The Jewels of Tessa Kent

by Judith Krantz

  “Why didn’t you leave a little light on in the bedroom so I’d see you on the rug?”

  “Oh.”

  “You weren’t thinking straight,” she said, forgivingly.

  “I’ve never been in this situation before. In fact, no woman has ever been in this house or on that bed before.”

  “But I thought you’d had a place in Cap-Ferrat for years?”

  “I do, that’s where I keep my boat. I bought this when I came down here after we got engaged—a place just for us. My God, you’re naked!”

  “I wondered when you’d notice.”

  Luke scooped her up, quilt and all, and carried her back into the bedroom and deposited her gently on the bed.

  “Will you wait here, without going anywhere else, just stay put, absolutely put, while I brush my teeth and take a quick shower?” he demanded.

  “May I breathe?” Now that Luke was properly awake and in charge, she found herself taking refuge in a sort of silliness that wasn’t natural to her.

  “From time to time.”

  Tessa waited for him, confused beyond measure, overcome with curiosity, anticipation, and anxiety. Her mind refused to function as she looked at the beams of the bedroom ceiling without seeing them. A short interval passed, a blank time of waiting, almost without breathing. When Luke returned he peeled off his towel, and rolled under the quilt next to her. Tessa was overcome with a sudden attack of acute shyness. She pulled away from him and hid as much of herself as she could under the quilt. One of her eyes looked out from under her hair.

  “Darling, Tessa, darling, you’re breaking my heart. Don’t look at me that way,” he pleaded. “We don’t have to do anything at all, there are no rules about this, we can get up and have breakfast and go exploring, we can spend a week doing nothing at all if you let me kiss you from time to time.”

  “No.”

  “No, you won’t let me kiss you?”

  “No, I don’t want to get up and have breakfast.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. You’re supposed to know.”

  “Normally I would. But you’re a …”

  “I know, I know, don’t remind me, just do whatever you’d normally do if you were in bed with some woman.”

  “You’re not ‘some woman,’ you’re my wife, the love of my life.”

  “Then make something up.”

  “First I’ll investigate the only part of you I can see,” he said, smiling at her childishness. He drew closer to her and traced her eyebrow with his lips. When she didn’t pull farther away, he kissed her with tiny, soft kisses along the curve of her bone from her eyebrow to her nose.

  “Fiona said that was my best feature,” Tessa mumbled.

  “I can’t tell yet,” Luke murmured. “You could have a better one hidden away somewhere.” Gently he turned her head so that he could kiss her lips. Mutely, Tessa returned his kisses, but Luke could tell, from the tension he sensed in the trembling pressure of her mouth, that she was filled with apprehension. Of course she is, he thought, what could be more natural? He modulated his passion to her timidity, keeping his kisses utterly undemanding, reining in any sign of his desire. For long minutes they lost themselves in a chain of soft, almost tentative kisses, while his fingers were plunged into her hair, caressing her skull with calm, reassuring movements. Some time after he felt her lips grow more confident, Luke allowed his mouth to stray from her mouth to her ear, holding her bundled up from her collarbone downward. He kissed her ear, leaving no fraction of its lobe untouched, and then he kissed her down the long, firm curve of her neck; and when he reached her shoulder he kissed her along the fragile skin at the base of her neck. Each time he reached her collarbone, his mouth retraced its journey down from her ear, never venturing lower and never breaking its rhythm.

  Tessa’s breathing grew faster with each voyage of his lips from her ear to her collarbone, until, suddenly, she flung back the blanket and revealed her high breasts, their small pink nipples as erect as if he’d been sucking on them without mercy. “Put your mouth on them,” she panted, “and leave my ear alone, you’re driving me crazy!”

  “That’s more or less the idea,” Luke mumbled, as he bent his head toward the points of flesh whose delicacy had grown so bold. Tessa reached her arms out blindly for him, but Luke drew the lower part of his body out of her reach so that she couldn’t again tantalize his rearing penis. She needed so much more to make her ready, he thought, so much long and careful preparation, yet she could have no idea of what her touch did to him. They lay facing each other while he cupped each of her breasts in his hands so that he could move quickly from one nipple to another, using his tongue, his teeth, his lips, firmly holding back the full force of his passion, entirely focused on giving her delight throughout every cell of her exquisite nipples that grew more engorged by the second. Tessa squirmed under the quilt that covered her from her waist down, trying to push it off, but Luke’s superior strength prevented her, even as he held her breasts captive to his sweetly plundering mouth. She pushed herself forward, trying to get as much of each breast into his mouth as possible, and when he switched from one to another, the instant during which he was unattached to her seemed unendurable. “Come on, come on!” she implored him through clenched teeth. Oh no, he thought, you won’t make me rush you, you can’t make me take you before you’re so excited that it won’t hurt.

  Suddenly, with a lightning change of pace for which he was unprepared, Tessa gathered up all her strength, freed herself of the quilt, and in one swift movement raised herself up off the bed, pushed Luke over on his back, threw one leg over him, and straddled him. Stunned, he felt her grasp his penis and pull it back from his belly so that it stood at a right angle to his body.

