Snowflakes on the Sea (3 page)

Nathan made a harsh, disgusted sound low in his throat. His eyes burned like ebony fire. “No,” he countered. “Something is chewing you up alive, and the hell of it is, I can’t do a damned thing about it if you won’t trust me enough to be honest.”

Mallory’s voice was small and shaky with dread. “Do you want a divorce, Nathan?”

He was on his feet in an instant, turning his back on Mallory, shutting her out. His broad shoulders were taut under the soft gray fabric of his shirt.

Unable to bear the oppressive silence placidly, Mallory reached out and grasped the big sponge resting in an inside corner of the tub. Fiercely, she lathered it with soap and began to scrub herself so hard that her flesh tingled.

“I would understand,” she said, when she dared speak.

Nathan whirled suddenly, startling her so badly that she dropped the sponge and stared at him, openmouthed. His face was rigid with suppressed fury and something very much like pain. He folded his arms in a gesture that, with him, signaled stubborn determination.

“Understand this,” he said in a low and dangerous tone. “You are my wife and you will remain my wife. I don’t intend to let you go, ever. And you will warm no one else’s bed, my love—not Brad Ranner’s, not anyone’s.”

Mallory felt the words strike her like stones, and it was all she could do not to flinch with the pain. “What?” she whispered finally, in shock.

Nathan’s face was desolate now, but it was hard, too. “You’ve been wasting away ever since you signed on with that damned soap opera, Mallory. And there has to be a reason.”

Mallory lifted her chin. There were reasons, all right, but Brad Ranner wasn’t among them, nor was any other man.

“I’ve been faithful to you,” she said stiffly. And it was true—she had never even been tempted to become intimate with another man, and she had come to Nathan’s bed as a virgin. She couldn’t bring herself to ask if he’d been as loyal; she was too afraid of the answer.

Nathan sighed, the sound broken, heavy. “I know, Mallory—I’m sorry.”

Sorry for what?
Mallory wondered silently, sick with the anguish of loving a man who belonged to so many.
Sorry for accusing me like you did or sorry that you have a number of nubile groupies to occupy your many nights away from home?

“I’m very tired,” she said instead.

“I see. You weren’t tired in the kitchen tonight, were you?”

The sarcasm in his voice made Mallory’s cheeks burn bright pink. “That was a long time ago,” she snapped, not daring to meet his eyes.

“At least an hour,” Nathan retorted.

“Leave me alone!”

“Gladly,” he snapped. Then, slowly, Nathan turned and left the room. When the door closed behind him, Mallory dissolved in silent tears of exhaustion and grief.

Nathan stood at the bedroom window, looking out. There wasn’t much to see in the darkness, but the storm had stopped anyway. That was something. Behind him, Mallory slept. The soft meter of her breathing drew him, and he turned back to look at her.

The dim glow of the hallway light made her fine cheekbones look gaunt and turned the smudges of fatigue beneath her eyes to deep shadows. She looked so vulnerable lying there, all her grief openly revealed in the involuntary honesty of sleep.

Nathan drew a ragged breath. How could he have urged her to surrender her body the way he had, when she was so obviously ill? And what had possessed him to imply that she was attracted to Brad Ranner, knowing, as he did, that that kind of deceit was foreign to her nature?

Quietly, he approached the bed and pulled the covers up around her thin shoulders. She stirred in her uneasy sleep and moaned softly, intensifying the merciless ache that had wrenched at Nathan’s midsection since the moment his press agent, Diane Vincent, had thrust Pat’s cable into his hands after the last concert in Sydney.

The night was bitterly cold. Nathan slid back into bed beside his wife and held himself at a careful distance. Even now, the wanting of her, the needing of her, was almost more than he could bear. Raising himself onto one elbow, Nathan watched Mallory for a long time, trying to analyze the things that had gone wrong between them.

He loved her fiercely and had since the moment he’d seen her, some six and a half years ago. Prior to that stunning day, he’d prided himself on his freedom, on the fact that he’d needed no other person. Now, in the darkness of the bedroom, beneath the warmth of the electric blanket, he sighed. If he lost Mallory—and he was grimly convinced that he
was
losing her, day by hectic day—nothing else in his life would matter. Nothing.

She stirred beside him. Nathan wanted her with every fiber of his being and knew that he would always want her. But there was one thing greater than his consuming desire, and that was his love. He fell back on his pillows, his hands cupped behind his head, his eyes fixed on the shadowed ceiling.

