Читать книгу The Marriage Experiment - Catherine Spencer - Страница 8

LOOKING supremely at ease, and for all the world as if he had every right to be there, he lounged against the frame of the French doors leading from her living room, his shabby attempt to look grave sadly undermined by the supercilious little smirk on his face.

“How did you get in here, Grant?” she spat, doing her best to sound both dignified and affronted—no easy task given that she was sprawled out practically naked before him and he was making no secret of the fact that he’d noticed.

“I let myself in,” he said, staring his fill at great leisure. “The butler doesn’t seem to be on duty. I thought perhaps you’d given him the night off.”

“I don’t have a butler.”

His smirk grew. “What, and no maid, either? Gee, it must be tough, having to do for yourself!”

“It is. But somehow I manage.” Aware that her strapless bikini top was precariously close to letting all it was supposed to contain fall out before his amused inspection, she tried rather unsuccessfully to cover herself with a towel.

Of course, if he’d had a grain of decency in his make-up, he’d have averted his eyes and let her fumble in private, but he’d never been long on chivalry. “You don’t seem to be managing that too well,” he drawled, shoving himself away from the door frame and ambling toward her. “Need any help?”

“Not from you,” she fumed, slapping the towel in his direction to keep him at a distance.

“No need to get all exercised, Olivia,” he said mildly. “I didn’t come here with seduction in mind.”

“What did you come for, then?” To her horror, the question emerged loaded with unintentional petulance, a fact he was also quick to pick up on.

“You sound almost disappointed, sweet face, as if it’s been a long time since a man reminded you how it feels to respond like a woman. Am I to take it that Hank from the Bank is no great shakes between the sheets?”

“His name is Henry,” she exclaimed, almost choking with anger, “and I thought I made it plain on Saturday that we are not lovers! This might come as a surprise to you, Grant, but there are men for whom sex is not the be-all and end-all of existence.”

“Only if they’ve been neutered.” Uninvited, Grant took a turn around the patio, peering into the various jardinieres as if he suspected Henry might be lurking amid the flowers. “If you were my woman, I’d be out defending my territory, especially if her unattached ex suddenly showed up in town.”

“But I’m not your woman. I never was, although I suppose it would be expecting too much for you to understand the difference between sharing your life with someone and treating her as if she were just another possession to load in the trunk of your car.”

“I was willing to share my life with you, Olivia,” he said, the very softness in his tone a warning as lethal as a jungle cat’s low snarl. By now, the sun had begun its descent toward the horizon so that his shadow lay long and narrow on the flagstones, making it seem almost as if he were reaching out to her. “I was willing to share everything—all my dreams and ambitions and, most assuredly, my heart. You just weren’t interested in coming along for the ride.”

His accusation brought the resentment she’d thought she’d buried years before rising up to engulf her, along with a smattering of remembered agony and a wealth of bitterness. “You’re the one who walked out, Grant Madison, not I, so don’t try rewriting history now, because I’m not about to buy it! I might not have been bright enough to have the letters ‘M.D.’ after my name, but I was far from the simpleton you took me to be. I knew exactly what you were doing, the day you presented me with an ultimatum no sane person would have found acceptable. You wanted an excuse to back out of our marriage and you found one.”

“I offered you adventure and freedom,” he said, the sudden edge in his voice sharp as a scalpel, “but you didn’t have the guts to seize opportunity when it came knocking. Instead you chose to remain in your father’s shadow and to hell with me!”

“As if you even cared! Your only passion was medicine.”

“Not just medicine, Olivia. At one time, I was passionate about you, too.”

“You didn’t let that stop you from abandoning me at a time when I was most vulnerable, though, did you?”

He swore at that, a profanity so explosively obscene that she cringed. “Save it, Olivia! I didn’t come here to be raked over the coals yet again for something over which I had absolutely no control!”

She shrugged contemptuously. “So, leave! I don’t see anyone keeping you here against your will.”

“Not until I’ve said my piece, which is simply this: it seems that you’ve carved quite a niche for yourself in hospital affairs, which means we’re bound to cross paths frequently in the next month or two. I suggest that, unless you want to set every tongue in town wagging, you learn to leave your personal antipathies at home, because the job site is no place to air them and I won’t put up with being made to look like a fool in front of my colleagues. Your little performance this morning will not be repeated, Olivia. Do I make myself clear?”

“Don’t you condescend to me, Grant Madison! I’m no longer the insecure little twit you once knew. I haven’t just grown older, I’ve grown up, as well. Meet the new me: Olivia Whitfield, B.Comm., fully accredited fundraising executive. It takes determination and guts to go out into the big world of business and hustle for bucks. But you wouldn’t know about anything like that, would you, locked away in your pure, anti-bacterial ivory tower?”

“Holy cow!” he murmured. “I’m impressed!”

But he didn’t sound impressed; he sounded highly amused.

“Listen to me,” she hissed. “I won’t put up with being treated like some feather-brained socialite playing at being important for want of something better to do! So the next time you get the urge to tell me to consult an expert, remember that I am the expert when it comes to finding ways for Springdale General to operate in the black, and if you really want to see that new equipment in CCU, you’d be well advised to put a lid on your ego and listen to me on the best way to go about getting it.”

