A not-so-discreet cough from Mr. Briggs out on the front porch roused Trinity from her reverie. She plucked a couple of dollars from her purse and called the men back in.
"I’ll keep a dozen roses, but everything else is to be returned to the sender—including all three vases."
"But . . . but . . ." Mr. Briggs was obviously shocked.
"Everything else!" Trinity’s green eyes were glacial.
"Okay, okay," the man muttered. "But that boyfriend of yours is going to be one unhappy gent."
#
Trinity got an indication of just how unhappy that was, the next evening, when the roar of the Lamborghini spilt the quiet of the night and interrupted the quilting she was doing.
It was after ten, and Stephanie was already in bed, fast asleep. Trinity herself had taken a bath earlier, and now—wearing only a thin terry-cloth robe, her skin soft and glowing, her hair piled on top of her head—had decided to quilt for an hour or so before going to bed.
She hadn’t yet locked the front door for the night, and Chase stepped into the room before Trinity had a chance to get halfway to the door. He was wearing a dignified, heather-blue three-piece suit, although the darker blue shirt had been relieved of its tie and the first three buttons had been undone.
Chase presented a virile elegance in the cozy front room of Trinity’s home, and her movements across the floor became suspended as she watched him walk toward her.
At the first sight of him, her heart had surprised her, leaping into her throat as it had. As long as she hadn’t been able to see him, her resolution to call their relationship off had been fairly easy. Now, however, their awareness of each other seemed to arc across the room, touching each of them with an electrifying jolt, and Trinity’s pulse raced out of control as Chase stopped in front of her.
"How are you?" The velvet softness of his voice reached out to stroke her, even as his long fingers came out and gently touched her face. The contact burned, and Trinity stepped away.
"I—I’m fine. How are you?"
Such banality, when she knew very well that that was not what they wanted to say to each other.
"I’m tired," Chase flatly pronounced. "It’s been a long two days, and I’ve just gotten back from Dallas."
"And you came straight here?" Trinity turned and walked to the front door, stopping to stare out into the blackness of the night. It was better than looking at Chase.
"Yes," he admitted simply. "I missed you."
She could tell by the sound of his voice that he was walking toward her, and his next words came from directly in back of her.
"I’ve missed the look"—his hands grasped the soft flesh of her upper arms through the peach-colored terry cloth—". . . and the feel . . . and the smell . . ."—his mouth came down on the sensitive cord that ran along the side of her neck— ". . . and the taste of you."
His mouth nibbled hungrily up her throat to behind her ear, and Trinity couldn’t stand still a minute longer. "Stop it," she groaned, and wrenched herself out of his grasp. Retreating to the relative security of the rocking chair, she sat down, holding her forehead in her hand, not meeting Chase’s eyes.
However, seconds later, Trinity looked up in surprise as a black velvet case was thrown summarily in her lap.
"Diamonds," Chase informed her succinctly. His hands were rammed into the pockets of his slacks, and his blue eyes roved intently over her face.
Trinity’s stunned silence filled the room. Finally, she managed to ask faintly, "Why?"
Chase’s mouth twisted into a wry grin. "I thought you might like diamonds better than you did the emeralds. There are five of them, by the way."
For the first time, Trinity was able to see some humor in the situation, and she began to laugh, a liltingly lovely sound. "No wonder your affairs are so short-lived, Chase! You can’t afford to know a girl too long."
"Don’t be ridiculous," he snapped, throwing himself into a nearby easy chair, but the harshness of his words was relieved by the unexpected indulgence she could see in his eyes as he looked at her.
"What is it you want. Chase?" Trinity asked quietly. "I told you I wouldn’t see you again. Can’t you just leave it at that?"
The silver weight of his head lay against the back of the chair, and his eyes were heavily lidded. "No," he told her softly. "I can’t leave it at that."
"I told you my reasons—" Trinity began.
