Lightning That Lingers

by Sharon

  "During summer I have her out-of-doors quite a bit, but we have a couple of foxes around so I've never built her a pen out there." His sentence rolled to a halt and it occurred to him abruptly that he had been going on and on about Henrietta and he glanced up at Jennifer's face. "Why are you smiling at me like that?"

  "Because. Because you're such a... such a..." Love sent an avalanche of nibbling attacks throughout her body. Catching Philip off guard, she tumbled him on his back as her mouth pressed against his and the brown hen took off squawking. Hotly, with glutted sweetness, they clung together, his laughter bringing soft gusts of breath against her mouth. Warmth radiated upward from his ribcage, infusing her breasts with a pleasant heaviness. The rhythm of his laughter caressed her nipples.

  "What am I, Jenny?" His mouth began to initiate a new, deeper contact. "Tell me what I am."

  His hands held the sides of her body just under her arms, his palms water-soft and stirring against the edges of her breasts. Her sensitivity there, her desire to be enclosed in the valley of his fingers overwhelmed her and she depressed herself against his chest. His hands tightened, pressing inward, and the temperature of her body seemed to fluctuate.

  "A surprise." Her words were whispers that rose between his heart-stopping kisses. "Why..." Her breath ran out as his knee bent, coming easily upward to ride the warm space between her thighs. She gasped out, "Why—do you like birds?"

  He showered little kisses across her upper lip. "They fly."

  "Chickens don't fly." Her voice was high and light, a trickle of sound. Her body moved against his, searching, trying to sate itself, acknowledging the hard angles, the silken planes.

  "Don't...get... technical," he breathed, pushing her away gently enough to bring his hands to the softness of her that was searing into his chest.

  Instead of a handful of her, he received a handful of chicken feathers. Henrietta wriggled between their separate chests, cackling affectionately, tickling their faces with a cloud of feathers. Jennifer descended into a laughing, hiccuping bundle at his side, and his hand stroking her face discovered that her lashes were damp. Nerve chills played up her back. In spite of the laughter, her body reflected distress. The cheerful smile, the bright manner were deceptive. She had endured a lot last night, and it was still with her. Too much, too quickly. He chided himself for not having fed her breakfast yet.

  She had barely finished laughing when Philip got to his feet and, smiling, helped her to stand. He said nothing, just caressed her under the chin. She was beginning to feel like one of his birds. She had learned more about sexual frustration since meeting Philip Brooks than from everything else that she had experienced in her life previously. Why had he stopped? All right, the chicken. But they could have gone back upstairs.

  She watched him make her breakfast in a peaceful room lined halfway to the ceiling with hand-painted Delft tile. Chaucer rode on his head, preening his hair into something that looked like it had been through a cyclone.

  Sitting with her knees drawn up on a bentwood chair, eyeing him curiously, she asked, "Did you know that you're extraordinarily good-looking?" Maybe it was a stupid question.

  It seemed to startle him. He paused in the act of chopping bacon into an omelet, and tossed a glance at her. "No. But hum a few bars and I'll fake it. Is this a test?"

  She couldn't help being fascinated that he was touchy about it. "No. What do you see in the mirror?"

  He turned back to the bacon. "Adult male homo sapiens, reasonable skeletal alignment, two eyes, one on either side of a nose, average dentition, medium height."

  "Oh boy. I hope I don't ever look in that mirror If that's what it does to you."

  That drew an unwilling smile. "I have a friend— Darrell—who says it was wasted on me. He says I could have been a short pot-bellied guy with hornrimmed glasses and never known the difference. He's probably right."

  "You don't think there are such things as beautiful and plain?"

  "Not to the degree most people seem to. I find it difficult to get excited about the cosmetic value of differences that amount to a few millimeters in facial structure."

  "Well, I guess I know now how not to excite you," she said, and saw that symphony of a smile fasten on her.

  "Your millimeters are an exception." He was fending Chaucer off the bacon with one hand.

  "I suppose you think it's relative? Aardvarks think aardvarks are pretty?"

  "That would sum it up nicely."

