Wild Lady Part 23

But once she had gone Mac stabbed at the dead ashes of the fire, taking his frustration out on the inanimate embers.

Why? She kept asking him why he was bothering with her. Now he was asking himself why he had fallen in love with her. He couldn't come up with an answer to either question that made any sense. Why would he put himself out for a woman he had actively disliked before he had ever set eyes on her? It wasn't as if she had made any effort to change his opinion. On the contrary she had gone out of her way to reinforce it, flirtatious one minute, downright rude the next, eagerly courting the media even while she purported to despise it. Yet all the time, underlying so much worldly cynicism, there was a little girl lost fragility that made him want to wrap her in cotton wool. He was sure it wasn't part of the act. The Claudia Beaumont performance.

For a while she had fooled him and it had made him angry with himself for wanting her so much. Angry with her for being so desirable. She was a man-eater. But a beautiful man-eater and honesty forced him to admit that he was a willing victim. When she had kissed him for the cameras he had thought he would explode. Yet when she had kissed him this evening if had been different. She had been different.

He poked at the fire again as he relived that moment when she had fallen apart. She hadn't cried. Not then. Wouldn't an actress have cried? Just a little, nothing too messy. But she'd fought tears and when later she had finally succ.u.mbed there had been nothing controlled or pretty about them. They had been real enough.

So, was the glamorous image something she put on for public consumption, little more than a disguise to hide behind?

Love was clouding his judgment and he shied away from answering himself, knowing that he wanted it to be the truth, knowing how easy it would be to fool himself into believing that she returned his feelings. He dragged his fingers through his hair, shutting his eyes tightly for a moment to blot out the moment when he had held her, when she had raised her lips and kissed him with an almost childlike innocence. He needed to concentrate, although how he was supposed to do that when he could hear the springs squeak as she climbed into bed just a few feet above his head ... There was only so much a man could take. It was definitely time for some fresh air.

He dropped the poker, straightened, flexing his aching knee and then quietly let himself out of the back of the cottage, standing for a moment on the step.

The night was clear and the newly risen moon was bathing the scene in sufficient light to make the use of the torch unnecessary. The lake, pink in the dying light of the sun, was now a smooth sheet of steel gray. Everything was perfectly still.

The brightness drew him down towards the small dock he had helped his father build years before, drawing him out along its length over the lake to stand finally a few feet above the water. He knew he should be doing what he had encouraged Claudia to do, think. Try and work out what was happening. The plain truth was that he was finding it difficult to think about anything but her.

He rubbed his hand over his face. The fire had dried him out, leaving him feeling tight-skinned and hot. He needed was a shower, preferably a cold one; what he had was the lake. It wouldn't be the first time he had taken a night time dip and now, when his body was tormented with the kind of thoughts that seemed to burn continuously in his brain, seemed as good a time as any.

He turned to look up at Claudia's window, half hoping to see her there, but there was no flicker of candlelight from behind the dark window and he imagined her lying in the big old-fashioned bed and wondered if she was restless too. For a moment he thought he saw a movement, but it was just the curtain shifting in the light breeze, his imagination conspiring with his overcharged libido to show him what he wanted to see.

He wasn't sure whether he was relieved or sorry, but he refused to dwell on it. Instead he reached up and catching hold of the collar of his shirt, he pulled it over his head.

It was too quiet. Used to London, Claudia missed the constant, day-and-night drone of traffic to lull her to sleep. Or maybe it was her thoughts that were keeping her awake, disturbing thoughts of Mac lying in this bed, locked in his wife's arms, the little bedroom filled with the soft murmurs of their lovemaking.

As her imagination began to work overtime it provoked feelings of such self-disgust in her that she threw back the cover and flew to the window, hanging onto the sill as, eyes closed, she drew deep breaths of fresh air down into her lungs. His wife. Jenny. It was terribly wrong to be envious of a dead woman, but she wanted Gabriel so much. For just a moment, when he had held her, kissed away her tears, she had been certain that he felt the same way. She had been fooling herself. He couldn't wait to get away from her.

