Petals in the Storm (30 page)

Stormclouds had been gathering around them ever since Rafe had arrived in Paris, and as he thrust into her, the storm struck. Furiously it swept her along, racing through her blood, driving all fear and doubt away. Then lightning blazed through every cell of her body. Moaning, she clung to him as the one certainty in the tempest.

The tumult died away, leaving her body quivering and her consciousness fractured. Only gradually did she realize that he was still hard within her. She ran her hands over his sweat-slicked back. "You haven't..."

"Don't worry about me," he said before she could finish. "The night is young."

Though that wasn't true, she did not bother to disagree. It was enough simply to be joined with him. Safe.

Yet desire still simmered within her. Rafe understood her body better than she did, for he knew when to begin moving again. His first strokes were infinitesimal, yet they generated an astonishing amount of heat. She matched his movements, and as the tempo increased, they ignited each other. The intimacy between them was scorching, a baring of mind and body that was frightening in its intensity.

Frantically she twisted her head back and forth as their bodies melded with stunning force. What had gone before was prologue, mere overture to a more urgent hunger than any she had ever known. This time the rising storm was not wind, but fire, burning away her awareness until there was only flame within her. Gone were fear and prudence, anger and hate, leaving only the searing knowledge that the man she loved was enfolding her with passion and exquisite tenderness.

She reached shattering fulfillment, and was consumed by fire. Unable to suppress the words, she gasped, "I love you."

Storm and fire. Disintegration and rebirth. Through the conflagration, she heard him groan, "Oh, God ... God help me."

With shocking suddenness he withdrew, crushing her in his arms as he thrust hotly against her belly. After a handful of violent movements, his seed spurted between them.

She held him with all her strength, tears seeping between her eyelids. Once again Rafe was protecting her from potential disaster.

During the years she and Robin had been lovers, they had taken great care not to start a child, for there was no place in their perilous lives for a family. In her mind, she knew that was still true.

Yet some of her tears were for the loss of what might have been—the children she and Rafe might have had in the last dozen years if they had married; the baby that might have been conceived in tenderness tonight. Gone like the wind, like all her other dreams.

Rafe shifted his weight from her and used the discarded nightgown to dry them both. Then he drew her into his arms and they both dozed off without speaking.

The words did not exist that could describe how she felt.

* * *

With a terrified gasp, Maggie awoke from nightmare. Panic, pain, destruction—all of the familiar, ghastly fears that had been triggered by the incident in the Plaza du Carrousel crowded into her mind.

Shivering, she burrowed closer to Rafe. Even in sleep he radiated safety. Almost compulsively, she stroked his chest, smoothing the dark hair that felt so sensual against her breasts.

When his breathing changed, she stopped, not wanting to wake him. Yet she found that she couldn't keep her hands away. She loved the smooth warmth of his skin, the candlelit contrast between his darkness and her paleness.

A stirring under the sheet indicated that part of him, at least, was waking. As if it had a life of its own, her hand pulled the sheet down and touched him. Heated male flesh unfurled into her palm.

His eyes remained closed, but his hand lifted and he started massaging the nape of her neck. Warmth spread through her, and she wanted to purr like a kitten. Even more, she wanted to roar like a lioness.

She began kissing him, bypassing his mouth in favor of other sensitive places. The junction between jaw and throat; the hollow above his collarbones; his flat, dusky nipples; the supple indentations between muscular thighs and flat abdomen.

Though he didn't move from his supine position, his breathing quickened and his right hand caressed whatever parts of her came within reach. Vowing that this time she would drive him to madness, she bent forward and kissed him in the most sensitive place of all, using her mouth and tongue to demonstrate what she could not speak aloud.

He sucked in his breath, and his limbs began to tremble. She redoubled her efforts, reveling in her power to move him. This time he would be swept into the storm as thoroughly as she.

He made a guttural exclamation and ground his fist into the mattress. Yet before she could bring him to culmination, he abruptly abandoned passivity and rolled her onto her back, reversing their positions. He pleasured her expertly, his heated mouth enflaming her, holding her at the brink of ecstasy, until she panted with frantic need.

Finally they came together like clashing cymbals. This was not the remembered innocence of youth, but the ardent sensuality of experience—skilled and knowing and unashamed.

