Different Dreams

by Tory Cates

  “Oh, look, a shooting star,” Malou said, and he looked over.

  She was a slender curve of tawny ivory against the midnight blue of the chaise cushions. Before Cam had time to censor the image, he imagined her nude, imagined the feel of the full, high breasts thrusting up beneath her blouse. In direct defiance of all his most prudent wishes, he felt his body responding. This was madness, Cam knew. He had to do something.

  “The sky is that way.” Malou pointed to the spot where the shooting star had long since charted the fiery course of its destruction. He was looking at her as if he too felt the same churning desire that she was attempting to suppress.

  “Ah, right. Ummm, quite spectacular.” He looked off vaguely at the stationary stars glittering above them. “How about a swim?” He jumped up with a rush of heartiness that convinced Malou she must have been mistaken. He was with her simply because he had to be. Because the mistake of his loan to Mr. Stallings had thrown them together. Period.

  “No suit,” she shrugged off the suggestion.

  Cam strode over to a louvered wooden door and opened it. Inside were shelves of towels and an assortment of swimwear. “Take your pick,” he announced, holding a one-piece in one hand and a bikini in the other. “I’d heard stories that the old man had a flock of nieces and nephews. Surely one of these will fit.” He disappeared into a stall with the only man’s suit available, a slim racer’s band of blue nylon. Malou hesitated a moment, then put her coffee aside and went to change into the more modest of the two suits, the one-piece.

  Cam was already in the pool when she emerged. Parabolas of moonlight arced across the water around him. His wet hair fell in dark waves around his face. Malou was uncomfortably aware of how emphatically she was silhouetted in the light from the changing room. She turned and switched it off and was cloaked in a sheltering darkness. The water was just cool enough to be refreshing without jarring her nervous system.

  “This was an inspiration,” she exulted, jackknifing into a dive that took her into the cool depths. She had almost forgotten how much she loved swimming. She pushed off from the bottom and jetted to the surface with a splash.

  Cam watched her frolicking like a happy otter. She was a sprite, he decided, a lovely, innocent sprite, more creature than human and more spirit than creature. She belonged in the world of animals that she loved. His reflections were scattered by a well-aimed blast of water that Malou splashed into his face.

  “Why you little otter,” Cam sputtered. Malou’s answering laugh sounded as if it had come from the rosebud mouth of a mischievous water nymph. He lunged out after her and she easily evaded his clumsy pursuit. Cam whirled around, searching the inky water for the merest hint of a bubble. It seemed as if Malou had escaped forever to some mythic underwater kingdom, until Cam felt the gentlest of currents rippling against the hairs on his legs and he realized that she had swum between them.

  Cam dived after her. In the watery darkness, Malou was just a tantalizing shadow as elusive as the mermaids whose siren songs had tempted ancient sailors to their deaths. She was quick and agile, as if the water were her natural element. Each time he thought he’d cornered her, she vanished. Again and again he lunged for a shadow. His lungs burning, Cam finally surrendered and popped to the surface.

  “You almost had me a couple of times there.” Malou was beside him. Where she had come from, Cam had no earthly idea.

  “You are one slippery customer,” he gasped, still trying to catch his breath. “But not slippery enough.” In one fluid motion, he whirled around and trapped her in his arms.

  “That’s not fair,” Malou protested.

  “All’s fair in . . .” He left the phrase uncompleted, knowing only that he had just committed his latest and possibly most fatal mistake. Now that he had her in his arms, Cam knew how wrong he’d been—Malou was no sprite, no creature of myth and innocence. She was a woman, every delectable, achingly desirable inch of her.

  At the moment of contact, Malou felt the emotional current change just as surely as a riptide current changed the ocean’s staid rhythms. That moment tore the mask of detachment away from them both. They came together with such an inarguable rightness that neither could pretend any longer that their joining was an impossible mismatch.

