Beloved

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  With a complex smile he let his gaze wander over her full length and back again. It was like setting her oven temperature to quick preheat. She wound her fingers through his and said, "Once you've opened the wrapper, you can't return it, you know."

  The sound of his laugh was mixed with pain. "I wish you weren't so beautiful," he said in a wistful voice.

  "Beautiful ... I'm not beautiful," she said, surprised. Then she added, "Why do you say you wish I wasn't? Which I'm not. But if I were."

  He climbed in bed and lay alongside her and raked his fingers gently through her long hair, fanning it on the pillow. "I want you, not because you're beautiful," he said, pressing his lips first to one temple, then to the other. "I want you because you're real. I love that you enjoy my people. I love that you could get excited about a rusty pickup truck. I love — I was amazed — that you moved your door and not the hollies."

  He was lying across her breast, supporting his weight on one elbow, his wide shoulders overshadowing her smaller frame. He lowered his mouth on hers in a kiss of almost unbearable tenderness and said, "And I wish now that I hadn't eaten your Napoleon at the church bazaar; I know you wanted it."

  It was the craziest, most whimsical declaration of — of what? Want? Love? She didn't know; all she knew was that she wanted — and loved — this man. She held his face between her hands and brought his mouth back down on hers and kissed him fiercely, not because she was impatient, but because he was so patient. If he wanted to make this last, he was doing a superb job of it.

  "Ah, Jane," he said hoarsely between kisses, "I don't want to rush this... ."

  "Mac McKenzie," she said with a giddy laugh as he buried his face in the curve of her neck, "you who watch trees grow for a living — there's no way you could rush this."

  His voice was both wry and rich with emotion as he said, "Trust me; it's been a while. I think what we need ... we need to give you a head start," he murmured, beginning a slow and wicked descent with his tongue across the sometimes uncharted terrain of her body.

  Jane had no idea, she hadn't a clue, that a man could make a woman feel this way, this long, this well. She sucked in her breath sharply, then sucked it in again, forgetting to let go, until her mind was spinning from lack of oxygen, until some survival reflex let the air out again, in long, shuddering waves, and she began all over in sharp, staccato intakes, her blood pulsing the whole time, her heart ragged from the effort to keep up.

  More than once she thought she had died; it seemed inconceivable to her that the human body, the female body, could survive such repeated plunges into near-oblivion and live to dream about it. She felt such incredibly intense, explosive yearning for him; she had nothing in her life to compare it to.

  But she had her experience of Judith. The image of Judith, once it filtered through her consciousness, became stronger and more pervasive until she understood on some level that she was Judith, and Sylvia was Judith, and so was Cissy. All women were Judith, anyone who'd ever loved the way a woman can, with all her heart and soul.

  And whether the love turned out well, or whether children followed, or long life, almost didn't matter, because the essential thing, the one essential thing, was to have opened oneself to the experience of loving someone without holding back.

  She opened her eyes, drugged with love, and saw Mac alongside her again, his chin resting on one hand, a bemused half-smile softening the craggy features of his face. "You are beautiful," he said softly. "More than ever."

  "It must be my feelings shining through," she whispered. She touched her fingertips to her lips, then pressed them gently to Mac's full, handsome mouth. "I think maybe you gave me too much of a head start," she said dreamily. "I seem to have got there before you."

  "I can probably still catch up," he said with a sensuous, lazy smile. He had the bedrock confidence of his sex; there wasn't a doubt in her mind that he was right. She wondered what would happen now if she said, "Fat chance."

  Fat chance that she'd ever say it.

  He brought his mouth down over hers in a test-the-waters kiss. Jane knew — how could she not? — that he would give her all the time she needed. The waters seemed just fine: not too hot, not too cold. The silvery lightness of his kiss lingered until it became something more liquid and golden, and then something else again, hotter and molten.

  And this, too, was new: this heat. She had wanted him before in an almost ineffable way, and he had more than satisfied that desire. But there was something else, an emptiness that needed to be filled, a mating ritual as old as time itself that needed to be consummated.

