The Hellion (27 page)

He waded toward the steps, his mouth communing with hers, then laid her down on the concrete, still warm from the day's sun, her feet trailing in the water, while he rested on one hip beside her. The moon shimmered along her wet limbs like a rich silver garment while his hand followed its path, relearning the curves of breast, stomach, thigh, and mons.

"Rachel," he managed throatily, "I've loved you since we were fourteen years old-- maybe even before that. There were times when I thought I'd die without getting the chance to tell you again."

She raised her arms in welcome and he came to her, pressing his length to hers as she caressed his back and buttocks, whispering, "Oh, Tommy

Lee, none of us can ever quite get over our first love, can we? And you were that for me. I loved you so much ... so much. And some of that love has always stayed with me, no matter who either of us was married to or what was going on in our lives." She felt him shudder and gently pushed him back to delve the dark mystery of his eyes. "I feel it still, and it grows stronger each time I see you." This was the supreme surprise, that she should at last recognize the love lying fallow within her heart, untouched, untarnished all these years, and be so eager for it to be nurtured and brought to bloom again.

A stab of wonder pierced his heart, and she saw it in his eyes, realizing fully what this moment meant to him. And she was suddenly filled with the need to give him back a thousandfold all the happiness he had missed in life.

She kissed his eyelids, held his face in both hands. "When I saw you tonight, walking to the door ... this feeling started then. You looked so devastatingly wonderful to me, as if the past twenty-four years had never happened." She praised his sleek shape with the brush of her hands and felt him shudder.

He kissed her eyelids, uttered her name in

a pained murmur, and returned to her
     
323 mouth with an impatience he found reflected there. "Ah, sweet woman, the things I want to do to you ... things I was too green to know about then. Do you realize that I've given you a baby but never a climax?"

"Mmm ..." Yes, she realized it only too well, had thought of it often, especially during these last months along. "Please feel free ..."

Their exchange sent a fresh current of sensuality rippling through Rachel's limbs. As his hands reacquainted themselves with her body, time spiraled in reverse, taking her back to that first nubile exploration, when he'd initiated her into the rites of sexuality. Once again he brought her the thrill of anticipation, then the even greater thrill of sensation as he touched the inner Rachel, whose secrets could no longer be withheld.

Her palm gathered the moisture from his back, transferred it to his belly, and closed about his flesh, still chill from the water, but quickly warming beneath her touch. He groaned, and the wasted years fell away. He twisted low, following the moonbeams down her wet breasts, sipping the dampness from them

with his warm tongue, dipping into the shallow navel where more water pooled, like dew in the chalice of a flower. He kissed the glistening hair at the juncture of her legs, where droplets still clung, bringing again to her lips the mewling sound. And only the heaven-borne stars and the guardian moon stood witness as he moved lower, inundating her with rapture.

And when they hovered at the pinnacle, their bodies taut and trembling, he turned again to press his length to hers, then paused on the brink of entering to vow, "I love you, Rachel Talmadge," unconsciously slipping back to the name he'd planned to change to his own when first they'd loved this way, aeons ago.

She touched his face with great tenderness while savoring this wondrous exchange about to happen.

"And I love you, Tommy Lee Gentry," she whispered with tears in her eyes.

Then the hurts of the past were lifted away as he thrust deep and fell into the rhythmic pulsing that made their bodies leap and flow. Soon the cry that shuddered from her throat was joined by his deep growl of release.

And in this world of false starts and misgivings,

they knew at last where they belonged.
      
325

           
CHAPTER ELEVEN

  
They had dipped into the pool and rinsed each other off, to emerge dripping and shivering. "Show me your bedroom. I'm tired of concrete."

She laughed and reached for his hand. "This way." And so simply was it decided he would stay the night.

The air had chilled their skin, bringing goose bumps and puckers as they ran for the house, two laughing specters with slapping feet. Inside, all was midnight shadows as they groped their way down a hall and found a linen closet, exchanging intermittent kisses, then swipes of thirsty towels. They paused for a heartier kiss, damp skin sealed by the residue of water warming between them, sending out a sharp smack as they drew apart.

He touched her face lovingly. "The bedroom," he reminded her, and again she led the way.

She stopped in the center of a darkened room where the only thing visible was the moon's silver reflection lilting across the surface of the pool

beyond a set of sliding glass doors.

"Is this the room you shared with Owen?"

"Yes, but everything in it is brand-new."

He glanced at the shadowy bed. "Everything?"

"Yes." She turned into his arms. "Even me."

Their kiss was brief, but welling with rebirth. "So turn on the light and let me see." Immediately he sensed her reluctance, even before she spoke.

"But it's nothing special, just yellow carpet and wicker and bamb--was

He covered her lips with an index finger. "Turn on the light, Rachel," he commanded quietly.

She thought of her thinness, and the breasts that were so minuscule they hardly showed when she was dressed, and of course the scar on her stomach.

"But ... but why?"

"Because we're not children anymore." His palms bracketed her neck, thumbs lightly pushing on her jaw. His voice became even softer. "Because I've made love to you more times than I can remember, but I've never seen you naked." Timidity intruded and she tried to drop her chin,

only to have his thumbs press it upward
    
327 unrelentingly. He kissed the corner of her mouth, whispering, "Please, Rachel. I'm forty-one, too, and I have my insecurities just like you do. But turn it on anyway ... for me."

She crossed the room with the faint brushing of bare feet on carpet and clicked on a low bedside light, pausing with her hand beneath the shade to glance back over her shoulder, her eyes wide, dark, and exquisitely beautiful. At last she turned to face him.

