Conquer the Memories (13 page)

He would explode. The warning was implicit, but she touched him anyway. One finger lightly traced the shape of him, and then her palm curled around his pulsing warmth.

He brushed her hand away, but she felt the tremor that shook his body. His head bent, and she saw the faint sheen of moisture on his temples, that coat of sensuous moisture like silk on his shoulders. His lips traced the line from her throat to her breasts. Her nipples were already taut for the wash of his tongue, yet a helpless shiver vibrated through her when his teeth gently grazed the sensitive flesh.

She felt a rush of sheer sexual pleasure, but that wasn’t the main cause of the trembling inside her. Mr. Hamilton was out of control. It was about time. Only, darn it, so was she.

Her fingertips danced over heated skin, down the muscled curve of his shoulders to his spine to his taut buttocks, finally resting on his thighs. He twisted. Such an impatient body, such exploding need. Plush carpet pressed into her spine, abrasive, ungiving. Sun poured on her eyes, and she lowered her lids. The flesh of his neck was so vulnerable; her lips whispered over it, so very gently; her teeth nuzzled, so very gently…

“Sonia, if you don’t stop…”

She had no intention of stopping. The damn boat was welcome to sink. Her lover was back. For some crazy reason, his lips were sinking from breasts to ribs to navel. The silly man was obviously still concerned with
her
pleasure.

“Come to me,” she whispered throatily. “Craig, I want my legs around you—I want to feel you inside me. Don’t wait. Don’t wait…”

For an instant, the searing images exploded in his head again. The man with light eyes, the darkness, that instant when Sonia’s eyes sought him out, desperately wanting and needing and expecting him to save her, that instant when he’d never felt more impotent, more helpless, his failure…The images were real; they had been real for weeks, as real as if it had all just happened.

“No
,” Sonia whispered fiercely. “You’re not doing that to me again, dammit. Or to yourself. Look at me, Craig.”

Her palms framed the sides of his face. She wanted to kiss away that terrible look in his eyes. Frustration and desire and all the fierce feelings of love she had for him glowed in her eyes.

There was one moment…but then a smile formed on his lips. That smile hovered and came closer, until with exquisite tenderness his mouth molded itself to hers. Even as her arms tightened around him, he was shifting his body over hers; in a surging thrust they were one again.

So long…too long. Her legs locked around him, terrified he would leave her.

There was nothing to be afraid of. A low groan escaped her lips as Craig urged them both to a fierce, pulsing rhythm. She could feel the hunger in him as if it were a live thing. His skin was damp with it; his eyes burned with it; his body shuddered with it.

“I
love
you,” he whispered. “So much, so much, so much…”

At her sudden fevered cry, he felt the agony of his own release explode inside of her. Like a prisoner set free, he saw the brightness of sun behind his eyes, a world renewed in loving, all guilt banished to another time.

***

“One can carry laziness just a little too far, you know,” Craig teased.

“It’s your fault I have all the energy of a marshmallow.” She parted her lips again.

Craig forked in another tidbit of steak. “Would you like me to chew it for you?” he asked gravely.

“Would you?”

“Doubtful.”

“I’ll settle for being fed, then.” She settled back with her head back against a bunched-up blanket, surveying her husband with limpid eyes.

Two hours before, it had taken more work to unhook the dinghy from the cruiser than it had to row in to shore. By then a velvet night had fallen, so black and soft that it looked almost as crushable as fabric. They had rowed across the cove to a deserted sandy beach; undoubtedly there was civilization somewhere close by, but there were no signs of it. Palms and tropical brush guarded their privacy, and the crackling driftwood fire Craig had built on the sand tossed up delightfully colorful sparks to the sky. That steady splish-splash of surf only added to her already somnolent state.

“Open,” Craig instructed.

She opened. Somewhere in the mound of sour cream on the fork was a tiny morsel of baked potato. Her wry smile made her husband chuckle, totally unrepentant at stuffing her unmercifully with the delectable goodies. “No more,” she pleaded when she had swallowed the bite of potato and sour cream.

“Nonsense.”

“The dinghy will sink.”

“I keep hearing all these dire predictions about your getting fat. I have yet to see one spare ounce of flesh develop.”

“I’m hardly going to wait until I’m waddling and you’re driven into the arms of some skinny yacht owner.”

Craig set aside the paper plate and sank down next to her. “I thought we’d established that she was pockmarked and wore braces.”

“We haven’t
established
anything.” She rearranged the blanket so there was pillow potential for both heads. Two pairs of cut-off-denim-clad legs stretched out, all four sets of toes digging in the sand. “The only thing the prosecution is really aware of,” Sonia said sleepily, “is that the man knows too much about boats. The rest has been simply brilliant deduction on my part. How long did you date her, anyway?”

