Ryman, Rebecca (35 page)

"You
are young and untouched and a stranger to sorrow, Olivia," he said,
breaking his silence, his voice heavy with those unsaid burdens he would not
allow her to share. "And you have come into my life, uninvited and
unexpected, like some unseasonable storm delighting in its capacity to
surprise, unsettling everything. I feel uprooted. My foundations are shaken and
I have been made defenceless. I am horribly disturbed at having to do battle
with a force that is totally strange to me."

Olivia
listened without breathing and now she exhaled cautiously, fearful of again
upsetting the fragile balance of his curious mind. But what he implied filled
her with aching, enchanting joy. "Is it necessary to ... do battle?"
she asked, treading on egg-shells. "Is it not possible just to accept that
force?" She reached up to smooth his forehead, to press out the creases of
worry, and he rewarded her with a smile.

"No,"
he said. "Oh no."

The
tinge of uncertainty emboldened her. "I too feel uprooted, Jai," she
ventured, holding his hand and pleating her fingers through his, frantic not to
ruffle the communion between them yet hungry for his confidence. "My
foundations too are shaken. I did not seek to feel for you what I do. For me
too it is an ... unseasonable storm neither invited nor expected. As
such," she took a deep breath, "at least something is owed to
me."

"Yes.
Something is owed to you." He unlaced his fingers from hers and moved away
to stand at the edge of the water and peer down into it. "Since you risk
so much by including me in your thoughts, it is my duty to repeat my
warning."

"Duty!"
His sudden, stiff formality was hurtful.

"Perhaps
unthinkingly I used the wrong word but I am unable to think of another."

"So,
it was a sense of duty that made you send your dog to sniff me out this
morning?" she asked, again disconsolate.

"No!"
He spun around and there was passion in the way he threw out the denial.
"I sent Akbar after you for purely selfish reasons. The memory of those
incredible eyes bruised with unhappiness haunts me, Olivia. It ruins my sleep
and fills me with shame and guilt, both of which are alien to me. They are
feelings I resent even more than I resent you for causing them." His
shoulders dropped and the passion faded. "I sent Akbar to fetch you
because I have a degrading need to see you."

The
sun exploded through the clouds and drenched her world with radiance again. She
ached for him, yearning for his embrace and the taste of his lips, but she
forced herself to be content with only his closeness as he sat down again
beside her. "It is a need that is mutual, you must know that." Her
whisper trembled.

With
an absent-minded smile he trailed the back of his hand down her cheek, making
the nape of her neck sting. "There is no decision in my life that I have
not made for myself, Olivia. Many of them have been cruel. I have made them in
spite of that. But now, I must ask you to make one for me."

Again
she stopped breathing. "Yes?"

He
turned to take her face gently between his palms. They felt cold and moist.
"Since I seem unable to, you must make the decision not to see me
again."

A
sinuous chill crawled up Olivia's limbs. To make a wilful, self-destructive,
masochistic decision as vile as this? Never to sit like this with him again? To
abandon willingly the taste of his lips, the touch of his hands in her hair,
the sight of those ashen eyes now looking into hers with such soft confusion?
To be denied forever the chance of entry into the lost, melancholy worlds that
lay beyond his stubborn barricades and turn her life into a desert? She might
as well be dead!

Olivia
covered his hands with hers and pressed them into her face, fingers of panic
clawing at her insides. "You know that that is a decision I can never
make, Jai." Her voice shook. "I am not afraid of taking risks, I am
not afraid of
anything
as long as I can see you."

"You
can invite disaster so blithely?" He seemed puzzled, and he stared into
her distraught eyes as if to search for an answer there. "What is this
stubbornness that drives you?"

She
laughed shakily. "It is a stubbornness called . . . love."

He
echoed the word with some slight mockery, then repeated it several times,
feeling it with his tongue as if sampling a morsel with an unfamiliar taste,
unaware of just how irreversible a commitment, how much of herself she had laid
at his feet. "It is not possible to love someone like me," he said
curtly but with wonder, looking at her as if she might be a wayward child bent
on some whimsical mischief. "Even to myself I am sometimes reprehensible,
an eccentric not to be tolerated."

"I
can tolerate anything you choose to be."

"Anything?"
He continued to humour her.

"Yes,
anything!" she said fiercely, clenching her fists, knowing that her eyes
were beginning to fill. It twisted her with pain that this once loveless,
lonely boy cast out by the world should still be so deprived as to not know a
word of such universal understanding. "Why do you not take me
seriously?"

"If
I did not take you seriously I would not be here! But what you profess for me
is perhaps a chimera, a mirage, an illusion of your mind." He tilted his
head and observed her through slitted eyes, wary and suspicious. "I know
that you have learned much from Kinjal," he said softly. "Considering
your obsessional curiosity it could not have been otherwise. Is it therefore
love
you feel, or pity?"

The
ease with which he seemed to delve into her thoughts and pull out the most
immediate one made her heart miss a beat, but she was not intimidated by the
tautness of his jaw line, the angry twitch of a muscle just below his temple.
"If I feel pity for anything," she said, irked, "it is for your
mulishness
that makes you so unworthy a recipient of either!"

He
broke into a laugh that loosened the lines of his face and brought genuine amusement
into it. "For you to complain of my mulishness is the height of impudence,
my obstinate American!" His arm brushing her shoulder slipped down to her
waist and he drew her close to him. With infinite tenderness he kissed her
behind an ear. "You are very stubborn, Olivia," he breathed with a
heavy sigh, "and I am weaker than I had thought."

"You,
weak?"
She laughed, shutting her eyes, not daring to move.

"Weak
and
insane, a vicious combination." His voice turned husky as he
stroked her hair lightly. "You make it impossible for me to stay away from
you."

