Conquer the Memories (12 page)

Craig noted her other choices with amusement. One blanket, two pillows, one bowl of grapes, two clean glasses, one additional bottle of wine when they weren’t even close to finishing the first one yet, and yes, a sort of portable telescope. “We needed the grapes to look at the stars?” he questioned wryly.

She stuffed one into his mouth. “Not
specifically,
but generally, yes,” she chided him. “Every normal human being suffers constant hunger pangs when spending a day on the water. Look how much we ate for dinner.”

“We?”
Craig teased.

“Waste not, want not.” Sonia glowered darkly.

“Is
that
why you raced through nearly two steaks all on your own?”

She nodded impishly. “And you’re going to pay for this trip when we get home with a week of cottage cheese, if you can’t control my appetite better than that, Mr. Hamilton.” She turned away, to bend over and spread out the blanket on the deck.

“In that case, perhaps I’d better take control over all of your appetites, Mrs. Hamilton.”

Her fingers stilled on the blanket, and then she gave it a vigorous shake. Amazing, how quickly sensuous images could dance through her bloodstream.

She hadn’t kissed her husband in twenty-four hours now. Fourteen hundred and forty minutes. Withdrawal pangs had set in about fourteen hundred minutes ago. To the devil with sex. Affection, just
touching,
had always been part of their relationship. And her heart was regularly beating out a reminder that plans or no plans, a man in trouble needed all the affection and compassion she could give him.

Still, love and attention she had given freely. It hadn’t erased the haunted look in her husband’s eyes. Other action, drastic action, had been called for.

Fine. Well, actually that wasn’t fine at all, because keeping him at a good distance meant not only that he couldn’t touch her, but that she couldn’t touch him either.

Craig swiftly moved beside her, fixing the blanket she couldn’t seem to smooth out to save her life. He cast her a quick smile, one of his most lethal playful ones. He’d changed into canvas shorts for dinner; she’d dressed just as informally in a black maillot bathing suit with sexy holes up and down the sides. For the instant, though, she couldn’t seem to get into the role of tease. All she wanted to do was grab those sun-browned shoulders and hold that huge man so tight, so hard, so…

“Cat got your tongue?” he teased. “All this silence is so rare I can barely stand it.”

“You,”
she said disgustedly, but the feeling wouldn’t leave her so easily. He needed some good, solid loving, that man. He’d been easy and tender and
special
all day, which made yet another ball of anxiety tighten inside her. What exactly was it going to take to get him to loosen up and admit what was bothering him? It hurt, that he believed he was fooling her. “Now,” she said, all businesslike as she plumped the pillows, “we have one night, one sky full of stars and one telescope. For once in my life, I’d like to locate more than the Big Dipper.”

He slid down beside her with a chuckle. “I wasn’t aware of this terrible gap in your education.”

“I don’t admit it to everyone.” Lying on the deck, she reached over him for the wine, and poured him a glass. “We have to do something until it gets dark enough. I figured I’d play Roman slave girl to your Nero. You lie there, and I’ll feed you grapes and wine.”

Blue eyes rested on hers. A lightning storm crackled from nowhere. The sky was cloudless and there wasn’t the hint of a breeze, but somewhere between his eyes and hers there was searing tension, a crackling awareness…“You do like that idea, don’t you?” Her voice was oddly low, working to keep the teasing tone in it. “The lady at your mercy, to do with what you will?”

“I like the idea.” His palm brushed in her hair, smoothing it back. “Not of Nero, not of slave girls. But of you feeding me grapes and wine, on a boat with no one around, on a night when no one can hear us. Do you know what I’d like to do to you?”

His eyes gave her a very good idea. She searched his face. Darkness had fallen so rapidly that his eyes had a luminous quality, all the intensity of luster, all the softness of the dark waters surrounding them. He wanted to touch her; he wanted to love her; she could feel it clear to her soul. Her spine tingled with it.

But would it be the same, would he make love
to
her but not
with
her, would he give only for her pleasure?

His eyes made lush, erotic promises to her…yet his body spoke of control. Control where he was concerned.

Leaning her cheek to his palm, she pressed her lips there softly and then withdrew. She picked up a grape and raised the sweet fruit to his lips. “Enjoy, Nero,” she commanded brightly. “Your time will come. First, the stars.”

She could feel him staring at her as she busied herself with the telescope, handing him his wine again, chattering. Naturally, he was staring; she’d never behaved like such a fool in her life! Still, he let her play out her games without a word, and in time she relaxed.

