Ryman, Rebecca (50 page)

Waves
of pain rose within and crippled her. She was down to her last crumb of courage
but she refused to let it go to waste. Some
remote sixth sense prodded her on and
whipped her again into retaliation. Between them now was the moment of truth;
it would not come again. She threw back her head and laughed.

"You
are not only a liar, Jai, you are a coward. You cannot face the fact that,
despite your cynical predictions, I
have
had the courage of my
convictions after all. You may sneer at my alleged 'chivalry' in offering you
an alibi for that night, but at the same time you feel small because I am
willing to lay down my reputation not out of constraint but because my
commitment to you
is
total." Her immense eyes flashed contempt in
his face. "If you do not wish to use my evidence, I accept that. If you do
not wish to see me or speak to me again, I accept that too, however wounding.
What I will
not
accept, Jai, is the devaluation, the denial, of your
feelings for me. You lie to hide your own delusions, not mine. You fabricate a
hate that does not exist. You do love me, Jai..." A split second of
anguish came and went. "As sure as the wind blows and I breathe, you love
me, and before the sun rises tomorrow I will make you eat your words, Jai, every
damned, lying one of them, I promise you that!"

"Get
out!"
His
voice, tight in his throat, was strangled.

"I
will, but not before you admit you have lied!"

The
final thread of his control snapped. With a snarl he sprang at her and two
enormous, powerful hands circled her neck. Distorted into a mask of virulence,
his features turned maniacal, barely human. Thumbs pressed against her
windpipe, he shook her with the fury of a mastiff gripping a rat between its
teeth, all reason gone. Olivia battled to breathe, gasping for air but neither
struggling nor feeling the faintest twinge of fear. A curtain of black started
to descend over her eyes, but her last conscious emotion as darkness engulfed
her was of triumph—she had broken through that shell! She felt herself slide
and then go down, down, down, into some bottomless pit of blackness and
silence. And then she felt nothing.

Time
must have passed but Olivia was unaware of it. Laboriously, imperceptibly, she
started to climb again, inch by inch, gasp by gasp. Air filtered through to her
lungs and light into her eyes. She felt herself cushioned; against her cheek
was warmth, and panting breath gushed into her ear. In the half haze of a mind
not yet fully conscious, memory struggled and then broke through the mists. She
smiled. Her mouth, buried deep against folds of musky, beloved flesh, formed a
word.
Confess!
Even though no sound emerged, it was heard and it was
understood.

"Why
can't you leave me alone?" Against her cheek the
question
sounded like a cry for help, a beseechment. "Why do you return to torture
me like this?" Raventhorne raised his face and stared wildly into hers.

Ignoring
the throbbing ache in her throat, Olivia clung to him. His breath scoured her
skin like a rake; within her embrace his heavy frame twisted with spasms as he
battled with his brutal inner devils. "Hush," Olivia murmured,
cradling his head on her shoulder. "Hush, my darling one,
hush."
Whispering
comfort and love, she solaced him and waited, waited, waited patiently for the
turbulence to subside, for the demons to retreat, for the body to still. Then
she framed his tortured face between her palms and kissed him. Her eyes filled
with tears. "Because I love you, Jai."

He
shuddered. "Don't love me, Olivia." It was now no more than a weary,
wasted refrain. His features contorted again. "My God, I could have killed
you! What further proof can you want of my worthlessness?"

"It
is also proof of what you deny. I see it in your eyes." She touched his
lids with her finger-tips and smiled.

"You
see too many damn things in my eyes that do not exist!" His fingers,
clutching the rumpled confusion of her hair, tightened.

"They
exist for me if not for you."

He
groaned and his mouth on hers was punitive. It was a kiss not of love but of
defeat and of rage at that defeat. "Go now, my golden-eyed innocent,"
he begged huskily. "Go, go
, go
before you commit yourself truly to
a life of regrets."

