Passing Through Paradise (18 page)

Seeing the picture brought back a rush of sweetness Mike hadn’t felt in a long, long time. The uncomplicated joys of a sunny summer afternoon, a winner’s trophy and a best friend had filled his world back then.

“Malloy,” Sandra said, eyeing him suspiciously. “What are you thinking?”

“I guess I’m thinking about the kids in the picture. Look at us—happy as clams.”

“Why do people assume clams are happy? I’ve never understood that.”

“It’s just an expression. We were ignorant, closed up tight. Neither of us could have known what life had in store for us. Which was probably for the best. If people knew what the future held, they’d never keep going. You don’t tell a kid, ‘You’re headed for a lousy marriage’ or ‘You’re going to die before you’re forty.’ What would be the point of knowing?”

He caught her stricken expression. “Sorry. I’m rambling.”

She traced her thumb over the old image of Victor. “His mother has a copy of this picture. It ran in the local paper, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t realize the other boy was you, though. You were both so . . . beautiful.” She handed it back to him, and her eyes were dangerously bright.

Don’t cry, Mike wanted to beg her.

“Tell me more about these boys,” she said.

“How much more?”

“Tell me everything.”

Mike drummed his fingers on the table. “How long do you have?”

She paused, then said, “All night.”

“I don’t have any great revelations for you. We were just. . . two kids who were friends. Pretty boring.”

“How can that be boring?” She smiled slightly.

“What’s funny?” he asked, relieved but trying not to show it. At least she didn’t seem to be angry, or on the verge of tears anymore.

“That’s pretty much what all my books are about. Two kids who are friends. Maybe that’s why they don’t sell too well. Boring.”

“A good writer can make white paint interesting. But I’m no writer.”

She drummed her fingers on the table. “Come on, Malloy. I need this. I need to know what Victor was like.”

“You were married to the guy.”

“You were married, too. Can you ever really say you knew your wife?”

The waves heaved against the hull with a hollow thumping sound. He thought about Angela, and the first time he’d brought her aboard the boat. She’d spent most of the time out on deck, working on her tan and admiring the yachts headed toward Newport’s Commercial Wharf. Even then, there were things about her he hadn’t wanted to know or acknowledge.

“Maybe not,” he admitted. “Things are a lot simpler for kids. Victor and I—the two of us seemed to fit. You wouldn’t think so at first. He was rich, I was poor. He made good grades, I didn’t. He had someone watching his every move and planning his every step. Nobody watched what I was doing, and that was fine with me. Still, we clicked. We went on campouts, hikes, all the stuff kids do. We built forts out of driftwood and had a hideout in an old boathouse on the south shore. We had an old dinghy we used to take on pirate raids—I bet it’s still there.”

He wondered if Victor had told her anything about Brice Hall. The year they’d started high school, Vic’s parents sent him away to the boarding school attended by every Winslow male for the past umpteen generations. Six weeks later, Victor had shown up at Mike’s house—he’d flunked out and hitchhiked to Paradise, and was afraid to go home in defeat to his parents. With rare understanding, Mike’s dad counseled Victor to go home, convince his folks that he’d be better off in public school. Victor had done just that, and more. To make up for their disappointment in him, he became the best and the brightest at everything, and Brice Hall was forgotten. But for some reason, Mike remembered it now—and decided not to bring it up with Sandra.

“In high school, Victor joined everything—student council, debate team, sports, that sort of thing.”

“And you?” she asked, watching him with a disconcerting stare. “What were you into?”

“Girls and cars.”

He sent her a self-deprecating grin, but she didn’t smile back. “Victor was the big planner, and I was doing well if I managed to find two matching socks. It was almost eerie, the way he figured out what he wanted to do and aimed himself at it like an arrow. He was only about thirteen when he decided to go into politics. I thought he was kidding, but it turned out he was serious. From that moment on, everything he did was calculated to get him there. The classes he took, the clubs he joined, even the friends he made. Except me. I wasn’t what you’d call an influential friend. He kept me around because he liked me. People called us the odd couple.”

“Really?”

“The jock and the brain. I don’t recall that we ever bickered over anything. Well, maybe one thing.”

“What was that?”

“A girl. What else?”

She leaned forward, her eyes keen and bright. “Really? Tell me about her.”

“Linda Lipschitz,” he said. “Curly black hair, huge tits and—sorry. She had a damned fine figure. We both wanted to take her to the senior prom. That was one of the few times I nearly punched him out.”

“Why?”

“He was the one who always had everything, and now he was going to take away the one thing I wanted.”

