By The Sea, Book Two: Amanda

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  "Amanda, look. We've got to get some rest. I can't keep my eyes open and you ... need to sleep, too." Actually, her eyes were wide open. Too wide open. She looked as if she was afraid of closing them, afraid of what she might see.

  He led her up the stairs to the room he'd found her in, then made up the bare mattress with the sheets he'd discovered. The sun was on the wane, and so was his energy. Amanda had retreated to her window seat.

  "How do you know so much about keeping house?" she asked out of the blue.

  "The Army has turned out some of the best domestics in England," he said with a grin. Actually, he'd had his own man to take care of everyday business, but he wasn't blind. He went up to her with a spare flannel nightshirt he'd found with the linens.

  "Here. I want you to put this on," he said, more sternly than he'd intended.

  Like a child, she did as she was told. Right then. Right there. The sight of her bare breasts as she pulled off her dress jolted him into wakefulness; before he had the manners to look away, he stared. Her skin was very smooth, very white, very alluring. Her breasts were firm; not large, but well-formed, the nipples dark and small. Exhausted or not, he was thrown into an instant arousal. More to hide that fact than to conceal his obvious voyeurism, he turned away and made a grand business of tucking the sheets in tight.

  When he turned back to her she was dressed in the baggy nightshirt, looking more forlorn than ever. He began to take his leave, but she said, "Please don't leave me alone."

  "Well, no, I won't if you don't want me to. Let's tuck you in, and then I'll sit here for a while," he said gently.

  "No! I mean, lie with me. Hold me. I might fall asleep, and then I won't be able to get back. You have to make sure I get back. At least hold my hand," she begged, seeing the look of caution on his face. "At least do that," she whispered.

  She hadn't even used his name. For her he was just a live, warm body, proof positive of the three-dimensional world. It tore at his heart to climb, fully dressed, into the iron-bound bed with her; and when she laid her head timidly on his chest, when she extended one arm across his stomach, he had to suppress a sob of frustration. For most of the next hour he was in a state approaching physical pain. Not since he was sixteen had he been so acutely aware of needing release. And yet his heart ached with tenderness for her, as it would for a sleeping child. She'd fallen asleep so easily, so trustingly. He'd been stroking her hair because it soothed her and because he wanted to stay awake to savor it all—his arousal; her warm breath and soft body; his self-imposed restraint; the incredibly deep feeling of protectiveness he felt for her. Three months ago he was an emotional void. Now he felt a little like a demi-god.

  But demi-gods needed sleep too. Before long Geoff was nodding off. Some time after that, when sleep makes instinctive decisions possible, he slid down from the feather pillows that were propping him up and curled his form around Amanda's, warming her, warming himself.

  Chapter 13

  He awoke before she did—still desperately aroused. The trouble was, he wasn't feeling nearly so noble as he had the day before. It seemed to him part of God's divine plan that he should peel away the heavy flannel nightshirt that Amanda was wearing and kiss her body into wakefulness. He closed his eyes again, this time in pain. He understood, more than some, that life wasn't fair. But if he'd played that damn game of bridge just a few days earlier, he surely would have been there for Amanda when the bomb went off on Wall Street. Maybe Perry would have been with them, and the tragedy would have been left on page one, where it belonged.

  Geoff's arm was still around Amanda, his body still curled around hers. It occurred to him that when she awoke she might find this disorienting, although it seemed the most natural thing in the world to him. He began to ease his way away from her, with about the same success as grains of iron trying to crawl away from a magnet.

  Amanda did awake, and with a start. Her little gasp of shock cut him to the quick. "Geoff! So it wasn't a dream?" she murmured in some confusion.

  "If it was, we are such stuff as dreams are made on," he said, quoting his beloved Bard out of context.

  "I don't understand ... does that mean ... are we ... lovers?"

  "Oh, we're not such stuff as all that," he answered with an affectionate look. She was so sweet, so completely desirable. But was she Amanda?

  She fetched a deep, long sigh, obviously trying to separate fact from nightmare. This would be the hard part, he knew. He'd gone through the same thing those weeks in hospital, after the trenches.

