“No, Curt,” she whispered, her smile gone. “It’s not crazy.” And then she leaned toward him and offered her lips for another kiss.
Time melted away. The edges of reality blurred. He kissed her, kissed her forcefully, kissed her in a way that let her know just how much he wanted her. He rose and guided her onto her back and then came down to meet her mouth, hard and hungry. If she didn’t think this was crazy, it wasn’t. It was simply what had to be.
He eased his hands under her sweater. She lifted her shoulders high enough for him to pull it over her head and off. He made quick work of her bra and sent it to the floor with her sweater. Then he bowed to kiss her breasts. They were small and sweet, and he kissed and sucked until she clenched her hands in his hair and shuddered beneath him. Did she want him to stop? Go slower? She’d have to tell him, because her movements, her sighs and gasps and tiny moans all seemed to be saying she wanted more and she wanted it now.
He reared up and caught his breath. Naked to the waist, she reminded him of a mermaid, her hair swirling around her head, her nipples hard and wet from his kisses, her lower body hidden beneath the blanket. To make sure her legs hadn’t transformed into fins and scales, he swept the blanket down to the end of the bed. Two legs, he noted. Two legs clothed in denim and loudly striped socks.
He attacked the fly of her jeans. She attacked the fly of his. He paused long enough to shuck his T-shirt, then went back to work on her jeans. By the time she’d gotten his button undone, he had her zipper open and was gliding the jeans and her panties over the soft swell of her bottom. She wiggled her legs and freed one from the worn blue denim. He tugged the jeans free of her other leg—the sock came along with it—and tossed everything over the side of the bed. She still had one sock on.
He left it alone. Perhaps she’d be offended to know that at that moment her feet were pretty much the least interesting part of her body, as far as he was concerned. Her legs were long and slim, her thighs sleek and pale, the skin of her abdomen tight and smooth between her hip bones. A tuft of brown curls adorned her crotch. Poets might believe a woman’s eyes were the windows to her soul. Right now, Curt preferred to reach her soul another way.
He shimmied down to the foot of the bed, knelt between her legs and pressed his mouth to her. Some guys did this because they felt they had to; some did it because afterward a girl would be obliged to give them a blow job. Curt did it because he loved it. He loved the smell of a woman’s arousal, a flowery, musky perfume, and the way her skin spread and quivered and grew moist. He loved knowing something so simple could make a woman feel so good. He loved—all right, he’d admit it—the power, the ego trip of believing he could reduce a woman to mindlessness with a flick of his tongue, a nip of his lips, a well-directed breath.
Ellie writhed, her hips arching against him, her knees flexing, the heel of her socked foot digging into his thigh. He slid his tongue deep and she moaned, her body heaving, pulsing against his mouth.
Suddenly, he didn’t feel so powerful. It was as if by reducing Ellie to mindlessness he’d lost his mind, too. He couldn’t think. He could scarcely breathe. All he could do was want. More. All of her.
The pressure of her hands on his shoulders helped to bring him back to—what was his word? Cognizance? God, he was a jerk to use that word. A pompous ass. It was amazing she hadn’t laughed him right out of the bed.
When he lifted his head, he could see she wasn’t laughing. She was staring at him again, her eyes reaching to him as her hands did, pulling him up onto her. His jeans were in the way, and given his hard-on he had trouble getting them off. But he did, somehow. Somehow he managed to pull a condom from his night-table drawer, somehow he managed to get the damn thing out of its package and where he needed it.
She reached for him, squeezed him, stroked him and then opened that womanly, wonderful window to her soul, spreading for him, taking him in. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, her legs around his waist and held him so tight he felt as if his entire body was inside her, his shoulders, his back, his hips. His soul. This was what he wanted, what he needed. Everything inside her, a part of her.
He didn’t last long, but that was all right. She didn’t last long, either. Just a few strong thrusts and she was coming again, sighing and clenching her thighs and throbbing around him, her body practically levitating off the mattress as she pressed her mouth to the ridge of his shoulder and released a muffled sob of pleasure. And then he was there, groaning right along with her, pushing her back down with a final surge.
