Lovers' Reunion (Silhouette Treasury 90s)

by Anne Marie Winston

  He looked down at her and his black eyes blazed with a primal demand.

  Turning her back to him, he pushed her forward to rest over the desk that had been behind her, crowding into the spread vee of her legs until she could feel the whole hard length of him pressed against the soft crease of her bottom. He didn’t even bother removing her panties, just pulled them aside and guided himself to the threshold of her yielding female portal, then thrust forward in one sure, swift move. The movement knocked a box of photos off the desk to scatter across the floor, but she barely noticed it.

  It was an exquisite moment of overwhelming pleasure for her, invaded, impaled, held hostage to his need. The room was filled with the sound of harsh gasping breath and the flat slap of damp flesh driving against damp flesh; the hot male scent of him surrounded her. She could feel it beginning, a faraway demand that came closer and closer, faster and faster, tighter and tighter, until her abdomen drew into a clenched ball of need and suddenly exploded into heaving undulations as waves of satiation crashed within her.

  Behind her, all movement stopped as his body went rigid and his hips arched deeply into her, she could feel the rhythmic pulsing of his own finish surging against the inner walls of her body and hear the low groans forced from his throat as he emptied himself into her. Then his muscles melted, and his weight slumped over her, carrying them both down onto the desk. His head lay beside hers; his face turned into the curve of her shoulder as he fought for breath.

  Finally, he raised his weight from her. “Are you all right?” he whispered into her ear.

  “No,” she said, exhaling deeply.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Sophie took a deep breath but before she could move, he slipped from her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, standing behind her. “Sometimes I just need you so much that by the time I get home to you—”

  “I’m fantastic,” she interrupted.

  “What?”

  “I’m fantastic,” she repeated. “Absolutely, positively wonderful. Don’t apologize.”

  She felt his hand on her shoulder and as she straightened, he swung her into his arms and limped through the doorway and down the hall to her bedroom.

  When he reached her bed, he set her on her feet long enough to tear back the covers before getting in and drawing her after him. And for a time she dozed, content, in his arms. He needed her.

  Later she realized with a jolt of amusement that they hadn’t even spoken beyond those few words they’d exchanged. “Was the Adamsons’ flight on time this morning?” Idly she traced the heavy line of jet-black curls that bisected his chest, wandering out to brush her fingertip over one dark nipple until it puckered and stood out from the surrounding flesh.

  “No problems,” he reported. “After they left, I drove to Purdue and worked for the rest of the day.”

  “They’re so lucky.”

  “Why? You mean the adorable munchkin? Yeah, she is something special, isn’t she?” The warm affection in his voice scraped over the sore spot that her own childless state had left within her. Every time he talked of children, his voice softened and took on a caressing quality. He would make a wonderful father.

  “Kitty is sweet, but that isn’t what I meant.” She sighed. “I envy them their freedom. It would be so exciting to be able to go to new places, meet new people, live in different climates and learn different customs.”

  “It’s not all that fantastic,” he said.

  “Hah. They’re going to Hawaii. Hawaii! To a girl who can count on one hand the times she’s been more than a state away from home, that’s exciting.”

  “You’d hate that life-style if you had no choice.” Marco’s voice had dropped flat and low. “You’d miss your family so much you’d do anything to get home.”

  Abruptly she realized why he felt so defensive. This had been his rationale for leaving her. So she continued stroking her finger over his torso, refusing to let him tell her how she felt. “It suited you. Why should I be any different?”

  “Because.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “You don’t see anything,” he informed her. He rolled to his side, facing her, and slid one big palm across the soft flesh of her belly. “You don’t realize what a support network your family is. And there’s a real comfort in living in a familiar environment.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  That stopped him cold. He was quiet for a minute. Then he lifted himself on one elbow, leaning over her. “You talk too much sometimes,” he informed her.

  She smiled sweetly. “Changing the subject?”

  “Umm-hmm.” The hand that lay over her slipped lower, and she caught her breath as one long finger feathered over the sensitive skin on the inside of her thighs. He moved the finger higher and she caught her breath as her body began to hum. “I like this subject a lot better,” he informed her.

  And as she wound her arms around his neck and pulled his head down to hers, she confessed, “So do I.”

  Another hour passed, and when Marco’s stomach rumbled, she laughed. “Oops. Guess we forgot one of the body’s basic needs.”

  “Yeah, but we satisfied the most important one.” Marco grinned as he rose from the bed and pulled on his pants.

  She rose, too, and drew on one of his T-shirts. It was so large it reached halfway to her knees. She started to retrieve her panties, but Marco kicked them beyond her reach and took her by the hand.

  “Hey!” she protested. “I need those.”

  “No, you don’t.” His grin was enough to halt her heartbeat all over again and she shook her head in wonder.

  “Don’t you ever think of anything else?”

  He laughed. “Yeah—when you’re not around.” He slung an arm over her shoulders, and she put hers around his waist as they started down the hall. It was a warm, casual intimacy that felt so right it nearly brought tears to her eyes.

