by Kay Hooper
She had never looked at him through a woman’s eyes, not really. Not until today. And today he was different.
Kelly turned onto her side and stared toward the window, trying to relax, to stop thinking. It occurred to her only a long time later as she was drifting off to sleep that it wasn’t just her mind and emotions that were drawn to Mitch. With all the tensions between them, she hadn’t realized how her body had reacted, how she’d been vibrantly aware of his every movement.
Except for when he had lifted the gold chain she wore, they hadn’t touched at all. Yet she’d felt every glance, felt his voice like some strange, taut vibration in the air that brushed her skin softly. New, unfamiliar, and unnerving feelings. And those feelings followed her into sleep, prompting dreams like none she’d ever had before…
—
He drew his thick jacket tighter and turned up the collar, mildly annoyed by the coldness of the wind. From his position in the lower level of the garden he could see the house clearly, had watched lights going out downstairs. She’d taken a bath, he thought, but had closed the wooden shutters so he couldn’t see. Modest little bitch. They were all like that, though, at least to hear them talk. Protesting the lights being on, acting uncomfortable about dressing and undressing around him. Trying to hide from him even when they were his to look at as much as he damned well pleased.
Then her bedroom light had gone out, and he had seen the dim glow in another bedroom, realizing that the two in the house weren’t sharing a bed yet. The very thought of the bastard in her bed made bile rise in his throat, and he spat into the bushes angrily. Ghosts were impossible to kill, but Mitchell was flesh and blood.
He stared up at the bedroom window, barely able to make out a shadowy form, then glanced toward the cliffs. He’d looked the place over thoroughly, and knew there were wooden steps leading down to the narrow strip of sand. After a while he leaned against a tree and watched the window, waiting patiently for that other watcher to go to bed.
—
Mitch stood at his bedroom window, staring out into the shifting landscape. The trees tossed restlessly, blown by the fractious coastal winds, and now and then he caught a glimpse of the dark gleam of the sea. The hardwood trees were naked branches moving eerily, and the pines whispered and sighed as they swayed. It was a lonely sight.
He found it difficult to trust sleep now, to relax and give himself up to it. The therapists had told him that was natural and that one day he’d be able to close his eye without feeling the dark stirrings of fear. Doctors had assured him that there was no likelihood of his slipping back into a coma. Not likely at all, they’d said with quick smiles.
But then, it hadn’t been likely that he would ever awake from the coma at all.
He hadn’t wanted even to close his eye in those first days, his resistance almost obsessive, until sheer exhaustion had taken the choice out of his hands. It hadn’t gotten any easier in all the months since. The sensation of drifting toward unconsciousness, so pleasant for most people, was for him a stoic leap of faith. And each time he opened his eye, his muscles were braced, the single thought in his mind like neon.
Just a night. Please, just a night…
Even now he found it impossible to sleep through the night. He woke often, peering in the darkness at the digital watch whose red numbers kept track of time and day and month and year. A reassurance that would allow him, minutes or hours later, to take the leap yet again.
So little control. That had been hardest to accept, that even his own mind and body could betray him. That fate could step in without warning and steal years. And that there was not one single, damned thing he could do to stop it.
That was why he had so quickly seen and understood what Kelly had talked about. Ten years earlier he had sought control in order to avoid the bitter struggles he remembered so vividly. Perhaps unconsciously he had fallen in love with Kelly because she’d been so young and adoring, so pliant to his wishes, because, as she’d said, he needed that. But now he knew only too well what an illusion control was.
More, he was beginning to realize that even the illusion was a cheat when it surrounded two people, and a twisted one at that. He would have fought like a tiger to avoid even the suggestion of surrendering his own individuality to another’s, yet he had—unconsciously—expected Kelly to do just that. To be swallowed up by him, to live through him.
It made him a little sick now to think of it.
He stood by the chilly window, still dressed because he wasn’t yet prepared to risk giving himself over to sleep, staring out without seeing because he was looking back at the past and inward at himself and his life. It came to him slowly, with a distant shock, that his father had been terrified of losing his mother. A naturally possessive and willful man, he’d seen his wife’s need for independence as a threat, and had either loved too much himself or trusted in her love too little. Perhaps both. Rather than risking losing her, he had held on tighter, demanding that she belong only to him.
She had fought him for years, and Mitch realized now that the struggle had gone on so long only because his mother had loved his father, and had sought to preserve her marriage without losing herself. In the end, unable to live through her husband as he demanded, she had chosen, painfully, to live without him. She had told her son that he could come to her as soon as he was of age; Hugh Mitchell would have fought tooth and nail if that battle had gone to court.
She had died in a plane crash two months later.
With her gone, Mitch had launched a war of his own, blaming his father and rebelling at the slightest show of authority. He hadn’t understood the complexities of relationships then, and had seen only the results of his father’s domination. Now, looking back, he realized that it had been largely a case of history repeating itself. Hugh Mitchell had held on tightly to his son out of fear, and Mitch had pulled away all the harder. Until, finally, the decision to marry Kelly had caused the final break between them.
