Dance of the Crystal (19 page)

“I used to come here more often than I do now. I learned to canoe in this river.”

“Did you.” Leaning on his elbows at the railing, Soren turned his head a bit to see the expression on Crystal’s face. Her voice had a wistful quality to it that he hadn’t heard before. He could understand why. Out here in the middle of the river, away from the noise of civilization and close to the serenity of nature, you could think about things on a visceral level. Could hear that little voice inside you that said maybe you didn’t have to be gun-shy around women. That maybe they weren’t all like his mother. That maybe a man could take a chance and open himself up to a certain kind of woman.

Crystal’s voice intruded on his musing. Good thing. It wasn’t like him to be maudlin. “My parents loved this area. Paddling through the Delaware Water Gap, I felt like I was one of the early explorers. I was six when I took my first dunking at Foul Rift rapids.” She was running her hands lightly over the railing, but she seemed to be in another time, another place.

“Of course, at that age I was outfitted in a hard hat and a bright orange life jacket, even though I already knew how to swim.” She squinted into the distance and fell silent.

A soft breeze ruffled her curls. Water gurgled as it parted and flowed around the stone buttresses. Soren let the silence build. He didn’t think he had the social skills to coax information out of her. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to know any more, to get emotionally invested in her and her family. There was still a part of him that needed to hang back and keep a relationship on a surface level, giving and taking the sex, but not the vulnerability. Things were going too fast for his comfort level.

“Then they met a couple at the country club who introduced them to hot-air ballooning. I was twelve when the four of them went down after a freak lightning bolt hit the bag.” Her voice cracked. “None of them survived.”

A different kind of silence ensued. The breeze whistled between the cables holding up the bridge. He could hear her deep breaths, as if she were trying to stay calm and unaffected. A couple of kids on the far bank raised their voices in excited chatter. A bird swooped down from the sky and flew under the span.

Finally he cleared his throat. He didn’t know what made the words come out. “My father killed himself.”

Her sharp intake of breath made him stand up, take a step away from her. “She drove him to it. My mother.”

He thrust his hands into his jeans pockets, turned southward to watch the water flow away from him on its inexorable path to the ocean. “They ruled it an accident, but to this day, I believe he aimed his car at that abutment. He didn’t want her lying, cheating self anywhere near him, but he couldn’t live without her.”

Abruptly, he turned on his heel and strode back to the near bank. “Wonder if that general store has something cold to drink.”

Crystal had to almost run to catch up to him. Had she been able to foresee this turn of events, she would gladly have gone anyplace but here. She thought they had established some kind of rapport after a dozen or so orgasms between them, after spending the night in each other’s arms, after the camaraderie of a nude breakfast and the fun of antiquing.

She reached his side just as he stalked up the three chipped concrete steps leading to a planked porch and a screen door that squeaked when he yanked it open. Inside was a feast of nostalgia, a store that was part deli, part jeweler’s, part bookstore, with old-fashioned bric-a-brac, postcards, gewgaws, shawls and other handmade items. A hand pump stood at a deep sink. A shaggy dog lolled near a potbellied stove. An array of penny candy enticed from behind a glass case.

But Crystal dismissed the urge to explore with barely a glance at the offerings. The object of her concern studied the contents of a refrigerator case then withdrew a brown, longneck bottle of ginger beer. She reached around him for a cream soda, in the process placing her palm on his back in silent, if fleeting, support.

She felt the ripple of tension in his muscles, but he didn’t pull away. “Want to sit outside and drink these?” With her chin she indicated a wooden picnic table under a weeping willow just turning a delicate yellow-green.

He nodded once then paid the middle-aged man behind the deli counter, who rang up the sale on an antique cash register that made a hell of a jingle.

Outside, Soren sat on the tabletop, feet on the bench, arms resting on his thighs, the bottle hanging between his fingers. A red-breasted robin hopped through a thin layer of mulch around an azalea, cocked its head then started jabbing its beak into the ground. Soren seemed to take an inordinate interest in the bird’s pecking.

