Lord of Lightning (12 page)

“It’s for your eyes—”

“A blindfold? No!”

He caught her hand as she brought it up, restraining her gently. “I’m taking you to a place you’ve never been, Lise, a place where we can touch the stars. I want it to be a surprise.”

She let out a trembling, disbelieving sigh. “I don’t like surprises, Stephen. I’ve
never
liked surprises.”

“Sure you do.” A telling wryness softened his voice. “You’re just a little afraid of them.”

“A
little
afraid? Stephen, I’m petrified!”

He let out a soft groan of something that might have been laughter and drew her up against him, gentling her with his voice and his hands. “It’s all right, Lise,” he said. “Nothing will happen that you don’t want to have happen. This is your dream.”

Her dream ...
Lord, wasn’t she the one who secretly believed some dreams had to be shared to come true! Well that explained it. She’d tempted fate.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Lise,” he said. “I’d never do anything to hurt you. Do you believe me?”

His voice was mesmerizingly husky. His hands were strong and bracing,
so warm on her arms.
Lise could feel his breath lifting her hair, sighing with sandalwood.
Believe
him, she thought, controlling the hysterical sound that bubbled inside her. She didn’t believe any of this! What was he doing to her? And why was she so gloriously weak, she could hardly stand up?

“Lise ... do you want me to do this? Tell me now if you don’t, and I’ll stop.”

The answer that swept into her mind was no. No, this was much too enthralling a dream for a woman who’d lived a life of careful restraint. No, she couldn’t. No, she shouldn’t.

“I want it,” she said finally, her heart surging.

His chest rose with a harsh breath. “The blindfold is a gift,” he said. “Welcome the darkness.”

The fabric dropped over her head, and as he knotted it loosely, her thin nightgown swirled around her, belling out with the air currents.
A gift?
Lise sensed some elusive meaning, but her thought processes were too scattered to make sense of anything at that moment. She felt naked without her robe, and the rising heat of his touch made her dizzy and breathless.

He released her then, standing back as the wind breathed silver lullabies, and the leaves trembled above her head. Her mind went crazy imagining what he might be doing. Was he looking at her? Could he see through the nightgown?

She heard another rip of fabric, and her heart went wild.

“Give me your hands, Lise. Put them behind your back.”

Lise wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told her that this sort of thing could ever have happened to her. That a man would come into her life this way, a strange and powerful man who could make her do things she didn’t believe she was capable of. A week ago she wouldn’t have believed it.

“Your hands, Lise. I won’t tie them tightly ... this is part of the dream.”

A sound rose in her throat as she unlocked her clasped fingers. It was a shocked and trembling sigh. Her body arched instinctively as she put her hands behind her back, and he looped the fabric once around her wrists.
What was she doing?
What was she letting
him
do?

“Everything you ever dreamed of, Lise.”

Leaving the material draped over her wrists, he swept her up in his arms, moving so quickly, she was forced to press into him for balance. He covered what seemed like a short distance, perhaps fifty feet before he stopped. A car door creaked open and he lifted her into the seat.

Moments later they were roaring down the highway.

Lise was in a state of shock and wonder. Her world had gone dark, and yet she was acutely aware of everything that impinged upon her—the slightest swerve of the Land-Rover, the needlelike prickles of the upholstered bucket seat, the rubber floor mat vibrating beneath the balls of her bare feet. Her sensibilities were heightened to the point of pain. Even the delicate hairs on her arms pricked like sensors.

Though she couldn’t see Stephen, his image stood out in her mind like a photograph. She was riveted to his every movement, to his shifts of weight and posture, to his occasional, audible breaths. If she could only read his mind.
If she could only predict his actions.
He had promised he wouldn’t hurt her. On a rational level, she was sure he meant it. And yet she felt totally out of control.

It was the ultimate irony, she thought.
It was her karma.
She’d spent a lifetime avoiding physical intimacy with a man. She’d always believed that some ancient territorial instinct took hold once a man made love to a woman. He became possessive and autocratic. Her father had controlled nearly every aspect of her mother’s life, and the possibility of that kind of relationship had always terrified Lise. And yet, now, with this man, the loss of control was thrilling somehow.
Why?

