At the Edge of the Sun (Maggie Bennett 3)

“Are you going to kill me?” She asked the question calmly, almost casually. He didn’t even blink.

“Why should I do that, Maggie?” he replied in a soft, deadly voice. “I don’t like the sick little games you play, pretending I’m Pulaski, but it’s not as if it really matters in the long run.”

“It matters.”

“The hell it does.” For a moment the violence erupted, then died down once more. “I won’t deny that I like sleeping with you. For some reason you appeal to me, God knows why. It can’t be your sweet nature or charming personality. You’re self-centered, completely absorbed in your own grief and your own emotions, with just a little left over for your damned family. I admit I want you, but I know the difference between love and lust.”

“Do you?” She goaded him deliberately, wanting to see the eggshell-thin composure crack, wanting to see whether he could actually feel like other human beings.

For a long moment he stared at her. Moving slowly he picked up the handblown crystal water carafe that rested beside the bed and hurled it at the nearest wall. Then he caught her before she could run, his strong, merciless hands digging into her arms, and he shook her, hard, with all his repressed anger. His narrow, handsome face was no longer distant and mocking. It was twisted with rage and grief and despair, and Maggie felt her heart turn over inside her.

“You pushed me too far, Maggie,” he said, his voice raw. “I’ve put up with all I can take from you. I can’t spend another six years waiting for you, watching you fall into bed with the wrong men, watching you fall in love with someone else when it should be me. I can’t spend another six hours knowing that all you can think about is Pulaski, knowing that you don’t give a damn that I love you—”

The moment the words were out he stopped, and Maggie knew if he could call the words back he would. But it was too late. They hung in the air like an entity, shimmering between them.

“Damn,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment as a look of agony swept over his face. When he opened them it was gone, and there was nothing there, no emotion, no anger, just bleak emptiness. “I’ve had enough, Maggie,” he said wearily. “Do you hear me?” He shook her again, hard, and his fingers were like iron around her arms. “Do you?”

“What do you want from me, Randall?” she asked. She waited for him to say it, she needed to hear him say it. That he needed her to love him, to forget Mack and to love him.

But he’d pulled his mask on once again, and the flaming emotions were banked, still smoldering. He released her, moving away to stand by the window, and the moonlight reflected on the canal and illuminated his weary face. “Nothing, Maggie. Nothing you’re prepared to give.”

She stood there by the bed, not moving, not saying a word. It had been a long six years since she’d first met Randall, and had known joy, and agonizing sorrow with him. She’d loved Mack with all the passion she had in her, but Mack was dead. Now she belonged with Randall, from now on until he tired of her. But he wasn’t going to tire of her. He loved her as much as she loved him and it was now up to her to prove it to him.

Holly had watched the two of them move off down the hall, a worried expression on her face. She’d never seen Randall look quite so angry, nor Maggie so frightened. She hadn’t heard what Signor Tonetti had said, but apparently it had a galvanizing effect on both of them. Maybe she’d better go make sure they hadn’t killed each other. Maybe she’d be bunking with Maggie after all.

She stopped outside their door, listening. She could hear low, angry voices, but no sounds of violence. She reached out to knock, then pulled her hand back. They needed to work things out by themselves, they didn’t need baby sister to interfere.

Slowly she turned, heading back down the hall to her own room. She would have liked to have stayed at the Tonettis’ party—even if her Italian was almost nonexistent she would still be busy enough to forget about Ian. Alone in her room she’d have no choice but to brood, to worry, to long for him. Damn the man to hell!

The lamp was burning by her bed, making a small pool of light surrounded by shadows. Holly closed and locked the door, moving into the room, then stopping short as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.

She wasn’t going to be spending the night alone after all. Ian half sat, half lay in the chair beside the bed, sound asleep. He hadn’t shaved, he was still wearing those loathsome polyester clothes that apparently were de rigueur for a Venetian hit man, and he was snoring. He was the best damned Christmas present she’d ever gotten. With a salacious grin she advanced on him, eager to get to the unwrapping.

sixteen

The moonlight was filtering through the casement window, illuminating the drifting snowflakes, its unearthly glow mirrored in the dark canal water. It lit half of Randall’s face as he stood looking out the window, exposing painful defeat and repressed emotions.

“Randall,” she said, her voice low and husky, “I’m prepared to give you anything you want. But you have to ask for it.”

He didn’t move, he didn’t look at her. He spoke in a voice that was barely audible. “I want you to love me.”

Waves of emotion washed over Maggie. It was as if she’d been locked under a spell, and his words had released her. Randall the remote, the cynical, the invulnerable, needed her and Maggie, the giver, let go of the last of her doubts. She could fight her own dark desires, and she could fight his efforts at control. But she couldn’t fight his need, not when it was what she needed too.

She slipped out of her high-heeled sandals and walking away from the bed crossed the room to him, silently, her stockinged feet chilly on the drafty floor of the old palazzo. He still didn’t turn, but she knew that every cell in his taut body was aware of her approach. She stopped within inches of him, close enough to feel the burning heat of his body without touching him. A hundred memories danced through her mind, Randall seducing her, ministering to her, making lov

e to her until she was weak with a dizzy sort of relief. Always it had been Randall, setting the pace, calling the shots, making the moves, and she had accepted, sometimes passively, sometimes with enthusiasm, sometimes with grudging despair.

This time it was different. This time it wasn’t Maggie lost in a welter of a pain and fright. It wasn’t an almost virgin confused by desire in a factory apartment in Gemansk, an angry, aroused woman in a shack in the Eastern European countryside, a grief-stricken widow in a New York apartment. It wasn’t any of the women she’d been for him over the years. It wasn’t even a woman in a deserted palace who’d seen too much death in the hills of Lebanon.

It was a woman who’d finally accepted that she loved the wrong man, and there was nothing she could do but love him as well as she possibly could. And it was Randall who was lost.

She lifted her hands, sliding them under his jacket to the silk-covered skin beneath. He was rigid with tension, the muscles of his back knotted beneath her hands. She edged closer, so that her body was pressed against his, and she slipped the jacket down his arms, dropping it on the chair behind her. She turned him gently toward her and then she reached for his tie.

Memory brought her back to a similar scene, six months ago in her sister Kate’s apartment in Chicago. His hands shot up and caught hers in a painful grip, stopping her in the midst of unknotting the black silk tie, and his dark, tormented eyes blazed down into hers. “I said I wanted you to love me,” he said, his voice low and raw. “I didn’t say I wanted a sympathy roll in the hay.”

She didn’t move, her hands still beneath his, and she felt herself begin to withdraw inside herself. She smiled, a small, knowing smile. “You don’t know what you want, Randall,” she said. “In one sentence you say you need me, in the next you use your nasty tongue to drive me away.”

“Maggie,” he said, “I’m so damned tired of you hating me in the morning.” He dropped his hands, leaning back against the window frame, waiting for her to withdraw.