Holding The Cards (17 page)

"Come here a minute. There's a vibration that feels a bit off."

Nothing off about what was vibrating between the two of them, but it was certainly unsettling. Josh gave her a crooked smile as if he heard her thought. He squeezed her hand and left her, his steps light and lithe, slapping across the hall and toward the basement area.

Lauren wrapped her arms around herself, feeling a bit lost, left with the company of Mellencamp's wistful voice and without Josh's heartbeat against hers.

Lord, what was she doing, getting all gooey over this guy she barely knew? It wasn't rebound; she was way too far past Jonathan for that. The terror she had felt on the beach returned, thinking about how instantaneous her feelings were for Josh, just as they had been with Jonathan. But maybe that was the way she fell in love. It was her, not the man. This was a different guy, totally different. She wasn't going to wallow into some psychoanalytical bullshit that suggested she kept choosing the same guy. Josh had shown more emotional reaction to her in thirty-six hours than Jonathan had in nine months.

Mellencamp was crooning that she'd met the boy who would be the answer to all of her dreams. Jeez, Louise, it was just sex games, just fun stuff. She was exploring, dipping her toe back in, just as Maria had told her she needed to do. The island was a safe place to play, because it wasn't reality, it wasn't home.

But it was home for Josh.

What was it Marcus had said? Remember how children played, for fun and for the fate of the Universe at the same time. Maybe this was a game that was always played best or worst when the heart was involved. Everything in between was just candy, where you had to be careful how much you indulged, or it became the desolate vapidity of a one night stand with a faceless stranger picked up out of a smoky bar.

She opened her eyes and found Marcus standing in the doorway. Apparently, they were tag teaming her.

"So have you played much since Jonathan, or is this your first time since then?" he asked, without preamble.

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Lauren lifted a shoulder, turned away to cut off the music before Mellencamp drove her to tears. Marcus didn't fill in the gap of silence, except with the pressure of waiting for an answer. She didn't have to give him anything, anything at all. It was her choice. Her choice. She took a deep breath, turned back to face him.

"No. It's been difficult, since Jonathan, even without the guilt. I've been struggling with it. Maria says I've been going through the skydiver process."

"The skydiver process? That's a new term on me."

"No term," she managed a chuckle. "Just a reference point. There was this documentary about a woman sky diver. One day she jumped out, and something went wrong with her chute. It didn't open."

Marcus winced. "Ouch."

"In spades." Lauren came to stand before him. "She didn't die. She was paralyzed, though, and they didn't think she'd walk again. She did, with several years of torture in rehab. For seven years after that she didn't sky dive. You'd think she'd have nightmares about that jump, and she did, sometimes. But most of the times, she said she dreamed about what it was to jump out of a plane and fly, float on the air, and it just be you and whatever amazing Power it is that creates everything. She realized she missed it, too much to stay away from it anymore. So she went up, and started jumping again."

"Incredibly brave or incredibly stupid, depending on your perspective," Marcus observed.

Lauren nodded. "The reporter asked her what she said to her friends and family, anyone who told her she was crazy for going back to something that had almost destroyed her."

Lauren recalled the firm, gentle touch Maria had placed on her face, that confident caress of a Dom as she spoke the woman's words. "'Fate caused the accident, not skydiving itself. I'm not going to shut out the joy because of fear. If I do that, sky diving won't be the end of it. Next thing I know, I'll be afraid of planes, or going out in crowds, or dogs. The fear will take over and I won't be living.'"

"Extraordinary," Marcus murmured. "And this applies to you…how?"

Lauren's lips curved at the glint in his beautiful eyes. "A smart man like yourself could put it together. I've been at the dreaming point. I want to be back in it again, but I haven't been ready. I've been able to watch, but not to play. Now I'm here, and all of a sudden," she thought about Josh, his eyes, his body, the soul that inhabited them, "taking him over seems the most natural thing in the world. God," she laughed, "Maybe we all need to be in therapy. Maybe we're all sick."

"Hardly." Marcus straightened from the doorframe and took her hand. "Since you've got your parachute on, I want to show you something."

"What? Where - "

He raised her brow by putting a quiet finger to his lips, the glint in his eyes turning devilish. She followed him back through the foyer, and he took her out the front door and down a set of winding stone steps from the front gallery. At the bottom, she was enchanted to find herself in a knot garden of dwarf shrubs, complete with a comfortable bench by a gazing pool for contemplation.

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A quick glance at his face showed her that this was not what he intended to show her. He pulled her onward, behind the sculpted topiaries flanking the steps, and stopped before a carved wooden door with a weight and style suggesting that it must have graced a medieval fortress in truth. On the protruding claw of a sly looking stone gargoyle mounted next to the door was a ring of iron skeleton keys, as ancient looking as the door.

Marcus directed Lauren's enthralled attention to the carved plaque above the door.

Here there be dragons of the most delightful sort.

She slanted him a glance. He fitted one of the keys and pushed the door open for her.

The door opened into a hall designed like an open courtyard. Skylights and prisms on either side and over the door directed the beams of outside light onto the cobblestone floor. The smell of fresh water focused her attention on a large fountain in the center of the cobblestone mosaic. Her breath drew in, and for an instant, she was unaware of anything but what lay in the center of the courtyard.

It wasn't the fountain itself, though it was beautiful. Dozens of smooth, colored stones formed a mountain down which the water splashed. The pool, with a diameter of at least twenty feet, was filled with more stones and, charmingly, a wealth of new shiny copper pennies that reflected the lights at the base of the pool. There were lily pads in bloom, full white flowers gliding lazily with the disturbance of the water, and the gleaming scales of gold and silver coy sparkled as they swam beneath the surface. Water jetted up from the rim of the stone fountain and curved over, forming rainbows around the central statuary.

