“I was playing!” she protested.
“You can play to your heart’s content in a minute. Let me get out of these clothes. Why don’t you get into bed, so I’ll know where to find you?”
He switched on the reading light beside the bed and saw the six or eight textbooks, some open facedown on the bedspread. “Are you expecting to need all these?”
“Publishing companies send me advance copies.”
“And you use them for bedtime reading?” He was getting himself back under control after nearly losing it in uncivilized, raw, rude, ravenous need, and now this. She had a bed full of textbooks! It shook a place so tender, so protective, his whole insides shivered with it. His diaphragm fluttered in what felt like a chuckle, but not because something was funny. Because something was so inexplicably, perfectly, miraculously right.
“Hand them to me.” One by one he took them and stacked them on the floor. Tomorrow he’d have to see about finding more bookcases or maybe talk her into getting a larger place. He hung his shirt on the back of a chair and folded his slacks carefully across the seat.
“Now lean back on the pillows, so I can see you.”
She obliged. Her honey and cream hair flowed around her face and lightly kissed her shoulder. The perfect white globes of her breasts, the skin like translucent satin, gleamed in the lamplight. As he looked at them the little pink nipples puckered. Just like that his own desire doubled. “You like for me to look at your breasts, don’t you?”
She touched her hair, a delicious combination of shy and wanton. “Yes.”
He forgot everything. All the reasons he needed to stay in control, stay focused, stay separate. All he knew was he had to feel those little nipples in his mouth, push his tongue against the hard little tips, and mold the delicious, slightly cool, fluid weight of her breasts in his hands.
With no intervening motion he was beside her on the bed, his mouth fastened on her, his hands full to overflowing, exactly as he’d dreamed. She arched against him and moaned. “Was that a good moan?”
“The best.”
“Then let’s make love.”
And they did… and they did… and they did.
His wonderful weight was on her, her skin so sensitive she was one quivering nerve ending. His hard, velvety length touched, just touched, at her center, and she tried to squirm it to where she wanted it to be.
He pulled back, and she clutched at him, digging her nails in when her strength wasn’t sufficient to hold him. “Don’t pull back. I need you now.”
“I know. I know.” He tore open a foil packet and sheathed himself. He lifted her heels to his shoulders and positioned himself.
“I want to hold you!”
“Not tonight. I can’t let you put strain on your shoulder. This will be good. I’ll make it good. This way you can get lots of leverage with your hips.”
The time for careful feather touches was over, and he knew it. He stroked her back to front, front to back. He opened her with his fingers and positioned himself at her entrance.
Four long, smooth strokes, three short ones. Four long smooth strokes, three short ones. Over and over with bodies slick with sweat, straining together in an agony of pleasure and anticipation of the peak.
Suddenly, she was there. It was like hot white light shot from where they were joined, ran up her spine, and exploded out the top of her head, enveloping him in instant, spontaneous answering incandescence.
Yes, she felt it, in his body.
It is the human condition that peaks may be scaled, but they cannot be sustained.
Sometime later they drifted back into ordinary time. How or when they had come to be lying face to face, arms around each other, neither knew.
“Did that really happen?” Emmie asked when the world seemed firm enough again to dare speech.
“The light? Yeah.”
“I could feel it in your body. I could feel your body feel my body.”
“Yeah.”
They slept.
Chapter 30
Entre’act
“WHAT’S THE PLAN FOR TODAY?” CALEB SIPPED HIS coffee sitting at the table in the kitchen. When he ran in the mornings he was taking routes through different neighborhoods, learning what was where and checking out apartment complexes and condos. There really wasn’t space for two people in this cottage.
What he’d really like would be a house over on one of the barrier islands. A condo was the next reasonable step. The beach house could come after they were married. In the meantime, while Emmie got ready for work, he stayed in one place, and they could talk as Emmie moved from room to room.
