Sharing Sunrise (13 page)

“Did you just insult one of us?” he asked sleepily.

“Not so you’d notice,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

Cuddled together, they both did.

“Rolph?”

“Hmm?” Slowly, he opened his eyes and looked over at the woman lying beside him. The woman he loved. The woman who had claimed, in a moment of passion, to love him. Liquid light from the open hatch above them shimmered on her pearly skin. Her eyes were still closed and a smile curved her beautiful mouth. In another minute, he was going to find the strength to lean over and kiss that mouth.

“Would it be really rude, horribly unromantic, to tell you that I’m starving?”

He laughed. “Yes, considering what I’m thinking.”

She opened her eyes languidly and ran her gaze over his face as she ran her hand over his chest and shoulder.

“What are you thinking?”

He shifted closer and watched her eyes widen, her smile curve higher on one side. “Oh!” she said, and moved her hand from his shoulder to his waist and then his hip, her thumb making small, sneaky side-trips of which she appeared quite oblivious.

“Yes,” he said, his breathing becoming ragged when her little side forays became more deliberate. “‘Oh!’ is right.” Then, squeezing his eyes shut and lifting his hips, he said it again, eloquently, “Oh!”

She sat up and looked. “Ohhhh,” she drawled, impressed. “I guess we’re going to have to do something about that, aren’t we? I mean, I understand it’s terribly painful if left unattended?”

“Terribly,” he agreed breathlessly, sending one of his hands on its own little trip of exploration, one that made her gasp and rise up on her knees.

“Oh!” she said and he circled her waist with his hands, lifting her astride him and fitting her down over him.

“Oh!”

“Your … vocabulary needs work, lady.”

She smiled and leaned forward, breasts brushing against his chin as she swayed back and forth. “Oh? As long as it’s my vocabulary and not my technique.” Sliding down, she encircled each of his nipples with a fingernail, then flicked them, squeezed them and rubbed them between finger and thumb before bending and kissing each one, tonguing it, sucking on it, nibbling until he shuddered and lifted her up. “Your technique is fine.”

“My turn,” he said, and captured one of her nipples in his mouth, holding her very still while he sucked for long, intense moments, feeling the reaction to those sensations deep inside her where she held him in a velvet fist. He switched to her other breast, and felt those inner convulsions recur.

“I can feel your response to that,” he gasped, moments later. “It’s incredible. You tighten all around me, quivering, and it’s like heaven.” With his thumbs, he stroked her wet nipples and smiled as her muscles spasmed again. “Yes,” he said. “Like that.”

“I can’t … help it. I didn’t know you could feel it too.”

“Oh, yes. You’re unique, my Marian.” Drawing a breast into his mouth again, he sucked on it, her reaction giving him more pleasure than he had ever experienced.

Again, she said, “Ohhh,” on a long, drawn-out note as she dragged herself from his greedy mouth, leaning back, her hands on his thighs, her head flung back, her body rigid, and her back arched. “Rolph!” she cried out, and he tightened his hands around her waist, feeling the deep, hard shocks within her, his gaze never leaving her shimmering form as she swayed over him. Her legs tensed against him and she moved, slowly at first, then faster, until her wild rhythm infected him and he rode the crest of passion with her until they were both sated, lying damp and replete in each other’s arms.

“Hey. Hey, sleepyhead. A couple of hours ago you were starved. What about now?”

Marian rolled over and saw Rolph sitting bedside her, dressed in his undershorts again. She laid a limp arm across her eyes to shield them from the sun slanting in through the main hatch while she assessed her degree of hunger.

“I just remembered,” she said, coming more awake. “In my explorations earlier, about all I found was sardines. Believe me, I’d have to be an awful lot closer to starvation than I am now to eat them.”

He smiled. “But you don’t know what I can do with a can of sardines.”

She sat up, reaching for her T-shirt, feeling inexplicably shy, maybe even inadequate. Through its fabric as she tugged it over her head, she said, “I don’t care what you do with sardines. Nothing makes them edible.” She grabbed her shorts and clambered into them.

“You’ll see,” he said. “Now come on. I put the dinghy in the water so we can go ashore and pick blackberries.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Blackberries? Do they have anything to do with what you do with sardines?”

