Heart of the Outback (15 page)

Stacey seemed endlessly curious about the facts of life, and they had several frank discussions on the subject. Not exactly mother talk, Alida thought ruefully, but Stacey obviously didn’t want another mother. Perhaps she had decided that stepmothers were something quite different.

Deborah Hargreaves’ easy acceptance of the situation was another bonus as far as Alida was concerned. Not only did Gareth’s sister insist on organising the wedding for them, but she warmly extended her friendship to Alida, often coming to visit her in the morning, armed with cryptic crossword puzzles that she said Alida could help her with.

In actual fact, the accident had been quite fortuitous in settling a number of potential problems. The way their marriage would work now had more reassuring substance to it with the sorting out of other relationships. As well, Alida no longer felt quite so threatened by the memory of Kate Morgan. She felt more confident of handling whatever came, once she regained her sight.

The day of the unveiling finally arrived. Alida did her best to hide her inner tension. Gareth was beside her, chatting to the eye specialist and his associate as the bandages were removed. No one seemed to nurse any doubt that the operation could have been anything but a complete success. The pads from her eyelids were gently lifted away, the last constriction to her seeing again.

“Now open your eyes,” the specialist instructed.

She did.

But there was no light.

“I can’t…” she started, then choked on the panic welling up in her.

“Patience, Miss Rose. It will take a few moments for your eyes to become acclimatised to light again.”

The few moments stretched into many more with no result. Please, please, Alida prayed wildly, desperately. This couldn’t happen to her. Hadn’t she suffered enough? Where was the reward for all the pain? She was going to marry Gareth tomorrow. She needed to see.

But her prayers weren’t answered.

“No. There’s nothing,” she forced out after an aeon of anguished waiting. “No light. Nothing but the same… the same darkness.”

And then began the darkest hour of all, the agonisingly slow examination, eyes right, eyes left, look up, look down, stare straight ahead. The humming and hawing. A slower recovery than expected. Perhaps in more time. These things took time.

The specialist and his associate kept on talking to each other. They talked to Gareth, who was asking questions. Alida stopped listening. What they said didn’t matter any more.

She was blind. And no one knew when, if ever, her sight would come back. That was what Alida had to face. And it changed the darkness to the blackest of black despairs because nothing could ever be truly right now. Her mind ticked relentlessly over the stark truths that jagged through her churning emotions.

Marriage to Gareth was unthinkable. To be a handicapped wife, like Kate, totally dependent on Gareth. Alida couldn’t do it. He didn’t love her as he had loved Stacey’s mother. The future ahead of them was not the future either of them had had in mind when their marriage was agreed upon. She had to release Gareth from his commitment to her, cancel the wedding.

And then what?

Her career as a designer was finished. She couldn’t see to sketch anything. Or to choose colour. Was she never to see colour again? Merciful heaven! What was to become of her? A whole future of this dreadful darkness?

Alida fought down the sickening panic. She couldn’t afford to dissolve into a quivering mess. There were things she had to do and say. Pride insisted that Gareth be shown she was capable of standing on her own, no matter what. Somehow she would reshape her life and make something out of it when she learned to cope with this terrifying disability.

The specialist and his associate took their leave of her, mouthing their optimistic platitudes. Alida thanked them. Undoubtedly they had done their best for her. It wasn’t their fault she was blind.

She heard the door open and shut as Gareth ushered them out of her room. He came back, crouched down beside her, took her hands in his, gently rubbed them. He inhaled a deep breath, then slowly released it.

“Alida,” he said quietly, “I know this must be a crushing disappointment for you.”

“Don’t go on, Gareth.” She couldn’t bear it. She knew what she had to do and it was best done now. She forced a calm decisive tone into her voice. “I appreciate very much, all your kindness and consideration. The way you’ve taken care of everything for me since the accident—”

“Alida…”

“No!” She drew a hand from his gentle grasp and lifted it to where his face had to be. Her fingers fumbled over his lips. “Please listen to me.”

“Whatever you want,” he said huskily.

