Loved Me Once (Love, Romance and Business)

by Gail Hewitt

  "Just relax. They'll feel better after I do this."

  Using both hands at the same time, he pushed a cube against each nipple so firmly that they disappeared beneath the ice.

  "It may hurt a little at first," he told her, "but it'll feel better afterwards."

  After a couple of minutes, he tossed the ice into an empty glass, then leaned over and gently took first one nipple and then the other into his warm mouth and sucked lightly. It did feel better, Maggie thought.

  "I didn't mean to hurt you," he murmured against her ear, pulling the robe back around her shoulders. "It's just that I've dreamed about being with you like this for long, of doing things to you that no one else has done, that I get overenthusiastic. Forgive me?"

  In response, she pulled his head to her and kissed him on the lips.

  "I've dreamed about you, too," she admitted, "at least since we were here the last time. I just about died when I thought I'd lost you."

  "I remember your saying something like that yesterday afternoon," he murmured, "but I thought you were just rewarding me for making that drive from Boston."

  And suddenly the voyeuristic proto-satyr of the bedroom was gone and he was Miles again, grinning and looking as good as he always did across a table. The thought reminded her that she was hungry for more than just Miles. As if reading her mind, he began to remove covers from dishes.

  "Name your pleasure," he said. "I think we have something here for just about any taste."

  Maggie surveyed the array of variously shaped dishes, each covered by a silver dome. "Tell me."

  He began to whip away covers and put them on the bottom shelf of the rolling cart. "Well, I wasn't sure what you'd want, breakfast being the only meal we haven't shared to any extent, so I made a general stab at the menu. There's French toast with strawberries and powdered sugar. Eggs Benedict. Applewood smoked bacon. Biscuits. Croissants. Melon segments. Pain au chocolat."

  "Pain au chocolat and melon," she told him. "I've been a sucker for bread and chocolate since forever."

  They dawdled over breakfast, looking at the Times, occasionally glancing at each other and grinning for no reason other than the fact that they were here, together, with the shared memory of the night before. Outside, the day was bright but frigid, and the fire's blaze was a welcome burst of color and warmth in the room.

  Maggie put down the paper and sighed contentedly. "This is nice, but it is funny in a way."

  "Funny? In what way?" Miles asked, his eyebrows shooting up.

  "I guess it's because, when I was here back in December, the weather was so bad that I didn't get outside for long, but I don't know much about this place at all. It's called Lake View Lodge, for example, and I've never gotten a good look at the lake and I don't have a clue about why it's called a lodge."

  "Well, it's called a lodge because the first building here – which was located on the other lake, incidentally, the one over the hill – was a hunting lodge that the owners adapted into an inn. As for a better view of the lake, that's easily remedied," Miles grinned. "Did you bring any cold-weather clothes with you?"

  "Sure, but the issue is: did you, or are you limited to the clothes you had on your back?"

  "I threw some stuff into a bag on my way out the door yesterday. I'll have them get it from the car."

  "You stinker. You knew all along I was trying to get you here to seduce you. You did come prepared to stay," she grinned.

  "With a friend in the village," he told her. "I wasn't sure what you were up to, and I wasn't going to make that Boston run twice in one day."

  An hour and several pleasurable, highly personal interruptions later, the two of them were standing on the porch outside the Tea Lounge, Miles in jeans, sweat shirt, boots and heavy car coat and Maggie in jeans, sweater, boots, and the down cape she always traveled with in cold weather. The lake, much of its surface coated in ice, had only a sliver of open water in the center, clear and a deep blue-green in the cold, bright sunlight.

  "It's a glacial lake," Miles told her, grinning. He looked very pleased with himself, she thought, understanding because she felt the same way. She felt thoroughly satiated, wonderful, in fact, except for her nipples, which after another Miles' assault were so sore she hadn't been able to stand the thought of a bra and so was very aware of the unfettered heaviness of her breasts under the tee-shirt and sweater that she wore. Somehow, she was going to have to divert Miles from his obsession with her breasts, but that wasn't going to be easy because he was so obviously enjoying being able to do whatever he liked with her body.

