Hold Back the Night (17 page)

Reverberating with a conflicting mixture of emotions, Domini raced across the room to where she had laid her clothes. She dressed in silence, regretting her last thoughtless remark but too disturbed to apologize for it. As reason reasserted itself she became certain that Sander was right. She couldn't return now, knowing that beneath the impartial professionalism with which he explored her body the primitive man in him was being consumed by the dark, fierce fires of desire. She reminded herself that she didn't love him, that she would never love him again, that her reaction to him was only due to the abysmal lack of sexual fulfilment in her life. And surely the cure for that could be found elsewhere!

At length, dressed, she turned to look at him again. He was standing at the sculpture table, his palms pressed against its surface, the droop of his head denoting not tiredness but a continuing and powerful tension.

Domini was calmer now and she managed to keep her voice level. 'I'm going now,' she said. 'As I doubt that I'll be modelling for you again, do you mind if I do take a look at your shelf after all? I assure you I won't be angry if there's anything unflattering of me.'

He took a while before answering, and then did so without lifting his head. 'I don't suppose it matters if you do see now,' he said in a forced, tight voice. 'Go ahead. Perhaps it will cure you of wanting to come here once and for all.'

Domini walked across to the shelf. Carefully she peeled back the coverings. The shelf held a far greater number of maquettes than she had expected. Those in the front she recognized; they had all been done during the daily sessions. But those in the back...

Domini's heart skipped a brief beat upon seeing the largest of the small clay models, a sculpture of a naked man and a naked woman entwined in the act of love. Passion was in every line, every moving nuance of the sculpture, and although the woman's face was buried hungrily against the man's, removing the need for facial features, Domini had no doubt that it was intended to be herself. The woman's slender curves were recognizably her own, and so was the hair captured in its French twist, and with so many small models to work from, Sander would have no trouble remembering those curves and that hair very well. As to the identity of the man, Domini was in no doubt.

So that was what Sander had not wanted her to see. Or was it the other maquettes at the back of the shelf? They were all of Sander's own face ... strong, tortured models that captured his inner agony very well, each with a feature as distinctive in its own way as were the unfinished faces on the sculptures of Domini.

'They're very good,' Domini said quietly, replacing the covers. 'Which was it you didn't want me to see? The way you were making love to me ... or the way you gouged out all the eyes in the sculptures of yourself ?'

His voice was flat, unemotional. 'Perhaps both. Or perhaps I simply didn't want you to know your ruse had met with success. Yes, it's true. I've been sculpting with frenzy for a good part of every day. I don't want to do it but I find myself doing it, driven by it, unable to stop. Are you satisfied? Isn't that what you wanted all along?'

'Yes,' Domini replied, turning to face him and feeling terrible because of the purgatory expressed in those eyeless sculptures of himself. Had she only added to his inner torture by forcing him to face up to the unexpressed artist in himself?

'You'd better go now,' he said without inflection.

'Who will you use for a model?'

He shrugged as if it were a matter of indifference. 'Miranda, Joel, the shopgirl next door, some wino who'll pose in exchange for a meal. Does it matter? I won't stop now, and a clothed model is quite as valid as an unclothed one. You've made your point, Miss Greey, and really, I think for your own sake you're very wise not to come again.'

'Domini,' she corrected.

'Domini, then,' he agreed with a bitter twist to his mouth. 'Perhaps I should thank you but I won't. My new occupation doesn't add to my ... peace of mind.'

Domini walked slowly to the door, thinking her way across each inch of floor. Before leaving, she stopped and turned. 'I'm not sure I should stop modelling after all,' she said. 'I need to think about it. You do need a model, and I did agree. I could do it with my clothes on.'

'I release you,' he said tonelessly.

But Domini knew he could not really afford the models he would need if he were to continue with anything other than his bitterly unhappy and introspective self-sculptures. Miranda was busy, Joel was busy, and winos might be more trouble than they were worth. 'I'll take a few days off and decide,' she suggested. 'I might come back.'

Sander's strong jaw worked for a moment before he controlled the muscles of his face. 'I wouldn't advise that,' he said in a monotone. 'You see, Miss Domini, another time you won't be so safe with me.'

'Is that a threat?' Domini asked, forcing a light, husky laugh.

Sander shifted and lifted his head so that his eyes caught a stray ray of light, illuminating their darkness for one illusory moment. Had Domini not known otherwise, she could have sworn he had seen the uncertain expression on her face.

'Yes, it is. If you arrive here to model for me again,' he warned in deathly earnest, 'I'll assume you've made some kind of choice. In which case I intend to take you up to my bedroom and make love to you very thoroughly and very lingeringly, not sparing any part of you at all. I don't need sight to do that, for any man who is a man can make love in the dark, and some prefer it. So please, don't come back unless that's exactly what you want.'

