Patricia Potter (12 page)

His height seemed to dwarf her as she looked up, finding wary eyes that didn’t appear entirely welcoming. The reserve was back, the barrier that he had occasionally placed between them.

Meara felt some of the anticipation, some of that immediate joy which had bubbled so quickly within her, fade. “I…didn’t know anyone was out here,” she said, hating herself for the slight quiver in her voice. But it matched the trembling along the length of her spine.

His eyes suddenly softened as a wry smile creased his lips, and his hand reached out, touching her elbow with sudden gentleness. “You never remain still, do you?”

“Neither, it seems, do you.” Meara flinched at the hesitancy, the wanting, in her voice.

“I needed to be alone for a while.”

“Me, too.” It was a ridiculous reply, but honest. She couldn’t tell him just why she had wanted to be alone, that she had wanted to think about him.

The silence stretched tautly between them. Meara wanted to ask so much. But he didn’t make anything easy, even with the confused, slightly more accessible look on his face. He was tense, and she didn’t know why. But she saw it in the stiffness of his body, felt it in the tightening of his fingers around her elbow. “Meara,” he whispered raggedly.

Then she didn’t have to say anything because his lips descended upon hers with a violence she hadn’t expected. There was desperation in the kiss, desperation and a kind of seeking that corresponded with her own confusion.

Her lips answered, and then her body as he drew her close, and they embraced on the lonely beach with the sound of running surf their background music, more haunting, more compelling than any man could pen. His kiss deepened, his tongue probing into her mouth with a recklessness that kindled her own.

Nothing else mattered except the need they were creating in themselves and each another, feeding on each other, tasting, exploring, reacting, each touch sending them further and further away from reality and into a spiral that seemed to have no end.

Somehow they sunk down to their knees, the sand cushioning them as they melded together, and the exploration continued, his lips trailing kisses over her face and her neck. Meara returned each one, following his lead, knowing from her body’s reactions what was happening to his. She felt bold and shy, reckless and cautious, sure and uncertain. So many things. So many confusing things. She had never thought herself passionate except in pursuit of goals she now recognized as passionless, yet now every part of her tingled unmercifully. Her heart hurt and her body ached, and a storm, a hurricane, was building inside, feeding on every touch, his and hers, until suddenly she was doing things she had never considered doing before.

Moving closer to him, she relished the heat of his body even through their clothes. Her hands twisted though his thick, crisp hair and her tongue tasted the exotic flavor of him, an intoxicating essence all his own, a mixture of sea spray and soap and a musky cologne. She laughed with the pure delight of all the new sensations, wonderful, delicious, unbelieveable sensations that made the rest of her life, a life she previously believed fulfilling and exciting, colorless and empty in comparison.

They rolled over in the sand like two wrestling children, and she felt the dry, cool grains against her face and legs, and there was a sensuousness to the sensation just as there was to the sight of the moon and stars above, and the sound of waves playing against the beach. Sight and sound and feel were magnified, each sensation growing upon the last until the slightest touch sent pulsating, heated ripples racing through the core of her.

She closed her eyes, then opened them to see the blue of his own. His eyes, usually so unfathomable, were intense and scorching as they searched her face with a possessiveness she thoroughly enjoyed. A smile, part incredulous, part accusatory, played on his lips.

“Sea witch,” he whispered into her ear.

“You’re a bit of a magician, yourself,” she said fancifully. “Like a male genie rising from the ocean.”

His hand felt her hair. Like silk. And her face was incredibly wistful and enchanting in the moonlight, her trembling lips stretched into a shy tentative smile that reached into his heart and squeezed it so hard that he could barely breathe. Magic, sorcery, fate. Whatever it was, he cursed silently. Fate. He had almost decided it was fate. But how could fate be so capricious, so cruel. To give and then take away. He leaned down, his lips touching hers gently.

“You taste like the ocean,” he said as he nibbled on her.

“And you like a sea breeze.” She nuzzled his ear.

His arm tightened around her. “This is not wise.”

“I know.” But it was said with such satisfaction that he had to smile despite himself.

“I’ll wager you’ve never done this before.”

“No,” she agreed. She didn’t have to ask what. She thought she knew what he meant: this peculiar intimacy, this unique sharing of a place, a moment. More than that. The awareness of exquisitely painful feelings they aroused in each other, the unspoken anticipation of what would surely come.

“You know nothing about me.”

“Yes, I do,” she disagreed softly. “You like children, and walking at night, and you build a spectacular sand castle.”

“And sand-castle construction is vital to your approval?”

“Oh, yes, quite definitely.”

“Anything else?”

There was a momentary silence. There was one other vital piece of information, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask it.

His hand released her, and he sat, looking out at the ocean.

Meara felt the closeness seeping away again, just as it had before. Her hand reached for his and clutched it as a drowning person might. She didn’t care whether she seemed forward, she only wanted him to come back to her, not lost out there in the emptiness of a black sea. There was a sudden melancholy between them, a sorrow that emanated from him and that encompassed her.

“Are you sure,” she said, trying to discover the reason for his silence and also compelled to discover another important fact, “that sailors don’t have a girl in every port?” She tried to keep the question light, but there was a certain earnestness in her voice that she couldn’t hide.

“No,” he said with a bit of dry amusement. “There are far too many sailors and not nearly enough girls.”

“And you. Do you have someone…special…waiting in Canada or England?” She meant much more, and she knew he knew it. The words were unspoken.
Do you have a wife? a fiancée? a lover?

“No,” he said gently. “It wouldn’t be fair. Not now.”

The pain started in the core of her. He was warning her. He was telling her there was no future beyond this night, this week, this spring.

