The Invitation

by Jude Deveraux

  Only the pounding of his heart under her cheek betrayed that William was affected by her words. In a way, she was telling him that she loved him, wasn’t she?

  “I have one question for you,” he said. “If you’d never known me as a child and you first met me when your plane went down, if I were the same age as you or a few years older, what would you feel for me?”

  Jackie didn’t answer right away, but gave the question the thought that it deserved. There was William’s sense of humor, which was so different from other people’s humor. She loved his honesty and the way he could laugh at himself. Of course there were many other men in the world who had a sense of humor; he wasn’t the only one. But there were too many Edward Brownes of the world, men who didn’t laugh. There were too many Edward Brownes who considered themselves old because that was what their passport said.

  But would William be different if he were thirty-eight instead of twenty-eight? Quite suddenly she had some insight into his character. If he married a younger woman he would take the responsibility of teaching her—Jackie knew all too well that older husbands considered two-thirds of their job to be teaching their young wives about life—so seriously he’d turn into an old man five minutes after he said, “I do.” Oddly enough, she knew that it would take someone like her to keep him young. He needed someone who flew airplanes upside down now and then, someone to keep him from turning into that rock the children had said he was.

  “Jackie? Are you going to answer me? Tell me the truth. What would you think of me if you knew nothing of me from the past? And if my birth certificate had a different date on it?”

  “I’d think you needed me,” she said softly. “Needed me to keep you young.”

  Jackie was still talking—she didn’t know what about—when she felt William’s breath in her hair. It was as though one minute they were innocent children comforting each other and the next they realized they were adults capable of very adult feelings.

  She quite suddenly became aware of his strong hands on her back, his lips that were now pressed against her neck.

  “William,” she whispered.

  He didn’t seem to hear her as he pulled her closer to him, her body, her breasts, full against his chest. She felt more than heard him groan as her softness touched the steel strength of his chest.

  Slowly, as though it were the most important thing he’d ever done, William buried his hands in her hair and brought his lips to hers. He’d kissed her before, but not like this. Before, he’d been in control; he had seemed to want to show her something. Those kisses had had a beginning and an end.

  But this kiss was tenderness. It was all tenderness and gentleness and sensitivity. It was as though he’d been wanting to press his lips to hers for a long while and now that he was being allowed to, he was going to savor every second of it. There was something else in the kiss: vulnerability. He was allowing her to see how very much she meant to him, allowing her to see his longing and yearning, and his love. He was showing her how easily she could hurt him. In that kiss he was not protecting himself, but allowing his innermost feelings to be seen and felt. He was trusting her.

  She knew that he would never take what he hadn’t been offered, so if the kiss continued past a kiss, it would be up to her to make the first move. William had too much respect for her to do anything that she would regret later.

  The kiss continued, then deepened, and the longing she felt in him increased. It was almost as though she could feel his very soul in that kiss. When he pulled away from her he was trembling from the iron will he was exerting to keep himself under control. She felt that he would like to leap on her, maybe tear her clothes off, make wild love to her. But instead he was limiting himself to one gentle, long kiss.

  “William,” she whispered.

  “Yes?” His normally deep voice was husky with suppressed emotion.

  “I…” She didn’t know what to say. Women were indoctrinated from childhood with the notion that a man should be the aggressor. Of course, after years of marriage a woman often found that if she didn’t start things, things wouldn’t get started. So now she wanted to tell William that it was all right, that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. Maybe this was wrong and maybe she would regret it tomorrow, but then maybe the world would end and tomorrow would never come.

  She didn’t use words to give permission but used the age-old device of opening herself to him, allowing her body to tell him yes. Turning fully toward him, she opened her mouth under his, pressed her legs against his, allowed her body to soften.

  She was afraid he would ask her if she was sure she wanted to make love with him and thereby give her yet another decision to make. But William didn’t waste time with words. Instead of speaking, he looked at her with the most delighted pair of eyes she had ever seen. His look was that of a boy who’d been given his first taste of ice cream and who meant to enjoy every bit.