"Which didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense," Chase finished for her, his eyes wandering down to her legs, which were crossed at the knee and revealed by the parting of her robe.
"They made perfect sense to me." Trinity pulled her robe closed.
"For a lady with such puritan ethics," he mocked, "you sure are fantastic in bed."
Damn him! Why did he have to bring that up, when she was trying so hard to forget it.
"Chase, go away! We lead different types of lives. There would be no hope for any kind of a relationship between us other than some tawdry little affair."
"There would be nothing tawdry about an affair between you and me." Suddenly, he loomed before her, gripping her arms and pulling her up against him. The case containing the diamonds slid from her lap onto the floor, but neither of them noticed. "There was a sweet, hot beauty to the way our bodies reacted to each other, and you can’t say there wasn’t!"
His lips were mere inches away from hers, and Trinity could feel the hard maleness of him through the layers of their clothes. It took a terrible effort on her part to keep on resisting him.
"It’s no use. Chase. I won’t sleep with you again."
"You didn’t sleep with me"—he laughed harshly at her euphemism—"however much I wanted you to."
His grasp lightened, turning into a tender caress, and his eyes roved hungrily over her face. "Oh, Trinity," Chase murmured huskily, "you really are a wild thing, aren’t you?" The velvet was back in his voice, sheathing the sharpness, turning her limbs to water and breaking down her resistance almost completely. "I’ve never met anyone quite like you before. You live life in your own special way."
"Chase . . . I—"
"Okay," he ground out abruptly, just as if she had asked something of him, and pushed her gently away. Running his hand around the back of his neck, Chase absentmindedly massaged the tense cords he found there. "I won’t try to pressure you into my bed, at least for a while."
"What do you mean?" Her tongue circled her suddenly dry lips.
"I mean," he stated grimly, "that we’ll try it your way. We’ll date."
"You’d be willing to do that?" Trinity was astonished. Chase Colfax, she knew instinctively, was not the sort of man who made concessions easily.
"I’d be willing to do that," he repeated wearily.
"And no more gifts?"
He bent over and picked up the black velvet case, tapping it against one hand and regarding her thoughtfully. "You don’t even want the ones I’ve already given you?" he asked, as if he couldn’t understand her reasoning.
Trinity shook her head emphatically, causing Chase to smile slowly and ever-so-charmingly at her. "All right. I’ll keep them for you."
Dear God! When he smiled like that, he was nearly impossible to resist. What was she letting herself in for?
Trinity swallowed hard. She had one more question. "No sex?"
"No sex," he agreed, maybe a little too easily. "But don’t expect me to resist kissing you."
#
And so it started—their dating. To say it was an interesting experience would have been grossly to understate the case. Chase exhibited a restless energy, leading Trinity through some of Dallas’s most expensive restaurants, finest homes and elegant clubs with a flattering attentiveness. He had been born into the exclusive world of the highly privileged, and he took it for granted.
And yet, knowing Chase as she now did, Trinity sometimes sensed that this was not the type of life Chase really wanted. She couldn’t help but feel that if one dug far enough beneath the hardness of the man, one
would find a core of sadness, perhaps even emptiness.
One night after dinner, he took her to his penthouse apartment and watched her reaction to the hopelessly modern decor of the place with quiet amusement.
The apartment sprawled across the top of one of Dallas’s newest luxury condominium complexes. Thick white carpet swept toward walls of tinted glass. Ultra-contemporary pieces of smoked glass and shining chrome accentuated the clean lines of the white custom-designed couches. The room had a stark beauty that was set off by a profusion of white candles and a melange of bronze sculptures, and the neutral-colored walls provided a backdrop for the artful splashes of color in the many paintings hanging around the room.
To Trinity’s surprise, she liked it. A child couldn’t be raised with any sort of freedom in an environment like this. For that matter, she wouldn’t want to live here, either. But the room was tastefully done, and it suited what she knew about Chase, reflecting a controlled sophistication, an elegant austerity.
