The Forever Dream (15 page)

"Oh, but it is," he interrupted. "Do you think I'd have let myself be used in these torrid petting parties if I hadn't thought it would be worth my while in the end? I'm a bit old for this kind of refined torment." He grimaced. "It's a wonder I haven't gone completely gray putting up with your little games. The only thing that kept me from going insane was that I knew what you were doing was conditioning yourself."

"Conditioning?" she asked, her expression stormy. "Conditioning me for what, pray?"

The hand on her breast was stroking her soothingly. "For me," he said softly. "I wanted you to grow accustomed to knowing what it was like in my arms, to feel how natural it was to have my hands and lips loving you. You're at home with me now. You'd miss this as much as I would."

She was too honest not to admit there was every possibility he might be right. She did have a strange feeling of homecoming in his arms, even when she was enveloped in a need so intense she was dizzy with it.

Her hands were suddenly on his shoulders, pushing him away. "No," she said sharply. "Let me go. I don't want this." She tried to wriggle off his lap, but suddenly found his arms holding her in a firm, but gentle prison. "You said I could set the boundaries."

"And you've been doing just that," he said, pulling her inexorably closer until she was cradled against the broad wall of his chest. "But we both know that referred to sexual boundaries." His hand was smoothing the fine hair at her temple with a gentle hand. "This is entirely different. I'm not trying to seduce you, Tania."

Wasn't he? Perhaps not in the carnal sense, but there were other ways to entice that were even more beguiling. She felt again that melting tenderness, that strange aching hunger to reach beyond that wall of reserve and touch him. But he wasn't a man to give without demanding in return, and how could she give him that? Her own barriers had been up too long to yield to probing without pain. Yet his arms felt so warm and secure about her. Her cheek instinctively nestled closer against the rough wool of his sweater.

"This isn't any good, Ryker," she said wearily. "I don't know what you want from me."

"Yes, you do," he said quietly. "I told you I want to know everything about you. I want you to open to me and let me inside." He paused. "I guess what I'm saying is that I want to be your friend. I can wait for the other. I've developed a good deal of patience over the years and find generally that anticipation only sharpens the pleasure." His hand moved to the nape of her neck, gently massaging the taut muscles. "But since you've been here, I've begun to want something more. If I read the signs correctly, I think you have too."

She tensed unconsciously. The yielding he was speaking of wasn't physical. And the surrender he was asking was much more frightening. Her hands clenched on a fold of his sweater. "And will you open to me as well?"

"As much as I can," he said, his tone of voice grave. "As much as it's safe. We can't go on as we have been, you know. We've reached the point where it's almost as painful to stand still as move on to the next step."

"And what is the next step, Ryker?" she asked. She raised her head to meet his gaze. "I don't think either one of us can afford that kind of vulnerability. We're much safer going on as we have been."

He smiled as he leaned forward to brush a kiss on

the tip of her nose. "We may not be prepared for a permanent disarmament, but we might settle for a temporary truce. That shouldn't damage our fortifications too drastically. Will you give that to me, little Piper?"

"It would be a mistake," she whispered. All her life she'd avoided the pain that went with being that close to anyone. The friendship he was talking about was not the casual camaraderie with which she filled her life. She could handle that and still protect the core of privacy that kept her free. There was every chance Ryker would trespass on that very private territory. If there was one thing she'd learned about him in the last two weeks, it was that he never did anything halfway. "I don't think I could do it."

"You can do anything," he said, his eyes twinkling. "You're the Piper, remember? You have er'b."

She suddenly knew with certainty that he was right. Why shouldn't she take what she wanted? And what she wanted was an intimate knowledge of Jared Ryker. If she had to let him breach her own walls to attain that goal, she could always rebuild them later. For a woman with
e
à
b
, it would be child's play. "You're right," she said, her dark eyes dancing. "I can do anything, Ryker."

"Of course you can," he agreed promptly. "Now, do you suppose you could begin by calling me Jared?" He grinned. "Ryker sounds a bit militant, and I could use a change of pace after the hostilities of the last two weeks."

