Angel's Baby

by Pamela Browning

  “I don’t,” Stuart said, tracing the neckline of her shirt with his thumb. His eyes were a deep, translucent blue in the shadowy dusk. She especially liked it when he looked at her like this; he made her feel like the center of the universe. His universe.

  “You’ll forget soon enough,” she said tartly.

  “Will I?” he said softly.

  “I hear that it’s really nice in the South Seas. Life can be easy there—”

  “Easier than on Halos Island? That’s hard to imagine.”

  “And the natives in their villages run around with hardly any clothes on, and—”

  “So do we.”

  “And it’s far away from everything,” she finished.

  “Far away from you,” he said.

  “And our marriage,” she reminded him.

  This earned a raised eyebrow from Stuart. “Shall we talk about our marriage, Angel?” he said.

  She managed a laugh. “What’s to talk about?” she said offhandedly, but inside, she was confused. Relationship talk had always been off-limits, by tacit understanding.

  Stuart removed the plate from her lap and twined his fingers through hers. “I’ve learned in the past few weeks that being married is different from not being married,” he said. He sounded pensive and a little amazed.

  “Didn’t we know that?” Angel said.

  “It’s one thing knowing it. It’s another thing living it,” he told her seriously.

  Angel thought she might agree, but she had no intention of telling Stuart. All she said was “What makes marriage different from, let’s say, merely living together?”

  Stuart leaned back and sighed, still holding her hand. “Commitment,” he said.

  “Commitment?” she repeated slowly. They both knew that he didn’t have any commitment to her aside from the financial one that he had made to support their child.

  “Yeah” was all he said, but now his smile was uncertain.

  Angel’s gaze fell on the ring on the third finger of her left hand. She heard her blood rushing in her ears. “Stuart, you have no commitment to me. That’s understood.”

  “Theoretically that’s true. Contractually it’s true, as well. But emotionally, well, there’s something there.”

  “Probably it could be explained in an anthropological sense,” Angel said. “In the original hunter-gatherer society, the male had a natural impulse to protect the mother of his children. Therefore, committed relationships ensued,” she said.

  “‘Therefore, committed relationships ensued,’” he said, mimicking her. “All that stuff you learned on the way to your Ph.D. has cluttered up your brain. Do you have a scientific explanation for everything, Angel? Do you always have to try to turn personal interludes into cerebral exercises?”

  “Probably,” Angel said in a small voice. The moon was rising, and with it the wind. The boat bobbed up and down on the waves, and the air had cooled. The rocking of the boat should have been soothing, but instead it only enhanced Angel’s growing agitation at the way this conversation was getting out of hand.

  All this talk of commitment made Angel wary. She had committed—once. She had been dumped—once. She wouldn’t let it happen to her again.

  “Angel,” Stuart said, “look at me.”

  She turned her head. Stuart was gazing at her with a serious expression. It caught her by surprise.

  “Wh—what?” she said, her voice catching. Her gaze locked with his.

  “The past few weeks have in some ways been the happiest in my life. I’ll always remember them. I want you to know that.”

  She started to shake her head, sure that he was exaggerating, but his finger against her lips stopped the words.

  “Shh,” he said. “Don’t talk, my Angel. Just kiss me.”

  She lifted her lips to his, and as his mouth covered hers, she felt as though her heart would break. The weeks since Stuart had arrived on Halos Island had been the happiest of her life, too, and she’d only realized it now. She had been only half-alive as she lived with her bees and her cat on the deserted island to which she’d fled, bruised and tattered, to recover from her disastrous love affair. Since Stuart Adams had arrived, she’d relearned what it was like to feel open and alive again. When he left, she’d be all the better for this experience, the experience of knowing a kind, caring man who made her feel like a real woman again.

  When he left. She would try not to say those words, even to herself. Because when he left, Stuart would take a piece of her heart with him.

