“I hate knowing you were hurt because of me,” she said in as calm a voice as she could manage.
“What do you think it does to me knowing that you could have been killed by that roof? What do you think it does to me knowing that I should have yanked you out of here the instant you called me in Seattle? What do you think it does to me when I see bruises on you and know I—”
Her fingertips on his mouth were light, but they cut off his words like a fist.
“I want Len’s killer, too,” she said. “Whatever happens to me along the way is my responsibility, not yours.”
Archer closed his eyes for an instant, not trusting himself to look at her without kissing her. If he kissed her, he wouldn’t stop until she was naked and wet and he was buried so deep in her heat that he would forget what it was like to be separate, cold.
“Hannah.”
The huskiness of his voice sent tongues of fire licking through her. It had been a long time since she had lain under a man, but she hadn’t forgot the glittery excitement, the hot rush, the rhythmic urgency of body against body.
“If you keep looking at me like that—” Archer began.
“Like what?” she cut in.
“Like you’re wondering what it would feel like to have me inside you.”
“Are you wondering?”
“I’ve been wondering for ten years.”
Her eyes widened. Ten years.
Len.
Memories broke over Hannah in a cold, endless wave, drowning her heat. She had been so sure of herself ten years ago, so certain that Len was right for her. And now she was standing a breath away from a man who was just as hard, just as ruthless as Len.
Len, who had been so wrong for her.
Len, who hadn’t cared when their child died at birth. He literally had not cared. Though she was so ill her baby died and she nearly did, he had dumped her in a hospital where no one spoke English and took off. As always, he was pursuing another hot rumor about a black pearl whose orient was all of God’s rainbows wrapped together.
God’s or the devil’s. She still wasn’t sure which. She no longer even cared. She had learned not to care. Just as she had learned not to risk any more unborn children to the whims of their careless father. She would never forgive herself for that. No punishment could be too great for such misjudgment, even the hell of living with Len McGarry.
In the instant before Hannah stepped back, Archer felt the change in her—resistance where there had been fluid ease, restraint where there had been hunger, distance where there had been heat. He let her slip between his hands like fire, because like fire, he couldn’t hold on to her without being burned.
“What did Len do to you?” he asked softly.
Eleven
For several heartbeats Archer thought Hannah wouldn’t answer.
And so did she.
Then she remembered the freedom she had discovered floating deep in the turquoise sea, and she wondered if she would ever find the courage of that freedom on land, face-to-face with the man she both feared and desired.
“Len taught me to be careful,” she said finally. “Very, very careful.” Her voice was ruthlessly neutral, concealing the stark female hunger and the much more complicated yearning that coiled just beneath. “Not a bad thing to learn.”
“There’s such a thing as being too careful.”
“Sure, I’ll bet you know all about it.” Her tone was sardonic. “Turn around so I can check the bruises on your spine, the ones you got by being so bloody careful.”
Despite Hannah’s brisk words, her hands were gentle as she turned Archer around. The simple heat of his body and the complex slide of his muscles beneath her palms made her wish that Len hadn’t taught her how necessary it was to protect her soft center beneath a harsh shell of experience. Touching Archer made her yearn for things she couldn’t name, only feel.
“I was careful ten years ago,” Archer said. “I’ve regretted it as I’ve regretted nothing else in my life.”
Hannah’s hands paused in their slow probing of his back. “What do you mean?”
He moved so that they were facing each other again. The feel of her fingers sliding on his bare skin did nothing to cool his blood. When she lifted them, he had to bite back a protest. The depth of his hunger for her would have shocked him, but right now he could feel nothing except his own heat, see nothing except her eyes shadowed by a past he couldn’t change.
Too late. Too damned late for everything except pain.
“Len and I had a complicated relationship,” Archer said evenly. “I didn’t know how complicated until it was too late.”
She frowned, not understanding.
He lifted his hand, wanting to smooth the lines between her shiny brown eyebrows. Yet he didn’t trust himself to touch her in even so casual a way.
And he touched her anyway, tracing the frown lines with a fingertip that was callused and gentle. Her eyes widened in surprise, but she didn’t pull back.
“I was raised,” he said quietly, “in a big family with love and shouting matches and laughing and hugs, grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, parents and brothers and sisters, dogs and cats and car pools. Len was raised by an unloving woman who began life as a calculating piece of ass and ended up as a bitter, alcoholic whore.”
Hannah listened with complete attention. She had often wondered about Len’s childhood. She had learned not to ask. She had learned so many things.
And Archer was teaching her other things now, with the gentleness of his touch despite the blunt woman-hunger that had tightened his whole body.
“When I found Len and told him who I was, he just stared at me,” Archer said. He brought up both hands, barely touching Hannah’s cheeks, tracing her sleek eyebrows with his thumbs. Her sudden breath brushed her breasts against his chest. He went still for an instant, then resumed the soft not-quite-caress of her eyebrows. “I told him that he was welcome in the Donovan household, that Dad had spent years looking for him.”
“What did Len say?”
“ ‘Too late, kid. Time only goes one way.’ ”
She winced. “That sounds like Len.”
