by Nora Roberts
“It’s better than flying,” she decided. “You feel a part of it. Look.” With a laugh, she pointed. “The birds are chasing us.”
Stephen didn’t bother to glance at the gulls that wheeled and called above the boat’s wake. He preferred to watch the delight and excitement bloom on her face. “Do you always enjoy so completely?”
“Yes.” She tossed her hair away from her face, only to have the wind rush it back again. With another laugh, she stretched back from the railing, her face lifted to the sun. “Oh, yes.”
Irresistible. With his hands at her waist, he spun her toward him. It was like holding a live wire. The shock rippled from her to him, then back again. “Everything?” His fingers spread over her back and, with the slightest pressure, moved her forward until their thighs met.
“I don’t know.” Instinctively she braced her hands on his shoulders. “I haven’t tried everything.” But she wanted to. Held close, with the sound of the water and the wind, she wanted to. Without giving a thought to self-preservation, she leaned toward him.
He swore, lightly, under his breath. Rebecca jolted back as if he had shouted at her. Stephen caught her hand as he nodded to the steward, who had just approached with drinks. “Thank you, Victor. Just leave everything.” His voice was smooth enough, but Rebecca felt the tension in his hand as he led her to a chair.
He probably thought she was a fool, she decided. All but tumbling into his arms every time he touched her. He was obviously a man of the world—and a kind man, she added as she sipped her mimosa. Not all powerful men spoke kindly to those who worked for them. Her lips curved, a little wryly, as she sipped again. She knew that firsthand.
His body was in turmoil. Stephen couldn’t remember, even in his youth, having had a woman affect him so irrationally. He knew how to persuade, how to seduce—and always with finesse. But whenever he was around this woman for more than five minutes he felt like a stallion being spurred and curbed at the same time.
And he was fascinated. Fascinated by the ease with which she went into his arms, by the trust he saw when he looked down into her eyes. As he had in the olive grove, he found himself believing he’d looked into those eyes, those rainwater-clear eyes, a hundred times before.
Still churning, he took out a cigar. The thought was fanciful, but his desire was very real. If there couldn’t be finesse, perhaps there could be candor.
“I want you, Rebecca.”
She felt her heart stop, then start up again with slow, dull throbs. Carefully she took another sip, then cleared her throat. “I know.” It amazed her, flattered her, terrified her.
She seemed so cool. He envied her. “Will you come with me, to my cabin?”
She looked at him then. Her heart and her head were giving very different answers. It sounded so easy, so … natural. If there was a man she could give herself to, wholly, he was with her now. Complications, what complications there were, were her own.
But no matter how far she had run from Philadelphia and her own strict upbringing, there were still lines she couldn’t cross.
“I can’t.”
“Can’t?” He lit his cigar, astonished that they were discussing making love as though it were as casual a choice as what dinner entrée to choose. “Or won’t?”
She drew a breath. Her palms were damp on the glass, and she set it down. “Can’t. I want to.” Her eyes, huge and lake-pale, clung to his. “I very much want to, but …”
“But?”
“I know so little about you.” She picked up her glass again because her empty hands tended to twist together. “Hardly more than your name, that you own an olive grove and like the sea. It’s not enough.”
“Then I’ll tell you more.”
She relaxed enough to smile. “I don’t know what to ask.”
He leaned back in his chair, the tension dissolving as quickly as it had built. She could do that to him with nothing more than a smile. He knew no one who could excite and solace with so little effort.
“Do you believe in fate, Rebecca? In something unexpected, even unlooked-for, often a small thing that completely and irrevocably changes one’s life?”
She thought of her aunt’s death and her own uncharacteristic decisions. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Good.” His gaze skimmed over her face, quickly, then more leisurely. “I’d nearly forgotten that I believe it, too. Then I saw you, sitting alone.”
There were ways and ways to seduce, she was discovering. A look, a tone, could be every bit as devastating as a caress. She wanted him more in that moment than she had ever known she could want anything. To give herself time, and distance, she rose and walked to the rail.
