Jennifer Greene - Conquer the Memories

His lips pressed a kiss into the center of her palm. She closed her eyes for a moment, savoring the tender gesture, reminded of the loving they had shared all day. When her lashes fluttered open again, Craig was shifting to lean closer to her. Her palm stroked the wall of his chest.

“Craig?”

His eyes lifted to hers.

“Certain secrets you don’t have the right to keep,” she said gently. “And I think it’s way past time you told me what’s been bothering you.”

Sonia slowly shifted to a sitting position, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. For a moment, she stared into the dying driftwood fire, wondering why on earth it was so hard to ask one very simple question of a man she knew so well and loved and trusted so very much. Pride? Her eyes raised to Craig’s, to his still features and dark, brooding eyes. Pride mattered, yet one of them had to let loose of it or they’d never get past that silence. “You haven’t wanted to make love with me for some weeks,” she said quietly.

He expelled a suddenly restless breath. “There hasn’t been a time from the first moment I met you that I haven’t wanted to make love with you,” he denied roughly. “Sonia…”

“You satisfied my needs. Not your own.” Sonia brushed a trembling strand of hair from her cheek, looking down. “Someone very close to me taught me that satisfaction and intimacy aren’t at all the same thing. Intimacy,” she said quietly, “takes two. You’ve taught me that over four years of marriage, Craig.” She was not surprised when her husband suddenly lurched to a standing position and started kicking sand on the fire. He didn’t want to talk about it.

“I’ve thought it had something to do with Chicago,” Sonia probed gently. “I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure of that, except that you’ve obviously changed since then. Doing very silly things like assuming I needed George to help me pick out my lingerie. Like paying someone to find some stupid kid a zillion miles away who can’t possibly touch us again.” She added softly, “Hear me?”

“Let’s go back to the boat,” he said swiftly.

Reluctantly, she rose, dusting the sand from the seat of her jeans. Her eyes never left Craig, as he finished packing up their dinner debris and carting it over to the dinghy. In very few minutes, Craig was dragging the little boat into the water.

She didn’t have much choice but to hustle over to it. Her toes splashed in the cool, frothing surf as she helped him tug the boat farther out. In knee-deep water, the little boat was finally free floating, and Craig held it steady while she climbed in.

She studied his profile as he got in after her. His features were all stark silver and dark hollows by moonlight, his eyes unreadable, the emotions on his face stubbornly hidden in shadows.

“Let me row,” she suggested.

“I don’t mind.”

“Really, I’d like to.”

He handed her the oars, a terrible mistake on his part. Sonia swiftly rowed away from the shore and into deeper waters. Secured in their oarlocks, the wooden paddles were easy enough to maneuver. When their dinghy was far out in the cove, she abruptly raised the dripping oars and swung them into the boat.

“Sonia.”

“There happen to be two of us in this marriage,” she reminded him. She said it gently, but she was tempted to unlock the oars and toss them overboard. In time, he’d talk. Or they’d starve somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

The moon shone down on the cove; the water reflected a sudden slash of a smile on his face brought on by the fire in her eyes. “I love you,” he said softly.

The tone was warm enough to melt steel. She could have killed him. He knew damn well she wasn’t steel.

“I love you, too,” she said with equal fervor, and reached for the starboard oarlock.

Startled, his hand snatched at hers just before she’d freed the oar to go drifting to Timbuktu. “Dammit.” He took a breath, staring at her. One by one, he pried her fingers from the oar. “God, you’re stubborn,” he remarked.

She was silent. They stared at each other, and Sonia felt a certain sadness. She couldn’t think of a time they’d pitted their equally strong wills against each other. They’d never had to before. That Craig’s was often the stronger she already knew. Unfortunately, he knew her very little if he didn’t recognize she was fully capable of digging in her heels when life called for it.

The oars flopped noisily inside the boat as he set them down. He leaned back, his arms stretched out along the wooden gunwales of the boat. His eyes never once left hers. “When you break a vow,” he finally said quietly, “it isn’t an easy thing to mend again.”

“You have never broken a promise to me,” she said fiercely.

He shook his head. “Dammit, don’t defend me.”

