Wild Honey (19 page)

Sasha heard him force out a guttural cry that sounded like her name. He swept her into his arms and crushed her to him ardently. Yes, it was her name he was repeating hoarsely and with such passion it brought an aching lump to her throat.

“Sasha,” he said in a raspy voice, “Sasha, Sasha...”

She bathed in the sound and swayed with the bursts of his muscles, her own body spasming softly until she was nearly spent with stimulation.

Their heated, heartstrung sounds mingled with the soft rumble of the ocean below and the beautiful, mournful creak of the old chair beneath them. Beyond that there was only the depth and silence of the evening sky as it spun out its music, the velvet dusk as melody, the emerging stars as grace notes.

In the quiet that followed, Sasha was struck with a sense of unfurling possibilities, as though everything needed and desired were within reach. She held off for as long as she could, and then, still full of emotion, she took his face in her hands and whispered to him gently. “Marc, it’s going to be all right, all of it, I promise you. Leslie told me,” she explained, “I know—”

His eyes registered a glint of shock. Catching hold of her hand, he squeezed it. “What did Leslie tell you? What do you know, Sasha?”

With his body still deeply inside her, she was too jubilant, too full of joy and love to pay attention to the warning signals in his eyes. “She told me about your father,” she said, caressing the tousled hair from his forehead. “She told me everything—and it’s all right. Really, Marc, please believe me. It is all right.”

He closed his eyes and exhaled. Finally, cursing softly, he took her hands from his face and held them between his. “Sasha, you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s not all right.”

“No, you’re wrong.” She smiled, even laughed a little at the absurdity of his comment. Didn’t he know that nothing he’d done could change her mind about him now or quell the emotion she felt? “Everything’s going to be fine. And do you know why? Because I love you, Marc. That’s why. I love you.”

His throat caught painfully in a swallow, and his body reacted with a physical flinch.

“What’s wrong?” she cried as he cupped the back of her head and brought her to him, hugging her so fiercely that she was instantly frightened. Without a word of explanation he released her and grasped her hips, lifting her from the heat of him.

A moment later Sasha stood on shaky legs, awkwardly pulling her skirt down and fumbling with the buttons on her sweater. Speechless, she watched him walk out onto the deck and stand at the railing. His name was on her lips, but she didn’t have enough breath inside her to voice it. It seemed a long time before she could move. Empty and chilled, she walked to the threshold.

He turned at the sound of her movement, his eyes dulled with the burden of unwanted memories. “Leslie shouldn’t have told you,” he said, “but since she did, you might as well know it all. I wanted my father dead, the brutal bastard. He drove my mother into her grave with his insane rantings and ravings, his jealousies, his delusions.”

He folded his arms and began to walk, talking in a low, abstracted voice. “When I left the estate on my eighteenth birthday, he threatened to disown me. I had defied his direct order to restore the estate to its former glory. It didn’t matter that the soil had gone bad years before and the buildings were in crumbling disrepair. It didn’t matter that I loathed the place, and him....”

He hesitated a moment, listening to the distant cry of gulls. “Five years ago, when I learned through his lawyers that he was gravely ill, I made the mistake of agreeing to go to see him. They told me he was dying, that he wanted to make amends. Actually he had something very different in mind.” He turned to her, his eyes dark in the fading light. “He pulled a gun. He threatened to kill himself if I didn’t assume my place as heir to the title and lands. It was the final, the ultimate manipulation.”

Turning back to the water, he shut her out. “He put the gun to his head, and I tried to stop him.” His next words were barely audible. “The gun went off.”

Sasha felt a terrible taste rise in her throat. It was horror and shock. It was sadness for him. “I’m sorry, Marc, about all of it, everything that happened. Please believe me. But none of that matters now, not to me. I love you.”

She heard him sigh, and the sound was unbearably sad to her ears. The arrowlike pain struck again, piercing her heart with such ferocity she thought it would never end. “Marc?” she asked, thoroughly frightened, “did you hear me? I said I love you.”

When he turned back she saw that he had heard. The sadness was riveting in his pale blue irises, but there was a shading of something cruel beneath it, as though his pain were too great for him not to lash out.

“Are you so sure that it’s love, Sasha? Have you ever thought it might be more complicated than that, like the fact that I’m broken and need fixing, for example?”