  His fingers glided across her body, quickly dispensing with her clothes and then his. She felt herself giving way to it, giving in to a man in a way she had never been able to before. Her mind was filled with him, her senses overwhelmed by him, and the soft swirls of dark hair on his chest were teasing her already sensitive breasts, his hips were pressing against hers, and she was holding him tightly, as if she would never let him go.

  It could have been a frenzied mating, but instead Angel felt enveloped in a deep tenderness that seemed to surround Stuart and flow into her as she molded her body to his. She was aware of her breathing synchronizing with his, of the tautness of his body tensed in anticipation. Each and every time he touched her like this, it was exciting to her, made her want him all the more. He made her feel bold and wildly sensual, he made her bloom into the woman she had always wanted to be.

  “Stuart, oh, Stuart...” she murmured as his hands teased her with agonizing slowness. “What do you do to me?”

  “The same thing you do to me,” he whispered, the planes of his face etched in moonlight, and he entered her slowly so that they would both savor the moment. Slowly, slowly, each millimeter sending warm waves of desire fanning upward and outward, until she held him snug and tight within her.

  He made a move to bury his face in her hair, but she said, “No, I want to look at you.” He smiled in instant understanding, his eyes dark with passion, and wove his fingertips through her hair until they pressed against her skull. His skin against hers was like silk, slipping and sliding, pure erotic pleasure. In a burst of energy, she wrapped her legs around him, urging him to bury himself deep inside her, consuming him in the only way she knew how.

  She would have closed her eyes, because she was afraid that he could see through her to her very soul, but when her eyelids started to drift shut, Stuart spoke sharply. “No. Open your eyes, Angel. I want to know more than your body.”

  She opened her eyes, feeling fully revealed as she watched his expression slip into transport, then abandon. And yet she knew that she still did not know Stuart Adams. She knew his body, and she might be getting a glimpse of his soul, but she could not know his heart.

  He moved against her harder and faster, and she met him stroke for stroke, watching his shadowed face as he strained toward his peak. She was one with him for this brief moment in time, and it was more than physical, it was an ecstasy that she had never dreamed possible. This was beyond passion, beyond pleasure, a journey up, up, into a realm that she had never known existed. This was mating, but it was also something finer, something more exquisite, more meaningful.

  When she could no longer think, when the world had receded to a tiny bright pinpoint deep within her brain, when her eyes had lost their focus so that they no longer saw Stuart’s face but seemed filled with the stars whirling high above them in the dark curtain of the sky, the world and the stars and the night burst into a thousand—a million—fragments of light. She heard herself cry his name, and she heard his voice in her ear, and in that moment, she was not only part of him, they were part of the whole universe, and for once in her life it all made sense.

  Woman. Man. That was all there was, and that was all there needed to be.

  “Angel?”

  The harmony of their breathing brought them down together. Stuart’s voice pierced her consciousness, and when she opened her eyes, she realized that he was staring at her in perplexity.

  “Are you all right, Angel?” His voice was tender, ca
ring.

  She couldn’t speak. She could only stare up at his dear face, so familiar, and now so much a part of her life.

  “Y-yes,” she said. She had never been more all right in her life.

  “Then why are you crying?” he asked. He touched a fingertip to her face, and it came away wet with her tears.

  She could only look at him, her eyes still brimming with unshed tears, and silently she lifted his wet fingertip to her mouth and kissed it.

  “I don’t want to make you sad,” he said in a bewildered tone.

  She could not bear to talk about her feelings at that moment—perhaps she’d never be able to let Stuart know how she felt—so for an answer she only pulled his head down upon her breast and lay back in the rocking boat, the breeze drying her wet face.

  “Angel?” he said, his fingers caressing her breast.

  “Shh,” she said, staring up at the stars. “Shh.”

  Chapter Nine

  They fell into a routine of living together, probably the way most married people did. The fact that they were not like most newlyweds seemed unimportant in the face of what they did in their daily lives.