“I tried to convince him to come home,” Archer said, looking at Hannah’s eyebrows, her dark chocolate eyelashes, the pink curve of her mouth. “He said he was already there.”
“Where was he?”
“In a hellhole in Kowloon.”
Her mouth thinned. The fever that had killed her pregnancy had begun in Kowloon. It had ended in another country.
And now it all seemed very far away, the world shrinking to one room, one man, the gritty depth of his voice and his eyes watching her as though he had just discovered life.
“I didn’t give up,” he said. “I’d been looking for Len too long. I couldn’t just let him go. He was a blond Viking like Kyle and Justin, with the Donovan smile, his way of looking over his shoulder, even his laugh. I couldn’t believe that Len wasn’t like the rest of my family.”
“Believe it,” Hannah said huskily. “He wasn’t. At least, for your sake, I hope he wasn’t.”
“Though he looked like us, Len was different. I know that now. Too late to help you.” Archer’s fingers trembled on Hannah’s face. “Way too late to change the pain. There was something bent or broken or missing or stunted in Len. Part of it was the way he was raised. Part of it was the sum total of all the choices he made when he was old enough to know better. The whys don’t matter anymore. What I learned too late does matter.”
Hannah watched Archer’s eyes change, felt him retreat from her even though he didn’t move an inch physically. The emotion beneath his neutral voice made her heart twist. She knew what it was like to bleed silently beneath the careful mask she showed the world.
“Too late,” he said, “I learned that Len resented me as much as he liked me. Instead of seeing us as a team, he saw us as locked in some kind of destructive competition. He was always playing all the angles to come out on top.”
r /> “He wanted to prove that he was the best man around,” she said.
For an instant Archer’s eyes shut, veiling the shaft of guilt and pain. “Is that what he said?”
“Not in so many words. But he used to taunt me for choosing the wrong man in Rio. If there was a wrong man in Rio, there must have been a right one. You.”
Wearily Archer swore beneath his breath and started to step back. The bathroom was too small for him to move. Hannah was too close, her hands over his, holding his palms against her cheeks. Holding him close. He felt as though he was absorbing her through his palms pressed against her skin. Her warmth and softness and strength went through him like a double shot of whiskey, making his blood ignite and his heart speed.
“That was another thing I learned too late,” Archer admitted huskily. “Len knew how much I wanted you before I admitted it to myself. You were so young, so vivid, so—”
“Stupid,” she cut in.
His smile flickered and vanished. He lifted her right hand and kissed the cool center of her palm. “You were innocent. That’s why I couldn’t admit I wanted you. So I had a hell of a shouting match with Len. I was going to send you to the Donovans. They would have taken care of you.”
The feel of Archer’s lips against her palm made Hannah light-headed. “I was nineteen. An adult.”
“You were raised with a Stone Age tribe. You weren’t ready for the tenth century, much less the twenty-first.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“It was worse.” Tenderly he bit the pad of flesh at the base of her thumb. The swift breaking of her breath went through him in a shock wave of desire. He hadn’t expected her to respond so quickly, so openly. Not after living with Len. “You’d never seen a flush toilet, never seen a sink, never seen a computer, never watched television, never flown in an airplane, never driven a car, never—”
“I remember better than you,” Hannah interrupted, hearing the huskiness of her own voice, knowing its sultry source, not caring. If she didn’t use her newly discovered freedom, it would become just another kind of cage, one filled with regrets and might-have-beens. “Anyway, my parents had a radio phone.”
He laughed softly and bit her again with great care. “For emergencies, right?”
She watched his teeth close on her flesh for a third time. Warmth flashed through her with an intensity that made her bones loosen. “Yes,” she whispered, though she had forgotten the question. Somehow she was so close to Archer now that she could feel his body heat, breathe in the salt and mystery of his scent, feel the stark reality and lure of his erection brushing against her with each deep breath.
“Ever use the radio phone?” he asked.
She shook her head, watching his eyes the whole time. If fog could burn, it would look like that, a hot silver glitter. “Technologically,” she said, “I was innocent. But in other ways, I wasn’t innocent at all. I knew more about life, death, and sheer human endurance than most technological types ever have to learn. I also knew about the other world, the civilized one out there beyond the rain forest, because Mother and Father kept telling me how evil it was, how decadent, how godless, how riven by greed and malice.”
Archer turned Hannah’s hand and began to taste each one of her fingers in turn. “Didn’t it scare you?”
“The outside world?” she managed, despite the vise of desire squeezing her throat. The velvet rasp and gentle suction of his tongue were a sensual revelation. The contrast between his neutral conversation and elemental sexuality made her dizzy. His control was utterly unexpected. Len would have had her on her back by now, driving toward his own satisfaction.
“Scare me?” Hannah repeated, her voice as raspy-sweet as Archer’s tongue. “No. The world beyond the rain forest fascinated me. A place where you could go thousands of miles in a few hours instead of a few miles in days. A place where every book ever written could be conjured up on a screen and read. A place where people looked like me, yearned like me, needed like me.”
He tasted her little finger, decided that he liked it best, and tasted it again, deeply, before slowly letting it slide free of his mouth. “What did you need?” he asked finally, looking at her, focusing only on her.
