Kitabı oku: «Something Beautiful», sayfa 4
And saw Allie’s hand outstretched behind her. About knee-level. She gulped in air, sagged against the doorway a little, and pulled Allie sharply closer.
“Don’t ever do that again!” she gasped out. “Not unless you want to have to run get Steven to pry me from the ceiling!”
“Do you feel changed, Mommy?”
“Do I ever!” Jillian said with heartfelt honesty.
“Lyle says Steven can’t change you like he can.”
Jillian felt inadequate to answer this, too. She didn’t like the implication, and she didn’t like knowing that Lyle was wrong. Steven had already changed her, though she couldn’t have spelled out exactly how, or why. Just his very presence had shifted her life on a fundamental level.
She remembered how that first day Steven had hesitated before taking her proffered hand, almost as though he were as conscious as she of the significance of their first touch. And she’d lowered her hand, rubbing it against her thigh, feeling relief, because she’d had the singular, staggering thought that their palms were meant to be touching, that she would be safe as long as she remained linked to him.
“Lyle can do anything,” Allie said with a matter-of-fact attitude. She even nodded, as if settling some unvoiced question.
Jillian couldn’t help but smile. “Anything but become visible to everybody but you,” she quipped.
“Oh, Mommy!” Allie said, and then giggled.
Allie’s hands dropped to pat her jumper in a parody of an adult performing a knee-slap, only to become serious again almost immediately.
“Lyle says someday soon you’ll be able to see him, too.”
Jillian felt her smile stiffen. This was a new twist, a turn she didn’t particularly care for.
Allie, still smiling up at her, said, “But he can touch you again, if he wants. ’Cause you said he could.”
For a glittering moment, Jillian actually thought her daughter was telling her that Lyle was about to touch her. Again. She felt a shudder of horror course through her.
“Well, he can’t now,” she said through dry lips.”
“Oh, yes, he can. He’s like a vampire. All you have to do is invite him once.”
Jillian heard an odd conversation played in her mind. A friend meeting her on the street, asking how Allie was doing these days. “Oh, she’s just fine,” she’d say. “She has an invisible friend who is just like a vampire. We love that creature of ours.”
“Tell him I uninvite him.”
Allie looked up at Jillian, her expression somber. “You can’t do that, Mommy. It’s against the rules.”
Jillian forced a smile to her lips. “What rules are those?”
Allie shrugged. “The rules.”
Jillian’s back tickled, her skin seemed to contract in on itself. Allie made Lyle seem so real, so present. Jillian couldn’t hold in the shiver this time. The idea of Lyle’s reality thoroughly revolted her.
She wished she knew, with complete certainty, what was real and what wasn’t.
At that precise moment, like an echo of her thoughts, she heard the sound of the gate’s latch and focused her eyes to see beyond her own reflection.
Jillian couldn’t withhold a gasp as Steven stepped through the narrow aperture.
At first glimpse, she was certain he was naked. His bare golden shoulders reflected the dull light from the bug lamps.
Then she saw that he held one hand tightly against his chest and his profile was rigid and stiff. Something was dreadfully wrong.
She realized then, with some relief, that he wasn’t naked, only minus a shirt. His golden, muscled shoulders were hunched in obvious pain.
With only the slightest of hesitations, she released the catch on the lock and depressed the French door’s handle and pushed the paned glass outward, exactly the way she hadn’t done the day Allie found Lyle.
“Are you all right?” she called.
Steven looked up, and even through the gloom of the thick, moonless night she could make out his green eyes.
He’s in terrible pain, she thought. She knew.
Automatically she reached for and clicked on the back floodlights, the extra lights Steven had installed a few days before. The harsh glare from the floods struck his eyes, and he froze, like an animal snared by a poacher’s illegal hunting lights, and yet he didn’t look afraid, only vastly wary. His eyes glittered, and her breath caught in some unreasoning atavistic fear.
His eyes are this big. She heard her daughter’s voice, saw the little hands forming a two-fisted circle.
“Are you hurt?” she called as she watched him fumble closing the gate.
In the two weeks he’d been with them, she’d never once seen him so much as falter; there was nothing awkward about any of Steven’s movements. All his actions were ungainly now.
