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When she woke up it was pitch-dark, and she was sweating and trembling violently from a familiar nightmare, her throat dry and raw, her legs cramping as if she had been running too fast for too long. Except for her shoes she was still fully dressed and her twisted clothes stuck clammily to her skin as she fought free of the light blanket that had been placed over her as she slept.
She groped her way off the bed, her heart hammering as she tried to orientate herself in the smothering darkness. She knocked against something with sharp edges and cried out as she fell and suddenly Duncan was there, picking her up and setting her back on her unsteady feet.
‘Kalera? Are you all right? I heard you shouting something.’
‘I…woke up,’ she said stupidly, her heart easing its frantic beat as she recognised the harsh, rasping tone. She stepped away from his touch. ‘I—for a moment I didn’t know where I was. Wh-what time is it?’
‘Late.’ There was a whisper of sound and a wall-light clicked on, and she found herself blinking at a dishevelled-looking Duncan, his jaw roughened with dark whiskers, his hair lightly matted on one side of his head, a faint pink crease-mark impressed on his hard cheek. A short black towelling robe was insecurely belted at his waist, the sagging lapels revealing a silky swatch of dark hair curling across his deep chest.
‘Too late for you to bother going home.’ His voice was blurred around the edges with sleep but his eyes were sharp and alert as he watched her fold her arms around her waist in an unconscious gesture of self-protection, her gaze jerking away from his bared chest. ‘When you didn’t wake up for dinner I thought you’d probably sleep through until the morning.’
Her ar
ms tightened about her waist as she looked enviously at the bed, wishing that oblivion were as easy as he made it sound. She rarely had an unbroken night’s sleep these days.
‘You may as well go back to bed for what’s left of the night,’ he added softly, persuasively. ‘My room is just across the hall if you need me—near enough to hear you call out. You know nothing can happen to you here.’
Her tautly strung nerves quivered. Didn’t he realise that it was when you felt most safe that you were most vulnerable? Innocent places and activities could harbour a danger all the more horrific for being so unexpected.
When Kalera didn’t answer immediately, his voice roughened. ‘Do you want me to get dressed and get the car out?’
He would do it, too, if she said yes. He made her feel both guilty and foolish with the gruff offer. She couldn’t be so churlish as to accept.
‘No.’ It came out as a husky whisper and she tried again. ‘No, you don’t have to do that…but I—’ Her hands plucked distastefully at her crumpled grey suit and high-necked maroon blouse, more suited to an air-conditioned office than a warm spring night. ‘I feel so hot and sticky—I’m not used to sleeping in my clothes…I suppose that’s what woke me up.’
He didn’t point out that people didn’t usually wake up screaming from the heat.
‘There’s a bathroom next door; a warm shower might make it easier for you to get back to sleep. I always have one before I go to bed.’ And before she could begin to feel uneasy at the thought of taking her clothes off in his domain Duncan yawned hugely, stretching his arms so that his robe sagged even more, sliding off one sleek, muscled shoulder. ‘I put a clean towel and some things in there for you earlier. Meantime you won’t mind if I turn in…I’m definitely not very scintillating company this early in the morning. G’night, Kalera.’
He turned and shuffled out of the room in a manner that suggested his brain had already checked the close-box on the window of his consciousness.
The ‘things’ he had left in the bathroom were neatly arranged on the top of a folded bath sheet, hand-towel and face-cloth—shampoo and a fragrant feminine soap pristine in its wrapper, a toothbrush still in its packet and a black silk pyjama top with a monogrammed ‘R’ on the pocket.
Kalera used the toothbrush and then, ignoring the shampoo, wrapped her hair in the hand-towel while she stood under the warm, pulsing water. The clear red soap slicked over her smooth skin, the bubbles bursting in a strawberry-scented flurry that made her sharply aware of how long it was since she had bought anything but utilitarian supermarket toiletries. Since Harry died she had avoided anything that served to emphasise her femininity. To want to feel attractive or sexy seemed a betrayal of their love.
