by Tory Cates
“You’re so cute when you’re irrational. I just diagnosed the disease; I didn’t cause it.”
“Well, how do I cure it? Tonight!”
“Tonight you don’t. But first thing tomorrow I can have someone out here. In the meantime, fate forces us together. Let’s enjoy it.”
“No.” Her answer was too quick, too anxious. The playfulness drained from Cam’s face. “No, I . . . I have to get back to Los Monos. Ernie . . . I’ve left Ernie by himself too much lately. And Bambi, the baby, I have to see if Tulip is taking care of her. I . . .” She ran out of excuses. “I have to go home.”
Cam saw through her excuses and into the heart of her final, plaintive appeal. He was startled, and a tiny bit wounded, by what he saw—fear. “I’ll take you,” he offered. “Tonight. Right now.”
The cornered panic that had swept over Malou subsided, leaving her feeling foolish and exposed. She laughed feebly, hoping to pass the whole episode off as a weak joke. But the honest concern in Cam’s eyes did not disappear with her laughter. He understood. “Thanks,” she said simply, getting out of the jeep. “I’d appreciate that.”
* * *
The lights of San Antonio had given way to an immensity of darkness pricked only by the pinpoint brilliance of stars a galaxy away before Malou fully relaxed against the pewter leather car seats.
“Nice night for a drive.”
Malou was touched by Cam’s sweetly clichéd effort to break the ice between them. “I’m sure that a drive down to a monkey ranch you never wanted to own is just what you wanted to do tonight.”
Cam smiled, happy to see that the tension that had held Malou rigid since the jeep had failed was relaxing. “You’re too perceptive,” he teased. “But, if it’s important to you to get back to the station, it’s important to me too. I told you before, we’re on the same side in this.”
Without thinking, Malou covered Cam’s hand on the gearshift with her own in a gesture that she had intended to show gratitude. It turned instantly into something far more. Cam pivoted his hand beneath hers until their palms touched. The gesture had more intimacy than Malou had known through entire affairs with other men. Affairs in which she had always been the one to set the tempo, to initiate and to stop the flow of events. She had always been the one with the control. Now, just the merest touch of Cam’s palm against her own reminded her just how far out of her control her feelings for him were. She withdrew her hand.
“So, you never told me if you worked out an agreement with the protesters.” Her voice sounded abrupt and artificial, shattering the crystalline moment beginning to enclose them.
Cam sighed and flipped his hand over onto the gearshift, tightening it as he rammed the car into a higher gear. “We reached an agreement,” he answered flatly.
“A ‘no-losers-no-tears’ agreement?” She tried to lighten the pall she had cast.
“It was the agreement I’d planned to propose all along. Once they stopped trying to grab headlines long enough to come in and talk with me about it, they were delighted.”
“What are you proposing?”
Almost against his will, enthusiasm for his work caught Cam and his voice took back its customary animation. “To establish a greenbelt area, a long, thick stand of junipers, where the birds they’re trying to protect usually nest.”
“That’s wonderful! What an admirable thing for you to do.”
“Hey, before you make me patron saint of the Audubon Society, let me point out that this greenbelt will enhance property values and buy me a lot of goodwill to boot.”
“Yeah, but you still didn’t have to do it.”
“You’re right. I will accept canonization,” Cam bantered. “I just hope your buddy, Ernie, doesn’t have the deciding vote. What does the guy have against me, anyway?”
“He’s just upset about the possibility of the troop being broken up, and it’s made him suspicious of everything in general and you in particular.”
“I picked up on at least one of those suspicions. What else has he accused me of?”
“Nothing. It’s silly.”
“Tell me, Malou. I want to know if there’s a whispering campaign going on behind my back, particularly if you’re the prime target.”
“It’s really nothing. He just mentioned that it seemed awfully odd that you didn’t know where the main house was.”
