Honey Moon (44 page)

She had no family left. She lived alone in the land of the dead, only her obsession with Black Thunder keeping her alive. But Black Thunder had no plasma, no skin, no heartbeat.

Gradually, she became aware of the noise of water running. At first she couldn't think what it was, and then she realized that Eric was using her shower.

Normally he was gone by the time she returned from her dinner, but she had come back earlier than usual.

She pressed her hands to her temples. She didn't want to be alone. She couldn't be alone.
I can't bear it anymore, Dash. I'm so afraid. I'm afraid of living. And
I'm afraid to die.

Her teeth began to chatter. She stepped away from the door, holding onto the counter for support. The fear was sucking at her bones, gobbling up little bits of her. She had to make it go away. She needed a connection with someone.

Anyone.

Numbly, she turned toward the short, narrow hallway and stumbled the few short yards that took her to the bathroom door. She told herself not to think.

Just to keep herself alive.

Forgive me. Oh, please, forgive me.

The knob turned in her hand.

Steam enveloped her as she entered. She pressed the door shut behind her and stood against it,

struggling to breathe.

He had his face turned to the nozzle, his back toward her. His body was too large for the rectangular shower stall, and when he moved, his shoulders bumped into the sheets of cheap plastic that formed the walls, making them rattle. She could discern the outline of his back and buttocks through the steam-clouded walls, but none of the details. His body could have belonged to any man.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she kicked off her shoes. Then she crossed her arms over her chest and peeled both her sweatshirt and T-shirt over her head. Her bra was lacy and delicate, pale shells of mint green,

the remaining token of femininity she hadn't been willing to abandon to the world of hard hats, work boots, and Skil saws. With a dull sense of inevitability, she unsnapped her jeans and pulled them slowly down over her legs, revealing the fragile pair of panties that matched her bra.

Her legs had begun to shake and she steadied herself with a hand on the rim of the sink. If she didn't

find a human connection, she would break apart. A connection with anyone.

Her reflection floated before her in the steam-fogged mirror above the sink. She could make out tangled hair, the indistinct outlines of her features.

The water stopped running. She whirled around. Eric turned in the shower stall and went absolutely still as he saw her standing there.

She said nothing. The steamy plastic panels continued to blur the distinguishing lines of his features in a way that comforted her. He could be any man, one of the faceless men in her dreams, an anonymous man whose only purpose was to take away her fear of being alone and unloved.

Slowly he turned his back to her, and the shower door made a hollow ping as he opened it. Reaching through with one dripping arm, he retrieved his towel from the wire hook outside. His eye patch dangled from a black cord beneath.

Still standing in the shower, he passed the towel through his wet hair, pushing it away from his face, then reached for the black patch and secured it over his head to spare her the sight of his mutilated eye.

Her heart thudded relentlessly in her chest. The steam was beginning to make her skin glisten. Naked except for the fragile pieces of mint-green lace, she waited for him to emerge.

He stepped through the shower door, watching her as he rubbed the towel in slow circles over the dark, matted hair on his chest. The bathroom was small, and he was so close she could have touched him. But she wasn't ready to touch, and her gaze dropped to his sex. It lay heavy against his thigh, the heat distending him. This was what she wanted from him. Only this. The connection.

She kept her eyes averted from his face so that she would know him only as a body. His torso was perfectly sculpted, the musculature deliberately defined.

She saw an angry red scar near his knee and looked away, not because she was repulsed, but because the scar personalized him.

He passed the towel over his buttocks and thighs. She could feel her hair curling in the steam, forming baby corkscrews around her face. Beads of moisture had gathered between her breasts. They dampened her thumb as she unfastened the front clasp on her bra and let the pale green lace drop away like fragile teacups.

She sensed his eyes upon her breasts, but she would not look at his face.

Instead, she studied the indentation at the base of his throat where a trickle of water had collected. His arm moved toward her,

the tendons strong and clearly defined. She caught her breath as he passed his hand over her breast.

The dark tan of his arm looked foreign and forbidden against the paleness of her skin. He flattened his palm against her rib cage, slid it down over her stomach and inside the waistband of her panties. Tendrils of fire licked at her nerve endings. Her body felt hot and swollen. He slipped down her panties.

As soon as she stepped out of them, she knew she had to touch him. Leaning forward, she dipped her mouth to the moisture that had cupped at the base of his throat. Her nostrils quivered as she caught the clean scent of his skin.

She pressed her nose to his chest, a nipple, turned her head toward his underarm, softly breathing him in.

Ribbons of her pale hair streamed over his damp chest, adorning his darker skin with gentle ornamentation. He flattened his hands over her back. She trembled at the sensation of once again being enclosed in a man's arms. He slid his hands down along her back to her buttocks, cupping them to draw her against him.

She felt him hard and moist against her belly.

She waited for him to speak, to ask all the "why's" and "what's" that would send her flying away from him. But instead of speaking, his head dipped to the curve of her neck. She caught the backs of his thighs and squeezed them. Then she arched her neck and offered him her breasts.

He lowered his lips to her collarbone before claiming the swell of flesh below.

Her skin was alive to sensation: the dampness of their flesh, the pleasuring pain of his whiskers, the soft whip of his wet, dark hair. And then she felt the demands of his mouth as he encompassed her nipple and drew it deeply inside.

His eye patch brushed over her skin.

He reached between her legs from behind and opened her. She moaned and encircled his calf with her leg, trying to climb his body so that she could take him in. But he held her off, stroking her and touching her in ways that made her gasp with need.

Only once did she turn cold. When he put her away from him and reached for his pile of clothing on the floor.