  Malou felt Cam’s arms lock about her waist. It was an imprisonment she had unknowingly been waiting for from the first time she’d set eyes on Cameron Landell. She struggled no more against it.

  “You should always be gleaming wet in the moonlight.” Cam’s voice was husky with wanting, with the burden of restraint. “You look and move like a bolt of quicksilver.”

  “My hair probably looks like a bolt of seaweed.” Malou arched backward and, without breaking the bonds his arm had forged around her, Cam let her dip her hair into the water. The motion pressed Malou against the full evidence of Cam’s arousal. As she came up, her curls were sleeked back into one satiny ribbon pulling away from her face. Water ran across her face and glistened like diamonds on her eyelashes. Cam never let her regain her position.

  The feel of his lips upon hers was unspeakably sweet. It was a taste that Malou had hungered for far more deeply than she’d realized. They both indulged their hunger, filling themselves with a glutton’s boundless rapacity for all that can be savored by lip and tongue. Malou felt her legs losing their power to hold her and Cam sweeping them away entirely from under her. She was cradled by the water and his arms. Floating in the weightless ecstasy she had dreamed of so often, she succumbed to its hypnotic power.

  Cam slid the straps of her suit down, exposing one, then the other breast with a tantalizing slowness. He cupped his hand and dipped it into the water, then let a shimmering rivulet trickle over what he had laid bare. The crowns of her breasts tautened beneath such exquisitely delicate stimulation. A breeze brought them to even fuller life, straining against the limits of his teasing attentions. Cam took her in his mouth. His tongue was warm against her breeze-cooled nipple.

  Malou felt everything. The gentle rasp of his beard. His hands beneath her lifting her, bringing her even more fully into his mouth. The thrilling patterns his tongue was inscribing upon her. The warm lap of the water between her legs. She was a vessel that she thought could never hold enough pleasure, could never be filled full enough with the sensations that she’d been afraid belonged exclusively to other women. And now she knew them and wanted the knowing never to end.

  Her suit was off before she could be aware of its removal. Cam stood with her floating beside his chest and stared, hypnotized by the magical assembly of curves before him. With one reverent hand he traced a path across the arch of Malou’s neck, lightly raked his fingertips across a swollen breast, down the ridges of her rib cage, the inward slope of her belly, and on to the slender columns of her legs. A trail of pulsing desire followed his touch, each tantalized cell yearning fiercely for more.

  With an expert hand, Cam massaged Malou’s feet, then began the return trip. By the time he reached the juncture at the top of her thighs, all Malou’s wanting had coiled there. His touch seemed part of her dream, as if he telepathically knew all the tiny motions and increments of pressure that fit her body most perfectly.

  Malou felt herself sailing, and she was a bit startled to discover that Cam was actually moving her through the water until her head rested on the slanting edge of the pool. Cam moved the hand that had been supporting her head down until he cradled the firm swell of her hips. Then, without ever interrupting the mesmerizing massage, Cam replaced his other hand with his mouth. Sliding both hands beneath her now, he brought her even more fully to him, to raise her against the ardent ministrations of his tongue.

  Malou was aware only of being leashed to Cam by bonds even stronger than those forged by his hands holding and lifting her, joining her to him in the most intimate of embraces. It took several rings before the shrill of Cam’s phone broke through, and several more before she could rouse herself enough to speak.

  “You’d better answer it, Ca
m.” She sounded like someone talking in her sleep. “It’ll wake the Maldonados.”

  Slowly, Cam’s hands slipped out from under her. He looked up at her as though the interruption were causing him physical pain.

  The phone continued ringing. Cam turned toward it, slashing through the water in his haste to reach the phone, to silence its damnable ringing. He scrambled up the steps and grabbed it.

  “Who is it?” he barked, his voice a harsh rasp. Malou pitied the caller.

  “They’re doing what!” Cam demanded. Light from the house behind him silhouetted his glistening wet form. It outlined the extent of Cam’s desire only barely hidden beneath the flimsy nylon swimsuit. Malou reverberated to the sight, mirroring as it did her own intense arousal.

