Tyler thought that the reason for Luke’s bequest was gratitude for their sacrifice in taking Maggie into their own family. He was probably right but, the good Lord knows, she’d more than earned it. In all justice, he should have left them more than he’d left Maggie. Tyler was his stepbrother, Maggie merely his wife’s sister. But justice wasn’t Luke’s strong point, as it was hers. Wasn’t she planning to give that girl a combination eighteenth birthday and graduation party, which, considering that Luke would never know about her generosity, she could perfectly well have skipped?
Even though it was soon going to be too dark to ride, Maggie wandered down to the stables and perched on the post-and-rail fence surrounding the empty practice ring. It was almost twilight on this soft spring Friday evening, a week before graduation. All the horses had been turned out to the fields, the six stable hands had gone home to their own lives, and she had the place to herself. She was surprised to feel a piercing nostalgia as she gazed at the scene of so many childhood hours of fear and humiliation. Yet heaven knew, she didn’t feel anything but anticipation at the prospect of going away to college, leaving a home that had never been a true home under the cold care of shit-for-brains Tyler and snake-blood Madison, who had never once greeted her with a trace of warmth or even cared enough about her to criticize, so she’d know what she was doing wrong.
There was no question in her mind now that Madison truly disliked her and always had, for all these years. She had grown used to the hurt of it, grown to accept it. Only the physical buffers of Candice and Allison, both now married, had kept Madison from openly revealing her unexpressed, but unrelenting and most mysteriously unexplained, hostility, which seemed to have grown more open since Luke died.
No, her nostalgia was certainly not for her years in this house where she was, at best, tolerated, though unwanted; where Elizabeth, the cook, was the closest thing she had to a mother figure; where, after thirteen years, she still felt like an intrusive, unattractive, inferior stranger, as if she were some kind of charity case they’d been forced to take in, although that didn’t make sense no matter how she tried to figure it out.
Her sense of loss was centered entirely on the time she’d spent with Barney, her faithful old protector, Barney who had forgotten her, disappearing into a world of grand new buddies and frantically social preppy vacations. She’d never had a chance to surprise him with how well she could ride. They hadn’t even had a chance for one of their private talks in years, because when Barney did come home, just long enough to get his shirts washed and pressed, he’d been too occupied with his parents and the impressively connected friends he brought with him, to do more than say a quick hello to her.
Damn Barney to hell, anyway! He was only seventeen and a half and she was about to be eighteen in a week, a grown woman feeling sorry for herself because she’d been ignored by a boy, a mere adolescent, who, unlike a female, wouldn’t really mature for years.
She was at the top of her class academically, Maggie told herself fiercely, she was popular with all the other girls, she was editor of the school paper and president of the debating team, she was highly computer literate, she’d been accepted by Smith and Vassar and the University of Michigan—and you’d better bet she was going to Michigan, where there were guaranteed to be men, genuine grown-up men, thick on the ground. Elm Country Day hadn’t any male presence except on the faculty. Once Maggie had made it clear that she wasn’t going to have a coming-out party, Madison hadn’t introduced her to any of her friends’ sons, not that she wanted to meet them, so her feeble experience of guys was limited to the geeky brothers of her classmates, not one of whom turned her on as much as her favorite horse.
Once she got to Michigan, after a decent week’s wait, she was going to head straight to the student health department and ask to be fitted for a diaphragm, so that she’d be ready for whatever happened, Maggie promised herself. She didn’t want to go on the Pill, she’d read too many articles about contraception to start the Pill at eighteen, with at least thirty fertile years ahead of her, but a diaphragm was safe.
She knew she’d meet the right guy during freshman year. It was impossible for anyone as ripe, as eager for experience as she was, not to find a guy, and it didn’t matter if the guy was a mistake, as he was almost certain to be. She wanted to fall in and out of love as many times as was possible for a sane person. Four years of serial love affairs, Maggie promised herself with a wide smile, wasn’t that the underlying purpose of higher education? She’d have to keep her grades up enough to stay in college, but fundamentally she was going to major in passion.
And when she graduated she was going to go to New York City and get some kind of wonderful job and have another five years of love affairs before she even thought of getting married. Almost more than anything else, she wanted, needed, a family of her own, because it had been so hard to grow up without one, but when she did marry, Maggie thought ferociously, she wanted to stay home and really be with her kids, the way she could still remember her mother being with her, although the memories were dim and fragmented. She was almost sick with a wild ambition to do and feel everything! She wanted it all, everything!
She’d been stuck in boring, limited horse country for most of her life. If ever a woman needed to be liberated it was she. There was a vast, marvelous world out there that she was going to bite into and chew up, piece by delicious piece, Maggie promised herself. She was going to be a raving success, she knew it in her bones. She felt as determined, as sharp, as purposeful and powerful as a shining sword. She took a deep breath, reveling in her sense of all the exciting, unknown adventures that were going to happen to her. She was ready for the world and all its surprises, oh, more than ready!
“Hey,” said a quiet voice behind her.
Maggie almost fell off the fence in surprise, prevented by a pair of muscular arms grasped around her waist.