“Today. Today is packed,” Emmie answered from the living room. “I have two classes to meet. Six advisees to comfort. Then a departmental meeting. That will go on until five-thirty.”
“Would you like to do something tonight?”
“Tonight is my choral society.”
He laughed. “You belong to a choral society?”
Emmie poked her head in the kitchen doorway. “I don’t understand your reaction. Should I be offended?”
“It’s so academic. So cultured.” He raised his mug and crooked a pinkie. “What do you do at meetings of the choral society?”
“Sing together.” Emmie disappeared back into the living room. He could hear her moving books around, putting things in her briefcase. “Choral singing is a totally different experience from singing by oneself or singing along with the radio. It’s like the distinction between running and playing football. You can practice the moves of football alone, but by definition, if you want to play it, you need other people to play with you.” She reappeared in the doorway to look down her adorable nose at him. “You can call it ‘culture’ if you want to. I call it recreation.”
He grinned at her so there tone. “Consider me chastised.”
“And humbled, I hope.”
“Don’t ask for too much.”
She laughed, that rich, robust woman sound that always turned him on. He set down his coffee and closed the distance between them—a matter of two steps. Anyone who could laugh like that deserved a kiss, so he kissed her. “What do you sing?”
“Sacred music mostly. Almost all the great choral music has been written in the context of Christianity. I think there’s a deeper meaning in the music about our search for unity and harmony among all our separate parts. We’re practicing for the Christmas concert right now.”
Finding the room in which the choral society met was easy. He followed the sound down the polished, and not brightly lit, corridor of the recreation center.
He didn’t think it was his kind of music—might not ever be. He liked a few groups, but he’d never gotten his identity from popular music and followed certain bands the way some did. He hadn’t come to hear the music.
Most of the large rooms in this wing were dark. He didn’t like the idea of Emmie walking in this big sinister building at night. He also had a feeling he’d better keep his mouth shut about it.
He located a side door, outside the line of sight of most of the people in the room, and slipped in, keeping to the shadows. He wanted to observe without being seen. It had never occurred to him to wonder how a choir rehearsed, and now he was curious. He wanted to know how rehearsal was done. He could hear in Emmie’s voice that it mattered.
After twenty-two minutes he thought a chorus rehearsal was as interesting as watching paint dry. They would sing for maybe thirty seconds. The conductor would stop them, say something usually incomprehensible, and they would do the whole thing over, with no difference he could discern. One positive was that he now understood the musical definitions of words like allegro and staccato.
He also knew that they were a more disciplined lot than he had seen in any context, except SEAL training. Rarely did the others talk if the director was working with a small group. No matter how often they were stopped, no one grew irritated. Instead, they did it over and over. The director did not have to ask for their attention. Well,
except for the times he yelled, “Look up! Look up!” meaning he wanted the attention on him, not the sheet music.
Mostly, he watched Emmie and her shining hair—a look so pure, so full of ardor, and so transcendent of all human emotion, she appeared almost inhuman. He had seen that look on SEALs’ faces when they practiced firing drills.
The conductor snapped off the line of music with one whack of his baton.
“You’re late!” His eyebrows bunched in a fierce scowl. “The altos are late every time. Don’t wait for your entrance. If you wait until it’s time to come in, you’ll be late every time. A phrase doesn’t start with the first note, it starts with the breath. You must breathe on the last note the basses sing.” Lecture over, he composed himself. “Try it again. Begin at letter D.” He tapped again, a merry, encouraging sound, and piano and singers started.
This time it was different. The music soared like a paraglider catching lift from desert thermals. It glided and swooped, and all riding with it, took wing. Finally, in the kind of hush that sounds like a miracle, it touched down.
After a long silence in which no one moved or spoke, the conductor gently laid his stick on the podium, so carefully it touched with only the tiniest click. “My friends, you humble me and touch me. That was it. You went beyond the voice, beyond the score. You made music. The chance to do that, just the chance, is why we’re here.”
