Home to Eden (18 page)
Authors: Dallas Schulze
It wasn't enough, Nick thought despairingly. The aftershocks of his climax were still rippling through him and he already wanted her again. He moved, thrusting gently, and felt her shudder of response as he began to swell within her. It could never be enough. No matter how many times he had her, he'd still want her. The force of his hunger sparked an anger in him.
Ignoring Kate's whimper of protest as he withdrew, he settled on his knees. His hands were hard as he caught her by the shoulders and dragged her up with him so they knelt face-to-face on the cushions. There was a drugged look of pleasure in her eyes when she looked at him.
"I want to see you," he muttered, shoving her shirt off her arms and throwing it to the floor. Lacking the patience to deal with the plastic clasp on her bra, he tugged it off over her head. Her breasts spilled into his hands, all soft creamy curves and rosy nipples. He bent to taste them, first one and then the other, laving them gently with his tongue and then drawing each one into his mouth and sucking strongly. He felt himself swell with lust as Kate's back arched when she offered herself to him.
He wanted to make this time last forever, wanted to savor every step of the way. But he was already so hard that it hurt and the hunger was tearing at his self-control, demanding release.
"I can't wait," he muttered as he dragged his mouth from her breasts.
"Who asked you to?" she whispered, her fingers closing around him, stroking and teasing.
Her touch burned away the last of his patience. Shuddering, he pulled away and stood up, stripping his shirt from his shoulders and shoving his jeans and briefs the rest of the way off. Kate lay back on the sofa, watching him undress, her eyes heavy-lidded with desire. The sight of her stretched out before him, I her tawny hair splayed across the faded cushions, her I slender body soft and pliant, was almost more than Nick could stand.
She lifted her arms and he came to her. It was like coming home, fulfilling a destiny. They belonged together. He'd never known anything as surely as he knew that.
❧
Kate came awake slowly, aware of a pleasant feeling of lassitude that permeated her entire body. She had no idea how long she'd been asleep, but she felt deeply rested, sated. She could lie here forever, she thought sleepily. Except her back was cold. Had she kicked off the covers? No, because there were no covers.
Reality began to sneak in around the edges of her contentment. There were no covers because she wasn't in bed. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was a broad expanse of furred male chest. Her hand was nestled in a mat of crisp curls, looking feminine and almost fragile in contrast. The light was subdued but it was enough to reflect off the small diamond in her engagement ring. Kate stared at that soft gleam for several seconds. Reality no longer nibbled at her consciousness, it crashed in wearing hobnailed boots.
Nick. Oh, God. Nick. And Gareth. What had she done?
She scrambled off the sofa with an inarticulate whimper of distress.
"Kate?" Startled awake, Nick sat up and reached for her.
"Don't!" She backed away as if his touch might bum. On her face was such a look of loathing that Nick felt as if he'd been struck. He let his hand drop, his face going cold and still.
The loathing Kate felt was for herself. How could she have done this? She fell to her knees and began scrambling through the tangled heap of clothing on the floor. Oh, God, what had she done? Gareth. How could she have done this to him? He was everything she'd ever wanted and she'd betrayed him in the most fundamental way possible. Not only had she slept with another man. She'd slept with his own brother. He'd never be able to forgive her.
Pain lanced through her chest and she curled into it for an instant, her slender body drawn into something approaching a fetal position as she rocked with the impact of her own actions.
Nick responded to her pain. "Don't tear yourself up like this," he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder.
"Don't!" She jerked away from his touch. "Don't you ever touch me again."
Nick pulled away as if burned. "I didn't exactly drag you kicking and screaming," he pointed out sharply.
"No. No, you didn't."
She'd finally managed to sort out most of her clothing. Beyond caring that he was looking at her, she stepped into her slacks and jerked them up around her hips, fastening them with shaking fingers. She pulled on her shirt but her hands were trembling too much for her to slide the buttons through the buttonholes. With a frustrated whimper, she tied the tails in a knot at her waist instead.
"Don't you think we should talk?" Nick asked. He stood up, magnificently unconcerned with his nudity.
