Wife On Demand
Page 23
“Just like that you’re not on parole anymore—technically you were never convicted. And now the city will have to withdraw its claim against us for damages...and pretty soon I guess it’ll be as if we’d never married, either. You don’t need the charade anymore.”
Jude watched her thoughtfully without speaking. His steady gaze made her nervous.
“It almost seems as though everything should suddenly be perfect again. But you still spent a year in prison, whatever the court records say, and Dad...well, it won’t bring him back, will it?”
She did not say that it would not bring back what she and Jude had once had, nor his trust of her, because there was no point in saying it. But it was in her mind.
“No,” he agreed, and it seemed as if he were agreeing with her unspoken thoughts, agreeing that nothing could bring back his feeling for her. “No, it won’t bring back perfection. Everything changes, everything has to move on, one way or the other, Hope.”
Outside a yellow leaf fell from its anchorage and drifted down onto the grass.
She looked down at her clasped hands. “I guess there’s no point in saying I’m sorry again. But I really, really am, Jude.”
He looked at her and saw in her face the shadow of the girl in the picture, making up her mind that she could never have what she most wanted.
“I guess we’ll have to decide what to do about the house,” she went nervously on, afraid to stop babbling nothings in case she began to beg. “Now that you’re back in business I guess...I mean, I won’t be able to afford it, but would you like to keep it?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d like to keep it.”
She shrugged and nodded as if she had expected it, but in fact she had hoped he would want to sell quickly. To leave him in the house would hurt, but it was not within her rights to complain. It had been left to them equally. He could raise a mortgage and pay her her half share, but she couldn’t possibly offer to do the reverse. And if he didn’t want to continue to share the house she doubted if her father’s will gave her the power to force him to do so.
“I suppose you—would you consider dividing it into a duplex? We could make a separate entrance with an outside staircase and I could have the attic and the third floor. It wouldn’t be too hard to put in a kitchen.” She grinned in an attempt at lightness. “You should be able to come up with a nice ‘architect-designed renovation.”’
She knew she was a fool to suggest it. She was storing up heartbreak for herself, living in the same house, watching him, waiting for the night that would never come, the night when he would come to her again, love her again...but she herself had made that impossible.
“Hope,” he said, and the flat, unemotional tone terrified her.
“I know you want a divorce, now that it’s all over I know you want your freedom, that’s okay, so do I. Also I want to get back to France, get down to some real painting, you know?”
“Do you?”
“Yes, but I’d like to know this place was still here, I could rent out my half if we—” she swallowed, running out of steam “—if we made it self-contained, and then I’d always have somewhere to come home to.”
She fell silent.
“Is that what you want?” he asked. “Somewhere to come home to?”
She met his eyes, tried to smile, and looked away.
“Hope,” he said, in a hoarse, raw voice, and now she could hear how he battled with emotion. “Is it too late to tell you the answer to the question you asked me that night?”
“Is it—what?” she said, unwilling to believe what she thought she had heard.
“Don’t leave me, Hope. Don’t make me live without you again. I learned to do it last time by teaching myself to hate you for what I thought you had done.”
She closed her eyes. “You succeeded.”
“No,” he said. “No! I didn’t succeed. I thought I had...” He squeezed his eyes shut. “How you haunted me in that place! Night after night! But I told myself—I don’t know what I told myself to keep sane. Hope, you asked me to forgive you, but I also need to be forgiven. I’m sorry. I hurt you, my blind stupidity made an intolerable year much worse hell for both of us. I’m very sorry I misunderstood you, and myself, and everything. Do you forgive me?”
“Yes.” Tears burned her cheeks, and she brushed them impatiently aside.
“I love you. That’s the answer to your question, Hope. You were right. I love you. Look at me.”
He got up and was standing over her chair. Hope lifted her head and met his eyes, and what she saw in them now lifted her heart to the sun.
“Do you love me?” he asked.
“You know I do.”
“Not until I hear you say it. Say it,” he half begged, half commanded, and then, before she could speak, reached down and drew her to her feet, into his arms.
“Say it, Hope. Say I am not too late.”
