Forsaking All Others (14 page)

But it was Rick, not Jason, who wielded the touch of fire in which she burned. And rather than withdraw it, he extended it as Allison had never known it could be extended, until her muscles went taut and the goodness lengthened and strengthened and took her tumbling into the world of sensation as her body became a choreographed dance of muscle and motion.

In the height of her passion, Allison’s palms unknowingly pressed his mouth away from her nipples, which had suddenly gone sensitive while she shuddered and cried out in a half sob, half laugh.

When she drifted down to earth from the place of lush quickening, his hand was stroking her languid legs, his kiss etching its mark upon her damp stomach. Weakly she reached to lift his face back to hers. “I didn’t mean to push you away. I’m sorry . . .”

His kiss cut off her apology. “For what?” came his throaty whisper. “Allison, that was beautiful. I never thought you’d be so . . . so free and open with me.” He kissed her neck, his voice a loud rumble in her ear as a hand ran from her knees to her waist and back again. “God, Allison, that was more than beautiful. It was an accolade.”

“It was selfish,” she insisted, abashed at her total abandon.

“No . . . no,” he assured her against her lips.

“But I forgot all about you in the middle of it.” She lay a palm along his cheek and felt him smile as he chuckled.

“But I’m next, darling.”

She rolled to her side, brushed her hand down his stomach to find him taut, silken, waiting. The next moment, she felt herself being tugged into a sitting position, insistent hands stroking her spine and urging her toward the edge of the cushions. He leaned away. Warm touches guided her to do his bidding. Her knee brushed his hard stomach as he parted her knees and settled himself between them. “Come here,” came his voice thickly. Then he pulled her hard and tight against him and tilted her back with a gentle pressure of his palm upon her chest. There came a rustle in the dark, and she felt a cushion fill the void between her back and the sofa. His hands found her hips, moved sleekly down the backs of her legs to the hollows behind her knees. Then he was touching and kissing her everywhere. The sated feeling of moments ago slipped away to be replaced by renewed desire as he laced his brushing caresses with random kisses, dropping them along her darkened skin wherever they happened to fall—on a breast, an inner elbow, a hip, her stomach . . .

She tensed, tightened her stomach muscles, and held a pent-up breath, sensing his destination. She reached
for his shoulders to stop him, but it was too late. His tongue touched her intimately, leaving her feeling utterly vulnerable and undeniably prurient.

“Rick . . . I . . .” His hand reached blindly to cover her lips while his lambent touches sent currents of sensation firing her veins with new life. Resistance fled beneath the onslaught of sensations, and she fell back, a strangled sound issuing from her throat, until at last he knelt to her, entering the silken front of sensuality with easy grace. When he clutched her hips and pressed deep, a soft growl escaped his throat, then the dark was filled only with music and breathing and the magnificence they shared as his body blended into hers.

He murmured her name, interspersing it with endearments, and somehow the beats of their bodies matched, became rhythm and rhyme as she lay back, remembering the sheen of these muscles the first time she’d rubbed them with oil, picturing his perfect face as vividly as if the room were not cast into darkness.

Her fingers flexed into the flesh of his shoulders as he moved within her, taking her beyond the point of no return. And when her nails unconsciously dug in, he jerked her wrists down, pinning them against the cushions while together they thrust closer . . . closer . . . closer.

His breath was tortured, her voice a ragged plea as she begged, “Let . . . m . . . my . . . hands . . . g . . . go.”
The pressure left her wrists, but her fingers remained clenched as she clung to his strong back while beat for beat she rode with him to their devastating climaxes.

Oh, it was good. Everything about it was good
.

He, too, was trembling, trying to control it by pressing her hard against him, holding the back of her head with a widespread palm. They had slipped down, their bodies now wilting toward the floor. Finally they gave in to the inertia that dumped their sated limbs in a loose heap onto the shaggy rug.

