To Have and to Hold

by Fern Michaels

  “Oh, yeah, yeah. Don’t stop,” Gus groaned.

  She felt powerful suddenly with his words, and proceeded to take the initiative, sliding smoothly on top of him. She smiled when she heard him groan again. The heat of his body mingled with hers, set off a banked fire she’d been holding in reserve all these years.

  She teased him then, nibbling at his earlobes, whispering wondrous things in his ear while she explored the wet, slick length of him.

  Before she knew what was happening, she was on her back, Gus over her, staring down at her. “You’re so beautiful,” he murmured. His hot breath seared her skin, making it impossible to think. All she wanted now, at this moment in time, was to feel, to taste, to live.

  Her body was warm honey, her mouth a raging volcano he sought to conquer. “Do you like this?” he moaned.

  “Oh, yes, yes, I do,” Kate moaned in return. Hungrily she brought his lips to her again. She felt his knee part her legs. “Not yet,” she purred, grinding her body upward against his. She felt him shudder, drawing her up, up, until they were locked together in a sitting position, their bodies slick with sweat, grinding and rocking to the beat of some unheard music.

  His hands moved, sliding up and down the sides of her body. Needing the closeness of her, he drew her hard against him as she moaned, arching her back. He kissed her eyes, her lips, fiery kisses that trailed along her jaw, down to the valley between her breasts. The burning heat from his body transferred itself to her, scorching her skin. She was a brushfire gone wild, a raging forest fire that only Gus could extinguish. His summer-blue eyes were burning, the only bright color she could see in the dim room.

  “Now,” he whispered fiercely.

  “Yes,” Kate whispered in return.

  Her body was exquisite, her responses delicious, but it was the expression on her face, the rapture and pleasure he saw there, that drove him forward. He read total joy and a hint of disbelief in her clear gaze, saw a lone tear in the little hollow under her eye. When relief came to both of them, her name exploded from him like a gunshot in the quiet room.

  Kate lay still, her breathing matching his in hard little spurts. She should say something, she thought, or he should say something. Anything. What? God, she hadn’t known sex could be this perfect, this wonderful. “I liked that,” she gasped.

  “You did, huh?” Gus said, smooching her cheek. “Well, guess what? I liked it, too. Hell, I goddamn loved it! What took us so long to get around to doing this?”

  “My stupidity. On the other hand, maybe you weren’t aggressive enough,” she teased.

  “You want aggressive? I’ll give you aggressive”—Gus laughed—“but later. You wore me out, lady. I need a breather.” Jesus, he was happy. He couldn’t ever remember being this happy. She was his now. “You are, aren’t you?” he said anxiously.

  “Are what?” Kate sighed.

  “Mine.”

  “All yours, forever and ever,” she said happily. “I’ve never been this happy. In the whole of my life no one ever treated me the way you do. No one ever seemed to care about me the way you do. I was so afraid of this ... afraid I wouldn’t—couldn’t—that you would be disappointed. Patrick was always disappointed in me. I think I was afraid of what I would see in your eyes.” “What did you see in my eyes, Kate?” Gus asked.

  “Love,” she said shyly.

  “Kate, you will never see anything but love in my eyes. You’ve made my life complete. I’ve been trying to tell you that for so long. Do you realize what we’ve been missing? When are we going to get married?”

  Kate’s stomach lurched. “Gus, don’t rush me. I have other . . . demons to set aside. Our age difference is no small thing to me. I have to work that out in my mind. Legally . . . am I a widow? I don’t know. Do I get a divorce? I never . . . there wasn’t any need. . . . I don’t want to leave California. You live in New York. You have a good job, I have a business. Can we, for now, just enjoy what we have, and work at the rest of it?”

  “Only on one condition, that this time next year we’re married. We should be able to resolve everything in twelve months. Say it, Kate. I need to hear you say you want to marry me twelve months from now. We can come back here and do it. Say it, Kate,” he said fiercely.

