When her hands went to his belt, he pulled them away. “Now I get what I want.”
His declaration shocked her and scared her. He had been urging her to take the lead, encouraging her until she had begun to think it was her show.
“Did you think it was all your way? Oh, no, sweet lady. You say what you want. I say what I want.”
His hands went to the waist button of her slacks. The zipper hissed. He pushed the slacks off her hips the same way he had the sweater, making it blatantly sexual. It wasn’t about removing slacks, it was about touching her. Claiming his right to her.
He skated his hands over her hips, he shaped the curves of her buttocks, squeezed them and kneaded them with strong strokes. He worked his fingers down into the cleft and the moist flesh, moving around her center, but never quite touching.
He pushed the slacks off her hips and dropped to his knees so he could follow with his hands. “Step out,” he said when his hand were on her ankles. He tossed the slacks to one side.
Again, he gripped the globes of her buttocks. “Come closer…” She inched her toes forward. “Closer.”
The pressure on her buttocks made going backwards impossible, but any closer and she would be… his face would be… “Closer.” He dug into her buttocks, and she had to inch forward or fall. She grabbed the only part of him she could reach, which was his head.
He pressed his face to the juncture of her thighs. He inhaled deeply.
She stiffened and dug her fingers through his hair to grip his skull. She wasn’t sure if she intended to push him away or brace herself. Her knees went weak.
Strengthening his grip to keep her supported, he turned his face up to her. “Did I shock you? Am I moving too fast?”
She was shocked and surprised, but more by his face than his actions. Emmie wasn’t sure when they’d taken the steps that carried them into the bedroom. With the only light coming from the kitchen, his face was in deep shadow. All nuance of expression that created the surface, social man was hidden, only the most basic components of who he was were visible. His words might have sounded sensitive, but his face looked harder and more intense than she had ever seen it.
Suddenly, his teeth flashed white in an unrepentant grin. “I’ve been wanting to do that for fourteen days and ten hours.”
Emmie did the math. “When we went to take care of the cake?” she clarified. All the time he had been acting so arrogant and condescending. Was that possible?
“The first time I put you in the truck,” he confirmed.
“Caleb, no!”
“Emmie, yes!”
“Really?”
He tightened his fingers on her buttocks with frank possession, and his smile edged toward marauder. “I wanted to push your shapeless, beige skirt up, pull down your plain, white cotton panties, and bury my face in your woman smell until I had you all over me. And I had been all over you.”
Despite his rather prideful declaration, the throb of raw, aching longing in his voice-longing that went far deeper than the need for sexual release-brought tears to her eyes. Desire to succor sent all her sexual craving into something richer, more compelling and more complex than she had ever known. It made her cradle his face in her hands. She relished the faint prickles along his jaw, the subtly thicker feel of masculine skin. She traced his perfect lips with her fingertips. She stroked the silky wiriness of his brows, and when she drew her fingers down the sharp strong wedge of his nose, he closed his eyes, leaving a wet glitter in his lashes.
“Stand up,” she whispered, lifting his face to hers as if it were made of glass. Her fingers went to the buttons of his shirt. “You have on too many clothes.”
Emmie had the shirt unbuttoned and was nuzzling the tiny flat nipples she found in the springy thatch across his pecs. He trailed his own kisses down the exposed side of her neck, then gently pushed her away.
“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 position
ed 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.
302 Mary Margret Daughtridge
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 devia-tion-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.
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