“I want to lie down,” she said. “Please, Marc. I can’t touch you when we’re like this.”
“You’re touching me, all right.” Clasping her hips, he moved her up and down against the bare skin of his abdomen.
“Not enough,” she said with a gasp. “It’s not enough!”
“It will never be enough,” he said, rolling her off him, lifting up to lean over her, his broad, callused hands sliding slowly up her body.
The room was plunged into darkness as she reached over and switched off the lamp.
“Why did you do that?” he murmured. “I want to see you, Sharon. Don’t you know how lovely you are? It excites me just looking at you.” He rolled to one side as if to turn it on again, but she caught him, held his arm in both hands, and shook her head.
“No. Please.” He gave in. She fumbled with the button at the top of his jeans, popped it free, and then slid down his zipper.
“That,” he said, “has got to be the sexiest sound in the world. A zipper in the dark.” As her hand slipped inside the denim, he didn’t speak anymore, just sucked in a sharp breath and lifted his hips up as her fingers encircled him firmly, her hand moving rhythmically. He groaned and fell back, his shirt draping open, and she moved her mouth over his chest until she found one of his nipples again and tugged on it with the same rhythm. He whispered her name in a tense voice, with a warning in his tone, but she didn’t stop. His breath rasped in and out harshly.
“That,” she corrected him, “is the sexiest sound in the world.”
“Oh, Lord!” he said again, tearing himself from her hands and mouth, flipping her onto her back and cupping her breasts. “You want sexy sounds, woman? Then listen to yourself!”
He kissed his way from her breasts to her toes and back up again, pausing here and there until she whimpered with need and writhed on the bed. He grasped the elastic of her bikini panties and slid them off her with her full cooperation, then quickly got rid of his own clothing. His hot tongue found the pulsating center of her, and the sounds that issued from her throat made him murmur in approval. Lifting her hips, he held her to his mouth, keeping her in place when her involuntary motions would have snatched her away from the very source of her pleasure.
“Marc … please … stop …” She moaned, her fingers clutching his hair tightly. “I can’t … do this. That’s what I was trying to tell you. I haven’t … had an orgasm for a long time. I can’t!”
He lifted his head long enough to gasp, “You can, you will, you are,” and continued his sensual caresses, until suddenly, she knew he was right. She squeezed her eyes shut as she soared up, up, up, went rigid, striving for something just out of reach. When she found it, she let out a glad cry, trembling and sobbing as he rested his head on her heaving abdomen.
“Sexy sounds,” he murmured as she stroked his hair, her fingers still shaking. “Such beautiful music, my Sharon. I want you to sing for me like that again and again.”
He nestled her close in his arms, licking the salty tears from her face. “I’ve been empty for so long,” she whispered. “I know I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do. I need you again, Marc. I need you inside me.”
“Yes.” He rolled away from her, and she knew he was preparing himself. She rested her cheek against his back, running her hands around his waist. She quivered, a deep shudder of need frightening her once more with its intensity, because what if she couldn’t find that wonderful place again, the way normal women did? What if what had just happened was a fluke? And then he turned, cuddling her close again. She could almost believe that it would be all right. Yet there was still that element of doubt, of fear, and she had to know!
“Please … I want you to hurry now,” she said, but he still held back. Parting her legs, he probed with one finger, finding hot, satiny moisture, and slipped inside her, parting her, widening the entrance, working in and out. She gasped, writhed, and dragged him to her. “Now!” she said, but he still resisted.
“Let me turn on the light,” he said thickly. “I want to see your face. I want to see what we look like together. Please, Sharon.”
Her robe was undone, but it still covered her back, and she was afraid if she didn’t do what he said he would leave her like that, hung up on the edge with nowhere to go. She was aching with need, burning with it, had no one but him on her mind. The rest didn’t matter as much as what she needed at this moment.
“Yes, yes, anything. Just don’t stop … Oh, Marc, promise me you won’t let it stop this time!” she cried softly.
The light wasn’t bright, but she squeezed her lids down tightly nonetheless. She knew he was looking at her; she could feel his gaze sweeping over her body. When he whispered to her to open her eyes, she forced herself to obey, staring into the tawny depths of his.
“I love you, Sharon.” He said it quietly but with deep conviction. She wanted to reply, to tell him the same, but her throat was filled with an aching tightness she couldn’t swallow, so she could only look at him and hope he understood.
He moved over her, then took her slowly, inch by inch, letting her get used to the feel of him inside her. All the while he gazed at her face, his own a taut mask of control. When he was as deep inside her as he could go, he stayed very still for several beats, then withdrew until her clenching muscles and the alarm in her eyes drew him back. He thrust again, one rushing plunge after another as she cried out. Her legs wrapped around him, her nails raked his back, her body arched into a taut bow as she reached ever higher until she was there again. The sensation was upon her in such a rush she had no control over it, had to go with it, let it take her where it would. Dimly she was aware of the same thing happening to Marc, and she held him with a fierceness she had never known before, helping him over the edge.
“How can so much woman be packaged in such a petite body?” he asked sometime later, and she had to smile at the way he pronounced “petite”—perfectly, not the way it was said in the English language. He gave it special charm, and she had a dim memory of his having murmured more French words as they’d made love.
