Man of Ice (15 page)

“You were angry because I watched,” she prompted, remembering how unduly enraged he’d been about that.

The color flared along his high cheekbones.

She saw the self-consciousness in his anger. Her hand reached up hesitantly and touched his cheek. He actually flinched.

Her whole body relaxed, forcing him to shift his weight so that he could take hers. She hung in his arms, her eyes quietly clinging to his, and her fingers went from his hard cheek down to the corner of his mouth and then lightly brushed the long lower lip.

“Why didn’t you want me to look?” she asked softly.

He didn’t speak. His breathing grew rough.

“For heaven’s sake, isn’t that what sex is all about?” she faltered. “I mean, isn’t the whole point of it to let go of inhibitions and restraints with another person?”

“Not for me,” he said flatly. “Not ever. I don’t lose myself with women.”

“No,” she agreed, studying him. She could almost see the answer. “No, the whole point of the thing is to make a woman lose all her inhibitions, to humble her so that she…”

“Stop it!”

He put her aside and got to his feet, his breathing unsteady. He rammed his hands into his pockets and paced to the window, viciously pulling the curtains aside.

She sat up on the bed, propped on her hands, staring at him as all of it jelled in her mind and brought a startling, shattering conclusion.

“That’s why you were so vicious to me in France,” she said. “You lost control.”

He drew in a breath. His fingers went white on the curtain.

“That hasn’t ever happened to you, not before, not with any woman,” she continued in a hushed tone, knowing it was the truth without a word from him. “And that’s why you hate me.”

His eyes closed. It was almost a relief to have it said, to have her know it. His broad shoulders slumped as if relieved of some monumental burden.

Barrie had to lie back against the pillows. She felt faint. He wasn’t admitting anything, but she knew all the same. She knew so much about him, so many things that she understood on a less conscious level. So why hadn’t she realized that it wasn’t Barrie he was punishing with his cutting words? It was himself, for losing command of his senses, for wanting her so desperately that he couldn’t hold back.

“But, why?” she continued. “Is it so terrible to want someone like that?”

The muscles in his jaw moved convulsively. “I came across them in the hall one day,” he said in a rough whisper. “She was teasing him, the way she always teased him, taunting him with her body and then drawing back. She did that to make him give in, to make him do what she wanted.”

“She?” she queried, puzzled.

He didn’t seem to hear her. “That day, she wanted him to trade cars. She had her heart set on a sports car, and he wasn’t ready to give up the luxury sedan he always drove. So she teased him and then told him she wouldn’t give in to him if he didn’t let her have her way.” He let out a cold breath. “He begged her.” His eyes closed. “He was crying like a little boy, begging, begging…! And in the end, he couldn’t contain it, and he pushed her against the wall and…”

He leaned his forehead against the cold glass, shivering with the memory. “She laughed at him. He was all but raping her, right there in full view of the whole damn household, and she was laughing that he couldn’t even make it to the bedroom.” He turned, his eyes blazing in a white face. “I got out before they saw me, and then I was sick. I actually threw up. You can’t imagine how I hated her.”

She was getting a horrible premonition. She’d seen her mother tease George Rutherford, but only with words. And once or twice, she’d heard her mother make some remark about him. But Barrie and her mother had never been close, and she’d spent as little time at home as she could manage, first at boarding school in Virginia and then at college. She made a point of staying out of her mother’s way and out of Dawson’s. So she’d known very little about her mother’s second marriage at all. Until now.

“It was…my mother,” she said in a ghostly tone.

“Your mother,” he said with contempt. “And my father. She treated him like some pitiful dog. And he let her!”

Her breathing was oddly loud in the sudden stillness of the room. She looked at Dawson and went white. Everything he felt, remembered, hated in all the world was in his eyes.

She understood. Finally it made some terrible sort of sense. She dropped her eyes to her lap. Poor Dawson, to have to witness something like that, to see the father he adored humiliated time and time again. No wonder he drew back from what he felt with Barrie. He didn’t want to be helpless, because he didn’t trust her not to treat him with the same contempt her mother had had for George Rutherford. He couldn’t know that she loved him too much to want to hurt him that way. And of course, he didn’t trust her, because he didn’t love her. His was nothing more than a helpless physical passion without rhyme or reason, a hated weakness that he couldn’t help. He looked at love as a woman’s weapon.

