Made For Each Other (9 page)

Nick’s eyes swept over her when she
met him outside their rooms, but he said nothing about the way the
bikini bottom barely concealed her curves, too ample to her way of
thinking.

He wore black briefs that emphasized
his rock-hard thighs and taut stomach, and she kept her gaze on the
stone steps that descended the bluff to the hotel’s private beach
so her gaze would not stray to Nick’s virile physique.

The two of them were alone on the
beach that early in the morning, although by ten the sun was
already white hot. Nick stretched out on the tawny sand without
looking at her and crossed his hands behind his head. she seated
herself a few feet away and began to rub the suntan cream she had
brought on her legs, though it could just as easily have been sand
she rubbed for all she noticed. She was more aware of Nick’s long,
lean body only inches from hers. When he turned over on his
stomach, cradling his head in his arms, she jumped and dropped the
tube of suntan cream.

What if she had angered him enough the
evening before that he had decided to forgo his promise? If he even
touched her . . . the prospect made her stomach muscles tighten in
apprehension – and,yes, anticipation.

“Rub some cream on my back, will you?”
he mumbled lazily.

Her tongue played over her lower lip.
She knew darned well Nick was aware of the volatile emotions his
presence aroused in her! Gathering her courage, she knelt beside
the lithe brown figure. She squeezed out the cream in a snakelike
figure down the length of the broad back, stopping just where the
waist tapered into the narrow hips. She found herself admiring
those hips—not slat-ass like some men’s she had noticed, but firmly
rounded with muscles.

“I’ll fry before you rub the cream
in,” Nick said casually, but for the first time that morning she
thought she detected the slightest hint of humor in his
voice.

She steeled herself and began to rub
the cream into the warm flesh. She tried to keep it on an
impersonal level, but as her fingertips moved over the tendons and
muscles that involuntarily rippled at her touch, her heart began to
beat faster, and the tight knot of desire began to expand in her
stomach so that it would soon snap at the unrelieved
tension.

She wanted to stop then before she
gave herself away, for surely he could detect by the way her hands
almost caressed his body how highly aroused she was—and,
unreasonably, she wanted to go on touching him. It would be one of
the few times she would have an excuse to without betraying her
feelings—and that was something she was determined not to do. She
would not behave like all the other women who clustered around
Nicholas Raf fer, throwing themselves on him.

“My turn,” he said.

“No, I—I’ve already put—”

“But not on your back,” he pointed out
and took the tube from her tight grasp. He pushed her face down on
the towel and deftly un-snapped the bikini top. Without regard for
her gasp of protest, he began to rub the cream into her soft skin.
Held immobile by the brace on her shoulders and by his thighs
locked about her hips, she could only lie passively while those
sure fingers stroked her in a manner that was anything but
impersonal, trailing along the fine line of her back to encircle
her waist and slide back up to massage the graceful curve of her
shoulders.

She held her breath, afraid, yet
excited. Her heart seemed to beat so loudly that the rumble of the
surf against the beach was a distant whisper in comparison. She
wanted to feel more than Nick’s hands on her; she wanted to feel
the entire length of his sun- warmed body pressed against
hers.

But when his hands slipped around her
small rib cage to encompass her freed breasts, she quivered as if
an electric wire had touched her. And yet she could do no more than
lie passively as his knowing fingers found her nipples and teased
them into life. “Nick. . . ” His name on her lips was a half moan,
half plea.

“Admit you want me,” he whispered at
her ear.

She wanted his gentle massaging to go
on forever. “Yes!” she rasped. “I want you”—the words slipped out
unintentionally—“but I’ll hate myself and you ... for making me
like your other women.”

Chapter Six

T
he weight of Nick’s body on her buttocks was suddenly
withdrawn. Julie turned her head to see him standing above her,
fists planted on hips. His lips were stretched in a flat, grim
line. “I’m going for a swim; then we’d better get ready to
leave.”

She watched him as he strode across
the white sand toward the gentle roll of turquoise waves. She
desperately wished he were not so virile, that he did not have such
a magnetic personality or such an intelligent mind . . . anything
to make her want him less.

And she knew she could never really
have him. As it was, he detested her for her outspoken columns. Now
that she was his wife, he could only compare her unfavorably with
Santa Fe’s young socialites who competed for his attentions. He
could have married any one of them, and now he was trapped in a
loveless marriage with her. But though he could and did have any
number of women at his command, she swore that she would not join
the throng of women who had surrendered to him.

Yet it would not be easy to live in
such intimate contact with him. Her skin still burned with the heat
of his touch . . . as inside she burned with unfulfillment. She
watched his easy, sure strokes cut through the incoming waves,
thinking that if it were not for the broken collarbone she would be
out there swimming also, if for no other reason than to cool off
her desire for him.

Nick’s distant but unfailing courtesy
on the flight back to El Paso accomplished the cooling most
effectively. And by the time they had made the silent journey by
car in the early-morning hours from El Paso to Santa Fe she felt
positively frozen inside.

When the Blazer left the highway that
paralleled the Rio Grande and traveled down a dirt road to halt in
what seemed the middle of the high desert, she was ready to storm
from the car. Only the thought of a scandalous paragraph in Dee
Morley’s column kept her anchored to her seat.

“Why are we stopping here?” she
demanded, keeping her eyes trained on the distant peaks of the
Sangre de Cristo Mountains that were painted pink by dawn’s first
light.

Nick switched off the engine. “This is
where I live.”

She looked around. She saw only a
juniper-dotted mound. “Where?”

Nick pointed before him.
“There—beneath that mound. I built an underground home last year—to
escape the demands of city life.”

