Season of Storm (19 page)

She was freezing to death, she couldn't wait any longer. She would have to risk going aboard in moonlight. On the next swell she grasped the chrome rungs with slippery hands and as quickly as humanly possible heaved herself onto the little swimming platform. Then up to the deck, where she crouched to dash to the open hatch. In another moment she was down into the welcome warmth, on her knees on the bed, gasping with fear and exertion.

"Welcome aboard," said a voice, and Johnny Winterhawk's hand closed like a vise on her wrist.

Eighteen

He was standing in shadow, looking dark and dangerous, and very big.  He stifled her scream with a quick hand over her mouth, wrapped his other arm around her and dragged her from the bed to stand in his fierce embrace.  

"Quick, march!" he said in her ear, pushing her into the saloon ahead of him, and closed the door behind them. He let her go, but there was no point in screaming now, the sound wouldn't carry to the
White Dolphin
with everything closed. The lights came on one by one as he moved around the room, and the space filled with the warm glow that shuts out the rest of the world. And in spite of herself the room felt safe and homelike to her. Its cosy comfortable proportions reminded her suddenly of the long-ago flat in Paris, the only place in her life that had really felt like home.
 

There was nowhere to run. The main hatch was still locked and he would be on her before she could get halfway to the forward cabin.

And she was tired of fighting, tired of a losing battle. She had been helpless against Johnny Winterhawk from the start. She turned to face him as he strode toward her, her long braid dripping wet and cold down her back, her body still beaded with seawater.

Johnny's hair glistened, his navy shorts were glued to his groin, and his body was as wet as her own. His eyes flashed with what looked like fury. She had never seen such powerful emotion in him.

Smith began to shiver, with cold and with reaction.

"You could have died!" Johnny said. "What did you think you were doing?"

"What do you think I was doing? Trying to escape!"

"Why?"  

"Why?" She laughed mirthlessly. "
Why?
Because I'm a hostage and I want to go home! Because you kidnapped me, remember? Because my father is ill and a band of lunatics want to cut off my ear! And because—because you hypnotized me or drugged me into sex and I don't…I can't…I want it to stop!"
 

His jaw tightened; she could practically hear the tension humming in his body.

"I have not hypnotized you and I have not drugged you," he said with clear, hard precision.

"Well, it sure feels like it!"

"And if you want it to stop, you might start by not leaving erotic literature around for me to read!" he said.

"Erotic literature?" Smith frowned blankly. "What are you talking about? I never—" She broke off as enlightenment came to her. "Do you mean my
poems
?" she screeched. How dared he! How dared he! "Are you telling me you think—"
 

"That's what I mean," interrupted Johnny Winterhawk. "Are you telling me it wasn't deliberate?"

"In the
garbage!"
She was almost incoherent with indignation. "I threw them in the garbage!"
 

"And it never occurred to you that the sight of my filing cabinet lying on the floor in my study might cause me to have a close look at any papers I saw—in the garbage or anywhere else?" he demanded.

"They were crap! Where did you expect me to leave them?"

"They were not crap."

"What the hell do you know about poetry?"

"I know—"

"You don't know much, but you know what you like?" she answered for him with heavy irony. "Anyway, if it was a message for you, you don't seem to have got it! Didn't you notice I said—"

"My mouth naked flame. Your body dry wood. That mean something other than what it says?"

"I guess you missed the part where it said
I have no water for you."
A chill ran over her
skin and she shivered. "
I guess you didn't get what that meant!"
 

Suddenly she was shivering in earnest, her teeth chattering so she could hardly get the words out.  Johnny bent down, lifted the seat of the sofa, and dragged out a stack of beach towels.  He crossed to her, shaking them out, and quickly wrapped her in warmth, head and body.  He stepped into the aft cabin and returned with a thick terrycloth robe. He held it for her, and obediently Shulamith slipped her arms into the sleeves, letting the towels fall to the floor, and wrapped herself snugly in its dark folds.  

Johnny bent to pick up the fallen towels, and she looked down at his perfectly muscled back, and the strange magic crept over her again, and he was no longer the enemy.

"You're wet too," she whispered, reaching for a fresh towel.

He straightened and tossed the wet towels onto the nav station seat. "Never mind me," he said, but she had already begun to dry his skin.

He caught her hand in a hard grip and made her drop the towel. "If you want it to stop, you have to stop it," he said, sounding like a man at the end of his rope.

"I'm sorry!" she whispered. "Johnny, I—"

"Shulamith, what is it you want from me?" He looked into her face and she saw Johnny Winterhawk stripped to the bone. His eyes were bleak and hollow, his face empty of every emotion save pain.  She wanted nothing so much as to give in to the urge to hold and comfort him.

"What are we going to do, Johnny?" she whispered, and then it was there, naked between them, their impossible, aching need.

He closed his eyes and whispered an imprecation.

 "Johnny," she whispered, and reached her arms out to him, feeling that if she couldn't hold him she would die. "Johnny, please--"

Before she could make the plea she was in his embrace, her arms wrapped around his neck, the robe open, her body arched into the commanding curve of his. His face burned against her neck, her head nestled into the muscled curve of his shoulder. His hand moved to cup her head, and she felt its heat through the cold wet press of her hair against her scalp. His other arm wrapped her tightly, so that her breasts pressed against him inside the enveloping warmth of the robe.

Johnny lifted his head and they gazed into each other's eyes for a long moment before she lifted her face and his mouth found hers. Then she drowned in feeling and sensation—every ache soothed, every hunger assuaged, every need answered.

