Dark Torment (12 page)

“Liza, your mother is looking for you. You’re to go to
her at once.” Sarah had rounded the corner of the house and stood
frowning at them from the shelter of a wilted wattle some few feet away. Her
bare arms were crossed over her small breasts; she looked as cross as he felt.
The faded blue gingham dress she wore did nothing for either her face or her
figure. Her hair—very nice hair, as he remembered from the one time he
had seen it loose—was pulled back into an untidy bun. Her eyes—she
had lovely eyes—were marred by the beetling of her brows above them. Next
to her lusciously feminine sister, she was about as sexless as a grasshopper.
Her very plainness irritated him. How could he possibly be tormented by desire
for such an unfeminine female? It went against everything he’d ever known
of himself.

“What does she want?” Liza asked, regarding her sister
petulantly.

“You’d better go find out, hadn’t you? Perhaps
your ball dress has arrived at last.”

“Oh, do you think so?” Liza squealed with delight. Her
demeanor changed, and she looked like what she was—a young girl thrilled
at the idea of her first ball. “I must go try it on.” With that she
picked up her skirts and, despite the heat, ran around the side of the house.

“I want to talk to you,” Sarah said evenly when Liza
was gone.

Dominic said nothing, merely leaned a shoulder against the frame
of the window he had just finished cleaning and waited. She moved closer.

“I want you to stay away from Liza.”

He laughed, the sound derisive. She moved another step nearer.
With her golden eyes glaring at him, she reminded him suddenly of a lioness he
had seen once at a circus in Dublin. He had a sudden urge to bait the lioness,
to madden her as she constantly managed to madden him.

“I mean it, Gallagher. She’s very young and
impressionable. You’re not to flirt with her. You’re far too old
for her, for one thing, and you’re a . . .”

She seemed to sense that he hated that word, because she broke off
without uttering it.

“Convict?” he finished, too pleasantly, straightening
away from the window. “Not fit to wipe your little sister’s shoes?
Well, maybe I find her attractive—God knows, there’s a dearth of
attractive women around here.”

That riled her, as he had meant it to. She seemed to be
inordinately sensitive about her looks. Her eyes flashed angrily at him, and as
her mouth tightened, he suddenly noticed how wide and full that mouth was; its
softness was unmistakable evidence of her feminity that she could not disguise
as she did her body. He found himself wondering, idly, what she would look like
if she took more pains with her appearance. Found a softer style for her hair,
say, and wore a dress that fitted her instead of looking as if it had been
intended to shroud Mrs. Abbott’s ample form.

“Are you listening to me?” She was practically right
under his nose now, looking as furious as she sounded. Dominic suddenly found
that he was enjoying himself. Baiting her was far more entertaining than
washing windows.

“You wouldn’t be jealous of your pretty sister, now,
would you, Miss Sarah?” He spoke softly, the Irish lilt rolling through
the words. They had all the effect he intended. He could see the temper explode
inside her like a firecracker.

“Why, you impertinent jackanapes! As if I would be jealous
of Liza over a—a convict!”

“Wouldn’t you,
Miss
Sarah?” He grinned
at her tantalizingly, prepared for the furious tensing of her body. What he was
not prepared for was the sudden sting of her palm against his cheek. He stopped
grinning. His eyes were at once as furious as hers as he lifted a questing hand
to his face.

“Violent little thing, aren’t you?” he growled,
a savage satisfaction lighting his eyes. “Well, it’s time you
learned that violence begets violence,
Miss Sarah!
”

And with that he reached out and hauled her toward him, not caring
if his hands bruised the smooth bare flesh of her arms. She gaped up at him,
her eyes huge, her lips parted in angry surprise. He bent his head and caught
those lips, grinding his own roughly against them as he had dreamed of doing
for weeks. Only a single thought penetrated the rage that engulfed him: He had
been right about that mouth. It was every bit as soft as it looked.

