Blind Man's Buff

by Victoria Gordon

  She giggled; she couldn’t help it. It was simply impossible to imagine the Ran Logan she knew with a crooked tie or mismatched socks.

  ‘On second thoughts, maybe we’d best forget it,’ he said then, bitterly. ‘It strikes me you’d think it hilarious to see me out in public with mismatched socks or soup stains all over my tie.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’ Rena’s indignation almost made her shout, and she quickly lowered her voice. ‘That’s a hateful thing to say about anyone!’

  ‘Anyone wouldn’t have giggled at the thought,’ Ran replied without retracting. ‘Although...’ and he paused as if for thought, ‘I really wouldn’t have thought you a vengeful woman, although I can’t imagine why.’

  ‘I’m not!’ And that, she decided, was no lie. If she were a vengeful woman, would she even be here? Would she have suppressed her own feelings of betrayal and hurt just to keep from taking advantage of his infirmity?

  ‘Just a man hatcr,’ he said almost musingly. ‘And you won’t tell me why. Or not really why, to be specific. Now if you’d been through what I have ... no, we’ll ignore that. But I have to say, even knowing you’ll reject it anyway, that it’s not quite fair to judge all men by the misdeeds of one.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ she asked, not really wanting an answer. She didn’t judge all men by one — just Ran Logan by Ran Logan. And the evidence was damning!

  ‘Oh, I think you know it ... intellectually,’ he said. ‘But in the heart, that’s something else again.’ He smiled, but it was the smile of a dangerous, hunting animal. ‘I know a bit about that myself, since my accident.’

  ‘You never did tell me about your accident,’ she said, praying inwardly that he wouldn’t sense the desperate need in her to know, to know every single detail. ‘Not ... not that it’s any of my business, of course, and if you’d rather not ...’

  He shrugged aside her hesitations. ‘Nothing much to tell, really. I got involved in covering a small riot, didn’t watch my back carefully enough, and got smacked over the head with something. When I came out of it, I was blind. Also pretty severely concussed and a bit cut and bruised, but the blindness was obviously the greatest concern.’

  ‘I see.’ Which was a lie; she didn’t see at all. ‘But didn’t you say it was only ... temporary?’

  ‘Well, that’s what the doctors thought, and that’s what I thought ... until it happened again. Now they say it’s psychosomatic and I ... honestly don’t know. It’s here, anyway.’

  Oh, damn you, Ran Logan, she thought. There’s more to this than you’re telling and I can’t appear too curious. Why won’t you just tell me everything}

  ‘It it must have been horrible for you,’ she said, shuddering at how patronising and expectable the remark must sound.

  ‘Oh, the first time wasn’t too bad,’ he said with a quite unexpected grin. ‘I was out cold for most of the time anyway, and when I did start to come good I managed to get a good deal of comfort from everyone’s assertions that the blindness really was only temporary.’

  ‘But what caused the second blindness ... or relapse, or whatever?’ she asked. ‘Did you have another accident, or ...?’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ he said. ‘I came back to Australia feeling quite fit, all things considered. Oh, the occasional headache, that sort of thing, but my eyes were fine. And then . .. well, something happened that, let’s just say rather thoroughly destroyed my faith in w ... human nature. I don’t understand the medical aspects of it all, but the blindness returned gradually then and I’ve been stuck with it ever since.’

  Rena couldn’t help but catch his faltering over the term human nature, and — unfortunately — couldn’t help her mouth from running away with her good sense.

  ‘I gather your human nature was of the female variety?’ she asked in a tone that was blunt despite the shakiness of her own emotions.

  Ran shook his head sadly and grimaced. ‘My word, but you’re observant,’ he retorted sarcastically. ‘Yes, I was led down the proverbial garden path, as I must presume you were. The only difference in my case is that my blindness appears to have been the cause. My original blindness, that is.’

  He sighed, deeply and with that soul-wrenching futility of betrayal that Rena knew only too well. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘it’s that part which hurts most. I could have understood being ... dumped just ... because it happens. But not because of something like that.’

