by Olivia
Olivia had come prepared to be wounded afresh, prepared for salt on those wounds she already had, but the brutality of what he said now made her flinch. "Is that all our ... relationship has meant to you, Jai?" There was an agony of disbelief in her whisper.
He stood up abruptly. "Olivia, don't make me say things that will hurt you more . . ." He did not look at her.
"Nothing you can say will hurt me more, nothing!" Stumbling forward, she confronted him with blazing eyes. "Do you have the courage to stare me straight in the face and answer my question— do you?"
Blank faced, he accepted her challenge. "Very well. If you insist. Yes, that is all our relationship has meant to me. You are nothing to me, Olivia, nothing at all."
Her bravado cracked. "I don't believe you, I will never believe you!" The pain suppurating beneath the façade exploded. "You're a lying, pernicious bastard!"
He laughed.
Olivia wasn't aware that she had struck him until the full force of her open palm connected with his cheek. It sounded like a crack of lightning. A glass bangle she wore—one he had bought!—shattered against his face; a turquoise-colored sliver embedded itself in his skin and drew a minuscule bubble of blood.
Raventhorne didn't move. Only the milky eyes flickered for an instant and then, slowly, his mouth curved into a mocking sickle. "So," he murmured under his breath, "the reckless American finds it difficult to honour her vow, does she?" He whipped the smile off his lips and his tone cemented. "If that is what I am, Olivia, then that is what I have chosen to be. Tolerate it if you can; if not, get out!"
Again her hand lashed out but this time he was prepared. She struggled briefly as he gripped her wrists but then, overcome by the hopelessness of her anger, she went flaccid and her body slumped. "I don't believe you," she said brokenly, "I don't believe you ..."
He released her wrists with a jerk that wrenched her shoulders, and she almost cried out but didn't. Thunder faced and cursing under his breath, Raventhorne impatiently brushed the glass sliver from his cheek and started to pace with long, leonine strides as if stalking some unwary prey through a jungle.
"Who the hell do you think I am, Olivia? What gives you the right, the infernal daring, to poke and pry and intrude, yes, intrude into my affairs? I am tired of your invasions, Olivia, tired of your monstrous curiosities, your appalling presumptions, tired of you!" His eyes smouldered with malevolence. "You question me as if I owe you answers. I owe you nothing, nothing, do you hear me?" Briefly he stopped to glare, then, spinning on his heel, he started to pace again, hands clasping and unclasping behind his back as if unable to stay still. "I am beginning to hate you, Olivia. In your mind you have made me into a creature of your romantic imagination—a creature that doesn't exist, has never existed. What you think you love is an illusion, and the burden of living up to your illusion is not one I am willing to bear any longer." He halted again before her, expression venomous, voice dangerously low. "Get off my ship, Olivia, or I will have you forcibly removed."
Waves of pain rose within and crippled her. She was down to her last crumb of courage but she refused to let it go to waste. Some remote sixth sense prodded her on and whipped her again into retaliation. Between them now was the moment of truth; it would not come again. She threw back her head and laughed.
"You are not only a liar, Jai, you are a coward. You cannot face the fact that, despite your cynical predictions, I have had the courage of my convictions after all. You may sneer at my alleged 'chivalry' in offering you an alibi for that night, but at the same time you feel small because I am willing to lay down my reputation not out of constraint but because my commitment to you is total." Her immense eyes flashed contempt in his face. "If you do not wish to use my evidence, I accept that. If you do not wish to see me or speak to me again, I accept that too, however wounding. What I will not accept, Jai, is the devaluation, the denial, of your feelings for me. You lie to hide your own delusions, not mine. You fabricate a hate that does not exist. You do love me, Jai..." A split second of anguish came and went. "As sure as the wind blows and I breathe, you love me, and before the sun rises tomorrow I will make you eat your words, Jai, every damned, lying one of them, I promise you that!"
"Get out!" His voice, tight in his throat, was strangled.
"I will, but not before you admit you have lied!"
