A Solitary Heart

by Amanda Carpenter

  Whatever had wound him up, Sian would, for sanity’s sake, have to quell. She said, imperturbable and prosaic, yet with wary eyes, “Surely there’s no need for such an extreme, when the price of a well-cooked dinner will suffice.”

  “Madam,” said the devil who was a gentleman, with a deceptively submissive inclination of his tawny head, “I assure you, I am entirely at your service.”

  His wicked gaze held hers, managing to make what would otherwise be an innocuous reply into something smokily suggestive. Sian felt a hot, betraying tide of colour rise to her cheeks. He saw, and his smile widened just a taunting fraction, and her composure broke.

  “You need to be put on a leash!”

  “What an evocative fantasy,” he murmured. “Do you see your hand at the other end?”

  Her nostrils flared in a hissing inward breath. He was incorrigible in his present mood. She almost turned back, and be damned to courtesy. Almost, but she stepped off the threshold and into the night, her narrow hands white on her bag, racketing heart in her throat, the pain and disappointment from that afternoon quite forgotten.

  “I’d be far too wise to want to hold your leash,” she said, green eyes flashing at brilliant odds with her even tone. “Headstrong as you are, I’d only gain whiplash for my pains.”

  “You disappoint me,” murmured Matt, his hand a hot brand through the material of her jacket as he led her to the Mercedes. “From our conversation on the beach two days ago, I would have said that control held all the attraction for you.”

  “You misunderstood,” she replied, carefully, delicately feinting. She slid into the seat, soft leather whispering a sigh as her weight settled in the bucket seat. “I only ever desire control over my own destiny, never over another human being.”

  “Ah,” he replied, one corner of his mouth curled, as he eased into the driver’s seat. “A chill, polite distance between you and the rest of the world. What a lonely life you have ahead of you.”

  “Your point of view,” she said, with a supreme gentleness that only afterwards did she realise sounded like a goad. He drove them swiftly, expertly along the route to a reputable restaurant, while a reckless glitter shone in those hazel eyes and an emotion akin to anger tautened the skin across hard cheekbones.

  Thinking to divert whatever riotous intention impelled him, she licked dry lips and asked, “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  He shot her a glance from under slanted brows, but remarked with cool apparent irrelevance, “Jane told me that your father couldn’t come for the weekend.”

  The reminder made her calm expression flicker, a brief crack in the poised façade that hardened into rigidity. “That’s right,” she said, obsessively neutral.

  Perhaps he had missed it. He continued, “That means you could come to Chicago with the other three.”

  He was indifferent, extending a courtesy forced on him by extenuating circumstances. She said, watching him, “Only if you have the room to put up one more person.”

  Now he seemed surprised at her cautious diffidence. “Well, of course. You were included in the invitation to begin with. I’m sorry for your sake that your father couldn’t make it, but his loss is our gain. Do you fancy going to the theatre on Friday night, or will that be a bit much after the drive?”

  “I can’t speak for the others, but I’d love to,” she said slowly, still in part reserved because of his apparent change of mood and yet disarmed at the importance he seemed to attach to her opinions and wishes.

  “Then I’ll have a look around tomorrow and see what I can book. We can go to supper afterwards, and, if we’re out during the day on Saturday, I thought I’d invite some people over for the evening. Then you can sleep as late as you like the next morning, have a relaxing brunch with the Sunday papers, and travel back to South Bend at your leisure. That way those of you who have summer jobs lined up won’t be too tired on Monday. How does that sound?”

  It sounded carefully thought out, and considerate, and just exactly right. The last of her lingering disappointment, which had been resurrected by the topic of conversation, faded away as she began to look forward to the weekend.

  “Well done,” she said quietly. “But your plans can’t have been what you wanted to discuss. You didn’t know this afternoon that my own plans had fallen through.”

  The Mercedes slid into a parking space at the restaurant. Matthew turned off the engine and turned to her, his expression inscrutable. “No, I didn’t,” he said softly, “did I?”

