Daniel wrapped his arms about her waist and picked her up off the ground while kissing her neck. Pamela laughed into his hair as he carried her to the bed. He pushed her back against the cool blue comforter as he lowered his body on top of hers. She reached her hands around to his firm backside and slid his white briefs down his legs. She let her hands travel up and down his back and thighs, and dragged her nails across his naked bottom.
“You’ll pay for that,” Daniel murmured into her cheek.
Grabbing her body, Daniel flipped her over, placing Pamela on her knees. He kneeled behind her, pulled her hips back to meet his, and pushed her thin cotton panties down. He threw her panties to the floor, then let his hands travel hungrily over her smooth skin and round backside. As he felt her hips grinding against his erection, Daniel leaned over and bit down hard into her shoulder. Pamela threw her head back and gasped. He reached in between her legs and ran his fingers along the tender folds of her flesh.
“Yes,” Pamela whispered, as she backed her hips into him in anticipation.
He tried to curtail his need to quickly enter her. Instead, he entered her slowly, eventually driving himself deep inside of her.
Pamela made a guttural moan as he started teasing her with a slow, deep thrusting motion that made her body tremble. Then he began moving faster and faster in and out of her. Pamela’s hands gripped the bedspread as she felt the slight tingle at the base of her spine travel up her body. Her muscles tensed, as the tingle became a wave of overwhelming pleasure.
Daniel grabbed her hips firmly in his hands as his body slammed harder and harder into hers. She met every thrust from his hips with her own. Daniel groaned against her skin and wrapped his arms about her as he felt her body coming closer to climax.
Pamela soon lost all sense of the world around her as she was overtaken by the sensations that were pulsating throughout her body. When the final release overtook her, she bent her head back and cried out his name in the darkness.
* * * *
“How long has it been?” Daniel asked as he lay holding Pamela in his arms.
“Was it that obvious?” she said, burying her red face in his chest.
He kissed her forehead. “No, it’s just that you never mentioned anyone other than Bob. There must have been someone since him.
“There was a guy right after the divorce, Walden. We went out for a while, but I was just starting my facility and we quickly drifted apart. Since then I haven’t wanted to get involved with anyone.” She looked up into his face. “What about you? When was your last relationship?”
“Relationship?” He rubbed his chin tenderly against her cheek. “Before I left for Iraq. Her name was Debra and we met in grad school at Harvard. Since Debra, I don’t think I’ve spent as much time with any woman as I have with you.”
Pamela sighed. “It’s hard opening up to people again, isn’t it?”
“I guess the more wounds you have, the deeper the scar tissue you have to cut through. Makes people like you and me impossible to get to know.” He paused and let his lips graze her cheek. “But I think we are making progress,” he whispered.
“Progress?”
“I think you’re beginning to trust me. Tonight you showed me a side of yourself that I suspect not a lot of people have seen.”
She rolled over onto her back and took in a deep breath. “Maybe you’re confusing passion with trust, Daniel.”
He chuckled. “I have had enough experience with women to know the difference.”
Pamela sat up and glared at him.
He saw the change in her eyes. The cold look of indifference was back. It was the same way she had looked at him when they first met.
“Perhaps you should take me home,” she stated in an icy tone. She turned away from him and started to get up from the bed.
Daniel grabbed her. He pulled her back down on the bed and wrapped his arms about her. She struggled against him.
“Don’t you dare think you can run away from me,” he whispered into her hair. “You’re supposed to be scared, Pamela. But don’t you let the fear win this time. Not with me.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” she mumbled.
“No, you’re afraid of what I may do to your well-ordered life. I’ve had the same fear you’re feeling now, Pamela. But running doesn’t make the fear go away. It only makes it worse until one day you wake up and you feel nothing.” He felt her body relax against his. “Don’t run away from what you are feeling. Give us a chance.”
She rolled over and faced him. “And what if what we are feeling turns out to be a mistake?”
He brushed a stray lock of hair away from her eyes. “No matter what happens between us, I will never look back on what we have as a mistake.”
She fell back against the bed. “I felt the same way with Bob, and look what happened.”
He settled in beside her. “I’m not Bob.”
“I know that. You don’t have Bob’s cruelty. He was never around much when we were married, and after I got sick he disappeared completely. Until tonight, I never realized how wrong I had been about him.” She paused and let out a long sigh. “The worst part is that, despite what I now know, I’m still stuck with the son of a bitch. I need his monthly allowance to keep my facility going.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get you enough donations so that you’ll never have to be dependent on Bob again,” Daniel said as sat up next to her. He traced the long scar down the center of her abdomen. “From the accident?”
She nodded and reached over and touched the three bullet wounds on his right chest. “We make a hell of a pair.”
Daniel began teasing her right breast with his fingers. “I think we make a very good team. Like gin and tonic or vodka and orange juice.” He leaned over and placed his mouth over her nipple and bit down hard.
Pamela closed her eyes and started running her hands through his thick, dark hair. “You’re talking about cocktails and I’m talking about people.”
