by Ann Cristy
"We will never part, Xenobia, no matter what happens." Damon seemed to be all around her, enveloping her in a sense of warmth and protection.
Just then, an all-too-familiar voice carried across the room. "Damon," Cherry Crawford caroled. "How sweet! You brought your bride to Dominie's. Did she want to meet all your former mistresses, darling?"
"Not all of them Cherry," Damon drawled, "just a few."
Zen leaned against his chest, loving the steady beat of his heart under her cheek. She regarded Cherry with indifference, content to let Damon lead where once she would have demanded independence. Where once she would have demanded to be heard, now she was content to wait in silence.
"Carter and I will join you," Cherry said, turning away. "I know where your table is."
Damon's body stiffened under Zen's hand. "Shhh, don't worry," she said. "We won't be staying long anyway." She smiled up at him, feeling lazy and confident.
A look of amazement furrowed Damon's brow. Then his tough-tender smile transformed his face, moving her almost to tears. "You don't give a damn if she joins us, do you?" he said softly.
"I don't care if she invites the whole world to our door. We'll always be alone if we choose to be, won't we?"
"Yes, my love," Damon's eyes stayed fixed on hers.
"Damon, lean down. You're so tall, you know, and I want to whisper to you." Zen chuckled, then stroked him when she felt him stiffen at the sound. "I love you, Damon—desperately, totally, completely. I've loved you since the first moment we met at Eleni's and Davos's wedding rehearsal." She laughed again, pressing her nail into his chin. "I laughed last night because I was so happy." She paused and glanced around her. Damon had eyes only for her. "I'll tell you more later when we're alone, shall I?" she suggested with an impish grin.
"Please." Damon kissed her forehead.
"We should sit down. People are staring at us." Zen struggled to control an insane desire to laugh out loud.
"Will you believe me if I tell you that I've loved you since before you loved me?" Damon grinned at her open mouth and began to lead her from the floor.
"How can that be?"
"I have something to tell you later, too," he replied, laughing now, too.
"Keep careful watch on me or I might put something in Cherry's drink to get rid of her." Zen muttered just as they reached the table.
"Darling Damon, how nice to hear you laughing like that." Cherry bared her teeth in an insincere smile. "You know Carter Siddons, don't you?"
"Siddons," Damon nodded. "This is my wife, Xenobia Aristides. Darling, you know Cherry, and this is Carter Siddons."
"How do you do." Zen was about to slide into the booth, but Cherry stopped her.
"Do let Damon sit here, Zen. I refuse to call you that horribly ponderous name that Damon calls you. But I'm sure you understand that Damon and I have so much to say to each other."
But Damon's firm hand on Zen's arm, kept her at his side. He gestured to the waiter. "Please bring them whatever they choose and put it on my tab," he instructed.
He reached for Zen's shawl. "So sorry, but Zen and I are tired." Damon smiled at tight-lipped Cherry and affable-looking Carter. "Have a nice evening." The bored look on his face made Zen bite her lip to hold back a grin.
They left hand in hand. Their wide smiles earned a wary glance from the maitre d'.
"Leonard thinks we're smashed," Zen said as she and Damon waited for their car to arrive.
"I feel more drunk than I ever have in my life."
On the way home Zen sang a song in Irish.
"What does it mean?" Damon asked, cuddling her.
"Oh, like most Irish songs, it's about life, death, and eternal love. The Irish are so romantic." Zen yawned.
"Are you tired?" Damon's voice held a note of disappointment.
"Not a bit. Just so relaxed that I feel as if my bones have collapsed." She looked up at him. "You've set me free, Damon. How many free people do you know?"
"Do you mean how many people do I know who are in love?" Damon asked her.
"Wise man." Zen rested her head on his chest, feeling so protected, so cared for, yet so strong and unencumbered. "It's really too bad that there are no more dragons to be slain. I could handle two of them tonight, with one hand tied behind my back."
"A lady knight." Damon sounded amused.
When the car pulled up in front of their apartment building, Zen followed Damon out of the vehicle and turned to face the driver. "Thank you for the lovely ride. It was wonderful."
