Sweeter Than Revenge (17 page)

“I thought you were taking a swim,” she said in a strangled voice.

Acutely—agonizingly—aware of the bubbling water as it churned around her heaving bosom, hiding and revealing it, hiding and revealing, he opened his mouth with no real hope that any sound would come out of his dry throat.

“I changed my mind,” he said hoarsely. “I’ve been doing that a lot lately.”

The words seemed to galvanize—and terrorize—her. She shot up, snatched her towel off the ledge and started to climb out. “It’s too hot for me, so—”

“What’stoo hot?”

“The water,” she cried, fumbling with the towel and refusing to look at him.

He hadn’t meant to overwhelm her, but he couldn’t let her go. Not now, not again. He grabbed her wrist, holding her in place with a light grip she could have broken if she’d wanted to.

“Maria.”

Frozen, half in the spa and half out, Maria stared at his hand on her and didn’t answer for the longest ten seconds of his life. Finally she looked up at him, and in those wide, dark eyes he saw the same emotion that currently throbbed in his own chest: torment.

“Can’t we sit and talk like civilized people for five minutes?” he asked softly.

Their gazes fused and he stared, willing her to understand—without him actually having to say those momentous words—that he wanted her. Again. Breathless, desperate for her to meet him halfway, as terrified and enthralled as a moth flying straight into the hottest flames of a torch, he waited.

David’s warm, gentle fingers circled her hand, and Maria couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think and couldn’t move. Not with that intense gaze boring into hers, not with that thumb stroking the sensitive flesh of her wrist.

The world as she’d known it seemed to be shifting and changing, and it suddenly made no sense. Nothing in her life had ever scared her as much as this new uncertainty. The old rules in the old world made perfect sense: their relationship, whatever it had been, was over forever, never to be revived, and they, by mutual but unspoken agreement, avoided each other whenever possible. These absolute truths were central to her existence, and she knew and understood them.

But now…could there be a new world? One where David spoke nicely to her and actually looked at her without open malevolence? Where he occasionally even smiled at her? Oh, sure, he’d been reasonably nice today at work, and there’d been that delicious moment when they laughed together, but that was just his professional demeanor. Wasn’t it?

“Can you stay for a minute?” he asked.

No.Staying here—or anywhere—with himwas dangerous. She shouldn’t stay here any more than a recovering pyromaniac should stay in a dynamite factory. How many times did she need to get burned before she put two and two together and realized she shouldn’t play with fire? She’d have to be too stupid to live if she couldn’t connect these few simple dots, wouldn’t she?

Apparently she was, because when she opened her mouth, one word came out without hesitation:

“Okay.”

Those two syllables did something strange to David. Tension seemed to melt away from him, right before her eyes. His rigid shoulders relaxed a little, and his face shone with a bright, mysterious new light. He didn’t smile, but that didn’t matter.

He also didn’t let go of her.

Staying was one thing, but staying in physical contact with him was out of the question. She gently pulled her arm free—he seemed reluctant to let go, but she wouldn’t think about that—stepped back into the spa, moved to the other side, as far away from him as she could get, dropped the towel and sat down.

A quiet moment passed.

Maria fidgeted, settling more comfortably on the bench.

Now what? Afraid to open her mouth and say anything lest she give him some fresh new reason to hate her guts, she kept quiet. So did he. The silence stretched, making this the most unrelaxing soak she’d ever had. Finally she decided she was being ridiculous. Leaning her head back, she closed her eyes so she didn’t have to look at that beautiful, unreadable face, and willed herself to appear relaxed even though she was ready to jump out of her skin.

As usual, her body was on fire for David. She could handle it, though. All she had to do was block a few images from her writhing mind’s eye: David, mostly naked and within arm’s reach, the bare, hard, ridged slabs of David’s chest and shoulders, David’s muscular thighs and shapely calves, David’s tight butt. Anything else? Oh, yes…what she could have sworn was an interesting bulge in the front of his trunks.

That about covered it. As long as she ignored all that, she would be fine.

“I want to tell you something,” he said out of the blue. “It’s about…my parents.”

Maria uttered a vicious, silent curse.

She’d forgotten about the voice. At the best of times, that deep, resonant voice vibrated under her skin and along her nerve endings like the beat from timpani. The additional huskiness she heard in it now would no doubt prove fatal if she listened to it much longer. More dangerous than the actual voice was what the voice said. David was sharing something personal with her—about a subject he’d always avoided before—and someone should really notify the Vatican that a miracle had just occurred.

Weeping with gratitude would be ridiculous, she knew, but she still felt the urge. David was the strong, silent type at the best of times, which these weren’t, so she’d put her chances of him warming up and talking to her to be somewhere between when pigs fly and when donkeys roost in trees.

