Her face was flushed from sleep, her hair in tousled disarray. The sheet had fallen to her waist and one strap of the blue gown had slipped over her shoulder. Her creamy smooth shoulder. Small nipples pushed ever so slightly against the silken material. If he didn’t get up...
He eased the other strap down. Instantly alarmed she said, “What...what are you doing?”
He stroked her shoulder. Her skin was soft. So soft.
“Annabel?” he said. And though he had told himself he would not do this, he kissed her.
For a moment Annabel didn’t move. As he put his arms around her, she murmured some plea. But when he gathered her closer, it felt so good to be held this way, to smell the warm man smell of his skin and feel the length of his body against hers.
He kissed her gently, not forcing her, and her lips softened under his with a familiarity, a shadowed memory that she had been like this before. Had he held her like this before? Had she lain with him like this?
He kissed the corners of her mouth, her eyelids and the tip of her nose. He leaned his cheek against hers and whispered, “Annabel. My Annabel.”
When he began to stroke her breasts, a warm sweetness flooded her body. Though she told herself she would not, she moved closer into his arms. She would be like this for only a moment more. But, oh, how nice the moment. How gentle the hand on her breasts, stroking, stroking.
“You have to stop,” she whispered.
“I will. I will.” Even as his lips closed around the peak of her breast.
She smothered a moan. “No, you shouldn’t... shouldn’t...” Her voice faded and she gasped with pleasure when he took a tip between his teeth to tease.
“Shouldn’t do this?” he whispered against her skin. “Or shouldn’t stop.”
“I... I can’t think when you touch me that way.”
“Nor can I.”
His mouth was soft and moist against her breast. He scraped the tip with his teeth and held it there while his tongue circled round and round.
Heat surged through her body. She had to stop him, knew she had to stop him. Herself. If she didn’t now, right this minute, she wouldn’t be able to.
“I don’t want...” she struggled to say. “It’s too soon. I can’t.” She backed away. In a voice that trembled with all she was feeling, she said, “I can’t do this, Luis. Not now. Not yet.”
He hesitated before he took a deep breath to steady himself and pulled the straps back over her shoulders. With one final quick kiss he threw back the sheet and swung his legs over the bed.
“Breakfast?” he asked in a matter-of-fact voice.
Annabel tried to keep her voice steady. She didn’t look at him when she said, “Uh, yes, please.”
He picked up the phone. “Meadowlark? Would you ask Ambrosia to come and help Mrs. Alarcon? And would you send our breakfast in about half an hour?”
He put the phone down. “I’ll leave the door open for Ambrosia,” he said. “And if it’s all right with you, I’ll be back to have breakfast with you.”
“Of course.” She still didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Don’t try to get up alone. Let Ambrosia help you.”
“All right.”
“Well then...” Still he hesitated, not wanting to leave her. He rested a hand on her thigh, squeezed, and then with a sigh he picked up the shirt and trousers he’d discarded so rapidly last night and left the room.
Annabel lay where she was, trying to get her breathing back to normal, knowing she should have stopped him sooner. But heaven help her, she had liked his kissing her, liked his touching her that way.
She was twenty-nine. She knew she must have had some sexual experience. With him? Had the familiarity she felt in his arms only been the familiarity of a remembered love affair with someone else. Or had Luis been the man in whose arms she had lain, whose lips she had kissed?
“‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why...’”
Lines of a half-forgotten poem came back to her. Edna Millay? Strange that she could remember that when she couldn’t even remember her own name.
Was Luis Miguel Alarcon really her husband, or was this all a great game of pretense, a web of fabrication being woven around her, drawing her in? And if it was, what was the why of it? If Luis had lied about the clothes, what else had he lied about? How could she trust him?
Luis was an attractive man, an intensely masculine man with a sexuality that seemed barely held in check. His kiss had excited her, his touch had inflamed her. Would she be able to resist him the next time?
