Wanton Angel

by Linda Lael Miller

  She decided that she didn’t dare hope for such a miracle. The disappointment would be unbearable if it turned out that she was mistaken. She had every reason to believe that Eli was using her and none to feel that he bore her any goodwill, yet she couldn’t resist his attentions. What had just taken place was proof enough of that.

  And she needed more of Eli’s loving; her body and her soul cried out for it.

  “I won’t be called a whore, or paid for my love, Eli McKutchen,” she warned. “And I will not be mocked when this is over and we’re both back in Northridge.”

  Eli lifted his right hand in a pledge, and a slight smile curved his lips. “You have my word, Bonnie. Once we get back to Northridge, it will be as if nothing had happened.”

  Bonnie wasn’t sure she wanted exactly that—the suggestion made her feel a little sad, in fact. Even bereaved. But she nodded her assent to share Eli’s bed because she knew she was bound for it anyway. This way she could at least tell herself that it had been a deliberate choice.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE HOTEL WAS a grand place, its huge lobby filled with potted greenery and handsome leather furniture. Heavy crystal chandeliers, powered by electricity, twinkled against the impossibly high ceilings, shedding their light over lush Persian rugs and the elegantly clad guests who walked upon them.

  Bonnie drew in her breath; she’d forgotten that such sumptuous beauty existed since her return to Northridge. Thinking these thoughts helped to distract her while Eli spoke to one of several clerks stationed behind the registration desk, but the trick didn’t work for long because Bonnie knew that she didn’t really belong in a place like this anymore. If she ever had.

  She paced, clutching the handle of her shabby valise, her conscience suddenly sore and smarting. She was no longer Eli McKutchen’s wife, in the eyes of either God or the law, and yet she had allowed the man to make love to her in a railroad car and then bring her to this hotel! What was the matter with her? What had happened to her principles, to her ideals, to her morals?

  Bonnie was about to walk out of the hotel and find a place that she could afford on her own, when Eli reappeared at her side, taking a gentle but firm hold on her elbow. The expression in his whiskey-colored eyes conveyed both amusement and a tender understanding.

  She was defeated, without Eli’s saying so much as one word, because for all the papers she’d signed and all the dreams that had died, Bonnie still felt as much married to this man as she ever had. Her mind might know that the union had been legally dissolved, but Bonnie’s soul was still cleaving to him as husband, and all her emotions took its part. Her intellect was left to struggle alone.

  “You swear you’ll never tell?” she asked tremulously, a part of her already anticipating the singular joys that lay ahead.

  Eli arched one butternut eyebrow. “As long as you want this to be a secret, Bonnie, it will be. Now let’s get settled and find a decent restaurant—I’m starved.”

  Bonnie gave a sigh of such relief that Eli chuckled as he took her valise in one hand and her forearm in the other, ushering her toward the elevator.

  “Did you think I planned to hurl you onto the bed and have my way with you the moment we entered our suite, my love?”

  Bonnie eyed the elevator dubiously. She disliked the things, was always dizzied by the swiftness of the ride. She would have felt safer, too, if the door had been sturdier, but it was only iron grillwork, and it made an alarming clanking sound when the elevator operator opened it. “No,” Bonnie lied coolly, hoping that the small, uniformed man who ran the apparatus knew what he was about. “I did not.”

  Eli only grinned, saving his reply until they had reached the top floor of the hotel and were standing outside the door of their suite. “We can have our supper right here, if you’d like,” he said.

  Bonnie made a face at him, hating his teasing but at the same time taking an odd comfort from it. “I don’t know that we can go anywhere fancy,” she conceded. “I haven’t the clothes for it, you know.”

  “Being a humble storekeeper from Northridge,” Eli added, unlocking the door of their suite with a brass key and stepping back, so that Bonnie might enter first.

  She swept ahead of him, chin high, on a wave of pretended elegance, but the simple beauty of the suite’s sitting room dissolved her act. The last of the day’s sunlight streamed through a western window, pooling on a carpet of the palest blue. There were two cream-colored sofas, facing each other, along with a small ivory fireplace polished to a glistening patina. Bonnie would not have believed that such an exquisite room existed in Spokane, outside some of the fine houses on the city’s South Hill, that is.

