Dark Desires

by JoAnn Ross

  He wanted to kiss her again. Badly. But he forced himself to resist the temptation. Instead, he simply reached down, took her hand and laced their fingers together.

  Relieved that Blake seemed willing to back away from what had been a very tempting situation, Savannah made the mistake of relaxing as they walked back up the beach, hand in hand.

  They had almost reached the house when Blake said, "Soon you're going to realize that you'll always be safe with me, Savannah."

  It had been too long since he'd kissed her—almost five minutes. Blake bent his head and brushed his lips against hers. The kiss was feather soft and unthreatening. But no less satisfying. "And when you do, we're going to make love."

  For some reason, this time his aura of masculine confidence didn't irritate her. Instead, she smiled. "You don't give up easily, do you?"

  The look he gave her was as serious as any she'd seen. "When it's something—or someone—I want? Never."

  As they entered the house, Savannah couldn't quite decide whether to take his quietly spoken declaration as a promise or a threat.

  Two days later, Savannah was in the tower room, enjoying the warmth of the fire as she stood in front of the window and watched Blake walk along the beach. Although she'd gotten into the habit of joining him on his frequent walks, this afternoon she'd begged off, pleading the feminine excuse of a headache. In truth, she needed some time alone. Time to try to unravel her tangled feelings about this frustratingly solitary man. She wanted him. Desperately. Every morning, she would come down the stairs, walk into the kitchen where she'd find him reading the paper over his morning coffee and be hit by a stab of desire that could only be described as visceral.

  During the day, she'd glance over to where he was working the Moviola editing machine, watch his strong hands turn the film wheels and grow warm as she remembered, in dazzling detail, exactly how those hands had felt on her body.

  In the evening, as they sat in front of the fire in the tower room—immersed in mutual silence, the cat curled up between them on the sofa while Cujo offered random, pithy comments from his perch—she realized that she'd never felt so comfortable with anyone. And late at night, lying in her lonely antique bed, she'd rerun their lovemaking over and over again, like the flickering scenes from an erotic movie…

  She watched him stop and pick something up from the damp gray sand, study it, then slip it into the pocket of his leather jacket. As if sensing her watching him, he looked up at the window and for a suspended moment, their gazes met and held. Then he continued down the beach.

  Cujo left his perch and settled on her shoulder. No longer afraid of the gregarious, talkative bird, Savannah reached up and absently stroked his black feathers.

  Blake was a puzzle inside an enigma. He was not an easy man to get to know. His reputation—of being cool, aloof, intensely private—was partly true. But she'd seen glimpses of another Blake Winters: a warm, caring man who could laugh—and love.

  Savannah sighed. No, he wasn't an easy man to know, and he would be an even more difficult man to love. If she were in love with him. Which, of course, she wasn't.

  "The lady doth protest too much."

  Cujo tilted his head, studying her with his unblinking black eyes. Unnerved by the way the bird had hit just a little too close to home, Savannah felt a slight inner twinge.

  Blake wasn't surprised when he looked up at the window and saw Savannah standing there. He'd felt her watching him. Somehow, during these past days, something indefinable had happened between them, allowing them to sense each other's thoughts and feelings . He had tried to come up with a time that had ever happened to him with any other person and came up blank. What he and Savannah shared was almost like a Vulcan mind-meld, he considered with a dry smile.

  Analyzing emotions did not come easily to Blake; he had long ago accepted that about himself. In his more introspective moments he often thought that was why he was so drawn to making films. It allowed him to explore his own inner turmoil on that giant silver screen and later, when he slipped unnoticed into the back row of a theater and watched an audience respond to his vision, he was forced to consider that perhaps he wasn't as unique as he liked to think. Or as solitary.

  Blake enjoyed living alone. At least, he had before Savannah Starr had taken hold of the orderly tapestry he'd woven of his life, plucked loose a few tidy threads, and changed everything. As he continued walking along the water's edge, it occurred to him that he enjoyed Savannah's company.

