by Sandra Field
CHAPTER TEN
THE next morning at the ultramodern airport in Martinique, Brant went into the drugstore; he needed shaving cream. He also picked up a package of condoms, paying for both in American money and getting a fistful of francs as change. He had no idea if Rowan was still taking the pill, and he wasn’t taking any chances.
She wanted children.
In the antiseptic cleanliness of the drugstore under its white fluorescent lights he was suddenly attacked by all the symptoms of danger: pounding heart and sweating palms and that knife-edge of alertness to all his senses. No job and a baby on the way. Was he crazy? Was the woman born who was worth that?
“Monsieur? Êtes-vous malade?”
“Non, non, merci,” he said rapidly and walked back into the terminal. Rowan was standing in front of the machine that exchanged currencies, her face intent as she counted out the sheaf of bills in her hand. She was wearing bush pants and her dark green shirt, a slim, capable woman doing her job, a woman whom he loved body and soul.
He’d shortchanged her for the four years of their marriage. He’d given her money; possessions and a fancy condo. He given her all the gifts of his body. But he hadn’t given her himself. He’d never given anyone that.
A five-year-old boy facing the big dark-browed stranger who was his father...
Was he totally out of his mind, or was he really embarking on the most difficult assignment of his whole life?
Brant shoved his purchases in his backpack and walked over to her. “Rowan...” he said.
A note in his voice brought her head around. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” he stumbled. “I just needed to—hell, I don’t know what I need.”
“It’ll be fine, Brant,” she said vehemently.
“Do I look that bad?”
“I’ve seen you look better and I’m not asking you to do anything you can’t do—I swear I’m not! Besides, I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
As if the man were still alive, Brant could hear his father’s voice sneering at him. Look at you—adventurer and world-famous reporter—leaning on a woman. Letting her put bars around you, cage you and coddle you, turn you into a momma’s boy. You’re done for, Brant. Finished
Rowan seized the front of his shirt. “Brant, don’t look like that—I can’t stand it!”
The voice had vanished. He was left with a distraught woman to whom he had nothing to say, and with Sheldon fast approaching them with a fixed smile on his face. He also saw how Peg and May were hanging back because they knew something was up, and how Natalie and Steve were giggling over some of the more risqué postcards in the newsstand.
Sheldon, who was oblivious to the possibility of any relationship other than his own, said, “We need help, Rowan, you know none of us can speak French.”
“I’ll look after it,” Brant said curtly, and took off toward the newsstand, Sheldon in his wake. And if he was running away again, there were always times on assignment when retreat was the most prudent of strategies.
An hour later they boarded the short flight to Dominica. The plane was full; Rowan sat near the front and Brant ended up at the very back. At the Dominica airport there was a slight holdup with their van. About to wander outside to examine the river on the other side of the road, Brant’s attention was caught by a small display of books in the little kiosk by the entrance. He picked up a couple of espionage novels, both by a well-known author whose works got rave reviews internationally. As he went to pay for them, the woman at the register said pleasantly, “My husband, he loves those books. Takes him away from it all, that’s what he says.” She laughed. “You can forget him once he gets his hands on one, oh, yes.”
“I’ll probably be the same,” Brant smiled. “Thanks.”
The van had just pulled up; he went over to help load the luggage. Rowan was doing the driving on this island. They’d landed on the windward coast, where the ocean was laced with white and where women were doing the wash in the many small streams that ran into the sea. Banana plantations and lush forest lined the narrow paved road as they wound their way across the island to the west coast, where their hotel was located. Rowan carried on an animated discussion with Peg, who was sitting beside her, about warblers and parrots; Brant sat quietly, content to watch the play of expression on her face and to let the island’s beauty soak into him.
The hotel was unpretentious and friendly, with its own dark gray sand beach edged with tumbles of orange, cream and magenta bougainvillea amidst swaying coconut palms. Brant’s room was at the very end, so he got the breeze from two directions; his balcony overlooked the sea and he felt instantly at home.
