“I think I went a little mad when I met you. You were … someone very special. You were at a crossroads in your life, suspended between woman and child. I don’t know, maybe if I’d had sisters and watched them grow, you wouldn’t have affected me quite so strongly. I think that was a part of it, watching you turn into a woman before my eyes. And you were—forgive me—starved for affection.”
Kyle nodded slowly, unable to take her eyes off a face that had grown worn and haggard these last hours but was still incredibly beautiful and no longer a mask. And with all he must be feeling himself, he still thought of her feelings. She swallowed hard. “I guess I was.”
“Me too.” He smiled just a little, but then the smile died and there was something bleak in his vivid eyes. “I was nine years older than you; I’d been a cop for five years. And when you work undercover, you—there’s a danger of losing yourself. But I forgot all that when you were with me. You were so untouched. So damned innocent of cruelty. You were just waking up to life. There were no shadows in you, no nightmares in your memories. You jumped on every bandwagon that passed, just for the joy of the ride.”
“And you believed selling heroin was another bandwagon.” She hadn’t meant to say it, realizing only then that there was a wound because he hadn’t trusted her enough.
“No.” His response seemed to come from deep inside him, where there was no question. But then he shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s haunted me because I could never be sure. I had never faced you with it.”
“And now? Looking back?” She gazed at him steadily. “Why did you do it, Luc? Because you thought you loved me?”
“Because I knew you loved me. Or loved what you thought I was.” His voice was low, tentative, as if it were a recent discovery. He looked down at the cooling coffee in his cup. “You looked at me like I was a god, Kyle, did you know that? Like I’d just stepped down off Olympus. And that’s heady stuff. Seductive stuff. I’d spent months at a time rubbing elbows with the scum of the earth, and sometimes all that dirt weighed me down. But I had to be worth something, because Kyle looked at me like that.
“But I knew I had feet of clay.” He looked at her then, with a crooked smile and a sheen in his eyes. “And I think I was less afraid of being disappointed in you than of having you be disillusioned by me. You thought I was special, and I didn’t want to have to tell you I wasn’t. That I was just a cop trying to do a dirty job. That I was watching you and following you to do that dirty job.”
Kyle stared at him. “So it didn’t matter whether I’d done what you suspected? It just mattered that I not find out you weren’t what I thought you were?” She felt bewildered, felt somehow hurt and … cheated. “Luc, girls grow up. And they find out that men aren’t gods. Even the ones they think they love.”
“I know.” He half closed his eyes. “Kyle, I can’t give you a clear list of reasons why I did what I did. It was a jumble then. And now. I was feeling too much to sort one thing from another. And since then I’ve felt a lot of bitterness because I turned my back on my responsibilities and walked away from my job.”
“And me? What did you feel about turning your back on me, Luc? How did you feel leaving my room and knowing I’d wake up alone, my one-night lover vanished without a word? Did you even consider just how brutally I found out about gods with feet of clay?”
He almost flinched from the sudden bitterness in her voice. “Yesterday,” he murmured, “I felt frustrated because I didn’t know what you were thinking or feeling.”
Kyle tried to reclaim her surface calm but found it gone, out of reach. “Yesterday I didn’t know what I was thinking or feeling,” she said tightly. “And this morning I felt shattered because I thought you’d sold your pride, or your honor, or something, to protect me. And now I’m just plain mad, because what you did was for all the wrong reasons!”
Lucas was gazing at her with an odd, searching look, and he made a rough sound that might have been a laugh. “When did I stop being godlike, Kyle? Ten years ago when you woke up alone? Or ten minutes ago when I admitted I made some human mistakes? What hurts worse—that I left without a word or that I left for purely selfish reasons?”