They drove in silence past the ghostly outlines of cattle sleeping on their feet and a windmill slicing the night air. Cam’s voice was strained when he finally spoke. “And you think it’s fairly strange too, don’t you?”
“Well . . .”
“The thought did cross your mind.”
Malou could not deny that it had. Outside, the countryside began yielding a few familiar landmarks; they were nearing Los Monos. An unbearable tension had gripped the car. Malou could feel Cam straining to keep a volcano of emotion dammed up within him. They passed the wrought-iron gate that marked the road leading to the main house and drove on. Malou feared that Cam would deposit her at Los Monos without breaking the angry silence. But, at the entrance to the stone house, Cam pulled the Escalade off the road and came to rest beneath Stallings’s age-weathered lazy S. He turned the motor off and turned to Malou.
“What you’re implying, then,” he said, his jaw tight with anger, “is that I deliberately took you down this road with the sole intention of seducing you.”
“No, I . . .” Malou stammered.
“No is the correct answer, Mary Louise Sanders. Because, had I intended to seduce you, I would have told you so. Just as I’m going to do now. Malou, I want to make love to you. Tonight. More than I’ve ever wanted any single thing in my life and you’re a fool if you put me off because I’ll not try again.”
Malou looked at Cam illuminated by the dim glow of the dashboard lights. His face was a mask of intensity, of desire translated into smoldering eyes, a rapacious mouth. She felt herself teetering on the edge. Behind her was a wide, flat plain. A known plateau uninterrupted by any unexpected bumps or turns. A terrain of vast and unlimited boredom that was her emotional past and would be her future if she chose it to be. Ahead was a precipice. A place shrouded by mist, impenetrably dark and, for now, unknowable. Choice lay before her. Malou knew with a bone-deep certainty that this moment would come only once in her life. She swallowed deeply and mentally swatted away the million and one reasons that tugged at her, dragging her back onto the flat plain of reason. She grabbed for the slender vine of passion that twisted through her and swung over the edge.
“Yes.” The word formed on her lips, but never passed her tightened throat.
Cam, though, did not need to hear it with his ears, for her acceptance was already inscribed upon his heart.
The stone house seemed to be waiting for them, seemed now to Malou to have been created for them, for their love. It was as Stallings had meant it to be, a place outside the boundary of time. They stepped into it together and shed the nattering cares of modern life. Moonlight more luminous than that which fell anywhere else that night streamed in through the windows. They breathed the wonderfully cool air exhaled by the sturdy stone walls and were caught up again in the otherworldly enchantment of the cottage.
It was as if the last twenty-four hours had been erased. Malou was swamped by the weightless feel of her dream, of the pool last night. It swirled warmly between her legs and lapped over her breasts, leaving them aching for Cam’s caress. His hair had gone silver in the moonlight, and patches of platinum splashed across his lower lip, his eyes.
“Is it going to be all right?” He wanted to know if there had been any second thoughts.
“Yes. More than all right. So much more.” She had crossed the precipice and was alone with Cam on the other side.
He came toward her, cutting through moonbeams and the still, cool air to reach her. Everything was decided; he felt it from the first touch. With the first kiss she was welded to him. It was as if they had spent the past day teasing and wooing, bringing
one another to the highest endurable pitch of arousal.
They clung together in this alien territory ruled only by sensation, unable to taste, to touch enough to make up for the hours of denial. She pushed at his shirt with an unbridled will and it was gone. Her hands sought out the smooth, hard contours of his chest, while his hands trapped her wandering mouth to tilt it upward and receive his. A groan tore from them, from whose throat Malou couldn’t say. He clawed at the blouse separating them, sighing at the relief of her breasts naked against his chest.
She moaned his name as his hand slid down between her legs to find the place that waited most ardently for his touch. Her hands found his buckle and unfastened it. Then his zipper.
Cam slid her shorts off, then her underwear. She was as undeniably ready for him as he was for her. The reins of control slipped then entirely from his hands.
