Elaine Coffman - [MacKinnon 04] (20 page)

“I don’t want this!” he said. “If I did, I could poke a
goddamn statue.”

“Perhaps,” she said, drawing the sheet over her body, “you
need to decide what it is you do want before you come in here again.”

“Damn you,” he said, opening the buttons of his pants.
“Goddamn you to hell!”

He joined her in the bed, ripping the sheet from her
glorious body before taking her into his arms, kissing her, feeling no
response, and kissing her harder because of it. He wanted to drive her as
insane as she was driving him, wanted to make her feel the same smoldering,
gut-twisting churning in her belly that he felt. He kissed her and kept on
kissing her, rolling over on top of her and grinding himself against her.

His mouth still on hers, he tore at the fastenings of his
pants, and his penis sprung free. He was hard, and hot, and straining with
need. With a groan of defeat, he eased himself inside her, surrounding himself
with exquisite peace, and wet, wet warmth.

His body took over when he became too mindless to function.
His need was primitive now and without a thought, save one. He came quickly,
the throaty groan of deeply felt rapture mingling with the harsh sound of his
breathing. He felt his heart pound within his chest, the blood racing at a
dizzying speed through his veins as he groaned and felt his release.

Slowly consciousness returned. He hated himself more than he
hated her at that moment. She felt small and warm and soft beneath him. She had
challenged him and won. He felt lousy and filled with shame. By giving in, by
feeding his hunger, she had bested him. He despised what she had made him do,
yet he couldn’t leave her. He lay there, waiting, desperately wanting her to
communicate with him, to save his soul from this humiliation, his mind from
despair. But she lay statue-still beneath him. He couldn’t even hear her
breathing. Not even whores were this impersonal. He cursed softly and pushed
himself away from her.

“No,” she said, her hands coming up to hold him in place.
“Dinna go,” she whispered against the dampness of his chest. “Come to me again,
Adrian.”

She was kissing his throat now, and he closed his eyes
against the agony of it. “Only this time make love to me, and leave Bruce and
Katherine in the past, where they belong.”

Maggie didn’t sleep well. What little sleep she got was
fitful, nothing more than brief little snatches where consciousness never
really left her. The most delicious memories and irreverent ideas kept coming
into her head. Adrian had made love to her last night.

It hadn’t taken her long to realize that he was not an
experienced lover. Not that he wasn’t adept, for he was. No, it was simply that
he was too eager and too hungry. He made love with a trembling sort of
uncertainty, an almost clumsy eagerness that was both touching and highly
arousing. For a man past thirty, he had the exuberance and almost awestruck devotion
to duty that reminded her of youth.

The moment he entered her, filling her with himself, a
bridge had somehow been crossed. A bridge that led her from her first marriage
and her old life into the new. With the swiftness of an unexpected kick, she
realized Adrian was far more real to her than any memory of Bruce.
Surprisingly, she found she no longer thought of Bruce as her husband.

Adrian was her husband now. Her reality. And he filled her
life and her consciousness so completely that she had little time or desire for
anything else. His lovemaking last night had proved that, and her heart turned
over at the thought.

Maggie looked at the window. It was still dark outside. She
turned over and closed her eyes. It was no use. Her mind was full awake. Shortly
before sunrise she gave up. If she couldn’t sleep for thinking about last
night, then she might as well get up and get dressed and give those bedeviling
thoughts her undivided attention.

She dressed and went down to breakfast. Afterward she was
feeling happy, mellow, and very domestic. It had become a habit with her to
wake up feeling all wifely and homespun the morning after making love. It had
started when she was married to Bruce. Apparently that same warm, buttery
domestic feeling was going to continue with Adrian. She smiled, remembering how
Bruce had always dreaded those fits of wifely exuberance, when, with a sudden
burst of energy, she turned all helpful. “It’s no that I mind your being happy,
Maggie, but it’s the way you go about showing it,” Bruce had said to her one
afternoon after she had dismissed his valet, and taken it upon herself to clean
out his wardrobe. “Please, love, dinna put starch in my drawers again. Today I
played the worst game of golf I’ve played since I was a boy. I couldna bend
over, and when I got hot, my drawers stuck to me.” He had started from the
room, paused, turned back to her, and said, “One other thing. Dinna dye my
handkerchiefs saffron yellow…or any other color. In fact, just stay out of my
clothes altogether.”

Maggie had learned her lesson. She wasn’t about to touch
Adrian’s clothes…but that desk of his…the one in the study…now, that surely
could use some help. Papers were everywhere, sticking out of books and ledgers,
wedged in between a pipe stand and lamp, sitting beneath a polished chunk of
wood, or just plain scattered. They were folded, stacked, tossed, held down by
paperweights, bound by wire clips, and tied together with string.

