Ultimate Weapon (McClouds & Friends #6)(157)

His grin went suddenly incandescent. “I could weep for joy to hear you say the word love for the first time. But for the fact that it would frighten you into fits if I did.”

“Frightened? Me? Hah.” She glared at him, but could not maintain the expression when he touched her face with his fingertip that way, as if she were a flower. Rare, precious, and delicate.

He leaned his forehead against hers, and the hot point of contact was so sweet, as intimate as a kiss but more oblique, more secret. She did not flinch away from it. She melted into it, softening.

He slid his hands down, over her shoulders, over her ribs, to the warm, bare skin of her waist, and then skimmed them upward, pulling the black T-shirt with them. Tam raised her arms, let him tug it over her head, pulling wisps of hair loose and dangling around her face.

She gazed at him, naked to the waist. “It’s not the first time,” she said. “I said the word once before.”

He froze. A muscle in his jaw pulsed. “After you drugged me? So it wasn’t just a dream?”

“No. It wasn’t a dream. I said it.” She shivered, feeling exposed. The pants hung low on her hips. He drew the drawstring bow loose, with a slow, deliberate pull. The soft, crumpled linen garment puddled around her feet, leaving her entirely naked. “And I meant it,” she finished in a whisper.

“Ah, Tamar,” he whispered back.

She flinched violently at the gentle touch of his hands spanning her waist. For a moment, it was just as she had feared it would be.

She cringed, her body going hard and tight with self-loathing at his touch. Still hearing that low, rasping voice, droning endlessly. Men don’t love women like you. They use them and discard them like the trash that they are.

But she closed her eyes and breathed. Covered his hands with her own, holding them motionless at her waist, and waited for a miracle.

Val himself was the miracle, a living, breathing miracle. His gentleness, his tender patience, melted her, healed her instantly.

The feeling bloomed from deep inside her, soft and sweet and intensely alive. Surprised, moved. Every moment a deeper revelation, a new level of tenderness, of longing. Her body was soft, hot, intensely sensitive. His every tiny touch burst like fireworks, tingling through her nerves. When he put his arms around her and pulled her against himself, an earthquake of accumulated tension shuddered through her.

He felt thinner, harder, his arms as tight and taut as piano wire. He vibrated with emotion, desire. He was rigid with the tension of holding back. Waiting for as long as she needed him to wait.

Amazingly, she felt safe in the circle of his arms. She pressed her face against him, breathed in his delicious scent. Listening to his heart, pounding strong and fast.

Safe. The feeling was so unfamiliar, it frightened her. To think that she could feel safe with him after all that had happened between them. All the ugliness, all the violence and betrayal.

“Why did you do that to me?” she blurted out and hid her face against his chest again. Afraid to hear the answer.

He stroked her hair, gripping her thick braid to tug her head back so she would look into his eyes again. “The video, you mean?”

She waited, eyes locked with his.

A long, careful sigh escaped him. “It was the deal I made with Novak,” he said. “Or rather, the deal he made with me. I was to deliver those videos to him every three days, and in return, he would refrain from carving a piece off of Imre while I watched on the videophone.”

She winced. “Oh, God.”

“I was desperate,” he said. “I hated myself for it, every time. I would never have chosen to do such a thing to anyone, let alone you. I am sorry. It’s over. Can we leave it behind? Can you forgive me?”

She nodded.

Val closed his eyes, sagging with evident relief. “He wanted me motivated,” he said. “He did not expect me to fall in love with you. Nor did I, though it happened before we even met.”

She glanced up, startled. “How could you—”

“I watched you and Rachel for ten days. That was enough for me,” he said forcefully. “You were so gentle with her, so patient. You were so strong. And bella maladetta. My wildest fantasy in flesh and blood. I did not even know that I had a fantasy woman. But you were—are her.”

He cupped her bottom and lifted her up onto the table. “My turn, now, Tamar. How could you do what you did to me?”

Her fingers tightened on his shoulders, then she remembered his wound and let go as if she’d been burned. “What are you referring to?”

“Ah, but where do I begin. The handcuffs, the drugs?” Anger hardened in his voice. “Running away while I was practically comatose? As if you did not care, as if there was nothing between us?”

The impulse to shove his accusation away from herself in anger was almost automatic, but she short-circuited it. She breathed, deep and slow, and swallowed the sharp words back.

They were no longer true, in any case, and she did not truly want to say them. It was just a reflex. A tic.

What she really wanted was for him to understand. She concentrated on the buttons of his black shirt, unbuttoning them one by one as she spoke to give her hands something to do, her eyes some place to rest.

“You know why,” she said fiercely. “I had to settle accounts with Stengl. He murdered my family, destroyed my village, my home. He killed my childhood, raped me, turned me into something that I was never meant to be. I’d been waiting my whole life for payback.”