Lightning That Lingers

by Sharon

  "You know," she said, "you could have found much better prey than me."

  "I seriously doubt it. You cringe. That's rare."

  "I don't cringe!" She felt a sudden, incredulous fury.

  "I'm sorry, but you do."

  "Damn it, you're sadistic!"

  That made him smile. "No. Actually, I'd like to find a way to make you stop cringing."

  In an absent gesture, the hand he had loosely draped over the seat back dipped enough to touch her. His thumb slid to the side of her neck, brushing tinglingly into the lowest hairs. The tip of his middle finger discovered the hollow at the back of her neck and lightly stroked. Sparklike prickles raised all over her body and her movement away from his fingers was almost violent.

  "I don't want you to touch me. If you think one unfortunate remark of mine justifies your repeated assaults—"

  Inspiration failed her as the wagon twisted sharply to the right, slicing through the open gateposts in a barbed-wire fence onto a field access road. The headlights picked out the dapple of withered corn shocks half-buried in drifted snow. Gears scraped, and the wagon rocked to a halt. He faced her, a hand on the seat back, the other on the steering wheel.

  "I think it would be much healthier if we didn't have to operate on this level of illusion." Lazy passion glowed in his eyes. "Let's straighten things out. Come here. And in a minute, we'll decide together if it's an assault."

  Anger flared inside her, then died into blankness like the sinking glitter of a drained firework. It would be much healthier... men had promised her a thing or two in her life. Philip Brooks was the first who had ever promised to make her healthy.

  Most puzzling to her, as she found herself drowning in the shadowed glimmer of his eyes, was how close she was to giving him that chance. Somewhere inside her, the mindless struggle grew still. Why, why, why?

  In one short sweep of words he had laid bare her lame rebuffs, with their curious residual touches of adolescent hysteria. And it brought her an unlooked for, painful relief, like sharp fresh air washed into a stale passage. And now, making no move to touch her, he watched her face in perfect silence with a patience that seemed as limitless as it was without effort.

  The hot-cold pump of embarrassment beat through her. Tears formed, and yet a feathery peace had settled within. When the indelicate tears had been subdued and she was sure that her voice was going to do what she wanted, she said, "I panic around men."

  "Tell me." The voice, the patience were a soft invitation.

  "I... I have to know. Did you come for me tonight for revenge?"

  "For telling me you were allergic to penicillin? Not at all. I don't have that kind of energy. Why do you panic around men?"

  "I don't know. I'm just not..." She grappled briefly for a word, "debonair."

  His smile, a startled slash of delight, consumed the word before he began to laugh, an alluring sound, winsome and melodic, kindling to her senses. "I'll admit debonair isn't the adjective that comes most readily to mind. But thank God. Being that well-protected is like living on the cutting edge of a scythe. You can never let anyone too close. I've been like that too much of my life. Tell me, why isn't Jennifer debonair?"

  Purling breezes stirred the corn stalks. Crisp blackness held up the stars in broken chains. The night gave the quiet between them the intimacy of a confessional and she folded her hands on the dash and dunked her chin on them, gazing at the bright moon. Tell me, the voice had softly beckoned.

  "It's a little hard to say. I didn't grow up with a father and my mother blames that for everything. But I'm not sure.... It might be because I never wanted to grow up, you know? When my friends started getting interested in makeup and clothes and... and other things, I just kept thinking: It's happening too fast! It's happening too fast! And puberty—" she gave a low disdainful whistle— "puberty was disgusting. I thought it was going to kill me. These crazy things happening to your body and who asked for any of it?" Dear God, I can't believe I just said that. Am I drunk? Falling apart? In suspended animation? Is he a hypnotist?

  "I understand that," he said. "A happy childhood, the warm cocoon that splits open slowly and there you are in a world you never expected. Famine. Aging. Competition. Sex. And you think, what am I doing here? I thought this place was going to be safe. You go to sleep in Kansas and wake up in Oz. I don't know if it's any consolation, but as puberties go, yours looks like it was a smashing success."

  "Thank you." She blushed slightly. "No one's ever admired my puberty before."

  "They have. Trust me." A pause. Then, gently, "Jennifer? Why don't you like to be touched?"

