by India Grey
Thankfully, much of his business was conducted internationally, so the long hours of the night when sleep would often evade him could be usefully spent working. His computer was state-of-the-art, fitted with the very latest in screen-reading software, which he had always refused to use, preferring instead to type by touch and magnify the words to a size that made it possible for him to read them.
Technically.
Tonight they seemed to slide across the edges of his vision and dissolve without penetrating his mind.
The Middle Eastern border situation he was dealing with was balanced on a knife-edge. Hired as a consultant on aerial tactics and weapons deployment by the government, he was monitoring the situation on an hour-by-hour basis, grimly holding out against sending planes into an area where they had about as much chance of surviving as a pheasant over the Easton beech woods in shooting season.
As he knew all too well. It had been on a similar raid that Felix had been shot down. Or that was the supposition: they’d never even recovered his plane.
Sighing, Orlando got up and went to stand at one of the long windows, feeling a gust of cold air as he pulled back the curtain and looked out. Around the relentless blackness in the centre of his vision he could see the courtyard was bathed in moonlight.
With something that felt almost like a physical blow he recalled Felix’s kindness that last time when he’d come home on leave, at the time when Andrew Parkes had given Orlando his diagnosis. Felix had accepted it with resignation, and for the remainder of his leave had treated Orlando with a horrible gentleness bordering on respect. When he had said goodbye it had almost as if he knew it would be the last time.
He’d had no intention of their relationship carrying on as before, Orlando realised now. As far as Felix had been concerned, if Orlando wasn’t the big brother he could compete with and look up to, he was no brother at all. Nothing.
Orlando leaned back against the wooden shutter, tipping his head back and banging it softly, rhythmically, against the paneling. The pain reminded him that he was still alive. Sometimes he felt that he was disappearing, that just as the world was fading before his eyes, so he was fading from the eyes of the world.
Somewhere in the distance he could hear music. Maybe he’d finally lost it? he thought with savage desolation, striding to the door and pulling it open.
But he hadn’t imagined it. Music was rippling through the dark rooms of the sleeping house, filling the empty spaces with sweet, sad resonance. With emotion. With life.
In the doorway of the grand salon he stopped, his breath catching in his throat. The effect of the music in the moonlit stillness was profound—it vibrated through him, smashing down defences he had spent the last year building. The room was inkblack washed with silver, and he turned his head, so that at the edge of his vision he could see her.
She had her back to him, her head tilted up so that her glowing red hair cascaded down over the thin slip of pale silk she was wearing. He could see with startling clarity the gleam of her bare shoulder in the moonlight, the shadowed drape of silk at the narrow part of her waist, just before it swelled out into sumptuous fullness. Hungrily, helplessly, his eyes sought her, desperate for more; but, as always, the instant he looked directly at her she disappeared into the black vortex in the centre of his vision. He felt his hands ball into fists of frustration as the music tugged invisible chords inside him, reawakening the feelings and needs he strove so hard to annihilate.
He was hardly aware of crossing the room, was conscious only of the thudding of blood in his veins beneath the soaring swell of music that was flowing with perfect fluency and exquisite grace from her fingertips.
Her precious fingertips.
He felt a moan of realisation escape him. Oh, God. He’d been so wrapped up in himself that he hadn’t given her a chance to explain what she’d meant. He’d thought she was some silly, pampered princessy type, who didn’t want to damage her false nails, but she was a pianist…
Remorse and self-loathing stole through him. His bandaged fingers throbbed and ached as he gripped the table beside him, waiting for this unwelcome, stinging insight into the man he had become to subside.
The music filled his head, each lovely, liquid note echoing inside the empty spaces of his heart. Until he noticed, above the piano, another sound.
An inhalation. A soft, swift gasp of indrawn breath.
He waited a few seconds. And heard another. The girl sitting a few feet away from him was creating that miraculous, moving music while crying her heart out very quietly.
He didn’t want to go to her. He wanted to leave the room and go back to his study and his work. He wanted to wall himself up again, pack his heart in ice and put his needs, his desires, back in the past.
He wanted all of that, and still he found himself going towards her. It felt as if he was crawling over broken glass, but he couldn’t stop.
Playing the last heartbreaking bars, Rachel closed her eyes and let her head drop backwards as the tears coursed down her cheeks.
Why had she played this piece?
It was the dream, perhaps, that had brought it all back. This was the piece she had played that horrible night at Carlos’s apartment in Vienna, when he had forced himself on her for the first time. They had been engaged for about three weeks, and, coming back from dinner in a restaurant, her mother had pleaded a headache and gone straight to the hotel. There had been no question of arguing when Carlos had suggested she went with him to his beautiful penthouse for a nightcap, and she had done as she was told without demur. Just as she always had.
Until…
Until later. When she had felt his hands, damp and insistent, sliding up beneath her blouse as she’d played the Chopin. And then she had protested and fought with all her strength.
A sob escaped her.
Just at that moment she felt warm hands on her shoulders, sliding down her chilled arms to cradle her from behind. Letting out a cry, she stumbled to her feet, desperate to get away as her mind, made irrational by the terrible memories, made instant, impossible connections. Stepping away from the piano stool, she whirled round, adrenalin giving her movements an intense energy.