Go?
Go where? Olivia wondered. With her whole world held in her arms where was
there left to go? "Regrets there will never be, Jai, that much I know.
Whatever I am
is
yours."

He
shook her in growing exasperation. "I can give you nothing in return, you
foolish girl. I have nothing to offer you!"

"You
give without knowing, Jai." Gently, she cleared his forehead of black strands
heavy with perspiration. "And what you cannot offer is perhaps not worth
having."

Hunger
darting out from his eyes devoured her from only a whisper away. Hands, awkward
and uncertain, fumbled within her cascade of hair as it spilled across the pillow
on the four-poster where she lay. But with the hunger there remained stubborn
incomprehension. "How can you still be so full of ideals, so blinded by
unrewarding romanticism!" Even in his frustration he spoke with
wonderment.

"The
same way you can still be so full of senseless doubts!"

"I
doubt because you commit without caution, tantalise
without
apprehension, like a child ignorant of tomorrow—and I am only a man, damn you,
as fallible as the next."

Olivia
sighed, too overwhelmed for debate, too crippled by the burden of a love too
long denied its natural fulfilment. She was no longer deceived by his assumed
postures. What he refused to say in words he was saying to her with his eyes,
with his hands, with every angry move of his body as it abrased against hers.
"Then prove your fallibility," she murmured dreamily into his ear as
she kissed it,
"prove
it, Jai Raventhorne!"

His
response to her brazen challenge was savage. The last of his defences crumbled.
Abandoning caution, he swept her into his arms, growling curses and hoarse
imprecations as he tore at her clothing, wildly impatient with the buttons and
bows and knotted laces. Assiduous in their fevered explorations, his hands
wandered over her body leaving licks of fire wherever they touched her skin. Gone
were the doubts, the indecisions and the uncertainties as he tossed aside each
garment in a frenzy of haste. Then for an instant, one brief instant, his hands
stilled. In smoky-eyed wonder he sat up on the bed to drink in the golden
expanse of her body—long, tapering legs, generously moulded hips, the
rose-tipped mounds of her breasts, the nipples already engorged and aching for
his caress. Visibly awed, he skimmed their peaks with a trembling palm.

"My
God, but you are exquisite
. . .!"

The
low, incredulous moan extinguished around the cinnamon dark of a nipple
engulfed by his mouth. Wherever his eyes feasted, his lips followed, making her
limp with love, weak with longing. At the havoc wreaked by his nibbling mouth,
his flicking tongue, the inquisitive tips of his fingers, she cried out in
agony. Ignorant of responses, she arched up against him, quivering like a leaf,
ecstatic and yet astonished at the revelations of her body. She turned and
buried her face in the pillow, covered in confusion. With a muted laugh, he
drew out her face to smother it with kisses, his rampaging mouth unwilling to
leave a single pore untasted, a solitary fibre unlearned. Holding her head
steady, he explored the niches of her own mouth, his serpentine tongue drinking
in her sweetness, making her drink in his. Olivia whimpered; there would be no
turning back now. The appetite that belonged to them both with such
impartiality demanded to be satisfied. She filled and overspilled with love,
rejoicing in the abundant proof of his need for her, knowing that the words he
had withheld for so long would also be part of their night.

He
halted but only to cast off his remaining clothing, and she
caught flashes
of glistening nut brown flesh, hard and sinewed, sheened with damp. And then he
was beside her again, the length of his body pressed close to hers, their legs
entwined, their mouths inseparable with intermingling tongues and shared
breath. Against the raven's-wing mesh of his chest, her cheek abraded into
nettle stings, silken skin against stubbled maleness, and she melted into him.
With their mouths locked, he traced the line of her spine to its base and
pressed her—was it possible?— even closer into himself. Jerking into rebellion,
Olivia burst into flame, savouring sensations as acute as pin points of fire.
She cried out again and he stilled her protests with bruising kisses, drowning
her whimpers with words that were alien. But the sounds of the words were
primeval, universal, wild and wonderful because she knew they spoke of love. Like
a musical instrument strummed for the first time, her nascent body leapt to
life. Plucking, stroking, searing fingers made her vibrate with music such as
she had never heard before. She knew not what further peaks were yet to be
scaled on this her maiden voyage of divine discovery, but she sensed there were
many. Velvet tipped intruders devised tantalising transgressions, with
accuracy, with abandon, and Olivia convulsed into insanity.