“I . . . ” Her breathing frayed as a shiver trembled through her body. She had never been looked at like that, as if she was the very center of life. “I don’t know. But I knew I wouldn’t find it in the rain forest.”
“Did you find it beyond the rain forest?”
She closed her eyes. “I grew up.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It has the same result.”
“Which is?”
“You stop looking.”
When Archer would have asked another question, Hannah put her fingers against his mouth. He kissed them and waited.
“Turn around,” she said in a low voice. “One of those bruises looked deep enough to need attention.”
Slowly he turned his back to her. Again he felt her cool, light fingers smoothing over his skin, probing gently, testing the bruises. He tried not to think how good it would feel to have her hands all over him. Not soothing him. Measuring him. Teasing and arousing, enjoying and demanding.
A decade of remembering her voice, her laughter, and her grace had been bad enough, but this was the most exquisite kind of torture he could imagine. Standing nearly naked, breathing in her cinnamon-and-sun scent, feeling her delicate touch on his skin, thinking what it would be like to pull her arms around him and kiss her until neither one of them could stand up . . .
He could barely breathe, barely think, only drown in a combination of lust and tenderness that was like nothing he had ever felt for a woman. Eyelids half lowered, aching and oddly at peace, he steeped himself in the moment. When her breath washed warmly down his spine, he couldn’t prevent a shiver of pure sensual pleasure. She was a dream he had never allowed himself to have, a warmth he had always needed and never known, the essence of everything he yearned for that had no name.
“Does that hurt?” she asked when he shivered again.
“Yes.”
Without stopping to think, she bent and brushed her lips over the bruised skin. “I’m sorry. When I asked you to come here and help me, I didn’t think you would be hurt. I thought you were too hard to ever be hurt.”
Slowly Archer turned around. “Don’t be sorry.” He eased his fingers into her wet, dark hair and tilted her face up. “It’s the best hurt I’ve ever felt.”
Hannah started to ask a question, but the words never formed. His mouth was brushing hers, his tongue was tracing her lips, and all she could think of was getting closer to him. Whispering his name, she stood on tiptoe, wrapped her arms around his neck, and buried her mouth in his.
With a thick sound of pleasure, Archer pulled Hannah hard against him and returned the kiss as deeply as she gave it. His teeth nipped at her tongue before his own tangled with it, teasing and tasting her until she had no thought but to get more of him, get it deeper, get it now. What she needed, a kiss couldn’t provide, no matter how hot and greedy the mating of mouths. Whimpering, demanding, she moved against him in a haze of hunger.
The bathing suits that had seemed so minimal were suddenly intolerable. He stripped her bikini top off, caressed her breasts, and tugged at the nipples. Helplessly she arched, pinning her hips against him, moving hungrily until the scent of her arousal infused the air. He breathed it in even as he pushed his hand beneath the bikini cloth that barely covered her soft, moist center. When his finger penetrated her, she cried out and silky heat spilled into his hand.
Hannah’s reckless response made Archer fight for breath and the self-control that he usually took for granted, the same control that was sliding away even as he reached for it, like her bikini bottom falling to the floor. She was so close, nearly his, caressing him with every glide and clench of her response to him. Unable to stop himself, he probed more deeply, pushing into the tight, slick satin of her body. Hidden muscles gripped,
begged, demanded.
She was more than ready for him. He could take her now, right now, filling her, ending the agony of always wanting what he couldn’t have. Yet he knew that she was off balance, frightened despite her courage, emotionally exhausted beneath her sexual hunger. Vulnerable.
And he had come to Australia to protect her.
With the last of his control, Archer pulled his mouth away from Hannah’s until there was just enough space to speak. “If you don’t want to finish this, tell me now.”
It took a moment for the words to get past her sensual daze. “I want you.”
“You’ve got me. But I don’t run around with a pocket full of condoms, because I’m too old to look at sex as a game. Unless you’re protected, we’re real close to making a baby right now.”
The thought of his own child teething and drooling on his knuckles aroused Archer as much as Hannah’s sultry feminine core rubbing against him. His hands contracted on her hips, lifting her against the erection that had outgrown his swimsuit. He fought against the climax pulsing at the base of his spine. He wanted to be inside her when he came. Naked. All the way naked. Naked as his tongue. He had never been like that with a woman in his entire life. He could only guess at how good it would feel.
“I’d like a baby, Hannah, but only if it’s what you want, too.”
Her eyes widened. The thought of having a baby had knocked her breath away, leaving her gasping. “I—I’m not—I haven’t—seven years—”
Archer wasn’t surprised that she had no handy means of birth control. Everything Kyle had discovered suggested that she hadn’t taken lovers. That was why she felt so tight when he pushed his finger into her sweet, hot center. So soft and yet so strong, so supple. She could take all of him and they both would know only a blinding pleasure.
“Your call,” he said huskily.
But he couldn’t help probing between her legs once more, tempting her with what she didn’t yet have. The hot, helpless rush of her response spilled over his hand. He gritted his teeth against a groan of need. Her hidden flesh clenched rhythmically around his finger. The sultry rain of her pleasure licked over him again, this time kissing the broad, bare head of his erection.