The radio was still playing. It intruded now where before they’d been unconscious of it in the background. Side by side they rested, neither able to conjure up the strength to move, while tomorrow’s weather was followed by a time check and a tuneful commercial for soft drinks. Then from the speakers came a guitar intro to a soulful melody and a man’s voice singing into their intimate world: “When I’m stretched on the floor after loving once more with your skin pressing mine and we’re tired and fine . . .”

The words broke into Allison’s consciousness in an unwelcome reminder of the past. But this was Rick, not Jason! Yet he was lying just as the words of the song described, flat out on the floor, and the enormity of what they’d done together struck Allison. Committed. She’d committed herself to a man again by sharing the most intimate of acts. Almost as if it possessed a
clairvoyance, the radio reminded her that once before she’d done this, trusted like this, only . . .

Rick’s warm hand rested on the soft skin of her inner elbow, and slowly she eased away from his touch and left his side to search for her clothing in the dark.

“Allison?” She sensed how he’d braced up on an elbow, but she didn’t answer, feeling along the seat of the sofa. Through the dark the song kept playing. Then a moment later she heard his heels thud across the floor toward the radio, and an angry hand slam against it, thrusting the room into silence. He found her again, but as his hand touched her shoulder, she ducked aside and evaded it.

“Allison, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t lie to me.” He touched her again, but she retreated to the sofa, curling up with her feet beneath her. The light switch sounded, and Allison flinched.

“Don’t . . . don’t turn the light on, please.”

The light flooded over her shoulder from the table lamp behind her, revealing her strewn hair and withdrawn pose as Rick studied her.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked.

“Just . . . let it be.” The only garment at hand was her jeans. She pulled them across her lap and slumped her shoulders as if to shield her naked breasts.

He leaned forward to touch her knee. “No, it’s too important.”

“Don’t look at me.” She huddled now, shivering while he hesitated uncertainly for a moment, then retrieved his shirt from the top of the stereo and draped it over her shivering arms and shoulders. He slipped into his pants, then returned to kneel on one knee before her, searching for words, for meanings, for reasons. But she remained closed against him as he tiredly rested an elbow on a knee and kneaded the bridge of his nose, waiting—for what, he didn’t know. Insight perhaps, guidance, a hint of where to start.

“Allison, tell me about it. Tell me about him.”

Her head snapped up. “It’s none of your business. I told you, no questions. Just . . . leave me alone, Jas . . .” Realizing her slip, she cut the word in half.

“Is that his name . . . Jason?”

“I said don’t probe, dammit! Don’t try to ch—”

“Don’t probe!” he shouted, coming to his feet, towering over her. “Don’t probe?” He flung a palm angrily at the sofa cushions. “You just came close to calling me by his name and you say don’t probe?” He laughed once, ruefully. “What the hell do you think I am, stupid? I heard your precious Five Senses song come on the radio, and I felt what it did to you. All of a sudden you weren’t there any more. How do you expect me to react?”

“Please, I . . . I . . . we shouldn’t have done this.” She turned her eyes aside. “I think you should go.”

She saw how he braced one hand on his waistband and locked his knees, his feet spread wide.

“I’ll need my shirt,” he stated coldly.

She waited, expecting him to yank it from her, dreading the moment when she’d be exposed to him again. Instead his angry footsteps moved across the hardwood floor to her bedroom. She heard the closet door open, then he came back, stood before her with her blue robe clenched in his hands, and repeated tightly, “I have to take my shirt.” A hand reached out, and she thought she saw it tremble before she clamped her eyelids shut, and the cool air covered her naked skin.

He glanced at her arms, crossed now protectively over her breasts. “I want to fling this thing at you and tell you to go to hell, you know that?”

Her eyes opened and met his. He was so totally honest—why couldn’t she be that honest about her feelings? He dropped the robe in her lap, then donned his shirt, tucked it in, and stood contemplatively. He sighed heavily at last, ran a hand through his hair, and squatted down beside the sofa again, studying the floor. “We can’t drop it here, you know. We have to talk,” he said.

“Not now, okay?” she asked tremulously.

He nodded. His knees cracked as he stood up again. “I’ll call you.”

