Maria’s legs gave and she sagged against him, too dazed with pleasure now to even think about escaping. Her eyes rolled shut and her head drifted to the side, and his lips took immediate advantage, skimming up her neck to her jaw.
“Do you feel it, Maria? Do you feel how much I want you?”
She stubbornly clung to reason even as her body begged her to surrender and give him what they both wanted so desperately. “Sex,” she said. “You want sex.”
The sharp, thrilling nip on the side of her neck told her he didn’t like this answer. She cried out and her groin tightened, pulsing and aching.
“I want you to loveme again.”
The unexpected ferocity in his voice stunned her. So did what happened next:
He let her go.
When she’d been putty in his hands, when he could have tugged her into the changing room off the pool, or into the house and up to his bedroom or hers, and all it would have taken was one word, one smile, one kiss and she’d have done anything he wanted her to do and begged for more, when he had all the power and she had none, he let her go.
A step or two had him standing in front of her, and their gazes locked. He stared, communicating everything he wanted her to know, using no words and not needing any. He wanted it all. He wanted her body, her heart and her soul, and he wanted them willingly given. The bottom line was that he wanted to be restored to the exact position he’d occupied in her life before he went back to school, and would never give up and never settle for less.
The absolute determination in his face sobered Maria up and made her rigid with terror. There was nothing left of her for him to take; he’d already had—and destroyed—it all.
“No,” she said, backing away from him.
He didn’t deign to contradict her. Merely held her gaze for another beat or two, and let her see that she could argue and deny it all she wanted, but there would be no compromise on this issue. Finally he blinked and walked away, back toward the house, as if he knew he’d made his point and was in no rush to collect what he wanted.
Maria watched him go and collapsed, devastated, onto the nearest chair.
Maria edged her way around the bookshelves, through the chattering, laughing, standing-room-only crowd, darted out of the Barnes & Noble and leaped into the limousine double-parked at the curb, slamming the door behind her. She sat next to David on the backward-facing leather seat. Opposite them sat Anastasia and Uri. Anastasia wore a purple suit with black-sequined piping around the lapels, and a voluminous black Chaka Khan wig that took up most of the seat and left Uri, still silent, still in black, smooshed into his corner by the door.
All of them looked expectantly at Maria. “Well?” Anastasia demanded.
“Perrier,” Maria told her, digging deep and trying to remember everything Shelley had taught her about dealing with difficult clients in the last couple of weeks. “They don’t carry San Pellegrino in the café.”
Everyone held their collective breath, waiting for Anastasia’s reaction to this tragic news.
Anastasia’s face twisted with venom. “Swine,”she spat. Uri patted her knee for support.
Maria waited a moment, until the worst of the storm had passed, before she spoke again. “Uh, Anastasia,” she said, “they have a very nice room in the back where you can wait until the signing starts. It’s only ten more minutes. I think the manager’s feelings are a little hurt that you won’t even wait insi—”
“Nonsense.” Anastasia flapped a large hand so heavy with rings it looked like she was wearing brass knuckles. Poor Uri was forced to duck out of the way or risk getting clocked in the face and the possible loss of several front teeth. “The fans expect me to make an entrance, and to mingle.I like to touch the people, to shake hands and listen to all their silly gushing. It makes them happy. Gives them something to tell their friends later when they go back to their boring little lives.”
“Of…course,” Maria said. Somehow she kept a straight face and did not succumb to the temptation to sneak a sidelong peek at David to see if he, too, wanted to vomit.
“What about the pens, love?” Anastasia asked.
“Yes,” Maria said, relieved that the pen situation, at least, was under control. “They have a big cup full of pens on the table, so there’s no chance of—”
“Are they purple Sharpies?”
Maria froze, midword, with her mouth popped open. Why hadn’t she thought about the crucial issue of pens?A beat passed while she fidgeted with her hoop earring and tried to find the words to tell Anastasia the cup was full of blue Bic pens with nary a purple Sharpie in the bunch. But as she stared at Anastasia’s darkening face and saw another storm brewing on the horizon, she decided that honesty was a grossly overrated virtue.
