant, and she wanted to admit that she was terrified. She almost put it into words, but just at the last minute, she stopped herself.
“I’m not afraid of anybody,” she said instead. “My father said it was better to go through life giving ulcers than letting other people give them to you.”
“Wise man,” he grinned. “On a trip to the Orient, did you say?”
It was just the question she needed to start her talking, and to take her mind off Moreland. They were in the elevator at city hall before she realized what Peck had been doing.
“You did that on purpose,” she accused gently.
He glanced down at her, cocking his hat at an angle over his pale brow. “Who, me?”
“Yes, you, you lovely man.”
He grinned at her. “Like to adopt me?”
“No. You’re too tall.”
He squatted down a little.
“How about now?”
“Lose a hundred pounds, and we’ll talk about it,” she assured him.
The conference room was crowded, but she didn’t spend one second looking around for Bryan Moreland. She took a seat beside Peck in the back section and lowered her eyes to her camera, keeping them down resolutely while she pretended to fiddle with light settings.
“You don’t think you’re going to get me a shot from here, do you?” Peck asked as he sat down beside her.
“I’ll use the telescopic lens,” she said under her breath. All around them, news people were milling around. A couple of them, radio reporters whom she recognized from other stories, called to her, and she managed a frozen smile and a tiny wave of her hand in response.
“What in hell is the matter with you?” Peck asked. “You look like you’re trying to get smaller.”
“Will you please shut up?” she begged. His voice was loud, and it carried. “Please sit down and pretend we aren’t acquainted.”
“But we work for the same paper,” he argued.
“Not for long, if you keep this up,” she whispered back.
“You are scared of him!”
“Shut up,” she said through her teeth, making a prayer of it as Bryan Moreland’s big, husky form came into view. He swept the room with his dark, cutting gaze, and she felt the impact of it like a physical blow when his eyes stopped on her averted face. She stared straight ahead, ignoring him, while her heart felt as if it were going to jump out of her body.
She didn’t look at him again until he was at the podium, with the City Council and the City Planning Commission gathered around the conference table with him. She recognized Edward King and Tom Green immediately.
“What’s this all about?” she asked Peck in a muted whisper.
“The airport,” he replied with a grin. “You made somebody take notice with that run-in with King, didn’t you?”
She shifted restlessly and forced herself to listen to Moreland’s deep curt voice describing plans for the new airport and the expansion of services it would mean by national airlines. For the first time, the city would have an international airport; a tribute to its rapid growth.
But when he finished, the land purchase still hadn’t been discussed, and she noticed that the mayor didn’t throw the floor open for questions, as he usually did at the end of a press conference.
She got her things together and started to dart out the side door, but Bill Peck left her, calling back that he had to talk to Tom Green, and Carla got trapped between the nest of chairs and a group of news people passing tidbits of information back and forth. The next thing she knew, she was looking up into Bryan Moreland’s dark, quiet eyes.
Her heart dropped, and she could feel her knees trembling. She let her gaze fall to his burgundy tie.
“Good morning, your honor,” she said with a pitiful attempt at lightness.
“Five days, two hours, twenty-six minutes,” he said quietly.
She looked up, feeling all the dark clouds vanish, all the color come back into her colorless world as she realized the meaning behind the statement.
“And forty-five seconds,” she whispered unsteadily.
He drew in a hard, deep breath, and she noticed for the first time how haggard he looked, how tired. “Oh, God, I’ve missed you,” he said in a voice just loud enough to carry to her ears and no further. “I wanted a hundred times to call you and explain…I know what you must have thought, and you couldn’t have been further off base. But I got busy…Oh, hell have supper with me. I’ll try to put it into words.”
The need to say yes was incredible. But she was cautious now, wary of him. He could hurt her now, because he could get close, and she wasn’t sure she was willing to take the risk a second time.
He read that hesitation and nodded. “I know what you’re afraid of. But trust me this once. Just listen to me.” She shifted and let a long breath seep out between her lips. “All right.”
“I’ll pick you up at six.”
She nodded her assent and looked up, hypnotized by the strange expression in his eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered deeply. “There are too many cameras in here.”
She knew what he meant without any explanation, and her face colored again.
“Reading my mind?” he asked with a wicked smile as his eyes dropped to the soft, high curve of her breasts. “Read it now.”
She pulled her coat tight around her and tried to breathe normally. “I…I’ll see you later, then,” she managed weakly.
He chuckled softly as he moved to let her pass by him. His eyes didn’t leave her until she was out of sight.
* * *
She was like a teenaged girl on her first date, waiting for him that night with her hair hanging loose over her shoulders, the single green velour evening gown she owned, clinging to her slender curves like a second skin, bringing out the soft tan of her bare arms and shoulders.