Still he didn’t go, but stood above her, looking down on her hair, which stood out like a dark nimbus in the light drenching her shoulder as she fought to hold back the tears.

“Hey,” he asked huskily, “you gonna be all right?”

She nodded jerkily, once, and he turned away. She heard him pause at the door to pull on his boots, heard the snaps of his jacket, and knew he was watching her through the long silent pause before the door opened, then quietly closed behind him.

At its soft click Allison flung herself around and fell across the back of the sofa, burying her head in her arms. And there in her loneliness and confusion she cried. For Jason. For Rick. And for herself.

R
ICK
Lang had left his Hasselblad behind. Guilt stricken at how she’d treated him, Allison at first declined to use it. He didn’t call on Monday or Tuesday, and by Wednesday the shots of the Winterfest came back from processing—crisp, clear and breathtaking. After viewing them, she found herself staring at the phone, wanting terribly to call him, to apologize. But she had hurt him so badly . . . so badly. She stared out the studio windows, seeing only Rick Lang, whom she’d likened to Jason when he was nothing at all like Jason. He cared so little about his looks, he hadn’t even asked to see the transparencies of the book cover.

She sighed and turned back to her work—a layout for a Tiffany diamond. The engagement ring nestled within the petals of an apricot rose to which she had applied a single drop of water with an eyedropper. Against a backdrop of lush salmon satin, the composition was stunning. She glanced at the Hasselblad again, weakened, picked it up, and was loading it a moment later.

The diamond, the rose, and the camera again worked on Allison’s conscience, and she promised herself she’d call Rick and apologize as soon as she got home. But before she finished the series of photos the phone rang, and Mattie said, “Prepare yourself, kiddo, I’ve got some news you aren’t going to like.”

“What?”

“Remember that series of shots you took of Jason last fall—the ones in the Harris tweeds?”

“Of course I remember.”

“Well, get ready for a surprise—they’re in this month’s
Gentlemen’s Review
.”

The shock set Allison in her chair with a plop. “What!”

“You heard me right. They’re in this month’s
GR
.”

“B . . . but that’s impossible! He only stole them a few weeks ago.”

“Apparently not. It appears he lifted them months ago and submitted them then. When did you realize they were missing?”

A sick feeling made Allison’s stomach go hollow. “When he left, of course. I wasn’t running to the files daily while he was living with me to see if his intentions were honorable or not.”

“Well, the creep was about as honorable as Judas Iscariot! The photo credit lists the photographer as Herbert Wells.”

“Undoubtedly with a post office box in some eastern city to which
GR
was instructed to send the handsome paycheck,” Allison surmised bitterly.

“You’re going to tell the police, aren’t you?”

Allison sighed uselessly. “Without the negatives to prove the originals were mine?”

There was silence, then Mattie’s sympathetic voice. “Listen, honey, I’m really sorry I had to give you the bad news.”

“Yeah, sure,” said the lifeless voice in the wide, drafty, echoey studio.

Allison hung up and shot to her feet, taking a defiant, angry stance as she stared unseeingly at the glittering diamond that seemed to wink hauntingly from the velvety folds of the rose. Two diamond-hard tears glittered from Allison’s eyes.

Damn you, Jason, you bastard! Even while you were taking me to bed night after night you were lying all the time, using your body to get me to do exactly what you wanted. Well, you certainly saw me coming! You
must’ve been standing on the sidewalk watching while this stupid little South Dakota farm girl came rolling off the turnip truck!

I fell for your line like some sex-starved ninny, while you stole the one thing that meant more to me than even you. All those transparencies—my God!—all of them good enough for publication, while I never suspected. But you knew, didn’t you? You knew and you used me. You picked my body and my files clean and made sure I’d know exactly how, by selling them to
GR!

Where are you now? Laughing in some other woman’s arms while you tell her about the ignorant little farm wench from Watertown?

It all flooded back, redoubling Allison’s sick realization of how gullible she’d been—of all the times she’d fawned over his body, adored it, both in clothing before the lens and out of it in bed. What a fool she’d been not to see how one-sided her affection was. He took her every compliment as if it were his due while giving back nothing but his body. And that he gave with a hint of smugness, as if doing her a favor.