“I think I didsee a purple Sharpie, yes,” she lied, praying that, once the excitement of the signing got under way, Anastasia would forget about the damn pens.
“Wonderful!” Anastasia beamed, and she and Uri exchanged toothy smiles.
Anastasia raised her tumbler of gin and tonic on the rocks—her third on the ride over here, not that Maria was worried or anything—clinked it with Uri’s glass and sipped happily. This time Maria took advantage of the momentary distraction to shoot a glance at David, who’d been watching her.
He always watched her these days. In the two weeks since he made his declaration of renewed wanting, he seemed to be always nearby, no matter how desperately she tried to avoid him, always watching her with those hot, intent eyes, always waiting.
Maria knew he was waiting for her to give in, wearing her down. It was a good strategy.
A supportive, amused smile drifted discreetly across his face, awakening the butterflies that always fluttered in her belly whenever he was nearby. Her cheeks began to burn with a delicious heat, and she couldn’t stop herself from returning his smile. Just a little, here in the car with other people around, where it was safe.
“And what about the tablecloth?” Anastasia asked, pulling Maria’s attention away from David. “What color was it?”
“White,” Maria told her.
Anastasia scowled, her penciled brows lowering to squiggles above her flashing eyes. “Who told them to use a bloody white tablecloth?” She looked around, catching everyone’s eye in turn, as though she expected them all to be as incredulous over this travesty of taste as she was. “You can’t show the cover of Blue Endearmentto advantage on a whitetablecloth! What would make them think—”
Uri put a hand on her arm, stopping the tirade. Holding his index finger up in the universal wait a minutegesture, he reached down and rummaged around in his black leather bag, which Maria always wanted to call a purse. With a flourish, he whipped out an enormous length of heavy black linen, and flapped it. A black tablecloth. Maria wanted to kiss him.
Anastasia did kiss him. With a booming, deep-throated laugh that reminded Maria of the bald guy in those old 7-Up commercials, she reached out, grabbed Uri’s face in one of her hands, and smacked him loudly on the cheek, leaving a huge set of flaming-red lip prints. Uri laughed, too, and order was restored in Anastasia’s universe.
Just then, the harried-looking community relations manager of the store hurried through the crowd and tapped on the window. Anastasia stuck a red-tipped finger on the control and lowered the window to stare imperiously at the woman.
“We’re ready for you,” the manager said. “Let me walk you in.”
The four of them climbed out and Anastasia began to glow with some internal light that superstars like Diana Ross and Elizabeth Taylor no doubt possessed. Radiating that indefinable it,an enormous smile on her face, Anastasia waved and cried, “Hello, darlings,” to the crowd at large. Heads whipped around, and when they realized it was Anastasia herself, a ripple of excitement went through the well-dressed crowd of mostly women. Some of them squealed and clapped, and there was much hugging, kissing and flashing of camera phones as Anastasia greeted her delirious worshippers, all of whom seemed to have a couple of Anastasia
’s books clutched to their bosom. Amazed, Maria trailed Anastasia through the crowd and wondered whether this was what life was like for rock star groupies. She half expected these women to whip out their lighters, hold them high over their heads and flick them as they swayed to Anastasia’s beat.
The crowd surged closer a couple of times, giving Maria a vague sense of unease; conditions were certainly ripe for a riot if they ran out of books or something, and she wasn’t certain the lone security officer she’d seen was much in the way of crowd control. As if he’d read her mind, David edged nearer and put a firm, protective hand on her back, and she breathed easier. David would never let anything happen to her, and she knew it.
Finally they arrived at the table, the black tablecloth was substituted for the white one, books were rearranged, Maria slipped Anastasia a big glass of iced Perrier—please, Lord, let her drink it—and the signing began. More accurately, the pilgrimage, with the faithful paying gushing homage to their idol, began. Just as Maria had hoped, Anastasia was so engrossed with greeting her enthralled fans that she didn’t notice the complete absence of purple Sharpies. Chattering happily, she signed copies of Blue Endearmentand her backlisted books with a huge, swirling signature that took up most of the title page. Her rapt fans couldn’t get enough.
