Ransacked Heart

by Jayne Bauling

  ‘Except that you’ll notice that much of the entertainment conforms to traditional Chinese tastes,’ Luke smiled.

  ‘Magicians and acrobats—they make a change,’ Maria conceded, smiling too. ‘And I loved the dragon dance; the aboriginal dancing too…Aboriginal?’

  ‘Native to the island. The purely Chinese came over from the mainland with Chiang Kai-Shek.’ He paused. ‘But people as well as their ceremonies are essentially the same the world over, aren’t they, Maria?’

  The way he was looking at her as much as the words and tone struck a personal note, and she regarded him uncertainly, unsure of what he was saying, or asking.

  ‘Just people,’ she agreed tartly eventually. ‘Human beings—most of us!’

  ‘You obviously have some doubts about me?’ Luke interpreted her tone accurately.

  ‘No, on second thoughts I don’t,’ she offered mockingly. ‘You’re human, although I’m not sure if you know it. Human beings make mistakes, but it never occurs to you that you could be wrong, does it?’

  ‘About you? But I don’t think I am, because you’re human too, with all the contradictions that implies—hating me at the same time as you want me, for instance.’

  ‘That’s not what I was talking about,’ Maria protested resentfully, just remembering to keep her voice low. ‘But since you’ve raised the subject, what about you? You despise me—so aren’t you degrading yourself by having anything to do with me? But perhaps it’s some quirk in your nature, and you actually get a kick out of despising the women you get involved with!’

  Luke’s face had darkened. ‘Wrong, Maria. My previous relationships have all been with women I’ve been able to like and respect at the same time as I’ve desired them.’

  ‘All? They can’t have been very successful relationships, then,’ she taunted.

  ‘But they have been.’ Luke was arrogantly emphatic. ‘Enjoyed while they lasted and ended by mutual consent when the time came to move on, usually because both the woman concerned and I knew from the start that it wasn’t going to be a lifelong affair.’

  ‘Meaning marriage?’

  His expression grew cynical. ‘Most marriages I’ve observed haven’t turned out to be lifelong affairs, and those that do all too frequently end up causing more misery than separation or divorce.’

  Maria regarded him curiously, unexpectedly chilled by the cynicism.

  ‘And yet you must still believe in marriage,’ she realised, ‘or you wouldn’t be so disgusted by the way I’m supposed to have come between Florian and his wife.’

  Luke’s lips twisted. ‘Oh, most marriages would start off with as good a chance of success as failure, I suppose, if it weren’t for outside influences, but there are too many women like you around, taking what you want with no thought for anyone else involved, and then hanging on once you’ve got it—out of sheer habit or emotional laziness, it sometimes seems to me.’

  The way you believe I’m hanging on to Florian?’ she prompted bitterly.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘No!’

  But she could see he didn’t believe her, and she turned her head away in deliberate rejection, refusing to sink to pleading for his belief.

  For Maria, and perhaps even for Luke, the evening finally came to mean something when, having done his duty as an announcer, Florian Jones was called up on stage once more as the winner of the radio category in which he had been nominated.

  ‘Not bad for a baby station.’ Maria’s brilliant smile was for a particularly attentive television camera, but the dreams sparkling in her eyes were uncontrived, as pure delight and ambition triumphed over all else for a moment. ‘And next year we’ll be all grown up, with lots of nominations and winners. This will mean a flood of new commercials too.’

  ‘You really identify completely with the station already, don’t you?’ Luke commented as Maria was exchanging victorious smiles and hand signals with staff seated at other tables, their number swelled by the presence of Cavell Fielding, and Maria had wondered earlier if she was still ignorant of the personal reasons behind Luke’s behaviour.

  Returning to the audience, an exuberant Florian had abandoned assumed modesty and was pausing to accept congratulations from all sides, but when Maria would have risen to add hers as his passage brought him close to their table, a light touch on her bare arm stayed her.