Orlando stepped back, holding up his hands. His face was entirely in shadow.
‘It’s you’ she whispered, relief coursing through her. ‘It’s you.’
‘Who did you think?’
She shook her head, looking away, feeling suddenly foolish and ashamed. Ashamed of the person Carlos had turned her into. ‘I wasn’t thinking properly…I was just…frightened. Of the dark. Does that sound stupid?’
He gave a low, mirthless laugh. ‘No. Not at all.’ He took a step towards her, into a square of moonlight falling through the huge windows, and it painted silver streaks in his black hair and shimmered on the hard planes of his lean face. ‘You were crying.’
‘Yes…It’s ridiculous, but you were right. I totally lack courage in everything. I’m afraid all the time…’
She stopped as he reached out and lifted her right hand in his. Mesmerised, she watched as he looked down at it with his strange intense stare, turning it palm upwards and unfolding her fingers with a sweep of his thumb, as if he were spreading the petals of a flower. And then he placed his own damaged, bandaged hand over hers, and Rachel closed her eyes, unable to control the series of seismic shocks that juddered up her arm and into some locked-up, secret part of her. Her hands had always been her way of expressing herself, through the music that they created, but never had they brought her this kind of feeling. She felt as if she held a tornado.
‘That’s OK,’ he said bleakly. ‘It’s OK to be afraid. It’s how you deal with it that matters.’
Looking downwards, he could see the paleness of her skin against his. In the moonlight she was so white, like porcelain, and he found himself wondering whether, given the colour of her hair, she also had freckles that he couldn’t see. He wanted to raise her hand to his lips, to feel the coolness of her flesh against his face
and breathe in the clean, young scent of her. He let his bandaged hand fall to his side, but somehow his other hand remained pressed against hers, palm to palm. Her fingers were almost as long as his, though finer. But as they meshed with his he could feel their incredible strength.
She moved towards him until she could almost feel the electric current crackling in the small space that separated them.
‘But I’m tired of being afraid. I want to be brave.’
She sounded both wistful and angry, and the words seemed to resonate in the charged air for a second. Then, her eyes never leaving his, she moved closer, closing the gap between their tense bodies, and stood on tiptoe to brush her lips against his in a gossamer-light kiss.
‘Show me how to be brave,’ she murmured.
His answer was a low curse as he captured her trembling mouth with a kiss of ferocious intensity. The miracle of his touch on Rachel’s skin seared a path of purifying fire through the confusion and revulsion Carlos’s touch had left in its wake. Suddenly, in the arms of this man, everything that had scared and confused her seemed so simple and so beautiful. One hand was still holding his, their fingers locked, but she lifted the other to his face, feeling the hard planes of his stubble-roughened cheek beneath her palm, feeling the leanness of his jaw as he kissed her with a passion and purpose that made the past irrelevant. His hand was in the small of her back, moving upwards and coming to rest between her shoulderblades, holding her against him with a touch so light it was almost as if he was afraid to crush her.
‘Rachel…No.’
Orlando pulled away, his fingers still entwined with Rachel’s, until he was holding her at arm’s length. He knew he was a hair’s breadth from surrendering control, but the lure of oblivion was incredibly powerful. To be, for a few blissful minutes, the man he used to be—powerful, capable, in command, omnipotent.
But he wouldn’t use her for that.
‘Please…’
She had her face tilted up to his, so that he could feel the warmth of her sweet breath fanning his cheek. She was shivering, and he could hear the yearning in her voice.
‘You don’t need this.’
With monumental self-control he turned, running a hand through his hair as his gut twisted with desire and agonising frustration. He felt as if he had been kicked repeatedly in the stomach.
‘I do. Oh, God, Orlando, you don’t know how much I need this. Please…’ She was almost sobbing with longing.
He didn’t turn, feeling his hands clench into fists, until the pain in his lacerated fingers provided a welcome distraction from his tortured conscience.
The last thing he wanted was a relationship, complications…companionship, for God’s sake. He wanted to be left alone with his suffering and his pain.
But, sweet Lord above, he wanted her. Wanted to lose himself in her. Now. Right now.
Silently she had slipped through the shadows to stand in front of him, a pale, trembling moon goddess. He stared straight ahead, but in the moonlight he could see the silvery glisten of tears on her cheeks.
‘I need you.’
Her whispered words broke down his last defence. With a moan of despair he gathered her into his arms and brought his mouth down onto her soft lips, feeling as well as hearing her answering moan of relieved surrender.
He could feel the frenzied pounding of her heart inside her shaking body. She seemed so scared, so vulnerable and needy, that his arms tightened around her, cradling her against the hard length of his body in an instinctive effort to warm and protect her. It felt so good. Her hands cupped his face, then slid to twine around his neck, her strong fingers massaging the base of his skull, pushing him downward, deepening the kiss, until his head was filled with nothing but the taste of her and the feel of her slender young body beneath the silky nightdress.
Reality melted away, and with it the demons and black dogs of despair. There was nothing now but darkness—a blissful darkness that only accentuated the powerful, miraculous sensations that were exploding inside him. Lifting his mouth from Rachel’s, he buried his face in her fragrant hair.