"We have nothing to say," she muttered, kicking aside his jeans in search of her shoes. One of them had been lying next to a paint can but the other one eluded her. She found her panties instead, and her cheeks flamed as she snatched them up and stuffed them in her pocket.
"What about Gareth?"
She spun to face him, her eyes bright with anger. "Don't you dare tell him about this!"
Nick's head jerked back as if she'd slapped him. Stung, he struck back. "What do you think I'm going to do? Announce it over breakfast? Pass the toast and, by the way, bro, your fiancee is a hell of a lay?"
Kate turned white, her eyes huge and dark with distress. With a curse, Nick bent and scooped up her shoe from the floor next to the sofa. He tossed it to her, and she caught it automatically. "Don't worry, Kate, your dirty little secret is safe with me. I'll just add it to the rest of them."
"I think I hate you," she whispered hoarsely.
Nick gave her a sharp smile. "Is that why I have your fingernail marks on my back?"
She stared at him an instant longer and then turned and ran, barefoot, from the room. Nick stayed where he was, listening to the solid thud as the door shut behind her. A moment later, he heard her truck pull away from the house, and then there was only silence.
He was alone again.
Hollow-eyed and pale, Kate watched the sun creep through a crack in the curtains and slice a pale gold path across the bedroom carpet. When the thin blade of light slid across the foot of her bed, she stirred sluggishly and crawled out of bed with movements as stiff and slow as an old woman's.
She went into the bathroom and followed her morning routine as if on autopilot, washing her face and brushing her teeth without once looking at herself in the mirror. It wasn't until she was pulling her hair from her face that she caught a glimpse of her reflection. Meeting her own eyes, she felt her fingers start to tremble and she jerked the elastic-covered band into place, ignoring the stinging pain when it pulled at her scalp. She looked away quickly, afraid that the past twenty-four hours might have left visible changes.
In her bedroom, she dressed carelessly, pulling on sweatpants and a worn gray sweatshirt. Though she knew the chill she felt came from inside, not out, she pulled on a sweater, tugging it close around her as she went into the kitchen.
She measured coffee into the filter and pushed the button to start the water heating, then moved automatically to check the plants that filled the bump-out window behind the kitchen sink. The window had been one of the reasons she'd chosen to rent the small apartment. She pinched off a few faded leaves and tipped a little water into one or two pots, soothed by the simple tasks.
She'd be able to have a real garden after she and Gareth—
The tenuous calm vanished in an instant. Kate dropped her hand to the counter, her fingers curling into a fist. Gareth. The thought of him sent a lancing pain through her heart. How could she have betrayed him so completely? Guilt twisted her stomach into knots, and she closed her eyes against the burning ache of tears. It was too late for tears. They couldn't change what she'd done. What she and Nick had done.
Nick. His name triggered a flood of memories— him kneeling beside Matthew, power flowing from him. The pain in his eyes when he spoke of his wife and child. The taste of his mouth, the feel of his hands—
Kate's eyes snapped open. Her hand was shaking as she took a mug from the cabinet and filled it with coffee. She wasn't going to think about that ever again. Or about him.
Sitting at the table, she wrapped her hands around the mug, trying to absorb its warmth into her. But the chill she felt was bone deep and it spread throughout her body in a slow, icy tide. Trembling, she pushed the cup away, folded her arms on the table and let her head drop to them as the tears began to fall.
What had she done?
As far as Nick could see, the one immutable law was that life went on. No matter what happened— good, bad or indifferent—the sun still rose every morning and the world kept on turning. Win the lottery? Fine. But there was still laundry to be done and the dog to feed. Sleep with your brother's fiancee? Too bad. You might as well scrape the paint off the crown molding.
Standing on a ladder in the formal dining room, he ran a scraper along a strip of molding, peeling away a hundred years worth of paint. It was backbreaking, miserable work and he'd chosen to start the job today because it fit his mood. And maybe he'd chosen it as a kind of penance, he admitted to himself. As if physical discomfort could somehow absolve him of guilt.