  ‘No.’ Luke withdrew his hand as she turned an agitated look his way. ‘A little distancing of yourself won’t come amiss. The management shouldn’t try to be one of the boys.’

  Instead of subsiding now that he was no longer touching her, the disturbance he had caused deepened as she looked at him and understood that the warning was a personal one, merely dressed up as professional advice. He thought her pleasure in Florian’s win was for her once and future lover and, presumably, that in her euphoria she was going to let him jump this queue of men he had convinced himself she had waiting for her sexual favours.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ she told him levelly, her decision finally made.

  He leaned forward once again, subjecting her to the unnerving illusion of being pinned by his shadow, trapped and oppressed by it, as if it carried physical weight, composed of all that he felt for her, lust and contempt.

  ‘I want to take you home,’ he retorted in a low voice.

  The awareness turning his eyes lambent kindled a flickering heat within her, slow, soft flames that ate fatally at her will-power.

  ‘If you’re not going to listen to me, I’m taking a taxi home,’ she asserted resolutely.

  ‘If it’s personal, then this isn’t the appropriate time or place,’ Luke returned, glancing towards the low, broadly curving stage. ‘Wait until this is over. It won’t be long now.’

  Ten minutes later they were free, standing in front of the row of lifts outside the so-called Ballroom. Maria was aware of Luke studying her, although she refused to look at him, afraid of meeting his eyes. He made her feel naked anyway, despite the fact that there was nothing transparent about tonight’s outfit and even its low round neckline fully concealed her breasts while revealing their shapely swell. Lower at the back, the short dress’s absolute simplicity contrasted effectively with the extravagant colour, a deep rich crimson, the silky fabric moulded to every curve that it covered and tapering up to thin straps that revealed the pale olive tone of her smooth, slender shoulders.

  The lift they entered was crowded, forcing them to stand close together, the brush of Luke’s jacket sleeve against her bare arm adding to the difficulty of trying to sort out what she was going to say to him before she agreed to get into the car with him.

  Would he even listen to her, and believe her if he did? He had ignored everything she had said previously to indicate that there was nothing between her and Florian, so why should tonight be any different?

  A simple explanation, words monosyllabic if necessary; that was the answer, and if he still despised her after he had heard her, she was taking a taxi home.

  The realisation that the lift was carrying them upwards instead of down made her heart jump horribly, and it went on fluttering febrilely as she stole a look at Luke, standing so still and confident at her side, and knowing, damn him, that she couldn’t bring herself to protest or ask questions in front of an audience.

  A few people still remained with them when they reached the floor he wanted, and he pushed her gently out of the lift ahead of him.

  ‘Where have you brought me?’ she demanded accusingly, her high heels sinking into thick carpeting.

  ‘My suite is just along here.’ He indicated the corridor and cast her an assessing glance. ‘Didn’t you realise? I always stay here when I come to Taipei.’

  ‘Forget it—I’m not talking to you in your suite!’ she snapped, chagrined by the way she had let him lead her.

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose you can say whatever it is you want to say right here, only I’m not hanging around to hear it.’

  ‘Wait!’ she instructed him furiousl
y as he turned and walked off, but although his steps slowed, he didn’t stop, forcing her to follow if she wanted to be heard.

  ‘Aren’t you overreacting a little, anyway?’ he enquired coolly, still moving ahead of her. ‘What wild suspicions do you have of me, Maria? I’m not going to jump on you and seduce you the minute we’re behind closed doors. You’ll have a chance to tell me or ask me whatever it is that’s bothering you, and I’ll listen.’

  Subdued by the mockery, she joined him at the door he was now unlocking, still not wholly trusting him, and the gleam in his eyes told her he knew it.

  ‘You deliberately didn’t warn me where we were going,’ she charged resentfully.

  ‘I didn’t think our destination mattered as long as it was private,’ Luke countered smoothly as he switched on the light, but Maria didn’t believe him.

  The spacious living area of his suite was as luxurious as everything else she had seen of this hotel—a pair of couches facing each other across a low table, two individual chairs at an angle close to the window, with a desk and a bar supplying practical touches.

