Evie woke in the still, dark silence before dawn. The moon had long since set, and even the stars seemed to have given up their twinkling efforts. The darkness that pressed against the patio doors was more complete than at any other time of night, in the last moments before being dispelled by the first graying that heralded the approach of the sun. She was still sleepy, exhausted by the tumultuous night in Robert’s arms. It was as if her body was no longer hers, the way he called forth and controlled her responses. He had seduced her past caring about fear, about pain, so that her body arched eagerly into his possessive thrusts.
Robert lay beside her, his breathing slow and deep. One arm was curled under her head, the other lay heavily across her waist. His heat enveloped her, welcome in the cool night. The strangeness of his presence beside her made her breath catch.
She didn’t want to think about the night that had just passed, or the things that had happened between them. She was too tired, too off balance, to handle the riot of impressions and thoughts that whirled in her brain, but she was also too tired to fend them off. She gave up the effort and instead tried to make sense of what she was feeling.
She had never thought that giving herself to the man she loved would prove so traumatic, but it had. The physical pain, oddly, was the least of it, the most understandable. She had known that, under his urbane manner, Robert had the soul of a conqueror. She had also known that he had been sexually frustrated from the time they’d met. It would have made her very uneasy if, under those circumstances, his control hadn’t wavered. She hadn’t expected such a complete collapse, but then, to be perfectly fair, he hadn’t expected everything that had happened, either.
She should have told him that she was a virgin, she knew, but the telling would have required an explanation that she simply hadn’t been able to give. Talking about Matt, reliving those brief hours of their marriage, was too painful. Her throat tightened with dread, knowing that Robert would demand that explanation soon. She had hoped—foolishly—that he wouldn’t be able to tell, that her first time would provide no more than a momentary discomfort that she could easily disguise or ignore. She felt like weeping and laughing at the same time. Had she told him, that might well have been the extent of her pain. As it was, she had paid dearly for keeping her secret, only to have it known, anyway.
The two most difficult things for her to deal with, however, were mingled grief and terror. She had known that sleeping with Robert would destroy her defenses, but she hadn’t known how panicked she would feel, or that giving herself to him would call up such poignant memories of Matt. She couldn’t distance herself from the grief; loving Matt, and losing him the way she had, had shaped her life and her soul. He had, in effect, made her into the woman she was now.
For twelve years she had been faithful to him, and his memory had wrapped around her like an invisible shield, protecting her. But now she had given herself irrevocably to another man, in both heart and body, and there was no going back. She loved Robert with an intensity that swelled in her chest and made her breath catch. For better or worse, he filled her life now. She would have to let Matt go, surrender his memory so that it became only a small, indelible part of her, rather than a bulwark between her and the world. It was like losing him twice.
“Goodbye, Matt,” she whispered in her mind to the image of the laughing, dark-haired boy she carried there. “I loved you…but I’m his now, and I love him, too, so much.” The image stilled, then nodded gravely, and she saw a smile, a blessing, move across the young face as it faded away.
She couldn’t bear it. With a low, keening sound of grief she surged out of bed, awakening Robert. He shot out a hand to catch her, but she evaded it and stood in the middle of the floor, looking wildly around the dark bedroom, her fist pressed to her mouth to stop the sobs that pressed for release.
“What’s wrong?” he asked softly, every muscle in his body tense and alert. “Come back to bed, sweetheart.”
“I—I have to go home.” She didn’t want to turn on a light, feeling unable to bear his too-discerning gaze, not now, with her emotions stripped bare. But she needed to find her clothes, get dressed…. There was a dark heap on the carpet, and she snatched it up, touch telling her that it was her dress. Oh God, her muscles protested every move she made, his lovemaking during the night echoing now in her flesh. A deep internal ache marked where he had been.
“Why?” His voice remained soft, compelling. “It’s early yet. We have time.”
Time for what? she wanted to ask, but she knew, anyway. If she got back into that bed, he would make love to her again. And again. Shaking with grief, caught in the transition between the old love and the new, she thought she would break into pieces if he touched her. She was irrevocably passing from one phase of her life into another, traumatic enough under any circumstances, but she had the sensation of leaving a secure fortress and plunging headlong into unknown danger. She needed to be alone to deal with what she was feeling, to get herself back.
“I have to go,” she repeated in a ghostly voice, tight with suppressed tears.
He got out of bed, his naked body pale in the shadowy darkness. “All right,” he said gently. “I’ll take you home.” She watched in bewilderment as he stripped the top sheet from the bed. His next movement was a blur, so swift that she couldn’t tell what he was doing until it was too late. With two quick steps he was beside her. He swathed the sheet tightly around her, then lifted her in his arms. “Later,” he added as he opened the patio doors and stepped outside with her.
The early morning was silent, as if all God’s creatures were holding their breath, waiting for first light. Not even a cricket chirped. The water lapped at the bank with only a slight rustling sound, like silk petticoats. Robert sat down in one of the deck chairs and held her cradled on his lap, the sheet protecting her from the cool, damp air.
