A Solitary Heart

by Amanda Carpenter

  He froze, listening to her laugh, looking at her over-bright, tear-glazed eyes. A toss up, between one or the other, and laughter had won. The thrumming tension in his body eased. He said ruefully, “I’ve been abominable, haven’t I?”

  “Now and then,” she admitted. Her hair slipped, silken and elusive, from his fingers, and he stroked the sides of her face. She could have pulled away, for she was no longer held prisoner. She didn’t. “But perhaps I’ve goaded you.”

  Matthew ran his thumbs over the crushed softness of her lips, and said, “Now and then. Your hairpins flew everywhere, didn’t they? Want me to collect them for you?”

  He bent to the dirty asphalt, looked around, then cocked a doubtful eyebrow at her. “Leave it,” she said, still laughing. “You’ll never find them all.”

  Her cheeks were flushed, her green eyes vivid, her raven hair falling gloriously about her shoulders, and he rocked back on his heels to stare up at her.

  “Sian, you take my breath away,” he said quietly.

  Her laughter died, and what came in its place was chilled and fearful. “Don’t,” she whispered.

  He rose until he towered above her, and her huge gaze rose with him. For a moment he looked stern, hard, a bedrock of the adamance that was always seen through the swirling mists of his ever-changing moods. She remembered the icy stranger she had met on Sunday, and shivered.

  But then his grimness passed away, and he said, “But to deny it would be to deny what has happened here between us, and I’m not prepared to do that. Come, I’ll take you home.”

  Well, she thought as she climbed into the car with a vague, secret, ever-to-be-denied sense of anticlimax, you couldn’t really get more mundane than that.

  Chapter Six

  The drive back to her apartment was undertaken in complete silence. By running her hands through her hair, Sian managed to restore at least some order, and her colouring had returned to its normal flawless cream.

  The Mercedes turned gently on to her street. She stared out of the window, feeling the pressure build inside her head as the houses melted past. After the resounding clash from earlier, this nothingness, this total withdrawal, felt like a desolation. Dinner and a kiss? The inadequate description was unacceptably trite. What had it been, Sian? What?

  Dinner, not a few kisses, and…

  They pulled up to the apartment, and she was her own greatest fan, as she achieved a perfection of cool courtesy. “Coming in for coffee?”

  But Matthew was already out of the car and coming around to her side. “So you decided to speak to me after all?” he remarked, one eyebrow slanted mockingly. “And here I thought I was the recipient of a magnificent sulk. I don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.”

  He always managed instant ignition. She snapped, “I don’t sulk!”

  The mockery became an outright laugh. She managed to fit her key in the back door lock and entered the cool dark kitchen, the hunter a close-following, silent menace. He found the light switch and snapped it on. She turned away from him, heard the echo of emptiness throughout the rooms. Oh, God. Get thee behind me, Satan…

  She felt to the counter and drew the coffee-maker towards her, and asked severely, “How many cups would you like?”

  “I don’t want any coffee,” said Matthew irritably.

  How he tried her. She bowed her head over the machine while her teeth clenched, then she pushed away from the counter and turned to glare at him. He was a restless caged beast, prowling.

  “I think this was a mistake,” she gritted. “Maybe you had better go, before either of us does yet another thing to regret.”

  “But Sian,” he purred, cocking that insolent brow at her, “you haven’t asked me what I do want.”

  She closed her eyes, as liquid lightning bolted down her legs. “No, I haven’t,” she whispered, averting her pale face in sharp rejection. “I don’t want to know.”

  “Always a contrary creature,” Matthew muttered, swinging with neat violence as he reached the limit of the kitchen, and turned to stalk back. “I say black, she says white. I say wrong, she says right. Is this what it means to be a woman, Sian? Everything has to be bent, nothing straightforward, bluff and rebuff.”

  His face was filled with dark enjoyment.

  “Heaven give me strength,” she groaned. “Can’t we even have a simple civilised conversation? Why must everything be a battleground for you?”