Keeping her eyes closed, she spoke softly and tried to sound like she was only marginally interested in this unknown chapter of his life. “What about them?”

“They never got married.”

“I know that,” she said gently.

“They split up when I was eleven.”

“I know that, too.”

He was silent for so long she opened her eyes to make sure he was okay. She knew there was much more to this painful story, and she wanted to hear it, but only if he wanted to tell. Raising a dripping hand from the water, he ran it down his strained face as though he needed to wipe some of his discomfort away.

“It was really bad. My mother had been sleeping with my dad’s boss, the guy who owned the auto-parts shop where he worked. That guy was rich, at least compared to our standards. Mama kept turning up with new clothes and stuff we couldn’t afford, and then one day she came home with a gold necklace. That was the last straw. My father went wild. She…was pregnant. He threw her out. One day she was there, that night they had a huge blowup, and the next day she was gone. So were all her clothes. I didn’t see her for two years. She lost that baby, and then she died a couple years after that. Car accident.”

Right there in the hundred-degree spa, Maria’s blood ran cold with horror. She could not believe something that terrible had happened to him and she’d never known it; she could not believe that neither parent had protected their son any better than that.

“Oh, God,” she said helplessly.

His troubled gaze swung back to her and he managed a wry smile. “Sometimes I wonder…whether what happened with my mother made me…do stupid things at times.” He paused. “With relationships, I mean. I wonder if I…might have…walked out rather than take the risk of someone walking out on me.”

He stared at her, his intense gaze heavy with significance.

Stunned comprehension took a while to come to Maria, but it finally arrived. She blinked. Hope, a foolish phoenix, rose in her chest, and the world shifted a little more, throwing her so far off balance she wondered if she would just slip away and hurtle through space.

A beat passed, and then another. His glittering gaze held hers and paralysis fused her in place. In the end her instinct for self-protection kicked into overdrive and demanded that she run. Escape.She couldn’t take this—any of this—anymore. Not the romantic setting, or his husky voice, or the hot gleam in his eyes and answering throb in her breasts and high up between her thighs, or especially the hope where there should be no hope.

She simply could not live if David broke her heart again.

“I—I’m tired,” she cried.

Abandoning all efforts to appear calm, cool and collected, she got out of the spa as fast as she possibly could, splashing out of the water like Shamu the whale. She looked wildly around for her towel but didn’t see it and wasn’t certain she’d recognize it anyway in her agitation.

The water splashed again, and then something terrible happened.

David came up behind her, wrapped her in a fluffy towel and rested his hands on her shoulders, massaging gently.

Chapter 15

Maria froze. The scalding heat from his big body, a thousand times hotter than the water in the spa, burned every aching inch of her flesh from her shoulders to her heels. That primitive flight response screamed at her again to run,but moving away from David was impossible.

She waited, trembling, and he shifted closer, wrapping one arm across her chest and gripping her shoulder. He slid his other hand under the towel and pressed, low on her quivering belly, until her butt was spooned against his heavy groin and there was no mistaking the bulge she’d thought she’d seen.

The contact was too excruciating, too exquisite,and she cried out, trying to pull away. His muscles tightened, hardening into steel. He lowered his head and whispered in her ear.

“Shh, Ree-Ree.”

That palm on her belly circled, massaging and gentling her, creating a hot, pleasurable flow between her legs. Against her will she felt herself relaxing and becoming pliant in his arms.

“I want to tell you something.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she whimpered, more terrified than she could ever remember being.

“You need to hear it.”

Somehow his whispers against her ear had become nuzzles, and the nuzzles became kisses. He paused, kissing her ear and cheek now, tasting her, and she trembled against him, on the razor’s edge between agony and ecstasy, with ecstasy edging closer.

“I want you back, Ree-Ree.”

“No.”

Two things happened at once, both equally devastating: his hips thrust against her, his hard length coming home to rest in the groove that had obviously been designed just for it, and the hand on her belly slid up and, hidden by the towel, rubbed over first one breast, then the other.

Maria’s legs gave and she sagged against him, too dazed with pleasure now to even think about escaping. Her eyes rolled shut and her head drifted to the side, and his lips took immediate advantage, skimming up her neck to her jaw.

“Do you feel it, Maria? Do you feel how much I want you?”

She stubbornly clung to reason even as her body begged her to surrender and give him what they both wanted so desperately. “Sex,” she said. “You want sex.”

The sharp, thrilling nip on the side of her neck told her he didn’t like this answer. She cried out and her groin tightened, pulsing and aching.

“I want you to loveme again.”

The unexpected ferocity in his voice stunned her. So did what happened next:

He let her go.

When she’d been putty in his hands, when he could have tugged her into the changing room off the pool, or into the house and up to his bedroom or hers, and all it would have taken was one word, one smile, one kiss and she’d have done anything he wanted her to do and begged for more, when he had all the power and she had none, he let her go.

