Gateway to Heaven (12 page)

He gave a lazy, smug grin as he ran his fingers through her loose hair.

“
That was excellent. I have to get the recipe from you for the marinade,” Megan said a half hour later.

Christian shrugged as he leaned back in the armed dining room chair. They’d decided that it was too hot to sit outside on the terrace, although Megan had accompanied him on a few barbecuing forays while he checked on the salmon he grilled outside. “I don’t have a recipe. I just make it up as I go along.”

“
Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” she teased. But her eyes were sincere when they met his.

“
Thank you, Christian. Nobody’s ever made me a congratulatory meal.”

He paused in lifting his water glass to his mouth. “Nobody?”

Her laugh sounded embarrassed. “Not that I can recall.”

Christian watched her for a few seconds, not particularly relishing the idea of no one ever doing anything special for this unique woman. He thought of something and bound up from his chair. “I almost forgot. Your special meal isn’t finished yet. Why don’t you go into the living room and I’ll bring it to you there.”

He ignored her when she said that she wanted to help him clean up and pushed her toward the living room. Megan was examining his black baby grand when Christian entered a few minutes later with a tray. “You play all of these instruments, Christian?”

“
Yes, but highly inexpertly.”

Megan smiled. “When you have a friend with Seth’s talent almost everything must seem inexpert by comparison.”

“
Exactly, but don’t tell Seth I said so. His head is already as big as the state of California. Do you play an instrument?”

Megan glanced up in surprise when she realized that he’d set down the tray on the coffee table and was standing right behind her.

“
No. Art lessons were my parents’ limit. My mother still considers art to be a hobby, not a career,” she said wryly. She placed one finger on a key, the struck note striking him as wistful somehow. “I always wished I could play the piano, though.”

“
You can still learn. My mom taught me. She was a real taskmaster, too.” He reached down and played the opening notes to one of the Brandenburg concertos.

“
One of your favorites?” he asked with a smile.

Megan shook her head in amazement.

“
Inexpert
, indeed
.
You noticed I like Bach, too, huh?” She asked, shaking her head.

“
Only because it’s one of my favorites, too,” he said before he seamlessly segued to a boisterous portion of Jerry Lee Lewis’s
Great Balls of Fire
. He smiled wider, charmed by the sound of her laughter. He straightened and herded her toward the seating area. “Enough showing off. You’ve got cake you need to get busy and eat, and the coffee is getting cold.”

Her grin slackened when she saw the two succulent pieces of cake on the tray. “You
made
that?”

“
You’ve got to be kidding. I had that bakery on Randolph deliver it. It’s chocolate raspberry. I hope you like chocolate.”

“
Now
you’ve
got to be kidding.”

She grabbed a plate, sat down and tucked into her cake with no further ado. He sat down and watched her, entranced. When she was almost finished, she glanced over at him in surprise as she sucked a dab of icing from her finger.

“
Aren’t you going to eat yours?”

“
I was enjoying the show too much.”

Megan’s fork paused halfway to her mouth. She must have noticed his expression of masculine appreciation. She almost set the last piece of cake down in her embarrassment, but took one look at the delicious morsel and thought better of it. She ate it with relish. Christian chuckled.

“
How is it that you manage to make everything about sex?” Megan asked a moment later, half in amusement and half in irritation. She sipped a cup of coffee and watched him eat his cake, if not with as much heat as he’d watched her, at least with a tight focus.

“
Honey, it was you that was doing that.” He chewed and swallowed a bite of cake unhurriedly before he finished. “There’s not a straight male in existence that wouldn’t have gotten hot watching you eat chocolate.” When he saw her chin go up defensively, he made an offensive strike, pointing at her with his fork. “It’s completely natural, Megan. There’s nothing weird about it…nothing twisted. Aren’t you at least a little glad that I find you so attractive?”

“
That’s not what—”

“
Aren’t you?”

Her stiff posture melted by slow degrees. “Yes.”

Christian retreated a little, knowing he’d won a small victory. He set down his cake and walked over to the bookcase. When he returned, he handed Megan a brown wrapped package and sat down next to her on the couch.

“
What’s this?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“
It’s a present. For you.”

“
You’re giving me a
present
?”

Christian rubbed one of her curls through his thumb and forefinger. “That’s what I just said,” he murmured, distracted by the silky sensation of her hair against his skin. “It’s not a big deal. It’s actually used, but lightly, and only by yours truly. I thought you’d like it.”

She tore off the brown paper eagerly. The look on her face when she examined the oversized book on Chinese sculpture pleased him inordinately. She began to pour over the pages. He couldn’t recall ever enjoying giving someone a gift so much. “I bought it at this cool English bookstore in Hong Kong. It was at my house in L.A., so I brought it for you when I came back. Have you ever been to Hong Kong?”

A tiny alarm started going off in his head when he saw her happy expression collapse at his words.

* * * *

Megan shook her head in reply to Christian’s question, but she was hardly aware of responding. She was struck dumb by his reference to the fact that he lived in Los Angeles. It was the first time that he’d ever mentioned it. For some reason, his casual reference to the fact that he lived across the country struck her as hypocritical. Anger pierced her awareness, the sharp tip on an arrow of hurt.

“
You’d love the sculpture there. We should go sometime. What’s wrong?” Christian asked slowly.

“
Nothing. Thank you so much for the book. It was very thoughtful of you.”

“
Megan, I asked you a question.” His voice carried a gentle threat.

