Finding Laura (30 page)

Her nails dug into the hard, shifting muscles of his back when his lips closed over the tip of her breast, and Laura heard another of those unfamiliar sensual sounds escape her. The pleasure of his caress was sharp and potent, drawing
her body taut instantly and creating deep inside her a hollow need for him that was so overwhelming it was almost frightening. Then his mouth left her flesh, and the ache of not having him there was unbearable.

“Look at me,” he ordered, his voice low and rough.

Laura forced her eyes to open. The lamp by the bed lit half his face with a warm golden glow while leaving the other half in shadow, and she found the sight mesmerizing. Half known, half not, attracting her so irresistibly even as he made her wary, he was a mystery she desperately needed to understand. “Daniel,” she murmured, as if answering a question he had asked or she had asked herself.

His hands slid underneath her, and instead of lowering his mouth to her, he lifted her to take his caress. Laura’s back arched and she caught her breath at the strange sensuality of the movement, then moaned at the piercing satisfaction of having his mouth back on her aching flesh. He was holding her in place with one hand still beneath her back, while the other gently shaped and kneaded her breasts, and Laura didn’t know how long she would be able to bear it.

He made her bear it. His mouth tugged at her nipples and his hand stroked her breasts and then slid lower, rubbing her belly, then lower still, and Laura cried out softly in wordless pleasure. Her thighs parted for him and her hips moved instinctively to his rhythmic touch, and Laura surrendered helplessly to the demands of her own desperate body. She couldn’t see or hear or feel anything except the exquisite tension torturing her with its promise.

Daniel waited until she was shifting restlessly, until her fingers gripped his shoulders pleadingly and uncontrolled little sounds of frantic need came from her, and then he moved swiftly to settle between her thighs. Laura felt him push inside her, deep inside, filling the terrible aching emptiness, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out wildly, to scream because it felt so good.

His body lay heavily on hers and Daniel slid his forearms underneath her shoulders and held them with his hands as though he feared she might slip away from him. His face was taut, his voice a rasping whisper when he said, “Don’t hold back, sweetheart. This is an old house; the walls are thick.”

Laura barely noticed the endearment or his perception, because he was moving in a slow, lingering cadence that held her body rapt with a fierce tension that was, had to be, like the moment before life ended. She even thought, with some distant and detached part of her awareness, that nothing could feel so incredibly wondrous unless the price demanded for it was death.

She didn’t care. The tension wound tighter and tighter, making her body jerk and undulate beneath his, drawing strange keening sounds from her throat, and allowing her to breathe only in sharp, shallow pants. And then, with shattering suddenness, the tension snapped, and waves and waves of throbbing pleasure washed over her.

She finally went limp, trembling, just as Daniel reached his climax, and her fingertips glided up his spine in an unthinking caress as he groaned and shuddered in her arms.

It was a long time before he stirred, and Laura luxuriated in the hardness of his body, the heavy weight bearing her down into the mattress. She was not the least bit uncomfortable, which surprised her given his size. A part of nature’s design, she supposed, that men and women should fit so well together even with a disparity in size and build. In any case, she loved the way he felt, loved his warm breath against her neck and then his nuzzling lips, and when he lifted his head and raised himself just a bit on his elbows to look down at her, Laura was very much afraid that her blissful satisfaction showed.

He was smiling just a little, his face relaxed now, and those normally pale eyes were dark in the scant light of the
room. “I don’t want to leave you,” he murmured, his forearms still under her shoulders and his hands tangled in her hair. “But if I’m too heavy—”

“No, you aren’t.” His fingers were moving lazily against her scalp, their bodies were still joined, and Laura felt such contentment she wanted to purr out loud. It was still storming, she realized vaguely, hearing a rumble of thunder. Or was this another storm altogether?

“Good.” Daniel kissed her gently. “Maybe I should hold you here all night.”

“You know I can’t stay.” The statement was neither as unequivocal nor as matter-of-fact as she meant it to be, since her fingers were stroking the nape of his neck at the time.