Even her silence aroused him. She had said she knew too little about him. He knew even less of her. And he didn’t care. It was dangerous, possibly even destructive, but he didn’t care. As he watched her with the wind billowing her shirt and her hair he realized that he didn’t give a damn about where she had come from, where she had been, what she had done.
When lightning strikes, it destroys, though it blazes with power. Rising, he went to her and stood, as she did, facing the sea.
“When I was young, very young,” he began, “there was another moment that changed things. My father was a man for the water. He lived for it. Died for it.” When he went on it was almost as if he were speaking to himself now, remembering. Rebecca turned her head to look at him. “I was ten or eleven. Everything was going well, the nets were full. My father and I were walking along the beach. He stopped, dipped his hand into the water, made a fist and opened it. ‘You can’t hold it,’ he said to me. ‘No matter how you try or how you love or how you sweat.’ Then he dug into the sand. It was wet and clung together in his hand. ‘But this,’ he said, ‘a man can hold.’ We never spoke of it again. When my time came, I turned my back on the sea and held the land.”
“It was right for you.”
“Yes.” He lifted a hand to catch at the ends of her hair. “It was right. Such big, quiet eyes you have, Rebecca,” he murmured. “Have they seen enough, I wonder, to know what’s right for you?”
“I guess I’ve been a little slow in starting to look.” Her blood was pounding thickly. She would have stepped back, but he shifted so that she was trapped between him and the rail.
“You tremble when I touch you.” He slid his hands up her arms, then down until their hands locked. “Have you any idea how exciting that is?”
Her chest tightened, diminishing her air even as the muscles in her legs went limp. “Stephen, I meant it when I said …” He brushed his lips gently over her temple. “I can’t. I need to …” He feathered a kiss along her jawline, softly. “To think.”
He felt her fingers go lax in his. She was suddenly fragile, outrageously vulnerable, irresistibly tempting. “When I kissed you the first time I gave you no choice.” His lips trailed over her face, light as a whisper, circling, teasing, avoiding her mouth. “You have one now.”
He was hardly touching her. A breath, a whisper, a mere promise of a touch. The slow, subtle passage of his lips over her skin couldn’t have been called a kiss, could never have been called a demand. She had only to push away to end the torment. And the glory.
A choice? Had he told her she had a choice? “No, I don’t,” she murmured as she turned to find his lips with hers.
No choice, no past, no future. Only now. She felt the present, with all its needs and hungers, well up inside her. The kiss was instantly hot, instantly desperate. His heart pounded fast and hard against hers, thunderous now, as he twisted a hand in her hair to pull her head back. To plunder. No one had ever taken her like this. No one had ever warned her that a touch of violence could be so exciting. Her gasp of surprise turned into a moan of pleasure as his tongue skimmed over hers.
He thought of lightning bolts again, thought of that flash of power and light. She was electric in his arms, sparking, sizzling. Her scent, as soft, as seductive, as a whisper, clouded his mind, even as the taste of her he
ightened his appetite.
She was all woman, she was every woman, and yet she was like no other. He could hear each quick catch of her breath above the roar of the motor. With her name on his lips, he pressed them to the vulnerable line of her throat, where the skin was heated from the sun and as delicate as water.
She might have slid bonelessly to the deck if his body hadn’t pressed hers so firmly against the rail. In wonder, in panic, she felt his muscles turn to iron wherever they touched her. Never before had she felt so fragile, so at the mercy of her own desires. The sea was as calm as glass, but she felt herself tossed, tumbled, wrecked. With a sigh that was almost a sob, she wrapped her arms around him.
It was the defenselessness of the gesture that pulled him back from the edge. He must have been mad. For a moment he’d been close, much too close, to dragging her down to the deck without a thought to her wishes or to the consequences. With his eyes closed, he held her, feeling the erratic beat of her heart, hearing her shallow, shuddering breath.