  Which seemed to be all he had to say on the subject of having a face that made the world stop and stare. The love inside her never stopped flowing. Once she had decided to accept it, the rest came naturally. She moved through the day like a hovercraft, never touching earth. Love, she discovered, had a strange effect on the body. Shivers pulsed through her at his slightest touch. She had body aches from the yearning.

  Well-fed, they went to his attic, where rising warmth made the air soft and luminous. A shining lacework of frost sparkled on semicircular windows. Light in bright colors from a stained glass skylight broadcast itself onto quiet surfaces.

  Everything here was magical: Japanese lacquered cabinets, oil lamps, clocks and urns, a Victorian pram, beautiful boxes filled with postcard collections, antique toys, Art Nouveau jewelry from Tiffany and Cartier.

  On a chintz settee in a window alcove, he showed her a stereoptic viewer—a tin binocular-like instrument that made the pictures on its special viewing cards come to life in three dimensions. There were scenes of buildings devastated by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, sentimental pictures of puppies at play with little girls in lace and ringlets, a young couple in neck-to-toe nightdresses grinning lasciviously at each other as they stood before a canopied bed. The title: "Married At Last."

  The photograph albums that he reluctantly let her see revealed a great deal about the Brookses in all their luster. Philip as a child standing at a tilt in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Philip skiing in Austria; Philip on yachts, in private stables with his pony, playing football on the White House lawn. Philip with loving parents and grandparents. There were no pictures of him beyond the age of sixteen.

  The obvious question would have been about the money. Being Jennifer, she didn't ask it.

  "I have a deep dark secret," she said, and set the photograph alburn on the settee between them.

  He took in the slight unsteadiness of her hands, the downcast glance, the set lips. She's going to tell me she's a virgin, he thought, and tried to prepare some remark that was light, comforting.

  "I'm illegitimate."

  Her words were simply spoken, emotionless, but they lacerated his next four heartbeats. In the forest, that was what she had been trying to tell him. That explanation for her reticence, her tiptoeing backward caution about life had never occurred to him. Perhaps it was because of the very unassuming ordinariness she seemed to project of a tame life passed without trauma. Silently, he praised the parent who had given her that, under less than normal circumstances.

  "That's something else I don't believe in," he said. "Illegitimacy. Children are always legitimate." Her face didn't change. Trite comfort, he thought. Language was an imprecise, unsophisticated tool, useless against the sparks of sadness that must exist among her memories. It appalled him that she had to sit there in her immaculate integrity and make that confession as though it stained her. Dick, Jane, and Spot, Mother and Father... If that image was changing, it was too late for Jennifer. Already she was beginning to look embarrassed, as though she was sorry she had told him, and had put him under the obligation of saying something kind. Plainly, pity frightened her.

  "Did you know your father?"

  "No. He's dead now. We saw his obituary in a Chicago paper. He was a traveling salesman." She grinned a little. "It's kind of funny, really. Mom was, well, not a farmer's daughter, but her dad ran a feed store. To this day, he hasn't quite warmed up to my appearance in the world." Her hands, forgotten on her knees, began to slide up and down over her kneecaps, massag
ing the denim as though she needed to restore circulation in the flesh below. "True tinges of black humor, wouldn't you say? My mother never accepted sympathy. She turned it around by thrusting her palm to her forehead and staggering melodramatically to the couch, saying in thrilling tones, 'I was seduced and abandoned!' And then she'd ask me if I'd finished my homework. But I could sense the pain inside." She paused. Her hands became still. "It ended happily because last November she went to Madison to become a speechwriter for the governor and she has a wonderful boyfriend who's a lawyer.... but there are days when I'll wake up and look outside at a gray sky and think that maybe my birth came from a dirty joke."

  He had wanted to let her talk on and on to him about it, to let it spill out and away from her and be rid of it. Her last words seemed to pierce some unknown pain threshold in his soul and he reached out, lifting her close to his body, holding her with crushing tightness. Her head curled against his chest, her hands caught and held on to his sweater. Presently, the dark emotions began to recede and he picked up her hands and began abstractedly to warm them with his breath. Dear God, she's never going to be able to stand it that I strip. What in the name of heaven am I going to do?