  “Oh,” he said with angry wisdom, “that’s why you invited me in for coffee—a simple, civilised conversation. About the weather, perhaps? It would have to be something appropriately distant for you, wouldn’t it? Containable, in control.”

  “You’re quite mad, you know,” she uttered, with the perfect calm of conviction. She was pressed back against the counter as if she would melt into the wood.

  “No,” he replied grimly, “but I am going crazy. I’ll tell you what I want. I want to fight. I want a good, hard, rousing, no holds barred, nasty fight. Care to oblige me?”

  “Be careful what you ask for,” she warned, hands curled into stiff claws at her sides.

  He stuck his face into hers and snarled, “I’m not finished yet.”

  She met him thrust for thrust, furiously. “I think you might wish to be!”

  He swung away from her, on another pacing lap. It was not a retreat. “Then,” he continued, as stark and as unrestrained as if she hadn’t spoken, leaning his long, taut body against the table, “we make up.”

  She hadn’t seen it coming and felt the breath knocked out of her. His hazel glare on her tell-tale face was insatiable. “Push and shove, Sian,” he whispered roughly of the maelstrom primeval. “Your angry spitting, and the limits of my endurance. I push you too far. You push me over the edge. How do you cushion a man who’s falling? The fight’s over now, and making up has a sweetness to pierce the soul.”

  Her mouth shaped words, but the words had no sound, just the shape and the siren call of his name, plea and curse, and invocation.

  “Then I would want you to walk over,” he muttered. His eyes closed. He tilted back his face, that harsh and worldly, compulsively handsome, predator’s face. He leaned back on his hands, the suit jacket falling open to white-covered torso, the muscular legs outstretched and slightly splayed. “Your grace of movement, green eyes intent with slumbrous warmth and the residue of fire. I would want you to come to me with confidence and surety. I would want you to catch me before I fall too far, with the feline ease of the slightest touch which is given in desire.”

  He filled her vision, encompassed her world. He made the fight so seductive, she might never want to make love to another man. His serpent’s tongue pulled her across the gulf of the floor, a whisper of movement between his legs. The convex breadth of his broad chest, tapering to slim waist, was a haven for her shaking fingers.

  Her butterfly touch arced his body. It brought her down to him, curved her to fit the power of his offered bow. She fell victim tenderly without a sound, and her eyes, closed, and her face lowered over his rigid mouth. At the meeting of her soft lips with his, he shuddered his delight and torment, and groaned, and sprang his sultry trap.

  His arms closed around her, and he rose up from the table, and as he gained his full height he carried her up with him so that her feet left the floor and she was flush and heavy against him, an irrevocable strain, no holds barred. His mouth was a piercing, open furnace.

  Her arms wound around his neck. The world moved and the light became intolerable. He was laying her on the table, his shoulders the bowl of the sky, spearing her wetness with his ravening tongue. Her thighs trembled and he parted them, and came between them as no one had ever done before, and his hardness pressed against her and made her own heat intolerable.

  Then he reared back in shocking retreat, his entire body a scream of protest. “Ah, goddammit, no.”

  She f
elt flayed by a whip. Her eyes opened, searing in her blinded face, framed by his sheltering forearms and the snaking black beauty of her hair.

  Matthew devoured her with his ferocious, loss-filled eyes. His naked face. She didn’t understand.

  Then she, too, heard it: the slam of car doors, familiar teasing voices, leisurely approaching footsteps, the advent of discovery. The comprehension of it slammed into her and twisted her expression into pure frustrated rage.

  Matt hauled her to her feet in a dizzying wrench, shoved her to the hall and said savagely, “Go to the bathroom.”

  She went; somehow, she went.

  With shaking hands she splashed cold water on her overheated face and throat, straightened her rumpled suit, found a comb and ran it through her hair. Then she looked at herself in the mirror.

  Was this what he had seen—the dilated eyes gone brilliant and black and ringed with emerald? The flush on her high cheekbones that matched the crushed velvet of her mouth? She stared at the woman, who was a stranger.

