The Collector's Edition Volume 1 (48 page)

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Authors: Emma Darcy

BOOK: The Collector's Edition Volume 1
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Isolation, she thought. The painting brooded with isolation, little objects starkly overwhelmed by their much larger environment.
“There are hidden depths to it,” he murmured, sliding a hand around her hip, over her stomach. “Keep looking, golden girl. I want you to see them....” He bent, his arm pulling her to him, a knee parting her legs, a swift, smooth guidance and he was inside her, plunging hard and fast. “And feel them,” he said with throbbing satisfaction.
Beth clutched the sofa, instinctively anchoring herself as she gasped, yet almost instantly she was enthralled with the incredible feeling of him invading the passage he’d already prepared, soothing the frustrated nerve ends and filling the empty ache with the solid insertion of his manhood—big, strong, pulsing with power. It was marvellous, mind-blowing, body-shattering.
“Concentrate on the lake,” he advised, rhythmically setting her on a sea of sensation. “The reflections...”
So strange to view the dark picture of isolation while feeling the most intimate joining between a man and a woman. The lake was still, not the slightest shimmer of movement in its reflections. Inside her the rushing flow and ebb of a tide that crashed and swirled and sucked, a storming of shores that welcomed the pounding, loved it, revelled in it.
She wanted to let it flow through her, an experience to be savoured to the full. But there was still the compulsion to turn the tide on him, to reach for his innermost core, the heart and mind of the man who had once been Jamie. She forced herself to concentrate, to catch him while his guard was down, believing he’d taken all initiative from her.
“Does this painting...” Her voice was little more than a husky croak. She swallowed hard. “Reflect what you feel?” She pushed the words out, determined to commune with him on more than a physical level.
He buried himself as deeply as he could in her, paused. “What do you imagine I feel?” A raw edge to his voice.
She drew on her knowledge of Jamie. Was he still inside the man she held in such intimate possession? “The white cow, a lonely outcast, a long, cold night... Did you have a need for me?”
“Hardly an outcast.” Harsh. A slow withdrawal as he made a sardonic point. “When one is wanted by so many. And so much...” He rammed home his full length and paused again. “Even by a woman who’s only read about me.”
But he was wrong about her, and he sensed it somehow. There was a wondering note in his tone. She seized on the hint of vulnerability, riding the moment as hard as he was riding her, mental against physical.
“I think you want a full moon.” She rushed the words out, fiercely gathering her thoughts against the active chaos he stirred. “But what is pictured...is a thin crescent...a partial...and it will never grow into anything else.” She closed her eyes, swept up in the maelstrom of feeling, fighting the tide to put the last critical question. “Is that what makes you scream?”
“A full moon for lovers? Dream on, golden girl,” he said derisively and drummed any coherent thought out of her mind with a wild vigour that smashed every last thread of control, both hers and his, climaxing with explosive force and leaving them panting in paroxysms of intense release.
Spent, shuddering in reaction, he wrapped her in his arms and clamped her against him, their naked bodies slick with heat and almost excruciatingly sensitive to touch.
“Is my skin hot enough for you?” he growled. “I wouldn’t want you to feel cold...or lonely.”
She didn’t speak. Her head was spinning, her body churning with the knowledge of how it felt to be taken so comprehensively, as though she was branded inside and out by his possession.
“Maybe we should move to another painting,” he taunted. “Or have you been shown as much as you want?”
She hesitated. He had seized and still held a dominating position. And was arrogantly confident of keeping it. If she stayed, undoubtedly she would be committing herself to a night of saturation sex. But knowledge came in many forms. And touch—as he had just shown her—could reach many places.
“I’m not satisfied yet,” she answered resolutely.
And probably never will be
, came the hollow thought. But the night was still young. He wouldn’t back down from the challenge implicit in her words, not a man who had to climb mountains and stand on top of them. If she could only touch him beyond the physical. She had barely scratched the surface of the inner man.
Jim Neilson was well and truly in the ring right now.
Would Jamie emerge before it was over?
B
ETH stood under the shower in the guest bathroom of Jim Neilson’s penthouse apartment, trying to soothe aching muscles and revive herself for the long day ahead. Her mind dredged up the consoling thought that it hadn’t been a totally fruitless night. At least she’d had the experience of a red-hot lover once in her lifetime. Though she suspected the memory would be soured by the failure of her real quest.