Perhaps he was still mad, Stephen thought. Even as the ragged edges of desire eased, something deeper and far more dangerous bloomed.
He wanted her, in a way no man could safely want a woman. Forever.
Fate, he thought again as he stroked her hair. It seemed he was falling in love whether he wished it or not. A few hours with her and he felt more than he had ever imagined he could feel.
There had been a few times in his life when he had seen and desired on instinct alone. What he had seen and desired, he had taken. Just as he would take her. But when he took, he meant to keep.
Carefully he stepped back. “Maybe neither of us has a choice.” He dipped his hands into his pockets. “And if I touch you again, here, now, I won’t give you one.”
Unable to pretend, knowing they were shaking, she pushed her hands through her hair. She didn’t bother to disguise the tremor in her voice. She wouldn’t have known how. “I won’t want one.” She saw his eyes darken quickly, dangerously, but she didn’t know his hands were balled into fists, straining.
“You make it difficult for me.”
A long, shuddering breath escaped her. No one had ever wanted her this way. Probably no one ever would again. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.”
“No.” Deliberately he relaxed his hands. “I don’t think you do. That’s one of the things about you I find most intriguing. I will have you, Rebecca.” He saw something flicker in her eyes … Excitement? Panic? A combination of the two, perhaps. “Because I’m sure of it, because I know you’re sure of it, I’ll do my best to give you a little more time.”
Her natural humor worked through the sliver of unease she felt. “I’m not sure whether I should thank you politely or run like hell.”
He grinned, surprising himself, then flicked a finger down her cheek. “I wouldn’t advise running, matia mou. I’d only catch you.”
She was sure of that, too. One look at his face, even with the smile that softened it, and she knew. Kind, yes, but with a steely underlying ruthlessness. “Then I’ll go with the thank-you.”
“You’re welcome.” Patience, he realized, would have to be developed. And quickly. “Would you like to swim? There’s a bay. We’re nearly there.”
The water might, just might, cool her off. “I’d love it.”
Chapter Five
The water was cool and mirror-clear. Rebecca lowered herself into it with a sigh of pure pleasure. Back in Philadelphia she would have been at her desk, calculator clicking, the jacket of her neat business suit carefully smoothed over the back of her chair. Her figures would always tally, her forms would always be properly filed.
The dependable, efficient Miss Malone.
Instead, she was swimming in a crystal-clear bay, letting the water cool and the sun heat. Ledgers and accounts were worlds away. Here, as close as a hand-span, was a man who was teaching her everything she would ever want to know about needs, desires, and the fragility of the heart.
He couldn’t know it, she thought. She doubted she’d ever have the courage to tell him that he was the only one who had ever made her tremble and burn. A man as physically aware as he would only be uncomfortable knowing he held an inexperienced woman in his arms.
The water lapped around her with a sound as quiet as her own sigh. But he didn’t know, because when she was in his arms she didn’t feel awkward and inexperienced. She felt beautiful, desirable and reckless.
With a laugh, Rebecca dipped under the surface to let the water, and the freedom, surround her. Who would have believed it?
“Does it always take so little to make you laugh?”
Rebecca ran a hand over her slicked-back hair. Stephen was treading water beside her, smoothly, hardly making a ripple. His skin was dark gold, glistening wet. His hair was streaked by the sun and dampened by the water, which was almost exactly the color of his eyes. She had to suppress an urge to just reach out and touch.
“A secluded inlet, a beautiful sky, an interesting man.” With another sigh, she kicked her legs up so that she could float. “It doesn’t seem like so little to me.” She studied the vague outline of the mountains, far out of reach. “I promised myself that no matter where I went, what I did, I’d never take anything for granted again.”
There was something in the way she said it, some hint of sadness, that pulled at him. The urge to comfort wasn’t completely foreign in him, but he hadn’t had much practice at it. “Was there a man who hurt you?”