Her hand came to his chest, warm and searching, her fingers entangling themselves in the thick matting of hair covering muscle and bone. “Nathan?” she whispered in a sleepy voice.

Despite the pain inside him, he laughed. “Who else?” he whispered back. “Sleep, babe.”

But Mallory snuggled against him, soft and vulnerable. “I don’t want to sleep,” she retorted petulantly. “Make love to me.”

“No.”

Her hand coursed downward over his chest, over his hard abdomen, urging him, teasing. “Yes,” she argued.

Nathan was impatient. “Will you stop it?” he said tightly. “I’m trying to be noble here, damn it.”

“Mmm,” Mallory purred, and her tantalizing exploration continued. “Noble.”

“Mallory.”

She raised herself onto one elbow and then bent her head to sample one masculine nipple with a teasing tongue.

Nathan groaned, but he remembered her thinness, her collapse on the set in Seattle, the hollow ache visible in her green eyes. And he turned away, as if in anger, and ignored her until she withdrew.

T
he telephone was ringing when Mallory awakened the next morning. She burrowed down under the covers with a groan, determined to ignore it. If she waited long enough, Nathan would answer it or the caller would give up.

But the ringing continued mercilessly, and Mallory realized that her husband wasn’t nestled between the smooth flannel sheets with her. Tossing back the bedclothes with a cry of mingled irritation and disappointment, she scrambled out of bed and reached automatically for her robe.

The house was pleasantly warm, and Mallory smiled, leaving the robe—and an aching recollection of Nathan’s rejection the night before—behind as she made her way into the kitchen and disengaged the old-fashioned earpiece from its hook on the side of the telephone. “Hello?” she spoke into the mouthpiece, idly scanning the neat kitchen for signs of Nathan. Except for the heat radiating from the big woodburning stove, there was nothing to indicate that he’d been around at all.

“Hello,” snapped Diane Vincent, Nathan’s press agent. “Is Nate there?”

Mallory frowned.
Good question,
she thought ruefully.
And where the hell do you get off calling him “Nate”?

“Mallory?” Diane prodded.

“He was here,” Mallory answered, and hated herself for sounding so lame and uncertain.

Disdain crackled in Diane’s voice. “One night stopover, huh? Listen, if he happens to get in touch, tell him to call me. I’m staying at my sister’s place in Settle. He knows the number.”

Mallory was seething, and her knees felt weak. She reached out awkwardly for one of the kitchen chairs, drew it near and sat down. She despised Diane Vincent and, in some ways, even feared her. But she wasn’t about to let anything show. “I’ll relay your message,” she said evenly.

Diane sighed in irritation, and Mallory knew that she was wondering why a dynamic, vital man like Nathan McKendrick had to have such a sappy wife. “You do that, sugarplum—it’s important.”

Mallory forced a smile to her face. “Oh, I’m sure it is—dearest.”

Diane hung up.

Outside, in the pristine stillness of an island morning, Cinnamon’s joyful bark pierced the air. Mallory hung up the phone and went to stand at the window over the kitchen sink, a genuine smile displacing the frozen one she’d assumed for Diane Vincent. Nathan and the enormous red dog were frolicking in the snow, their breath forming silvery white plumes in the crisp chill of the day. Beyond them, the towering pine trees edging the unpaved driveway swayed softly in the wind, green and snow-burdened against the splotchy sky.

Mallory swallowed as bittersweet memories flooded her mind. For a moment, she slid back through the blurry channels of time to a cheerful memory….

“One of these days,” her father was saying, snowflakes melting on the shoulders of his checkered wool coat and water pooling on the freshly waxed floor around his feet, “I’m going to have to fell those pine trees, Janet, whether you and Mallory like it or not. If I don’t, one of them is sure to come down in a windstorm and crash right through the roof of this house.”

Mallory and her mother had only exchanged smiles, knowing that Paul O’Connor would never destroy those magnificent trees. They had already been giants when the island was settled, over a hundred years before, and that made them honored elders.

With reluctance, Mallory wrenched herself back to the eternal present and retreated into the bedroom. There would be time enough to tell Nathan that Diane wanted him to call, she thought, with uncharacteristic malice. Time enough.

Mallory crawled into bed, yawned and immediately sank into a sweet, sound, dreamless sleep.

When she awakened much later, the sun was high in the sky, and she could hear the sizzle of bacon frying and the low, caressing timbre of Nathan’s magical voice. Grinning, buoyed by the sounds and scents of morning, Mallory slid out of bed and crept to the kitchen doorway.

