She felt like a fool. There was nothing to be frightened of. Vanessa walked through to unlock her own door and led the way upstairs.
Inside her sitting room she flicked on a small lamp and then turned again, "Jake, I... I wish—"
But he was right beside her, and she turned almost into his arms. His breath fanned her temple. "Vanessa," he said softly, caressingly. "Don't be afraid. I'll make you want me."
But she already wanted him, desperately wanted him and loved him, whatever he thought. If he touched her now she knew she could not say no.
She was gazing fixedly at his crooked sensuous mouth, feeling hypnotized. When it moved nearer she remained still, waiting, unable to think or breathe, and when his lips brushed hers they parted involuntarily on a soft indrawn breath of anticipation.
The sound seemed to ignite him. His strong lean arms encircled her almost brutally then, and his mouth closed hungrily on hers. Vanessa sagged against him. Everywhere he touched her, electric currents ran along her skin, shocking her into a need so desperate that reason was blotted out.
"Vanessa," he said in a deep tortured voice. "Vanessa, I need you." His mouth was pressing the hollows of her throat, the thin bones of her shoulders with a feverish intensity; as her head fell back she moaned and her arms reached up to hold him with a need that matched his, flame for flame.
His hands had pushed under her white shirt and his long fingers caressed the hungry skin of her shoulder and her long naked back under the fabric's soft folds. His touch was water in a desert: everywhere it ran her skin came gaspingly, electrifyingly alive, and it was never enough. Each stroke of his fingers against her made her understand her need for more.
When his hand moved upward from the hollow of her stomach, over her ribs and at last enclosed the full firm rise of her breast, she gasped out her breath on a pleading moan that Jake instantly smothered with a kiss. It was as though he wanted to take her cry into his body through his lips rather than his ears, as though the quality of that cry were meat and drink to him.
He slid the soft silk of her shirt from her body then and let it fall to the floor as she stood helpless in front of him, arms at her sides, like a small child being undressed for bed. But the look on her face was not like a child's, and when he pulled out the comb that held her loosely bound hair and its soft weight brushed down along her cheek she swayed against him. Her breasts pressed against the fabric of his shirt as her naked arms wrapped tightly around his waist, and her head dropped involuntarily back to offer her mouth up for his kiss.
He breathed as though she had winded him, and his arms closed convulsively around her, but he did not kiss her. He stood looking down at her for a long moment of tortured stillness, his thighs urgent against her, and then his mouth began the long slow journey toward hers. Time stopped; it was as though a year of her life might pass before his mouth branded her.
She parted her lips for one pleading cry, "Jas... on." His mouth stilled his name on her lips, and as he bent to pick her up in his arms, his mouth still fastened to hers, she sensed a sound deep in him like tortured laughter.
As he carried her through a door into darkness he lifted his mouth. "That's right, my love," he whispered. "Jace."
But it wasn't Jace. It was Jake. And it was Jake she loved, even if he thought she needed the lie he had just given her.
"No," she whispered urgently as he set her down on her bed in the soft enclosing night. "I love you. I love you, Ja—"
This time his mouth covered hers with a ruthless suddenness that took her breath away. "Stop," he said.
As though afraid of losing her, he kissed her as he undressed, kissed her with sudden thrusts of passion that kept her breathless in the darkness as she listened to his clothes fall.
But he would not have lost her. She needed him, and she might have waited forever in that warm, soft, expectant darkness if he had asked her to.
He did not make her wait. A faint starlight lightened the gloom as the lean muscled shape of Jake Conrad bent over her, and his hands unerringly found her waist and the zipper hidden in the pocket of her skirt.
The touch of his fingers on her smoothly stockinged legs, her silk-clad sex, was like white heat, and when her breath hissed into the night he knew it and smiled. She reached for him, wanting the power to give him the same pleasure. In response to her touch he moved, and the rough warmth of his body covered hers.