  Perhaps his pleasure was what made him especially handsome, in this light and from this angle, much like his great-grandfather, the slim, athletic young man with the tennis racket in the old photograph album.

  "A glacial lake, huh? That's a piece of information I didn't expect to get today," she teased, reaching up to kiss his cheek.

  "You can thank Mr. Drummond," he told her, taking her hand to lead her down the porch steps and onto the path that curved around the lake. "He was a kids' counselor here at Lake View who ran the special youth programs and took guests between the ages of six and twelve on wood-lore hikes. Since we came throughout the year, every year, I heard pretty much his entire store of nature facts, multiple times."

  "What's a glacial lake?" she asked.

  "Think you'll catch me out, huh?" He laughed, and then paused, looking mildly surprised. "You know, I think I remember. A glacial lake originates in a melted glacier. As it retreats, the glacier leaves behind ice deposits in hollows between hills. As the earth's temperature warms, the ice melts, and lakes like this are created."

  He took her arm as they began to walk the path. "Mr. Drummond had a model in his workshop in the old Power Building that showed the process, with all the parts labeled. That ridge that parallels the lake is called a drumlin. Those stacks of rock that you see scattered around the lake at different places are debris piles left over from the glacier's retreat – they're called moraines. And you see those long marks in the rocks that line other parts of the lakeshore? They look like grooves or scratches? Well, those are striations left when the base of the glacier began to move."

  "I'm impressed," she laughed.

  "Mr. Drummond must have been a good teacher," he grinned. "Of course, over the years I heard that same talk a lot. My parents were big on learning experiences for kids, and he tended to have just the one set of facts for each topic."

  Maggie smiled. It was nice to think of Miles here, as a little boy, continuing his family's century-long tradition of getting to know Lake View and its surrounding wilderness. It was nice to think of Miles, period. She squeezed his arm, and he kissed the top of her head, the evergreen-tinged scent of his aftershave enveloping her nostrils. She hugged him, both arms around his whole body.

  They continued walking along the snow-banked path at a companionable pace, in no hurry in spite of the fact that it was even colder than Maggie had thought at first, and she could see her breath. She and Miles were two of only a dozen or so walkers strung along the lake-hugging path. When she commented on the lack of people, Miles explained that it had to do with the ritual of Sunday lunch.

  "They began serving a few minutes ago, and most people do the first seating."

  "You really know the routine of this place."

  "Long experience. I can trace a lot of my life around Lake View. See that lodgette up there?" He pointed across the lake to a tiny latticed structure perched on the edge of the mountain ridge. "That was the first place I kissed a girl. I was ten."

  "Lucky girl," she murmured, squeezing his hand. "I'll bet you were a cute little boy."

  "And up there," he continued, pointing to one of the smaller lodgettes on a higher stretch of the walk that went up the mountainside to a lookout tower, is where I first felt a girl's breast. Which reminds me, how are yours feeling?"

  "Uh, O.K., I guess," she said, surprised at the question. "A little sore still."

  "They probably will be for a
while," he said with what sounded suspiciously like satisfaction. "But we can help them." He looked around and grinned. "Yeah, that's what I thought. The lodgette we used to hide in when we were kids is just over there." He pulled her arm so that she went with him along a side path that led about twenty feet to an evergreen-shrouded, pocket-sized lodgette, evidently placed here for the convenience of a single hiker for the purpose of a moment's perch. When both of them were inside the structure, they almost filled it. Anyone seeing them from the side path would have trouble telling if it were a couple inside the deep shadow of the tiny building or simply one large person. Not that there was likely to be anyone to pursue that line of thought. The side path's surface had been pristine until she and Miles walked along it to reach this place.

  Miles shoved aside her cape. "Pull up your sweater," he commanded.

  "I'll freeze," she protested, laughing.

  "That's the point. I'm going to re-ice you. That'll help the soreness."