She cringed now at the memory of how openly she’d displayed her need, her desire, her love. For she
had
loved him. That’s what hurt the most. She had. And Jason had fed off her, figuratively as well as literally, for she’d paid all the bills as long as he posed, posed, posed,
while she collected the portfolio of photos he was systematically rifling all along.

She lived again the anguish and disbelief of that afternoon she’d returned to the apartment to find his message scrawled across the bottom of the picture on the easel. How typical of him to leave his parting message in that way, as if she were some adolescent groupie.

Allison sighed, deep and long, then dropped to her desk chair forlornly. Jason Ederlie had done it all to her, everything a man could possibly do to a woman. He’d taken all a man could take, left as little as a man could leave.

Well, she’d learned her lesson but good. She’d been taken in once by a stunning face and a talented body, but no man would ever reduce her this way again. Not even Rick Lang! Whether he doled out kisses like Eros himself, nobody was going to worm his way into her heart or her bed or her files again!

The telephone rang once more that afternoon. When Allison recognized Rick’s voice, she told him this was the answering service and that she would have Ms. Scott return his call. There followed a puzzled hesitation before he thanked her and hung up.

At home that night during supper Allison’s phone rang twice. Later she lay in bed listening to its jangling insistence for the fourth time since she’d gotten
home. Determinedly she buried her head under the pillow.

The following morning her answering service reported that a man named Rick Lang had been calling and was becoming abusive to the woman on duty, who could not make him believe they weren’t withholding his messages from Ms. Scott.

Late Thursday Allison made the sudden decision to go to Watertown for the weekend. But she was restless and irritable even there, for the farmhouse felt confining. She wished she could talk to her mother about Jason and Rick, but her mother would never understand Allison’s having had a sexual relationship with a man before marriage, much less having lived with him for the better part of a year. Sexual intercourse had never, never been a discussed subject at home, and Allison knew her mother would be extremely uncomfortable to confront it with her daughter, even now.

Allison’s married brother Wendell farmed nearby, but they weren’t close enough for her to seek his counsel either. Then, too, every time Allison’s mother looked at her it was with a shake of the head as she declared, “Land, you’re nothing but skin and bones, girl.” At mealtime the woman invariably added another spoonful from each dish after Allison had already filled her plate.

Finally over Sunday breakfast Allison’s irritation
churned out of control, and she exploded, “Dammit, Mother, I’m twenty-five years old! I don’t need any help deciding how many scrambled eggs to eat for breakfast!”

The stunned silence that followed left Allison feeling guilty and far less adult than she claimed to be. She returned to the city more discontent than ever, and bearing one more niggling burden of guilt.

She was sitting in her empty, silent apartment eating a TV dinner that tasted like plastic when the phone rang. She glared at it, dumped her unfinished food into the garbage can, and went to do her washing. The damn phone rang with extreme regularity through three loads of washing and the ironing, too. She was sure it was Rick, but refused to take the phone off the hook, and let him know she was home.

But the ringing finally raised her hackles beyond soothing. She yanked the receiver up and blared, “Yes, yes, yes! What do you want!”

There was a moment of silence, then his voice. “Allison?”

“Yes?”

“Just where in the hell have you been for three days!” he exploded.

“I went home to South Dakota.”

“While you let me wonder if you’d dropped off the face of the earth!”

“I didn’t want to see you or talk to you,” she explained expressionlessly.

“Oh, well, that’s just dandy! You didn’t want to see me! Just like that! Did you happen to think I might be going crazy worrying about you while you traipsed off and ignored my calls!”

He was so angry the receiver seemed to quiver in her palm. Allison’s hand was shaking too as she backed up against the wall, let her eyes droop shut, sighed, and slid down until her butt hit the floor. “No,” she answered wearily, “no, I didn’t stop to consider that. I’m sorry.”