  Rena gasped. She simply couldn’t comprehend this! Bad enough to be faced with the fact that Ran had, to use his own words, dumped her for someone else. But to have done it for a woman who would then turn around and abandon him when he needed her most...

  ‘I ... I’m sorry,’ she said. And meant it, more than he must ever be allowed to understand.

  ‘Don’t be!’ His retort was harsh, brittle. Cruel, even. ‘I certainly wouldn’t apologise for mankind in general for what happened to you, and I don’t need either sympathy or misplaced apologies for my own problems.’

  Then he grinned, again that horrible wolfish grin that disguised so much bitterness, so much pain, that Rena shuddered. ‘Besides, I was warned. So I guess I’ve only myself to blame in any event.’

  ‘Warned? Do you mean she ... she...?’ Rena simply couldn’t bring herself to complete the question. Valerie Dunn — now she was a woman Rena could imagine uttering such a warning. But obviously it hadn’t been Valerie Dunn, who was still very much in evidence. And who else? What else, what kind of cruel, unfeeling woman might do such a thing?

  ‘If you mean did she warn me in advance that she couldn’t face life with a blind man, no,’ he replied coldly, almost angrily. ‘She wouldn’t have had the guts to be that honest, apparently. But she made it clear enough to ... someone .. . after the fact.’

  ‘I ... I can’t imagine such a thing,’ Rena said. ‘I just can’t imagine it. You’re saying she didn’t even hang about until the diagnosis was confirmed — as it wouldn’t have been, from what you’ve said?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it,’ he growled. ‘From what I understand she found out I was blinded, asked very few questions at all, but quite quickly and conveniently disappeared.’

  ‘My ... God!’ Rena breathed.

  ‘Oh, don’t sound so astounded,’ he snarled. ‘I’m sure you know as well as I do that such things happen.’

  ‘Obviously,’ she replied drily, rather piqued by his attitude. ‘It happened to me, too, remember? Although at least I wasn’t blinded as you were.’ Not blinded, but surely blind, she thought. And equally vulnerable, shouted some demon inside her. You might have been pregnant!

  ‘No, but you might have ended up with an equally difficult burden. You could have found yourself pregnant.’ Ran’s voice echoed that of the demon inside, and Rena shivered at the truth of a fear she had quite forgotten having experienced.

  ‘It’s hardly the same thing,’ she snapped, unaccountably irritated by his remark. ‘I’m quite sure you weren’t personally involved in your eventual blindness.’

  ‘That isn’t what the doctors say,’ he replied with a hint of wry grin playing about his mouth. ‘According to them, don’t forget, I’m not blind at all. It’s all in my head. And if you mean the lady in question wasn’t personally involved, well ... maybe not.’

  ‘I don’t think I follow you.’

  Ran shrugged, almost as if he was now bored by it all. ‘I didn’t become blind, the second time, until I was faced with the irrefutable evidence that she’d ... pulled the pin, as it were. That’s why the quacks reckon it’s all psychosomatic — some kind of reaction to the shock of having been deserted.’

  ‘You must have loved her very much,’ Rena said, denying the demons that cried out how often he’d claimed to love her, too.

  ‘Nothing I won’t get over ... in time.’ But he had loved this mysterious, cold-hearted bitch, Rena could tell. It was written all over him, in the calculated casualness, the wry, ironic twists of his lip, the bitter coldness that occasi
onally flared forth. Oh, why, she wondered, couldn’t he have loved her like that? She would have stood by him.

  Certainly better, she thought, than he had stood by her. And she fell silent, wallowing in her own silent, unspeakable bitterness, until he broke the silence himself.

  ‘Does it make you feel any better to find out you’re not the only victim in the game, Rena?’ His voice was changed, now, somehow softer, more gentle, compelling.

  ‘Should it?’ she snapped, ‘I never thought for a minute that I was the first — or last — to be taken in by a smooth line.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. But tell me, what would you do now, if you could meet this fellow face to face and have it out with him?’

  It was too close to home. Too personal. Too unanswerable under the circumstances.

  ‘What would you do?’ she countered in a desperate bid to gain thinking time.

