Storm Over the Lake (6 page)

Three days in New York didn't improve him, either. He stood over Dana in the den, his eyes on the appointment calendar she was making an addition to, his mouth a thin line.

“Hold it,” he said shortly. “You're scheduling me for the Chamber of Commerce banquet on the twenty-seventh. I won't be here,” he added, one long, darkly masculine finger touching hers on the calendar to point out a scrawl in one corner. “I've got a meeting with Callahan and Vaughan on that new equipment I'm ordering.”

“I'm sorry,” she said quietly, feeling his breath in her hair as he leaned over her. “I didn't see that.”

“Did you bother to look?” he asked harshly.

“Yes, sir, I did,” she defended herself weakly. She laid the calendar aside and stood up, moving away from him.

“Where the hell do you think you're going?” he demanded.

“To…to help Lillian get supper on the table.”

“My God, how did she ever manage to do it without you?” he growled, glaring at her across the room. “All right, run, Meredith. You'll eventually wear yourself out.”

She had her hand on the doorknob and was just about to open it.

“Meredith.”

“Yes, sir?”

“When you're through pecking at your supper, come back in here. I've got to work up a report on our latest production schedules.”

“Yes, sir.”

She dreaded those minutes alone with him, and her appetite dropped again.

Lillian grimaced at the food she left on
the plate. “You're going to blow away if you don't start eating!” she scolded.

Dana managed a wan smile. “All the way back to Miami, do you think?” she laughed mirthlessly. “I…I left someone there I'm concerned about. I can't even call to find out…”

“And why not?” Lillian was indignant. “You aren't a prisoner here, and the Mister wouldn't begrudge you a phone call.”

“Lillian, he begrudges me the air I breathe,” she said miserably, “Speaking of which, I've got to go back in there and take some dictation. I thought I heard the TV.”

“You did. He's watching it.” Lillian smiled at the shock on Dana's face. “Oh, he does, occasionally. Some cable movie, I think. It should be just about over by now. He had a tray in there.”

“I set him a place in the dining room.”

“One man, all alone, in that huge room?” Lillian asked gently. “Would you eat in there?”

The thought shocked her. Was he vulnerable enough to be lonely? She'd never
considered it before, and it touched her in some unfamiliar way.

She knocked gently at the door of the study and went in, closing it behind her.

“Just a minute, Persephone, it's almost over. Sit down,” he said over his shoulder. He was leaning forward on the couch, his eyes glued on the screen, not noticing that Dana came no closer to the wide-screened color TV.

She stood with her back against the cold wood of the door, trembling from one end of her body to the other, her horrified eyes hypnotized by the sight of a dam bursting on the TV screen, spreading a watery blanket of death over screaming victims. Her legs felt as if they were going to collapse under her. Her throat dried up. It was only six months ago and she was seeing her nightmares in full color.

With a terrible effort, she closed her eyes and felt the shudder rip through her, while the sound of the rushing water pounded in her ears and brought the old tears washing down her face. “Let it end, let it end, let it end,” she chanted silently like a prayer, “let it end. God, let it end!”

S
econds later, mercifully, a commercial took the place of the flood scene.

“Not bad, for a disaster flick, was it?” Adrian asked as he snapped off the television. “Well, let's get to…” He stopped in mid-sentence, looking at her where she was frozen, white-faced and trembling.

With an effort, she straightened and dashed the tears away impatiently. “My…my pad's on the desk,” she whispered huskily, moving toward it.

He intercepted her, his big hands catching her head to tilt her flushed, tear-stained face up to his dark, narrow eyes. “What's the matter?” he asked gently.

“It…it's nothing, really,” she said with a hollow laugh.

He scowled, darting a glance at the black television screen as his eyes came back to capture hers. “The movie? My God, honey, I didn't think…” he said harshly.

Her eyes widened, the question in her whole look.

“Yes, I know,” he said, confirming her suspicions. “Charlie told me all about it. My God, little girl, why didn't you say something?”

“What should I have said?” she asked bitterly. “Please don't look at any movies with dambursts in them, or listen to any recordings that sound like rushing water because they give me hysterics? Don't take me to a waterfall, because I'll scream when I hear the water?” She laughed shakily. “Right after it happened, I couldn't take a bath, do you know, because
the water sounded…God, I can't! I can't think about it, please…please, let's get to work, please…”

He drew her gently against him, his arms swallowing her up, warm and powerful and almost tender. “Tell me about it. Tell me everything you remember.”

“I…I can't…bear to remember!” she wept, shuddering.

“Until you let it out,” he said quietly, “it's going to haunt you like a ghost. Meredith, you don't face problems by running from them, haven't you learned that in your young life?”

She lifted her face to his. “I don't run from much, Mr. Devereaux,” she reminded him proudly.

