Читать книгу Echoes in the Dark - Gayle Wilson - Страница 7

“Give me the keys,” he said, the patient humor evident in the deep voice. The faint accent ran like an echo through his English.

When she ignored his command, he caught her wrist, and the sight of dark, tanned fingers against the paleness of her arm caused a reactive tightening of her stomach muscles. She watched, mesmerized, as he slid his fingers up her inner wrist. She could tell by his eyes that, as always, he knew exactly the effect his touch had. She resisted the memory of the pleasant roughness of those fingertips moving over her breasts earlier tonight when he had coaxed her to dress and join him at the reception she had just disrupted.

She took a deep breath, fighting the hunger that his hard body could always evoke. It was so easy for him to manipulate her. She was so ready to do whatever he asked because she loved him and she wanted him. God, how she wanted him. She shook her head to destroy the images produced by the remembrance of his familiar possession. If she allowed him to touch her, she would lose the anger, and he would win.

“Let me go,” she ordered, punctuating her command with a sudden jerk against the strong hand that held her prisoner.

Perhaps the element of surprise made her successful or perhaps his desire not to hurt her made him loosen his hold. Suddenly she was free, running again toward the Mercedes convertible he had given her. She opened the door and, slipping into the driver’s seat, tried to insert the key into the ignition.

Her trembling fingers failed in the first attempts, and by the time the engine finally roared to life, he had moved into the passenger seat beside her.

She glanced at his face and saw he was still amused. Her temper, never under any reliable control, especially lately, reacted predictably. No one had ever angered her as he could, with only a look or a word. The blow she ineptly directed at his face fell harmlessly against the hard forearm he raised between them.

“Kerri,” he protested, laughing, and again caught her wrist. His reflexes were so much faster than hers, honed by years of activities that demanded speed and dexterity to escape the constant threat of injury.

“Why are you so angry? What have I done this time?” he asked, still smiling.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. ‘What have I done?’ I can’t believe you can ask that. You couldn’t take your eyes off her.”

“Is that what this is all about?” he asked, laughing, relieved. “Of course, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was practically nude. A palace reception and the ambassador’s wife shows up in something most women wouldn’t wear to bed.”

“She seemed to think you liked it well enough. She certainly wanted you to get a good look. A very good look. A close-up.”

His only answer to that accusation was the quick upward slant of his beautifully molded lips, but this time he controlled his laughter. He reached to run his knuckles gently down the slim column of her throat, knowing it was futile to argue with her in this mood. She slapped at his hand and moved as far away from him as the confines of the car would allow.

“Have you slept with her? Have you slept with every woman in the country? Every damn woman in the whole damn world?”

She hated the hysteria she could hear building in her voice, wished she could control the ridiculous accusations, the same accusations that she had made too many times in the past weeks. One minute she wanted to cry and rage at him, and then, perversely, she wanted to bury her head against the elegant dark dinner jacket and vent all those frustrations. Even she didn’t know what she was crying about or why she couldn’t seem to stop these bitter scenes.

Eventually he would tire of the ranting denunciations. Just as he would tire of having to explain to her his world of art and music and literature. She knew so little of those things, and he knew so much, she thought with despair. The gap between their backgrounds seemed too wide to bridge, no matter how hard she tried. Deep in her heart she knew that their time together was flashing by in an ever-increasing spiral, fueled by her jealousy and her endless insecurities. She knew it, but she didn’t seem to be able to do anything about slowing that inevitable destruction.

He tried to pull her into his arms, and she wondered why she resisted what she wanted so desperately. He brushed tendrils of sun-streaked blond hair out of the tracks of her tears. She turned her face to rest against those caressing fingers and saw pain in the lucid blue depths of his eyes. Then he masked what was reflected there with the downward sweep of thick, coal black lashes, so that when he looked up at her again there was only concern and, as always, the reassurance of his love.

“No, I haven’t slept with her,” he said resignedly. He lightened his voice deliberately. “But you’re right. This is my fault. Everything is my fault. The fact that you are only nineteen and very pregnant and very far from home. All of those things are my fault.”

His voice softened seductively, and his thumb teased slowly along her bottom lip. “And I am delighted to take full responsibility for them. We should be at the villa, watching old movies. I could massage your back and show you how much I love you. I shouldn’t have brought you tonight—”

“Because you’re ashamed of me. Ashamed to be seen with a cow in a tent while everyone else—”

“Kerri, for God’s sake, stop this. You’re not a cow.” He laughed suddenly at the ridiculous comparison to her graceful body, and at the sound, she raised her eyes to focus on his, to launch another round of vitriolic bitterness, but the look of tenderness on the spare planes of his face arrested the impulse. “You are so beautiful it’s all I can do not to make love to you in public,” he whispered. “All night I’ve wanted to run my hands over you, to touch our son. To hold your breasts. So full. God, so sensitive...”

He stopped, the impact of those memories blocking his throat. He couldn’t believe she didn’t know how he felt. How could she not know after all this time?