Evie tried to hold herself tight, all emotion contained. She managed for a few minutes. Robert simply held her, not saying anything, looking out over the dark water as if he, too, were waiting for the dawn. It was his silence that defeated her; if he had talked, she could have concentrated on her replies. Faced with nothing but her own thoughts, she lost the battle.
She turned her face into his neck as hot tears ran down her cheeks and her body shook with sobs.
He didn’t try to hush her, didn’t try to talk to her, simply held her more closely to him and gave her the comfort of his body. It was, despite her chaotic emotions, a considerable comfort. The bonds of the flesh that he had forged during the night were fresh and strong, her senses so attuned to him that it was as if his breath were hers, her jerky inhalations gradually slowing and taking on the steady rhythm of his.
When she had calmed, he used a corner of the sheet to dry her face. He didn’t bother to wipe her tears from his neck.
Exhausted, empty of emotion, her eyes burning and grainy feeling, she stared out at the lake. In a tree close by, a bird gave a tentative chirp, and as if that were a signal, in the next moment hundreds of birds began singing madly, delirious with joy at the new day. In the time while she had wept, the morning had grown perceptibly lighter, the darkness fading to a dim gray that gave new mystery to details that had been hidden before. That dark hump out in the water—was that a stump, a rock or a magical sea creature that would vanish with the light?
Robert was very warm, the heat of his powerful, naked body seeping through the sheet in animal comfort. She felt the steely columns of his thighs beneath her, the solid support of his chest, the secure grasp of his arms. She rested her head against that wide, smoothly muscled shoulder and felt as if she had come home.
“I love you,” she said quietly.
Foolish of her to admit it; how many other women had told him the same thing, especially after a night in his arms? It must be nothing new to him. But what would she gain by holding it back? It would allow a pretense, when he left, that he had been nothing more than a summer affair, but she couldn’t fool herself with a sop to
her pride. Probably she couldn’t even fool him, though he would be gentleman enough to allow her the pretense.
All the same, she was glad of his self-possession. He didn’t parrot the words back to her; she would have known he was lying, and she would have hated that. Nor did he act uncomfortable or nervous. He merely gave her a searching look and asked in a level tone, “Then why the tears?”
Evie sighed and returned to staring at the water. He was due some explanation, would probably insist on one, but even though she loved him, she simply couldn’t strip her soul bare and blurt out everything. She had a deeply private core, and even if she remained Robert’s lover for years, there would be some things she wouldn’t be able to tell him, memories that brought up too much pain.
“Evie.” It wasn’t a prompt but a gentle, implacable demand.
Sadness haunted her eyes and trembled around her mouth. She was very familiar with it, had walked with it for twelve years, gone to bed with it at night, awakened with it on countless mornings. Sadness and a deep lonelines that neither friends nor family had been able to dispel had been her constant, invisible companions. But Robert wanted an answer. A man who had held a woman through such a bout of bitter weeping should at least know the reason for her tears.
“I realized,” she finally said in a low, shaking voice, “that Matt is truly gone now.”
Cradled against him as she was, she felt the way his muscled body tightened. His words, however, were still controlled. “He’s been gone for a long time.”
“Yes, he has.” Only she knew exactly how long those twelve years had been. “But until last night, I was still his wife.”
“No,” he said flatly. “You weren’t.” He put one finger under her chin and tilted it up, forcing her to look at him. It was light enough now for her to see those pale eyes glittering. “You were never his wife. You never slept with him. I hope you aren’t going to try to pretend you weren’t a virgin, because I’m not a fool, and the stain on the sheet isn’t because you’re having your period.”
Evie flinched. “No,” she whispered. God, it was eerie how he had gone straight to the secret she had kept for so long.
“You married him,” he continued relentlessly. “How is it that I’m the only man who’s ever had you?”
Sadness still darkened her eyes, but she said, “I had a June wedding,” and a wealth of grief and irony lay in those brief words.
He didn’t understand, but he lifted his dark brows, inviting her to continue.
“It’s impossible to book a church for a wedding in June unless you do it about a year in advance,” she explained. “Matt and I picked the day when we were still juniors in high school. But there’s no way to do any personal planning that far ahead of time.” Evie turned her head away from him once more, toward her private solace, the water. “It was a beautiful wedding. The weather was perfect, the decorations were perfect, the cake was perfect. Everything went off without a hitch. And my period started that morning.”
Robert was silent, still waiting. Evie swallowed, aching inside as she looked back at the innocent girl she had been. “I was so embarrassed that night, when I had to tell Matt that we couldn’t make love. We were both miserable.”
“Why didn’t you—” he began, but then stopped as he realized that two teenagers wouldn’t have the ease and experience of two adults.
“Exactly,” Evie said, as if he had put his thoughts into words. “We had never made love, obviously. Matt didn’t have any more experience than I did. What experience we had, we’d gotten together, but we’d both wanted to wait until after we were married. So there we were, two eighteen-year-olds on our wedding night, and all we could do was neck and hold hands. Matt was so miserable that we didn’t even do much of that.