Now she could make out on the southern
side windows framed by a portion of stucco that blended with the
earthen roof. She had heard of underground homes, but the idea that
she would be living in one completely captivated her. More than
that, she felt a great relief, for she had expected Nick to live in
one of those pretentious haciendalike mansions required by a
senator’s image—and with a dozen servants trailing underfoot to
make her extremely uncomfortable.

Inside, the home was just as informal.
Reached by steps descending into a section of the mound, a
hand-carved wooden door opened onto a large room with smoothly
whitewashed walls that sloped out toward their bottom to form
curved benches topped with thick burnt-orange cushions. The
unbroken strip of high, narrow windows gave a magnificent view of
tawny desert floor walled by mountains capped with winter’s white'
lace. The small kitchen was very utilitarian, with most of the
appliances concealed by stucco facades.

But what most enchanted herwas the
beehive fireplace in one of the room’s rounded corners. It lent a
warm, homey feeling to the room.

She felt his scrutiny and looked up to
find him watching her. “Will you be comfortable here?” he asked, as
if he actually cared. “I have a housekeeper who comes in for half a
day during the week.”

She wanted to say that she loved it,
that she could live in a place like this forever, but she managed
to restrain her enthusiasm and equal his own cool manner. “It’ll do
very well while I’m here.”

Nick jammed his hands in his pockets.
“Come on, I’ll show you the—” The ringing of the telephone
interrupted him. With a sigh, he rolled his eyes toward the beamed
ceiling. “I sometimes feel as if a monitoring device announces to
the public when I walk in that door.”

She watched him reach into an obscure
alcove and withdraw the telephone. The direction of the
conversation indicated that the call was from his secretary, so,
not wanting to eavesdrop, she wandered into the adjoining
room.

The bedroom was a continuation of the
same adobe simplicity, with a portion of the walls extending two
feet off the hard, mud-tiled floor to form a king-size bed covered
with a large Navajo blanket. A hand-carved chest of Mexican pine
was the only piece of furniture in the room.

She went to the far door expecting to
find another bedroom but found instead a bath done in sea-blue
tiles, with a sunken tub shaped in the form of a miniature lagoon.
Above, a skylight filtered sunlight on the clusters of small trees
and plants that rimmed the tub.

She was ready to strip there and soak
her aching body, but Nick’s voice reminded her she was not alone.
“It didn’t take your co¬worker long,” he said, coming to stand in
the doorway. He leaned against the doorframe, blocking her movement
so that she had to tilt her head to look up at him—and what she saw
made her quake inside. Bright, glinting eyes, a hard mouth etched
by two grooves that belied the smile.

“What do you mean?” she asked, damning
her own betraying breathlessness.

Nick ran a fingertip along the short,
straight line of her nose. “My secretary called to congratulate me.
Our marriage has made headlines in all the state newspapers, thanks
to Dee Morley.”

She desperately wished he would not
touch her. She remained silent beneath his regard, uncertain how to
respond to his news. After all, she thought, this was what Nick had
planned, and it was too late for him to regret the marriage
now.

“And we’re expected to
attend a command performance next week,” he continued. “The
governor’s wife is giving a dinner for the beginning of the
Christmas
novenas
.”

“I see,” she said now, not really
referring to the party celebrating the nine daily masses held
before Christmas. The announcement of Nick’s marriage was one
thing, she deduced, but to actually display his country-bumpkin
wife to the ridicule of Santa Fe’s elite was quite
another.

She brushed past him. “Maybe you can
make excuses for me . . . tell the governor’s wife I’m exhausted.”
She threw a haughty glance over her shoulder as she moved toward
the door to the living room. “After all, isn’t that how a bride’s
supposed to feel after her honeymoon?”

“Would you like that?” Nick threatened
softly. “Would you like me to make love to you so that you’re too
tired to even move off my bed?”

She spun around. “No!” Her fearful
gaze went to the large, inviting bed. “And I won’t sleep there,
either!”

Nick bridged the distance between them
in two strides. He grabbed her forearms and drew her up against
him. “Yes, you will, Mrs. Raffer. You will sleep there because I
won’t have my housekeeper arrive every morning to find us sleeping
apart. And you will attend the party next week. That was the idea
of this miserable marriage—to convince everyone that we married out
of urgent love.”

He released her abruptly. “I’m going
into my office for a while this morning to catch up on things, and
you can rest—alone in my bed!” At the front door he turned back and
said, “Mrs. Martinez, the housekeeper, will be in around nine. Try
to portray the happy bride.”

After he left, she threw
herself across the bed, feeling anything but happy. It was almost
noon when she awoke to the opening of a door. “Oh,
senora
, I did not want to
disturb you.” A little white-haired lady with Mexican features
peeked through the door. “Tomorrow I clean the
bathroom.”

She raised on one elbow. “No, that’s
all right. It’s time I got up.” She managed a sleepy smile. “You’re
Mrs. Martinez?”

“Si,
senora
.” The old woman’s eyes twin¬kled.
“And you are seiior Nicholas’s esposa, his new wife, no? I read
about it in the papers.” Her knotted brown hands clasped together.
“So romantic! I told
Senor
Nicholas it was time he settled down. Time for
marriage and babies, I told him. He needs someone to love him and
take care of him.”

She hated to deceive the well-meaning
housekeeper. “Yes, I love him,” she managed to say convincingly,
then added, “Very much.”

Later, after Mrs. Martinez had helped
remove the brace, Julie took a long bath. She could all too well
imagine Nick’s magnificent body stretched out in lithe relaxation
in the sunken tub. Across from the tub on an inset counter were
Nick’s brush and comb and shaving cologne. Hanging on a hook was
his short terry-cloth robe. All about her were his personal effects
to constantly remind her of him her every waking hour.