by Nancy Gideon
But the minute he emerged from the darkness, he saw he was wrong.
She was up on the porch, standing tall and fiercely proud with her bruised arms akimbo and bare legs set in a combative stance. Her dark eyes flashed to his, conveying an unspoken dare. Just try to make it up to me, Savoie. Coward.
That pitch-black glare, so steady, so penetrating in its blame, held him at bay, kept him circling like something wild and wary. She stood on his porch, with her greatest enemy’s people at her back in silent support of her right to be there, her right to take him to task. His pride and his own clan’s scrutiny kept him from going to her. That and the warring shame and umbrage chafing his already raw restraint.
He prowled through the revelers, darkly dangerous. And while he nuzzled a willing neck or ran his hands along a pliant form, his gaze never left her.
Charlotte.
The scent of her, the feel of her, the taste of her swirled about his sharpened senses, consuming him with hot madness. The others who would cling and coo at him were nothing. Cool, bland moons compared to the volatile gravitation of her sun. And he couldn’t resist the pull.
Charlotte.
Wanting her shivered icy cold over the burning pump of his blood until she filled every hard, reckless beat.
Agitation quickened his light steps and had him tacking back and forth like a graceful sloop pushing against a gale-force blow. Closing in on her with calculated purpose, he finally strode toward the porch with stalking intensity.
A big hand closed on his arm, jerking him from that self-destructive path. He rounded on Jacques LaRoche with a cold snarl. “You’re in my way.”
“You planning on making rough with your lady and putting more of them bruises on her?”
Max reared back, eyes glittering, unable to believe he was being challenged. “She’s mine to do with as I want.”
“She’s not one of us, Max. You’ll hurt her. You might even kill her. Is that what you want to do?”
He paced, a wild thing in a small cage, his movements tightly controlled as his breath shook from him in harsh bursts. He slowly lifted his gaze to the porch and that hot twist of desire fisted in his groin, the pain unbearable.
“Get out of my way, Jacques.”
“Max, think. Think of Charlotte. She’s going to fight you, and you’re going to hurt her. You won’t mean to, but you won’t be able to stop yourself.”
Max bent over, panting hard against the violence pounding through him, his face dripping sweat. His voice was deep, hoarse. “Don’t let me hurt her. Please, Jacques. I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t think. I don’t know what to do. I can’t stop myself.”
LaRoche cursed softly—then grinned. “I must be crazy, but all right, Max. There are other ways to work off some of that mean you’re feeling.”
Max looked up at him. “How?”
The sudden punch dropped him to his knees.
“Let’s dance a bit, you and me. Nothing fancy. And nothing fatal. Just man to man. For fun.”
The music had stopped. Curious and intrigued, the others began to circle to watch.
Max licked the blood from the corner of his mouth, darkly amused. “There’s no challenge there. You can’t beat me.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. On your hind legs, Savoie. Like men, nothing more. Afraid I’ll embarrass you?”
He grinned ferociously. “No.”
“Make it a wager,” someone called.
“See? Our friends are anxious to earn a little fast cash off our sweat and blood. What do you say, Max? Ready to let me knock some of the arrogance out of you? I can get in a few good licks before you pulverize me.”
Max straightened slowly. “Name the stakes.”
“Me.”
They both turned toward the strong voice, where Charlotte glared down from the porch, taking a savage satisfaction in the abrupt slackening of Max’s expression.
“I’ll go home with the winner. Whichever one of you can still walk, come get me.”
And with that monumental claim of indifference, she turned her back and went inside.
“Thanks, Charlotte,” LaRoche muttered. “You sure know how to suck the fun outta things.”
Then the impact of Max’s fist exploded his consciousness into a halo of bright lights. He shook it off to see the younger man fling out of his coat as he said, “Consider me highly motivated.”
