The Second Time (5 page)

Dust had naturally accumulated on the windowsills and floors. A cupboard door or two in the kitchen had swelled shut, but there were no major things wrong. None of the ceilings showed any signs of roof leakage. There weren’t any rust stains from leaky water pipes. Without furniture in the rooms or curtains at the windows, the house had a starkness to it, but now and then Dawn caught traces of the character she remembered as Slater toured her through the rooms.

Coming full circle back to the living room, Slater paused inside the arched doorway. Behind his lazy regard of her, there was an intensity that had persisted each time he looked at her. It made Dawn uncomfortable and tense, as if she never dared to relax. She made a show of ignoring him, her glance wandering around the room instead.

“Trying to decide which wall to hang your Picasso on?” Slater queried mockingly. “It might look out of place in these simple surroundings.”

“Why should it?” She swung around to face him, half the width of the empty room separating them. “The ceramic cat Picasso designed for
Hemingway is displayed in the house where he lived here in Key West.” She was tired of his constant jibes about money and cultural status. “There’s a whole colony of artists and craftsmen here.”

“But not jetsetters, or the wealthy elite,” Slater countered. There was a lazy curve to his mouth, but it held more mockery than amusement. “Their gathering place is Key Largo. Maybe that’s why I have trouble believing you are actually serious about buying this house. Or are you trying to make this area the new ‘in’ place for rich snowbirds?” His taunting voice continued to challenge her. “How much time will you spend here? A week a year? Two weeks?”

“Key West is my hometown,” Dawn reminded him. “Why is it so impossible to think that I might want to live here?”

“Maybe because you’ve stayed away for ten years.”

“Eleven,” she corrected.

A shoulder lifted in an uncaring shrug. “Who’s counting?” It was obvious he wasn’t. That hurt almost more than anything else he’d said.

“You’re right.” Her voice went flat.

“Why did you really want to see this house, Mrs. Lord?” he challenged.

He deliberately kept using her married name, constantly reminding Dawn of her perfidy. She wanted to scream at him to stop it, the sound of it scraping over her raw nerves, but she didn’t.

“I’ve already told you,” she insisted stiffly.

“It’s a lovely old home,” Slater said idly. “A
bargain. I guess that’s the problem. I don’t see you as a bargain-hunter—” There was an abrupt pause. “I guess you are at that. You like to look over the merchandise and shop for the best deals, don’t you?”

“What am I supposed to say to that?” she demanded, bristling at his constant harangue.

“If the shoe fits?” he murmured and left the rest of the old saying unfinished.

“Sometimes people outgrow old shoes.” It was the closest she’d come to denying his veiled accusations against her character.

Now that she had finally risen to his baiting remarks Slater seemed to tire of the sport. “About this house—” he began. “You have seen the condition it’s in. If you’re serious about buying, we’ll get down to the business of price and terms. Even if you don’t choose to live in it, the property would be a sound investment.”

“I’m considering possibly moving here permanently,” Dawn stated, drawing his sharpened glance.

“Depending on what?” Slater sensed the unspoken qualification in her announcement.

“Depending on you.” The conversation had finally come around to the subject she needed to discuss with him, and she drew her first calm breath, the moment finally coming.

But the calm didn’t last more than a second. The stale air became suddenly charged with a volatile energy. Slater discarded his pose of lazy mockery as his features hardened in contemptuous anger and his gray eyes smouldered.

“That’s rich!” He breathed out the harsh words, his jaw rigidly clenched. “You don’t give a damn about me! You don’t care about anybody but yourself and what you want!”

Her gaze faltered under the censorious glare of his. She tightened her grip on the blue purse, glancing at her whitened knuckles briefly.

“I don’t blame you for thinking that way about me. Heaven knows I’ve given you cause,” Dawn admitted, managing to keep her voice even. “What I did was wrong. I know that now. And I’m sorry.”

“And what does that mean?” He moved toward her, one slow step gliding into the next.

It wasn’t until he stopped inches in front of her that Dawn realized how much he had kept his distance from her. Now he was all too close, so tall, wider in the shoulders than she remembered. She felt the rush of adrenaline through her veins, heightening all her senses.