  ‘Sit down,’ Luke invited her. ‘Do you want a drink?’

  Maria shook her head, still trying to reassemble the thoughts she had lost hold of when she had made her discovery in the lift. Obstinately, she remained standing, looking at him and trying to shut down the traitorously receptive part of her that was assimilating the way his formal evening attire enhanced his devastating masculinity.

  ‘I told you I wanted to talk,’ she reminded him in a carefully colourless voice.

  ‘And you didn’t deny that it was personal,’ Luke remembered musingly. ‘What’s worrying you? If it’s the usual question of protection that so many couples can’t bring themselves to discuss because they find it unromantic or embarrassing—heaven knows why, when they’re close enough to be going to bed together—you can relax. Safe sex is rule number one.’

  Maria lost her temper.

  ‘You’re assuming a hell of a lot, aren’t you? That we’ll be having sex of any sort, for a start.’ Her eyes blazed, molten gold. ‘We won’t, and that’s only part of what I want to tell you. I won’t even agree to having you partnering me at all these functions I have to attend as part of the job—and I’ll take whatever trouble you try to make for me—if you carry on treating me as you have been doing. The way you speak to me, the contempt—I don’t deserve it, Luke. I came to Taipei because I wanted this job, not to be with Florian Jones. I’m not involved with that man in any personal way, and it’s an insult to me to imagine that I am. I’d have to be incredibly stupid, or as shallow as he is. Apart from himself, the only people he really cares about are his listeners; the radio relationship is the only sort of genuine love-affair he’s ever known. We work well together, I respect him as a professional, I can laugh at his jokes and I can even accept that his genius probably entitles him to live by a set of standards most of us don’t even recognise as standards—but that’s it!’

  ‘Take it or leave it?’ Luke taunted lightly, observing the quick rise and fall of her breasts for a moment before meeting her eyes and continuing quietly, ‘Yes, all right, I can accept that. You couldn’t say these things about the man if it wasn’t true, and why would you bother anyway?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Maria emphasised sarcastically.

  It elicited a slight, sardonic smile.

  ‘From the biting tone, I infer that you think it’s no more than your due? And you’re probably right.’ His gesture was reluctant. ‘Because, as it turns out, you’ve developed the intelligence I expected of you, and I suppose there’s some excuse for what you were at nineteen. It’s an age when we feel but don’t think yet, but you didn’t seem to have learnt a thing about either yourself or Jones in the whole of the six years since I saw you last.’

  Maria hesitated fleetingly, realising that he must still believe there had been something between her and Florian six years ago. It wasn’t important, though, she decided. Surely it was what he had seen as her present stupidity that had earned her his contempt, since the past was the past, and she was still reluctant to explain anything more than the absolute minimum necessary to put an end to his increasingly unbearable taunts.

  It wasn’t as if she wanted or needed his complete understanding. Luke himself didn’t matter to her in any way. His openly expressed scorn was all that had mattered, because, quite inexplicably, it had begun to hurt and humiliate.

  ‘I have no illusions about Florian,’ she confirmed drily, and was driven to hesitate a second time. ‘That was all, really…If you don’t mind, I’d like to go home now.’

  ‘Why bother, now that we’re here?’

  The voice lowered to soft sensuality and the warm attention his eyes were giving her warned her. Maria nearly swore out loud. Of course, that side of it still existed unchanged. The truth might have stopped him despising her, but it hadn’t put an end to desire.

  Nevertheless, she felt compelled to challenge his assumption.

  ‘I didn’t come here to bargain with you, Luke,’ she offered caustically. ‘My body in your bed in exchange for your acceptance of the truth and an end to your constant comments about my supposed affair with Florian? Forget it!’

  Luke’s face hardened perceptibly. ‘Do you really believe I was thinking along those lines? Why should I? You’ve told me what you wanted to and I accept it, but what else was it supposed to change? We still want each other.’

  ‘Lust!’ Maria condemned.