A boom box sat on the floor, and he'd turned the sound up to a level guaranteed to have him wearing a hearing aid by the time he was forty. At the moment, the Beach Boys were trying to talk Rhonda into helping them get over a lost love. The driving rhythm echoed in the big room but it wasn't enough to drown out his thoughts.
Nick doubted if anything short of a two-by-four up alongside his head could have kept him from thinking about Kate—the way she'd tasted, the sweet warmth of her in his arms, the incredible feel of her body yielding to his. He ground his teeth together as he used the comer of the scraper to tease bits of paint from the edges of the crown molding. What kind of a prize bastard was he to keep thinking of how good it had felt to make love to her? He'd do better to think about the way she'd looked at him afterward, as if the sight of him might turn her to stone. Or he could think about the way he'd betrayed his brother.
He and Gareth had never been exceptionally close. The five-year gap in their ages had seemed enormous when they were children, and the bond he and Brian had shared hadn't left much room for anyone else. Even after Brian was killed, Nick and Gareth had never really seemed to connect.
But that hardly excused him. He'd never been one to poach on another man's territory. He had nothing but contempt for married people who had affairs. And while Kate wasn't married—yet—she wore another man's ring on her finger, which put her off-limits. Yet all he'd had to do was touch her, hold her, and his scruples had disappeared. He hadn't thought of anything but the need to have her.
❧
"I could hear this thing three blocks away!"
The shouted comment startled Nick into jerking halfway around, barely avoiding a fall as he grabbed the top of the ladder. He nearly fell the rest of the way down when he saw Gareth leaning over the boom box, apparently looking for the volume control. When it wasn't immediately apparent, he punched the button to stop the tape, cutting Brian Wilson off in mid-word. The abrupt silence seemed louder than the music had been.
"I rang the bell but no one answered," he said as he straightened. "I guess I'm not surprised, considering how far up you've cranked the volume. If you're not careful, you're going to be deaf before you're fifty."
"I figured I'd be lucky to make it to forty." Nick's response came automatically. His brother's sudden appearance had his mind reeling.
"I could cite you for noise pollution, you know."
"It would never stand up in court. Not in California. Not when it's the Beach Boys."
Gareth grinned crookedly. "You could be right."
Outside the open window, Nick could hear Laura's mother calling her. He wondered if the little girl had hidden herself somewhere in Harry's gardens. She had a knack for finding spaces just the right size for her and Leroy and then developing a convenient deafness to her mother's voice. For a moment, he was tempted to escape by saying that he had to go find the girl.
Gareth watched Nick pull a rag from his back pocket and begin wiping off the blade of the scraper he'd been using. He pushed his hands in his pockets, his carefully planned little speech suddenly vanishing into thin air. Why was it always so damned hard to talk to Nick? he wondered, exasperated with himself.
Even when they were boys, he hadn't known how to talk to Nick. It hadn't been that way with Brian. Brian had been quiet. Focused. With Brian, there were no hidden comers, no surprises. He'd understood Brian. But not Nick. As a boy, Nick had been like quicksilver—changeable, unpredictable. Easy to love but impossible to grab hold of—impossible to really know.
"Have you got a minute?" he asked finally. Nick's head came up, his eyes wary. He nodded.
"I've got two, if you need them." He came the rest of the way down the ladder. "Why don't we go someplace where the fumes are less likely to cause a toxic reaction?"
Gareth followed him across the foyer and into the living room. "Looks like you've got every room in the place torn apart," he commented, looking around.
"Pretty close. I suppose, if I were more organized, rd do it one room at a time but it's less boring this way, and with Harry hiding out in the guest house, I'm not driving anyone crazy but me."
He took a pack of cigarettes from the mantel and tapped one loose. Gareth's brows rose as he put it in his mouth.
"I didn't know you were smoking again."
"I'm not." Nick struck a match and held it to the cigarette's tip. "I picked up a pack on the way out of the mountains yesterday. Two packs, actually." He gave a half shrug and grinned a little. "When they're gone, I'll quit again."
"Oh, yeah?" Gareth looked doubtful.
"I've done it before. I figure I can do it again. Most things get easier with practice, right?"
