Lightning That Lingers (10 page)

But her warm unsteady fingers covered his mouth gently, a stubborn mute barrier. Her other
hand pressed shakily against his chest, begging for space.

“Philip, no.”

Under his hands he could feel the tense hold of her body, the winsome trembling in her thighs. He could sense her lacerating inner struggle against the violent flame that was the mirror of his own. He searched her expressive brown eyes.

“No?” he asked.

“No.” She whispered the word and tried to slide away, her warm inner thighs brushing over his jeans. His hands stopped her.

“Why?”

“Because—Philip, please. Let me go. I can’t think with my—with your leg in between …”

He released her and watched her go to stand against the desk, closing her eyes, catching the edge in a pale-knuckled grip. It struck him then that she was saying no to more than the kiss. She was saying no to everything. There was an odd despair in her face and he echoed that as he had her desire. In a lifetime of hearing yes, the first shy, sane voice to break the babble that his life had become was telling him no. Don’t you want to be my redemption? he thought. He tried to choose what he would feel, to corral and control and confront it, but the emotions were too new, too unfamiliar.

She watched him stand, glance around the room in a distracted restless fashion, and then absently lift a nearly empty roll of paper towels from an upper shelf. He removed the last paper sheets, and selecting scissors from the pencil can, cut the cardboard roll in half. For a bewildered moment, she had no idea what he was doing. Then she saw him
set the cardboard rolls in the wicker basket. After a cautious minute, the gerbil came to sniff at them, and then darted inside one. Philip had made a toy for Jinx. It was a small thing, but it touched her. Her throat grew uncomfortably tight as he sat back down facing her, his dramatic, endless legs stretched out with the wine-colored boots crossed at the ankle, the shapeless cling of the sweatshirt outlining the hard modeling of his upper body. He met her eyes and repeated, “Why?”

The subtle tracing of feeling she had seen earlier on his face seemed to have vanished and she began to wonder if it had been there at all. The blue eyes were only clear and curious, the long mouth relaxed. She had never felt less articulate.

“It would be too complicated,” she said.

His head tilted slightly. His eyes affected interest.

“Is that based in something concrete or is this more of the ‘I don’t trust men because they’re strange and have body parts that change size’ doctrine?”

“If you think I’m that ridiculous, it’s a wonder I intrigue you at all.”

That drew a smile. “When you’re ridiculous, you’re wonderful. We only begin to have problems when you try to be consistent.”

He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, the action unconsciously drawing her tense attention back to the taut pull of fabric over his hip bones. Pummeling herself mentally, she watched him stand once more—the restlessness again, what did it mean? He gave Jinx another sunflower seed. His gaze strayed around the room. It lit softly, suddenly, on the Cougar Club calendar and the contraction in her throat spread downward to her
stomach when he reached out one patrician hand to flip the pages open to July. Dispassionately, he surveyed the beautiful nude photograph of himself.

“It’s because I strip, isn’t it?” He looked up at her and gave her a smile of heart-stopping charm. “Don’t think another thing about it. I’m sure everyone who comes to the show is only interested in my mind.”

She turned away, fighting to enforce the slipping hold on her will. He came to her and caught hold of her shoulders, bringing her to him. She sensed something in him that reminded her queerly of exhaustion as he laid his forehead against hers, his fingers gently kneading through her thin blouse.

“Jenny, Jenny … Why do you have to make this a problem?” he whispered. He must have felt her resistance, her fierce hold to decisions made in cooler moments, because he raised his head, looking down into her worried eyes, his hands resting loosely on her shoulders.

“All right then. Let’s explore your consistencies,” he said. “If I posed nude as an artist’s model would that disturb you?”

Knowing that she was going for a baited hook, yet not able to resist the temptation, she said, “I’m not sure. Probably not as much.”

“I see. You like a high culture tag on your exposed skin. What if I was an artist who painted nudes?”