Nathan, clad in battered blue jeans and a bulky blue pullover sweater, stood with his back to her, the telephone’s earpiece propped precariously between his shoulder and his ear. While he listened to the person on the other end of the line, he was trying to turn the fragrant bacon and keep an eager Cinnamon at bay at the same time. Finally, using a meat fork, he lifted one crispy strip from the pan, allowed the hot fat to drip off and then let the morsel fall to the floor. “Careful, girl—that’s hot,” he muttered. And then he moved closer to the mouthpiece and snapped, “Very funny, Diane. I was talking to the
dog
.”

Mallory stiffened. Suddenly, the peace, beauty and comfort of the day were gone. It was as though the island had been invaded by a hostile army.

She went back to the bedroom, now chilled despite the glowing warmth that filled the old house, and took brown corduroy slacks and a wooly white sweater from her suitcases. After dressing and generally making herself presentable, she again ventured into enemy territory.

Nathan was setting the table with Blue Willow dishes and everyday silver and humming one of his own tunes as he worked. Mallory looked at the dishes and remembered the grace of her mother’s hands as she’d performed the same task, the lilting softness of the songs she’d sung.

Missing both her parents keenly in that moment, she shut her eyes tight against the memory of their tragic deaths. She had so nearly died with them that terrible day, and she shuddered as her mind replayed the sound of splintering wood, the dreadful chill and smothering silence of the water closing over her face, the crippling fear.

“Mall?” Nathan queried in a low voice. “Babe?”

She forced herself to open her eyes, draw a deep, restorative breath. Janet and Paul O’Connor were gone, and there was no sense in reliving the brutal loss now. She tried to smile and failed miserably.

“Breakfast smells good,” she said.

Nathan could be very perceptive at times—it was a part, Mallory believed, of his mystique as a superstar. The quality came through in the songs he wrote and in the haunting way he sang them. “Could it be,” he began, raising one dark eyebrow and watching his wife with a sort of restrained sympathy, “that there are a few gentle and beloved ghosts among us this morning?”

Mallory nodded quickly and swallowed the tears that had been much too close to the surface of late. The horror of that boating accident, taking place only a few months after her marriage to Nathan, flashed through her mind once more in glaring technicolor. The Coast Guard had pulled her, unconscious, from the water, but it had been too late for Paul and Janet O’Connor.

Nathan moved to stand behind her, his hands solid and strong on her shoulders. It almost seemed that he was trying to draw the pain out of her spirit and into his own.

Mallory lifted her chin. “What did Diane want?” she asked, deliberately giving the words a sharp edge. If she didn’t distract Nathan somehow, she would end up dissolving before his very eyes, just as she’d done so many times during the wretched, agonizing days following the accident.

He sighed and released his soothing hold on her shoulders, then rounded the table and sank into his own chair, reaching out for the platter of fried bacon. “Nothing important,” he said, dropping another slice of the succulent meat into Cinnamon’s gaping mouth.

Mallory began to fill her own plate with the bacon, eggs and toast Nathan had prepared. “Diane is beautiful, isn’t she?”

Nathan glowered. “She’s a bitch,” he said flatly.

Mallory heartily agreed, in secret, of course, and it seemed wise to change the subject. “My contract with the soap is almost up,” she ventured carefully, longing for a response she knew Nathan wouldn’t give.

“Hmm,” he said, taking an irritating interest in the view framed by the big window over the sink. The dwarf cherry trees in the yard looked as though someone had trimmed their naked gray branches in glistening white lace.

Mallory bit into a slice of bacon, annoyed.
Damn him, why doesn’t he say that he’s pleased to know I’ll have time for him again, that we should have a child now?
“Well?” she snapped.

“Well, what?” he muttered, still avoiding her eyes.

Mallory ached inside. If she told him that she wanted to give up her career—it wasn’t even a career to her, really, but something she had stumbled into—it would seem that she was groveling, that she hadn’t been able to maintain her independence. “Nothing,” she replied with a defeated sigh. She looked at the food spread out on the table and suddenly realized that the makings of such a meal hadn’t been on hand when she arrived the night before. “You’ve been to the store.”

He laughed at this astute observation, and at last he allowed his dark, brooding eyes to make contact with her green ones. “My dear,” he imparted loftily, “some of us don’t lounge about in our beds half the day with absolutely no concern for the nutritional needs of the human body. Which reminds me—” His wooden chair scraped along the floor as he stood up and reached out for a bulky paper bag resting on the kitchen counter. From it, he took six enormous bottles containing vitamin supplements. Ignoring his own rapidly cooling breakfast, Nathan began to shake pills from each of the bottles and place them neatly beside Mallory’s orange juice. Finally, when there was a colorful mountain of capsules and tablets sitting on the tablecloth, he commanded sternly, “Start swallowing.”