He turned back toward the house and took a step into the pool of light to the house side of the gate. As the light had revealed the green of his eyes, it now refracted off a gash of glistening red on his bared forearm.
“My God,” she said, stepping outside and rushing down the steps.
“Mommy—!” Allie called behind her.”
“You’re hurt!” Jillian cried, hurrying to join him.
Instinctively, she held out her hands to take his arm, to look at it. She experienced a near electric shock when her hands lightly braced his bare and bleeding arm.
He’s hurt, she told herself sharply, nearly fiercely, but all she could think about was this odd electrical sensation…and his bared body, heat radiating out from it like a fire.
She had touched him before, she thought inanely, when she had exchanged payment, when showing him the guesthouse and where the lawn tools were stored. But then she recalled how carefully he’d avoided so much as grazing her skin. Nothing in her life had prepared her for the shock of this contact.
Jillian looked up at him, horrified by the wound, more horrified by her reaction to touching him. Her heart pounded in a painful, unsyncopated rhythm.
“I cut it,” Steven said unnecessarily. His voice was brusque, scalded with pain.
His eyes met hers, and she could read the tension there. The need. He tried pulling his arm away from her, but she held on, avoiding the wound itself, but gripping him around the wrist and elbow. Her knuckles brushed the hot skin of his flank and seemed branded by the contact.
“Come into the house,” she said swiftly. “We’ll see what we can do. I’ll call a doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” he said, holding his arm higher, as if trying to stem the flow of blood or to pull away from her. Either way, it was a vain attempt.
“I’m sorry,” he said then, and she could have sworn he wasn’t apologizing for any possible inconvenience, but for something she didn’t understand.
Why do I feel I’ve seen you before? she wanted to ask.
“Nonsense,” she said, drawing him up the steps and brushing past Allie, who was half blocking the doorway. “Allie, honey, run fetch a towel out of the bathroom.”
For a moment, Steven hung back, still outside, only his hand having crossed the threshold. Blood dribbled over Jillian’s hand, hot, smelling of copper, dropping to the floor in what seemed audible splats. She followed his gaze to the swiftly staining hardwood.
Jillian exerted more force, pulling him inside. “Please don’t worry about the floor. Good heavens, Steven, you’re hurt! Come in now.”
When he still seemed reluctant, Jillian looked at him squarely, meeting his unusual eyes. “You need help,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed, but not as if he meant with his wound.
He said it coldly, directly. And with greater purpose than the moment seemed to warrant. His words reminded her of the first moment she’d seen him on her doorstep.
Instead of answering him, she simply pulled at him with greater strength, exhorting him to come inside, still cradling his bleeding arm in her outstretched hands. She felt blood seeping through her fingers and looked at him sharply, appalled at how much he must be suffering.
Instead of looking pale and shaken, as might have been more normal, Steven wore a small smile on his lips, and gazed about the room, as if warm for the first time in years of being cold.
Jillian realized that Allie hadn’t run for the towel as ordered; she was staring, transfixed, at the blood pooling on the hardwood floor.
Jillian guessed at Allie’s dark thoughts—would her daughter ever be able to erase that terrible morning from her mind? She had to break through the darkness and reach her daughter.
“Allie! Quickly, now. Run fetch me a towel. Steven’s hurt, but he’ll be okay. Now hurry, honey.”
Allie gave her a swift, agonized look and whirled for the archway to the bed and bathrooms. Jillian followed rapidly, leading Steven into the kitchen. She held his arm over the sink and turned the cold water on.
“Let’s rinse it and see what we need to do,” she said, pushing his arm beneath the near-icy water.
Allie returned and, without saying anything, pressed a towel against her mother’s side.
“Thanks, honey. Oh, and would you turn on the overhead light, please?”
Allie did so, and the bright glow of the overhead made Steven’s wound look even worse, jagged and deep. What could he have run into to cause such an ugly gash?
“You don’t need to worry,” Steven said. “It’ll be all right now.”
Something in his words, or perhaps his tone, made her examine him with something akin to suspicion. There was nothing about this wound that could possibly be considered all right.
“The water helps,” he said, stepping behind her, allowing her greater access to his arm.
Jillian didn’t say anything, but continued to bathe the wound.