  Her voice was barely a shudder, lost in the tangle of her senses, as she said, "Come into me ... come into me now ...."

  And when he did, in a slow slide into the melting recess of her self, she closed her eyes and breathed a sigh of exaltation because now, at last, she was whole.

  Mac, who parceled out his words like gold coins, parceled out three more. "I ... won't ... last," he said, his brow beading up from the effort to do just that. He became very still.

  She had to smile. "The general idea is, you don't have to," she answered, sliding her hands through his wild, sun-streaked hair. "Because there's more, you know."

  His voice was tremulous, almost apologetic. "I pace myself much better than this ... but with you, it's different. I ... something ... drives me to you. With you ... I have no choice."

  "It's the roses," she said with a soft, mysterious sigh. "We're bound by them."

  She watched as he closed his eyes, savoring the moment, savoring her. "Bound," he repeated softly.

  The word hung in the air between them, the simple sum of their destinies. Mac seemed to relax, as if the word had liberated him, freed him from the agony of having to make choices. She, too, felt that way. Bound: to the present, to one another, to the act of loving. Bound: to the past, to the memory of Judith and Ben Brightman, and all lovers during all ages. Bound: to a future together, a man, a woman.

  They were bound, and somehow that made them free. Mac quickened his pace, and she opened herself to him, made it easy for him, until he shuddered, and she cried out, "I do love thee!"

  Chapter 24

  She lay on his breast, listening to the steady thump of his heart. After a while Mac said softly, "You called me 'thee.'

  "Thee has a problem with that?" Jane said lightly, tracing an aimless pattern on his chest. She remembered the "thee" very well; it came right after the I-do-love part.

  He stroked her hair away from her face and said, "I wouldn't have, if I were two hundred years old. Are you trying to revive an old tradition? Or are you just trying out for the lead in Friendly Persuasion?"

  She hesitated, then said, "I guess I was feeling just so overwhelmed. I guess I was feeling ... Judith."

  For another long moment he was quiet. Then: "Tell me about her. What else, since the chimney fire?"

  It didn't seem possible that Mac could want to hear about Judith; but his voice was low and kind and intimate, so Jane threw open this deepest, most secret part of her life to him. She described Judith's apparition on the night of Uncle Easy's party. She told Mac about her discovery of the house on Pine Street. And she confessed that that's where she'd found the Belle Amour rose.

  At the end she said, not daring to look at him, "Couldn't the Belle Amour be the rose from Ben Brightman's grave? Ben's rose — or its offshoots — could have been around forever; there's a rose called the Tombstone Rose in Arizona that's supposed to be four hundred years old. The Belle Amour could have been brought from Europe on a ship to Nantucket, just as so many trees and shrubs were. If the house really was Judith's and Ben's —"

  "If."

  "And if the rose really is from Ben's grave —"

  "If."

  "If," she conceded softly. "Something happened to us downstairs, Mac," she said. "I added the Belle Amour roses to the pitcher with the rugosa roses, and the combined scents of the two — well, here we are," she said, propping herself on one elbow and giv
ing him a whimsical, helpless look. "Nothing else has been able to get us into bed."

  He slid his hand around her back and began idly rubbing concentric circles into the base of her neck. "You don't think we were headed here on our own?"

  She closed her eyes, relishing the sensation. "I think we got a little push."

  "So the 'thee' — that was Judith speaking? Judith was using you as a surrogate when we made love? And Ben was making the most of me?"

  "I don't know. It could be."

  "And the part before the 'thee'?" he asked her softly. "That was Judith too?"

  She opened her eyes. He hadn't missed a thing. "That part was me," she admitted with a steady look. "Because I do."

  He returned her look with a troubled one of his own. "This is moving along, isn't it?"

  Jane colored and said, "No obligation, sir, none at all. It was just something ... I needed to say." She hunkered back down, with her cheek pressed against his heart. Wild horses wouldn't drag another declaration of love out of her now; not until he got a little further along in analyzing his feelings for her. She sighed and wondered when that would be.