There was nothing he did not know about her body. He touched her with an expert's touch, his hands and his mouth calculating each searing caress to push her closer and closer to mindlessness, his own desperate need held at bay with a tight, vibrating control that she wanted to break but could not. She cried out again and again, wanting his body, as Jake watched and touched her, and sometimes his teeth flashed in a smile.
But she could not move him.
"Jake," she whispered urgently, "Jake." His breath caressed her brow and his lips pressed against her temple.
"What is it?" he asked softly.
She could not see his eyes in the gloom. She said, "Jake, if you don't love me, why are you wearing the ring I gave you?"
He drew in his breath as though he were dying, and the hand that had been so tormentingly caressing closed like steel on the soft flesh of her upper arm. It was the reaction of a moment only; she felt him regaining control. But now she knew that her power lay in words.
"I love you, Jake," she began wildly, driven by a need she couldn't name, "I love you, I need you to touch me, I need your hands, I need your mouth kissing me, I need your body inside me. Oh, God, I need it! I need you to love me; love me, Jake, please love me now, I love you...."
A groan ripped from his throat, and his mouth came down on hers with a violence of unleashed need that nearly destroyed her. His hand pressed her breast, her waist, her hip, no longer with the need to give pleasure, but to take it. His mouth left hers to find her breast, not now with the desire to arouse, but in the frantic need to taste her flesh.
It was this, at last, that swept her away. Vanessa gasped and moaned in passionate surprise, and then, as his body at last pushed into hers, the darkness was inside her head and reason collapsed under the onslaught of need and pleasure.
He was the expert no longer. He was as lost as she, bones water, flesh fire, and his fingers gripped her with a fierce bruising need that he could not control as he demanded from her body everything she was able to give.
Without warning, then, she was frantic. The deep tumult began in her, and an ache so deep it seemed not to be a part of her but to spring from some rushing river between them, of which they both drank.
They reached the last frontier of joy and pleasure intermingled, and there were tears on her cheeks as, shuddering, his voice a deep rasping surrender, she heard Jake cry out her name.
* * *
Sunlight always woke her. When Vanessa opened her eyes the bedroom was bright with it. The whole apartment was bright with it; that was one of the reasons she loved it so much.
Her head was in the hollow of his shoulder, her arm across Jake's suntanned muscled chest. She felt the black hair crinkling under her cheek and breast and her soft underarm, and sighed in deep content.
Vanessa tilted her head to look up at his face and was surprised to see that Jake was wide awake, one arm under his head, his eyes open and staring into the distance. The peace that she felt was not mirrored in his face.
The cotton sheet slid down her back as Vanessa pushed herself up and sat gazing down at him. Her hair, glinting like fire in the sunlight, was a tousled cloud around her head and shoulders, and Jake moved a lazy arm to stroke it.
A smile touched her lips and her eyes as he looked at her. "Good morning," she whispered.
"Good morning." But there was no answering smile in Jake Conrad's eyes, not even the crooked cynical smile she knew so well.
She stroked his chest down to his flat stomach and watched the muscles rippling under his skin in response.
"You're beautiful," she
whispered, for the sight of his body pulled at her emotions in a way that was almost disturbing.
"You made love to Jace last night." The words came out flat and cool, as though he were making a simple statement of fact.
She gasped, "No!"
There was a silence.
"Jake, I love you. And it was you who made love to me last night, and I always knew it. I never forgot it was you for one moment."
"Not even when you called his name?"
When would this demon stop torturing him? What had she done to him, the woman who had married another man?
"I never called his name," she said.
"I think you did."
"No."
There was a closed cruel look on his face that disturbed her.
"Jake," she whispered, her voice urgent with the knowledge that if only he would let her, she could heal his scars with love. "I love you. Please believe that. I love you."
A light of angry triumph kindled in his eyes as he looked at her, and he sat up and bent over her, forcing her to lie back against the pillows. He lifted a hand to catch a lock of her wild hair and stroked it between fingers and thumb with an odd sensual concentration.
"You don't love Jace anymore?" he asked, and his eyes were slitted and his crooked mouth was twisted in a smile.