Malou felt as if she were floating off the ground, wafted away on the breeze that was Cam’s strong arms crooked about her, lifting her, bringing her to him. Her heart thundered out a message that Cam’s answered with a harshly pounding rhythm. Aching for the deliverance of union with him, she parted her legs and twined them about his waist. He filled her and they were one. Their joining came as the completion of the dream of weightlessness that had started the night after she’d first met him.
Great surges of ecstasy pulsed through her. Increasing in power, they drove them both before the unleashed fury of their intensity. They dictated the rhythm of Cam’s hands as he pulled Malou closer. She rose and fell against him with a will as mindless and inexorable as the tides. Cam mated the pace of his need to hers so that they soared together to a shattering crescendo. Her lips found his at the moment of fulfillment. She collapsed against his chest, her head wilting against the spasm of pleasure pulsing through her.
Cam’s legs began to buckle. He sagged onto the couch still holding Malou tightly. She nestled against his neck, breathing in the wild scent of their abandonment to one another. He stroked her back, running his fingers up and down the slender column of her spine, then stopping to gather her to him in a fierce hug. Gradually, conscious thoughts replaced the pattern of sensation that had occupied their minds.
“Malou, I . . .” Cam struggled to put a voice to the enormity of his emotions, but Malou silenced him with a kiss. Now was not the time to try to corral the wildness they had unloosed. To try to brand it, marking it as something that it might not be. She wanted only what they had now. But she wanted all of it.
She sat up, still straddling his lap, and traced her finger across the sweep of his brow, the hard slash of his cheeks, the arch of his nose. She dragged the finger lazily across the bow of his mouth, and as it passed over the fullness of his lower lip, Cam’s tongue flicked across the tip of her finger. He pressed her palm to his lips and licked its lacework of delicate lines. Nerves tingled from Malou’s sensitive palm up her arm and across her breasts. He nibbled at the fleshy pad at the base of her thumb.
“You have a very sensuous nature,” Cam joked, his mouth still a whisper from her hand. “I know. I can read palms.”
“How very insightful of you,” she bantered back, a sense of deep, rollicking joy beginning to fill her. “Could you lick along my life line and tell me how long I have to live?”
His tongue flickered tantalizingly along the curve of her palm. “You will live a long and happy life filled with much accomplishment and even more love.”
The last word stabbed Malou in the one spot she had momentarily left unprotected. It pained her far more than she wanted to admit to hear Cam speak of love as part of a trifling jest between them. The pain was fleeting, though, obliterated by the liquid feel of Cam’s tongue inscribing bewitching new demands upon her palm, demands that continued to bring her breasts to ever-fuller, tingling life until they too strained for the velvet massaging of his tongue. As if her desires had become his, Cam took her hand from his lips and, coaxing her forward across the scant inches separating them, brought the yearning tip of her breast to his mouth.
Leisurely he explored it while fondling her other breast, drawing dizzying circles about first one, then the other nipple. Malou’s eyelids fluttered shut. As if Cam’s tender ministrations were putting her into a deep sleep, she bent her neck and rested her forehead against Cam’s, bracing herself against his shoulders. Even as her nipples came to life in his mouth, Malou felt Cam come alive within her once again.
“This time, we’ll take as long as we want,” he promised in a whisper that renewed desire was already turning to a hoarse rasp.
Malou swallowed at the unimaginable delirium of the promise. He pulled her closer and brought her mouth to his. His hands washed over her with the warmth of a tropical rain. He drew her to him and, guided by instincts she’d never given rein to before, Malou pleasured Cam with an infinity of sinuously fluid motions.
Cam’s head rolled back against the couch, his eyes shut against the waves of delight that battered him as her hips rolled against his.
Malou felt herself compelled by rhythms she had never felt before. Following that beat, she led Cam, again and again, to the very limits of his control. But always it guided her back just in time so that the voluptuous rapture could continue.