  But Marco didn’t notice. He pulled her to a halt at the door to the spare bedroom. “What a mess. Wonder why I didn’t see this before?”

  She laughed, recalling the wild lovemaking that had sent the boxes crashing to the floor.

  But when he started forward, she tugged at his hand. “Leave it. I can clean it up later. Let me get you something to eat.”

  It was too late. He already had bent over and retrieved the box, then started scooping up photos from the stack spilled across the floor. His movements slowed as he flipped through photo after photo. He was seeing himself, she knew, because only hours before she’d been looking through those very same pictures, images of his life from high school and on throughout the years. After they’d begun to date, there were many, many more. Any time they’d spent time together, she’d taken her camera along. When he went away again, those photos had been all she had left.

  Finally, he raised his head. “You kept all these pictures?” He looked stunned.

  She nodded, uncomfortably aware that the act spoke volumes about the depths of her feelings for him. She’d never been able to bring herself to toss them out, though she’d always been careful that Kirk didn’t see them; he didn’t deserve to be hurt like that.

  “Why?” His tone was quiet, as if he were genuinely bewildered.

  She shrugged. “It helped me to keep you close when I hadn’t seen you in a long time.” She took the box from his hands and straightened the photos enough to close the lid. But as she turned to set it back on the desk, Marco closed the space between them and drew her back against his body.

  “I didn’t need pictures,” he said, wrapping his arms around her from behind. “Any time I liked, I could picture your face in my head.” He made a sound that was halfway between annoyed and amused. “Half the time, you were there even when I didn’t want to be thinking about you. Do you know I once had a woman throw a crystal vase at me after I called her Sophie during—” He suddenly seemed to recognize the dubious wisdom of completing his sentence. “Well, anyway, she wasn’t very happy.”

  “Too bad for
you.” She couldn’t keep the fierce satisfaction from her voice as she slipped out of his arms. “I hope she had good aim.” The hurt that had sprung at her, all the more vicious for having been unsuspected, drew her body into taut, tense lines. She’d known there had to be other women through the years; Merry Adamson had even mentioned them. But they hadn’t been real until now, and she found she couldn’t bear reality.

  “Sophie, I—”

  She turned and raised a hand, palm out, pushing his explanations away. “Don’t. Just don’t. You made it clear that we had no strings between us. We were both free agents.” Furious at him for spoiling what had been a special evening, and equally furious with herself for reacting, she headed for the doorway. “I’m going to reheat something for dinner.”

  She busied herself setting two places at her little glass table with its ice-cream-parlor-style chairs in the kitchen nook and making a small meal.

  A few minutes later he joined her in the kitchen. He didn’t mention their last exchange and neither did she. They spoke little during dinner. When they did, they both were stilted and polite, and she was grateful that it was short. He helped her clear the table and put away the dishes, and it struck her that he always helped in the kitchen, that he never expected her to wait on him. In fact, often the reverse was true. He was a credible cook and sometimes had dinner waiting for her when he beat her home in the evening.

  She glanced at him as he reached to store wineglasses on a high shelf, and she thought that even with a dish towel slung over his shoulder, he was one of the most masculine men she knew. He’d put on a pair of khaki shorts, and the muscles in his legs shifted and bunched as he moved. The scarred right knee was so much a part of him she didn’t even notice it anymore.

  Without warning, tears stung behind her eyes and she turned away. She might want to strangle him right now, but oh, how she loved him. He’d owned her heart her whole life long. How could she bear to give him up?

  But the answer was clear. She had no choice.

  He would go away again one day, no matter how badly she wished it could be otherwise. And when he did, she would smile and say goodbye if it killed her, because she had gone into this with her eyes wide-open; she knew what to expect.

  This talk of marriage would fade as his leg healed more and he realized he didn’t have to stay here. She refused to believe there were no possibilities for fieldwork for him out there.

  He let her avoid him, hold him at arm’s length, until the lights were out and they were both settled in her bed for the night. But there was no way he was going to let her brush the fight—if that’s what it had been—aside and ignore him.

  Reaching out, he snagged her hand. The feel of her small fingers linked with his eased the constriction around his heart a little, and he simply lay there holding her hand for a while. He hadn’t meant to hurt her earlier. Each of them had moved ahead without the other in the years he’d been away, and he guessed it was time he faced it.

  “What was your husband like?”

  Her whole body tensed. “Thoughtful. Kind. Gentle. Why?”

  “Just wondered.” He shrugged. “And you said you were married for about a year?”

  “Sixteen months, one week and two days.” Her voice had dropped to a low monotone.

  The precise way she recounted the time shook him a little. She hadn’t given any indication that she was thinking so much about any other man, even her husband. He didn’t like it, though he knew he was a jerk for resenting a dead man, when he, Marco, had chosen to let her go free to marry that man.

  But all he said was, “And you told me he was a farmer.”

  “He was going to farm,” she corrected. “He worked here in Chicago for a little while after we were married.”

  “You loved him?”

  She sat up and twisted to look down at him as if she wasn’t sure she had heard him right, her eyes wide with shock. Then she sprang off the bed so fast he didn’t have time to grab for her.

