Judith McNaught (49 page)

"What the hell are you trying to pull?"

"I'm not pulling anything, I've just realized what a heartless bastard you really are!" The freezing look on

his face as he watched her moving away from him was nothing compared to her own fury. "You're running away when you leave here, aren't you! You have no intention of trying to find the real killer, do you?"

"No!" he snapped.

"You must be the biggest coward on earth!" Julie taunted, too furious to quail before the murderous look

tightening his face. "Either that or else you killed her yourself!" She opened the door to her room, turned back, and added scathingly, "I'm leaving here in the morning, and if you intend to stop me, you'd better be prepared to use that gun!"

He raked her with a contemptuous glance. "Stop you?" he jeered. "I'll carry your bag out to the ear!"

Julie slammed the bedroom door on his last words.

Fighting back tears, she heard him go into his room as she stepped out of her slacks and pulled on a Tshirt from a dresser drawer. Not until she'd turned off
195

the lamp and gotten into bed, did she let herself lose control. Dragging the thick down comforter up to her chin, she rolled over onto her stomach, and buried her face in the pillow. She cried with shame and

anger at her stupidity, her gullibility, and her humiliation. She cried until her tears were spent and she was

exhausted, then she rolled onto her side, staring blindly out the window at the moonlit winter landscape.

In his own bedroom, Zack pulled off his sweater, trying to calm down and forget the scene in the living

room, but the effort was futile. Her words hammered in his mind, more agonizing each time he

remembered the contemptuous look on her face when she called him a coward and a murderer.

During

his trial and imprisonment, he'd inured himself against feeling anything, but somehow she'd gotten under

his guard. He hated her for that and himself for letting it happen.

Flinging the sweater onto the bed, he stripped off his pants. It hit him then—the only plausible explanation for her ridiculously volatile reaction to what he'd said in the living room—and he stopped cold in the act of dropping his trousers on the bed.

Julie thought she was in love with him. That's why she thought she had "rights" where he was concerned.

She probably thought he was in love with her. And that he needed her.

"Son of a bitch!"he swore and flung the trousers onto the bed. He didn't need Julie Mathison, and he sure as hell didn't need the added guilt and responsibility for a naive small-town schoolteacher who didn't

know the difference between sexual desire and that nebulous emotion called love. She'd be better off if she hated him. He'd be better off, too. Much better off. There was nothing between them except sex, which they both wanted and she was denying them out of some infantile urge to retaliate.

With some half-formed notion of proving all that to her and himself, he stalked toward his bedroom door and pulled it open.

Julie was dismally contemplating what to do tomorrow if he reneged on his remark about letting her go

when the bedroom door abruptly opened and Zack strode in, naked. "What do you want?" she demanded.

"That question," he mocked, sweeping the comforter off of her, "is almost as asinine as your decision to sleep in this bed because I won't come to heel."

Infuriated by his obvious intention to sleep with her, Julie flung herself to the opposite side of the bed and scrambled out of it, trying to bolt diagonally for the door. He caught her as she rounded the foot of the bed and pulled her against his bare chest.

"Let go of me, damn you!"

"What I want," he informed her, belatedly answering her original question, "is the same thing you want every time we look at each other!"

Flinging her head back, Julie stopped struggling, gathering her strength for her next move. "You bastard!

If you even think of raping me, I'll murder you with your own gun!"

"Rape you?" he repeated with icy scorn. "I wouldn't dream of it. You'll beg me to make love to you in three minutes."

Julie struck just as his mouth seized hers: bringing her knee up hard, she aimed for his groin and then
196

screamed as she missed and landed on her back beneath his heavy body.

Instead of retaliating for her missed blow to his groin by ramming himself into her, which she half expected him to do, she felt his fingers slide into the hair at the juncture of her thighs, probing very lightly,

starting to massage and caress with familiar, unerring skill. He wasn't going to force her, Julie realized; he

wanted her full cooperation, and if she gave it to him, it would be far more damaging to her pride than being a helpless victim. Her body was already responding against her will, and she was so furious with

herself and with him that she actually tried to force him to finish the act before she capitulated completely.

