Blue Willow

  The doors were locked. She beat on them with both fists and yelled for Artemas to let her in. She wanted to scream that he couldn’t buy back the past.

  Deep inside the house came the quick, soft thud of feet on stone. The doors cracked, shuddered. One swung inward abruptly. Artemas stood with his feet braced apart, centered with overwhelming physical command before the vast height of a great, empty entrance hall. He was dressed in soft brown trousers and a loose shirt, with the sleeves rolled up. His large, intense eyes were astonished and somber, raking her with intentions that seemed anxious, welcoming—or victorious. As he judged the look on her face, he arched a brow and asked, “Jehovah’s Witnesses? Avon calling? Taking donations for the Daughters of Nazi Stormtroopers?”

  His careless dismissal broke the dam. Lily flung herself at him, grasping the front of his open-collared shirt, jerking at it, slamming into his chest so forcefully that he staggered back several steps as he grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “You bought that damned teapot back,” she yelled. “You couldn’t keep from interfering in one of the few free choices I had left, could you?”

  “You had no right to sell it,” he answered, his voice brutal. “That silly teapot represents something important to both of us, something I won’t allow you to forget.”

  “You won’t allow me?” She kicked him in one knee, and his leg buckled. They went down in a heap on the cold stone floor.

  He cursed and forced her hands into balls inside the hard grip of his own, then wrestled her furiously contorting body as she drew up her knees and jabbed the heels of her thick leather shoes into his thighs. His sharply inhaled breaths conveyed pain and shock, and with a sudden growl of fury, he rolled away and wound one hand into her tangled hair. He got to his knees and held her at arm’s length, while she tore at his hand and tried to writhe upright. He pinned her head to the floor. She couldn’t see him. His ragged breaths came between muttered obscenities and warnings that finally trailed off into “Crazy … absolutely certifiable … I’ve never … God!”

  She made a keening sound and dug what was left of her work-torn fingernails into his wrist. “If I have to be a bitch to make you leave me alone, I can do it!”

  “Thank God for one thing,” he said with another deep breath. “You’re fighting like the woman I remember.”

  She wrung her head and struggled against the fistful of hair, the side of her face mashed painfully into the rough stone floor. “You want everything to be the way you remember it! But that means pretending Richard never existed!”

  “I wish to God he never had. My sister would be alive, and there’d be no guilt and duty to keep you and me away from each other.” He let go of her. She bolted upright and crouched, heaving, her hands clenched on her knees. They felt raw against the hard floor, even through her jeans, and her head ached at the crown. Through a haze of rage and frustration she saw Artemas kneeling in front of her with undaunted anger on his face.

  Lily shook her head fiercely. “Julia is dead because she bullied and threatened people unmercifully.” She curled a hand to her chest. Misery hunching her over, she cried, “You think you can coax me into forgetting that. You’ll always protect your family, even if it hurts me!”

  He caught her by the shoulders and made a bitter sound deep in his throat. “If I felt that way, I would have turned my back on you from the moment I knew Richard was incriminated. Every time I try to help you, I risk losing my family’s respect. But that doesn’t stop me from trying. Dammit, Lily, you have to believe that.”

  She pushed herself to her feet. “When I was nineteen, I wanted to believe you loved me more than anyone or anything else in your life. I learned a hard lesson then. I’ve never forgotten it.”

  She whirled around and started out the door, her legs shaking. Behind her was the sound of swift movement, then his footsteps on the stone. “We need to have one helluva long talk about my motives and your attitude,” he said softly. A hand latched onto the back of her shirt.

  Lily yelled and twisted, but by then he’d already enveloped her with his other arm. He pinned her arms to her waist and lifted her off the floor. Her back and hips were crushed against his torso. “Come and see the house,” he said, his voice tight with exertion. “You always wanted to see it.”

