Annie's Song (33 page)

Annie had never known anyone quite like Alex. Since she’d come to Montgomery Hall, he had changed her life. She loved him better than she’d ever loved anyone. She couldn’t bear to see bad things start happening to him because of her. He needed someone else to love. Someone who could make him happy, not the other way around.

Having reached that decision, Annie cried until she was exhausted and had no tears left to shed. Then she contemplated ways in which she might inform Alex of her feelings. He wasn’t good enough at lipreading yet for her to communicate with him that way, and trying to act it out would be impossible.

Pondering the problem, she suddenly remembered the night he had drawn her a picture to tell her about the baby.

Alex paced. Across the hall. Up the stairs. To the nursery. Then he retraced his steps. Again and again.

Then again. Pretty soon, he lost count of how many times he ascended the stairway. Something was horribly wrong. He’d seen it in her eyes. But he couldn’t imagine what. He’d thought the ear trumpets would make her wildly happy. Instead she had burst into tears. Why? No matter how Alex circled it, he could find no answer.

When he finally heard the telltale creak of door hinges, he was midway up the staircase, executing what seemed to him the thousandth climb. The slight sound of her opening the door sent him flying up the remainder of the steps. Racing along the hall, he braked to a stop outside her door. Annie stood just inside the room, her small hand on the doorknob, her face as white as milk. By the redness around her eyes, he knew she’d been crying.

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Backing up a step, she motioned for him to come in. Alex had a bad feeling about this. She avoided his gaze as he stepped into the room. Then, with a decisive little click, she closed the door behind him. Still not looking at him, she crossed quickly to the table where she picked up a sheet of paper and held it out to him.

“What’s this?” Alex closed the distance between them and took the paper in a tense hand. After studying the drawing she’d done, he said, “Annie, this is astounding. You’re very talented.”

She had sketched their head-and-shoulder likenesses, and her attention to detail was incredible. Aside from the work of professional artists, Alex had never seen such mastery. With nothing but charcoal and paper, she’d brought him to life. He smiled slightly at the expression she’d captured on his face. Did he truly look at her that way, with a rakish grin and a lascivious gleam in his eyes? He supposed he must and couldn’t help but marvel that she hadn’t slapped him silly a couple of times for the affront. Not that Annie would recognize lecherousness if it ran up and bit her on the behind.

His gaze drifted to her image, which seemed a little off-plumb to him somehow. After studying the likeness for a moment, he realized that she had captured herself on paper much as she probably appeared to herself in a mirror, unsmiling, with no trace of the innocent sweetness or candid expressions that had stolen his heart. The eyes held no emotion or sparkle. No dimple flashed in her cheek. Annie, with no lustrous glow, still beautiful, but a face without any soul.

There was something else that didn’t seem quite right. Something missing. But for a moment, he couldn’t pinpoint what it was. After studying the drawing awhile longer, Alex finally noted the flaw and looked up at her, his heart in his throat.

Annie had drawn herself without ears.

With a trembling hand, Alex put the drawing back on the table. He was about to speak when she snatched up another and shoved it into his hands. He glanced down and saw another perfectly executed sketch of Annie’s face, only it was minus the ears as well as a mouth.

Alex’s first instinct was to rip the drawing into tiny pieces and tell her to stop being ridiculous. But the bruised look in her eyes forestalled him. This was very serious business to her, and judging by the pinched tightness of her mouth, calling attention to what she obviously believed were her inadequacies was painful for her. Extremely painful.

Tossing down the drawing, Alex sat on one of the chairs. Patting a knee, he said, “Come here, sweetheart.”

She folded her arms under her breasts and shook her head, the stubborn set to her chin making her look more adorable than anything else. Alex also couldn’t help noticing that the position of her slender arms was causing an upward thrust of certain parts of her anatomy. The dressmaker, following his explicit instructions, had cut the necklines of her gowns a bit low. Nothing immodest, but low enough to provide a lovely display of her feminine attributes, which had become more generous with her advancing pregnancy. The way Alex saw it, if he couldn’t partake of the meal, the least he deserved was an occasional glimpse of the menu.

He patted his knee again. “Come on, honey. I just want to talk with you.” That was, without a doubt, the biggest falsehood he’d ever told.

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She shook her head and mouthed the words, “I want to go home.”

With daily practice, Alex’s lipreading skills had improved to a point that he could, with great effort, make out simple sentences. “Home? To your parents, you mean?”

“Yes.”

He had only one answer for that. “Absolutely not.” Leaning forward, he grasped her wrist and drew her to him. Ignoring her protests, which was rather easy to do since she didn’t voice them aloud, he pulled her down onto his knee and curled an arm around her. “This is your home now. You belong here with me.”

She jerked her gaze from his lips and stared resolutely at the window. Realizing immediately what her game was, he tugged gently on a curl at her temple. When she still persisted in not looking at him, his mouth quirked at the comers. Catching her by the chin, he forced her face back around to his.

“Annie, I don’t care about your being deaf. You’re beautiful and warm and funny. Being with you makes me happy as I haven’t been in a very long—” Alex saw that she was staring fixedly at his nose. He chuckled in spite of himself. “You little minx. So, it’s your plan to ignore me, is it?”

Tweaking the tip of her nose, he succeeded in reclaiming her attention. “I love you,” he whispered hoarsely. “If you go away, Annie, you’ll break my heart. Is that what you want, to make me sad?”

Shadows of pain shifted in her lovely eyes. Touching a small hand to his jaw, she said, “I want you to be happy. You can’t be with someone like me. You should find someone who can hear, someone who can talk.”

Following her lips movements, Alex struggled to make sense of the few words he’d been able to make out. The effort gave him cause to appreciate Annie’s intelligence. So many of the mouth positions that formed certain sounds looked exactly like those that formed others. Yet Annie managed to lip-read with amazing adeptness. He knew that to do so she not only had to keep up with the speaker, but had to second guess him half the time to figure out any unclear words.