  She had, of course, thought more than she wanted to admit about the fact that William had mentioned, in a rather angry moment, that he was a virgin. More than once she had awakened at night and imagined being an older woman teaching a shy—yet highly desirable and utterly gorgeous—young man what to do. She imagined herself as a worldly-wise French courtesan, remembering to be gentle and kind, thinking of his needs and his first impressions. She would want to make his first sexual experience memorable for its sheer beauty.

  Dreams alone in bed had nothing to do with reality. And this reality was about two hundred pounds of enthusiastic, hungry male. There was no shyness. No hesitation. The beauty of it was in the exuberance, the energy, the unbiased delight, in William’s sheer joy and surprise.

  Brother! Could William unfasten buttons quickly. One minute she was fully clothed and the next she was wearing nothing. One minute she was expecting languor and the next she was smiling happily in delight as William began touching and tasting her skin.

  William’s hands were all over her at once, searching, exploring. His mouth followed his hands, and when Jackie moaned in pleasure he seemed to have found the keys to heaven. With one hand on one breast, his mouth on the other, he tried different movements to see what felt best to both of them. As far as Jackie could tell, everything felt best.

  “William,” she tried to say, but he had his hands all over her and that lovely mouth of his was sending such shivers of delight through her that she could hardly think. “Your…” She broke off because she couldn’t remember what she had meant to say. Who could remember something as complicated as words when he was touching her like that? His hands were on her thighs, his strong palms running over the curves of her legs. Now she understood the fascination men had with virgins. To think that this man had never done this to another woman! It made her seem more than special. It made her feel unique, unequaled, like the queen of the world. That this divine man had never been touched by another female made her feel that he was hers in a way that nothing else could.

  Her body was turning to mush, pliant, soft, easy. “Your…” she tried again.

  “My what?” he managed to whisper, his voice filled with the intoxication of pleasure he was experiencing.

  She tugged at his shirt collar. She was fully nude, deliciously nude and open to William’s eyes and hands, but he had on all of his clothes.

  After the ease with which he had removed her clothes, she wasn’t surprised when his came off in the flash of an eye.

  Heavens, but he was beautiful. Skin like something newly hatched, something that had been born yesterday. Soft, downy hair on his chest, muscles strong and new, glistening with strength and youth. She wouldn’t have thought it possible but the sight of his beautiful body made her grow even more limp with desire. Eagerly her hands sought any and all of him that she could touch; then she twisted her body so she could put her mouth on his clean bare shoulder, and her hands moved downward.

  She was not prepared for the bliss, the rapture, that was apparent on William’s face and in his voice when she took the most private
parts of him into her hands. If nothing else, her pleasure was in knowing that he was not comparing her to anyone else. No other woman had touched him. No woman had put her hands or lips on him. He was hers alone.

  When he moved his big, heavy body on top of hers and prepared to slip inside her, Jackie arched her hips to meet him. Never had anything felt as right, as proper, as “what was meant to be” as did this joining of her body with William’s. The word “home” echoed through her brain: he had come home; she was now at home. They were where they were meant to be.

  “Yes, yes,” was all she could say as William began to move on top of her. “Ecstasy” didn’t begin to describe how he made her feel. There were no words to describe the joy. There was the excitement that always accompanied sex, but with William there was more. He seemed to touch some deep, remote area of her that had never been touched before. This act that she had experienced before had been a physical one, but now it was deeper than that. It was almost spiritual, because she felt that she was bonding with this man in the last possible way. They had been friends, had exchanged thoughts and secrets, but this exchange had until now been denied them.

  If Jackie had thought about it—and she had, far more than she’d admit to herself—she would have expected the first time with William to be of the very shortest duration. Happily—very happily—she was wrong. After several minutes she began to wake up inside.