Where was sanity? Shulamith swallowed convulsively and gasped in a shaky breath. "Wait," she begged softly, lifting a small hand to cup the curve of his shoulder. That touch of flesh fitting flesh was so sensual it shook her, and she closed her eyes and swallowed again. "Wait," she breathed, like a woman fighting for breath in a burning building.

His mouth moved over her skin with a keen stinging so intense she could not tell if it was fire or ice. He kissed her throat, her neck, her shoulder, as though the taste of her were all the sustenance he needed. Then he raised his head and looked into her face, and his eyes were changed. They were black now, and hungry and determined, and the look in them poured gasoline on the desire that flamed in the pit of her stomach; so that it whooshed up and burned like hot honey along every nerve. Her hands went still against him, and her breath began to shudder between her parted lips. His arm drew her closer. Her head fell back, offering her throat up to his mouth, and now she was impatient for him to taste her needy flesh, for the heat of his lips.

But still that black gaze stared into her eyes, electrifying every corner of her mind, and she knew that this was the lover she had waited for every day of her life without knowing it. His free hand stroked the taut muscles of her arched stomach, and she quivered with desire and pressed her body to his. She was being stripped down to essentials again, but now it was without interest that she felt the social veneer fall away. Now she was Cinderella, throwing off her rags for the ball gown, her whole attention turned on the glittering fury that wrapped her.

"Wait?" he queried hoarsely, as his hand paused its hypnotic stroking.

"I...what?"

"You asked me to stop," Johnny said, and his deep voice stroked her nerves like animal fur. "Stop me now if that's what you want. Don't expect to stop me later. More than anything on God's earth I want to love you. Once we start, there'll be no stopping."

Shulamith smiled in sensuous, slow understanding of everything he said and did not say. She wondered fleetingly what would happen if she told him to stop, because Johnny Winterhawk was lying to himself. His possessive rage was only stilled because she lay quiescent in his arms. If she fought to get away....

But she did not want to fight to get away. She was dressed in the flames of a fire that licked and flickered unmercifully at her flesh, and it must consume them both. She felt the curve of her own flesh under the hard shape of his palm, as though through him her femaleness was defined. Some new understanding hovered on the periphery of her mind, and again she smiled. The confidence of womanhood through millennia flooded her.

"Please love me, Johnny," she breathed, and his arms tightened almost savagely on her, and she was drowning in a sea of flame.

He lifted her up against him, her legs around his hips, his hands cupping her thighs to press her open body against his aroused sex, his mouth on hers in a double assault that overwhelmed her senses, the heavy bathrobe enclosing them both. Fingers in his hair, she held his head and tore her mouth away.

"Johnny," she whispered, her voice husky with passion and a kind of animal panic, "Johnny, I'm scared."

He moved through the door into the moonlit cabin, set her on the bed and leaned over her, as if he were her barrier against the world. "So am I," he said, touching her face with a hand that trembled. "I've never been so frightened in my life."

She had thought that he at least was experienced in this all-consuming need that had her in its grip like a drug. Terror fingered her throat as she watched Johnny's trembling hands struggle to remove the wet fabric that hugged his hips and saw what she had not understood before: this was taking him unawares. Johnny Winterhawk was out of control.

His hungry flesh free, he lifted the sheet and slid onto the bed beside her.

One part of her mind was reeling with fear, but it was the other part that ran her body. She moved against him with a convulsive need that she could not hold at bay and held her mouth up for his kiss with an urgency that the rational part of her could only watch in mute terror.

"Shulamith," he whispered against her lips. "You belong to me, you're part of me. Do you know it?"

"Yes," she cried softly. "Yes, Johnny, please, please."

He kissed her breast, circling the tightly hardened nipple with his tongue, and the warmth radiated through her body from his mouth. But it wasn't what she wanted, it wasn't enough.

"Please," she gasped, curling desperately into him, touching the blazing heat of his hardened sex with a moan of mingled pleasure, discovery and anticipation that shook him, body and soul.

He lifted his lips from her skin then, and lifted his body to draw her under his sheltering warmth. Then, in a pleasure so profound it was almost torment, he sank down into her.

She cried out her sense of completion, of oneness with him, and saw in his dark, half-lidded eyes that this was the cry he needed to hear from her.

This, and more. He needed every response that his body could draw from hers, every moan, every whimper, every convulsive press of her hips to meet the thrust of his, every quiver of her thighs, every tightening of her fingers against the pillow or against his flesh. He drew them from her steadily, unrelentingly, and drank them in with a look of such possessive need she had to shut her eyes against it. Johnny did not shut his eyes, not till the very end. He watched her hungrily until the wild climb of passion that gripped her exploded in her body and throat. Then she cried out with an intensity that was too much for him to bear, and he closed his eyes as his body surged against her. Then, shuddering and trembling, he cried out his release and her name together.

***

She awoke in the early hours, just before dawn. The moon was gone; faint pink threaded the midnight black above her eyes, lightening into gloom the unfamiliar cabin. But Shulamith knew instantly where she was, and curled against Johnny's warm frame without a flicker of surprise that he should be here in her bed, her lover.

When his hand moved to stroke her hair she felt that, too, without surprise. Never again need she be alone in those terrible small hours between midnight and dawn.

"Awake?" breathed Johnny above her head, and she nodded against his shoulder.

"Mmm," she agreed.

"Shulamith, let's get married," he said. "I love you. I can't live without you. Will you marry me?"

His arm gripped her protectively, and she snuggled into his embrace and sighed with mingled release and joy.