INTIMATE STRANGER

by Donna Sterling

  Somewhere in the terrifying distance, she heard a door open. His voice came from the far end of the hallway. "Jen?"

  With fierce concentration, she forced her breathing to a slower pace—a struggle she wasn't sure she could win. Her eyes had begun to adjust to the dark, she realized, and she made out vague outlines of doorways and furniture within the bedrooms. The vagueness itself terrified her.

  "Trev," she said with only a slight tremor as she braced her hand against the hallway wall, "what happened to the lights?"

  "We must have thrown a breaker." A hazy image of white appeared, and as he drew nearer, she realized he wore nothing but a white towel slung low around his hips. "Are you all right?"

  "Yes," she whispered, dizzy from the force of blood rushing to her head with every heavy thud of her heart. "Why wouldn't I be?"

  One large, warm hand slid around her waist, while his iron-strong arm hooked around her shoulders. "I thought I heard you yell," he murmured, pulling her against him.

  "Yell? Oh … I was just startled." Leaning gratefully into him, she buried her face against his bare shoulder. His bare, dry shoulder. She'd thought he'd been in the shower. Obviously, he hadn't stepped into it yet—

  "Are you scared of the dark?" he whispered into her hair, distracting her from vague musings.

  "No."

  He held her tightly enfolded in his arms, his strong, solid body an infinite comfort. "Then why is your heart pounding so hard?"

  "Probably because I—I tripped over my suitcase. The fall gave me a fright. But I'm fine."

  He didn't reply for a while. When he did, he sounded doubtful. "You're sure you're okay?"

  "Yes." But she remained in his arms, flush against his chest, savoring his nearness and warm, muscular body.

  "Then I'll go see if I can find the circuit box. It may be in the garage." He made a move to pull away.

  "No, wait." She tightened her hold around his lean, bare waist. She didn't want to let him go, didn't want to face the darkness alone yet. Not until she'd fortified herself a little more. "You're not dressed." She ran her hand up the broad, sinewy planes of his back. "You'll catch a chill if you go outside. The lights will probably come back on by themselves, anyway."

  "They won't, Jen." A huskiness had entered his voice, and he brushed his slightly abrasive face against hers, his breath warming her skin, stirring her hair. "I saw through the bedroom window that the other houses have light. Ours is the only one without power. We've thrown a breaker."

  "Do you have a lantern, or flashlight, or candles?"

  "I don't think we've unpacked them yet."

  The ramifications slowly occurred to her. Unless Trev went searching for the circuit box, he wouldn't be able to see her very clearly in the dark. Which meant, as long as she kept him in her arms, she had no reason not to spend some time in his bed. She couldn't stay too long, though.

  She certainly couldn't allow herself to fall asleep.

  "The dark's not necessarily a bad thing, is it?" he rasped against her ear. With a slow caress down her back and backside, he fitted her body to his, and she felt the heat and size of his arousal through the thin cotton towel. "I mean, we could probably find something to keep ourselves occupied."

  Sensual longing heated her blood. With quickening breath, she smoothed her hands over the towel in a lingering path along his taut, rounded buttocks, then down to his bare upper thighs—all hot virile flesh, silky hair and hard muscle. "Yeah … I'm sure we'll find something."

  Trev's heart revved; his temperature soared. Abandoning the newest question that had been needling him—had she been terrified of the dark?—he surrendered with a tortured groan, dug his fingers into her lustrous, unbound hair and kissed her. She tasted of chocolate, sweetness and all things utterly delectable. As the kiss slanted and surged, he filled his hands with her breasts, so soft and accessible beneath the loose, body-heated silk.

  The nightgown had to come off. Now. He needed her naked against him. He'd been waiting too damn long. Impatiently he pushed the satiny straps from her shoulders and brushed the gown down the curves of her body. She tugged the towel from his hips. He yanked her panties in frenzied pulls down her sleek thighs and endless legs.

  When he finally took her mouth in another voluptuous kiss, he cupped his hands around her bottom and lifted her. Her legs went around his hips, enfolding him in her feminine softness and warmth. With blinding, voracious need, he carried her to his bed.