The boat was adrift; neither one of them seemed to notice or care. A dark night greeted them, waters that stretched in endless darkness, and Sonia waited, so very angry with him that she was hurting with it. Talk to me, she wanted to cry, and instead she waited longer.

“That love, honor and cherish vow. The part about the cherish,” Craig clipped out. “Corny stuff, Sonia. Only I was raised on just that corny stuff. I was raised to believe that a man keeps what he has by protecting it, by guarding it. You fight to get what you want, and then you fight to keep it.” His voice abruptly softened. “You happen to be a most precious part of me, Sonia. And the problem was never what you expected of me but what I expected of myself.”

Confused, she stared at his stark features.

“I exposed you to danger. You could have been-”

“No.” Her tone was swift and sure.

“Yes. I hurt you. No one else. Not some fool with stringy blond hair, not some gang of hoodlums. I did it. I broke my vow to protect you…”

She took up the oars, too shaken to sit still. The wooden paddles sliced neatly through the waters, and she ached inside, feeling the strain on the muscles in her shoulders, feeling the pain of the man across from her.

He was so very foolish, her lover. He was a man to the core, a capital M man. How on earth could he ever have doubted it? “That’s why,” she asked quietly, “you didn’t want to make love to me?”

“I kept seeing the bastard’s face…” Craig roughly shifted forward, grabbing the oars. “Whenever I touched you, I saw his face, and then yours, vulnerable and terrified. We were all but making love when it happened, in that park. The only thing on my mind at that time was getting you in bed. Maybe if I’d spent a minute less time selfishly obsessed with my own needs-”

“You think you were the only one too busy fooling around to see anything else?” Sonia whispered.

Craig said nothing.

“I was the one who insisted we shake off our bodyguard, as I remember. Not you.”

He still said nothing.

Her jaw firmed, and her voice was suddenly threaded with urgency. “There is nothing to blame yourself for, dammit. We both shook that idiotic shadow, and we both chose to neck in the park. Whatever went wrong, we share that responsibility. For that matter, I never expected or wanted you to be some kind of macho wrestler, you fool. There were five men in that gang of muggers, Craig! The worst part of the whole thing for me wasn’t those goons, but seeing you unconscious in the grass. I thought…” Her voice broke.

He couldn’t stand the aching threat of tears in her voice. “You can continue shouting at me,” he remarked gravely, “but if you don’t sit down, you’re going to tip over the boat.”

“I don’t care.” But she sank back down on the seat with a reluctant smile. The beast. If he’d done anything but tease her, she would undoubtedly have burst out crying.

“I don’t have the least idea where we are,” he continued mildly.

“Neither do I.”

“And I don’t see any point in continuing to argue when we’d both rather go back to the yacht and make love.” Craig shifted forward, planted a shaky kiss on her lips and then put both her hands on the oars. “You row, woman. I have every reason to want to save my strength. You’ve already exhausted me twice today.”

Sonia dragged one oar in an arc through the water until the dinghy was turned around and headed back for their cruiser. She leaned toward Craig with the forward motions and away from him as she brought the oars back. Amazing how such action echoed other, more sensual rhythms.

Her eyes rested on Craig’s face, studying him pensively. He was leaned back, studying her with equal intensity, a very stark, very male, very hungry sexual promise in his eyes. He was very clearly through talking. He was willing to communicate further about the past lonely weeks, but in other ways.

The ache in her lower body said she’d already been well loved that day. She didn’t need sex. She did, however, need to see that look in his eyes again. She needed that sweet, monumental relief of knowing they’d talked, that there had never been anything so terribly wrong that they couldn’t solve it together.

Dip and pull, dip and pull. Craig motioned his willingness to take the oars; she shook her head.

A kind of silence gripped her, deep inside, absorbing what he’d tried to tell her. Not the words, but the guilt behind them. That he’d blamed himself for wanting her too damn much on a very still, very seductive night in Chicago…that he’d linked that to his right to make love to her…that he’d suffered through a very masculine feeling of failure to protect her-how could she not have known?

Dip and pull, dip and pull. Always, the man had bolstered and encouraged and abetted every feminine instinct in her. She felt secure about herself as a woman because of him. It had never occurred to her that Craig could possibly doubt himself as a man, or that she could have been so totally oblivious to how important that male role was in their relationship. To him.