  “No!” he cried, but Tessa was already arched above him, her expression rapt and isolated in an absolute purposefulness. Her eyes were tightly closed as she guided his penis directly between her parted thighs. She circled the head of his penis in her fingers and lowered herself until he was just inside her flesh. “Oh,” she said to herself, “oh … yes …”

  “Darling …”

  “No, don’t move, don’t say anything, I have to do it myself,” she commanded. He lay absolutely still, disciplining himself with all the authority of his maturity, fascinated by her intent caprice, as a fraction of an inch at a time she pressed down onto him with her taut, quivering body. Both of them barely breathed, her lips were pressed firmly together, there was no sound in the room as moment by moment, at a pace determined by Tessa, she resolutely impaled herself on him. It seemed to Luke that she was as ruthless with the pain she must be feeling as she was ruthless in her insistence on his passivity. She looked like a stranger, with the fierceness of an Amazon branding her brow, her teeth pressed into her lower lip. From time to time she paused briefly, all her senses utterly focused on the point where his flesh met hers, and then she pushed on. Time stopped until finally Tessa gave a deep breath and Luke became aware that he was enclosed, up to his hilt, in her warmth. He looked up at her face, close to him now, her lips finally parted, her eyelids fluttering, an expression of relief recreating her face, familiar again.

  Only then did he dare to fold her in his arms and, making certain that he didn’t move too quickly, gather her closely to him and turn her over, so that he was above her. He stayed motionless, watching her face as a smile came to her lips, a complex inward smile of accomplishment, pride, and astonishment.

  “Look at me,” he whispered, but she kept her eyes closed, her smile suddenly teasing. “Look at me, my darling,” he insisted, and she opened her eyes and saw his, bright with tears. “Did I hurt you?” he asked.

  “Only a little, because I could control it—it’s all right now—why are you crying?”

  “Because you’re my virgin bride and it’s more beautiful than anything I could ever have imagined.”

  “But I’m not a virgin anymore.”

  He drew back slowly, until his penis le
ft the cave of her body, and then, with infinite care, he pushed it in again as far as it would go, filling her completely. “No,” he said, “now you’re not a virgin anymore.”

  13

  I never knew people could be domestic for four whole days in a row,” Luke said, as he and Tessa cleaned up the kitchen after the lunch they’d walked into the village to buy: a newly baked baguette, sweet butter, fresh ham sliced from the bone, and five kinds of cheese. “Would you like to go out for dinner tonight? We’re invited to a party on board a yacht tonight, it’s only a half-hour drive down to the harbor.”

  “So love in a farmhouse has already made you itch for social life,” she sighed mockingly, hanging up the apron that Madame Boulet, who owned the neighboring farm, used each evening when she brought over the dinner she’d cooked in her own house.

  “It’s not social life, it’s the sheer brutish macho satisfaction of showing you off to a roomful of people, knowing that every man there feels desperate envy of me. I’m basically a disgusting swine, just a step more evolved than a caveman about some things, and you might as well know it now. No, don’t laugh, I’m serious, Tessa. I’m going to be profoundly jealous and utterly possessive and I’m going to flaunt you all over this little planet. Thank God you’re much too young to want children. By the time you’re—oh, maybe thirty—I suppose I’ll be able to face sharing you with them. I’ve never felt the slightest need to reproduce, although I guess you will.”

  “Why didn’t you mention any of this sooner?”

  “I didn’t truly know it sooner … well, perhaps I had intimations, but I’d never thought about it for five consecutive seconds until we got married. Would you have married me if you’d known the kind of man I am?”

  “I would have married you if … if … I can’t think of anything that would have kept me from marrying you except a wife and six kids.”

  And even that, Tessa thought, even that wouldn’t have been enough to stop her from doing everything in her power to be with him. Her all-important new sense of safety had grown steadily more solid and established during the past four days they’d been together, long, unsurpassingly perfect days, consuming days of promise and fulfillment, brimming with a heavenly green-gold light that had changed her forever. Whatever combination of cells once made up her brain and heart had mutated into a new soul, someone she’d never known, a soul who dwelt at the heart of a secure fortress of safety and had no fear of adoration.

  Tessa had reached a point at which it was emotionally and physically painful to be farther away from Luke than the next room, and then it was only possible to endure this separation for a few minutes at a time. She begrudged the time he spent in the shower and shaving, the way he quickly scanned Le Figaro when they went into the village, the minutes he disappeared to bring in wood for the fire they made at night as soon as the sun set. She couldn’t settle in a chair or on a sofa without her eyes straying to his blunt, powerful fingers and becoming intensely aware that the quivering, tender flesh between her legs was growing avid again. She couldn’t fall asleep, no matter how he’d satisfied her, until he’d drifted off and she could lie in his arms, remembering each honey-and-fire-filled hour of the safe, safe day. Even as she felt their breathing merge, she could barely allow herself to drift into his dreams and waste these exquisite minutes.

  “Yes,” Tessa agreed, forcing the light words, “by all means, let’s go to the party. What should I wear?”

  “A little black dress.”

  “But I don’t have one with me. How about a little white dress?”

  “Is it plain?”

  “Plain how?”