  ‘I’m not sure, but one day I’ll find out,’ he replied calmly. ‘There was a time when I’m quite certain I’d have killed the bitch.’

  And he meant it: no question of that in Rena’s mind. He must have been as hurt and bewildered and angry as was she herself. But to say now that one day he’d find out ... she couldn’t resist the question.

  ‘I know you’ll think I’m being callous, but how will you know her if you do find her?’ she asked, trembling a bit inside as she awaited his reply.

  His answer was totally unexpected, and therefore impossible for her avoid. One lean hand reached out to grasp her own with unerring accuracy, lifting it, holding it to his lips for a kiss that burned like acid, then dropping it before she could even think to object.

  ‘Oh, I fancy I’ll know her right enough,’ he said in a voice so cold, so deadly cold, that she shuddered. ‘After all, I seem to find it easy enough to recognise you without seeing you. Don’t I?’

  ‘Well, so you think,’ she replied with a confidence she didn’t feel. ‘I imagine that given half a dozen women with my perfume and general size and you wouldn’t find it so easy.’

  Ran’s laugh was low and gurgling with suppressed merriment. Quite unexpected, considering how serious he’d been only moments before.

  ‘And think how much more difficult it would be if I could see again,’ he chuckled. ‘Especially if all six were beautiful; I’d have the devil’s own time choosing then, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Be serious,’ Rena snapped, glad he couldn’t see the blush that had climbed up from the hollow of her breasts to flow across her throat and cheeks.

  Instead, he reached out to take her fingers again in his own, and while she was wondering how he could possibly, in his blindness, be so damnably accurate, he replied: ‘But what could be more serious? Do you realise that I don’t know at all what you look like, that my entire conception is based on a voice and a general idea of size? And of course, the way you kiss.’

  And once again he drew her hand up, touching it with his lips in exactly the manner he used to do that, so very long ago when he had said he loved her, when she had loved him. His lips were a slow, deliberate instrument of torture, moving across the back of her hand, then across her palm as he turned her defenceless wrist, then on to her wrist itself, firing her pulse to improbably racing, pounding life.

  Her mind screamed. Her heart, beneath its pounding, cried out in desperation. But the muscles that tensed to yank her hand from his grasp were limp, useless. Control of her body flowed across to him like electrical current through a wire.

  ‘Don’t.’ Was it a whisper, or merely the sound of her mind inside her brain? ‘Please don’t.’ That was her voice; even she heard it, but if Ran heard he made no acknowledgement.

  He came to his feet, sliding erect in one sinuous, easy movement and drawing her unprotesting body with him. His lips never left her wrist, never ceased to hold her with an hypnotic, claiming certainty.

  As Rena flowed into his arms, her lips rising to meet his mouth as it flowed up her arm, across the hollow of her shoulder, her mind screamed at the folly. But her body obeyed, obeying not her own cries for salvation, but the insistent, persuasive aura of Ran’s presence.

  And then she was in his arms, her body moulded to his, her heaving breasts against the strong, flexing muscles of his chest, her lips softly merging with his own, her thighs taut against the tautness of his thighs. She couldn’t breathe, her mind was a soundless, airless vacuum, her body a rag doll in his hands.

  His mouth was a magnet, claiming her lips, drawing their softness, giving life to them. His arms went round her, his fingers closing in the hollow of her back for an instant before embarking upon an exploration of tantalising, fingertip expertise. She felt his fingers in the softness above her trouser waist, along the nubbly knuckles of her spine, rising to where bra-line would have been if she had been wearing one.

  Then they moved lower, kneading into the softness at the base of her spine, each delicate fingertip alive in itself, rousing her, drawing her closer to him, spreading vibrations of love, of life itself.

  His mouth softened on her lips, melding the tastes of them both as his lips softened hers, making her mouth more pliant, more biddable to his will.

  Rena’s knees turned to jelly; had he not been holding her she would have fallen. Her stomach fluttered in gyrations of ecstasy; her fingers trembled as they brushed against the nape of his neck, feeling the coarseness of his hair, the hotness of his skin. Wherever he touched her, she was loose, alive with his vibrant physical essence.

