It was a hard-evidence that he offered her, hard, urgent, pulsing through the constricting material of their clothing. She was frozen against his rampant aggression, her eyes locked with his in startled enquiry.
He groaned and threw a wild glance around the deserted neighbourhood street, then he grasped her hand and pivoted on one heel to stride with escalating speed back around the street corner. Her long legs flashed as she worked to keep up with him; she stumbled on the uneven pavement, and he grimaced, and caught her, and urged her into a run, muttering, ‘Hurry, damn it.’
‘Adam!’ she gasped, in protest at his manhandling. He stopped for a whirling instant, hauled her to him, and kissed her with unsteady, uncalculated, unskilled ferocity, piercing her smooth chignon with destructive fingers, dragging her hair out of the confinement until it flowed all around her head and shoulders in a dusky, untamed cloud.
He gritted against her parted lips, ‘It’s been seven long, hard, dry, suspenseful days, and I’m so famished for you that I’ll probably take you here in the street if you don’t expend a little more effort and start hustling, woman.’
She got the point, and nodded, and hustled. Since his flat was so close by, he hadn’t driven to the restaurant, and by the time he dragged her up the garden path and unlocked the door of his ground floor flat she was gasping and dishevelled. She would have laughed if she hadn’t caught his urgent need and become a willing accomplice to the seriousness of the intent.
Yvonne wanted to scream at the unexpected intrusion as a matronly figure hurried into the shadowed hall in response to the grating of his key in the lock. ‘Mr Ruarke!’ puffed the middle-aged woman. ‘I’m so sorry-Ms Trent called just as you hoped she would, and I did manage to tell her where you were, but she wouldn’t leave a message—’
The housekeeper hadn’t caught sight of her yet. Yvonne hung back slyly. ‘Thank you for minding the phone, Mrs McFaddan,’ said Adam in a serene voice, as his fingers crushed hers to a numb bloodlessness. ‘And well done.’You did just exactly what you should have done, and now you may go home.’
‘Hello, Mrs McFaddan,’ said Yvonne as she peeped around the bulk of Adam’s shoulder, startling the other woman into a gasp of delight. ‘We spoke earlier. How nice to meet you; goodnight.’
‘Ms Trent! You’re actually here in Britain?’ The housekeeper’s eyes glowed. ‘Oh, it’s such a pleasure to meet you! I love your films…’
Adam exploded. He forcibly hustled the housekeeper to the front door, talking the entire time. His relentless politeness overrode her astonished squawks. Then he advised her to take the next day off, shoved her out of the door, slammed and locked it. Yvonne leaned her aching head against the wall and laughed until tears streamed down her face.
He didn’t turn to her. He planted his fists into the door with a great wooden boom, and gritted, ‘Damn—Yvonne, I have no patience left—’
That was the last of it, spent in considerate warning. She licked her lips, looking at his bowed head and hunched shoulders. Control was such an erotic thing to misplace. She helped to bury his, and whispered, ‘Adam, I’m so wet.’
He growled, and turned to lunge at her. She fell giddily under his onslaught; he caught her and lowered her gently to the floor. Then that was the last of his carefulness as well. He didn’t even bother undressing her, but lifted up her skirt and moved between her legs, unbuckling his trousers, shaking, fumbling, heedless.
It was the most moving and touching thing she had ever experienced, the animal need to couple with this intelligent and humane man. She was helpless before his sensual finesse, and unbearably excited by his consummate patience, but this rough, immense penetration-.-—-this she gloried in—again, again, again. And then he propped himself on one elbow to stare down at her, appalled, in wonder, triumphant, and he cried out from the very heart of him, ‘I love you!’
She,drew him in, all of him, all of the gift, and cried it back, and it was new.
They came home together. They came together, such along, long way.
The truth and a final understanding.
Said the wife, peaceably, to her husband, ‘I told you so.’
Said the husband to his rose-pruning wife, ‘You’re always right. It isn’t fair. Admit it—you had some doubts there, for a little while.’
The wife was a serene and subtle matriarch, hatted and gloved to protect her fine skin from the sun, a delicate queen of the perpetual summer. She gave her husband a secretive smile; that always maddened him.
‘I never doubted for a moment,’ said the wife, snipping and pruning with great energy, stepping back now and then to consider the loveliness of her design. ‘I saw from the beginning that Adam and Yvonne were right for each other. ‘Yin and yang, two halves of a coin. She warms him up, and he draws her out. They’ll drive each other crazy for the rest of their lives and love every minute of it.’
The husband considered that, broodingly, then nodded his resignation. ‘She thinks I did it,’ he said darkly, and began to laugh all over again. ‘She thinks I had the entire thing mapped out. I quite like being the recipient of so much respect.’
The wife tapped him on the arm to remind him of his place. ‘Don’t let it go to your head,’ she advised him in a sweet voice.
The husband considered that as well, and sighed. ‘Won’t you ever tell her that it was all your idea?’
The wife laughed. ‘And give up my one advantage of secrecy? Not likely. Now, how do we go about convincing them that they want a great gaggle of children? I can’t wait to become a grandmother.’
‘I love you,’ said the adoring husband to his wife.
She was so busy. She snipped and said happily, ‘I know.’
The next Oscar awards ceremony was the first in six years that the famous director Adam Ruarke He triumphed in absentia; he and his wife had another pressing engagement.
The labour-room was modern, homey. There was a television they could watch in between her contractions. Yvonne laughed with glee at each award their film won and then groaned in pain successively. Adam told her she sounded like a bizarre kind of mule. She threatened to have him evicted.
The engagement became even more pressing. Yvonne never got to see the part when she won her own Oscar for her portrayal of Hannah. As she was wheeled into the delivery-room, she was shouting furiously, ‘I’ve changed my mind, damn it! Give me drugs, hit me over the head, for God’s sake, just take the baby out!’
Adam was overcome, with laughter, worry, terrible empathy, bottomless remorse, heart-shaking excitement. There was only just so much emotion that one man could stand.
He managed admirably, after all; he rose to the occasion; if there was too much emotion, why, he just had to grow to contain it.
His calm, steady coaching was an unfaltering anchor for her to hold on to. She gritted, and poured with sweat, and pushed, and cried that she must be the fattest, ugliest woman on earth, and that he must hate her for it; and he crooned, and supported her straining shoulders, and reminded her to breathe, and said that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and that he loved her quite terribly, and that they must never make love again.
At that she nearly split her swollen sides with laughing, until the last great contraction squeezed her like a vice, and she screamed ear-splittingly, and gave birth to a tiny, funny-looking, vastly surprised little creature whom she loved at once so much that she burst into noisy tears. The healthy baby girl immediately wailed in concert; grinning nurse wiped and weighed and measured quickly, then thrust the minute bundle of outrage into her father’s stunned arms.
Adam looked from his wailing daughter to his weeping wife. Oh, my God, he had two of them now.
He was quite certain that he was the luckiest man on earth.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
The Winter King Page 16
