Wild About Harry

by Linda Lael Miller

He wrapped her in a heavy bathrobe of navy velvet and led her out to the living room, where he settled her in a chair by the hearth, then built up the fire. He brought her food, fruit and bread, and a snifter of brandy, and for a while she thought Harry was beginning to see reason.

  Instead, he was resting up for another round.

  Once she'd eaten, he took her back to bed and made love to her again.

  "Will you marry me?" Harry inquired implacably, when she was dangling from the edge of ecstatic madness.

  "Yes!" Amy cried. "Oh, Harry—oh, God—yes.!"

  Her reward left her drenched with perspiration and weak from her own straining efforts.

  Harry finished what he'd begun, and after a long time, he got up and found oil to rub into every inch of her skin. Finally, then, he allowed her to sleep.

  The next day a judge arrived with a special license, and Louise, John and Charlotte appeared with the children. Louise had brought along a flowered sundress for Amy to wear, along with casual clothes, nightgowns and underwear for later.

  "You're sure you're okay with this?" Amy asked her children, when the three of them were alone in one of Harry's guest rooms. She hadn't told them, of course, how Harry had burned her clothes and made love to her repeatedly. "You really want a stepfather?"

  "We really want Harry" Ashley clarified.

  "We're going to live in Australia, on an island!" Oliver crowed, hardly able to contain his enthusiasm at this good fortune. "Wow!"

  Amy was looking forward to becoming Harry's wife, but she was also reluctant. She couldn't get past the idea that none of this would be happening if she hadn't told Harry she was expecting his baby.

  The wedding was to be held in Harry's living room, that evening, by the light of a hundred candles. All the rest of Tyler's family came over for the occasion, and since Amy's father couldn't take enough time off from being a world-renowned surgeon to make the trip, John Ryan gave away the bride.

  Oliver was to be the best man, Ashley the maid of honor.

  Amy went to the master bedroom to be alone and gather her thoughts before the ceremony, and what she found there practically stopped her heart in midbeat.

  In the middle of the bed, fragrant and lacy and totally impossible, lay an armload of white lilacs.

  Mentally Amy searched the lighthouse grounds, and she found no lilacs. They couldn't have come from the mainland, either, because there had been a hard freeze the last week in August and all the flowers were gone.

  Slowly, her eyes filling with happy tears, Amy approached the bed and lifted one of the lovely fronds into her hands. She was drawing in its unforgettable scent when she heard the door open.

  Harry was standing there.

  "Did you have these shipped in from somewhere?" she asked, knowing the answer before he spoke. Harry had sent for caviar and champagne, but his contribution to the ceremony was a massive bouquet of pink roses, already in full bloom. Amy knew their petals would become her marriage bed and, for all the time she'd spent exploding in Harry's arms, she was ready to give herself again.

  "No," Harry answered, coming to her side and taking up one of the boughs with a frown. "I thought these were gone for the year."

  Someday, Amy thought, she would tell him that white lilacs had been special to her and Tyler. Someday, she would say that Tyler had found a way to offer his blessing on their marriage, but now wasn't the time for explanations and Amy knew it.

  She made a wreath of the lush lilacs for her hair, and when it came time for the ceremony, she drew a deep breath, said a prayer and went out to be married. Somehow, she would find a way to make Harry love her, truly love her, for real.

  In the meantime, she would take whatever happiness she could find, wherever she found it.

  The Ryans took Ashley and Oliver back to Seattle after the wedding, and Harry drove Amy to the jet. When the plane was high in the air, bound for some mysterious honeymoon destination, he left the pilot to handle the controls and joined Amy in the main cabin.

  "You are beautiful, Mrs. Griffith," he said in a hoarse voice, taking off his suit jacket and draping it casually over the back of one of the seats. As he loosened his tie, he went on. "If you would be so good as to go into our bedroom and take off your clothes, please."

  Amy could hear her own heartbeat, thundering as loudly as the jet's engines. "You're incredible," she said.

  He smiled easily. "Thank you," he said, with a slight bow of his head.

