Second Nature

by Nora Roberts

  Hunter seemed to consider the idea a moment, while he studied his daughter and the woman under discussion. “It’s a possibility. One of those delicate jeweled crowns and filmy veils would suit her.”

  “And dragons.” Obviously enjoying the game, Sarah leaned back against the counter, the better to imagine Lee in a flowing pastel gown. “A knight would have to kill at least one full-grown male dragon before he could ask for her hand.”

  “True enough,” Hunter murmured, thinking that dragons came in many forms.

  “Dragons aren’t easy to kill.” Though she spoke lightly, Lee wondered why her stomach was quivering. It was entirely too easy to imagine herself in a great torchlit hall, with jewels winking from her hair and from the bodice of a rich silk gown.

  “It’s the best way to prove valor,” Sarah told her, nibbling on a slice of green pepper she’d snitched from her father. “A princess can’t marry just anyone, you know. The king would either give her to a worthy knight, or marry her off to a neighboring prince so he could have more land with peace and prosperity.”

  Incredibly, Lee pictured her father, staff in hand, decreeing that she would marry Jonathan of Willoby.

  “I bet you never had to wear braces.”

  Cast from one century to another in the blink of an eye, Lee merely stared. Sarah was frowning at her with the absorbed, absorbing concentration she could have inherited only from Hunter. It was all so foolish, Lee thought. Knights, princesses, dragons. For the first time, she was able to smile naturally at the slim, dark girl who was a part of the man she loved.

  “Two years.”

  “You did?” Interest sprang into Sarah’s solemn face. She stepped forward, obviously to get a better look at Lee’s teeth. “It worked good,” she decided. “Did you hate them?”

  “Every minute.”

  Sarah giggled, so that the silver flashed. “I don’t mind too much, ’cept I can’t chew gum.” She sent a sulky look over her shoulder in Hunter’s direction. “Not even one stick.”

  “Neither could I.” Ever, she thought, but didn’t add it. Gum chewing was not permitted in the Radcliffe household.

  Sarah studied her another moment, then nodded. “I guess you can help me set the table, too.”

  Acceptance, Lee was to discover, was just that simple.

  The sun was streaming into the kitchen while they ate. It was rich and golden, without those harsh, stunning flashes of white she remembered from the cliffs of the canyon. She found it peaceful, despite all the talk and laughter and arguments swimming around her.

  Her fantasies had run to eating a thick, rare steak and a crisp chef’s salad in a dimly lit, quiet restaurant where the hovering waiter saw that your glass of Bordeaux was never empty. She found herself in a bright, noisy kitchen, eating pizza stringy with cheese, chunky with slices of green pepper and mushroom, spiced with pepperoni and hot sausage. And while she did, she found herself agreeing with Sarah’s accolade. The best in the stratosphere.

  “If only Fred could learn how to make one of these.” Bonnie cut into her second slice with the same dedication she’d cut into her first. “On a good day he makes a superior egg salad, but it’s not the same.”

  “With a family the size of yours,” Hunter commented, “you’d need to set up an assembly line. Five hungry children could keep a pizzeria hopping.”

  “And do,” Bonnie agreed. “In a bit less than seven months, it’ll be six.”

  She grinned as Hunter’s knife paused. “Another?”

  “Another.” Bonnie winked across the table at her niece. “I always said I’d have half a dozen kids,” she said casually to Lee. “People should do what they do best.”

  Hunter reached over to take her hand. Lee saw the fingers interlock. “Some might call it overachievement.”

  “Or sibling rivalry,” she tossed back. “I’ll have as many kids as you do best sellers.” With a laugh, she squeezed her brother’s hand. “It takes us about the same length of time to produce.”

  “When you bring the baby to visit, she should sleep in my room.” Sarah bit off another mouthful of pizza.

  “She?” Hunter ruffled her hair before he started to eat again.

  “It’ll be a girl.” With the confidence of youth, Sarah nodded. “Aunt Bonnie already has three boys, so another girl makes it even.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Bonnie told her. “Anyway, I’ll be heading back in the morning. Cassandra, she’s my oldest,” she put in for Lee’s benefit, “has decided she wants a tattoo.” She closed her eyes as she leaned back. “Ah, it’s nice to be needed.”