She was becoming blindingly conscious of his thumbs, which were making leisured uplifting circles under her collarbone. “That would be different.”

“High culture,” he repeated dryly, “and you prefer the exploiter to the exploited. Smart.”

“Now just a—” “What if I were a doctor and spent the day examining naked bodies?”

Exasperated, and yet enchanted by him, she said, “Doctors at least don’t kiss their patients.”

“True. But maybe they should. Kissing someone for a buck is significantly more wholesome and probably more therapeutic than sticking your fingers into their body cavities for fifty dollars an hour. Oh no!” He shortcut her sudden effort to jerk herself out of his grip. “There’s one more thing I want to know, love.” His next words, an urgent whisper, formed themselves against her mouth. “How does this fit into your logic?”

Logic evaporated like steam as his mouth moved in a soft eddy over hers, dragging her lips into fragile openness. His knee rubbed over her outer thigh as it flexed just enough to permit his hand to slide over her back and lower, his slowly rotating palm lifting her into the hard cradle of his hips. With a seizure of need, she melted forward into the firm welcoming frame, her restive senses seeking him, learning his pliant flesh, the complex detail of projecting bone structure, the sensitive strength of his hands. Her fingers found his shoulders, the sides of his face, winnowed the fawn-soft delicacy of his hair. Each part of her that pressed his body stung with the tingling hunger to know more of him.

His gentle swirling kisses altered, and his hands burned their way upward to form a nest for her head as they guided her deeper into kisses and slow tongue strokes that carried the motion of
physical love. He had stopped courting her defenses. This was a preliminary, the shattering avowal of a love act that was not to follow and they broke from it gasping, sex-flushed, though she saw with enhanced insight that in his experience, he could control it much more accurately than she.

His hands left her, resculpting themselves quickly to her cheekbones, his thumbs gently lifting her chin.

“When you—” He stopped, taking in a betraying breath. “When you decide to pull your head out of the sand, come see me. You know all the places to look.”

Six

He left her with a hammering pulse and the image of his mouth wet-burned into hers. And she knew the moment she let him walk out the door that it was a mistake. No woman in her right mind would have let that man walk out of her life. Because Philip Brooks had won. She liked him. She desired him. More, she respected him. Staring into the wicker waste basket, watching Jinx’s whiskers poking out of the end of a paper towel roll, she made an important discovery about human nature. One didn’t always hand one’s heart to another human being. Sometimes, it just went.

The library closed late, and she stood in the darkened back hallway wishing that he was waiting for her outside. She pulled her coat from the hook, and stopped, staring at the muffler still hanging there. For the first time that week, she admitted that she wasn’t wearing it because it was the scarf her hand had happened to fall on.
She was wearing it because it was his. His, and because of that, somehow precious. She traced down the muffler’s soft length with a fingertip and then brought it to her face, rubbing her cheek against it unseeingly. Philip Brooks. She had survived the good-humored teasing about his sudden appearance and much speculated upon assistance to her in the staff room that afternoon from Annette, Lydia, and Tracy. Surely that was a beginning.

Tonight was her turn to drive, and she let Eleanor off with a friendly wave, turning down a hospitable offer to join her for popcorn and an episode of Masterpiece Theatre preserved on the video recorder.

Inside she was drifting, her mind awash with the aggressive idiocy of what she was doing as she directed her old Volkswagen Beetle toward the Brooks mansion at Lily Hill. She knew only one thing. If she was going to Philip Brooks, she would have to do it quickly, before thought returned. Quickly and without thinking. Just do it, like a paratrooper making a jump into fog-saturated space.

An arctic cold front had sliced the state and the steadily dropping temperatures were keeping the prudent indoors. Traffic was light on the country roads. Across the lake, she could see the lights of the village as a distant glitter that threw fading streamers on the lake’s frosty glass. Within the curtain of trees, the towering ramparts of oak and maple, there was no light except that from the headlamps, piercing far in the clear, frigid air, yet revealing little beyond smoky tunnel glimpses of road and brush. The cold seemed to burn out even light.