He grinned and shoved her ahead of him out the hatch and into the cockpit. “Only indirectly. Move it.”

“I think I’ll stick with pie for dinner,” Marian said some time later. She stood from bending to put the blackberry pie in the oven and brushed flour off her hands.

“Good little girls only get dessert if they eat up all their din-din,” he said loftily. “You’ll eat your rice and canned asparagus along with my magically transformed sardines, or you don’t get pie.”

Marian sat on the settee, pulled her feet up and folded her arms across her chest, watching Rolph as he filled a large pot with water and set it on top of the stove then lit the burner under it. “Canned asparagus is almost as bad as your ugly, oily little fishes,” she said. “But since I’m hungry, and you’re my host, I’ll make an exception and eat it. But only to be polite.”

He set a lid on the pot, then turned, hands on hips and grinned at her. “You’d better be more polite about those ‘ugly, oily little fishes’, or I might just refuse you even one tiny bite of the ambrosial transformation, my girl.”

“Suits me,” she said absently, hearing an echo of those words, ‘my girl’ as she watched him crouch to rummage in a locker. The last rays of the sun slanted in a porthole and bronzed his golden hair, glinting off the stubble of beard forming on his chin. His muscles moved and worked under his smooth, tanned skin of his back and shoulders, and she wanted to touch him but now that they were more-or-less dressed again, there was a hint of distance between them, not quite an awkwardness, but a reserve she had felt since she’d wakened the last time. Was she really Rolph’s girl? It was what she wanted to be more than anything in the world, but he had said he “had” to make love to her, as if he were compelled against his will, and that he wasn’t going to fall in love with her so that it wouldn’t hurt too badly when the whole affair burned itself out.

Yet, deep inside where her innermost feelings lay, was a conviction that he
did
love her. How could he have made love to her so sweetly, so tenderly, if he did not? And then she remembered: Wendell. Like she’d told Rolph, her husband had wanted her bank balance more than he’d wanted her; he’d just taken her to get the money he thought she was worth. So why had Rolph taken her? To get the sex he knew would be good? For a little illicit excitement because he was finding the search for his “long-term lady” a bit tedious at the moment?

“Hey, come on,” he said, snapping her out of her reverie. “Don’t look so sad. I didn’t mean it.”

She smiled at him and shrugged. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He gave her a questioning look, but let it drop, only reaching out to tousle her hair. “On deck with you, wench,” he said, pulling her to her feet and encircling her with his arms. “The bow deck.” He half-released her to reach for the book she’d been trying to read only a few hours before and tucked it between her arm and her breasts. “Keep your nose buried in that. What I do to transmogrify those sardines is an old McKenzie family recipe and outsiders are never allowed to watch. I’ll call you when dinner is ready.” He kissed the tip of her nose, her chin and then, hard and fast, her mouth, leaving her heart hammering painfully in her chest.

“No peeking,” he ordered, shoving her toward the companionway. “Promise.”

She nodded, her throat too tight with an intense ache to form words, and slipped out.

She didn’t want to be an outsider. She wanted to be a loved and trusted member of the McKenzie family, the way Jeanie was. And, after “whatever this was” finished “burning itself out” she didn’t want to have to stand back and smile like a good, old friend, while Rolph spent the rest of his life sharing
Sunrise VII
with somebody else.

She sat on the bow deck, facing forward, not reading the book on her lap, gaze roving along the outline of the long, low point that sheltered the bay from the restless swells outside, the dipping, wheeling gulls and a single bald eagle that soared in a high, constant circle above the boat. She refused to give into despair. Dammit, she had won a round at least. Rolph McKenzie was hers and she was not going to give him up.

Unless, of course, those sardines proved to be his favorite dish. Then, she might have to reconsider.

“All right, where are they?” Marian slid onto the settee and stared at her plate, on which lay a pile of rice beside several spears of asparagus covered with what looked suspiciously like cheese sauce. That made all the difference in the world. She could eat burned rope with cheese sauce. But of the despised little fishes, there was no sign.