  The confinement of the car was stifling. Sian unbuckled her seatbelt as quickly as her fumbling fingers would allow, but he must have had split-second reflexes, for he was already striding around the back of the convertible to reach her door even as she grasped the handle. What she had intended as an escape became an advancement into further confrontation, as she slid long legs around and rose to her feet.

  The added height from her heels brought her almost to his level. The fact added a subtle link in her armour; Sian didn’t like the vulnerability she felt when she had to tilt back her head to look up at him.

  “Well, then,” she said at last, obscurely disturbed by his coiled manner and his reticence, “what was it?”

  Matthew’s amusement was a dangerous, velvet thing. “Did no one ever tell you about curiosity and the dead cat?”

  Her nostrils pinched. She told him, with a pointed chill as he curled one hand around her elbow and they strolled towards the restaurant, “You were the one to initiate this. I was merely following through.”

  “Yes, tenacity is one of your strong points, isn’t it?” He shouldered a door open and slanted a smile at her, brief and private. “I would do well to remember that.”

  She chose to ignore what his intense regard did to her midsection, and stepped into warmth, light and muted noise.

  Sian had heard of the restaurant but had never been. She liked the rich wood decor and the unobtrusive efficiency of the staff. As the hostess checked for Matthew’s booking, then led them to their table, she wondered, surprisingly without much heat, just when he had made the reservation. Before or after he had talked with her? But then perhaps he had meant to eat here whether she came or not. She was glad she had not said something precipitate and foolish.

  She could not help but be aware of the attention they received, in an oblique fashion, from the other diners in the restaurant as they walked through. Sian saw the women glance casually at Matthew’s sulphurous graceful prowl, then halt in wide-eyed assessment. One or two held forks suspended in mid-air. She had a sudden, primitive image of stalking over to the more blatant ones and slapping their laden utensils out of their hands.

  When Matthew held out a chair, she settled into it smoothly, her face dark with self- mockery.

  Their conversation was at first desultory as they perused the menu. Sian settled quickly for a simple meal of grilled rainbow trout, salad and a glass of white wine. Matt ordered a steak, then when their waiter left he settled back in his chair and lazily contemplated her. What shifted, she wondered, behind those private eyes, reflecting the intense blue of his dark suit so that he seemed almost a stranger?

  “What will you be doing with your summer, Sian?” asked Matt, one corded, long-fingered hand idly twirling the glass of Scotch that had been set before him. “Do you have a job lined up?”

  “I was going to wait until my father came for his visit before I decided what to do,” she replied, unaware of her wry grimace or the downward bent of her mouth. “Now I suppose I’ll have to rethink things. To be quite honest, I’m not sure what I’ll do. The last few months of school have been too pressured for me to do anything but cope with the deadlines as they came up.”

  “Jane mentioned you graduated top of your class. Congratulations,” he said, “and well done. You’ve worked very hard.”

  “Thank you.” Her green eyes held genuine pleasure from
his praise. “But it’s not over yet.”

  Their meal came, attractively displayed and superbly cooked. Sian picked at hers without much interest.

  “You’re going on to graduate school?” he asked after the interruption.

  “Mmm, two more years.” He was not looking at her any longer, but instead studied the amber lights in his drink; she wasn’t sure why she went on to confess, slowly, “I’m rather intimidated by it, actually. Courses in business administration aren’t exactly my strong point.”

  “So you choose to grapple with the subject, instead of avoiding it. I’m sure you’ll do just fine once you’re in the middle of it,” he remarked. His iced-water glass was sweating. With one forefinger he wiped down the edge of the glass and came away wet. She gave the movement close attention. Matt lifted his gaze and said softly, “After all, as with anything else, it’s the anticipation that’s the worst part.”

  The gold necklace at the base of her neck winked with her tight swallow. “Is it?” she said very drily, regarding him from under level brows. “And what of reality that exceeds all expectations?”