  He laughed. ‘Why do so many people use that word as if it represents something ugly?’

  Her lips parted to tell him that it did, but hesitation seemed to have become a periodic tendency, afflicting her like hiccoughs.

  No, lust wasn’t ugly; many of her friends’ affairs and marriages were founded on mutual lust and a few had stayed that way, neither foundering nor developing into something richer and more complex; but for her it could never be enough, even in the context of a mere beginning, and, after the depressing end of the relationship in Wellington, she knew that even if it had been allied to liking or affection, it still wouldn’t have been enough. She supposed she was an idealist.

  She realised how close to her Luke suddenly was, and panic leapt.

  ‘I can’t!’ she protested breathlessly—stupidly!

  Surprisingly, it diverted him.

  ‘Because I have to prove it to you, don’t I? That I’ve accepted what you’ve told me. By——’ He broke off, an almost resentful expression flitting across his face. ‘And how long will it take to convince you, Maria?’

  A rueful smile tilted her mouth as she followed Luke’s reasoning. If she was an idealist, he was the arch-cynic. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that her resistance to their becoming lovers might be rooted in the fact that they simply didn’t love each other. Between the two of them, the act of love would be a contradiction in terms.

  The smile seemed to arrest him, his gaze focusing intently on her mouth, and after a moment he raised a hand, his forefinger extended, lightly tracing the curve of her lips.

  ‘I just don’t want you to touch me,’ Maria asserted rather desperately, disconcerted by the huskiness suddenly invading her voice.

  ‘And when I’ve succeeded in convincing you, will I get to see this more often? The smile, the single imperfection…Without it you’d be just another beautiful, exotic woman, magazine-cover material, for look ing at. It’s the human quirk. Do you know it makes a hollow just here?’ His fingertip barely touched the place it should have been, but the smile had faded, replaced by tension, and Luke’s eyes darkened in response to the turbulence that had entered hers. ‘And you think I owe you proof, when you still owe me so much!’

  His hand had dropped to her shoulder and Maria stared at him, immobilised by the fascination he exerted and incapable of speaking for a moment, for all the hot rebellion boiling up in her mind.

  ‘Luke…’ Now her voice had become a whisper.

  Luke’s arms came round her as if she had
summoned him by saying his name, and she couldn’t continue.

  Prisoner or prey? Maria didn’t know. She only knew that there was a part of her that welcomed this, increasingly subject to a perilous urge to surrender herself to Luke, and not merely her physical self but all those special subjectives that made her Maria McFadden.

  Here it was again, his power over her robbing her of identity. She had never known anything like it.

  ‘I’m not sure if I can do it,’ he was muttering, his features hardened by some complex emotion. ‘The time it will take…’

  She saw the recklessness take over as he abandoned speech impatiently. Then her subtly coloured eyelids swept shut, blindness an instinctive need, as if by shutting Luke out of her vision she could barricade herself against the swoop of his mouth.

  The pressure of his lips on hers was confident, demanding access to her mouth, and she granted it helplessly, already caught in the dark magic once more. His tongue stroked briefly across the tender inner swell of her lower lip, inducing a tingling sensitivity, and then she was accepting its sinuous thrust against hers and along with it a wild pleasure, desire following only a heartbeat behind.

  Their mouths took heat from each other, lips and tongues hotly voluptuous, fiercely caressing. The hands Maria had raised to Luke’s shoulders strayed eagerly to the back of his neck and up into the thickness of his dark hair, her fingers pressing themselves to the perfect shaping of his skull as she sought and claimed a deeper kiss, drawing him far into the warm moist depths of her mouth.

  Her trembling body was curving and lifting itself to the hardness of his in obedience to the quickening in her loins, a fierily hollow quivering, the force at the centre of a storm of sensation. The intimacy with which she and Luke explored each other’s mouths was possession of a kind, so wholly were they given to that long kiss, and when it ended they had to have it all over again, instantly, mouths colliding with an urgency which carried them dangerously beyond mere sensuality.