by Sandra Brown
“You’re wonderful.” He kissed her, guaranteeing with his ardor that, as with all his promises, this one would come true as well. Her response stirred him, but he wanted all the corners of their new life swept clear of debris.
“I’ve looked at a house,” he began.
She shook her head, sweeping his massaging hands with her hair. Unconsciously everything she did now was sensuous, sexual. She had been wrapped in a chrysalis of unhappiness and insecurity. But under Deke’s gentle coaching she had thrown off that cocoon of self-consciousness to become a woman capable of both giving and accepting great passion. She had found self-confidence in his love for her.
“That’s not necessary, Deke, honestly it isn’t. When I was objecting to living here, it wasn’t because of the location.” She looked up at him impishly. “Besides, I have friends just a few floors up. Remember Sally and Jeff? I guess I should call and tell them that I’m married and living here now.”
“I want to meet them, too, but don’t call right now.” He took her mouth under his for a long, slow kiss that was as deep and probing and thorough as his lovemaking. When he drew back, he toyed with the strands of hair that framed her face. “Back to the topic of houses. I know you don’t care for high-rises because of the elevators.” He playfully tugged on a honey-blond curl. “And I don’t want my children to grow up without a huge yard to romp in. I’ve found a house that I hope meets with your approval.”
“If you’re sure that’s what you want to do, Deke.” Inching herself down again, she whisked light kisses over his torso as she went. Her hands were never still.
“It is. This is a bachelor pad. Not a family dwelling.”
Hearing him say that made her inordinately pleased. She rubbed his abdomen with her nose, her chin, her lips, nuzzling him. “We should decide on something soon. Right now we have three residences.”
“What do you want to do with the house in Sunnyvale? I’ll buy it if you want me to.” For what she was doing to him, he would have done anything she wanted him to. “You might want to know it’s there to go back to.”
She laid her cheek on his thigh and let her hands run up and down the muscled columns of his legs. Her voice was quiet. “There won’t be any going back.”
“Laney,” he groaned when her tongue touched him ever so lightly. He pulled her up to lie on his chest so he could look directly into her eyes. “I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that.”
“I can’t tell you how happy I am.”
They kissed and it was a covenant, more binding than a marriage license or spoken vow. His arms closed around her. Once more in repose, her eyes wandered around the room. “That morning when I sneaked out, I would never have imagined that I’d be back, like this, doing this.”
Mischievously she let her middle roll against his. But it was she who was surprised when she felt his hard readiness plowing into her stomach. His eyes flashed, but his hands were gentle as they skimmed down the backs of her thighs, parted them, caressed. He lifted her hips over him.
Her eyes became dark and smoky with passion. The pulse in her throat throbbed against his searching lips. “I thought you would forget me as soon as I left, Deke. Why did you care enough to come looking for me?”
His breath faltered as she took him gradually, slowly but inexorably, accepting him into the moist mystery of her body. “I knew I’d found the woman I wanted to share my life with.” His thumbs rotated over the points of her pelvic bones and his fingers curved around to sink into the flesh of her hips and hold her fast. Her body sinuously rocked over his. “None other would do. None had. I wanted you in my life and I had to find you. I had to. My, God, Laney . . . ah, sweet . . .”
His body strained upward, reaching to touch her womb. He leaned forward and, palming her breast, lifted it to his mouth. Her head fell back as he closed his lips around her nipple. His surging motions deep inside her drove her closer and closer toward the sublime.
It rushed upon them and smothered them in its golden warmth. Their veins throbbed with pleasure. Their senses hummed with fulfillment. Their spirits were forged together with a heat so intense it would burn forever.
“Deke, are you asleep?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you know what today is?”
“Uh-huh. Saturday.”
“No, I mean the date.”
He rolled onto his stomach, propped himself on his elbows and looked at her. They were having a picnic lunch on the parklike grounds surrounding the stately Tudor house they had purchased. Laney and Deke were sharing one blanket while the twins were sharing another. All were enjoying the drowsy sunshine of an early-summer day.
They had made a trip to Arkansas to settle their affairs. The lease to the house had been turned back over to the landlady. Most of the furniture had been given away. Only a few pieces had been shipped to New York. The station wagon had been given to a flabbergasted Mrs. Thomas. Laney had declined the contract Mr. Harper offered.
But no sooner had they moved into their house than she had secured a position with the elementary school nearest them. Starting with the fall semester, she would act as a teacher’s aide, working only a few hours each morning. Deke had endorsed her decision completely, realizing that he never wanted her to feel trapped, insulated, smothered. It was no wonder to him that she was claustrophobic. She had grown up in four walls surrounding a lifeless, emotionally suffocating atmosphere. He would always give her freedom, yet wrap her in love.