Gravel ground out under the wheels of the Rover, and Lise swayed back against the seat as they lurched up a steep incline. The car kept climbing and climbing until finally she was afraid they would topple off the edge of some mountain peak.

From somewhere beyond them a crow’s raucous squawking carried over the drone of the engine, and the wind roared against the windshield, but there were no specific sounds to tell her where they were.

“Why can’t I see where we’re going?” she asked.

“There is nothing to see. Yet,” he added.

When they finally came to a stop, Lise pitched forward, gasping as a brawny arm broke her fall. He pressed her back against the seat with one powerful arm swing, crowding her breasts. She could feel heat and muscle through her nightgown. She could even feel the hair on his arms.

“Are you all right?” he asked, concern in his voice.

Before she could answer, his door had wrenched open and slammed shut. A wall of cool air hit her as her own door opened, and she was scooped out of the van and into his arms.

“
Lise
—talk to me. Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes—fine,” she said, “just out of breath.”

Moments later she could hear the sound of solid granite beneath his feet, the crunch of pebbles as he carried her toward some unknown destination. They were climbing again, she realized. She burrowed into the warmth of his leather jacket as a gust of wind whipped at her hair.

He pulled the open jacket around her, covering her against the night’s sudden chill. The air that penetrated her eyelet nightgown felt cool and sharp against her flushed skin. Occasionally she caught the scent of something she vaguely recognized—pine needles or brown, sun-dried sage—before it was carried away by the wind.

It was his scent that enveloped her as they climbed toward what felt like the zenith of the world. The tangy odor of his leather jacket mingled with the musk of overheated muscles and a tantalizing hint of something that might have been sandalwood.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“I told you, Lise. To a place you’ve never been, a place where we can touch the stars.”

He moved quickly and powerfully up what seemed to be the sheer side of a cliff. The image that swept her mind was a golden lion of a man carrying her off to his lair. She saw him vividly—the Norse warrior—rough in his seduction, hungry in his ravishment of her trembling body. The fantasy left her weak with anticipation, dizzy with fear and desire.

And then her imagination truly went off on a tangent. Perhaps he
was
an alien life-form, she thought, imagining some luminous spaceship awaiting them on a distant and lonely mountain peak. The thought sent a hard shudder through her. A panicky burst of laughter burned in her throat. The air was getting thin, and
she
was getting hysterical!

S
TEPHEN WAS BREATHING
deeply as they reached a plateau. Lise pressed herself against him for balance as they floated downward for an instant. And then the icy wind was gone, as though they’d taken shelter in a ravine.

“We’re here,” he said, his breath warm against her face.

She felt herself being tilted forward and realized he was setting her down. Even though her hands weren’t bound, she felt a precarious sense of vertigo. “Wait!” she cried as her nightgown began to hike up. Cool air swirled through her legs, and an instant later rock-solid ground burned the soles of her bare feet.

After being carried for so long, she felt weightless, as though she were spinning in space. With her vision gone, the disorientation was total. She stepped backward, gasping softly as she lost contact with him. “Stephen?”

The ground was uneven, studded with rocks and crevices. A moment of terror caught her as she imagined stepping off the side of a cliff.
“Stephen!
Where are you!”

“Here—”

She felt a tug at her wrists and realized he’d drawn off the cotton fabric.

“You’re all right, Lise,” he said, turning her around, pulling her into his arms. “I’ve got you.” She felt herself being lifted gently and settled back down. And then something hard and cool pressed against her back, an embankment.
Thank Heaven, solid earth.

His hands anchored her shoulders, a steadying force. Lise slumped against the granite wall behind her, letting her head tilt back, breathing deeply. Lost in the darkness of the blindfold, she shuddered as he released her.

Several seconds passed before the trembling subsided, before she became aware of his silent presence again. “Stephen?” What was he doing now?

“You make a beautiful captive,” he said.