  "Do you know what date this is?" she asked with a puzzled frown.

  "The twenty-second of September."

  She seemed to calculate for a moment. "Then I have to get back."

  She swung her legs over the side of the bed, but he restrained her. "Hold on! You're in no shape to make that drive."

  "I know what shape I'm in, thank you," she said stubbornly. "I don't know what shape Perry's in. They wouldn't let me see him. But I'll break down the door this time if I have to."

  "I spoke with your mother yesterday. Perry's coming along well."

  "That's what you say."

  "That's what I know, damn it."

  Yes, indeed. She was sounding more and more like Amanda every minute. "Amanda, your aunt and uncle need a little time to cool off. They're being irrational now, understandably so—"

  "You think I had something to do with that horrible affair, too," she murmured, bowing her head.

  "My God—how could I?" he asked, astonished. Clearly she had no idea why he was there.

  They were sitting side by side on the bed. Amanda turned to him and in a wooden voice—as if she'd offered the same defense to a thousand different juries in her head—said, "I went to see Lajos right after the bombing. He was genuinely shocked. He said he and the others had nothing to do with it. He said that there's a splinter group, a more radical group, that he has no control over. I don't know if I should believe him, but I do. I want to believe him. I need to believe him. If I couldn't, I would kill myself. It would be the only fair thing to do. An innocent man was killed."

  "How deeply were you involved with Lajos?" he asked her quietly.

  "Lately, not at all. I felt ashamed not to be more committed to the movement, but my sculpture was taking up more and more of my time. Besides, I lost my enthusiasm after ... after that day on the Victoria. You were so scathing."

  "Well, what do I know? Probably I envied your enthusiasm, your willingness to take a stand on something. Don't you know a cynic when you see one, Amanda?" He smoothed her sleep-rumpled hair. It was a bit longer now, prettier. "No, I don't suppose you'd know one if he fell on you."

  Which is pretty much what Geoff wanted to do just then. Someone get me under control, he prayed, irrationally happy.

  "I don't think it's very funny," she said somberly, misinterpreting the smile on his face. "You may not always mean what you say, but I've listened to every word. When you told me I had talent, I believed you. When you told me to go sit in a corner until I grew up, I took you very seriously. You've affected my politics, my art, my family life. And now you smile and say it was all a joke." She looked away from him. "Do you enjoy that sort of thing?" she asked, playing with a thread hanging from the cuff of her nightshirt.

  "No, no, you have it all wrong." He took her hand in his. "I'm smiling because—" Because I'm thirty-one years old and hopelessly in love with you. Should he tell her that?

  "—because you're looking so much better than you did yesterday," he said. Nope. Not yet. This was an unusual situation, and Amanda was in an unusual mood. There must be a better time to tell her that his sexual frustration had reached the knuckle-gnawing point.

  "You're right," she said with sudden resolve. "I am much better than I was yesterday, and I'm leaving." She stood up rather quickly, got dizzy, staggered, and fell back into his waiting arms. "For God's sake, what's wrong with my knees?" she whispered.

  "They want their breakfast. Get back in bed. There's an e
gg farm not far from here. I'll bring back some real food, and then we'll see about the drive to New York. I mean it, Amanda. Stay where you are."

  ****

  It took longer than he'd hoped, naturally, to scrounge up the fresh supplies, but the boot of his Buick was filled with eggs, milk, produce, and a block of ice when he returned, thanks to an obliging farmer's wife. Feeling smug and humming a tune, Geoff was not prepared for the sight of the bright yellow Daniels, hung up on one of the more impressive of the frost heaves in the access road to Fain's Folly. Amanda was trying without success to rocket the disabled car over the hump.

  When she saw Geoff slam his car door and come marching toward her, she winced, then threw the engine into reverse one more time.

  Obviously he'd missed his chance. He ought to have declared himself to her at the exact moment when she was poised between delirium and obstinacy, sometime in the middle of the night. Now that she was back to normal, things were going to be a bit more dicey.