  Amy went to the master suite as she'd been bidden. The bed was mounded with pink rose petals, just as she'd expected, and there was a bottle of sparkling cider on the nightstand, cooling in a silver bucket.

  "I thought champagne might be bad for the baby," Harry said from the doorway.

  Amy was touched, but she wished she could matter to Harry as much as this child she was carrying. "Where are we going?"

  Harry closed the door and kicked off his shoes. "I'm taking you to the morning star and back again," he said.

  She couldn't believe it, not after the marathon they'd already put in. "I meant, for our honeymoon," she retorted dryly.

  "Wait and see," he answered.

  Soon rose petals were drifting down off the edges of the bed like pink rain, and Amy had made more than one trip to the morning star before the plane touched down.

  She looked out and saw an isolated airstrip, a lot of desert and cactus and a proud hacienda of white stucco.

  "Mexico?" she asked, kneeling on the bed and peering through the porthole.

  "Yes," Harry answered, pulling her back down beside him.

  Later, they went into the house, which was clean, well furnished and vacant. The pilot refueled the jet, went through a flight check and took off again.

  "Is this your place?" Amy inquired, amazed. There was a pool out back, filled with inviting crystal-clear water, and the main bedroom had air-conditioning, a terrace and its own hot tub.

  Harry smiled. "Belongs to a friend," he answered, setting their suitcases down at the foot of the massive bed. "Not a bad place to be a prisoner of love, is it?"

  Amy blushed furiously at the reminder. "I gave in to your demands," she pointed out. "By all rights, I should no longer be classified as a captive."

  "You may get a reprieve someday," Harry responded easily. "Time off for good behavior and all that. Louise is going to interview governesses for the kids so we can leave for the island soon."

  Amy sat down on the bed. "You certainly are anxious to get back to Australia," she said, worried.

  Harry stood near enough to touch the tip of her nose with an index finger. "Never fear, rose petal," he began. "I'm not planning to dump you and the nippers there and then go off and chase women. I want my baby to have the best possible start in life, and a calm, peaceful environment for its mother seems like a good beginning."

  No protests came to mind. The kids, who would have been her best excuse for staying in Seattle, were eager to visit the island. Harry had promised them each a pony, and Tyler's folks were already making plans to visit.

  The honeymoon lasted a week, though afterward those delicious days and nights ran together in Amy's mind, indiscernible from each other. She and Harry swam and made love, talked and made love, ate and made love, played tennis and made love.

  Then they went back to Seattle, where Amy put her house on the market, said good-bye to her friends and family, packed summer things for herself and the children, put Rumpel into Mrs. Ingallstadt's loving care, and did her best to absorb the fact that her life had changed forever.

  It wouldn't have been accurate to say she was unhappy—she was married to a man she loved desperately and was expecting his child—but there was an undercurrent of suspense. Harry was doing what he saw as his duty, and it didn't matter that he did such a damn good job at pretending to like it.

  Amy's happiness was underlaid with a sense of urgency, of barely controlled anxiety.

  The children thrived on the long, often-interrupted journey from Seattle to Australia. Bot
h of them took their turns at the plane's controls, and when they stopped in Hawaii for a day, they explored their surroundings with energetic delight. The same thing happened in Fiji and Auckland, New Zealand and finally Sydney.

  Once again, there was no problem with Customs. Ashley and Oliver were permitted into the country on the strength of Amy's passport and, she suspected, because Harry Griffith was their stepfather.

  Returning to Harry's private isle, which Oliver promptly renamed Treasure Island, was like having the gates of Eden swing open again. It was a second chance.

  The governess Louise had selected, a pretty brown-haired girl who had been doing graduate work at the University of Washington, was waiting when they arrived, as were Elsa and Shelt O'Donnell. Evidently, Amy thought testily, the nanny had taken a direct flight.

  Although Amy's pregnancy was in its early stages, it had already begun to take its toll. She was exhausted from the trip to Australia, even though Harry had taken every opportunity to let her rest.

  She hadn't been able to sleep on the plane, though she'd tried. Instead, she'd mindlessly read one book after another, and five seconds after she'd closed the last cover, she'd forgotten what the story was about. When she wasn't reading, she was in one of the swanky bathrooms, being violently sick.