"Jared."

His name on her lips sounded oddly intimate, and he felt a little shock of sensation surge through him. He drew a deep breath, carefully keeping his expression from registering pleasurable emotion. He could sense the hesitancy and fear behind Tania's impudent acceptance, and he didn't want to disturb the fine balance between them. Strange how he was beginning to catch those vibrations emanating from her almost as if they were his own. Now those vibrations indicated the need for very delicate handling if he was going to coax her into is hand.

"That's better," he said lightly. "See how easy that was? There won't be any problem at all if we take it one step at a time."

The simple phrase caused her spirits to lift and banished the last vestige of uncertainty. They were the words that had given her strength during her ordeal in the Andes. She had a sudden fleeting memory of Jared in bed with her murmuring those words as he held her in his arms in an agony of sympathy on her first morning at the chateau.

"All right, Jared," she said quietly. "One step at a time."

"Good." He gently pushed her off his lap and stood up. "Now, why don't we celebrate our truce by taking a stroll up to the birch grove?" His eyes twinkled. "As usual, after a few hours in your very desirable presence, I feel a definite need to cool off."

Chapter
7

The night was crisp and clean, and the moonlight cast a pale glow over the valley below that made it look as unreal as a picture in a fairy tale. It was an indisputably lovely sight but Tania felt a shiver run through her just the same.

Jared looked down at her in quick concern. "You're cold? I thought surely that jacket would be enough. Do you want to go back to the chateau?"

She shook her head. "I'm fine. A goose walked over my grave, I guess." She suddenly chuckled. "What odd sayings you Americans have." But so descriptive, so very descriptive, she added to herself. Her gaze traveled restlessly over the rough terrain. "I can't say I share your fondness for this spot. In the daylight it's all right, but at night it's too harsh, too cruel."

He stopped, and his eyes searched her shadowed face. "Is it the mountains? You said before that they bothered you."

"Probably." She shrugged wearily. "I don't know." She paused beside the slender birch tree on the very edge of the precipice. She had an evanescent memory of her first glimpse of Jared leaning against this tree, so remote and strange, like the mountains around him. She shot him a swift, defensive look. "I'm not frightened, you understand."

"I'd never make the mistake of thinking such a thing," he said, his lips quirking. "Never you, little Piper."

Was she afraid? No, of course not. She just didn't like bloody mountain ranges. But it was suddenly intolerable that Jared would think she was. On their almost silent stroll from the chateau, she had been conscious of an odd closeness with the man by her side. It was as if there were a living cord binding them together.

"I'm tired," she said abruptly. She deliberately dropped down on the ground and leaned back against the white birch. "I think we should rest before we go back to the chateau." She cast a carefully casual glance at the rugged outlines of the mountains closest to them. "They're really quite pretty, aren't they?"

There was a gentle smile of amused comprehension on Jared's face as he sat down beside her. His arm drew her close in a sexless embrace that offered only warmth and comfort. "But they're not to everyone's taste. I can see how you could prefer other surroundings. I think you would have liked my island. Not a mountain on the entire three miles."

She remembered that Jared had mentioned he'd spent the last few years on an island in the Caribbean. She hadn't given it much thought, but now she was curious. "Would have?" she asked. "Why the past tense? Don't you own it any longer?"

"I sold it before I came back to civilization. It had served its purpose and furnished me with the privacy I needed to do my work." His voice lowered. "There wasn't a chance in hell I'd be let alone on the island once I went public. I needed a wall around me the size of Fort Knox."

"So you approached Sam Corbett?"

He nodded. "He had a ready-made security system, political contacts, and credibility. He also had the reputation for being fairly honest." He smiled cynically. "As honest as any politician."