‘If we don’t stop this now, I won’t be able to.’
‘Good.’
Her voice was low and fierce. Carnal, he thought, at the very moment when he felt her hands at his waist, slipping beneath his shirt and moving over the taut flesh of his stomach. All further thought became impossible.
Rachel felt his shuddering exhalation of breath in her hair as her trembling fingers fumbled with his belt. She was no longer shivering with cold, but with excitement. With heat.
At the beginning her overwhelming need had been to have the stain of Carlos’s touch washed from her skin, but at that moment she couldn’t have said who Carlos was. There was no thought in her head but Orlando, and she needed nothing but the feeling of his hands on her waist, his lips against her hair, her ear, her neck…
His thumbs swept upwards over the quivering skin of her midriff to run along the sharp ridges of her ribs. She was lost inside his kiss, but felt him gently pushing her backwards as her hands finally released the top button of his trousers and slid downwards. And then the silence was broken by a discordant clash of notes as her bottom came to rest on the piano keyboard. She was tearing at the buttons of his shirt now, her mouth never leaving his as her hands hungrily sought the warmth of his skin, pushing the fabric down over his massive shoulders, feeling them bunch and flex under her questing fingers.
He was so huge. So powerful. Dazedly, she tore her mouth from his.
‘I want to see you,’ she whispered.
He looked down at her, into her. His face was utterly unreadable. The moonlight bleached his skin to an unearthly white, so that he looked like the ghost of some heroic centurion. Only the rise and fall of his broad chest and the dark glitter of his eyes gave away the fact that he was real.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ she murmured in wonder.
He didn’t smile. With an expression of intense concentration he moved towards her again, and caught hold of the hem of her nightdress in his hands, drawing it slowly upwards over her head until she stood in front of him, spread against the piano, completely naked. His head jerked backwards as his hands slid upwards over the flat of her stomach, her arching ribs.
‘So are you.’
The intensity of his voice sent a pulse of liquid need crashing through her, which was nothing to the deranging impulses that sizzled through her central nervous system as he cupped her breasts in his hands, shifting her weight backwards onto the piano. With another decadent, dissonant chord, she opened her legs and pulled him towards her.
It wasn’t Chopin. It was a million times sweeter.
Their mouths found each other, and then he was lifting her, swinging her into his arms and carrying her across the room. For a second he lifted his mouth from hers, negotiating a path between the low mirrored table and the sofas, and then he lowered her gently to the floor.
She gasped as she felt soft, warm fur against her bare skin, twining her fingers luxuriously into it as she raised herself up and let her head fall backwards, arching her back as his lips traced a path of bliss down the column of her throat. She caught the back of his head, pulling him downwards, harder, until they were both lying in the thick fur, their mouths devouring each other, bruising, biting, tasting.
No moonlight penetrated their dark intimacy. The world was reduced to the sensations of the flesh. Abandoning his strait-jacket of self-control, Orlando was lost in the feel of her hair in his hands, her lips on his neck. She smelled of roses, the warm smell of summer and purity and beauty, and as he entered her it was like regaining paradise.
She was exquisite. He heard her soft, throaty gasp and felt her clutch at his back, her strong fingers pressing into his skin, urging him deeper, demanding all of him, as she raised her legs and wrapped them around his waist, gripping him, cherishing him. And then her hands were cupping his face, imprisoning it millimetres from her own as her mouth captured his again, and he felt i
t open in a cry of high, primeval release.
She stiffened, and for a second was completely still, before he felt her shudder with ecstasy in his arms. It was too much. Helplessly he plunged headlong into blissful release, and as he did so the relentless, smothering blackness in his head was lit up with dazzling explosions of red and green and gold.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘I CAN see angels.’
Rachel lay beside him, gazing upwards, and her voice was soft and drowsy and sated.
‘Does that mean I’ve died and gone to heaven?’
Orlando stirred, rolling over to face her and propping himself up on one elbow. He could hear the smile in her words and wished he could look into her face. He wanted to kiss the corners of that smile and make it fade into something more intense and abstract as his lips moved further down her body. He wanted to see if that astonishing passion of hers lit up her eyes, made her skin glow…
But he couldn’t.
‘I doubt it, if I’m here too,’ he said harshly. There was no peace and light in the place he inhabited.
‘Don’t say that,’ she whispered softly. ‘You saved me today. For that, if nothing else, you’ve earned your place in heaven.’
She pulled him down beside her again, sweeping her arm upwards in a wide arc, and then he understood. Remembered. He’d forgotten the carved plasterwork on the ceiling above them, and how at night the charcoal-grey-painted background seemed to recede into the darkness, making the angels depicted there come alive. He’d loved it as a child. But he’d stopped looking at it long before he’d stopped being able to see it.
‘Look,’ she murmured. ‘They’re so beautiful. I can’t imagine that heaven could be any better than this, can you?’
Orlando sighed. Of course he saw nothing. The colours that had filled his head as he’d exploded inside her had faded, leaving a deeper darkness—like an empty winter sky after the fireworks were all finished.