She felt a shock that was almost physical, a painful jolt that knocked anger and disillusionment completely aside. “No. I—”
“I suppose we all do that,” he said quietly. “Rationalize to protect our self-images. Ten years ago I told myself I was protecting you, I was doing something noble, when all the time what I was trying to protect was your very attractive image of myself. I couldn’t tell you who I was without shattering that image. So I walked away. And what did I leave you with? Your own rationalizing.”
It was true and she knew it. And because he was being so painfully honest, she could be no less.
“It was a mystery,” she said slowly. “No record of you at the university. No one who knew where you’d gone. A mystery. Strange. And I built on it. I told myself over and over that you wouldn’t have left without a word unless you had a strong reason. I imagined wild things.”
He didn’t ask her to elaborate, saying, “And this morning you suddenly had a reason. I left to protect you, sacrificing—what was it you said?—my honor or my soul in the process? I wasn’t the only one who painted myself noble.”
Kyle nodded, surprisingly unembarrassed, but said after a moment, “I think you did sacrifice something, though.”
“I did,” he agreed immediately, wryly. “I sacrificed whatever may have evolved between us. And perhaps I gave up a part of my—oh, honor, for want of a better word. I turned my back on the responsibilities of my job. But it felt like an even trade then. That part of me for your image of me.”
She felt as if she were looking at him for the first time, a stranger met while rounding a sudden corner. “We never knew each other at all, did we?” she asked wonderingly. “You knew a kid trying too hard to be a woman, and I knew an image in my mind.”
He smiled another twisted smile. “It’s taken me these ten years to see myself clearly,” he said. “And the last of that noble image shattered when you told me I left for nothing. What about you?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m just beginning to see myself.” She was silent for a moment and then, jerkily, she asked, “Did you plan that last night?”
“No.” Then he swore softly. “I don’t know. I knew you were untouched: That’s an old-fashioned word, but it fit you. Maybe I wanted that. You said it yourself. Girls become women and find out that men aren’t gods. I think I wanted to make love to you before you found out.”
Slowly, quietly, the last lingering remnants of that godlike image faded away. He had fallen off the pedestal she had put him on all those years ago, and she didn’t know what he was now. And Lucas seemed to read her mind—or the expression on her face.
“I’m just a man, Kyle,” he said quietly. “I’ve made more mistakes in my life than I like to think about, but I hope I’ve learned from most of them. What I did to you was cruel, and if I could go back and change it, I would. But I can’t.”
Kyle stared into the fire, feeling cold and painfully aware of a tearing grief. He hadn’t been real. She had given herself, everything she was, to a man she had made up in her own mind. And ten years couldn’t soften that blow. Ten years had made it worse, because that image had lived in her mind so long, it had seemed even more real. And now he’d torn it out by the roots, and the bare spot hurt terribly.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“It doesn’t help,” she snapped.
“I know.”
She looked at him then with burning eyes. “You should have stayed away.”
“So you could go on loving a god?” he asked bleakly.
“It didn’t hurt, not like this. At least there was no one to tell me that you weren’t real.”
Lucas shook his head. “But I was real, dammit. I am real. Kyle, I needed that image of yours then, because there was so much dirt in my life and I was tired of it. Call me a
bastard, a heel—anything you want. I deserve it. But I didn’t deliberately set out to hurt you. I never wanted that.”
He looked at her with restless eyes. “Sometimes through the years I wanted to see you so badly, I ached. I looked for your name in the magazines and newspapers, and some of the things you were doing scared the hell out of me.” He hesitated, then said, “There was never any hint of a man in your life, though.”
She knew what he was asking, and her smile was bitter. “What man could live up to the memory of a god?”
“Kyle—”
“I know. You’re sorry.”
His smile was bitter too. “You forgave me for leaving you, Kyle. Ten years ago. You just can’t forgive me now for being human.”
He rose and carried his cold coffee to the kitchen, then returned to gaze down at her with no expression. “I’ll tell Hagen we’ll have to find another way into Rome’s house.”