  Her voice, obstinate in its lack of expression, cut into his thoughts.

  "I don't usually tell people."

  "Why should you?"

  Her head tipped against his shoulder, looking up at him. "I thought you should know. In case It mattered."

  He tried hard to keep a straight face. He tried so hard that his jaw felt like it was turning to cement. At times, she seemed to come right out of Jane Austen. Finally, it was partly his savage anxiety about her, partly the Elizabeth Bennett sincerity in those brown eyes that did him in and he began to laugh, and kept laughing even though his side had begun to ache and she had punched him a couple of times on the shoulder.

  "Jenny, darling," he gasped, "I'm sorry, I'm truly sorry. But do you think you've confused me with Fitzwilliam D'Arcy?" That drew him another round of pummeling. She was laughing now too, her eyes alight with indignation, though her facial muscles had relaxed like a child's. Gathering her head in the curve of his hand, he brought her parted lips inch by inch to his, pressing her again and again into his slow open kiss. Their eyelashes drifted against each other's skin like damp brushes. Her lips shone intoxicatingly with their joining moisture. Desire ran through him like torch fire. Thought expired. Now, Jenny. Love, I can't wait anymore. I can't wait. His hand had started to slip to her breast when she spoke to him, her voice quiet, love-slurred.

  "Philip?"

  "Hmm?" he murmured tenderly.

  "Others might care. Some of your relatives."

  Oh, God, he thought. She's still thinking about it. For all the kindling responsiveness of her body, part of her mind remained in the shadows. His body was so filled with the red mist of wanting her that most of him seemed to be floating. Half the fluids in his body felt like they'd buried themselves into the part of him that wanted to bury itself in her. If she'd been any other woman, he would have let nature roll on its own sweet, inevitable course to avoid the cost of subduing his fiery body. But this was Jenny. For Jenny, he had to make everything right. Some of his relatives, she had said.

  "No one I'm interested in," he murmured, and was relieved to see the bruised eyes warm. He wanted to shower her sensitivity with gifts, to crowd her memories with so much joy that the blackness would draw back like a tide and tremble at its own lack of significance.

  He stood, cradling her to his chest, carried her to a Java teak wardrobe and set her lightly down.

  "Since we're up here, would you like to climb into something prettier than my jeans?"

  CHAPTER 8

  When jeans encased his incredible legs, there really was no prettier garment in the world, she thought. She had been burning since breakfast to climb out of the jeans she'd borrowed from him and into his arms. The problem was, she had done about everything that seemed possible for a basically shy person to initiate that. Loving someone was no longer an abstract dream. He was here with her, his company a giddy delight. Every part of him seemed touchable, inviting. In her lifetime, she had never wanted anything as badly as she wanted him at this moment. She smiled at him as he opened the wardrobe, but she could feel the tautness in her mouth, and the jittery nerve-thrills within.

  Inside the cedar-lined teak cabinet was a world of costume that rivaled free access to a storeroom of historic dress at the Smithsonian. There were top hats, satin opera slippers, umbrellas in black silk, handpainted evening gloves, beaded evening bags, huge elegant hats with flowers or plumes and veils. Gowns in rich textiles glowed like old gems in the delicate attic light.

  She laughed when he put a top hat on her head, and remembered that she had been Abe Lincoln the first time his mouth, with its softness and eroticism, had closed over hers.

  Then with the abandon of children dressing up, they turned the lovely clothes into play. She peacocked in a black velvet evening cloak, her eyes finding his over a gold ostrich fan. He lounged indolently in a chair like an Edwardian rake, a brown derby hat tipped forward over his eyes, quizzing her figure through opera glasses. She let the cloak slide to the floor, and with her heart beating wildly, caught a handful of fabric at her back and tugged the T-shirt tight, very tight over her breasts, making her nipples stand out in delectable arrogant points. The bowler hat toppled, the opera glasses fell lightly to the Persian carpet at his feet, and Philip slithered from the chair as though his spine had turned to jelly. The tumble was a masterpiece of athletic grace. She joined him quickly on the floor, reviving him with a mink muff rubbed teasingly against his cheek.