The final thread of his control snapped. With a snarl he sprang at her and two enormous, powerful hands circled her neck. Distorted into a mask of virulence, his features turned maniacal, barely human. Thumbs pressed against her windpipe, he shook her with the fury of a mastiff gripping a rat between its teeth, all reason gone. Olivia battled to breathe, gasping for air but neither struggling nor feeling the faintest twinge of fear. A curtain of black started to descend over her eyes, but her last conscious emotion as darkness engulfed her was of triumph—she had broken through that shell! She felt herself slide and then go down, down, down, into some bottomless pit of blackness and silence. And then she felt nothing.
Time must have passed but Olivia was unaware of it. Laboriously, imperceptibly, she started to climb again, inch by inch, gasp by gasp. Air filtered through to her lungs and light into her eyes. She felt herself cushioned; against her cheek was warmth, and panting breath gushed into her ear. In the half haze of a mind not yet fully conscious, memory struggled and then broke through the mists. She smiled. Her mouth, buried deep against folds of musky, beloved flesh, formed a word. Confess! Even though no sound emerged, it was heard and it was understood.
"Why can't you leave me alone?" Against her cheek the question sounded like a cry for help, a beseechment. "Why do you return to torture me like this?" Raventhorne raised his face and stared wildly into hers.
Ignoring the throbbing ache in her throat, Olivia clung to him. His breath scoured her skin like a rake; within her embrace his heavy frame twisted with spasms as he battled with his brutal inner devils. "Hush," Olivia murmured, cradling his head on her shoulder. "Hush, my darling one, hush." Whispering comfort and love, she solaced him and waited, waited, waited patiently for the turbulence to subside, for the demons to retreat, for the body to still. Then she framed his tortured face between her palms and kissed him. Her eyes filled with tears. "Because I love you, Jai."
He shuddered. "Don't love me, Olivia." It was now no more than a weary, wasted refrain. His features contorted again. "My God, I could have killed you! What further proof can you want of my worthlessness?"
"It is also proof of what you deny. I see it in your eyes." She touched his lids with her finger-tips and smiled.
"You see too many damn things in my eyes that do not exist!" His fingers, clutching the rumpled confusion of her hair, tightened.
"They exist for me if not for you."
He groaned and his mouth on hers was punitive. It was a kiss not of love but of defeat and of rage at that defeat. "Go now, my golden-eyed innocent," he begged huskily. "Go, go, go before you commit yourself truly to a life of regrets."
Go? Go where? Olivia wondered. With her whole world held in her arms where was there left to go? "Regrets there will never be, Jai, that much I know. Whatever I am is yours."
He shook her in growing exasperation. "I can give you nothing in return, you foolish girl. I have nothing to offer you!"
"You give without knowing, Jai." Gently, she cleared his forehead of black strands heavy with perspiration. "And what you cannot offer is perhaps not worth having."
Hunger darting out from his eyes devoured her from only a whisper away. Hands, awkward and uncertain, fumbled within her cascade of hair as it spilled across the pillow on the four-poster where she lay. But with the hunger there remained stubborn incomprehension. "How can you still be so full of ideals, so blinded by unrewarding romanticism!" Even in his frustration he spoke with wonderment.
"The same way you can still be so full of senseless doubts!"
"I doubt because you commit without caution, tantalise without apprehension, like a child ignorant of tomorrow—and
I am only a man, damn you, as fallible as the next."
Olivia sighed, too overwhelmed for debate, too crippled by the burden of a love too long denied its natural fulfilment. She was no longer deceived by his assumed postures. What he refused to say in words he was saying to her with his eyes, with his hands, with every angry move of his body as it abrased against hers. "Then prove your fallibility," she murmured dreamily into his ear as she kissed it, "prove it, Jai Raventhorne!"
His response to her brazen challenge was savage. The last of his defences crumbled. Abandoning caution, he swept her into his arms, growling curses and hoarse imprecations as he tore at her clothing, wildly impatient with the buttons and bows and knotted laces. Assiduous in their fevered explorations, his hands wandered over her body leaving licks of fire wherever they touched her skin. Gone were the doubts, the indecisions and the uncertainties as he tossed aside each garment in a frenzy of haste. Then for an instant, one brief instant, his hands stilled. In smoky-eyed wonder he sat up on the bed to drink in the golden expanse of her body—long, tapering legs, generously moulded hips, the rose-tipped mounds of her breasts, the nipples already engorged and aching for his caress. Visibly awed, he skimmed their peaks with a trembling palm.