There was an element of hardness in his voice that disturbed her. She hadn't realized how quickly she'd become accustomed to that gentleness of tone in the last few hours. She instinctively moved to distract him from the subject that had brought that abrasiveness to the forefront. "You're right, I probably would have enjoyed your island," she said lightly. "And not only for the lack of mountains. I much prefer a little foliage on my trees." She raised her hand to indicate the grove that surrounded them. The slender white birches looked strangely ghostly in the moonlight, their branches stretching toward the sky in a loveliness as stark as the mountains themselves. "I always hated the time when the leaves would fall and there would be nothing to protect the trees." Her face was dreamily reminiscent. "There was a tree in my mother's garden that was very old and gnarled, but it had the most beautiful glossy green leaves imaginable. I used to gather them and sew them into chains that I'd wear as a necklace or crown."

"Your home was in a small village just outside Moscow, wasn't it?" he asked, careful to display only an idle interest. "The autumn is short there; the winters are extraordinarily cold. There must have been many, many days when the trees were as bare of leaves as these."

"Yes, but it didn't really matter, for then there were always the wind chimes."

"Wind chimes?"

She nodded, her gaze fixed on the valley below, but not really seeing it. "Every year when the leaves would start to fall, my mother would hang wind chimes from a branch of a tree. It became a little tradition with us. She had brought them from Hungary with her. She told me that her father had given them to her when she was just a little girl herself." She closed her eyes. "1 loved those wind chimes. No matter how ugly or harsh everything was, they were always beautiful. They glinted and shimmered in the sunlight like icicles, and their music. ..." she paused, searching for words, "their music was like a blessed balm when things became too much to bear."

"And did they get that way very often?" he asked quietly.

Her eyes opened, and he inhaled sharply at the desolation he saw there. "It was never any other way," she said simply. "My mother was a whore, you know."

He felt himself stiffen with shock and then mentally cursed the instinctive reaction. Now that she was at last opening to him, he wanted nothing to inhibit the flow. "I don't understand," he said gently. "According to what I've read, your father was a colonel in the army and brought your mother with him when he returned from his tour of duty in Hungary. The magazines played it up as a grand passion."

"It was a passion, all right." Her smile was bitter. "He probably desired her greatly at the start. My mother was quite beautiful, you see." Her lips tightened. "She was also very simple and very gentle. She was perfect for my father."

"Perfect?"

"What could be more ideal for a destroyer than the quintessential victim?" she asked. "They were really quite a pair."

He was silent, afraid even the most casual comment would cause her to close within herself.

"After my mother died, I tried to look at him objectively. I tried to tell myself that he couldn't be as bad as I thought he was." She shook her head." "It didn't work, because he was that bad. I don't know what made him like that, and I don't even care anymore. No one has

the right to drain all the joy from life, the way he did. He was like a vampire, devouring all the good things in life."

"Your mother?" he prodded.

"My mother was in love with him." Her lips twisted. "I told you she was simple. She'd let him do anything he wanted with her. When he took her from her home and family in Budapest to a strange country, he didn't even marry her. He set her up as his mistress in a cottage outside Moscow and visited her when the mood took him. I was born there, two years after she left Hungary."

"You were illegitimate, then?"

"To put it politely. My father rarely was so courteous. From the time I was old enough to understand, he made sure that I was aware that I was a bastard whose birth never would have happened if my mother hadn't been so stupid that she couldn't remember to take the pill." She smiled sadly. "She was always afraid to admit it even to me, but I don't think she'd really forgotten. I think her life was so hellish by then that she wanted something of her own. Someone to love who would love her back. It wasn't a great deal to ask."

"No, it was very little."

"My father didn't feel the same way. He thought she should be punished for the inconvenience and expense she'd caused him." She drew a deep, shaky breath. "So he decided to see that he was compensated for some of that expense. He started to send her other officers to 'entertain.' At first they were only high-ranking officials he wanted to impress or curry favor with. Later he wasn't so discriminating."

"Why didn't she just leave him and return to Hungary?"

"By that time he'd found I was useful for something after all," she answered. "He'd threaten to take me away from her and she'd do anything he wanted." Her voice