Together, they both learned the absolute boundaries of their appetite for one another. The enormity of it was frightening. Malou was the first to retreat before it. The teasing, undulating dance of her hips quickened into something more insistent as she pressed toward the climax that neither of them could forestall any longer. In his moment of fulfillment, Cam grabbed for her in an embrace of shuddering intensity, whispering her name over and over like a benediction of what they had created together.
Malou shivered within the grip of his impassioned embrace as the coils of the love they had made together and wound so unbearably tight began to unwind, spiraling out in ever-widening ripples.
* * *
“Bedtime, my dozy darling.”
Malou jerked awake, the slight crick in her neck alerting her that she had been napping for quite some time against Cam’s chest.
“I didn’t fall asleep, did I?”
“Afraid so. Even snored the tiniest bit.”
“I don’t snore,” Malou maintained stoutly.
“Probably just the wind.” Cam chuckled in the absolute stillness of the night. With his forefinger, he curled one of the ringlets that petaled against Malou’s forehead.
“I’ve never done that before. Never fallen asleep like that. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Only women who are well loved fall asleep. It’s one of the infallible indicators.”
“And what about men?” Malou asked, raising herself up to look into his face. “You appear inhumanly alert.”
“Just been amusing myself watching you sleep, and thinking.”
“Thinking? About what?” Malou rolled smoothly off of Cam’s lap and snuggled beside him on the couch.
“Oh, about . . .” His eyes searched hers. For the first time, Cam seemed at a loss, uncertain of himself. He retreated from her question. “About why on earth I ever dragged out that trunk of clothes last time we were here and allowed you to wrap yourself up. We’re not going to repeat that error when we sleep together tonight.”
“Sounds far from restful,” Malou jibed back, wondering what Cam had really been thinking about. Could it possibly have been the same question that now deviled her mind?
As they walked to the bedroom, Malou dismissed the possibility. Cameron Landell was not a man to be derailed by love.
Chapter 8
Malou awoke the next morning to the crystalline notes of the canyon wren’s song, filled with a sense of joy she had not known since childhood. It was the kind of feeling that had percolated through her on the first morning of summer vacation as she lay in bed contemplating the prospect of three months of freedom. Reality had intruded when she entered high school, and all her vacations after that had been diligently filled with the kind of summer work and research
that eventually won her grants and awards before her time. Now Cam had come bringing a reprieve from reality.
She watched him sleep, just as he had watched her last night. Swatches of buttery morning sunlight splashed across him. He’d managed to capture most of the sheet they’d slept under, and it lay clumped in a wad between his legs, one corner drawn up togalike over his shoulder; he looked like a fallen Roman. One knee was cocked and his fist was jammed beneath his jaw, so that he seemed to be puzzling out a problem in his sleep. A deep well of tenderness opened up in Malou as she watched him so hard at work at sleeping. For a few minutes she felt she knew exactly what he had looked like as a little boy—spindly arms, and eyes too big and dark and intense for his face.
Then those eyes opened and filled with joy; they were the eyes of the young boy she’d been imagining. He smiled.
“So it wasn’t a dream after all,” he said, lazily reaching for her. At his touch, all hints of the little boy he might have been vanished. Cam had been a man for a very long time. “You’re depraved, do you realize that? You shouldn’t go around masquerading as the prim primatologist when you can do the things you can to a man.”
“I suppose the high-dollar developer image fits in pretty well with the kinds of things you’re able to do to a woman.” Malou loved the easy bantering between them, the feeling of comfortable sensuality, the fact that they could tease about their careers.
“Come here, you little minx, you.” He grabbed her and pulled her to him. “This high-dollar developer has all kinds of things he wants to do to one very special woman.” Then, with a leisurely abandon, he proceeded to make good on his threat.
“Malou,” he whispered into her ear much later on as she lay with her back curled against him, drifting in a mindless reverie in the comfort of his arms. “Those ‘kinds of things’ you were talking about earlier . . .”
