by Nora Roberts
puddles near the curbs, and Angela’s voice is so—vital. She was so beautiful, Grant, not just her face, but her. She never outgrew sweetness. She was telling me about a party she’d been to where she’d met someone. She was in love, bubbling over with it. The last thing she said was that she felt wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Then I killed her.”
Grant took her shoulders, shaking her hard. “What the hell kind of craziness is that?”
“It was my fault,” Gennie returned with deadly calm. “If I’d seen that car, if I’d seen it just seconds earlier. Or if I’d done something, hit the brakes, the gas, anything. The impact was all on her side. I had a mild concussion, a few bruises, and she …”
“Would you feel better if you’d been seriously injured?” he demanded roughly. “You can mourn for her, cry for her, but you can’t take the blame.”
“I was driving, Grant. How do I forget that?”
“You don’t forget it,” he snapped back, unnerved by the dull pain in her voice. “But you put it in perspective. There was nothing you could have done, you know that.”
“You don’t understand.” She swallowed because the tears were coming and she’d thought she was through with them. “I loved her so much. She was part of me—a part of me I needed very badly. When you lose someone who was vital to your life, it takes a chunk out of you.”
He did understand—the pain, the need to place blame. Gennie blamed herself for exposing her sister to death. Grant blamed his father for exposing himself. Neither way changed the loss. “Then you have to live without that chunk.”
“You can’t know what it’s like,” she began.
“My father was killed when I was seventeen,” he said, saying the words he would rather have avoided. “I needed him.”
Gennie let her head fall against his chest. She didn’t offer sympathy, knowing he wanted none. “What did you do?”
“Hated—for a long time. That was easy.” Without realizing it, he was holding her against him again, gaining comfort as well as giving it. “Accepting’s tougher. Everyone does it in different ways.”
“How did you?”
“By realizing there was nothing I could have done to stop it.” Drawing her away a little, he lifted her chin with his hand. “Just as there was nothing you could have done.”
“It’s easier, isn’t it, to tell yourself you could have done something than to admit you were helpless?”
He’d never thought about it—perhaps refused to think about it. “Yeah.”
“Thank you. I know you didn’t want to tell me that even more than I didn’t want to tell you. We can get very selfish with our grief—and our guilt.”
He brushed the hair away from her temples. He kissed her cheeks where tears were still drying and felt a surge of tenderness that left him shaken. Defenseless, she made him vulnerable. If he kissed her now, really kissed her, she’d have complete power over him. With more effort than he’d realized it would take, Grant drew away from her.
“I have to get back,” he said, deliberately putting his hands in his pockets. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes, but—I’d like you to stay.” The words were out before she realized she’d thought them. But she wouldn’t take them back. Something flared in his eyes. Even in the dim light she saw it. Desire, need, and something quickly banked and shuttered.
“Not tonight.”
The tone had her brows drawing together in puzzlement. “Grant,” she began, and reached for him.
“Not tonight,” he repeated, stopping the motion of her outstretched hand.
Gennie put it behind her back as if he’d slapped it. “All right.” Her pride surged forward to cover the hurt of fresh rejection. “I appreciated the company.” Turning, she started back to the house.
Grant watched her go, then swore, taking a step after her. “Gennie.”
“Good night, Grant.” The screen door swung shut behind her.
Chapter 7
She was going to lose it. Gennie cast a furious look at the clouds whipping in from the north, and swore. Damn, she was going to lose the light and she wasn’t ready. The energy was pouring through her, flowing from her mind and heart to her hand in one of the rare moments an artist recognizes as right. Everything, everything told her that something lasting, something important would spring onto the canvas that morning; she had only to let herself go with it. But to go with it now, she had to race against the storm.
Gennie knew she had perhaps thirty minutes before the clouds would spoil her light, an hour before the rain closed out everything. Already a distant thunder rumbled over the sound of crashing waves. She cast a defiant look at the sky. By God, she would beat it yet!