"I'm not sure this falls into that category." But he hadn't come here to lecture on the evils of nicotine. "I brought your clothes over. I dropped them on the table in the foyer. You left them at the cabin yesterday."
"Thanks."
"My pleasure." Gareth looked away for a moment, debating the wisdom of continuing. But there were things he wanted to get off his chest and this was as good a time as any to do it. "I wanted to talk to you about what happened yesterday," he said slowly.
Nick inhaled too quickly and coughed as the smoke burned his throat.
"You okay?" Gareth asked, concerned.
"Fine. I'm fine." Nick turned to stub the barely touched cigarette out. "Maybe I'll quit before I finish both packs," he muttered. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and looked at his brother again, his dark eyes shuttered and unreadable. "What about yesterday?"
"The thing with Matthew. It was incredible."
"Yeah, that's me. Incredible as hell." Nick's mouth twisted in a self-mocking smile. Oddly enough, he seemed to relax a little. ''Miracles to order—that's my stock in trade."
"I know you don't want to talk about it," Gareth said doggedly, ignoring the sharp humor. "But there's something I want to tell you, something I should have said a long time ago."
Nick shifted uncomfortably. "I have an awful feeling you're about to break the Guy Code."
"The Guy Code?"
"You know, the one that says we don't talk to each other about anything but sports and food. So, what do you think of the Rams' chances at the Super Bowl this next year?"
"I think they've moved to St. Louis." Gareth was torn between exasperation and amusement. The conversation was going in a typically Nick-like direction.
"I forgot." Nick frowned. ''Are the Dodgers still around?"
"Yeah. And, if you really want to, we can analyze whether or not they're going to make it to the World Series, but I'm still going to say what I came here to say."
"You always did have a nasty dogged streak in you." Nick sounded resigned.
"I'll take that as a compliment." Gareth took a moment to set his thoughts in order. "A while ago, when Kate cut her finger at the nursery and...you—"
"I waved my magic wand," Nick finished for him, his voice edgy with temper. "I remember. What about it?"
Gareth cursed his own clumsiness. He was blowing it, but it was too late to back down now. He had to plow ahead and hope he didn't make a bigger mess of it. "You said some things that made it sound like you thought I was ashamed of your...gift."
"Did I?" Nick shifted restlessly, the old oak floorboards creaking under him. "It doesn't really matter one way or the other, does it?"
"It matters to me if you think that." Gareth hunched his shoulders. "What you can do—" He broke off and shook his head. "People use the word miracle to describe everything from a football upset to a sale on toilet paper, but what you did yesterday—that was the real thing."
"But you didn't want me to do it, did you?" Nick said more sharply than he'd intended.
"I've seen what it does to you when you succeed—and when you don't," Gareth said simply.
Memories suddenly lay between them, as vivid and sharp as a film strip. Gareth pulling him away from the car, away from Lisa and the baby. Gareth telling him it was too late, that he couldn't help them, that no one but God could help them now. He'd finally had to knock Nick unconscious to get him out of the garage.
"That was...a long time ago," Nick said, his voice rough with emotion.
"I guess it was," Gareth said. "I didn't mean to dredge up old memories. I just wanted you to know that... Well, I guess I wanted you to know that, when I saw what you did yesterday, I was very...proud." He shrugged, uncomfortable with the emotional direction the conversation had taken. "I just wanted to tell you that."
"Thanks. I... It means a lot to me to know that."
"Yeah, well. I thought it ought to be said." Gareth pushed his hands in his pockets and then pulled them out again. Wanting to end the sudden, uncomfortable silence, he looked at Nick and grinned. "How the hell are those Dodgers, anyway?"
Nick laughed, but the shadows remained in his eyes. Gareth wondered if those shadows would ever fade completely, if he'd ever be able to put the past behind him and move on with his life.
"The Guy Code is always there when you need it," Nick said.
"Nice to know there's something you can count on." Gareth nodded to the stack of lumber and paint cans. "You think Harry's really going to sell this place?"