Craig lifted his foot and sprinkled her ankle with a layer of sand. “How long have you had this violently jealous streak?” he remarked conversationally.

“Ages.”

“You’ve kept it very well hidden.”

“Thank you.”

“I like it. That you’re jealous.”

“I’m glad that you’re glad that I’m jealous,” Sonia said patiently. “How long did you date her?”

He chuckled, rolling over on his stomach. His rear end, Sonia noted with amusement, was covered with sand. So was she, almost everywhere. The blanket made, at best, a crumpled pillow, and the grainy sand had crept inside her cutoffs…and she was amazingly, thoroughly comfortable.

But then, her husband was relaxed, as he hadn’t been in weeks. His hair was disheveled, and his eyes were full of humor, and every limb and muscle reflected lazy, sated easiness. She reached over to push back a shock of hair from his forehead. “Answer me,” she demanded, but her tone was loving.

“About what?”

She sighed. It was useless to pursue. “You’re very good at keeping secrets, you know,” she scolded.

“Only at keeping secrets you really don’t want to know.”

“True.” Sonia added softly, “Sometimes, Craig. Not always.” She stroked back that shock of hair again. This time, her fingertips lingered on his temples. “I don’t need to know about your past love affairs,” she said softly. “That’s not part of
our
lives.”

His lips pressed a kiss into the center of her palm. She closed her eyes for a moment, savoring the tender gesture, reminded of the loving they had shared all day. When her lashes fluttered open again, Craig was shifting to lean closer to her. Her palm stroked the wall of his chest.

“Craig?”

His eyes lifted to hers.

“Certain secrets you
don’t
have the right to keep,” she said gently. “And I think it’s way past time you told me what’s been bothering you.”

Sonia slowly shifted to a sitting position, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. For a moment, she stared into the dying driftwood fire, wondering why on earth it was so hard to ask one very simple question of a man she knew so well and loved and trusted so very much. Pride? Her eyes raised to Craig’s, to his still features and dark, brooding eyes. Pride mattered, yet one of them had to let loose of it or they’d never get past that silence. “You haven’t wanted to make love with me for some weeks,” she said quietly.

He expelled a suddenly restless breath. “There hasn’t been a time from the first moment I met you that I haven’t wanted to make love with you,” he denied roughly. “Sonia…”

“You satisfied
my
needs. Not your own.” Sonia brushed a trembling strand of hair from her cheek, looking down. “Someone very close to me taught me that satisfaction and intimacy aren’t at all the same thing. Intimacy,” she said quietly, “takes two. You’ve taught me that over four years of marriage, Craig.” She was not surprised when her husband suddenly lurched to a standing position and started kicking sand on the fire. He didn’t want to talk about it.

“I’ve thought it had something to do with Chicago,” Sonia probed gently. “I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure of that, except that you’ve obviously changed since then. Doing very silly things like assuming I needed George to help me pick out my lingerie. Like paying someone to find some stupid kid a zillion miles away who can’t possibly touch us again.” She added softly, “Hear me?”

“Let’s go back to the boat,” he said swiftly.

Reluctantly, she rose, dusting the sand from the seat of her jeans. Her eyes never left Craig, as he finished packing up their dinner debris and carting it over to the dinghy. In very few minutes, Craig was dragging the little boat into the water.

She didn’t have much choice but to hustle over to it. Her toes splashed in the cool, frothing surf as she helped him tug the boat farther out. In knee-deep water, the little boat was finally free floating, and Craig held it steady while she climbed in.

She studied his profile as he got in after her. His features were all stark silver and dark hollows by moonlight, his eyes unreadable, the emotions on his face stubbornly hidden in shadows.

“Let me row,” she suggested.

“I don’t mind.”

“Really, I’d like to.”

He handed her the oars, a terrible mistake on his part. Sonia swiftly rowed away from the shore and into deeper waters. Secured in their oarlocks, the wooden paddles were easy enough to maneuver. When their dinghy was far out in the cove, she abruptly raised the dripping oars and swung them into the boat.

“Sonia.”

“There happen to be two of us in this marriage,” she reminded him. She said it gently, but she was tempted to unlock the oars and toss them overboard. In time, he’d talk. Or they’d starve somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

The moon shone down on the cove; the water reflected a sudden slash of a smile on his face brought on by the fire in her eyes. “I love you,” he said softly.

The tone was warm enough to melt steel. She could have killed him. He knew damn well she wasn’t steel.

“I love you, too,” she said with equal fervor, and reached for the starboard oarlock.

Startled, his hand snatched at hers just before she’d freed the oar to go drifting to Timbuktu. “Dammit.” He took a breath, staring at her. One by one, he pried her fingers from the oar. “God, you’re stubborn,” he remarked.