"My God, but you are exquisite . . .!"
The low, incredulous moan extinguished around the cinnamon dark of a nipple engulfed by his mouth. Wherever his eyes feasted, his lips followed, making her limp with love, weak with longing. At the havoc wreaked by his nibbling mouth, his flicking tongue, the inquisitive tips of his fingers, she cried out in agony. Ignorant of responses, she arched up against him, quivering like a leaf, ecstatic and yet astonished at the revelations of her body. She turned and buried her face in the pillow, covered in confusion. With a muted laugh, he drew out her face to smother it with kisses, his rampaging mouth unwilling to leave a single pore untasted, a solitary fibre unlearned. Holding her head steady, he explored the niches of her own mouth, his serpentine tongue drinking in her sweetness, making her drink in his. Olivia whimpered; there would be no turning back now. The appetite that belonged to them both with such impartiality demanded to be satisfied. She filled and overspilled with love, rejoicing in the abundant proof of his need for her, knowing that the words he had withheld for so long would also be part of their night.
He halted but only to cast off his remaining clothing, and she caught flashes of glistening nut brown flesh, hard and sinewed, sheened with damp. And then he was beside her again, the length of his body pressed close to hers, their legs entwined, their mouths inseparable with intermingling tongues and shared breath. Against the raven's-wing mesh of his chest, her cheek abraded into nettle stings, silken skin against stubbled maleness, and she melted into him. With their mouths locked, he traced the line of her spine to its base and pressed her—was it possible?— even closer into himself. Jerking into rebellion, Olivia burst into flame, savouring sensations as acute as pin points of fire. She cried out again and he stilled her protests with bruising kisses, drowning her whimpers with words that were alien. But the sounds of the words were primeval, universal, wild and wonderful because she knew they spoke of love. Like a musical instrument strummed for the first time, her nascent body leapt to life. Plucking, stroking, searing fingers made her vibrate with music such as she had never heard before. She knew not what further peaks were yet to be scaled on this her maiden voyage of divine discovery, but she sensed there were many. Velvet tipped intruders devised tantalising transgressions, with accuracy, with abandon, and Olivia convulsed into insanity.
"No more," she beseeched, crying out in a frenzy of unendurable rapture, "please, have mercy, my dearest one!"
For a fraction of a second his hand stayed. Glaze eyed with resurging uncertainty, he hesitated. Then, with a helpless groan, he buried his face in her shoulder. "There will be pain, my angel. How can I spare you that?" He was again ravaged with doubts.
She circled his neck with her arms and held him secure. "I love you, Jai, I love you more than my life!" Her whisper was fierce with emotion, thick with feeling. "It is not pain that I will feel, I promise you. Whatever else, it will not be pain."
The pain came but once, like the nick of a knife tip, the flick of a whip, forgotten even before it had passed, for with it Olivia swept on the crest of an incredible flood into womanhood. Past and future were obliterated; there was only the here and now of each moment stretching into an eternity of timelessness. Their bodies melded and merged and swayed into oneness, moving into rhythms as old and as enduring as time itself. His love-making was violent, his need for possession compulsive. Olivia jubilated in the possession, revelling in it, responding to it, reacting to her joy with delirium. When her moans became too fevered, he soothed them with kisses; when she could tolerate the exquisite torture no longer, he gentled her with sudden flashes of tenderness. And when his own fulfilment was imminent and he teetered on another perilous precipice of doubt, she locked her legs around his and tacitly forbade him to leave.
Give me something, something of yourself at least, now . . .!