  He was sober-faced, and laughing at her. “Clarify the matter for me. I don’t see reality’s exceeding all expectations as necessarily a terrible thing.”

  “Catastrophe?” she murmured. Her sarcasm was a delicacy flavouring her words with rare spice. “Flood, fire, act of God?”

  “One cannot live one’s life in constant fear of disaster, Sian,” he returned. “Bad things do happen, to good and bad people alike. Don’t you see that’s why it’s so important to snatch at the good when fortune presents it to us?”

  Her smile was excessively mild. “I don’t disagree with you, Matthew. I do, however, take issue with the imposition of your values over mine. I’m the one to judge what’s good in my life, and I will take it where I find it.”

  His face had tightened until it was a study in angled severity. It gave her no pleasure to look on it. “Like Joshua?” he bit out.

  She lifted her chin. She didn’t know why she didn’t just either tell him she was “engaged” to his brother, or confess the real story to him. The timing would have been right for either. But one was a weapon she wasn’t prepared to use, and the other too revealing. “If I choose,” she said coolly.

  His eyes glittered. She distrusted him, and her own assessment of his strange mood, however, as he paid for their meal with apparent composure, as they strolled leisurely to the parking area.

  She did well to be wary, but it was not enough. She waited in silence while he unlocked her door, then quelled an impulse to step back as he straightened and turned to regard her with brooding eyes, a taut mouth.

  “I have been remiss. I never did tell you how lovely you look,” Matthew said then, almost absently. “You are stunning, Sian. I was proud to be seen by your side tonight.”

  She was shaken by the intensity of pleasure that coursed through her at his quiet compliment. How vain she was, to know such a fierce thrill at his words, and to know, too, that they had been judged well matched by outsiders: her cool femininity in delicate contrast to his forceful masculinity.

  “Thank you,” she said, gravely, sternly demure.

  He looked down her, a bright and graceful fall. They stood in relative privacy between the passenger side of the Mercedes and the car parked next to it. The light from a nearby street-lamp burned white along the edge of his bent tawny head; the rest of his face was in translucent shadow.

  “I like your blouse.”

  An irony: despite the intimacy of his regard, she had room to be grateful that he wasn’t looking at her face, which felt as if it were glowing neon-red. Her throat needed to be cleared before she could speak. “I like it too.”

  He asked throatily, tightly, “Is it as soft and as silken as it looks?”

  Her legs went wobbling. She said, shaken and alarmed, “I don’t think—”

  He brought a hand up inside her open suit jacket and slid the fingers around the slim curve of her ribs, just under her breast, and at the light caressing pressure her pulse went wild.

  “Mmm,” he sighed, with deceptively sleepy pleasure. “It is. Cool and whispery thin, and moulding itself to the body underneath it. That’s how a woman should always dress, in silk and lace, and—well, maybe a touch of leather.”

  His hand moved to the small of her back, and he pulled her to him, and with slow, sensuous deliberation he began to lower his head.

  Her composure, so hard won at the beginning, so grimly maintained throughout the evening, was now a quivering bowl of jelly. It trembled strengthlessly at the pit of her stomach, at the back of her knees, in the base of her throat, and the softened curve of her mouth. “Matthew,” she managed to gasp. “Stop it.”

  His lips hovered, a bare inch from hers. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” he murmured with oh, such false innocence, as he lifted molten eyes. “That isn’t the message your body was telling me on the beach.”

  Her hands rested on his forearms, tightened convulsively on him. Her lips had gone dry; she licked them and whispered, “It’s what I’m telling you now.”

  With her body bowing back against the strength of his arm, her eyes dilated to immense black pools; she looked young, dazed and blinded. He took his time in examining her face, the arced lines of her collarbones as they disappeared in shadowed mystery into the neck of her blouse. Then he shook his head a little, and said softly, “No, you’re not.”