Domini held her breath and then let it go. 'I won't,' she murmured, and at the time she thought she meant she wasn't coming back at all. She didn't realize until later that she had left her terry robe behind, perhaps a symbol of subconscious intent.

❧

'You asked for a view,' Grant reminded her as he placed his hand over hers on the tablecloth. 'I couldn't think of a better one.'

'It's dazzling,' Domini agreed, her shining face turned towards the exciting skyline of New York. From this height, a quarter-mile above street level at their prime table in Windows on the World, the city's skyscrapers were spread out in a sweeping pageantry of lights stretching upward towards the sky and northward to the far limits of vision. The Empire State Building and the famous Chrysler

Building were recognizable in the panorama. Old skyscrapers were dwarfed by newer ones, and the newer buildings were in turn dwarfed by the one hundred and ten storeys of the World Trade Center, atop which the restaurant sat. New York was never so impressive as when seen from a height, and never so magical as at night.

Grant had managed to secure a windowside table, a feat no doubt helped along by the discreetly folded banknote he had presented upon arrival. While Domini devoured the view, commenting excitedly as she recognized each landmark far below, a vintage champagne was uncorked. It frothed into two glasses, and Grant lifted one without releasing Domini's hand, where his thumb was tracing lightly over her palm.

'A toast to the future, now that I'm sure we have one,' he said, his voice vibrant with meaning.

At last Domini dragged her eyes away from the breathtaking view and sought the stem of her champagne glass with her free hand. Flushed with optimism, she was sure that Grant was at last giving her the news she had been longing to hear. Although he had congratulated her on the window she had dressed, he hadn't exactly said whether he intended to award her the job on a permanent basis. But his words now tended to confirm that he did. Domini decided to probe a little, to assure herself that it was so.

'Oh, Grant, I'm so thrilled you like the display. That is the kind of future you're talking about, isn't it?'

He laughed lightly. 'I wasn't actually referring to your window. But yes, I do like it immensely, and yes, you will get the job. It's very simple, very stunning, very effective. Several people have commented on it already. I can't think why you haven't been working on Fifth Avenue all along.'

Domini had devised a simple but ingenious answer to Grant's window problem. Because of its size, the window needed mannequins, but dressed mannequins seriously detracted from the merchandise he sold. So she intended to leave them totally undressed, covering all the joints and the vital areas with one device or another. In the window just done, which was intended to promote pearls of all kinds, a long-haired siren of a mannequin was in the process of emerging from a gigantic oyster shell. Part of her was hidden by the huge hinged shell Domini had constructed, part by the hair, and part by the pearls that decked her body and spilled out ahead of her feet. On the sand-covered floor of the window, the showcard declared: 'Bring on the Pearls!'

Grant's confirmation brought a sparkle of pleasure to Domini's eyes. 'That's wonderful! Then I do have reason to celebrate tonight.'

'You certainly do,' he agreed, his lips describing a sensuous curve. 'I can hardly wait to see what you have in mind for me next.'

'I refuse to describe it, but I have something absolutely wonderful in mind,' she said happily.

Grant's eyes smouldered. 'So do I,' he said, his tone so intimate that Domini could not possibly mistake his intentions for later in the evening. And if she had doubts, they were put to rest by the way his eyes swept meaningfully over the low neckline of her dress. A silky midnight blue with tiny shoestring straps, it was a youthfully flattering Paris gown saved from more fortunate days. That, and an embroidered cape that had never worn out over the years because it was too impractical for everyday use, allowed her to feel quite as well dressed as the wordly assemblage of people patronizing the expensive restaurant. If Grant's admiring expression could be believed, her appearance was second to no one's.

Domini was perfectly sure Grant intended to make advances before the evening was through, but she had no idea how she was going to respond. Once she would have responded with total naturalness, doing only what her heart told her to do; but life had tamped down some of

Domini's instinctive responses. Her head told her that Grant Manners was a very eligible male ... handsome, virile, wealthy, well-educated, potentially good husband or father material. For Domini, the heart had always ruled; long ago she had been taught that truth lay in the heart. But she no longer knew what her heart was telling her.

And so, if she had made any decision at all, it was that only time would tell .. and yet she hoped her head would learn to rule. When the heart ruled, it was too easily hurt.

Several glasses of champagne later, after pate and lobster Thermidor and little curlicues of an exotic vegetable known as fiddleheads, after conversation that ranged over Grant's real past and Domini's invented one, after anecdotes about Tasey and about Fifth Avenue and about Grant's recent holiday in Aspen, the chairs were at last pulled out by the unobtrusively attendant waiter. At Grant's suggestion, instead of leaving immediately, they moved for liqueurs to the bar at the south side of the tower, from which the view of the harbour replaced the view of the city in all its night splendour. From this vantage point the Statue of Liberty, so huge when seen at water level, looked like no more than a small toy doll.