They all met at the beach for lunch. That afternoon they drove north to the rain forest, where Rowan produced a red-legged thrush out of the scrub on the way up the mountain, and then a charmingly plump gray and white warbler at the forest edge. Parrots flew overhead, flycatchers darted up from the grapefruit trees, and again Brant was delighted to see the tiny Carib with its glittering purple throat.
They left just before dusk. The trail down the mountain boasted some of the biggest potholes Brant had ever seen. Rowan negotiated them with considerable skill; but he noticed she was limping when she came into the dining room for dinner. After they’d eaten, he got her to one side. “How are your knees?”
“Not bad. But it’s weird, it’s only nine-thirty and I feel totally wiped.” Her brows knit in thought. “It was hard work, what we did last night by the rocks.”
“High stakes.”
“You said it. And we have to get up at five tomorrow, to see the other parrot.”
“The Imperial parrot, otherwise known as the Sisserou,” he supplied with a grin.
“I’ll make a birder out of you yet.”
“Now that, my darling, is pushing it.”
She bit her lip. “When you smile at me like that, I turn into a puddle on the floor.”
- “When you say things like that,” he riposted, “I want to carry you off to my room and make love to you until neither one of us has the strength to pick up a pair of binoculars. Let alone identify what’s at the other end.”
She widened her eyes. “You mean if we make love you won’t be able to tell a hawk from a hummingbird?”
“Want to put it to the test?”
Her smile faded. “It still feels too soon, Brant—and I’m not being coy and I’m not playing hard to get.”
It was the answer he’d expected and that, to some extent, he agreed with. At least, his head did. His groin was another matter. He said slowly, “Maybe I won’t be convinced any of this is really happening until we go to bed together.”
“I want to, oh, God, how I want to,” she said helplessly. “But I’m so scared we’ll do what we did so often—fall into bed as a way of escape.”
“It doesn’t help one bit to watch Steve and Natalie crawling all over each other.”
“Or Sheldon and Karen necking on the beach,” she added.
“Look at it this way—we’re building character.”
“We’d darn well better be building something.”
He brushed her cheek with his lips. “Good night, my love.”
She blurted, “Even though we don’t really know where we’re going from here, I want you to know how happy I am, Brant. Wonderfully happy and not lonely at all.”
“Good,” he said, patted her on the bottom, and got a drink from the bar before he went to his room. He stripped to his briefs and piled pillows against the bamboo headboard. Sipping on a rum as smooth as velvet, he opened one of the books he’d bought and started to read, doing his best to put Rowan out of his mind.
The next day was for Brant the most pleasurable so far. In the high Dominican rain forest they got incredible views of the rare Imperial parrot as it munched on fruit at the top of a tree by their picnic site; in the scope he could distinguish the individual feathers on the back of its neck, deep maroon feathers in startling contrast to its lime-green plumage.
That afternoon he thoroughly enjoyed the boat trip to the cliffs at the northern tip of the island, stationing himself on the upper bridge along with the captain and Rowan. Back at the hotel, they ate callaloo soup and mountain chicken, and the sun set in pink and gold splendor over the sea.
He’d stayed up reading until midnight the night before; at eight-thirty he went to his room to pack for tomorrow’s flip to Guadeloupe, and to try and finish his book. Rowan had driven Peg and May to visit birding friends who lived near the capital, Roseau; he wouldn’t see her again until tomorrow.
Time was passing, he thought uneasily. Two more islands, and then he’d be heading back to Toronto. He didn’t want to be alone in his room, he’d been alone in far too many hotel rooms the world over. He wanted Rowan with him. Now.
Besides, there was something she was keeping from him. A secret of some kind that was causing her distress. He couldn’t imagine what it was; and knew it was adding to his sense of apprehension.
He needed to make love to her, to anchor their reconciliation in the body.
With an impatient sigh Brant headed for the shower. Afterward he went back into his bedroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. After uncapping a plastic bottle of guava juice, he picked up his book and his pen—because he’d been taking notes in the margin—and settled himself on the bed to read.