A wisp of a smile curved his broad, hard mouth. “Don't you, Persephone?”

“If I have to qualify it, only from devils,” she replied.

“Deh-vuls,
did you say?” he asked, his eyes dark and laughing.

“You needn't make fun of my accent,” she returned. “You have one of your own!”

“Me?” He scoffed at that. “Not a trace.”

“Say card. Go ahead, I dare you,” she challenged, the flood forgotten in the business of arguing with her dark enemy.

“Card,” he said, lifting his head arrogantly.

“Aha, you see?!” she burst out, her eyes gleaming with laughter, her small hands pressing quickly against his broad chest.

“See what?” he asked.

“You say ‘cahd',” she explained impatiently.

He chuckled softly. His dark eyes traced the lines of her cheeks, her mouth, her nose. “You'd rather fight me than eat, wouldn't you?” he asked deeply. “I liked that about you three years ago, I recognized a kindred spirit. Do you believe in reincarnation, Meredith? That we take an instant like, or dislike, to a stranger because we knew him or her in another lifetime?”

“I don't know,” she admitted. “Some
people…some places…it's like going home when you're around them.”

“Isn't it, though?” he asked in a soft, low tone.

She felt her pulse race at the look in his dark eyes and abruptly turned away. “I'll get my pad.”

“Do that,” he said with a lightning change back to his normal curtness. “I could use a few hours sleep. These damned cross-country jaunts are getting to me.”

“Old age creeping up?” She couldn't resist it, darting a glance at him from under her lashes.

His bold, slow eyes touched her from head to toe.

“Come upstairs with me, you impudent little taffy cat, and I'll show you how old I am,” he replied in a tone that brought the blood burning into her cheeks.

“Uh…I'm ready when you are,” she said, side-stepping the innuendo as she dropped into the chair at his desk with her steno pad in her lap and her pen ready.

“Oh?” Both dark eyebrows went up
and she felt herself cringing in the chair as what she'd said echoed in her mind. “A Freudian slip?”

With a glimmer of the old Dana Meredith, she peeked under the hem of her skirt and shook her head. “Nylon,” she corrected.

He threw back his head and laughed like the devil he was, and she couldn't bite back a giggle of her own. The years and arguments and bitterness fell away, and she was his secretary and he was her boss, and it was like the sun coming up in the morning.

“Shut up and write, you little monster,” he chuckled. “Ready? Production figures on the cutting room…”

 

She lay awake for a long time, watching the moon-washed pattern of leaves dance on the coverlet of her bed. If she'd had anything to make her sleep, she'd have taken it. The movie brought it all back, and it was taking her forever to push it far enough away.

Far away in the darkness, there was a
sound. A rumble, vaguely like thunder, above the steady beat of the rain. Then a crashing watery roar seemed to come out of nowhere. On a wide plain, she was standing, paralyzed, watching, as a thirty foot wall of muddy, debris-carrying water came tumbling over the waterfall and down over houses and trees. Frightened into action, she turned and ran, her thin white silk gown flaring out behind her as she sprinted ahead of the water, her lungs bursting, her legs stretched to the limit, and all around her the screaming, dying sound of victims being sucked into that wet, hungry maw…it caught her, and soaked her, and she was being dragged under…

“Meredith!”

The voice was salvation, shelter. It jerked her away in the nick of time, returning her to consciousness, bathed in sweat, tears rolling down her cheeks. She looked up drowsily into a broad, leonine face, its hard planes outlined in the light of her small lamp. He was sitting beside her on the bed, his eyes dark with concern,
his big hand holding both of hers. He must have come running, she thought dazedly, because that broad, hair-riddled chest was bare, and all he had on were silk pajama bottoms.

“My God, I've never heard a scream like that,” he said gently. “Are you all right, honey?”

“What?” she whispered, blinking her eyes, her breath coming in gasps, as if she'd been running.

His fingers brushed the damp, sweaty strands of her hair from her temples, her cheeks. “You had the great grandfather of all bloodcurdling nightmares, from the sound of it,” he told her, a smile touching his hard mouth.

She swallowed, catching her breath, just his voice enough to calm her, to ease back to fear. “I'm all right,” she whispered. “I'm all right, now.”

“You were screaming,” he said, his eyes narrowed. “I want you to tell me about it, Dana. Now.”

It barely registered that he'd called her by her first name, or that the concern in
those dark eyes was genuine. She didn't look higher than the bronzed skin of his throat.

“I can't.”

“You can.” He threw the covers back. His big arms lifted her, turned, cradled her until she was lying across his broad, warm chest with her cheek on his bare shoulder.

“Now,” he murmured, looking down into her stunned eyes, caressing her bare shoulders, the soft curves of her nightgown, with gentle eyes. “Tell me what happened. Tell me what you saw. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can touch you as long as I've got you close like this. You're safe, honey. Tell me about it.”