  The suite also boasted a bathroom with a giant tub of gray marble, a small dressing room, and, of course, a bedchamber, decorated in burgundy and pale pink. The bedstead was of glistening brass, and the sheets—Bonnie pulled back the wine-colored counterpane just a wee bit to investigate—looked and felt like real silk. As shy as any virgin bride, Bonnie turned a shade of pale fuschia well-suited to the decor and fled back to the sitting room.

  Eli had just dismissed the bellhop, who had brought his suitcase up from the registration desk. He grinned at the high color in Bonnie’s cheeks. “Do the rooms meet with your approval, my dear?”

  “They do,” Bonnie confessed in a choked mockery of dignity.

  “Bonnie.” Eli took her upper arms gently in his hands. “Please relax—I was only teasing before, when I talked about having my way with you. We won’t make love at all, unless that’s what you want.”

  “Then why did you go to all the trouble of following me?” Bonnie demanded, angry with Eli and angrier still with herself. “Why did you make love to me in—in a railroad car, for pity’s sake—and then persuade me to come here?”

  Eli chuckled, bent to kiss the tip of her nose. “I made love to you? Tell me, Bonnie, was I alone responsible for what happened on board that train?”

  Bonnie knew that he wasn’t completely to blame, though he had, of course, instigated the thing in the first place. Honesty forced her to concede, at least to herself, that she had been a willing and even eager partner. “I can’t believe we did that,” she muttered.

  “It was tame, compared to that time—”

  Quickly Bonnie pressed gloved fingers to Eli’s mouth, silencing him. But even through her gloves, the warmth of his lips triggered some response within her, and she drew her hand back as rapidly as she had sent it forth. “It is unfair of you to remind me of past indiscretions, sir,” she said, only half in jest. For good measure, she stepped back, out of Eli’s reach. “I’m very hungry,” she added. “Can we go and have something to eat now?”

  They dined in a darkened corner of the hotel’s enormous restaurant, by candlelight. The mood, for all Bonnie’s efforts to the opposite, was intimate.

  “This is almost like old times,” Eli observed over the rim of his wineglass. “Sometimes I wish we could go back to those days, when we were first married and all was right with the world.”

  “We can’t,” Bonnie said flatly, wishing that she had never agreed to do this mad, scandalous thing. She would probably be damned for her sins, and here she’d tried so hard to be good.

  But trying to behave herself had never been any help when it came to Eli McKutchen. This was the man who had always been able to take outlandish liberties with her person and get away with it. For instance, there was that time when he had brought her to a sweet, fierce release in the dark privacy of their box at the opera, using only his expert touch and words of gruff, challenging love that no one else could hear …

  Bonnie turned pink just remembering.

  Eli smiled but said nothing, apparently intent on finishing his steak.

  Bonnie, on the other hand, felt a heated despair that wasn’t entirely unpleasant and could hardly eat a bite of her own dinner of fresh trout, fried potatoes and glazed beets, no matter how she tried. The fine food had all the allure of stewed cardboard.

  “Would you l
ike to see a play or something?” Eli asked, once he’d finished his dinner and the dirty dishes had been taken away. “It’s early.”

  Bonnie ached to be alone with her former husband even as she castigated herself for giving in to his charm so easily. It was no great wonder, was it, that he had left her fifty dollars in payment the other night. Perhaps she’d deserved that, just as she would deserve the pain and remorse she would almost certainly feel when this enchanted time-out of-time was over. “I have to see all my suppliers tomorrow,” she said remotely, “so perhaps it would be better if I got some sleep.”

  To his credit, Eli said nothing; he allowed Bonnie to fool herself that there would be no more to the evening. But she knew better, and so did he.

  When the check had been signed, Eli graciously drew back Bonnie’s chair and offered her his arm. It was easy to pretend that they were still married, still a part of New York society. For a moment their divorce was not real to Bonnie, nor was her flight to Northridge or her time as a hurdy-gurdy dancer, mayor and storekeeper. It was as though none of those things had ever taken place.