It was that statuary that commanded her attention. The bronze sculpture depicted a man and a woman.

The woman wore a lovely evening gown, draped low in the back. The dip in her spine and the dimples over her buttocks were defined. The dress was slit up to the hipbone, and as she was in forward motion, one long slim leg in a stiletto heel was visible, the fragile musculature etched out in metal, with the muted sheen of silken skin. Her upper body was turned toward the man. He stood before her, towered over her actually, because she was small, perhaps just over five feet, but he did not look clumsy. In fact, he was elegant and magnetic in a tuxedo with the tie undone; the shirt carelessly worked open several studs. The intensity of the look between the two caught Lauren's breath, as did the riding crop in the woman's delicate hands. The man's hands had been manacled behind him, and those chains, as well as those attached to the cuffs on his ankles, ran to a circle bolt in the base of the statue, which was braced on a platform atop of the mountain of stones. Lauren could almost feel the sexual heat in the gaze the man rested upon his captor. Her gaze slid over the fall of hair over his forehead, the delicate working of the metal that had even accomplished the impression of a five o'clock shadow, lending the captive a dangerous, predatory look.

"It's a J. Martin," she breathed. "I've never seen one…life-sized. I bought a small one at an auction a couple years ago. A merman, bringing a human woman a conch shell with a pearl in it. The beach is done in sand, shards of diamonds, and topaz glass. It's amazing work. I paid a mint for it, but something about his work just…"

"It calls to you, doesn't it?" Marcus nodded, standing close to her elbow. "He gives them innocuous names, like 'The Power of Woman Over Man', so that the vanilla world buys them, calling it pop art, but it's their unconscious that opens their pocketbooks. Deep inside, they know his work is a direct sexual expression of the soul." He took another step up, until his legs were pressed against the fountain wall, so he could get a closer view of the sculpture.

"He's the client I value most. There's no artist I respect more, and to complicate the matter, he's a very
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dear friend. Though, I warn you, a pain in the ass. All great artists are. He did the dragon you saw out there as well. That's why he didn't want us lingering over it."

Lauren turned and stared at Marcus. Her throat did not respond immediately to the pressure of her vocal cords, and when it did, her voice came out as a whisper. "J. Martin is…Josh?"

"Joshua Martin. One and the same."

Lauren took a moment to digest that. She walked around the statue, examining it from every side. The light that shone through the windows touched all the important details, the expression, the curves, the tension of the bodies waiting, testing.

It made even more sense now. His wife, the tattoo artist. He was not the tattoo type, but he had allowed himself to become a living canvas for some of her more experimental work. Who but another artist would understand the need to marry art with love, to bind art to their other passions? Or bind him with that passion, rather, not only in the work she did with her hands, but by displaying what she had created of him by branding him with it.

"This is even more incredible when there's a full moon. You see things you can't see with the sun. It's almost like their expressions change."

"Marcus…" Lauren stopped before him again, her eyes filled with pain.

"It's the last complete work he's done since Winona," the art dealer said softly. "His home is littered with half finished work, things he started and then destroyed, mangling them in his rage. Artists are psychotic parents, turning on their children when they see only their failures in them, those things they've planted in them themselves, with every sculpting motion. After all, it was their clay to begin with, wasn't it? The artist's hands being the loins from which they sprung, the creations cannot help but reflect the parent's shortcomings, and so the sight of them is so beastly to the artist that he must destroy them. And yet, Josh leaves them there, broken, destroyed, not giving them a proper burial, simply leaving the half finished next to the demolished. His home, his studio, has become someplace he goes to punish himself, an embarrassment," his eyes met hers again, "that he is reluctant for anyone to see."

She put out her hand, touching his arm, her throat aching with the pain she heard in his voice. He touched the track of the tear running down her cheek and she closed her eyes.

"Did he ever bring her here?"

Marcus shook his head. "I think its part of its appeal to him. It's free of her taint."

"You didn't like her."

Marcus nodded. "Something was off about her, I never could put my finger on what, but I know Josh wasn't Josh when he was with her. There was some dynamic between them that had everything to do with sex, a mutual fascination. You called me an Iowa farmboy. Josh came from the city, but he's always had an innocence to him, and an innate goodness. It's one of the things that makes him so fucking irresistible."

He sighed. "I was holding back on you, somewhat, about he and Winona. I honestly don't know what happened, but I was there the night it ended. I know that he called me from a police station because he had been arrested for assault. He had nearly beaten a man to death. I made his bail. The man refused to
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press charges, indicating it was all a misunderstanding. The prosecutor felt without his testimony, the police did not have a case. Winona came to his apartment an hour or two after we got home that night.

She followed him into his room, and they talked. I couldn't hear about what. Then I heard him tell her to get out in a voice I have never heard Josh use. It wasn't a shout, it was more an invocation. It vibrated through the apartment like the voice of God."

Lauren felt the tension in Marcus's voice communicate itself to her vitals. Her fingers curled into her palms.

"She must have pushed it," Marcus murmured, "because next thing I know he brought her out of the room. Well, dragged her out of the room actually. She was trying not to go, but he had her by the arm and was hauling her to the door. She was screaming, crying. He opened the door, flung her out into the hall so hard she hit the wall and crumpled to the floor. She was crawling for the door when he slammed it. I heard it strike her in the head. There was a blood stain there the next day. She wept out there for awhile and then left."

Marcus turned his gaze to Lauren's stricken one. "You've seen him, Lauren. He would never, not in a million years, consider violence against a woman. And yet there it was. He went to the couch, turned on the television. To the cartoon channel of all things, and turned it on, maximum volume. It made the glass in the windows vibrate, but I could still hear her keening, just beneath the noise. Then it got quiet, and he muted it. He turned and looked at me and said he was going to the island. And he hasn't left here since.