She lifted her face to the spray, helpless to prevent the insidiously arousing memories that were suddenly swirling around her, like the rising steam in the small glass cubicle. Harry had loved to join her in the shower. Her dear staid, stodgy husband had been a secret sensualist and anything but stodgy in his lovemaking. It was through his unashamed delight in the physical side of their relationship that Kalera had learned to revel in her own deeply sensual nature.
From the time she was old enough to realise what her parents’ ‘open marriage’ really meant she had nurtured a strong distaste for casual promiscuity. Unlike the rest of her schoolfriends’ parents, Kris and Silver Donovan had expected their daughter openly to indulge her adolescent sexual curiosity and had been bewildered when she’d shown no interest in exercising her freedom. But Kalera had yearned for a conventional morality where sex was cherished as something special—personal and private between two people, not just another physical appetite to be satisfied with whomever happened to be convenient and willing. She’d been wary of the strong passions that seethed through her maturing body, repressing her sexual urges out of fear that she was destined to roam in her intemperate mother’s footsteps.
It was Harry who had freed her from her inhibitions. He had shown her that enjoying sex with the man she loved didn’t mean she had a predisposition for promiscuity, that it was possible to be wild and out of control in bed and still be utterly faithful out of it. After Harry she had never looked at another man, never been tempted, not even in her fantasies.
As her hands moved over her soapy skin Kalera ached for her husband’s slow touch, for the obliterating pleasure that could block out everything but the moment. She missed the physical side of their relationship with a fierceness that shocked and dismayed her—it seemed so selfish to be dwelling on what she had lost, when it was Harry who had lost everything…
Her eyes closed as her palms glided up over her slim hips and supple waist and cupped her firm, high breasts, shaping them with yearning fingers. She imagined that she had Harry back, that he was right there behind her, that they were his hands slipping and sliding erotically over the slick, wet hills and valleys of her flesh…
She groaned, the involuntary sound jolting her out of her forbidden fantasy into a horrified awareness of what she was doing. Her hands shook as she hurriedly turned off the shower and grabbed the fluffy bath sheet, quickly towelling the moisture off her tingling skin.
Her whole body felt tight and hot and achy, and a treacherous weakness trembled in her limbs. Avoiding her image in the steamy mirror, she unwrapped the towel from her head and shook out the loose pins from her sagging hairstyle, raking her fingers through the tangles. She shrugged into the pyjama jacket, shivering as the cool silk settled against her sensitised skin, and rolled up the too long sleeves, but when it came to the elegantly small buttons the fine tremor in her fingers made her so clumsy that she gave up, wrapping the slithery fabric across her front and folding her arms under her breasts to keep it in place. The jacket, designed to be roomy on a tall, muscular male, swamped her in loose folds to below her knees—like a black shroud, she thought with sudden revulsion.
From outside in the quiet street came several short, sharp reports as a cranky car sputtered past with a backfiring engine. The small explosions echoed like gunshots in Kalera’s overwrought mind and her mouth flooded with the metallic taste of terror as she was catapaulted back into her worst nightmare.
Half crouching in an instinctive effort to make herself as small and insignificant a target as possible, she darted blindly for sanctuary. The door to Duncan’s bedroom was ajar but the interior was dark and silent and she faltered, her ears straining for the reassuring sound of his presence, but she was unable to distinguish anything over the violent pounding of her pulse.
He had promised he would be there if she needed him. He had to be there! Her panic-stricken sense of disorientation was fading, but fear clogged like pack-ice in her veins as logic battled with her unreasoning dread of abandonment. If Duncan was only asleep, surely she should be able to hear the sound of his breathing? Oh, God! Even young, apparently healthy people sometimes died of heart attacks, or suddenly, in their sleep, for no reason…
She pushed the door wide, the muted light from the hall projecting her blurry shadow across the pale carpet as she crept into the room. She could see a motionless lump in the centre of the wide bed and a thready whimper escaped her lips, her heart stopped momentarily, only to resume its frantic beat as Duncan abruptly reared up on one elbow, his reactive speed indicating that he had been lying there awake in the dark.
‘Kalera? What’s wrong?’