Twenty minutes later, stretched flat, she had the telescope to her eye and was squinting into it as she swung it back and forth across the sky. “This is hopeless,” she complained. “I can’t even find the North Star.”

Craig tugged the telescope from her hands and pointed it at the brightest diamond above. One could hardly miss it.

She gave him a severe look for the chuckle he was barely holding back. “I
know
it’s up there. But it disappears when you put the lens to your eye.”

He sighed. “How can one extremely intelligent woman be such an occasional dunce?” he questioned the heavens.

“Oh, hush.” She put the telescope back in its box, stood up and stretched. “I knew all along I should have married Mack McPherson. Never,
never,
would he have made fun of me.”

His eyes trailed the length of her long, sleek legs in the moonlight. “
Who
is Mack McPherson?”

“Didn’t I ever mention him? You dragged everything else out of me. Without once,” she added plaintively, “revealing one interesting detail about your own past love life.”

“Mack,” he reminded her.

“Mack was the high school heartthrob,” she said with a grin. “The Mr. Cool of Cold Creek High. Basketball star, big man in school politics, the local tycoon’s son—and also my first date.” Sonia’s lashes lowered as she took a thoughtful look at her husband. He wasn’t scowling, because Craig was far too mature to give in to anything as childish as jealousy. He just looked…irritated. Definitely irritated.

While she had his attention, she slowly stood up, and receded just slightly into the shadows. When Craig glanced up at her, she peeled down first one strap of her maillot, then the other. “My first date, and he took me up to the Stone Canyon—the local lovers’ lane. He took all his dates there, which is exactly why I went out with him. He had a fifty-eight Chevy with a terrible muffler and a big backseat. I could hardly wait. Everybody else had been kissed to death, and I hadn’t the least idea what they were talking about. It was…humiliating. Mack was my big chance to get in on the action.”

She encouraged the black maillot down her long, slender legs until it fell like a little puddle on her toes. Stepping out of the shadows, she gave the suit an impish kick in Craig’s direction. The moonlight shimmered down on her bare skin like a cloak of silk. “Want to swim?” For a big man, he could certainly move fast. His canvas shorts joined hers on the deck. “What I
want,
” he growled, “is to hear what the hell happened. Keeping in mind that with
that
attitude, I’m surprised your parents didn’t keep you permanently locked up.”

He was aroused, she noted. They hadn’t even touched, and he was…definitely, vibrantly, aroused. And coming toward her.

She took a swift step to the ladder, stepped up and around the rail, and posed for a racing dive. “Heck, he kissed like a fish,” Sonia called over her shoulder. “I decided all that sex stuff was vastly overrated. Of course, when I was seventeen…” She sent one quick, teasing grin over her shoulder before diving in.

The water was cool and dark and buoyant—all delightful qualities to cool her husband off, Sonia considered. Except that his hands were cleaving through the water as if he were in the Olympics. Which would be fine, if gold medals were all he wanted to get his hands on.

And it wasn’t time. His wanting to touch her wasn’t enough.

She held her breath and went down, deep down, and switched directions. Evidently, she hadn’t gone as deep as she planned, because their toes touched once, and she heard a garbled sound ringing through the night air when she surfaced. She was hardly about to let that slow her down. She lapped around the boat once, then twice, then a third time. Craig was by far the better swimmer but lacked the basic, purely feminine deviousness to keep changing directions on a whim.

Gasping, Sonia took the last lap around the boat and reached for the ladder. Water streamed from her body as she pulled herself up, and a quick chill trembled on her bare skin in spite of the warm night air. By the time Craig heaved himself up behind her, she was swathed in floor-length white terry cloth, all chaste and prim.

“No sharks got me,” she said demurely.

“The night is young.”

Unfortunately, yes, she thought sadly. The night was young and an ideal one for lovers, and Sonia managed to keep the two of them busy gathering up the telescope and pillows and whatever. Down in the cabin there were a few other little washing-up chores from dinner. Sonia showered first, and while Craig was washing the salt water off himself, she was burrowing under the covers and forcing her eyes closed and trying to make her breathing seem even.

***

Craig clicked open the shower door and stepped out, wrapping a towel around his waist. His pulse was racing at an odd rate. It had been racing that way all day. Sonia was the cause, and when he stepped out into their stateroom, there was a glint of something dark and unfathomable in his eyes. Torture would have been easier to handle than the teasing that Sonia had handed out all day.