The click of a thumb latch being raised startled her out of the bewildering thoughts that raced through her head, thoughts she didn't want, couldn't handle, but refused to be blocked out and she swung round, hoping that she had been wrong, that Gabriel would be standing the doorway. But the door remained closed. Everything was so quiet here that each sound seemed magnified and after a moment when her confused brain sent her heart rate rocketing with a heady mixture of excitement and desire, she realized that the sound had come not from behind her, but from below.

Peering down into the overgrown garden she saw Gabriel stepping from beneath the shelter of the eaves, his tall frame bleached by the moonlight, his dark hair touched with silver as he covered the ground noiselessly, heading for the lake and out onto the landing stage.

For a moment Claudia watched him, an awful longing welling deep inside her, a longing to be down on the dock beside him, to go to him, put her arms about him and attempt to offer him some comfort for the pain buried deep within him. To offer him her love.

But she couldn't. There was a barrier between them now. His lack of trust would always be there. It wasn't as if he had come racing back to her side because he realized that he was wrong, that he had misjudged her. He had come back because something had made him uneasy. Because his conscience had p.r.i.c.ked him.

Determined to pull herself together, not to spy on him as he wrestled with memories that had kept him away from the cottage for so long, she began to back away from the window. Then he turned to look up at her window and Claudia froze. Had he seen her watching him in the darkness? For a moment she remained like a statue and hoped she was hidden by the curtains. Her hope was apparently realized because after what seemed an age he turned back to the lake. But before she could make good her resolve to beat a retreat to the bed, he had raised his hand and in one fluid movement pulled his shirt over his head, dropping it at his feet. She remained perfectly still as he kicked off the soft desert boots he wore, peeled off his socks.

Claudia's forehead wrinkled in a frown, then her hand flew to her mouth to stifle the small hungering sound that bubbled up from her throat. Her earlier shivers had had more to do with the thick walls of the cottage that kept out the August heat, more to do with fear than the ambient temperature. The breeze that brushed against her cheek, molding the fine lawn nightdress to her figure, was warm and Gabriel MacIntyre was going to swim naked in his lake.

As if to confirm her thoughts he began to unfasten the buckle at his waist. She could hear the sharp slap of the leather as he tugged the end of his belt free and she listened intently for the telltale sound of the zip. Before it reached her, he had pushed his denims over his hips, discarding them and his underwear in one smooth, economical movement. Then, as he stepped clear, she caught her breath.

It was as if he was being revealed to her by layers.

Even on that first encounter, when she had mentally dismissed him as too rough hewn for her taste, Claudia had still been toe-tinglingly aware of the promise beneath the heavy olive drab sweater and combat trousers that he had been wearing.

When, on Sunday morning, he had been dressed in well-cut casual clothes she had realized that he was more elegantly put together than first impressions had suggested. He might have shoulders like a steel girder, but he was tall, well proportioned and the toughness had seemed less obvious. And afterwards, in her dimly lit spare bedroom, when she had been offered a more telling glimpse of the hard torso, a stomach flat enough to iron on and the kind of taut b.u.t.tocks that a girl's fantasies were made of, a great deal more than her toes had tingled.

More than her toes were tingling now as he stood quite naked on the dock; hers to admire and enjoy at leisure, with every tantalizing promise more than fulfilled. He was awesome. A statue by Michaelangelo, but deliciously, gloriously alive and far more beautiful than any of the pretty actors who had escorted her to premieres and parties.

She sank to her knees in front of the window, propping her chin on her arms to marvel at the way the light muscling of his back was sculpted and accentuated by moon shadow and the deep indentation of his spine terminated in neat, firm b.u.t.tocks. Then, as he turned to drop his wrist.w.a.tch on his clothes, she had the briefest glimpse of the spattering of hair that arrowed down his flat belly to his loins, fluffing darkly...

She felt herself blushing at her shamelessness, but her gaze remained fixed to his body and when he turned back to the lake she let her glance trickle down the straight, well-shaped legs. Leg. He favored one of them. Without his clothes it was easier to see why. Even the soft moonlight could not disguise the scar that jagged viciously behind his left knee and calf where the bullet had sliced through his flesh. Before she could register the extent of the damage he had executed a simple, elegant dive, scarcely raising a ripple on the surface of the water and disappeared from sight.

Her private peepshow was over and Claudia knew she should move before he returned and saw her staring down at him.