“Why don’t you know how I feel?” he asked, pain darkening the timbre of his voice. “I don’t know what else to do. Nothing I do or say seems to be enough. Tell me what you want from me, Kerri. What do I have to do to convince you?”

For the first time she heard despair in the voice that always before had been gently patient, tenderly amused at her tantrums, loving, caressing. With her fears, she was destroying what they had, and she knew it.

She looked up to reassure him, to tell him how much she loved him, adored him, thought she couldn’t live if she lost him.

Perhaps the answering tenderness in her eyes made him think that it was over, a display of fireworks like all the other scenes, bright and intense, but fleeting when confronted with his concern. Perhaps he regretted letting her see what these emotional outbursts did to his control. Whatever the impulse that produced his next words, it was a mistake.

“And a tent?” he repeated, smiling at her. “Believe me, my darling, if that’s a tent, it is the most beautiful, and probably the most expensive, one in the world. Not that it wasn’t worth every franc. You look—”

“You bastard,” she hissed at him, suddenly and unreasonably furious again. “You told me to buy something special for tonight. I didn’t want to come. They all hate me, and it doesn’t matter what I put on. I’m still going to look like a cow. And then you tell me I’m too extravagant.”

“I don’t give a damn what the dress cost. I don’t care what you spend, and you know it.”

She could hear anger beginning to thread through the rich darkness of his voice, the accent thickening as it did when he became emotional. As it always did when he made love to her.

“This is insane,” he said, bitterly. “Everything I say you pounce on. You wait for me to say something you can use against me. There’s no way I can win,” he finished, turning away from her to look out the windshield.

“And God knows you have to win,” she mocked, another familiar battleground. “God knows your whole damn life revolves around winning. All the little games. You have to be the best. You always have to win. Well, you certainly won the prize this time. And you’re stuck with it. Is that what’s wrong? You’ve begun regretting this particular trophy, haven’t you?”

“Only at times like these,” he said quietly, a contrast to her fury, and he didn’t look at her.

It was what she had dreaded. And expected. Finally he’d said it. She didn’t acknowledge how long it had taken her to goad him into it. Another self-fulfilling prophecy.

She slewed the Mercedes out of the parking place, leaving a trail of smoking black, and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The car fishtailed in response, and as she corrected the movement, she felt him reach across to find and buckle her seat belt. It took him several attempts, but he was successful, despite her fist beating ineffectually against his hands.

He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He trusted her driving. He had taught her how to drive on these mountain roads himself. Repeating the lesson, instructing, demanding, until he was sure enough of her competence to present her with the car that was now speeding toward the first series of hairpin turns that led away from the palace terraces.

She touched the brake, anticipating, as he had instructed her. She felt the difference in the response, the sponginess of the pedal, but then the car was into the curve, and she concentrated on guiding it smoothly through the series of switchbacks. As soon as she reached a relatively straight stretch of road, she touched the brake again, more strongly this time, recognizing that the speed of the car was approaching a level beyond her competence.

He would have been able to handle the rocketing vehicle, smoothly and nonchalantly, she thought bitterly. Nothing ever challenged his sure control, his hard certainty. She had never seen him at a loss. Years of privilege, blue blood and too much money insulated him from the fears people like herself faced every day.

In the midst of that familiar litany came the realization that the brake was having no effect on the downward plunge of the Mercedes. There had been no perceptible slowing in spite of the fact that she was practically standing on the pedal.

“Julien,” she said, and the panic in her voice made him open his eyes, pulled him from the contemplation of how he had mishandled tonight, from the regret he felt over the pain he had caused her.

“Julien!” This time she screamed, begging for his competence against the rush of the wind, and as her eyes sought his face, she lost control of the car. The right front tire touched off the pavement and the steering wheel jerked from her hands. It spiraled against the frantic reach of his fingers, but by then it was too late.

The Mercedes plunged off the sheer drop of the curve and almost to the bend below, its downward hurtle stopped only as it caught between two of the trees that lined the twisting mountain roads. Caught and held. She was strapped inside by the seat belt that he had fastened only moments before, but the wrenching deceleration threw him from the convertible to the road below.

* * *

HE NEVER KNEW how long he was unconscious. He awoke to the smell of gasoline and absolute silence. He wiped ineffectually at the blood obscuring his vision, and then his only thought was to find her.

The brutal journey was agonizing in the darkness. He was never sure that he was crawling in the right direction, guided only by the smell and then by the soft crackling that he had thought at first was the metal of the car expanding against the forces that had left it a twisted ruin.

It was not until he was close enough to feel the heat that he knew he was wrong. What he had heard was the fire that had begun to lick around the shattered Mercedes.

He had been calling her name for a long time, willing her to answer him. Finally his long fingers found the handle of the door, and he used it and his desperation to pull himself up in spite of his shattered leg. As he reached for the seat, hands groping to find her in the pitiless blackness, the explosion rocked the night, throwing him to lie once more against the gravel of the road below.

This time he didn’t awaken even as careful hands loaded him into the ambulance. It would be a very long time before he was again aware of anything at all.