Kyle had forgotten about that. She looked up at Lucas and felt a sudden, searing anger. “Just like that? So for a second time you’re going to waltz through my life, drop a couple of bombshells, and then simply leave?”
“What the hell do you want me to do?” he demanded, sliding his hands into the pockets of his jeans, his face tightening. “We’re strangers, Kyle. And once upon a time this stranger hurt you. What do you want, atonement? There’s nothing I can do to change what happened. I can’t even try, because you won’t forgive me for being human.”
Kyle automatically set her cup aside and stood up, facing him. And she didn’t know what she would say until the words emerged. “I want to know what I missed, Luc. I’m a woman now, and we both know I don’t believe men are gods anymore. I think I deserve to know who really walked away from me ten years ago.”
Lucas gazed at the lovely face that wasn’t serene anymore; ten years hadn’t aged or changed her surface tranquillity, but the shattering of illusions had. She looked older than yesterday, the new maturity making her more beautiful than ever. And he had a sudden premonition that this time it would be he who would be left hurting and alone.
“So, I don’t walk out that door?” he asked steadily enough.
“I don’t know. Do you? It’s two weeks until Martin’s little weekend party. Is that long enough for two strangers to get to know each other?”
“What have you got in mind?” He was trying not to remember a slender body flaming with awakened passion. Trying not to remember how badly he had hurt himself by leaving her and how long he had hurt. She probably wouldn’t believe him. Probably wouldn’t believe he still woke sometimes reaching out for her.
Kyle shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I want … I want time to heal. I trusted you then, and I haven’t trusted anyone since. No other man could ever measure up to what I thought you were. Even though part of me kept you on your pedestal, another part of me never wanted to be hurt like that again. So I just stopped feeling. I want to feel again, Luc.”
His smile was forced, stiff. “Hate me. That’s feeling.”
“I don’t want to hate you.” She looked at him searchingly, wondering what she did want.
He wondered too. “Then what? Just two nice grown-up, adult people on a two-week date? To see if we click?”
“Maybe we would,” she said soberly.
Lucas walked over to the window because he had to move, had to stop looking at her. He looked outside instead. “And if we did?”
She didn’t know. Did she want to take such a risk? A god, with all his thunderbolts, couldn’t hurt a girl the way a man could hurt a woman. Kyle felt confused, afraid. “I don’t know,” she said finally, almost inaudibly. “Do you?” She watched his shoulders square, as if he were bracing against something.
“I left you once,” he said, very low. “Tell me to go and I’ll leave you now. Later I may not be able to leave you, Kyle.”
“Why not?” She was suddenly tense, aware that a great deal depended on his answer.
He turned to face her, leaning back against the window frame. He looked as drained as she felt. “If I stay, we’ll very probably end up being lovers. I hope you know it.”
She hesitated, then nodded slowly. A day for honesty, indeed. “I know. It’s possible.”
“Are you willing for it to happen?” His voice was terse, controlled.
Kyle met his gaze steadily. “You wanted to make love to a girl who didn’t know the difference between men and gods; maybe I want the possibility of making love to a man knowing the difference.”
“You may not want the man I am.”
“I want to find out if I do.”
“While I wait patiently?”
“While you find out if you want a woman who’s no longer a girl, Luc. I’m not her anymore. You may not want me now.”
“I do.”
She blinked, felt a sudden heat course through her body. “You do?”
On a sigh he said, “Kyle, I never stopped wanting you.”
Dropping bombshells, she thought. He was good at that. “How can you know? You don’t know me.”
“It doesn’t matter. I knew how I felt yesterday when I watched you soaring around out there hanging under that glider. I was scared to death you’d fall. Just like I’ve been scared all these years every time I saw a picture of you or read an article about you. Scared you’d wreck the damned race car, or get hurt or killed jumping out of a plane or climbing a mountain.”
