Stepping inside the gloom of its interior, he found this grandeur to be haughty and arrogant, designed to make the supplicant feel cowed when looking up into the dim recesses and vaulted ceilings. He shivered as the cold dampness from above descended on him, until it clung like a clammy shroud, chilling him far more within this house of God than he’d felt without. What light he saw came from the hundreds of candles that flickered everywhere— on the altar, beside the confessionals, and in the dozens of side chapels where a few people huddled in prayer. The dark rows of pews were empty, as much as he could make them out, for they receded into the blackness at the back of the church. He walked along a side aisle toward this dark section, thinking that if Ingrid was hiding anywhere, it would probably be there. His steps echoed on the stone slabs which composed the floor, the sound blending with the hushed murmurs of prayer and an occasional muffled cough.
She’d always warned him that if she ever felt it unsafe to meet at his apartment, the cathedral would be where he’d find her. “It’s the perfect place for a person to sit alone in the dark, or for two people to huddle together and whisper, with no one thinking it odd,” she’d once told him in all sincerity. He’d found it all rather melodramatic, yet he began to worry about what had set her off tonight. Not because he really believed that they were in any immediate danger—that would come once she went public—but because at other times when she’d been afraid of being followed, she’d cut short their time at his apartment, foregoing the sex. She better not pull that shit tonight, he thought, suddenly growing angry. He’d protested on some of the other evenings when she’d tried to leave early, and occasionally she’d relented, insisting they at least get away from his building. Then he’d had her in out-of-the-way places—back alleys, parks, anywhere there were shadows—and the furtiveness had seemed to excite her more. The memory of her at those times caused his loins to stir again.
He’d strolled nearly three-quarters of the way down the length of the church—a distance of over a hundred meters—when he passed a large alcove situated behind wrought-iron bars but with its gate ajar. A good-size area, it contained a large ancient confessional off in one corner, and at its center stood a table with two chairs. Here the light became particularly dim, and massive columns on either side of the recess obscured the sight lines to and from the rest of the church. The sign over a receptacle for offerings read CHAPEL OF RECONCILIATION.
Exactly the kind of place Ingrid would choose, he thought, pausing with his hand on the bars while wondering if he should check farther back still. But all he could see in those shadows was a collection of raised, ancient stone crypts, their covers supporting full-sized statues, presumably of the holy men whose remains lay within, and some scaffolding where renovations to a crumbling wall were under way.
He decided to look there anyway, thinking she might be hiding behind one of the tombs, when he caught the scent and froze. Though faint, it was definitely her perfume. TABOO, the label had read. Over the months since he’d given it to her, it had become an aphrodisiac to him, and already half aroused, he found that even such a dilute trace of it made him fully erect and ready for her in seconds. Controlling his breathing, he remembered how once he’d caught a whiff of some other brand on her hips. He’d driven himself crazy, imagining other men giving her such gifts and plying her body. But he’d never dared ask about her other lovers. Shoving all such torments out of his head, he’d thought only, Tonight she is mine.
Yet, where was she?
He stepped briskly toward the aboveground graves, but immediately all hint of her aroma vanished. He returned to the chapel gate where he caught it again, yet the alcove remained empty. He looked around for any other place she might be concealing herself, seeing nothing.
He pulled open the gate and went inside. The traces this time filled his nostrils with an authority that made his heart quicken. They became even stronger as he approached the wooden confessional. Made of dark mahogany, it consisted of two side compartments and a much wider central chamber for the priest. The air intoxicated him now, as he reached to open the middle door.
Enough light spilled into the darkened interior that he could see her sitting sideways on a bench seat, naked, hugging her long legs to her breasts and smiling at him. “What took you so long, my love, and what do you have for me?” she whispered.
He stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind him. The side grates through which the priest would normally speak let in sufficient illumination that he could still see her eyes sparkle as she reached for him and made him bend toward her. “I asked what you had for me,” she repeated into his ear.
He’d carried the vial in a bag, to keep it cool in the night air. He took it, along with the computer disk in his jacket pocket and tucked both items among the folds of her clothes, which she’d placed in a neat pile off to one side.
“What if a priest had come?” he asked her as she stood and started undoing his belt buckle.
“I would have heard his confession.”
When his pants were around his feet, she turned her back to him and ground her hips into his groin. Spreading her legs, bending forward, and extending her arms to lean on the bench, she cooed, “This is how we’ll do it here.” Deftly arching her back, she reached a hand between her legs and glided him into her. Excitedly he grabbed her rear and started to thrust, but she shoved against him, until her hips had him pinned against the door. “You don’t move,” she commanded softly.
When he went still she began to pump him, slowly, expertly, and ever so silently. It was all he could do to control his breathing so as not to make any noise. Just as he felt about to climax, she’d stop her movements, wait, and then start again. She repeated the process several times until he thought he’d faint. “Lean forward, my love. You mustn’t fall now,” she quietly advised, as if she knew the dizzy state she’d aroused him to.
