by Janet Dailey
Moments later they were lying naked on the soft comfort of the double bed, facing each other. His hand made a leisurely trace of the soft, flowing lines of her breast, stomach, and hips while her fingertips made their own intimate search of his hard male contours as they loved with their eyes.
As his hand shifted to the small of her back, he applied slight pressure to gently arch her toward him. With a beginning point on her shoulder he trailed a rough pattern of nibbling kisses to the base of her throat. Rachel quivered with the wondrous sensations dancing over her skin.
“It doesn’t bother me, Rachel, that I’m not the first man to love you,” Gard murmured thickly into the curve of her neck. “But I’m damned well going to be the last.”
Her heart seemed to leap into her throat, releasing the admission that she’d been telling him in everything but words. “I love you, Gard,” she whispered achingly and turned her head to meet the lips seeking hers.
In a relatively short period of time it became apparent to Rachel that she had not underestimated how wonderful it would be in his arms. His hands and his mouth searched out every pleasure point on her body, discovering everything that excited her.
The union of their flesh came after they had become intimately familiar with each other. Nothing existed but pleasing the other, moving in rhythmic harmony, the tempo gradually increasing. It was a glorious spiraling ascent that exploded in a golden shower of sensation, unequaled in its blazing brilliance.
Chapter Nine
With her head pillowed comfortably in the hollow of Gard’s shoulder, Rachel dreamily watched the lazy trail of smoke rising from his cigarette. The bedsheet was drawn up around their hips, cool against their skin. The contentment she felt was almost a feline purring. She had no desire to move for a thousand years.
“Well?” His voice rumbled under her ear. “No comment?”
Reluctant to move, she finally tipped her head back to send him a vaguely confused glance. “About what?”
His hooded eyes looked down at her. “Did you worry for nothing?”
A sudden smile touched the corners of her mouth as Rachel realized what he was talking about. She had long ago abandoned the conern that her expectations were too high. Her head came down again.
“You know I enjoyed it,” she murmured, being deliberately casual.
“Enjoyed it?” Gard taunted her mockingly. “You only enjoyed it? I must be losing my touch.”
Her laughter was a soft sound. “Was I supposed to say I was devastated?”
“Something like that,” he agreed, this time with the humor obvious in his voice, teasing her.
There was a small lull during which Gard took a last drag on his cigarette and ground out the butt in the ashtray on the stand by the bed. In that short interim Rachel’s thoughts had taken her down a serious and thoughtful path.
“You know that I loved Mac,” she mused aloud, sharing her thoughts with Gard. “A part of me always will. There were times, just recently, when I wondered if I would ever care so strongly for a man again. I never guessed I would love anyone like this—so totally, so—” She broke off the sentence, not finding the words to adequately express how very much she loved him.
“Don’t stop,” Gard chided. “Tell me more.”
“You’re already too conceited,” Rachel accused.
“You think so?” He shifted his position, turning onto his side and taking away his shoulder as her pillow. His hand caressed her jaw and cheek as he faced her. “If I am, it’s because you’ve made me so damned happy.”
Leaning to her, he kissed her with long, drugging force. When it was over, it just added to the overall glow she felt. Her gray eyes were as soft as velvet as she gazed at him, happy and warm inside.
“Do you realize they’re serving dinner, and neither one of us has had anything to eat all day?” she reminded him reluctantly, loathe to leave the bed.
“Yes,” Gard said on a heavy sigh, then smiled crookedly. “But I can’t say that I like the idea of sitting across the table from nosy Helen and her husband.” Rachel made a little face of agreement. “I’d rather keep you all to myself. Why don’t we have dinner in the cabin?”
“I’d much prefer that,” she agreed huskily.
“As a matter of fact,” he went further with the thought, “I can’t think of any reason to leave this cabin for the next two days, until the ship puts in at Acapulco.”
“I can think of one,” Rachel smiled. “All my things are in my cabin. I won’t have anything to wear.”
“I know,” he murmured with a complacently amused gleam in his eye. “It would be terrible if you had to lounge around the cabin stark naked for two days.”
The thought brought a little shiver of wicked excitement. “I’m sure you’d hate that,” she retorted with a playfully accusing look.
“Like a poor man hates money,” Gard mocked. “But—since I don’t like to share my toothbrush, I’ll let you fetch some of your things tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” Rachel murmured with false docility.
“In the meantime”—he flipped the sheet aside and swung out of the bed—“I’ll see if I can’t get the steward to rustle us up something to eat.”
Rachel lay in bed a minute longer, watching him pull on his pants before walking out to the sitting room to phone. With a reluctant sigh she climbed out of bed and made use of his bathroom to wash and freshen up.
When she returned to the bedroom, instead of putting on her grape-colored shift, Rachel picked up his shirt. Its long tails reached nearly to her knees and the shoulder seams fell three inches below the point of her shoulders. The smell of him clung to the material and she hugged it tightly around her, then began to roll up the long sleeves.
There were sounds of his moving about in the sitting room. Rachel walked to the door and posed provocatively in its frame. Gard was standing in the far corner of the room by the drink cabinet.
“How do you like my robe?” she asked, drawing the rake of his glance.
