The Baron (16 page)

Halley’s fingers were tunneled into his hair, and her eyes were open wide, watching every etched line in his face, every movement of his jaw. “Yes, Nick. I want you.” She spoke so softly, he almost didn’t hear her, but he read her lips, and his words blended with hers so that neither was sure who spoke. It didn’t matter.

Then, with a desperation he could no longer control, Nick eased himself on top of her. Parting her thighs, he positioned himself between them and, with what little restraint he could muster, slipped gently into her.

The arching of her back was instinctive, a welcoming movement that forced him deeper inside her.

“Oh, Nick, I want you so.” Her arms wound around him tightly, her hips pressing into him. She couldn’t seem to get close enough. She wanted to be totally one, meshed so completely together that this searing joy would never leave her.

Her eyes closed as the room began to fade, and all that was left were she and Nick, wound together and transported on tiny pads of air toward golden shafts of light somewhere in the distance.

She felt him moving inside her, smooth and hard and warm, and felt her body tighten around him. Then the floodgates of pleasure tore open, and she clutched at his back as they soared off into the sky. His deep growl of total joy reached out for her. She answered, and then they slowly tumbled back to earth, wrapped together in a primal, rocking peace.

Halley walked quietly out of the bedroom with Nick’s thick robe wrapped around her. It touched the ground and was large and cumbersome around her waist. When she rubbed her cheek against the wide collar, she could smell Nick in the velvety fabric. It smelled wonderful.

A small smile on her face, she headed for the kitchen. She hadn’t seen one the night before but assumed that even Nick Harrington’s apartment would have a kitchen, and she found it beyond the spacious, perfect living room.

She walked through a splash of yellow sunshine
on the polished tiled floor and stopped short. How could she be so calm and normal? She, Halley Finnegan, had just spent the night with Nick Harrington. No, not
the
night. She had just spent one of the loveliest nights of her life with Nick Harrington. No, she had just
made love
with Nick Harrington. Several times, in fact. Several
wonderful, lovely, tender
times.

What had awakened her an hour ago as the sun began to creep up the eastern sky was the awareness that she had not only made love with Nick Harrington but
loved
him as well.

And that was a whole new kettle of fish, as Joe Finnegan would say.

Halley walked over to the cupboard and rummaged around until she found a tea bag, neatly stashed in a labeled canister.

Of all the unlikely men to fall in love with, Nick won first prize.

In love with …
Halley pondered the words as she filled a teakettle she found beneath the shiny stove and put it on to boil. What exactly did that mean, anyway? She’d never tried to analyze it before. She walked over to the window, waiting for the kettle to whistle. Outside, the day was just beginning.
A beginning …
Maybe that’s what all this was about. She felt new and reborn, and all those things you read about and saw in the movies.

It had crept up on her, this feeling. Each time she was with Nick, it was fueled, and when she slept, her dreams had nourished it even more. And now … and now she had loved him completely. Yet deep down, she knew she was only beginning to know Nick. He was so many different people, and there might be more she didn’t know about yet. But all her mind could attend to for any length of time was the fact that Nick had somehow become an integral part of her.

Halley answered the call of the kettle and poured the water into a mug. She sipped her tea thoughtfully, then padded her way back through the living room. She looked at the room once more in the clean light of day, but it was the same: elegant, tasteful, expensive, and cold, without any personal trace of the man who was filling her with such joy. There were no pictures, no books with curled pages, no slippers peeking out from beneath a chair or sofa.

She pulled the robe more tightly around her and hurried into the cavernous bedroom. Curling up in a chair beside the bed, she cradled the warm mug in her hands. Tiny shafts of sunlight spilled across Nick’s face as he slept, and she watched the shadows playing with the angles and bones of his face. His mouth moved every now and then, sometimes lifting in the beginnings of a smile; sometimes parting slightly, then closing again. Halley watched, fascinated. There was enough right there in his face, she decided with a small smile, to absorb her attention for a lifetime.

Nick stirred.

“Hi,” she said softly.

His lids opened slowly. “I must have died and gone to heaven.”

“Uh-huh. Me too. Would you like some tea?”

“No.” One well-muscled arm came out from under the silky sheets and reached toward her. “I want you.”