Reality went blurry again. Time vanished. The fire burning through his body slowly, slowly cooled. His lungs remembered how to function. The drumming of his pulse inside his skull faded. Ellie’s arms and legs relaxed, went slack, released him from their glorious bondage.
He propped himself up, and there were those dark, haunting eyes, watching him. She smiled, the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen.
He knew right then that Ellie Brennan was all he’d ever wanted and all he would ever want….
FOUR
EVENTUALLY SHE WOUND DOWN, her tears spent. Cuddling up to Curt, resting her cheek against his shoulder and drinking in his familiar scent felt too good. She used to feel so safe when he held her this way. But now she knew any safety he offered was illusory. He couldn’t keep bad things away.
Sheepish about her display of waterworks, she eased out of his arms, dabbed her damp cheeks with his handkerchief and then returned it to him. The TV screen held the frozen image of her and Curt on the day he’d graduated from college, both of them smiling, wildly in love. He must have paused the DVD while she’d suffered her little meltdown.
“I can’t watch this,” she said, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and standing. “I need some fresh air.”
“Sure.” He pushed away from the bed as well.
God, no. She didn’t want him to accompany her. She had to get away from him before she sank into his arms again. “I’m just taking a walk,” she said brusquely. “You don’t have to escort me.”
“It’s late.” He glanced toward the windows, their closed drapes blocking out the night. When he turned back, she noticed the shadow of moisture her tears had left on his shirt and suffered a pang of remorse. She shouldn’t have fallen apart like that. Not on his shoulder.
“I’m just going to step outside the building for a few minutes. I’ll be fine.” Like hell she would, but she had to find her own strength. She couldn’t rely on him to wipe her tears and make everything better.
She slid her feet into her shoes, grabbed the room key from the dresser and swung through the door. Only after it had shut behind her and she was halfway down the hall to the stairs did she draw in a breath. Her tongue tasted salty from her tears. She needed air. She needed the night.
She needed to get away from Curt, from his arms and his warmth and all the memories of the love they’d once shared.
The key weighed cold and heavy in her palm. Its quaintness—not one of those computer-programmed card keys—appealed to her. And the fact that she had it and Curt didn’t meant he probably wouldn’t come after her. If he did, he’d be locked out of the room. They had only one key between them.
Still, she hesitated on the stairway landing for a minute, waiting. Curt didn’t emerge.
She continued the rest of the way down the stairs, which ended in the front hall near the taproom. Cheerful conversation bubbled out of the room, and she hurried past it. She’d endured enough cheerful conversation at her birthday party to last the next fifty years. Faking happiness, she’d learned, could drain a person of energy.
Stepping outside the inn’s front door, she let the cool night wrap around her. A couple of paunchy older men stood on the path near the porch, smoking cigarettes. A young man and a woman strolled toward the parking lot, their arms wrapped around each other. After a candlelit meal at the inn’s restaurant, they were probably heading home for a très romantic night. Ellie felt a twinge beneath her breastbone as she wat
ched them recede into the shadows. Not jealousy. Just…regret. Loss. Emptiness.
She spotted a bench on a side path that led to a small garden near the inn. The carved wooden slats were stiff and chilly against her back and thighs, but at least she had the night, a sky full of stars above her and the scent of pine around her. The air was nippy, and she hugged herself warm.
You’re allowed to be a basket case, she assured herself. You’ve just turned fifty. You’re on the verge of a divorce. Mere minutes ago, you dissolved into a blubbering fool and let Curt—the man you’re planning to divorce—comfort you. Anxiety is acceptable under the circumstances.
She wasn’t sure what she felt was anxiety, though. It was more those other things—regret, loss, emptiness.