  He half carried, half dragged her through the dim, cavernous hall. It opened on one side to a court with a small fountain in the center, on the other to a grand marble staircase, and flowed through a wide arch into a huge main-floor gallery—stark, empty except for a baby-grand piano near rows of towering glass Palladian-style doors that opened onto the loggia. The walls were stripped of paper, the enormous wooden floor unstained. But the bare, stately house was magnificent, and the gallery simmered with late-afternoon light that poured through the doors.

  Lily’s dazed attention focused on the piano. The blue-and-white teapot sat there. She struggled until they were both panting. He wound a hand into her hair and held her still. She felt his heart hammering against her back. “I’ve dreamed of taking you on a more genteel tour, but this is the best we can do.” He pushed her against the piano. “Pick it up,” he ordered, shoving her toward the teapot.

  “I’m beginning to feel I should wear it around my neck on a chain. Like a porcelain albatross.”

  He flattened her against the keyboard. A discordant crunch of sound echoed through the room. “Pick up the damned teapot with one of your claws,” he repeated. “Or by God we’ll stand here until the F-sharp goes flat.”

  He had her pinned just above the elbows. Lily maneuuvered one hand up and finally managed to grasp the delicate little vessel by the handle. Bending his head beside hers, he said grimly, “We’re going to sit on the loggia with our albatross and enjoy the sunset.”

  His arm still around her, they stumbled out a pair of the open doors to the windswept loggia into the long, soft rays of the sun, which hung just above the distant mountains. “Sit,” he ordered, when they reached the loggia’s marble steps. When she stood rigidly, her feet braced apart, he shoved one of her legs out from under her with his foot. They both sat down hard on the wide steps, her sliding down between his legs to the step just beneath his. She cradled the teapot in her lap protectively.

  His arm mashed her breasts as she tried to get up, then released her. His hand sank into her hair again. She twisted between his thighs and stared up at him.

  They traded a violent, searching, bewildered look. His face was flushed; the tiny mole beneath his right eye stood out on the tight skin. His black hair hung over his forehead in disarray, and a muscle popped in his cheek. He lowered his hand from her hair. She didn’t move.

  “Truce,” he said sharply. “Please.”

  She searched his eyes and tried to assess the heated, vital roar of blood through her body Afraid of that feeling, she turned and faced forward. The air was cool and bracing on her flushed skin. Below the loggia’s stone steps sat the trio of old fountains. The ground around them had been chewed by workers’ feet, and all that remained of the pine forest was a patch along one side of the corridor, a dark and secluded spot draped in wisteria.

  “How do you like it?” he asked, his tone grim. “It needs your attention.”

  “I don’t belong here—not as someone you hire to rebuild the gardens, and not as a guest.” Her hands curled tightly around the old teapot. She exhaled wearily, got to her feet, and hugging it against her stomach, went down the stairs, toward the fountains. He followed.

  The warm, prickling sensation in her muscles whispered that she was alive and vital, not the helpless shadow she’d felt like for so long. It was seductive and frightening to realize he was the source of that energy. She walked to the balustrade at the end of the fountains’ terrace.

  “Does restoring it mean so much to you anymore?” she asked tersely. “How can it be worth the price you’ve paid to save it?”

  “It means even more to me now than before. Maybe it’s become a symbol of my family’s survival.” He pause
d. “And yours. Because even after all that’s happened, you’re here.”

  “This place is not a sanctuary for either of us anymore.”

  “I’ll never accept that, Lily.” He gripped her shoulder and forced her attention back to him. He swept a hand toward the section of garden that hadn’t been cleared yet, where the scrub pines had been enveloped by wisteria. The fat vines were full of leaves, and they cascaded down in shady umbrellas over the matted grass. Someone had cut a narrow space under them. It was shadowy and private.

  “There was a wooden arbor there when I was a boy. I used to hide inside the wisteria when vacation ended and I had to return to New York. Of course, my grandmother or her servants knew exactly where to find me, but I never stopped hoping that I’d become invisible.” He added gruffly, “You see, if I’d been invisible, I could have stayed here forever and done exactly as I pleased.”

