Wild Orchids (43 page)

"Pass the soap," he said, and Lora obediently handed over the soap, watching with interest as he lazily soaped his chest.

The sight of white bubbles smeared across bronzed skin and whorls of black hair was captivating. Lora smiled at him as he lifted one hard-muscled arm to scrub beneath it. She could envision doing this every day of her life, until she was a little old lady of ninety-two. There was something about the intimacy of sharing a bath that made her want him to belong to her—permanently, forever, all hers—with an intensity that was almost physical. Her heart trembled and her lips quivered with the need to say, I love you, but she firmly clamped the lid on her foolish organs. Sex with no strings, she had promised him. Of course, she hadn't meant a word of it, but her deepest feminine instincts warned her that now was definitely not the time to confess to that. She had to wait a little longer—wait until he needed her a little more. Wait until he loved her a little. All of which was an awfully tall order…

"You're looking at me like a cat at a mouse. You planning to pounce?"

This was so close to the truth that Lora was momentarily taken aback. But she made a quick recovery, realizing that he could have no notion that she had just been plotting his ultimate surrender. From the teasing glint in his eyes, he had interpreted her fixed attention as a sign that she wanted him. Which she did.

"I was giving it serious consideration." She stretched out a hand to stroke his hard-muscled calf, enjoying the feel of the wet, warm, hair-roughened skin beneath her palm. "But I think I'll have to wait until after supper. I'm starving."

"You mean you'd rather eat than make love? Tsk, tsk, Lora, you wound me.'' Max grinned, sinking down a little in the tub and then straightening abruptly as his back came into contact with the hot and cold fixtures. "This is uncomfortable as hell. Think there's room for me at that end?"

"No," Lora said, but he was already standing, grabbing her arms and pulling her up beside him.

"You can sit on my lap."

He was holding her by the upper arms so that she would not slip, and their bodies just brushed each other. The slight contact was electric. His eyes changed, the teasing glint darkening, turning into something both primitive and powerful. Lora knew her expression must have changed, too. She stepped closer or he pulled her closer, she wasn't sure which, but suddenly she was against him, with his arms fight around her waist and her arms sliding up to encircle his neck. His chest was slick with soap, and the contrast between that and the abrasion of his body hair was tantalizing. She rubbed her body against him instinctively, feeling her nipples harden and the now-familiar quickening between her legs. He felt so good—so hard and tough and male. Funny to think that she was such a sucker for old-fashioned masculinity… Lora half smiled at the humor in it as his mouth came down on hers. Then she quit smiling, quit doing anything at all except kissing him back, her tongue and lips and teeth telling him what her heart was afraid to. She loved him… She kissed him like a woman in love, and only hoped that he was too blind to notice.

Finally, he lifted his head, staring down at her with an expression she couldn't define. She smiled up at him dreamily, hardly aware of the soap that covered them both or the bathwater rapidly cooling around their calves, her fingers trailing over the broad expanse of his shoulders, sliding down to play with the soapy curls of hair on his chest. With a quicksilver forefinger she touched his flat nipple, then skittered away to the other one, barely sliding over the rough surface. His nipples reacted just as hers did. With a catlike smile at him, she leaned forward to press her lips provocatively to that first responsive nipple, drawing it into her mouth and nibbling at it as he did her own. It tasted of soap…

"To hell with taking a bath. I want you." His voice was hoarse, his eyes burning as he drew in a rasping breath. Then he was pushing her away from him, his hands hard on her waist, steadying her. Lora yearned toward him with a little mewling moan, her arms reaching to encircle his neck once more. Her body cried out for the touch of his.