“The date?” he asked now, catching her around her bare ankle and massaging the sensitive spot with a decadent thumb.
The muscles of her leg twitched. “Stop, Deke, I have something to say.”
“So do I. You have outrageously sexy ankles.” He twisted an imaginary villain’s mustache. “And other sexy things as well, and I have a lech for you that won’t quit.” He caught her Achilles tendon between his teeth. “Wanna make love out here under the trees?”
His hand slid under her jean leg to squeeze her calf. She didn’t draw her foot away, but he could see that something else was on her mind. He withdrew his hand. “What did you want to tell me?” he asked seriously. Sometimes his sensitivity to her moods was uncanny. That was only one of the reasons she loved him.
“It’s our anniversary. It was a year ago today that we met in that elevator during the blackout.”
“I hadn’t even thought of that,” he said, sitting up.
“I have a present for you.” She took a gift-wrapped box out of the picnic basket and handed it to him. “I’m not sure you’ll like it.”
He watched her for an endless minute and she recognized that look. On several occasions he had invited her to be a spectator in the courtroom. His demand for the truth from a witness was unrelenting. Between probing questions Deke would watch the witness long and hard as though piercing through his defenses and reading his innermost thoughts. If the witness were lying, he invariably squirmed under that incisive gaze. Laney didn’t. What she had said wasn’t just rhetorical. She really was afraid he wouldn’t like her gift.
Deke unwrapped the package. Without speaking he opened the jeweler’s box and saw the gold wedding band secured in its velvet lining.
“You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to,” she said softly, nervously. “But I didn’t bring anything into our marriage. Not even a wedding ring for you.”
Her heart stopped when he handed the box back to her. But then she saw his eyes and they were glassy with emotion. “Put it on me, please.”
Taking the ring from the box, she slipped it on his ring finger. He clasped her hand tightly. “How can you say you brought nothing to the marriage? You are the marriage.” He moved across the blanket and folded his hands around her head, linking his fingers in the back. He drew her mouth beneath his and their tongues exchanged intimacies.
“I was going to wait until we went out to dinner tonight, but . . .” He took a box from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.
“
Oh, you!” she exclaimed, wiping tears of love from her eyes. “You remembered all along.”
“How could I forget the most momentous day of my life?” She tossed away the wrapping paper and found another jeweler’s box, this one long, slender and flat. Lying golden and beautiful on a white satin lining was a smooth oval locket on a long chain.
Reverently, Laney lifted it out and sprung the delicate hinge open. In one of the tiny frames was a reduced picture of her and Deke taken by one of his brothers at a recent family get-together. They were smiling radiantly, their heads close, their happiness with each other enviable. In the other frame was a picture of the twins lying side by side in three-month-old perfection.
Laney couldn’t speak for the tentacles of emotion that squeezed her throat. “It’s inscribed,” Deke said quietly. On the back was engraved, Our family, our love. Your Deke. Taking the locket from her shaking fingers, he slipped it over her head and watched it nestle between her breasts.
She lifted the locket to her lips and kissed it, then pressed it back onto the setting it seemed made for. “I love you so much it hurts sometimes.”
This time, when their mouths met, their bodies did as well. They reclined together on the blanket. His hand slipped under her cotton sweater and found her braless breasts full and warm and vibrant with love. He pushed her sweater up and gazed at the patterns of sunlight and shadow that danced across them. He lowered his head and let his lips drift over them as lightly and lazily as the sunbeams.
“Deke, we can’t. The staff—”
“Has the afternoon off, remember?”
“The babies?” Her voice had lost some of its impetus as a result of the agile tongue that circled her nipples.
“Couldn’t care less.”
They looked at the infants curled up together. They had filled out and were plump and rosy, a testimony to the happy atmosphere that surrounded them. “They’re precious, aren’t they?” Laney said softly.
“Yes. You know, it’s curious. Every time there’s a blackout in the city, there is a baby boom nine months later. I didn’t hear anything about one this time. But then the blackout only lasted about ten minutes.”
Laney’s naughty laugh brought her husband’s attention back to her. Her mouth rubbed invitingly against his. “Then you’re a ten-minute wonder. In that amount of time we certainly did our share to promote a baby boom.”
His grin was the rakish, overconfident one that she adored. He worked his hand between them and unzipped first her jeans, then his. Willingly she let him adjust their clothing. Heartbeats later she felt his virility, hard and velvety warm, moving against her, seeking. “Haven’t I always told you that I’m a man who gets quick results?”
She had to admit that he was, since he found her warm and moist and swollen with desire for his loving.
“Laney. My dearest, dearest love.”
And he always knew the right words to say.