Rowan had delivered Peg and May to a bungalow high on the hillside overlooking the ocean, had met their friends and had enjoyed a piña colada made with local coconut. When the husband, a retired bank manager, offered to drive the two women back to the hotel later on, she accepted gratefully. She’d realized on the drive to the bungalow that she’d neglected to tell everyone what time breakfast was being served: a very simple and routine detail, the forgetting of which showed how preoccupied she was with Brant.
She got back to the hotel, gave the information to Steve and to Sheldon, and then walked down the path to the unit at the very end of the hotel. Her heart was thumping in her chest like a drum at a Christmas parade. Swiftly, before she could lose her nerve, she tapped on the door.
Brant opened it. When he saw her, his involuntary smile of pleasure went straight to her heart; hastily he snugged the towel he was wearing more tightly around his waist. “Rowan,” he said, “I thought you were in Roseau.”
Her eyes skidded from his bare chest to his long legs and then back to his face. “I forgot to tell you we’re meeting for breakfast at six-thirty in the morning, the flight’s at eight forty-five,” she mumbled. “Sorry to disturb you.”
His eyes gleamed with sudden purpose. “You didn’t,” he said, lifted her by the elbows, swung her over the threshold and kicked the door shut with one bare foot. Then he kissed her. Kissed her, she thought dazedly, as if there were no tomorrow.
Hadn’t she, when she’d left him to the very last, hoped that something like this would happen?
She was tired of being cautious, of worrying about old patterns and of holding him at arm’s length. There was nothing remotely at arm’s length in his embrace, and she was going to make sure it stayed that way. Rowan threw her own arms around his waist, feeling the nub of the towel against her wrists, and kissed him back with a passion as instinctual as breathing.
Brant muttered her name under his breath, kissing her lips, her cheeks, her closed lids, roaming her face as though to memorize it. He smelled delicious, a tantalizing mixture of the familiar and the unknown, this man whom she’d lived with for four years, yet who’d become, in so many ways, a stranger to her. She dug her nails into his spine, loving the tightness of muscle and the knobbed bone, feeling his arms strengthen their hold as once again he sought her mouth.
Opening to him, Rowan let her tongue dance with his in an intimacy that caused her heartbeat to spiral. She pressed into his body so that the heat of his skin penetrated her shirt, kindling a still greater heat. She toyed with his hair, traced the flat curves of his ears and the taut throat muscles, and all the while her certainty grew that this was where she belonged.
As though he’d read her mind, Brant raised his head.
“Are you sure this is what you want to be doing?” he said roughly. “Because now’s the time to stop if it isn’t.”
The pulse at the base of his throat was hammering against his skin; another drumbeat, she thought, rested her fingertip there. “I don’t want to stop. Not if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t have words to tell you what I want.”
“Then show me,” Rowan said with sudden urgency. “We’ve done enough talking for now.”
He smiled into her eyes, dropping kisses light as raindrops on her face. “Not entirely. I love you, I need to say that.”
“I love you, too.” Giving him a radiant smile back, she said artlessly, “It’s really quite amazing, isn’t it?”
“Astonishing,” he agreed solemnly. “I’ve got something else to say and it’s very important, so you’d better pay attention.”
She tweaked his chest hair. “You have my total attention.”
“Good.” He was laughing at her, she saw with a catch at her heart; he looked as young and carefree as he had on their wedding day and she wanted him as she’d never wanted any other man. “But you’d better hurry up,” she added, swiveling her hips against his and widening her eyes mischievously as she felt the imperious hardness of his erection. “Or I’ll be accusing you of being all talk and no action.”
He lowered his hands to grasp her hips and gave a sudden thrust that made her gasp with a fierce and altogether unfeigned pleasure. “What did you say?”
“Skip it,” she said faintly.
“You have altogether too many clothes on, that’s all I was going to say. Particularly as the towel keeps slipping.”