Halley set the cup on the table and moved onto the bed, sitting down next to him until her hip pressed cozily against his. She looked at his tousled black hair and smiled.

Nick shifted beneath the covers.

“It’s morning, Nick. Would you like something to eat? I’m starved.”

“Eat?” His fingers crawled into her lap, and slipped beneath the voluminous folds of the robe.

“Food, you know.” She squirmed as the heat of arousal spread through her.

“Let me just hold you first.” He withdrew his hand and tugged her down beside him, wrapping his arms around her tightly and cradling her head to his chest. “I need to be sure you’re real, Halley.”

She nodded and rubbed her cheek against his bare chest.

“I don’t want to ruin the night with words, but I do want you to know this—”

She tilted her head up until she could see the tenderness and love in his eyes.

“—it was very special, Halley, even more than I dreamed it would be.”

The sensations that flooded through her were too overwhelming to describe, so Halley nodded again. Why did she feel tears building up? This was a happy time.…

Nick twisted his fingers into her hair and kissed her gently on the forehead. “I didn’t expect this to happen,” he murmured softly into her hair.

“Nor I. Barons and librarians don’t usually end up in bed together.”

“It’s a pity. It works so well.”

Halley laughed. “Shall we try to reeducate people?”

“I’m a selfish man, Halley. I only care about us.” He stroked her gently while he talked, his fingers rubbing across the fleecy fabric of the robe. “You’ve filled a big void in me that I wasn’t planning on having filled.”

“What kind of void, Nick?” Her voice was just a whisper, and the words were ones she somehow knew he wanted to hear.

“I was married once, Halley, to a wonderful woman. Her name was Anne Melrose, and she died in an automobile accident.…” He paused while Halley digested his statement and made the necessary connections. Damn, he should have told her this days ago, but he hadn’t expected to care so much.…

Halley’s heart lurched. Her mind grabbed on to the words and processed them neatly, but her heart refused to stop clamoring beneath the thin wall of her chest. “Melrose …” she murmured.

He drew her closer. “Yes, she was Abbie and Stan’s daughter.”

“You loved her very much.”

He nodded against her hair. “Yes. She was the … the first person in my life that I loved.” He had always, in his thoughts, said
only
person he had loved. Halley’s presence had changed that, and Nick stirred, feeling vaguely guilty. “And she loved me back, fully, without any reservations or calculations. When she died, a part of me was buried too. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to love again.”

Halley thought of the cemetery and the shadowed pain she had seen on his face. “It must have been awful for you.”

“I moved into this condo and built a life of work—”

“—and parties,” Halley added.

“A foolish kind of escape, but one I knew well.” He kissed her cheek. He wanted to make love to her again, right away, to block out the old, painful memories, but he couldn’t. His feelings for her were too important. Loving Halley was complete in itself; it couldn’t be connected to any other purpose. He eased himself away from her and pushed back the covers. “Maybe we do need some food.”

Halley lay still while he walked across the room, her heart full of a range of feelings that defied categories. She watched his naked back and loved the way he moved, bending over to pull the shade, stretching in the thin light that slid through. She hated to think of the hurt he’d been filled with.

And she had trouble imagining a woman other than herself in his life.

By the time she’d showered, Nick had a stack of lukewarm toast piled in a basket on the kitchen
table and was struggling to release two flat, anemic-looking eggs from the skillet. His thick hair was combed, and he wore a pair of blue jeans with an elegant blue cashmere sweater.

“Jeans. I’ve never seen you in jeans before,” she joked, padding across the floor in bare feet. Her thick hair hung loose and free about her shoulders, and she wore a huge yellow warm-up suit that Nick had pulled out of his closet. “Sexy. Very sexy.” She slapped his buttocks playfully.

“Careful there, Contessa. Little do you know the power of your touch.”

Halley wrapped her arms tightly around his waist while he put the eggs onto the plates. “When will you admit I’m not a contessa?” She loosened her arms and moved alongside him. “There’s no contessalike glamour here, Nick. Finnegan glamour, maybe—that’s all.” She wondered briefly what Anne had been like. Her mother was certainly elegant …

Nick slipped his fingers beneath the fall of hair and kissed her lightly on the top of her head. “What kind of glamour is that, my love?”

