CHAPTER TWELVE

Bean paste again, this time without even the dubious saving grace of tortillas. The sight of the candy box was driving Maddy crazy, and even the knowledge that only an inedible videotape rested inside didn’t soothe her chocolate cravings. She spent the hours after dinner planning just how many raspberry creams she was going to eat once she got back. There was a French confectionnaire in Manhattan Beach. She might even stop on her way home from the airport, assuming she was ever going to see LAX again. At this point even that seemed doubtful.

For a while she lay there in the dark. The dim light bulb wasn’t much to read by, and it attracted the swarms of mosquitoes that Ramon still insisted were nothing compared to a real infestation. Every now and then she thought she heard the muffled sound of gunfire, and each rumbled blast shot through her body like lightning. She was beginning to understand something of what Jake had told her. The guns seemed to be getting closer. He had told her life and death were quick and cheap, and she wondered if she was going to die in her bed that night.

Not her bed. Jake’s bed. Would he dare come back to try to join her there? She remembered the bleak, cynical look in his eyes, and she knew he wouldn’t. She had driven him away, forever, and he wouldn’t come near her again, not unless she made the first move.

What a ridiculous thought! Why should she make any move toward him? For once in her life she’d been smart enough not to get involved with someone who was no good for her. Her luck up to then hadn’t been spectacularly good. Tom McAndrews and Carl Aguilar hadn’t been a noticeable improvement over Jake Murphy. And nothing, not even Carl’s athletic and inventive sex, had moved her the way a simple kiss from Jake’s hard, unsmiling mouth moved her.

Except there was nothing simple in Jake’s kisses. They were all wrapped up with guilt and wanting and childhood dreams that had never quite died. There was no way she could view them objectively, no way she could view her feelings about him objectively, except to treasure her good sense in leaving him alone.

So why was she lying there in the dark, thinking about him, dreaming about him, being obsessed by him? For all her denying his power over her, it was unavoidable.

Sighing, she climbed off the bed, moving toward the light. Maybe Hemingway would distract her once more.

The night was dark and silent, and she paused at the short string for the light, then moved on without pulling it to stare out the window into the dark garden. The moon was behind the clouds, and not for the first time Maddy wished she knew what time it was. Probably after ten, judging by the utter stillness of the rambling old hacienda. She looked upward, to her father’s bank of windows, and saw nothing but darkness. She wrinkled her forehead in sudden worry. With a man in her father’s weakened condition she would have thought someone would be there at all times and at least a small light be kept burning. Uneasiness washed over her in waves, an uneasiness she pushed away. If there was one thing she could trust, it was that Jake would keep Sam Lambert safe.

Closing the shutters, she went back and pulled the light cord, flooding the small, barren room with dim yellow light. At some point during the afternoon her purse had been returned, and surprisingly enough, the money and passport were intact. The only thing missing was the stash of candy bars. At that point Maddy would have gladly forked over the five hundred dollars in travelers’ checks for one Hershey bar.

It didn’t take her long to wash up that night. She managed a fairly thorough sponge bath in the small, stained sink in the bathroom. Even if the water was rusty and only lukewarm she felt somewhat refreshed and definitely more human. She’d asked earlier, but apparently a shower was out of the question. The water supply, such as it was, was extremely limited. She had no choice but to make do.

There was no sign of a living soul in the darkened hallway as she made her way back from the bathroom, and no sound permeated the thick walls except for the distant, almost constant thud of gunfire.

Boy, it felt good to get the contact lenses out. She perched her thin, wire-rimmed glasses on her nose, pulled on a loose cotton nightgown, and climbed between the rough sheets.

Hemingway had lost his charm. She dropped The Sun Also Rises with a sigh, pushed the Faulkner away, and concentrated on the others. It wasn’t a promising choice, probably culled from the deserted library of the old hacienda. There was Dickens, and she’d rather die than read David Copperfield again. Joyce Carol Oates wasn’t worth the effort. Only the last held promise. It was an aging volume of The Oxford Book of English Verse, dated 1901. With a sigh of pure pleasure she settled back against the lumpy pillow, ready to lose herself.

The book opened readily enough to Christina Rossetti. It was “A Birthday,” one of the most beautiful love poems of all time. Maddy felt the pain slice through her heart at the simple, elegant lines.