Finally, a smile. A wry one, though. “Did Linda Lipschitz have anything to say about this?”

“We were seventeen. Do you think we cared about some girl’s opinion?”

“I can’t believe you fought over a girl.”

“Actually, we didn’t have to. Everything turned out okay. We both took her. She got to be princess for a night, and we all had a great time. I talked her into sneaking away and parking with me later, but Victor forgave me.”

“Of course he did,” she said quietly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She hesitated. “Victor . . . was very forgiving.”

Odd comment, he thought. But then, as little flickers of memory came back to him, he realized it was true. “Yeah, the only time he got truly pissed at me was when I didn’t bother applying to college.” He eyed Sandra. “Does any of this sound familiar to you? Does it sound like Victor?”

“Completely. He . . . liked to help people.”

“He knew I wanted to go to college and knew my family couldn’t afford to send me. He and his folks figured out a way for me to get a full ride at URI, and he kept after me until I went for it.”

“The football scholarship.”

“Yeah.” He drummed his fingers on the table, picking through a minefield of memories. “It was my fault we lost touch. I wanted it that way.”

“Why?”

“Because I left school before finishing. He would have been disappointed in me.”

“You’re not the type of guy to disappoint anybody. Isn’t that obvious?”

Chapter
21

S
andra couldn’t believe she’d just blurted that out. She should have known she’d regret coming here. She should have stayed home, making lists in her journal.
Ten Ways to Get Through the Day Without Speaking to Malloy . . .
But here she was, an uninvited guest in the place he called home. It was a strangely intimate intrusion—she discovered what he ate—a blue bowl of bananas and tangerines on the counter; what he read—histories of architecture, novels by David Malouf and Patrick O’Brian; what he stuck on his undersized refrigerator—Kevin’s drawing of a T-Rex, Mary Margaret’s perfect spelling test, this month’s tide chart.

“I should go.” She got up and reached for her jacket.

“You should stay.” He took the jacket from her and dropped it on the chair behind him. The boat listed, straining at its moorings. She staggered with the motion, lurching into him. He grabbed her shoulders, then held on with firm insistence. Since he’d kissed her, they’d been tiptoeing around the issue, trying to keep each other at arm’s length while they decided where to go from here. Judging by the heat in his gaze, she suspected he’d made up his mind. She had never thought of blue as a hot color before, but when she looked up into his eyes, she saw flames.

A moment ago, she’d found him hard to read. Now, watching him bracing for the storm, she had no trouble at all. With some ancient, embedded awareness, she sensed an invisible alchemy seething and bubbling between them, holding her spellbound.

You should stay.
What a world of meaning she heard in those three little words. Her whole life had been about what she should and shouldn’t do, and she’d never taken the path marked “shouldn’t.” Suddenly she wanted to, with every cell of her body.

“You impair my judgment, Malloy,” she said, trying to drum up some of her old caution and timidity.

“Not on purpose.” He touched her in that slow, deliberate way of his, as though he couldn’t
not
touch her. His hand slid down the side of her rib cage, settling at her waist and pulling her toward him. Outside, the storm sang through the staywires and rigging of the boats, its voice almost human.

“I can’t do this,” she said, almost whispering in an attempt to get the words out. She leaned back to escape the suggestive touch of his hand.

“Stay with me. You’re alone too much, Sandra.”

She shifted a nervous glance at Zeke, who slept curled on a ratty-looking cushion in the corner. “So I’ll get a dog.”

“Not good enough.” He trailed his finger down her upper arm. The light caress seemed almost casual, but she knew better. It was his way of reminding her that there was more going on here than this increasingly absurd conversation.

“Malloy— “

“Shh.” He gripped her shoulders and drew her against him, ignoring her caution and hesitation. Her heart raced. A part of her that lay deeper than the fear wanted him, wanted his touch, wanted . . .

She clutched his sweatshirt. It felt old and soft against her fingers, fragrant with laundry soap and the warm smell of a man just out of the shower.

She reminded herself that he was a liar—that was why she’d come here. She should push him away, leave while she could still think straight, but against her will, she stayed, anchored by his immutable strength. She was like the moored boat—able to move and shift and strain, but unable to leave.

“This is not what I had in mind,” she said, still trying to extricate herself from his arms, his boat, his life.

His hands closed around her upper arms; his touch held the heat of frustration. “What the hell do you need, then?”

Torn and shuddering with warring emotions, she couldn’t answer. Everything inside her strained toward him, toward the simple promise in his eyes.