But his bedroom was surely the highlight—and the revelation—of the tour. The room was dominated by a massive bed set high up on a platform, with steps leading up to it. The bed was covered with a rich, soft gray suede, and the headboard was nothing but pillows—pillows piled upon more pillows, dozens of pillows in assorted sizes, shapes and hard, bold colors of vivid blues, bright reds and hot corals.
The crowning touch of the room was the large mirror on the ceiling, perfectly centered over the bed. Trinity walked around the bed, viewing the mirror from different angles. Finally, she turned to Chase, with a smile tugging at her full lips. "How do you clean it?"
His laughter, a low, throaty sound, roared around the room, making Trinity’s heart beat faster. Chase laughed so rarely that, when he did, it was a treasure to be stored up and cherished.
Pulling her into his arms, he looked down at her. "No one but you, Trinity Ann Warrenton, would think to ask a question like that."
"But it’s a very practical consideration."
"My cleaning service," he assured her, "must have no trouble cleaning it, because I’ve never heard a word about it."
"Cleaning service? You call the people that clean your apartment a ‘cleaning service’? Chase, how impersonal! You don’t even know the names of the people who clean your apartment. At least if you had a maid, you might just know her name. You know, perhaps you might have come upon her one day and asked—"
"Shut up, Trinity!" Chase advised pleasantly. Picking her up and holding her close, he fell back on the bed, and Trinity landed with a soft bounce beside him.
"What are you doing?"
"I’m about to show you, my wild, beautiful creature, the advantages of having a mirror on the ceiling," he enlightened her, lowering his lips to hers and softly rubbing them back and forth, until she had to reach up and hold his head still, pressing her lips to his in a long, deep kiss that made slow heat seep through her body, right down to her toes.
Chase unbuttoned her blouse and took it off, and Trinity didn’t protest. He ran the palm of his hand across the tips of her nipples until they stood upright and tight, actually throbbing for the moist encasement of his mouth.
But it never happened. Instead, without ever taking his eyes from hers, he unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged out of it. Then, ever so gently, he covered her with his half-naked body. The fine curling hair of his chest was a sensual abrasion against the swollen sensitivity of her breasts, and, supporting himself on his forearms, he began rocking against her.
Trinity moaned in helpless pleasure as the hard lower portion of his body ground against her at the same time that the upper half of his body barely grazed the tenderness of her skin, teasing her to a new plateau of passionate desire.
Hearing low murmuring sounds coming from deep in her throat, Trinity realized that she was arching under Chase in a provocative invitation that she had to stop.
"Chase . . . no . . ."
He moved off of her but kept his hand on her breast, gently caressing it. "Look up at the ceiling," he commanded softly. "Can you see the way my hand strokes you, the way your body strains toward mine?"
In spite of herself, Trinity’s eyes were drawn to the mirror above them, and she was captured by the erotic image the two of them made. She could see that Chase’s eyes were on her, watching her reactions. He was propped up on one elbow, one leg thrown across hers, his body nestled into the side of her.
"Do you see the way my fingers trail over your skin and up onto your breast?" His voice reached out, velvet-soft and seductively low, flowing fluidly over her. "Can you feel my touch in the pit of your stomach at the same time that you see my hand on you?"
"Chase . . ." Trinity gasped, meaning to sound a protest, but instead hearing his name come out as an aching whisper.
"I can actually feel your body quivering under my hand, Trinity. Your body responds to mine as it does to no other. Admit it."
"No," Trinity moaned.
He continued, working insidiously on her mind. "Think how we would look completely naked, the beauty of your soft body against the hardness of mine. . . . Imagine how my back would look, tensed and ready, right before I plunged into you. . . . Think how my hips would look as I moved in and out of—"
"Chase . . . don’t."
He was rolling her nipple between his thumb and two of his fingers, making her nearly crazy with a need that was becoming almost impossible to deny.
"It would be a slow motion at first, until you begged—"
"Stop it!" she cried.
