Belonging to Taylor (13 page)

He could hardly help but laugh. "No.
If
you've given up your intention of seducing me tonight. I still think we need a little time. Without walls between us now."

"If you insist. But I already know everything I need to know." She leaned over to place the bowl on the coffee table, then used the remote control to turn the television back on.

Trevor slipped an arm around her as she curled up at his side. "Oh, you do, do you?"

"Certainly. I know that you're a humorous, caring, sensitive man. I really don't need to know anything else."

"I thought you said I wasn't macho enough," he objected dryly.

"Only where your scruples and my virtue are concerned. Otherwise, you're perfect."

"I'll try to do better next time, ma'am," he murmured, humble.

Blue eyes glinted up at him before returning to the television screen. "I'll make certain of it," she said gently.

The late show turned out to be an all-night horror festival.
and somewhere in the middle of it they both fell asleep. It was an easy thing to accomplish, since they'd stretched out during the second movie by mutual consent, both turned facing the set with Taylor's back to Trevor and his arms around her.

Trevor had never slept so well. He woke to bright sunlight streaming through the windows, hearing the murmur of an early news program on television and feeling the warmth of her in his arms.

It was, he decided, a very nice way to wake up.

"You
don't
snore," she murmured.

"That's odd. I thought I did."

"Liar."

"So I told one small white lie.
You
came here with the fixed intention of seducing me."

"I'm shameless, and you're a liar. Don't we make a perfect couple?"

"I plead the fifth amendment."

"Coward."

He laughed softly, tightening his arms around her. "I won't bother trying to defend myself on that one. Instead, why don't we have breakfast?"

"Does it occur to you that we spend a great deal of our time together either cooking or eating?"

"It crossed my mind. D'you suppose there's some Freudian meaning behind that?"

"Likely just hunger," she said practically. She sat up and
swung her feet to the floor as he released her, looking down at him with a smile.

He gazed up at her for a moment, taking in the tousled chestnut hair and bright blue eyes. The robe's belt had worked loose during the night, the open lapels revealing black silk and lace; Trevor silently acquitted her of deliberate enticement, but he had to swallow hard before he could speak. "I might have known," he muttered in a long-suffering tone, "you'd look as beautiful in the morning as you do any other time."

Taylor leaned down and kissed him fleetingly, her hand lingering on his cheek. "Thank you, sir," she said gravely. "You look pretty good yourself—in spite of the stubble."

For the first time in his adult life, Trevor found a distinct pleasure in his fairly heavy morning beard; the tingling caress of her fingers was one for which he would have willingly let his razor grow rusty. "I have to shave," he said reluctantly.

"Only if you want to," she said. "I don't object to beards."

Dryly, he asked, "Is there anything you do object to?"

"Yes. Eggs in the morning." She stood up, absently drawing the robe's lapels together and tightening the belt. She stretched slightly, unconsciously luxuriating in the blissful morning action. "Do you like waffles?"

"Love 'em."

'Then if you have the fixings, that's what I'll make."

He got to his feet, stretching as unconsciously as she had. "I have the fixings, but you shouldn't have to cook; you're a guest."

"Forced on you against your will," she recalled soulfully. "Cooking will be my penance."

Trevor managed to swat her one on the fanny before she escaped, laughing, to the kitchen. He smiled after her for a moment, realized abruptly that he probably looked like a besotted teenager, then mentally decided not to give a damn. Feeling much more cheerful today than he had yesterday morning, he went off to shave.

He'd once heard a woman say that shaving to a man was like washing dishes to a woman—before electric dishwashers; it was an automatic, curiously soothing action, allowing the mind to range free. Trevor agreed that shaving tended to free
the mind; he'd more than once worked out some tricky problem or legal question while gazing absently into a steamed mirror.

This morning, his mind focused inevitably on Taylor and their night together. The evening before was divided by his mind into four separate and distinct parts. Part one had been seduction, part two had been laughter, part three revelation, and part four an amazingly restful sleep. For the first two, he felt no surprise; seduction and laughter were quite definitely a part of their relationship. The fourth part amazed him only because he wasn't a gibbering idiot after holding her platonically in his arms all night.

Part three occupied his thoughts. Revelation. He never hesitated in accepting her assurances regarding the telepathy. She didn't read his mind, and that meant that there was no reason for the wall he'd built between them. However, he knew the wall still existed in a ghostly form, elusive and still vaguely troubling.

And he couldn't fully commit himself until he was certain that faint barrier posed no threat to them.

He pondered that wall as he shaved. It was formed of fear, he thought, a primitive and unreasoning fear of the unknown and the misunderstood. Applying logic in a determined attempt to breach that fear, he reminded himself that there was only a tiny part of his mind she could see into
anyway.
It helped, but the wall remained a nebulous threat.

Trevor thought he could deal with it eventually. Experience. A surer knowledge of Taylor gained through time. A gradual relaxing of the guards people inevitably raised against one another in the tentative beginnings of a relationship.

Wanting that relationship, he thought, would go a long way in helping. And he very badly wanted Taylor to become a permanent part of his life. She made him feel a better man than he knew himself to be, a fact he acknowledged with an inner rueful sigh. There were no rosy glasses blinding Taylor's honest eyes; she knew well that he was far from perfect. But she thought him perfect for her, and for that very unusual and fascinating woman to believe that of him was a compliment Trevor found both moving and bemusing.

It meant laughing. And loving. It meant being known and
understood, a fact that caused a faint uneasy quiver to disturb some deep part of him, but was, on some other level of himself, curiously pleasing.