“Don’t say anything, it’s me, Barney,” he whispered urgently in her ear, and lifted her easily off the fence so that she stood directly in front of him.
“What are you doing here! You’re not supposed to get out of school till next week. What’s going on? Why are you whispering?”
“I’ve been expelled.”
“Shit! Why?”
“Pot party, I made the buy and they caught me on the way to my room where the other guys were waiting.”
“Oh, Barney, you asshole! You moron, you’ve fucked up your life. Jesus! What happened to the others?”
“They said they didn’t know what I was up to, a surprise to them.”
“Nice guys.”
“Why should they risk admitting anything when they didn’t have any weed on them? I’d have done the same. So I’m out, one year short of graduating.”
“How’d you get here?”
“On my bike. I have a secondhand Harley I fixed up so it’s better than new, kept it in a garage in town. Bikes are my thing, my real thing, I’m so good with bikes you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Wow, Easy Rider all over again,” she drawled.
“You got it, I’m reinventing the genre,” he grinned. “Somebody’s got to.”
“And what are Ma and Pa Webster going to say?”
“That’s the part where it could get nasty. Let’s go in the tack room and figure out a lie.”
“Barney, you’re delusional. The school’ll notify them. You’d have it easier escaping from Alcatraz.”
“I’ve already escaped from Alcatraz, I took off as soon as I was kicked out, didn’t pack, just got my bike and headed home.”
“Alcatraz? I thought you liked school.”
“Nope, not really. I’m academically deeply lacking, but mechanically brilliant. I tried to be a real preppy but my heart wasn’t in it. I made a lot of friends, but they’re busy planning to turn into their fathers, and that isn’t for me. I want to work with my hands, run a bike shop—it’s my dream—only problem is I don’t dare tell my folks, they’ll never allow it. A blue-collar son! They’
ll make me get a college degree from any tenth-rate place that would have me, even if they have to bribe one.”
He opened the door to the tack room, turned on the light, and closed it behind them.
“Whew! Safe at last. I figured I might find you still trying to learn how to stay on a horse, so I came down here first, left my bike behind the barn.”
“I can damn well stay on any horse in the Essex Hunt.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
They faced off opposite each other, unable to stop smiling in sheer joy at the sight of each other. She’d never been so glad to see anyone in her life, Maggie thought. Time seemed to stretch and sway, as subtle as a spider web, time all but stopped while they searched each other’s faces, suddenly speechless. Barney had shot up, he was well over six feet tall. His streaky blond hair, tangled by his long ride, flopped over his forehead; his face was tanned; his pleasant, lively boy’s face had turned into that of an almost-man, strong but still changing into what it would eventually become. His impudent grin and his freckles were the only fleeting reminder of the boy she’d known since she was five.
“Bet you can’t,” he said. “Bet I still have to save your ass.”
“What’ll you bet?” Maggie challenged him.
“A kiss.”
“What kind of bet is that? If I can’t ride I kiss you, if I can ride you kiss me? Heads you win, tails I lose? No thanks.”
“Okay, no bet. I believe you. Do you know what a sexy, lovely girl you’ve turned into?”
“Of course.”
“Well I didn’t.” He put his hands on either side of her face and bent down and kissed her full on the lips, a long, lusty, sweet, sweaty kiss that detonated like a depth bomb in her belly. Her eyes opened wide in astonishment as she kissed him back wholeheartedly, voraciously. The tack room whirled around her; bridles and saddles, hunt caps, rows of polished boots, dozens of photos of horses—everything blurred and she staggered with dizziness. Only Barney’s arms kept her upright.
“You liked that,” he said, stunned by her response.
“I did. I’d like more. Over here, on the sofa.”
“Maggie, we’re not related or anything, are we?”
“Not even kissing cousins. We’re just old friends.”
“Oh, God,” he groaned, “you’re so gorgeous, so grown-up, where have I been?”
“Too busy to notice me.”
“I must have been fucking stupid.”
“You are. Shut up.” She reached up for him with her open, impetuous, curious, innocent lips, groaning with hungry haste and need, adoring the touch of his searching tongue. She quivered with delight as he explored her mouth, lacing her fingers in his hair to bring him closer, kissing him all over his face, smelling his unfamiliar, delicious, rough skin. She rapidly pushed and pulled him around so that she could kiss his neck and his ears and his forehead, returning always to his open mouth and his hot, eager, shamelessly seeking tongue. Oh, Barney was a man, a man and a stranger and she had never known, never understood. She loved him, Maggie thought dimly, loved him as she would love a man.
“I’ve got to feel your breasts,” he muttered into her lips. Maggie instantly ripped the buttons of her blouse open and exposed her breasts to his hands and his mouth, catching her breath in bliss as she felt his touch, so warm, so firm, so focused, so utterly different from when she played with them herself that a new world opened up to her. She lay under him, pushing upward, as he greedily sucked her nipples and madly rubbed her mound, under her jeans, with a penis that felt like a club. In a minute they both came, fully dressed, Maggie gasping, Barney with a muffled scream.
