by YatesNZ, Jen
It was gone eleven and Merryn and Case and her mother had left. Gould and Fran had hardly stopped talking since they'd met, with Torr filling the gaps with laconic observations. Occasionally Fran had prodded him into sharing some of the more remarkable adventures he'd had and she'd even managed the odd question or hopefully intelligent comment herself.
They were all sprawled now on sun-loungers in the semi-dark of the patio conservatory overlooking the lake. It was a magical spot at night with streetlights reflected across the water and the moon and stars shining above. It should also have been relaxing.
But tonight, Georgina had the strangest feeling of sitting on the edge of her seat in a theatre, waiting for the climax of a suspense movie. The worst of it was feeling that she, who hated suspense movies, was somehow central to the outcome of the plot. A tense energy had hummed through her all evening and she'd sensed it at odd times in each of the other three.
Gould had seemed to find it more than usually necessary to stake his claim to her by caressing her back or her arm, or by twining his fingers intimately in hers. Or, as now, by fiddling with the arrangement of her hair, which he knew she didn't like and then giving her that boyish, unrepentant grin which she could rarely resist. Tonight though, it annoyed her and she felt irrationally like slapping his hand away. Especially when he continued to loosen her hair from its clip while turning that same, guileless blue-eyed smile on Fran. He knew she hated it loose, had only agreed to grow it long for his pleasure with the understanding that pleasure was confined to their bedroom.
While avidly questioning Fran on her experiences of the wonders and dangers of the Peruvian jungle, which was on his `books-to-write' list, he'd removed the clip and was starting on the elastic band that was now all that confined the mass of her hair. Impatiently she jerked her head away from him and felt Torr Montgomery's eyes fixed on her. Darkly shadowed against the dim light of the distant street lamps, she was nevertheless intensely aware of his scrutiny.
Such beautiful hair should never be confined.
Sweeping a startled glance over the others to see if they'd heard the words, Georgina dropped her eyes to where her fingers played restlessly with the bow-clip Gould had dropped into her lap. It was crazy to think she was picking up Torr's thoughts yet she'd heard the words quite clearly in her mind.
Easing out of Gould's embrace, she let Katja outside then gathered up the empty coffee cups and wine bottle. Escaping into the kitchen she loaded the dishwasher, started it on its cycle and began wiping the work surfaces. She needed to think and the best place for that was the pyramid pit.
When Case offered to design a house for her, she'd almost laughed. Casey Valois was a one-time painter and paperhanger turned master healer in the modalities of the ancient East. He was heavily tattooed with a bull rampant on his back and dragons and other mythical beasts on chest, arms and legs. Habitually garbed in denim or black leather, he rode a gleaming Harley Davidson as if born to it. He and Merryn ran a `Crystal & New Age' shop in Mt Eden Road and operated an alternative healing practice from rooms at the back of the shop.
Their home, a colonial villa nestled among trees at the foot of Mt Eden, one of Auckland's extinct volcanic cones, had a mystical ambience created by Case's flare with the stones. None of which gave him any of the skills necessary for designing a house. Georgina had nevertheless agreed to let him try. He'd suggested they consult architectural magazines so she could show him what styles attracted her.
Georgina had demurred.
‘No time for that. I like stone, natural wood, and lots of windows. Mediterranean style maybe.’
He'd said nothing of the plans for weeks until one night they'd insisted she come round for dinner. Until that point the project had really only been something to toy with in her few quiet moments because Merryn had suggested perhaps she should use her share of her inheritance from their father to build her own house so she could move from the place she'd shared with Alan. When Case placed his drawings before her after the meal, she'd been forced to regard her brother-in-law with much greater respect.
She'd been enchanted. There was no other word to describe the way the house had affected her from the moment she'd seen the drawings. Enchanted, and impatient for the moment she could start living in a place that spoke to something in her soul. She would've scoffed at the suggestion any part of her leant toward the mystical or spiritual but she'd allowed Merryn to demonstrate the relaxing effects of the pyramid in her meditation room once. When she found Case had incorporated one in the conservatory-style step-down relaxation pit set off the corner of the kitchen/breakfast area, she'd been intrigued enough by the innovation not to change it.