“Someone else can’t make me happy,” he assured her when he had finally made sense of what she’d said. “Only you, Annie. So, you see? You can’t leave me. If you do, I’ll be sad forever.”

“I can’t hear. I can’t talk. People think I’m an idiot, and they hate me. If I stay with you, they’ll hate you, too!” She made a frustrated little gesture with her hands. “I want you to be happy. Let me go home.”

Those last four words were easy enough for Alex to interpret. “No,” he shot back. “Never. If you leave, Annie love, I’m leaving with you.”

A glisten of tears touched her luminous eyes. She gazed at him for several endless seconds before a smile started to quirk at the corners of her lips. Finally she said, “You are the stupid one, not me.”

After stumbling his way through that sentence, Alex grinned. “Stupid, yes. A big, bungling oaf without any sense whatsoever. I guess you’ll just have to stay here and look after me.”

She rolled her eyes, clearly exasperated with his logic. Or perhaps with his lack of it. “I can’t stay here.”

He had other ideas, and sliding his hand around to the nape of her neck, he quickly acted upon them,
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settling his mouth over hers. There were more ways for a man and woman to communicate than simply with words, and he was determined she should learn that lesson before he finished with her. No mouth?

The girl had a mouth most men would kill for.

Fully expecting her to resist his kisses, Alex tensed his arm at her back, prepared to subdue her until she began to relax. But, to his pleasant surprise, she acquiesced, allowing him to part her lips and touch his tongue to the moist recesses of her mouth.

Dear God. Just that quickly, and Alex was lost. Never had a kiss been so wonderfully sweet. She surrendered to him like a blossom to sunshine, opening, pressing upward, so soft and delicately fragrant that he felt intoxicated. His heart started to pound. His breath became ragged. Tightening his arm around her, he slid his lips from her mouth to her throat. He wanted her. Like embers fanned to a sudden flame, the passion he had so ruthlessly tamped for weeks ignited within him.

At the touch of his lips on her throat, Annie leaned her head back and moaned low in her chest. Alex lifted his free hand to her bodice. The tempting softness of her breast filled his palm. Obviously aroused, she began to breathe in quick, whining little pants. The sound alone was enough to drive Alex half-mad.

With a practiced touch, he grazed his thumb across the peak of her breast, delighting in the instant hardening of her nipple. But there were too many layers of cloth. He wanted so badly to feel the silken warmth of her skin that he burned.

The buttons at the front of her bodice were frustratingly small. He fumbled, managing to unfasten one, then two, his sense of urgency mounting. In the back of his mind, he kept expecting Annie to start struggling, and he was prepared to stop himself if she did. But instead she ran her small hands into his hair, her breathing still as fast and irregular as his. Finally Alex slipped the last button free. Gently, his senses electrified with anticipation, he drew the panels back and encountered ... a chemise.

“Shit.”

He drew back to survey the undergarment, acutely conscious of Annie’s blue eyes, large and feverish, on his face. Pleased to find that her chemise had a drawstring neckline instead of damnable buttons, he seized the ribbon and tugged sharply. Instead of pulling free, the strands of satin knotted. Alex clenched his teeth, biting back another curse, knowing, even as he began to untangle the snag, that Annie might regain her senses during the delay and start to panic before he ever got her breasts bared.

Taking a deep breath and giving her what he hoped was a reassuring smile, Alex leaned farther back so he might see better. Then he set upon the knot, so frustrated that it took all his restraint not to rip the chemise off her. Keep smiling. After all, it was just a little knot, he told himself. He felt sweat start to bead on his forehead. One stubborn knot. He could scarcely believe his miserable luck. The most beautiful girl he’d ever seen was sitting on his knee, not only willing but patiently waiting for him to get her clothes off her, and he was fumbling around like a goddamned idiot!

Alex glanced up to find that Annie was watching his hands, her beautiful eyes filled with bewildered curiosity, her mouth slightly pursed. She didn’t seem in the least afraid, and for that, he was grateful. On the other hand, he wasn’t at all sure she knew what he meant to do, either. Whatever Douglas’s offenses against her had been, he had clearly not trespassed on her upper torso, at least not in such a fashion that he had left Annie with an aversion to being touched there.

Alex felt a pang of guilt as the knot finally came loose. But he chased it away. The girl was deaf, not dead from the eyebrows down. And at twenty, she was no longer a child. In addition to that, she was his wife. Another man, given the opportunities Alex had had, would have long since consummated the

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marriage. Besides, it wasn’t as if she were struggling. Or frightened. She only seemed curious about what he found so fascinating beneath her chemise.

Alex was more than willing to satisfy her curiosity.

His heart was slamming inside his chest like a threshing machine as he loosened the gathered neckline of the chemise. The white cloth fell loose to underscore her breasts. Milky white globes with swollen pink crests. Reverently, Alex brushed a fingertip across her skin. It was warm and silky, just as he had imagined. He trailed his touch lightly to her nipple, watching the swollen aureole grow pebbled, the peak erect. Annie jumped when he captured the sensitive protrusion between his thumb and forefinger. Her startled eyes flew to his. As he rolled her flesh gently, she made tight fists in his hair and her eyes darkened to a stormy blue, her lashes drifting low over her pupils.

Bending his head, Alex flicked her other nipple with his tongue. She emitted a strangled little cry and arched her back to better accommodate him, her sudden yearning expressed to him in a language as old as womankind. Alex was happy—no, elated—to attend her needs. In fact, he couldn’t quite believe that she had surrendered to him so easily and was responding as she was, pressing herself forward, eager for his touch and the ministrations of his mouth.