At the first touch of Gallagher’s mouth on hers, Sarah went
rigid, fighting to ignore a frightening excitement in favor of healthy outrage.
How dare he do such a thing, she ranted inwardly. He was hurting her, his lips
brutal as they crushed hers, forcing her lips hard against her teeth. Focusing
on the physical discomfort he was causing her was her best defense against a
nearly overwhelming urge to melt in his arms and let him kiss her as he would,
she knew. She concentrated . . . then tasted blood from a split lip, and
moaned. That small sound seemed to be all he was waiting for. His hands on her
upper arms tightened cruelly, his fingers digging into her flesh. But, try as
she might, she could not seem to care about the pain that shot through her
arms. Instead she was drowningly aware of that hard mouth as it moved harshly
on her own; of his tongue as it thrust its way into her mouth.

She moaned again, shuddering, as she felt the intimate invasion.
His hands left her arms and came around her, pulling her hard against him. She
felt the heat and strength of his body, his unmistakable arousal pressing
crudely against her belly. Her arms were crushed between them; with a last,
frantic effort at sanity, she tried to use her arms to force a distance between
them. She would not, could not let this happen. . . . Her hands encountered the
bare skin of his chest, roughened with a thick growth of hair and wet with
sweat—and were suddenly still. Her fingers curled of their own volition
into that curling mat, her nails scraping his skin. He groaned, the sound
guttural, rasping. His hold on her changed, became less brutal although no less
tight as he bent her head backward so that it rested against the iron muscles
of his upper arm. His breathing quickened. Sarah could feel his heart pounding
through his chest against her breasts. His thrusting tongue gentled as it began
a hot exploration of the inside of her mouth. Sarah suddenly lost the battle
for control of her wayward senses as a gusher of fire shot from their joined
mouths all the way to her toes. Her eyes, which had been glaring furiously at
him, fluttered shut.

Under the intoxicating influence of his mouth, she forgot that he
was a convict and she was a lady. She forgot everything, able to concentrate on
nothing except the hot pounding of her blood, the trembling hunger that made
her small breasts seem to swell as they pressed against his chest, the
wonderful, moist, aching weakness that pulsed to life in that secret, shameful
place between her legs.

When his tongue moved again, she responded mindlessly, her own
moving fiercely to meet it. He stiffened against her; she could feel every hard
muscle and sinew of his body pressing into her yielding flesh, including that
one that both excited and embarrassed her even to think about. His lips seared
hers; she felt as if she would be reduced to cinders at their touch. Her lips
clung to his in convulsive response. If she could have freed them, her arms
would have been tight around his neck.

He ended the kiss as abruptly as he had begun it, his hands moving
back to her arms and thrusting her away from him without warning. Sarah
whimpered a protest, blinking at him bemusedly for an instant, noting even
through her daze how his glistening blue-black hair, his hard mouth tight now
as he stared grimly at her, and his blue eyes could take her breath away. Then
his mouth twisted, and his hands clenched on her arms.

“Someone’s coming,” he said through his teeth.

The words didn’t penetrate at first. He shook her,
impatient, in what she took to be rage. As her head snapped back, her reason
returned—and with it came growing horror. It showed in her eyes as she
stared at him, her hand coming up to press against her suddenly trembling
mouth. The voices of the approaching workers seeped through to her
consciousness, and she went crimson. If they had seen . . . if anyone had seen
. . .

“Let me go,” she said, pulling against the hold he
still had on her. He hesitated for a moment. Then his hands dropped from her
arms. A group of aborigine workers came into view, heading for the orchard.
Sarah took that moment to back away, her hand still pressed to her mouth. When
she was safely out of his reach, she turned and ran for the house.

* * *

The next three days were hectic as preparations for Liza’s
ball were completed. Sarah had a thousand and one tasks to attend to, and she
could not concentrate on any of them. The burning memory of that kiss drove all
else from her mind. That she had been kissed by a convict was shameful; the
friends and neighbors who were so shortly to be their guests would be
scandalized if they knew. But that she had actually returned that kiss. . . .
She shuddered every time she remembered how she had responded.
Gallagher’s mouth on hers had robbed her of her senses; that was the only
explanation she could find for behavior that in anyone else she would not have
hesitated to condemn. If, for instance, she had caught Liza kissing Gallagher
like that, she would have recommended to her father that the girl be shipped
off to a convent without delay!