“Damn.” She slammed shut the aging volume, and a cloud of dust tickled her nose into a sneeze. What the hell would Murphy be doing, having that by his bed? With that section marked? Well, the book offered more than enough poetry for every taste—she’d find something dour and depressing and wipe Christina Rossetti’s lush romanticism out of her soul.

She opened the book again, searching for something deathly, but the papers tucked into the middle of the book interfered, and she pulled them out, tossing them to the bed beside her before turning back to the book. Then she froze.

Slowly, carefully she shut the blue leather book once again. A trembling hand reached down to pick up the papers that had held his place.

It was the photograph Stephen had taken a lifetime ago. There she was, seventeen and anxious and terribly in love. She remembered well when that picture had been taken. Stephen had returned, reluctantly, when the scandal hit and Sam and Jake disappeared. He’d done his best to make Maddy smile, telling her long, fanciful stories of his trip out west, feeding her milkshakes until she was nauseous, keeping her out of range of her mother’s intense rage. He’d taken that picture two days before he left to go back to college. She was wearing the flowery dress she’d worn for her birthday, and her long legs were bare, the thick mane of dark hair a curtain down her back. She looked lost and lovely, and when she’d had the pictures developed she’d sent that one on to her father, with the absurd hope that he cared enough about her to want it.

Jake must have taken it from him. The shiny photograph was creased and wrinkled, fingerprints and marks marring the finish. It had been held a lot, looked at a lot, and beside it were the crumpled sheets of her letter to him.

She hadn’t been into elegant stationery at the time; yellow lined legal pads had seen the outpourings of her heart. The paper was crumpled and shredding, fourteen years old and soft as cotton with the passage of time. And all this time Jake had kept the letter, the picture, with him.

His tiny island of innocence, her father had called her with a trace of his aristocratic disdain. His moment of sanity, the one part of his adult life untainted by guilt. Well, it was untainted no more. She’d told him just how completely he’d destroyed her life, he and her father. After she left he’d probably come back and destroy the letter and she wouldn’t blame him.

Slowly, carefully she unfolded the delicate sheets of paper, leaning back to read the embarrassing words of her childhood. And then she refolded it without reading a sentence, putting it back in the book, this time next to Christina Rossetti’s own impassioned outpouring. She didn’t need to read it. All she had to do was lean back and close her eyes and she could feel the emotions washing over her. Because they were still there, still as strong, tempered by time and distance and a reluctant maturity that couldn’t talk her out of it. She still loved Jake Murphy, and she expected she always would.

The sudden flash of light was brilliant, blinding. The thunder that followed it shook the building, and Maddy could hear the crash of broken glass, the cracking, tumbling sound of part of the building collapsing. It took her a moment to realize that it wasn’t a thunderstorm. Sam Lambert’s fortress was being shelled.

The next one was even more frightening, now that she knew what it was. She was about to dive under the bed when common sense reared its ugly head, and she realized that the second floor might not be the wisest choice. The first thing she had to do was to get her father down into the basement, and to safety. She couldn’t count on anyone there, with the exception of Jake, to see to that. And Jake would need help.

She didn’t hesitate before she leaped from the bed. She considered changing for only a moment before the next shell hit even closer, and the bed shook on the rough wood floor. She grabbed her sandals and headed out into the hallway, just as the power flickered off.

The darkness closed around her like a tomb. She paused long enough to slip on the leather sandals, then moved off into the darkness, running a hand along the wall for a small measure of security. She could smell the acrid scent of gunpowder mixing with the dryness of plaster dust, and the floor beneath her feet crunched with the bits of the building that had rattled loose.

The next shell was the worst. Closed in the darkness, Maddy sank against the wall, whimpering in sudden panic, as the villa shook around her. At any moment she expected it to crumble into dust, at any moment she expected to be blown to kingdom come. Fast and cheap, Jake had said of life and death. She was learning the hard way.

She slipped on the stairs, scraping her hands and knees against the plaster rubble. She had no thought in mind but to try to reach her father’s room, not because it would do any good but because Jake would be there.

She heard him calling her from a distance, his voice harsh and curiously panicked. She never would have thought Jake would be frightened of anything. She turned back from her father’s room without a moment of hesitation, making her way carefully back down the debris-strewn staircase in the darkness.

