What Dreams May Come (15 page)

"I never knew," she whispered against his lips, the confession made because she wanted him to understand just how much pleasure she'd found in his arms. "I didn't even dream I could feel that way."

Mitch kissed her again,
then
searched her face with a gaze he knew was too intense. But he couldn't temper what he was feeling, because his own thoughts had made him afraid. Afraid he'd lose her again. "Sometimes reality is better than dreams. And the reality is that we belong together, Kelly."

"Do we?" She avoided his gaze. "Because of ten years ago?"

"Because of now.
Can't you feel that?"

She
did
feel it—but she didn't trust the emotions. They were still tangled inside her, and she needed time to sort them out. "Mitch, it has all happened so fast. I'm not sure what I feel. I know only that ten years is a long time, and not something we can ignore. You said that I had to come to you because I wanted to, not because I felt guilty. We both have to be sure of that. Any doubt could destroy us."

He took a slow, deep breath and then nodded slightly. "You're right, I know. I'm trying, Kelly. I'm trying not to hold on to you too hard."

Looking up at the lean, handsome face that had tautened with his emotions, Kelly felt as much as saw what this meant to him. It wasn't just important, it was vital. And it disturbed her on some deep level to realize she could be so much a part of someone else's happiness. He saw her reaction, and his face relaxed suddenly.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart." His voice was rueful. "I didn't mean
to
overwhelm you. I think I did that once before."

Grateful for the crooked smile that invited her to share his wry look back at his younger
self,
she lifted her eyebrows and made her own voice dry. "You certainly did. Gathering my family together and announcing briskly that we were going to be married as soon as I graduated. If I'd been a little older, I probably would have thrown something at you."

"Believe
me,
I don't
want
to be domineering. If I say or do anything that feels that way to you, tell me.
All right?"

She nodded, smiling a little.
"All right.
But now it's my turn to warn you."

He eyed her warily. "Oh?"

"Yes. I am older now, Mitch."

He chuckled softly. "I'll get ready to duck." He bent his head and kissed her, the first light touch rapidly heating and becoming more deliberate.

Kelly pressed herself closer, her hands stroking his thick dark hair and her mouth coming alive
beneath his. A sound of pleasure purred in the back of her throat, and she gave herself up to the wonder of these incredible feelings.

It was some considerable time later when they shared a shower in the glassed-in stall, and Kelly's initial stiffness faded in the face of his behavior. Mitch looked at her and touched her, his intense yet tender expression as well as his murmured words telling her clearly that he found her beautiful. And though she very obviously aroused him—the interlude in the shower left her with the vague, curiously delighted certainty that all her bones had melted away—he never made her feel as if her body were only a source of physical satisfaction for him and nothing else.

He helped her to dry off, dropping occasional kisses on rosy flesh, the caresses definitely stirring her blood yet just as definitely intended to be soothing and loving rather than arousing.

They were new lovers physically, but the feelings that had prompted this new turn in their relationship were longstanding ones. And their reaction to each other now was a curious mixture of both. She was still a little shy, a little surprised but pleased by his fascination in the shape of her, the textures of her body. At the same time, Mitch had been a part of her for so long that her responses to him seemed to come from deep inside herself and without thought. And he touched her with an odd sense of familiarity as well as fascination.

Kelly got clean underwear out of the bureau in the bathroom and put it on, then went into the bedroom, where Mitch was putting on his discarded clothing. He eyed her as she pulled jeans and a bulky sweater from the chest of drawers, and when he spoke his voice was both light and husky.

"That ought to be illegal."

"What?" she asked, turning to look at
him.

"Frilly underwear."

She glanced down at the flesh-colored bra and panties, which were lace-edged but otherwise rather plain, and laughed. "This? I have some lingerie that's a lot more adventurous."

He grinned slightly, looking extremely piratical as he stood there buttoning his shirt. "I hope you mean to do some adventuring," he said. "I've seen a few outfits in store windows and imagined you in them. Talk about fantasizing."