The driver nodded seriously. "Thank you, ma'am." He doffed his cap and drove away as Damon and Zen strolled into the foyer.
"He thinks I'm tipsy." Zen clamped a hand over her mouth to smother her laughter.
"He doesn't understand that you've discovered the fountain of all happiness," Damon said, ushering her into the elevator.
"You." Zen twined her arms around his waist.
"Darling, do you know that you make me feel very humble?" The elevator doors opened to their apartment, and they wandered into the living room. "I feel as if I should pay the national debt or do something equally grand. I have so much to pay back. Do you understand what I mean?"
"I know exactly what you mean." Zen threw her arms wide. "Sometimes you feel guilty for having found so much love when you know how rare it is. Yet love is the common denominator of life, the most basic thing there is." She whirled to face Damon. "Are we getting philosophical?" she asked, her eyes wide.
"We are." He answered sagely. He led her to the couch and pressed the button to open it into the mammoth bed. His eyes fused on her body and surveyed her slowly, sending white heat pulsing through her. "You look glorious," he said huskily.
"I should hope so." Zen laughed, then clapped a hand over her mouth again. "I'm trying not to laugh, but love has a weird effect on me. All the tittering, smirking, giggling that I didn't do all those years we were apart is spilling out of me. You see"—she took a deep breath to steady herself—"love is strange. It makes you look glorious. It makes you chortle like a teenager. But"—she held up an index finger—"only if you're loved back." Her bottom lip began to tremble. "Last night I realized that Damon Aristides loves me." She shrugged one bare shoulder, bringing Damon's gaze to it. "I couldn't handle such a momentous realization." She blinked at Damon. "Did you ever laugh at something foolish and keep on laughing, not because your foolishness was funny but because your insides were celebrating? Mine were celebrating the stupendous revelation that you loved me." The words were pouring out of her. "Until that moment, I thought I could live without your loving me. Then I discovered that... that you pull the sun up in the morning for me, that the moon is full because you touch me." She took another shaky breath. "Now do you understand why... why I was laughing?"
Damon looked at her, unable to speak, a dark red staining his cheeks. "Will you be my wife?" he asked finally.
Zen chuckled. "I am your wife, silly."
"I'm going to ask you that question every day for the rest of our lives, Xenobia Driscoll Aristides."
He swept her up in his arms and stepped into the middle of the bed, sat down, and held her on his lap. "Now, where were we? Ah, yes. I was just thinking about kissing your knee. Have I told you, my love, that you have sexy knees?"
Zen giggled and cuddled closer to him, closing her eyes in rapture as his tongue touched the back of her leg. "No, but you must tell me that every day, too. Oh, I'm going to love being married to you." Her eyes popped open when he fell still beside her.
He was regarding her intently. "On your birthday— I think it was when you turned twenty-six and you had been gone a year—I was here in my apartment alone, preparing to get drunk, as I did every year on your birthday."
"You did?" Zen grieved for the pain he had suffered. She cradled his head against her. "I won't let you be hurt anymore."
His tongue caressed her shoulders. "There's nothing in this world that can destroy me if you stay with me, my love."
"Me, too."
Zen gazed at him with a solemn promise in her eyes. Then her mouth curved in a smile.
"Here comes Chuckles the Clown again," Damon murmured, easing her onto her back in the bed, his grin widening when she began to giggle. "You are my love challenge," he said.
"Do you think you can make me stop laughing?"
Damon's soft smile conveyed a hunger she was eager to satisfy. "I will enjoy the challenge, my darling albatross."
"What?" Zen struggled to a sitting position. "What are you saying? You're my albatross, not the other way around, Damon."
"So you told me at the cottage one night in your sleep.
Whether I stay or leave you, you said, I'm your albatross." In one gentle motion, he pulled her bodice down to bare her breasts. "Ummm, so lovely... so tasty." He leaned over to suck her nipple.
"Yeeek! Damon Aristides, stop it. We're talking," Zen moaned.
