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No, she wouldn't give him much time to regroup. She wanted to get down beneath those shields, find out what he was hiding there and maybe help him heal it.
"Ah, God," she closed her eyes, pressed her temple to the cool glass. Nothing more pathetic than a woman trying to heal a brooding man. The cliche of practically every mainstream romance, and something every woman who reached thirty knew almost never happened. Still, those romances sold millions for a reason. There was a germ of hope in them, the hope that, if they did kiss the frog, he really would turn into a prince. You just had to believe, Tinkerbell .
She left the living area and prowled the foyer some more. The Salernos obviously had money to spend on any type of art they wanted, and yet she saw no Van Gogh's or Picasso's. Everything she saw was an artist established in the past twenty-five years, talent poised on the brink of inevitable genius. On closer scrutiny, she detected another pattern in their choices. Love.
Not in the romance sense, which would likely have been of little interest to Mr. Salerno. No, these pieces reflected the raw soul of love that persisted through every torture the human mind could devise.
Lauren touched the sculpture before her with light fingertips. At a distance, it looked like the twisted trunk of a tree hit by lightning, a few jagged edged branches gnarled and jutting from its sides. But when the observer was close like she was, and could study its features, she discovered a sculpture of a man and woman intertwined. They could have been embracing or fighting; it depended on the angle at which one stood, but the overwhelming message was passionate devotion. There was nothing pretty about love, it seemed to scream, but there was nothing more necessary. There was nothing more vital than fighting your way into the soul of another and claiming it for your own.
Lauren smiled at her thought. The catch was, in order for you to claim the soul of another and be happy with the prize, you had to lay yourself just as bare to them. Her touch lingered on the rough-hewn part that was the shoulder of the woman figure, and then slipped away as she turned to wander further down the hall.
At the end, she had the choice of staircases, one going up, and one going down. The latter was where she presumed Marcus and Josh had gone. To her right was a pair of double doors of carved teakwood, rounded at the top to accommodate an elaborately molded archway. Lauren hesitated, then shrugged, turned the polished pewter handles and pushed the unlocked doors inward.
For a moment, she felt just like Julie Andrews.
It was a ballroom, the walls lined with tall arched windows providing a view out to the surrounding forest on two sides, the now turbulent ocean on the third. On the wall space between the openings were gilt paintings in Baroque style, biblical figures, angels in swirling robes, women and men in shimmering dress.
Three glass chandeliers hung from the domed ceiling, each probably weighing more than her Lexus. The floor was polished oak, inlaid with darker pieces to form a starburst design at the center. Chairs lined the wall; brocade and velvet cushioned of course, antiques with carved mahogany backs.
There was a silence to the room, a hush that she could close her eyes and easily imagine filled with the rustle of skirts, men's voices, the light chime of glasses, and a waltz playing in the background. Now that silence was punctuated by the strike of the rain against the windows.
Lauren moved to the center of the starburst and turned slowly, looking at every painting. She tilted her head to discover the ceiling that held those chandeliers was also painted with an array of angels and romantic figures.
When
she lowered her eyes, her neck screaming, her gaze landed on one other piece of furniture. Its face had been painted with a cadre of cherubs and positioned between two windows, camouflaged. A smile tugged at her lips and she went to it, pulling open the doors of the tall cabinet.
No need to import the orchestra when you had a state of the art surround sound system. She glanced around and up, but it took a few moments to locate the speakers. The ceiling and wall murals had been painted over their wire mesh faces, screening them so well that the Salernos probably had to keep a location diagram somewhere in case the stereo guys ever had to come in and work on one.
The entire room was a work of art. Lauren had no doubt that masters of the craft had created this fantasy. It was a room that begged for dancing, for music that would flood the room and transport the dancers to whatever mood or mode they chose to embrace. The room's style suggested a sweeping Wagner piece, a light Chopin waltz, or an elaborate Fred and Ginger number, but that wasn't really her style. She wondered what Josh's style would be. At the thought, her lip curved. Lord in Heaven, she was gone over the man.
She squatted in front of the CD player, and looked through the selections in the partition below it. Her finger alighted on a favorite, and a smile crept across her features. She decided she liked the Salernos.
She opened the player; laid her choice in it, and then keyed up the track she wanted, setting it for random choice after that. Then she turned up the volume.
The first hard guitar licks vibrated through the room up through the soles of her feet. She turned from the player as John Cougar Mellencamp began to expostulate about his days as a young boy.
She wasn't surprised to find him there, watching her from the arched doorway. Josh leaned against the frame, his arms crossed over his bare chest, his eye glinting with amusement. She twirled, shimmied toward him and back, put in a couple hip-hop moves, flashed a daring smile at him.
The beat picked up and offered the chance to be with a girl just like her.
She worked her way over to him and extended a hand. She wondered if he was one of those men who steadfastly avoided the dance floor, or who had learned just enough to clumsily guide a date through a few obligatory steps and increase his chances of getting laid. She got a quick answer.
He took her offered hand and yanked, spinning her in a tight turn that brought her up hard against him.
Before she could get a breath, or her fill of the way his body felt against hers, he twirled her back out again, moving them both into a smooth shag step. She missed her cue on the first round, but when he cycled back to the beginning, she was ready for him. She slid under his arm and flowed along his touch on her neck, as she turned outward, then came back to him again, so that both hands were clasped in his.
It might have been falling in lust up to this point, but at that moment her heart took a tumble in a little more serious direction. She felt the fall, the vertigo. The grin on his face, the sheer enjoyment of playing off each other, the ease with which they moved together. He moved into a Latin step and she was turned so her back was brought up against his front, her hips tucked into the angle of his. His palm pressed into her stomach, and her arm curled around his neck as he rocked and twisted them down and then back up again. She pressed her nose briefly against the warmth of his throat as Mellencamp invited her to sink her teeth in.
She spun out again, laughing, and then he had her by the waist facing him, revolving them around the room in an impromptu Fred and Ginger waltz at a beat that the couple themselves would have enjoyed if they had had Mellencamp's talent at their fingertips. She caught hold of his bicep for balance, and he gathered her closer, his hand dipping low on her back so she was firmly against him.
Lauren looked up into his face. His grin had faded at the corners, the curve of his mouth now more tense, underscored by something in his eyes that stopped her breath and elevated her heart higher than was warranted, even for such stimulating aerobic exercise.
His grip was gentle, but strong enough to tell her he had her captured if he was of a mind to hold her.
They were still moving together over the dance floor, the line of his thigh insinuated between both of hers as he switched back into the sensuous steps of the Latin dance, to the mean tempo that called for recklessness and sexual heat. To lyrics that insisted love could hurt in a way that would make you welcome the pain and ask for more.
The kiss was easy, a slight movement to put his lips on hers, but the fire swept through her like the churn of the electric guitars. Somehow, he kept moving, and the sinuous roll of his body against hers, the turn, the steady cradle of his palm against the side of her neck and back of her head, made her totally his for a moment, incapable of balance without him.