Her lips curved at that, but he couldn’t know that she was laughing at herself. Naturally, she’d dated. They had been polite, cautious evenings, usually with little interest on either side. She’d been dull, or at least she had never worked up the nerve to spread her wings. Once or twice, when she’d felt a tug, she’d been too shy, too much the efficient Rebecca Malone, to do anything about it.
With him, everything was different. Because she loved him. She didn’t know how, she didn’t know why, but she loved him as much as any woman could love any man.
“No. There’s no one.” She closed her eyes, trusting the water to carry her. “When my parents died, it hurt. It hurt so badly that I suppose I pulled back from life. I thought it was important that I be a responsible adult, even though I wasn’t nearly an adult yet.”
Strange that she hadn’t thought of it quite that way until she’d stopped being obsessively responsible. Stranger still was how easy it was to tell him what she’d never even acknowledged herself.
“My aunt Jeannie was kind and considerate and loving, but she’d forgotten what it was like to be a young girl. Suddenly I realized I’d missed being young, lazy, foolish, all the things everyone’s entitled to be at least once. I decided to make up for it.”
Her hair was spread out and drifting on the water. Her eyes were closed, and her face was sheened with water. Not beautiful, Stephen told himself. She was too angular for real beauty. But she was fascinating … in looks, in philosophy … more, in the open-armed way she embraced whatever crossed her path.
He found himself looking around the inlet as he hadn’t bothered to look at anything in years. He could see the sun dancing on the surface, could see the ripples spreading and growing from the quiet motion of their bodies. Farther away was the narrow curving strip of white beach, deserted now, but for a few birds fluttering over the sand. It was quiet, almost unnaturally quiet, the only sound the soft, monotonous slap of water against sand. And he was relaxed, totally, mind and body. Perhaps he, too, had forgotten what it was like to be young and foolish.
On impulse he put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her under.
She came up sputtering, dragging wet hair out of her eyes. He grinned at her and calmly continued to tread water. “It was too easy.”
She tilted her head, considering him and the distance between them. Challenge leaped into her eyes, sparked with amusement. “It won’t be the next time.”
His grin only widened. When he moved, he moved fast, streaking under and across the water like an eel.
Rebecca had time for a quick squeal. Dragging in a deep breath, she kicked out. He caught her ankle, but she was ready. Unresisting, she let him pull her under. Then, instead of fighting her way back to the surface, she wrapped her arms around him and sent them both rolling in an underwater wrestling match. They were still tangled, her arms around him, her hands hooked over his shoulders, when they surfaced.
“We’re even.” She gasped for air and shook the water out of her eyes.
“How do you figure?”
“If we’d had a mat I’d have pinned you. Want to go for two out of three?”
“I might.” He felt her legs tangle with his as she kicked out lazily. “But for now I prefer this.”
He was going to kiss her again. She saw it in his eyes, felt it in the slight tensing of the arm that locked them torso to torso. She wasn’t sure she was ready. More, she was afraid she was much too ready.
“Stephen?”
“Hmm?” His lips were a breath away from hers. Then he found himself underwater again, his arms empty. He should have been furious. He nearly was when he pushed to surface. She was shoulder-deep in the water, a few feet away. Her laughter rolled over him, young, delighted, unapologetic.
“It was too easy.” She managed a startled “whoops” when he struck out after her. She might have made it—she had enough of a lead—but he swam as though he’d been born in the water. Still, she was agile, and she almost managed to dodge him, but her laughter betrayed her. She gulped in water, choked, then found herself hauled up into his arms in thigh-deep water.
“I like to win.” Deciding it was useless to struggle, she pressed a hand to her heart and gasped for air. “It’s a personality flaw. Sometimes I cheat at canasta.”
“Canasta?” The last thing he could picture the slim, sexy bundle in his arms doing was spending a quiet evening playing cards.
“I can’t help myself.” Still breathless, she laid her head on his shoulder. “No willpower.”