Uri and the manager hovered around the table, assisting Anastasia when the task of flipping books open to the signature page became too much for her. Maria hovered several feet back, near the end of an enormous bookshelf, available if Anastasia needed her and out of the way if she didn’t. She’d just begun to relax when David materialized at her elbow, causing her pulse to go berserk.
With a negligent crossing of one ankle over the other, he lounged back against her bookshelf so that they were side-by-side and touching from shoulder to elbow. Maria went rigid and she had to force herself to stay where she was and not scurry away like a frightened mouse. Her heart skittered with excitement and her blood began to heat, but she studiously ignored him and prayed he would go away. He didn’t.
“Alone at last,” he murmured.
“We’re not alone,” she said coolly.
But they were, for all intents and purposes, and he didn’t bother to contradict her. The crowd chattered and orbited around Anastasia, today’s star in the Barnes & Noble universe, and no one paid them the slightest attention. Agitated, Maria tried to act unruffled and unconcerned.
“I wish you’d stop trying to avoid me,” he told her. “I’m getting tired of it.”
“I’m not avoiding you. I just need a little quiet time after a long day at work.”
David snorted, and she felt ridiculous for telling such a dumb lie. Ever since his confession by the spa two weeks ago, she’d put herself in virtual lockdown in her own room. Like house arrest, except that she couldn’t roam the common areas, such as the kitchen, living room or pool, because she never knew where he might turn up. Paranoid beyond all reason, she’d even taken to locking her bedroom door at night lest he take it upon himself to pay her a nocturnal visit.
Day by day, inch by inch, heartbeat by heartbeat, she felt herself losing the battle against him, her resistance weakening, but she fought against the inevitable. She did not want to go down this road with him again. She did not want to give him another bite at the apple. She did not want to risk another heartbreak at his hands. She’d barely survived the first one, and she couldn’t do it again. She didn’t have it in her.
“How are you?” he asked.
That soft, deep, murmuring voice felt like a caress, a lingering stroke of fingers across her bare skin that made her long for things she shouldn’t want. “Fine,” she said, not looking at him and struggling to get air into lungs that didn’t seem to want to expand all the way. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine. Hadn’t been fine since he got back to town, and had no prospects of being fine again anytime soon. How could she be fine when the man who’d broken her heart said he wanted her back? Was she supposed to be okay with that information? Crossing her arms over her chest, she turned slightly away from him, hoping he’d take the hint, but he didn’t seem to be the slightest bit deterred.
“Have you thought about what I said?” he asked.
Yes.It was all she’d thought about, all she wanted to think about. He obsessed her, just like he always had, and she knew that if she could somehow empty out her skull and scour her brain with bleach and a brush, she’d still never get David Hunt out of her thoughts.
Crinkling her brow, she tried to look politely perplexed. “What you said? Why would I think about that?There’s nothing to think about.”
“I’vethought about it.”
There was a long, agonizing pause while the words hung in the air like a kite on the breeze. Against her will, against all her better judgment, her head turned and her gaze locked, for the first time, with his. Everything she saw on his face was profoundly disturbing to her equilibrium: the vulnerability; the longing; the heat; and, worst of all, the continued determination. Longing drew her irresistibly to him, as though someone had taken a giant steel S-curve and hooked it around both their waists, binding them together. She couldn’t get away and, worse, she was losing her desire to get away.
They’d already been touching at the shoulders, but now, somehow, he was closer, leaning over her, his eyes monopolizing her entire field of vision until there was nothing else. No crowd, no noise, no distractions…only this man and this moment.
“I think about how good it felt to put my hands on you again and—”
Maria made an involuntary, embarrassing little protesting noise.
“—how much I’ve missed you and—”
“Please don’t,” Maria begged.
