Wild Honey (8 page)

“I’ll be ready for a convalescent home! I can’t believe you put all your actors through this.”

“Not all of them. Just you.”

“Just me?” She looked him up and down. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means—” He broke off, shook his head as though he weren’t sure the explanation was worth the effort.

“You’re not going to tell me?” she asked, furious.

He swung around. “It means,” he said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her toward him, “that you are willful, self-centered, and rebellious to the point of idiocy. It means that I’ve lost another half day’s shooting because of you. And it also means that you’re devoid of talent, McCleod. That’s right,” he reiterated as she gazed up at him in shock, “as actresses go, you stink.”

He released her abruptly and turned to leave, adding over his shoulder, “We start rehearsing again in forty-five minutes. Be here.”

Sasha watched him stride toward the side exit, her heart thundering in her chest. If he’d meant to infuriate her, he’d sure as hell succeeded. As he reached the door, she sprang off the bed. “You don’t have to waste any more rehearsal time on me, Renaud. I’ll get the scene right, dammit!”

He turned and glared at her. “We’ll see, McCleod. Personally I don’t believe you’ve got it in you.”

Sasha felt tears of sheer exhaustion burning her eyes. “I can do it!” she vowed, her chin trembling violently. “I’ll prove it to you. Here”—she grabbed the script up off the bed, flung it back down—“I’ll do it now!”

Skepticism hung over him like a storm cloud. “You’ll do it now?” he questioned, walking toward her. “Are you telling me that you’re ready to strip off the layers of pride, the self-consciousness, that you’re not terrified of what’s underneath?”

“What are you? A radio psychologist?” she asked, her voice hoarse with fatigue. “I said I can do the scene.”

He considered the idea, his eyes assessing her shaking hands, her drawn features. “Fine, I’ll read the part of Jesse.”

Moments later, immersing herself in the emotional scene, Sasha walked through the door of the set and stared at the bed, vividly imagining Jesse’s semi-conscious body sprawled there. Trembling, she approached him, and suddenly it was all terrifyingly real. He was in front of her, bleeding, dying, the hunted, haunted man she’d nearly betrayed. She could hear his ragged breathing, see the fevered flush of his dusky skin. Jesse was dying. He needed her. She was torn with guilt and desperation at the utter hopelessness of it all, rocked with love and longing for him.

“Jesse?” A naked quiver of pain shook her voice.

She stood at the bed and dropped to her knees, reaching out for him, laying her head on the blanket and sobbing. “Jesse,” she pleaded, “don’t die.”

She could almost hear him rouse, feel his body heat as he rolled to his side and grasped her arm. Shuddering violently, she registered the insistent strength of his fingers and gradually realized that it was Marc Renaud who held her, that he was crouched next to her, repeating Jesse’s words. “Look at me,” he whispered, a brutal tone to his voice, “
look at me, Lisa.
”

A shock wave of physical longing paralyzed her. She couldn’t. It didn’t matter that the script called for her to look up at Jesse, to mouth his name. Her heart was thudding in her chest, a heavy, hurtful beat. She couldn’t look at the man who was rising above her, drawing her up with him.

“Lisa—”

She ripped away from him, pushed to her feet, and stumbled to the far wall of the set.

“What is it? Lisa—what’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her back to him. She wasn’t sure if those were the right words, if she was still acting, if any of it was in the script.

“Sorry? Why? What did you do?” He hesitated, swore under his breath and slowly exhaled Jesse’s disbelief. “Not the police? You didn’t—”

Whirling around, tears streaming, she was Lisa again. “Yes—”

In her mind he was there, across the room from her...Jesse, trying to stand, staggering and sinking back to the bed. Jesse as he clutched the flesh wound at his temple, and blood coated his fingers with crimson. Pain ripped through Sasha’s heart. “I didn’t tell them where you were, Jesse. I didn’t, I
swear.
I hung up.”

She walked to him slowly, crying, wanting to run from him, to escape this man who was tearing her life apart, who was destroying her body and soul. What if he
had
committed the crime he was accused of? What if he’d killed a woman and her child in cold blood?