She didn’t say anything. There was nothing she could say. She could only lie there in his arms and savor the feelings seeping through her. She had made it. Twice, she had made it. She wasn’t what she had thought for so long. She wasn’t what Ellis had told her she was. It wasn’t the euphoria of elation she felt, she decided, examining her emotions, it was the quiet joy of personal vindication. She wasn’t “frigid.” She wasn’t “sexually dysfunctional” as the magazine articles had so tactfully put it. She was whole. She was normal. She was a woman!
“What are those for?” Marc kissed the tears from her cheeks.
“I don’t know. Happiness, maybe.”
“I hope so, Sharon. Because you’ve made me very happy. Happier than I’ve been for a long time. “
“That’s the way I feel.” Shyly, she looked at him through her black lashes. “I didn’t know I could … do that … anymore.”
“Do what?”
She felt a flush rising on her face. Dammit, she was thirty-seven years old. She was the mother of two children! She could certainly tell this man who had just become her lover her innermost thoughts, couldn’t she? “I didn’t know I could reach a climax.”
“So you said earlier.” He smiled slowly, sexily, making her want him all over again. “I don’t know why you would think that,” he said. “You’re a very responsive, sensuous woman. Any man would know that, looking at the clothes you wear.” He fingered the satiny fabric of her robe. “Things like this, like the velvet and fur of your bridesmaid’s gown, the silk dress you wore Christmas Day, like the velour thing you had on when I came to ask you out for dinner. You like soft, you like smooth … and so do I.” His gaze held hers, mesmerically. His hands slid the robe down off her shoulders, over her arms. “Your skin is the smoothest … the softest, the most touchable skin in the world.” Lifting her unresisting body, he sat her up and slipped the robe right off her, sliding his hands up and d
own her back.
Suddenly his hands stopped, one returning to a certain spot, his fingertips touching something. He felt her go rigid against him, and she struggled to get away, to pull her robe back up, but he carefully flipped her onto her stomach, and stared at the marks on her back.
Her entire body heaved in an attempt to get away as she cried, “Don’t look at me! Stop it, Marc! Oh, God, please stop it!” But his gentle fingertip continued to trace the three small, round, puckered scars, all the more horrible as he realized what they were—cigarette burns.
All at once, he thrust himself away from her. She heard his feet thudding on the carpet, heard the bathroom door open and close with a bang that shook the house. She pulled her robe back on, covering her shame, and huddled there weeping. Of course he would despise her now. How could he help it? He knew what she had allowed Ellis to do to her. He knew she was weak and ineffectual and useless as a woman, as a human being. The good effects of more than two years of counseling faded away. She wanted to die right there, but it came at her in waves as she curled into a fetal position and stopped trying to fight it. Marc had seen. And he left her.
Marc felt ill. Sharon had been physically as well as emotionally abused! He remembered her saying that her divorce had meant the end of pain. And he thought she meant unhappiness. Oh, Lord, how could she ever have trusted a man to come near her again? How had she ever managed to trust him? He groaned as he pounded his fists on the edge of the sink, fighting against the anguish that tore into him.
He loved her! He wanted to make a future with her, but she had been abused, scarred inside and out, injured by the man she loved! Of all the men for her to turn to, it should never have been him. Once she knew the truth, the trust would die. And when it did, that tiny, glowing brightness he had sensed still lived inside her somewhere wouldn’t burst into flames of love for him as he had been praying it would.
What he should do was get his clothes on, leave her house, get into his camper, and drive away. But where could he go? He wasn’t ready to go home. He had been so sure that he had found the place for him, the place where he could make a new life, be truly happy again.
But not without Sharon. He knew that now. Without her, he would never be happy no matter where he went.
He heard the door open and looked up, staring at the ghostlike little figure that came through. Her face stark white between the black brackets of her hair. She held his clothing in one arm.
In a tiny, frightened voice, she said, “I brought your things. Good-bye, Marc. I’m … sorry.”
He stared at her, his mouth in a hard, set line. “Why?” he croaked. “Why the hell did he do that to you?”
His fist hammered on the edge of the basin again, and she recognized the muffled sound that had made her hesitate outside the bathroom door for so long. The violence of it terrified her even further, and she backed up, out the door. He followed her, as she cowered away from him, her gaze never leaving his face. “No,” she whispered. “Please don’t be mad at me. I won’t let it happen again. I didn’t mean to upset you. I—” She gasped as his hands clamped down on her shoulders.
At once, he let her go, lifting a gentle hand to touch her cheek, shoving her hair back. He remembered how she had had the same haunted, stricken look on her face outside his camper on Christmas Eve. He’d been confused by that diffidence following each little spurt of entirely forgivable temper, but now he thought he understood it.
“Sharon.” He swallowed as he lifted her face and looked into her terror-filled eyes. “Don’t be afraid of me. Please, ma chérie, no fear. I will not ’urt you. You haven’t upset me. I was upset by what I saw ’ad been done to you, but I’m not angry wit’ you. How could I be? You are too precious ever to be harmed in any way.”