“I’m sorry about your floor,” he said.
He seemed to be almost whispering in her ear. She shivered in pure physical reaction.
“Mommy—?” Allie asked tremulously.
“It’s okay, honey. He’ll be fine. Why don’t you go on back to bed? I’ll come tuck you in again in a minute.”
“But, Mommy…”
“Allie,” Jillian interrupted. “Go on, now.”
“But remember—?”
Remember what?
“What I said this afternoon…”
What had Allie said earlier that afternoon? It wasn’t the blood, not the reminder of her father’s death, that was bothering Allie.
“Remember, Mommy?”
Then Jillian did remember. What had Allie said exactly? Just whatever happens, don’t let Steven in the house.
Jillian felt a frozen understanding crack through her.
Now, at her sink, in her house, Steven stood staring down at his own blood spattering red upon the white porcelain and swirling to pink in the rush of cold water. An odd, almost bitter smile played on his full lips.
When he looked up and met her gaze, he asked, so softly she had to lean toward him to hear it, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
CHAPTER THREE
Steven closed his eyes.
He closed them against the sight of blood, but more against the keen awareness brought by Jillian’s touch on his bared arm. And he tried hiding from the truth.
The hydrogen peroxide Jillian poured over his wound splashed, corroded his skin, then burned in terrible fire. It hissed as it bubbled, then burrowed deep to fight the possible germs in his wound. He tried concentrating on the feel of Jillian’s hands deftly cottoning the edges of the cut, as she tried to catch the dripping peroxide as it rivered from his arm, but for a single instant, nothing could cut through the piercing torment.
Pain…Pain…Pain…
Spiked, burning, horrible pain.
All-too-human agony, Steven thought, just as intense as it would be for any man. The torment twisted, whetted by acute and fierce demand, and there was nothing at all human about this accelerated incineration. This torture was uniquely his, and the entire universe seemed colored by it, ten thousand years of blood reds, sharp blues. Harsh, dark screams of misery roiled through him.
Then the agony began to slide down that peak of torture. In increments—slow, and as torturous as the initial onslaught of the pain—the torment slowed.
Steven opened his eyes. The world again swam into view, the room into focus, and he could again see the lovely auburn-haired woman tending his arm.
Jillian.
The pain began to ebb almost as swiftly as it had risen. And other emotions swamped him, emotions from Jillian.
She dabbed at his wound, her back to him, her silken blouse, warm body beneath, brushing against his bare flesh. He heard her murmuring, softly, as if he were a child who needed comforting.
Steven swallowed the bitter taste of irony, and wanted to but couldn’t smile. He’d craved her touch for so many years, and now that he had achieved this moment, her nurturing touch seemed a travesty of his misbegotten illusions.
He wanted to tell her she could save herself the trouble; the gash in his arm would heal soon enough. For him, physical wounds always did. He wanted to tell her it was the gaping wound inside him that she couldn’t heal; no one could.
He closed his eyes again, this time to subdue his sudden longing for the woman so intimately curved against him. This feeling, too, would fade, when she no longer touched him. If only that aching restlessness deep within him could be so easily fueled and so rapidly quelled.
But at this moment, with her hands upon his arm, her back pressed to his naked chest, he couldn’t bring himself to step back, to stop the feel of her.
The feel of Jillian.
So soft, Steven thought, and yet her careful fingertips felt like hot steel, branding him, marking him somehow. What would those hands feel like touching him, not as a healer, but as a lover? What would they feel like if she was not a woman simply tending a handyman’s wound, but a woman crying out his given name, her hands clutching his shoulders in fierce passion?
The notion was enough to make him groan aloud.
Jillian immediately shifted in the curve of his arms and removed her fingers from the edges of the wound.
He cursed himself and opened his eyes to see her artist’s fingers hovering in the air, questing…uncertain. He stared at those slender hands for a second before raising his eyes to hers.
Jillian was scrutinizing him, as if looking for some deep truth. Her lips were parted slightly, and her blue-gray eyes were wide with some unspoken emotion.
His own breath caught, felt trapped in his throat. He’d wanted inside her home, had deliberately sought entry. But now he was sure that some part of him had spent the past two decades imagining her within the circle of his arms.
