Wild Honey (11 page)

Lightning split the sky again just above his head, and Sasha flinched back with a reaction near to awe.

Certain that she must be eavesdropping on some private moment, Sasha stepped back into her room. Her sense of bewilderment grew as she tried to make sense of what she’d seen. What had possessed him to do such a thing? For some reason, the emotion in his eyes during their love scene came back to her, the pain, the pinprick of rage. She wondered again what he’d done. Or what someone had done to him.

Even in the quieter moments they’d had together, which had been too few, there’d been a melancholy unease about Marc Renaud. Her mind jumped automatically to the possibility that disturbed her most—that his turmoil had something to do with Leslie. Had she left him? Was Leslie the source of his conflict?

Sasha walked to her still-made bed and sank down, dropping back onto the pillow. Lost in thought, she tugged absently at her lower lip, a holdover habit from childhood moments of deep contemplation. It disturbed her terribly to think of him racked with pain over another woman. No, worse, it hurt like hell. Why in the world it should affect her so intensely, she didn’t know, but there was a viselike ache around her heart that felt hot and tender as a new bruise. It was almost as though something precious had been taken from her.

The sensation was pervasive and astonishingly painful, and it was alleviated only a little as she pressed her hand to her chest. It was like an arrow through the heart. Oh, she was being ridiculous, she told herself, shaking her head as she sat up and swung her legs off the bed. A person had to be in love to have a broken heart, and she couldn’t be in love with a man she’d known for only a week, a moody character she wasn’t even sure she liked very much.

She walked to the patio door again and touched the glass, watching the rain. She didn’t step out to see if he was still there. The storm was lessening, and somehow she knew he wouldn’t be.

By the time dawn had turned into morning, she had brought her situation into focus. She was suffering from a bad case of infatuation. If she cared to probe, she probably would find that it all stemmed back to some unresolved adolescent crush—the high school science teacher who’d failed to notice her, maybe. It wasn’t hero worship exactly, but it was close. It was understandable, even appropriate. Marc was a famous director and arguably the most attractive man she’d ever met. If she didn’t count his moods, there was plenty to be infatuated about.

An hour later, after an intense session of isometrics and a round of hot and cold showers—a relaxation trick Sasha had picked up from the colonel—she felt as though her sense of direction had been restored. Her murky feelings about Marc had been temporarily sidelined in favor of a weightier matter—his past relationship with Leslie. There were too many pieces missing to make a complete picture of the twosome. Sasha wanted to know exactly what had happened to his former star and live-in companion. Where was Leslie now? How did Marc feel about her?

The tantalizing smell of fresh-ground coffee wafted up the stairway as she descended to the first floor a short time later. Aware of the house’s quiet, she made her way through the maze of hallways to the kitchen. For security reasons, the staff had all been dismissed except for Bink and Arturo, but neither was in evidence that morning.

Marc was standing at the kitchen window when Sasha entered. Unaware of her, he stared out at the gray sky, a cup of coffee in his hand, a French cigarette drooping seductively from his lips. His jeans, faded and glove-soft from wear, hugged his hips and defined his thighs and calves with the precision of an artist’s brush. His chambray shirt was rolled up to the elbows and open at the neck.

Très continental,
Sasha thought, hesitating in the doorway. He looked like he had been strolling on the Champs-Élysées and was transported magically into the kitchen. He also looked, well, decadent. She resisted the urge to take issue with the cigarette. If he wanted to ruin his lungs—and his life in the process—she told herself firmly, that was his prerogative.

“Hi,” she said in a neutral tone. “Looks like we’re in for some foul weather, doesn’t it?” Humming quietly, she walked to the coffeemaker and poured herself a mugful. “How’s this downpour going to affect the beach shoot?”

He took the cigarette out of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, Bogart style, then tapped its ashes into the potted palm next to him and glanced over his shoulder at her. “We’re shut down until the storm breaks. Pray for sunshine.”