And she did. She told him about the dam that burst on a rainy Sunday morning in the darkness, and the unbelievable damage that a 30-foot wall of water can do to property and people, and about the victims…the victims…

“So many of them were children,” she whispered, her face buried in the curling hair on his chest, her hands clinging to him. “So many…and the mud and mire
was everywhere, and I didn't want to look. I didn't want to look!” A sob shook her. “But the whole place was covered with reporters and TV cameras and curiosity seekers who got past the rescue workers…! And that man, that poor harassed man in the thick of it trying to get his friend's body onto a stretcher past the television camera, and he said…he said…” Her voice broke. “He said we were vultures, that we were making a…a carnival out of it, and he was right, Adrian, we were, we were! All those poor, dead people, and the poor men who had to get them out and live with what they saw…!”

“Oh, my God,” he breathed, his big arms swallowing her, protecting her. “Oh, my God, Dana!” She felt the powerful muscles go taut as he pressed her softness against him. His face buried itself in the thick, silky hair like a taffy cloud at her throat, holding her…just holding her.

“I felt so stupid, getting upset when all I had to do was write the story.” She moved restlessly in his arms. “But it hurt me. It hurt me! I've always been a little
afraid of rivers and waterfalls, and I kept thinking how it must have been, all that water shooting down over the falls…”

His arms tightened even more, until her body was so close that his heartbeat shook it. “It's over,” he murmured quietly. “All over. There's nothing to be afraid of anymore.”

He rocked her gently, as if she were a child, and eased the fear and the trembling and the nightmarish memories. She felt her drawn muscles relaxing, felt the hardness of warm muscle and bone close against her in the drowsy silence that followed. She was aware of his warmth and strength, but even more aware of the sudden longing that flooded her yielding body. Only the thin slip of a nightgown separated flesh from flesh, and she could feel every hard line of his torso burning against hers. She was more aware than ever of his massive strength, of the raw power in that big body, of her own weakness.

“I…I'm all right now,” she murmured, and gently pressed against that unyielding muscle.

“I'm not.” He drew back a breath, and she could see the hard lines of his face, the strain in it, the tiny brown flames in his dark eyes. “I can feel every cell in your body through that gown, little girl,” he said quietly, “every soft inch of you. I want you, Dana.”

She tensed defensively, her eyes widening with fear.

“Don't go cold on me,” he said, his big hand tracing shivery patterns along her throat, down to the neckline of her gown. “I'll be exquisitely gentle with you, little cat. I'll set you on fire and watch you burn in my arms…”

She drew up like a scorched leaf, turning her face away from that sensuous look in his eyes. “Please let me go,” she pleaded tearfully. “I didn't know I was expected to pay for a shoulder to cry on.”

She felt him stiffen, felt the anger touch every muscle in his vibrant body. “Payment in kind?” he growled. “At least you wouldn't have to buy me, Meredith, the way you had to buy that middle-aged…”

“You're middle-aged, too!” she threw
back at him, and regretted it instantly, even before she saw the explosion that blackened his glittery eyes.

“That,” he said, his voice deep and dangerously soft, “was the biggest mistake you've made tonight.” His hand tangled in her hair, jerking her face up to his, holding her head back against the merciless strength of his arm.

She stared back at him defiantly, determined not to show the fear that was ripping her pulse to shreds. “I'm not afraid of you,” she said deliberately.

“Why should you be?” he asked carelessly. “I wouldn't be the first, and we both know it.”

His eyes slid over her with an intimacy that made her blood surge in her veins. Like some magnificent dark illusion, he studied her, his dark hair rumpled, his eyes intense, his mouth almost smiling.

“Are you going to fight me, Meredith?” he asked in a slow, gentle tone.

Her lips trembled uncertainly, but she stood her ground. “To the last breath,” she assured him.

His hand propelled her face up to his. His warm, chiseled lips parted hers with all a lover's practiced skill, smothering her protests as he forced her down into the pillows, his hard chest pinning her under him while he taught her how intimate a kiss could be.

With a sob, she fought him, panic making her wild as she struggled away from his deep, penetrating kiss and felt his bristly cheek rasp her swollen mouth.

He drew back, scowling down at the shock and fear that had left her face white.

“Meredith…” He murmured her name quietly, thoughtfully.

She sobbed, the sound pitiful in the darkness, like a child being whipped.

Abruptly, he let her go and stood up, his eyes puzzled, and anger mixed with it so that his face was frightening.

“Have you ever thought of going on the stage?” he asked with icy sarcasm. “You play the innocent with a flair. But you needn't bother, little cat. As you so accurately put it that night in the garden, it wouldn't mean anything.” His eyes
summed up her cowering body with a flick of indifference.