He knew her, had watched her for so long he ached to be the one she wanted, the one she needed in her life. I know everything you want, he ached to tell her. I know every dream, each longing expression on your lovely face. I know you.
But Steven knew he couldn’t tell her any of this. He couldn’t frighten her now, couldn’t push her. Knowing her as he did, seeing the look on her face, the vulnerability, the momentary and utterly undeserved compassion, he felt the full weight of guilt, and something else, an anger at her belief in her own safety. Jillian, of all women, was anything but safe.
And he was anything but innocent.
“We have to get you to the emergency room,” she said finally, and he had the strong sense that it was not what she truly wanted to say.
Tell me, he urged inwardly. Tell me what it is you want. You only have two weeks left on this earth.
“Your arm needs stitches,” she said instead. Her cheeks stained a hot red, as if giving the lie to what it was she thought he really needed.
To his vast relief, she looked down at the gash in his arm. The self-inflicted gash.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, not in any display of bravery, but in raw and self-knowing honesty. She couldn’t know that.
She shook her head.
“It already doesn’t hurt as much.” This was also nothing but the truth.
She shook her head, biting her lower lip. Steven had seen her do this a hundred times before. She’d bitten that lower lip since she was child, just as her own daughter now cocked her head to one side when thinking.
Jillian said, “It’s not so deep, but you’ll have a nasty scar if you don’t have it stitched.”
For a moment, he pictured her opening an old-fashioned sewing kit and gently sewing up his arm, brushing her lips against his inner arm as she snipped the thread after the final knot. His entire body tensed at the imagined kiss. This, too, would burn, would sear him, as the peroxide had done, as her fragile smile did now.
He looked from his arm to her and was surprised to again meet her gaze. She was afraid of him, he thought, as she should be. But he knew instinctively that she wasn’t afraid for the right reasons. She didn’t look at him as her friend did, as a danger, as a threat. Perhaps she did see the mystery, perhaps not. She seemed to look at him as if she would melt into his arms at the merest of touches. It was this she feared, more than she might ever fear what he could do to her.
Steven’s breath caught. He knew the bloodletting granted him entry only to the house, not to the woman inside it. And yet…her lips parted, her eyes softened, and to his damnably augmented vision, somehow her skin seemed to grow dewy, inviting.
“Please,” she all but whispered, and Steven felt certain that, on some level, at least, she was asking him to touch her.
He could no more have resisted her if he had been wholly human. Almost without conscious thought, he lifted his good arm and lightly grazed her pale, delicate skin with his fingers. He sensed her emotions through his trembling hands, though he couldn’t begin to understand them.
In a flash, in that searing, scalding awareness inherent in him, he felt her and, to his shock, he knew the sharp rush of desire, the heady taste of want. Was this from her, or from himself? What was happening? How many years had it been since he’d felt such things? Too many to count.
What was it about this woman, this one woman in all the hundreds of millions of women over time, that seemed to draw him so? It couldn’t be only the years of following her, watching her from a distance. And it couldn’t be attributed solely to her ethereal beauty, though that was an undeniable fact. And it didn’t—couldn’t—stem from his burning need to be at this place, at this time, even though that was also a fact.
How much of his want of her was born of her possession of the portals to other worlds? Was his desire created by the inevitability of this final battle? This last encounter. One way or another, the entire war would end at the stroke of midnight on the autumnal equinox, a date less than two weeks away. He’d lived so many years hating the longevity, hating the emptiness, but now that the battles were soon to be over, perhaps some wholly human part of him wanted to live on. And live as a man for a short time. A man with Jillian.
He wanted to close his eyes and drink in her scent, revel in the soft velvet of her skin, the heat of her breath upon his hand. He wanted to take her tightly in his arms and press his lips to hers, to see if she tasted of that mixture of mountain spring and oven-inspired spices that he’d imagined. He wanted this. He deserved this.
Hadn’t he fought enough battles? Hadn’t he done enough? Shouldn’t he be granted this one desire, this one wish? A dying man’s last request? No cigarette for me, he thought, no last meal. A kiss from this woman…that’s all I want. I deserve it.
And when she died, he would give her that one perfect moment, the moment she most cherished, he would bring it alive for her, make it fresh, new, hers again.
But he didn’t want her to die.
