The Dangerous Hero (15 page)

Afterwards, she cuddled up to his side, resting her head on his shoulder while he slung an arm loosely around her. Their
legs were entwined.
She was affectionate. She insisted on kissing his eyelids and his forehead and his chin and telling him once again that she thought he was beautiful. Made him feel all warm and toasty. She seemed happy, and he wondered if he'd imagined that feeling of disconnection, that sense of something lost.

Chapter 13

The sky was
beginning to lighten with the coming of the dawn when Viola awakened and stumbled to Stephen's bathroom. She felt dazed from lack of sleep and the satiety of love. She wasn’t sure how long it had been since she and Stephen had settled down to doze, tightly wrapped in each other's arms. For most of the night, they had alternately made love and talked. She had learned about his family, including his neurologist mom and his younger sister Maggie, who was in her first year of residency as a gastroenterologist. He had heard all about her life at Whittacre. The only thing they had not discussed was the past.

At some point she’d fallen asleep for a bit and awakened to find him gone, but he’d returned a little while later, explaining he’d had an idea for his book. "I think you’re inspiring me. I keep getting new insights on the plot, which is great because I've spent far too many weeks being stuck."

Viola splashed cold water on her face and examined herself in the mirror over the sink. Her hair was a wild and flaming mess, and her eyes, though sleepy-looking, were glowing with contentment. Her cheeks were flushed from the roughness of Stephen's overnight growth of beard.

Spontaneously, she smiled at herself in the mirror. She looked happy. And why not?

It was happening just the way it had happened nine years ago. No one had ever made her feel the way he did. Their bodies were perfect together, but it was more than that. It felt as though something had slipped into place, putting all the random jigsaw pieces of her life together to produce a picture that actually made sense.

Still grinning, Viola went back into the bedroom and stood looking down at her lover sleeping. He lay sprawled on his back, half covered by the bedspread, one arm stretched out as if unconsciously seeking her. The sculpted bones of his face seemed much less harsh than when he was wakeful. His expression was peaceful and the tiny lines around his eyes and mouth had been wiped away. He looked younger than his years.

She was about to crawl back into bed beside him when she noticed the rosy hue extending out over the ocean, the forerunner of the sunrise, which she hardly ever saw. She was a night person, staying up late and rarely awakening before nine in the morning. This morning the rising sun seemed to symbolize a new beginning, and she wanted to watch it break out of the purple sea.

She picked up his sweat shirt and drew it over her head. It was much too big for her, but she took a subtle pleasure in wearing something that had touched his body.

She went to the circular staircase at the end of the bedroom. She had noticed it last night and asked Stephen what was up there, and he'd explained that the entire third story consisted of one large room, his studio, which was dominated by large windows. She wanted to see where he composed his novels, where he did all his work. It was also likely to be the best place from which to watch the dawn.

The view was even more spectacular than she had imagined. The tide was high, and a strong wind ripped across the waves, creating thousands of foamy whitecaps beneath the pearly predawn sky. In the east, the sea was already a rolling carpet of hot pink and apricot, even though the sun had not yet made its appearance. Viola pulled Stephen's desk chair away from his computer table and sat down to watch. As the crimson sun burst from the sea, she felt her spirits lift even higher.

She remained at the window in a kind of meditative trance until the sun was well over the horizon. Then, yawning, she rose to go back downstairs. But first she pushed the chair back over to Stephen's desk, lingering briefly to examine the place where he spent so much of his time.

The computer screen was on. It was huge, and she wondered if she ought to shut it off. A colorful geometric screen saver was dancing across the screen, but even so, it must be wasting a lot of energy. Her own habit was to shut down electronic devices when they weren’t being used.

She wouldn’t turn off the computer of course, lest any open files be lost, but it wouldn’t hurt to switch off the monitor. When she brushed her fingers over the keyboard in search of the off switch, the screen saver vanished, revealing the file he must have been working on earlier. It appeared to be a chapter from his latest Bartholomew Giles novel.

She really didn’t intend what happened next. She would never have gone on his computer and searched for any of his files, but whole sentences seemed to leap off the screen at her. She couldn’t unsee them. Before she had even thought about what she was doing, she had read halfway down the page.

It was a torture scene. Bartholomew Giles had captured two members of a secret cabal of Spanish agents who were plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. A man and a woman. He had them down to his secret, illegal dungeon below his house. When neither prisoner would answer his questions, he had the woman put on the rack to be tortured while the man, who was also her lover, was forced to watch.

What happened made Viola feel a little woozy. She didn’t want to keep reading, and if Stephen hadn’t been the writer, she probably would have stopped. But there was a weird fascination reading words that he had authored. Despite the use of certain diction and terminology that must have come from the 16
th
century, the narrative voice sounded just like his own voice. The sentence style, with its intelligence and wit, was the same as the style he used when writing her personal emails.

This created an odd sense of dislocation. This was Stephen speaking, but what he was saying was extremely dark and violent. Plus, it was written in a way that seemed perversely erotic. Although Bart wasn’t doing anything explicitly sexual to the poor woman, there was something about the description of her appearance, including the loving detail about the physical effects of the rack, that suggested that Bart was getting off on what he was doing. With a horrified fascination, she read the dialogue as he bent over his writhing victim and cranked the wheel of his rack up a notch or two. Then he took up a flogger with sharp metal hooks in the tips of each whip tail and dangled it over his victim's helpless, straining body. "Scream now for me," he said, and starting slashing her, tearing her flesh and savoring her cries.

Her heart pounding, Viola reminded herself that this wasn’t new. Bart was a sadist, and there were similar scenes in Stephen’s former novels. The words, "scream now for me" were a refrain he’d used before; the signature phrase that meant Bart was taking his own perverse pleasure in the torture.