  She felt an echo of buried pain and the sudden stomach-tightening awareness of him as a man. He was sweetly, tinglingly close, a motion away, and she squeezed her eyelids tightly shut, feeling the heavy pinprick sensations that anticipated his touch. She lied. "There isn't a reason. It just makes me uncomfortable."

  Through the back of her thighs, she felt his shifting weight on the car seat and then the light presence of his arm, slowly stroking on her back.

  "Does this make you uncomfortable?" he asked, a soft inflection in his voice.

  "Yes." The word barely escaped her dry mouth. She felt the warm sliding pressure of his flesh as his hand followed the outline of her chin and then raised it gently.

  "And this?" he whispered against her mouth as his lips found hers with the lightness of drifting shadow.

  "Yes," she breathed as he laid her back against the seat and slid one hand underneath the high knit collar to lay a sensuous massage into the curve of her neck. His mouth caressed her cheeks and then returned to ride liquid fire into her lips.

  "Do you know," he whispered, "this sweet little mouth has been haunting me. I could feel it against my skin when I closed my eyes...." Warm sharpening strokes parted her lips, and his tongue swept over the access to her mouth and then inward in a light tease over the uneven line of her teeth, igniting heat waves that spread like velvet shimmers inside her chest.

  The fragrance of his hair, fresh and piney, was potent in her senses. His lips tasted of the night breeze and the vivid tang of winter. His hands, moving with heart-lifting candor, had begun to burn through her coat, and then they returned to cradle her head, dragging her into his kiss, his ardent breath coming with thrilling rapidity against the damp tissues of her mouth. His palms brushed the underside of her chin and gently, carefully, spread open her coat. Her temperature fluctuated, flooding her veins with shuddering heat.

  "Are you cold, Jenny?" he murmured, his tongue rimming her earlobe, his hands on her waist pressing her into him. "Let my body keep you warm. Jenny, darling Jenny." His whisper teased the inside of her ear. "Are you uncomfortable now?"

  His hands wove gentle up-and-down patterns on the sides of her body, tracing her shape through her smooth sweater, caressing her ribs, the flatness of her stomach, and her rounded hips, molding her softness with exquisite sensitivity.

  "Yes..."she breathed as his fingertips skimmed the underside of her breasts, and as his fingers gently covered her tenderness, driving the aching need deep within her, "yes... yes..."

  His laughter came quietly against her cheeks, then her lips, and she drew a hard concussive breath when his fingers, wending downward, began to feed thick dreamy pleasure to the inside of her thighs. "Darling, if you're still uncomfortable" —his lips sought and nuzzled hers, showing her the outline of his smile—"I think we could find the cure."

  CHAPTER 4

  His words brought her chin up, which hardly surprised him, and her wide-set eyes gazed up at him with dismay. For a moment, she was painfully open, her unguarded sensitivity carrying the simplicity of a line drawing—Tweetybird in a tough predicament. He knew suddenly why she had grown up to be so cautious. Jennifer Hamilton was very vulnerable.

  He enfolded her in his arms, watching the top of her head as her face sought the false refuge of his chest. Her fingers clung to the sides of his coat and he heard her make a soft sound, something less than
a word, more than a sigh.

  He knew surrender when he saw it in a woman. This was something else. Numb shock, probably. He had a sudden unsettling vision of himself as a predator—the puma holding a small struggling creature under one paw. The thought disturbed him enough to bring discipline to the fire in his senses.

  The riveting sweetness of caressing her mouth with his tongue had taken him off guard. This was new to him, this overpowering need to be with a woman. The one thing he was not capable of doing right now was letting her leave his life. It was ironic that after all this time and all he'd experienced, the feeling should come in the arms of this tender, unripe person. This wasn't the way he'd expected it to happen.

  He put his hand against the back of her head, stroking the sleek healthy strands of her hair, watching its subdued sheen glow like jet in the starlight. God, he thought, please don't let me hurt this woman. He knew that if he pushed deftly enough in the right direction, he could probably have her with him tonight. That knowledge brought him nothing but a weary self-accusation. A fast, easy, efficient seduction would wound her no matter how much it met the demands of his body. For her, he had to relearn intimacy.