"And then the movements would be very fast . . . up and down, around, in and out."
Trinity’s breath was coming in great hurtful gasps, yet she couldn’t seem to take her eyes from the mirror that so perfectly reflected back their images.
He persisted. "Can you see it, can you feel it?"
Of course she could feel it. Of course she could see it, and she knew with a great certainty that she couldn’t take much more!
The shrill ring of the telephone in another part of the apartment proved to be the distraction and the opportunity Trinity needed. She rolled out from under him and grabbed for her blouse. Holding it against herself, she gasped, "What are you trying to do to me?"
Chase sat up and reached calmly for his shirt. "The same thing you’re doing to me. Turn you inside out with wanting."
"You promised—"
"I didn’t promise anything," he retorted very definitely. The ice was back in his eyes, and the sharpness of his voice cut her like a newly sharpened knife. "What I said was that I wouldn’t try to pressure you into my bed, at least for a while." He stood up, shrugging into his shirt. "And I haven’t."
"What do you call what just happened then?"
"I didn’t ask you to let me make love to you, did I?" His tone was neutral, almost indifferent.
"You didn’t have to, Chase. The way the velvet strokes of your words paint erotic pictures in my mind is more than adequate to set my imagination on fire. It will be a long time before you get me alone again."
He gave her a lazy half-smile, a glint of humor sparkling in his eyes. "Fine. If you insist, I’ll take you to dinner in a crowd."
Which is exactly what he did the next weekend.
#
The trip into Dallas was made in the surprising luxury of the sleek jet helicopter that Chase used for transportation as casually as Trinity used her car.
Since Chase was piloting. Trinity sat up front in the cockpit with him, watching while he flew the helicopter with the same sureness and expertise as he had driven the Lamborghini. It was so quiet in the cabin that they could talk to each other in a normal voice, without shouting or using headphones. That shattered a misconception Trinity had had concerning helicopters. But then again, she knew this was no ordinary helicopter.
From the minute she had climbed the steps and set foot onto the plush carpeting, Trinity knew she was entering a world of power and wealth, where minimized travel time, combined with the utmost luxury and comfort, were a
ll-important and money was no object.
Behind the cockpit, five seats covered in a soft burgundy leather faced one another in a club seating arrangement. The cabin featured the most up to date electronic and communication abilities, individual environmental control vents, custom cabinetry, along with fluorescent cabin lighting and large tinted glass windows—everything that money could buy for passenger comfort and convenience.
Cruising at 150 mph, they reached Love Field in forty-five minutes. "This sure beats fighting the traffic," Chase said as they landed, and Trinity had to agree with him.
Getting into a blue Cadillac that had been parked at the airport waiting for them, they drove to Texas Stadium to a specially roped-off parking area. There Chase presented a card to a uniformed attendant that allowed them to park only a short distance from the entrance. An escalator carried them high into the stadium, to the first level of the Circle Suites.
A long carpeted hallway fed the suites, and, even though the game had started, there were still people milling in and out of the different rooms. A few called hellos to Chase, but he more or less ignored them, briskly nodding his head and leading Trinity to a numbered door.
The Circle Suite he ushered her into was long and narrow and on two levels. The step-down level by the window had chairs lined along its length for viewing the game. The upper level was wider, with a fully stocked bar and several couches and chairs. In the middle sat an impeccably laid linen-covered table, awaiting their dining pleasure.
The lights in the suite were dim, but Trinity’s eyes were drawn to the immense sheet of glass covering the wide opening that looked down upon the playing field. Trinity knew that there were no glass windows in the other suites, and she had to laugh. "I believe Larry was right. You have out-Texaned the Texans. How did you ever purchase one of these suites, and on the forty-yard line, too?"
"Why, Trinity," Chase mocked. "Didn’t you know that with enough money and enough know-how, a person could own the world? Obtaining a Circle Suite was no problem, I assure you."
Silver Miracles Page 6