Crystal sat beside him, for the moment silent as she pondered how to reach him. After a swallow of cream soda, she said, “How old were you?”

“Nine.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Nine when he kicked her out. Took him several years to go out of his mind.”

“Why did he…never mind. I shouldn’t ask.”

“She had an affair. Broke the family apart.”

“That’s awful. My parents…” Crystal stopped, wondering if what she’d been about to say wasn’t pouring salt on his still-festering wound. “…seemed happy,” she tempered her statement. “They didn’t fight or anything in front of me.”

“I wish I’d never overheard them. I don’t want to know what I know.”

Crystal waited. If he could get whatever it was off his chest, maybe he could start healing. Because the hurt, she could see, went deep down into the depths of his soul.

The robin flitted away without having found a meal. Soren watched him fly out of sight then lifted the bottle to his lips. He took a long series of gulps. Crystal wondered how he could drink something so pungent without coughing. To her, it tasted like the shredded pieces of fresh ginger still lived inside the bottle.

“She wanted a divorce. Wanted to follow someone to Fairbanks.”

“Oh no.” Instinctively Crystal touched her hand to Soren’s forearm. How terrible that she wouldn’t want her children. And how much worse for Soren to live with such knowledge.

“Pop said over his dead body then kicked her out.”

“What happened to her?”

Soren was silent a long time. “Don’t know. I never heard from her again.”

There was more, but Soren couldn’t talk about it right now. Maybe he never would.

The mood was subdued on their ride home, the quiet punctuated by Crystal’s occasional “turn here” or

“about five miles down Route 30” as she directed him to her home. It had taken him a moment to backtrack in his mind as to why he was going there. She’d come to Thor’s Hammer last night in her friend’s car, and had been with him since then. Her own car was parked at her home, a place he’d been to only once, in the dark, when she’d brought him over after their “dinner with a bachelor”.

Christ, that seemed like a lifetime ago. The woman was messing with his mind. He’d never revealed what he’d overheard to anyone, not even Magnus. He didn’t
want
to get close to her. He didn’t want to get close to
any
woman. Soren had learned his lesson at age nine—love hurts.

He’d be dipped in sheepshit before he’d let a woman get close enough to hurt him.

And this one was damn near there already. Under his skin. Inside his mind.

Well, she’d gone as far as she ever would. From now on she was history. He’d see to it.

Finally he pulled the truck in front of her home. In the late afternoon light he saw tidy flower beds with yellow and red flowers swaying in the breeze, tulips, he thought. The house looked like a Cape Cod without dormers in front, although he knew the back roof was raised and the second floor accommodated two large bedrooms and a spacious bath.

A bath with a Jacuzzi that fit two.

Shit.
Don’t go there
.

“Thanks for…everything, Soren.” Her chocolate brown eyes were somber on his. “I appreciate your helping me with the antiques. And the, um, well, everything. You’ve had a long day, all that driving. I have some homemade lasagna in the fridge, if you’d like to stay for dinner.”

Christ, had she planned this whole thing as an ambush? The “way to a man’s heart” business? “Don’t worry about me. I’ll pick up something at the pub. I’d better be getting back. Trang’s never had the responsibility of the whole place for an entire day before.”

A fleeting look of…hurt?…passed over her face, but so quickly he thought he imagined it.

“Sure. I understand.” She reached out as if to touch the hand that rested on the steering wheel then withdrew it when the muscles in his arm tensed. “Thanks again.” She gave him a patently false smile. “See you soon.”

Then opened the door and got out. He didn’t watch her walk up to the cozy porch or enter the house.

Still, he sat curbside, engine idling, for a long moment, his hands gripping the steering wheel until he noticed how white his knuckles were. Then gunned the motor and laid a track of rubber on the asphalt as he sped away from the temptation to bury himself deep within her warm body and find oblivion for a few minutes.

* * * * *

Okay. Fine. He was hurting, that much was obvious. And he wasn’t accustomed to baring his soul, of showing—feeling—emotion. He’d built a Berlin Wall around himself and it was up to her to dismantle it.