  Which was totally unexpected. A reclusive man, Blake didn't like people invading his space, infiltrating his haven. But rather than being intrusive, Savannah's presence under his roof made him feel something dangerously close to contentment.

  Something else had changed, as well. Although he still wanted her—painfully—during these past days, he'd found himself wanting her friendship, too. This was a subtle change in their relationship that he didn't quite understand and wasn't certain he cared for. But it was a fact—one he was going to have to face when their work together was done.

  In the meantime, he was going to have to rely on his self-control to keep from dragging her off to bed at the slightest provocation. After a checkered youth that had included more fistfights than he cared to count, Blake had learned to harness his more primitive emotions with a strength others found discomfitting.

  He'd been called, by both acquaintances and enemies, an unfeeling son of a bitch. During his marriage to Pamela, she had managed to come up with several even less-complimentary epithets.

  None of the unflattering descriptions had bothered him. Blake had never cared what others thought of him. Or said about him. Until Savannah. She was the one woman he didn't want to think him cold or unfeeling—because she was the first woman he'd ever met who elicited pure emotion.

  Looking out to sea, Blake brooded. Unfortunately, Savannah was also the one woman with whom he didn't dare lose control. The tide was coming in. A froth of icy water washed over his boots. As he turned back toward the house, Blake wondered when, exactly, his hard-won self-restraint had become a prison.

  She was back at the synthesizer when Blake returned. Immersed in her work, she hadn't heard him come up the stairs. Taking advantage of the opportunity to watch her undetected, he leaned against the doorjamb, enjoying the view.

  The synthesizer was capable of duplicating an amazing array of sounds and at the moment, Savannah was struggling with a passage of woodwinds. Her slender fingers moved over the keys again and again— sometimes changing a single note; at others, altering the time of a few bars or a phrase.

  He understood her almost-compulsive need for precision. How many times had he labored over a scene or even a single line of dialogue? Blake decided that Savannah's refusal to accept less than perfection was something else they had in common.

  If he was keeping score.

  Which he wasn't.

  The hell, he wasn't.

  8

  Savannah was working nearly around the clock. After taking a cryptic, strangely threatening message for Blake from the studio, she'd learned about his deadline dilemma and was determined that she not be the cause of him losing artistic control.

  As the days passed, she also learned to find her way around the labyrinthine corridors of Blake's house with ease. Familiarity also brought comfort as she realized the house wasn't nearly as spooky as she'd first thought. Her attitude immediately changed, however, the morning Blake insisted on taking her down into the basement.

  Descending the narrow, creaky wooden stairs into the lurking shadows, Savannah felt exactly like a heroine from some Gothic romance novel. Or from a Edgar Allan Poe story.

  "Tell me again why I need to come down here," she complained. Something rustled in the corner. Savannah stifled a scream as a small gray field mouse scurried across the room.

  Blake appeared not to notice. "So you can learn how the boiler works."

  "I know all I need to know about the boiler. I turn on the tap and presto, hot water comes
out. What else is there to know?"

  "This, for one thing," he said, pointing to a complex assortment of gauges, handles and dials. "It's important to check the steam level every so often. If the pressure builds up and steam isn't released, this entire house could blow sky-high."

  "Oh."

  Savannah leaned closer. Perhaps he had a point, after all, she decided, as she watched him demonstrate the heating system that was a great deal more complicated than her own electric furnace. Actually, now that she thought about it, Savannah had never seen her furnace. It sat atop her roof, obediently blowing warm air whenever she flipped the switch.

  Nothing about Blake Winters—his work, his inscrutable personality, even this house with its temperamental, turn-of-the-century boiler—was simple. But wasn't that partly why she found him so intriguing? she asked herself.

  After Blake was convinced that Savannah knew how to operate the seemingly inexhaustible boiler, they went back upstairs to the studio where they were still working long after the sun had sunk into the sea.

  Although she'd grown accustomed to having Blake watch her work, Savannah found herself growing more and more uncomfortable.