  She gave a quick glance in either direction, but then did as he said as he scooped up a handful of icy snow and compacted it in his hand. Then he applied it to first one breast and then the other, afterwards taking each nipple into his mouth and gently working it with his tongue.

  "What if someone sees?" she laughed. "What'll they think?"

  "That I'm one lucky guy," he told her.

  She'd half-expected him to try to take the situation to the next level and was wondering just how he planned to manage that in this tiny, ice-encrusted structure. When he'd finished with the gentle sucking, however, he simply patted her breasts with a handkerchief and flicked each nipple until it was hard again, which made her wince, and then pulled down her sweater. Returning to the lakeside path, they continued onward, taking their time, looking around and breathing in the clear, cold air. Thinking about what had just happened, Maggie had conflicting feelings. On the one hand, it was a little silly, like a teenager mooning cheerleaders from the band bus. On the other, there had been something undeniably hot about it. She would never have guessed that Miles was into situationally-risky sex. Or maybe he really had been concerned about the soreness that he had caused, which in a way was even hotter. Of course, the hard flicking of each nipple at the end of his little process had only increased her discomfort, but he may not have intended that, she thought.

  It was some minutes before Miles spoke again.

  "Before my father died, he liked to bring us out for the evening cookouts on Indian Rock, the big flat stone up there, next to the water. My brother saw a snake over there and fell into the water when he started backing away from it. And that wall of rocks just ahead, the one that looks like a big pile of kid's building blocks that someone's knocked over? When I was eleven, I was rock climbing there when I fell and broke my wrist."

  He held out his arm and pulled up the sleeve of his jacket to reveal a faint scar. She leaned over and kissed it.

  "God, I'm crazy about you," Miles said, hugging her tightly. "I want us to be married as soon as possible. There is just one thing though."

  "What?" Maggie asked idly, turning at the sound of something falling in the woods, probably a small branch overladen with ice.

  "When I was talking to my mother this morning, she suggested that we return to Boston and give her the chance to help us plan a real wedding."

  Maggie didn't say anything, but all her antennae had sprung to attention. So that's who he'd been talking to. Her expression evidently gave away something of what she was thinking.

  "It was just a suggestion," Miles protested. "We don't have to do it, although I don't see why it matters that much if we delay things by a few days."

  Maggie sighed. "It matters, Miles. I have watched girlfriends start out planning what they call a ‘small ceremony' and it just keeps growing. It's as if once you start down that path, there are dozens of detours that have to be made, and all of them take time and it gets very stressful. I've actually seen couples break up over the frustrations involved."

  "I just don't see it," Miles said stubbornly. "We go back to Boston and listen to my mother for a couple of hours, and then we go wherever we want and get married in whatever way suits us. Big deal."

  Maggie shook her head pityingly. "You are one bright guy, baby, but any woman alive can tell you it doesn't work like that, once the mothers start to get involved."

  "Don't call me 'baby' – it's irritating," he muttered. "I'm not a baby."

  "Okay, you're not a baby. It's just an expression."

  "I don't like it," he said. "Please don't do it." His expression was positively petulant, like that of the little boy he'd been if that little boy had been prone to sulkiness. The thought made Maggie stop in her tracks. Whatever he admitted, was it possible he was self-conscious about the six-year difference in their ages?

  She sighed. "Okay, let's talk about that. Are you absolutely certain that it doesn't matter to you that I'm older than you are?"

  "My brother's a dozen years older than his wife," Miles said stubbornly, "and it's worked fine for them."

  "Yes, and society accepts that age difference as relatively normal when it's the man who's older," she pointed out. "But an age difference of even a couple of years when it's the woman who's older seems to be worthy of comment. People start throwing around terms like 'cougar' and such."

  "That's vulgar," he told her, frowning. "No one who matters is going to think that, much less say it. I don't understand why you even brought up the topic."

  "Because you objected to my use of ‘baby' as an endearment," she reminded him.