  “William, you are wooonnnderful,” she said dreamily, her back arched, her eyes closed. She heard him laugh, that smug laugh of men when they are very proud of themselves. Then he pressed his sweaty chest on hers and nuzzled her neck.

  For the next week, Jackie lived in a dream world. Her sexual experience had all been with Charley, so, in a way, she was as new to sex as William was. When Jackie met Charley, he had been to bed with any woman he could get to say yes, or even to say maybe. By the time he met Jackie he knew what he liked, how he wanted to do things. He’d tried every position, every possible variation. Like all women, she’d been very curious and she’d asked him to tell her of his past experiences. She’d heard how some girl in Singapore had been great at so-and-so, and then there was this girl in Florida who’d been especially good at something else. At the time Jackie hadn’t thought about it, but years later she knew that she had felt intimidated. How could a skinny thing like her compete with those women who knew so much? She’d said this to Charley once and he’d laughed at her, told her she was the best of all of them and he’d rather go to bed with her than all the women in the world. At the time she’d felt better, but still, there was that nagging little worry that maybe other women had been more…more what? Enticing? More technically skilled?

  With William she felt free, free from comparisons, free from having to live up to the standards of anyone else. And who would have thought that freedom was the headiest aphrodisiac on earth?

  Also, who would have thought that solid, dependable, upright-citizen William Montgomery would be a demon in bed? In all the years she’d known William she’d seen little evidence that he was creative. On the contrary, he seemed to be the epitome of follow-the-rules. Even as a child he had always colored inside the lines.

  For one week they did nothing, absolutely nothing. The excuse they gave themselves, and Pete, was that they needed to wait until Jackie’s hand healed before they could fly or work on engines or even look at the financial aspect of setting up a business. The truth was—a truth that they didn’t openly admit to themselves—that they were so interested in each other’s bodies that they could think of nothing else.

  Jackie told herself not to compare William to Charley, but she couldn’t help it. Charley was a very sexy man. He seemed to think about sex all the time and he loved sexual innuendo. Everything—soaring airplanes, chairs, whatever—reminded him of sex. He thought about sex, joked about it, wanted to discuss it.

  William could not have been more different. Looking at him, fully clothed, across the breakfast table, Jackie couldn’t believe this was the same man who’d been in bed with her an hour before. With his clothes on, there was no one more dignified than William. He was so cool, so remote, so private, that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. For all of his youth, William was an old man, had an old man’s established habits. She’d seen people older than he ask him for advice, and the first time she had a problem that didn’t involve him, she planned to go straight to William. So it was easy to think that if she had been asked, or if she had thought of it, which she had, she would have assumed that William might be a bit shy in bed. True, he had been affectionate and tender toward her, but still, she was taken aback by how ardent he was.

  To her delight, she found that once William got his clothes off, he became as sensual as a child. Children would see a mud puddle, think the mud felt nice and cool, so they’d take their clothes off and smear themselves with the ooze. They had no preconceived ideas that one wasn’t supposed to like mud because it wasn’t “nice” or “civilized.” This innocence, this sensuality, was something that William brought to bed. He had no desire to get things over and done with so he could roll over and go to sleep. He wasn’t just interested in that climactic moment and nothing else. William liked all of it.

  Jackie had never for a moment thought that she was sexually repressed. In fact, a woman had once asked her what she saw in a man as old as Charley, and Jackie had laughed in a very naughty way. She’d had her disagreements with Charley and her complaints about him, but there had never been any sexual problems between them.

  At least that was what she thought—until she met William. No wonder men wanted a woman who was a virgin; no wonder a man was ready to kill if “his” woman touched another man: if women were allowed to jump into bed with lots of men they might start comparing, just as she now compared Charley with William. If women compared lovers, what would happen to the world? Would men have to stop saying, “I’m the best, baby,” and start having to prove that they were even good?

