Lightning That Lingers (13 page)

His hand cooled her cheek, his thumb lazily stroking the rise of her cheekbone. Her respiratory machinery seemed to be operating on a broken current.

“If I … that is, if we … together—” She took a steadying breath. “I mean, if we were together, it wouldn’t be your first time, would it? I mean, obviously. Right?”

Touched and rather taken aback by the question, he answered gently, “No. It wouldn’t.”

“Is this different? Different from the other times?”

“Altogether different.” He wasn’t sure if she believed him. Words would never be enough. The kaleidoscope of emotions in her face was too complicated to be dissected simply. How could there be such longing in eyes that had a tendency to stare at him like he was about to hurt her? He wanted to cleanse those eyes of fear. He was almost overcome by the urge to slide his terry robe off her shoulders and make her naked. But that wasn’t going to convince her that this was different. Instead he made himself stand and smile briskly at her. “Well. Breakfast. Your clothes are still on the damp side. Want to borrow something of mine?”

She looked a little less terrified walking down the staircase beside him belted into a clean pair of his jeans, her unbound breasts swaying against the cotton fabric under his long-sleeved T-shirt. Two pairs of wool socks held on his running shoes. Knowing that she couldn’t possibly have on any underpants was hard on his libido so he labored
to perish the thought. She was moving stiffly, sore from the stresses of hypothermia on her muscles, but her expression was bright and engaging as she gazed in wordless awe around her.

“Nice little place you’ve got here,” she said, as though it made her uncomfortable.

“It’s a bear to heat. Maybe you should have a sweater too. Are you cold?”

She wasn’t, not really, but something in his eyes made a shiver scamper up her spine and she hugged herself. His arm came around her, tucking her against his body as they walked.

“You could have a fresh egg for breakfast. I’ll take you to see my chicken.”

Shyly, she put her hand up to take hold of his fingers. “You have chickens instead of etchings?”

“One chicken.”

After a sweep of breathtaking, empty rooms, they were in a large sunny pantry lined with fresh newspapers. Philip got down on one knee in a pool of flaxen sunlight. In front of him was a short square house with protruding straw and he looked as if he were about to propose to it.

“Henrietta …” His voice was musical, coaxing. His tongue clicked beguilingly.

A beak emerged from the doorway, and the bright bead of an eye, and then a small brown hen plunged out at a fast strut and ran comically across the floor to Philip. He slapped his thigh several times and she hopped up there, clucking contentedly as he stroked her feathers and cooed blandishments at her.

“ ‘Morning, Henrietta. What have you been up to, hmmm?” The hen put back her head and luxuriated in having her neck scratched. “Did you
lay an egg for Jenny? Good girl … Clever girl …” His hand slid over the polished feathers on her back. “The wildlife rehabilitation people in Milwaukee found her in a crowded city park when she was a tiny ball of fluff, and thought maybe she was a bobwhite. They brought her to me hoping I’d be able to rear her so she could be returned to the wild. Of course, with my great store of book-learning, I told them no way is this a bobwhite; this is a quail. I don’t know quite how she grew up to be a chicken. Do you, sweetie? Why’d you grow into a chicken?”

Since the last two sentences had regressed to a coo, Jennifer assumed the questions were directed at the hen rather than at her. As she watched his enchanting, if slightly besotted, attentions to the small bird, an unsettled feeling grew within her. She loved him. She loved this man. She was afraid at first to experience the emotion, and held the knowledge at an intellectual level, resisting it, fighting to keep it from impacting her senses. Then the walls weakened and collapsed, and it flooded into her, each sensation sure and strong. What had made him like this, as gracious, as appealing inside as he was outside? The sensations kept flowing powerfully as though they were fed by some deep spring. She became desperate in her need to feel the tactile richness of his lips against her, to touch his hair and let it stream through her fingers like gold webbing.

“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 handpainted 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 album 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, massaging 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.