Mallory gulped, eyeing what amounted to a small meal all on its own. “But—”

Nathan merely leaned forward and raised his eyebrows in firm instruction, daring her to defy him.

Dutifully, his wife swallowed the vitamins, one by one. When the arduous task had been completed, Mallory had no appetite left for the food remaining on her plate, but she ate it anyway. Clearly Nathan meant to press the point if she didn’t.

Once the meal was over, they washed and dried the dishes together, talking cautiously about things that didn’t matter. As Mallory put the last piece of silverware into the appropriate drawer, however, she bluntly asked a question that had been tormenting her all along.

“Nathan, why didn’t you make love to me last night?”

He looked at her, and their eyes held for a moment, but Mallory saw the hardening of Nathan’s jawline and the tightening of his fine lips. He broke away from her gaze and once again took a consuming interest in the cherry trees outside.

“I was tired,” he said after a long pause. “Jet lag, I guess.”

Mallory was not sure whether what she felt was courage or just plain foolishness. “Are you having an affair, Nathan?”

He whirled, all his attention suddenly focused on Mallory’s face. “No,” he bit out, plainly insulted at the suggestion. “And in case you’re wondering, I still find you as desirable as ever, last night notwithstanding, even if you are a touch too bony for my taste.”

“Then what is it?” Mallory pressed, crumpling the damp dish towel between her hands. “We haven’t been together in six weeks and—”

Nathan pried the cloth out of her hands, tossed it aside and drew Mallory very close. The encounter of their two bodies, his, hard and commanding, hers, gently rounded and very willing, set off an intangible, electric response in them both. “You don’t need to remind me how long we’ve been apart, pumpkin,” he muttered, his lips warm and soft at her temple. “This last tour was torture.”

Mallory throbbed with the dreadful, ancient need of him. “Make love to me now, Nathan,” she whispered.

But he stiffened and held her away, and the only contact remaining was the weight of his hands on her shoulders. “No,” he said firmly. “You’re tired and sick…. I don’t know what your doctor’s orders were, but I’m sure they didn’t include a sexual marathon.”

Mallory’s chin trembled slightly. Was he really concerned for her health? Or was he fulfilling his needs in someone else’s bed? He’d denied having an affair, but it didn’t seem likely that he would admit to anything of that sort when he knew his wife had been hospitalized only a few days before.

Taking no apparent notice of her silence, Nathan kissed Mallory’s forehead in a brotherly manner and released his hold on her shoulders. “There’s a nice fire going in the living room,” he said, sounding determinedly cheerful. “Why don’t you curl up on the couch and read or something?”

Mallory had several “or somethings” in mind for the living room sofa, but they certainly didn’t include reading. With a proud lift of her chin, she turned and marched out of the kitchen without a word.

The living room was a warm and welcoming place, however, with its window seats and sweeping view of Puget Sound. Mallory couldn’t help feeling soothed as she entered. She stood still for a long time, looking out at the water and the snowy orchard that had been her father’s pride. When he wasn’t piloting or repairing his charter fishing boat, Paul O’Connor had spent every free moment among those trees, pruning and spraying and rejoicing in the sweet fruit they bore.

Presently, the snow began to fall again. Mallory took a childlike pleasure in the beauty of it, longing to rush outside and catch the huge, iridescent flakes on her tongue. Too tired for the moment to pursue the yearning, she perched instead on a window seat, her knees sinking deep in its bright polka-dot cushions, and let her forehead rest against the cool dampness of the window glass.

She sensed Nathan’s presence long before he approached to stand behind her, disturbingly close.

“I’ve got some business to take care of, pumpkin,” he said quietly. “I’ll be back later.”

Mallory’s shoulders tensed painfully, and she did not turn around to look at her husband. She had a pretty good idea of what kind of “business” he had in mind, but she would have died before calling him on it. If she was losing her husband, she could at least lose him with dignity and grace.

But she was entirely unprepared for the warm, moving touch of his lips on the side of her neck. A shiver of delightful passion went through her, and she was about to turn all her concentration on seducing Nathan then and there when he suddenly turned and strode out of the room.

Mallory closed her eyes and didn’t open them again until she’d heard the distant click of the back door closing behind him. She cried silently for several minutes, and then marched into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face until the tears had been banished.