THE SOUND OF his footsteps sped up her heartbeat. Max’s steps were usually light, barely making a noise. These footfalls were heavy, almost reluctant, and for one awful moment, she thought it might be Jacques LaRoche coming to claim her.
Then what would she do?
Go with him, of course. What choice had Max left her? Had her own fierce pride left her? Not that she planned to do anything with him, and if he thought different, she’d prove him wrong in a quick minute. But she’d go. That, or let Max put his foot down firmly on the back of her neck for the rest of their relationship.
Would that be so bad?
That seditious whisper shocked her.
To have him, would it be so bad to just give up all the struggling, all the battling, all the barriers? To admit that she wanted him, under any circumstances?
Yes—it would be bad for both of them. No matter how difficult, that tentative balance they’d struck had to be maintained. Which was why, when she saw him fill the door frame, no delighted relief showed in her steady stare.
“Disappointed?” he drawled in a chilly voice.
“In several things lately.”
He looked so temptingly hot with his black hair mussed, his face flushed with temper and exertion, his eyes dazzling jewel-like. Though he showed no physical effects of his tussle with LaRoche, his expensive clothes were ripped, grass-and blood-stained, and beyond the resuscitation of the best dry cleaner. He was breathing light and fast through clenched teeth. The effort of restraint pounded off him like heat from a summer pavement. He was furious—and he was also afraid. She could see it flickering behind his posturing rage.
“Sorry you didn’t get the chance to prove your point?” His words were like jagged glass.
“And that point would be?”
“That you would toss me away on a whim of chance.”
She’d never believed LaRoche could beat him, but her sense of injury wouldn’t allow her to mention that. “It wouldn’t have been personal, Max. No big deal, right? It wouldn’t have meant anything. Just brush it off. Isn’t that what you were expecting me to do?”
He began to prowl the room, careful to keep away from her. His hands worked in frustrated fists at his side.
She held her ground, watching him, wanting him, unwilling to make the first move.
“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Really? And watching you fall into a fornicating free-for-all with those bitches in heat wouldn’t hurt me? Knowing you were putting your hands on someone else, putting yourself into someone else, wasn’t going to hurt me how? Thanks for being so considerate of my feelings.”
He wheeled about, circling up against her, bumping her with his hard, lean form, his cheek against her hair, his hands trembling over the bruises he’d left on her arms. “It wasn’t your feelings I was afraid of hurting.” His words ground up from the sharp-edged terror weighing cold and heavy in his gut. “I would walk away from you forever before I’d have you look at me like—” He went still.
“Max? Like what?”
She put her hand over his and he leapt away as if scalded. “Don’t,” he growled. “Not now. Not when I’m like this.”
“Like what, Max?” she pressed.
He brushed by her, reeling slightly as he stepped out onto the balcony. Below, the mood had shifted back to party mode. The music rose full of energy and spice while unidentifiable shapes danced beneath the moon. Max watched them for a moment, bombarded by the mingling of scent and sound that itched over his nerves.
“Like what, baby? Talk to me, Max.”
She moved up beside him in th
e heavy shadows, and he sidled away with a gruff, “Don’t touch me.”
“I won’t. Just talk to me.”
For a moment there was just the rasp of his breathing, a harsh counterpoint to the good-time tune rising from the lawn. Then it came pouring out of him, pumping in an arterial gush, unstoppable.
“I came back for you and Mary Kate.”
The instant she took his reference, a cold, familiar terror churned up her insides. Immediately, she was back in the awful warehouse, surrounded by unimaginable horror. Unimaginable to a girl of seventeen—not to the woman she was now, who had seen too many horrible things to be surprised by the ugliness humans could summon up from the darkness inside. Though she wanted to tell him to stop, she whispered, “Go on.”
“After I’d killed them—those men, those animals—I bent down to see if you were still…if you were all right. They’d left you on the floor, tossed away like something used up and broken. I thought…I was afraid I was too late. When I touched you, you opened your eyes, those fierce, brave eyes, and they were empty. There was no soul in them. I thought they’d crushed that spirit that so amazed me.”