Her nightgown felt like liquid silk against her skin, a cool flutter of nothingness. She knew it must be transparent in the moonlight, which meant he was seeing what she’d seen in her bedroom, tightening thighs, breasts that were full and overripe, a woman’s body shamelessly in need of a man’s attention.

He hadn’t touched her in any intimate way, but she knew he was going to at any minute. In the dark recesses of her imagination, she could already feel his hands lifting her nightgown, sprinkling her thighs with electricity. “Let me go,” she whispered softly, not quite sure why she’d said it. He wasn’t even touching her.

He knew why she’d said it.
He smoothed back her hair and lifted her chin. “I can’t do that, Lise.”

His voice was grainy and hushed. It had the same riveting obsessional quality she’d sensed in the supply room. She felt his warmth as he drew close and hesitated, close enough to kiss her. A quiver of excitement darted through her body as she anticipated the sweet shock of his lips.

“You said it was my dream—” The words rushed out of her, forestalling him, delaying that inevitable moment when he touched her and she went weak at the knees, weak in the mind. “That nothing would happen I didn’t want.”

“This is what you want—”

His mouth brushed hers lightly and all of her protests fell away. Her chin trembled. Her lips parted, tingly and urgent. She could even feel warm air streaming gently through her nostrils. It was happening again, she realized. That same glorious softening that came over her whenever he touched her. Her stomach went to liquid as she tilted her head back, yielding to him.

She said yes to the deep, draining kiss she expected.

But he didn’t kiss her. Instead he did something far more alarming, something wildly thrilling to a woman as inexperienced as Lise. He took hold of her hands and pressed them to the wall behind her, one on each side of her head. The unexpectedness of it left her shocked and breathless. Granite cooled her shoulders, making her aware of the heat that came off his body. She felt weakened, nearly paralyzed by the implicit power of what he’d done, and yet he hadn’t hurt her. He wasn’t even touching her except where his hands held her.

“You want to be swept away, Lise,” he said. “Transported,
taken by storm.”

His thighs brushed against hers, and the flare of his body heat called up an answering flare from deep within her. It fanned out from the pit of her stomach and swept through her senses so suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. It seared the back of her throat with a sharpness that wouldn’t let her swallow.

“Stephen—” A helpless sound constricted in her throat. She caught at his arms, intending to push him away, but the gentle nudge of his hipbones caught her loins on fire. If she’d had any doubt that he was made like a normal man, it vanished the moment she felt the evidence of male arousal against her thigh. The dawning awareness arrested her thoughts. In the space of a heartbeat, she was riveted by the hardening wonder of the male body, by the slow burn of it against her flesh. Stephen Gage might not be human, but he was fully capable of making love to a human woman!

“You want a man to make you tremble and sigh, Lise—”

His hand stroked down her arm, trailing a shower of sparks in its path. As his palm came to rest on the small of her back, Lise moved against him involuntarily. She couldn’t help herself. Some irresistible tidal rhythm pulled at her.

He caught her by the hips and brought her up against him, letting his hands slide down to her buttocks. “You want it all, Lise. You
want to touch the stars.”

A grainy sound wavered in Lise’s throat. This wasn’t a dream, she realized. This was sexual seduction. These were the ancient overtures to taking possession. He moved against her, pressing into her softness, and desire flared. It swept through her like a wind-fed fire, burning sweetly.

She resisted the terrifying pleasure of it for an instant, and then she slumped against the wall and let the flames take her. The fight was lost. It was useless to struggle against what was happening. He was too powerful. He wasn’t a man, he was a force of nature.

“You
are
a beautiful captive,” he said, tilting her face up to his. His hand was warm on her throat, a slight waver in his touch. “And this
is
what you want. It’s what I want too.”

From somewhere a voice cried out to Lise to give him what he wanted ...
whatever he wanted.

He took her lips at last, electrifying her.

Her mind flashed a vision of the kiss, of lips touching breathlessly and bodies coming together. Against the dark landscape of night, she saw a man and a woman surrounded by an aura of shimmering green light. Their embrace was incandescent, one of the most beautiful things she’d ever imagined.