Daniel let his lips work their way to her stomach. “Cocktails are much like people,” he murmured against her skin. “They are blended with care and a variety of ingredients to create their own unique flavor.” He planted tender kisses along her scar as his mouth traveled down her body. “Like one of my personal favorites,” he whispered as he knelt in between her legs. “The screaming O.”
* * * *
Pamela awoke from a sound sleep to find that Daniel was not next to her. She sat up and gazed about the room until she saw a tall figure standing with his back to her by the french doors overlooking the balcony. She got out of bed and went over to him.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked as she wrapped her arms about his waist.
He turned and folded her naked body into his arms. “I was just standing here thinking about things.”
“What things?”
“Life things. You know the kind of questions that only seem to come to you in the darkness.”
“Mine are more like fears than questions. The ‘what ifs’ always seem to haunt me at night.”
“And what fears keep you up at night?” he murmured against her hair.
“It’s usually fears about the future. What will happen to my facility if I get sick, or worse.”
“You always have Carol,” he ventured.
Pamela stared out beyond the windows into the darkness of the Quarter. Somewhere out in the still night, a ship making its way down the Mississippi River sounded its deep horn.
“I can’t ask Carol to give up her dreams for mine. She wants to be made the sole beneficiary in my will, but she’s so young and has so many plans for her life. I don’t want anyone to suffer because of my shortcomings.”
“Being sick is not a shortcoming,” he insisted.
“It is to me,” she replied.
Daniel sighed against her. “For me it’s a liability.”
“But you’re not sick,” she said as she turned to him. “Your PTSD is the result of war and trauma.”
He
ran his hands up and down her naked back. “So I’m scarred, but not broken. Is that it?”
“That’s not what I meant. Your fears are different from mine, that’s all.”
“Your fears are about the future whereas mine are all wrapped up in the past.” He paused and looked down into the dark courtyard. “There are times when I can’t let go of the images or the sounds of being in Iraq. My dreams are sometimes filled with the horror of being trapped and shot at again and again until I wake up drenched in sweat.”
She pushed away a lock of hair that had fallen over his brow. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
His hands gently caressed her shoulder and neck. “No, you’ve already done enough. More than you will ever know.” He leaned forward and tenderly kissed her on the mouth.
She stepped back from him and took his hand. She pulled him toward the bed. “Well, if you can’t sleep, and I can’t sleep…” She grinned up at him.
“What did you have in mind?” he asked, raising one eyebrow at her.
“Perhaps you could show me more of those bartending skills of yours,” she said in a husky voice as she lay down on the bed, naked before him. “I think it’s time for another round.”
Chapter 11
The bright morning sunlight blazing through the french doors woke Pamela from a deep sleep. At first, she looked curiously about the strange bedroom and didn’t know where she was. Then a flood of memories from the night before came rushing back into her mind. She giggled and then stretched lazily in the bed. She looked over at the clock on the dresser and saw that it was already after eight.
“I haven’t slept this late in years,” she said aloud.
“After last night’s exertions, I figured you needed the rest,” Daniel spoke up from the bedroom doorway.
Pamela covered her naked body with the bed sheets as she caught sight of Daniel. He was wearing a dark blue robe and carrying a round, red tray with two steaming white cups of what appeared to be coffee. He came over to her side of the bed and carefully sat down, trying not to spill a drop.
“I wanted to make you breakfast but all I had in the house was frozen waffles.” He handed her one of the cups. “I thought I would bring you this and then we could walk on over to Café Du Monde and grab some beignets.”
She took a sip of the hot coffee. “I should call Carol and check in first.”
“I already did that,” Daniel told her as he picked up his coffee and put the tray on the floor next to the bed. “Everyone is fine. She fed all of the babies and was chopping up vegetables for the animals in the outside cages.”
Pamela felt her insides warm over. “You called Carol.” She leaned over and kissed his lips. “Thank you for doing that,” she whispered.
“I knew that would be the first thing you wanted to do when you got up, so I did it for you. I didn’t want you to worry.”
“No one has ever worried about me worrying before. It’s a new experience for me.”
He stood up. “Get used to it. From now on you share your worries with me.”
Pamela stared up at him. “What are you saying?”
He laughed when he saw her astonished face. “I’m not proposing marriage, Pamela. I just don’t want you to think you are in this by yourself anymore. Lean on me from now on. Share your burdens with me.”
“It works both ways, Daniel. I don’t want you to keep things from me, either.”
“Deal,” he held out his hand to her.
Pamela took his hand and shook it. “Perhaps we should seal it with a kiss,” she suggested.
Daniel glimpsed her body hidden beneath the sheets and smiled. He took the cup of coffee from her hand, and then placed both cups back on the tray on the floor.
“I’ve got a better idea,” he said, removing his robe.