Yet in spite of the mind-drugging pleasure, she knew that only his body was fully engaged. His mind and spirit held back, leaving a shadow of emptiness at the heart of intimacy.

Even as she shuddered with convulsive release, she mourned. He was as superb as a lover as one could imagine—except that he did what he did without love.

Margot slept in his arms, utterly still in the depths of exhaustion, her tangled hair adrift on his bare chest. Rafe was so tired that he could barely find the strength to raise his hand and brush the dark gold strands from her eyes, to trace the fine bones of her face. Yet he could not sleep.

One might say that he had been lucky, for fate had given him the opportunity to free himself of his obsession by allowing this passionate interlude with the woman who held him in thrall.

One would have been wrong. Though he had succeeded in his goal of briefly severing her awareness from her tortured memories, for him it had been an empty victory.

For years, he had dreamed of Margot coming to him with sweet words of longing and an intoxicating invitation. Tonight part of his dream had come true, yet he had discovered the bitter truth that the invitation was hollow without the sweet words.

If there had been only silence between them, he would have been able to maintain the illusion that they were lovers in truth. Instead, Margot had been so lost to her circumstances that words of love had escaped her. The declaration had hurt more deeply than he would have dreamed possible, because he knew that it was meant for another man. It was Anderson who held her heart. Only chance had brought her to his own bed tonight, when she desperately needed oblivion.

Yet in spite of the pain, he wished the night would never end. He had wanted Margot Ashton back, and with the bittersweet treachery that marked the gods' answers to human prayers, he had gotten what he wanted. What Rafe hadn't realized was that if he found Margot again, he would once more be as blindly, helplessly in love with her as he had been at twenty-one.

The obsession he had felt for Countess Janos was only another name for that love, but he had been too cynical to name his emotions truly. In the dark, with the palest of dawn light etching the windows, he recognized starkly that he had never stopped loving Margot. No matter what her betrayals and lies, no matter how many beds she had passed through, he loved her— more than wisdom, more than pride, more than life itself.

And in the morning, she would leave him. Tomorrow all the barriers would be firmly in place again, perhaps with an additional layer of shame on her part, for what she had done so shamelessly.

The irony was crushing. Rafael Whitbourne, fifth Duke of Candover, had been beloved of the gods— blessed with health, intelligence, charm, and wealth beyond imagining. Those who crossed his path gave him admiration and respect.

Yet he damned his fate with dark, despairing anger that this one woman, who mattered more than all else, could not love him. She had cared for him when she was young, surely, but not enough to be faithful through the short months of their betrothal. He had never come first with her, not then, and not now, when a traitor and spy held her first allegiance.

Staring upward into the softening dark, Rafe wondered what deep, crippling flaw made him unable to love any woman except one who could not love him back.

Tomorrow would be time enough to ponder that. For now, he would savor this handful of moments with the only woman he had ever loved.

With the bleakness that lies beyond hope, he knew that it was all the time he would ever have.

Maggie felt deeply rested when she awoke, though the angle of the sun showed that it was still early. In the clear light of day, it was hard to believe that she had had the audacity to ask Rafe to make love to her. Yet the warm length of his body lying beside her was irrefutable proof of what had happened.

As a woman of the world, she had thought it likely that he would oblige her; though females needed a reason for intimacy, men usually needed only a place. She had had a reason, and Rafe had supplied the place.... Yet what had passed between them had gone far beyond anything she had been able to imagine, and it would stay etched in her brain forever.

Turning her head slightly, she studied Rate's sleeping form. His numerous bruises had matured to melodramatic purple-black. God only knew how he had gotten her away from that mob. Take away his title and his wealth and his influence, and he would still be a man among men—strong and brave and heart-stoppingly beautiful, in an utterly male fashion.

Maggie closed her eyes in anguish. She had always known that if they became intimate, she would be helplessly in love with Rafe again, and it had happened. The love had always been there, since she had first met him thirteen years ago. Perhaps that was why she had never been able to love Robin as completely as he deserved.

No, the problem was not how
much
she loved Robin, but
how
she loved him. She cared for both men more deeply than words could ever express, yet Rafe she loved with conflict as well as harmony, challenge as well as understanding.

Strange to think that it was the harsher elements between them that gave her feelings for him such depth and intensity. With Robin there was always harmony, and their love was that of friends, almost siblings. Rafe she wanted as a mate, the archetypal male who made her feel most deeply female.