Heaving a deep sigh that expressed frustration and resignation, she turned off the taps. No point in looking back any more. The man she’d left asleep in his bed was so encased in self-made armour, he was not about to let anyone break it open. Her probing had been turned away again and again. If Jamie still existed somewhere, he was suppressed under so many layers he was unreachable.
Despondently she towelled herself dry, then sorted through the clothes she’d collected from the living room. Her yellow suit was hopelessly crumpled. Not that it mattered how she looked this morning. She was not about to meet anyone she knew. Once she was at her hotel, she would have plenty of time to change into a fresh outfit before Aunty Em collected her for their trip to the old farm.
Nevertheless, she didn’t feel comfortable in the clothes that had been stripped off her by Jim Neilson. She knew she would never wear them again. Needs must, until she could get to her luggage.
Grimacing at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she reached for her handbag, took out a hairbrush and lipstick and proceeded to achieve a fairly respectable appearance. Having braced herself to get on with her life, she left the bathroom and headed down the hallway, hoping the private elevator would not present any problem in making a quick and quiet getaway.
Wrapped in her own purpose, she was several steps into the living room before the aroma of freshly brewed coffee registered. Her feet faltered as she frowned at the smell. It had to mean...
“Good morning.”
Her heart lurched. Her head jerked around to face the source of the unexpected and unwelcome greeting. He stood by the huge picture window she had unveiled last night, a steaming mug of coffee in his hand. Although a black silk robe covered him from shoulder to knee, it did not diminish the impact of powerful virility. Instead it increased his sexual appeal, the belt loosely looped, ready to fall open with a finger flick, the deep V neckline showing an inviting expanse of raw masculinity.
Beth felt her throat drying up. There wasn’t one inch of his body she wasn’t intimately acquainted with, and it was a magnificent male body. But in the end, it was just a body, she fiercely reminded herself.
He showed no surprise that she was dressed. He waved casually to the long glass table between the sofas where he’d set down a tray—coffee, milk, sugar, biscuits. “I’d hate you to go without some sustenance,” he said with one of his quirky smiles.
“Why?” she asked bluntly, ignoring the tug of physical attraction.
He shrugged. “Perhaps I want to show you I can be civilised.”
“You’ve shown me all your sides. I don’t need to be shown any more.”
He raised a mocking eyebrow. “Giving up?”
Her smile was wry. “I know when I’m beaten.”
“Perhaps not.” There was a curious expression in his eyes. “Give me your name.”
She shook her head. “It’s irrelevant. This is goodbye.”
He frowned. “What if I don’t want it to be goodbye?”
“It is, anyway.”
“It was great sex,” he reminded her with wicked appeal.
“Yes,” she conceded flatly.
Through ultimately soul-destroying
, she added, crushing the wistful thought that it might have been different if he’d opened the doors she’d knocked on.
“What more do you want?” he dressed, looking for a response he could work on.
The doors to Jamie were locked. Beth had come to the conclusion that Jim Neilson had thrown away the keys and that what she wanted was irretrievable. Not even the greatest sex in the world could make up for it. It only made the loss greater.
“I want to go now,” she said decisively. “I have other things to do.”
He turned to face her full on. She felt the unleashed blast of his formidable concentration as his eyes probed hers with all their brilliant and magnetic intensity. “Not once have you used my name,” he said with slow deliberation. “Now you’re going without telling me yours. Did you intend all along for us to be ships passing in the night?”
She shrugged, dismissing the point as of no real importance. “It was always a possibility.”
He nodded consideringly. “You turned last night into a contest.”
“Did I?” She paused, her eyes mocking his view of what had happened between them. “Or did you?” She threw the question at him.
His mouth twisted. “Why do I have the feeling there is more to this encounter than you’re letting on?”
“Why worry?” she asked him flippantly. “You won the contest. You didn’t let me get to you. You stayed on top.”
“If you go, I lose,” he stated with a certainty that puzzled her.
“I’m sure you can generate great sex with any amount of women,” she said sceptically.
“No. It was the mental fight. Something... quite different.” He hesitated, seemingly feeling his way along uncharted territory. “I think I’ve been looking for someone like you for a very long time.”
The sickening irony of those words cut deep. “No, you haven’t,” she retorted with blistering certainty.
“Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?”
“If you’d been really looking, you’d have found me long before this.”