"So talk, darling. I won't stop you." Damon put his arms around her waist as he shifted to the other breast.
"Did I really talk in my sleep?" Zen ran her fingers through his hair.
"Many times. You were often restless, my sweet, so I held you. The night I read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to the boys, you called me your albatross in your sleep."
"I thought about it when I woke up, too—how the bird flew around the ship and the winds filled the sails, then the bird was killed and the winds died and bad luck followed the Mariner." Damon's arms tightened on her. "Without you, nothing went well in my life. Oh, it carried on. David made me happy, my career was satisfying. But there was no luster, no freedom, no deep delight, no joy." Zen grew frustrated as she tried to express her feelings to Damon. "What's the matter with me? I talk constantly these days."
"Go on, my darling." Damon kissed her navel. "I love hearing that I'm important to you."
"Important? What a milksop word! Try intrinsic to my life, indigenous to my being," Zen expostulated, then giggled. "I'm doing it again, philosophizing." She looked up at him. "How many of the women you made love to also expounded on philosophy?"
"Not more than ten." Damon chuckled when she punched his arm.
"Damon," Zen said, "what were you going to tell me about getting drunk on my twenty-sixth birthday?"
Damon rolled over onto his back, placing his head in her lap. "My mother had been nagging me to get you to bring David back to see her. As usual, I told her that I felt it was up to you to make the first move.
Well, that night, as I opened my bottle of whisky and prepared to drown my sorrows, it suddenly hit me that I had no chance of ever having you again as long as you were in Ireland, that you might even marry over there, and then you would be completely lost to me. In that moment I decided I would fight, fair or foul, to get you—and that I would win." He looked up at her and fell silent.
She leaned over him, letting her red-gold hair drape around him. "And what did you mean when you said that you loved me first?"
"I like this," he whispered, "being curtained by your hair. I've never felt so secure. We're good for each other, aren't we, my love."
"Tell me," Zen urged, her fingers caressing his face.
"When Eleni and Davos began dating, you must have been about seventeen or eighteen. I was down at the dock with my boat when they asked to go sailing with me. Eleni was always a good sport about doing whatever Davos wanted. She sailed even though I don't think she liked it."
"She didn't," Zen recalled.
"On this particular day we jibed unexpectedly, and Eleni's purse slid across the deck. Her wallet fell out, open to a picture of a woman in a bikini, and I asked who it was. It was you. Eleni and Davos were so busy gathering her belongings before they blew away that they didn't notice when I pocketed the picture."
"You did?" Zen's nerve endings hummed with joy.
Damon reached for the jacket he had tossed aside. He fumbled through his wallet and drew out a worn snapshot of a younger Zen, smiling directly into the camera. He dumped his wallet upside down, and other pictures of her fell onto the bed, photos of her in her early twenties, then a newspaper picture of her just before she left for Ireland.
"This was all I had of the woman I loved," he said hoarsely. "I was ashamed of loving an eighteen-year-old girl, but I did love you. I saw you at nineteen when you swam in the state meet in college. I went alone to watch you. I wanted you even then." "I wish I'd known that."
"Oh, God," Damon groaned, kissing the inner curve of her breast. "I didn't want you to know then. No one ever knew. And when I met you through Davos and Eleni, I pretended it was the first time I'd seen you."
They fell into a long, thoughtful silence as Zen assimilated this new knowledge of him.
"Damon, your mother approached me once during the court battle to take David to Ireland. But I thought it was to castigate me further. I was young and raw with loving you. I see now that she might have been trying to mend fences."
"I forgave her long ago, because I saw how upset she was about what my Aunt Dalia said to you. But I ignored all of her pleas to get in touch with you. I don't know why. I guess I was too stubborn and proud to admit that I'd been wrong to let you go away. Then, when you returned from Ireland, I was determined to move heaven and earth if need be to win you back." He chuckled. "I must say, working through David was simpler."
"Devious man."
He nodded, his thick hair tickling her bare breasts. "Angel, your pink dress is getting badly wrinkled. Let me take it off you. After all, I'll want to see you in this gown many more times. Of course, only when we're dining alone."