Tortured by all kinds of conflicting thoughts and emotions, she barely heard Ambrosia call out, “It be all right if I come in?” And when Annabel said yes, she came in and helped her to the bathroom.
Sitting on the low porcelain seat in the tub, Annabel showered and washed her hair. She dried it with the dryer in the bathroom, then brushed her hair back into a ponytail, touched a bit of mascara to her eyelashes and lip gloss to her lips.
When she finished, Ambrosia helped her dress in a summer sundress she knew she had never seen before.
When Luis knocked at the bedroom door she told him to come in.
“We’d better have a look at your hand and your foot,” he said, and carried her to the chaise, where he took the wet bandage off her foot.
“It looks better,” he said, touching it carefully. “But we’ll bandage it again just to keep it clean for another day. Now let’s see your hand.”
It still hurt. The two places where the spinelike needles had broken off were red and sore. He put more antiseptic cream on them, then rebandaged her hand and gave her the antibiotic. And although she insisted she could walk, he picked her up and carried her onto the balcony.
Meadowlark had decorated the table with bright red hibiscus and set it with fine English china.
“How pretty,” Annabel said with a smile.
Meadowlark smiled back. She was an exceptionally lovely young woman, Annabel thought, with skin the color of coffee and cream. Her eyes were slightly tilted and her eyelashes were impossibly long. She wore her curly hair short, and colorfully bright earrings dangled from her ears.
Now, before Luis could, she pulled out Annabel’s chair and said, “If there be anything else you want, you just holler out.”
“Everything looks wonderful,” Annabel said. “Thank you, Meadowlark.” Then, because she was too curious to restrain herself, she added, “I love your name. Where does it come from?”
“My mama.” Meadowlark grinned. “She say right at the moment when my daddy plant his seed she heard a meadowlark singing. She say she knew right then she was going to be pregnant, and that if I be a girl, she name me after the bird.”
Luis raised a skeptical eyebrow, but before he could make a comment, Annabel said, “That’s wonderful, Meadowlark. Thank you for telling me.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She patted Annabel’s shoulder. “You want anything, anything at all, you let me know.”
There was fresh orange juice, a platter of fruit, ham and eggs and buttered croissants, mango jam and a silver carafe of coffee.
Annabel had eaten very little yesterday but she made up for it now. The fruit was delicious, the ham succulent and the eggs just right. When she buttered her second croissant and added a dollop of mango jam, she looked up to see Luis grinning at her.
“I have a hunch you’re going to live,” he said. “Nobody with an appetite like yours is sick.”
“I guess I was hungry.” When she took a bite of the croissant, a smudge of the mango jam pebbled her lower lip and she put her tongue out to lick it off. “Everything is delicious, Luis. You really do live very well here.”
“We live very well here,” he said, barely restraining the impulse to leap across the table and nibble on the lip that she had licked.
She took a last sip of coffee. “I’ve never been here before.”
“Of course you have.”
Annabel shook her head. “You’re all pretending that I h
ave, but I don’t believe it. Or you. Any of you, Ambrosia, the two men at the dock...” She lifted a bit of the material of her skirt. “I’ve never worn this dress before, not this or any of the clothes in the closet.”
“Of course you have. They’re your clothes.”
“They’re new clothes. I found the price tag on one of the dresses and on a sweater.”
A muscle jumped in his cheek. He looked startled, angry. “We...we went to Puerto Rico last month. You shopped there.”
“And threw out everything I’d owned before?” She shoved her chair back from the table. “That doesn’t make sense. I wouldn’t have done that.”
“Not everything in your closet is new. Ambrosia takes good care of your clothes. They just look new.”
She didn’t believe him. He saw in her eyes that she didn’t. He wanted her to, not just because she would be easier to handle if she did, but because it would be easier for her, too. Whatever might have happened, whatever conspiracy she might have been involved in, above all else he wanted to protect her.