  “Have any press shown up yet?” He paused, listening for the answer to his question. “Thank God. That kind of media attention now could cripple the project. Okay, stay on it. Work with them any way you can. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Cam hung up and, a defeated look on his face, he turned to Malou.

  “There’s trouble at the project.” He exhaled the words on a long sigh. “A bunch of those environmental protesters have formed a human barricade around the front gate.”

  “And you’re worried that someone with a TV camera might show up.”

  Cam nodded. That one weary gesture told Malou far more than she had previously known about the crushing weight of the responsibilities that consumed Cam’s life. She felt around for her suit, fished it out of the dark water, and wriggled quickly into it. The evening air was cool against her wet skin as she stepped out of the pool and went to Cam. He was still hunched over the phone when she reached him and put her arms around his bowed shoulders. He reached up and covered her hand with his.

  There was something even more intimate about that touch than the one of only a few moments ago. For the first time Malou felt as if she and Cam were allies, not adversaries.

  “Sometimes . . .” He shuddered. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s all worth it.” He turned to face her, to take her fully into his arms again. The hum of passion, which had barely stilled, vibrated again between them. “Just say the word,” Cam offered, “and we’ll dive right back into that pool and stay there until we both sprout fins and have a whole family of little babies with webbed feet.”

  The barest hint of a smile played across Cam’s lips. But Malou knew that at the merest gesture from her, Cam would stay. Instead she laughed warmly, knowing that her laughter was Cam’s release. The smile blossomed more fully on his lips.

  “You have to go,” she said, stating the painfully obvious.

  His lips tightened in sad acceptance of the onerous fact. He bent down and kissed her neck, then raised his mouth to whisper in her ear, “Thanks.”

  “And I have to get back to Los Monos. Ernie’s probably already called out the Texas Rangers to look for me.”

  “Ah yes, your suspicious colleague. Just give me two minutes and I’ll be ready to whisk you back to him.”

  * * *

  When Cam pulled up at the research station all the lights were off except for one in the far back lab.

  “And not a Ranger in sight,” Cam jibed as they stepped out. “I’m not even going to say good night,” he informed her outside the station door. “Because I have every intention of continuing this night as soon as I possibly can.”

  “Sooner,” Malou answered. A facade had been stripped away from between them, and she gloried in the freedom of acting and speaking without pretense.

  Their kiss was a down payment on a treasure that they reluctantly had to deny themselves for the moment.

  Malou stood outside beneath the stars, watching Cam’s taillights until they were pinpoints of red heading north through the vastness of south Texas. She turned to the door and opened it. Her task for the next day, or however long it was until Cam returned to her, was to make as much time as possible disappear.

  Chapter 6

  Malou went immediately to Bambi’s cage and looked in on the little orphan. She was sleeping peacefully, curled up next to the blanket with its clock heart wrapped inside and ticking away comfortingly. The little monkey’s tummy was round and her face a bit fuller than it had been when Malou had first brought her in. So Ernie was being a good surrogate mother.

  Malou was pleased by that, but not by the prospect of the infant growing up caged. Still, Malou had to remind herself, she was not much worse off than she would have been with Jezebel as a mother. With no one to tie her to the troop, Bambi too would have become an outcast and lived as her mother had, always on the outskirts. Malou sighed at all the weighty injustices imposed upon such a tiny creature simply by an accident of birth, then went to search for Ernie.

  She flipped on lights all the way back. She’d never seen the station in complete darkness before, and it wasn’t a friendly sight. The unfamiliar darkness combined with her absence and the compelling power that Cam now exerted over her to make Malou feel almost an interloper in her own station. What had once been the core of her world now seemed very alien territory. She shook from her mind the image of herself as a burglar breaking into someone else’s home.

