Hold Back the Night (20 page)

With her problems easing, Miranda's face began to look less pinched and thin, except when her mind turned to wistful thoughts of Joel. Domini thought they were probably having an affair but didn't feel it was her place to pry. One day Miranda did, however, admit that she was familiar with Joel's apartment. 'It's not very grand,' she said. 'Only three bedrooms, ail quite tiny. For now, he can't afford anything bigger. His restaurant does well, but he's still paying off the bank loan he got when he started up.'

Domini gathered that two extra people could not possibly move in to share Joel's quarters on a permanent basis. Miranda, maybe; Sander never. All the same, if the financial picture continued to brighten, maybe a solution could be found. Domini knew Miranda was hoping.

As for Sander, Domini realized wryly that he was too possessed by his need to sculpt to even notice that money problems had become less pressing. In doing the sculptures, he had indeed been helping himself, although he might not yet know it. Along with the satisfaction Domini felt came the bitter realization that should he ever become truly successful, he might soon feel no more need of her at all. For sculptors of note, models were easy to come by ... and so were mistresses.

Domini's finances were easier too. Her bank-book showed no great balance, but it did show a balance. Grant Manners had awarded her the job as hoped, reaffirming that her initial judgement of him had not been too far amiss. She had lunched with him several times, purely business luncheons during which he remained affable and charming, pressuring her in no way for a relationship she clearly did not want. She liked him and knew he liked her, and there the matter remained. Oh, why hadn't she been able to fall in love with someone nice and easy like that?

'Another of the bronzes sold!' Miranda declared happily as Domini came through the gallery door one day at the end of June, when the heat wave had still not broken. In the humidity her cotton shift was clinging over damp skin, and even without nylons and wearing light sandals she felt uncomfortably hot. It was cooler in the gallery, thanks to a somewhat cranky air conditioning system, a relic of more prosperous days when Miranda's husband had been alive. The cooling system didn't extend to the upper floors;

Domini knew to her sorrow that the third floor, due to poor insulation in the old Victorian roof, was like a blast furnace.

'That's wonderful, Miranda.' Domini smiled. 'It's about time I filched another maquette, don't you think? Or shall I just get some castings from the moulds I've already made?'

'I think it's time I started looking after all that,' Miranda decided, displaying some firmness. She looked at Domini, her grey eyes clear and friendly. 'I can manage it now, you know. Believe it or not, this heat is good for business! People come in to get cool and sometimes stay to buy. All this year I've had good tourist traffic ... and some decent things to sell. It makes a difference.'

'In that case why don't you think about having one of Sander's big pieces cast?' Domini suggested eagerly. 'The one of Joel sitting dejectedly on an old chair is a simply marvellous study.'

Miranda shook her head and made a face. 'I'd have something big cast if I thought for a moment I could sell it. But in some things I'm a realist, Domini. The customers who walk in here wouldn't pay the price I'd have to charge for a large piece like that. Truthfully, Sander needs a better dealer than me. Preferably a chic uptown gallery, one with a good reputation.'

There was no way Domini could dispute that, because it echoed her own sentiments exactly. There were many reputable and important dealers in SoHo, but the best of them featured works more avant-garde in nature than Sander's. He was an individualist, not a follower of fashions in art; Domini would have called his works contemporary classics. Some of the studies he had done were more experimental than the sculpture of herself, but they were still firmly rooted in realism. They would do well with dealers such as the one that handled Domini's own father, but they wouldn't mingle well with Campbell's soup labels and overblown comic strips and collapsed plumbing fixtures made of soft plastic.

But such tact as she had acquired over the years forbade Domini to agree with Miranda too strongly, thereby casting a slur on Miranda's little gallery. She murmured a vague 'Maybe.'