"I doubt it." Nick caught his questioning look and shrugged, smiling ruefully. "He thought I needed to be saved from the evils of Wall Street so he drummed up the idea of selling the house and hit me with a major guilt trip to get me back here. I've got to hand it to him, he put on a hell of a performance."
"He must have been hell on wheels in a courtroom," Gareth said, careful not to make any comment about whether or not Nick might have been in need of saving. There was a limit to the amount of emotional baggage he wanted to shed in one day.
"It would serve him right if I made him sell the damned place when I'm done with it," Nick said, but there was no real force behind the threat
"It's a great old house." Gareth looked around the room, seeing past the shabby surface to the quality beneath. "They really built to last in those days."
"Labor and materials were a lot cheaper." Nick reached for a cigarette and then changed his mind. He pushed his hands into his pockets instead and watched as Gareth crossed to one of the windows and ran his hand over the woodwork.
"Makes my place look like it's put together with spit and bailing wire," He looked out the window. "Kate's crazy about this yard. She says it could be a real showpiece."
"Harry likes what she's doing with it." Nick said neutrally.
"She's done a little work around my place already." Gareth turned from the window and wandered toward the center of the room. "But I have a feeling she wants to make some major changes and is waiting until after we're married to spring them on me.
"She seems to know her stuff when it comes to landscaping."
"She does." Gareth picked up a paintbrush and flicked the bristles back and forth across his palm a few times before setting it down. "It's funny that she should be so into plants since her family was constantly on the move when she was a kid. She doesn't talk much about it, but I gather she hated moving all the time."
"That kind of thing can be hard on a child." Nick could think of no more exquisite punishment for his sins than to have to listen to Gareth talk about Kate.
"I never have figured out why they moved so often. Something to do with her father's job, I guess." Gareth frowned and looked down as he gently bounced the toe of his shoe against the side of a paint can. "Like I said, she doesn't say much about it."
"Maybe she figures it's best to leave it in the past."
"I suppose." Gareth was silent a moment and then he seemed to shake off his contemplative mood. "I'd better let you get back to work. I'm heading into the station. They weren't expecting me back today so I figure I might be able to catch up on some paperwork."
"All work and no play," Nick reminded him, hoping it wasn't obvious that he was anxious to see this visit end.
"Yeah, I know I'm in danger of becoming a workaholic." Gareth grinned ruefully. "I did call Kate to see if she wanted to catch a movie, but she thinks she's coming down with a cold and wants to spend the day popping vitamin C and resting to see if she can head it off."
"I hope she can," Nick said. Guilt was a lead weight in the pit of his stomach.
"Me, too." Gareth turned toward the door and then hesitated, bending to pick something up off the floor near the sofa. He straightened up with a lacy, flesh-toned bra dangling from his finger.
"Something new in house restoration tools?" he asked quizzically.
Nick felt as if he'd just been kicked in the stomach.
His mind went completely blank, and he stared at the lacy garment as if he'd never seen it before.
"The grapevine must be slowing down," Gareth said, filling in the silence. "I haven't heard about anyone you're seeing."
"Some people like their privacy," Nick got out. His muscles felt stiff as he moved forward and took the bra from his brother. Not knowing what else to do with it, he stuffed it in his back pocket.
"Not even Howard Hughes could have kept his privacy in this town." Gareth looked both curious and surprised. "Someone I know?"
"I doubt it."
Gareth waited, as if expecting him to add something to the flat statement, but Nick's powers of invention had been drained dry. The bra felt as if it was burning a hole in his pocket to match the one guilt was burning in his gut. When he didn't say anything more, Gareth frowned, his expression going from curious to concerned.
"You're being careful, aren't you? I mean, these days, there's—"
"I'm a little past the age of having my big brother lecture me about safe sex," Nick pointed out. He was suddenly sharply aware that the warning came too late.
"Sorry." Gareth's smile was a little sheepish. "Old habits die hard, I guess."
"I suppose." Nick started for the door, beyond caring if Gareth thought there was something odd in his behavior. Five more minutes in his brother's company and he was going to start screaming a confession neither of them wanted to hear.