But he stayed beneath the water for so long that she began to panic, rising to her feet in her agitation. Suppose he had knocked his head on some rubbish that had been dumped since he was last here? Or had become entangled in weeds? Then, when she thought her lungs would burst from holding her breath and much further out than she had expected, Claudia saw the pale arc of his arm as he lifted it clear of the water, swimming in a slow, deliberate crawl that ate up the distance.

For a while he was out of her sight, hidden by a reed-fringed spit of land, then without any warning he was suddenly back at the dock, hauling himself up on powerful arms, the water streaming from his moon whitened skin.

She backed slowly away from the window, wanting to stay, but knowing instinctively that if she remained there a second longer he would sense her watching him and look up. And then she knew she wanted him to look up, to come to her. She wanted him more than she could have believed possible.

It was as if her thought waves were plugged directly into his brain because quite suddenly he stopped rubbing himself dry with his T-shirt and lifted his head as if he'd heard something, instinctively looking up to her window, their eyes meeting across the unbearable distance. For a moment he remained perfectly still, then he began to run towards the cottage.

She was still at the window, looking down into the garden, when he burst through the bedroom door. "What it is? What's wrong?" he demanded.

"Nothing's wrong, Gabriel. Not now you're here," she said, quietly. She was wearing a fine lawn nightgown and the moon was shining through it so that her body was a dark silhouette as she turned to him and crossed the room on bare, silent feet. "But you told me you wouldn't leave me." She reached out her hand and took his. "You're cold. Come to bed, my love and I'll warm you."

He had been cold, but she'd just turned on the central heating.

"Claudia?" He breathed her name, wanting her to be certain, hoping that she was certain.

"I'll understand if you don't want to make love with me. I know what I look like. But I need to hold you. I need you to hold me."

She needed rea.s.surance. She needed to be loved. He understood that. He hadn't been mistaken when he had stepped away from her and sent her to bed. It wasn't him she wanted, but comfort. And G.o.d help him, she thought it would be difficult for him. At least he could disabuse her of that. He dropped the T-shirt he had been holding in front of him and she gave a gasp as she realized that he was fully aroused.

"Why are you surprised?" he asked. "Isn't that the effect you usually have on a man?"

He saw her swallow, struggle to find the words. "It's been a while."

"For me too." He lifted the hand linked in his to his mouth and kissed the palm before raising it to his cheek while his other hand found her hip and drew her closer. "But they do say it's like riding a bicycle..."

"Who says?" she murmured. "What bicycle?" Her fingertips found his mouth, the pad of her thumb stroking the inside of his lip, her mouth, her tongue following in a long, erotic kiss that turned up the burners to steam heat.

And as she kissed him, he eased up her nightdress inch by inch savoring the torturously slow discovery of her body as it came into direct contact with his. A smooth, satiny thigh and the soft fluff of down that marked her s.e.x moving slowly against the inside of his leg. Her abdomen soft and yielding against an arousal that was almost painful in its intensity. The excitingly hard tips of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against his chest as his hands, on their own journey of exploration cupped her firm, round bottom, then swooped into her waist before his fingers spread out over her back to hold her even more tightly against him. She moaned softly into his mouth, a small begging sound that made him feel like a G.o.d and then she let her head fall back so that he could pull the gown over her head.

As he dropped it, he bent to taste her skin, breathing a trail of small kisses from her neck to the shadowy valley between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Then his tongue began to circle the dark areola of her nipple and as he drew it into his mouth he felt her begin to tremble and her legs parted eagerly as his fingers touched the dewy warmth there.

"Gabriel, please," she begged, hoa.r.s.ely and he didn't need a second invitation, scooping her up onto the bed. "Now, Gabriel, now," she urged, her thighs parting to him, leaving him in no doubt as to her meaning and near to exploding with his own urgent need, he was inside her with one long thrust.

She had been ready for him, but she was tight, she had been telling the truth when she said that it had been a while and an exclamation of surprise was startled from his lips as he paused above her to wonder at it.

Claudia opened her eyes and looked up at him. "I thought you said you hadn't forgotten how to do this," she murmured, tightening her muscles around him, just in case he needed a reminder.