  “A tattoo?” Sarah wrinkled her nose. “That’s gross. Cassie’s nuts.”

  “Fred and I are forced to agree.”

  Interested, Hunter lifted his wine. “Where does she want it?”

  “On the curve of her right shoulder. She insists it’ll be very tasteful.”

  “Dumb.” Sarah handed out the decree with a shrug. “Cassie’s thirteen,” she added, rolling her eyes. “Boy, is she a case.”

  Lee choked back a laugh at both the facial and verbal expressions. “How will you handle it?”

  Bonnie only smiled. “Oh, I think I’ll take her to the tattoo parlor.”

  “But you wouldn’t—” Lee broke off, seeing Bonnie’s liberally streaked hair and shoulder-length earrings. Perhaps she would.

  With a laugh, Bonnie patted Lee’s hand. “No, I wouldn’t. But it’ll be a lot more effective if Cassie makes the decision herself—which she will, the minute she gets a good look at all those nasty little needles.”

  “Sneaky,” Sarah approved with a grin.

  “Clever,” Bonnie corrected.

  “Same thing.” With her mouth half-full, she turned to Lee. “There’s always a crisis at Aunt Bonnie’s house,” she said confidentially. “Did you have brothers and sisters?”

  “No.” Was that wistfulness she saw in the child’s eyes? She’d often had the same wish herself. “There was only me.”

  “I think it’s better to have them, even though it gets crowded.” She slanted her father a guileless smile. “Can I have another piece?”

  The rest of the evening passed, not quietly but, for all the noise, peacefully. Sarah dragged her father outside for soccer practice, which Bonnie declined, grinning. Her condition, she claimed, was too delicate. Lee, over her protests, found herself drafted. She learned, though her aim was never very accurate, to kick a ball with the side of her foot and bounce it off her head. She enjoyed it, which surprised her, and didn’t feel like a fool, which surprised her more.

  Dusk came quickly, then a dark that flickered with fireflies. Though her eyes were heavy, Sarah groaned about going to bed until Hunter agreed to carry her up on his back. Lee didn’t have to be told it was a nightly ritual; she only had to see them together.

  He’d said Sarah was his life, and though she’d only seen them together for a matter of hours, Lee believed it.

  She’d never have expected the man whose books she’d read to be a devoted father, content to spend his time with a ten-year-old girl. She’d never have imagined him here, in a house so far away from the excitement of the city. Even the man she’d grown to know over the past two weeks didn’t quite fit the structure of being parent, disciplinarian and mentor to a ten-year-old. Yet he was.

  If she superimposed the image of Sarah’s father over those of her lover and the author of Silent Scream, they all seemed to meld into one. The problem was dealing with it.

  Righting the overturned chair on the patio, Lee sat. She could hear Sarah’s sleepy laughter drift through the open window above her. Hunter’s voice, low and indistinct, followed it. It was an odd way to spend her last hours with Hunter, here in his home, only a few miles from the campsite where they’d become lovers. And yes, she realized as she stared up at the stars, friends. She very much wanted to be his friend.

  Now, when she wrote the article, she’d be able to do so with knowledge of both sides of him. It was what she’d come
for. Lee closed her eyes because the stars were suddenly too bright. She was going back with much more and, because of it, much less.

  “Tired?”

  Opening her eyes, she looked up at Hunter. This was how she’d always remember him, cloaked in shadows, coming out of the darkness. “No. Is Sarah asleep?”

  He nodded, coming around behind her to put his hands on her shoulders. This was where he wanted her. Here, when night was closing in. “Bonnie, too.”

  “You’d work now,” she guessed. “When the house was quiet and the windows dark.”

  “Yes, most of the time. I finished my last book on a night like this.” He hadn’t been lonely then, but now… “Let’s walk. The moon’s full.

  “Afraid? I’ll give you a talisman.” He slipped his ring off his pinky, sliding it onto her finger.