  They rode the elevator in silence, neither of them noticing the balding and watchful operator, who knew that these two strangers loved each other and smiled to think that there was still romance in the world.

  Bonnie’s feet seemed to glide an inch or so above the floor, rather than making solid contact with it, and when Eli unlocked the door of the suite and handed her inside, she was quite unprepared for his courteous “I could use a walk in the fresh air. Make yourself comfortable, Bonnie, and try to relax.”

  Try to relax? Didn’t he know that she was about as relaxed as it was possible to be? Why, if he’d wanted to make love on the sitting-room floor, she wouldn’t have protested. “You’re not angry?”

  With one finger, he touched her nose. “I’m not angry. I just want to take my time, Bonnie, and savor this night.”

  A delicious tremor went through Bonnie’s tired body. Her knees were still weak from that torrid episode on the train and her drawers were still hanging from her waist in ribbons, and here she was wanting Eli to take her again. Well, she too would savor this night, for it and the one to follow might have to last her all her life. Instinctively, Bonnie knew that there would never be another man, Webb or anyone else, who could stir in her the kind of passion that Eli did.

  Wanting to seduce the man, there and then, Bonnie instead turned away with sweeping grandeur and made her way into the bathroom.

  She closed and locked the door behind her and began running water into the impressive tub for a bath. Oh, yes, she was a paragon of poise and deportment, she told herself. No one would ever guess, to see her lounging in that luxurious tubful of water, that Bonnie had any self-doubt at all.

  She did have, however. What she did not possess, having forgotten to fetch one from her valise, was a wrapper. That was no matter for concern, for the bathroom quite conveniently and sensibly adjoined the bedroom. When her bath was over—and Bonnie stretched it out to a sinful length of time because it was so very pleasant—she wrapped herself in one of the hotel’s thirsty white towels and ducked into the next room.

  Had she known that Eli would be there, sitting on the side of the bed, undoing his cufflinks as any husband might do after an evening out, she would certainly have remained in the bathtub for a little longer, giving herself a chance to gather her courage.

  When she saw a bottle of champagne on the bedside table, couched in a silver wine cooler, she trembled inside her towel.

  “H-how was your walk?” she managed to ask, painfully conscious of her dripping-wet hair and her nakedness beneath that scrap of fluffy cloth.

  Eli only smiled, setting his cufflinks aside. They made a musical, tinkling sound against the base of the wine cooler.

  Bonnie swallowed hard, drawing the towel more tightly around her. She was cold—that was it, she was cold—and she began to shiver.

  “Come and get into bed before you catch your death,” he said. Inadvertently, Eli had reminded himself as well as Bonnie of Kiley’s fatal bout with pneumonia, and his wonderful flax-colored eyes reflected an almost fathomless grief, though only briefly. He even managed to smile as he rose from the bed and approached Bonnie.

  He settled her beneath the covers and took away the towel in almost the same motion. Briskly, while Bonnie sat with the silken covers drawn up to cover her breasts, Eli towel-dried her hair until she knew it must be standing out around her head like the mane of a lion.

  Finally Eli tossed aside the towel and stood up to round the bed. There he uncorked the champagne with a practiced motion of his thumbs and the liquid bubbled enticingly as he poured it into one crystal glass and then another.

  He extended the first glass to Bonnie, his eyes bright and changeable as molten gold as they made their way over her face, her wild tangled hair, her bare shoulders. Bonnie drew the covers up a little higher, though not even a hint of cleavage was showing.

  Eli smiled at her breathless, wide-eyed suspense and lifted his glass. “Here’s to us, my love. May this be a night we never forget.”

  Bonnie was certain that the night would be memorable. Perhaps at some future time, while lying sleepless in her own lonely bed, she would recall the minutes and hours to come and weep for them, for Eli, for herself. Her throat felt thick and her eyes burned as she lifted her glass high, took a long sip and then set her champagne aside.