Her voice was soft and husky when she leaned her head back to look at him. “Oh, Pop says it’s a little auto grease or garden dirt beneath your fingernails now and then, and a sparkle in your eye. That’s about it.”

Nick felt it again, that crazy, earthquake-type lurch, only it came from inside him, not somewhere under the ground. He reached down and captured her fingers between his palms, his voice strangely choked. “How much more glamour could a man handle? Now eat, Halley, or you’ll blow away.”

They sat across from each other at the glass-topped kitchen table, plates of eggs, the aura of their love-making, and thoughts of Anne Melrose Harrington between them.

“You may have to use your imagination with this breakfast. I don’t cook much,” Nick apologized.

“It’s fine.” The eggs slid down her throat, and she watched Nick’s hands as they held the fork. Strong, firm, wonderful hands. “How long ago?”

“Four years.”

“That’s a long time, Nick,” she said softly.

He reached out and held her hand tightly, pressing it into the thickly woven table mat. “Time kind of stopped. It’s hard to explain, Halley. Our lives have been so different, yours and mine. Your family …”

“My family?”

“The way they dish up love so readily—big daily doses of love. Mine was different. I never even knew my parents, really, and with Anne I felt that kind of closeness that you’ve probably never
not
felt. It gave me a footing. And when she was gone, it was too. I couldn’t seem to get things together.”

“I see.” Halley threaded her fingers through his and lifted his hands to her lips. A lot of things fell into place now. Not everything, but certainly more. Beneath the handsome, powerful facade of her Baron was not only a loving, kind man, but a vulnerable one as well.

Nick watched her closely. He wasn’t sure what she was thinking; hell, he wasn’t even sure what
he
was thinking, or why he had gone into all of this. Why was he thinking of Halley in terms of his future when she had so recently become a part of his present? He looked out the window at a perfect, blue sky, but it held no answers.

A pleasant sensation drew his eyes back across the table. Halley’s head was bent so that her hair flowed over his fingers in rippling auburn waves, and slowly, carefully, she was kissing the pad of each finger on his hand.

“Nick?” she murmured softly.

“I’m right here,” he said, his voice suddenly dropping.

“I have an hour and a half before I said I’d meet my folks for Mass.…”

“An hour?” he said vaguely. “And a half …”

“We could do the dishes or …”

He nodded. Hot, fiery streaks were shooting from his fingers to every imaginable part of him.

While he was thinking, Halley walked around the table and coaxed her way onto his lap, pulling his arms around her.

“… or we could make more eggs.”

Nick moved his legs beneath her in delicious torment. “Or?”

“Or we could watch an hour and a half of a two-hour movie.” She wiggled and sunk deeper as his legs parted slightly.

“Or we could …” He slipped his hand beneath the warm-up top and began to stroke her stomach lightly.

“Mr. Harrington the Third, where is your mind?” she said huskily.

“Let’s see if we can find it,” he breathed into the hollow of her neck. “If I can still walk. That may be a problem by now.”

Halley slid off his lap. “I’m sure we can take care of whatever the problem is.” She glanced down at his bulging jeans and grinned mischievously. “We’re down to one hour and twenty-eight minutes.”

“And we’re not going to lose another second.” Nick grabbed her hand and led her back into the bedroom.

Nick tossed and turned in the bed. It
was
lonely without her, lonely as hell.

He stumbled into the kitchen and plugged in the coffeepot. He wanted Halley Finnegan beside him, wanted to twist his fingers tightly into her thick, silky hair and have her head tilt back, her eyes look up at him, a sea of love and laughter cascade over him.

He had loved her. He loved her. Yes, it was love. Nothing else could account for the way he felt. He also knew, because Halley was incapable of shrouding anything in those lovely green eyes, that she loved him back.

Nick slid open the terrace doors and stepped outside into the crisp breeze that blew over the city. Traffic was starting to get heavy, people were moving down below, tiny insectlike figures on the sidewalks and streets. He breathed in the air deeply, trying to block out the parts of his mind that were shouting at him, warning him that when you loved someone, you let them know all of you and what you were all about. Otherwise, they only loved part of you, and what would happen when they discovered the rest?