Last night she had felt very small and defenseless in his arms and he had experienced feelings he hadn’t known for a long time, feelings he did not entirely welcome. He reminded himself now that he had brought her here for a reason. No matter how appealing she might be, he had to keep his mind focused on his real objective. And so he steeled himself to say, “You’re being ridiculous, Annabel. The clothes in the closet are yours. Don’t start imagining things.”
With that, he pushed his chair back from the table and stalked off. Leaving her alone and wondering if, after all, she had only been imagining things.
The dreams came again that night. She was on the boat. The day was hot, muggy. The sea was a flat gray and there were storm clouds overhead. A man put his arm around her. “What a perfect day,” he said. “If this was the last day of my life, I’d die a happy man.”
Someone laughed.
“Die...” The words echoed in her mind. “Die a happy man.”
“You get your wish, pal.”
A woman screamed.
Mouths opened in horror, screaming a silent scream.
Bullets sprayed—thunk, thunk, thunk—and a man, a man who seemed to be looking at her through a pane of rain-spattered glass, smiled a terrifying smile. Another man, eyes wide with terror, windmilled his arms and tried to run. Two bullets tore into his back and he fell, as though in slow motion, facedown on the deck.
A gun, black steel, was aimed at her chest. She was going to die. God in heaven. Going to die. “No!” she screamed. Screamed and couldn’t stop screaming....
“Annabel!”
“Oh my God! Oh my God, he’s going to kill me!”
“It’s only a dream, a nightmare. Wake up. You’re all right. You’re safe.”
“He killed them,” she cried, her eyes wide, unseeing. “He killed them all.”
“Who?” Luis asked. “Who killed them?”
“He..he killed him and then her and...and another man, and then he...he was going to kill me.”
“What did he look like? The man in your dream. Can you tell me, Annabel? Can you tell me what he looked like?”
She was trying to focus, fighting to get things in perspective. But she was terrified, so terrified her teeth were chattering.
Luis gripped her shoulders. “Think, Annabel. Try to think.”
She closed her eyes. “Dark...dark eyes. A narrow face and a scar, a scar on his chin. He was wearing a jacket.” She opened her eyes and looked at Luis. “It was hot but he was wearing a jacket.”
The grip on her shoulders tightened. “Can you remember his name?”
She shook her head.
“Flynn,” he said. “Zachary Flynn. Does that mean anything?”
“I...I don’t know.” She covered her eyes and tried to stop shaking. “I don’t remember.”
“All right,” he said. “No more questions. Try to sleep.”
The hands that had come up to cover her eyes lowered and she shook her head. “I’m afraid to sleep,” she whispered. “Afraid of the dream.”
“I’ll stay with you.”
She tried to see his face through the darkness, the face of this man who said he was her husband. He had lied to her, she knew, but she didn’t want to be alone, and when he eased her back into the bed and carefully covered her with the sheet, she was reluctant to have him leave.
Still... “You don’t have to stay.” She yawned. “I’ll put the light on and read for a—” She yawned again. “For a while.”
He stroked the hair back from her face.
“I’m all right now. Really. I...” But while she was trying to think about what she wanted to say, she fell asleep.
When she did, Luis lay down beside her, on top of the sheet, his head propped on a doubled-up pillow. He thought about her dream and the way she had described Zachary Flynn, which meant of course that she was beginning to remember, if not in her conscious mind, then surely in her subconscious.
She’d said in her dream that he had killed the others. But it was the explosion that killed them. Yes, the coast guard had found Flynn’s jacket floating in the water with other debris, so it was pretty obvious he had been aboard. But presumably he’d died in the explosion, too.
Why had Annabel dreamed about people being shot? Dreams weren’t true to life, of course, they were only dreams. And Flynn was dead, just as the others were.
Was Annabel starting to remember? Could some of what she’d dreamed have been a horrible reality?
Was she as innocent as she looked, or had she been a part of some devious plan?