At first he’d been amused by her antics. Sonia had never been predictable. He loved that in her, but sometime earlier that day his humor had died. In part, he thought she’d just been playing, enjoying the high that came with their impromptu vacation. In part, he’d been so wrapped up in his own problems that he hadn’t really thought out her motivations. And in part, perhaps, after living on the ragged edge of frustration for so many weeks, he just hadn’t noticed that Sonia’s behavior was distinctly out of character.

Dropping the towel, he spotted her curled-up form on the bed. His pulse abruptly stopped racing. Sonia was totally still, except for the odd pattern of her breathing.

She wasn’t asleep, only pretending to be.

Very quietly, he turned out the light. Instead of joining her in bed, he slipped out into the salon, closing the door behind him. Collapsing in a chair with his head thrown back, he closed his eyes.

She didn’t want him to make love to her? She’d been sending him sexual S.O.S. signals all day.

It was past time he figured out what game she was playing. He felt as if he’d been kicked, hard and painfully, in the ribs. For weeks, he’d survived his own deprivation. That wasn’t the same thing at all as being deprived of his right to love her, please her, touch her. A man could survive a hell of a lot longer without food than without water. And no, he wasn’t in a desert.

His heart was just beginning to feel as if he were lost in one.

Craig woke to find himself alone in the bed, his arms curled around a pillow. He groped for his watch on the bedside table. It was barely six.
Not
a likely hour for Sonia to be up and around—barring World War III or Christmas.

Unless she was making a distinct effort to be out of touching range whenever he was around.

Again.

Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he broodingly tossed the pillow aside and dragged a hand through his hair. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the faint scream of gulls fishing for their breakfast. A brilliant sun was trying to peek through the opaque curtains of their cabin, and beneath his feet the boat undulated in peaceful sway.

None of that peace touched the almost violent determination inside his head. He’d gone to bed with the mood, he’d slept with it, and again awoke to the same powerful, indefinable feelings gnawing at him. He felt driven to the wall. But hadn’t he driven himself there?

Impatiently, he stood up and reached for his jeans. Very few minutes later, after splashing his face with cold water and raking a brush through his hair, he stalked barefoot over the thick carpet toward the salon.

He stopped abruptly when he saw Sonia with her head buried in the refrigerator, her back to him. Silently plunging his hands into his back pockets, for a while he just studied her. During the night, he’d come to several conclusions about what she was up to, which now appeared rather useless. In a single glance, he could see very quickly that her game plan had changed. For one thing, she was wearing a bra, and she certainly hadn’t done that in the past thirty-six hours.

And she’d pulled on an oversized T-shirt that denied any claim to sexiness; it was blue and wrinkled and voluminous. Beneath it, he could just see the bottoms of her white shorts when she bent over. Her hair was pulled back with a terry-cloth band, and she wasn’t wearing even a touch of makeup; her skin was clear and soft and golden, her lips their natural color.

She hadn’t spotted him yet. She was too busy noisily stirring orange juice in a pitcher with a big wooden spoon. When that was done she yawned, a huge, lazy yawn.

For the first time in days, Craig felt a natural smile form on his own lips.

A very complicated set of devils had been chasing him for weeks. For an instant, they receded, and it was as if a spring had uncoiled, a key unlocked some door. Love, at times, could be foolishly simple. And as powerful as the pulse suddenly erratically beating in his throat. Sonia
was
that power, and her feminine games had been driving him nuts. Tease and withdraw, tease and withdraw—they’d
never
played those kind of games with each other. Sonia was very subtle and had never played such immature tricks as trying to make him jealous of her former beaux. Exhibitionism. Chase. Tease.

If she thought she was actually getting away with something, she was terribly…right. Every male nerve ending would have been delighted to explode very early last night. All night long, he’d felt on the fragile edge of violence.

And this morning, if her choices of bulky T-shirt and sweatband were supposed to calm anyone-in-particular’s raging libido, they had certainly failed. Her breasts were well buried and her fanny hidden…and neither had anything to do with the essential desirability of Sonia. She was terribly mistaken if she thought they did.

“Craig? You’re up. I thought you’d sleep in this morning.” Sonia felt her heart skip a beat at the look of her husband bearing down on her like a great sleepy brown bear. Well. Not sleepy. She smiled a little uncertainly at the oddly intense expression radiating from his eyes, and then turned away. “Just sit down, you. I have a terrific breakfast planned. Melon, then ham and eggs…Won’t take more than a minute—it’s almost ready. Coffee and juice first…”

She whipped a steaming mug on the counter in front of him, then a small glass of orange juice.