It had become the heart of her house. Sometimes when she sat in it, she fancied she could sense it beating. Usually, when she reached that stage in her relaxation she decided it was time to move. Flights of psychic fancy weren't for her.
Like the rest of her home, the kitchen was a showcase to twentieth century technology and convenience. The room was square, but set diagonally into the center of the house, with the glass enclosed step-down pit in its northern corner like a solitaire diamond in a ring. Case had wanted to suspend a large piece of quartz crystal from the apex of the wood and glass pyramid but she'd resisted that idea.
Putting out the light and leaving her shoes in the kitchen, Georgina crossed the breakfast area, slipped the new relaxation CD Case had brought for her to try, into the stereo, and stepped down into the lounge-pit beneath the pyramid. Sinking onto the soft sheepskin-covered banquette she stretched her arms along the top, rested her head back, closed her eyes and let the floating strains of music enclose her.
Case often brought her music to `try out' on her state of the art system. He talked of finding the inner self in the meditative state. Georgina wasn't sure she'd like who she was inside and there was no choice about continuing to live with who she was. Yet she always enjoyed the way Case's music made her feel. As usual, he knew what she needed better than she did herself.
If she hadn't been so aware of Torr Montgomery in the house she'd have indulged in another soak in the spa and played the CD over the intercom. But the pyramid pit offered a safer haven. The music flowed about her and for several long moments she reveled in the luxury of total relaxation.
Yet even here was she betrayed—but the majesty of what was playing on the screen of her inner sight held her spellbound. Herself, at least a strangely sensual approximation of herself, draped in a cobwebby gown dusted with gold, ran upwards on a silver-misted road among the stars. Her hair flowed out behind her, shimmering like burnished copper thread in the ethereal light. All about was a soft pink glow and as she ran with arms out-stretched towards a leather-clad warrior on a huge white war-horse with tail and mane of rippling gold, the glow intensified to a fiery glare.
On the warrior's head was a gold horned helmet. At his side hung a massive iron broadsword. High above him flew a double pennant featuring a rampant, golden bull on black beneath a golden dragon with glittering diamond fangs breathing orange fire across a scarlet background.
Taur. The warrior's name was Taur. She loved him and there was so much more she knew as she ran with arms reaching upwards, joy filling her heart. But as the distance between them lessened the light flared even brighter, harsher and the dark angles of his face blazed into focus. Teeth bared in anger, eyes flashing green and hot as the dragon's fiery breath, he shouted her name with a terrible ferocity.
`Gynevra!'
In an instant she was floating far above him. With a cataclysmic roar, the brave pennant was devoured by the inferno of the dragon's breath and all the waters of the earth rose in a soaring tower to engulf the warrior and his horse.
She was alone, lost in the heavens with no way back to the misty silver path.
Taur. Ta-au-ur!
After Georgina left the patio conservatory, Torr found it impossible to keep his mind on the discussion of the antiquities of Peru, which had engrossed Fran and Gould ever since dinner. Excusing hims
elf to the other two who, to his bemusement scarcely glanced up at his going, he wandered into the lounge and stood contemplating the wall of books hoping for some clue to Georgina Hackville. Barrington's books along with Fran's two novels shared one shelf with an exquisite ceramic wolf. On other shelves he recognized many best-selling fiction titles along with an amazing collection of photographic travel books, a full set of Tolkien's works, reference books on many topics from family medicine to plant lore and even one on how to build a waterwheel to generate electricity.
An eclectic collection of fantasy and sci-fi novels vied for space with an ancient copy of Plato and a great variety of dictionaries, atlases and encyclopedias. It was the sort of generic collection one would find in many people's homes and he had no idea which books were Georgina's or which were Gould's though he figured the beautiful ceramic wolf figurines set here and there to break up the wide wall of books had to be Georgina's touch. Katja on a dark night in the forest could easily be mistaken for a wolf.