The feel of her, the lure of tasting, pulled his wants to the surface, drove thought into the background. Had anything ever felt this wonderful, this sweet?
As if in answer, Jillian released a soft sigh, almost one of resignation, he thought, and her eyes slowly shut. She turned her cheek into his palm so that he cradled her face. Automatically his thumb traced the softness of her parted lips, the rounded line of her chin, her jaw.
The battle he was waging inside seemed far greater than any he’d fought over the countless years. He actually rocked with the rough need to bury his fingers in her silken auburn hair, to pull her sharply to him, to hold her tight against his heaving chest, to take her, to bend her to his will.
A side of him demanded that he stop, that he remember why he was here, why he’d torn his arm, the reason he’d let his blood drop into her home, onto her floor, spill across her hands.
The darkest part of him—the part he knew to be completely divorced from his immortal life—ached to believe he could use the blood tie to coerce her, to flood her with desire. And for a stark, terrifying moment, the dark almost won the inner battle.
He wanted her. Feeling her now, that was all that could be allowed to matter. Again he had the bitter notion that he’d somehow earned her with all his unrelenting years of war, the years of loneliness and privation. On the heels of that thought he had the distinct awareness that she could be his for the simple taking.
His good hand slid into her hair, gripping it tightly. He closed his eyes, unable to lower his hand, but unable to look at her without giving in to that darker side of himself. What was it about her?
From the very first moment he saw her, almost twenty years earlier, when she was not much older than Allie, he’d felt something unusual, something alien to his being. And he’d spent years watching her grow, always just out of sight, ready to help, if he could, but always unseen, unnoticed. She’d been such an unusual child, adultlike and sophisticated on the one hand, and as giddy and happy-go-lucky as a pixie on the other.
He’d grieved with her at the loss of a childhood pet, the dog, Tippison, she’d loved so much, and had wrestled with the urge to comfort her when she lost her parents in her early college years. He’d tried telling himself he was both relieved and happy when she married Dave Stewart, but what he’d felt most was raw, unvarnished envy. He’d wanted to be Dave, wanted to be the one holding the young and lovely Jillian’s hand, wanted to be the one she gazed at with such adoration. And he’d ached to be the one she slept next to at night. He’d wanted to be the one who dried her tears, who told her she was beautiful, who might have loved her as David Stewart never could.
In all the other battles, he’d stayed in the background until the final moments. But this time, this final time, he’d been unable to resist the desire to be seen, the need to talk with her, touch her, hear her laugh, while looking into her blue eyes.
He’d spent these past two weeks, every waking moment of the days and most of the lonely nights, not acting, not doing anything but watching her, waiting, strangely content to simply work in her small gardens, knowing she lingered nearby. Often he’d sensed her eyes upon him, and felt curiously at peace, knowing she watched him. He’d often looked up from some inconsequential task to find her puzzled glance resting on him.
Perhaps he should tell her about the portals. Perhaps that would change the outcome, would allow her to have some slim possibility of survival.
He opened his mouth to do just that, then closed it again. What would he say? You carry the portals of other dimensions inside you. Even now they are opening. By the night of the autumnal equinox, you will have opened all five. And on that night I will use the portals, and so will another. As in duels of former times, we will battle. One of us will win, the other will cross through. But no one who has carried the portals has ever survived.
But this time, the war would be over, once and for all. And even Steven didn’t know what would transpire then. Ten thousand years of preparation for that moment, and he didn’t know what to anticipate as an outcome. Would he simply cease to be? Would he cross back over into his former existence?
Or would he, like Jillian, die?
No perfect moments for him. None but this, none but holding her, touching her. Wanting her.
A soft moan escaped her, and he realized he was still gripping her hair with what must be a painful intensity. He loosened his hand somewhat, but still couldn’t bring himself to release her.
“You are so beautiful,” he said. Even to him, his voice sounded rough, harsh with want.
Perhaps if he told her all, he would be able to coax her artist’s soul to see the portals for what they were, to persuade her to keep the portals sealed. Was that even possible?
He knew it wasn’t, and he understood that it was his want for her, this momentary, painful desire, that was driving him to even consider such things.