Being held by Curt had felt so good. But why the hell shouldn’t it feel good? He was a man, and for many years, Ellie had associated being held by him with joy and love and fabulous sex. Just because she was prepared to walk away from what used to be didn’t mean she couldn’t feel wistful about her decision. Any woman would feel the way she did, especially after going so long without a man’s arms around her.
She sat straighter and gave her head a shake. It hadn’t been so long, she reminded herself. She’d had a man’s arms around her just a few months back, when she’d been in Ghana.
Ten months ago
“DON’T GET IDEAS ABOUT ADRIAN,” Rose warned Ellie. In her sixties, stout and bristling with energy, boasting a crisp British accent to match her crisp blue dress, Rose Hampton was the administrator of the clinic where Ellie would be working. During the drive from the airport, Rose had provided Ellie with a brief biography of herself. She was a widow whose late husband had been in the foreign service. His last posting had been in Ghana, and after his death she’d stayed on, putting her management skills to work at the clinic so Dr. Adrian Wesker could be brilliant and perform his healing magic free of bureaucratic demands.
She continued to talk about Dr. Wesker’s extraordinary abilities as Ellie unpacked her things in the cramped cubicle of a bedroom she’d been assigned to in the residence compound next door to the clinic. Fortunately, she’d packed light. Had she brought more clothing, she’d have had no place to store it. The room featured a three-drawer chest, a closet the size of a high-school locker, a narrow bed with a foam mattress and a nightstand. Thin cotton drapes hung across the tiny window, which overlooked the cinderblock side wall of the clinic.
If Ellie had wanted a four-star resort, she wouldn’t have come here. The stark, cell-like room would serve as a perfectly adequate home for the next six months.
“Every woman who passes through the clinic gets a crush on him,” Rose warned, looming in the doorway and watching Ellie sort her clothes into the snug drawers. “Some men, too, I’d imagine. I must warn you that his first, last and only love is the clinic.”
“I’m here because I want to fall in love with the clinic, too,” Ellie assured her with a smile. The notion of getting a crush on some single-minded, charismatic doctor with supernatural talents amused her. She was too old and weary for that kind of thing.
“He’s been here seven years now,” Rose continued. She entered the room, crowding it with her bulk, and settled herself on the wooden stool at the foot of Ellie’s bed, which was made with fresh white sheets and a cotton spread. “I daresay he’ll wind up dying here. He hardly ever goes back to London anymore, except on fund-raising missions. His passion is here, with his patients. The women and children. You’ve familiarized yourself with the literature we sent, I presume?”
“Yes.” Ellie had read about the economic upheaval in the villages surrounding Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city. Developers were sometimes buying and sometimes simply stealing the small farms that surrounded the city, often with the complicity of village chiefs. Men tended to own and work on farms farther out from the city, cultivating land too distant from Kumasi’s urban center to interest the developers. But the smaller, closer farms were generally owned and worked by women. Once these women lost their plots, they could no longer feed their families and earn money with their home-grown crops.
Funded by several international charities, Dr. Wesker’s clinic served the medical needs of those economically displaced women and their children, as well as the farm women and children living in the territory surrounding the city. The clinic was always looking for pediatric nurses willing to serve a few months in exchange for free room and board, an exotic experience and a chance to feel they’d made some small contribution to the world.
When Ellie had learned about the program, she’d lunged at the opportunity. Both her daughters had flown from the nest and the house was painfully silent. A boy should have been thumping up and down the stairs, leaving trails of mud with his soccer cleats, devouring groceries faster than she could buy them, blasting god-awful hip-hop music through the speaker of his laptop and pretending he wasn’t excited about the female classmates who called to talk to him and giggled as they passed along the news that some other girl—never the callers themselves, of course—had a thing for him.
But no boy clamored through Ellie’s house anymore, complaining about too much math homework and asking what was for dinner. Peter was dead, and so was a huge chunk of Ellie’s soul. And now her marriage was dying, too. She’d had to get away.
“I assure you,” she told Rose, “I have no intention of getting a crush on Dr. Wesker.”