“But he was basically such a cheerful person that nothing depressed him for long. He was making jokes about it the next morning, making me laugh, but we both agreed that it was something we’d never tell our kids when we got old.” Her voice wavered and faded until it was almost soundless. “He died that day.”
Gently Robert pushed a strand of hair away from her face. So she had never made love with her young husband, but for over a decade had kept herself untouched for him. With an acuteness of insight that often made people uncomfortable, he saw exactly how it had been. Traumatized by Matt’s death, she had doubly mourned the fact that they had never been able to make love and had sealed herself off from other men. If her first time couldn’t be with Matt, it would be with no one. She had existed ever since as an animated Sleeping Beauty whose body had kept on functioning while her emotions had been suspended.
Robert felt a deep, savage satisfaction. Despite that enormous barrier, he had succeeded where others hadn’t even been able to begin. Her first time had been his. She was his.
He had always despised promiscuity but hadn’t prized virginity. It had seemed to him the height of hypocrisy to demand something from a woman that he himself lacked. All of his sophisticated affairs, however, had nothing in common with the powerful, primitive sense of jealous possessiveness that had swept over him the moment he had realized that he was the only man ever to make love to Evie.
Her association with Landon Mercer, whatever it was, was certainly not romantic in any sense. Sitting there in the early dawn, with Evie cradled on his lap, Robert made a swift decision. He wouldn’t stop the investigation, wouldn’t warn her in any way, because the espionage had to be halted before it did irreparable harm to both the space station and national security. But when the net was tightened and all the traitorous little fish caught, he would step in and use his influence to shield Evie from prosecution. She wouldn’t escape punishment, but the punishment would be his, and his alone, to mete out. The simple truth was that he couldn’t bear for her to go to prison. He was astonished at himself, but there it was.
He didn’t know why she was involved in something so vile. He was a very good judge of people, and he would have sworn that honor was a cornerstone of her character. Therefore, she had to be doing it for what she considered a good reason, though he couldn’t imagine what that could be. It was possible she didn’t realize exactly what was going on; that explanation fit better than any other, and made him all the more determined to protect her. As he had told her once, he was good at taking care of his own, and last night Evie had become his in the most basic of ways.
He was fiercely glad that nature’s rhythm had interfered with her wedding night all those years ago. Poor Matt. A lot of his jealousy for the boy faded away, and a rather poignant pity took its place. Matt Shaw had died without ever tasting the perfection of his young wife’s body.
Robert remembered the moment the night before when he had removed her last garment and seen her totally naked, nothing left to his imagination any longer. To his numb surprise, his imagination had fallen short. He had seen her breasts before, but each time he had marveled at how firm and round they were, delightfully upright, the nipples small and a delectable shade of dark pink. Her body curved in to a lithe waist, then flared again to very womanly hips. Her skin, in the silver moonlight, had glowed like alabaster. Instead of being model thin, like the women he had been accustomed to, her curves had been lush and sensual. He hadn’t been able to wait but had mounted her immediately.
A gentleman would have been far more considerate of her than he had been, but he had always been wryly aware that, despite what all his acquaintances thought, he was definitely not a gentleman. He was controlled and intelligent and not a cruel man, but that wasn’t the same thing as being gentlemanly. Where Evie was concerned, though, his control went right out the window. His mouth took on a grim line as he remembered the wild rush of passion, the primitive instinct to make her his, that had blotted out all reason. Not only had he hurt her, he hadn’t used a condom. He, who had never before neglected to make certain some form of protection was used, hadn’t even given a thought to birth control.
She might be pregnant. He allowed the possibility to seep into his mind j
ust as the golden light began to seep over the ridge of mountains. To his surprise, he didn’t feel any panic or disgust at his stupidity. Rather, he felt pleased—and intrigued.
He put his hand inside the sheet, resting it on her cool, flat belly. “We may be parents. I didn’t wear a condom.”
“It’s all right.” She gave him a composed look. The tears and grief were now well under control. “I went to my doctor in Huntsville and got a prescription for birth-control pills.”
He felt a not altogether pleasant jolt. He should have been relieved, but instead he was strangely disappointed. Common sense prevailed however. “When?”
“Not long after meeting you,” she said wryly.
Robert almost snorted at the amount of work he’d had his people doing, trying to find out what she had been doing, whom she had seen, that day in Huntsville. He would pull them off that particular job now, but he would be damned if he’d tell them what she had been doing.
He lifted his eyebrows at her, a sardonic look on his face. “I distinctly remember you saying that you didn’t intend to sleep with me.”
“I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean I’d leave something that important to chance, because you were determined, and I wasn’t entirely sure of my willpower.”
“Your willpower would have been fine,” he said, “if you hadn’t wanted me, too.”
“I know,” she admitted softly.
Dawn was well and truly upon them now, golden light spilling across the water. The roar of outboard motors broke the serene hush of the morning, and soon the river would be crowded with fishermen and pleasure boaters. Though Evie’s position on his lap would keep anyone from seeing he was naked, Robert thought it best not to chance shocking the locals. After all, she ran a business here, and she might be recognized. He stood up easily, still cradling her securely in his arms, and carried her back through the open patio doors.