  She would be his. That's all that mattered for the moment. He'd put everything from his mind—all doubts, questions and suspicions—until they both lay sated and exhausted in each other's arms.

  Then, God help him, he'd go looking for butterflies.

  Passion possessed him for hours. He loved her in countless ways, with his body, hands and mouth, in countless positions, each one taking him deeper and higher, coaxing her into loud, earth-shaking orgasms, and soft, trembly, weeping ones—and the kind that launched both her and him into some distant heaven where their souls soared and danced and floated back to earth profoundly transformed. He couldn't get enough of her. He knew he never would.

  Even as he lay spent and silent beside her in the small hours of the morning, their fingers loosely entwined, their bodies salty with the sweat of hard loving, he wasn't ready to quit. Maybe because he was afraid that once they did, he'd never have her again.

  He couldn't tolerate that thought. She was a fever in his blood, but a life-giving fever. She was also an ache in his heart, because as much as she'd opened her body to him, she still kept a secret part of herself closed. The deeper he kissed her, the longer her loved her, the more aware he became of it.

  Nor could he forget the fact that she would make love to him only in the dark. He wanted her body, heart and soul. She gave them, but only on loan.

  He had to know why.

  In taut, unmoving silence, he waited until the sound of her breathing changed to the deeper, slower rhythm of sleep. She wouldn't sleep long, he knew. Her determination was too strong. Every time they'd stopped and rested, she'd murmured her intention of leaving his bed "to get some sleep." He couldn't think of a better place for them to sleep than in each other's arms, but he knew better than to argue. Instead, he'd drawn her back into the passion, distracted her with another round of lovemaking.

  He believed he'd finally worn her out. For the moment.

  The time had come. His pulse pounded in his ears as he reached between the bed and nightstand and drew out a small gas lantern. Setting it on the stand, he took matches from the drawer and lit the wick. A bright flame illuminated the immediate area with a soft white glow.

  He glanced at her face. She hadn't batted an eyelash.

  Slowly, cautiously, he shifted onto his side, pushing up on one arm to loom over her. His first look sent a rush of renewed heat to his head, chest and loins. She was just so damn beautiful. He had come to know her body by feel, scent and taste, but the luxury of sight added a poignant richness.

  Holding his desire firmly in check, he focused on his mission and skimmed his gaze down her body, bracing himself for what he might find imprinted below her navel. Conflicting emotions gripped him in that millisecond before he knew—a visceral fear that he'd find the butterfly and learn that he'd been the victim of some terrible deceit; and a gut-wrenching hope that he would find the butterfly, which would mean Diana was alive and well … and with him. The opposing forces clashed so fiercely in his heart that when he reached his targeted area, the final discovery came as something of a shock.

  There was no butterfly. No butterfly. Only then did he realize how sure he'd been that he'd find one. He simply couldn't fathom that she looked, sounded, acted and reacted in every situation so much like Diana, without, in fact, being Diana. Even now, he refused to take the absence of the butterfly as conclusive proof that she wasn't. If she'd gone to the extreme measure of surgically altering her face, he reasoned, she could have removed the butterfly, too.

  Realizing how crazy he
would sound if he shared his suspicions with anyone—and wondering, for the umpteenth time, if he had lost touch with sanity—he was seized by the need to resolve the question of her identity here and now. If she was Diana, he could surely find another way to identify her. He'd been so familiar with her body, right down to the last detail. But seven years had gone by, and time always wrought changes—and dimmed even the most treasured memories. Would he recognize his wife, if he were staring at her now?

  Desperately determined, he scanned Jen's body in search of telling features. Though the hair on her head was a dark ash-blond, the tangle of curls between her thighs was dark. A rich, cocoa brown … like Diana's. He couldn't make much of that, though. Thousands of women lightened their hair, and he wasn't even sure he could deduce that she wasn't a natural blonde.