“I need—”

“I know.” He didn’t say anything else, and in a perverse way, she was grateful. Words were too easy to argue with or misunderstand. Malloy settled his mouth firmly over hers just as she was about to play her verbal trump card and declare the game over.

He slipped his arms around her, one across her upper back and one at her waist, shaping her against him, so close that she could feel. . . everything. The wall of his chest, his searching kiss, the press of his erection. He didn’t seem eitherself-conscious or apologetic, but then, why would he? He was Malloy.

His hand skimmed downward as his tongue probed delicately into her mouth, and a shock of heat shuddered through her. Thoughts spun away, unformed, unimportant. He pressed her against the table, and she arched toward him to keep her balance, clinging, her fingers digging into his biceps. He whispered something into her mouth; she didn’t hear the words but took the meaning of it deep into her heart. He robbed her of the ability to think . . . to object. She felt the strange power of a force stronger than reason, stronger than logic. Some ancient, long-buried call roared to life in a way she hadn’t thought possible until she’d met him. It made her wild—knowing he wanted her, seeing it in his eyes.

He pressed her against the edge of the table, parting her legs, fitting himself there. He drew from her a smoldering compliance, made her step out of her tentative shyness and into a state of breath-held anticipation. She felt like water, like silk, some substance that had no shape or form of its own, spilling out into storms and whirlwinds.

His next kiss came with unhurried, inexorable deliberation, giving her time to anticipate the heat and the taste of him before she actually felt it. Their lips touched, the contact deepened; then he worked his mouth over hers in a slow exploration that sent searing waves through her in long, unstoppable ripples. She felt dizzy and lost, yet there was nowhere on earth she wanted to be—and that was her surrender.

She simply gave in to the tension and hunger that had been building for longer than she would admit. She moved her hands upward over his shoulders, tangling urgent fingers into the damp strands of hair that spilled over his collar. She felt free and fearless; his earthy openness invited her to explore him in any way she chose.

Except she didn’t quite know how.

But her hands did. Her mouth did.

Someone who was not Sandra slipped audacious hands under the waistband of his sweatshirt. Someone who was braver, stronger, more intuitive than Sandra pressed her palms against his flesh, drew back momentarily in astonishment when she felt his ridged stomach, his broad chest, like seasoned oak, honed smooth.

Someone who was not Sandra lifted the edge of the old sweatshirt, then stepped back to pull it up and over his head.

Despite his height, he was oddly graceful as his arms brushed the low ceiling of the boat’s saloon. Dropping the shirt, he held her with a look that was both frankly lustful and mildly bemused. She would die if he laughed at her, but she could tell he wasn’t going to laugh. The radio played a slow, soft tune, but the thud and suck of the waves drowned out the melody. The constant motion created a cadence that was wholly unique, moving this moment ahead, stripping away layer after layer of resistance until she couldn’t deny the stark truth even to herself. She wanted him, and she would not leave him tonight.

She pressed her mouth against his chest, right below the collarbone, inhaling his scent. Her hands slid across his shoulders and then lower, discovering the fascinating geography of his body.

A sound came from him, wordless but full of meaning, and those large, steady hands took hold of her, pushed her slightly away, not in refusal but in a silent invitation to go deeper, to do more. She understood the question in his eyes; he sensed the answer in hers.

Taking her by the hand, he led her through the narrow galley, to the stateroom tucked into the bow of the boat. Louvered doors flanked the threshold of the room, and a polished wooden footlocker provided a step up to the bunk. A soft, diffuse heat blew gently through small vents overhead.

The wishbone-shaped bed dominated the room, sides curving like a welcoming embrace. A pair of sconces glimmered on opposite walls, creating waves of amber light and shadow over plain sheets and pillowcases, a thick tartan comforter.

A jolt of reality struck her, and she faltered, glancing backward through the door. But he stood blocking the way, challenging but not threatening her. She bit her lip, watching him—gray sweatpants slung low on his hips, bare chest and ridged stomach.

“Um,” she finally said, speaking past a throat gone tight, “I’m not sure. . .” She kept staring; then, over-whelmed by impulse, she dragged her fingers along the bunched muscles of his arms and downward over his rib cage.

“Yes, you are,” he pointed out in a taut, quiet voice. As he spoke, he unbuttoned her sweater—Victor’s sweater— and dropped it on the floor. If she’d been a practiced seductress, she would have made certain that she wore a demi-bra of lace and gossamer satin, in some exotic color not found in nature. And under her jeans she’d have on a dainty thong that yielded under the pressure of the slightest touch.

No such luck, considering that her purpose in coming here tonight had been to yell at him. Under the sweater and jeans, which he removed with a slow, easy caress down her hips, she wore grape-colored long johns.