So many thoughts, and all the while so aware of her here in the bed beside him. In the shadowed light he could make out the shape of her body, the length of her legs, the mound of her hip, the tangled spread of her hair on the pillow next to him. He eased his own pillow down, and finally, telling himself he wouldn’t, he, too, slept.
The rain started sometime toward dawn, changing the temperature, chilling the air. Luis shivered and without waking crawled under the sheet. He awoke an hour later to find Annabel snuggled up against him, her face against his shoulder, one arm thrown over his waist.
He lay where he was, realizing he must have moved under the sheet with her, and that if she woke, she wouldn’t like it. If he could ease out of bed without waking her... But when he began to slide away from her, she mumbled in protest and tightened her hold on his waist. Her gown had hiked up. He felt the line of her bare leg against his, the softness of thigh, the roundness of hip. And the sudden insistent strength of his arousal.
He was afraid to move, afraid to have her move. But just then, as though reading his mind, she snuggled closer. Her breast brushed against his chest and he groaned.
“Whazzat?” The mumbled word was accompanied by a sinuous cat stretch and a sleepy purr.
“Annabel?”
She nuzzled against his chest.
“I...uh, I have to get up.”
The arm around his waist tightened. She put one leg over his.
“Por Dios, Annabel!”
Her eyes flew open. She stared at him, started to say, “What are you...?” when he kissed her. Kissed her with all of the pent-up passion he’d held in check for the past few days. Kissed her and couldn’t stop kissing her.
She said, “Wait!” and began to struggle against him. When she pushed against his chest, the straps on her gown slipped down, exposing her breasts.
“Love,” he said against her lips. “Oh, love, it’s been so long.”
“Let me go!”
“Annabel, I... I’ve waited so long.” He kissed her again and said, “Kiss me back. Part your lips for me.”
“No,” she whispered. “No, I...” But when his kiss deepened, when he moved his mouth so fiercely against hers, her lips softened, parted.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, mi querida. Amor de mi vida. Corazón. Corazón.”
He touched her breasts and began to stroke them, softly, lightly, coming
ever closer to the poised and hardened peak. She moaned into his mouth and he said, “So soft. So soft.” And leaned to kiss her breasts.
And, oh, the feel of his mouth on her that way, the flick of his tongue against the hard peak of her nipple. He slid his hands under her back to raise her higher and rested his head between the mounds of her breasts, rubbing his face back and forth, whispering words in Spanish she didn’t understand.
He held her there, gently caressing, gently suckling her, drawing out her passion, her heat. And when he reached to stroke between her legs, he said, “You’re waiting for me, wanting me as I want you.” And before she could reply, he kissed her mouth again and, grasping her hips, thrust himself into her.
“No!” she whispered, even as she lifted her body to his. “Oh, no!” she cried, even as her legs came up to hold him closer, even as her mouth sought his mouth.
She was caught in a whirlwind of remembered passion she couldn’t control, clinging to him as he clung to her, lifting her body to his, whispering his name in a litany of need. “Luis, Luis, Luis.” With each thrust, “Luis.”
He left her mouth to capture a breast. His teeth closed over one tender peak, and when he flicked hard with his tongue, she cried out.
There was no holding back now. Her body was on fire, yearning, yearning, oh, sweet heaven, wanting him, wanting to be closer, to be a part of him, to merge her body with his. She climbed higher and yet higher in the grip of sensation after sensation, dizzied, frantic.
“Yes!” he said. “Yes!” He thrust hard against her, again and again while she clung to him, close to fainting, lost in an immensity of feeling, carried higher and higher on the crest of passion.
“Oh, please,” she said. And then, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes!”
She cried aloud, shattered and broken and his.
“Oh, love,” he said. “Love.”
And when he collapsed over her, she held him close and whispered, “Luis. Luis.”
Afterward, heart thudding against heart, he buried his face in that space between her throat and shoulder, his lips against her skin.
Long-Lost Wife? Page 8