She shook her head, confused, wanting him to stop.

“I saw it the first moment you walked on that stage, weeks ago,” he persisted, his voice harsh, “the crusader complex. You have this thing about righting wrongs, defending the underdog. You even took me on when I yelled at Jimmy. So what’s the attraction, Sasha? Do you have some crazy need to save me from myself? Is that it?”

“No! No, of course not.”

“Lost soul? Isn’t that what you called me? Weren’t those your exact words?”

“Yes, but I didn’t mean—”

Beneath his anger the sadness flared again. “It doesn’t matter, Sasha. It doesn’t matter what your motives are. I’m going back.”

“Back?”

“To France.”

“When? For how long?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Why?”

“I have to. I haven’t been back since it happened.”

Everything else he might have said was there in his face. He had ghosts in his homeland, excoriating memories to be faced, and emotions to purge. “For how long?” Desperation crept into her voice. “You’ll be back?”

His jaw flexed as he shook his head. “The studio has some things for me to do over there, a film festival, scouting locations...I’ll be gone a few months.”

The arrow turned like a knife blade in her heart.

How could he do this? She knew he was emotionally savaged, that he had to go back, that he might never be ready for a relationship, but she didn’t care about any of that. She was balanced precariously on the razor’s edge of her own pain. She cared nothing for his anguish in that moment, only that he was hurting her. Lord, how he was hurting her.

“All right,” she said finally, her voice shaking with outrage. “All right, then, you do what you have to. You go—for a few months—whatever. But know this,
know this!
” She caught hold of the gold heart around her neck, and her voice twisted with sadness. “I do love you, Marc Renaud. I will always love you. However you may choose to rationalize that fact, you’re going to have to live with the knowledge that someone cared about you once—bastard that you are!—really cared about you. And you ran from her.”

She turned, fighting tears, and fled the room.

F
OR
S
ASHA THE NEXT
several days swept by in a blur of hurt and hell-hath-no-fury indignation. “Well, it’s better than Camille, isn’t it?” she said to T.C. one morning when he complained that she was slamming file drawers and banging around his office like a cat with its tail in a knot.

“Camille was quiet at least,” he observed.

Sasha rifled through folders looking for copies of a liability insurance rider that was about to expire. She came up empty-handed, turned to T.C., and sent the file drawer careening shut with a bump of her hip.

“Camille was a jerk,” she said bitterly. “I mean, let’s face it—a lingering death over some guy who wasn’t worth a bout of the twenty-four-hour flu? No siree, not for this kid, no more of that dying-on-the-vine nonsense for me. There’s not a man on the planet worth that kind of grief.”

T.C.’s sigh was heavy. “Sasha,” he offered patiently, “don’t you think it’s time we had a heart-to-heart? Tell ol’ Top Cat all about it, okay? You’ll feel better, and there’ll be less wear and tear on the office furniture. Besides, I’m curious. What actually went wrong with you and Renaud, anyway?”

In no mood for a heart-to-anything, Sasha shook her head. Like a romantic fool, she had half hoped Marc would postpone his trip to Europe and come after her when she rushed out of the beach house, or at least call her before he left. With every day that had gone by, she’d died a little, waiting. Finally, mercifully, she had gotten angry, very, very angry.

“Thanks, T.C., but no thanks.”

She snagged a nail banging the next drawer, and, paradoxically, the mishap nearly undid her. “Damn, damn, damn!” she said with a moan, shaking her finger. The ragged tear brought her no physical pain, but the suddenness, the unfairness, the sheer defeat of it sent her blood pressure skyrocketing. Her throat filled with outrage over life’s little indignities. Over its huge inequities. Who arranged it so that what one wanted most in life was always unattainable, she wondered. Who did that?

She held on to the drawer and forced down the stinging upsurge of emotion. She would not lose control again over that man, she would not! Shaking with relief as the impulses passed, she turned to T.C.’s concerned gaze and saw what she’d been doing to him over the past few days. He looked confused, almost helpless in the face of her crisis. His silence made her realize how self-involved she’d become, and how blessed she was to have him for a friend. He’d not only put up with her, he’d stuck by her. “I guess I’ve been pretty miserable to be around lately, haven’t I?”