“But they didn’t, Max. Because you came back. Because you came back and saved us.”
“I came back and saved myself.” He shuddered as the memory of what he’d seen that night overwhelmed him. That night when he defied everything he understood, everything he believed, because of what he’d seen in the rebellious glare of an unknown girl’s eyes: strength. Courage. Freedom.
“I’ve done terrible things, Charlotte. Things I will never, ever share with you. Nothing I did made any impression on me. There was nothing inside me that could feel for those I killed.
“And then you touched my face, my other face, the face of the beast, and you looked at me as if you saw something beautiful. I was never the same after that.”
He turned to her, eyes glittering in the darkness. “I put that look of helplessness and terror into the eyes of every man I killed, because I was like them—those men who raped and tortured you and Mary Kate. Jimmy never told me I could be more than that. He never told me that there was more to me than the monster. I’d forgotten what it was like to feel…until you, Charlotte.”
“You weren’t like them, Max,” she told him softly. “You were never like them.”
If he heard her, he didn’t believe what she was saying. “You were my chance, Charlotte—my chance to do something good, something right. My chance to remember where I’d hidden away my soul when I was just a child. I swore that day that I would never do anything to put that look back in your eyes; that you would never, ever have reason to fear me.
“I don’t know what I was saying down there. I didn’t mean any of it. If I’ve hurt your feelings, I’m sorry. Better to break your heart than your bones.” A glum caricature of a smile.
“I’m not afraid of you, Max. I’ve always known I was safe with you.”
He grabbed her wrists so suddenly, she gasped. His grip was tight, too tight to be comfortable. “You’re not safe now, Charlotte. I’m not safe. I’ve always been able to control the other part of me, ever since that first time when I was a boy. But I can’t now. There’s something loose inside me, something without a heart, without a soul, and without a care for what happens to you. Listen to me, Charlotte. Listen.” He shook her once roughly, then realizing what he’d done, he quickly released her. He shoved his hands deeply into his pockets, his breathing harsh with agitation. “I can’t trust myself to touch you. I’m afraid of what I might do.”
So she touched him, just a light brush of her knuckles along his taut cheek.
“Don’t.” His eyes were on her, wide and wild with objection.
“I trust you.” And she stretched up to take his mouth, lightly at first, then slowly sinking into passion. He made a soft sound in his throat, a moan of helpless surrender, of desperate longing. His lips parted to let her in, and he was lost.
She flooded every part of him, becoming the beat in his blood. Wanting her pushed against all the weak spots in his levee of restraint, the small cracks becoming large fissures, finally leading to violent collapse.
He had her by the arms, swinging her around, thrusting her against the abrasive white stucco wall. Her head hit hard and for a moment her focus swam. His mouth ground against hers, shifting brutally until she tasted blood. When she tried to turn to one side to catch her breath, his hand clamped like a vise on either side of her jaw, making deep indentations in her flesh as he anchored her in place.
Through the red haze, he heard her muffled squeak of protest. He wanted to gentle his hold on her; he tried to ease back, to show her tenderness, but couldn’t. Because the pounding in his head chanted Take her. Take her now. Have to have her.
His muscles coiled tight, vibrating with tension, ready to spring, to snap, to attack. There was no backing down, no controlling the animal inside or the hunger razoring across his consciousness. And then, through the primitive pulse driving him, he heard her voice.
“Max, stop.”
He staggered back, his world spinning, bent over double as he panted hard into the swells of violent impulse.
“Max.”
He held up his hands to keep her away as he stumbled backward into the porch rail. His eyes squeezed shut, blocking the image of his fingerprints marring her soft skin, of the fear and pain surely twisting in her expression. She’d run now. She’d run and she’d be safe, someplace far away from him.
The feel of her palm on his face was a cool slide of sanity over the madness consuming him.
“It’s all right, baby. We’ll get through this.”