  When he felt her trying to withdraw from his arms, he let his grip slacken immediately and watched in sympathy, touched with desire and tender amusement, as she slid a little distance down the seat, straightening her shoulders with a visible attempt at dignity.

  Staring with some intensity out the windshield at the frozen, twisted line of trees across the field, she slowly drew off her mitten and touched bare unsteady fingertips to her damp lips. Her hand dropped. She cleared her throat. "You're very thorough."

  Admiring the pluckiness that made her continue to resist him, he said, "Which, I take it, is not a characteristic you find endearing?"

  "People who are good at everything depress me."

  "Don't worry. I have moments of great ineptitude."

  Glaring blankly out the window, she said, "I have hours of great ineptitude."

  He wanted to take her in his arms again but he couldn't, because the desire to make love to her was still stinging his body. Instead, he rested his arm on the seat back, his fingertips stroking her shoulder, running along the pliant groove of her jacket seam. Then, without wanting it to happen, his fingers strayed to her face, tracing the line of her nose, the gently rounded nostrils, the entrancing corner of her lips. I want you, he thought. I want you, lady.

  He slid his fingers underneath her soft knit cap to explore the warm hollows of her ear. "D'you know something?"

  "What?"

  The slight breathless quality in her voice found a strong answering vibration within his body that took a heavier struggle than he had anticipated to subdue. The face she turned toward him, though wary, seemed to have no idea what effect she had on his body chemistry. He grinned inwardly. It wasn't safe to allow this poor kid out after dark!

  He withdrew his hand and started the engine. "You don't really cringe."

  Jennifer, watching the skillful, intriguing motions of his hands on the steering wheel, was trying to fathom how Philip Brooks had happened to a life that until now had been droning along at a pleasantly mundane rate.

  It had begun to snow, gay tumbling drops that grew bright in the headlights, scattering like breeze-blown blossoms. Black and dramatic, the naked tree limbs met in tangled embraces overhead. Behind the stars, the sky was the color of magic.

  Magic. When they reached the turnoff that would have permitted them to double back toward the Victorian Arms, the car swept onward. Jennifer closed her eyes. I hope he's kidnapping me. Abandoned to the wolves... She was forced to begin redefining the wolf. Unexpected depths had surfaced in a man she had expected to be shallow. He was funny, forceful, and clever. If it was difficult to tell whether he was kind or merely charming, it didn't seem to lessen his appeal. She spent a moment thinking about the word "appeal." To say that Philip Brooks had appeal was to win a black belt in understatement.

  Philip Brooks. The name caught and held in her mind, printing and reprinting. Brooks had a special meaning in Wisconsin, as Rockefeller had in other parts of the country. One studied it in elementary school history classes. A grand and eclectic family, they had made a fortune in banking and put it into consolidating small railroad companies throughout the Midwest. Outstanding philanthropists, their names showered the pediments of art centers and libraries all over the state. She had a flashing memory of the M.C. at the Cougar Club introducing Philip as a "native blueblood" which she had paid no attention to at the time. And there was the patrician accent— never explained. Surely it was impossible for a true Brooks, precious to the state's historical heritage, to be peeling off his jeans in a raucous nightclub. The thought shocked her more than any other thing that had occurred this strange evening.

  The station wagon stopped in front of a mammoth gateway, the tall brickwork and wrought iron bristling with rank and importance. It was the portal to the Brooks estate.

  Philip depressed a disk on a small control that sat on the dashboard and the gate swung apart as though it had been whisked open by invisible hands. Jennifer thought immediately of the magical palace in Beauty and the Beast. The beast's palace. The outrageous but not unappealing idea that Philip was going to take her to a cozy bachelor pad and make love to her gave way to a truly terrifying notion: not only might he be sinfully wealthy, he might also be taking her to a far from cozy mansion to introduce her to his parents. He wouldn't. He couldn't.

  "I hope that I don't seem vulgarly inquisitive," she said in a voice that was distinct and polite. "But where are we going?"

  "I'd like to make you acquainted with some friends of mine."

  Friends. "Do they live in a mansion?"