A step or two had him standing in front of her, and their gazes locked. He stared, communicating everything he wanted her to know, using no words and not needing any. He wanted it all. He wanted her body, her heart and her soul, and he wanted them willingly given. The bottom line was that he wanted to be restored to the exact position he’d occupied in her life before he went back to school, and would never give up and never settle for less.

The absolute determination in his face sobered Maria up and made her rigid with terror. There was nothing left of her for him to take; he’d already had—and destroyed—it all.

“No,” she said, backing away from him.

He didn’t deign to contradict her. Merely held her gaze for another beat or two, and let her see that she could argue and deny it all she wanted, but there would be no compromise on this issue. Finally he blinked and walked away, back toward the house, as if he knew he’d made his point and was in no rush to collect what he wanted.

Maria watched him go and collapsed, devastated, onto the nearest chair.

Maria edged her way around the bookshelves, through the chattering, laughing, standing-room-only crowd, darted out of the Barnes & Noble and leaped into the limousine double-parked at the curb, slamming the door behind her. She sat next to David on the backward-facing leather seat. Opposite them sat Anastasia and Uri. Anastasia wore a purple suit with black-sequined piping around the lapels, and a voluminous black Chaka Khan wig that took up most of the seat and left Uri, still silent, still in black, smooshed into his corner by the door.

All of them looked expectantly at Maria. “Well?” Anastasia demanded.

“Perrier,” Maria told her, digging deep and trying to remember everything Shelley had taught her about dealing with difficult clients in the last couple of weeks. “They don’t carry San Pellegrino in the café.”

Everyone held their collective breath, waiting for Anastasia’s reaction to this tragic news.

Anastasia’s face twisted with venom. “Swine,”she spat. Uri patted her knee for support.

Maria waited a moment, until the worst of the storm had passed, before she spoke again. “Uh, Anastasia,” she said, “they have a very nice room in the back where you can wait until the signing starts. It’s only ten more minutes. I think the manager’s feelings are a little hurt that you won’t even wait insi—”

“Nonsense.” Anastasia flapped a large hand so heavy with rings it looked like she was wearing brass knuckles. Poor Uri was forced to duck out of the way or risk getting clocked in the face and the possible loss of several front teeth. “The fans expect me to make an entrance, and to mingle.I like to touch the people, to shake hands and listen to all their silly gushing. It makes them happy. Gives them something to tell their friends later when they go back to their boring little lives.”

“Of…course,” Maria said. Somehow she kept a straight face and did not succumb to the temptation to sneak a sidelong peek at David to see if he, too, wanted to vomit.

“What about the pens, love?” Anastasia asked.

“Yes,” Maria said, relieved that the pen situation, at least, was under control. “They have a big cup full of pens on the table, so there’s no chance of—”

“Are they purple Sharpies?”

Maria froze, midword, with her mouth popped open. Why hadn’t she thought about the crucial issue of pens?A beat passed while she fidgeted with her hoop earring and tried to find the words to tell Anastasia the cup was full of blue Bic pens with nary a purple Sharpie in the bunch. But as she stared at Anastasia’s darkening face and saw another storm brewing on the horizon, she decided that honesty was a grossly overrated virtue.

“I think I didsee a purple Sharpie, yes,” she lied, praying that, once the excitement of the signing got under way, Anastasia would forget about the damn pens.

“Wonderful!” Anastasia beamed, and she and Uri exchanged toothy smiles.

Anastasia raised her tumbler of gin and tonic on the rocks—her third on the ride over here, not that Maria was worried or anything—clinked it with Uri’s glass and sipped happily. This time Maria took advantage of the momentary distraction to shoot a glance at David, who’d been watching her.

He always watched her these days. In the two weeks since he made his declaration of renewed wanting, he seemed to be always nearby, no matter how desperately she tried to avoid him, always watching her with those hot, intent eyes, always waiting.

Maria knew he was waiting for her to give in, wearing her down. It was a good strategy.

A supportive, amused smile drifted discreetly across his face, awakening the butterflies that always fluttered in her belly whenever he was nearby. Her cheeks began to burn with a delicious heat, and she couldn’t stop herself from returning his smile. Just a little, here in the car with other people around, where it was safe.

“And what about the tablecloth?” Anastasia asked, pulling Maria’s attention away from David. “What color was it?”

“White,” Maria told her.

Anastasia scowled, her penciled brows lowering to squiggles above her flashing eyes. “Who told them to use a bloody white tablecloth?” She looked around, catching everyone’s eye in turn, as though she expected them all to be as incredulous over this travesty of taste as she was. “You can’t show the cover of Blue Endearmentto advantage on a whitetablecloth! What would make them think—”

Uri put a hand on her arm, stopping the tirade. Holding his index finger up in the universal wait a minutegesture, he reached down and rummaged around in his black leather bag, which Maria always wanted to call a purse. With a flourish, he whipped out an enormous length of heavy black linen, and flapped it. A black tablecloth. Maria wanted to kiss him.