  A lazily heated smile glittered in the blue eyes. He took the muff from her, sliding his hand inside it, and put it to her cheek. Then his lips replaced the muff, wandering over her skin to lightly caress her mouth. Long sleepy kisses followed, a feast of sensation, suffusing her body with liquid heaviness. He did not touch her intimately, but she felt the growing tautness there, deep, a flaring pressure. Gently he brought the muff back to her cheek, massaging her flesh with the dense fur. The massage wandered to her nape, the fur raising little welts of pleasure down the length of her spine. He played the fur over her scalp, and in slow erotic circles on her back, following her hips, the curves of her bottom. His kiss sank into her, a repeated motion, his body angling slightly away to permit his hands access to the front of her. Her body curled toward his hand as the fur stroked her stomach, and then, softly, her breasts. One of his hands tugged at the T-shirt, drawing it up until she was uncovered for him and the mink tingled over her breasts, whetting her nipples to a hypersensitivity that made the air against them have texture. Her mouth was deeply open to him, her skin tender. Her body writhed against his hand as it traveled over her jeans, sliding over her thighs, her belly, between her legs.

  Her skin was feverish, her eyes as overbright as his when he swept her to her feet.

  "Will you dance with me now, Jenny love?" He laughed, probably at her expression. His breath came in short gasps that sounded as though he were trying to bring them under his control. "Don't look like that...." More thick laughter. "I love you. Let's dance. Just like this. It'll feel so good— wait. Come here, darling...."

  He pulled a gown from the wardrobe, a fairy-tale creation from the turn of the century, of biscuit-colored chiffon with drifts of Valenciennes lace. He held it to her, smiling, and she saw in a daze that the shade matched her skin. Her legs barely held her as she dressed in it behind the clouds and winged cherubs of a French giltwood screen.

  Quavering, her heart aloft, she ran back to the exhilarating strength of his arms.

  Honeyed melodies from the early years of the century drifted from a gramophone with a mahagony horn and the room swirled with color and sound. His voice softly taught her the steps but it was his hands and his body that guided her into them, making the movements simple and direct, a blur of pleasure.

  The bouquet of cedar and floral potpourri from her gown
enclosed them like the perfume of a spray of flowers. Their bare feet streamed against the warm oak floor, making soft sounds. Her naked skin under the gown felt the slippery fabric move over it in fluid swirls. Her silk petticoats rustled, caressing his legs. They seemed to be free-falling, then blended together, their bodies exquisite against each other in their heightened state of sensual awareness. Each brush together was dulcet, golden.

  He stepped back from her, holding her fingers in a light clasp, and the warmth in her body centered, humming, in her fingers where he touched her. She was a little shaky, but the sensation was delightful, and her pulse became a slow uncertain rhythm, holding time as his mouth bent to hers in a nectarous whisper.

  He drew her to a velvet chair that stood by a desk inlaid with marquetry.

  "This was my great-grandmother's desk." His breath grazed her skin like a petal. "When I was little, she used to sit beside me at this desk and make me practice my signature, because she said I was going to be an important man and I should have an impressive signature for the momentous— documents I was going to be required to sign." His smile registered the memory. "And—she said a gentleman should be able to write beautiful love letters to all his mistresses." The blue eyes held apology and amusement. His unsteady fingers rested for a moment on her cheek. "I'm afraid a few of her notions were on the outdated side. I do keep the inkwell filled, though." He took a pen from a compartment in a gold-mounted inkstand and dipped it twice in the lapis inkwell. "As things turned out, no major bills of state have been graced by my signature, but would you like to see this masterpiece anyway?"

  She nodded and watched the graceful, quietly flowing movements of his hand as it performed a charmingly ornate signature on a piece of pressed paper. Below it he drew a heart, entwining their initials like a monogram. He picked up her hand and touched his lips to her fingertips, and her pulse tickled through her senses. In the same archaic, romantic script, he wrote I would never do anything to hurt you. Are you protected?