  "I wish ...." She stopped, then began again. "By now you think I'm completely mad, but ... what if there were some way to combine those two roses? Permanently, I mean. Isn't there something horticulturalists do — stick one branch on the other or something to make a new hybrid? Grafting, isn't it called? Could we do that with two such dissimilar roses?"

  He still seemed a little thrown for a loop by her admission that she loved him. "I — what? Graft them? I guess so. You could try budding the Belle Amour onto the roots of the rugosa. The new rose would flower next year. But why?"

  Jane really wasn't sure why. She struggled with her reasons, then said, "You, of all the people I know, see firsthand how life — this is such a cliché, but it's true — how life goes on. Trees, flowers — people — grow old; they reach the end of their lifespan; they die. They decay, and turn into another form of life. Some of us hate to admit it," she said with a sigh. "But it's like the song says. Soldiers eventually go to flowers; every one."

  "And our two lovers have gone to roses?" he asked, idly stroking her hair. "And the only way they can be together is if we do the job for them?"

  "I truly believe it."

  "Isn't that a little like playing God?"

  "I don't think God would mind. It's spring. It's His busy season," Jane said, smiling. But she wouldn't look at Mac's face; she didn't want to see the skepticism that she could hear creeping into his voice. Not now. Not after today.

  "Well, you should know," Mac said at last. "You're a closer relation to Sylvia than I am."

  "Sylvia? What does my Aunt Sylvia — a closer relation! Are you telling me that you're any relation to her?" she asked in a scandalized voice, bolting up.

  He laughed and pulled her back down to him. "She's probably my twentieth cousin six times removed. On Nantucket everyone's related to everyone else. Don't worry," he said, kissing her forehead, "we haven't violated any civil laws this afternoon. My point is that everyone around here knew Sylvia was empathic. You must have inherited some of her sensitivity to the paranormal."

  "Excuse me? Why didn't you tell me this on the night of the chimney fire?"

  He grimaced. "You really wanted to be told you were psychic?"

  "No," she said, giving his hair a yank. "I'd much rather go on thinking I was insane." She sat up and reached for the robe that was lying over the footboard. "Is that why everyone on the island avoided my aunt?" she asked as she got out of bed and slipped the robe around her. "Because she was psychic?"

  "Not at all. Sylvia was born off-island and out of wedlock. Her mother was an islander, but she hated Nantucket; people here remember stuff like that. Sylvia grew up, moved here, and married a local boy, but by then people's minds were set against her. By then it was a tradition."

  "You people sure are hell on outsiders," Jane said, tying her robe and looking down at him with a rueful smile.

  "Yeah, it's our one edge over you: we were here first." He caught one end of her bathrobe tie. There was a stirring in him, a glimmer of lazy interest. "Leaving?"

  Jane slid the tie out of his hand with a knowing smile. "I'm starved. I thought I'd go downstairs and bring back some milk and Oreos on a tray. And, what the heck, maybe the pitcher of roses. I think we ought to test my theory again."

  "I've always been a believer in the scientific method," Mac said, folding his arms contentedly behind his head. "Want any help down there?"

  She shook her head and said, "Stay right where you are." He was so relaxed, so completely at home. It filled her with immense joy to think that finally, at last, after months of touch-and-go, Mac McKenzie was settling in. Maybe.

  She was on her way out of the bedroom when she turned, irresistibly drawn by the certainty that he was staring at her.

  "What," she said, mimicking his earlier challenge.

  He let out a moody sigh. "I just hope your Judith moonlights as a guardian angel."

  Jane knew exactly what he meant. "Phillip truly isn't a danger to me, Mac," she said, plunging her hands into the pocket of her robe and looking down at her toes. "I, ah, wanted to tell you something concerning him earlier, but couldn't. Anyway, it's academic now, because I've changed my mind."

  She lifted her head and said calmly, "The fact is, Phillip — his relations, actually — made me an excellent offer on the house. I ... I got as far as signing a sales agreement; it's downstairs on the front table."

