Wild Honey (16 page)

A moment later he was aware of nothing but his thundering heartbeat and the pounding heat between his legs. He crushed her nightshirt in his fists and drew it up her thighs, riveted by the cries in her throat, the shimmering softness of her legs. She was naked underneath the shirt, naked and tender as a baby.

With one frantic tug Marc released the button and zipper on his jeans. He hooked a hand beneath each of her knees, lifted her to his waist, and curled her legs around him. She straddled him gracefully, entwining her arms around his neck and gasping in surprise as he pressed against the golden triangle of her sex. Astonished at his own control, he entered her gradually, probing, seducing away the natural resistance of her muscles with rhythmic half strokes.

He took it slowly, easily, caressing her with the aching hardness between his legs, priming her until she was crying and bucking and breathing out his name. Curled around his body, she was a trembling, unrestrained lover. “
Yes, like this
,” she whispered, lacing her fingers into the thickness of his hair, arching up and lowering herself onto him. “
I need you like this.
”

Out of his mind with desire, Marc pressed her tender, undulating body to the wall and drove into her again and again. He was oblivious to everything but the primitive, pounding urges of his body—and his desperate need for her. She was the hot, sweet pressure in his loins, the cinch closing around his heart, the eternal wonder in his soul.

They rocked and kissed and clung to each other. In the final moments of completion, Sasha felt his power streaming inside her and her body tightened to bursting. In her mind she saw the golden spiral of an exploding star. It was glorious, the most acute pleasure she’d ever known. In the last brilliant seconds before the blaze engulfed her, she called out a name,
his.

I
N THE FIRST FLUSHED
moments of recovery, Marc wrapped Sasha in the overcoat and pulled her into his arms. Swaying with tenderness, he held her head against the curve of his neck and gentled her with whispers. When her tremors subsided, he shifted back to look at her.

“Are you all right?” he asked, molding a hand to her face protectively. Aware of the staccato beat of her pulse beneath his fingers, he drew an arc in the downy blond hair wisps at her temple.

She nodded and pressed herself to him again as though for warmth and some kind of reassurance. Marc’s heart moved oddly in his chest. He enfolded her tightly, his hand squeezing into a fist at her nape. It was a strange, sweet moment of bonding, and he found himself wishing it would never end.

The soft thunder of the ocean drifted to them through the doorway, ushered in by a breeze that was increasingly chilly and damp with condensation. As the mist penetrated his clothing, Marc snuggled the coat around her, savoring her delicate warmth and her small shuddering sighs.

He hadn’t expected this, not from her. He’d glimpsed her vulnerability on several occasions, but nobody could have made him believe that the beautiful spitfire he’d met a week ago would respond to him with the naked abandon of this woman in his arms.

He kissed the spun silver crown of her head, and she arched her neck to look up at him. Her soft smile and the sparkle in her eyes seemed to whisper
wow.
No guilt, no regrets, no frills, just
wow.

My sentiments exactly, he thought.

Her face was flushed and slightly abraded from his beard-rough jaw. Her hair was wild. Another man might have called her a temptress, but Marc saw her as he wanted to see her, as he needed to see her. She was pristine, with a clarity about her eyes, a purity in her passion. This woman’s soul is new and clean, he thought, taking her by the hand.

A melancholy came over him as they returned to the house, and their reverential state of silence came to an end. She dropped the overcoat on a chair and turned to him, a finger pressed to her lips as though she weren’t quite sure what was supposed to happen next. Finally, lifting a shoulder, she said, “I could fix us something, some coffee?”

He caught hold of her hands, his mood philosophical. “Tell me, Sasha,” he asked, “are you...what’s the word? Incorruptible?”

She gave it a moment. “Yes, I think so.”

He stared into her eyes, and the melancholy inside him compressed into a tiny hot kernel of regret. For her sake he almost wished it were true. She was proud and unassailable. She was beautiful.
But she was wrong.
How do I tell her, he thought. How do I warn her that even she can be seduced? Will she believe that everyone has his fall from grace...his despoiler? Will she believe that with her it’s me. He brought her to him, halting as their hips touched.
I’m the one who can corrupt her.