  “You’re still not invisible. You have responsibilities to everyone who depends on you, everyone who trusts you to do what’s best for your family and your businesses.”

  He scowled. “There has to be room for what’s best for me. And for you. That could start right now—today—if we agree to stop tearing each other apart over the past.”

  “All I want from you is respect for what I had with Richard, for the son I loved dearly, and for what I believe about Richard’s integrity. Until I have that, there’s nothing else.”

  “You have that respect from me. I don’t have to agree with your beliefs to honor them.”

  He touched her face, very slowly, his fingertips almost but not quite motionless on her cheek. “Don’t,” she begged.

  As if helpless to stop, he gave the faintest shake of his head. “I’m not asking you to forget him. I’m asking you to remember me.”

  “That’s the same thing.”

  “Lily.” His voice was the barest of whispers. “No matter what else you feel, I don’t think you can say you stopped loving me, even after you were married.”

  Grief and guilt exploded. She jerked back. The teapot slipped from her hands. With the awful, stunning sound of something delicate and irreplaceable meeting harsh stone, it fell against the balustrade and broke into pieces.

  The horror in her sharp gasp was echoed in Artemas’s low sound of distress. They stared at the ruins in shared misery. Lily dropped to her knees. Picking up a shard of porcelain, she closed her hand around it and bowed her head. “I didn’t mean to. I swear.”

  He knelt close beside her and carefully pried open her hand. A tiny smear of blood marked where she’d pressed a sharp point into her palm. He took the piece into his hand and studied it with an anguished gaze. She cried out softly as he gripped it. When he opened his fingers, his palm bore a similar dab of red. Dropping the shard, he clasped her hand, melding their blood together.

  Lily murmured his name with violent despair. He pulled her to him and ground his mouth on hers. Hard and wild, they fed on the provocation, his heat exploding into hers. She felt everything, every warning and alarm, screaming that she’d gone too far and couldn’t go back. Didn’t want to go back.

  We can’t It won’t change anything, she tried to say, but the words came out in a ragged moan.

  He picked her up and carried her to the dark tunnel of wisteria. Under it, hidden from all view, they turned to each other with ferocious hands. He pierced her mouth with his tongue, and she was enveloped in the deep, searing heat of a blindness she’d known only with him. She clung to it, to him, twisting her mouth on his, recklessly acknowledging that he could give her something no one else could.

  Suddenly she was an animal that had to have him, and he was taking her wildness with stunning precision, his hands in rough sync with hers, his eyes burning with blind need as she pulled him to the ground. He dragged her jeans and cotton underwear down and jerked them off over one of her clumsy boots, while she sank her hands into his thick hair. They were both making guttural, furious, sexual sounds.

  Lily dived forward and lightly sank her teeth into the swath of chest exposed by his open shirt, gripping the hard flesh over one of his nipples, then just as quickly putting her teeth to his stomach. He shuddered and jerked her to him, but she shoved him away, then latched her hands into his trousers. She tugged frantically as they caught on his soft leather shoes. The rip of the trouser hems brought a victorious sound from her throat.

  But he grabbed her hands as she reached for the thick, greedy flesh jutting between his thighs. He pushed her onto her back, then raked his teeth and lips over her stomach and down to her sex, plunging his tongue between her spread legs. She writhed and arched her back. The scent of musky sex and wisteria joined in her brain. When she moaned helplessly, he slid upward, slower now, no endearments necessary, the feeling of being both lost and discovered simultaneously holding her as tightly as his hands.

  In the next second he shoved her shirt and bra up and took her breasts with rough, scalding tenderness. She scooped her hands between their bodies and brutally massaged the fettered muscle and coarse hair of his chest and belly. He covered her breasts with hard, sucking kisses, wild in his possession, a possession that erased everything but the masculine incense of his sweat and the heavy weight of him, the complete and primal love she felt.

  We can’t It won’t change anything, she tried to say, but the words came out in a ragged moan.