He shifted his weight, placing his hands above her on the back wall of the booth for support. She proceeded to grind him again, but this time with an urgency that told him she would finally let him come. As he surrendered to her control and she brought him ever closer to his release, he barely noticed the door behind him slowly open. The change in light ultimately caught his eye, yet even when he started to turn his head, he got barely a glimpse of the shadowy figures outside the confessional. My God, the priests have found us, he thought in the seconds before one of the intruders grabbed him from behind and snapped his neck with a vicious twist.
As she savored his final spasms, Ingrid smiled and murmured, “Your biggest yet, my love, exactly as I promised.”
The Plaza Hotel, New York
“Happy New Year, Kathleen,” Steve Patton said, raising his champagne glass as revelers all around them blew party horns, threw streamers, and showered the gilded ballroom with confetti.
“Really, Steve?”
“Of course.”
“But that depends partially on you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t continue the way we’ve been.”
He froze, still holding his drink toward her.
“I’m just not able to compartmentalize sex the way you do,” she continued. “That’s not a criticism. It’s simply that I don’t have it in me to be one of your string of women. It messes me up.”
He looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign tongue.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Steve,” she added. “You are what you are, an elegant rascal and a wonderful lover. What you gave me this last year was exactly what I needed, in a raw sort of way, but now I must move on with my life. I guess I’m old-fashioned enough to require more from a man. Above all, I don’t want to lose you as a friend, and it’s vital we remain close colleagues, especially now, with so much important work to be done—”
He silenced her with a finger to her lips. “Kathleen, I’d welcome a chance to be the man who gives you more. I just thought you wanted room and no commitments. My affairs are dalliances, marvelous interludes be
tween me and consenting women that harm no one, and I don’t apologize for them. But never think what I have with you is so casual. You’re my best friend, and this past year I’ve felt like the luckiest man alive.” He took her hand. “Let’s you and I move in together.”
She pulled back. “Steve, you’re kidding me.”
“I had liaisons because they fit my lifestyle. On the road, traveling around the country, and living most of the year in hotel rooms. My work, I always figured, made it impossible to have anything with a woman. You changed all that, Kathleen.”
“Steve, what are you saying?”
“Come back to my apartment and let me show you.”
He made love to her that night with more intensity and passion than she’d ever known from him. His fierceness liberated her, igniting a shamelessness that she abandoned herself to as she sat astride him and brought them both to the limits of their pleasure, held them there, quivering on the edge, until their ecstasy ebbed enough that she could resume the rhythm and repeat the deliciously slow ascent.
Then his phone rang. To her surprise he answered, yet motioned her to continue.
She hesitantly went on with her movements, suddenly feeling shy about being overheard.
“Hello,” he said in that familiar husky voice, raising his hips and thrusting deeper into her, making her let out a moan in spite of her sudden self-consciousness. Grinning mischievously, he arched higher just as he said, “Why, Mandy, Happy New Year to you, too.” She felt him throbbing inside her, urgent and imploring.
At first she hesitated, then thought, What if Mandy was the one with him the other night? A delicious excitement flooded through her, releasing an impulse to let the woman know what it felt like to be listening at the other end of the phone, and she ground into Patton, withholding nothing, determined to take him to climax in earshot of her rival. This time it was his turn to moan. He let the receiver fall onto the bed, grabbed her buttocks, and they both came noisily together. She then collapsed onto his chest, giggling and thinking, Take that, Mandy, whoever you are.
An hour later as she rode home in a cab, she felt shaken by what she’d done and the feelings she’d experienced. On one level it had been fun, but on another, her electric response to his kinkiness disturbed her, and the prospect of where such games might lead left her uneasy. Though she probably meant more to Steve than she suspected, he was what he was, she told herself, a womanizer, perfect for a “marvelous interlude,” but not much more. Despite his outrageous offer that they live together, she knew she could never expect better than being number one in his string, the way she had been tonight. And that could become a kind of control, especially when fueled by jealousy, she realized, thinking of his eagerness to play Mandy and her against each other. She’d no illusions that his being with the others, especially if she continued to care for him, would make her far un-happier than it already had and eventually consume her. Revulsed by the pall of such sexual masochism, she shuddered, watching the slick blackness of the millennium’s first morning slide by outside the window, and renewed her determination to break off with him. Lisa’s right. I deserve better.
When she got out of the cab at her apartment in the East Village, a cool drizzle tingled against her cheeks. It felt like a cleansing shower.
Chapter 5
Steele’s first days of convalescence didn’t go too badly, for no other reason than the doctors and Martha had laid out his every move in a schedule. Between his twice-a-day walks with regular half-block increases, his carefully planned meals three times a day, and all his follow-up visits for tests and checkups he’d had little time to think, which was fine by him.
Except at night. Then he mostly sat in the living room, staring at the grand piano and nursing a tumbler of scotch. No need to worry about my breath in the morning, he told himself as he switched back from vodka.