“Nice.” But the look in his eyes was more eloquent with approval. “I told you that you didn’t need clothes.”
She laughed softly and came gliding silently across the room in her bare feet to watch while he finished mixing them fresh drinks. In truth, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so happy—or even when she’d ever been this happy. She gazed at him, so sure of her love. If she ever lost him, she thought she’d die. The possibility suddenly brought a run of stark terror to her eyes.
“Dinner is on its way, so I thought we’d have those drinks we never got around to having.” He capped the bottle of tonic water and turned to hand Rachel her glass. An alertness flared in his eyes at her stricken expression. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I—” She started to shake her head in a vague denial, but the fear that gripped her wouldn’t go away. She looked back at him. “I just have this feeling that ... I’d better grab at all the happiness I can today. Tomorrow it might not be here.”
A searing gentleness came into his features. He put an arm around her and brought her close against him, as if reassuring her of the hard vitality of his body. His head was bent close to her downcast face.
“Rachel, I’m not your . . . I’m not Mac.” He corrected himself in mid-sentence, making it seem significant that he hadn’t said “your husband” as he had been about to say. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
“I know.” She stared at the scattering of silken-fine hairs on his chest, but the tightness in her throat didn’t ease.
He tucked a finger under her chin and forced it up. “Do you always worry so much?” he teased to lighten her mood.
“No.”
When he kissed her, she almost forgot that odd feeling, but it stayed in the back of her mind throughout the evening. It lent an urgency to her lovemaking when they went to bed that night. While Gard slept, she lay awake for a long time with the heat of his body warming her skin. In the darkness the feeling came back. It seemed lik
e a premonition of some unknown trouble to come. Try as she might, Rachel couldn’t shake it off.
Stirring, Rachel struggled against the drugged feeling and forced her sleep-heavy eyes to open. A shaft of sunlight was coming through the drawn curtains and laying a narrow beam on the paneled wall. There was an instant of unfamiliarity with her surroundings until she remembered that she was in Gard’s cabin. Her head turned on the pillow, but the bed was empty. Unreasoning alarm shot through her, driving out the heavy thickness of unrestful sleep.
She bolted from the bed, dragging the sheet with her and wrapping it around her nude body, her hand clutching it together above a breast. She rushed to the sitting room door and pulled it open. Before she’d taken a full step inside, she halted at the sight of Hank Scarborough standing next to Gard.
Both men had turned to look when the door had been yanked open. Hank had been twirling his hat on the end of his finger, but he stopped when he saw Rachel in the door with the sheet swaddled around her. Self-consciously she lifted a hand to push at the sleep-tangle of her hair, knowing that Hank had a crystal-clear picture of the situation. Rachel hitched the sheet a little higher.
“Good morning.” She broke the silence.
“Being an officer and a gentleman, I should keep my mouth shut,” Hank declared with a wry shake of his head. “But if I were Gard, I’d be thinking it’s a helluva good morning. And I hope I haven’t embarrassed you by saying so.”
“You haven’t.” In fact, his frankness had relaxed her. “I shouldn’t have come barging in like this, but I didn’t know anyone was here.”
“Did you want something?” Gard asked, then slid a quick aside to his friend. “And you’re right about the kind of morning it is.”
“No, I—” She couldn’t comfortably admit that she’d been worried that something had happened when she hadn’t found Gard in bed with her—not with Hank standing there. “I just wondered what time it is.”
“It’s nearly ten o’clock,” Gard told her.
“That late?” Her eyes widened.
“You were sleeping so soundly, I didn’t have the heart to wake you,” he said. “I’ll order some coffee and juice.”
“All right,” Rachel agreed, still slightly stunned that she had slept so late. Her glance darted to Hank. “Excuse me. I think I’d better get cleaned up.”
“You’ve missed breakfast, but we’re lying off the Las Hardas Hotel,” Hank informed her. “You’ll be able to get breakfast at the hotel.”
“Thank you.” She cast him a quick smile, then moved out of the doorway and closed the door.
Her clothes were draped across a chair in the room. After she had untangled herself from the length of the sheet, Rachel hurriedly dressed. For the time being she had to be satisfied with combing her hair, because all her makeup was in her own cabin, but at least she looked presentable.
Hank had left when she returned to the sitting room. Within seconds she found herself in Gard’s arms, receiving the good morning kiss he hadn’t given her earlier. His stroking hands rubbed over her body when he finally drew his mouth from her clinging lips. The premonition that had troubled her so much the night before was gone, chased away by the deep glow from his searing kiss.
“You shouldn’t have let me sleep so late,” Rachel murmured while her fingers busied themselves in a womanly gesture of straightening the collar of his shirt.
“If Hank hadn’t shown up, I planned on doing just that,” Gard replied. “Although I probably would have crawled back in bed with you to do it.”
“Now you tell me.” She laughed and eased out of his arms. “When is the coffee coming?”
“Anytime. Why?”
“I thought I’d run down to my cabin and pick up a few things—like my toothbrush,” Rachel explained, already moving toward the door.
“Don’t take too long,” Gard warned. “Or I’ll send out a search party to find you.”