She was silent. They stared at each other, and Sonia felt a certain sadness. She couldn’t think of a time they’d pitted their equally strong wills against each other. They’d never had to before. That Craig’s was often the stronger she already knew. Unfortunately, he knew her very little if he didn’t recognize she was fully capable of digging in her heels when life called for it.

The oars flopped noisily inside the boat as he set them down. He leaned back, his arms stretched out along the wooden gunwales of the boat. His eyes never once left hers. “When you break a vow,” he finally said quietly, “it isn’t an easy thing to mend again.”

“You have never broken a promise to me,” she said fiercely.

He shook his head. “Dammit, don’t defend me.”

The boat was adrift; neither one of them seemed to notice or care. A dark night greeted them, waters that stretched in endless darkness, and Sonia waited, so very angry with him that she was hurting with it.
Talk to me,
she wanted to cry, and instead she waited longer.

“That love, honor and cherish vow. The part about the cherish,” Craig clipped out. “Corny stuff, Sonia. Only I was raised on just that corny stuff. I was raised to believe that a man keeps what he has by protecting it, by guarding it. You fight to get what you want, and then you fight to keep it.” His voice abruptly softened. “You happen to be a most precious part of me, Sonia. And the problem was never what
you
expected of me but what
I
expected of myself.”

Confused, she stared at his stark features.

“I
exposed
you to danger. You could have been—”

“No.” Her tone was swift and sure.

“
Yes. I
hurt you. No one else. Not some fool with stringy blond hair, not some gang of hoodlums.
I
did it. I broke my vow to protect you…”

She took up the oars, too shaken to sit still. The wooden paddles sliced neatly through the waters, and she ached inside, feeling the strain on the muscles in her shoulders, feeling the pain of the man across from her.

He was so very foolish, her lover. He was a man to the core, a capital
M
man. How on earth could he ever have doubted it? “That’s why,” she asked quietly, “you didn’t want to make love to me?”

“I kept seeing the bastard’s face…” Craig roughly shifted forward, grabbing the oars. “Whenever I touched you, I saw his face, and then yours, vulnerable and terrified. We were all but making love when it happened, in that park. The only thing on my mind at that time was getting you in bed. Maybe if I’d spent a minute less time selfishly obsessed with my own needs—”

“You think you were the only one too busy fooling around to see anything else?” Sonia whispered.

Craig said nothing.

“I was the one who insisted we shake off our bodyguard, as I remember. Not you.”

He still said nothing.

Her jaw firmed, and her voice was suddenly threaded with urgency. “There is nothing to blame yourself for, dammit. We
both
shook that idiotic shadow, and we
both
chose to neck in the park. Whatever went wrong, we
share
that responsibility. For that matter, I never expected or wanted you to be some kind of macho wrestler, you fool. There were five men in that gang of muggers, Craig! The worst part of the whole thing for me wasn’t those goons, but seeing you unconscious in the grass. I thought…” Her voice broke.

He couldn’t stand the aching threat of tears in her voice. “You can continue shouting at me,” he remarked gravely, “but if you don’t sit down, you’re going to tip over the boat.”

“I don’t care.” But she sank back down on the seat with a reluctant smile. The beast. If he’d done anything but tease her, she would undoubtedly have burst out crying.

“I don’t have the least idea where we are,” he continued mildly.

“Neither do I.”

“And I don’t see any point in continuing to argue when we’d both rather go back to the yacht and make love.” Craig shifted forward, planted a shaky kiss on her lips and then put both her hands on the oars. “You row, woman. I have every reason to want to save my strength. You’ve already exhausted me twice today.”

Sonia dragged one oar in an arc through the water until the dinghy was turned around and headed back for their cruiser. She leaned toward Craig with the forward motions and away from him as she brought the oars back. Amazing how such action echoed other, more sensual rhythms.

Her eyes rested on Craig’s face, studying him pensively. He was leaned back, studying her with equal intensity, a very stark, very male, very hungry sexual promise in his eyes. He was very clearly through talking. He was willing to communicate further about the past lonely weeks, but in other ways.

The ache in her lower body said she’d already been well loved that day. She didn’t need sex. She did, however, need to see that look in his eyes again. She needed that sweet, monumental relief of knowing they’d talked, that there had never been anything so terribly wrong that they couldn’t solve it together.

Dip and pull, dip and pull. Craig motioned his willingness to take the oars; she shook her head.

A kind of silence gripped her, deep inside, absorbing what he’d tried to tell her. Not the words, but the guilt behind them. That he’d blamed himself for wanting her too damn much on a very still, very seductive night in Chicago…that he’d linked that to his right to make love to her…that he’d suffered through a very masculine feeling of failure to protect her—how could she not have known?

