Wild Honey (18 page)

Even when T.C. had dismissed her unshakable certainty as nonsense and smugly informed her that Antony and Cleopatra weren’t a match made in heaven, either, she couldn’t be dissuaded from believing that she and Marc were soulmates.

It wasn’t at all like Sasha to be self-indulgent or self-pitying. She disliked those traits, considered them character flaws, in fact, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. She’d lost control of her car somewhere along the bumpy road of life. She was drifting through her days in a trance, uncaring and uninvolved, and it looked as though she might go on that way indefinitely....

Fortunately, life had something more interesting in store for Sasha. She was to languish only two more days before an unexpected event jolted her back to reality.

The event was the arrival of Leslie Parrish. When the ex-movie star walked into The Fitness Factor late one muggy, listless afternoon, Sasha could hardly believe her eyes. “Leslie?” she said, staring at the woman with whom she shared two things in common, a physical resemblance and Marc Renaud. If ever she’d seen a bearer of bad news, Sasha thought, interpreting the actress’s frantic wave as a harbinger of trouble.

Leslie flew across the room, drew Sasha out of the captain’s chair, hugged her forcefully, and stepped back. “I’m so glad I found you, Sasha,” she said. “It’s about Marc.”

Sasha’s heart nearly tripped over itself. “What’s wrong?”

“Can we talk?” Glancing around to see who might be listening, Leslie sank down into a chair at Sasha’s table and waited until Sasha did the same. “They’re screaming at the studio,” she confided. “Marc hasn’t exercised his final cut option on the film, and he and Paul Maxwell got into it the other night. Before it was over, Marc told Paul pretty graphically what he could do with the movie and Gemini Studios.” She threw up her hands. “I swear, Sasha, he doesn’t seem to care about anything these days.”

It was the best news Sasha had heard all week. “Tell me more.”

“He looks terrible. He’s drinking too much—” Leslie peered at her, scrutinizing. “You don’t look too terrific yourself. You’re thin, you’re pale—”

“I’m fine, Leslie,” Sasha cut in. “I had a touch of the flu, that’s all.”

“Umm, just as I thought,” Leslie said, slowly tapping a finger to her lips. “You’re not eating I’ll bet, or sleeping either. It’s him, isn’t it?” She sighed. “It’s criminal the effect that man has on women!”

“Let’s turn him into the love police,” Sasha suggested darkly.

Leslie gave her a commiserating smile. “Not a half-bad idea, but let’s take care of you first. There’s a whole truckload of hurt under that sarcasm, girl, admit it. You’re pining. Listen, if it’s any comfort to you, he’s crazy in love with you too. Either that, or he’s gone completely over the edge.”

“Crazy in love? Marc?” Sasha slid forward in the chair. “Are you certain? Oh, my Lord,” she murmured at Leslie’s firm nod. “I knew it.” She looked around for her office manager. Maybe he would believe her now. “T.C.!”

“Shhhh,” Leslie said, pulling her chair up to the table. “Don’t get carried away. We’ve got to talk first. You have no idea what a mess you’re letting yourself in for.”

“I know he’s difficult, but—”

“Difficult? Open your eyes, child. He’s downright self-destructive.” Leslie was suddenly serious. “You knew he was the son of a marquis, didn’t you?”

“Yes, why?”

“Did you also know his father was dead?”

Sasha remembered Paul Maxwell mentioning something about Marc’s father. She nodded again, hesitantly. Something in Leslie’s frown told her this wasn’t fun and games anymore.

Leslie glanced around the juice bar and returned her gaze to Sasha as though trying to decide how much she should reveal. “I probably shouldn’t do this,” she admitted, her voice hushed, “but before you do something you’ll regret, there are things you have to know about Marc Renaud. He has a past tragic enough to destroy the average person. I don’t know all the details, but it has to do with his childhood—a love/hate thing with his father, his mother’s death.”

“I guess it was a couple of years ago,” she went on, her breath gathering in a sigh. “I’d been shooting at night, location stuff on the remake of a fifties mystery thriller, a Hitchcockian thing. Anyway, I came home late that night, near midnight, and found Marc roaring drunk. The beach house was in a shambles, and he kept ranting about ‘the old man.’ I finally realized it was the anniversary of his father’s death. I wish now that I hadn’t kept after him the way I did. I begged him to tell me what was wrong.”