His quiet voice was calming, and his accent more pronounced. Oddly, that helped the fear begin to abate, as if some part of her knew that he was speaking from the heart, not taking care with his pronunciation as he usually did. But she still eyed him warily, still kept her back pressed into the corner in case the sight of it set him off again.
It was, he thought, as if she didn’t fully trust him not to turn on her in the next instant. He felt sick to his stomach, knowing his fury at what had been done to her had probably hurt and frightened her almost as much as the original abuse had. He told himself he should leave, that it would be best for her if he did. But how could he leave her like that? He had to make it up to her, calm her, get her back to her bed where she would be warm and safe.
“I just want to ’old you,” he said, stroking her face again. “I want you back in my arms, trusting me.” Trust? The word had a bitter taste in his mouth. Soon, all too soon he would have to tell her about his past, and then she wouldn’t trust him to change her tire! “You thought I left your bed because I was disgusted by what I saw, yes?”
She nodded, her eyes huge and dark and fathomless.
“I was, little Sharon, but not with you,” he said tenderly. “Never with you. With the monster who did that to you. Will you come back to me? Will you let me hold you? Will you give me that much trust?”
After several moments, she moved forward, and he held her loosely, stroking her hair, kissing her eyelids and her cheeks. “I’m going to pick you up now,” he said, giving her plenty of time to object. She rested her cheek against his chest, but for all the trusting gesture, he felt her quivering and lifted her with great care. Carrying her back to the bed, he laid her down on it, drawing the covers up over her.
Out of the darkness came her faint whisper. “No. Marc, please don’t go.”
“You want me to stay?”
“I want you to … hold me.”
He could see those big eyes looking at him in the light coming through the crack where he hadn’t fully shut the bathroom door. It was wrong, so wrong of him not to tell her, not to give her a decent chance to make an informed choice, but he wanted so badly to hold her, too, that he couldn’t resist the pleading he saw there in her eyes. He slid under the covers and felt her shivering with cold and tension.
Turning half toward her, making a little hollow in his shoulder for her head, he drew her into his warmth and pulled the covers around them both.
“Why?” he said. “Why did he do it? It was your husband, wasn’t it?”
She sighed, and he didn’t think she was going to tell him. But then she said, “Because I got pregnant with Roxy and wouldn’t … do anything about it.”
“Bastard!” He went rigid with fury, but felt her quiver again and knew he would have to curb any tendency he might have toward violence. Until he’d seen those scars on her back, he had never had such a tendency. It shocked him with its scope and fury. “Why,” he said again more gently, “why would he want you to do a thing like that?”
“Because he thought it was bad for my career.” And then, as if floodgates had opened, her words spilled out. “He didn’t want me to have Jason either. We just … argued a lot about it until it was too late. I think he sort of liked Jason, at least at first, but when I wanted to stay home with the baby, he was furious. He said he owned me, owned my name, owned my career, and I would do what he said or else.”
Marc sighed heavily, his hand smoothing satin fabric over the scars he could still see, even though they were covered and her back was turned from him. He knew he would have nightmares about them. How many nightmares was he going to be forced to endure? “Or else … this?”
“No. No, that started later. I just did what he wanted. He was right. He did own my name, he did own my career.”
“How did that happen? He was your manager as well as your husband, I take it, but how could he own your name?”
“I don’t know. He just did. A lawyer confirmed it. Before Ellis was my husband he was my teacher, my mentor. He was older, and I thought very wise, the right one to steer me through the music business.” She frowned. He could feel one of her eyebrows move against his shoulder. “I was twenty-three when we married, and he became my manager.
In spite of the fact that I’d been on my own and raising my little sister for five years, I was a very young twenty-three, very naive. He was also a very good composer and a harpist of fair renown, and I trusted him.
“When I started to get bookings to play at concerts and with orchestras all over North America, was even offered a contract to begin recording, he grew jealous, angry with me. He told me that it was only because the classical music community needed a token woman. I was too young to realize that he was wrong, that plenty of talented women had good positions with many different symphonies, were making recordings of classical music and going on tours. He said I wasn’t very good, that I had to keep working, keep trying harder until I was perfect. But everything I wrote he rejected, until I felt he was rejecting me. He took most of the music I wrote and put it away, saying it wasn’t good enough yet, that when I had “matured” he’d give it back to me to work on again. Some, he let through because other people had heard them. Those comprised the two recordings I made.”
“And then I got pregnant with Roxy.”
“And he hurt you and you left him,” Marc said finally.
She was silent for too long. “Sharon?”
“No. No, I didn’t leave him. I should have. I know that now, but he told me he was sorry, told me I had driven him to it. To make amends, he let me keep the baby.”
“Was that the only time he harmed you physically”
“It was emotional hurts he preferred to inflict,” she said, and he heard the shame in her tone. “He grew angrier and angrier, because I wouldn’t play anymore. I wouldn’t compose. I couldn’t. I didn’t have it in my soul any longer. I used to try. I’d sit there at my harp for hours in the evening after the children were in bed, when he was out of the house, and try to play with joy, the way I used to. But there was no joy in me, only sadness, so I stopped.
Moonlight Man Page 8