She swallowed hard. Her mind dictated the words and her mouth delivered them as ordered. “I can’t marry you, Gareth. So all this, all you’ve been doing has to stop. You can still be a father to Andy. Perhaps it’s best if you have him most of the time. At least until I learn to manage.”

“No.” An explosive negative.

She lost touch with him. He must be shaking his head, Alida thought. His fingers gripped her hand more tightly.

“We’re getting married. You gave me your word, Alida. The wedding is all arranged for tomorrow. We are getting married,” he repeated with hard decisiveness.

“You can’t want it. I won’t do it,” she cried in protest.

“Why not?” he demanded.

“Because it’s wrong.”

“In what way?”

Why was he making this so difficult for her? Why was he hammering at her like this? He couldn’t possibly want to be married to her now. He could only be insisting out of some stupid sense of honour. Dear God! She knew all about internal haemorrhaging. Her heart was bleeding as she forced herself to deny him for his own sake. Every word was killing her.

“You know I can’t be the kind of wife you should have, Gareth. You’ve already been through one marriage with a handicapped woman. You understand all the stress it involved. To load yourself down with a blind-“

“You won’t stay blind, Alida,” he argued fiercely.

“What if I do?”

“Then we adjust to it. There are many people without their sight who lead full lives—”

“Gareth, do you hear what I’m saying?” she cut in desperately. “You don’t need me. You can have Andy.

I’ll only be a burden to you. I’ve never been a burden to anyone before. I don’t want that. I’d hate it.”

“I want to take care of you, Alida.” His voice vibrated with deep passion.

“That’s guilt talking, Gareth. You think you have to do right by me. Because of Stacey and Andy, and maybe because of what happened in the past. That’s part of why you gave me this ring.”

She slipped her hands from his and started to tug off his token of commitment.

“No!” His fingers crushed hers, making removal of the emerald ring impossible. “What the hell kind of man do you think I am, Alida?” he rasped. “I don’t turn my back on adversity.”

“I know. But that’s not the point,” she cried plaintively.

“What is the point?”

“My being blind. It was an accident. Simply an accident. You don’t have to pay for it. And I won’t let you.”

“Alida, what I do is my choice. Not yours.”

“I know how you feel. Can’t you understand that?” she pleaded. “You said you didn’t want to live the rest of your life with guilt. You said—”

“Whatever I said doesn’t apply to this situation,” he insisted, his voice beating at her from above as he straightened.

“You have to see…”

He grasped her other hand and pulled her out of the chair, enfolding her in a tight embrace. “I want you,” he said thickly. “That’s what I see. That’s what I know. That’s what I understand. I want you, Alida. And every day that passes, I want you more.”

He swept warm soft kisses around her temples, closed her eyes with kisses. Alida stood helpless in his embrace, trembling with the warring forces of her need for him and the despair of having to reject that need.

Gareth lifted her hands to his shoulders. She slid them down, meaning to press away from him. Her fingers instinctively lingered over the strong muscles so clearly defined under the thin fabric of his shirt. Her palm came to rest over his heart, and it was as though the quick heavy beat swept into her bloodstream, bonding her life force to his.

“Gareth.” His name was whispered from her lips in a moan of tortured longing. “You must let me go.”

His mouth covered hers, rendering such words powerless with a sweet, seductive sensuality that Alida found impossible to fight. It was entrancing in its tenderness, as though Gareth felt more than desire for her. Compassion, perhaps.

She shouldn’t have responded, yet somehow she couldn’t help herself, and the soft movement of her lips under his was quickly possessed by Gareth who used every tantalising incitement to draw her with him into the wild passion that drowned out everything else. He sapped her will with a deep, enervating persuasion that demanded she acknowledge one reality—him— and his desire for her, no matter how wrong it was.

As his mouth took hers into a drowning well of sensation, his hands made love to her, moulding her body to the desire coursing through his, allowing her no respite from the yearning within, feeding it with his touch, with the feel of him wanting her, needing her.

When he started to undress her, Alida had a pang of awareness of where they were. “You can’t!” she moaned. “Anyone could come in.”