Kyle realized then that her arms were crossed over her breasts, that she had been trying unconsciously to hold him off, close him out, stop what he was saying. Because with her illusion of him gone, it was hard to believe what he was telling her. Hard for a woman to grasp that a girl’s dreams of a god were shallow and insignificant when compared to a man’s emotions that had lasted ten long years.
She had stored her dream in a deep freeze, but it seemed Lucas had lived with his.
Ignoring the body language that he understood fully, Lucas said softly, “And that’s why I couldn’t leave you later, Kyle. I never said good-bye to you, so I never really lost you. If we were lovers and you wanted me to go, I’d have to say good-bye, because I could never leave you the way I did before. I’d have to say good-bye and lose you completely and that’s something I just don’t think I could do.”
Kyle couldn’t seem to breathe very well and she was shaking inside. “You make it sound so important,” she whispered. “So terribly important.”
Lucas pushed himself away from the window slowly and crossed the room to stand before her. His hands slid from his pockets and lifted to hold her shoulders carefully—too carefully. “It is important,” he murmured, and bent his head until his lips touched hers.
He didn’t kiss her like a stranger. A flood of memory rushed through her mind and triggered a storm of sensations, memory of hot, possessive kisses and hands that had made her body his own, imprinting her with the very essence of himself. And her body, attuned to his as instantly as it had been so long ago, swayed toward him.
She was aware of rough flannel and hard muscles under her fingers as her hands slipped around his lean waist and moved slowly up his back. Her heart smothered her with its pounding, and strength flowed from her limbs as if something inside her, some barrier, had ruptured, given way. The slow, stark possession of his tongue ignited a curl of fire deep inside her where no fire had burned for a decade, and she barely heard the faint, hungry sound that tangled in the back of her throat.
As her body moved to be closer, his hands slipped down her back in a lingering caress that left a trail of stinging awareness. It had been like that before, she remembered dimly; he had always made her more aware of her body, her senses. He had always been able to bring her alive with no more than a look or a touch. Her body remembered.…
But the touch of his body felt slightly different, she realized. He was harder, stronger. His kisses were rougher, more demanding, his desire more direct. She was different, too, but neither of their differences changed her reaction to his passion. Her breasts were
fuller, her hips more rounded in the womanly figure gained by years, but she remembered. And all her senses, frozen for so long, recalled only too vividly sensations known but briefly.
Nothing else mattered. Not ten years, or old and new hurts, or illusions shattered. She didn’t know this man, but her body knew him, wanted him, and willpower was a frail thing overpowered by sheer, burning need.
Lucas tore his mouth from hers with a hoarse sound, and his hands dropped to pull her hips fiercely against his lower body. “It is important,” he said thickly. “I haven’t felt like this for ten years, Kyle. And I’ve learned too much since then to throw it away without a hell of a fight.”
THREE
KYLE TRIED TO get hold of herself, but it was difficult when she was so aware of his arousal and her own. She wanted to back away, put some distance between them, but her body refused to allow that escape. So she rested her forehead against his shoulder and tried to think. She was so tired and drained, and she wanted him so badly.
But then she thought of everything that had happened between them, and strength returned. There was a slow, grim anger inside her, a resentment at how he had cheated her, how she had cheated herself. She backed away from him abruptly until they stood apart, and looked at him with her chin lifted.
“I’m not a girl anymore, Luc. And I won’t fall into bed with a stranger this time.”
“Kyle—”
“I mean it! Because it isn’t that easy. Being lovers isn’t an automatic step for us; it may never happen.”
“It’ll happen,” he said roughly. “Don’t try to tell me I imagined your response, Kyle. I’m the one who stopped, not you. We wouldn’t have made it to the bedroom!”
Her voice emerged soft and firm, and there was more emotion in that quietness than Lucas would have thought possible.
“I gave you everything ten years ago. No matter what I thought you were, I gave you everything I was. And you gave me nothing, Luc. Not even honesty. I won’t let that happen again. I want to find out who you are, and who you were, and then I’ll decide if I want you to have who I am.”