“I’m so sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know.”

“How could you not know what she was like? She was your mother!”

“She never wanted me,” she confessed stiffly, and it was the first time she’d ever talked about her mother to him, or to anyone else. Her face felt frozen. “She told me once that if abortion had been legal at the time, she’d never have had me in the first place.”

He was shocked. His heavy brows drew into a frown as he looked at her, sitting as stiff as a poker in the bed. “Good God.”

She shrugged. “My father loved me,” she recalled with determined pride.

“He died when you were very young, right?”

“Yes,” she said.

He didn’t even blink. “You were fifteen when she married my father.” His eyes narrowed. “How many men did she go through before she found him, Barrie?” he asked with sudden insight.

She bit her lip almost through, wincing at the pain.

“Stop biting your lips,” he muttered impatiently.

She smoothed her finger over it resignedly. “She had lovers, if that’s what you’re asking.” She glanced at him. “That’s why you thought I’d had them,” she realized.

He nodded. He moved to the bed and sat down in the chair beside it, fatigue in his face, in his eyes. “She was a bitch.”

“Yes,” she said, not offended. She searched his face, looking for weaknesses, but he was mending the wall already. “I know you loved your father.”

“I tried to,” he said shortly. “She came along just when he and I were beginning to understand each other. After that, he had no time for me. Not until he was dying.” He looked away. He didn’t want to talk about that.

She didn’t push. He’d already given away more than he’d meant to, she knew.

After a minute he took a quick breath and his pale eyes searched her thin face. “You’ve lost weight,” he remarked abruptly.

She managed a weak smile. “I started losing meals the day I left the ranch,” she confessed, and flushed as she remembered the circumstances.

“I couldn’t eat for the rest of the day,” he recalled. He stared at the floor. “I shouldn’t have let you go like that, without a word.”

“What could you have said?” she asked. “I felt used…”

“No!” He was really angry now. “Don’t you ever say anything like that to me again. Used! My God!”

“All right, cheap, then!” she countered, sweeping back an annoying strand of hair. “Isn’t that how you wanted me to feel?”

“No!”

She glared at him, her lower lip trembling with emotion.

He made a curt gesture with one big hand and his lips flattened. “Damn.” He leaned forward, his head bowed, his hands supporting it as he braced his elbows on his splayed thighs.

She picked at the bedspread nervously. “You only wanted to see if you were capable with a woman,” she muttered. “You said so.”

His hands covered his face and pushed back into his hair. “I had an orgasm,” he said roughly.

She recognized the resentment in the words even though she didn’t quite understand their content. “What?”

He looked up, glared up, at her. “Don’t you know what it is?”

She flushed. “I read books.”

“So do I,” he replied, “and until France and then that afternoon, that’s the only way I knew what it meant.”

“You’re in your mid-thirties,” she said pointedly.

“I’m repressed as hell!” he snapped back. “I never liked losing control, in any way at all with a woman, so I never permitted myself to feel anything…anything like that,” he added uncomfortably. His head bent. “I got by on little tastes of pleasure, now and again.”

What she was hearing shocked her. He was admitting, in a roundabout way, that he’d never been completely satisfied by a woman until he’d made love to Barrie.

“Oh.”

The husky little reply made his head lift. She didn’t look like a cat with the cream. She didn’t even look smug. She looked…

“You’re embarrassed,” he said unexpectedly.

She averted her eyes. “That’s nothing new, with you,” she muttered, and blushed even harder.

Her inhibition made him less irritable, and much less threatened. He watched her with open curiosity.

“Don’t stare at me,” she grumbled. “I’m not some sort of Victorian exhibit.”

“Aren’t you?” He leaned forward, with his arms crossed over his splayed thighs. His wavy gold hair fell roguishly onto his wide forehead, tangled from his restless fingers in it. He hadn’t remembered how soft her skin was, how radiant it was at close range. It had the sheen of a pink pearl. He’d bought her a string of them once, and balked at giving them to her. They were still in the safe back in Sheridan.