Kelly stepped into her jeans and drew them up. "Frederick's of Hollywood—type stuff?" she asked dryly.

"I have no idea. I wasn't exactly paying attention to advertising. I remember one red lace thing with garters, and there was something in black that looked like one of those old-fashioned corsets."

Choking back a laugh, she pulled the bulky sweater over her head. "You must have spent a lot of time in front of that window. Didn't you get odd looks from passersby?"

"One little old lady snorted at me in disgust."

"Ladies don't snort, they sniff."

"This one," Mitch said with feeling, "snorted. And she made straight for a cop standing nearby on the street, obviously to report me as a pervert. So I slunk away, hugging my fantasies close."

Her earlier thoughts came back
to
haunt her as she wondered suddenly about fantasies—and realities. She turned toward the dresser, running a brush through her damp hair,
then
put on her wristwatch. And, automatically, picked up the thin chain she always removed at night, slipping it over her head and allowing the ring to rest inside her sweater.

"Hey," Mitch said in a wounded tone, "you were supposed to laugh."

"At the image of you slinking away?" she asked lightly. "I think the lady was rude for intruding on your fantasies."

"What's wrong, sweetheart?"

She looked up to meet his gaze in the mirror, watching as he came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist. Drawn back against the hard warmth of his body, she struggled not to ask what she had no right to. "Wrong?"

"Something's bothering you. What is it?"

Kelly managed a shrug. "It's nothing.
Gremlins of the mind.
And none of my business."

Mitch smiled. "Oh.
Other women?"

She frowned at him in the mirror, trying to keep it light. "Was I that obvious?"

"It must have been this connection of ours," Mitch murmured, still smiling.

"Teenagers are so complacent," she offered, determined to sound offhand and merely thoughtful. "It just occurred to me recently that it
never
occurred to me then. I mean, there you were in your twenties, according to all the studies at the peak of your sexuality, and I was determined to be a virgin bride. Three years engaged, and I never even considered the possibility that you might have ..."

"Stepped out on you?"

She laughed suddenly, honestly, if ruefully, amused. "It is ridiculous, isn't it? To have expected you
to
wait three years so I could wear white without guilt." A sudden memory made her add in a dry tone, "I should have known better. You and Keith were chasing girls all through your teens, and I know you caught quite a few of them. It used to make me feel miserable to see you with
your arm around some busty blonde." The arms currently around her tightened slightly, and in the mirror his expression looked curiously indecisive.

"I was a normal teenager," he admitted lightly. "Hormones raging, bent on conquest. And there were a few girls in those days."

"Of course there were," she agreed in a brisk tone, forcing herself to ignore the painful stab of unreasoning jealousy she had no right to feel. "Like I said, anything else would have been ridiculous."

"There were a few girls," he repeated deliberately, the brief look of indecision gone from his expression, "before you, Kelly. Not after."

She turned in his arms so that she could look up at his face rather than at his reflection. Her hands lifted to rest on his hard chest. "What?" She felt a little numb. Surely he didn't mean . . .

Mitch kept his arms around her, but loosely now. Obviously trying to lessen the impact of what he was saying, he kept his voice light and rather thoughtful. "Half your life, but I can't really say it was fourteen years, since I was unconscious for nine of them. And for the better part of this past year I didn't have the strength or the inclination to chase nurses—no doubt because I was hardly in what you'd call prime physical condition, and because none of them was you. So we'll say it was four and a half years, give or take a couple of months."

Kelly swallowed hard. "You mean . . . even after you came out of the coma, you didn't—?"

"Doctors," Mitch said consideringly, "love to explain things in clinical terms. And my doctors, including the physical therapists, were careful to explain that there'd been no injuries that would prohibit my enjoying an active, healthy sex life. At the time I was too concerned with getting back on my feet to think about it very much."

She stared at him.

With an expression that was both humorous and rather self-mockingly defensive, he said, "All right, I
did
think about it. You weren't there, though, and I decided—well, I decided that was the problem. But the coma had stolen several other things, after all, and I couldn't be sure. Still, I kept telling myself everything would be fine. The entire point of the therapy was to get all my muscles and nerves back in working order, so I could hardly expect..."