  The scene she was scoring was a pivotal one: the first lovemaking scene between the bridegroom and his vampire bride. The couple was spending their honeymoon in a remote, Gothic hotel that was eerily similar to Blake's own home. Like Blake's, it was also perched precariously on a cliff overlooking a storm-tossed sea.

  Instead of the customary klieg lights, Blake had lit the scene with dozens of flickering white candles that reminded Savannah of the beeswax ones in her own bedroom upstairs. A fire crackled in the stone fireplace while outside the leaded windows a storm raged. Thunder boomed and lightning flashed, intermittently bathing the room in a brilliant, stuttering white light.

  The old-fashioned four-poster bed was draped in yards and yards of diaphanous white gauze. At the beginning of the scene, the camera captured only the shadows of the two lovers as they embraced, drew apart, then embraced again. The slow, soulful sound of a saxophone matched the rhythm of their movements.

  Cut to a medium shot. The shadowy woman began undressing her new husband. She unbuttoned his white dress-shirt, flinging its ebony studs aside with sensual abandon. As she pressed her lips against each new bit of exposed flesh, her long hair, draped over his naked chest, shimmered in the candlelight like a platinum curtain.

  The camera cut to the fire, over to the rain-lashed windows, and then slowly circled the room, taking in every exquisitely-styled detail: the wax dripping down the sides of the fat white candles, the cream satin high heels lying on the plank floor, a pair of diamond-and-pearl earrings discarded on the bedside table, the gossamer wedding veil abandoned on a gold satin chair, an open champagne bottle, the glittering chips of ice surrounding it melting in the silver bucket.

  The camera continued toward the bed, past its billowy draperies, moving over the couple with the sensuality of a lover's caress. The woman left the plump feather mattress long enough to bend down and pull the high-necked, lacy confection of a wedding dress over her head. The gown fell to the floor in a billowy cloud of white European lace and seed pearls.

  Beneath the dress, she was wearing a white merry-widow that plunged nearly to her navel while displaying full, firm breasts remarkable even by Hollywood standards. The snowy lace of the merrywidow was so sheer that it could have been spun from spiderwebs. A white lace string bikini, a matching garter belt and lace-topped white stockings completed her ensemble.

  Along with, Savannah noticed, admiring Blake's unerring eye for detail, a strand of glowing white pearls.

  The woman stood beside the bed for a long, silent moment, letting her husband drink in the provocative sight. Except for its color, there was nothing virginal about such wedding-night lingerie. As Savannah added some brass to the sax, she decided with a small, inward sigh, that this woman was probably every man's secret fantasy come to life.

  The groom stared, spellbound. The music, like the woman herself, seemed to taunt him. Woodwinds flowed in and out of the melody, like the sound of a soft summer breeze blowing through the grass of a lush, flower-strewn meadow.

  Her flesh gleamed like warm satin in the candlelight; as the groom reached out to touch it, something dangerous flickered in her silvery eyes—something as compelling as it was frightening. The all-seeing eye of Blake's camera captured both the man's fear and his unwilling fascination before returning to the woman's face. Her eyes had turned as hard as silver dollars, but her enticing smile, and the way her hands moved invitingly over her own curves, drew him nearer.

  Outside the honeymoon suite, a full moon rose in a midnight-black sky. Inside, the sexual tension was building. Savannah reminded herself that these were only actors playing their parts. They were paid to pretend passion. Soon Blake would yell, "Cut!" the magic would disappear and everyone would go home. But even as she told herself that, she found her own body warming, responding to the sensual crescendo Blake had so brilliantly orchestrated.

  Even as she fought against the feelings the lushly erotic scene evoked, even as she struggled to keep her mind on the music, Savannah couldn't help wondering if this was how Pamela had appeared to Blake on their wedding night. And if so, how horribly she must pale in comparison.

  Blake, who had begun watching the scene with a director's hypercritical eye, realized he'd made a fatal mistake in viewing this particular scene with Savannah. As he watched the actress's silvery blond hair drape across the man's chest, all he could think about was how Savannah's hair had felt like silk against his skin. And when the woman's lips skimmed down the actor's chest, the memory of Savannah's tender kisses made his own flesh burn.