  Angel began to feel comfortable around Stuart. He never criticized her, never belittled her. He was so different from what she had learned to expect from a man that he might as well have been a different species altogether.

  He was interested in her work. He asked her questions about it. Howard had never done that, even though he was a scientist, too. She told Stuart as much about her bees as she thought he could absorb, but he never seemed to tire of hearing her talk about them. Curious, she asked him why he was so interested.

  “I like the way you look when you talk about your bees. I like your enthusiasm. I find the things you tell me interesting. Hey, what can I say? I’m a honey of a guy.” He laughed at himself, but she agreed. The more she got to know Stuart Adams, the better she liked him.

  He made life fun again. When had it become so serious? she wondered. After she came to the island? When she broke up with Howard? Once she had been a person who liked to go to movies, to dance, to sleep late once in a while. She was rediscovering that person, bit by bit, with Stuart’s help.

  They went to Key West and saw a play, spending the weekend in the honeymoon suite at the Kapok Tree again. He bought her a dress with black spangles, even though she protested that she’d never wear it. He proved her wrong by treating her to a nightclub where they listened to jazz and Stuart drank margaritas while he admired the way she looked in her new black dress. They danced together, and again she was so nervous that she stepped all over his feet. He didn’t seem to mind. “You’ll learn,” he said. “You’ll learn.”

  She was learning—learning to like herself and him. After only a few weeks of being married, she couldn’t recall life on the island before Stuart.

  They settled into a life of comfortable domesticity punctuated by the things that Stuart did to make things interesting. He was definitely no couch potato, and she learned that her suspicions about his being a complete romantic were absolutely correct. This fascinated her; she’d always thought that women were the romantic ones in a relationship, but no one, absolutely no one, could be more romantic than Stuart Adams.

  “What’s this?” he said one night, pulling a dilapidated, mildewed Leatherette case out of the living-room closet. Angel looked up from the button she was sewing on a pair of shorts.

  “Oh, that’s an old portable Victrola. Those navy guys must have left it here,” she said.

  “Does it work?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, snipping the thread. She folded the shorts and set them aside. Stuart opened the lid of the Victrola to reveal a turntable and an arm, both remarkably free of dust.

  “It doesn’t matter whether it works or not, if we don’t have any records,” he pointed out in a bemused tone.

  “I think there might be records in the back of the closet. Look behind the ironing board.”

  Stuart knelt on the floor and tugged at a cardboard box until it sat in front of him. “Look at these,” he said, wiping away the dust. “Old 78 rpm records. Collector’s items, some of them.”

  “Are there any Glenn Miller? My grandmother used to play those.”

  “Sure. Right here is ‘String of Pearls,’ and here’s ‘Tuxedo Junction.’ We’ve got ‘Stardust’ and ‘Green Eyes’ and ‘Pennsylvania 6-5000.’ Miss Beatrice couldn’t have provided better dance music at the Junior Cotillion,” he said.

  It always made Angel feel uncomfortable when Stuart mentioned his life in Boston or on Nantucket. He came from a life of privilege, and she did not. She couldn’t even imagine living the way Stuart must have lived before he came to Halos Island.

  As she watched, Stuart plugged in the Victrola and set a stack of records on the changer. When the first strains of “String of Pearls” filled the air, he stood up and held his arms out to her. “May I have this dance?” he said.

  “Can’t we just listen?” she implored. She was still self-conscious about her dancing.

  “No sense in sitting around like lazy slugs,” Stuart said, pulling her up beside him.

  “I should think that you’d had enough of my dancing,” she said, but she went into his arms anyway.

  His voice was close by her ear, and it sent warm tremors through her. “I never get enough of any part of you,” he said before twirling her around in an intricate maneuver that she could barely execute.

  She was dizzy, as though she’d had too much to drink. “Stop, Stuart,” she said, but he only pulled her closer. It was so enjoyable to be close to him, smelling his scent of fresh-washed cotton and sun-warmed skin, bending and dipping gracefully in his arms.