She met his gaze, and he saw her momentary bewilderment, the sparkle of apprehension. It was as though she’d read his thoughts. And then gradually, like the morning sun creeping over a hill and refusing to believe there was anything beyond the warmth of its rays, she gazed up at him with such burning sweetness he could hardly breathe.

“Yes, I suppose I am incorruptible,” she said, rifling her fingers through his hair, “unless you had something in mind. I might like a bad-tempered French film director to ruin me. Or to try.”

She kissed him on the nose, nuzzled up his neck, and left a sharp kitten’s nip on his earlobe. “Now you’re marked,” she murmured, rolling her eyes, realizing what she’d said. “Pardon the pun.”

Marc laughed at her, disarmed, his sadness fading. “What are you doing to me?” he asked, shaking his head as he realized how many times he’d said or thought those words. All of a sudden he had to have her in his arms, to feel her heartbeat against his ribs and breathe the same air she breathed. He swept her into an embrace so abruptly, she gasped.

“I need you again,” he told her.

“If I’m incorruptible,” she said, “then you’re insatiable.”

He kissed her deeply, rimming her lips and the fine edges of her teeth with his tongue. She opened her mouth to him automatically, whimpering as he pressed into her with a deep, rhythmic thrusting that simulated the passion to come. His stomach muscles knotted with pleasure as she tightened her lips, encasing his forays and creating a friction that set his blood on fire.

He broke away, breathing huskily. “Here? In the kitchen?” he asked, freeing the buttons on her nightshirt and curving his hands to her breasts as the silky material fell away.

She pressed her hand over his as desire rekindled, and led him out onto the glass-enclosed sun deck. Naked, wordless, she melted against him, and they dropped to the chintz daybed. Their steamy passion saturated the night and beat heavily through the room around them. Marc was aware only of her warm flesh, caressing lips, and the fiery heat of her loins. They rolled and clung and writhed, her sobbing with pleasure and him moving deeply inside her, another magnificent fantasy realized.

Sasha was driven senseless with the riotous pleasure he gave her. He made love like a man possessed. She clung to him wantonly, moaning under the sweet, hammering thrusts of his thighs, the deep penetration of his tongue. One moment he was tender and unbearably gentle, cherishing her as if she were the most precious, inviolate thing he’d ever touched. The next he was invading, plunging himself into the exquisite heart of her, taking possession, taking everything she had to give.

As the crescendo of power and passion began, Marc had the answer to his question. He knew what she was doing to him. She was burning away his past like a torch held to an old photograph. When he was with her, he could block out the memories, drive them away with every aching thrust into her pliant body. She was his liberation. As long as he could hold her, make love to her, he could ward off the devils.

Afterward, their bodies still joined, they held each other. A dream flickered on the rim of their awareness, the same crazy, wistful lovers’ dream. Sasha was afraid to voice it. Marc was reluctant even to think it. Was this it, they both wondered. The missing puzzle piece in their lives, the key to completion?

In the days that followed, with shooting wrapped and the movie in post-production, Marc turned
Tell Me No Lies
over to his film editors, and he and Sasha secluded themselves in the confines of the beach house, making it their hideaway. Neither of them knew exactly when the studio might decide it was time for Sasha to return to her former life.

It was enchanted, their private world. Marc’s mood seemed to have lifted permanently. He ran with Sasha on the cool sand at sunrise, and at twilight they celebrated the balmy coming of spring to the Malibu coast with champagne and laughter. The tangy scent of the sea surrounded them, murmuring lovers’ secrets. No matter where they were, desire breathed. An intimate touch, a whisper, and they were caught up in the sexual undertow of their passion, dragged down by some powerful current.

Sasha was dizzied and drunk with it all, happier than she’d ever been. She entertained Marc until the wee hours of the morning with the life and times of Sasha McCleod, air force brat, fitness phenomenon. She even included the bittersweet story of Alexandria, her Gypsy mother, a confidence she’d never shared with anyone else.

Marc absorbed her monologues with silent admiration, marveling at her openness. He understood her fierce independence now. What he couldn’t fathom was her ability to fling herself into things, to embrace them with such fervor. Very soon it would be him, he realized. He was about to become her next cause, which meant she would want to know everything about him, every blessed detail. She would expect it.