“I will,” she said, debating the wisdom of joining him at the window. He didn’t look as if he’d bite, though she suspected he might. The man certainly had a bizarre effect on her. She’d begun to feel slightly delirious with some of the random thoughts and notions that popped into her head where he was concerned. Just being around him was an event. She never knew quite what
she
was going to say or do next. Was that what made him a good director, she wondered. His ability to draw on the spontaneous, his ability to make people react instead of “act”?

When she finally did join him at the window, he drew himself out of his reflections long enough to nod at her and step back to the tiled counter to stub out his cigarette in an ashtray. His eyes were pale and intense, even at this hour of the morning, and they never quite seemed to leave her, even when he looked away.

She glanced out at the ocean uneasily, certain that it wasn’t just his concern about the movie schedule that had him so pensive. It must have something to do with whatever had taken him out onto the deck in the rain.

“Paul said these delays cost tens of thousands of dollars daily.”

“Paul was right for once,” Marc answered.

Sasha cordoned off the rest of the questions lining up in her mind. This wasn’t the time, she told herself. His body might be in the kitchen, but his psyche was still out in the rain. As he studied the coastline, she studied his profile, more curious about him than ever. Like Faust, she would have made a bargain with the devil at that moment to know what he was thinking.

It wasn’t the movie on Marc’s mind or the haunting memory of that night long ago that had forced him out into the storm. It was Sasha. He might have looked preoccupied when she’d entered, but he hadn’t missed how appealing she was in her jeans and brief cotton top, her blond hair cascading around her. He hadn’t missed the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her ample breasts shimmied under the tank top when she moved, straining at the fabric in ways that made his thoughts steam up like a teenager’s car window and his hands ache with adult male urges.

“You’re staring at me,” she pointed out.

“Staring? Was I? Sorry, I’ve got things on my mind.” He smiled faintly, aware that what was on his mind would have shocked the hell out of her. His body was quickening, responding to her physically, but his mind had taken a different tack, looped back on itself and gone inward. He was thinking about himself, about the dark spot in his soul. Strange as it sounded, he sensed that she had something he needed badly, and suddenly he’d begun having crazy thoughts...about her stubborn purity of mind and spirit, about the white flame that burned inside her—about sex with her...or making love to her. Which would it be? He didn’t know, but he did know it would be incendiary and consuming. He did know the fantasy of taking her to bed obsessed him like danger obsesses the thrillseeker.

He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, lit one, and inhaled deeply. Why did he imagine that her fire could cauterize whatever it touched? Why did he believe she could burn him clean?

“Marc?”

She touched his arm and he turned away, staring out to sea, pulling deeply on the cigarette. A cinchlike sensation pressed hard around his heart. It wasn’t pain, he decided. He barely remembered what pain felt like...until now, until her.

When he turned back, she was across the room, pouring herself another cup of coffee and looking as though she’d picked up on his mental impulses. She stared at him uneasily, her eyes large. Neither of them spoke, and in the quiet that expanded around them, the words left unsaid seemed to take on tremendous import.

Finally her searching gaze flicked to his cigarette, and a frown of disapproval surfaced. He knew damn well it wasn’t his smoking that was bothering her, but at least it was a safer topic than anything he could come up with.

“This isn’t personal, okay?” he said, taking one last deep drag before he stubbed out the cigarette. “I’m not out to sabotage your one-woman campaign to rid the world of ashtrays. I’m addicted. It has nothing to do with you.”

She pressed both hands around the coffee cup and took a drink with steadying slowness. “Thirteen years off your life just like that,” she said, her voice faint but firm. She was a woman who held to her convictions, even under siege.

“The good die young,” he reminded her.

“Umm, but it’s not a fun way to go. The lungs turn black and gummy with corrosion,” she said, “the heart valves clog up with fat—”

“Enough.” He pulled the entire pack from his pocket and crushed it. “If I live to be a hundred, it’s your fault.”

They stared at each other, and at last she smiled.

He nodded. An unspoken truce was in the making.

“If you’re really thinking of quitting,” Sasha offered, perhaps a little too eagerly, “I’ve got a few tips. You have to learn to respect yourself, of course, and your body. Anticipate success—that’s a must—practice deep breathing, and when you get the urge—” she shrugged and smiled as though it were so so simple—“do something else.”