The impetus was with her, an urgency that said today—it’s going to happen today. Whatever she’d done before—the sketches, the preliminary work, the spread of paint on canvas—was just a preparation for what she would create today.
Excitement rippled across her skin with the wind. And a frustration. She seemed to need them both to draw from. Maybe a storm was brewing in her as well. It had seemed so since the night before when her mood had fluctuated and twisted, with Grant, without him. The last rejection had left her numb, ominously calm. Now her emotions were raging free again—fury, passion, pride, and torment. Gennie could pour them into her art, liberating them so that they wouldn’t fester inside her.
Need him? No, she needed neither him nor anyone, she told herself as she streaked her brush over the canvas. Her work was enough to fill her life, cleanse her wounds. It was always fresh, always constant. As long as her eyes could see and her fingers could lift pencil or brush, it would be with her.
It had been her friend during her childhood, a solace during the pangs of adolescence. It was as demanding as a lover, and as greedy for her passion. And it was passion she felt now, a vibrant, physical passion that drove her forward. The moment was ripe, and the electricity in the air only added to the sense of urgency that shimmered inside her.
Now! it shouted at her. The time for merging, soul and heart and mind was now. If not now, it would be never. The clouds raced closer. She vowed to beat them.
Skin cool with anticipation, blood hot, Grant came outside. Like a wolf, he’d scented something in the air and had come in search of it. He’d been too restless to work, too tense to relax. Something had been driving at him all morning, urging him to move, to look, to find. He’d told himself it was the approach of the storm, the lack of sleep. But he’d known, without understanding, that each of those things was only a part of the whole. Something was brewing, brewing in more than that cauldron of a sky.
He was hungry without wanting to eat, dissatisfied without knowing what he would change. Restless, reckless, he’d fretted against the confines of his studio, all walls and glass. Instinct had led him out to seek the wind and the sea. And Gennie.
He’d known she’d be there, though he’d been convinced that he’d closed his mind to even the thought of her. But now, seeing her, he was struck, just as surely as the north sky was struck with the first silver thread of lightning.
He’d never seen her like this, but he’d known. She stood with her head thrown back in abandon to her work, her eyes glowing green with power. There was a wildness about her only partially due to the wind that swept up her hair and billowed the thin smock she wore. There was strength in the hand that guided the brush so fluidly and yet with such purpose. She might have been a queen overlooking her dominion. She might have been a woman waiting for a lover. As his blood quickened with need, Grant thought she was both.
Where was the woman who’d wept in his arms only hours before? Where was the fragility, the defenselessness that had terrified him? He’d given her what comfort he could, though he knew little of soothing tearful women. He’d spoken of things he hadn’t said aloud in fifteen years—because she’d needed to hear them and he, for some indefinable reason, had needed to say them. And he’d left her because he’d felt himself being sucked into somethin
g unknown, and inevitable.
Now, she looked invulnerable, magnificent. This was a woman no man would ever resist, a woman who could choose and discard lovers with a single gesture. It wasn’t fear he felt now, but challenge, and with the challenge a desire so huge it threatened to swallow him.
She stopped painting on a roll of thunder, then looked up to the sky in a kind of exaltation. He heard her laugh, once, with an arousing defiance that had him struggling with a fresh slap of desire.
Who in God’s name was she? he demanded. And why, in heaven and hell, couldn’t he stay away?
The excitement that had driven her to finish the painting lingered. It was done, Gennie thought with a breathless triumph. And yet … there was something more. Her passion hadn’t been diffused by the consummation of woman and art, but spun in her still; restless, waiting.
Then she saw him, with the sea and the storm at his back. The wind blew wilder. Her blood pounded with it. For a long moment they only stared at each other while thunder and lightning inched closer.
Ignoring him, and the flash of heat that demanded she close the distance between them, Gennie turned back to the canvas. This and only this was what called to her, she told herself. This and only this was what she needed.