His eyes narrowed on the burning derision in hers. “Perhaps I’ve been blind.”
“No.” The bitterness of total defeat poured into words before she could stop them. “You’ve been too busy being Jim Neilson. I think you’ll never be anyone else but Jim Neilson now. So I’m leaving, because I didn’t come for Jim Neilson and I don’t belong in Jim Neilson’s life. Is that enough recognition of your name for you?”
“For whom did you come?” he asked her, homing in instantly on the one significant point.
She sighed, wrung out by this futile confrontation. She looked at him with dull, weary eyes, seeing the aggressive vitality of the conqueror determined on climbing another mountain. But her mountain had been climbed, and she was returning to the valley he’d put behind him.
“Who
are
you?” he demanded, propelled from his stance at the window of his private eyrie, high in the sky above the city he’d made his. He came straight for her, unprepared to let her go when
he
wasn’t satisfied.
The urge to hit him in the face with it was strong. Her deep disappointment, the long years of wondering and the final frustration of last night’s intense campaign to reach him—all surged together in a compelling need for some kind of recognition from him, a glimmer of memory...even if he hated it.
“I’m Beth Delaney.” She shot the words at him.
It stopped him dead in his tracks. Shock, confusion, a wild searching for features that would confirm her identity to him, a glassy stare at her eyes, recoil, then slowly the dawning of realisation, a look of appalled horror at her reemergence in his life and the form it had taken.
It gave Beth savage satisfaction to see he hadn’t completely forgotten her. The years they had shared were not a blank to him, either. Though Aunty Em was right. He didn’t like having them recalled. But be damned if she would let him off scot-free now. He’d forced the issue. She proceeded to give him the answers he’d demanded, straight between the eyes.
“I came looking for Jamie.”
His chin jutted. A muscle in his cheek flinched.
“He once said he would come to me when he could.”
His throat moved convulsively.
“He never did. Not once in fifteen years.”
No glitter in his eyes now, only dark turbulence.
“Last night I had the chance to look him up. But Jamie was gone. I only found Jim Neilson.”
His mouth thinned into a grim line.
“Now it’s time for Beth Delaney to go, too,” she said with bleak finality. “There’s nothing left of what there once was. I guessed it had to be so, but I wanted to see for myself. That’s all.”
She turned and headed for the tiled foyer. There was nothing to hold her here. No doubt Jim Neilson would only feel intense relief at seeing her go, a ghost from the past he didn’t want to remember.
“Wait!”
The snapped command fell like a whiplash across her shoulders. It was totally unexpected, cutting through her suppositions, heart-jolting in its seeming senselessness. She gathered herself to look at him once more, turning her head but not her feet. They were set on her own path.
He hadn’t moved. Tension seemed to have stretched the skin on his face tighter, highlighting its strongly boned lines. His hands were clenched at his sides. Fighting himself, Beth thought. His dark eyes looked like burning coals from hell.
“Where did you come from?” he asked.
“Melbourne. You might recall it was where my family moved after the bank sold up our farm,” she added sardonically.
It didn’t score a hit. He’d already donned his armour against recollections of the past.
“Are you going back to Melbourne?” A searching missile, targeted at a danger point to him.
“That’s up in the air. Though don’t let it concern you. I won’t intrude on your life again. Jim Neilson is absolutely safe from me.”
Her assurance was ignored. “Where are you going to from here? Today.” His mind was on one track. Self-protection.
She heaved an exasperated sigh. “Nowhere you want to know. I’m going back to the valley. Our old family farm is up for auction this afternoon. If I can buy it, I will. For my father. As strange as it might seem to you, he left his heart there.” Her smile was self-mocking. “Maybe I did, too.”
He said nothing, just stared at her as though she was a nightmare he wished he’d never dreamed.
“Goodbye, Jim Neilson,” she said firmly, and walked to the elevator, her high heels clacking hollow echoes on the tiled floor of the foyer.
There was no problem in effecting an exit. The elevator was waiting. She stepped into the private compartment and pressed the Down button. The tops of mountains were lonely places, she thought, wondering how much Jim Neilson valued his isolation, how much he liked it.
But that was none of her business.
The elevator doors closed.
Her brief encounter with him was closed.
She was going down...to the old valley where generations of her family had once lived. Back to her roots. Though she knew there would always be a ghost there for her. Impossible not to remember Jamie...in the valley.

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