She reached for the crystal dangling at her throat. No wonder it chose him, she thought. He needed someone who cared, really cared, for him. She would just have to prove to him that she did.

Making love with Soren had been magical. How perfectly his body had fit into hers, how strong and hard his muscles, how tender his kisses. Well, sometimes. At other times, how hot and insatiable he’d been, devouring her mouth, her breasts, her pussy. And most of all, how he filled her, whether slow and gentle or fast and frantic, how they’d held each other’s gaze as their orgasms exploded in tandem.

He could be warm, loving, funny, quirky when he forgot about that wall.

“I’m not done with you, Soren Thorvald,” she declared. “Not by a long shot.”

* * * * *

Soren’s chef, bald and outgoing Milton Semonik, stopped stirring his famous pot of chili as he watched his boss enter the kitchen through the employee entrance. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be off tonight.”

“Since when do you make the rules?”

Milton shrugged his shoulders. “I only know what Trang told me.”

“What she says isn’t gospel. One would think the boss could do pretty much what he wanted.”

“Yep. You’d think so.”

Soren narrowed his eyes, but Milton studiously turned his attention to his stirring.

“How’s business today?”

“Second pot. First one’s about gone.” Milton lifted a bit of the spicy mixture to his mouth on a wooden spoon, blew softly to cool it then tasted it. “Mmm. Just about ready for the evening crowd.” He looked up. “Want me to dish you up some?”

Soren warred within himself. Chili—again—instead of homemade lasagna? “Nah, not hungry yet. I’ll catch some later.” Without asking himself why he didn’t take a bowl of it upstairs, he strode through the swinging doors and out into the bar area.

“What are you doing here?”

“What’s this, an echo?” Soren glanced around the room by habit then glared at Trang, who, it seemed to him, had everything under her competent control.

“You’re supposed to be—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Can’t the boss change his mind? Hell, everyone else around here does.”

“Well, aren’t you in rare form. Now we know why it’s been three years since you’ve taken a day off.”

Soren worked a jaw muscle as he scanned the tables and booths. Nothing amiss.

“Because you come back from your ‘vacation’…” she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers,

“growling like a bear just out of hibernation.”

“And your point would be…?”

Trang calmly wiped down a nonexistent spot on the bar’s surface. “Maybe you need more…vacation.”

She was studiously avoiding his gaze, but she had a kind of smirk at the edges of her mouth. Even Coral, bussing Table Four, glanced his way and gave him a leer. Christ, did everyone in the place know he’d gotten laid last night?

And this morning and several times in between.

“Hey, boss, feeling better this evening?” Ellen, the other table waitress, chimed in.

That did it. “I see everything is under control,” he said testily. “I think I’ll go upstairs and…and read a good book. Call me on the house phone if there’s a problem.”

He strode out of the bar, ignoring the dropped jaws and speculative stares, and plowed through the kitchen to reach the inside stairs to the second floor. One of these days, he swore to himself, he’d get an outside entrance to the apartment so he wouldn’t have to endure all the wise-ass remarks.

As soon as he’d punched in the combination and opened the door to his living room, her scent assailed him. Like flowers and oranges. Shit. In three long strides he reached the bank of windows in the dormer and opened each one. Sure, April nights were cool, but he’d be damned if he’d wallow in her scent. Hell, it probably even clung to his skin.

Right. Scrub it off, that’s what he had to do. Walking through to the bedroom, he pulled off his polo shirt, unzipped his jeans…

And stopped dead.

His bed. The unmade bed, with its rumpled sheet and blanket long since shoved to the floor, where they’d made love over and over and—

No! They didn’t make love. They’d just had sex.

Plenty of sex. Mind-bending, soul-searing, once-in-a-lifetime sex.

But they hadn’t made love.

Not once.

Savagely he stripped the sheets and stuffed them into the washer he’d installed in the bath hallway, poured detergent in then set the controls to wash away all trace of her. Hopping out of his jeans, he kicked them aside then hit the shower.

God almighty, the shower. Where she’d gone down on her knees and soaped him until he was ready to burst then took his aching cock into that sweet, soft mouth of hers and…