  He slid his arms under her bare back and down to her buttocks, lifted them to his belly and thighs, tested her with a quick, expert hand high up between her legs, and when she cried out with pleasure, her head thrown back and eyes shut, he buried his head beside hers and arched into her with a swift, hard stroke.

  She was already writhing under him and raising her hips convulsively. He came down on her with a gentleness she hadn’t expected, and tears burned her eyes. Lily wrapped her arms around him and shuddered with waves of sorrow and release. He met her in one last frantic, bowing arch of his body, his lips twisting against her cheek, his hands pulling her upward into the deep penetration, then holding her there, as they struggled together. It was done. Completed. Lost.

  There was no peaceful relaxing after the fierce physical need faded. Frozen, they clung to each other harshly, her legs locked around him, his knees half under her, keeping her hips pillowed on his thighs. His arms still circled her so that only her shoulders touched the ground. His heart hammered against her breasts. She drew ragged breaths with the soft, damp texture of his hair against her mouth. Minutes of stark, fragile silence passed. Neither of them wanted to break the spell.

  Guilt without shame. Love without pleasure. They merged as intimately as her body had joined with his. Slowly he drew his head up. The conflicting emotions had been waiting beneath it all, as inescapable as the warm fluid between her thighs, the tender but uncompromising look of triumph on his face. Victory. There was nothing brutal or careless about his expression, but the conquest, no matter how well-meaning, was there.

  Lily turned her head to one side and shut her eyes. Shut him out. A different brand of tension infused the stillness in his body.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “We’ve only made the problems worse.”

  Pulling away, he lay on his side next to her, but when she started to move, he held her against his body. Lily twisted to lie with her back to him, quivering. Finally she realized he was guiding her shirt together over her breasts. “Lets go inside,” he said gruffly. His voice seemed hollow, frantic. “Let’s try to make sense of this.”

  “I have to go home,” she said desperately, sitting up. Artemas moved with her, closing a hand around her arm. “You are home.”

  Tears that had not been possible before now slid down her cheeks. She hunched over her bare legs and pulled her clothes to her. His semen, warm and smooth and pungent, covered her inner thighs.

  “You are home,” he repeated.

  Lily twisted toward him. His open shirt made him as vulnerable and exposed as she. The urge to communicate her torment and gratitude made her rea
ch out, brushing the backs of her fingers down his chest; then she quickly withdrew her hand and looked away.

  His face mirrored her anguish, but she knew they couldn’t go any further. He lifted a hand to stroke her hair, but she froze, and he dropped his hand to his side. He looked at her grimly but said nothing. Her nerves jerked. Shivering, she dressed hurriedly, trying not to look at him as he dressed also. They rose at the same time and bumped into each other. “We’re not exactly graceful romantics,” she said in a lame attempt to sound casual.

  He snatched her into his arms. His face was etched in deep lines of anger and sadness. “It’s only a matter of time. I’m not willing to sacrifice my happiness anymore. Or yours.”

  “Maybe we had our only chance years ago, and we lost it.”

  “You mean I threw it away. You’ve never forgiven me for that.”

  She knotted her hands in his shirt. “You made your choice then. And you didn’t choose me.”

  “There was so much about that I couldn’t control. I know you don’t understand why, but I’ll never be trapped like that again.”

  “You’re trapped now. Between your family and me. Between what you believe about Richard and what I believe about Julia. And if you have to choose again, I’ll lose this time too.”

  “No. Stay with me. Fight for us. Give us that chance, and there won’t be anything we can’t overcome.”

  “I don’t have that faith anymore. I don’t have that strength. I don’t know if I could survive losing anyone else I—” Lily hesitated, choking.

  “Love,” he finished for her. “Anyone you love. Can you say that, at least, that you love me?”

  Lily flinched. I can’t do that to Richard. “I loved you when I was eighteen. I love what I remember about you. But in so many ways, you’re a stranger now.”