Grant watched her pack her paints and brushes. There was something both regal and defiant about the way she had turned her back on him and gone about her business. Yet there was no denying that jolt of recognition he had felt when their gazes had locked. Under his feet the ground shook with the next roll of thunder. He went to her.
The light shifted, dimming as clouds rolled over the sun. The air was so charged, sparks could be felt along the skin. Gennie packed up her gear with deft, steady hands. She’d beaten the storm that morning. She could beat anything.
“Genviève.” She wasn’t Gennie now. He’d seen Gennie in the churchyard, laughing with young, fresh delight. It had been Gennie who had clung to him, weeping. This woman’s laugh would be low and seductive, and she would shed no tears at all. Whichever, whoever she was, Grant was drawn to her, irrevocably.
“Grant.” Gennie closed the lid on her paint case before she turned. “You’re out early.”
“You’ve finished.”
“Yes.” The wind blew his hair wildly around his face, and while the face was set, his eyes were dark and restless. Gennie knew her own emotions matched his like two halves of the same coin. “I’ve finished.”
“You’ll go now.” He could see the flush of triumph on her face and the moody, unpredictable green of her eyes.
“From here?” She tossed her head as her gaze shifted to the sea. The waves were swelling higher, and no boat dared test them now. “Yes. I have other things I want to paint.”
It was what he wanted. Hadn’t he wanted to be rid of her from the very first? But Grant said nothing as the grumbling thunder rolled closer.
“You’ll have your solitude back.” Gennie’s smile was light and mocking. “That’s what’s most important to you, isn’t it? And I’ve gotten what I needed here.”
His eyes narrowed, but he wasn’t certain of the origin of his temper. “Have you?”
“Have a look,” she invited with a gesture of her hand.
He hadn’t wanted to see the painting, had deliberately avoided even a glance at it. Now her eyes dared him and the flick of her wrist was too insolent to deny. Hooking his thumbs in his pockets, Grant turned toward the canvas.
She saw too much of what he needed there, what he felt. The power of limitless sea, the glory of space and unending challenge. She’d scorned muted colors and had chosen bold. She’d forsaken delicacy for muscle. What had been a blank canvas was now as full of force as the turbulent Atlantic, and as full of secrets. The secrets there were nature’s, as the strength and solidity of the lighthouse were man’s. She’d captured both, pitting them against each other even while showing their timeless harmony.
The painting moved him, disturbed him, pulled at him, as much as its creator.
Gennie felt the tension build up at the base of her neck as Grant only frowned at the painting. She knew it was everything she’d wanted it to be, felt it was perhaps the best work she’d ever done. But it was his—his world, his force, his secrets that had dominated the emotions she’d felt when she’d painted it. Even as she’d finished, the painting had stopped being hers and had become his.
Grant took a step away from the painting and looked out to sea. The lightning was closer; he saw it shimmer dangerously behind the dark, angry clouds. He seemed to have lost the words, the phrases that had always come so easily to him. He couldn’t think of anything but her, and the need that had risen up to work knots in his stomach. “It’s fine,” he said flatly.
He could have struck her and hurt her no less. Her small gasp was covered by the moan of the wind. For a moment Gennie stared at his back while pain rocketed through her. Rejection … would she never stop setting herself up for his rejection?
Pain altered to anger in the space of seconds. She didn’t need his approval, his pleasure, his understanding. She had everything she needed within herself. In raging silence she slipped the canvas into its carrying case, then folded her easel. Gathering her things together, she turned toward him slowly.
“Before I go, I’d like to tell you something.” Her voice was cool over flowing vowels. “It isn’t often one finds one’s first impression was so killingly accurate. The first night I met you, I thought you were a rude, arrogant man with no redeeming qualities.” The wind blew her hair across her eyes and with a toss of her head she sent it flying back so that she could keep her icy gaze on his. “It’s very gratifying to learn just how right I was … and to be able to dislike you so intensely.” Chin high, Gennie turned and walked to her car.