“I’m here, Jake.” Her own voice sounded raw and frightened, and the next shell held her panicked, motionless, unable to move until the rattling, rumbling power of it passed by and the house was still standing.

“Where the hell are you?” His voice was desperately angry and blessedly close in the darkness. She vaulted off the steps in the direction of his voice, and a moment later felt her trembling body crushed in the fierce safety of his arms.

“Where were you?” he whispered, pressing her head against the solid warmth of his shoulder. He smelled of plaster and sweat and Jake, and the unexpected scent of crushed gardenias. Even chocolate paled next to his earthy scent, and she buried her face closer to him.

“I was looking for you,” she murmured against his shirt. “I thought you’d be with Sam, so I was trying to get up there.”

“Sam’s okay—you needn’t have worried,” Jake said, his gentle voice at odd variance with the rough strength of his hands on her body.

“I wasn’t worried about Sam. I was worried about you.”

He hesitated, and she could feel the tension running through his body, a new tension, not caused by the shelling and the house falling down around them. “You shouldn’t have bothered. Nothing gets to me.”

“I know. But if I was going to die I wanted to be with you.” It was very dark, but when she moved her head to look up at him she thought she could at last read his expression. It was a fierce, possessive joy.

“Why?”

What was the good of hiding? she thought wearily. They might be dead in another minute. “Because I love you. I always have, and I always will.”

It took her a moment to realize that the sudden stillness was without as well as within. The shelling had stopped, and she was standing there in Jake’s arms, having just bared her soul to him and wiped out any last defense.

Then he spoke. “You know I’m no good for you?”

“Yes.”

“You know I can’t go with you when you leave?”

“Yes.”

“And you know that I love you?”

It had been years since anyone had said that to her—not since her brother had died, and not often before then. She closed her eyes with a sigh. “Yes.”

His mouth gently brushed hers, a benediction, a promise made to be broken. He scooped her up in his arms, a fragile burden. “This has been a long time coming,” he said, and his voice shook just slightly.

“Yes,” she said, twining her arms around his neck through the long thick silk of his hair. “Yes.”

He made his way unerringly to the bedroom they’d shared the night before, kicking the door shut behind them and tumbling her down on the bed with a glorious disregard for the papers and books she’d left strewn on top of it. She knew a moment’s regret as she heard the papers hit the floor, and then regret was the last thing on her mind, as she felt her nightgown being stripped away by clever hands.

Very gently he removed her thin, wire-framed glasses, his mouth caressing each eyelid in a touch feather-light and unbearably moving. Her hands weren’t nearly so deft; she trembled as she tried to undress him, and finally he caught one struggling hand in the grip of his larger one, a soft laugh filling his voice. “I’ll take care of it.” He pulled away for a moment, and the loss of his hard, strong body against hers was an ache that was a sudden presage of times to come.

Then he was back, half beside her, half on top of her, his body naked against hers, hard where she was soft, muscled where she was lean, strong where she was weak. With a sudden desperation she clutched at him, trying to pull him over and onto her, and her mouth rained rapid kisses over his face, his mouth, his neck and shoulders.

“Slow down,” he murmured against her skin. “We’re in no hurry. We’ve waited fourteen years, we can wait a little longer.”

“I don’t know if I can,” she whispered against the hard, silky flesh of his shoulder. “I want you now.”

His hands were sliding down her trembling body, soothing and arousing feelings she’d never thought existed. When his hand reached the soft, damp mound of her femininity he groaned deep in his throat, a sound of pleasure and frustration. “I guess you do want me now,” he said between tiny, stinging kisses that trailed across her fevered skin. “But you’ll have to wait. I have every intention of doing this right.”

His lips, his teeth, his tongue performed wonders on every inch of her body, bringing her to a fever pitch. In return she covered him with frantic, hungry kisses, delighting in the smell and taste of him, the sharp edge of frustration that his deliberate pace incited only carrying her further along on the tide of sensuality that threatened to drown her. Just when she thought she was about to explode, his mouth found her, wet and warm and seeking, and the thrust of his tongue sent her gasping and clutching, over the edge into oblivion.