“Charlotte, stay away from me. Please, don’t let me touch you. I could kill you. Don’t you understand?”
“I understand that you might want to on more than one occasion. You piss me off enough for me to want to cheerfully choke the life out of you sometimes, too. But not tonight. Not just this minute.”
She continued to stroke his fevered cheek, his brow, and he leaned into her touch. He clung to the quiet calm of her voice, focusing on it, centering on it.
“Do you trust me, Max? Can you trust me?”
He nodded, even as he fought back the blackness trying to crack through his chest. He kept his eyes closed, narrowing down the sensory bombardment so it was a bit more manageable. She lifted his hands carefully and fit them over the wrought-iron rail behind him, curling his fingers around the metal.
“You hold on and don’t let go. Don’t let go.”
Curiosity nudged through the dark whips of madness. “What are you going to do?”
“Just taking a little pressure off the top.”
“What? How are you going to—”
She slid down his zipper and opened his pants. “Just don’t let go.”
“Charlotte—”
The first soft sweep of her mouth buckled his knees. Then he was hanging on with frantic desperation as she took him in with a slow, velvety slide. His mind blanked, his breathing spilled out in short, shallow bursts as she began to work him. Gently at first, to snare his attention and channel his aggressive energy into a very specific focus. Then the light scrape of her teeth. His legs started shaking. Hot, immediate sensation pushed everything else away as she cupped him, caressed him with her mouth.
Her voice reached through the pounding in his head.
“Let go, Max. Let go.”
She wasn’t talking about the rail. And she wasn’t going to let him resist, though he was struggling to do just that. She suddenly remembered that first time she’d coaxed him to lose himself to her—his amazement and surprise, the dizzying sense of power she’d felt from making his will collapse.
“I love you, Max. Let me have you.”
He unloaded with the force of cannon fire.
She rode him down as his knees gave out and he sank to the porch boards in a shuddering heap.
After a long moment, his raw, hitching breaths eased and his world balanced. Carefully, very care
fully, he slipped his arms about the precious woman resting against his laboring chest. Good, she felt so good.
“Better now?”
Because he hadn’t quite mastered speech, he simply nodded. Cautiously, he put his hand on her head and gingerly combed his fingers through her hair. His movements were ridiculously weak and shaky but under his control. Testing the theory a bit more bravely, he rubbed his cheek over the mess he’d made of her hairdo, and everything inside him settled on a quiet sigh.
She’d stayed with him. He couldn’t quite grasp the magnitude of her courage.
She reluctantly straightened to look into his eyes. Cool, beautiful green.
“Welcome back, Savoie.”
“Glad to be here. Thank you, sha.”
A smile. “Sometimes I love my job.”
A smile back. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind coming with me to work. I could tuck you under my desk in case of emergency.”
“I do love you, Max.”
Her kiss was soft and sweet, tempting emotions he thought better kept guarded for now. Her smile was tender as she traced his cheekbones with her fingertips.
“We should go down and take care of your company.”
He caught her hand and pressed her knuckles to his lips. “The only company I want is yours.”
“Then let’s go chase them out of here, so we can go to bed.”
Seven
MAX LET CEE CEE help him up, surprised at how much he had to rely on her strength. He was kitten-weak now that the adrenaline-pumped aggression had quieted. It still whispered about, prowling in the back of his consciousness, murmuring darkly even though his body was slack with well-satisfied relief. So as much as he longed to linger in Charlotte’s arms, he didn’t dare.
She fingered the blood-stained lapel of his jacket, her eyebrows winging up. “Yours?”
“Could be.”
“We should clean up a bit, or our guests will think we beat the hell out of each other.”
His thumb rubbed over her darkening bruises, his expression closed down tight. “Would they be wrong?”
She didn’t know what to say, so she leaned in to hug him and felt the sharp stab of something in his pocket. She drew out her single shoe, then patted him down.