  She watched shamelessly as Eli removed his clothes and turned down the lights. Through the window above the bed came the silvery glimmer of moonlight, as pleasing to the eye and the spirit as champagne to the tongue. Bonnie felt a ferocious sort of contentment; hang Northridge, the Friday Afternoon Community Improvement Club, the conventions of the day. For tonight, she was still Eli McKutchen’s wife and she had the right to his tender pleasuring and the primitive passion that would follow it.

  She did not resist, could not have resisted, when Eli caught one of her hands in his and pulled her upright, so that she knelt in the middle of the bed. Lifting her easily by her waist, he brought her to the very edge of the bed and then sank to his own knees on the floor.

  Bonnie shivered with anticipation and unguarded need as he slowly stroked her hips, her bottom, her back, his hands conveying a sort of reverence by their touch, rather than any sort of command. The points of Bonnie’s breasts swelled and then tightened as Eli ignored them to caress the rest of her thoroughly, and she made a soft yet savage sound as he traced the tender flesh of her inner thighs with the tips of his fingers, urging them to part for pleasures yet to be relished.

  Presently Eli’s fingers circled the peaks of her breasts, in a touch so light as to be something more nearly imagined than experienced as a reality. Bonnie moaned and her long, damp hair tickled the backs of her calves as she lifted her face to the ceiling, abandoning her body to pleasures that would be almost unendurable for their keenness and power.

  And Eli continued to tamper with her distended nipples, now shaping them, now soothing them, now causing them to ache with the need to nourish one impossible, magnificent man. Throughout, a second hand was moving down over Bonnie’s rib cage, over her quivering middle, to the spot where a bud of flesh pulsed in its silken hiding place, waiting to be found.

  The finding was not swift; no, the search was wondrously slow and deliberate, causing Bonnie such delicate anguish that she made a sound that was half groan and half whine when the tender treasure was at last uncovered and conquered. Her back arched still further as Eli consumed his prize, now tentatively, now with voracity.

  Bonnie tangled her fingers in Eli’s hair, but her hands fell to his shoulders when her gratification came, for it was the shameless response of a savage’s woman, convulsing her again and again, with a biting keenness that tore a low groan of lust from her throat.

  The satisfaction had been brutal in its might, but it still left a hollow place inside Bonnie. For her the act would not be complete until Eli entered her and made her fully his own.
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  She fell backward on the bed, drawing him with her by her desperate grip on his shoulders and by his great need for her, and the weight of his body upon hers was a welcome dominance.

  Eli took her in one thrusting motion of his steel-like hips; instinctively her legs wrapped themselves around him in a claiming as old as the stars at the farthest border of the universe.

  Bonnie was fevered, flinging herself at Eli as though to batter him, but in reality, of course, she was surrendering herself. Smoothly, fiercely he lunged and withdrew, lunged and withdrew, until Bonnie was tossing her head back and forth in delirium and groaning senseless, desperate pleas.

  “All right,” Eli conceded gruffly, as he let his own measured restraint fall away. “All right, Bonnie. I’ll give you what you want…”

  Bonnie rose high off the bed to meet his final stroke, a wailing moan coming from her throat as her body shuddered in glorious defeat. Only moments behind her, Eli growled as he caught her bottom in strong, lifting hands and plunged into her depths in a series of long, explosive strokes that ended with a warrior’s hoarse shout of conquest.

  Eli sank, gasping, to Bonnie’s side, his head pillowed on her dampened, tingling breasts, one of his legs curved over her thighs.

  “That,” she managed to say, “will be fifty dollars.”

  Eli laughed and gave what he could reach of her bottom a smart slap. Mere minutes later, he had recovered his considerable virility, and he seemed determined to make up for every session of lovemaking lost because of the years apart.

  He washed Bonnie and himself with a cloth soaked in champagne, then, with his fingers, he sprinkled droplets of the sparkling wine over her full breasts. His method of clearing away the nectar left Bonnie insensible with need.

  Bonnie awakened early the next morning, with Eli sprawled beside her in sated sleep, and she scrambled from the bed, her cheeks pounding. She needed a bath, in water instead of champagne, but she filled the tub slowly because she didn’t want to wake Eli. She had important business to see to, and none of it would get done if he decided to make love to her again.