  Her mind screamed in protest. This was wrong! This was folly, a deadly foolishness that could only bring more pain, more heartbreak, more suffering. But her body rejoiced; this was right, this was heaven itself.

  When his fingertips flowed down across the taut hollows of her tummy, down to the softness beneath her waistband, she could only sigh her pleasure, her lips whispering meaningless delights.

  But she was not entirely abandoned. When his fingers touched at the waistband of her jeans she shrank away; when they became more insistent she murmured her objections.

  Forget that her fingers were now buried in the hair of his chest; forget that the open buttons of his shirt-front were open because she had opened them, her fingers flicking like wildfire across the buttons to let his body come even closer to her. Forget that she hated him, loved him, despised him and cherished his touch. This was right and wrong and perfect all at once.

  She wanted him, her body cried out for him, her mind was a mere annoyance with cries for common sense, for restraint. Too late now for restraint as her fingers flowed down across the muscled smoothness of his stomach, down against the hard maleness of him, the essence of him for which her body cried so loudly in desire.

  Holding her, he leaned back, sliding his body clumsily on to the length of the porch swing on which he had been sitting. Rena went with him, her mind protesting and her body moving to help him, to balance him, to position them both on the softness of the cushions.

  His weight shifted to slide her into position, his hands already busy at the waist of her jeans and her own fingers drinking in the pleasure of him as her hips shifted to aid his explorations. The swing creaked as it took their weight, then groaned in protest as the imbalance caught, tipping them downward in a welter of limbs and falling metal framework.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘Randall? What’s happened? Are you all right?’

  The voice seemed right beside them, an extension of the light that suddenly blazed into being within the flat.

  Rena cried out — silently — as she swarmed to her feet, scrabbling against the tiled deck of the veranda as she scurried like a small frightened animal towards the base of the stairs. In seconds she was up them, creeping silently but swiftly on all fours, her heart pounding in her heaving breast and Ran’s ‘get out of it’ whisper still loud in her ears.

  ‘It’s all right, for God’s sake,’ came his voice, behind her now. Ran’s voice, astonishingly calm, astonishingly clear in the sudden stillness. ‘I just slipped and knocked over the porch
swing, that’s all.’

  More light, this time from the porch flood as Valerie Dunn emerged from the front door, wrapping a flimsy, almost sheer nightgown around her. She was like a magazine model, not a hair out of place, not a single sleep-smudge around her deep-set green eyes.

  Rena cowered in her own little pool of shadow at the top of the stairs, afraid to move, now, lest she be heard. Afraid not to move, lest she be seen.

  ‘Randall ... you’re impossible!’ the auburn-haired woman exclaimed. ‘Just look at you ... and of course sitting out here alone in the middle of the night. What am I to do with you?’

  ‘Exactly as you’ve always done, I should imagine,’ Ran replied. Rather wearily, Rena thought, as if this were a discussion of long standing between him and his exquisite secretary. ‘Why don’t you trot off back to bed, Valerie? I’m quite all right, as you can see.’

  ‘If you were quite all right,’ came the reply in sultry but officious tones, ‘we wouldn’t be here in this ridiculous little backwater in the first place. We’d be in Sydney, where you can have proper medical help on tap as you need it, and where I can take care of you properly.’

  Ran snorted. ‘The fact that the place would drive me mad being quite irrelevant to the issue, I suppose?’

  His secretary shifted closer to him, her bare arms winding round him, Rena thought, like two silky smooth snakes. Vipers. ‘Poor darling,’ she cooed, lips moving up to brush at his cheek. ‘Why can’t you give up this obsession of yours and let’s go back to civilisation? You won’t find what you’re looking for here, no matter how long you stay.’

  ‘That,’ he retorted steadfastly, ‘is a matter of some considerable opinion. Anyway, I’m stuck with the place now until this course is finished and there’s no way around that.’

  Valerie Dunn grimaced. ‘That course! Really, Randall ... it wasn’t one of your better decisions to take on such a project. I thought you’d have realised that by now.’