Anastasia did kiss him. With a booming, deep-throated laugh that reminded Maria of the bald guy in those old 7-Up commercials, she reached out, grabbed Uri’s face in one of her hands, and smacked him loudly on the cheek, leaving a huge set of flaming-red lip prints. Uri laughed, too, and order was restored in Anastasia’s universe.

Just then, the harried-looking community relations manager of the store hurried through the crowd and tapped on the window. Anastasia stuck a red-tipped finger on the control and lowered the window to stare imperiously at the woman.

“We’re ready for you,” the manager said. “Let me walk you in.”

The four of them climbed out and Anastasia began to glow with some internal light that superstars like Diana Ross and Elizabeth Taylor no doubt possessed. Radiating that indefinable it,an enormous smile on her face, Anastasia waved and cried, “Hello, darlings,” to the crowd at large. Heads whipped around, and when they realized it was Anastasia herself, a ripple of excitement went through the well-dressed crowd of mostly women. Some of them squealed and clapped, and there was much hugging, kissing and flashing of camera phones as Anastasia greeted her delirious worshippers, all of whom seemed to have a couple of Anastasia’s books clutched to their bosom. Amazed, Maria trailed Anastasia through the crowd and wondered whether this was what life was like for rock star groupies. She half expected these women to whip out their lighters, hold them high over their heads and flick them as they swayed to Anastasia’s beat.

The crowd surged closer a couple of times, giving Maria a vague sense of unease; conditions were certainly ripe for a riot if they ran out of books or something, and she wasn’t certain the lone security officer she’d seen was much in the way of crowd control. As if he’d read her mind, David edged nearer and put a firm, protective hand on her back, and she breathed easier. David would never let anything happen to her, and she knew it.

Finally they arrived at the table, the black tablecloth was substituted for the white one, books were rearranged, Maria slipped Anastasia a big glass of iced Perrier—please, Lord, let her drink it—and the signing began. More accurately, the pilgrimage, with the faithful paying gushing homage to their idol, began. Just as Maria had hoped, Anastasia was so engrossed with greeting her enthralled fans that she didn’t notice the complete absence of purple Sharpies. Chattering happily, she signed copies of Blue Endearmentand her backlisted books with a huge, swirling signature that took up most of the title page. Her rapt fans couldn’t get enough.

Uri and the manager hovered around the table, assisting Anastasia when the task of flipping books open to the signature page became too much for her. Maria hovered several feet back, near the end of an enormous bookshelf, available if Anastasia needed her and out of the way if she didn’t. She’d just begun to relax when David materialized at her elbow, causing her pulse to go berserk.

With a negligent crossing of one ankle over the other, he lounged back against her bookshelf so that they were side-by-side and touching from shoulder to elbow. Maria went rigid and she had to force herself to stay where she was and not scurry away like a frightened mouse. Her heart skittered with excitement and her blood began to heat, but she studiously ignored him and prayed he would go away. He didn’t.

“Alone at last,” he murmured.

“We’re not alone,” she said coolly.

But they were, for all intents and purposes, and he didn’t bother to contradict her. The crowd chattered and orbited around Anastasia, today’s star in the Barnes & Noble universe, and no one paid them the slightest attention. Agitated, Maria tried to act unruffled and unconcerned.

“I wish you’d stop trying to avoid me,” he told her. “I’m getting tired of it.”

“I’m not avoiding you. I just need a little quiet time after a long day at work.”

David snorted, and she felt ridiculous for telling such a dumb lie. Ever since his confession by the spa two weeks ago, she’d put herself in virtual lockdown in her own room. Like house arrest, except that she couldn’t roam the common areas, such as the kitchen, living room or pool, because she never knew where he might turn up. Paranoid beyond all reason, she’d even taken to locking her bedroom door at night lest he take it upon himself to pay her a nocturnal visit.

Day by day, inch by inch, heartbeat by heartbeat, she felt herself losing the battle against him, her resistance weakening, but she fought against the inevitable. She did not want to go down this road with him again. She did not want to give him another bite at the apple. She did not want to risk another heartbreak at his hands. She’d barely survived the first one, and she couldn’t do it again. She didn’t have it in her.

“How are you?” he asked.

That soft, deep, murmuring voice felt like a caress, a lingering stroke of fingers across her bare skin that made her long for things she shouldn’t want. “Fine,” she said, not looking at him and struggling to get air into lungs that didn’t seem to want to expand all the way. “I’m fine.”