“It doesn’t say anything about continuing with alcohol on these sheets of instructions you brought home,” Martha pointed out, scowling at him and shoving the papers in his face after he’d been home a few days.
“Two drinks a day, Martha. It’s good for the heart. Been in all the medical journals for years,” he declared, raising the amber fluid in a toast.
“Oh, really. Then you should have already had the healthiest heart in the land.” Without waiting for an answer, she huffed out of the room and headed off to bed, muttering, “And did they mention the size of the glass by any chance?”
The piano had been Luana’s. Whether playing professionally for choirs, teaching at schools, or giving private lessons, she’d possessed a boundless passion for music all her life, including a dream to someday take a master’s program for concert pianists. When diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the pancreas, prognosis six months, she immediately signed up to take the audition she’d so often postponed. “At least I’ll know if I’m good enough,” she explained, submerging herself in the hours of daily practice necessary to prepare her presentation piece— Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20.
Steele had found the urgency of the playing nearly impossible to bear. Each note, exquisitely poignant to the point of pain, seemed to tick off how little time she had left. As the date of the competition approached, she became too weak to sit at the bench for long periods, and his despair for her deepened. She nevertheless persisted, resting between segments of the score and insisting that he make a tape of her playing. On her behalf he submitted the recording to the judges, along with a letter from her doctor attesting that, for medical reasons, she could not perform in person. A week later she received a telegram announcing that they’d accepted her, conditional on her being well enough to attend classes.
The flash of pride he’d witnessed in her gaunt eyes at that moment seemed as much for her spirit’s triumph over the cancer, despite its destruction of her body, as for her musical victory. When he tried to tell her how much he loved her and that he felt in awe of her courage, she smiled.
“I’m proud of me, too, and that makes me feel sexy,” she’d said. “Come here,” and she pulled him weakly to her for what would turn out to be the last time they made love.
The day she’d died he shut and locked the keyboard cover. She wouldn’t want him to, he knew, but the thought of hearing anyone else play the instrument she’d poured her soul into proved too much for him.
One night Martha asked, “Do you want me to sell it? It’s morbid how you sit and look at it all the time.”
“No!” he’d snapped.
She never raised the subject again.
“Returning to Daily Activity” was what doctors called the portion of the printed schedule that allowed him more and more leeway. In his case it left him knowing less and less what to do with himself. As a result, he resorted to dropping by the hospital, hoping to chat with colleagues and get caught up on the institutional gossip with the staff of his own ER. At first they welcomed him with open arms.
“Thank God you’re all right.”
“We sure miss you!”
“But we’ll scrape by until you’re back.”
When he started checking files, hovering over physicians’ shoulders, and giving unwanted second opinions, he quickly became such a nuisance that eyeballs shot skyward at the mere sight of him.
“Dr. Steele, you’re here again?”
“We’re managing okay, really.”
“Excuse me, Richard. Gotta run.”
He ended up spending his afternoons strolling in Central Park instead, trying to find warmth in the thin sunshine of midwinter. Failing that, he added a detour to his excursions, dropping by a bar in the Plaza Hotel with an armload of newspapers for a drink. By week’s end, the waiters considered him a regular and even knew his name.
At home, relations between him and Chet remained as strained as ever. It seemed the boy couldn’t get out of the house fast enough as he headed off to school each morning. When Steele did get up sufficiently early to join him for breakfast, the teenager hurriedly gulped the remainder of his food in sul
len silence, making it evident that he preferred his father’s absence. Evenings proved no better. The boy routinely arranged to do his homework at a friend’s house, and if father and son did encounter each other at supper, the meal became a repeat of breakfast, Chet staying at the table only as long as it took for him to wolf down Martha’s excellent cooking.
“If it wasn’t for his appetite and your culinary skills, I’d never see him at all,” Steele lamented as he and Martha finished supper one evening after the boy had gone off as usual.
“I’ll keep making the meals to get him here. Getting him to talk, you’ll have to do on your own.”
“And how do I accomplish that?”
“With more of what you said to him in ICU.”
“He spoke with you about that?”
“Yeah. And he also wanted to know if I thought you meant it.”
“Oh, my God!”
“I told him, ‘Of course, he did,’ but Chet needs to hear it from you.”
An hour later Steele had already poured himself his drink and sunk into the overstuffed cushions on the sofa, settling in for his nightly brood, when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” Martha called out cheerfully. “I forgot to tell you. Your friend Greg Stanton called this afternoon and asked if it would be all right to drop in. I told him, ‘Sure, come ahead.’ That you’d be glad to see him.”
Over the years he’d learned for certain that the woman never forgot anything. “Martha!” he exclaimed sharply. “You deliberately didn’t mention it.”
“Now, why would I do that?” she called over her shoulder, her voice filling with innocent surprise as she made her way to the door.
Because maybe you figured I wouldn’t let anyone, not even an old buddy like Greg, interrupt my nightly feeling sorry for myself, thought Steele, growing surlier by the second.
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