“You’re up early,” he commented, as he slid onto the cushioned stool.

“The salt air,” she said breezily.

“And then, you went to sleep early last night, didn’t you?”

Such an innocuous question. Amazing that she felt instantly uneasy. “Um. Yes.” She turned quickly. The eggs were all whisked in a bowl, but she had yet to add pepper and cheese.

“You were extremely tired.”

“I certainly was,” she agreed, and whisked harder.

“Yet you seemed so wide awake. After our swim.”

The air in the cabin was stifling, surprising when the windows were all open and the morning was still cool. Craig’s voice was mild. Teasing, really. There was no reason to get nervous, she told herself. She’d woken up nervous enough. One could play with fire only so long…and then it had miraculously occurred to her that she could get burned as well. She had in mind starting out the day low-key, easy and…safe. Safe meaning attire that couldn’t possibly be a turn-on.

“Sleepiness just seemed to creep up on me all at once,” she said hurriedly, and bounced a fork and knife on the counter, tossing Craig a quick glance before pivoting back to the stove. That man had gorgeous shoulders. The hair on his chest curled every which way; it always had. And his eyes were very blue—too blue, too damned blue—for this early in the morning. She grabbed the spatula. “We’ve got a thousand things to do today.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Fishing, for one. We’ve got all the gear. And Mr. Bartholomew went on and on about the fish in these waters. Marlin and sailfish and snapper, even barracuda once we move out a little deeper. You know, though…” She slid his eggs on a plate and set it in front of him. “I wouldn’t mind a nice red snapper for dinner. Sailfish are another thing. I don’t want to risk catching one—every single time I see one mounted I get sick. They’re so beautiful…”

“Sit down, honey. If you don’t want breakfast yourself, at least have a cup of coffee.”

“I forgot your melon.”

“Sit.”

She perched obediently on the cushioned stool next to him, hugged her coffee mug in her hands and smiled brightly. Her husband was sending out calming, soothing vibrations. Which was very strange, because she felt increasingly unnerved. “If you don’t want to go fishing, we can explore the shore of the cove. We could take the dinghy. I’ll row in, you can row back,” she remarked magnanimously.

“You’ll row
with
the surf, and I fight the battle against the tide on the way back?”

“And if you’re
really
good, I’ll even let you make the picnic lunch.”

“One of us,” Craig mentioned, “is in an awfully lazy mood this morning.”

“Exactly,” Sonia agreed impishly. “We can gather shells and swim and lie around in the sand. There are palm trees out there just waiting to provide a little shade. Now, it may be the coast of Texas, but who’s carrying an atlas? It
looks
like the shoreline of a nice little deserted Pacific island.”

Craig chuckled, pushing back his plate. He turned and swung his leg around, hooking his bare foot on the rung of her stool. He watched as Sonia ever so unobtrusively tried to shift away from any physical contact, but between his leg and the teak bar she had nowhere to go.

That very small effort at withdrawal from her aroused a very pure, very basic, very male instinctive response in him. The same instinct that had nearly driven him over the edge the night before. His jeaned calf rubbed against Sonia’s bare one, and his wife’s chatter accelerated just slightly, like the increased rev of a motor.

“If you don’t want to do any of that, we could snorkel. There’s equipment in that locker on deck.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“You’re supposed to be able to see all kinds of fish and things in the shallow waters.”

“Yes.”

Sonia could feel his eyes on her lips and throat and felt another dozen of her nerve endings zoom to life. He shouldn’t be looking at her like that
now,
for heaven’s sake. Couldn’t he see she was dressed like a derelict? And she was
not
going to succumb to those damn eyes. Not if he had in mind more one-sided loving. She had several days of specific activities planned to ensure that his libido was hot-wired solely on his own behalf.

Furthermore, she had the sneaky feeling he was deliberately trying to make conversation difficult. With utmost grace, she stood up, only to find that his other foot had captured the rung on the opposite side of her. She was pinned in. “I’ll do the dishes now,” she said cheerfully.

“In a minute. Finish your coffee.”

Her bottom despondently plopped back down on the stool. Nothing was going well. “Which would you like to do?” she asked brightly.

“The choices are fishing and snorkeling and picnicking on the beach in the cove?”

She picked up her mug, nodding. “Actually, we could probably do them all. We’re up early.”

“Very early,” he agreed.

His tone was still mild. One would think he was trying to soothe a fractious kitten. Sonia was not soothed. She took another hurried sip of coffee. “And if you don’t want to do any of
those
things—”

“I think you’re in the mood for a very busy day.”

