Jennifer Greene - Conquer the Memories

He slid down beside her with a chuckle. “I wasn’t aware of this terrible gap in your education.”

“I don’t admit it to everyone.” Lying on the deck, she reached over him for the wine, and poured him a glass. “We have to do something until it gets dark enough. I figured I’d play Roman slave girl to your Nero. You lie there, and I’ll feed you grapes and wine.”

Blue eyes rested on hers. A lightning storm crackled from nowhere. The sky was cloudless and there wasn’t the hint of a breeze, but somewhere between his eyes and hers there was searing tension, a crackling awareness…“You do like that idea, don’t you?” Her voice was oddly low, working to keep the teasing tone in it. “The lady at your mercy, to do with what you will?”

“I like the idea.” His palm brushed in her hair, smoothing it back. “Not of Nero, not of slave girls. But of you feeding me grapes and wine, on a boat with no one around, on a night when no one can hear us. Do you know what I’d like to do to you?”

His eyes gave her a very good idea. She searched his face. Darkness had fallen so rapidly that his eyes had a luminous quality, all the intensity of luster, all the softness of the dark waters surrounding them. He wanted to touch her; he wanted to love her; she could feel it clear to her soul. Her spine tingled with it.

But would it be the same, would he make love to her but not with her, would he give only for her pleasure?

His eyes made lush, erotic promises to her…yet his body spoke of control. Control where he was concerned.

Leaning her cheek to his palm, she pressed her lips there softly and then withdrew. She picked up a grape and raised the sweet fruit to his lips. “Enjoy, Nero,” she commanded brightly. “Your time will come. First, the stars.”

She could feel him staring at her as she busied herself with the telescope, handing him his wine again, chattering. Naturally, he was staring; she’d never behaved like such a fool in her life! Still, he let her play out her games without a word, and in time she relaxed.

Twenty minutes later, stretched flat, she had the telescope to her eye and was squinting into it as she swung it back and forth across the sky. “This is hopeless,” she complained. “I can’t even find the North Star.”

Craig tugged the telescope from her hands and pointed it at the brightest diamond above. One could hardly miss it.

She gave him a severe look for the chuckle he was barely holding back. “I know it’s up there. But it disappears when you put the lens to your eye.”

He sighed. “How can one extremely intelligent woman be such an occasional dunce?” he questioned the heavens.

“Oh, hush.” She put the telescope back in its box, stood up and stretched. “I knew all along I should have married Mack McPherson. Never, never, would he have made fun of me.”

His eyes trailed the length of her long, sleek legs in the moonlight. “Who is Mack McPherson?”

“Didn’t I ever mention him? You dragged everything else out of me. Without once,” she added plaintively, “revealing one interesting detail about your own past love life.”

“Mack,” he reminded her.

“Mack was the high school heartthrob,” she said with a grin. “The Mr. Cool of Cold Creek High. Basketball star, big man in school politics, the local tycoon’s son-and also my first date.” Sonia’s lashes lowered as she took a thoughtful look at her husband. He wasn’t scowling, because Craig was far too mature to give in to anything as childish as jealousy. He just looked…irritated. Definitely irritated.

While she had his attention, she slowly stood up, and receded just slightly into the shadows. When Craig glanced up at her, she peeled down first one strap of her maillot, then the other. “My first date, and he took me up to the Stone Canyon-the local lovers’ lane. He took all his dates there, which is exactly why I went out with him. He had a fifty-eight Chevy with a terrible muffler and a big backseat. I could hardly wait. Everybody else had been kissed to death, and I hadn’t the least idea what they were talking about. It was…humiliating. Mack was my big chance to get in on the action.”

She encouraged the black maillot down her long, slender legs until it fell like a little puddle on her toes. Stepping out of the shadows, she gave the suit an impish kick in Craig’s direction. The moonlight shimmered down on her bare skin like a cloak of silk. “Want to swim?” For a big man, he could certainly move fast. His canvas shorts joined hers on the deck. “What I want,” he growled, “is to hear what the hell happened. Keeping in mind that with that attitude, I’m surprised your parents didn’t keep you permanently locked up.”

He was aroused, she noted. They hadn’t even touched, and he was…definitely, vibrantly, aroused. And coming toward her.