Pamela watched as the robe fell to the floor, revealing his naked body. She tossed the sheets aside and went over to the edge of the bed, kneeling before him. She ran her hands over his chest, hips, and thighs. She leaned over and kissed the scars on his chest. Daniel wrapped his arm about her slim waist and eased her back down on the bed beneath him.
“I think I could get used to this arrangement, Mr. Phillips,” she murmured against his neck.
“I aim to please, Ms. Wells,” he said as he stroked her breasts. “And I plan on making sure you are completely satisfied.”
* * * *
Later that morning, they walked over to Café Du Monde, the only place to go in New Orleans for beignets. The open café, located in the French Market on Decatur Street, had been serving the doughy, sugarcoated concoctions to the residents of New Orleans for almost 150 years. Open seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, the green and white awnings of the cafe were only closed for Christmas and the occasional hurricane.
Daniel and Pamela were sitting by an open table in the far corner of the café facing Decatur Street. Some street musicians were entertaining a handful of tourists right outside the eatery as Daniel and Pamela looked on.
“I wanted to live in the Quarter when I first moved here,” she revealed as she sipped her black coffee and chicory.
“I thought you were from New Orleans,” Daniel said, sounding surprised. “You seemed like one of the locals.”
“I moved here from Dallas when I was twenty, after a spring break trip in college.” She wiped some powdered sugar from her jeans. “I was studying pre-med. I fell in love with the place and decided to stay. My father had a fit. He cut me off and left me to make my own way. I got a job waiting tables at an uptown restaurant while I went to EMT school. A couple of years later I met Bob. I quit work to be the full-time wife of a Louisiana attorney.”
Daniel placed his cup of coffee down on the table in front of him. “What about your father?”
“He’s a plastic surgeon in Dallas. He’s on his fourth wife and never had any other children besides me. We never really got along.” She paused and peered into her coffee. “I haven’t spoken to him in six years. I called him when Bob and I got divorced. He blamed me for Bob’s leaving; told me I was a worthless wife, just like my mother.” She shrugged and took a sip of her coffee. “After that phone call, I figured we had nothing left to say to each other,” she added.
“And you were in pre-med because that was what your father wanted?” Daniel asked as he took in her profile in the midmorning sunshine.
She looked over at him. “He wanted me to join his medical practice and eventually take it over after he retired.” She smiled. “So I guess we have that in common, too.”
“But my old man has never been as far removed from my life as yours has been. My father has always tried to stay in touch with me. I’m the one who doesn’t want to stay in touch with him.”
She put her coffee down, reached over, and placed her hand over his. “You should try, Daniel. My father gave up on me. Yours hasn’t.”
“Does you father know about your lupus?” he asked as he picked up his cup of coffee.
“He knows. He sent me to a few specialists in Dallas. They poked and prodded and gave me pills that made me feel worse than the lupus. They even talked about a T-cell replacement procedure.”
“What’s that?” he inquired and took a sip from his coffee.
“A special procedure that kills your own naturally occurring T-cells, or immune cells, with chemotherapy, and then implants healthy donor T-cells into your body. It is experimental and controversial, but it has brought remission to some lupus and multiple sclerosis patients.”
He placed his cup back on the white saucer before him on the table. “You didn’t want to try that?”
Pamela shrugged. “By the time they started discussing that option I was done with doctors and hospitals. They don’t really know how to treat a chronic disease like lupus. They just treat you like a lab rat until they find something they think makes you better, but everything they do only makes you feel worse. At least that is how it made me feel.” She shook her head as she picked up her coffee again. “So I wal
ked away from the treatments and all of the pills. I found a local rheumatologist here in the city and never went back to Dallas. It was right after I gave up on my treatments that Bob decided he wanted out of our marriage.” She took a sip of her coffee.
“But you seem all right now. Is there anything else that can be done?”
She placed her cup down on the table. “I have good and bad days. Today is a good day.” She paused and felt the sunshine on her face. “I try to limit my stress, which isn’t easy. I eat right, take care of myself, and I go in every six months and get blood work done to check my kidney function. My kidneys aren’t as good as they used to be.”
“Maybe there are other doctors, other hospitals with better drugs who may be better at treating your disease,” he declared, his voice filled with emotion. “There must be something we can do,” he implored.
Pamela shook her head. “I’ve seen some of the top lupus doctors in the country. There is nothing left to be done. I manage with what I have. I’m a lot better off than some patients and, besides, everyone has a cross to bear; even you.”
Daniel gazed into her eyes and for the first time since his mother’s death, he felt helpless. Here was someone he cared about who was suffering, and he could do nothing to ease her burden.
“There is something that I would like you to do for me, Daniel.”
“Name it,” he replied with a firm nod of his head.
She gave him a warm smile. “Call your father. You never know how precious family can be until you don’t have them anymore.”
He sighed and turned to take in the musicians next to the café who were playing a solemn jazz tune. “I promise to think about it,” he finally told her.
She picked up her coffee, sat back in her chair, and soaked up the warm rays of the sun on her face.
Broken Wings Page 15