  Amy concluded that she just wasn't cut out to be a jet-setter.

  When they finally reached their destination, she slept for two days straight, waking up only to eat and bathe and go to the bathroom, and although he was in bed beside her at regular intervals, Harry didn't once make love to her. She supposed the inevitable withdrawal had already begun, and for the first time in her life she was irrationally jealous of another woman.

  Mary Anne, the governess, to be precise.

  "You're just saying Louise hired her," Amy said pouting one night, when she and Harry were sitting on the terrace outside their room. The children were asleep and the sky was scattered with gaudy stars that were bigger and brighter than they had any business being. "You probably handpicked Mary Anne yourself, because of her great body."

  Harry bent over her chair, gripping the arms, his nose less than an inch from Amy's. "You're very fortunate that you're pregnant, rose petal," he said. "If you weren't, I'd turn you over my knee, bare your backside and paddle you soundly for saying that."

  Amy stuck out her lip. "You wouldn't dare. Modern American men don't do such things."

  "Maybe they don't," Harry replied softly, "but I'm not an American and I'm not especially modern, either. It would behoove you to remember that."

  A tear slipped down Amy's cheek. "She's so pretty."

  With a warm chuckle, Harry gathered Amy up, sat down in the chair she'd occupied before, and cradled her on his lap. "If I didn't know better, Amy-girl," he said soothingly, holding her close, "I'd think Tyler did you wrong. What on earth gives you the idea that I'm constantly on the prowl for other women?"

  "You wouldn't really spank a grown woman," Amy said, ignoring his question. But she laid her head against his shoulder, feeling fat and frumpy and very worried.

  "Don't test the theory," Harry warned. "Australian men are still a generation or two behind the times, love. I would never get myself into a drunken rage and beat you or anything like that, but a few smart swats on the bottom never hurt."

  "That depends on whose bottom it is," Amy reasoned. She had an unsettling feeling that Harry was totally serious.

  Harry laughed and kissed her soundly on the forehead. "I will never, ever, be unfaithful," he promised in a sincere tone of voice a few moments later. "So stop worrying."

  "What about when I'm fat and cranky and I'm retaining water?"

  "You're cranky now, love, and no doubt you're retaining water, too." He opened her robe, baring one of her breasts to the attentions of an idle index finger. "And all I can think about is taking you to my bed and having you, thoroughly and well."

  A delicious shudder ran through Amy, and when Harry bent to take her nipple between his lips and tease It mercilessly, she gasped.

  Both her breasts were wet, their peaks hard and tingling, when Harry carried his bride inside and arranged her gently on his bed.

  He laid aside her robe, like the wrapping on a gift, and never .took his eyes from her as he stripped away his clothes.

  He made her body tell all its secrets over the course of that magical night, and he had Amy so thoroughly and so well that, a couple of times, she thought she glimpsed the far side of forever.

  10

  * * *

  The following week Harry left the island on business for the first time. Late that afternoon a tropical rainstorm blew in, hammering at the roof and tapping at the panes and making Ashley and Oliver rush, giggling with nervous excitement, from one window to another.

  "Do you think it's a hurricane?" Amy asked Mary Anne, who was reading a book next to the fireplace. Amy had already come to terms with the fact that her children's teacher was a good person, not likely to engage in frolics with the master of the house, and the two women were becoming friends.

  Mary Anne smiled. "Just a regular spring storm," she said.

  It still seemed weird to Amy that mid-October could qualify as spring, but in Australia it did. "It doesn't appear to be bothering the kids."

  Mary Anne closed her book, the pleasant expression lingering on her pretty face. "Kids are born adventurers," she agreed. "Is there anything I could get you, Mrs. Griffith? Some tea, maybe, or a glass of lemonade?"

  Amy shook her head, feeling guilty for all the uncharitable thoughts she'd once harbored for this bright, intelligent young woman. "Thanks, no. I'm all right."