She jerked up the trunk of her car and put her equipment and canvas in, perversely glad to flow with the fury that consumed her. When Grant’s hand closed over her arm, she slammed the trunk closed and whirled around, ready to battle on any terms, any grounds. Blind with her own emotions, she didn’t notice the heat in his eyes or the raggedness of his breathing.
“Do you think I’m just going to let you walk away?” he demanded. “Do you think you can walk into my life and take and not leave anything behind?”
Her chest was heaving, her eyes brilliant. With calculated disdain, she looked down at the fingers that circled her arm. “Take your hand off me,” she told him, spacing her words with insolent precision.
Lightning shot across the sky as they stared at each other, cold white heat against boiling gray and angry purple. The deafening roar of thunder drowned out Grant’s oath. The moment stood poised, crackling, then swirled like the wind that screamed in triumph.
“You should have taken my advice,” he said between his teeth, “and stuck with your counts and barons.” Then he was pulling her across the tough grass, against the wind.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“What I should have done the minute you barged into my life.”
Murder? Gennie stared at the cliffs and the raging sea below. God knew he looked ready for it at that moment—and perhaps he would have liked her to believe he was capable of tossing her over the edge. But she knew what the violence in him meant, where it would lead them both. She fought him wildly as he pulled her toward the lighthouse.
“You must be mad! Let me go!”
“I must be,” he agreed tightly. Lightning forked again, opening the sky. Rain spewed out.
“I said take your hands off me!”
He whirled to her then, his face sculptured and shadowed in the crazed light of the storm. “It’s too late for that!” he shouted at her. “Damn it, you know it as well as I do. It was too late from the first minute.” Rain poured over them, pounding and warm.
“I won’t be dragged into your bed, do you hear me!” She grabbed his soaking shirt with her free hand while her body vibrated with fury and with wanting. “I won’t be dragged anywhere. Do you think you c
an just suddenly decide you need a lover and haul me off?”
His breath was raging in and out of his lungs. The rain pouring down his face only accented the passionate darkness of his eyes. She was sleek and wet. A siren? Maybe she was, but he’d already wrecked on the reef. “Not any lover.” He swung her against him so that their wet clothes fused, then seemed to melt away. “You. Damn it, Gennie, you know it’s you.”
Their faces were close, their eyes locked. Each had forgotten the storm around them as the tempest within took over. Heart pounded against heart. Need pounded against need. Full of fear and triumph, she threw her head back.
“Show me.”
Grant crushed her closer so that not even the wind could have forced its way between. “Here,” he said roughly. “By God, here and now.”
His mouth took hers madly, and she answered. Unleashed, the passion drove them far past sanity, beyond the civilized and into the dark tunnel of chaotic desire. His lips sped across her face, seeking to devour all that could be consumed and more. When his teeth scraped over the cord of her neck, Gennie moaned and drew him with her to the ground.
Raw, keening wind, hard, driving rain, the pound and crash of the stormy sea. They were nothing in the face of this tempest. Grant forgot them as he pressed against her, feeling every line and curve as though he’d already torn the clothes from her. Her heart pounded. It seemed as if it had worked its way inside his chest to merge with his.
Her body felt like a furnace. He hadn’t known there could be such heat from a living thing. But alive she was, moving under him, hands seeking, mouth greedy. The rain sluicing over them should have cooled the fire, yet it stoked it higher so that the water might have sizzled on contact.
He knew only greed, only ageless need and primitive urges. She’d bewitched him from the first instant, and now, at last, he succumbed. Her hands were in his hair, bringing his mouth back to hers again and again so that her lips could leave him breathless, arouse more hunger.
They rolled on the wet grass until she was on top of him, her mouth ravaging his with a strength and power only he could match. In a frenzy, she dragged at his shirt, yanking and tugging until it was over his head and discarded. With a long, low moan she ran her hands over him. Grant’s reason shattered.