  The record changed to a song Angel didn’t recognize. Stuart flung her away from him, looking carefree and younger than his years. This time on the island has been good for him, Angel thought. As he pulled her close again, she curved her arm even farther around his shoulder, wanting to feel every contour of him, wanting to make him want her. At the moment, she felt sexy and wanton and exceedingly voluptuous, traits that were foreign to her. Or had been before she met this man who was now her husband.

  Her husband. The words seemed to have taken on new meaning, new nuances.

  Her husband was whispering in her ear. “You’re getting it, Angel. You’re a really good dancer,” he said.

  “Two left feet,” she whispered back.

  “Your feet aren’t the body parts I’m thinking about at the moment,” he said. He lowered his hands and rested them on her buttocks, cupping her firmly against him. She let her head fall back, caught up in the scratchy romantic music from the Victrola and in the attentions of this very handsome, exciting man whose growing excitement she could feel through her clothes. She felt her own power over him and smiled up from beneath her eyelids, giving him a long, smoldering look.

  He lowered his head to kiss her lips briefly before letting his mouth drift to her throat. He skimmed his hands slowly upward over her rib cage, until they reached her breasts. She moaned. His hips ground insistently into hers, and she pressed into it, into him.

  “I like this kind of dancing,” he said, keeping his hands where they were and guiding her around the room.

  “I think,” she said unsteadily, “we should go into the bedroom.”

  “You do, do you?” he said.

  “Yes,” she whispered against his rough cheek.

  “There are a few new steps that you definitely need to learn.” He moved his hands and tugged gently at her nipples until she was hungry for more.

  She reached for him, cupping her hands possessively around his erection. “Tat for tit,” she murmured, and he laughed.

  “I love it when you talk that way to me. I love doing this,” he said as the shoulder of her blouse fell down her arm. He slid it down even farther as the record changed to a slow samba, and she said helplessly, “I don’t know how to dance to these Latin rhythms.”

  Her blouse was around her
waist, and her breasts were open to the cool night air. Somehow their feet were still moving, though barely. She pulled his shirt aside, and he said, “With Latin rhythms, it’s all in the hips,” demonstrating something that would not have been allowed on any dance floor.

  “Am I ready for Miss Beatrice’s Junior Cotillion?” Angel asked mischievously as she nibbled on his earlobe.

  “I’d say you’ve far surpassed anything Miss Beatrice ever knew.”

  And what about Valerie? Does she know how to dance like this, too? Angel wanted to ask, but it was a question she could never ask Stuart. She pushed aside the stab of jealousy and concentrated on following Stuart’s lead. He was moving them slowly and inexorably toward the bedroom.

  The needle on the phonograph got stuck on part of a song that went, “thrill me, thrill me, thrill me,” and Stuart said, “Thrill me, Angel,” and she thought, One advantage that I have over this Valerie person is that at this moment, Stuart Adams is here with me. And he is my lawfully wedded husband.

  “Have we practiced enough steps?” she inquired innocently as they reached the bedroom door.

  “There’s one more,” he said unsteadily as he laid her on the bed and lowered himself over her, supporting himself on his outstretched arms.

  “Show me,” she said, reaching for him. And he did.

  The record continued to scratch, urging “thrill me, thrill me,” for hours; neither of them was listening. At least not on that particular frequency.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY after breakfast, Stuart said with a twinkle in his eye, “Since you caught on so quickly to my dancing lessons, I thought I’d teach you to sail today.”

  Angel shot him a look of pure alarm. “I hope you’re not expecting me to have the same natural aptitude for sailing that I do for dancing.”

  “Your dancing,” he said, leaning over to kiss her quickly on the lips, “is superb. Unequaled in modern history. I’m willing to settle for a lower level of perfection in your sailing skills. Oh, and wear shoes with rubber soles. Old sneakers or something.”