"No
more," she beseeched, crying out in a frenzy of unendurable rapture,
"please, have mercy, my dearest one!"

For
a fraction of a second his hand stayed. Glaze eyed with resurging uncertainty,
he hesitated. Then, with a helpless groan, he buried his face in her shoulder.
"There will be pain, my angel. How can I spare you that?" He was
again ravaged with doubts.

She
circled his neck with her arms and held him secure. "I love you, Jai, I
love you more than my
life!"
Her whisper was fierce with emotion,
thick with feeling. "It is not pain that I will feel, I promise you. Whatever
else, it will not be pain."

The
pain came but once, like the nick of a knife tip, the flick of a whip,
forgotten even before it had passed, for with it Olivia swept on the crest of
an incredible flood into womanhood. Past and future were obliterated; there was
only the here and now of each moment stretching into an eternity of
timelessness. Their bodies melded and merged and swayed into oneness, moving
into rhythms as old and as enduring as time itself. His love-making was
violent, his need for possession compulsive. Olivia jubilated in the
possession, revelling in it, responding to it, reacting to her joy with
delirium. When her moans became too fevered, he soothed them with kisses; when
she could tolerate the exquisite torture no longer, he gentled her with sudden
flashes of
tenderness. And when his own fulfilment was imminent and he teetered on another
perilous precipice of doubt, she locked her legs around his and tacitly forbade
him to leave.

Give
me something, something of yourself at least, now . . .!

The
sheer magnitude of her surrender defeated him; not even he was man enough or
perhaps too much a man to deny her silent supplication. In a cascade, his
essence, the life force of his manhood, coursed into her, flooding and filling
and fulfilling every last fragment of her body. Olivia gasped with happiness,
then convulsed again and again, then catapulted like a trajectile into realms
beyond reality. Suspended high in time and spaces unknown, she was blinded by
the matchless perfection of the moment. And then slowly, softly, delicately,
trembling in the folds of a nameless oblivion, a little death, she floated down
again along slopes of a magnificent contentment into a dreamless valley that is
the ultimate resting place of fulfilled love.

Even
before their bodies drew apart, she was asleep.

A
minute passed, or maybe an hour or a day. When Olivia opened her eyes again,
dazed and drowsy, Jai was lying next to her on his stomach, his cheek cushioned
on his arm, his face averted. Her throat constricted with emotion and her eyes
melted. Across the hardened ridges of his bare shoulders she ran a hand, loving
him, cherishing him, in silence. She laid her cheek on his back and whispered,
"I love you."

He
stirred, then turned and gathered her again in his arms, cradling her so that
her lips nuzzled the base of his throat. In its hollow, she dropped a kiss and
fingered the silver pendant he wore around his neck. She had never known such
peace, such perfect serenity. Lightly, he kissed the top of her head. "You
love me too much." In his tone there was fatigue and an immense
unhappiness. "I have wronged you."

Olivia
struggled up so that she could look into his face. "You have made me
complete," she protested, searching for his eyes.

He
looked away. "It was not meant to be like this. It was never meant to be
like this."

She
cupped his face and forced his eyes back to her. "It was always meant to
be like this, always! From the very first moment we met that night on the
river. It was
fated
to be like this!"

He
exhaled a long, boundless breath, anxiety etched into every tired line of his
face. "It is dangerous to love too much, Olivia."

"It
is the only way I can love."

Gently
he kissed the hurt away from her eyes and shook his
head. "You
should not have come, Olivia. You will regret the commitment you have made
tonight. I should not have allowed you to. It is I who am to blame, it is
I."