Rose shook her head, unconvinced. “They all say that.”
Ellie laughed. “I’m here to give vaccinations and take throat cultures for strep. The last thing I need in my life is romance.”
Rose’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You’re not a lesbian, are you? Not that I mind, one way or the other, but you do have to share this floor with three other ladies. They’re rather young, I’m afraid. College girls on an academic semester abroad.” She gestured through the doorway toward the hall, onto which several other rooms opened. “No medical skills to speak of. They’re very good with the children, handing out suckers and jelly beans after the little ones have received shots. One of them has been a godsend when it comes to processing the paperwork. The other two may someday make suitable nannies, but I don’t see much more in their futures. Certainly nothing in the healing arts.”
“I’m sure we’ll get along fine,” Ellie said.
“They all have crushes on Adrian,” Rose added.
Ellie laughed again. Not strained, hysterical laughter but relaxed, comfortable laughter. Coming here—flying across an ocean and landing somewhere near the equator, in a country that smelled of ferns and spice and cocoa, where people dressed in cool, colorful linens and spoke a language called Twi as well as a pungently accented English, and where impoverished women and their children needed access to free medical care—had been a wise move. When Ellie had exited the airport with Rose and stepped into the warm African morning, she’d felt her spine straighten, her eyes widen. The darkness that had been her companion for nearly two long, horrible years melted away beneath that fine tropical sun.
Once Ellie had finished unpacking, Rose took her on a tour of the clinic. The boxy, functional building wasn’t much to look at, but it included the basics: a waiting room with a spacious play area full of toys for the children, two examining rooms, a modest surgery—“Anything major we refer to one of the hospitals in the city,” Rose explained—and a six-bed ward. Currently two beds were occupied by thin, sad-eyed children battling the flu. “Dehydration, both of them,” Rose noted, pointing to their IV drips. “They’ll recover shortly. Be prepared to encounter lots of childhood diseases you thought had vanished from the face of the earth. Measles, rubella, chicken pox. These children don’t get inoculated the way your children back home do.”
Ellie nodded, taking it all in. She gave each of the young patients a warm smile before leaving the ward.
Rose walked her through the nurses’ station, which contained a small pharmacy, two desks and a computer that would have been obsolete ten years ago. Ellie
recalled the nurses’ station at Children’s Hospital in Boston, where she’d taken her first job after receiving her RN degree. It had boasted clean, sleek counters, bright lighting and all the high-tech equipment a nurse could dream of. Even her office at the Felton Primary School made this clinic on the outskirts of Kumasi seem about twelve rungs lower than primitive.
But a nurse didn’t need a fancy computer to make a child with chicken pox feel better. Just lots of liquids, cool baths, calamine lotion and ice cream to slide down a tender throat.
Dr. Wesker’s office door was closed, and Rose warned Ellie not to disturb him when he was shut up inside, unless it was an emergency. So Ellie didn’t meet the doctor until that evening at dinner, in the dining room on the first floor of the residential compound. A long, family-style table took up most of the room, which had windows along one wall and a colorful abstract mural painted on another. She’d taken a seat at the table with the three college interns, who were bouncy and bubbly and eager to fill Ellie in on everything they felt she needed to know: “The market’s a great place to connect with the women—they’re always shopping and bartering. Whenever we see one with a kid, we go over and tell her about the clinic,” one of the girls informed Ellie.
“And we go into the school and give talks on hygiene and the importance of vaccinations.”
“A little sex ed, too,” the third girl said with a grin. “I’m planning to teach middle school, so I like doing the sex-ed stuff.” All three girls were from Georgetown University, they told Ellie, although their manner of speech indicated they heralded from different regions of the United States. One girl had a thick Southern drawl, another the flat intonations of the Midwest and the third, from central New Jersey, could have been a speech coach for the cast of The Sopranos.
Abruptly they nudged one another and fell silent. They were gazing past Ellie, and she twisted in her seat to find out what had caught their attention.
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