"Why
should you want to?" Held in his arms, revelling in the fact of his
crumbling defences, in her ability to at last breach
the barricade,
the answer to that question was immaterial to Olivia.

But
he gave her an answer anyway. "Because I am not used to being a slave to
my wants. I am not used to being commanded."

She
pulled back, wounded. "I have never commanded you!"

He
kissed her mouth. "You command with every look, every touch, each time I
think of you. You command when I am awake and trying to sleep and when I am
asleep trying not to dream. You command," he ended savagely, "because
I desire you more than any other woman I have known."

His
resistance cracked; his arms tightened to crush her in an embrace that was
harsh and violent and yet with the sweetness of honey. In the moist fullness of
his lips there was anger, but to Olivia his kisses were touched with magic, the
culmination of every dream she had ever dreamed about him, every fantasy she had
ever played out with him in the secret niches of her mind. Extraordinary
sensations, acute and piercing like shards of glass, chased each other around
her body, awakening in it longings that might have been frightening had they
not also been so exquisite. In his whispered endearments she heard not the
hoarse confusion of sound in alien languages but the music of angels; in his
trails of fiery kisses across her face, her neck, the dip between her breasts,
she felt a flight of doves, soft and feathered with love. His fingers of
darting quicksilver, inciting her nerve ends into flaring rebellion, covered
her body with caresses such as she had never known.

"Olivia,
Olivia . . ." His muffled groan was one of anguish. "What damnable
tortures you are devising for me . . .!"

"Hush."
She pressed his head between her breasts, spilling over with impossible joy.
"Hush
. . .!"

"Have
you any idea, you callous sorceress, how
much
I desire you?" Buried
in her bosom she could feel his teeth clench, his breath so hot that it seemed
to burn craters in her flesh.

"Yes."
In this moment of perfection there was nothing, nothing she could have denied
him.

He
raised his head to grip her shoulders with clawlike hands and nails that bit
into her, making her wince. "Then why do you encourage me, you rash,
foolish girl?" His eyes were wild and in his helplessness he shook her
roughly. "Do you not know that men like me are animals who take their
pleasures where they find them?"

The
pressure of his nails brought tears to her eyes but she
held them back.
"I love you, Jai." Gently, she wiped his forehead clear of moisture,
looking into his wild, wonderful eyes without flinching. "Whatever I have
is yours."

He
held her stare, chest heaving rapidly as he struggled for control, and then his
hands dropped. "Don't say that, Olivia," he said, wincing.
"Don't ever say that again."

"It
is the truth," she said simply.

"You
make yourself into such an easy prey! Just as well I refuse to participate in
your damned recklessness. If I did," he started to pace again, still
agitated, "it would only make me hate myself more than I sometimes do now.
And for that I would never forgive you." He paused to glower at her,
bristling eyebrows locked together like warring caterpillars. "I have
quite enough hate from others to last me through one lifetime!"

Olivia
said nothing. She knew it was useless to argue. How quickly she was learning
his chameleon colours, his fickle moods! Instead, she sat hugging her knees,
watching him in silence, waiting for him to expel and expend the fearful
energies that had blown him once more out of her reach. His kisses still clung
to her skin like peach down, making it glow; what he had revealed of himself
was like an oasis of hope in a desert of uncertainty. For the moment, it was
enough for her.

Picking
up stone after stone he flung them violently into the trees like trajectiles
aimed at an invisible enemy. Excited by the game, both dogs pranced around
yelping and dashing back and forth to hunt out the prizes from the undergrowth
and fetch them back. It was only when the neat pile at his feet had grown
substantially and the dogs, spent and panting, had flopped to the ground again
that Raventhorne finally stopped. He was breathing hard from the exertions, and
the fabric of his shirt clung wetly to his back, but whatever private demons
had been haunting him had been cast out from his system. His expression was one
of regained control.

"It
is time you returned," he said, chastising his unruly hair with his
fingers, "or your uncle will get Slocum to send a police posse after
you."

Olivia
didn't move for a moment. She filled with dread, for he said nothing more as he
untied Jasmine's reins from a branch and held them out to her. Once again it
seemed a dismissal, but now she was no longer willing to accept it without
comment. Her eyes held challenge. "Will I see you again?"

He
said nothing while he tightened the girth on her mare, then turned to search
her face with sombre, speculative eyes. "Do you truly wish to?"

"Yes,"
Olivia said, pink faced and morose since it was she who had had the need to
ask. "I truly wish to."

Lightly
he trailed his fingers down her arm, his eyes cloudy and distant. "So be
it," he sighed.

Olivia's
colour deepened as she almost snatched Jasmine's reins out of his grasp.
"If you believe it is
me
you are indulging—"

He
cut her off with a snort. "If it were you I were indulging," he said
irritably, "there would be no problem. Unfortunately, my gross selfishness
allows me to think only of myself. I am angry because it is
not
you I am
indulging!"

Olivia
smiled again. "When?"

"Soon."

Already
she trembled with mortifying impatience. "How soon?"

"Very
soon."

"How
will you know where I am?" she asked rapidly, feeling inept but unable to
let go.

"I
always know where you are," he said with a return of the gentleness that
demanded she forgive him everything.

And
she did. Instantly. However, his casualness, his ill-concealed reluctance,
wounded her somewhat. In silence she mounted Jasmine but then once more he
lifted the injury right out of her mind. "You can never know,
Olivia," he murmured against the palm of her hand as he kissed it,
"just how much I want to see you again."

Over
the small kiss he folded her fingers, placed her hand back carefully in her lap
and slapped Jasmine hard on the flank. Olivia knew that he stood and watched
her ride away until she was lost to his sight.