"No," she said as calmly as she could. "Except as a memory. Jace is dead."
"And he's dead to you?"
"Jake—"
"He's dead to you?" Jake persisted. "You aren't in love with him any more?"
"I told you, no."
"If he walked into this room now you'd feel nothing for him?"
"I...." How could she answer that? If Jace walked into this room now she might go mad, she supposed. "Jake, why is this so important? It was all over ten years ago. I don't feel anything for Jace except—" Except memory, the memory of first love? Except a tiny regret? But how could she regret anything in a life that had led her, at last, to Jake? She shook her head helplessly. "I don't feel anything for him, can't you accept that?"
"Nothing?"
How could she explain about the small corner of her heart that might, perhaps, always belong to Jace? He was waiting to pounce on every word. Yet there was no threat to Jake in that tiny tenderness; it simply was there.
"Jake, he's dead. He's been dead nearly ten years. I love you more than I ever loved him. Please forget about Jace."
A black flame leapt up behind his eyes, and his crooked smile became more cruel than ever. "Well, that's not so easy," he said softly, his voice tight with the effort to remain steady. "That's not so easy. Because I've been lying to you, my love. There is no cousin with the same name, Vanessa. There has only ever been one Jason Conrad, and that's me. I am Jace, Vanessa."
Chapter 13
"Jace?" she whispered softly, uncomprehendingly. Her eyes grew wide as she gazed at him. "Jace?"
He nodded. There was a strange smile on his face; he said nothing.
"Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Jace!" Vanessa exclaimed, tears starting in her eyes. She reached her arms around his warm naked chest and clung as the sobs shook her body. "Jace, Jace, Jace! Oh, I don't believe it! It's too—oh, God!" She lay back, wiping the tears from her cheeks, smiling tremulously up at him. "Why didn't you tell me before?"
She laughed as another sob caught her throat, feeling as though her heart were going to explode. She forgot where she was, she forgot the past, the present; she forgot time. She only knew that the man leaning over her was miraculously and unquestionably both her men, both her deepest loves in one, that Jace and Jake were the same man—a man who belonged to her now as irrevocably as the rising sun belonged to morning.
She wrapped her arms around his chest again, pressing her face against him with a joy that welled up from somewhere deep inside her. "I love you," she said, almost incoherent with joy and tears. "I love you so much! I ought to have known, I should have recognized your body if not your face, shouldn't I? Oh, your poor, scarred, battered face—and it's so beautiful now, but I should have known you, you—"
"Yes, I made a lot of slips." His voice was cool, and Vanessa was abruptly aware that he had not moved. She was clinging to him, but he was not holding her or touching her... nor was he smiling. When she drew back slowly and looked up at him, his face looked like a death's head.
"Jake!" she whispered, shocked. "What is it? What's the matter?"
Now he smiled, the kind of smile that made her wish he hadn't.
"You really are a most accomplished hypocrite," he said.
It was like a slap across the face, like ice water thrown over her heart. Vanessa shrank back into the pillow.
"Hypocrite!" she whispered. "Why do... what do you mean?"
"God," he breathed. "You're wasted. You should be on the stage."
"Jace—Jake, I...."
"My name is Jake," he said roughly. "Jace may not be dead, but he hasn't been around for a long time."
Suddenly she felt nakedly vulnerable, and as though she were in danger of her life. Trembling, she reached to pull the sheet up over her breasts.
"You don't love me, do you?" she said in a low even voice, building frantic barriers to ward off the blow that was coming.
"I'm afraid not."
"You... it's hate, isn't it? You hate me." A little voice inside screamed that it wasn't true, that it was impossible that he should hate her, because if he hated her she would die. But the rest of her was numb, the rest of her could accept what he was saying with only the dullest, most distant sense of being bludgeoned.
"That's what it is," agreed Jake.
She closed her eyes and put a hand up over her mouth to contain a sob.
"Oh, God!" she whimpered, choking.
