But he’d had her in bed with him, half-naked, and he hadn’t even touched her. She flushed, recalling what he’d shown her, how aroused he’d been. Surely if it had been only physical, he’d never have hesitated. Of course, he’d been drinking...
She took the glass of champagne the stewardess offered and drained the glass. It made the hurt a little easier. She’d told Rourke no. Now she was going home to get married. She’d tell Ruy when he came home. He’d said he’d be away for three weeks. She’d tell him when he got back. He would be delighted. She’d help him regain his status in his community. She’d protect herself from being tempted to give in to Rourke’s hunger. It would benefit everyone.
The stewardess offered a refill. She accepted it. She drained the second glass. She was pleasantly numb. She didn’t drink, so the champagne affected her strongly. She closed her eyes, drifting away. Rourke wanted her, at last, at long last. But all he really wanted was one night in bed with her, after which he’d walk away and probably be just as abusive, just as taunting as he’d ever been in the past. Except this time he’d have real ammunition. He would be able to taunt her with giving in to him, if she was crazy enough to let him into her bed. She’d become what he’d always accused her of being.
Her heart jumped when she remembered what he’d said to her, while they were dancing and later, in his room. He knew she was innocent. But he’d known when they were dancing. How had he known?
She closed her eyes and let herself drift away. She was going home. She would marry Ruy. Rourke would return to Nairobi. She would be safe. Yes. Safe.
* * *
What she didn’t know was that a tall, blond man with a bloodshot pale brown eye was even at that moment buying a plane ticket to Manaus.
Clarisse took a cab to her small house, the one that her parents had bought so many years ago. She’d been staying at hotels when she was in the country, when she’d brought Peg Grange here, because the memories were too stark. But she had to face the past someday. The house was part of it.
She put down her suitcase and purse and walked into the living room. She’d replaced the couch where Rourke had almost seduced her eight years ago. But the memories were still there, so exciting, so hot, that she flushed just recalling them.
It had been Christmas Eve. She was seventeen years old. Rourke had been in Manaus on a job, and he came by to pay his respects to Clarisse’s parents. He and her father had been friends, despite the difference in their ages. Her parents and K. C. Kantor had been close since Clarisse was a child, playing with Rourke when her father was stationed in Kenya.
Rourke had teased her while they decorated the Christmas tree. She’d been wearing a slinky dress that her mother hadn’t approved of, but she knew Rourke was coming by the house and she’d wanted so much to look grown-up, to make him see her as a woman.
And he had. He’d looked and looked. While they spoke, while he teased her, while they put the ornaments on the tree.
Her father and sister had been doing last-minute shopping. Her mother had been home, but a neighbor had come by and asked her to step next door and look at a small child with a fever. Maria had been a nurse and she was still the last refuge of people with little money. Reluctantly, because she knew Rourke’s reputation, she’d let herself be talked into leaving the house.
Clarisse could still see the expression in Rourke’s brown eyes, because it was before he’d lost one of them, as the front door closed behind her mother. He’d moved toward her with intent, for the first time since she’d known how she felt about him.
Without a word, he’d lifted her off the floor in his strong arms and his mouth had settled with exquisite tenderness on her trembling lips.
He brushed them softly with his and smiled when she looked at him from wide blue eyes. “You’ve never done this,” he whispered.
She shook her head.
“Lucky, lucky me,” he whispered back, and bent again to her lips. “Don’t be afraid, Tat. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”
He’d spread her out on the couch while he unbuttoned the silk shirt he was wearing and pulled it out of his slacks. She watched him like a cat, with wide-eyed wonder.
He slipped out of his shoes and slid alongside her on the long leather couch.
“Mama,” she whispered worriedly. “She won’t be gone long...”
“I’ll hear her,” he promised.
While she was worrying, his big hands went to the wide straps that held up the dress and slid them with sensual mastery right down over her soft little breasts. She opened her mouth to protest and his mouth went down right on one breast and began to suckle it.
She had to bite her lip almost through to keep back the helpless cry of pleasure as she felt desire for the first time in her life. It was more than desire. She arched up to his lips, clutched at the back of his head, where the hair was thick, and tried to bring his mouth even closer. The suction increased suddenly and she threw back her head, arched her back and climaxed in his arms.
She cried then. It shocked her that she was abnormal. But Rourke had only laughed, softly, with pure delight, and comforted her. She loved him, he whispered, that was why. It made her extremely sensitive to his lovemaking.
Her eyes had opened wide as his body slowly overwhelmed hers. He let her feel the slow, building tension of his body, let her feel it swell against her flat belly. That, too, he whispered, was the most natural thing in the world. And how would she like to feel it inside her?
She flushed, but his mouth covered hers and she shivered, her legs parting as he moved between them, her voice breaking as she encouraged him. She felt his hands under her dress, moving the lacy little briefs down, touching her in a place and a way she’d never been touched in her life. And all the while, he fed on her breasts, working the hard crowns with his tongue. She was pleading then, begging him. His hand moved between them in a heated rush as he felt for the zipper and tugged at it with something like desperation...
And they’d heard the door open and her mother’s footsteps.
Barely in time, they were dressed and apparently putting decorations on the tree when she walked in. But Clarisse’s mother could see quite easily what had been going on. She hadn’t approved—that was obvious. She’d lectured her daughter after Rourke had left, minutes later, without a word to Clarisse or even a backward glance. That man, Maria said coldly, had a string of lovers, and he was not adding her precious chaste daughter to them! She would make sure of it.
Clarisse didn’t think of Rourke that way. Not until Rourke had been wounded soon afterward in a conflict that cost him his eye and almost his life. She’d flown to Nairobi and sat by his bedside for days, nursing him, forcing him to live, to cope with the loss of the eye. His reaction to her had been heartbreaking. He’d been ice-cold, withdrawn. He acted as if he hated her. The minute he was allowed to leave the hospital, he took an old girlfriend home with him and didn’t even thank Clarisse for being there when he needed her most.
But that was only the beginning. Later that year, he flatly refused her invitation to a party in Manuas. Even then, she didn’t get the idea. He stopped answering her letters and refused to pick up the phone if she was on the other end.
Not until the next time they met, at some fund-raiser in Washington, DC, when he was so cold and mocking about her behavior that she was certain he hated her. He called her an immoral little tramp who was any man’s. Nothing had ever hurt so much. He was the only man she’d ever been intimate with. Had her behavior with him made him think that she was