  When she was as presentable as she could possibly make herself, she left the bathroom and walked into the kitchen.

  Jane had made the coffee that Sian had forsaken. Her blonde friend sat at the table with Steven, and Joshua, and, as the kitchen set had only four chairs, Matthew had appropriated a tall stool, leaving the fourth chair empty for her.

  She stood unnoticed in the doorway and studied him numbly. That tough countenance was composed, shuttered, the lean body in that elegant suit relaxed. He looked distinctly undisturbed by the cataclysmic events that had just taken place, and she searched for hate in her terrified heart, for she had been cauterised.

  Then she saw the dark residue of heat that clenched his skin, the hooded glitter of his eyes, and her hands, which had clawed, flexed.

  Jane saw her first and smiled in puzzlement. “Hi, did you have a good dinner? We rescued Joshua from his books. Sian, wasn’t your hair…?”

  Sian’s eyes flashed at her, a brief warning flick. Her friend’s voice died away. Suddenly Jane became very busy with serving coffee to everyone, while under the distraction of the movement Sian slid weakly into the empty chair beside Matthew, who looked at her with a tight, sulphurous smile.

  “We rode to the restaurant with the convertible top down, and Sian’s hair blew everywhere,” lied Matt smoothly, his tawny brows slanted mockingly. “She still hasn’t forgiven me for ruffling her feathers, have you, darling?”

  Her heart thumped. Damn him, he should have remained silent and let Jane’s remark pass into oblivion. Then, because everyone was looking at her for some kind of reply, she grimaced and said drily, “I looked as if I’d been dragged through a bush backwards.”

  Steven and Joshua laughed. Jane was staring at her profile; she could feel it and didn’t dare to look at her friend, or her fixed, set expression would crumble. She took the only revenge she could on Matt, groping surreptitiously with her foot to grind her stiletto heel into the toe of his shoe.

  She could feel his silent grunt as the conversation turned to other things, then he casually shifted his position, putting one hand on the back of the chair behind Sian’s head while lifting his foot out of range.

  It looked an elegant, indolent pose and also placed her into the half curve of his body. She tried to ignore the long, hard thigh pressing against her arm, but found it was a losing battle. She could feel every flex and shift of the muscle sliding underneath the dark cloth and in desperation she turned to chatter animatedly to the others.

  She nearly leaped out of her skin when she felt the stealthy caress of his fingers flowing through the fine, sensitive hairs at the nape of her neck. Unseen by any of the others, the ball of his thumb found the base of her skull and rotated with sensuous gentleness against the soft skin, and her whole body quivered in response.

  It was agony, trying to maintain a semblance of normality while wave upon wave of chaotic emotion clashed symphonic cymbals inside her so loudly that she was amazed no one else could hear it. Fury, sheer, inarticulate stupefaction at his audacity, and an insidious pleasure, warred for supremacy; and she could sense the tension weaving through his otherwise placid demeanour.

  “Are you all right?” Joshua asked her. “You look sort of dazed.”

  Incautiously she said the first thing that came into her reeling head. “Oh, I’m fine, I’ll just be ready for bed soon.”

  Her tormentor shook, a fine tremor that ran down his whole body, and oh, she could wish for the freedom to curse him to a thousand hells. She slipped one hand under the cover of her other arm, groped at his thigh until she had a good hold of skin and cloth and pinched as hard as she could.

  “Ouch!” he snapped. He had to sit forward to jerk away, which thankfully removed the hand at her neck.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Jane, surprised.

  “My leg went to sleep,” drawled Matthew, as he flexed the injured limb. His face was creased with sardonic amusement. “It feels as if a cat has sunk her claws into it.”

  “You ought to be more careful in how you position yourself in the future,” Sian said in a sugary voice and a poisoned smile.

  He shot her a dark look and growled at her. “You’re an unsympathetic woman, Sian Riley.”

  She clicked her fingers at him. “Hard as nails, that’s what I am.”