“It means I’m truly sorry I hurt you.” There was no adequate elaboration she could make on the apology to convince him she was sincere.

His mouth was pulled straight in a hard line, a muscle jumping on the high ridge of his jaw. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” Slater repeated her words in a tautly flat voice. “As if I’d been knocked down and skinned my knee.” He dismissed the apology as small compensation for the pain she had caused him. “I loved you.” The declaration was pushed through his teeth, fierce and low. “When you married him, you took everything—my heart,
my pride, my all. You left me barren and empty—like this house! Crying out for—for you!”

The sting of tears was in her eyes, sharp remorse twisting like a knife in her heart. Dawn met the harshness of his gaze without blinking. At the time, she had been too selfish to see the full consequences of her action, the ripple effect her decision had made, first striking Slater, then Simpson, Randy, even her parents.

“I know,” she said. “I had hoped time would have healed some of the pain.” Or at least tempered some of his anger, but it hadn’t.

“Why?” Slater demanded. “Did you think you could come back and pick up where we left off? Did you think you could kiss away the hurt that was left and make it better?” His hands gripped her arms, his fingers digging into the seersucker sleeves of her light jacket. “Why don’t you see if it works?”

The snarling challenge was no sooner issued than Slater was pulling her roughly against him to have it carried through. An arm was hooked behind her waist while eleven years of bitterness, anger, and loathing came crushing down on her mouth. Dawn was rigid against this punishing sexual assault, powerless but unyielding.

The hardness of his mouth ground her lips against her teeth, not taking any effort to make the bruising kiss anything but unpleasant. The humiliating sensation was so at odds with the stimulating scent of spicy male cologne that assailed her nose, and with the evocative familiarity
of his lean, muscled body molded so tightly to hers.

There was only one purpose to this embrace—to hurt and degrade her mentally and physically the way she had injured him. And Slater was resorting to the base tactic of sexual force to accomplish it. Even while Dawn hated him for treating her so brutally, she couldn’t cast stones with a free conscience.

The grinding pressure of his mouth gradually eased as he slowly broke the contact. Dawn remained motionless, a prisoner in his arms. Her eyes closed as she tried to piece together her pride. His fanning breath was warm and moist against her sore lips, his breathing labored and uneven.

“Damn you.” There was frustration in the hoarseness of his low curse as if the result of his abusive kiss hadn’t been as satisfying as he had expected it to be.

Slowly Dawn raised her lashes to look at him. He was so close she could count the number of tiny white suncreases around his half-closed eyes. Mixed in with the bitter pain, she could see the want that was darkening his gray eyes. Her breath caught in her throat.

His hand moved slowly along her spine, no longer imprisoning but exploring instead with almost reluctant interest. She was conscious of the feel of his body shaped so fully to hers and the ache of desire in his eyes. Memories came rushing back of a time when his touch had excited her beyond all measure, making it easy to forget
something so unpleasant as the events of a minute ago. The protective tension faded, taking the stiffness from her limbs, letting her go soft against him.

“Why did you have to come back?” he groaned in a kind of despair. “I was just getting to the point where I could hear your name without going to pieces.”

“I was such a fool, Slater.” Caught in the emotional moment, Dawn nearly sobbed out the admission.

When her arms went around his neck to make her a participant instead of a victim of his embrace, it was only instinct that prompted her fingers to retain their grip on her clutch purse. This time eleven years of hunger were unleashed when his mouth moved onto her swollen lips. The rawness of his need evoked a tumultuous response that sent her heart soaring.

She strained to fulfill it, wanting to give back more than she got. She was the aggressor. Her fingers curled into the virile thickness of his hair, forcing his head to increase its angle and the pressure of his kiss, while the driving probe of her tongue pushed its way between his lips to intimately deepen the kiss. She could feel the hammering of his heart, only a beat behind the racing tempo of her own.

His hands were caressing, roaming at will over her back and shoulders and stirring up passions that had lain dormant for so long. It was not that Simpson had been sexually unsatisfying as a lover, but there had not been this volatility that
was created by the combination of physical and emotional desire. Time hadn’t altered this feeling they shared. Dawn recognized that, and there was a wild singing in her veins at the discovery that she found what she thought had been irrevocably lost.