Too shaken to say anything, too surprised to move, they lay one on top of the other, holding each other tightly. After a minute Maggie, crushed, eased herself out from under Barney’s body and lay next to him, hugging him close. He was limp from the unexpected power of his orgasm, she was weak with a pleasure greater than she’d ever known.
“And we didn’t even do anything,” Barney finally said in wonder.
“We didn’t?”
“Not really.”
“I never have,” she admitted. “Have you?”
“Yeah, not much though. You’re so … A fast.”
“Is that good?”
“Damn right. Oh, Maggie, I’ve got to do it again.”
“I do too.”
“Touch me this time, touch me, please, I’ve always loved you, Maggie.”
“I know.”
“Can you take off your jeans? I want to touch you too.”
“Okay, but that’s all, just touching.”
“I promise.”
In seconds both of them were naked, kissing and nipping at each other, looking at all their secret places, exploring each other’s bodies almost roughly, trying to hold back from the only thing they really wanted, until, as mad with curiosity as with need, they both had to give in and explore each other frantically between their legs, fingers wet and ruthless. Soon, much too soon, they were both racked by profound, piercing, slowly widening and exploding orgasms that neither of them would forget for the rest of their lives.
Maggie returned to her room by a back staircase while Barney settled down to sleep in the tack room. She’d managed to make herself look almost normal in case she met anyone on the way, but no one saw her as she shakily made her way home and closed her door behind her. She sniffed herself. She’d never smelled the aftermath of sex on herself before, but she knew instantly that the first thing to do was to take a shower. The pungent odor was all over her, on her hands, on her jeans, even her hair reeked wonderfully of Barney and his sticky juices. If there hadn’t been the chance of someone knocking at the door to find out why she wasn’t at dinner, she would have liked to have wallowed in the marvelous smells of the two of them as long as possible, but she had no choice.
After her shower Maggie put on clean pajamas and got into bed so that she could say to a curious maid that she didn’t feel well enough to eat. She turned off her lights, lay back on her pillow, and finally let herself think about what had just happened to her.
Barney, Barney, was all she could think at first, still dazzled by a trembling buzz that made her nerves zing with shudders from head to toe when she thought about the look of his cock, the unexpectedly smooth skin of his cock rising from the silky nest of his blond pubic hair, the blue veins on his cock, the thickness of his cock, the way it became, literally, the center of the universe as it grew imperious, demanding, irresistible. He had a power she’d never known existed. If he had asked her, she might not have been able to stop him from putting his cock in her. She longed for it so intensely right now that she was forced to give herself to another orgasm, before she was calm enough to think about anything else.
Barney was seventeen and a half years old, Maggie told herself when she had regained her breath and found herself finally able to consider the situation calmly. A man-boy, half-grown, who had the terrifying power to make her do crazy things because of that thick cock that dangled so heavily between his legs when he stood up to put on his jeans.
No. The word came from within her, a warning, a summons, an enjoinment from deep within her spirit. If she met him again in the tack room there was no possibility of not giving in to him. By tomorrow he would have managed to jaunt out on his bike and buy condoms, she was certain of it, and somehow he’d talk her into thinking that was safe enough, because she wanted him so much. No!
She was scared witless, Maggie realized with the utmost seriousness, by the thought of how helpless she would become if she lay in his arms again, kissed him, smelled him. She’d never be able to stop with just grinding and petting and the kind of touching they’d done tonight. Barney, darling, beautiful Barney, no! She knew ten times more about sex now than she had a few hours ago, she knew that his stiff cock—that cock she’d always want—was quite enough to make her take leave of her senses. And she wasn’t going to do it.
She must not. She dared not. T
here were too many reasons against it, she told herself sternly. They could not allow themselves to venture any deeper into a sexual obsession with each other. As little as Maggie knew, she realized enough to sense that they were on the very verge of obsession.
They were not kissing cousins, not related by a drop of blood, this almost-grown-up Barney was as fascinating as if he were a stranger and she could too easily imagine the insane risks they’d be willing to take, if they ever really started. They’d do anything to be together and one of those times they’d be discovered and utterly disgraced. By Madison and Tyler. No, never!
She was on her way to college, he’d been thrown out of prep school and didn’t want to go back. She was on her way to many years of adventure, he had no ambitions beyond his dream of a bike shop, Maggie told herself, forcing herself to be coldly realistic. Both of them had their lives ahead of them but they didn’t want the same things. Sex wouldn’t be enough, their still-childish love wouldn’t be enough. The real world would crush them. They were simply too young. Kids, both of them.
What had happened to all her sense of adventure and her eagerness to get out and stir the world up around her? she asked herself. The answer came clearly. Nothing had happened. She still intended to have it all. Barney’s appearance here tonight had changed nothing fundamental. The timing was all wrong. She couldn’t change her own dreams for Barney, sweet, loving, heavenly, glorious Barney, even if she would never forget him. It was over. It had to be over. There was no choice. Never again.
It was, Maggie thought as the tears streamed down her cheeks, her first one-night stand.
The next day, at lunch, Maggie found herself alone at the table.
“Where are my aunt and uncle?” she asked Elizabeth as soon as she could find her alone.
The Jewels of Tessa Kent Page 23