"Silly," Zen cooed, lifting her arms so that he could ease the dress over her head. She was wearing a half-slip of pink silk, pink silk panties, and a pink garter belt and stockings. Damon's eyes were riveted to her. Her hand touching his arm recalled him from his contemplation of her.
"Would you hire me as your lady's maid?" he asked.
"Job sharing," Zen said dreamily. "I'll be your valet, and you can be my maid. What's a fair salary?"
"No salary, just fringe benefits." Damon swallowed hard as he unhooked each garter and rolled the stockings down her legs.
"Is this what the well-dressed wife of Damon Aristides should wear? Dangling earrings and nothing else?" Zen giggled as Damon urged her down on the bed and stretched out next to her.
"Yes. Now, about me making you stop laughing..." Damon had a devilish leer on his face as his mouth moved closer and smothered the chortle just escaping her lips. His tongue filled her mouth, tangling playfully with hers. His hands skimmed over her, reacquainting themselves with each dip and curve of her body. He sought out each pleasure spot, and she gasped when he touched her, first with his hands, then with his mouth.
"Damon..." She heard her voice as if from far away. It seemed to belong to someone else entirely. She opened her eyes to find his black gaze drawing her into a sensual vortex.
Sensation upon sensation built within her in an exquisite crescendo. She was lost in him, one with him, enveloped and overwhelmed by him, body and soul. Again and again he caressed her flesh to throbbing readiness, then calmed his touch and soothed her restless yearning, only to build it to fever pitch once more.
At last, their bodies damp and straining, he moved to take complete possession of her. His thrusts were slow and powerful and made her cry out with every stroke. She clung to his shoulders like a drowning person to a lifeline in a turbulent sea.
As he moved faster and faster within her, she lost all sense of herself.
She was climbing steadily on a still sharper ascent. There, everything stood still, teetering on a splendid brink, pausing in breathless ecstasy. And then she tumbled, tumbled, and was flung high up on a dry beach, still clutching Damon in her arms.
Long moments later, side by side, nose to nose, Damon whispered, "Now I understand why you laughed. I hadn't realized how much joy was bottled up in me, my love." He shook his head. "I'd watched you with the boys and felt such a complete happiness, especially the day you were trying to head the ball
in soccer."
"What do you mean, trying?" Zen's eyes flashed.
"You were good," he assured her. "And no wonder, since you were such a tomboy when you were young." Damon rubbed her back.
"And you know all about that because you were there for some of it."
"Yes, I was there. Whenever I could drive upstate, I attended your meets. And no one knew, not even you."
"Maybe I knew deep inside. I used to wish that I had parents who were watching me. Sometimes I would imagine that the cheering was for me. Did you cheer?"
"Oh, yes, my dove, I cheered." Damon pulled her onto his chest. "Shall we take a shower?"
"Together?"
"Of course. You're my wife, and I'm not letting you out of my sight."
"Good plan." She allowed him to pull her up.
He was momentarily distracted by her bouncing breasts. "I like it when they do that," he said.
Zen shook her head. "I do feel sorry for the women that David and Daniel put their eye on, because I think they are just like you."
"Do you?" Damon preened, flexing his muscles, drawing her eyes to his body. "Good. Then I hope they find someone just like you, someone to drive them mad." He swept her into his arms and headed toward the bathroom.
On the way, Zen spied a bronze sculpture on a Sheraton table. "Oh, how beautiful!" She scooped up the bronze as Damon walked past and began to examine its intricate detail. But her movements caused Damon to lose stride and stagger. He jostled Zen in his arms, and her tenuous grip on the sculpture loosened. The statue slipped from her fingers. "Oh!" Zen gasped.
"Aaaaagh! Xenobia, my toe!" yelled her naked husband, putting her down abruptly.
"Oh, darling, are you hurt?" she cried. "Oh, let me see. Oh, dear, your toe is so red." Zen tried to get a closer look as Damon hopped around on one foot, holding the other foot in his hand.
"Don't you dare... call it an accident," he warned her, wincing in pain.