  The other three became involved in some kind of argument. It sounded good-natured. Sian assumed an attentive expression and never heard a word of it. Matthew had hooked an ankle around one of her legs and slid down her calf slowly. Her mouth shook, and she pressed the offending tender flesh tight in desperation. He reached her shoe and began to ease it from her narrow foot.

  She exploded upright. “The air in here seems awfully stuffy,” she snapped, as four pairs of eyes regarded her, three of them surprised. “I think I’ll go change out of this suit.”

  Matt turned his tawny head. They stood staring at each other for a brief moment, and she could feel his proximity like a coal brazier emitting heat. He murmured, sotto voce, “Running away?”

  “Just forming a strategic retreat until you start behaving yourself,” she replied grimly, proud of her even tone.

  Neither of them cared about their fascinated audience. Matthew’s eyes gleamed, satiric and lazy. “How unutterably tame, sleeping princess.”

  She thrust her angry expression close to his and said succinctly, “The French call it etiquette. In case you were wondering, that stands for good manners. Excuse me, please.”

  “Wait, Sian, I’ll come with you. I just remembered I didn’t put your clothes away after doing laundry today,” declared her friend, who scrambled to her feet in an untidy rush.

  Sian stared at the blonde in amazement, for today had not been laundry day. But questions were beyond her; she pivoted on her heel and stalked out of the kitchen, her room-mate close behind.

  As she travelled down the hall, she thrust her hands through her hair distractedly and held on to her head. It seemed that she and Matthew were destined to enter into a relationship that throbbed with disturbing undercurrents of one kind or another, which invariably built up to a static discharge of glowing white sparks.

  First it had been his disapproval over Joshua’s intended proposal. Now it looked as though he had every intention of niggling away at her peace of mind in an unrelenting pursuit of—Sian’s mind shied away from the memory of what had happened in the restaurant car park, the kitchen, then she forced herself to be blunt to the point of crudity.

  Face facts, she told herself fiercely. She had offered herself to him earlier, and he had only done what any normal, healthy male would have. Was it entirely his fault, considering that she had reacted the way she had?

  She would have melted into a stunned heap at his feet had he let her. The gall of it—after all her fine philosophising about what she was looking for in a husband, about how she scorned passionate
affairs of the heart, then one seductive touch from him and she flared like a torch.

  So what did she think she was playing at, allowing herself to be seduced by him? What did he think to gain? Was she a challenge to him because of her differing standards, or merely light relief?

  She had to come to some conclusion, and fast, because otherwise she would find she had trapped herself into another dangerous situation by emitting unconscious signals he was sure to pick up. Maybe it would be wisest just to cry off the weekend party at his place. Then she might never have to see him, or face his provocative unpredictability, again.

  She strode into her bedroom, as did Jane, who shut the door behind her. Sian couldn’t look at her friend. Instead she began to jerk her clothes off in tight, frustrated movements.

  Jane had settled on her bed and after a moment asked, “Are you going to tell me what’s happened between you and Matt?”

  Off came her suit jacket. Usually so neat, she threw it into a corner and slipped out of her skirt. “What makes you think anything happened?”

  “Because,” retorted her friend in exasperation, “you two are sparring again as if World War III is about to break out!”

  The skirt followed the jacket, then her blouse, and her shoes and tights. Sian’s mouth was twisted in wry resignation. Trust Jane to barge right into the heart of the matter. Then, because she hated to hurt her friend’s feelings and she needed someone to confide in anyway, she said as she yanked a T-shirt over her head, “He kissed me.”

  How inadequate were the words; but she couldn’t confess the real depth of what had happened to save her life. Jane appeared disappointingly unsurprised. “So? I’d already figured as much.”

  She swivelled around to face her and asked grimly, “Was it that obvious?”

  “Sweetheart, I know you,” replied Jane gently. “And I’ve been watching the way you and Matt looked at each other over the weekend when you thought nobody was paying attention. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”