  "No." His smile enlarged the word. "In trees."

  That set her back. The wagon traversed fifty yards of a wooded drive and then turned bumpily into a narrow, snow-packed lane. Stiff branches pelted the car doors and windows with a clapping rattle. High withered grass reached through the snow to brush the car frame. She wondered if there was some inoffensive manner of phrasing a question that asked teasingly if these mysterious tree dwelling friends were members of the ape family. She had decided there was not when he said, "You don't wear perfume," as though it had just occurred to him.

  For some odd reason there was approval in his voice. "True. I never remember."

  "That's good. They might not have liked it."

  They live in trees. They don't like perfume. Hokay. The ultraconservatism of someone who could be offended by women wearing perfume accorded not at all with someone leading a raffish and precarious existence in a tree house. The man was pulling her leg.

  "These friends of yours—they are human?"

  "Jennifer! I strip. Would I expose you to any of my unsavory associates?" he asked playfully.

  His tone was light as spun sugar, amusement rimmed the corners of the long fascinating mouth, and yet some little understood sense within her seemed to be registering his subtle anxiety. Or it might have been her imagination. Surely it wasn't possible that this beautiful, bossy, sensual person could be that vulnerable.

  Anyway, every shred of evidence indicated that he came from a family whose members shipped their money to the bank in semitrailers. One wouldn't think he had to work at all, much less at something that disturbed him. Confused as she was, she couldn't bring herself to ask him about his family directly. His connection or at least what seemed to be his connection to wealth and power was strangely embarrassing to her. She wasn't sure why, perhaps because it seemed so alien. Reared herself in a genteel, modest prosperity in the milieu of the small college where her mother had taught economics, she had experienced nothing of the world of the great and grand beyond the fairy tale version of it depicted on television and in films. But surely these people didn't let their sons strip in nightclubs.

  "Why do you do it?" she asked, her voice raised to carry over the scratching branches. Studying his face intently in the reflected gleam of
the headlights she caught every nuance of his expression as it became a powerful combination of cynical amusement and some darker thing that she barely glimpsed.

  Tersely he said, "They pay me." He paused. "A lot."

  She might have pointed out that there were plenty of other jobs that would have done the same without requiring him to take off his clothes. But the memory of his kiss was growing warmer inside her instead of fading, and the sky was the color of magic. Jennifer relaxed back into the seat— and into the new and wonderful glow of frivolity.

  "More than the Emerald Lake Library, do you think?" she asked. "Can women be Cougars too? Do you give lessons?"

  "Yes. No. And I'd be delighted to show you how to take off your clothes. To be honest, though, I'd be much more interested in results than in technique."

  I asked for that, she thought. How interesting of me. I wish—oh, dear Lord, how I wish—he would stop this car and kiss me again.

  The car did stop soon. He killed the engine in a small clearing and turned to her in the darkness.

  "Now we have to wait."

  "What for?"

  "Our eyes need to adjust to the night. Do you know much about night vision?"

  "No." She was beginning to find Philip Brooks more and more fascinating. "Except that it's an excuse to make kids eat carrots."

  "Yes. Because deficiency in vitamin A can impair night vision. The retina of your eye is covered with rod cells and cone cells. The rods are sensitive to light. The cones are sensitive to color and they can't function very efficiently in dim light. That's why you can't see colors in the dark." He slipped an arm around her shoulders and drew her to his sturdy comfort. "Look at the sky."

  Jennifer looked at the sky and thought about how close his sensitive fingers were to her breast.

  "That black velvet sky is just as blue now as it was in the day," he said. "Our eyes don't work well enough to see it. But they can still do much better than most people realize. There's a chemical in the rod cells of the retina that decomposes as it reacts to light, but in dim light, you can synthesize it faster than light can break it down so you build up a good supply. Once your eyes are fully dark-adapted they become many times more light sensitive than in bright light. Hmm." He tilted up her chin on a strong finger and examined her face. "You must have a higher threshold of boredom than most of my friends. You're still awake! And," he continued softly, "you've begun to smile, miracle of miracles." His thumb was tracing the upcurve of her lips as they tipped to meet the slow descent of his.