She tried to reassure herself—at least they were ladies’ long johns, made of ribbed Thermasilk, a leftover from a disastrous ski vacation to Killington with the Winslows. A pity they were purple.

By the time she stepped out of the rumple of jeans on the floor, she began wishing she’d talked herself out of this.

“Now what’s the matter?” he asked, moving the flat of his hand down her back, then over her hips. He bent to nuzzle her neck, and she yielded willingly, tilting her head to one side.

“I didn’t say anything.” The unrelenting gale battered at the boat, and she braced herself against the edge of the bed.

“You didn’t have to. I can tell by the look on your face. You think too damned much. What were you thinking, just now?”

It was hard to keep things from him, she realized. “Skiing in Vermont,” she said. “With the Winslows. I was the human bowling ball of the slopes.”

“Your mind works,” he said with a chuckle of affectionate amusement, “like a mouse in a maze. Quit thinking about the Winslows.”

“But—”

“Don’t think at all.”

“I never planned to take my clothes off in front of you,” she confessed. “If I had, I wouldn’t have worn long underwear.”

He slipped his hands down each side of her, shoulders, waist, hips, and up again. He moved so slowly, yet his touch had the impact of a shattering collision. He gave the waistband a gentle tug. “You look like a goddess in this, Sandy. I’m not kidding.” He swirled his finger around her navel, lowered the elastic another notch. “Even so, I bet you look even better out of it.”

The rhythm inside her echoed the frenzy of the storm. Every word, every touch, every breath, sent little shocks through her. She was helpless, falling, burning out of control all at once. He didn’t hurry, but there was no wasted movement as he finished undressing her, then rolled the sweatpants down his long, muscular legs. She’d always been taught that it was rude to stare, but she seemed to be breaking every possible rule tonight, and gladly left that one by the wayside.

“Come here,” he said in a rough whisper, and took her in his arms. He thrust aside the covers and they fell together, facing each other, a clash of searching hands and mouths. His eagerness flattered her and she faltered, wondering if she could ever match his honest hunger.

“Now what?” he asked. “You’re thinking again.”

“I . . . ” She made a halfhearted attempt to recall advice from the endless
Cosmo
articles she used to read with scholarly diligence—”How to Drive Him Wild (but Tame Him to Clean the Kitchen).” “How to Tell if He’s Seeing Another Woman.” “Tricks from the Hooker’s Trade.”

She couldn’t remember anything. And judging by the harshness of his breathing and the way his body pressed deeply, aggressively against her, it didn’t seem to matter. In the frenzied collision, her hands and heart had more sense than her brain on its best day.

His mouth covered her breast with frank possessiveness, and all her thoughts evaporated. The heady knowledge that he wanted her was intoxicating. Plain, uncomplicated lust had its own kind of purity. It was joyous, liberating, unself-conscious, like deep belly laughter. She didn’t feel furtive or guilty as their bodies moved together in an unrehearsed dance that turned the night to pure magic. She was awash in sensation—the smell of the boat, his bed,
him.
Beneath her fingers, his chest thrummed with the heavy beat of his heart.

Her touch drew a groan of response from him. He caressed her with an intensity that was both deeply carnal and startlingly tender. He lifted her up, entered her with a swift movement that took her breath away. A feeling of total surprise took hold. This was so new, so different. . . Sensation flashed; she heard the roar of the storm and the slap of the waves, felt a lash of desire that stung and burned, as though the boat had caught fire. The moment swept her upward to a pinnacle of unbearable sensitivity.

With an inner sense of perfect rhythm, he seemed to know when to press forward and when to retreat; he could judge by the cadence of her breathing and the thud of her heartbeat the moment need consumed her entirely. She arched upward, crying out. His arms, braced on either side of her, trembled with restraint until she came with a shuddering, overwhelming sweep of intensity.

Astonished, she closed her eyes and saw colors fusing, melding, blurring before any image could form. It was the color of bliss, of surprise, of fulfillment. He wasn’t far behind her, his surge powerful, her name on his lips. And then he lay covering her, his weight a welcome burden, his breath rasping in her ear.

Awash in wonder, she surrendered to the rocking motion of the boat and to his warm, fast breathing. Blinking her eyes open, she felt like Dorothy, stepping from her drab black-and-white world into a fantasy land of ecstatic, wild color.

“Are you a good witch,” she whispered, “or a bad witch?”

With a reluctant movement, he pushed up and off, then lay at her side, his hand trailing over her with suggestive intent. “Beg pardon?”