She took a swift step to the ladder, stepped up and around the rail, and posed for a racing dive. “Heck, he kissed like a fish,” Sonia called over her shoulder. “I decided all that sex stuff was vastly overrated. Of course, when I was seventeen…” She sent one quick, teasing grin over her shoulder before diving in.

The water was cool and dark and buoyant-all delightful qualities to cool her husband off, Sonia considered. Except that his hands were cleaving through the water as if he were in the Olympics. Which would be fine, if gold medals were all he wanted to get his hands on.

And it wasn’t time. His wanting to touch her wasn’t enough.

She held her breath and went down, deep down, and switched directions. Evidently, she hadn’t gone as deep as she planned, because their toes touched once, and she heard a garbled sound ringing through the night air when she surfaced. She was hardly about to let that slow her down. She lapped around the boat once, then twice, then a third time. Craig was by far the better swimmer but lacked the basic, purely feminine deviousness to keep changing directions on a whim.

Gasping, Sonia took the last lap around the boat and reached for the ladder. Water streamed from her body as she pulled herself up, and a quick chill trembled on her bare skin in spite of the warm night air. By the time Craig heaved himself up behind her, she was swathed in floor-length white terry cloth, all chaste and prim.

“No sharks got me,” she said demurely.

“The night is young.”

Unfortunately, yes, she thought sadly. The night was young and an ideal one for lovers, and Sonia managed to keep the two of them busy gathering up the telescope and pillows and whatever. Down in the cabin there were a few other little washing-up chores from dinner. Sonia showered first, and while Craig was washing the salt water off himself, she was burrowing under the covers and forcing her eyes closed and trying to make her breathing seem even.

***

Craig clicked open the shower door and stepped out, wrapping a towel around his waist. His pulse was racing at an odd rate. It had been racing that way all day. Sonia was the cause, and when he stepped out into their stateroom, there was a glint of something dark and unfathomable in his eyes. Torture would have been easier to handle than the teasing that Sonia had handed out all day.

At first he’d been amused by her antics. Sonia had never been predictable. He loved that in her, but sometime earlier that day his humor had died. In part, he thought she’d just been playing, enjoying the high that came with their impromptu vacation. In part, he’d been so wrapped up in his own problems that he hadn’t really thought out her motivations. And in part, perhaps, after living on the ragged edge of frustration for so many weeks, he just hadn’t noticed that Sonia’s behavior was distinctly out of character.

Dropping the towel, he spotted her curled-up form on the bed. His pulse abruptly stopped racing. Sonia was totally still, except for the odd pattern of her breathing.

She wasn’t asleep, only pretending to be.

Very quietly, he turned out the light. Instead of joining her in bed, he slipped out into the salon, closing the door behind him. Collapsing in a chair with his head thrown back, he closed his eyes.

She didn’t want him to make love to her? She’d been sending him sexual S.O.S. signals all day.

It was past time he figured out what game she was playing. He felt as if he’d been kicked, hard and painfully, in the ribs. For weeks, he’d survived his own deprivation. That wasn’t the same thing at all as being deprived of his right to love her, please her, touch her. A man could survive a hell of a lot longer without food than without water. And no, he wasn’t in a desert.

His heart was just beginning to feel as if he were lost in one.

Craig woke to find himself alone in the bed, his arms curled around a pillow. He groped for his watch on the bedside table. It was barely six. Not a likely hour for Sonia to be up and around-barring World War III or Christmas.

Unless she was making a distinct effort to be out of touching range whenever he was around.

Again.

Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he broodingly tossed the pillow aside and dragged a hand through his hair. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the faint scream of gulls fishing for their breakfast. A brilliant sun was trying to peek through the opaque curtains of their cabin, and beneath his feet the boat undulated in peaceful sway.

None of that peace touched the almost violent determination inside his head. He’d gone to bed with the mood, he’d slept with it, and again awoke to the same powerful, indefinable feelings gnawing at him. He felt driven to the wall. But hadn’t he driven himself there?

Impatiently, he stood up and reached for his jeans. Very few minutes later, after splashing his face with cold water and raking a brush through his hair, he stalked barefoot over the thick carpet toward the salon.