He caught his breath, for a moment fighting the need to simply let go and take the quick release she offered. But this wasn't about him, or his needs. This was for her, for the beautiful, vulnerable woman he had come to love in a way he had believed impossible. For a moment it was touch and go while he struggled to blank out the singing in his ears, the vision of erotic beauty Claudia made lying back on the pillow, her lips parted, her lashes thick fringes against her cheek. He had to concentrate on something incredibly dull; the formula for working out the speed of a falling object, the battles of the Hundred Years War, the temperature at which ... then, quite suddenly, he found the strength to rise above his body's clamor and the bucking need for satisfaction was restrained to a steady throbbing heat.

"What's the matter, sweetheart?" he asked, lowering his head to her breast and resuming the torment of one tight nipple with his tongue. She gasped and again the muscles tightened about him, this time involuntarily, but he was ready for it. "Are you in a hurry?"

"No," Claudia gasped, her eyes wide with startled pleasure. Then she smiled slowly. "I'm not going anywhere, take all the time you like." And as he began to move at a slow, measured pace within her, she reached up, placing both hands on his chest and began to slowly circle her palms over his chest.

His nipples tightened under her hands, grazing her palms and sending small tremors of excitement through her body as Gabriel began to slowly stoke up a deeper heat within her, murmuring soft love words, as he nuzzled at her throat, her shoulder, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And she took her pace from him, matching the even rhythm of his hips as he increased the pace and as the heat became an inferno, she began to sizzle. She clutched at his shoulders, digging in her nails as it became impossible to contain the earth-shattering momentum towards a searing, sensually devastating release that seemed to lift her, propelling her into a dizzy world of absolute pleasure that was compounded by Gabriel's shout of triumph and the warmth of his own release deep within her.

She was a long time coming down from the explosive climax of their love-making and for a while there was no sound beyond a ragged gasping for air as Gabriel cradled Claudia to him and pulled the cover over them. She felt glorious, as if she had been found after a long time lost, yet a little frightened at the intensity of her feelings. Afraid, too, of the silence that seemed to be growing between them. Afraid that he was already regretting what he had done. She didn't want him to feel trapped by guilt into some relationship which he wouldn't handle, she wanted him to know that he was free to walk away. Anytime. So she tilted her head back to look up at him. His head was thrown back against the pillow, the arm not cradling her, thrown across his face so that she could not see his expression, had no way of knowing what he was feeling.

"Gabriel?" she murmured, to capture his attention.

"Mmmm?" He didn't move.

"I'm looking forward to seeing you on a bike," she said.

He turned to look at her, his eyes blank and for just a moment she thought she had made a dreadful mistake. Then he leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the lips. "If you're good I'll let you have a ride on my cross-bar."

"I can't wait," she said, wrapping her arms about his waist, burying her head against his chest so that she could blink back the hot tears that burned at her lids.

"Tomorrow. Go to sleep."

But Claudia couldn't sleep. And neither, apparently, could Gabriel. For a while they both lay very still, then she sat up.

Gabriel fumbled in the darkness for the matches and lit the candle. "What is it?" he asked, turning to her. Claudia shook her head unable to look at him. "Are you concerned? Because I didn't use anything?" When she didn't answer, he said, "I haven't been with anyone since Jenny. You've no need to worry."

Worry? She hadn't worried, hadn't spared a thought for the consequences when she had invited him into her bed. And he had obviously thought she would be on the pill. Well, she wouldn't disabuse him. But she could put his mind at rest. "And despite what you might believe, I'm not into casual s.e.x either, Gabriel."

He propped up a pile of pillows and sat back against them, before stretching out his arm and offering her his shoulder. "I'm beginning to get the idea that your reputation as a wild lady is something dreamed up by a newspaperman on a slow day."

She settled against him. "Even newspapermen have to have something to work on, Gabriel; I had a lot of fun to catch up on when I left home. The trouble is that when you've got a famous name it doesn't need much. The smallest indiscretion..." She shrugged, tellingly.

"You must have been the gossip columnists delight."

"Well, if a girl wants fame and fortune in the theater she has to get noticed. And at eighteen I was still been young enough to take some pleasure in hurting my father." She sighed, sorry for that.

"Claudia -"

"The best part, though, the one thing that was remarked upon in the disapproving and yet slightly salacious style adopted by all the commentators, was that although I looked like my mother, I wasn't in the least bit like her in any other way." She felt Gabriel stiffen, knew she had shocked him and she tried to pull away from him. But he held her fast.