  Her breasts were fuller and rounder than he remembered Diana's to be. But the years that took her from twenty to twenty-seven could have accounted for the extra fullness, as well as the more voluptuous flare of her hips.

  His attention then shifted to her nipples. They were a deep, tawny rose color, and reminded him of sunbursts. Something in his gut began to tighten. Sunbursts. How could he have forgotten? He swore he'd taken those very sunbursts into his mouth more times than he could count.

  Other details soon returned to him from the foggy recesses of his memory. Adrenaline surged, accelerating his pulse and sharpening his senses, as he shifted his scrutiny to her navel—a neat, perfect oval in the concave dip of her stomach. Sure enough, he found within that oval a delicate swirl resembling the tip of a rosebud. His stomach constricted like a fist. He'd dipped his tongue into that rosebud many years ago.

  He suspected he knew what he'd find on her inner thigh, too—a light, almost imperceptible beauty mark in the shape of a crescent. Her current position frustrated his efforts. She lay with her thighs angled in a way that cast the area into shadow.

  With his heart thudding so loudly he feared she'd wake from it, he grabbed the lantern from the bedside table and brought the light closer, edging farther down on the bed, his scrutiny of her body intense. Before he made it as far as her thighs, the concentrated circle of light swept over her abdomen.

  And that's when he detected it, just below the tan line where her bikini bottoms would start. The butterfly. Or what was left of it. A small patch of colors, faded from jewel-bright to dream-hazy. Even when he strained his eyes, he couldn't identify a definite shape. But the colors were there.

  Or were his eyes playing tricks, painting illusions across her skin—illusions born of obsession?

  He needed better light, damn it. Bright electric light, to see all the elements of her body that he swore he recognized. Until he examined them more clearly, he couldn't allow himself to jump to conclusions.

  Intending to hurry into the utility room and flip the switch in the circuit box to restore the power he'd deliberately cut earlier, Trev braced himself on his elbow beside her and reached to set the lantern on the nightstand. The movement jostled her.

  With a languid intake of breath, a leisurely stretch of her elegant body and a small, dreamy smile, she lifted her long, dark lashes. Blinked herself awake. Turned her head and glanced at him.

  And his heart slowed to a near halt.

  He stared directly into eyes he could never forget, or mistake for anyone else's. Vivid green eyes—forest green—with dramatic rays of gold radiating through them like sunbeams.

  Diana's eyes.

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  10

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  He could do nothing but stare. He had no voice, no words. The shock of knowing for sure was too great a blow to absorb that quickly. She was Diana. She was the woman he'd married, and lost, and mourned. His bride, his wife. His greatest joy, his greatest sorrow. Diana.

  "Trev?" Her brows gathered in a small frown as she pushed herself up on her elbows beside him, her hair a silky, disheveled cascade down her naked back. "Is something—?"

  Her words cut off, and he watched as awareness settled in. He believed it was his thunderstruck stare that chased away the last of her sleepiness. Her eyes widened, and her glance darted to the glowing lantern, then down at her nakedness in unmistakable alarm. With a soft cry, she yanked a corner of the sheet that lay bunched on the far side of the mattress and tugged the white linen around her for cover. "What—what are you doing? Where did you get the lantern? You said—I thought you didn't have—"

  Again she stopped mid-sentence, her voice fading in the thick, tense silence. Clearly she read the depth of shock in his gaze. She sat perfectly still, her back stiff, the sheet clutched against her chest and draped across her body. Her stunningly familiar body.

  Gazing into her green-gold eyes, he had no doubts left. His mind still reeled, though, in an attempt to grasp the momentous truth and all its imputations.

  Before he realized he'd moved at all, he took her face between his hands. With a tight, sick feeling of awe, he scrutinized the changes in her appearance, turning her face slowly from one side to the other. She tried to pull away. He wouldn't allow her to escape, but held on tightly, sweeping his thumbs over her cheeks, jaw and mouth. Her nose was different, too. Her chin … her eyelids…

  "Why?" he asked in a drawn-out whisper. "Just tell me why."

  "I—I don't know what you're talking about."