Love without trust. The difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul.
His father must have been a lonely man.
Mitch leaned his forehead against the cold glass and stared out at the bleak, alien landscape. How close he’d come to repeating his father’s mistakes. And he would have, had not fate intervened.
I was alone, and I didn’t know how to be.
But she had learned how to be. After her brief marriage. There was, Mitch thought, more to that than she’d told him. He’d heard it in her voice, but hadn’t been willing to probe because it had been like a knife inside him to hear her say she’d needed another man. But he’d have to hear it sooner or later; he’d have to listen and deal with his own feelings. That was part of the past he had to accept, part of who Kelly was now. Another man had been her first lover. Her husband.
He had no right to be jealous, but he was. No right to feel bitter and betrayed, but he did. He still was enough of the possessive, willful man he had been to feel the violence of those emotions even while he recognized them as unreasoning. And because she was the last tie to all he’d been, he had to fight an even more desperate urge to hold on too tight, to demand of her how she could have given herself to another man. To blame her for the pain he felt.
The emotions were raw inside him, a jumble composed of past and present. He didn’t know where one left off and the other began, or if there could even be, in the end, a division between the two. The only thing he was certain of was that his need for Kelly was far greater and infinitely more complicated than it had been ten years earlier, and that if he were able to win her love this time, it would happen only once he mastered his own innate possessiveness.
And that was going to be very difficult for him. He had accepted that control was an illusion, but he had lost so much that the fear of losing her was something he couldn’t bring himself to contemplate.
Yet he had to let go. Let go of the past. Let go of Kelly. He had tried to chain her then, and fate had stopped him. He had to stop himself
from trying to chain her now. If she could learn to love him again…he had to learn to trust that love enough to hold only a hand.
Not a soul.
It was three in the morning when he roused himself and glanced toward the waiting bed. But he didn’t move toward it, and after a moment he returned his gaze to the wind-tossed trees that teased him with glimpses of the ocean.
He wasn’t ready. Not yet.
—
“Good morning.”
Mitch looked up from his work to see her standing just inside the kitchen. Wearing jeans and a dark blue cowl-neck sweater, her bright coppery hair pulled back away from her face and tied with a ribbon, she was lovely and a little wary, but less strained than she had been the night before.
Perhaps it was her sudden appearance, or the demons he had wrestled with in the night, but for one fleeting instant he saw her clearly, without the blurring of past images. He saw intelligence in her violet eyes, sensitivity and vulnerability in the curve of her lips, stubbornness in the delicate line of her jaw. He saw the slender figure of a woman who moved slowly and gracefully, shoulders almost unconsciously braced, something of vigilance in the tilt of her head.
He saw a woman who had lost a great deal, perhaps much more than he knew. No girl now, but a woman who had survived.
And in that brief moment he felt a desire for her so strong it was almost like a blow. It was a feeling of stark necessity, a shattering tangle of physical and emotional needs. He wanted her not the way he had ten years earlier with a passion tempered both by her youth and by the arrogant certainty that she belonged to him; this was a need far more complex than anything he’d ever felt before—deeper, and grinding inside him. Not the male urge for possession, but a compulsive realization that she was half of himself and that without her he’d never be whole again.
“Mitch?” Faint color bloomed across her cheekbones, and her eyes skittered nervously away. “Is—is something wrong?”
With an effort that tore at him jaggedly, he pulled his gaze from her and looked down to watch idly as the spatula in his hand bent under the tightening force of his grip. Too much, he thought, I’m feeling too much. She’d seen it, and the apprehension in her eyes was plain.
Dear Lord, was she afraid of him? Afraid he’d resort to force, that he would attempt to overwhelm her with his own feelings?
He cleared his throat and carefully loosened his grip on the spatula, concentrating on reining his wild emotions. “Good morning. Ready for breakfast?” His voice held steady, somewhat to his surprise.
Kelly slid her hands into the pockets of her jeans, shaken by what she’d seen in his intense gaze and by her own instant response. These strange sensations, heat and tightness and a wordless yearning…they unnerved her.
“I usually don’t eat breakfast,” she murmured.
He glanced back up at her, the intensity shuttered now, and where the old Mitch might have told her she was too thin and needed to eat more, this one merely said, with a faint smile, “Humor the cook.”
She nodded and went to pour juice and coffee while he transferred golden pancakes from the griddle to plates. Kelly couldn’t think of anything casual to say as they began eating, but she couldn’t stop glancing up at him. He seemed different this morning, at least after that first oddly naked, searing scrutiny of her. More…what? More withdrawn. As if his focus had turned inward.
And she felt peculiar, unable to stop herself from remembering her surprising dreams. She rarely remembered dreams, yet she vividly recalled those of last night. Some had been stunningly erotic, filled with shapes and images and colors and throbbing feelings. But the dream she remembered most clearly had been different. It had been unnerving, threaded with tension that had built to a nightmare ending.