Domini felt giddy, as much from the height as from the champagne with which she had been so freely plied. Her head, which had been trying to reach a decision about Grant Manners, was beginning to be incapable of any decision at all. Why did she have to keep thinking about Sander's recent passionate embrace, of the way his mouth had branded hers and the way his hands had blazed over her skin, instead of turning her mind to what was sure to be an equally dizzying experience with Grant?

'No liqueur?' Grant lifted his brows in surprise when the waiter came to take their order and Domini ordered a glass of plain soda water. 'In that case let's not stay. I have better things in mind, more exciting things that can't be done in public. Those little straps of yours make a man's imagination work overtime.'

Within minutes of the elevator's swift downward flight, Grant was giving directions to a taxi driver without consulting Domini. She made no demur, because the chill January air had cleared her head enough to remind her that this was what she ought to want. Besides, the baby-sitter had been warned to expect a late night. How would her heart ever know how to feel about Grant if she didn't give it a chance to find out?

Grant's penthouse apartment was on Park Avenue, in a hushed, exclusive building with plush carpeting and a discreet doorman and a good deal of highly polished brass. Yet another elevator swept them upward, its roller-coaster effect this time felt in Domini's stomach and not just in the pressure of her ears.

'If it's heights that excite you . . .' Grant said softly as he opened the door of his apartment, and ushered her into an oyster-white space with a plate glass expanse that opened on to a view less lofty, but otherwise almost as stunning, as the view from Windows on the World.

He relieved Domini of her cape, and she walked across to admire the night scene while he busied himself at a sideboard that served as a bar. Moments later a brandy snifter was placed in Domini's hand despite her halfhearted protest. She set it down on a small table as soon as Grant once more left her side.

'Your view is fantastic,' she breathed.

'It's even more so with the lights low,' Grant promised softly as he adjusted several dimmer switches, leaving only a pale illumination that emanated from somewhere near an island of deep down-filled couches. He came to stand behind Domini at the window, so close that his warmth could be felt. Interior darkness had turned the outside to a fairyland of glittering diamonds blazing on black velvet. Surely this was a time to find magic with some man other than Sander Williams?

But even before Grant's arms came around her, hand seeking and stroking the soft swell of her cleavage, she knew that it was not. She twisted away without rancour, evading the intimacies of his embrace but making no move to escape when he closed in for the kiss he was most certainly expecting. A detached part of her mind told her that the skilful movements of his lips were pleasurable enough. But where was the exhilaration?

She pulled away as soon as it became possible to do so. 'I'm sorry, Grant, it won't work,' she said simply and directly. 'I like you, but I'm not about to go to bed with you tonight or any night, and you may as well know it right now.'

Grant rubbed a hand around the back of his neck in a gesture of extreme frustration. 'You weren't exactly clear about that before,' he reminded her in an explosion of irritation, 'I don't think I made any particular secret of my intentions ... in fact, I believe I stated them clearly several times. Why on earth did you even come up to my apartment if you didn't plan to make love to me?'

'Because I hadn't made up my mind,' Domini said slowly. 'I wasn't sure whether I'd say yes or no. I've been thinking about it all evening.'

'And you're sure now, just like that, after a single kiss? That's not exactly flattering.' He finished with a heavy groan, and Domini realized he had been far more affected by the embrace than she.

Domini lifted her shoulders in a small apologetic shrug. 'I'm sorry, Grant, that's the way it is. I thought it might work, but . . . you see, my heart has to be involved, and it's not involved with you.'

He had controlled himself by now, the moment of anger swiftly over. 'I didn't expect your heart would be involved, not yet,' he said with sounds of strain. 'On the other hand, I didn't expect your body to be so damn . . . iminvolved. You're an unmarried mother; it's not as though you're totally inexperienced.'

'I've always thought it better to tell the truth about Tasey,' Domini replied levelly. 'Just because I never had a husband, that doesn't mean I'm prepared to fall into bed with any man, no matter how much I like him. I do like you very much, Grant. But I have to be in love, really in love.'

He was silent for some difficult moments. 'I wish to God you'd told me that before I started letting my imagination run riot,' he said with a short, humourless laugh.

'I couldn't tell you because I didn't understand it myself,' Domini said slowly as she turned to the window with its spangled view. As understanding dawned, her heart grew full with a great sadness and a great sweetness, and neither emotion had anything to do with the frustrated man at her side. Why had it not occurred to her before that what she felt for Sander wasn't purely sexual attraction? Why hadn't she known it was love?