  “I’m not superstitious,” she said loftily, but curled her fingers into her palm to hold the ring in place.

  “Of course you are.” He drew her against his side as they walked. “I like the night sounds.”

  Lee listened to them—the faintest breeze through the trees, the murmur of water, the singsong of insects. “You’ve lived here a long time.” As the day had passed, it had become less feasible to think of his living anywhere else.

  “Yes. I moved here the year Sarah was born.”

  “It’s a lovely spot.”

  He turned her into his arms. Moonlight spilled over her, silver, jewellike in her hair, marbling her skin, darkening her eyes. “It suits you,” he murmured. He ran a hand through her hair, then watched it fall back into place. “The princess and the dragon.”

  Her heart had already begun to flutter. Like a teenager’s, Lee thought. He made her feel like a girl on her first date. “These days women have to kill their own dragons.”

  “These days—” his mouth brushed over hers “—there’s less romance. If these were the Dark Ages, and I came upon you in a moonlit wood, I’d take you because it was my right. I’d woo you because I’d have no choice.” His voice darkened like the shadows in the trees surrounding them. “Let me love you now, Lenore, as if it were the first time.”

  Or the last, she thought dimly as his lips urged her to soften, to yield, to demand. With his arms around her, she could let her consciousness go. Imagine and feel. Lovemaking consisted of nothing more. Even as her head tilted back in submission, her arms strengthened around him, challenging him to take whatever he wanted, to give whatever she asked.

  Then his hands were on her face, gently, as gently as they’d ever been, memorizing the slope and angle of her bones, the softness of her skin. His lips followed, tasting, drinking in each separate flavor. The pleasure that could come so quickly ran liquid through her. Bonelessly, she slid with him to the ground.

  He’d wanted to love her like this, in the open, with the moon silvering the trees and casting purple shadows. He’d wanted to feel her muscles coil and go fluid under the touch of his hand. What she gave to him now was something out of his own dreams and much, much more real than anything he’d ever had. Slowly, he undressed her, while his lips and the tips of his fingers both pleasured and revered her. This would be the night when he gave her all of him and when he asked for all of her.

  Moonlight and shadows washed over her, making his heart pound in his ears. He heard the creek bubble nearby to mix with her quiet sighs. The woods smelled of night. And so, as she buried his face against her neck, did she.

  She felt the surging excitement in him, the growing, straining need that swept her up. Willingly, she went into the whirlpool he created. There the air was soft to the touch and streaked with color. There she would stay, endlessly possessed.

  His skin was warm against hers. She tasted, her head swimming from pleasure, power and newly awakened dizzying speed. Ravenous for more, she raced over him, acutely aware of every masculine tremble beneath her, every drawn breath, every murmur of her name.

  Silver and shadows. Lee felt them every bit as tangibly as she saw them flickering around her. The silver streak of power. The dark shadow of desire. With them, she could take him to that trembling precipice.

  When he swore, breathlessly, she laughed. Their needs were tangled together, twining tighter. She felt it. She celebrated it.

  The air seemed to still, the breeze pause. The sounds that had grown to one long din around them seemed to hush. The fingers tangled in her hair tightened desperately. In the silence, their eyes met and held, moment after moment.

  Her lips curved as she opened for him.

  She could have slept there, effortlessly, with the bare ground beneath her, the sky overhead and his body pressed to hers. She might have slept there, endlessly, like a princess under a spell, if he hadn’t drawn her up into his arms.

  “You fall asleep like a child,” he murmured. “You should be in bed. My bed.”

  Lee sighed, content to stay where she was. “Too far.”

  With a low laugh, he kissed the hollow between her neck and shoulder. “Should I carry you?”

  “Mmm.” She nestled against him. “’Kay.”

  “Not that I object, but you might be a bit disconcerted if Bonnie happened to walk downstairs while I was carrying you in, naked.”

  She opened her eyes, so that her irises were dusky blue slits under her lashes. Reality was returning. “I guess we have to get dressed.”

  “It might be advisable.” His gaze skimmed over her, then back to her face. “Should I help you?”