  But she wasn't, and Mary Anne seemed to know that as well as Amy did. Amy was imagining Harry in cosmopolitan Sydney, dressed in one of his tuxedos, surrounded by sexy blondes, brunettes and redheads at some swanky party.

  The next day, however, the storm blew out and Harry blew in. He brought fancy saddles for the kids, whose promised ponies had been waiting in the stable on their arrival, and for Amy there was a sketch pad and the biggest selection of colored chalk she'd ever seen.

  She began to sketch the fabulous birds roosting in the trees just outside her walls. Startled at her own ability, Amy progressed to drawing images of Shelt and Elsa and Harry and the kids. When Ashley and Oliver were busy studying and Harry was either away or working, Amy's new interest in art positively consumed her.

  Harry brought oil paints and canvases when he returned, and so many art books that Shelt had to make two trips to the landing strip to pick them all up.

  In November, Amy and Harry went to Sydney on their own to take in a concert, have elegant dinners in gracious restaurants and do some preliminary shopping for the holidays. Amy visited her doctor, who pronounced her in good health, and she and Harry made love all of one afternoon and half the night.

  When they returned to the island, Amy felt restored and renewed.

  In early December they flew back to Sydney, this time taking Mary Anne and the kids with them. Although it was the height of summer, it was also Christmastime, and the clean, beautiful city was decorated for the holidays.

  Harry and Amy took the kids and their governess to see The Nutcracker at one of the city's better theaters, then everyone shopped. Mary Anne sent presents to her family via airmail, and when they returned home, there were boxes galore awaiting them at the mainland post office.

  They decorated a towering artificial tree, even though the sun was dazzlingly bright on the water. It seemed to Amy that there were presents hidden everywhere, and Ashley and Oliver were having the time of their lives.

  Amy couldn't quite trust Harry's commitment— every time he left the island, she was on pins and needles until he returned. She had progressed by that point to making her own exquisite gift wrap, though, complete with hand-painted angels and other heralds of Christmas, and she did her level best to keep busy.

  "Happy, love?" Harry asked, late Christmas Eve, when they'd filled the kids' stockings and played Santa.<
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  Her emotions were complex and very confusing, and she supposed a lot of them could be ascribed to her pregnancy. For all of that, Amy was insecure as she had never been insecure before. Despite her art and her beautiful children and the much-wanted baby tucked away between her heart and her soul, Amy felt cut off from Harry. It seemed to her that the only time they were really close was when they were in the throes of love-making, unable to speak coherent words, flinging themselves at each other as if in battle.

  Not being able to put her condition into words, Amy started to cry instead.

  Harry put an arm around her and drew her close beside him in bed, one hand resting in a proprietary way on her rounded stomach. "There now, love," he said, his lips moving against her temple. "Your hormones are in a bit of a muddle, but it'll all come right in the end. You'll see."

  Tell me you love me, Amy thought. "That's easy for you to say, Harry," she said aloud. "You're not pregnant."

  "Darn good thing, too," he confirmed good-naturedly, "or we'd get nothing done for fending off photographers from all the tacky tabloids."

  Amy laughed in spite of herself. "If I were you, I'd hate me," she said.

  Harry rolled over to look deeply into her troubled eyes before he kissed her. "Hate you?" he countered hoarsely, after he'd left Amy dizzy from the intimacy of their contact. "Never."

  Normally he would have made love to Amy then. Instead, he just cuddled her close, sighed contentedly and went to sleep.

  The next day was a noisy riot of rumpled gift paper, food, presents and laughter.

  On New Year's, Elsa and Mary Anne took the Christmas tree down and put it away, and Amy got out her oils and canvas and started to paint.

  Harry took Amy to Sydney for another doctor's appointment at the end of the month and again in February.

  The first week in March, just as winter was getting off to a fine Australian start, Amy went into labor.

  This time she didn't go to the doctor, he came to her on board Harry's jet, bringing a nurse and an anesthesiologist with him.

  Sara Tyler Griffith was born in her parents' bedroom, with a tropical storm threatening to make the seas run over onto the land. She was a lovely child, with the blue eyes all babies have, and a rich shock of dark, dark hair. Just as Ty had predicted.