Sitting behind Adrian’s desk, Maggie began to sort through
the papers. It was a lot of work organizing and putting them in some semblance
of order. Why, it was a wonder to her how Adrian ever found anything.

Three hours later, she had cleared his desk, and polished
the mahogany top to a soldier’s boot shine. It was about this time that Molly
came looking for her. “Uh-oh, trouble,” Molly said, coming into the room. “What
have we here?”

Maggie blew a strand of hair out of her face and gave the
desk one last swipe before coming around it to stand beside Molly, viewing the
change—for the better, she might add. “I’ve straightened this mess,” she said,
with a tone of satisfaction. “Won’t Adrian be surprised?”

“Oh, he’ll be surprised, all right. I should have warned
you—I would have, if I had known you were thinking about this,” Molly said,
looking at the desk and shaking her head. “I don’t suppose you could put it
back the way it was, could you?”

“Put it back?” Maggie asked. “What do you mean, put it back?
It took me three hours to straighten it. Why, for Heaven’s sake, would I want
to put it back?”

“Because Adrian is going to kill both of us if you don’t.”

“That’s absurd. He should be happy that this has been done.”

“Maybe he should,” Molly said, “but you can take my word for
it, he won’t be. I’ve been given strict orders not to touch anything on this
desk, not even to dust.”

“Well, there you have it,” said Maggie.

“Have what?” said Molly.

“
You
didna touch it. I did.”

“That only means he will kill you first,” said Molly.

Adrian did not come home for dinner, so Maggie ate alone.
After dinner, she spent some time in the library with her knitting, but soon
she grew weary of that. Going to her room, she dressed for bed. Sitting at her
dressing table looking through her ribbon box, she came across a raven’s
feather Fletcher had given her. She picked the feather up, absently stroking
its sleek, glossy surface. How well she remembered the day he had given it to
her, along with two plover eggs. The plover eggs were gone now—where, she did
not remember—but the feather…

She wrapped her hand tightly around it and clutched it to
her breast, feeling her eyes burn with the sudden swirl of recollection. She
wanted to cry, and fought the urge by closing her eyes, but not even that could
shut out the memory of her beloved children: Barrie sitting in the nursery, toiling
over an alphabet sampler she was stitching, the sunlight turning her red hair
to flame. Ainsley bouncing on her rocking horse, telling it to go faster. And
of course, Fletcher, as sturdy and sensible as the brown color of his hair, a
Scot to the core, and so like his father. She couldn’t help wondering if he was
still trying to coax his sisters outside to play Harry Racket or hoodman-blind,
or if there was even any room to play such games aboard the ship they were now
on.

She remembered afternoon tea parties spent with her
daughters, sitting in miniature tufted chairs, sipping tea from a tiny china
tea service, and the precious, intimate moments during the evening bath, when
Fletcher always forgot to wash behind his ears, and the girls made beards for each
other from soap bubbles. She recalled Barrie and Ainsley sitting on the kitchen
stoop, blowing bubbles in Bruce’s favorite clay pipe, and Fletcher fishing in
the fishbowl with a tiny hook tied to the end of a piece of string, Ainsley
crying when he told her he was going to eat all of her fish for dinner. There
were happy times flooded in sunlight, and crisscross days, when nothing seemed
to go right, and convalescent days for sore throats and bowls of steaming leek
soup. There were winter afternoons just made for sledding, and warm summer
mornings spent riding in a flower-bedecked pony cart, and dreary days when the
mist turned to rain, keeping the children indoors to wile away the hours
cutting snowflakes from paper and making crumbly oatcakes in the kitchen with
Maude. There were sunny spring afternoons spent walking on the moors, gathering
mallow blossoms and violets, or lying beneath the cool shade of a rowan tree
making gowan chains and finding animal shapes in the clouds overhead.

She opened her hand and smoothed the tiny feather, placing
it in the bottom of her ribbon box. Then she picked up a button that she had
meant to sew on Barrie’s dress. Putting it back, she picked up a pale blue
satin ribbon, seeing a few strands of Ainsley’s red-gold hair still tangled in
the knot. She left the knot there, putting the ribbon back where it was,
knowing there would be other times she would take it out, for these memories
were like stones that were too heavy to be washed away at will, stones too
heavy to do anything but sink to the bottom of her mind and wait.

She closed the ribbon box and picked up her hairbrush, her
thoughts now on her children as well as Adrian, her mind busy imagining the
ways she could break the news of them to him.

What had happened last night had complicated things, to be
sure.

She drew the brush absently through her hair, looking at
herself in the mirror. Her face was a pale oval lost in a frame of red-gold
hair. She pinched her cheeks and was rewarded with a faint blush of color.