Dip and pull, dip and pull. Always, the man had bolstered and encouraged and abetted every feminine instinct in her. She felt secure about herself as a woman because of him. It had never occurred to her that Craig could possibly doubt himself as a man, or that she could have been so totally oblivious to how important that male role was in their relationship. To him.

She was suddenly very definitely in the mood to make love again. She had a great deal to show Craig about how she thought of him as a man. A great many imaginative experiments to try that would reinforce that welling love she felt, that would make very clear that they were equal mates in bed, equally sensitive, equally giving, equally…

Leaning forward, she handed Craig the oars. She had no more time to risk getting all tuckered out. Not when there was a long night ahead, and their cruiser was finally within sight again.

***

Stepping off the plane with Craig just behind her, Sonia scanned the airport crowd for a cigar-smoking, wizened little man with a wrinkled face.

Charlie found the two of them first; Sonia’s cherry-red dress was impossible to miss. He whipped the cigar out of his mouth as he ambled forward. “Didn’t think the two of you were ever coming back. Well, how was it?”

Charlie bent a little forward. Not that he was expecting or even wanted a peck on the cheek from Sonia, but she usually insisted on these things. He received a resounding buss and hug besides. Beaming, he grabbed for her flight bag and reached around to hook an arm across Craig’s shoulder. “Looking good, you two. I can hardly wait to hear about the whole trip. You catch any good fish?”

“Not a one,” Craig admitted.

“Not
one?
How could you possibly be anywhere near—” someone bumped into him; he maneuvered aside “—that incredible fishing territory and not catch a single fish?”

“Nothing was biting, actually,” Sonia said, and added swiftly, “How’re the pups?”

Charlie gave her a disgusted look, as the three angled through the crowd to the baggage area. “Don’t ask.”

“Okay.”

“They tipped over the trash. One teethed on the patio furniture. Another decided he was going to whine outside the door the
whole night.
Thinks he’s going to be a lap dog, that one. John called from work,” Charlie mentioned to Craig.

“Hmm?”

“John. Work. Another problem with that guy from Radoil—”

Charlie watched, amused, as Craig leaned over his wife and kissed her. The kiss wasn’t long; it wasn’t short either. Sonia was wearing a hat, a wide-brimmed white thing with a red ribbon; she had to hold it on with one hand. And when Craig disappeared into the getting-luggage crowd, she was still staring after him, a faint flush on her cheeks, her fingers still holding the silly hat.

Charlie cleared his throat. “So you didn’t do much fishing,” he chortled.

Sonia twirled in his direction, a delightful smile on her lips, almost as red as her dress. “Pardon?”

“Did you at least see the Gulf? Port-to-port it between marinas?”

“Well…sort of.”

“Meet a lot of people?”

“Not really.”

“Get a lot of swimming in then?”

“We
did
swim. We swam a lot,” she assured him. “Every day.”

“Somehow I thought the two of you’d be browner than you are. Not that you weren’t plenty tanned when you left home, but after four days of nothing but sun—”

“It rained,” Sonia improvised swiftly.

Charlie’s eyebrows innocently vaulted up. “That’s strange. I watched the weather report every day. The whole area was supposed to be hot and dry.”

“The Gulf gets sudden rains.” Sonia’s eyes nervously sought Craig’s lean form in the crowd. “Lots of them. You’d be surprised.”

“That’s a shame,” Charlie commiserated.

“It was,” Sonia agreed.

“Nothing to do on a boat in the rain.”

“We played,” Sonia assured him, “a lot of chess.”

Charlie’s most undignified guffaw startled her. Craig shot her a questioning glance as he returned with their two small bags. Charlie grabbed both, adjusted them with the flight bag he’d already claimed and stumbled ahead of the two of them, still chuckling.

“I’ve missed him,” Sonia remarked to Craig as he steered her toward the exit with his palm at her back. “I could kill him, but I always miss him when we’re away.”

“Pardon? I can’t hear you because of that hat.”

She lifted her head, holding the hat in place again, an amused smile softening her lips. “That doesn’t make rational sense, Mr. Hamilton, that you can’t hear because of a hat. Give us another.”

“All right.” He took advantage, bending down again to test his lips against hers. The taste was not appreciably different than it had been moments ago. Delicious. The taste of her wasn’t any different, and the feel of her wasn’t any different, but after four days of seeing Sonia naked most of the time, he was having trouble adjusting to his lady fully clothed. The cherry-red linen dress and absurd hat and red-and-white shoes, the flick of mascara on her lashes again, the lingering hint of perfume…he liked it all. And wanted it all off again as soon as possible.