  "I had a nanny whom I disliked intensely who called me that," he told her. "That's the only reason I don't like it. I don't even think of there being any age difference between us. If either of us has any problem with it, it's you."

  "So it doesn't bother you that when you were eleven and probably in – what? – sixth grade, the year you broke your wrist on those rocks over there, I was seventeen and in college?"

  "Of course not. Don't be silly. But I just realized something," he said thoughtfully. "Seventeen is the age you were when you first met Tom Scott, isn't it?"

  Maggie shot him a searching look, but he didn't seem upset, just interested. "Seventeen is the age I was when I met Tom," she confirmed reluctantly.

  "Guy was kind of a cradle-robber, huh?"

  "Not exactly. I lied about my age. He thought I was nineteen."

  "Yeah, I'll bet he bought that," Miles snorted. "Even so, he knew he was almost ten years older."

  "Seven," Maggie said automatically. "He thought he was seven years older. In retrospect, I'll agree it wasn't the smartest thing I ever did to get involved with a guy who was nine years older and had so much more experience than I did, but at that age, smarts don't come into it very much. Anyway, with Tom, the age thing didn't seem to matter particularly."

  "So you had a lot in common?"

  "We seemed to, at the time, although that wasn't exactly how I thought of it. He was just Tom, this guy I'd met at school." The image of Tom as he'd been then tried to insinuate itself into her consciousness, but she resisted. She didn't need to think about any of that, ever again, of how he'd looked leaning so casually against the rear wall of the classroom, pretending to listen to the Georgia Tech professor he'd accompanied even as he watched her from the corner of his eye. She certainly didn't need to remember how handsome he'd been, maybe the handsomest boy, not boy, man, the handsomest man she'd ever known. Stop that, she told herself. She'd had her choice, and she'd made her decision. She'd elected to choose the man next to her now, the man who wants her as she is, not the one who wanted her as she'd been at seventeen.

  She glanced over at Miles and was surprised to see that he was still frowning.

  "Well, when you met Scott, did you . . ."

  Maggie withdrew her hand from his arm and stopped walking.

  Miles checked his step and turned his head toward her. "You look upset. What's wrong?"

  "When I got here on Friday and Bev was showin
g me that he'd arranged what I asked for about the suite and the private dining room and the Tea Lounge and the 'Maggie loves Miles' banner and the cookies and all the rest of it, we detoured to the library. He'd guessed, of course, that it was you I was trying to surprise. He seems very pleased by the fact that both of us, at different times, chose Lake View as the place where we . . . Well, where we got serious about each other. I guess that's why he showed me the old hotel album with that wonderful photograph of your great-grandparents with their tennis rackets."

  "So?" Miles seemed genuinely puzzled by the introduction of this topic.

  "They looked so happy," Maggie said, "and when you and I stood on the Tea Lounge porch just now and looked across the lake," she nodded toward the fairy-tale façade of the hotel, "I thought about your great-grandparents and was happy that we are here together, where they were. All I was thinking about was you and how nice it is to be in this place, this second in time, just the two of us, walking where they walked and seeing a lot of the same landscape that they saw."

  His face relaxed a little.

  "I never knew them," he told her, "but my mother's talked about them, of course. They often brought her here when she was a little girl, so the place was always special to them. But I don't see what my great-grandparents have to do with Tom Scott."

  Maggie sighed. "That's exactly what I mean," she told him. "I don't see what any of this has to do with Tom Scott. I don't know how to put this more plainly. I've admitted you were right – Tom tricked me into thinking he wanted me to work for him last December when all he wanted was to keep me around while he figured out how he felt. Then, when I got tired of being condescended to like an office pet, I quit. Then he showed his hand by telling me what he'd done and proposing. And that was that." She paused and took a deep breath. "He proposed. I refused. Just let it go."

  "He didn't ask you about me?"

  "Once or twice," she admitted, "in a very casual way, but I told him that I wasn't going to discuss you with him."

  "By which, I assume, you're implying that you aren't going to discuss him with me," Miles said, frowning.