Miracle (52 page)

“Remember the day I saw you perform magic tricks at a
festival in the mountains? And you used a video-game token to show me—”

“You kept it? This is it?”

“Yes.”

“And you wore it?”

“Yes. I need to tell you about it.”

She sank into a wooden chair. He settled by her feet on the veranda’s edge and looked up at her steadily as he talked. She listened in stunned silence as he told her how the token had saved him from a knife wound in Africa, how he’d kept it in the years afterward, how he’d tried to throw it away, and how, finally, it had turned up at the moment that he needed the memory of her most. She was crying softly when he finished.

He stood up and pulled her up with him. “When I was in Africa I planned to come back to the States and see you. Except for wounded pride, I would have. It was very hard for me to appreciate the kind of emotions you made me feel. It was easier to repress them. I wasn’t capable of showing or accepting love. Now I’m trying very hard to change that.”

Tremors ran through her, through them both. “You were planning to come back for me?”

“Yes. I swear it. If I’d been open about my feelings for you, you would have known, then no one would have been able to take you away.”

Jeff
. He
had
found out about her and Jeff, that one terrible night they’d spent together. Had it angered him so much that he’d decided not to come back for her? The question tormented Amy, but she was afraid to ask it.

“Forgive me,” he whispered.

Amy looked up at him in wonder. “For what?”

“I had trained myself to be callous, and I lost you because of it.” He searched her face for answers. She saw the quiet desperation in his. “I hope that I didn’t lose you forever, Amy. I know we have a lot to learn about each other, but being with you feels so right, so necessary.”

She let her question about Jeff dissolve. Why dredge that up? A fierce sense of protectiveness surged through her. Nothing mattered except that Sebastien had wanted to find
her again, that he’d kept the old video token as if it were sacred, and that he’d never forgotten her. She put her arms around him and struggled to speak. Mended dreams were filling her throat. “You didn’t lose me, Doc. I was just misplaced.”

His slow caresses wound through her veins like a river of silk, sinking her into the bed because her muscles had become heavy with desire. He was patient as he conquered each small kingdom of her body with his fingertips and the languid exploration of his hands.

She tilted her head back on the pillow, strained gently upward into each caress, felt her breasts aching, swollen, waiting to receive his hands again, his mouth again, as every other part of her had already been blessed. The rhythmic throbbing between her legs became fiercer as he returned there.

Reaching for him, she sang for him with her body, a fine instrument responding to a virtuoso’s care, now stretching to its peak, the crescendo welling into his mouth as he kissed her and drank her moans. Her welcome brought hard words of devotion from him, tormented words straight from whatever hell had trapped them until now. She took him, held him with tears on her face, hugged him with her legs both to comfort and invite.

Inside her he moved with convulsive energy, while his hands knotted in her hair and he angled his face to catch the touch of her fingertips. This first time was a struggle between tenderness and greed, restraint and chaos, emotions so raw that they could only bleed before the healing began. In the end she struggled with him, screamed against his shoulder in contrast to the urging of her hands riding his hips. Worlds of light were born in the frantic completion.

Afterward she stroked his back, trying to calm both him and herself. Then he murmured
je t’aime, je t’aime
against
her mouth, and she fell apart again. “I talked to you in my mind for ten years,” she told him, crying. “I wish you’d heard me sometimes.”

“I did, love, I did,” he said, thinking of the whispers he had been too distant from himself to understand, until now.

O
utside the open bedroom window the spring afternoon was warm and peaceful, whispering with the winds and the birds, ripe, waiting. It was impossible to move without noticing everything about the man who lay under her, between her knees, his belly and chest a solid, thickly haired enticement that made her press herself down on him and wrap her arms under his neck. She moved—noticing, loving.

“I’m afraid to look at you,” she whispered against his ear, her breath still fast, still recovering. “I’m afraid you’re too good to be true.”

Sebastien melted her over him with the stroking of his large hands, gentle but provocative as they journeyed down her back. “I thought it was beyond me to feel this way again,” he whispered in return. He caught the tip of her ear lobe with his lips, then kissed her cheek and chin before nuzzling his face upward so that he could kiss her mouth. She looked down into his dark, gleaming eyes. Their happiness combined with the ruddy flush in his face to make her smile. “Doc, you were worth waiting ten years for.”

She noted the hardening of his expression and the way his eyes began to see farther than her face. He protested gruffly when she lifted herself from his body and lay down beside him, but she shook her head. She curled a leg over his thighs and stroked his matted chest hair as she studied
his change of mood, worried. “It doesn’t matter,” she said softly, sensing his thoughts.

“It does. We’ve lost so many years. I can’t ignore a feeling of obsessive protectiveness toward what we have now, a feeling that it could disappear again too easily.”