Before she had time to catch her breath he had moved, up and over her, poised and waiting between her legs. She opened her eyes then, meeting his in the flood of moonlight that washed through the garden window, carrying with it the tropical night breezes and the scent of gardenias. Slowly he pressed against her, filling her with his massive strength that seemed almost more than she could accommodate. But there was no pain, only a tightness that quickly faded to something beyond ecstasy, and she closed around him, her arms, her legs, her body, and arched up to meet the last tiny bit of his thrust.

“I don’t … want to hurt you,” he murmured in her ear, his voice ragged, his body taut with his fierce control.

“No,” she whispered. “You couldn’t … ever. …” And if she thought she’d reached the pinnacle of release before, the slow, diabolically clever movement of his hips against her, his body against hers, proved that she had only begun.

It built slowly, steadily, until it reached a fever pitch, and she was clutching at his sweat-slick body, his long hair all around her, in her eyes, in her mouth, and she could hear her voice sobbing, whimpering, weeping against him in a helpless litany of a pleasure that was almost pain.

And then she was there, past the struggle, in a white-hot flashpoint that shattered and scorched and disintegrated everything around her. She felt his body stiffen against her, rigid in her clinging arms, and knew he’d joined her in the conflagration.

Slowly, slowly she tumbled back to reality, back to the narrow bed in the barren room in the besieged villa. She wept then, burying her face against his salt-damp skin, and he held her as she wept.

When the storm of tears finally abated he pushed the wet, tangled curls away from her face. “No Kleenex,” he whispered with gentle understanding. “Do you want to use my shirt?”

She nodded, then realized he might not be able to see her, and opened her mouth to speak. But he’d already leaned over to retrieve the soft chambray shirt he’d been wearing, and she sat up to wipe the tears from her face.

“Are you that good in bed?” she said in a shaky voice. “Or did I just imagine it?”

She could feel his smile through the moon-shadowed darkness. “I’m not that good,” he said, and his voice was rich with amusement. “Love is a powerful aphrodisiac.”

She lay back down with a sigh, curling into his arms. “It certainly is. I didn’t know I could feel that way.”

He lay very still against her, and she could tell he was searching for the right words. “Haven’t you … felt like that before?” His voice was very careful, but she knew that he wanted to ask what he felt he had no right to ask.

“Never,” she murmured against his chest. “I waited for you as long as I could, Jake, but I couldn’t wait forever.”

“I didn’t want you to.”

“Didn’t you?” She was faintly, happily skeptical. “I’ve had two lovers. One in college who was straightforward, unimaginative, and short-lived in more ways than one. It didn’t seem worth the effort to get involved again, until I met Carl three years ago. He was the opposite of Tom, fiery, emotional, very inventive. I enjoyed being with him but something always seemed to be missing.”

He said nothing, but his hands began to move down her arm, long, lingering strokes that couldn’t disguise his tension. Then he spoke, and his voice was a deep rumble beneath her ear. “I don’t think I’ve ever been jealous before in my life except for the time I found you necking with Eric Thompson.”

Maddy laughed. “You don’t need to be jealous. There was something I forgot to tell you. Both those men looked exactly like you.” She reached out and ran her hand through his silky mane. “Without the hair, of course.”

She could feel the tension leave his body, and his hand slid down her arm to lightly catch her hip. “You don’t like my hair?”

“It’s very erotic. It might not do too well in the States nowadays.” The moment the words were out of her mouth she could have bitten her lip, and grief washed over her.

But Jake only smiled. “When I come back to get you I’ll cut my hair.”

Maddy said nothing. There were no guarantees. They could be killed in their sleep that very night, they could be separated by the fortunes of war and never see each other again. There was even the distinctly farfetched possibility that it might work, that he might come and find her in L.A.

But fate had never been their friend, and Maddy wasn’t about to trust in it at this late date. She was going to take what was hers, in front of her, warm and strong and close at hand, and the devil take the future, be it five years or five hours away. She reached up her arms to him, and the sudden desperation that sparked their coming together was an overlying veil of sadness that made their union bittersweet, and all the more glorious. This time her release was expected and, impossibly enough, even more shattering, so that she buried her face against the side of Jake’s neck to muffle her incoherent cries. And as he followed her in a tumult of hopeless love, she wept into the darkness of the San Pablo night.