Reflection (The Chrysalis Series) (6 page)

‘This –’ he held up the small, electronic device, which was about the same size as an iPad but clearly not one ‘– is my CleanSlate.’

He fiddled with it a bit and then handed her the device. On the screen was a beautiful landscape with mountains rising up to break through clouds drenched in hues of silver, purple, and rose, with fantastical birds flying around the summit. The realism of those mountains juxtaposed against clouds and birds that would never exist on this planet created an image both surreal and startling in its beauty.

Connor was silent and still as she gazed upon the piece.

‘Did you do this?’ she asked, looking up at him.

He didn’t answer. He just nodded.

‘It’s lovely. The clouds are gorgeous and those birds are so lifelike even though they clearly exist in some other dimension.’

The grin that broke out across his face was infectious. She found herself grinning back at him.

‘I love to mix realistic and fantasy elements in my art. The CleanSlate is awesome because I can work in any medium on it. It’s designed to allow me to do oil, watercolour, pencil, whatever I want. I have unlimited canvases with it.’

‘Do you do any actual painting?’ Her curiosity was growing.

‘Yeah, but art supplies can cost you an arm and a leg. Beside, this is so much easier to carry around and I like the digital medium best. It gives me a lot of flexibility and creative licence.’

The passion he had for his art was apparent in his face and voice.

‘Do you have others I can see?’ she asked, nodding down at the CleanSlate.

‘Sure, just hit that button and it’ll scroll through.’ He pointed to a small button near her right thumb.

She did as instructed and was amazed at the breadth of his work. He had landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Each was intricate and lovingly detailed. Many of the portraits featured people doing some mundane activity, but with some fantastical twist that changed everything. She scrolled through his work, her admiration growing for his talent with each one. The last picture, however, caused her to almost drop the device.

‘Oh shit!’ Connor snatched it from her hands and flushed a deep shade of red. ‘I’m sorry, Bridget. I forgot that was on there.’

Her own face was red and she was sure she looked shocked. Raising her eyes to look at him, she said, ‘Can I please have that back?’ She held out her hand.

His flush deepened, but he handed it back to her. She gazed at the screen in frank appreciation mixed with wonder. He’d drawn
her.
The painting was exquisite. She reclined on a couch that could have graced the parlour of Queen Victoria, but it rested on a cloud. Deep blue sky was her backdrop. She was clothed in what could have been some sort of toga. Layers of silky ivory fabric draped her body. She was fully covered in the painting, but the hints of cleavage where one shoulder strap fell down, leaving an expanse of creamy skin exposed, and the slit up the leg showing an expanse of thigh created an eroticism that was unmistakable. Her face was in profile, but her expression was one of hunger and desire. She looked like a woman waiting for her lover.

‘It’s –’ Her words failed her and she swallowed hard.

He took the CleanSlate from her, gently this time, turned it off, and put it back in his pack before turning to face her.

‘Bridget. Look, I’m not going to apologise for drawing you. It’s what I do. I draw, but I should have prepared you before you saw that.’ He raked a hand through his close-cropped hair and looked at her like a man about to walk the plank. ‘Say something, anything, please … put me out of my misery.’

‘It’s beautiful.’ She wouldn’t meet his eyes, still overwhelmed at the carnality so evident in his vision of her. ‘I’ve never been painted before. I’m just surprised at how erotic it seemed.’

‘Why are you surprised? You
are
erotic, Bridget.’

‘Hardly!’ she whipped her head up to look at him, speaking louder than she’d intended, but his statement had shocked her. The last adjective she’d ever apply to herself was erotic.

He must have seen the shock on her face, because he smiled at her. It was almost tender.

‘I have no idea why you don’t see yourself as sexy, but you are. From your brain all the way down to your perfectly-painted toes. Everything about you is erotic as hell. You get me hard in the same breath that you intrigue me with some thought you just spoke.’

She turned her eyes away and flushed even deeper at the mention of him getting hard over her. She was no prude, but she wasn’t used to men so casually discussing sexual things with her.

