Winter's Daughter (19 page)

"Is it all solar heated?" she asked, spotting the panels on the south–facing roof.

Dillon nodded. "And cooled. I have a back–up natural gas system for water heating. Logan claims he uses one hundred percent solar to heat both his pool and the Jacuzzi, but I find that a little hard to believe."

"Logan?"

"Yeah, you met him the other day, remember? Chief of police? That’s his place down there. He put in a pool because of his kids. I decided for the amount of use I’d get out of it, it wasn’t worth the trouble, and besides, if I really want to swim, I can always use his. I do, however, have a Jacuzzi. It’s, uh—" He coughed and, with an endearing awkwardness, pushed open the door and held it for her. "Well, here we are. Please excuse the mess. I haven’t had much luck with housekeepers."

"Oh." Tannis sighed, for somehow he had brought the desert’s beauty inside. Airy, vaulted ceilings, pale wood floors, Navaho rugs, the colors sand, terra cotta, and touches of sky blue. "It’s lovely."

"Thanks. Kitchen’s in here." Half smiling, he waited for her reaction.

She didn’t disappoint him. "Wow, what is this? Are you a gourmet cook?" The kitchen was a dream, tile and wood and hanging copper pots and every convenience imaginable.

Dillon’s chuckle was sardonic. "Sure. I’m a wizard with a microwave." With a grand flourish he threw open the door to a full–sized freezer. "What’ll it be? Shrimp Cantonese? Chicken l’orange? Eggplant Parmesan? Pepperoni pizza?"

"Good Lord," Tannis said faintly, gazing at the most incredible array of frozen foods she’d ever seen outside a supermarket.

"Take your pick. Unless you like to cook?"

She gave him a wary look. "Though I do get the urge now and then, I know if I had to cook, I’d probably hate it. I’ll have the fish Florentine. And a blueberry muffin, please," she added politely.

Dillon couldn’t decide between pasta primavera and chili with corn bread, so he took them both.

While they waited for the oven’s beep, Dillon unwrapped the Los Angeles Times and sorted through it for the comics section.

They ate perched on stools before a counter of terracotta tile while a famous chef’s fabulous gourmet dessert defrosted slowly in the microwave. Tannis didn’t know what it was called, but it involved chocolate fudge cake and hot raspberry sauce.

"I can’t believe I ate that," she groaned sometime later, licking the last of the sauce from her lips. "I can’t believe
you
ate it—on top of pasta and chili and corn bread. How do you stay so thin?"

"Hmm." He stared at her so intently, she began to think she’d asked a very dumb—or very personal—question. Then he said, "Hold still," reached out and drew his thumb across her upper lip, then popped it into his own mouth.

It was a gesture of such casual, spontaneous intimacy, it took her breath away.

"Come on," he said abruptly, taking her wrist and pulling her off her stool, "let’s go walk off some calories. I’ll show you my kingdom."

"It’s raining," she protested as they stepped outside.

"So it is." Dillon squinted up at the sky, then down at her. His eyes had an odd brightness. "Cold?" Light, misty droplets clung like fool’s gold to his skin.

She nodded, shivering. With the same impulsive intimacy with which he’d taken the chocolate from her lips, he took off his bomber jacket and put it around her shoulders.

"Come on. There’s nothing more beautiful than the desert in the rain." The twin smile grooves etched his cheeks. She realized it had been a long time since she’d seen them.

Tannis suddenly felt irrationally happy. She imagined it must be the way the earth feels when the sun touches it after a long rainy spell—warm—nourished.

Happy
.

Wrapped in Dillon’s body heat, steeped in the masculine soap and old leather scent, Tannis experienced another of those explosions of hers. Not a small, tender awakening this time, but an eruption that rocked her to her core. It boiled up in her, demanding some kind of release, but since she’d never experienced anything like it before, and didn’t know what that release should be, she just let go of a long, shaken breath and followed Dillon into the rain.

Dillon loved the desert when it rained. There were the smells: the scent of thirsty earth and pungent sage, and the wet–hay smell of dried grass. There was the turbulent sky, with the awesome display of elements spread out like some epic battle among the gods. But more than anything, there were the colors. The colors of the desert were muted and subtle; ordinarily the sun bleached them almost to a monochrome in varying shades of ivory, like drying bones. But in the rain the soft pastels became fresh and vibrant, and colors and patterns appeared where there were none before.