What then, he asked himself.

The week wore on, and she surprised him by biding her time. He’d almost begun to think she wasn’t going to broach the topic of his past when she casually waylaid him in the Jacuzzi. They were on the deck off his bedroom, lounging in the warm bubbles and laughing at the Sunday comics.

She touched his arm. “Tell me about France,” she said simply. “I’ve never been there.”

“That could take years.”

She smiled at him, delighted. “Good, I’ve got years.”

Marc knew there was no deterring her. He began with the France of his childhood, highlighting the pleasant memories, skirting the fissures and shadows. The postwar Burgundy region, where the family estate and vineyards were located was an idyllic setting, he told her. He’d stolen away with the peasant farmers’ children whenever he could to play in the Roman ruins near Vezelay, a crumbling medieval town where his passion for fantasy and filmmaking was born.

Sasha made a rapt audience, hanging on his every word as he described the pitfalls and privileges of his only-child existence. He elaborated on his mother’s doting presence and her fair-haired loveliness, and, at Sasha’s gently probing, he revealed that she had died tragically, at thirty, of a lingering illness.

“Thirty?” Sasha murmured. “My age?”

They lapsed into a silence which she ended with a soft question. “Was your father heartbroken?”

Marc didn’t answer her right away. “That would have been difficult,” he said. “He didn’t have a heart.”

She stared at him in the rebounding silence as though she knew they’d reached a door that wouldn’t open.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last.

He didn’t respond. There wasn’t time. An oddly familiar female voice interrupted his train of thought and sent a bullet of surprise through him.

“Marc?”

He turned, splashing water, and saw the smiling woman approaching them. His mental processes jammed. He knew the voice, but the unadorned face and the odd clothes didn’t match. A wrinkled tunic top flowed to her calves, nearly covering the matching pants beneath it, and her hair was cropped short. It wasn’t until she reached the edge of the Jacuzzi and crouched down that Marc put a name to the face. “Leslie?”

Leslie Parrish laughed and nodded. “How’re you doing, Marc? Thought you might be worried about me.”

“Worried? That doesn’t quite cover it, Leslie. Where the hell have you been?”

“Back east.”

“New York?”

She shook her head, still laughing softly. “No, a little farther east, actually. India. I’ve been studying higher forms of consciousness.” She glanced briefly at Sasha and smiled. “Lovely girl, Marc. Your latest victim?”

“You’re not really serious about Marc, are you?” Leslie queried later that same morning. Perched cross-legged on Sasha’s bed, she could have been one of Shakespeare’s weird sisters in a toga. “You
can’t
be.”

Stretched on her side on the floor, Sasha continued her leg raises. She’d been exercising off and on ever since Leslie arrived. Sasha always exercised when she was upset. “Why can’t I?”

“Because he’s so yang and you’re so yin.”

“And if I happen to like yang?” Sasha picked up the pace of her leg raises. “Besides, opposites attract,” she said.

“Abbott and Costello were opposites,” Leslie observed. “Look what happened to them.”

“What happened to them?”

“I wasn’t privy to the details, but they’re not together any longer, are they?”

“They’ve both passed away, Leslie.”

She shrugged. “There you go.”

Sasha rolled onto her back and hoisted her legs in the air for some bicycling. Leslie’s attempts to talk her out of a relationship with Marc might have made sense if Leslie had wanted him back for herself, but she didn’t. She’d made that perfectly clear ten minutes after arriving. “I’m a different woman now, Marc,” she’d told him. Rolling her pants above her knees, she’d dangled her feet in the Jacuzzi and smiled at them both. “My ego, I’m happy to say, is quiescent. Physical love and material gratification no longer have any hold on me.”

She’d further informed them that she expected to return to India shortly, where she was studying under a famous swami and added that she’d come by only to pick up her things.

Her serene state of mind wasn’t catching, apparently. Marc didn’t seem to give a damn about her quiescent ego. He informed her that she’d breached a contract, and finally, in exasperation at her sublime lack of concern, he absented himself from the Jacuzzi and the deck. At that point Leslie had turned to Sasha with a commiserating smile. “Dear boy’s a zero in the humor department, among
other
things.”