“And he did?”

“Yes...he finally admitted that he’d been in a terrible fight with his father the night the old man died. He said he was responsible for his father’s death. He hadn’t been able to stop him from shooting himself.”

“When did this happen?” Sasha asked, her voice faint with shock.

“The shooting? I guess it must be nearly five years ago. I met him a year later, at the Cannes Film Festival. He was just coming out of a bout of depression and drinking. ‘His walk in the wilderness,” the gossip columnists called it. They assumed he was grieving for his father. Apparently no one knew what a monster the old man was—except the immediate family.” She sank back in the couch. “The rich and their secrets.”

Sasha couldn’t respond. Her mind was hurtling back, recollecting the signs she’d seen in him, the anguish, the staggering, tortured passion when he’d made love to her. She’d never imagined a man could make love the way he did, as though his sanity, even his life had depended on it. She had to go to him, she thought. She had to help him.

When she looked up, Leslie was shaking her head as though she knew what Sasha was thinking. “Don’t, Sasha, you won’t change anything, I know. I love him, too, in my way, but he’s been too badly damaged by this thing. Listen to me, you can’t help him now.”

No, she could help him, Sasha knew. She could be what he needed. She was what he needed.

“Sasha, please, listen to me. You’re the first person he’s allowed himself to care about since it happened. Without realizing it, you’ve opened wounds. He needs to struggle with the guilt by himself. For both your sakes, let him be.”

But Sasha wasn’t listening. In her mind she was reliving the rehearsal when he’d kissed her with such savage tenderness and ripped her dress in his anguish. He’d told her he would die without her. That hadn’t been Jesse; it had been Marc Renaud talking to her. Leslie was wrong. He did need her. She was the only one who could help him.

“Tell T.C. I was called away,” Sasha said, heedless of Leslie’s cautioning voice as she rose out of the chair. Negotiating a single-minded arc through her small office, she whisked her shoulder bag off the coat tree and headed for the door.

“Sasha, wait—”

The four-letter word that followed Sasha into the hallway evaporated in a sigh of resignation. “Who’s T.C.?” Leslie called after her.

No one answered Sasha’s insistent knock at the front gate of the beach house. Driven by emotions that wouldn’t allow her to listen to reason, she paced along the seven-foot block wall, searching for a way to get over and oblivious of the traffic racing along the coastal highway. Finally, a quarter mile down the road, she found an entrance to one of the public beaches that dotted the waterfront. If she doubled back, she could get to Marc’s place from the beach.

The ocean was swallowing up the sun as she came upon his house at last, its glass facade aflame with the brilliant crimson and violet hues of dusk. Sasha paused a moment, struck by the infernolike beauty. In mythology fire was often a symbol, not just of death but of renewal, the end or the beginning. Which was this, she wondered.

Leslie’s warning came back to her as she took the steps that led up to the deck off the kitchen, and for the first time a flash of doubt intruded on her thoughts. Could she help him? Was it possible for someone to be beyond the healing touch of love? The mild onshore breeze suddenly felt chill against her back. What if he rejected her?

She found the glass doors unlocked and the kitchen in total disarray—empty bottles of wine, leftover food, crushed cigarette packs. It looked much the way she’d found his inner sanctum the day she’d arrived. The urge to clean up the chaos shimmered through her, and now, oddly, she saw the inherent value in such an act. People needed order in their lives, and discipline. There was sanity in discipline. There was direction and purpose. She could bring those things to his life, she thought. She could help him.

She found him in his room, seated in an antique chair in front of the open patio doors and staring out at the twilight’s consuming fire. Her impulses were at war. He looked so quiet, so pulled into himself. Did she dare disturb him?

Finally. “Marc?”

He swung around in the chair and stared at her with eyes that had not lost any of their ability to turn her soul inside out. Pale and harrowingly beautiful, they pierced her defenses and ripped right through her heart. She drew in a breath through her nostrils that made her dizzy. When she spoke, her voice shook. “Are you all right?”

His mouth tightened, white at the edges.

She felt lost and frightened in that moment, unsure what his reaction meant.

Hunching forward in the intensifying silence, he held his head in his hands. “I’ve missed you,” he said finally, simply, murmuring the words into the loose cradle of his palms. And then he looked up at her.