Abruptly, almost violently, Slater was pulling her arms from around his neck and pushing her from him. Dawn was stunned by the fury she saw in his expression. Cold and bitter rejection was taking the place of the desire that had glittered in his eyes.

“Your husband has only been in the ground a month and already you’re trying to seduce another man into your bed,” accused Slater. “But you’re not going to sucker me a second time,
Mrs. Lord.”

“No. Slater—” She was wounded by his sarcasm, which was for once totally unjustified. Regardless of what he thought, that hadn’t been her intention in meeting him.

“You warned me eleven years ago.” There was disgust in his sweeping visual assessment of her. “But I didn’t think even you would have the gall to do it. ‘The second time for love,’ isn’t that what you said? But first you were going to marry money.” His mouth curled with contempt.

“Don’t.” It was a quiet protest, because there was no point in going into all that.

But Slater took no notice of it. “Well, you’ve got your money now, don’t you?” he taunted. “The Widow Lord and all her Texas millions.”

Dawn didn’t correct his impression that Simpson had bequeathed her the bulk of his estate. Her wealth, or lack of it, wasn’t the issue that had brought her here, so she didn’t want the distraction of discussing it. Besides, it wasn’t any of Slater’s business.

“You came back to see if that love you threw away eleven years ago was still around. Did you really think I’d want you?” There was a rigid movement of his head, a kind of negative shake that was heavy with disdain. “You can take your money and your love—and you know what you can do with it!”

Dawn spoke quickly when he started to swing away to leave. “That isn’t why I came back, Slater.”

“Isn’t it?” His mouth was slanted in a cruelly mocking line.

“There are a lot of reasons why I haven’t been back before now, but there is only one reason why I wanted to see you privately today,” she stated, a steadiness finally returning to her voice after the passionately disturbing kiss. “When I told you that I hoped you wouldn’t be so bitter after this much time, it was the truth. Not because I wanted to pick up where we left off. I don’t expect us to be lovers. I doubt if we can even be friends.”

“I’m glad you see that so clearly, because you destroyed any future for us eleven years ago,” he returned grimly. “Don’t forget to shut the door when you leave.”

“Wait.” Her voice checked the stride he had
taken toward the door. Impatience vibrated in his glance as Slater half-turned. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“I can’t think of anything you have to tell me that I would be interested to hear,” he stated flatly, and started again for the door.

“Not even about your son?” Dawn asked and watched him freeze, then slowly turn to face her.

His probing gaze was hard with anger. “What is that supposed to mean?” he demanded with an openly skeptical expression.

“I’m talking about Randy—my son.
Our
son.” Her voice remained level, containing a degree of false calm under his narrowing gaze. “You are his father.”

The silence lengthened into interminable seconds without his expression changing from its hard and doubting contempt. “You haven’t changed a bit.” His low pronouncement reached out to strike her down. “You’ll use any trick in the book to get what you want. Even to the extent of trying to tie me to you by pretending I fathered your son.” He shook his head, suddenly becoming totally indifferent. “It won’t work”

“Randy is your son,” Dawn insisted, but Slater was already striding to the door. She started after him. “If you’d just let me explain—”

The door was pulled shut behind his retreating figure, ending her sentence before it was finished. Dawn stopped and stared at the door, stunned by his reaction to the news. She had prepared herself mentally for bitterness, anger, and outrage—even doubt—but she hadn’t expected Slater to dismiss
it as an impossibility and refuse to listen to what she had to say.

A despairing depression settled heavily onto her shoulders. Dawn turned, her gaze running sightlessly around the empty room. Dust particles danced in the sunlight streaming through a window. What proof could she show Slater that he would believe? If he refused to hear her out, what could she do?

Outside, a car engine growled to life and accelerated, its transmission being shifted into reverse gear. There was something final about the fading sound of Slater’s driving away. Unsure what her next move would be, Dawn walked to the door through which Slater had so recently exited the house. The self-locking latch clicked as she closed it and crossed the veranda.