His diffident shrug said it’s okay, compadre, you’re entitled. “If you change your mind about talking, my rates are reasonable.”

“I’m going to be all right, T.C.,” she said, compressing her lips into a smile that promised him she would be.

The next few weeks slipped by quickly as Sasha worked diligently to make good on her promise. She resumed teaching her exercise classes and organized a racquetball tournament. With the check she received from Gemini Studios, she paid off the balloon mortgage payment and began plans to expand the juice bar into an intimate, on-site health food restaurant.

The hardest thing to put behind her was her sense of destiny with Marc Renaud. Some small part of her mind refused to relinquish its stubborn belief in a cosmic link. Maybe she did have the savior complex he’d accused her of. Or maybe their moment in time had come and gone, played itself out like a dust devil in the desert. Those were the reasons she gave herself, and since she had no other explanations for destiny’s capriciousness, they had to do.

Sasha kept busy, but she needed something besides her work to occupy her, a distraction, a challenge. Surprisingly, it was Leslie Parrish who was to provide that distraction. The former actress had taken to stopping by the health club several times a week, ostensibly to work out, but Sasha noticed she was spending an unusual amount of time with T.C. Once Sasha even came upon T.C. giving Leslie a wheelchair tour of the facility. On his lap!

When she queried T.C. about it later, he merely winked. “She says I’m an old soul. You know, evolved.”

Sasha laughed, really laughed, for the first time in weeks. “Oh, T.C., I don’t believe it! You and Leslie?”

He almost blushed. “Hey, she likes deep thinkers, what can I say? I’m her idea of a macho dude, spiritually speaking.” He wheeled off, humming a happy tune.

Sasha was delighted but apprehensive. T.C.
and Leslie?

Fortunately Leslie brought up the subject herself after an afternoon aerobics class. She and Sasha were in the locker room, changing into street clothes, when Leslie began to wax philosophic about the male gender.

“Where men are concerned,” she told Sasha, “there’s a high road and a low road. I should know, I’ve logged plenty of miles in the passes. One day my memoirs will tell it all—how my best years were spent on a collision course with the wrong guys—actors, producers, directors,” she added pointedly.

“Where does T.C. fit on your street map?” Sasha inquired.

Leslie raised an eyebrow and smiled. “That darlin’ boy is definitely a viaduct on the turnpike of life. He’s wonderful, isn’t he?” she said, her smile turning secretive. “A woman bumps fenders with a guy like that maybe once in a lifetime.”

Sasha nodded, her thoughts bittersweet. Yes, she knew all about that collision-of-a-lifetime feeling.

Leslie never gave her a chance to express her thoughts. If she was convinced that T.C. was an overpass, she was just as adamant that Marc Renaud was a tunnel. “You’re better off without him, Sasha,” she insisted. “I know you don’t believe that yet, but one day you’ll see I’m right.”

As it turned out, Leslie was right on both counts. No, Sasha didn’t believe her. And yes, that day of reckoning Leslie spoke of did come...exactly two months later, and in a manner that even Leslie wouldn’t have expected.

Sasha just happened to be crouched by the edge of The Fitness Factor’s Jacuzzi checking the water temperature when the phone call came. T.C.’s voice blasted through the pool’s loudspeaker, nearly jolting her headfirst into the water.

“Gemini Studios!” he yelled. “Sasha, get in here!”

Sasha’s nervous system reacted with a power surge that left her immobilized and trembling. Gemini? No, she told herself, it couldn’t be Marc. Her thirty-second dash to the office felt like a marathon. Her legs were Jell-O as she took the phone receiver from T.C. and pressed her hand over the mouthpiece. “Who is it?” she whispered to T.C.

“Maxwell,” he mouthed.

She faltered for a second, biting back her disappointment. “Paul?” Her voice sharpened in her effort to sound bright as she put the phone to her ear.

To her complete surprise, Paul Maxwell was bubbling over with good news. After thanking her warmly for all her “fine work” in the movie, he told her the studio was genuinely enthusiastic about the final cut of
Tell Me No Lies.
“We may have a minor masterpiece on our hands,” he said. “We’ve accelerated the post-production process to get the film into the theaters before the summer rush. You should be seeing our publicity campaign in a matter of days.”