He kissed her again, this time with more hunger than tenderness, and she felt the faint stirrings inside her of his reawakening desire. “You can stay for hours yet,” he told her huskily, his lips brushing across her cheekbones.

Laura wanted to remind him that he had business in the morning, that both of them would be expected to bear the appearance of people with a solid eight hours of sleep behind them, and that if they didn’t, Amelia at least would certainly be suspicious. She wanted to say that. But his lips were moving over her face, teasingly avoiding her own hungry mouth, and by the time she finally managed to put a stop to his tormenting, there didn’t seem to be much use in continuing the conversation.

T
HEY HAD SLEPT
awhile, Laura realized when she woke around three-thirty as yet another storm vented its fury outside. When she eased up onto her elbow, a glance at his bedside clock told her the time, and she spent a good five minutes looking down at him as he slept. Utterly relaxed now, he looked younger, and the rugged planes of his face seemed softer, less harsh. He had unusually long eyelashes,
she realized, something that normally went unnoticed because they framed those strikingly pale and unreadable eyes.

He lay on his back beside her while she lay in the circle of his right arm, and on his flat, hard stomach his left hand and her right were clasped, their fingers twining together. Laura wondered which of them was so determined to hold on to the other that the grasp hadn’t loosened even in sleep, and had the uneasy idea that it was her. Proof of that was when she was able to slip her hand gently from his.

I’m clinging to him. Gotta stop that
.

She wasn’t yet ready to leave him and go back to her own room, and she didn’t want to wake him, since he seemed to be sleeping deeply, but she was wide awake and felt too restless to just lie there quietly. There was too much to think about lying in his bed, she decided. Too much to worry about. She’d be better off all around if she found something to occupy her mind until he woke or it got so late she’d have to go back to her own room.

She managed to slip from his loosened embrace without waking him, and knelt beside the bed among the jumble of their clothing on the floor. It amused her slightly that their clothing had once more ended in a tangle. She pushed his shoes and her slippers to one side, and laid his pants and shorts over a chair near the bed. She fingered her gown and robe for a moment before tossing them over the arm of the chair, then shrugged into his white shirt.

Laura’s art training had included studies of the nude, and between that and an innate lack of undue modesty or self-consciousness, she would have been perfectly comfortable roaming about Daniel’s dim room naked. So she was amused at herself for putting on his shirt.

Women always do this in books and movies. I wonder why
. Never having had a lover in the true sense of the word, Laura had no experience with such things. But putting on a lover’s shirt instead of their own things seemed to be the
rule in books and movies, and created mild curiosity in Laura’s mind. Then she turned her head to rub her chin absently against the collar of his shirt, and his scent caught her instant attention.
Ah. Now I understand
. She knelt there for several minutes just breathing in the slightly musky scent of Daniel, her eyes half closed, and might have remained there in a mindless heap for some time if a crash of thunder and the discomfort of the hardwood floor beneath her knees hadn’t driven her to her feet.

She studied his bedroom as she hadn’t before, noting the mostly heavy mahogany furniture and muted rugs scattered on the floor. There was an overstuffed burgundy armchair and ottoman near the fireplace, and a padded bench at the foot of the big bed. The draperies and bedspread were a dark green, the wallpaper in here a subdued stripe, and there wasn’t a great deal to reveal Daniel’s personality except for bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. She went to them and studied titles in the dim light, finding a number of old friends in fiction, numerous non-fiction volumes on finance and related subjects, and a couple of figurines that looked to her uncertain eye to have come from Hong Kong or some part of the Orient.

She wandered on, looking at quietly tasteful oils on his walls, none of which aroused more than mild interest until she saw the portrait hanging near the window. John Kilbourne, Daniel’s father. It had to be, she thought, because this man was a slightly older edition of Daniel, with only a touch of gray at his temples and a more heavily lined face to indicate more years than his son had yet achieved.

Odd. Daniel’s the living image of his father, and yet Madeline said that Peter was all she had left of John. Or did Daniel inherit the physical appearance while Peter got the personality of their father?