"Come here, baby." He stepped out of the tub, then lifted her out after him, careful not to slip on the cool tiled floor as he carried her into the bedroom. Lora was scarcely aware that they were moving. All her senses were focused on the hot fusion of their mouths, and the reaction it was setting off in her body. All he had to do was touch her and she caught fire. It was wonderful, unbelievable, a private fantasy given breathtaking life; a dream from which she never wanted to wake…

He was dropping her on the roughly woven bedspread, falling with her, crushing her with his weight. Lora was conscious of the prickly cloth beneath her back, the electrically cooled air drying the moisture from her skin with its chilly breath, the heat and weight of his body on top of her. Then she was twisting and turning in his arms, her own arms capturing his head and pulling it down. She wanted him. She wanted him. She wanted him. She had no time to waste on preliminaries, and apparently neither did he. She twisted and squirmed in his arms until the maximum amount of her skin was pressed to his, entwining his legs with hers and urging him down to her. She felt the touch of him against her, fiery hot and urgent as it sought its home, and surged upwards. The sudden impact of their joining sent shudders of pleasure through her. Lora clung, gasping with need, as he claimed her with a frenzy to match her own. He took and took and gave and gave and she shuddered and shivered and matched his every stroke…

There was a sudden brisk knock at the door. Lora scarcely heard it, but Max hesitated and she was aware of that. The knock came again, louder, more imperative.

"La cena, señor!"

"What a hell of a time for room service!" Max muttered a few other words that would, under normal conditions, have singed Lora's ears. But under the circumstances she was totally in accord with the sentiments he expressed.

"Leave it outside the door! Christ, he probably doesn't speak English." Max repeated the command in Spanish.

"Si señor!"
here was a slight rattle of crockery, and then the faint sound of retreating footsteps.

Max looked down at Lora. "Now, where were we?" His lips were curled in a half smile.

She moved beneath him suggestively, employing her own version of the slithering technique that had been driving her out of her mind.

"Somewhere about there, I think," she said politely as her hands slid over his buttocks and pulled him deep inside her. The smile deepened, warmed just before he bent his head to catch her lips.

"I thought it was more like here," he murmured against her mouth, withdrawing himself until he was just barely inside her.

"Ummmm, wherever." Lora's fingers clenched on his buttocks, her nails sinking deep into his flesh, and he came into her again with a laugh and a groan.

"Animal," he accused against her mouth, and then he was kissing her and loving her and there was no more talking at all.

Later, much later, after a quick shared shower in which Lora finally got to wash her hair, Max wheeled the dinner cart inside and they sat down to eat clad in nothing but thick towels. As Lora lifted the cover from her meal of steak and potato, she closed her eyes in rapt appreciation of the savory smell. Then she opened them again to see Max sniffing with equal enjoyment across the table. She smiled at the picture he presented with his black hair damp and tousled and his torso bare. He looked good enough to eat… Her eyes slid over his naked chest with much the same rapt appreciation she had felt for her steak. If ever anyone had told her that she would be dining with a man dressed only in a towel slung low on his hips, his hairy flesh prominently on view across a very small table, she would have been disgusted. Only beer guzzling, belly scratching morons came to the table without a shirt, and Lora had always thought that if she were unlucky enough to encounter one, she would know how to deal with him. But Max was dazzling half-naked. Besides, with her hair in a beige towel and her shoulders and the tops of her breasts bare above a large brown one, she wasn't in any better shape than Max. And from the warm smile he was giving her, he didn't mind at all. Lora smiled back at him as she picked up her knife and fork. It was cozy eating dinner this way, she decided. She felt as if they had been married for years.

The steak was cold, of course, and so was the potato, and the salad was correspondingly warm, but that didn't detract a whit from the first decent meal either of them had had in two weeks. They wolfed their food with gusto, gobbling up every last bite of bread and butter and salad dressing. The wine served with the meal was a very good burgundy, and after the food was gone they sat talking about nothing, laughing as they polished off the bottle. Lora told him little snippets from her childhood, about Janice and her mother and father and her house and her job. He listened in attentive silence, leaning back in his chair as he swirled and sipped at the wine, as she described her ambivalent feelings about her mother and the guilty relief she had felt at her death. Lora thought she must have been a little tipsy form the wine, because she told him feelings that she had never expected to confide to another soul. By the time she had finished, the wine was gone and they were lying naked in the double bed, the room dark around them and his arm warm and comforting around her shoulders. Lora lay back, replete with food and drink and this sharing of her deepest secrets with the man she loved, and waited for him to do his part by confiding the details of his life. But he didn't.