Her imagination flared, throwing up the disquieting fantasy that she was the last soul left on earth after a nuclear holocaust, utterly alone. Alone forever. She swallowed hard and turned on the radio for company, and heard the weather reporter announce with an eloquent shiver that the chill factor had dipped to sixty below. The public was advised to travel with a full tank of gas and stay with their cars in the event of breakdown. Jennifer glanced at her gas gauge. She had a quarter of a tank. Plenty. But the aged inadequate heater wheezed out air that was no better than lukewarm, and a stiff chilliness began to settle in her feet as they worked the brake and clutch. She could feel the thick wind tugging at the Beetle’s light chassis.

Her nerves were fine and tight, overstretched cords, by the time Philip’s gateway loomed at the deserted roadside. The high wrought-iron gate was closed. If it was locked, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do.

Wind-drifted snow obscured the twenty or so feet leading to the gate. That meant trouble for the Beetle, so she crushed the accelerator seeking momentum as she made the turn. But it must have been too much momentum, because the little car landed on the driveway with a hop, its rear wheels catching in a hidden ice patch. The car sloughed around, showering snow powder, and spun off the drive, the engine-heavy rear end pulling it down a steep incline into a snowbank.

For Jennifer, there was no time for fear, only a dense vision of a swirling world, a dizzying swing, a tumble backward that ended with a bump. In dumb surprise, she found herself sitting back inclined
like an astronaut in an early space capsule. Panic, not plan, made her gun the wheels, burying the rear bumper in another foot of snow.

She was not thinking clearly beyond a shaken inner monologue on her own stupidity when she got out of the car to assess her situation, leaving the engine running. More rattled than she knew, working on automatic reflexes, she stood in the snowbank, locked the door and slammed it shut. Then automatic faded to comprehension and she stared in disbelief at the silver key ring dangling back and forth, separated from her by a pane of glass. The swaying circle mesmerized her, and when it stopped she crossed her arms on the sloping yellow roof, buried her head against the chill fabric of her coat, and moaned in frustration.

The wind snatched the sound; it tore with hooked claws at her rigid back. Her body awoke all at once to the cold. It framed her face in iron, wept like damp acid through her pants, blared in her muscles. Her stadium coat was fine for twenty and thirty degree weather, or for running from car to work to car to house. Tonight, it might have been Kleenex.

Stay with the car
. All right. She would run to the mansion, and if Philip wasn’t home, she would run back to the car, smash in the window with a rock, and wait inside until help, in some form, arrived.

The large gates were locked, but there was a smaller entrance not far down the wall that was open. She ran down the rutted driveway away from the slanting headlights of her VW, headlights that were shooting aimlessly into the swaying leaf-stripped trees above her head.

I’m a penguin. I’m a penguin. I like cold weather, she thought, trying to dream it, believe in it.

Night closed around her as the drive curved. The stars twinkled in a cloudless black sky, too distant for comfort. The trees arching over the drive seemed in their thrashing malevolence to want to deny her the small solace of the sight of the stars. The wind keened, a predatory chorus.

She had expected the mansion to be close because the lake was out here somewhere, but the drive went on and on. Her breath came in dry puffs. Each step vibrated through her chilled joints in a shock wave.

She pulled her hat over her ears as far as she could, and covered her mouth and nose with the muffler. Her breath made the cashmere damp, then ice-clogged, then raw agony on her flesh. The world was filled with harsh sound: the wind, her breathing, the fluttery scratch of her clothing. Her muscles had begun to contract rhythmically in shivers. As her eye fluids chilled, she tried to walk with her eyes closed but she stumbled in the darkness, falling twice. Even with her eyes open, she could barely make out the lane. The moon was dimmer than it had been a week ago when she was in the forest with Philip, but then, there were many sources of light in a night sky. Philip said so. She ought to be able to see.