And then, obeying the internal compass that pulled her to its own personal magnetic pole, her eyes turned restively towards the stairs. A brief conversation with Miranda had become a ritual part of her visits whenever she had a few moments to spare, but today she didn't feel like prolonging it. Since the start of the heat wave she had not liked to think of Sander sweltering over his sculptures in the confinement of a poorly insulated house. He refused to sit in the cool of the gallery because of an in-built hatred of being on public view. Troubled by the confined life he led, early in the year Domini had pushed and prodded him to start walking outdoors, something he had not been given to doing on his own because he disliked carrying his white cane or accepting help from strangers. Miranda, anxious for his safety, had also had to be convinced. But now Sander did sometimes venture alone within the range of a few familiar blocks, usually at night when he felt more comfortable about his cane. During the day he still avoided such outings.

But in weather like this there was little relief to be had on the streets; they were like blast furnaces too. Ought she invite Sander to her loft, which was somewhat cooler due to its high ceilings and white paint? Or would that be a mistake? She decided it would. Sander never asked questions about Tasey, and Domini scrupulously avoided the topic herself. To take Sander to the loft would be to take him into a world where traces of Tasey were everywhere, and Domini didn't think she could bear a situation like that.

The bell at the door jangled, advertising the arrival of a customer. With a last murmured word to Miranda, Domini hastened up the stairs.

Sander was out of view in the kitchen. Domini could hear the clink of glass. 'Start stripping,' he called out at once. 'Would you like a glass of ice water?'

'Yes, if it's big enough to jump into,' Domini called in return. On a day like this there were distinct advantages to be found in removing one's clothes, and she did so in about two seconds flat. Sander entered the room, while she was still removing her sandals, the last of the coverings to go. He was barefoot and naked to the waist, his only concession to decency a pair of cut-off jeans. His lean, hard torso was gleaming with perspiration, and in his hands were two glasses already dripping with condensation.

'What a good idea,' he murmured smokily.

'What good idea are you talking about?' asked Domini, accepting the chilled glass and looking at him through her lashes while she touched her tongue-tip to the ice and then quenched her thirst.

'A cool shower,' he said, 'or a bath. Something big enough for two to jump into. Something wet and very, very wanton.'

Anticipation tingled through Domini's blood as his hand arrived to close over her wrist, locating it easily because of the clink of ice cubes. 'Does this mean you've finished the sculpture of me?' she asked. Beneath its damp shroud the sculpture looked altogether complete to her, and she had been wondering when Sander was going to admit that it was done. On her last visit he had not touched it at all, claiming that it was too hot to work, and yet he had not found it too hot to vent his passion on the steamy third floor.

He bent his parted lips to bathe a wrist already damp from the day's heat. His tongue was chilled from the ice, sending a sensuous thrill up Domini's arm. When he straightened, she tiptoed impulsively up to kiss him, too, and tasted the salt tang of his sweat-moist jaw on her tongue. 'I'm not sure about the bath,' she whispered happily. 'You taste wonderful exactly the way you are.'

'No more talk,' he muttered, removing the glass from her hand and putting it down on a table. Then he drew her to the door.

'My robe,' Domini reminded him, pulling back.

'A little risk only adds to the excitement. Besides, don't you think anyone with eyes to see my sculpture will soon be able to see exactly what you look like in the nude? Think about that, my beautiful friend

In the unrestored Victorian bathroom, the old-fashioned bathtub was huge on its massive clawed feet. Above it was the showerhead, with a light plastic curtain affording the only enclosure. Sander adjusted the spray of the nozzle, evidently having settled on a shower rather than a bath. Impatient for his sensual satisfaction, he lifted Domini into the tub and stepped in himself without taking time to remove his short frayed denims. As the shower stung them both, their mouths met urgently and with no hesitation, Domini reaching for his waistband with the abandon of a woman who knows her bold caresses are wanted.