She hesitated, gasping as he snagged her by the wrist and pulled her to him. With a choked sob she dropped to her knees in front of him, staring up at him...mesmerized by the turbulence in his features. Her heart twisted inside her. He looked so lonely, so desperate. And then suddenly it wasn’t Jesse’s turmoil she was witnessing, it was Marc Renaud’s. He was holding her wrist tightly, almost fiercely, and his hand was shaking. In his crystalline blue eyes she saw pain compressed to the hard brilliance of a diamond, a tiny white spot of sadness and rage that she didn’t understand and couldn’t reach....

What has he done?
The question flared into her mind, seared her consciousness like a comet.

“Marc?” she asked, searching his face. She needed to hear his voice, to touch him. She needed to reassure herself that he hadn’t metamorphosed into someone else, someone she didn’t know at all. “Marc, what is it? Tell me what’s wrong. I don’t know what to do....”

He exhaled, eased his grip on her wrist, and stared down at her. The emotion was his, but the words he spoke were Jesse’s. “Lisa, I need you. Help me—”

His voice caught at the end, broke off as though something vital inside him had snapped.

Tears filled Sasha’s eyes again, and the pain inside her mounted. She didn’t understand it, the welling sadness, the nearly unbearable longing, but it stung at her lids, ached in her chest. It had nothing to do with the character or the movie—and everything to do with the man and his piercingly beautiful eyes. They ripped through her heart with their breathtaking anguish.

“What is it?” she asked, her fingers at his temple, hovering at the place where the wound would have been. “How can I help you? Tell me what to do.” She was desperate to make his pain go away, wild to heal his torment, whatever it was. In her mind he was Marc, but he was Jesse too. She couldn’t separate the men or their pain. She was responding to anguish the only way she knew how.

He answered her with a shuddering groan. “I need you,” he said again drawing her into the V of his legs. “I’ll die without you....” The contact with his body was painful to Sasha’s senses. The heat of his enclosing thighs arrested her breathing.

She drew back, staring up at him, silenced by the quivering stricture of her throat.
No, you won’t die,
her eyes told him,
I won’t let you die. I can be what you need, whatever that is. Please, let me be what you need.

She reached up to touch his face, and he flinched under her fingers. Tears welled in her eyes. “Jesse, let me be with you,” she said, her voice breaking. “Let me make love to you.”

His jaw clenched with pain, and a transfiguring wave moved through his features. For an instant, anguish became something else...cleansing fire, naked need. Eyes that had burned with death now ignited with life. Awed by the change in him, Sasha trembled with a new emotion, wonderment. A luminescence built inside her, piercing softly, opening her clear to her soul. It was an inner dawn breaking through the darkness and bringing with it the exquisite anticipation of beauty, of hope.

“Angel of death, angel of redemption.” Goethe’s phrase shook in his throat.

He touched her hand as she caressed his face, and she was seized with longing. She was frantic to be with him, to absorb his pain, to make it her own. It was a bone-deep hunger, a call from the marrow of her being. His hand contracted on her arm, and the heat of it brought a moan of surprise to her lips. Yes, she was frightened, but she understood the fever in him, the desperation. For this moment in time, this split second in the loop of infinity, she was his salvation, his redemption. She could give him back his life.

He caught hold of the bodice of her shirtdress, his voice a serrated plea. “I need you, to touch you.” Balling the ragged material in his fist, he slowly dragged her closer to him, a staggering mix of emotion in his eyes. For an instant she saw tenderness there, heartbreaking tenderness. And then in its place, naked desire, waves of it...His hands burned her skin, seared her soul. They were hot and hard and rapturously frantic as they worked open the buttons at her neckline. If she hadn’t felt the shuddering roughness in his fingers, she would have believed she was dreaming, dying.

Glancing down, she drew in a sharp breath as his fingers slipped through the front placket of her dress and grazed her skin. Her breasts shuddered and tightened instantly, shimmering in anticipation of his touch. Mesmerized, she watched the buttons begin to fall free. The first button, the second. A part of her didn’t believe,
couldn’t
believe any of it was happening. She was an enthralled child on a roller coaster, and it was too late to stop the plunging momentum.

The third button eluded him. He breathed out a savage word, and with one magnificent wrench he ripped free a triangle of material, jerking Sasha’s body forward with a force that made her cry out. He caught her with one arm and held her suspended, inches from his mouth.