"It’s like being inside a watercolor painting," Tannis said in a voice that seemed hushed and awed.

Unbidden stirrings of pleasure made Dillon turn and look at her. She had paused on the crest of the hill behind his house and was looking out across the valley. Her chin was lifted and her arms were down at her sides; her face was rain–washed but rapt, the cold forgotten.

He walked slowly back to her, knowing it was dangerous, fully aware that the ache he felt inside himself was the need to take her in his arms.

"Oh, Dillon," she said, turning to him, "I love it here. How did you ever find this beautiful place?"

He cleared his throat. It seemed a safe subject. "I didn’t, actually. Logan did."

She smiled. "Logan again. Have the two of you known each other a long time?"

Dillon nodded. "We go back a long way. We were in the academy together, we were rookies together, best man at each other’s weddings. That sort of thing. When Logan’s first child was born, he decided L.A. wasn’t anyplace to raise a kid, so he moved out here. Desert land was cheap then, and he talked me into coming out and taking a look at this great opportunity. Of course I said, ’Yeah, sure, next you’ll be selling swampland in Florida, right?’ But— well, I ended up putting a down payment on the lot without talking it over with Cindy first." His smile was rueful. "Big mistake. She hated the place on sight."

"How could anybody hate this?"

"Well, she was from Seattle. As far as she was concerned, the desert was too hot, too dry, and too empty." He shrugged and looked away, dismissing past disappointments. "The desert’s not for everybody, I guess."

"Well, I love it." Her laughter had a carefree sound, like tumbling water. "There’s so much light, and air, and space!" She whirled impulsively away from him, her face lifted to the rain, her arms widespread in a joyful pirouette. "Clarence would love this place!"

"Clarence?"

"Yeah, one of the street people I’ve been studying. He’s claustrophobic."

You understand him, Dillon thought, and it came to him that her fear of deep personal involvement was a kind of claustrophobia. That insight and his own urgent need collided like opposing air masses; the resulting tumult drowned out the voices of reason, blew away his self–control, and blinded him to the consequences of his actions. Emotions of gale force swept through him as he caught Tannis and spun her breathless and laughing into his arms.

Her laughter died as she looked up into his face. Her eyes darkened; her lips parted. For a moment he held himself still, feeling the frantic pace of her breathing, feeling his own respirations time themselves to hers. He brought unsteady fingers to her face to brush away the raindrops. And then he lowered his head and took her mouth with all the passion and hunger that was in him.

He kissed her without any restraint at all, hard and deep, giving neither of them time to think or reason. It was a blitz, a tidal wave, a flash flood; it had caught him first, and he meant to sweep her up and carry her along with him if he could.

He knew the moment it happened. He knew the moment the fine, taut thread of her resistance snapped, tumbling her into the vortex that had already claimed him. He heard her whimper, then a sigh in surrender as her arms lifted and her rain–cool fingers touched his face, combed through his hair, and finally clung to the back of his neck.

He made a low sound of wordless approval and fitted his hands to the sides of her waist under her sweatshirt. As he slipped them upward against her skin she gasped at their coolness, opening to him even more. He felt as if he were drowning in her, barely aware that his fingers had fanned over her ribs and back, that his thumbs were brushing the silken undersides of her breasts, following that gentle, weighted curve to slowly circle the pebbled tips. Desire and need became a corkscrewing pain that speared him from chest to groin, so that finally it was he who had to tear his mouth away from her in order to release the screaming pressure in his lungs.

"Dillon!" She said his name as a gasp of shock.

"Oh, Lord," he said, meaning no profanity at all, and caught her against him. Resting his cheek on her hair, he folded his arms around her and felt the turbulence inside her come together with his own in a roiling storm of labored breathing, surging heartbeats, and tight inner trembling.

After a while, when the storm inside him showed no sign of abating, he drew away from her a little and, with one hand framing her face, lifted it so he could look into her eyes. "This time," he said through through the restriction of cramped jaws, "I know for darn sure I meant to do that. Tannis, I—" He stopped, swallowing the words that would have voiced his need of her, feeling as if he were swallowing rocks instead.