“Did you have one, too?” he asked suddenly.

Nine

S
HE
didn’t know how to answer that. She was intimidated and embarrassed.

He became more relaxed when he saw her expression. She still hadn’t smiled, or acted as if his fall from grace in her arms had made her want to gloat.

He leaned back and crossed his legs. “Well, well,” he murmured, his eyes narrowing. “What a blush. Are you embarrassed?” he added, emphasizing the word with a mocking smile.

“Yes.” She bit her lip. He got up and sat down beside her, his thumb forcing her teeth away from it. His hand spread onto her cheek, gentle and caressing while he studied her pale, pinched face.

“So am I,” he confessed unexpectedly. “But maybe the reason we’re embarrassed is because we’ve never talked about being intimate with each other.”

“You’ve already said quite enough,” she muttered stiffly.

He let out an odd, amused sound. “Miniskirts,” he mused, “silk hose, four boyfriends at a time, low-cut blouses. And it never occurred to me that it was all an act. You little prude.”

Her eyes flashed. “Look who’s calling who a prude!!” she raged at him.

His eyebrows went up. “Who, me?”

“Yes, you!” She took a shaky breath. “You gave me hell, shamed me, humiliated me, and all because I opened my eyes at the wrong time! I couldn’t really see you anyway,” she blurted out, “because what I was feeling was so sweet that—” She stopped in midsentence as she realized what she was admitting.

But if she was embarrassed, he wasn’t. His face changed as if by magic, his body became less taut.

He drew in a quiet breath. “Thank you,” he said huskily.

She didn’t recognize the expression on his handsome, darkly tanned face. “What for?”

His eyes dropped to his hands. “Making the memory bearable.”

“I don’t understand.”

He picked at his thumbnail. “I thought you watched because you wanted to enjoy seeing me helpless.”

Tears stung her eyes. She’d always thought of Dawson as invincible, stoic. This man was a stranger, someone who’d known pain and grief and humiliation. She wondered if what he’d let her know about him today was only the tip of the iceberg, if there were other painful memories that went back even farther in his life. Surely it had taken more than her mother’s taunts to George Rutherford to make Dawson so bitter about women and his own sexuality.

Hesitantly, she reached out and touched his hand, lightly, her cold fingers unsteady as she waited to see if she was allowed to touch him.

Apparently she was. His hand opened, his fingers curled warmly around hers and then linked slowly with them. He turned his head, searching her eyes.

“Couldn’t step on an ant, hmm?” he asked absently, and his eyes softened. “I don’t suppose you could. I remember you screaming when you saw a garter snake trapped under the wheelbarrow you were using in the flower beds, and then moving it so the poor thing could escape.”

She liked the way it felt to hold hands with him. “I don’t like snakes.”

“I know.”

Her fingers slowly moved against his and she lifted her eyes quickly to make sure that he didn’t mind.

His lips twitched with amusement. “You’re not very sure of yourself with me after all these years.”

She smiled briefly. “I’m never sure how you’re going to react,” she confessed.

He held her eyes. “Tell me what you felt when we made love in my study.”

She flushed. She tried to look away, but he wouldn’t let her avoid him.

“We’ve gone too far together for secrets,” he said. “We’re going to be married. I hurt you when I pulled back. How?”

She shook her head and dropped her eyes.

“Talk to me!”

She grimaced. “I can’t!”

There was a long pause. When she got the courage to look up, he was watching her with an expression she couldn’t analyze.

She felt his hand still holding hers. She looked at it, admiring the long, deeply tanned fingers wrapped in her own. Her hand looked very small in that powerful grasp.

“Reassure me, then,” he said quietly. “I hurt you. But it wasn’t all pain, was it?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “There was so much pleasure that I thought I might die of it. I opened my eyes and I saw you, but I felt just barely conscious. Then, you started to draw away and it had been so sweet that I wanted to stay that close to you, so I resisted…” She swallowed. “That’s when it started to hurt.”

His breath was audible. “You should have told me what you really wanted.”

“I couldn’t. You looked as if you hated me.”