“How did you fake your IQ?” Emmie’s question came out of the dark. He’d been close to drifting off.
“Do you get chatty after sex?”
There was a short pause while she adjusted her pillow. “You know, I think I do,” she said in a tone of discovery. “Answer the question.”
“It’s easy to fake it down. It’s hard to be smarter than you are, but easy to be dumber. And you know, most people find it easier to believe you’re dumber than you look.”
“That’s not what I meant. The Stanford-Binet scores aren’t supposed to vary more than one standard deviation—that’s just fifteen points, right? So here you are with scores all over the map. Didn’t someone smell a rat?”
“Well, now, that was a problem. A Navy psychologist actually wrote a paper on the effects of intellectual stimulation in late adolescence on the IQ score of an enlisted man.”
“Meaning he thought joining the Navy made you smarter?”
“Pretty much.”
Emmie snorted. “You country-slicker, you. He bought the backwoods hick act.”
“What can I say? When I could see for myself that the world was round, it changed the way I looked at everything.”
They had dinner with the Calhouns on Thursday night. A woman identifying herself as Mrs. Calhoun’s secretary had called on Monday to issue the promised invitations.
Calhoun himself answered the door in corduroy slacks, striped dress shirt, and maroon cardigan sweater. He smelled of tobacco and bourbon.
“Glad you could come. As I told Charlotte, we are in your debt. A dinner is the least we can do, and I hope if there’s anything else, you will tell us.”
With only a few lights on, the entry hall seemed even larger than it had on Saturday. Two huge Christmas trees, one at each end, provided the only lights in the huge reception parlor. The effect was dramatic and professionally designed, and to Emmie’s eyes, a little sad.
“You’re here!” Vicky came pelting down the staircase, her hair drawn up in a ponytail that bobbed and bounced with each step. She wore green jeans and a sweater embroidered with snowmen.
“Vicky, as you can see,” Calhoun commented tongue in cheek, “has deigned to join us.”
Calhoun ushered them into the smaller parlor on the other side of the house. Smaller was a relative term, and this room was just as formal as the other. Twin camel-back sofas upholstered in yellow silk flanked a marble fireplace where Charlotte stood conversing with guests who had arrived before them.
All three turned to face them. “How wonderful you could come.” Charlotte extended her hand to Emmie and Caleb. “Emmie, I’m sure I don’t need to introduce you to these guests. Chief Dulaude, this is Dr. Blount Satterfield and Dr. Sally Armitage.”
Emmie tried to keep an alert expression while Blount, Sally, and Charlotte discussed the politics within the state university system. Charlotte had graduated magna cum laude and now sat on the board of regents of the university in an appointed, non-voting capacity, but she made it clear she took her position seriously and worked hard at it.
Everyone, including Emmie, had assumed she would wish to participate in their discussion, since she had the most in common with them. As she listened she made an important discovery. She didn’t lack the ability to handle herself with them. She just didn’t care. She tried to think of a way she could join Vicky and Caleb in a corner. After Vicky had been shushed a couple times, and her mother had apologized twice for allowing her to join the adults, Caleb had drawn Vicky away. Now she listened enrapt as he told her a story that involved a lot of hand motions.
Emmie might even have liked to talk to Uncle Teague, and since he had known her mother as a girl, ask him questions about her and her grandmother. Since the advent of email, Vicky kept in daily or nearly daily contact with her parents, but of the people here in Wilmington, Calhoun probably knew the most about her family’s past. Edward Fairchild had drawn him out of the room halfway through the meal, saying there was a call he had to take. He hadn’t returned, although Emmie had seen Fairchild pass by in the hall several times.
“Charlotte, “ she said, “I was wondering if might use your powder room?”
“Emmie, what are you doing with a man like that?” Edward Fairchild’s voice was pitched low. Fairchild had accosted her in the hall as she returned from the powder room. She had seen him twice that evening although he hadn’t joined them at dinner. Charlotte had explained that Fairchild had an office on the ground floor and that he “kept his own hours.” Apparently, that meant that he had the run of the house. She had the feeling he had been lying in wait for her, determined to talk to her out of the others’ hearing. “Emmie, do you know what he is?”