Laura made a mental note to ask someone about that and wandered on, ending up at the window that faced the rear of the house. Since Daniel’s room was at the end of
the wing, his bedroom and bathroom between them boasted windows on three sides of the house, but the best view would be this window looking out over the gardens just as Laura’s window did.

She leaned against the casing and looked down on the gardens, interested to see that the maze was visible from this vantage point. The lights were still on out there, as they no doubt were all night, and from here there were fewer trees blocking her line of sight to the maze. It was a weird, almost ghostly scene on this stormy night, the shrubbery lights delineating the paths of the maze even as the rain blurred and softened the lines and lightning flashed sporadic harsh emphasis on the display.

It was the strobelike lightning that caught her attention, though she couldn’t have said why. Because it was so powerful, she thought, or because in the momentary brilliance of that light she glimpsed something that tugged at her awareness.…

“Laura?”

She turned her head to look back toward the bed, and caught her breath. Clearly, Daniel didn’t have a problem with nudity any more than she did. He was moving across the room toward her, his grace catlike and his strength stunningly explicit in rippling muscles and powerful limbs. Big, rugged, starkly masculine, he was a blunt invitation for any woman to learn just what her body was capable of feeling.

That, Laura thought dazedly, was how a man should always approach a woman—naked in the firelight. There was something heart-catchingly primitive in the sight, and long before he reached her, Laura felt the effect in her thudding heart and sudden inability to breathe evenly. It was like recognizing a primal force that would never, could never, be contained or controlled except by its own will.

Yes, you’re that. You’ve always been that. And I’ve always been—

“I thought you’d gone,” he said when he reached her, his low voice displacing the strange sensation his approach had created. He put his hands at her waist and drew her against him.

“I should go. It’s almost four.” She had the odd notion that she had been on the verge of … something. That some knowledge she needed had been right at the door of her awareness, almost within reach. But it was gone now.

He bent his head and kissed her, the initial gentleness deepening as always, and against her lips, he said huskily, “I should let you go. But I don’t want to. Stay a little longer, sweetheart. Please.”

Possible revelations slipped from her mind even as her arms slipped up around his neck, and all she could say in response was, “I want to.”

After that, Laura wasn’t at all surprised to find herself back in his bed, and when she next worked herself up on an elbow and looked at the clock, she also wasn’t surprised to find that it was nearly five A.M. The storms had finally faded away, and it was very quiet in the bedroom.

“I know,” Daniel said, one hand toying with her hair and a slight smile curving his lips.

“It’s awfully late,” she said anyway. “Or early. You have to go into the city in just a few hours, don’t you?”

“Around ten.”

Laura nodded, and hesitated before speaking again. She didn’t want to disturb the peaceful contentment between them, but she also had no idea when—or even if—there would be another moment such as this, when the intimacy of the past hours might be expected to encourage truth, or at the very least diminish guardedness.

“What is it, Laura? What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing. That is …” She shook her head
a little, then blurted, “Did you lie about having been in Scotland?”

“No,” he replied calmly. “Who told you I hadn’t been there?”

“I asked Josie,” she confessed, uncomfortable now. “She said you hadn’t.”

“In the last five years, I haven’t,” Daniel said. “It was before Josie came to live here.” His free hand moved to cup her cheek. “Why do you have to doubt me, Laura? I wish you could learn to trust me.”

“I want to. But—but you haven’t been completely truthful with me, have you?”

“About what?” His question seemed honestly puzzled, but his eyes were dark and abruptly shuttered.

It unnerved her. And it made her feel guarded herself, unwilling to show her own vulnerability when he had retreated from her this way. He was warding her off, protecting himself somehow, and she had to do the same thing. Frustrated and troubled, Laura fell back on the thing that had brought her to this family in the first place. “About the mirror, for instance.”

He sighed. “Laura, listen to me. There is nothing I can tell you about that mirror. I don’t believe it’s connected in any way to Peter’s murder, and as far as I know, it was just another piece of forgotten junk up in the attic. It brought you here, and for that I’m grateful, but beyond that I’m not interested in your mirror. And that is the truth.”