He needs me, Tannis thought, seeing what was so naked in his face: the deep–etched grooves, the purple smudges, the hunger in his eyes. It was neither the dark side nor the light, but something else, something in shadowed limbo between the two. And she knew that for this moment at least
, she
was his sunlight.

Dillon needed her. She couldn’t remember anyone ever needing her before—really needing her. Oh, many men had spoken plaintively of
need
when what they’d really meant was
want.
But here was a man whose need was so great, he couldn’t speak of it at all. She felt powerful and humble, joyful, and a little frightened, everything tumbling around inside her.

"Dillon," she whispered and, laying her hand over his, she held it tenderly against her cheek. And she smiled, offering herself to him, giving to him for no other reason except that it was what she wanted to do.

He searched her eyes, trying to read what he saw there, struggling to believe it. Tannis waited, blinking raindrops, licking them from her lips. And at last, with agonizing slowness, still cupping her face in his hand, Dillon lowered his mouth to hers, released his sigh against her parted lips and took the rain from them as if it were an offered blessing.

The kiss was gentle, and the more compelling because of its restraint. She could feel his urgency in his heart’s erratic thumping, hear it in the slight harshness of his breathing. She knew it, too, by the way he kissed her with such exquisite, excrutiating thoroughness, forcing himself not to hurry, though heat and passion were surging through his body in waves, like seismic shocks.

She was shivering again by the time he lifted his head. He gave her another long look, his own eyes for once unshuttered, the hunger in them stark and unvarnished for her to see. The question was evident in his eyes, too, but it was Tannis who tenderly touched his face and asked, "Why don’t we go inside?"

A cloudburst caught them a hundred yards from the house. They came into the kitchen laughing and stamping water onto the tile floor.

"Oh, wow, look at your jacket," Tannis said breathlessly. "I hope it isn’t ruined."

"It’ll be fine," Dillon assured her as he slipped it off her shoulders, "but you’re soaked."

She turned and placed her hand flat against the front of his sweater. "So are you."

There was the briefest of pauses, before he said, "Yeah. We should probably both get out of these wet clothes." He lifted dripping strands of hair delicately away from her face. In a voice as gentle as his hands he said, "Why don’t you go first? Use my bathroom while I see if I can start a fire."

She looked up at him, touching the drops on the end of her nose with the back of her hand. "But you’re wetter than I am. Aren’t you—"

"I’m fine," he said softly, making a little nudging motion with his hand. "You go on. Take a shower if you like. I think the blue bathrobe’s clean."

She gazed at him uncertainly, seeking reassurance, but his eyes held no answers for her. They were soft, but dark and opaque as dead coals.

"Go," he said firmly, taking her by the shoulders and turning her. "Before you’re chilled to the bone. Right through there and down the stairs."

She had no choice but to go. As she went through the door she looked back and found him watching her, wearing his smile like a mask. What, she wondered, feeling banished and confused, had happened to the need, to the urgency and the passion in him? Had she only imagined it, or had it taken no more than a dash of cold rain to put out the fires?

Dillon’s bedroom was like the living room—vaulted, skylighted ceilings, hardwood floors, soft rugs, muted colors. She entered it like a trespasser, feeling odd about the intimacy of it but unable to keep her eyes from avid explorations.

The room was clean but not neat; clothing hung over the backs of chairs, and the pale fur bedspread had been pulled up over ambiguous bumps and ridges. Neither a neat freak nor a slob, Tannis thought with tender amusement; just a busy man with no time to spare for unnecessary fussing.

In the bathroom she found the Jacuzzi tucked away in a walled atrium with a glass roof to let in sun or starlight. She understood Dillon’s slight embarrassment now. It all felt a little dated. The whole thing—the indoor hot tub, skylights, huge furry bed—it all painted a picture that could have borne the caption: California Swinging Bachelor’s Pad, late–20th Century. Funny , she’d never thought of Dillon in that light before. Doing so now gave her a queasy feeling.

Throwing off her fears along with her wet clothes, she turned on the hot water and stepped into the shower. She thought about using the Jacuzzi. She thought about how good it would feel to lie back and relax and let herself steep in soothing bubbles…