  Her eyelids fell under an unsustainable weight as he kissed her, a featherlight, moulded, exploratory caress, and the same searing judder of sensation that always happened when he touched her crackled down the length of her body. She made some slight sound, reactive, incoherent, and his whisper of expelled breath answered.

  Gentleness, civilisation’s veneer, was discarded for the game it was. He took her fully into his arms, hard against the length of him, and slanted his opened mouth over hers.

  The dark, secret invasion was impossible to resist. Her lips parted on a sigh. He touched her inside, drew her out, and danced with her tongue. She whirled mindlessly in a downward spiral, head to one side and sinking fast to his shoulder, moulded breast to hard-muscled breast, the arc of hip to hip, thigh to thigh.

  She felt it as if it shook her own foundations, the uncontrollable tremor that raced over him like fever. He cupped the back of her head, then dug with delicate urgency into the French twist until the pins scattered away and her hair spilled over her shoulders and he sank greedy fingers into the midnight rain.

  If he had not been holding her so very tightly, she would have slid down to the ground. As it was, she clung to him, her arms wound around his neck by some mysterious force while common sense flew away on fickle wings and he drove with hard, escalating passion into her unplumbed depths.

  His heart beat like a sledge-hammer against her breasts. His breath was coming in long-distance-runner gasps; gradually he eased the ferocity of the tempo into something more bearable, swooping with shallower intent on the bruised peach of her mouth. If it was meant to soothe and restore, it did the exact opposite. Plunged into the dazzling, uncloaked sexuality of the former kiss, then offered this, was like denying a condemned man his last meal, and she trembled with a violent gnawing hunger she’d never before experienced, nor knew how to assuage.

  At last he turned his head away with a sharp, muffled sound, and pressed her face not gently—not that—into his neck. They stood thus for some minutes, in reverberative silence too tense for words, while he stroked her hair and back.

  Sian was suffering from deep, uncomprehending shock. She felt as if she had lived all her life with blinkers on, like some kind of ironic joke: I see, said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw. Or that the world of colours and textures that she loved so much had suddenly sprouted a fourth dimension. There was no room in her for the concept that had just exploded all around her,
and inside her, with the force of nuclear fusion. She couldn’t recover because she didn’t know where she had been.

  Then Matthew stirred, and sighed into her hair, and said hoarsely, “That’s what you were saying to me.”

  She shook her head dumbly. She didn’t know what she was doing. One hand threaded in her hair clenched into a powerful fist. “You lack proof?”

  Even his growl was an invasion; it permeated her body. She breathed hard once, in distress, and would have shaken her head again. She could not. She was trapped, by his hands and by the truth.

  “Matthew,” she whispered, violently unsteady, “you push me too far.”

  His head reared back, the ferocious male gaze narrowed, that tight evocative mouth twisted. “I, push you?” he breathed, a visual and audible statement of incredulity. “Woman, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Look at you—every aspect about you is a provocation. Your mouth, your skin, those high, firm breasts, and curving hips were made for ravishment, and you lock it all away in a safe pretence and a polite distance, and a stubborn belief for the future you know will shrivel everything generous and giving inside you.”

  “Shut up!” Her lovely face twisted. His hold at the back of her head, on her senses and crumbling convictions was making her crazy with pain and desire. She raised her hands to strike at him; she, who had never before done or wished to do violence to another human being in her life. Her fingers curled around the intransigent poles of his wrists, an ineffective shackle, an impossible protest as she strained to gain her freedom.

  If anything he became even more reckless, a rampant wildfire that drove her, fleeing, before its devouring heat. “I will not!” he snarled. Then, strangely, he opened his fingers and spread her raven hair along the palms. “Oh, look,” said Matthew, “I’ve messed up your lovely hair-style. Somehow you don’t look so cool and unapproachable any more, darling. Why, if anyone sees you this way, they’ll think you’ve been kissed.”

  She shook all over. It must be fury. It must. Her lips trembled as she struggled to hold it in, but the laughter stole like a thief from her anyway.