Emotion blocked her throat, but she hoped Christian didn’t notice it when she said, “Hilary told me last night that you didn’t actually live in Chicago. You’d never said anything to me about it, so I was sure she must be mistaken.”

His jaw clenched. “I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret, Megan.”

She opened the book and flipped through a few pages. “I never said you were.”

“
You’re certainly implying it.”

“
All right. Maybe I was.”

She saw Christian’s eyes widen slightly in surprise at the anger in her voice. Good, she thought. Let him know that you’re not going to roll over and pant whenever he snaps his fingers.

“
It’s not like you didn’t have the opportunities to tell me,” she accused. “You could have said something when Father Gregory introduced us, or at the American Girl Place, when I asked you about how long you’d lived at 748. Why are you acting so secretively?”

She noticed that he had the good grace to at least look sheepish. “I didn’t want you to make the wrong assumptions about me.”

“
That’s ridiculous! What kind of wrong assumptions would I make about you, Christian?” she asked, her irritation bubbling to the surface.

“
Oh, I don’t know,” he began smoothly. It took her a moment to recognize his rising tension as he spoke. “Maybe the kind of snap judgments that idiots make when they see a ludicrous lie about me while they’re standing in the check-out line at the supermarket. The kind of dead wrong assumptions that people like your bitchy sister and a hell of a lot of other people make without knowing the most basic things about me. And all because certain people have nothing better to do with their lives than to feed their ignorance and lasciviousness with the sleazy
shit
that the media cranks out to appease their endless appetites. I wouldn’t have thought that you were like them, Megan. But hell, that’s what
I
get for making assumptions, right?”

Megan felt like all the blood drained from her head. Her heartbeat began to throb in her ears in the taut silence that followed. She closed the beautiful book that Christian had given her with a calmness she was far from feeling. She’d obviously struck at a very raw nerve without realizing it. Christian’s eyes were blue fire. Not with the desire she’d seen light them in the past, but with pure, unmitigated fury.

And hurt, Megan realized. It struck her that Christian’s tendency to reveal so little about himself was a protective mechanism against pain.

His anger seemed to burn out of him almost as rapidly as it had blazed to life. He slumped back onto the couch and rubbed his eyes.

“
I’m sorry for yelling,” he muttered after a half minute of silence.

“
It’s okay. You were mad. So was I.”

When she turned to look at him he was watching her with weary eyes.

“
I’ve done some things in my life that I’m not proud of, Megan. When I was younger I used to party as much as I breathed. My ‘fuck the world’ attitude almost got me killed more times than I’d like to admit. I was never as promiscuous as the tabloids made me out to be but I was selfish a few times when it came to women. I must have made myself fair game for the media. By the time I grew up…by the time I wised up enough to be worthy of a good woman’s love, the damage had already been done. When the press sprang a big story about my supposed affair with an Italian model that I’d met only briefly at a mutual friend’s party the woman that I just mentioned believed every word of it.”

Megan just stared at him. She knew there was nothing she could say that wouldn’t sound trite. His misery was palpable. She touched the back of his hand softly then covered it with her own. They sat in silence for several minutes. She knew how different Christian and she were. She couldn’t even imagine some of the things he’d experienced in his life.

So she couldn’t understand how it was possible to feel so close to him.

He turned over his hand and returned her caresses. She realized he shared in their profound mutual awareness of each other.

“
I should go,” she murmured.

“
Don’t.”

His soulful one word reply was more than just a request not to leave for a few more minutes and Megan knew it. Part of her wanted to stay more than anything she’d ever wanted in her life. She’d never felt closer to Christian than she had at this moment. The attraction between them was tangible, like an invisible thread that was attached somewhere high inside both of their ribcages, a thread that was shrinking with every moment that passed, pulling tauter, making it almost impossible to resist the inevitable impetus drawing them together.

“
Are you still mad at me?” he rumbled.

Megan’s hair fell against her cheeks when she shook her head. “Are you still angry at me? For letting Hilary influence my opinion?”

“
No.” His hand slid behind her neck and brought her against his chest. “Just do me a favor and tell me if there’s something bothering you.”

“
I will,” Megan whispered. Now would be the perfect time to express her many uncertainties about them becoming involved. Instead, she pressed a kiss into his chest. She closed her eyelids when she felt him shudder beneath her touch. “I’ll help you clean up before I go,” she offered shakily.

“
Next time. The guest of an honorary dinner is excused from cleaning up.”

“
Really?”

Megan glanced up into his face when Christian didn’t answer her for several seconds. He looked strained, like he wanted to do something and was struggling not to. He finally replied after taking a deep breath and letting his hands drop to the couch. The absence of his touch was like a pain.

“
You don’t know that rule? The only time my mom ever let Katie, Mary and me off of dish duty was on our birthdays or graduations, things like that.”

“
Katie and Mary? Your sisters?”

Christian nodded.

“
What are they like?” she asked.

”
Katie’s a little older than me. She lives in Burr Ridge and has two rowdy little boys, Eric and Nick. Mary is eleven years younger than me, and almost as much of a hell-raiser as I was at her age. Would you like want to meet them?”

“
Yes.”

He brushed her cheek with warm fingertips then dropped his hand. “Good, I’ll try to set it up for next weekend. It’ll have to be Friday. I’m…busy on Saturday night.”

“
That should be fine,” Megan murmured. Their conversation was casual, but the messages their eyes were exchanging were far from mundane. She was a coward, keepings things so surface, so sterile…so
safe
with him. Her conversation with Tina earlier today leapt into her mind. Nervousness joined the chocolate cake in her belly.