  “Unadorned, not embroidered or whatever, just plain white.”

  “Is this some new fetish of yours? Another terrible thing I wasn’t warned about? A plain white wardrobe?”

  “Just not decorated,” he growled.

  “It’s as plain as plain can be,” she assured him.

  “You’ll understand it all at the proper time,” he said, coming to stand behind her, his arms crossed in front of her so that each of her breasts was lightly enclosed in his warm hands. He buried his face in her hair as Tessa bent her head in swift, docile delight. They stood without the slightest movement, barely breathing, as Luke’s penis rose, under his trousers, and grew, jerking slightly and swelling upward against the small of her back.

  “In the kitchen?” she gasped, her heart beating so heavily that she thought he must be able to hear it.

  “Bedroom,” he groaned. “Understand now why I didn’t want to make the bed?”

  “I knew why. I didn’t think you’d make me wait this long.”

  All afternoon they lay in bed, making love, dozing, and making love again, sometimes as playful as animals in a zoo, sometimes deeply earnest, caught by the voluptuous gravity of a whirlwind of passion that Luke, for all his experience, had never known before.

  Tessa, discovering an untapped well of sensuality that only her dreams had ever revealed, let herself go freely into her deepest fantasies, sometimes disarmingly submissive, pliant and willing, urging him, in deliciously wanton, indecent words she’d never used before, to fuck her quickly, to fuck her good and hard, to give it to her as if she were a whore, to treat himself to a quickie. Sometimes she was as dominant as he, insisting on her right to make him submit every inch of skin on his body to her, to lick him slowly behind his knees, under his arms, inside his elbows, on the arches of his feet and the balls of his heels, to tantalize the head of his cock without any fairness, touching him with nothing but her tongue, holding him off ferociously, listening with delight to his pleading, and finally, when she could stand it no longer, grasping his penis and plunging it hungrily and still awkwardly into her body, while he reveled in her candid lust. More often they strove to match their separate passions and more and more frequently they discovered that their rhythms blended together and that the miracle of two separate human beings becoming one was achieved.

  “I never expected you to be so … inventive,” he told her. “Or have I fallen into that old cliché about wild convent girls?”

  “I surprise myself,” she admitted. “Mimi and I used to read sexy stories when we were fourteen—I almost memorized them—and I imagine I must have been waiting for the right opportunity to present itself ever since.”

  “Thank God it was me.”

  As the sun began to set, sated for the moment, they prepared themselves for their evening out. Tessa was glad that Fiona had insisted on her buying the far-too-expensive strapless white dress they’d seen in the Couture Boutique at Harrods. Although it had a matching chiffon stole with a wide, hemstitched border, it looked like nothing on the hanger, yet when she put it on, its finely pleated, Grecian shape, cleverly draped, outlined her body to below her hips, eloquently justifying its Dior label. When she whirled in front of the mirror the short skirt, unpleated, swished around her thighs and kissed her knees. When she leaned forward, she could see that the bodice of the dress began no more than a hairline above the top of her nipples.

  Tessa put on white silk sandals and the string of pearls she’d bought at Tiffany’s in Beverly Hills just before her nineteenth birthday. She’d spent another fifteen hundred dollars for matching pearl studs, telling herself that they not only would commemorate the film but were also the only ornaments a woman could wear at any time of the day or night and be certain that she was suitably decked out. Even her mother had approved of the purchase, saying dryly that she supposed that Tessa was looking forward to occasions on which she wouldn’t feel “good enough” in artificial pearls. She’d worn them with her wedding gown and they’d been exactly right, Tessa thought, as she fastened them around her neck.

  With a final twirl in front of the mirror, flourishing her engagement ring at an imaginary audience, Tessa picked up her wrap and presented herself to Luke, who stood in the living room of the farmhouse, clad in the unaccustomed formality of a white linen suit, a blue shirt, and a yellow tie.

  “That’s y
our plain white dress,” he inquired, “ ‘as plain as plain can be’?”

  “You said a yacht,” she reproached him, “and anyway, show me where it’s not plain, just show me one bit of decoration.”

  “It’s perfect,” he assured her, “but pearls don’t do it justice, they’re too proper.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t appreciate understated elegance.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  “Promise to keep them closed, no matter what?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “All right.”

  Tessa stood with her eyes tightly closed as she felt him unclasp her pearls and take off her earrings. What now, she wondered, shivering, as she felt him fumble at the back of her neck and heard a slight click as a heavy necklace was settled around her neck. Suddenly the lobes of each ear were embraced by a weight of cool metal. “Yes,” Luke said, “absolutely spot on.” He took her shoulders and guided her steps until she stood in front of her bathroom mirror. “You can look now.”

  “Good God!” From a necklace of five huge, pear-shaped emeralds, brilliantly graduated in size and mounted in thick crusts of diamonds, hung a pendant fashioned from a single giant pear-shaped emerald, an emerald almost the length of her little finger. It lay on her breastbone, rimmed in its own diamond setting, a fathomless drop of the very essence of green. The earrings were great round emeralds, of a color perfectly matched to the necklace, set in large diamond domes.

  “You’re mad, insane, out of your mind …”