It was these scenes that she had always objected to; most of the rest of the narrative was intelligent and witty, with extremely good research into 16
th
century life at the court of Elizabeth Tudor. There was a great deal that balanced out Stephen’s indulgence in, well, sadism. But she had never before had to confront the fact that he sat down at a computer and visualized these things. In the case of this particular scene, if he had gotten up out of bed to work on it tonight, that meant Bart had been torturing his victim in between their sessions of lovemaking.

When did the scene come together in his head? Was he envisioning his vile hero abusing this woman while he was fucking her? If Bart got off on torture, did Stephen?

He wanted to introduce her to his whips, his floggers. Nipple clamps. Predicament bondage.

When she’d first told him she wasn’t into pain, he had demonstrated that he knew ways to make pain erotic. He clearly enjoyed hurting his lovers. How much, she wondered? What were his limits? What were hers?

"What are you doing?"

Viola’s heart did a somersault and she jerked back from the desk in a manner that must have looked guilty. Stephen came up behind her, unsmiling for once. She hadn’t heard him on the stairs.

"I was watching the sun come up. Your screen was on, so I thought I’d switch it off. To save power."

"It’s still on," he pointed out.

Since it was obvious that she had been reading what was on the screen, she decided to be upfront about it. "I was briefly mesmerized by Bart’s being his usual nasty self. Is this the latest volume of your sadistic hero’s adventures?"

"Yes." Reaching past her, he pressed the screen’s off button. Bart went dark. "I don’t allow anyone to read my books until they’re finished."

"I’m sorry." She felt terrible. Would he think she was a snoop? No one wanted a lover who seized the first opportunity to rifle through the files on their computer. "I really did mean to turn it off. I wasn’t deliberately prying."

"Let’s go back down to the bedroom," he said, his tone far colder than usual. He was angry. He was tense and his lips were tight. Uneasiness shot through her. She had never seen him angry before. It scared her a little. Angry males reminded her of Derek, and Derek was absolutely the last person she wanted to think about now. Or ever.

She ducked away from the arm he tried to drape around her shoulders. She scurried down the narrow winding staircase to the lower level and climbed back into bed, shivering. She couldn’t seem to get the image of Bart slashing his prisoner with a vicious whip out of her head. Why had she permitted herself to read it?

Stephen joined her in bed, but he seemed remote. He didn’t touch her. "I’m really sorry," she said again. "You’re mad, aren’t you?"

There was a longer than usual interval before he answered, but when he did speak his voice was mercifully wry. "I’m getting over it. Sorry. I had a bit of a Melanie flashback. She used to sneak into my office and read my email. It really pissed me off."

"She’s the ex you were telling me about?"

"Yep. She knew my stuff was off limits, but she did it anyway. She loved to provoke me. I think she wanted to be caught because she got off on the punishment. It took me awhile to catch on."

"You used to punish her?"

"Sure," he said, sounding a bit abstract, as if still in the past. Then his eyes focused again on her and he added, "But when I figured out why she was being so brazen, I stopped. It was like the old joke—what does the sadist do to the masochist? Nothing."

Viola laughed, but she felt uneasy again.

"Are you okay?" he asked a few moments later. "I’m sorry I snapped at you."

"No, it was my bad. I went up there to watch the sunrise, which was beautiful, by the way. I had a Green attack and tried to turn off your monitor, and there was Bart. Don’t worry, I won’t do it again. I’m not usually a privacy invader, honestly."

"It’s just that I write a lot of drafts. Scenes are never finished until, well, they’re finished. I don’t like anyone seeing the unpolished early attempts. It’s embarrassing."

"Well, don’t worry." She tried to make light of it. "I only write nasty reviews of thoroughly complete and well-polished novels."

He pulled her into his arms. "I’m not Bart, you know. You
do
know that, right?"

"Sure," she said. "I know that."

Chapter 14

When they dragged themselves out of bed later in the morning, they had a light breakfast and went out together to walk the dog. When they got back with Rusty, Viola took a long shower. When she finally returned to the living room, she discovered Stephen sitting on the sofa in his living room typing furiously on his laptop. Not more torture, she hoped. "Are you writing?"

"Yep." He looked up with a smile. "Got another idea. You're inspiring me."

"Well, don't let me interrupt. Do you want to work for a couple of hours? I can amuse myself."

He lifted his eyebrows. "How would you do that?"

"I thought I might take a ride over to the other side of the Cape and stop in at my dad's house, since I'm so close."

Stephen abruptly shut the cover of his laptop. She noted that frown between his eyes as he said, "May I remind you that you're here with me this weekend. You didn't come down to the Cape to visit your father."

He was touchy about her father. "Don't worry, he's not even there. It's my cat I want to visit. Dad's gone fly fishing in Montana for a week. He's got a cat sitter taking care of Leta—that's my cat—but she only stops by once a day, and Leta must be lonely. I feel bad about her being all alone when I'm near enough to visit and cheer her up a bit."

Stephen appeared to relax again. "Okay, I get that. I have a dog sitter come in for Rusty when I'm away for the weekend, too, and he's not wild about that, either. I figure it's better than putting him in a kennel, though. But why is your cat living at your father's place?"

"Because the owner of house I'm renting in Rolling Meadows refused to allow me to have any pets. You've seen how immaculate the place is, so I guess I understand, but I think I'd have rented someplace else that did allow me to have Leta with me if the whole thing hadn't been so last minute."

"So Percy offered to take care of your cat for you?"

"Well, she's sorta become his cat, too, since I was living with him for a while after I left my husband." It had been one of the many things her father had taken care of for her after she had fled from Derek. She had never wanted to see him again, not for any reason. It had been Percy who had gone to their house and packed up her things, rescuing her cat from Derek, who had barely tolerated Leta anyhow.