An inner cry of excitement swept her, rioting through her senses. “Dear Lord,” she said as her nerves registered his fist tangled in the material at her bodice, his fingers pressed into her trembling flesh. He was a heartbeat away, staring down at her.

The anticipation of his mouth on hers was a fiery ache in her limbs, a cry from deep in her loins. She longed for him to hold her, crush her in his arms, kiss her until she was dizzy and drunk with him. She wanted desperately to know his heat, his fire, his sweetness. She told him so with her eyes, and his response was a shuddering groan, low and beautiful, made brutal with his need.

Disorientation crept into Sasha’s senses. It was almost as though he were fighting himself, and that possibility was both thrilling and unnerving to her. That he might have the strength to hold back made her even wilder to be with him. This wasn’t about the movie scene anymore, she realized. It was a clash of wills and hearts, a stunning collision of opposite forces, male and female. She felt it all, drank it in until it swamped her, the fear of losing control, the driving desire to be part of him. It was primal and terrifying.
It was real.

His fingers curled into her hair, his eyes searched out her secrets, but it was his mouth that beguiled her. She saw the whole man there, a microcosm of Marc Renaud in the taut full lines that fought their own sensitivity.

She let her eyes drift from his lips to the pulse point in his throat. She bent to kiss the tender spot and felt his arms go rigid. He ripped her away from him, held her at arm’s length, his hands shaking. “Lord,” he whispered, “what are you doing to me?”

The heat of him fled her body, and a convulsive tremor took its place. “I don’t know,” she said, a sob in her voice. “Dying for you?”

He swept her off the floor as he kissed her, lifting her body to his, crushing her with his intensity. Sasha’s world went shock-white for a moment, and then it imploded slowly in a kaleidoscopic burst of color. His mouth, his heartbreakingly soft lips, were the source of light, of beauty.

She wanted to stay forever, spinning in that world of light and beauty...she wanted to spiral there like a leaf caught in the wind.

Without warning he released her for an instant, and she was lost in a free fall, plummeting until he caught her to him again. The power in his arms, in his body, intensified her feelings of thrilling, curling weakness. He claimed her lips in a deep, consuming kiss, savage and tender at the same time. His tongue barely touched hers, but she felt its caress deep inside her.

Limp in his arms, she lost touch with her thoughts, her senses, her very heartbeat. The languidness showering her from head to toe was the most beautiful and terrible sensation she had ever had. It felt as though she were dissolving, melting into a pool of fiery liquid. She couldn’t call out his name, beg him to stop. She didn’t have the strength!

She felt him release the torn material of her dress and slide his fingers inside the ragged opening. She arched up, her hand flying to his arm to stop him, a sigh quivering deep in her throat as he cupped her breast. Her body came alive, electrified. She cried out silently, dizzy with agonized pleasure at the sensations of his fingers on her flesh.

“You make me ache, you’re so soft,” he whispered against her forehead. And then, relinquishing her breast, he combed his hands into the silky hair at her temples and kissed her with such amazing gentleness, she began to cry. Tears swelled into her eyes.

A line from the script swept into Sasha’s thoughts as he shifted back to look at her, words she’d never been able to say convincingly to Carlos. “Jesse”—she breathed out his name on a soft sob—“I love you.”

She could feel the recoil in his muscles, could almost see his head snap up as though he’d been hit.

Somewhere in the building a door slammed, and the echo broke through Sasha’s languor like a sound traveling through a tunnel, hollowed out and distant. She tightened her fingers on Marc’s arm, momentarily confused by the interruption, by his reaction. Her heart caught between beats as he eased his hold on her.

As he looked at her there was no doubt in her mind that he wasn’t acting. He was Marc Renaud and he was as shattered as she was by what had happened. The door slammed again, and voices drifted to them from the side entrance of the cavernous sound stage. He lifted her to her feet, touched her arm with a sad, fleeting caress, and took the torn material of her dress in his hand. “Can it be fixed?”

Sasha found her voice. “There are safety pins in the makeup room,” she said, blushing slightly. “I think I can patch it up.”

He nodded and pointed to a smaller makeup room off the set. Sasha broke away from his gaze and turned to go, awkwardly, her heart pounding.