Hearing a soft knock on her door, she was about to answer
when she heard her name called.

“Maggie?”

It was Adrian’s voice.

“Aye. Come in,” she called, turning toward the door. “It
isna locked.”

He opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind
him. She smiled tentatively.

He greeted her with a curt nod.

Trouble
, her mind warned. She had been so lost in the
luxurious after-haze of his lovemaking that she hadn’t stopped to think about
what
if.

What if Molly was right? What if he didn’t want his desk
touched? What if he was angry that she had?

One look at him told her that he was more than angry.

They stayed that way for a minute, him looking at her, her
looking back at him, both of them busy mentally circling each other like two
wolves—cautious, on guard, wary—each of them looking for an opening, a way to
move in with a killing lunge, a way to catch the other with his guard down, a
way to be victorious without suffering any wounds. Kill or be killed. A ritual,
a dance, that was old as man.

Why must men and women drive each other crazy before they
settle in?
she wondered.

Here was a man pulled between two forces, his expectations
and his desires. Clearly what she had done in his study wasn’t sitting too well
with him.

“I suppose you’ve come about the papers on your desk,” she
said, seeing her directness had surprised him.

“What are you talking about? What papers?”

“The papers on your desk,” she said. “The bills and things.
The ones I straightened today and put away.”

“You what?” he shouted.

“I straightened your papers and cleaned your desk.”

“Tell me you didn’t,” he said. “Tell me this is some kind of
joke.”

“I canna,” she said softly, understanding now that Molly had
been right. He would kill her first.

“What else did you do in my study?”

“Why, nothing. Havena you seen it?”

“No, I haven’t, and now I’m sure as hell afraid to. Let me
tell you something, Maggie. Don’t ever touch anything on my desk. Better yet,
stay the hell away from my study.”

She looked puzzled. “But if you havena seen it, why did you
come here?”

“I came here to tell you that last night…”

Was wonderful…the second time.

He paused, looking off for a moment. When he looked back at
her, he said, “I want you to know that what happened last night… I’m sorry I
forced myself on you. It won’t happen again.”

The brush trembling in her hand, Maggie rose to her feet. He
was watching her with an odd expression on his face. “Why?” she asked, fighting
for her lost composure.

He shrugged. “What difference does it make? What happened,
happened. It was a mistake that can’t be changed. There’s no reason to try.”

“I wasna,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Unlike you, I canna
say I am sorry it happened. And it wasna force.” She began to laugh.

“What do you find so amusing?”

“Us,” she said simply. “It is something to laugh at, you
ken.”

“Only if you’re mad,” he said. “Are you?”

She laughed harder. “Aye. I ken I must be verra mad to find
the way we always seem to see everything through such different eyes so
humorous.”

His gaze was direct. He clearly did not understand. He held
her eyes with his, waiting. Her first thought was to look away, but something
prevented it.

“Last night,” she said reflectively. “I canna help thinking
about it, and apparently neither could you. But no for the same reason, I ken.
You come into my room after a night of undeniable brooding, telling me it
willna happen again,” her voice dropped now, low and husky, “while I have been
sitting here counting the hours until it did.”

For the craziest moment she felt like laughing at the look
on his face. She shook her head instead. “How different is truth from fancy,”
she said, then glanced at him with a look that she hoped burned right through
him. She saw the red, bloodshot eyes, the stubble of a beard, the weary stance.
“I ken you didn’t sleep much?”

“None,” he said.

“Aye,” she said, “I ken that. I couldna sleep either. I lay
awake most of the night thinking.”

He seemed to relax a bit, as though he was a little
interested in hearing just where she was headed with all of this.

“I spent a great deal of time thinking about our next
meeting, only now I ken just how very far apart our thoughts have been. You
were thinking stop. I was thinking go.”

“You don’t make sense.”

“Aye, it’s a peculiar habit of mine.” She smiled sadly. “You
canna imagine what I thought about all night, the things that filled my mind
and kept me from sleeping.”

“Things like what?”

“I thought about what you would look like without your
clothes.” She paused.

Maggie watched as his body seemed to jerk in response.

“Thoughts have no place in this,” he said curtly.

“Neither has reason, apparently,” she said, her voice lower.

The muscles in his jaw worked. “Reason has nothing to do
with it.”

“Aye, it does. By reasoning we arrive at conclusions.”

“I am not an idiot.”

The corners of her mouth lifted. “I’ve seen no proof of
that,” she said, then realizing how he resisted even humor, she sighed. “Then
tell me you dinna reach the same conclusions I have. Tell me that after last
night, you can say there is nothing between us. Tell me that when you touch me,
you feel nothing.”

She paused, looking at him. Waiting. Pleading.