His grin deepened. “I’ve got the urge.”

Sasha caught the sexy flash of blue in his eyes and felt the nape of her neck tingle. Boy, who doesn’t, she thought. “Can I suggest some...exercise?”

“Suggest away.”

“Stretching exercises, maybe some isometrics?”

“Actually, I was thinking about—”

“No,” she said flatly, anticipating him, “no pushups. You need something calming and meditative, like yoga. I could show you a couple of postures.”

“I wish you would.”

Moments later they were out on the deck off the kitchen and she was demonstrating some basic yoga positions. She knew he was putting her on at first, but the enthusiasm of her presentation gradually won him over, and by the time she got around to explaining the benefits of deep breathing, he seemed sincerely interested. She even coaxed him into a cobra position, which she promised him was yoga’s answer to the pushup.

“Relax and raise your upper torso until you’re at a forty-five-degree angle with the floor. Yes...there...good! How does that feel?”

His groan was rich with laughter. “It feels like I’m going to need a chiropractor.”

As they lay on the floor afterward, Marc with his arms crossed under his head, contemplating the ceiling, Sasha propped up on her elbow, contemplating him, she realized it was the closest he’d ever been to being in a congenial mood. It pleased her to think that she might have had something to do with it.

They talked casually about yoga, about
Tell Me No Lies,
and finally she broached one of the questions that had been heavy on her mind. “Paul told me that Leslie was indisposed,” she said cautiously. “I hope she’s not seriously ill?”

He rose to a sitting position, worked a catch out of his shoulder muscle, and roped his arms around his legs. “Paul was being discreet,” he replied bluntly. “The truth is, Leslie wasn’t happy with the arrangement that she and I had.”

Arrangement? A pregnant word if ever Sasha had heard one. Struck by its implications, and by his totally unexpected openness, she sat up too. Now we’re getting somewhere, she thought, barely able to rein in her curiosity. “You mean business, of course.”

“No, I mean personal. She walked off the set because I called off our engagement.”

“Engagement? You were engaged?” Suddenly Sasha’s heart was pounding like a jackhammer. This was more information than she’d counted on, perhaps even wanted. “Then you must have been in love...very much in love, both of you, with each other?”

He stared at her over a hunched shoulder, irony in his expression. “Only one of us was very much in love,” he said, “and that was Leslie—with her makeup mirror.”

“Oh, I see.” Sasha sagged back down to her elbow, literally weak with relief.

They were both quiet for the next few moments, Sasha trying to assimilate the land mines of information she’d tripped over in the last seconds. Marc wondering what she was going to come up with next. She’d been thrown by his directness, that was obvious, but he may also have inadvertently whet her appetite by his willingness to talk about forbidden subjects. He suspected he had. She didn’t disappoint him.

“If you didn’t love her,” she asked, a thoughtful naïveté in her voice, “then why did you become engaged to her?”

The ensuing silence accentuated every sound in the room, the soft whir of the dehumidifier in the corner, the precise tick tick tick of the wall clock. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time,” he said finally.

“Where is she now?”

Marc pushed to his feet. His reticence had nothing to do with Leslie. His mistake, he realized, was in opening himself up to Sasha’s questions in the first place. She was fatally inquisitive, a woman who wouldn’t give up until she’d pared to the bone, until she knew everything. By his openness, he’d given her tacit permission to continue probing into whatever inspired her next—his life, his past.

White-capped breakers crashed on the beach as he walked to the railing and stared out. He knew exactly how it would go once she’d discovered the grisly truth. She would either shrink away or feel compelled to save him. Yes, he thought, she had “cause” written all over her. She held a better, brighter view of the world that included rescuing lost souls and fixing broken lives. Well, he wasn’t lost. He knew exactly where he was—in hell, a fiery abyss of his own making. At least he had an edge over ninety percent of the human race who didn’t have a clue where they were.

“Leslie didn’t leave a forwarding address,” he said, aware that she probably wouldn’t believe it. “And I don’t appreciate or need the second-rate psychoanalysis.”