Keepsake

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Why steal it? Did someone know it was hers? How? Either he had seen her arrive in it, or he had watched the two of them leave Olivia's townhouse earlier. Of course, someone could have known from the get-go that the cape was Olivia's. A friend or a relative. Quinn decided to put that possibility aside for the moment. It didn't make sense, and he didn't want it to make sense.

  "Quinn! Really! Where did I lose you?" Olivia asked, waving her hand in front of his face as if she were a hypnotist whose act had gone wrong.

  "Hmm? Sorry," he said. "My mind was somewhere else."

  "So I see," she said, standing back up. With a look of pure, devilish mischief she hiked her silver slip of a dress to mid-thigh and brought one knee down on each side of him, straddling him. She began working the lower buttons of his shirt.

  "Now you're trying to shock me," he said mildly.

  "Am I succeeding?"

  "Real well." He had a hard-on that felt the size of his forearm. What was it that a great historian had once said? God gave man a brain and a penis, with only enough blood to run one at a time?

  Right now, Quinn knew just where all the blood was pooled.

  He looked up into Olivia's eyes, dark and dancing and inviting, and he decided, what the heck, first things first. "You're a witch, you know that?" he murmured, slipping his hand behind her dress. He gave a tug at the zipper and listened to the satisfying sound of its effortless slide as the fabric loosed what little hold it had on her body.

  He had the sense that he was testing her and she was testing him, but no one flinched. She smiled, and Quinn realized that the smile had been seventeen years in coming.

  "Sweet Olivia," he whispered, sliding the thin sparkly strap off her shoulder. He watched with pleasure as her eyes fluttered lower and her lips parted in a sigh. Greedy for her flesh, he nuzzled, then nipped her shoulder, marveling that it was like no other, and peeled her dress lower still, exposing bare breast. With his tongue he tasted its rosy tip, making her moan.

  His craving for her was wide and deep, and it left him shaky. "Liv ... ah, Liv," he said, unable now to utter more than the essence of her. He peeled away the silver fabric like a wrapper from a candy bar, exposing her other breast, sending his own hunger to a new level of anticipation, a boy with a KitKat bar all for his own.

  Make it last, he thought, but he couldn't get at her fast enough. He began to devour her, dragging his mouth from one breast to the other, thrilling to the sound of her breaths coming fast, always in fear that, like a candy bar, she would somehow vanish in no time flat.

  Her moans became shudders; her shudders, a series of whimpering pants, until she caught his face between her splayed fingers and kissed him hard. He met and circled her tongue with his own, in a dance as predestined as any in the animal kingdom. Come to me, come to me was the song on both their lips.

  In one easy motion he twisted her up from his lap and onto her back, her left side lost in the seafoam-colored pillows that lined the sofa and tumbled over her like surf. Her face was flushed, her lips puffy and wet; he could not imagine a more desirable countenance.

  "Let me love you," he said in a besotted voice.

  "Quinn ... oh yes," she answered, lifting her arms to him. The gesture was so completely without guile that it pierced his heart with its devastating directness. Quinn found himself sitting up and sucking in a lungful of air, simply to get past the blow.

  And that was his undoing.

  Because as he did it, the beam of a car's lights cut across them like the sweep from a lighthouse. He couldn't believe it. Out there, somewhere below them, was a curving drive where cars were free to roam. Olivia's house was on a knoll, and the windows were low enough that the combination provided ringside viewing for the curious as well as the calculating.

  "My God!" he said. "We're on stage!"

  "No, we're not. No one can see us. No one cares," she argued breathlessly, tugging at his sleeve.

  An incredulous laugh escaped him. "Olivia—a car just went by. I practically saw the whites of the driver's eyes." He pulled her dress back up, as if he'd been caught doing something wrong, and felt a sudden surge of irritation at his guilty response. Damn it! It was the last feeling he wanted.

  He stood up, determined to get past the welter of bad emotions stuck in his craw like lousy pizza. "Hey, kiddo," he said softly, "unless we tape newspapers over those windows, this is not going to happen. Not here, not on this couch."