  He walked around her car, surveying the damage she'd done by ramming her low-slung car over the heaved-up boulder. He peered underneath the chassis. "Ayuh," he said, mimicking the accent of the egg farmer, "jest like I figgered. Busted axle."

  Amanda stared stonily ahead. "It's your fault. You threatened me."

  "Oh yes. Back home they call me The Brutalizer."

  "I can't drive it now."

  "That's for damn sure."

  "Will you drive me back to New York?"

  "After breakfast."

  "Fine."

  "Okay."

  "Now what?"

  "Out."

  He reached inside and opened the door for her. Amanda climbed out, a little shaky still, but able to manage. As for Geoff, he was left facing a quarter-mile of mountain terrain with a block of ice, a plucked chicken, a dozen eggs, a milk can filled with surprisingly heavy whole milk, and other treats and sundries pressed upon him by the kind-hearted egg farmer's wife. So much for impulse buying.

  As he staggered up the remaining access road which Amanda had managed to make so inaccessible, his back numb from the block of ice that was melting through its canvas carrier, his arms aching with pain from trying to haul everything in one load, he thought: Do I love her? Can I love such an obstinate, perverse, unmanageable, impulsive female?

  Just then Amanda, who'd been able to keep up with his slow progress, turned and gave him one of her patented looks, part miffed, part teasing, part apology, part guilt, part double-dare. It was the look he had sailed three thousand miles for, and he still didn't have a clue what it meant.

  "Damn it all!" He stopped. She stopped. He put down the ice, the dead chicken, the milk can. "Just what are you trying to say?"

  Amanda shrugged her shoulders. "I didn't say anything."

  "Of course not!" he said angrily. "With you it's either a look or a deed, never a well-placed word in between. Grab a gun, slug a cop, run away from those who care—do anything but sit down and talk about what's on your mind. That's too civilized, too logical an approach."

  "Look who's talking!" she answered, roused at last. "The master of British reserve! When have you ever said what's really on your mind? I'm so tired of all your pleasantness: 'Thanks awfully. Frightfully good of you. So kind of you, old chap.' So this! So that! Why don't you haul off once and let go? That's how we do it over here. God knows, you've seen it done enough times. What are you afraid of?"

  She wrapped her sweater more tightly around her. That little gesture, far more than her words, struck him as unacceptably belligerent. He threw down the produce, the cupcakes, and the fresh-picked apples, took her in his arms, and kissed her as he'd never kissed a woman before in his life. His mouth was bruising hers, but she didn't retreat from the kiss, not one inch. It surprised him. Somehow, he thought she'd find a way to turn the kiss into a cat-and-mouse game. But her lips were there for him; her arms were around him tight; her body stood up to his, unflinching before his arousal.

  Is that all it took? One good kiss?

  Breathless, he broke away and said in a voice shaky with passion, "I love you, Amanda. You know I do."

  "I've had ... my suspicions," she answered in a voice as breathless as his. "But then again ... I've had my doubts," she added, curving her neck to him.

  "For pity's sake, woman—do you love me or not?" He trailed kisses on her cheek, her temple, coming back to her mouth, not knowing where to start, where to finish.

  Amanda's answer was low with pleasure. "I memorized your face the first moment I saw it, at my father's house."

  "Woman, is that a yes or not? Don't do this to me," he moaned, returning again and again to her lips.

  "It's as yes as it can get. I love you, Geoff."

  He kissed her again, long, hard, hungrily. "It goes without saying that I'm perishing with desire for you," he murmured after the kiss, burying his face in her hair.

  "My father's right. You do have a way with words," she said. Her laugh was low, throaty.

  She was sounding coy, too coy; he began to panic. "What about now? Is now all right?"

  "Or later," she teased. "Whichever."

  He looked around him at the scattered food and melting ice. His dilemma was of the fox-and-corn-and-chicken type. If he left the food out here in the wild, it was good-bye to any more meals. But if he let Amanda walk all the way back, she might be too tired to make love. Or she might change her mind. She could twist an ankle or get appendicitis; anything could happen. He stood there, arms around Amanda, his rational processes destroyed, the little that was left of his mind racing and plotting like a sixteen-year-old's. He hadn't planned it this way. He'd planned dinner, roses, a ring ....