She had dreamed of Mitch as he was now, quieter and yet more compelling than he had been all those years before. He had been wandering through the house and grounds, walking along the beach at the base of the cliffs, and she thought he was looking for something he couldn’t find. She’d wanted to tell him where it was, but hadn’t been able to utter a word. Following him because she had to, because a misty bond connected them and it pulled at her irresistibly, she’d felt tense and restless, her heart thudding, needing to look over her shoulder but afraid to see what was behind her.
She had known somehow that if she could only catch up to Mitch and talk to him, whatever was behind her would go away and stop troubling her. But there seemed to be a measured distance between them, pulling the bond taut without snapping it, and all she could do was try not to lose sight of him. She wanted to walk faster, and couldn’t, yet she could hear what was behind her getting closer, like her own shadow at her heels.
Breathless, troubled, longing, anxious for reasons she didn’t understand, she had followed Mitch through the night, never able to close the distance between them. She’d heard quiet music that throbbed and a soft little chuckle that might have been the wind behind her, had seen the eerie shapes of trees bending and swaying, reaching out for her.
Then, as the stark gray light of dawn spread heavily through the air, Mitch had stopped on the edge of the cliffs, gazing out on the ocean, and she’d felt a jarring sense of urgency. She had to get to him, reach him, it would be her last chance. Behind her, hot breath on her neck, no, just the wind, it had to be the wind, and as long as she didn’t look she was safe. Hurrying toward Mitch, seeing him turn and smile and hold out his hand. The lean, hard face and black eye patch, so dangerous, but not like the other one, he couldn’t be. She’d reached him at last, his hand touching hers, and then, behind her, the rushing of angry steps, the shadow overtaking, pushing.
Kelly had awakened with a cry trapped in her throat, her heart pounding, remembering vividly the sickening feeling of slamming into Mitch, both of them falling, the jagged rocks below spinning crazily as she closed her eyes.
“Does it bother you?” he asked suddenly, looking up from his plate.
“What?” she asked, startled, trying to push the stark images out of her mind.
Mitch made a slight gesture with his left hand toward the eye patch.
She wondered if he’d felt her glances, if her own restless anxiety had somehow touched him. “No. I—I got used to it in the hospital. It must have been rough on you though. Waking up.”
“A shock at first.” He shrugged. “It was the easiest thing to accept, really. I don’t think about it much anymore.”
Kelly smiled a little, forcing herself to be casual. “The patch makes you look piratical. Dangerous.”
He considered that opinion for a moment, watching her with a faint smile but an unreadable expression. “Other men hardly notice it, as far as I can tell. Women definitely do. I just figured the interest came from a kind of maternal instinct. You know—a bird with a broken wing.”
“It may be partly that,” she said dryly, “but not all. Like I said, it makes you look dangerous, and a lot of women are drawn to that look. Pirates and rakes. Heartbreakers.”
“Including you?” The question was light, but his gaze remained watchful.
She should have expected it, but she was nonetheless caught off guard. Compelled by something in him or by her own innate honesty, she said slowly, “I don’t know. When I look at you, it isn’t the patch I see. You’re more impressive somehow than I remember. More complex. There’s a stillness in you, a quiet that wasn’t there before. Maybe I’m drawn to that.”
Her own admission surprised her, but she didn’t try to take it back. She was drawn to him, and for her own peace of mind she needed to understand why. Past, or present? Was it remnants of her guilt over having left him, or a deeper connection that had lain dormant inside her until she had been able to look at him through a woman’s eyes?
Mitch seemed to hesitate, then said, “If that’s what you see, it’s deceptive. And elusive.”
“Is that a warning?” She held her voice steady, even though something in his made her heart thud unevenly.
He half
nodded, still looking at her. “I’m trying, Kelly. I’m trying to work through all this, I promise you. I don’t want to be the kind of man my father was, holding on so tightly to someone I care about that I strangle them. But I’ve lost too much not to be afraid of losing again. It’s something I have to fight all the time, that fear. I think that’s why I haven’t touched you.”
She wanted to tell him that he had touched her, that she felt every glance, but her throat had closed up. She was aware of her pulse throbbing, of a strange, restless heat inside her, and the force of her own feelings bewildered her. And even though she’d never felt this way before, some instinct deeper than knowledge warned her that all the strength she’d fought so hard to gain would never be enough to fight this.
If she wanted to fight it.
Without a single physical touch, he had made her aware of him, had made her feel the stirrings of longing. New, unfamiliar feelings that made what she had once felt for him seem like dim and distant echoes.
She was afraid. The fear had more than one level, like steps going down into darkness, and she couldn’t make herself move from the topmost tread. She stood on the top step now, shaken by her own yearnings—and frozen by memories of pain. She hadn’t felt these longings then, but she couldn’t forget the pain and helplessness another man had taught her, couldn’t make herself believe it would be different, because she could feel the intensity in Mitch, and the danger.
His low voice roughened. “I might not be able to let go once I touch you. I’ve wanted to hold you for so long that I’m afraid I’ll hold too tight.”
Chapter 4
Kelly didn’t think he meant that literally. Then again, perhaps he did. Either way, she wasn’t ready to find out. And she knew that his feelings were still unresolved; she’d heard that in his voice last night.