  “Ernie!” she called out, more to break the unnerving silence than to locate her co-worker. Her call echoed hollowly through the portable building. She laughed at herself, at the very idea that a portable building could, in any way, be menacing. Light streamed out from under the lab door. She knocked on it briskly, then, without pausing, pushed the door open a crack.

  “Ernie?” she called again. There was no answer. She tried to push the door open farther, but it would not budge. Must have swollen in the rain, Malou thought as she leaned into it. Just as she was about to put her full weight against the lodged door, Ernie’s face popped up directly in front of hers.

  “What are you trying to do? Knock the door down?” His abrupt appearance and odd question startled Malou.

  “Didn’t you hear me calling you?” She camouflaged her fright behind mild annoyance.

  “You know the lab is soundproofed,” Ernie rebuked her.

  “Oh, of course. Mind if I come in?” Her annoyance drained away, replaced now by curiosity. Why was Ernie barring the door?

  “Ah, yes, as a matter of fact, I do. I’m right in the middle of something and don’t want to lose my train of thought.”

  “I’m sorry. I know how that is. Sorry for disturbing you. I just wanted you to know that I was back. I’ll take over Bambi’s feedings now.”

  “Good. Fine. I’d appreciate that. Talk to you later.”

  “Right, later.” But the door was already shut. The bolt slid into place, locking it with a click. So much for the Texas Rangers, Malou thought. It was clear that Ernie hadn’t been chewing his nails about her absence. Regret flickered through her; she should have gone with Cam. To San Antonio, to the fulfillment of the evening’s golden promise. In the next instant, she was chiding herself for the dangerous turn her emotions were taking. She was, first and foremost, a primatologist, and she’d better start acting like one. And, if she was forgetting how, she had Ernie to serve as a pointed reminder. Her purpose at Los Monos was research, not romance.

  That admonition, though, was not enough to chase away the phantoms that tormented Malou as she lay in bed, tantalized with memories only a few hours old. When she did drift off into sleep, she moved directly from remembrances of floating with Cam between her legs, into the dream of weightless lovemaking with a Roman charioteer with espresso brown eyes.

  In a clap of thunder, the charioteer disappeared and Malou jerked awake. It wasn’t thunder at all, but the bang of the lab door. She heard the rattle of a key and the bolt clicking home again and wondered why on earth Ernie was locking the lab. He’d never done that before. His footsteps, though she knew he was attempting to tiptoe, made the flimsy building rattle as he made his way to his room on the other side of the station.

  He probably has research notes scattered all over that he doesn’t want disturbed, Malou tol
d herself, explaining the locked lab. But it was still a good long while before she coaxed herself back to sleep. In that time, she marveled at how deeply Cam had ingrained himself: She missed him already.

  Bambi’s whimperings awoke her before dawn. Still in a sleepy fog, Malou pulled on a clean pair of her inevitable khaki shorts and a cotton blouse and went to the hungry infant. The baby clung contentedly to Malou as she sucked formula from the infant bottle Malou held to her mouth. The baby’s eyes were just as busy as her mouth, following the pattern of Malou’s mouth, nose, eyes. Holding the helpless monkey and pouring life into its tiny body, Malou stopped minding the ungodly hour and began to understand a bit of the secret joy that helped mothers survive the early years.

  The sun was just rising as Malou reached the gate of the compound. The feeling of alienation that had attacked her the night before evaporated as soon as Malou was again on the same ground with her troop of monkeys from Storm Mountain. At her approach, a couple of youngsters, awake before the others, darted up to her. With their nimble fingers they immediately began plucking at her shoestrings until they had them untied.

  “You scamps,” Malou laughed, shooing the pair away. One ran off and picked up a fallen branch that the other immediately decided he must have, and the chase was on.

  Malou sat on a boulder and watched them scoot across the open land. The rain had cleansed everything, and the mesquite trees were fresh and green in the predawn light. She pulled out her field notebook and began to check off her census list, taking a head count of who was where before they all woke up and scattered. The seemingly random arrangement of sleepers would become significant when she started analyzing her data.