The two of them studied each other. Tommy Lee's towel was draped about his neck. Rachel's was clutched against her stomach. His eyes traveled a slow path from her brown irises to her pink toenails, then back up. Hers moved lingeringly from parted lips to strong brown feet, then returned to rest within the rich, waiting depths of his gaze. How amazing that they should never before have seen each other this way. In her eyes he was unutterably perfect. The marks of age became only testimony she cherished.

"You have much more hair on your chest than you used to," she noted shakily.

"And most of it's gray."

"Gilding," she praised softly. Her heart lifted expectantly as he slowly moved toward her, sliding the towel from about his neck with singular lack of haste. He ran it down the shallow ravine between her breasts, where beads of moisture caught the light and sent it radiating like polished chips of amber. Their eyes clung while the towel skimmed her naked back. "You're beautiful, Rachel. Perfect. Too perfect for this world." Then Tommy Lee dropped to one knee and meticulously dried her legs. When he arose, his eyes locked with hers as he drew the towel from her fingers and tossed it aside with his own.

He stepped back. His eyes slid down her exposed body, but when they reached her stomach, the dark brows curled and he flashed her a questioning look.

"Rachel, what's this?" Automatically he reached out.

Automatically she shielded the scar. "Nothing ... nothing."

He clasped her wrists and drew them to her hips, searching first her stomach, then her eyes again. "You had the baby by cesarean?"

"It doesn't matter," she
         
329 reassured him.

"Doesn't matter?" He made a throaty sound as with one swipe he lifted Rachel and placed her diagonally across the bed, bending over her. Gingerly he touched the pale scar. "Everything about you matters. That's what this is from, isn't it?"

Tears shimmered on her eyelids, and her heart eased with the blessed relief of sharing it with him at last, after all these years. "They said I was too small to deliver it naturally."

His eyes seemed unable to pull away from the telltale line running from just below her navel into the black pubic hair. He traced it with four curious fingertips. Then his eyes darkened, glittered, and filled with the past as he opened a hand wide upon her stomach and uttered thickly, "Our baby ... God, she was our baby. Think of the waste. ..."

His voice broke, and suddenly he bent to caress Rachel's stomach with his face, placing warm lips at the spot where the scar disappeared into the dark triangle, breathing on her while wondering at all she'd gone through because of the seed

he'd planted within her, letting the hurt rush back and take him one last time.

He felt a sting behind his eyelids and slipped both arms around her hips, cradling his cheek against her warm stomach. "Rachel, I wanted to marry you so badly, and keep her. I wanted to take care of you and have other babies with you, and watch them grow, and get old with you."

It had taken Rachel years to get beyond self-pity and regret, but at the sound of Tommy Lee's emotional outpouring, sensing how close he was to tears, her own eyes blurred. "I know, darling, I know." She rolled to her side, coiling about his head and shoulders, caressing his warm skull while they let the anguished past in to be cleansed.

"What did she look like?"

She closed her eyes, remembering.

"She had a perfect cap of dark, dark hair, just like yours. ..." Her fingers knew again that hair, finding it crisp now at his temples, while she rued each wasted year that had grayed him and thinned her and kept them from knowing these changes daily. "And gray eyes in a face with the tiniest, most perfect mouth I'd ever seen. I

only got to hold her once."
         
331

"Rachel ... Rachel ..." His tortured words were muffled against her, and she saw again the rosebud mouth of the child they had created together, while the pain billowed within them both. "Our baby ..." he murmured--a prayer now. "I wanted her ... took you both away from me ... my Rachel ... all these years ..."

They had only one means of solace to offer each other, and as his mouth, hands, and body moved over her in recompense, her heart cried and sang at once. Their lovemaking was fierce this time, an attempt to dissolve a past that could never be dissolved, for when they came together in cataclysm, that past bound them more surely than vows.

  
The bedside clock read 3:18. The lamp glowed softly on two dark heads and across the yellow and white bamboo-designed sheets that covered Rachel's breasts as she lay tucked in the shelter of Tommy Lee's arm. He was propped against a cache of ruffled pillows, smoking, her temple pressed to his slow-thudding heart.

"And what happens now, Rachel?" he asked, staring at the surface of the pool beyond the open shades.

"I don't know."

He took a deep, thoughtful drag, and she heard the air enter his lungs beneath her ear. "Then I'll tell you. You marry me, the way you should have twenty-four years ago."

Her fingers stopped combing the coarse hair on his chest. How simple things became in the throes of passion; how complex upon reconsideration.

"Oh, Tommy Lee, how can I marry you?"

"Do you mean, what would people say?" His voice held a honed edge as he rested a wrist across an updrawn knee.

What would people say? She had pushed the question aside all night, but now it pressed for an answer. "Owen's only been dead for a few months."

"And the fact still remains that I've had three wives and a stable of lovers the whole county knows about, and I've spent a hell of a lot of years drinking like there was no tomorrow, and you're scared it set a pattern I can't break, is that right?"

She tried to sit up, but he held her fast.

"Rachel, don't run away. Did you
  
333 think I kept after you for nothing more than a roll in the hay, and now that I've had it I'll let you walk out of my life again?"

"I didn't think that, I just--was Just what? Needed my sexual thirst slaked? Wanted to see if I could still bring Tommy Lee Gentry to heel? Am I so shallow that I'd use him, then toss him aside, knowing all along how vulnerable he is where I'm concerned? Slowly she pushed herself up. He let her go this time, watching her naked back curl and the side of one breast slip into view as she doubled her arms across her updrawn knees.

"You just what, Rachel?" His voice sounded brittle, hurt already.

Miserably she dropped her forehead onto her arms and shrugged.