She touched a mildly rebuking finger to his lips. “Not if we admit the problems. Not if you want to solve them as much as I do.”

“Problems?”

“I have a career and it takes a lot of my time. It’s not the kind of work—or the kind of life-style—that’s even remotely like anything you know.”

“Oh, that.” He dismissed the conflict with a bored sigh. “I don’t mind being the power behind the throne. We de Savins have
always
played that role in French history. It’s really the most important position.”

She laughed. “I should have known your confidence wouldn’t be threatened.”

“I don’t mind your devotion to your work, love. I respect it. When I return to medicine, you’ll respect my devotion, I’m sure.”

Amy cocked her head and eyed him warily. “There’s a threat there, somewhere.”

“Only the threat that we’ll both have to compromise. I’ve never been good at compromising, I admit it. But I’ll learn.”

“I go to the other extreme. You’re looking at an
expert
on compromising.”

Her jaunty smile brought a soft chuckle from him. He tweaked one of her breasts. “Good. You can teach me.”

“Oh, I will.”

“Then perhaps our only significant problem is Elliot Thornton. Tell me about him.” Frowning, she said nothing. Sebastien curled an arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer, taunting her a little with his possessiveness. “I’ve told you all that was important about my relationship with Marie. Now you tell me about this Thornton.
Compromise
, dear Miracle.” He gave her a benign but commanding look. “Talk.”

“I care about him. I’d like to help him. He used to be a pretty lovable person. But I think I loved being needed by
him more than anything else. Eventually I realized that it wasn’t the same as loving
him
. Does that make any sense?”

“Yes. But I want him out of your life. I’m not … hmmm, what would be the word?” Sebastien frowned, then found it and nodded. “I’m not
modern
enough to encourage you to remain friends with him. In fact, I would prefer that you never see him again.”

“
Dear
doctor, there isn’t a man on this planet you need to feel jealous of.”

His free hand slid over her hip and dipped between her thighs. With his fingertips he spread the wetness that came from both their bodies. It was a loving caress, without domination. “I know. But indulge my fierce territorial instinct where you are concerned.”

She could tell he was struggling not to let jealousy make him sound Neanderthal. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her feelings for him—she knew
that—
it was that he wanted to drive away any other male who had ever coveted her. The attitude was surprisingly primitive for him, and it made her so happy that she was drunk with wanting to please him. But she knew that she had to be honest.

“I don’t love Elliot, but I want to help him, if I can. I won’t promise you that I’ll turn my back on him if he wants to be friends again, if he’s
capable
of being friends.” She paused, girding herself for what she wanted to say next. “Elliot and I were finished a long time before you came back. You don’t have to worry.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“Do you … want to talk about Jeff Atwater?”

Silence stretched between them. His expression became carefully shuttered as he held her gaze. “No, I think not,” he said finally. His hand lay still on the top of her thigh, then began its slow caress again. But there was something hard and challenging in his eyes. “Do you want to remember him?”

He knew about that night. There was no doubt
. “No, it ended ten years ago. It was a terrible mistake.”

“You had given up waiting for me. I understand why. I never gave you reason to wait.” He halted the line of conversation with an upraised hand. His eyes were colder
than she would have liked. “Someday, when we’re old and bored and have nothing better to discuss, we’ll talk about Jeff. But not now.”

She nodded but wondered how long they could let this painful part of their past remain unexplored.

“So you want to be friends with Elliot Thornton,” he said abruptly, his tone grim. “And rehabilitate him.”

“Yes, I do.”

Sebastien lifted a hand and pointed at her in a slow and emphatic gesture of protest that held the future hostage.
You test my limits
, it said. She met his reproachful stare with an arch expression, while her fingers drummed a deceptively light-hearted rhythm on the center of his chest. “Compromise,” she reminded him.

His eyes flickered. His attitude shifted to exasperation. He lowered his hand and engulfed her teasing fingers. “So be it.
Compromise
.” The word came hard, and she knew it. She kissed him in honor of it, and hoped that it would help her in the future.

Sebastien went with her when she flew to New York to audition for
Late Night With David Letterman
. She was ecstatic when Letterman’s producer offered her a stand-up spot on one of the following week’s shows. She luxuriated in Sebastien’s pride.

In their hotel suite the next morning she woke to find herself wearing a slender gold necklace from which hung a diamond pendant. “See what the tooth fairy brought me?” she said tearfully, looking up into Sebastien’s solemn eyes. “And I didn’t even trade a tooth for it.”

“He must have known that yesterday was a momentous occasion and should be commemorated.”

“I’ve been getting a lot of goodies lately.”