She couldn’t help feeling nervous. What was he going to expect from her now? The fact that he’d missed her hadn’t really changed anything. And what about her? What was she willing to give? What did she truly feel?
In the midst of her mental interrogation, the doorbell screamed into the silence, and she jumped just before she ran to answer it.
He walked in by her even as she opened the door, his scowl fierce, his eyes dangerous.
“Hard day?” she asked softly.
“They’re all hard,” he said, turning to look down at her. The anger drained out of his hard face as he studied her soft curves with an expression that grew warmer, possessive, as the seconds throbbed past.
His massive chest rose and fell heavily under his dark evening clothes, his ruffled silk shirt. “Oh, honey,” he said finally, deeply, “that is one hell of a dress.”
“Do you really like it?” she murmured inanely, speaking for the sake of words, while her eyes told him something very different.
“I hope you haven’t gone to any great pains with your makeup, little girl,” he said finally, moving closer, “because I’m about to smear the hell out of it.”
Her lips parted under a rush of breath while he pulled her against his big body, molding her slowly against him.
“It’s been too long already,” he said in a harsh whisper, bending his dark head until she felt the warm, uneven pulse of his breath against her trembling lips. “I can’t get that evening out of my mind, Carla….”
His mouth hurt. It was as if the hunger he felt made violence necessary, and his big arms bruised in their ardor while he took what he needed from her soft ardent mouth.
“Sleep with me,” he whispered against her mouth. “I need you.”
“Bryan…” she breathed, drawing back as far as the crush of his arms would allow.
“God, don’t make me wait any longer,” he growled unsteadily. “I’m so hungry for you I can hardly stay alive for wanting you. Carla, little Carla, why are you holding back? You won’t regret it.”
She swallowed and her eyes closed. “Bryan, there’s never been a man,” she said in a haunted voice.
She felt his arms stiffen around her, felt his breath catch.
“What did you say?” he asked.
She drew a steadying breath. “I said, I’ve never slept with a man.”
“But, at the farm…My God, woman, you were on fire…”
Her eyelids pressed hard together as a wave of embarrassment swept over her, and her pale cheeks colored. “I know. But it’s still true.”
There was a long pause, and then his big, warm hands came up to force her face out of hiding, so that he could search it and her misty eyes.
“It was the first time for you…touching, being touched?” he asked finally, and there was a new tenderness in his voice.
All she could manage to do was nod. Her throat felt as if it had been glued shut.
The hard lines in his face relaxed, smoothed out. He looked at her as if he’d never seen a woman before. Hi
s dark eyes went down to her soft body, lingering on the high young curves that his fingers had touched so intimately.
“I remember looking down at you,” he said absently, “and there was an expression on your face I couldn’t understand. Now it all makes sense.”
She chewed on her lower lip, vaguely embarrassed, because she remembered that moment, too—vividly.
He turned away, ramming his big hands into his pockets with a heavy sigh. “Well, that tears it,” he said roughly.
She stared at his broad back, her eyes drawn to the thick, silver-threaded hair that gleamed like black diamonds in the overhead light.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured inadequately.
“My God, for what?” he asked harshly, whirling to face her. His dark eyes blazed across the room.
The question stunned her. In the sudden silence, she could hear the ticking of the clock by the sofa, the sounds of traffic in the street as if they were magnified.
“Are you trying to apologize to me for not being the woman I thought in my arrogance that you were?” he asked, a new gentleness in his voice. “I don’t want that.”
She swallowed, dreading the question even as she asked it. “What do you want?”
A wisp of a smile turned up one corner of his sensuous mouth. “I could answer that in a monosyllable,” he teased, watching the color come and go in her cheeks. “But, I won’t.” He shot back his white cuff and glanced at his watch. “We’d better get moving, honey. I ordered the table for seven-thirty, sharp. Ready?”
Confused by his sudden change of mood, she nodded absently and went to get her long black coat with its lush mink collar—an extravagance she’d once regretted.
He opened the door for her but caught her gently by the arm as she started out.
“I’m glad the first time was with me,” he said in a strange, low tone.
Her face went beet red. She couldn’t seem to meet his eyes as they walked together to the elevator.
* * *
He took her to a quiet restaurant downtown, with white linen tablecloths and white candles on the tables, and a live string quartet playing chamber music. It was cozy, and intimate, and the food was exquisite. But she hardly tasted it. Her mind was whirling with questions. He seemed to sense her confusion as they lingered over a second cup of rich coffee. He set his cup down in the saucer abruptly and leaned back in his chair, studying her with a single-minded intensity that began to wear on her nerves.