Perhaps it was indeed the risk of having no robe that added to the excitement, or perhaps it was the sharp tingle of water on bare flesh, or perhaps the unleashing of Sander's turbulent and turgid passion, unquelled by the shock of cooling spray. Domini was by now well acquainted with all the secrets of his superb male physique, but the newness of the moment made the love-making itself seem new. Sander loosened her hair to let it stream free. Then he lifted her against his aroused body to command her with the kiss his greater height would otherwise not allow, his powerful muscles supporting her slender curves as easily and surely as if she were no more than a feather's weight. With one impatient hand imprisoning her waist and the other smoothing her willing hips into instant compliance, he sank his mouth greedily into the hollows of her arched throat. Domini gasped with pleasure as she felt him join her as if for the first time, and the wild savagery of his kisses against her wet skin told her that for him, too, the moment of joining was supreme.

With bodies bare and streaming and mouths hungrily exploring, with dark hair and gold soaked and mingling beneath the shower, with droplets beading on his chest and hers, they made impassioned love, although Sander might have chosen to call it sex.

'What an unbridled creature you are,' his wet mouth muttered against her straggling hair a short time later when he had released her from his commanding grip. 'You don't hold anything back, do you? And to think I once believed you had inhibitions.'

'The shower washed them all away,' Domini breathed, still quivering in the aftermath of his ungoverned and inventive ardour, which she had returned with wild shamelessness.

After that he soaped her and she soaped him with a slowness and sensuality that was pleasurable in itself, although both were too well sated for a renewal of the volcanic passion of before. When the shower had rinsed them, Sander closed the drain and allowed the tub to fill. And then, with the shower at last turned off, they sank together into the contained cool sea of the tub.

And there they remained for the next few minutes, Domini at first luxuriating in the coolness of her flesh, but soon turning reflective and unhappy as she lay enclosed in Sander's arms, in a tight embrace dictated by their close confinement in the bath. With lids lowered over the sightless silver eyes and a distant expression on his mouth, he ran his fingers over her body with the slow-motion indolence of a man whose passions have been fully slaked, lightly touching her breasts and the contours of her face, neither speaking nor asking Domini to speak. She accepted without question, because the lazy stroking of his now passionless fingers must needs serve him instead of eyes, and serve her instead of the words of love she wanted so desperately to hear.

To Domini there was no wrong in what she did. She loved and she expressed her love freely and fully and without reserve, as she had been taught to do in childhood. Although she was bound by neither vows nor inhibitions, she was bound by stronger bonds. Sander had fathered her child although he did not know it, she loved him although he did not know it, and Domini would have married him had he asked. She knew he would not ask, not only for reasons of pride or cynicism, disillusion or despair, but because his feelings for her did not include love. Were it not for her daughter, she would have moved in with him altogether and felt no shame, although she was certain that Sander would not have asked that of her either. He might want her physically, but he wanted her in no other way.

Domini's morbid reflections troubled her, and she decided she was only torturing herself by staying for the afternoon when no sculpting was to be done. Wordlessly she left Sander in the bath, wondering if the steep furrow in his brow was caused by thoughts as difficult as hers.

With passion no longer heating her flesh, she was more cautious on the downtrip, and so she commandeered Sander's dressing-gown for the return to the studio. Moments later she was on the main floor, hair still damp and twisted into a quick pony-tail.

Miranda was idling over a daily newspaper, one of several on her desk, but put it down as soon as Domini appeared. If she was surprised at the shortness of the visit, she didn't comment upon it.

'Sit down and take a break,' she suggested with no more than a faint smile at the sight of Domini's betrayingly wet hair, which had dripped down the back of her light dress, darkening the cotton, i'm only catching up on last week's art columns, which I was too lazy to read at the time. And I'm still too lazy! I'd much rather visit. Besides, it's been ages since we've had a really good chat. You're always in such a hurry, first to get to Sander, then to get to Tasey. Or do you have to rush off to see some client?'

With the end of day care still some time away, Domini was for once able to take a breathing spell, and so she sank on to a padded bench near the sales desk, unwilling as yet to face the intense heat of the street. 'No, thank God, my work's in good shape. I have no more windows to change until next week. Then I have a pile to do, but perhaps the heat will have broken. They say it's about to.'