  Her smile was edgy; she was taking it personally. "No problem," she said, sitting up and pulling the sparkly spaghetti straps over her shoulders again.

  It was absolutely the wrong time to ask the question, but it came flying out: "Have you ever worn that cape before?"

  Obviously the blood had returned to his brain.

  She stared at him. "Why are you asking me that now?"

  "Just ... have you?"

  "Yes," she said, clearly annoyed at the shift in his mood. "Once. To the Met, five years ago. Why?" she repeated.

  He knew he shouldn't continue to obsess over the cape, but the blood was where it was. "If no one knew that you owned that cape—if it wasn't your trademark, say, during the holidays—then someone must have seen you in it for the first time tonight."

  "Your point being?"

  "My point being, it couldn't have been stolen for its value, not with all those furs around. Someone wanted it because it was your cape, Olivia."

  She snorted and said, "I think you're confusing me with Elvis Presley. No one would want a cape just because it's mine."

  But Quinn was on a mission now, determined to put some healthy fear in her. She was just too blasé for a beautiful woman living alone and fraternizing with the enemy.

  He said, "Indulge me here, please. How could someone have known it was your cape? The answers are: he could have seen you as we entered the great hall tonight. I admit, that's the likeliest scenario."

  He hooked a thumb at the blackness pressing against the bank of windows. "Or, he could have seen you as we left here. Which means he could be out there again. If that's the case, I'd just as soon that he didn't see any more of you than he has already," he said dryly.

  Her response to that was incredulous laughter. "There's no one out there, Quinn." She stood up and, egging him on with a defiant smile, took hold of the straps of her dress. Apparently she planned to flash the darkness to make her point.

  "Oh, for—humor me, would you, dammit?'' he said, reaching her in two long strides. He scooped her up in his arms before she could irritate him any more than she already had and hushed her objections with a hard kiss. Then he began carrying her up the stairs, he didn't know why. To prove how powerless she could be in some man's arms?

  She seemed to have mixed emotions about his impulsive act. "Hey! What're you doing?" she cried. "Quinn! Put me down!" But she didn't struggle, and he was grateful for that. He was tired of playing games.

  At the top of the stairs, he said, "Which bedroom?" and before she could answer, he toed the right door open and walked through it with her still in his arms.

  "Drapes—good," was all he said. She laughed. He laid her on the bed and kissed her again, a wet and hungry promise, and then he began to unbutton his shirt.

  Bemused, she said, "I feel like Scarlett O'Hara."

  "I never read the book," he said, tossing his shirt on a chair.

  "We'll have to rent the movie."

  He peeled off his undershirt and sent it sailing over to the long-sleeved shirt, then kicked off his shoes and unzipped his trousers. He looked up with a wry smile. "Next thing I know, you'll be wanting to rent Titanic."

  "No, I've—"

  Off went the trousers, off went the Jockey underwear, and whatever it was that she was going to say about Titanic, it never got formed into speech.

  ****

  That's it, thought Olivia. Spoiled forever. That grin ... on that body ... Quinn Leary was the answer to a woman's fantasies. She felt a sudden moment of panic, a stab of inadequacy. He could be in a Calvin K
lein ad. She couldn't.

  "Almost forgot," he said, reaching over into the hip pocket of his pants. He came up with two foil packets and slapped them down on the painted nightstand. "For starters. Now. Where were we?"

  He looked and sounded so cocky. If any other man had approached her with such confidence ... but this was Quinn, the mighty Quinn, and he was definitely entitled.

  He sat on the side of the bed and said with a burning look, "Now you."

  "Now me," she whispered.

  He reached for the sparkly straps with hands that were shaky, and with infinite tenderness he slid the straps from her shoulders. And from that single, tender gesture, she knew: she was in love with him.

  "You have seen Gone with the Wind," she said in a flash of illumination. "And Titanic, too." She knew it, because at that moment she could see straight into his soul. He was a romantic.

  But he would never admit it. He gave her a wonderfully wry look and said, "Prove it," then peeled her dress down and down and down.