  “What are you asking?” Her voice was suddenly aggressive, more so than he’d ever heard her, and her finely arched brows were a study in fury. “Exactly what do you want to know, Marco? Was he my only other lover? Was he a good lover? Did I love him?” She paused and took a deep breath, holding up a finger in warning when he would have spoken. “All right. Here are your answers. Yes, he was my only lover, other than you. I cried the first time, and he was upset. He thought he’d hurt me. But the reason I was crying was because he wasn’t you, because I’d always imagined that you would be the only man who—”

  “Sophie—”

  But she didn’t stop. “Yes, he was a good lover. Good enough for me, even if it didn’t come close to being like it is with you.” Tears had formed in the corners of her eyes. As she gestured wildly, one overflowed its boundary and streamed down her cheek, followed by a second, and then another and another. “And did I love him? Yes, in a way. But I never loved Kirk the way I love you.”

  He reached for her then, but she slapped his hands away. “Does that make you happy? Knowing that there were three people m my marriage, and one of them was you?” She began to sob aloud. “Do you have any idea how guilty that makes me feel? That I married a wonderful, adoring man that I didn’t love, that my sweet husband died without ever knowing he wasn’t the one who held my heart?”

  He reached for her again, pulling her to him despite her struggles to push him away, and as she began to sob in earnest, he simply rocked her and let her cry. When she began to calm a little, he drew her to the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress with her in his lap.

  “Down deep, I expected to come home and find you waiting for me.” It was a hard confession to make; he had to force himself to utter the words. For so long, he’d told himself that he didn’t need Sophie to make his life complete.... “It was selfish, and stupid, and wrong, and I have no right to be jealous. But I am.”

  She sighed, and it was a sad, dead sound that tore at his heart. “If you knew how many nights I lay there wishing the arms around me were yours....”

  He hadn’t cried in years. Even when he lay in a hospital bed praying that he wouldn’t lose his leg, he hadn’t cried. But now he had to swallow the lump that rose as he cradled Sophie in his arms and pressed a kiss to her temple. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

  “Kirk asked me to marry him on Valentine’s Day the year after our college graduation. I didn’t know what to say. We’d been friends since our freshman year, and we’d dated occasionally. After graduation we dated more steadily.” She took a deep breath, then lifted her head and looked him in the eye. “But I was still waiting for you. I hadn’t heard a word from you since—since the time we made love, but I still was convinced you’d come back for me.” She shook her head at her own stupidity.

  How many men were lucky enough to find a woman like this? If he’d been in her shoes, he wasn’t sure he could forgive so readily. Why did she still love him?

  She plowed on, seemingly determined to get the story out now that she’d started. “When Kirk proposed, I wasn’t really surprised. He’d been hinting at it for a while, but I had never committed myself. But then, when it became real, it was as if someone threw a bucket of cold water in my face. I realized that I was wasting my life waiting for a man who probably hadn’t given me a second thought since we’d said goodbye, that this might be the best chance I had for happiness.”

  “I did think of you,” he said in a low voice. “Nothing I can say will change the past, but you were always the one I thought of when I imagined myself settling down.”

  “But I didn’t know that,” she pointed out. “So after a week of mourning, of saying goodbye to my dreams, I said yes to Kirk. We got married in May.” She slid off Marco’s lap and walked across the room to her dresser, idly fingering the silver-backed comb and mirror that lay there. She turned to face him, and her eyes were so bleak and despairing it frightened him. “One day I came home and Kirk was sitting in the kitchen. I knew right away something te
rrible had happened. We’d been friends for six years—he couldn’t hide anything from me.”

  Her breath hitched, and Marco put out a hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she came across the room and took his hand, seating herself beside him on the bed. He laced his fingers tightly through hers, wishing he could erase the horror she’d been through from her mind and replace it with only good memories, memories that included him. How had he gone through his life without realizing he couldn’t live without Sophie? How could he have been so blind for so long?

  But she didn’t hear the agonizing questions pounding through his head, and she continued speaking, telling him her story, a story about which he wanted desperately to know every detail, and yet he could barely stand to hear her soft voice.

  “Not long after the wedding Kirk had been having some back pain. I thought it went away, but it was getting worse. He didn’t tell me because he didn’t want to worry me. He finally went to a doctor when the pain was so bad he couldn’t take it. He expected the doctor to tell him he had a disk problem, or that he should start seeing a chiropractor ... but he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It had already metastasized—he had a huge abdominal lump that was causing the back pain, but it had spread to other places as well.”

  Now her voice sounded calm and matter-of-fact, and he realized she’d told this part of the story many times before.

  “He started treatment, but they didn’t give us much false hope,” she said. “A few years, if we were lucky. The next autumn, he got the flu at the beginning of October and he never completely recovered. Three weeks later, he died.”

  Her words echoed around the silent room for a moment, then they, too, faded away until the air was thick with the absence of sound.

  Marco cleared his throat. He didn’t know exactly what to say; he wanted to take away her pain, and the worst thing in the world was the realization that he was helpless. That part of her life was forever lost to him, emotions and memories he could never share—