“Well, you should be, for crissakes,” he raged on. “You don’t just disappear into thin air to leave a man wondering if you’re alive or dead or what the hell is going through your impossible female head. You were pretty damned upset when I left you the other night, you know. Did you think I—”

“I said I was sorry!” she hissed.

“Well, dammit, I was worried sick! I’ve been up to your apartment no less than eight times in the last three days, and all the people downstairs could tell me was that they hadn’t seen you since sometime Thursday morning, and they didn’t know where you’d gone. And I couldn’t get one damn thing out of your answering service except some catty little snoot placating me with ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Lang, but we’ve given her all your messages.’ So just what the hell kind of game are you playing!”

“It’s no game,” Allison assured him. “We had some laughs together and took a few pictures and ended up making love, that’s all. That doesn’t constitute a commitment of any kind. It was just a . . . a mistake.”

“Just a mistake,” Rick repeated, thunderstruck, his voice now holding a sharp edge of hurt. “You call what happened between us a mistake? Who the hell are you trying to kid, Allison?”

“It
was
a mistake for me. It’s too . . .” She stopped, drew a deep breath, and went on. “I can’t see you anymore, Rick. I’m sorry, I’m just not as resilient as I thought I was. I can’t forget that fast—”

“Forget what! Something I did or something
he
did? I’m not him, damn it, yet you’re judging me as if I were! If you’re going to judge a man, at least do it on his own merits and shortcomings instead of someone else’s.”

Damn him, he was right! But the full sting of Jason’s duplicity was too fresh within Allison to allow her to feel unthreatened by the thought of committing herself to a new relationship. To commit was to become vulnerable again.

“So why are you wasting your time on me?” It hurt, it hurt, having to say those words to him. And even across the telephone wire she could tell they hurt him, too.

“I don’t know. I felt what we did together
does
constitute a commitment, and I thought you were the kind of woman who felt the same way, but apparently I was
wrong.” A pause followed, then he muttered, “Oh, hell,” and his voice grew persuasive. “I don’t know how to say this, but you and I spent some hours together that were far, far above the ordinary for first times. We worked and laughed and learned we had a lot in common. And after such a great day last Sunday, the way we ended it was as natural an ending as . . . as . . . you know what I’m talking about, Allison. We’re good together, so I kissed you and you kissed me back and we made love . . .” His voice had gone low and gruff. “And don’t lie to me. It was like fireworks.” She heard him swallow. “And then you ran, and I deserve some answers, Allison. I have a right to know why.”

“Because I’m afraid, okay?” she answered truthfully.

“Tell me what Jason—”

“I don’t understand why you’re bothering. I’m not even a very good . . .” But abruptly she gulped to a halt.

“Lover?” he filled in. “Is that what you were going to say? Because if it is, you might be interested in knowing that not every guy thinks of that first. Some people honestly look for the person inside the body first. Some people actually base their feelings on more than just superficial appearances.” He paused. “And you are a hell of a good lover.”

“Stop it! Stop it! You want to know why I’m afraid to trust you, I’ll tell you why. Because I trusted Jason
Ederlie and all I got for it was taken. We lived together and I paid his way. Like a stupid, lovesick fool I took him in and stroked his ego and let him live scotfree off me, thinking all the time we were working toward . . . toward something permanent. He posed for me. Oh, did he pose! And he knew his charms very well. I laid my whole future on the line with him, and one day I walked into this house and found him gone—lock, stock, and negatives! You want to know why I’m afraid to commit myself to a man again? Open up this month’s issue of
Gentlemen’s Review
and find out. You’ll recognize his face—it’s the one from my files. They say a picture is worth a thousand words—well, in
GR
it’s also worth about a thousand dollars and a fixed career, and there’s a whole layout of them. Only the photo credit, you’ll note, is not quite accurate!”

By now Allison was quivering, viewing the chrome legs of the dining room chairs through a blur of angry tears.

“All that doesn’t change one thing that’s gone on between you and me, Allison, because it’s past. It’s done. What about what we shared?”

“What about it?” she retorted, wanting to draw back the words, but unable to, hurting him, hurting herself.