“—how I’ve prayed for God to send me another woman who’d help me forget about you, just for a little while, or at least to take the edge off the wanting, but God hasn’t listened.”
Unshed tears swam in Maria’s eyes, mercifully blocking her image of his earnest, intense face. She hastily looked away and wiped at the corners of her eyes, sniffling. She would not engage in this conversation with him. He could confess like a penitent with a priest if he wanted to; she couldn’t stop him. Nor could she help it if she heard what he said. But she would not tell him her own feelings, and she would not open the door—not the tiniest crack—to any sort of a discussion that could lead to a reconciliation. Too much had already been lost, and too much was at stake. She would not give him an opening. Keeping her gaze fixed over her shoulder away from him, she stubbornly clamped her lips together and said nothing.
“Maria?”he whispered.
The plaintive note in his husky voice undid her. Much as she wanted to, she could not leave him hanging, nor could she ignore him. With all the reluctance in the world, she turned her head back and met his tormented gaze again, and the connection felt like a swift kick to her gut.
“You broke my heart,” she told him. “Why would I ever give you the chance to break it again?”
“Because,” he said without the slightest hesitation, “you have to remember how good it was between us. Don’t you?”
She couldn’t answer because she didremember. All too well. It had all been good: the sex, the laughter, the emotional connection. Better than anything else in her life had ever been.
“I know I was a fool for leaving you before, Maria. I’m not ever going to do something that stupid again.” There was no waver in his voice, no flicker in his eye. Just an absolute conviction that told her he believed what he said even if she didn’t. “Give me another chance” he murmured, leaning so close now she wondered dazedly if he meant to kiss her. “Love me again.”
A dreamlike, hypnotic state seemed to come over her, until she didn’t quite know where she was or what had happened. She felt as though she were drifting…floating closer…if not to him, then at least to a place where she could acknowledge that she still wanted him. She opened her mouth and his eager gaze sharpened—
“Maria? Maria?Pay attention,
love. Trot down to the café and get me a lovely chocolate-chip cookie, will you? No nuts.”
David muttered a vicious curse.
Maria blinked, coming out of her trance and to full attention. She looked wildly around and saw Anastasia, still sitting in her chair but twisted at the waist to look back at her and David. One of her bejeweled hands was high in the air over her head, and she snapped her fingers several times as though summoning her dog back into the house after a romp in the yard.
“You can make cow eyes at David later,” Anastasia barked. “Let’s go, love.”
Beside her, Uri stared back at them and gave his hands a sharp double clap that very clearly put the right nowat the end of Anastasia’s sentence. He looked down at Anastasia, and then they both turned back to the fans.
Embarrassed, her cheeks flaming, Maria took a couple large, hasty steps in the café’s direction, but David’s hand on her arm stopped her.
“This isn’t over,” he whispered, the urgency in his voice matching that in his eyes.
Grateful for the well-timed interruption that’d stopped her when she was right on the verge of doing something stupid, and for the subsequent reprieve, Maria snatched her arm away. “Yes, it is.”
Two days later they were in New York for Anastasia’s interview on the “Live with Sturgis & Molly” show.
“You look beautiful,” Maria told Anastasia. “This is going to be a greatinterview. I can feelit.”
Anastasia, who’d been admiring herself from every angle in the green room’s lighted mirror, paused in the act of smoothing today’s wig, a short, spiky, black number that made David think of Liza Minelli, and sniffed.
He watched her and wondered how that much haughtiness could be contained in one person.
He, Maria, Anastasia and Uri had flown to New York yesterday, and he’d been surprised that the plane was able to stay airborne under the weight of the tension in the first-class cabin. Anastasia had complained bitterly about the service, the food, the bathroom, the movie selection and the drinks. Anastasia reported that Uri was also upset about the drinks, although David couldn’t tell for sure because he never heard Uri actually speak, and also couldn’t read Uri’s usual expressionless face.
Sweeter Than Revenge Page 18