But... could he ever know her that well? She was endlessly fascinating, his love, blessed with the gifts of humor and tolerance and honesty. Her unconventional upbringing had left her with few subtleties or feminine evasions at her command; she would never be blunt to the point of hurting another, but she'd always be honest, he knew.

Abruptly, superimposed over his own cloudy image in the mirror, he saw those honest eyes staring at him blindly.

"/
wish it was the other way around. I wish I could cry when it mattered and not when it didn't."

A sensitive woman, her vulnerability for the most part hidden within her—like those unshed tears that mattered. A woman who was the calm, practical hub around which her ridiculous family turned, and yet who could herself become absurd at the drop of a hat. She was invariably cheerful, yet her psychic gift had shown her the darker side of humanity, had given her eyes to see into a madman's sick, murderous thoughts.

And not just one madman, Trevor realized painfully; she felt "a responsibility to do what I can to help." To help capture madmen, she'd willingly expose herself to those dark and twisted thoughts.

Automatically wiping away the steam obscuring the mirror, Trevor gazed into his own suddenly blind eyes.

She believed he was the man for her, and he realized then that he had never really considered their relationship from her point of view. "Sensitive," she'd called him.
Fool!
he called himself. He knew that he'd nearly had it once, nearly realized why she needed him—and it had thrown him into a blind panic.

She didn't need the dark gremlins hidden in his own mind; she only needed his willingness to share them.

That was all. All! If he could be willing to share his vulnerability, then she would share hers. It would not be an exchange of dark and guilty secrets, hurts, fears, but a simple knowing and understanding of them. Trust. Openness. And most of all... love.

Trevor had heard all the rhetoric. Times had changed.
People
had changed. Women could be strong and men sensitive. Women could be assertive and men understanding. Women could be forceful and men intuitive. But knowing it
could
be done was only half the problem solved.

Knowing that a man could cry made his unshed tears no easier than those a strong woman held at bay within her.

Taylor couldn't cry when it mattered, and neither could Trevor.

For her, he thought, the tears refused to come because her psychic abilities guarded her mind so carefully. For him, he knew, the tears a boy might have learned to shed had been deeply buried by a man's responsibilities. He'd been eighteen when their parents had been killed, his own shock and grief numbed by the necessity of raising his ten-year-old brother.

Jason had been able to cry, but Trevor, willingly accepting the role of parent, had buried his own tears, comforted Jason as best he could, and picked up the threads of their lives. And his brother would never know, although he might well guess, the sleepless nights and anxiety that had tormented Trevor. Their parents had left them far from penniless, but Trevor had struggled nonetheless in raising Jason and putting them both through school.

He regretted none of it, but he wished now that he'd allowed himself to share his brother's tears. For, having once accepted a stoic path, Trevor had found it impossible to retrace his steps. How could he be vulnerable when Jason had needed him to be strong?

How indeed.

But Jason had his own life now. And Trevor could see now how that first stoic step had molded his way of thinking. Even his choice of law as a career had reinforced the impassive surface of himself. How many times had he swayed a jury with emotional rhetoric while a part of him had watched analytically for the reaction he sought?

He'd learned to play with the emotions of others while keeping his own tightly bound in dark silence. Even his love for Jason had been an unspoken thing, proving itself in gruff gestures rather than words. Thankfully, Jason had seen through to the truth, Trevor thought.

And Taylor... Taylor. She called it empathy, this sensing of moods and understanding of them. She with the naked eyes holding the power to pull emotions from him and tease him into enjoying it. She had brought his emotions much closer to the surface—because
she
needed that as much as he did.

The other half of himself... the emotional, intuitive part of him buried for so long. They were, he realized with a sudden flash of insight, almost mirror images of each other—but reversed. His mind flew back to that first day. Taylor, on the surface a cheerful woman brought easily to laughter or tears, but underneath so very controlled because she'd been forced to build shields around her sensitive mind and heart. Trevor, outwardly controlled and stoic, calm and logical, but inwardly a caldron boiling with nearly fifteen years of suppressed love, laughter, and tears.

In a blink of time, Taylor had begun guilelessly to free those tightly bound emotions within him. And laughter, because it comes easiest, had fought its way free first. Love was struggling, but the chains binding it were snapping one by one. Tears would be the most difficult to free.

And Taylor, he realized slowly, had begun changing herself. There was now a curious blending of the very cheerful woman and the controlled one. Absurd as her humor sometimes was, there were deeper meanings to it now—such as when she had deliberately roused him to laughter to ease his troubled mind. And she had allowed him to glimpse the vulnerable part of her, to see her pain at a madman's thoughts, to see her diffidence at her own reckless "seduction" plans. The wonder at seeing herself reflected in a man's—his—passionate eyes.

Trevor grappled with the thoughts as he left the bathroom and headed for the kitchen. They could free each other, he realized dimly. Somehow, through an elusive but very real... empathy... they could free each other from cages only vaguely perceived.

He stopped in the doorway of the kitchen and watched her silently. She looked tiny and fragile in his robe, the sleeves turned back several times on her slender arms and the hem falling past her knees. Her hair was still gloriously tousled, the pins that had confined it last night now lost and unremembered.

She was handling the waffle iron with the expert touch of a born cook and humming softly to herself.

He banked his thoughts carefully in his mind and stepped into the room. Whether those thoughts were right or wrong would only be proven, he knew, with time.

She looked over her shoulder at him, smiling. "I was afraid you'd cut your throat," she confided, neatly flipping the golden-brown waffles onto plates.