“I love you,” she said. His hold tightened painfully around her. “Oh, Jude, I love you!”
“Hope, will you be married to me, and live with me, and be my wife?”
She sighed as his breath brushed her cheek. “Oh, yes!” she began, but Jude could not wait to hear the words, and bent to take her answer from her lips.
Jude led his wife to the bedroom and the bed which he had never yet shared with her. He lay down and drew her gently after him, and then he wrapped her in his arms and held her for long, silent moments in which they both understood more than words could say. His desire was painfully tender in him now, and he felt that he would cherish and protect her all of his days. He kissed her, and stroked her forehead and her hair, smiled down at her and kissed her again, as tenderly as if she were newborn.
Hope felt the tenderness in him, felt how her heart trembled and opened under its impact. The desire that flooded her now was not sharp, but full, rich, and trusting. She wrapped her arms around his neck and gave herself up to his embrace with an openness that shook him.
Slowly, without haste, he unbuttoned her shirt and slipped it from her shoulders, lifting her body to take it from her. Gently he stroked her bare flesh, kissed her as though she were a flower bud. His love was all new to him, though it had been part of him almost since the first moment of seeing her. It was new because for the first time he was not afraid of it; not afraid of how love would make him vulnerable.
He undressed her, bit by bit, and then lifted the quilt as she slipped naked into the warmth of the bed. When he had taken his own clothes off, he followed her, and took her in his arms again, and kissed her, and held her.
“I love you, Hope,” he said.
“I love you,” Hope replied, smiling softly up into his face.
“You’re my wife,” said Jude, and she blinked back tears.
Then slowly, gently, he began to make love to his wife, loving her, desiring her, needing her body and soul, and knowing it. He made her tremble and cry out with pleasure, and drank in her responses like nectar. When at last her hands held and begged him, he rose over her and pressed his way home, feeling how much trust her acceptance of his body signified, how deeply she trusted him, and he her, and he shuddered as feeling shook him.
He smothered her mouth with a kiss, wanting to take her into himself, wanting to be part of her, wanting her to be part of him, feeling that deeper, truer union that this act was the physical image of.
“Hope,” he whispered, and she was: she was hope to him. She always had been.
He pushed into her again, and then wrapped her tightly in his arms, kissing her face, her mouth, her hair as sensation enveloped them. They had had passion, and would have it again, but not yet. Now he felt a tenderness so strong it could hardly be borne as he moved in her and felt how her body accepted his.
For Hope it was a nearly unbearable pleasure, a pleasure that tore at her heart and made her weep with love, with sadness, with happiness, with forgiving. When he moved in her he touched her soul, and her soul answered with a yearning ache, a profound need of him that would never
leave her.
Slowly, slowly, the need built in them both, and he raised himself over her and began that rhythmic motion that would not be denied, as the rain of pleasure built up in them. Then, like a flooded river, it burst its banks, and the floodwaters rushed through the valley of their two selves to nourish and moisten what had been parched and dry.
There was so much that he had never understood before. Jude lay beside Hope, clasping her to himself, and felt how love consumed him, altered him, and knew that it was this that he had feared: that one could not hide behind walls, and love. He had tried to have both—his invulnerability and his love of her, but love that withholds itself is not love.
He had feared her because love had stripped him of armour. It was he himself, not she, who had not trusted their love. If he had trusted himself and love, he would have bound her to him from the beginning, instead of allowing their love to be a thing understood but not spoken.
To say “I love you” is to admit to a vulnerability that he had been afraid to admit. He had had no right to expect her to take for granted something that he himself did not confess.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered awkwardly, for words did not come easy to him. “I was wrong. I should have told you I loved you, Hope, long, long ago.”
She smiled tenderly at him as deep, loving contentment spread through her in the aftermath of his lovemaking and his words. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said, and he knew that she was right.
Only the future mattered now.
ISBN : 978-1-4592-6538-7
WIFE ON DEMAND
Copyright © 1998 by Alexandra Sellers
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents
He takes me to have and to bold. But not to love and to cherish. He wants me cl
Letter to Reader
Also by
About the Author
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Copyright