He felt compelled to know more about this woman who, like a dulled copper penny, hid intense personal beauty behind asexual business suits and an unimaginative hairstyle. A woman whose home had a fantasy foyer to flay the breath from his lungs and whose essence spoke to his on levels he'd never experienced before and didn't understand. He wanted confirmation she was hearing his thoughts in her head, as he was hers. He wanted to know where the damn thoughts were coming from in the first place because they sure as hell weren't his! He only had to catch her eye and it was as if a tape recorder had been switched on in his mind and the words would roll; words so incredible they couldn't be his.
Restlessly he wandered across the room to stare out into a small side garden lit only by a concealed ground light and as if conjured from his earlier thoughts, Katja padded through the shrubs and up onto the step. He opened the sliding door and the dog sank to her haunches by his feet, looking up at him with an intent and knowing look.
‘If you could talk I think you'd answer all my questions,’ he muttered, fondling her ears and frowning out into the night. He was as unsettled as a lion behind bars. Crouching beside the dog, his fingers combed through her thick white coat while his mind roamed back over his involuntary mental conversations with Georgina through the evening. He'd had no control over the words flowing between them.
He'd talked of love and betrayal and knew it to be more ancient than mankind's memory. When he tried to create the thoughts, the images, the words in his mind, there was nothing. Then their eyes would meet and suddenly they were conversing about something out of this world. In some weird way it seemed natural. He had to know if it was the same for her.
He knew basic stuff about her and not enough of that. He knew she owned and ran a cafe-cum-bookshop in the Auckland central business district, which had become a by-word in literary circles, and not just in New Zealand. Knew too, that she'd been married to a much older man who'd died of cancer about three years back. He'd also seen with his own eyes, the evidence of Fran's assertion that she was the butterfly side of the coin while Georgina was the quiet, hard-working ant.
Honey bee more like, he thought, his mind conjuring a vision of her, all bronze and gold mystery in the candlelight at the dinner table. Did the understated camouflage she wore conceal sweetness, or a dangerous sting?
Who the hell was this woman who'd walked into his soul with the ease of someone walking into a garden, but who fit there with the comfort of a damned thorn bush? Who was Georgina Hackville and why did she disturb him so?
Unable to still his restless thoughts, Torr rose and roamed through the lounge, Katja padding silently at his side. He stood for several minutes in the foyer absorbing the music of the waterfall, lit now only by pearlescent shadows of moonlight through the high window. It offered not even a glimmer to the enigma of the woman who was the twin sister of his fiancée. He needed to ring Hugh and arrange his escape before disaster struck. It hummed in the air, the kind of disaster that blasted families asunder; that would forever damage the closer than close relationship Fran enjoyed with her sister, and which was infinitely precious to her.
A wet sensation against his hand brought Torr back to awareness. Katja sat at his side, eyes colorless pools of shining darkness that flickered briefly across the deserted living space to the closed kitchen door and back to Torr.
‘Yeah, I'll go talk to her,’ he said gently and walked back across the lounge.
The need to use the phone was a perfect excuse to track Georgina down. Quietly opening the door, he stepped into a room lit only by the glow of distant street lamps mingled with the softness of moonlight through the windows of the small pyramid-shaped conservatory in its eastern quarter.
Closing the door at his back, he stood for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust. Where was she? The dishwasher hummed in the shadowed, deserted kitchen and other-worldly music played quietly on a stereo system from the direction of the tiny conservatory. He moved towards it and then he saw her.
Totally relaxed as he'd not seen her since his arrival, she leant back on the circular couch under the pyramid. Like threads of cobwebby silk, strains of the soft haunting music floated on the air, drawing him to her. Lunar silver limned her hair and profile. Halted again by the ethereal luminous glow of her skin and the bone-deep stillness of her body, he leant against the cool marble of the kitchen counter, and waited, his whole being vibrating with the strange ambivalence she awakened in him. His body thrummed as if with the memory of a shared physically intimate knowledge and a burning need to renew that knowledge, while his mind reverberated with the gut-deep certainty of treachery.