Roughly, he pushed her on her back, cutting off her breath as lightning burst overhead. Ignoring buttons, he pulled the blouse from her, desperate to touch what he had denied himself for days. His hands slid over her wet skin, kneading, possessing, hurrying in his greed for more. And when she arched against him, agile and demanding, he buried his mouth at her breast and lost himself.
He tasted the rain on her, laced with summer thunder and her own night scent. Like a drowning man he clung to her as he sank beneath the depths. He knew what it was to want a woman, but not like this. Desire could be controlled, channeled, guided. So what was it that pounded in him? His fingers bruised her, but he was unaware in his desperation to take all and take it quickly.
When he dragged the jeans down her hips, he felt both arousal and frustration as they clung to her skin and those smooth, narrow curves. Struggling with the wet denim, he followed its inching progress with his mouth, thrilling as Gennie arched and moaned. His teeth scraped over her hip, down her thigh to the inside of her knee as he pulled the jeans down her, then left them in a heap.
Mindlessly, he plunged his tongue into her and heard her cry out with the wind. Heat suffused him. Rain fell on his back unfelt, ran from his hair onto her skin but did nothing to wash away the passion that drove them both closer and closer to the peak.
Then they were both fighting with his jeans, hands tangling together while their lips fused again. The sounds coming low from her throat might have been his name or some new spell she was weaving over him. He no longer cared.
Lightning illuminated her face once, brilliantly—the slash of cheekbone, the eyes slanted and nearly closed, the soft full lips parted and trembling with her breathing. At that moment she was witch, and he, willingly bewitched.
With his mouth against the hammering pulse in her throat, he plunged into her, taking her with a violent kind of worship he didn’t understand. When she stiffened and cried out, Grant struggled to find both his sanity and the reason. Then she was wrapped around him, drawing him into the satin-coated darkness.
Breathless, dazed, empty, Grant lay with his face buried in Gennie’s hair. The rain still fell, but until that moment he didn’t realize that it had lost its force. The storm had passed, consumed by itself like all things of passion. He felt the hammer-trip beat of her heart beneath him, and her trembles. Shutting his eyes, he tried to gather his strength and the control that meant lucidity.
“Oh, God.” His voice was rough and raw. The apology wouldn’t come; he thought it less than useless. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he murmured as he rolled from her to lie on his back against the wet grass. “Damn it, Gennie, why didn’t you tell me?”
She kept her eyes closed so that the rain fell on her lids, over her face and throbbing body. Was this how it was supposed to be? she wondered. Should she feel so spent, so enervated while her skin hummed everywhere, everywhere his hand had touched it? Should she feel as though every lock she had, had been broken? By whom, him or her, it didn’t matter. But her privacy was gone, and the need for it. Yet now, hearing the harsh question—accusation?—she felt a ripple of pain sharper than the loss of innocence. She said nothing.
“Gennie, you let me think you were—”
“What?” she demanded, opening her eyes. The clouds were still dark, she saw, but the lightning was gone.
Cursing himself, Grant dragged a hand through his hair. “Gennie, you should have told me you hadn’t been with a man before.” And how was it possible, he wondered, that she’d let no man touch her before? That he was the first … the only.
“Why?” she said flatly, wishing he would go, wishing she had the strength to leave. “It was my business.”
Swearing, he shifted, leaning over her. His eyes were dark and angry, but when she tried to pull away, he pinned her. “I don’t have much gentleness,” he told her, and the words were unsteady with feeling. “But I would have used all I had, I would have tried to find more, for you.” When she only stared at him, Grant lowered his forehead to hers. “Gennie …
Her doubts, her fears, melted at that one softly murmured word. “I wasn’t looking for gentleness then,” she whispered. Framing his face with her hands, she lifted it. “But now …” She smiled, and watched the frown fade from his eyes.
He dropped a kiss on her lips, soft, more like a whisper, then rising, lifted her into his arms. Gennie laughed at the feeling of weightlessness and ease. “What’re you doing now?”
“Taking you inside so you can warm up, dry off and make love with me again—maybe not in that order.”