"Get it over with, damn you!"

His answer was a whisper as cold as his heart:

"Why? So you can call me a rapist as well as a murderer

and a coward?" His fingers searched deeper, moving.

"Not a chance." His mouth closed over her nipple, tongue circling, lips tugging, and Julie swallowed a scream of furious protest. She bucked her hips beneath his hand, and he laughed softly, sliding his finger deeper inside of her so that she rode it. She stopped abruptly, tensing every muscle in her body to resist what he was doing to her, and in silence, he forced her treacherous body to betray her, his eyes watching her face every moment of the time.

"You're soaking wet," he said, and not even the calculating heartlessness of what he was doing to her could quell the quick, piercing, stabs of desire already beginning to jolt her. "Do you want me, Julie?"

She wanted him inside her, she wanted the climax she knew he could give her so badly she felt like she was going to die. "Go to hell!" she gasped.

"I am in hell," he whispered, moving his body up along hers, and for the first time he kissed her, forcing

her lips to part. Abruptly, he gentled the kiss, his lips moving on hers with melting hunger as he slowly moved his hips, forcing her into vibrant awareness of his rigid erection. "Tell me you want me," he coaxed.

Trapped beneath the exquisite promise of his aroused body and the driving persistence of his mouth, her

own body began to shake with uncontrollable need, and the words tore out of her in a tormented sob. "I want you—"

The moment she capitulated, he drove into her instantly, circling his hips hard, driving her to a shattering

climax within moments. He pulled out while her body was still racked with shudders and lifted off of her,

shrugging free of her embrace. "Three minutes was all it took," he told her.

The door slammed behind him with the finality of a death knell.

Julie lay there, physically exposed and freezing with shock, unable to absorb the proof that he was actually vile enough to prove his point this way.

Emotionally spent, she crawled slowly to the head of the

bed, pulled the comforter off the floor, and closed her eyes, but she did not cry, would not shed one more tear because of him. Ever.

* * *

head in his hands, trying not to think or feel. He had done what he set out to do and more; he had proved to himself and to her that he didn't need her, not even sexually. And he had proved to her that he wasn't worth caring about or worrying about after she left here in the morning.

He had accomplished his goals brilliantly, eloquently, indelibly.

197

He had never felt more desolate or more ashamed.

She wouldn't imagine she was in love with him after tonight, he knew. She'd hate him completely. But not nearly as much as he hated himself. He despised himself for what he'd done to her and for the unprecedented weakness that made him yearn to go to her and beg her forgiveness. Straightening in the chair, he looked across the room at the bed they'd shared, but he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep in it,

not when she was lying in the next room, hating him.

The keys to the Blazer were on the dresser when Julie got out of bed at dawn the next morning, and the

house was eerily still. The agony of last night had receded to a dull numbness, and she pulled on clothes

without any particular awareness of what she was doing. All she wanted to do was get out of here and never look back, never think back. Forget everything. All her attention was focused on that, on forgetting

that she had ever met him and been foolish enough to love him. She never wanted to love anyone again if

it meant being this vulnerable. She got her empty nylon duffel bag out of the closet, dumped her toiletries

into it, zipped it closed, and picked it up.

At the bedroom door, she paused, looking around the room to make sure she'd left nothing behind her, then she turned off the lights. Quietly, she twisted the doorknob and stepped out into the darkened living

room, then she stopped short, her heart slamming in shock and dread. In the watery gray light of early dawn, she could see Zack silhouetted at the windows across the room, his back to her, his left hand shoved into his pants pocket. Jerking her gaze away, Julie turned and started silently down the hall, but before she took the second step, he said without turning: "The list of everyone who was on the set the day of the murder is on the coffee table."

Ignoring the sudden knot in her chest at the realization he'd conceded after all, she forced herself to keep

walking down the hall, past the closet.