Rachel had no intention of making a project of it, but even hurrying and packing only the few items she absolutely needed, plus a change of clothes, took her more than a quarter of an hour. When she returned to Gard’s cabin, she had to knock twice before he came to the door.
A puzzled frown drew her eyebrows together as he opened it and immediately walked away. She had a brief glimpse of his cold and preoccupied expression.
“How come you took so long to come to the door?” she asked curiously as she quickly followed him into the room. “Is something wrong?”
“I’m on the phone to California.” There was a harshness in his voice that chilled her.
Her steps slowed as she watched him walk to the phone and pick up the receiver he’d left lying on the table. A tray with cups and juice was sitting on the long coffee table in front of the sofa. Rachel changed her direction and walked over to it, sitting down so she could observe Gard.
There was very little she could piece together from his side of the conversation, but it was his body language she studied. His head was bent low in an attitude of intense interest. He kept rubbing his forehead and raking his fingers through his hair as if he didn’t like what he was hearing. There was a tautness in every line.
That odd feeling began to come back, growing stronger. She poured coffee from the tall pot into a cup and sipped at it. It seemed tasteless. She folded both hands around the cup, as if needing to absorb its warmth to ward off some chill.
The phone was hung up, but his hand stayed on the receiver, gripping it tightly until his knuckles showed white. He seemed to have forgotten she was in the room.
“What is it, Gard?” Rachel asked quietly.
He stirred, seeming to rouse himself out of the dark reverie of his thoughts, and threw her a cold glance. “An emergency.” He clipped out the answer and pulled his hand from the phone to comb it through his hair again.
“Is it serious?” she asked when he didn’t volunteer more.
“Yes.” Again his response was grudgingly given, but this time there was more forthcoming. “Bud—one of the partners in my law firm—was killed in a car accident on the freeway last night.”
Even as he spoke the words, Rachel could see that he was trying to reject the truth of them. Quickly she crossed the room and gathered him into her arms. She understood that combination of shock and pain and hurt anger. His arms circled her in a crushing vise as he buried his face in the blackness of her hair.
“Damnit, he had three kids and a wife,” he muttered hoarsely.
For long minutes she simply held on to him, knowing that there was no more comfort than that to give. Finally she felt the hard shudder that went through his body, and the accompanying struggle for control as he pulled his arms from around her and gripped her shoulders.
“Look ...” His gaze remained downcast as he searched to pull his thoughts together. “I’m going to have to see if I can’t catch a flight out of Manzanillo back to Los Angeles. Would you mind throwing my things into the suitcases?”
“I’ll do it.” She nodded with an outward show of calm, but inside there was a clawing panic. Last night she had worried about losing him. Today he was leaving her. They wouldn’t have those two more days on the ship as he had talked about. It couldn’t be over—not so quickly—not like this.
“Thanks.” Gard flashed her a relieved glance and turned to pick up the phone.
Rachel bit at the inside of her lip, then boldly suggested, “Would you like me to fly back with you?”
“No.” As if realizing that his rejection was slightly abrupt, Gard softened it with an explanation. “There’s nothing you can do, but I appreciate the offer. It’s going to be chaotic for a few days, both personally and professionally.” He dialed a number and waited while it rang. “Did you say you were staying in Acapulco for a few days?”
“I was, but—I think I’ll fly straight back on Saturday.” She didn’t look forward to those idle days in the Mexican resort city now that she knew Gard would be in Los Angeles.
“Write down your address and
phone number so I can call you later next week,” he said, then turned away as the party answered the phone on the other end.
While he was busy making inquiries about airline schedules and reservations, Rachel took a pen and notepad from a desk drawer and printed out her name, address, and the telephone numbers at both her home and the office. She slipped it onto the table in front of Gard. He glanced at it and nodded an acknowledgment to her, continuing his conversation without a break.
A feeling of helplessness welled inside her, but there were still his suitcases to be packed. She went into the bedroom they had shared for only one night and took his suitcases from the closet and began to fill them with his clothes.
Half an hour later she was shutting and locking the last suitcase when Gard walked into the bedroom. The troubled, preoccupied expression on his features was briefly replaced with a glance of surprise at the packed suitcases on the bed.
“Are they ready to go?” he asked.
“Everything’s all packed,” she assured him.
“The steward’s on his way.” He looked at his watch. “There’s an opening on a flight leaving Manzanillo in an hour and a half. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to make it and my connecting flight to Los Angeles.”
As she noticed the slip of paper in his hand with her address and phone numbers marked on it, Gard folded it and slipped it into his shirt pocket. There was a knock, followed by the steward entering the cabin.
There were no more moments of privacy left to them as Gard called the steward in to take the luggage. Then they were all trooping out of the cabin and down to the lower deck to take the tender ashore.
As the collection of white block buildings tumbling down the steep sides of the mountain to the bay came closer, Rachel was conscious of the sparkling white beauty of the place, contrasted with the dark red tile roofs. Flowering bushes spilled over the sides of white balconies in scarlet profusion. But she couldn’t bring herself to appreciate its aesthetic beauty. She was too conscious of Gard’s thigh pressed along hers as they rode on the tender to the yacht harbor.