He didn’t say anything else, but he did shift until he was sitting more closely beside her. She could feel the heat from his skin through the jeans he wore. The cotton of his T-shirt did nothing to mask it either. A soft breeze washed over them and she could smell the light, woodsy scent of the soap he used. Her entire body was instantly attuned to his.

She saw his hand move but was still surprised when he gently tipped her chin up to look at him. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but the depth of the desire she saw in his face was not it. She responded almost violently. Her nipples sprang to life, hardening and tingling against the simple cotton of her bra. She went liquid at her core and her heart rate kicked up a notch.

‘I want to kiss you, Bridget. Hell, let’s be real, I want to do a whole hell of a lot more than that, but I want to start with kissing you.’

His eyes had deepened to an almost gunmetal grey with lust. She was mesmerised by his obvious desire for her, by the touch of his fingers on her chin, by the scent of his body so close to hers. She didn’t bother reaching for words, she just nodded.

He leaned in and brushed his lips across hers. They were warm, and soft. As he deepened the kiss, licking into her mouth, she could feel the slight rasp of stubble from where he’d shaved earlier that day. His tongue leisurely explored her mouth. No crevice went without tending, but he didn’t force his attention on her.

His hand ran gently up her body, stopping briefly to cup her breast. He lingered but a moment, as if testing the weight and shape, before moving up her body. She luxuriated in the feel of him. The soft invasion of his tongue in her mouth was both foreign and familiar, throwing her even further off kilter.

She moaned and leaned into him, bringing one hand to rest on his thigh, which flexed under her fingers. Her blood was thrumming through her veins and she felt her body tuning to him. Any lingering embarrassment over the portrait was forgotten as she gave herself up to his kiss.

She could kiss him for ever.

Connor brought his hand to the side of her neck and exerted gentle pressure to lean her backwards. At the same time, he turned and subtly shifted his body to cover hers.

She didn’t think. She simply reacted. Her knee connected with his balls and he exploded back from her, curling into the foetal position with a sharp cry.

‘Connor!’ She scrambled to her hands and knees as realisation sank in. ‘Oh God! I’m sorry. I’m sorry!’

Hot tears began to run down her face and she chanted her apology over and over. He wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were clamped closed and he rocked back and forth, the pain evident on his face.

It was time to face facts. There was no use pretending any more. She should never have come.

Chapter Seven

He was going to puke. Lying there, huddled in a ball, Connor was going to lose his lunch. How in the hell did he go from kissing a beautiful, sexy woman to holding his nuts and praying for relief? The ache was spreading out from his groin and settling in his stomach, causing him the most excruciating pain mixed with the most severe nausea he’d ever experienced.

He panted through the pain.

She was saying something, but he couldn’t make it out. He honestly didn’t care at that particular moment. He would care. He would demand an explanation, but right then, he just wanted the contents of his stomach to stay where they were.

Long moments passed where the nausea slowly receded, the pain became a dull ache, and his hearing cleared so that he heard more than the rushing of his own blood.

‘Stop,’ he groaned, ‘s’OK.’

He was slurring his words. It wasn’t OK, but she was crying and that was tearing his gut up again. He didn’t want her to cry.

‘Stop, please.’ At least he sounded more human that time.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked. Her voice wobbled and she sniffled before reaching for a napkin and blowing her nose.

‘No –’ he wasn’t going to lie ‘– but I will be.’

Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself up to a sitting position, moving to lean his back against the tree trunk to remove any pressure from his balls.

‘I am so sorry, Connor.’ She looked pitiful. Her green eyes were drenched and there were tear trails down her porcelain skin.

‘What the hell happened?’ It was still hard to speak normally considering his balls were throbbing, but he needed to know what just happened.

‘It wasn’t you. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just that –’ She broke off and, looking away, began tearing apart the napkin she was holding. ‘It’s just that there are some things I just can’t do.’

‘You can’t kiss me?’

‘No, it’s not that.’ She balled up the wreckage of the napkin. ‘It was the way you held my neck and tried to lay me down.’

‘So you can’t have your neck touched or lie down to kiss me?’

‘Right, well, I just can’t have you on top of me like that.’

‘So I can touch your neck, but not lie on top of you?’ His head was starting to hurt as much as his balls. She wasn’t making sense.