Sarah had been kissed before, of course—twice. The first man
to kiss her had been Michael Argers, the son of one of the neighboring station
owners; he had had too much to drink at one of the graziers’ infrequent
get-togethers and had surprised her in a dark hallway. He was seventeen at the
time, the same age as she, and clumsy, but if his mouth had not been rancid
with whiskey she would have quite enjoyed the experience. He had used his
tongue, too—but there all comparison to Gallagher’s kiss ended. Not
by the largest stretch of the imagination could her reaction to
Gallagher’s kiss have been described by such a tepid sentiment as
“quite enjoyed.”

Percival had been the source of her other kiss, when he had begun
to lose patience with her refusals of his proposals of marriage. Apparently he
had thought to sweep her off her feet with a show of ardor; or perhaps he had
merely hoped to drive home the fact that he was a physically superior male, and
that she, as a weaker female, should submit to him in all things, including
marriage. It hadn’t worked. Sarah had found his kiss downright
distasteful, and had told him so in words of icy rage when he had at last
released her. He had never tried such a thing since. Whether he had decided
that such a tactic would not aid his cause, or whether he had simply found
their kiss as distasteful as she had, Sarah couldn’t say.

She dreaded having any further contact with Gallagher, but as he
was constantly around the house during those three days it was impossible to
avoid him. Sarah wanted to die of mortification every time her eyes met his.
She knew from his expression that he was remembering their kiss just as she
was. His eyes mocked her everywhere she went; he seemed constantly to be
underfoot. But there was no way to rid herself of him without it being obvious
to him how much his kiss had affected her. And she thought he despised her
enough without that.

The worst part about it was that he had kissed her in anger, as a
means of retaliation for that slap. It had been no more to him than answering
the blow she had struck. How he must have laughed inside when she had begun to
kiss him back! Because of course he had not felt the same bewildering surge of
fire through his body as she had. Long ago she had faced the fact that she was
plain. Gallagher himself, on that never-to-be-forgotten night in the stable at
Yancy’s place, had called her scrawny and said she had about as much
feminity as a broomstick. While he, if she had been mentally concocting a
portrait of a dream lover, would have fitted it like a glove.

He had made a fool of her—no, she had made a fool of
herself, Sarah corrected bitterly. If she had only maintained her poise, had
held to a semblance of icy detachment or even righteous fury, she would not now
be writhing with humiliation. Instead, she had let a convict kiss her; worse,
she had behaved like a wanton in his arms, kissing him back with a fervor that
she would have gladly slit her throat to be able to erase from both their minds
forever. But the fact was that it was done, she
had
kissed him back in
that feverish way, and she must deal with it.

Sarah had determined that, for the sake of what self-respect she
had left, Gallagher must have no inkling of how deep her embarrassment was. She
would act as if nothing, nothing at all, had happened—after making their
relative positions crystal clear to him. . . . When she had run away after that
traumatic kiss, she had fled to her room and flung herself on her bed, reliving
every shameful nuance of what had happened. Even then, when her mortification
threatened to choke her, she had realized that she could not remain in her room
forever and would inevitably have to face Gallagher again. He must be made to
understand that nothing between them had changed: he was still the servant, she
the mistress. She would tolerate not the slightest deviation from that.

The next morning she had mustered every ounce of her courage and
summoned him to the station office. As she faced him across the large, scarred
desk at which she did the station accounts—she seated; he, in the absence
of an invitation from her to sit, standing with his hat in his hand—she
had met his blue eyes, which seemed nearly as hostile as she felt despite
outward composure. Inwardly she was a mass of nerves, but she was determined
that he would never guess. To that end, her tone was severe as she told him
that if he ever, ever so far forgot himself again as to lay a hand on her, she
would not hesitate to report his behavior to her father, who would undoubtedly
mete out the severest punishment. Her manner implied that what had happened was
entirely something that he had done to her; her eyes dared him to so much as
remember how she had responded to his outrageous act. He stared at her as she
spoke, his face as coldly aloof as her own, his big body formidable in the
small room, his eyes now unreadable. When she had finished, favoring him with
her haughtiest stare, he spoke not a single word by way of a reply. Instead he
merely inclined his head arrogantly at her, with more mockery than deference,
turned on his heel, and, without permission, left. She had been left staring at
the gently closing door, fiercely fighting an impulse to pick up the heavy
glass paperweight near her left hand and hurl it after him.