  "My God!" he cried. "I forgot to ask you to marry me!"

  Her eyes got rounder, but she scarcely missed a beat. "So—ask me."

  "Naturally I'll understand if you decline," he added immediately. "You have a fortune to protect; I'm one step from the poorhouse. But understand this, Amanda," he said in a voice husky with emotion. "I need you at my side." He took her by her shoulders and gazed deep into her dark eyes, peering through the veil of banter that she liked to wear. "It may take me a while, but sooner or later I'll be able to afford you. And until that time, I plan to love you every chance I get. Saturday nights, every night—whenever you'll have me. I'll live with you or you can live with me, it makes no difference."

  He lowered his mouth to hers to seal his pledge. The kiss left him lightheaded. In his soul he understood that Amanda would always have this effect on him—when he was young, when he was old, and all the years between.

  He released her from the kiss and she smiled a blurry smile, then seemed to shake herself free of it, which he hated to see.

  "Let me see if I understand you" she asked innocently. "You'd like to marry me, but you think it would be unfair because I have too much money, so you're withdrawing the offer?"

  "Something like that," he agreed. Put that way, it did sound more original than logical.

  "Then cheer up. I've been disinherited," she said with a bright smile, watching him carefully for his reaction.

  "Your father would never do that! You must be joking!"

  "Nosiree. I'm almost as poor as Job's turkey."

  He stared at her, waiting for the punch line. None came. And then he let out a Wild-West whoop of sheer joy. There would be no title, no money; just him, just her. They balanced beautifully. Suddenly all other dilemmas became solvable. He piled the food around the ice, threw his hunting jacket over the whole shebang, wrapped one arm around his startled, laughing sweetheart, and practically sprinted her back to the upstairs bedroom of Fain's Folly.

  Geoff was no virgin, but it seemed to him—then and for the rest of his life—that the morning with Amanda in the Adirondacks was his first. Never had he felt skin so silky, so soft; never had a woman's sigh of pleasure sent his own body rippling in response. And this, too, was new: he was enjoying giving her pleasure almost as much as he was enjoying accepting it. Geoff had known lust,
and he had known passion; but never before had he known joy.

  When he caressed Amanda's breasts and she whimpered, it made him grin with happiness. And when he slid his hand along the shaft of sunlight that lay across her body, leading ever lower, and Amanda laughingly cried, "Don't you dare don't you dare don't you dare!" and tried to wriggle away from his touch—he laughed out loud. Forest nymph: he would pursue her, and he would find her, and he would make her his own, there in the sunlight of her bed.

  Because she was the one. He slid his arm around her waist and pulled her toward him, without haste. The game was over. She knew it, and so did he. Her eyes were shining with love for him as she whispered, "I've wanted you forever."

  "All my life," he agreed, in the strange shorthand of lovers. He brought his mouth down on hers in a kiss of surpassing sweetness, a kiss almost of melancholy that he had wasted so much time in his search. "My life," he said softly, tracing the wet line of a tear that had been rolling down her cheek. "I love you."

  She nodded haltingly in reply, not trusting her voice. Geoff came into her then, an easy, sweet slide into the promise of ecstasy. Amanda sighed, then lifted herself up to him. When she gasped—either from pleasure or from pain, he could not tell—he stopped.

  He should not have.

  Immediately a vivid image leaped up inside his head, of his tattered and bloodied canvas cot inside the officers' tent on the front line. With a groan he began to withdraw from her, from the flashback, whispering, "Oh, God ... not now."

  No! Not now. He braced himself and with a fierce, emotional effort pushed himself forward again, sweeping aside once and for all the image of the cot, embracing instead the feel of the feather tick underneath his legs; of Amanda's warm body beneath his. "Oh, yes ... now," he whispered as he plunged to another rhythm altogether, the rhythm of coming home at last. He wanted to keep coming, keep coming homeward for the pure joy of it. But ecstasy sneaked up on him; knocked him over; and ran away.