  “In one year we’ll come back here and get married. I do want that, Gus, more than anything. Waking up with you next to me every morning will be wonderful. Cooking for you, making love with you, doing your laundry. I want to say nice things to you and mean them, and I want to hear you say nice things to me and mean them, too. I want to be with you to watch the sun come up, and I want to be with you when that sun sets at the end of the day. I do love you, more than I ever thought I could love a man.”

  Gus sighed happily. “Okay, I accept that.”

  They talked for hours, about everything and anything. When the torchlights were lit outside on the path, Gus said, “It’s dark!”

  “Now that’s a brilliant deduction if I ever heard one.” Kate giggled.

  “I think we missed dinner,” Gus said.

  Kate snorted, a very unladylike sound. “Eat me,” she gurgled. God in heaven, did I say that? “Let’s go ballistic this time!”

  Gus threw back his head and roared with laughter. He’d wakened a sleeping tiger. He obeyed the lady to the letter.

  Kate stirred sleepily at three o’clock. She knew instantly where she was and what had transpired earlier. All the proof she needed was lying next to her. She smiled to herself in the darkness as she listened to Gus’s lusty snores. A shout of happiness birthed in her belly, stretched upward, and was about to explode from her mouth when Gus’s arms snaked out to draw her close. “Was I snoring?” he asked sleepily.

  “Ohhh, you feel so good,” Kate murmured, snuggling against him. “Yes, you snore, like a bull, but I like the sound. We made love four times,” she said, her voice full of awe.

  “You were counting?” Gus teased.

  “Only after the third time. I’m wide-awake. I’m hungry. Actually I’m starved. I feel like . . . oh, I don’t know.”

  “All charged up.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Want to go for a walk?” he asked. “We could get up, shower, go for a walk, come back to our front porch and watch the sun come up. And,” he drawled, “I’m the guy who has two Hershey bars and a pack of double Oreo cookies in his flight bag. Plus . . . plus four bags of United Airlines peanuts and one banana. A veritable feast.”

  “Come on, come on,” Kate said, bounding from the bed. A moment later she realized she was naked. She turned slowly to face Gus in the dim lamplight. “I want you to look at me in the light, Gus. I’m forty-six years old. I have stretch marks, a bit of a potbelly, and my butt is starting to droop. This is what I am. I need to hear you tell me it does or doesn’t make a difference. I need to hear it now. I’m tired of sucking in my gut, tired of wearing control-top panties, tired of trying to cover up my ... my imperfections.”

  “You want to compare bodies?” Gus said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He stood up. “So look and tell me you like tall skinny guys covered with hair from top to bottom. I look like a goddamn grizzly bear, and my hair is thinning on top, in case you didn’t notice. It is also receding. My legs are skinny and go all the way up to my chest. But to answer your question, it doesn’t matter, and you would be doing me a personal favor if you didn’t suck in your gut anymore. I love you just the way you are. Get it through your head. Okay, it’s your turn now,” he said uneasily.

  “Uh, your dick looks kind of wilted.” Kate whooped and ran for the bathroom. God, did she really say that? Ellie would say something like that, not a forty-six-year-old mother. She turned on the shower full blast.

  “Son of a fucking bitch!” He ran after her, yanked open the shower door and said, “You forgot to mention that you also need glasses. I’ll accept your apology now.”

  She gave it, one hundred percent.

  Later they walked barefoot up and down and around the trails,
peering at the different huts, stopping to smell the hibiscus. Gus plucked one and slid it behind her ear. She picked one for him; he stuck it in the pocket of his T-shirt. His arms around her, they threaded their way past the dining room, the open-air bar, the gift store, and up to the beach.

  “This is as near perfect as anything I ever experienced,” Kate said, gentle waves lapping at her feet. “Everything just feels so right. It’s hard to believe there’s a world we have to go back to that is so ordinary. I wonder what it would be like to live here.”

  “It would probably get boring after a while. Places like this are just little slots of time God allows us to experience from time to time so we can exist in the real world. It occurs to me that we both have enough money to buy a house or condo over here if we want to. We could check out Maui. I hear it’s lush and vibrant. We could get a boat. Maybe a Sunfish. Snorkeling gear. A jet ski. An open-air Jeep like the one you rented. We could be beach bums a couple of times a year.”