"Don't go," he called hoarsely. "Please."

Her heart twisted at the harsh desperation in his voice, but her ravaged pride screamed that only a fool

without pride or sense would let him near her after last night, and she kept walking. She reached for the knob on the back door and his voice came from somewhere closer behind her, raw with emotion.

"Julie—please don't!"

Her hand refused to turn the knob, her shoulders began to shake with silent sobs, and Julie leaned her forehead against the door, tears streaking down her face, the duffel bag sliding from her hand. She wept with shame for her lack of will and with fear for a love that she couldn't control. And even as she wept for herself, she let him turn her into his arms and pull her against his chest.

"I'm sorry," Zack whispered fiercely, helplessly trying to comfort her, his hands rushing over her shoulders and back, clenching her to him. "Please forgive me. Please."

"How could you do that to me last night!" she sobbed. "How
could
you!"

Swallowing, he turned her wet face up to his because it seemed to him that he didn't deserve the
198

protection of anonymity when he admitted, "I did it because you called me a murderer and a coward and I couldn't stand it—not from you. And I did it because I'm a heartless bastard, exactly as you said."

"You're right, you are!" she choked, "and the horrible part of it is that I
love
you anyway!"

Zack pulled her back into his arms and fought down the words he knew she wanted to hear, the words he felt. Instead, he crushed her to him, kissing her forehead and her cheek, then he rested his jaw against

her fragrant hair, letting her words bathe him in their sweetness. At thirty-five, he had finally discovered how it felt to be loved for no reason except for himself … to be loved when he had neither wealth nor

fame nor even respectability to offer as an attraction

… to be loved unconditionally by a woman of extraordinary courage and loyalty. He knew it now, just as surely as he knew that if he told her how he felt about her, those same qualities would make her wait for him for years after he disappeared. Even so, he couldn't let her sweet avowal pass without comment, and so he rubbed his cheek against her hair and

tenderly spoke another truth: "I don't deserve it, sweetheart."

"I know you don't," Julie joked tearily, refusing to be crushed that he hadn't said he loved her, too. She'd heard the aching emotion in his voice just now and the torment when he thought she was leaving. She'd felt the reflexive tightening of his arms and the increased pounding of his heart against her face when she'd

told him. It was enough for her. It had to be. She closed her eyes as his hand slid under the hair at her nape, his long fingers stroking sensually, but when he spoke, he sounded incredibly weary. "Would you consider going back to bed with me for a few hours and postponing our discussion about the murder until

I've had some sleep? I've been awake all night."

Julie nodded and walked with him into a room she'd never expected to see again.

He fell asleep with his arms wrapped around her and his cheek against her chest.

Unable to sleep herself, Julie watched his face, her fingers toying with the soft hair at his temple. Sleep didn't soften his rugged features, she noticed, probably because he found no real peace, even then.

His

brows were dark and thick, and so were his eyelashes, she suddenly noticed—spiky lashes so dark they

looked black. She shifted a little to make him more comfortable, but his arms tightened instantly—to prevent her from leaving, no doubt. The

unconsciously possessive gesture made her smile because it was

so unnecessary. She had no intention of slipping away.

Years before, she'd come across a quotation from Shakespeare that life was a stage on which each man must play his part. Ever since she graduated from college, she'd felt as if she was standing just off the stage where her own life was supposed to take place, waiting in the wings, waiting for someone to give her a cue that it was time to step on that stage and do whatever she was meant to do. Julie drew in a shaky breath, smiling a little tearily, because she'd finally gotten her cue.
Now
she knew what she had been waiting for all these years, why she had been created, and who she had been meant for. Despite all her diligent efforts to remake herself into a model of propriety, when it came to falling in love, she'd reverted to form and fallen in love with a man who was a renegade, a black sheep; a daring, cynical, tough social outcast who in some ways reminded her of the boys she'd known on the Chicago streets.