She nodded, much more happily. It was the first sign that he was going to prove…tractable. “We take vacations so rarely. We may as well take advantage of every minute.”

“I agree.” Craig set down his mug. “We
should
take advantage of every minute. And I think we should do everything on your list. Tomorrow. Today we’re already busy.”

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “We’re already—?”

“We’re going to spend this day in bed, Sonia.”

A few drops of her coffee decided to leap right out of her cup. Craig took a napkin to mop it up.

“Finish your coffee, honey,” he said gently. He made every effort to keep his voice calm and soothing. It didn’t seem to be working. Sonia was both nervous and clearly…not in the mood. Huge green-blue eyes peered at him over her coffee cup.

His ethical system flew out the window. His unbudgeable, rocklike, irrefutable ethical system. No one and nothing had ever made Craig do anything he believed wasn’t right. And as much as he adored his Sonia, she was going to have to get in the mood. Two months of abstinence had just, very simply, combusted inside him with all the docility of nuclear fission.

Did he mean what she hoped he meant? Was he thinking of
his
pleasure for a welcome change?

Sonia licked dry lips. “Listen…”

“Finish your coffee. I want to go to bed.”

Rapidly, she raised the cup to her lips again. A disgraceful feeling of utter elation was trying to swamp her.

“The first time, unfortunately, it’s going to go fast,” he said gently. “Not the second time. The second time, we’ll take it nice and slow. Then we’ll have lunch. After lunch you can nap. And after you nap, we’ll be tired of mattresses, Sonia, and we can go for a swim. We’re going to do a complex study of friction in salt water. Body friction—it’s going to be an in-depth study…You’re not drinking your coffee,” he chided gently.

Hurriedly, she took another sip. Actually, she downed the cup.

His legs hooked around the rungs of her stool; he leaned closer with his palms spread on her thighs. “When you bought that red bikini you wore yesterday, you must have been in an inciting-violence kind of mood. I hate to say this, honey, but it’s your own damn fault the first time is going to go too fast.”

She nodded. Everything was her fault. She would gladly have taken responsibility for the earth caving in. Who cared? She hadn’t heard that sound in his voice in weeks. That unmistakable I’m-going-to-take-you tone.

“You want me to tell you how much I want you?” His voice was gravelly, almost pained, trying to be light, trying to be humorous.

She set down her cup. She wasn’t smiling. “
Want
me, then,” she whispered vibrantly.

“How on earth could you doubt it?”

In a twinkling, he gathered her up. The stools teetered behind them. His mouth pressed on hers as if he were totally unaware her neck could snap from that kind of pressure; his length to her length seared into one. Air was forgotten. Breathing was forgotten. His hands were running up and down her spine, his fingers finally closing around her hips, crushing her to him.

His lips lifted from hers long enough to trail more heated kisses on her cheeks, down to her throat. “But what has been
wrong,
then?” Sonia whispered achingly. “Craig…”

The T-shirt muffled her words.
Her
T-shirt. In a moment, it went soaring over her head; his palms skimmed down her white shorts, and he lifted her to get her out of them. She didn’t argue. His lips crushed down on hers again with a bruising pressure, a bruising sweet, sweet pleasure. So rough…Craig had never been rough. And the drowning hunger of his lips ignited a sweet, fierce hunger in her as well.

He carried her up a step and then another. She felt like laughing for the first time in weeks. The bed couldn’t have been thirty feet away, that gorgeous stateroom set up with satin sheets and opaque curtains and soft pillows. But he placed her on the carpet, and through the slits in the curtains the morning sun was blinding…at least for that instant before Craig’s head dipped down to hers again.

She tried to draw back for a brief gulp of air. He wouldn’t let her. His tongue slid inside her parted lips, a busy, busy tongue informing her without words that she didn’t need to breathe.

He was absolutely right. She needed that arrogant tongue. She needed the feel of his chest and his heartbeat crushing her breasts; she savored his impatience as he finally pulled away to peel off his jeans.

His flesh was so warm, all taut and strained, yet giving beneath her stroking palms. Such a rage of love she felt for him. His limbs were tangled with hers, oddly awkward when they’d played the game so many times. It didn’t matter. His need, his desire, communicated itself to her, and she accepted his love as if it were riches. Her unselfish lover radiated desire; she invited his selfishness. Her fingers curled around him, and she rejoiced at the sound of his gasp of pleasure.

“Don’t,” he hissed softly. “Sonia, if you touch me—”