  “It sounds wonderful. Let’s do that after . . . later on.”

  “Okay.”

  Hand in hand they walked back to their hut and watched the sun come up. They forgot about the peanuts, the banana, cookies, and candy.

  For ten days they frolicked, always to return to their hut to make love for hours on end. When it was time to pack and leave, Kate cried. “I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to go back to an empty house. I don’t want to have to worry about what Betsy is going to do next. I don’t want to go into the office and work. I want to be with you. I don’t want to give this up.”

  Gus started to unpack his bag, a wry grin on his face.

  “I know we have to go back.”

  He started to repack.

  “I could stay the rest of the month if I call Ellie and the office.”

  He started to unpack.

  “But that’s not fair to the office staff. If we stay, it won’t be the same. You’re right, we were allotted these ten days.”

  He started to repack.

  “Don’t you have something to say?”

  “Are we going or not?”

  “Yes, we are going, but I don’t want to.”

  “Neither do I. It’s going to be cold back home. Did you notice something, Kate? There’s no air-conditioning in these huts.”

  “I know, which just goes to prove I’m more astute than you are. Did you know there are no keys?”

  “Yep.” Gus snapped the lock on his suitcase. He turned, placed his hands on Kate’s shoulders. “These last ten days have been the most wonderful of my life. I would not trade them for anything. I love you so much it hurts me. I keep thinking I’m dreaming and when I wake up I’ll know it was a dream. God, I love you, Kate. A year is too long to wait to get married. Can we move it up? I don’t want you getting away from me. I’m serious, can we move it up?”

  “To when?” Kate asked shakily.

  “Next week. Hell, I’m ready now. I feel like dragging you back to the mainland and the nearest justice of the peace. Just soon. Will you consider it?”

  “Of course.” Maybe June, Kate thought. Or September. No, not June, she’d married Patrick in June, had been a June bride. August was a nice month.

  They would part in San Francisco, Gus to fly on to New York and Kate to fly into LAX, where Ellie would pick her up, drive her home, and spend the weekend with her.

  “I’ll miss you,” Kate said at the gate.

  “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “Okay,” Kate said in a choked voice. “ ’Bye, Gus.”

  “ ’Bye, Kate. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  A moment later he was gone. She’d never felt so alone in her life. She was still wearing the lei he had placed around her neck. She thought she could smell his after-shave. In her hand she had a lei in a bubble box that she’d bought for Ellie. God, it was wonderful to be loved. To love someone and have that love returned tenfold.

  With an hour to kill before her plane left, Kate walked into the lounge and ordered a Diet Pepsi. She fished around in her flight bag for a pen and paper to write Della a letter. She ended up with seven pages. Four lines concerned Kona Village, the rest was about Gus and his proposal. She ended the letter with, “I want you at my wedding. If I have to, I’ll come and get you. You must be here when I march down the aisle or march up the steps to the justice of the peace. I miss you terribly, Della. You are always in my thoughts, and you know there is a place in my heart reserved just for you. I send my love. Please call or write.” She signed her name, licked a stamp. She spotted a mailbox outside one of the gift stores, dropped in the letter, sighed, and walked over to the gate, her ticket in hand.

  It was unseasonably cold in Los Angeles when Kate got off the plane. She shivered in her cotton dress.

  Heart soaring, Ellie handed her mother a heavy sweater. She’d never seen her look so happy, so full of life. She smiled from ear to ear and kept on smiling when her mother blushed. “Right now, right here, I want to know,” she said.

  “Ell-ieeee!” her mother admonished her.

  “I don’t care.” She yanked her mother out of the way of the other travelers. “I played Cupid, I feel like Cupid, and I deserve to know. Was it great? Was it everything you thought it would be?—and I know you thought about it a lot. I don’t want details, but I want to know that. God, you look so damn happy. Oh, Mom, I’m so happy for you. You deserve the best, and for you the best is Gus. I believe that in my heart, I really do.”