Emmie paused to think over the question carefully, knowing there might be subtle power plays at work here. At the university she was used to the lecturer’s trick of rhetorical questions, set up to reveal personal brilliance or prove the listener stupid. In this case, she suspected the latter. “A SEAL?”
“Don’t you know about SEALs?” he demanded. “They’re trained killers—assassins.”
“Are you under the impression that anyone in the armed forces isn’t trained to kill?”
“That’s not my point.”
“Oh.”
Fairchild blinked at the deliberately dropped conversational ball, but quickly recovered. “My point is that you can’t trust him.”
“Trust him to what?”
Fairchild waved that away. “Emmie, I’m trying to warn you. Your grandmother was a dear friend. I’m trying to give you the same advice she would have: stay away from him. If you know what’s good for you, stay away from him.”
“I can’t tell whether you are warning me or threatening me.”
“My dear—” Fairchild shook his head sadly. “I’m warning you, of course. But being seen with a SEAL won’t improve your standing in the academic community.”
Emmie studied the senator’s advisor. He was no more than an inch or two taller than she, and wearing heels, Emmie could look straight into his pale blue, but still sharp eyes. He kept claiming a need to look after her based on deep friendship with her grandmother. She couldn’t remember her grandmother speaking as fondly about Fairchild. Emmie wished she had paid more attention to who was who in her grandmother’s activities. All she knew was he’d never tried to counsel her before.
“You’re smart, Emmie. Your research credentials are noteworthy, and you have the right connections. You can choose where you want to go in the university system. All I’m saying is don’t shoot yourself in the foot by allying yourself with someone who will be a liabi
lity.”
Emmie’s jaw tightened. She might have no gift for politics, but she knew she’d just been told if she went along, she could write her own ticket. If she didn’t, her career was likely to stall. Charlotte and Teague had the clout to accomplish all Fairchild promised with no more than a word dropped here or there. Most universities had far fewer tenured positions than they used to. Just like big business, they had figured out that hiring short-term contract employees who didn’t have to be given benefits, who weren’t earning seniority, and who didn’t even have to be fired—they simply weren’t renewed the next quarter—saved a lot of money. Tenure-track positions, such as Emmie’s, were halfway between no job security at all and the holy grail of tenure. The competition for them was fierce.
Once in line for a tenured position, the competition turned fiercer. No matter what anyone said about rigorous scholarship, the name of the game was money. Who could bring the most money into the department by obtaining grants for research. And who had powerful connections with the legislature and policymakers.
This was heavy, and cutting Caleb out must be vitally important to someone.
There was the implication that Fairchild was carrying out someone’s directions, but he might be acting on his own. He obviously had a lot of autonomy in the Calhoun household and the Calhoun organization. She couldn’t believe Calhoun and Charlotte would invite her and Caleb to dinner and then sic Fairchild on her to do a hatchet job—but it was the sort of backstabbing she had seen before.
It was a situation she hated and had avoided as much as possible. She had no idea what to say next. She was almost relieved when Blount, stylishly professorial in a chocolate leather sport coat and turtleneck, came into the hall. “Emmie,” he squeezed her shoulder in a one-armed hug, while extending his right hand to Fairchild. “Good evening, sir. I’m Blount Satterfield. Emmie and I are colleagues.”
Cripes, this evening had gotten strange all of a sudden. Blount was touching her in public and acting like they were the best of friends and maybe more. She laughed out loud when she got it. Emmie removed his hand from her arm. “Blount, if you’re hoping to make points with Mr. Fairchild by claiming close association with me, your timing couldn’t possibly be worse. He thinks I have poor taste in the company I keep.”
Mary Margret Daughtridge SEALed Bundle Page 54