The sheer magnitude of her surrender defeated him; not even he was man enough or perhaps too much a man to deny her silent supplication. In a cascade, his essence, the life force of his manhood, coursed into her, flooding and filling and fulfilling every last fragment of her body. Olivia gasped with happiness, then convulsed again and again, then catapulted like a trajectile into realms beyond reality. Suspended high in time and spaces unknown, she was blinded by the matchless perfection of the moment. And then slowly, softly, delicately, trembling in the folds of a nameless oblivion, a little death, she floated down again along slopes of a magnificent contentment into a dreamless valley that is the ultimate resting place of fulfilled love.
Even before their bodies drew apart, she was asleep.
A minute passed, or maybe an hour or a day. When Olivia opened her eyes again, dazed and drowsy, Jai was lying next to her on his stomach, his cheek cushioned on his arm, his face averted. Her throat constricted with emotion and her eyes melted. Across the hardened ridges of his bare shoulders she ran a hand, loving him, cherishing him, in silence. She laid her cheek on his back and whispered, "I love you."
He stirred, then turned and gathered her again in his arms, cradling her so that her lips nuzzled the base of his throat. In its hollow, she dropped a kiss and fingered the silver pendant he wore around his neck. She had never known such peace, such perfect serenity. Lightly, he kissed the top of her head. "You love me too much." In his tone there was fatigue and an immense unhappiness. "I have wronged you."
Olivia struggled up so that she could look into his face. "You have made me complete," she protested, searching for his eyes.
He looked away. "It was not meant to be like this. It was never meant to be like this."
She cupped his face and forced his eyes back to her. "It was always meant to be like this, always! From the very first moment we met that night on the river. It was fated to be like this!"
He exhaled a long, boundless breath, anxiety etched into every tired line of his face. "It is dangerous to love too much, Olivia."
"It is the only way I can love."
Gently he kissed the hurt away from her eyes and shook his head. "You should not have come, Olivia. You will regret the commitment you have made tonight. I should not have allowed you to. It is I who am to blame, it is I."
The commitment you have made . . .? Was it not shared? A question trembled on the tip of her tongue but she swallowed it; to ask it would be to break faith with herself. "Whatever the commitment, I have made it voluntarily. I do love you so very much, Jai."
He sighed and ruffled her hair but he did not smile. "It is not a love that will bring you worthwhile compensation."
"It already has," she said bravely. "If it brings nothing else, there will always be this."
"I am the wrong man for you, Olivia—you have chosen to love the wrong man." His inner storms would not subside.
"You are the only man for me, Ja
i," she explained patiently, despairing of ever breaking the vicious circle but not wanting to tempt the fates again with a futile argument. "Don't spoil my moment of happiness, Jai," she implored. "I refuse to let you." She hugged him close and, caressing his chest, deftly changed the subject. "How did you get this scar?"
With a sigh he surrendered. "In a fight."
She followed the livid line from shoulder to hip with a finger-tip. "From a sword?"
"No." He hesitated. "From a whip."
With a small cry of horror she bent down and kissed the scar from one end to the other. "Oh, how I wish I could erase all your scars with my kisses!"
He looked amused. "You think love is a universal panacea, do you?"
"Yes. If one allows oneself to be loved." She scanned his face for hints of his private thoughts. "Why don't you, Jai? Why are you afraid to be loved?"
He laid his head back and stared at the ceiling. "Because love such as you give me humbles me. It reduces me to something despicable in my own eyes. It diverts me. I feel threatened." He gave a hollow laugh. "Perhaps I am not used to being humbled."
"Then humble me too!" she whispered, hating the subtly increasing distance between them. "Reduce me too, divert me, threaten me, do with me as you wish—but don't stop me from loving you!"
His eyes liquefied, their corners suddenly bright. He pulled her close to him and rocked her back and forth like a child and his voice became thick with feeling. "Yours is an extraordinary love, Olivia, pure and undemanding, unselfish and, alas, unrewarding. I have never known anything like it; it baffles me, strikes wonder in me, decimates me." Lifting her hand, he kissed it almost with reverence. "Yes, I lied to you. What you have come into my life as is ... a miracle. You have washed away so much of its ugliness, so much. In return you have asked for nothing, and I have given you even less than that." He lowered his head onto hers and his arms tightened. "You can never know what you have meant to me."