She hadn’t rehearsed the tirade, but it rolled off her tongue as smoothly and with as much fire as if she’d been practicing for weeks. She was breathless when she finished: breathless and triumphant. In the old days, she’d never have put him in his place so effectively that he was rendered momentarily speechless.

“Well,” he said, when he finally found his voice again. “Well, well, well! Daddy’s little girl seems to have grown up after all, and about time, too. Tell me, sweet face, how did you manage to slide out from under that big, controlling thumb of his?”

“After surviving ten months of marriage to you, it was a breeze, I can assure you!”

“Oh, come now, Olivia, I don’t deserve that. They weren’t all bad months. We had some memorable times.”

“Too few to count, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, really? Is that why you lost it on Saturday night? Because you couldn’t remember how it used to be with us?” He shook his head. “If you’re going to go over the top like that for no reason at all every time we happen to meet, you’ll turn the next few weeks into one long soap opera for everyone else in town.”

“I don’t give a hoot what everyone else in town thinks.”

Of course, it was a bald-faced lie, but, surprisingly, he bought it. Abandoning his contemplation of the flower pots, he strolled over to where she sat in the chaise with her knees drawn up to her chest so that he had no opportunity to subject her cleavage to further inspection. “You know,” he said, looking down at her with a mixture of respect and regret, “if you’d shown half the backbone then that you’ve acquired since, we might still be married today.”

“I don’t think so. Say what you like about my father, but he was right when he warned me that you and I shared nothing in common. It’s a miracle we stayed together as long as we did.”

She ought to have known better than to bring her father into the discussion. The old light of battle sparked in Grant’s eyes before her words had cooled on the evening air. “Nothing?” he echoed. “Oh, that’s not quite true, Olivia. We shared something quite extraordinary—for a little while, at least.”

“I suppose you’re harping on sex again,” she said, squirming a little under his gaze, “but I’m afraid it doesn’t have any staying power when it’s the only thing holding a relationship together.”

“You’re sure of that, are you?”

“Yes,” she said, but he heard the betraying quaver in her voice and, like the predator he was, took immediate advantage of her weakness.

“Why don’t we put your theory to the test, Olivia?” he murmured silkily, and before she could blink, let alone refuse him, he dropped down beside her on the chaise and kissed her.

How ridiculous that the same word used to describe a peck on the cheek should apply to the exchange which occurred between them at that moment. How preposterous that nothing Henry had been able to devise in the way of romantic overtures came even close to the utter seduction of Grant’s mouth on hers.

He didn’t touch her anywhere else. No hands sliding up her bare arms to find her throat and trace a daring line to where her bikini top clung tenuously to her breasts. No forcing her lips apart with his tongue to take possession of the dark and secret enclaves of her mouth. No doing any of those things she found herself wanting him to do. Just simple devastation with a touch as light as thistledown that lasted a second, and then two, and then three, and which left her aching in every pore. Hurting for something she had missed more than she’d ever dared admit.

The pain roared through her like fire, as though it had been lying in wait for the last eight years for just such an opportunity to destroy her. The starch went out of her spine, seeping away like water to expose the great arid desert where her heart had lain untouched for so long.

She felt the moan rise in her throat and did her best to smother it, but it escaped anyway, a pleading, shameless whimper of need. The fingers she’d knotted around her knees lost their strength and let her legs fall slackly apart, leaving her with nothing but the yellow triangle of her bikini bottom to protect her where she was, and always had been, so susceptible to his advances.

“Grant,” she implored him faintly, begging him in that single word to tell her that he understood, that he felt the same, that he wanted her as rapaciously as she wanted him.

But, although she heard the unspoken words as clearly as if she’d screamed them from the rooftop, he either did not or he chose to ignore them. Or perhaps he listened instead to his own, more prudent inner voices, because, very slowly, he lifted his head and drew back from her and muttered, “I shouldn’t have done that. It was a mistake. A very big mistake.”

“Why did you do it, then?” she asked, tears trembling in her throat.

“To prove a point that no longer has any relevance in either of our lives,” he said soberly, and stood up. “I thought it was important that we clear the air between us, but it would have been better if I’d found some other place to do it because I should never have come here, nor will I again.”

The sun still slanted across the garden, filming the surface of the pool with gold and leaving the air soporific with heat, but suddenly she was so cold that gooseflesh stippled her limbs and set her teeth to chattering. He would never know what a supreme effort it took for her to reply, “So leave. Run off and play with your stethoscope. Learn to knit with it, for all I care. I’m sorry I don’t have a butler to show you out, but I’m sure you’ll find your own way.”

Just briefly, he paused, as though perhaps he had something more to convey, some small indication that he was not completely unmoved by what had happened between them. But then he straightened his shoulders and swung away.

Miserably, she watched as he strode across the patio, dwelling on the sight of him and trying not to remember the time when she’d had the right to explore all that height and breadth of sheer masculine beauty. When to hold him in her arms and welcome him into her body had been the joy of both their lives. When to reach up and kiss him for no reason other than that he was her husband and she loved him had been as natural and instinctive as breathing.

Gradually, his footsteps faded, and as the silence he left behind came pressing down on her so did the tears. Not because he had left her tonight, but because he had reminded her too vividly of the pain she’d experienced when he’d left her before. She had not known he could hurt her so badly a second time.