When she spoke her voice broke, and she took a halting, painful step forward. “I missed you too.”

He held out his arms, and she flew at him, dropping into his lap, a wild cry of relief and joy rioting through her.

“Sasha,” he said with a groan, his voice butchered by emotion. He crushed her in the explosive power of his embrace, sending tremors through the ancient chair’s wooden frame as they rocked and sighed and shuddered. The passion that overtook them, that drove them together, was pure and soul-shattering. It was ecstasy tinged with anguish.

Sasha broke away, needing to look at him, to see if the amazing burst of love she felt was there in his brilliant eyes. Racked with his own need, Marc brought her back, barely in control of the near-violent emotion inside him. He was wild with urges, crazy to hold her, devour her, become a part of her body.

She was an exquisite, quivering thing in his arms, sobbing and gasping out her happiness. She was an angel of redemption, his angel. Her breasts brushed his arms, and desire burned through his psyche, scorching away pain and guilt, freeing him of everything but a raging need to know her naked softness again—her skin, her scent, the ravishing sweetness of her. She was life itself. She was the warm, drizzly wild honey that made his loins throb and his jaws ache with pleasure.

He took her parted lips in a kiss that was agonizingly slow and deep in its penetration, primal in its urgency. His tongue plunged into the vault of her mouth, skimming her teeth, skirting the tender chamber of her throat. Sasha was helpless, a whimpering child as he slowly withdrew it and tantalized her lips with feathery strokes. She groaned with pleasure, arching instinctively as he began to coax her tongue into the silky heat of his own mouth.

At first she resisted the suction pulling her in, and then, aware of his index finger caressing the corner of her lips, she let herself be drawn deeper into him. His sharp shudder thrilled her. His body tensed. She could even feel him hardening beneath her. She darted her tongue into his mouth again and again with a throaty moan.

She whispered yes as he unfastened the buttons on her cotton cardigan. Releasing the front hook of her bra, he cupped her breasts in his hands and took the tip of one creamy mound into his mouth. He stroked her flushed skin with his tongue, sucking her gently, roughly, as his need burgeoned.

“Your body, this sweetness”—his voice was a groan of pleasure—“it’s tearing me apart.”

She burned under his lips, her breasts swollen, her nipples cresting with sensation. Desire was a living, flaring thing inside her, as powerful and consuming as the flames of sunset outside the doors.

“There’s only one thing on earth I want right now.” He pressed his palm into the valley between her pelvic bones. “This. This tight, silky miracle around me.”

Before she knew what was happening, he was turning her, bringing her body around until she straddled him on the chair. His hands slid up her widespread legs, peeling back her skirt until her thighs and lace panties were exposed. With one deft movement, he undid his jeans and released the rigid heat between his legs.

Sasha’s head swam dizzily at the sight of him. Her body melted and ran like butter left in the sun. The magnificent need in his body, in his face, was overwhelming. Sweetly shocked and utterly aroused, she felt a trembling gush of desire. The liquid fire, the aching tenderness at the juncture of her thighs, made her sharply aware of her body’s needs. Deep muscles contracted, clutching against their own emptiness. Sweet Lord, but she wanted that hardened splendor moving deeply inside her, thrilling her, filling her up until she was bursting with him.

“I’m aching for you,” she whispered, flushing at her own boldness as she touched him.

Marc pulled aside the obstruction of her panties and drew her onto him. Sasha cried out with pleasure as he surged into her, thrusting as deeply as her body would allow. He gripped her hips, holding her still when she began to rock and undulate with the enchanting rhythms that beat in her loins. An instant later he released her, and she arched up, moving with the guidance of his hands, moaning, crying out again as he brought her back down.

Sasha moved under his hands like a woman possessed, flowing with desire, crazed with the wild, engorging pleasure he gave her. As she felt the ecstasy building, she lost the cadence of her beautiful, sinuous dance to the quick rhythms of completion. She was sobbing with the pure, undiluted joy of it, nearly insensate with pleasure.

Marc felt as though a hot, golden sun were pulsating around him. All the energy in his body flowed to the spot that she was caressing with her body. Every cell of his consciousness centered there as the sun gathered radiance and swelled to bursting with the intensity of its own brilliance.