"You encouraged them, didn't you? You played up the similarity in your looks and the difference in your behavior?"

"Congratulations, Gabriel. You've just won first prize."

"Why do you hate her so much?" She resisted him, but he wouldn't let her go. "There must be a reason, Claudia." He sat up, turned her to face him. "You can tell me. I know what it's like to hate someone."

"Do you?" She turned her head to look up at him, searching his face for some clue, but finding none. "You wouldn't believe it. No one would."

"Try me." Still she hesitated and for a long moment he seemed to wrestle with something buried so deep inside him that he couldn't find to way to tell her. Then he said, "Jenny, my loving wife Jenny, was so desperate to be the world's most famous climber that she was prepared to die in the attempt. It was her life to risk and since I was risking mine on a daily basis, I could hardly stop her. Unfortunately, her ambition was so great that she killed our baby too."

And then Claudia remembered the whole sorry story. "She was pregnant ... I knew there was something..." Jenny Callendar had been at over twenty thousand feet, climbing without oxygen, when she began to miscarry and she had died before her companions could get her to medical help. "Oh, Gabriel, I'm so sorry. To lose everything at one stroke -"

"I lost a son or daughter. I don't believe I ever had Jenny. If I had, she could never have done that to me, or to our child."

"You mean she knew? They said ... the papers said ... that she hadn't realized she was pregnant."

"When I flew back from Bosnia for the funeral there was a letter from the ante-natal clinic with her first appointment."

"Here?" she asked, very quietly.

"No, Claudia. Not here." He pulled her back against him, drawing the cover over them both in a gesture that was both protective and rea.s.suring. "She wouldn't live here at any price. She had married me for an imagined fortune; having the Abbey in sight of the window just added insult to -"

"The Abbey?" Then, "Oh, I see. You're the man with the troublesome inheritance tax."

"I'm getting on top of it. But I had eighteen years of living in a drafty old house that was impossible to heat. I couldn't wait to escape and I'm certainly not going back. The management consultants are welcome to it ... at a price. Now, what was that you were saying about me not believing your story? Won't you trust me?"

So she did. As the candle guttered in the balmy breeze that stirred the curtains, she told him exactly why she hated to be compared with her mother.

"My mother had this reputation as a some kind of paragon. Not only was she a great star, but she was the perfect wife and mother. These days it would be impossible to maintain the fiction, even then it must have taken a conspiracy of silence among people who knew her, a willingness to suspend belief..."

"Some legends are too big to be challenged."

"There must be a lot of people who could make a fortune out of telling it the way it really was. Why don't they?"

"Would you like them to?"

She didn't answer for a while. "No. It would hurt Dad too much to drag it all up. He suffered enough when she was alive."

"Then maybe the conspiracy of silence is to protect him, rather than your mother," Gabriel suggested. "After all, there hasn't been anything to stop you telling it "the way it really was". Has there?"

She shook her head. Except that she wouldn't, couldn't put the nightmare down on paper for everyone to read. "It never occurred to me that people were simply being kind."

"What was it, Claudia? Drink? Drugs?"

"No, she didn't drink, she was too careful of her looks and her figure for that and she despised people who took drugs. It was just plain old s.e.x with her. She was having an affair with a married man. A politician. He drove off the road one night with her. She was terribly injured, her face was scarred..." She touched her own cheek in an unconsciously protective gesture.

"You won't be marked," Gabriel said, quickly, taking her hand away, gently kissing her blotched cheek.

"I know, Gabriel. But tonight, when I looked at myself in the mirror, I asked myself how I would react if I had to live with these marks for the rest of my life. Supposing I was really like her? Deep down?"

"And did you come up with an answer?" he prompted.

"When you've had perfection, I suppose second best is never enough." She half turned to lay her head against his chest, her arm across his waist. "At least I was never perfect."

"That's true." Then he yelped in protest as she pinched him. "I was only agreeing with you.

"It isn't compulsory."

"I'll bear that in mind. What happened to the man? Do you know who it was?"

She shook her head. "Only that he walked away without a scratch, and that he was powerful enough to ensure that the incident was hushed up."

"But surely your father didn't let him get away with that?"