  Mac said absolutely nothing. She saw one eyebrow twitch slightly; but that was all.

  So she told him the amount. "You can see how tempting it was," she said with an uneasy smile. "I wanted to stay on Nantucket, but you weren't giving me any encouragement at all. But now all that's changed. It was such a close call. If I hadn't been out of stamps to mail the agreement ... if you hadn't come here today ... if I hadn't knocked over the vase ...."

  She smiled lamely. "It's fate, don't you think?" she murmured. When Mac continued to remain impassive, she rambled on about Phillip's aunt and uncle and what nice neighbors they'd have been for everyone, trying feverishly to defend her decision to sell to Phillip and them.

  Finally she shrugged and said, "I can't imagine what I was thinking of when I accepted the offer. But you were so determined to shut me out ... and Phillip was so persuasive ... and at the time it all seemed so reasonable ...."

  "Because it was reasonable," Mac said, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of her bed. "I was wrong about him, obviously," Mac said without looking at her. "That's a great offer. I thought he'd try to steal the place out from under you. But when his last trick backfired, it must have shaken him. He wants the place more than I thought," Mac added under his breath.

  "For perfectly legitimate reasons!" she said. "An aunt! An uncle!"

  Mac stood up and reached for his pants. She had to resist an impulse to grab them first and toss them out the window. "What are you doing?" she asked, not knowing what else to say.

  When he answered, "Getting dressed," in a flat, unemotional voice, it was all she could do not to scream out loud. "Are you crazy? You can't just walk out from this. You can't just how can you? I don't want to sell! Don't you get it? I want to stay here! With you!"

  He yanked the turtleneck over his head and began tucking it in his jeans. "You signed a sales agreement," he said, hooking his belt up. An angry flush darkened his cheeks. "I don't care if you've handed it over yet or not. At some point you were perfectly willing to sell me out." He stopped himself, got his anger back under control.

  "You signed it," he repeated doggedly. "Good for you. It's a great offer. Now you can go back to work, for yourself, doing — what was it? — drawing lipstick and chairs?"

  "I've changed my mind!" She wanted to stamp her foot but knew instinctively that it would be deadly to do it. "I don't want to stay in advertising. I could never go back to that rat race!"

  She pulled her robe more tight
ly around her, feeling absurdly at a disadvantage now that he was dressed and she wasn't. "You think I became part of some master plot against you, Mac. But I asked Phillip specifically about what would happen if he ever bought Bing's place, and he swore that things would stay the same for you."

  "And you believed him."

  They were standing face to face now; she could see the distrust, the sense of being betrayed in his eyes. "Mac, you have to get over this obsession with Phillip! That car episode was a lifetime ago; it's water under the bridge. Your bitterness is eating at you ... it won't let you trust anyone."

  "You don't know who I trust," he said evenly. "Excuse me — whom."

  "Who, whom, who cares? Only you, Mac. You're the only one. No one else gives a shit."

  Mistake. She saw the veil come down over his eyes; she saw him withdraw completely from the fray.

  "You're blocking the doorway," he said coldly.

  He was walking away. Again. It was more than she could bear. She slammed the door shut behind her, then slapped herself up against it, barring him from leaving. "No! I have enough phantoms in my life! This time you stay and we talk about it!"

  He made a sharp, instinctive move for the door, which infuriated her. She grabbed the doorknob ahead of him. "Dammit, Mac — can you hate me so much? So soon?" Her voice cracked, but she rallied, determined to face him down without resorting to tears.

  "All right," she said calmly. "Assume I made a mistake. Assume I'm sorry for disappointing you; God knows I am. But I want to know exactly what it is you were hoping I would do. You're so smart. Tell me." She waited for his answer.

  His hands were on his hips now, his gaze somewhere above her head. His jaw was clenched tight, always a bad sign. She didn't care. She waited.

  "I don't know!" he burst out at last. "All I know is what I didn't want you to do. I didn't want you to sell to Harrow, I didn't want you to sell to anybody else, I didn't want you to leave the island."