  Anger flashed through his mind-clouding shock. "No more lies. The game is over. Tell me, Diana. Just tell me." She'd deliberately left him. Hidden from him. Let him grieve … for seven years.

  "My name's not Diana," she cried, sounding agonized. "Now let me go."

  As much as he wanted to shake her—shake the truth right out of her—he released her. She scooted away from him, dragging the sheet with her. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she grabbed his denim shirt from a chair and awkwardly donned it.

  "What are you going to do," he thundered, "run to put in your blue contact lenses? Throw on some clothes to cover up the butterfly?"

  She froze in the act of buttoning the oversize shirt. "There is no butterfly!"

  "You tried to erase it, but the colors are still there. I recognized you without the tattoo, anyway. You forget how well I knew you, back when you were my wife."

  She stared at him in stricken silence.

  He rose from the bed, shrugged into his black flannel robe and briskly belted it. "You owe me at least an explanation," he seethed, slowly rounding the bed toward her. "Don't even consider taking another step toward that door until you give me one."

  Her bottom lip trembled; her throat worked. Her eyes filled and shimmered brighter than a sunlit sea. "I'm so sorry, Trev."

  And though he'd thought he couldn't possibly feel any worse, somehow he did. Her apology amounted to an admission of guilt, and made the unthinkable all too real. He couldn't avoid the truth now, even if he wanted to.

  "Sorry?" he repeated. "You're sorry? Do you know what you put me through—me and my family? Not a day went by that I didn't imagine the horrors you might have faced. I spent every dime I had the first four years, trying to find you. My grandmother is still suffering from serious depression, thinking she caused your disappearance. And you're sorry, Diana? As in, 'Ooops … sorry about that'?" He clenched his teeth and struggled to rein in his fury. Shouting at her would bring him no answers. "Your apology doesn't mean a damn thing. I want to understand. I want to know why you left me without a word. Why you changed your appearance, why you're living as someone else … why I've spent the last seven years in hell."

  Intensive guilt and regret showed on her face. "There's so much you don't know."

  "That goes without saying. And the one thing I thought I knew as gospel truth was obviously a lie." He pressed closer, angrily probing her gaze, as if she were hiding the real Diana somewhere within. "I thought you loved me."

  "We barely knew each other," she choked out.

  He drew back, reeling from the blow. After all she'd done, he should have known—but he still hadn't expected that kind o
f answer from her. He'd been waiting to hear her tell him that she had loved him … because he swore she had.

  In a tight but even voice, she pressed relentlessly on. "Our marriage was based entirely on lies. I told you I was born in Chicago and grew up in Tennessee and Oklahoma, but that wasn't true. I was born in New York, and grew up in Louisiana."

  He frowned at her in bewilderment. Why had she lied about something so irrelevant? He'd never cared where she was from—except when he'd tried to track her whereabouts. He supposed the deception explained why the detectives hadn't found clues to her background.

  "I told you my father was an insurance salesman," she said, "and that when he died, I had no family left. I said I had to work my way through school. Those were all lies. I have a huge family—cousins, aunts and uncles. And I grew up wealthy—in a mansion—with servants, a driver, limousines, private jets, and all the money I could spend."

  He supposed he should have guessed that much. She'd always had expensive tastes, and her elegance seemed deeply ingrained. "None of that makes a difference, except for the fact you lied. Explain that to me."

  "My father wasn't a salesman, Trev," she said, ignoring his request. "He was a bookmaker. And I don't mean he made the kind of books you read. He took bets and laid odds for extremely wealthy people from all over the world. And he's very much alive."

  He blinked at that. Interesting though it was, she hadn't answered his questions. "Your father's business has nothing to do with us, Diana."

  "I only wish that were true. And my name's not Diana."

  He let out a soft, fluent curse. "Don't start again. We both know who you are."

  "No, I mean my name never was Diana Kelly. It was a false name, Trev, on a fraudulent birth certificate. I married you under an alias."

  Now that grabbed his attention—like a boa constrictor wrapping around his chest and throat. "What the hell are you talking about?"