  “He asked me to marry him. It was wonderful, Ellie. And you’re right, I have never, ever, been this happy. I said yes. My God, I really did say yes. He ... he doesn’t care that I’m forty-six. He doesn’t care that my behind looks like cottage cheese. He loves me. I’m still a little hung up on the numbers, but I think I can handle it. I take it you approve of ... all this.”

  “You got that right! You should have heard him that day you didn’t answer the phone. He was wild, absolutely wild. He thought you’d been in an accident or something. He actually called several hospitals, and then of course the police. He truly loves you. By the way, what was that all about, anyway? You never did tell me.”

  Kate told her, in the middle of the moving walkway. Ellie doubled over laughing, and so did Kate. People turned to look at mother and daughter with amusement. “Did you tell that to Gus?” Ellie gurgled.

  Kate nodded. “He fell off the chair laughing. Actually, I pushed him off.”

  “Is he a good lover, Mom?”

  “The best,” Kate said. “On a scale from one to ten, I’d give him a . . .”

  “Yes, yes, what?” Ellie demanded.

  “A nine and a half. No one is a ten,” Kate said glibly.

  Ellie hooted and she yanked at her mother’s arm as they neared the end of the walkway.

  Kate spent the weekend with her daughter, cooking and hanging out in the hot tub. At night they rented videos, all horror flicks to which Ellie was addicted. On Monday morning when Ellie left, Kate hugged her. “Thank you for going with your instincts and . . . and for arranging everything. I don’t know if I could have done it on my own. I needed that push.”

  “It was all Gus’s idea. I just went along with it.”

  “Ellie, does Betsy know about Gus?”

  “Not from me she doesn’t. If she knew, she’d be making all kinds of noise. If you want some advice, and I hate to say this, I don’t think I’d mention it until it’s a done deed. I keep hoping that one of these days she’s going to get all her ducks in a row and come back to whatever is normal for Betsy.”

  “I think I’ll take that advice, Ellie. Thanks for picking me up at the airport, and thanks for spending the weekend with me. I’m really glad you like your prospective in-laws. I knew they’d love you. Happy New Year, honey!”

  “Same to you, Mom,” Ellie said, hugging her mother.

  The new year started out in a legal mode, with Kate paying visits to the Mancuso law office on a weekly basis. She wanted the Air Forc
e to issue a death certificate, which they were reluctant to do. “I’m not going to fight or argue,” Kate said after the sixth visit, in late May. “File for a divorce. I want it done quickly, and if it can’t be done quickly, I’ll go someplace else, like Nevada or Mexico. I want this behind me. I’m getting married, and I don’t want any surprises along the way. I want everything legal.”

  Mancuso shrugged. “I’ll do my best. I did manage to get you a clear title to the house in New Jersey. Anytime you want, you can sell it. Do you have a buyer?”

  “As a matter of fact I do. I’m going to divide the money between Betsy and Ellie. Mr. Stewart is buying the house for his mother. I imagine he’s going to put the deed in her name. It’s a cash sale. He’ll be sending all the papers to you. You have Ellie’s address, so you can send all the papers to her. She does my taxes and the taxes for the corporation. This sale isn’t going to come back and haunt me later on, is it?”

  “I don’t see how it could, Kate. Everything is legal. Don’t worry about anything. Go home and plan your wedding. By the way, when is it?”

  “I was hoping for August or September, but it looks more like December at this point. I can’t wait,” she said, a girlish ring to her voice.

  “I hope you’ll be very happy.”

  “I don’t just hope. I know I will be. Thanks for all your help, Nick. I never would have gotten this far if not for you.”

  “Kate, about Betsy. Do you have any idea of the kind of money she’s been spending on all these searches she’s been doing over the years?”

  “A lot. She’s dedicated her life to finding her father. It makes me sad when I hear she’s begging for money on the streets to finance . . . whatever it is she does. Every lead fizzles, and still she keeps at it.”

  “Do you give her money?”

  “When she asks, which isn’t often,” Kate said, then added nervously, “She doesn’t know I’m planning on getting married.”

  “I see,” Mancuso said, which meant he didn’t see at all.