Kelly had a good idea of why Mitch was being humorous and mocking about this, and it wasn't only to cover what must certainly have been a very real anxiety. She was so moved she could hardly bear it, and yet at the same time she was conscious of a giggle trapped in the back of her throat. It was the
way
he was explaining this to her, with that disarming charm of his she remembered so well, his lean face so expressively droll. As if the whole
thing, at least with the benefit of hindsight, were
absolutely ludicrous.

She wasn't sure if she wanted to hug him, hit him, or shake him.

"Everybody kept telling me I was doing fine," he went on in a thoughtful tone. "Just remarkable, they said. No problems and nothing at all for me to worry about. And I didn't really have the nerve to say, hey,
Doc,
I think the family jewels are lagging behind."

Kelly bit her bottom lip, and carefully cleared her throat. She wasn't going to laugh. She
wasn't.
"I—I see. And—when you got out of the hospital?"

"I fixed all my attention on finding you. I didn't want anyone else, so I figured that was the problem anyway. When I first got here, the emotions
were so
thick,
they sort of got in the way of a physical response. But, then, the next morning . . . the possibility was definitely there."

She suddenly remembered that morning, and his intense scrutiny of her. She'd felt his desire then, so sharp and powerful it had badly unnerved her. "Oh," she murmured.

Mitch eyed her severely. "Oh? Is that all you have to say? Talk about waking the dead."

Kelly choked, and balled up one fist to punch him somewhat weakly on the chest. "Stop making me laugh! You aren't fooling me into believing it wasn't serious to you."

"I was hoping you wouldn't realize that. You know what they say about fragile male egos?"

"I've heard a few things."

"They're all true," he said sheepishly.

This time she managed not to laugh. And, since she knew the other reason he had guided her along the deliberately humorous path of his worries about the "family jewels," she forced herself to face the central fact about which he had so carefully been offhanded.

"But not really the point, I think," she said steadily. "The point is that you waited for me. And I didn't wait for you."

"Dammit, this is just what I didn't want to happen." All signs of self-mocking humor were gone; Mitch's face was entirely serious and even a little grim.

"I can't avoid the truth," she said.

"You're painting the truth with guilt," he told her flatly. "And there's no reason. Kelly, stop and think about it for a minute. That arrogance of mine, remember? I could afford to be noble and wait while you grew up because there was never any doubt in my mind. We were going to spend the rest of our lives together, I
knew
that. So what if I was so horny I had to take long walks and cold showers? I didn't want another woman, I wanted you. Hell, I congratulated myself on being so patient."

"You did?" she asked involuntarily.

He laughed shortly. "Of course I did. Combine the sins of arrogance with a sense of one's own superiority, and that was me. I was the so-called adult, remember, waiting for my child bride to
become a woman. And I was so damned sure of
myself
, it took a kick from fate to knock me on my backside."

With the wind taken out of her sails, Kelly stared up at him. "So you're saying you waited for me with the worst of motives, and I left you with the best of them?"

Some of the grimness faded from his face, and Mitch smiled. "Does sound a bit cut and dried, but that's basically it. I loved you, Kelly, and the waiting was easier because of that. But the truth— the bare truth not painted with guilt or anything at all—is that I knew we'd have a future together, and you knew we wouldn't."

"But you're here—"

His hands slid up to grasp her shoulders, and he shook her gently. "Stop saying that. It's a fluke that I'm here, a whim of fate. One of the rare little jokes God probably uses to teach medical science they don't know as much as they think they do. The point is that nobody thought I'd wake up.
Nobody, sweetheart."

Kelly accepted that for the moment. But she knew the question of her guilt was yet to be settled. Because no matter how convincing his arguments were, the fact was that Mitch was still unable
to
forgive her. Maybe that sense of betrayal he'd been so honest about
was
deeply buried, and maybe he could come to terms with it—but he hadn't yet. And unless and until he did, she couldn't completely forgive herself.