“Damn them all!” he muttered. “I put a Don’t Disturb sign on the door.”

His mouth burned a trail of kisses down her throat, choking off any further speech. The intensity of his desire for her pulsed through Alida in melting waves. Forced by her blindness into an inner world of feeling, everything seemed more intense. She could not see the expression on Gareth’s face, could not see what was reflected in his eyes, but what emanated from his mouth and hands and body was an overwhelming hunger for all of her.

He undressed her slowly, seemingly intent on savouring to the full every part of her feminity. He kissed and caressed her as though luxuriating in the feel of her skin, the taste of her flesh, as though he couldn’t bear not to know, not to experience everything about her, and she had the sense of him feasting on the tremors of pleasure that rippled through her body under the enthralling excitement of his touch.

He lifted her onto the bed. She heard the discarding of his clothes and quivered in anticipation for what was to follow. I’ll have this to remember, she thought, excusing the weakness that craved this last time with him.

His fingertips feathered over the soles of her feet, trailed exquisitely up the calves of her legs, stroked her inner thighs. The bed was depressed under his weight. She reached for him, but he eluded the embrace she offered. She felt the warmth of his breath on her thighs, experienced a shock of incredible sensation as his mouth grazed over the most intimate part of her, delicately caressing in the sweetest of all tortures.

“Gareth.” His name scraped from her throat in a grown of ecstatic despair. If only he could be hers forever. If only this could go on for eternity. If only they had met and loved in some other life where nothing came between them, as nothing did now.

He slid his body up over hers and she hugged him tightly to her, so tightly she felt the strained tautness of his muscles. His flesh was warm and strong and sleekly beautiful. She wanted to melt into him. She found his mouth and kissed him with all the primitive fervour in her soul and heart and body.

He lifted her to meet the power of his need and she welcomed the full thrust of him inside her, revelling in the sense of belonging together, sighing with the wondrous fulfilment of having him sharing an inner world that needed no vision.

He stayed still for several piercingly sweet moments, as though he, too, was savouring the feeling of completeness with her. “Alida,” he breathed, and to her ears it sounded like a reverberating echo of her own glorious satisfaction.

He moved slowly at first, as though entranced by every minute sensation. She heard the quivering catch in his breath each time he drew back to plunge again, deeper and deeper as she opened for him and closed around him.

“Alida.” Husky emotion, something beyond want and need like disbelieving wonder.

She let her hands and body speak their language of love, knowing that she could not say any words. The freedom of her response to him was the gift of her love, unleashed from the chains of a reality that made any future together impossible. For this time—this precious hour—the only reality was the blissful fusion of his body with hers.

Alida didn’t want to think. She clung to the mindless sense of simply being with Gareth until he stirred and spoke. “No more talk of not marrying me, Alida,” he said, his voice throbbing with determined conviction. “You will marry me!” She could feel the strong vibration of it in his throat where he held her head tucked under his chin. “Whatever happens about your sight, it changes nothing for me. Whatever you are, you’re the woman I want, I’ve never felt less burdened than I do at this moment with you.”

He rolled her onto the pillows and kissed her mouth, imparting his contentment with soft dreamy pleasure. Alida thought about what he said, slowly coming to the realisation that the basis for which Gareth wanted their marriage had not changed. Her blindness did not stop her from functioning as a woman. In that way she was not handicapped at all. Most married couples made love in the dark.

Would it be terribly weak of her to give in and accept what he offered? She wanted him so much. Always had. Always would. Losing her career was nothing if she could have him.

If Gareth was satisfied with her sharing his bed, perhaps their marriage was workable, despite her inability to share other aspects of his life. And since those other aspects were familiar to her, she would be able to talk about them with him.

Her career couldn’t separate her from him now. Perhaps with Gareth that would be a plus. She would be a full-time wife at Riordan River, which gave rise to a number of very positive thoughts about the future. If Gareth didn’t mind her blindness.

She reached up and touched his face. The muscles around his jawline relaxed. She felt his head turn, and he kissed her fingertips. His pleasure in her brought a tremulous smile of pleasure to her lips.