  She felt cool air alight on her bare breasts, her fluttery stomach, her thighs in their high-cut panties. Nearly free.

  He knelt on the bed, straddling her lower legs, and slid his hands up the sides of her body, letting them come to rest on her breasts. He kissed and teased until she begged for mercy, whimpering don't, don't, when she wasn't murmuring more, more. Again and again he came back to her mouth, the way a thirsty man goes to the well, and every time, he told her how much he wanted her.

  When he had her clawing at his back in frustration, he began a long, slow slide downward with his tongue, building her up, heating her up, making her frantic for release. Her underpants went the way of the rest, and she opened herself to him, welcoming him, and felt his hands, huge, cup her under her buttocks and lift her arching hips to his kisses.

  No mercy for her; he kindled her until she was up, up, and nearly over the edge. She was holding back, trying to hold on, when she felt herself slip and begin to fall.

  "Not that way, Quinn," she said in a gasp. "In me ... inside ...."

  With a low laugh he said, "For you, anything."

  He shifted his position to be even with her and kissed her harder than she'd ever been kissed before. It was new, wanton, rough, and she loved it, loved him. He had complete control over her responses, but she didn't care because she loved him, and if he told her to take a flying leap off a cliff just then, she would do it because he had asked.

  She heard a tear of foil and then endured the damnable reassurance of him slipping a condom on himself, and then he slid in easily in one sharp thrust, taking her breath from her, exactly what she wanted, to be left dazed and filled and every nerve ending on fire, and then she cried, "Wait!"

  "Wait?"

  "Yes ... for me to save up again."

  He chuckled, then buried his face in the curve of her neck and said, "Sure," driving her right back up to the edge in no time at all, which amazed her, because she wasn't the type to come quickly or often.

  She thought.

  And meanwhile, always, always, she was aware of him in her, separated by that barrier, and she thought, what a waste, what a waste to hold back that seed. But the thought went away and she was left with only a mindless drive to completion, a primitive need to drive more deeply into her own pleasure. Wild; she was wild to have him. She sought and found his hands and gripped them in her own on each side of her, pinning herself down with him. Lifting her haunches in a rush to take him all the way in, she matched him thrust for thrust and groan for groan, his equal in everything except her terrifying, deep-seated need to yield, the only way to true equality. It was a profound, completely erotic thought, and it whipped her into a blissful plunge right over that cliff, a free-fall into space that must have been very like death, except for the fact that she knew that Quinn was falling with her.

  ****

  Olivia thought that maybe they'd died, after all.

  She had no idea how long they lay in their own dampness on top of the coverlet, wrapped in one another's arms. A minute? An hour? She tried to move, but she didn't have the strength. They could have been lying broken-boned at the bottom of a canyon, the way she felt.

  It was Quinn who stirred first. With a groan, he rolled off her and lay flat on his back, shielding his eyes from the light with the back of his forearm. "Tell me the earth moved for you," he said at last. "Because I've just been to Mars and back."

  "I think it moved and fell on top of me," she said, staring immobilized at the ceiling.

  "This feels like silk," Quinn muttered, sliding his hand over the surface of the bed. "Is it?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "The condom dripped. Did I just wreck it?''

  "Uh-huh."

  "Oh, well. In that case ...."

  He trailed the back of his fingers lazily over her knee and up her thigh.

  "Oh, Quinn, really, I can't," she said, scandalized at the thought of it. "Honestly. You don't know me. Really. I can't."

  Amazingly, it turned out that she could.

  Chapter 15

  They lay curled in sleep, Olivia nestled in the curve of Quinn's body, as a sullen drizzle became ugly and turned to icy rain. A nagging northeast wind drove the sleet into the windowpanes, tap-tap-tapping at Quinn's subconscious.

  He dreamed fear. It was all around him, a pervasive sense that someone was going to get killed. In his dream he was rushing from house to house, from river to woods, always a frustrating two steps behind a mysterious presence in a black cape. Death? Dracula? He wanted desperately to find out before it was too late.