Rolph grinned and flipped a tea towel open on her lap, in lieu of a napkin. He sat across from her and covered his own lap. “Right here,” he said, lifting the lid of the big pot and reaching in with another towel wrapped around his hand. With a flourish, he pulled out a large crab and set it on her plate so its bright orange pincers embraced the mound of rice. “I told you you wouldn’t recognize them.” He set another crab on his own plate.

“Oh, you rat, you,” she said, catching on. “Old family recipe indeed! You used a can of sardines to bait your crab trap.”

His grin broadened. “Works better than cat food. Besides, the sardines were free. A Norwegian client gave me a couple of cases.” He wrinkled his nose. “Personally, I can’t stand the ugly, oily little things.”

“Well,” she said, picking up one of the crab legs and snapping it free of the shell with a practiced twist of her wrist. “That’s one thing we have in common.”

“Only one?”

“How many do you think there are?”

He met her gaze, his sober and thoughtful. “We have a lot of things in common, honey.”

“Yeah,” she said. “The trick’s going to be finding them.”

He touched her wrist with a gentle hand. “We found a couple of them this afternoon, Marian. Or one of them, at any rate.” He frowned. “An important one, I think.”

She pulled her hand free. “Oh, I agree. Wholeheartedly.”

He lifted his brows. “But?”

She shook her head and smiled, lightning the mood. “But nothing. Eat your sardines before they get cold.”

It wasn’t until much later that he brought up the subject again. Curling a hand around the nape of her neck, he turned her toward him as he held on to the anchor chain, the cool water of the bay swirling around them in fiery spirals of phosphorescence. Except for the fire-in-the-water, it was dark, and he could only see the shape of her face, not her expression. She put her hands on his shoulders, let her legs float up around his waist and snuggled close.

“Cold?” he asked.

“No. This is heavenly.” He thought he caught the glimmer of her smile in the darkness. “You’re the first man I’ve ever skinny-dipped with.”

Hands encircling her waist, he kissed her as they sank through the brilliance of the water, every movement sending shafts of light outwards until Rolph kicked to surface again. Side by side, they floated on their backs.

“This is another thing we have in common,” he said. “We both love the water, being either in it or on it.” She nodded. He felt the brush of her wet curls against his shoulder, and felt something else, too, something that had been bothering him since before dinner, a reticence, a reserve, and apartness from him when he thought they should be sharing a great closeness. She’d said she wanted him. He’d believed her. Hell, he still did. The kind of response she’d given him was not something any woman could fake.

But since then, there was that subtle change in her manner toward him, as if, having given of herself so generously, she was suffering regrets. “And it’s good, what we share. Isn’t it?” he insisted.

“Of course it is.” She swam away from him, lifted herself up the ladder at the stern and arose, silver water streaming down her lithe shape. She shook her head to rid her hair of droplets and, like lightning bugs, glowing splatters landed all around him in the moonless dark.

He joined her on deck, caught the towel she tossed him and rubbed himself down before taking her towel from her and patting her skin dry with it.

He felt her erect nipples, sensed the change in her breathing, and knew they would be together again in only moments. “We have a lot going for us, don’t we?” he murmured, letting both towels slip to the deck.

“Yes,” she agreed, lifting her arms to encircle his neck. “Oh, yes.”

Yet, as much as he wanted to consummate their union again, he forced himself to hold back, to wait. As he had at dinner, he said, “But?” and felt her go very still in his arms, wary, he thought, as if she might leap away if he didn’t find a way to hold her.

“Why do you think there’s a ‘but’?”

It was an evasion and he knew it. Hands on her shoulders, he gave her a slight shake. “Because I know you, Marian. I sense a kind of … distance in you, a holding back. You’re not as happy as I’d like you to be.”

“Oh, Rolph! Of course I’m happy,” she said, but he knew from her tone that she was not.

“Hey, this is me. We don’t lie to each other. We don’t have to. Something’s bothering you about … this. About us. Can’t you tell me what it is?”

This business of loving a man who had known her and cared about her since she was three years old was not going to be easy. With him, there would be—could be—no equivocation. She sighed.

“Because suddenly, after we made love, after I discovered how wonderful it was to be living in a dream come true, I realized it was my dream, not yours. And maybe it’s not enough. Not enough for you. It’s—I’m—not what you’re looking for. I hate to face it, but I know it’s true.”