  And when the actress took off her wedding dress, displaying herself with arrogant female pride, Blake remembered Savannah's endearing and entirely misplaced fear that he'd find her body unattractive.

  Compared to the frothy white lingerie worn by the actress in the wedding-night scene, Savannah's underwear—plain white cotton and as starkly utilitarian as a nun's—had been an admitted surprise. Blake would have expected a woman of Savannah's intensely passionate nature to have been wearing satin and lace. Black, perhaps. Or even red.

  Puzzled at first, Blake had since decided that believing her body to be flawed, Savannah had taken to wearing the decidedly unsexy lingerie in an attempt to suppress her sexuality.

  He smiled. She might as well try to stop the tide from rising and ebbing. Or the sun from coming up each morning. Because the truth of the matter was that Savannah Starr was the most passionate woman he'd ever known. He couldn't remember when he'd wanted a woman more than Savannah. He couldn't remember when he'd needed a woman more.

  His body stirred, painfully reminding him that it had been much too long since he'd held her in his arms; since he'd watched her dark eyes widen in amazement as he took them both over the edge.

  The images continued to flicker on the screen. Savannah's body ached as she watched the man's strong dark hands move over the woman's glistening flesh. Just the memory of Blake's hand touching her in that very same way made her own skin grow hot and sensitized.

  The couple lying amid the love-tangled sheets was naked now. The woman was clad only in her pearls and as she drew him down on top of her—his dark male flesh against her ivory female flesh—she draped the necklace over his head, as well, holding him to her with the gleaming strand of beads.

  Savannah glanced over at Blake, saw his faint smile and wondered at its cause. Was he remembering Pamela? Was he remembering what it had been like to make love to her perfect body?

  The mood was intensifying. Savannah's fingers trembled on the synthesizer keyboard; the music swelled. On the screen a log collapsed in the fire, sending forth a flare of orange sparks. The wind howled at the windows like a lost spirit, a ghostly white ring encircled the cold pale moon.

  The groom was lost in an overwhelming passion. So much so that he didn't notice the change in his new bride. He didn'
t notice the way her silver eyes changed to flame; he didn't see the needle-sharp fangs appear from between her ruby-red lips.

  Savannah introduced a clash of percussion as the woman buried those sharp white fangs deep into the mahogany flesh of her husband's neck.

  The milky pearls broke, scattering over the bed, over the floor. Fade to black.

  "Wow." Exhausted, Savannah slumped back in the chair and ran her hands through her hair. She was nervous. Confused.

  "Wow, indeed," Blake agreed numbly. "Once the ratings board sees what you've done to that scene, we'll be lucky if we can pull a NC-17."

  "What I did to the scene?"

  Savannah spun around in her chair and made the mistake of looking directly into his eyes. The banked fires smoldering in those depths told her that she hadn't been the only one unduly influenced by the highly charged scene. "You're the director, Blake."

  In an effort to break away from his steady, heated gaze, she jumped out of her chair and went over to the window, where she stood looking over the moon-gilded sea. "You're also the producer and the writer," she reminded him needlessly. "All I did was add some music."

  "You made that scene come alive," he argued. "I can't remember when I've had a song go straight to my blood like that." Blake found himself wanting everything that her music had hinted at. The heat. The passion. God help him, even the madness.

  "The intensity was already there. I simply tried to echo the mood you'd created."

  His fingers practically itched with the need to touch her. "Which you did. Brilliantly."

  "Thank you."

  Having already determined that Blake Winters was a perfectionist, Savannah knew that such rare words of praise should bring pleasure. And they probably would, she decided, as soon as her mind started working properly again. At the moment, that familiar, warm, giddy feeling was surging through her, leaving her weak.

  Blake swore softly. "I give up." He stood and crossed the room to stand behind her. "I promised I wouldn't force you into my bed, Savannah. And I meant it."