  She smiled. “I think that we might have the same result with you dressing me as we do with you undressing me.”

  “An interesting theory.” Hunter reached over her for the brief strip of ivory lace.

  “But this isn’t the time to test it out.” Lee plucked her panties out of his hand and wiggled into them. “How long have we been out here?”

  “Centuries.”

  She shot him a look just before her head disappeared into her shirt. She wasn’t completely certain he was exaggerating. “The least I deserve after these past two weeks is a real mattress.”

  He took her hand, pressing her palm to his lips. “You’re welcome to share mine.”

  Lee curled her fingers around his briefly, then released them. “I don’t think that’s wise.”

  “You’re worried about Sarah.”

  It wasn’t a question. Lee took her time, making certain all the clouds of romance were out of her head before she spoke. “I don’t know a great deal about children, but I imagine she’s unprepared for someone sharing her father’s bed.”

  Silence lay for a moment, like the eye of a storm. “I’ve never brought a woman to our home before.”

  The statement caused her to look at him quickly, then, just as quickly, look away. “All the more reason.”

  “All the more reason for many things.” He dressed without speaking while Lee stared out into the trees. So beautiful, she thought. And more and more distant.

  “You wanted to ask me about Sarah, but you didn’t.”

  She moistened her lips. “It’s not my business.”

  Her chin was captured quickly, not so gently. “Isn’t it?” he demanded.

  “Hunter—”

  “This time you’ll have the answer without asking.” He dropped his hand, but his gaze never faltered. She needed nothing else to tell her the calm was over. “I met a woman, almost a dozen years ago. I was writing as Laura Miles by then, so that I could afford a few luxuries. Dinner out occasionally, the theater now and then. I was still living in L.A., alone, enjoying my work and the benefits it brought me. She was a student in her last year. Brains and ambition she had in abundance, money she didn’t have at all. She was on scholarship and determined to be the hottest young attorney on the West Coast.”

  “Hunter, what happened between you and another woman all those years ago isn’t my business.”

  “Not just another woman. Sarah’s mother.”

  Lee began to pull at the tuft of grass by her side. “All right, if it’s important for
you to tell me, I’ll listen.”

  “I cared about her,” he continued. “She was bright, lovely and full of dreams. Neither of us had ever considered becoming too serious. She still had law school to finish, the bar to pass. I had stories to tell. But then, no matter how much we plan, fate has a way of taking over.”

  He drew out a cigarette, thinking back, remembering each detail. His tiny, cramped apartment with the leaky plumbing, the battered typewriter with its hiccuping carriage, the laughter from the couple next door that would often seep through the thin walls.

  “She came by one afternoon. I knew something was wrong because she had afternoon classes. She was much too dedicated to skip classes. It was hot, one of those sultry, breathless days. The windows were up, and I had a little portable fan that stirred the air around without doing much to cool it. She’d come to tell me she was pregnant.”

  He could remember the way she’d looked if he concentrated. But he never chose to. But whether he chose to or not, he’d always be able to remember the tone of her voice when she’d told him. Despair, laced with fury and accusation.

  “I said I cared about her, and that was true. I didn’t love her. Still, our parents’ values do trickle down. I offered to marry her.” He laughed then, not humorously, but not, Lee reflected, bitterly. It was the laugh of a man who’d accepted the joke life had played on him. “She refused, almost as angry with the solution I’d offered as she was with the pregnancy. She had no intention of taking on a husband and a child when she had a career to carve out. It might be difficult to understand, but she wasn’t being cold, simply practical, when she asked me to pay for the abortion.”

  Lee felt all of her muscles contract. “But, Sarah—”

  “That’s not the end of the story.” Hunter blew out a stream of smoke and watched it fade into darkness. “We had a memorable fight, threats, accusations, blame-casting. At the time, I couldn’t see her end of it, only the fact that she had part of me inside her that she wanted to dispose of. We parted then, both of us furious, both of us desperate enough to know we each needed time to think.”

  She didn’t know what to say, or how to say it. “You were young,” she began.