"Tell me about you," she prompted finally in a drowsy murmur.

His arm tightened around her shoulders, and he turned her so that she was lying half on his chest, her head pillowed on the resilient muscle beneath his collarbone and her hand spread out across his chest,

"Nothing to tell," he answered, his fingers lightly stroking her upper arm. Like Lora, he sounded half asleep.

"Of course there's something to tell," she replied in exasperation. "Do you realize that I don't even know how old you are?"

"Thirty-seven. There, does that make you feel any better?"

"No." There was so much she wanted to know, but she was so tired… too tired to play the role of inquisitor. Obviously, he had no intention of talking about his past unless she pried every single fact out of him. And she wasn't sure if he would even tell her everything then. If it hadn't been for Tunafish, she wouldn't have known anything at all about him except his name, the fact that he kidnapped women and was wanted by the Mexican police, and now his age. It was as if he was determined to hold her at arms length on every plane but the physical. She realized what he was telling her without words, but what he didn't know was that she was equally determined to sneak under his guard, to make him need her as she had come to need him: as fundamentally as food to eat, water to drink, air to breathe. But tonight was not a good time to start prying his secrets from him, she decided. She was just too tired. There was always tomorrow. Thank God for tomorrow, she thought with a sleepy smile.

"I was born on October twenty-seventh. I believe that makes me a Scorpio. Satisfied now?"

"No." But she had to smile again at the ridiculousness of it, and he must have felt the movement of her mouth against him because he smiled too,

"Neither am I."

"What?" She was so sleepy that the question was the merest breath of sound.

"Satisfied."

"What?" It took her a few seconds to make sense of this. It might have taken her longer, but his mouth was on her breast and he was turning her onto her back and coming with her. The exquisite suckling sensation made her curl her toes, even half asleep as she was. Then his hand moved down between her legs, seeking and caressing…

"You're not sleepy, are you?" The question was murmured as he switched his attentions form one aching nipple to the other. Lora quivered, and her legs parted instinctively to encourage his wandering hand to explore further.

"N—no." It wasn't true, of course, she was so sleepy she could scarcely keep her eyes open, but what he meant was, was she too sleepy to make love with him again and she was never too sleepy for that, never, never, never, never…

"Sure?" His fingers found the part of her that most cried out for his possession, and slid inside. Lora moaned.

"Yes."

"Good." He moved on top of her, replacing his fingers with himself as his mouth continued to nibble at first one and then the other quivering breast.

Lora moaned again, writhing beneath him despite the waves of exhaustion that his caresses were just barely holding at bay. She could barely keep her eyes open, but she wanted him, wanted him…

She arched and moaned and clung, and their union was all the sweeter because of the lethargy that threatened to claim her. When at last the exquisite explosion of feeling made her cry out, clasping him tightly to her, he was right behind her, crying out himself, gasping her name. They fell back to earth together, clinging, and were still joined as they were both engulfed by waves of sleep.

It was later, much later, when Lora awoke. She wasn't sure what woke her as she lay blinking into the darkness. There was only a sense that something was not quite right. Something… Max moved beside her, turning violently from his stomach to his back, muttering. Lora turned on her side facing him, frowning. He was not usually a restless sleeper-but then, she didn't have much experience sleeping with him. Maybe he was a restless sleeper, and she just didn't know it…

His head twisted from side to side, and the restless muttering increased. Lora sat up, staring down at him, wondering if she should wake him. Wondering if it was the nightmare again…

"Oh, God, what have I done, what have I done? Those people—those people!" He sobbed, clutching at his head, his fingers tearing at his hair.

Lora bent over him, catching the rigid forearms and shaking them gently, trying to awaken him.

"Max! Max, wake up! Max!"

"Oh, God, oh. God, oh, God…"

"Max!"

She caught him by the shoulders, shaking him roughly because his pain frightened her. He was hurting, and she couldn't bear to see him suffer like that.When he still continued to moan and writhe, she shook him as hard as she could, calling out his name. He sat up then with a great cry, his arms flinging wide. The right one struck her and sent her sprawling backwards.