“You do have a way with words, my love.” Rowan tugged at the towel, sliding one hand beneath to caress the jut of his pelvis and his taut buttock. “I’m all yours,” she murmured. “Because do you know what I want?”
Again he laughed. “Me?” he said hopefully.
“Whatever gave you that idea?” Her cheeks flushed, she added, “I want you to undress me, Brant—the way you used to,” and watched desire and wonderment chase themselves across his rugged features.
He reached for the top button of her shirt. One by one he undid them, his knuckles grazing her breasts, and all the while his eyes were trained on her face. She was still blushing, she knew. She also knew all her happiness must be written on her features for him to read. No barriers. No anger or bitterness. Only a deep joy that Brant and she were together again and that her world had righted itself.
He tugged her shirt out of her waistband and eased it from her shoulders, and only then did his gaze drop. Rowan stood very still as her shirt fell to the floor and he sought the clasp on her bra. It, too, slid to the floor. For a long moment he simply looked, his eyes stroking her flesh, lingering where her nipples had tightened like the seeds of ripe fruit. “I’ve never forgotten how beautiful you are,” he whispered, and took her breasts in his hands, lowering his mouth to taste their ivory smoothness.
Her body quivered like an overstrung bow. Arching toward him, she began her own exploration, relearning the banded muscles of his belly, the hollowed collarbone and ridged rib cage, feeling in her bones as though she’d come home after a long and arduous absence. His towel joined her shirt on the floor. With a deliberation that was both sensual and wanton, she let her hands move lower down his body, following the dark arrow of hair to his navel, then wrapping her fingers around his shaft.
He groaned deep in his throat. Roughly he undid the zipper on her trousers and pushed them down her hips. His haste was contagious; Rowan kicked off her sandals, then yanked at the lacy underwear that she always wore on her trips as an antidote to the practicality of her outer garments. Hauling them down her thigh, she grimaced a little as she bent her knees.
“Easy, sweetheart,” Brant said, “we’ve got all night.”
“But I don’t want to take all night. I want you no
w.”
He pulled back the covers and drew her down on the bed. Hunched over her on one elbow, he ran one hand down her ribs, his face intent. She burst out, “I know you better than anyone in the world and yet you’re a stranger to me.”
“Maybe that’s one reason I’ve craved to have you in my bed again—so you won’t be a stranger anymore,” Brant said.
Then she felt the slight roughness of his palm at waist, hip and thigh as he continued his exploration. For a few moments she closed her eyes, the better to savor pure sensation. Very gently he circled her knee; he clasped her ankle; he traced the arch of her foot where the blue veins lay close to the skin. Then, more slowly, Brant let his mouth do the journeying back from ankle to breast.
Shivering with delight, Rowan watched him, glorying in the intimacy with which he was traveling her body, knowing she wanted him to touch her everywhere there was to touch, so she could melt and yield, be filled and fulfiled. She whispered, “Oh, Brant, I do love you.”
His lips had reached the peak of her breast. With exquisite sensitivity he played with it, until again she arched toward him in blatant arousal; only then, taking her head in his palms, did he kiss her lips with a deep and passionate hunger.
Rowan pressed herself to the length of his big frame, the same hunger encompassing her in its imperative and ancient demands; she ached and throbbed with that hunger. Suddenly, so suddenly that she cried out with an ardor as naked as her body, Brant parted her thighs and thrust between them. She surged to meet him, her whole being nothing but the frantic need to mate with this man who was her true and only lover.
He gasped, “Wait a minute, Rowan—are you still protected? If not, I can look after that.”
As though he’d struck her, Rowan spiraled from a passion as scarlet as hibiscus, as searing as flame, into a very different place: an ice-cold place, a place of thick darkness. She pulled away from him in a single, graceless movement, her face stricken. “No, I’m not protected,” she said.
Four words that brought with them a crushing load of guilt and sorrow. She shoved at his chest, as frantic to escape as only seconds ago she’d been frantic to join with him, tears crowding her eyes. As she fought them back, Brant said, aghast, “What did I say? Rowan, what’s the matter?”