“I’ve never felt like this before,” she blurted out honestly, partly chagrined for saying aloud what she had admitted secretly.

He pulled her back against his chest until they were both looking out over the water, and his hands caressed her arms, rubbing up and down in both comfort and barely restrained passion. Meara felt the almost invisible trembling of his fingers.

She felt his lips against her hair. “I know,” he said.

She leaned against him, knowing a wild esctatic joy as she felt his strength against her, his hands touching her tenderly, his breath whispering against her hair. In all her life, she had never known, had never realized, she had emotions quite so wild, so deep, so needy. All her vaunted independence lay in ruins, like the sand castle she had built. She had constructed a world she believed strong and sure, and now it had crumbled into individual grains of sand next to the pull and strength of this man.

Yet he was promising nothing. As the waves had erased the sand castle, time would take him away. To violence she couldn’t really comprehend. She took his hand in hers and brought it to her mouth, nuzzling the back of it, the almost invisible gold hairs on the back of his now tanned hands. They were strong hands, the fingers lean and tapered but the palms hard and powerful, callused from years of hard physical work. He was such a contradiction. She had seen and met many wealthy people, some of whom were born to money and others, like Mr. Connor, who had made it. Michael wore the easy grace of one born to it, yet there was also a hardness, a wariness that didn’t fit.

“Do you have any family?” she asked, wanting so badly to pull something from him, to try to extract some small piece of him for herself.

She felt his body stiffen, but she held onto his hand for dear life. She wasn’t going to let him escape this time.

“No,” he finally answered, and the sudden chill of his voice warned her from probing further.

But she persisted. She couldn’t help it. “There are no ties then, anyplace? No home?”

“No.” Again, the reply was short, curt, unresponsive.

“And you don’t…want one?”

He sighed, a whisper of breath on her cheek, but his answer was curiously flat and unemotional. “I…expect very little, Meara,” he said. His hand moved restlessly along her neck. “You’re a planner, aren’t you, Miss O’Hara?” he asked unexpectedly.

“I’m afraid so,” she admitted self-consciously. “I decided when I was eight I wanted to be a writer, and everything has been a straight line since.”

Until now. The words hung between them.

“I’ve never planned anything,” Michael said slowly.

“Why?”

“Why?” He repeated the question musingly. “I suspect you like everything tidy, bundled up neatly with ribbons and bows,” he said, his voice gently mocking. “Perhaps I’ve been at sea too long and learned to anticipate the unexpected. A typhoon, a hurricane, even a sudden squall can waylay the best of crews, the sturdiest of ships.”

“Properly warned, you can take precautions,” she inserted, not entirely liking the direction his thoughts were taking. Or the way they made her feel, the way they crawled into her soul.

“But sometimes you’re not ‘properly warned,’“ he said. There was something in his voice that was almost accusatory. As if she were the unexpected storm. Flickers of heat ran through her, flickers of intense desire.

“And then what?” she asked unsteadily. “What do you do then?”

“You batten down the hatches,” he replied, dry amusement again in his voice, and Meara thought how attractive it was, how…intriguing. As if he were mocking himself.

“And then?”

“Ride it out.”

“And when you’re safe in harbor again?”

“You repair the damage and hope it’s not fatal.”

“And you go back to sea again,” Meara said.

“Yes.” The one word had a finality about it that sunk like a stone in Meara’s stomach. He had been saying much more to her than the surface meaning of the words, but she didn’t exactly understand what. She did know it was a warning.

“To risk another storm?”

He chuckled, a sound coming from deep in his chest, and she felt it echoing in her own head which was leaning against his heart. It was a nice sound, warm and amused, and she sought to hold it in her mind, in her memory.

“Always to risk another storm,” he confirmed.

“You don’t think I would? Risk a storm, I mean.”

“I don’t know.” The laughter was suddenly gone and his voice was somber. “The first storm, yes, but the second? Planners are wiser than that.”

“And you’re not wise?”

“Not now, not this minute, not since I’ve met you,” he answered slowly.

“Is that so bad?”

There was a long silence. Then his hand turned her head so he could see her face in the moonlight. “How old are you, Meara?”

“Twenty-two.”

Meara saw a sudden bleakness in his eyes. “You’re so damned young.”

“How old are you, Methuselah?” she countered, trying to lighten his sudden dark mood.

He hesitated. “Thirty-one.”

“Hardly dottering,” Meara observed.

“At times, I wonder,” he said slowly. His hand touched her cheek. “Don’t ever lose that joy of living, Meara. Don’t ever let a storm overwhelm you.”

Meara wanted to say more, but he was rising and bringing her up with him. “It’s time to go back.” He leaned over and kissed her, his lips tender but they didn’t linger, not as she wanted them to.

She stood on tiptoe and her fingers touched his mouth. Meara knew somehow that if he left now, it would be the end of whatever there was between them, whatever could be. Her body ached with internal tension, with fierce wanting, but even more than that was her mind, crying out to experience totally what she instinctively knew was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. He was the man. She knew it with all her heart. He was the one she would love. The only man. Already loved with an intensity all the stronger for its brevity, and the knowledge there might never be more time. She didn’t understand at all. She didn’t understand how quickly it all happened. She only knew she couldn’t let him go, not now, not without more, and if there was one thing Meara was, it was stubborn and determined when she wanted something. She knew it was both a weakness and a strength, this single mindedness. It had seen her succeed in a field everyone said was closed to women. It had made her second in her class and had helped her obtain a job all her classmates envied. Because she never quit, never gave up. Full speed ahead and damn the consequences.