Keeping her eyes averted from his face, she watched his hands, too befuddled by the urgency of her

need to understand why he should be taking a wallet from his jeans. What he wanted there. And then

as he slid out the small foil packet she understood and hated the necessity because faceless men should have no need for small foil packets. Faceless men should have bodies that blindly served, without the power to reproduce, without the dangers of disease.

She turned her back while he readied himself.

And then his hands came around her to toy again with her breasts until she sobbed. He turned her. She propped her arms over his shoulders as he lifted her, wrapped her legs around his waist. He pressed her to the thin bathroom wall so that her spine was flat against it.

"Are you ready?" he whispered, his voice smoky.

She nodded her head against his cheek and pressed her eyes shut as he pushed himself inside her.

Her hair tumbled down over his back, and her thighs clasped him with their work-strengthened muscles. She clung to him, whispering yes and yes. Her body was so starved, so desperate.

Gently, he used her.

Tears seeped from her eyes and trickled along his damp spine. He held her in his strong arms, stroked her so deeply, caressed her so tenderly. She cried out with her climax, and then gripped his shoulders tighter while he drove to find his own release. She stoically bore his weight as he leaned shuddering against her.

Gradually he withdrew and lowered her to the floor. His breathing was harsh and uneven. She saw his arm move and knew he was about to draw her close.

Quickly, she backed away, not looking at him, not letting him touch her.

Within seconds, she had left him alone while she closed herself in the small bedroom across the hallway.

Much later, when she emerged, he had disappeared. She could find no sign that he had even been there except for the droplets of water still clinging to the walls of the shower. She dried them off before she stepped inside herself.

* * *

He couldn't take any more hurt!

Eric's knuckles were white as he gripped the van's steering wheel. Why had he let another wounded person into his life? He had been trying to get away from suffering, not plunge in deeper. He wanted to drive away, but he had not even been able to put the key in the ignition.

Her face was imprinted on the windshield in front of him: those luminous, haunted eyes, that full mouth trembling with need. God, he'd been dreaming about that mouth from the moment he had seen her again. It was soft and sensual, and it drew him as if it had magic powers. But he hadn't even kissed her, and he doubted she would have let him if he'd tried.

Instead of finding sanctuary in this dead amusement park, he had plunged himself deeper into hell. Why was he so drawn to her? She was cold and tough, with a grim, single-minded determination that was at odds with her small stature. Even the men on the construction crew shied away from her. They had been stung too often by her razor-sharp tongue. She was the same little monster she'd been that second season of the Coogan show, a hundred years ago.

Over the trees he could see the top of the lift hill. He didn't understand what there was about the coaster that obsessed her, but he had begun to hate those moments when he looked up from the ground and saw her small body entwined with the frame of the great wooden beast until she and the coaster almost seemed to be one. Her obsession frightened him.

Who was she? Not the needy, love-struck girl who had once reminded him of his little brother. Not the tough, sharp-tongued boss lady in the yellow hard hat, either. Sometimes when he looked at her, he thought he saw another woman standing slightly apart from her—a saucy, laughing woman with a loving heart and wide-open arms. He told himself the image was an illusion, a mental hologram he had created out of his own despair, but then he wondered if he might not be seeing the woman she had been when she was married to Dash Coogan.

Tonight, her beauty had clawed at his guts. The strength, the tragedy, the awful vulnerability. But they had come together like animals instead of human beings. Even when their bodies were locked together, they had given nothing of themselves to each other, so that in the end he could use her as she was using him, impersonally, as a safe receptacle.

But it hadn't worked that way. The thing that terrified him—the thing that made sweat break out on his body and his stomach clench—was the way she had made him feel.

For the space of time while he had held that fragile female body—a body that demanded nothing more from him than sexual release—he had felt all the fiercely protective layers he'd erected around himself slip away, leaving him ready to go to the ends of the earth to console her.

As he sat staring blindly through the window of the van, he knew that he should leave just as surely as

he knew he was going to stay. But he would never let himself be so vulnerable to her again because he had no place left inside him to hold anyone else's pain.

They said he was the best actor of his generation, and he was going to use his talent. From this moment on, he would wrap himself so tightly inside his identities that she would never again be able to touch him.

* * *

The next day Honey drove herself relentlessly, trying to shut out the events of the night, but as she inspected a section of track with the project foreman, the images washed over her. How could she have done it? How could she have betrayed her marriage vows like that? Self-hatred gnawed away at her, a bleak antipathy toward the person she had become.

For the rest of the day she threw herself into her work with a ferocity that, by evening, left her drained and weak. As she dropped to the ground and unfastened her tool belt, she heard someone approaching her from behind. Even before she turned, she could feel who it was and she tensed.

Eric regarded her with a face empty of any expression. Instead of feeling relieved that he wasn't forcing her to acknowledge what had happened, she felt chilled. If it weren't for the small aches in her body, she would think that she had imagined the whole thing.

"I understand that your cousin and her husband have left," he said in his carefully accented English. "Would you mind if I move my belongings into the Bullpen? It's more comfortable than my van."

She had tried to forget about the empty Bullpen. All day she had looked down at the vacated building expecting to see Gordon's truck parked there, but he and Chantal were gone.

"Suit yourself," she said stiffly.

He nodded and walked away.

When she returned to her trailer, she heated a can of beef stew for her own dinner and tried to block out her loneliness by running numbers on her calculator. The figures hadn't changed. She could meet her payroll through the first week of January, and then she would have to shut down.

Grabbing a soft blue cable-knit cardigan, she let herself outside. The night was clear, the sky dotted with silver stars. She hoped Chantal and Gordon were all right. It would be Christmas in less than two weeks. Last Christmas, she and Dash had camped in the desert and he'd given her handmade gold earrings shaped like crescent moons. She'd put them away in her jewelry box after he died because she couldn't bear looking at them.