  At the same time, he was afraid. He was convinced that sooner or later he would catch up with the lurking evil, and he wasn't sure that he'd survive the encounter. But he continued to run from hill to hollow anyway, exhausting himself, his breath coming faster and faster until at last he was within reach of the presence. He grabbed at the cape, the way he'd been grabbed by the jersey a thousand different times on the football field, and the presence turned on him, rising up monumentally large and black and powerful and horrifying Quinn.

  Quinn started from the nightmare, lifting himself up on one arm, his heart hammering wildly, his eyes wide open to see ... nothing. Nothing more than the sweet curve of a woman, sleeping peacefully with long, slow breaths, her soul in a happier place than his had been.

  He stayed braced on one elbow, waiting for his heartbeat to calm down, and gazed at the sleeping form next to him. She was so innocent, so vulnerable. He had to protect her—and Mrs. Dewsbury, too—but he couldn't be everywhere at once. Was he deluded? Were they at risk? And how could he protect them, when he himself was the reason they were at risk, if they were at risk? Insane paradox!

  Olivia ... sweet Liv. He snuggled into the softness of her pillow, breathing her scent, restoring his baffled and battered spirit with the simple nearness of her. Oh, to wake up every day next to her ... no man could ask for more. He slid his arm around her waist and snuggled her to him. Olivia sighed in her sleep and burrowed her hips into his crotch; and in the space of that single movement, his desire to protect her became transformed into a hunger to have her. Earlier that night he had wanted her desperately. Now he needed her, just as desperately.

  He lifted his arm and brought it back to her buttocks, then slipped his hand between her thighs from behind. He had one goal in mind: to arouse her. If only he could make her want him ... if only she would deign to receive him ... he would consider it an honor of the highest magnitude. He had no rubies for her, no pearls. He had only his ability to give her pleasure.

  Please let it be enough.

  He began a slow, gentle caress, separating her soft, warm flesh, and then with feathery strokes he began to coax her back from her dreamworld and into the waking one where he lay alone and bereft.

  She stirred, and then she stirred a little more. Her sigh, half moan, told him what he needed to know. He was coming to her, hat in hand, and she was willing to hear him out.

  He quickened the pace of his strok
es, focusing on the hard nub he found there, marveling that a thing so small could contain power so vast. Her moans were no longer sighs. She was inhaling deep, long draughts of air, letting them out on the sound of his name: "Quinn ... oh, Quinn ... oh, Quinn ..."

  She rolled over on her stomach and brought herself partially up on her knees, inviting him in, unmistakably. In a waking dream he swung his knee over her calves and brought himself in an easy slide deep inside of her. He was reaching into her, reaching out to her. She was the one, the only one, who could make his life whole again. His movements became a pumping scramble for oneness with her, a defiant stand against caped villainy and murdered dreams.

  With one hand he gripped a spoke of the headboard, with the other he braced himself on the bed as he plunged over and over into her, hanging on for dear life, waiting for he didn't know what. And then she cried out, and he knew at once what it was: her. He was waiting for her. Had been waiting, for seventeen indistinct years. He felt an explosive, tremendous release into her, and his body collapsed on hers, but by then he was somewhere else altogether—on some other plane, in some other realm.

  But with her.

  ****

  Olivia Bennett, so-called morning person, opened one eye and was amazed to see that it was eight-thirty. She never slept past six.

  She was alone in her bed. With a stab of disappointment she rolled over, and then she saw Quinn, dressed in shorts and T-shirt and sitting in the tub chair, watching her. His face was a study in serenity. He looked exactly like what he was: a man who acted with purpose and a sense of commitment. It gave her a rush to know that he couldn't be involved with her just for the thrill of it.

  Through the window behind him, she saw scudding clouds being bumped out of view by brilliant sunshine. As with everything else in her life just then, it promised a new beginning.

  "Happy New Year," she said to him softly. She stretched luxuriously and sighed, then jabbed an index finger playfully into the rumpled covers beside her. "How come you're over there instead of over here?"