Jake rolled away from her, stood up and began to dress. With a tortured fascination Vanessa watched him.
"Is this it, then?" she cried, her voice cracking in disbelief. "I'm never going to see you again?"
"No," he said, turning to face her as he buckled his belt. "This is by no means it. I'm not finished with you yet—I've barely begun."
Hope fluttered frantically outside her heart, begging to be let in. "Begun what?" she faltered, but the look in his eyes killed the hope.
"Begun to make you pay."
"Pay? Pay for what?" she whispered with a dull terror starting to throb in her. My God, how could he hate her so much when all she felt was love?
"What do you think?"
"My God, for—but that was ten years ago, Jake," she begged him, her voice hoarse with protest.
"It was ten years," he stated grimly, and it took her a moment to realize what he meant.
She said in disbelief, "You've remembered and hated me for ten years?"
"Not remembered," he corrected her again. "I didn't remember you for ten years. But you shouldn't have come back, Vanessa."
Suddenly she was cold, icy cold all over. A woman would have to be a masochistic fool to love a man who hated her as much as this. Anyway, she had no feelings left: she was pure, detached, as cold as an angel.
Vanessa flung back the sheet and crossed the room to pull blue jeans from the closet. Ignoring Jake's presence she thrust her long legs into them and zipped them up. "So now you want your revenge, is that it?" she said in a choking voice. "You're going to take the opportunity of my being in Vancouver and being in love with you to make me pay for what I did ten years ago?"
"I didn't take the opportunity," he said, laughing suddenly. "Haven't you understood? I made it."
"You made it!" Vanessa pressed her hand to her mouth. "You mean all this—everything—" she waved her hand vaguely "—it was all for this? The business, bringing me here—just so you could have me under your thumb?" Her voice was high and cracking, almost unrecognisable. The pain was threatening to break through the frail icy barrier she had set up against it, and it was sharp, stabbing and a thousand times worse than the pain of losing him the first time.
"Why?" she cried on a long howling note of uncomprehending ago
ny.
"Why did you marry Larry?" he asked abruptly.
"Why didn't you tell me not to? Why didn't you write to me?" she cried angrily, and she knew that it was a hurting anger that had lived inside her all these years and that this was why she had planned on looking up Jace, to ask him this.
"Tell me!" he said as though she hadn't spoken.
She slapped him. Slapped him with all the strength in her slim body, all the anguish in her heart. Jake twisted with the force of it; and then he was swinging around, his hands raised, and he caught her with a force that sent her sprawling across the bed. Before she could catch her breath he had flung himself on top of her and pinioned her wrists.
"Tell me why you married Larry."
"Why?" she demanded, and her anger filled her with a wonderful pulsing strength. "So you can decide whether your hatred is justified? So you can plan just the right degree of revenge?"
He shook her wrists a little. "Tell me," he repeated. "Vanessa, I want to know."
"Do you! Well, you had your chance to ask me that question ten years ago and to raise your objections then, and I didn't hear you doing it. My reasons are none of your business. You were satisfied to hate me without knowing the reason; you can just go on hating me."
He began to kiss her, his lips running across her cheeks and lips, throat and breast, knowing she would hate it, knowing she would flinch from that burning touch.
"Vanessa," he said softly, threateningly, "tell me."
If that meant he would take her against her will if she didn't tell him, Vanessa thought, blind with rage, then he deserved whatever he got. And he would get what he deserved. She would make sure of that.
She laughed lightly, and it was a sound that chilled even her blood. "Can't you guess?" she asked in a high voice. "Can't you really guess? Or perhaps you don't want to know as badly as you say!" She smiled and opened her eyes at him. "Larry was such an exciting lover, Jake," she said, the words almost surprising her as they came from her mouth. Maybe Jake was right, she should have gone on the stage. "You—Jace was a lovely person, but...." Her voice trailed gently away. "I think I knew it that night Jace—you made love to me, but I didn't want to admit it to myself: I couldn't have lived without Larry. I couldn't have given that up."
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