A treachery which nevertheless, wouldn't prevent their bodies from melding and exploding together with cataclysmic and volcanic force should she make one positive move in his direction. Torr had the harsh conviction the civilization he'd always thought an integral part of his psyche was but a flimsy veneer, stretched to its thinnest, over a barbaric brigand lurking beneath. There was no doubt he was losing his mind.
Torr. To-or-rr!
She was moaning his name!
Rationality suspended. Striding to the pyramid he stepped down and dropped to the seat beside her. His hand covered hers where it lay along the padded back. So still was she beneath his touch he too froze. He didn't breathe and he'd swear she didn't either.
Then her eyes opened, staring into his. In their unguarded moonlit depths he saw—horror. In the next second she'd snatched her hand from his grasp and flung her body sideways as if his very touch spelled ineffable danger, as if he was indeed the marauding brigand he'd thought of earlier.
‘Georgina! What the devil...’ he began.
‘Who—are—you?’ The words were a rough evisceration. ‘Who the hell—are you?’
Torr didn't believe a man could be so drawn and so repelled at the same time. He wanted to crush her to his chest, fill her with his body, lose himself in her very essence. Yet he knew also a desperate fury to squeeze the breath from her throat and fling her like a rag-doll out into the indigo night sky soaring above and beyond the glass.
He was trembling. Six feet four inches of macho, muscular, quivering jelly.
‘That's my question,’ he snarled, then subsided in dismay as he realized that what he'd intended to sound as a snarl was little more than a grating whisper. Shit!
Georgina had flung herself as far away from Torr Montgomery as she could get, which wasn't far, on the circular banquette. Mere inches separated their knees and she was intensely aware of the strong emotional energy emanating from him. Her feet, her hands, the whole of her physical body trembled for contact, straining towards him with the vibrant attraction of a magnet to iron, knowing they would fit together with the perfection of yin to yang.
‘How long have you been here?’ she demanded, aware now that her heart beat in her chest like a war drum.
‘Long enough.’
Terse bastard.
‘Would you mind leaving?’
The words were as clipped and
cool as she could make them.
He looked nonplussed then said, ‘You called my name.’
‘I didn't. At least—’ Oh God! ‘It wasn't you!’
One black brow rose in disbelief, his eyes darkening to rival the sky beyond the glass. He stood. Georgina held her breath. The air about them crackled, fragile as glass. If he touched her it would shatter and she would disintegrate too.
‘I apologize for intruding. I came to ask if I might use your phone to call my office in London. I have a card so it won't go on your account.’
His voice had the rough-smooth quality of a rasp sheathed in black velvet. Her senses responded accordingly.
‘Of course. There's one here in the kitchen—or you might like to use the one in the office. Off the front hall—opposite the garage entry.’
‘Thanks.’
Their words were as sharp slivers of glass sliding beneath the skin. Georgina didn't move until the kitchen door closed behind him, then very slowly she curled back onto the seat. After several moments of brain-dead stillness she reached out a foot and with a vicious stab at the concealed button, silenced the music. Case could have that CD back. She'd never listen to it again.
For that moment when she'd stared into Torr Montgomery's eyes, she'd felt as violated as when Gavin—Alan's son—I won't think about that. Not ever again.
Suddenly she was very tired. There was nothing she wanted more than to be in her bed with her head buried under the pillow. Or safe in Gould's arms. But if he wanted to make love she didn't know whether she could face that tonight. Life could be so bloody unfair! She loved Gould. He was a wonderful lover, had taught her to trust again, live again, however tentatively. How the hell could one man, her sister's fiancé, make her feel like a—whore, something she understood only too well—for sleeping with Gould! Or make her jealous of Fran whom she loved more than life itself?
Georgina was still in the pit, furled as tightly in on herself as a hedgehog, when Gould came in about an hour later.