‘No, what I mean is –’ Her brow creased and new tears threatened. ‘It’s just that –’

Connor was losing his patience. He liked her, but this was the second time she’d gone physical on him. He wasn’t trying to get involved with a crazy person.

‘OK.’ He groaned a little as he sat forward and his bruised nuts rubbed against the cotton of his boxers. ‘Tell you what. Let’s call it a day. I don’t know why you lose it with me the way you do, but clearly this was not meant to be.’

‘I was raped, Connor.’

He’d begun to rise, only to fall back when her words registered.

As if in slow motion, he turned to face her. She wasn’t looking at him. Her tension was obvious in the balled fists resting in her lap and the corded muscles standing out along her neck.

Hypocritically, his own tension drained. It was like having the answer to a riddle you didn’t even know you had to solve. It explained why she’d reacted so violently to being startled. And it certainly explained her fighting him when he’d taken a posture that effectively trapped her.

Gently, he lifted one of her hands and smoothed out her fingers so he could take her hand in his.

‘Can you tell me about it?’ he asked. When she hesitated, he said, ‘Please.’

She didn’t know if she could tell him. She didn’t want to see his face change. To see the pity and have him begin to treat her differently. They all treated her differently after they knew.

‘Bridget, if you don’t feel comfortable telling me right now, that’s fine. I understand. We don’t know each other very well yet.’

There he went again with his compassion and willingness to let her take the lead. Squeezing his hand, she shook her head, which he mistook as an indicator that she didn’t want to talk and began to pull his hand away.

Squeezing it tighter, she took a deep breath and began, ‘I was in college.’ Letting go of his hand, she smoothed her capris and looked off into the distance as she continued. ‘I was returning some notes to a friend when a guy I’d been kind of flirting with invited me into his dorm room. I went in and the rest, as they say, is history. He raped me.’

There was more to the story. Infinitely more. But she just couldn’t go there. She’d never told anyone the full story. It was bad enough she had to live with it; she wasn’t going to allow anyone else to judge her for it.

Bridget jumped when Connor took her hand and brought it to his mouth, kissing the back of her hand.

‘I am so, so sorry that happened to you,’ he murmured against her skin.

She squeezed his hand reassuringly. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘What happened to him?’

A wave of bitterness flooded Bridget.

‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ She pulled her hand from Connor’s and began to pluck at the blanket again. ‘I never told anyone.’

‘Why not?’

‘The same reason why so many women don’t say anything. I was ashamed. And I wasn’t willing to be vilified on the stand. So I just moved on.’

Shame coloured the bitterness, but she pushed it away. What was done was done.

Connor didn’t try to take her hand back, but he did move closer and put a gentle arm around her shoulder. She stiffened. Here it came. This was the part where he stopped looking at her like a woman and began to treat her like a victim.

The last thing she should be treated as was a victim, but how could she convey that to him without telling him everything? How could she get him to understand without losing his respect?

Every single time she’d told a man she dated about the rape it was like this. She went from being a sexy, desirable woman whom they could barely keep their hands off to a victim. Someone they treated like spun glass. Instead of embracing her and kissing the breath out of her, they kissed her like she’d shatter if they pressed too hard.

She may have been raped, but she was still a woman and she hated the way men treated her once they knew. She hated more, though, that there were some very real things she needed them to be aware of. It could be hard to have passionate, animal sex when she tensed every time they touched her neck, or they had to remember not to lie on top of her.

Each time, she eventually gave up. She’d lie quietly, doing her best to not react to anything they inadvertently did. They’d fuck her just as gently and she’d pretend to get off. Inevitably, the relationship would sour, distance would grow, and she’d amicably end their dalliance. All of her serious boyfriends were now happily married and she was going on her fifth year without any kind of meaningful relationship in her life besides her two best girlfriends.

She’d long ago given up on finding a man who could tread that fine line with her between truly uninhibited sex the way she fantasised and being mindful of her past. Connor brought out the deeply sexual woman in her. That much was obvious, but she highly doubted he’d be any different than the others now.

Back stiff as a rod, she waited for the inevitable.