But if he told her the whole truth, then, at the very least, he might be able to prepare her for the coming battle. She was the innocent, not him. He knew what was at stake here. He knew the consequences; she didn’t. He should have told her the truth years and years ago, when she had still been a child and might have believed him, might have been open enough to listen to him. But he hadn’t, and now it was far too late, and he couldn’t think of her as only the carrier of the portals; she was a wholly desirable woman, too.
Had he gone insane? Had his too many years on earth made him more human than he’d ever suspected possible? For in her presence, he found himself craving her want of him, her need of him as wholly human. As if he were just any man, a man she would want to be with.
If only it were possible, he thought bitterly, his hand caressing her hair now, rolling it in his fingers, memorizing the silken texture.
But it wasn’t possible; he wasn’t just any man. If he were just anyone, the entire battle to be waged yet again would never happen, would never be important. And it was important. It was the single most important battle in the universe.
“Steven—?” she breathed. In pain? In want? He forced himself to relax his fingers still more, though he couldn’t go so far as to move away from her.
“I can’t do this,” she said, but didn’t step back. “I don’t know anything about you.” Her eyes begged for answers to questions she hadn’t voiced.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Who you are…many things.”
He couldn’t answer her without telling her everything, and that telling would take more than a few minutes standing over a sink of running water. And if he did tell her, she would run from him, order him away.
And he couldn’t go. Not now.
What could he tell her, anyway? I’m not a mortal being?
But that, too, would be a lie now. With her hair in his hand, her scent in his nostrils, he was all too human, and all too conscious of wishing to be even closer to her. And conscious of the end looming around the corner.
Why did this one woman seem so vastly different? What special magic did she possess that she made him feel as a man would feel, think as a man might, made him want things that only a man could have?
But he was a man, he told himself bitterly, however inhuman. He bled like a man, ached like one. Wanted this woman as any man would. Who could pinpoint the difference between all other men and himself? None but he. And it was his hell to know that, no matter how much he might seem the same, he wasn’t.
Her lashes fluttered against his skin as his long fingers drew a slow line down her cheek, her jaw. He felt her trembling, a soft infusion of reaction that no mortal could ever have detected. He wanted to stand beside her forever, feeling her confusion, her desire, her want, her fear. If only he could.
But he knew with utter certainty that the moment he took his hands from her the feelings would begin to fade, would ebb, and he would be left with only memory, and faint memory at that. He didn’t want to drop his hand, and yet he knew, with the weight of ten thousand years’ worth of knowledge, that he had to let this feeling go.
She—and he—would probably never understand how much it cost him to release her.
Seconds, he thought dazedly. He’d only been touching her for seconds.
It wasn’t fair, he thought with a dark, piercing ache, even as he lowered his hand. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought such a thing, but it seemed to him at this moment that it had become a primal scream of rage somewhere deep within him.
As he had known it would, the sensation of knowing her, the feeling that they were meant to be together, the idea that his body was wholly in tune with hers, slowly shifted, began to ebb, slipped into some distant place. But, puzzling him, startling him, the richness of feeling didn’t go away altogether, as it always had in the past.
Something of her lingered, like an elusive scent, or perhaps, more accurately, like the last coal in a fire, an ember, a flicker of life that could be extinguished in time or suddenly spark a conflagration. Was it because the end was so very near?
Drawing a shaky breath, he found that at least now he could think. And he could act. He could bend her now, or he could tell her the truth. With the blood tie in effect, she might believe him. With the look of confusion in her eyes, she might even want to.
“Your arm,” she murmured, as if grasping at a lifeline and not out of concern for his well-being.
“I’ll be all right,” he said, again telling her the truth, though he could see she didn’t understand.
She bent over his wound again, her soft auburn hair lightly brushing his bare shoulder. He could feel its silky warmth tickle his skin. He tilted his head slightly to take in the fragrance. It was, as he’d expected, filled with nuances of her day, her night.
“It’s not bleeding so badly now,” she said. “Maybe you’re right, but—”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, then added, “Trust me.”
She stilled then, and looked up, not quite meeting his gaze. That shadow he’d often seen in her eyes hovered there now. She was thinking about her dead husband, Allie’s father, the man he’d so often envied. Dave must have said similar words to her at one time, at any time, meaning them or not.
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