  If she’d ever been to bed with a man like William before she went to bed with Charley…well, she didn’t want to think about it.

  After the first couple of days she stopped comparing the two men and allowed herself to enjoy. She would never be able to explain it to anyone—not that she’d try—but William made her feel as though she, too, were a virgin. They caressed each other, looked at each other, and touched as though they were the first couple to discover how nice skin against skin felt.

  They didn’t talk about sex or even seem to think about sex. Sex was something that just seemed to happen, something spontaneous and joyful, something clean and happy and delightful. They seemed to be saying, “How would it feel if I did this? Or this?” William lay still for as long as she wanted while she ran her hands over his hard thighs, over his broad chest.

  And kissing with William was as though they’d invented this delicious practice. Charley had always felt that kissing was a waste of time. “I like the more serious stuff, kid,” he’d said. Jackie had no idea that she was as starved for kissing as a man in the desert was for water. She and William kissed constantly. Nude, she stretched out on top of him and kissed his face—his eyes, his long nose—teasing him that it took sixteen kisses to get far enough down it to suck gently on his lower lip. She felt his teeth with her tongue, running her tongue over the contours of his mouth.

  And then they traded places and he kissed her, his hands caressing her arms and shoulders while his lips traced every outline of her face. They spent hours in bed, touching, looking, kissing, exploring. Jackie sometimes thought that they were like Adam and Eve and they were the first two people to have felt such pleasure.

  When they made love it seemed to be different every time. Sometimes there was such urgency that they couldn’t get their clothes off fast enough. Other times lovemaking took hours. However long it lasted, it always seemed to catch them unawares. One minute they’d be sitting on the couch—William reading the newspaper, Jackie sewing a button on his shirt—and the next second their clothes wou
ld be hanging from the light fixture. Afterward they’d look at each other with startled expressions, as though to say, “How did that happen?”

  Lovemaking itself was divine. Freedom, she thought. The headiness of freedom. With William she knew she wasn’t being judged or compared. She knew that whatever she did was, to him, the right way, the only way. It was amazing how it changed her outlook when she knew that someone liked whatever she did. After the first couple of days, she and William seemed to adopt the attitude of “Let’s try this and see how that feels.” Feeling. It was everything to both of them. Touching hands, touching lips, trying different positions during sex.

  And then there was William’s creativity. It was as though he’d saved all of his imagination for this one ongoing event. He’d sat through school and studied other people’s words and spat them back out with all the inventiveness of a parrot, but here at last he’d found a place where there were no rules he had to follow. Sometime during the third day, during a moment when sweat was dripping off both of them, William said, “Jackie, I like this,” with such feeling that she laughed out loud. “Me too,” she’d answered.

  The only person they encountered during this week was silent Pete. They did their best to keep their passion from his sight, but they weren’t successful. Jackie recalled an Arabic saying that she had always liked: “There are three things you can’t hide: pregnancy, love, and a man riding a camel.” She and William proved the second one true. The morning after their first night together, they cautioned each other that it would be better to keep their newfound passion from others. William had reluctantly agreed. “Since you won’t marry me, I guess we should,” he said. Jackie had just said that it would be better for both their reputations.

  They had gone outside, confident that they were the greatest actors on earth and that no one would know anything was different between them. For all of approximately eleven minutes they were able to fool Pete. He was cleaning distributor segments with a cloth soaked in kerosene and, trying to act as though everything were the same, they stood, one on either side of him, and talked of that day’s activities. Jackie and William didn’t look at each other for several minutes. Then William said something about picking up some passengers for Denver, and when Jackie answered him, she made the mistake of looking into his eyes. For several moments they were silent, just looking at each other over Pete’s head. The next moment Pete looked up, and his face turned as red as though he’d stumbled into the bedroom of a honeymoon couple. In the blink of an eye he left the hangar, leaving Jackie and William standing alone, doing nothing but looking at each other. It was a gaze that nearly ignited the kerosene.