by Sharon
"It should be easy to find, then."
She smiled. "Yes. And it's convenient to Earth, too. Only thirty-two light years." That date and another clicked pleasantly together in her mind. "The light we're seeing tonight was made the year you were born. Imagine that now we can see it together, like a birthday present."
After another pause his voice returned, a murmur. "Susan, let's have a star together."
Waves of sudden and unexpected shyness began inside her. "I don't know…"
"One star, Susan. Don't you think in all the universe there could be just one star for us?"
Shyness persisted, but it was a dim voice, the vapor of her conscience. Stars seemed to drift down, surrounding her, surrounding him.
"Choose one."
"It has to be bright." He thought, and then pointed. "Like that one."
She followed the line of his arm. "That's Deneb. In the constellation of the Swan. She flies toward the constellation of the Eagle."
"That sounds good. How bright is it?"
"First magnitude. It's a beautiful star, one of my favorites."
"Is it close to the earth?"
"No," she said. "That's the hitch. It's very far."
"Thank God. Then it's perfect." The humor in his voice made her laugh before they were silent again together, admiring the Swan, flying with it.
"You know," she said, "maybe we shouldn't have such a famous star."
"That's what I was thinking."
"How about—the little one that's a bit north of Deneb— there. Such a merry little flicker in the darkness…"
"Just for us…"
"Just for us…"
Then, because it seemed the most natural thing in the world, he rolled over and kissed her. At first, the touch of his lips was no deeper than the starlight. His kiss stroked her mouth gently, learning again the shape, the unique contours, the flow of her breath. Slowly he developed the contact until her mouth began to stir under his.
His body shifted slightly, half-covering hers, and fear sparked with pleasure all down her body, as though the star points had suddenly come inside. His chest made a careful caressing weight on her breasts. His hips pressed against hers with sweet strength. Questing against her mouth, his lips urged, hers into moist and softened openness. His tongue touched the inside of her mouth.
He lifted his head, holding her star-tipped face in a gentle, exploring gaze.
"Yes?" he whispered.
"No."
His parted lips lowered toward hers. "Yes."
Her fingertips stopped his mouth. The innocent fingers, slightly spread on his lower lip, had a powerful effect on his inflamed senses. She was like an unfamiliar delicacy beneath him, exotically fragrant, deeply inviting, deeply desired. Easing his mouth against her fingertips, he pressed the kiss there that he would have delivered to her lips.
Her breath wavered. Starlight accented the simplicity of her expression and the dark, startled quality of her eyes as she withdrew her hand and held it to her chest, then lifted it urgently to her own mouth, tasting his kiss. Then she lowered her hand and was still a long time before speaking, while he listened to the meadow and the beating of his heart.
"I encourage it, don't I?" she asked finally. "I don't understand why. I'm like a child playing on the edge of a cliff."
The print of her fingers remained with his mouth, an incredibly sweet sensation, a gift, in its way. Her confusion moved him, but his need was strong, So strong. Gathering her face in his palms, caressing her cheekbones with the sides of his thumbs, he spoke quietly.
"Your body wants me, Susan."
His gaze followed the light where it showed the curve of her cheek, the crisp linen of her kapp, the shine of her eyes. He felt the long stroke of her exhalation under his chest.
"I can't seem to help that." Her eyes became rueful. "I am resolute, you know, in my mind at least, even though sometimes the other parts of me aren't so sure."
"Is that what you came to tell me tonight?"
"Yes."
If some parts of her were vacillating, his had no doubts at all. His pulse hadn't slackened its leaping rhythm, and his skin surfaces felt as if they'd been too close to a torch. His blood was eighty-proof adrenaline. If any chance existed that he could control the urgency of his need, he would have stayed where he was, coaxing her gently with humor until she became as ready as he was himself. But he was too close to the borderline. Even during the insanity of adolescence, he'd never experienced anything this intense, and for all he knew there might be a point beyond which he would not be able to hear her say no.
Separating their bodies and sitting up took an effort that made his head swim. The alcohol in his system obviously wasn't helping. He sat still, not touching her, and counted to ten. Thirty times.
When he had his body back in some semblance of order, he stretched out near her on his side, supporting himself on his forearm. "You are one naive lady," he said with feeling.
She was sitting upright, hugging her tucked legs, her cheek resting on one of her bent knees. "When John and I were courting, nothing like this happened. It wasn't to be thought of."
Not to be thought of. To him, she was the victim of brainwashing on a profound, intimate level. You might not have thought of it, but I'll bet points on my next picture that Johnny-boy thought about it plenty.
Her eyes remained solemn. Plucking a stem of tufted grass, he tickled it over her bare toes to make her smile. "No shoes."
"I'd never have them if I didn't have to. Barefoot is the nicest feeling."
"Almost."
She smiled a little. "Part of the problem is that no one has ever tried to seduce me before. I don't have my fences ready. I would suppose… you do this often?"
"It varies. I try to seduce… say, six, maybe seven a month."
The smile grew. "Then this month you're running behind."
He made his expression sorrowful. "If things don't happen pretty soon between you and me, I may end up having to seduce the whole bunch on the last day of the month."
Her head came right up and she laughed. But then, "Not really?"
"I've never seduced anyone in my life."
"Pshaw."
"Amish, the date of the last recorded seduction was 1903. As a social convention, it's been extinct since the demise of the secluded alcove. Now when two people discover they want to love each other, they do."
"Strange world, English."
"Freedom, Amish."
Immersed in the agony of a headache on the ride back to Grey-ling, he said, "You know what they say about the wisdom of Solomon. And he was a strong believer in the pleasures of love."
"You've read the Bible!" Her voice was surprised and gratified.
"I saw the movie," he corrected. He watched her shake her head and heard her laugh, amused by his incorrigibility but trusting him still, trusting her own resolve and his capacity to understand it.
His capacity to understand her resolve was greater than she anticipated. He understood, as she did not, how close he was to breaking it.
Chapter 12
If this were Baton Rouge instead of Greyling, Wisconsin, they'd call this place a honky-tonk, Joan decided with a certain artistic satisfaction. She sniffed the air, redolent with cigarette smoke, sweat, cologne, and beer.
Inveterate party types from the movie company rocked with the locals on a strobe-lit dance floor. Joan had a good view of Max, slicked up in his khaki safari outfit. He looked sort of like a collapsed pup tent.
Having danced with everyone from the lighting director to the bartenders and fielded a number of single-entendres, she had a sense of having discharged her responsibility to the male sex. Contentedly seated by herself at a pine table surrounded by a clutter of deserted chairs and half-empty bottles of light beer, she was soaking up atmosphere for her novel—a roman a clef about the movie business—"the business," they called it in L.A., as though there existed no other businesses that mattered. Marvelous to be here in Wisconsin in a tave
rn with cheap paneling and bad paintings of mallards and stags. Even the neon sculpture on the roof—a bubbling blue highball—seemed wholesome.
Let's face it, girl. You're licking your wounds from last night. No, actually, the night had been magnificent, a sensual free fall. But it wasn't worth the aftermath. The funny thing was, she had no one to blame but herself. She knew David's reputation; who didn't? And Alan, who had a policy of complete noninterference in anyone else's life, had observed the sway of David's libido in her direction and had actually gone so far as to look straight at her over a clipboard last week and say, "If I were you, I wouldn't."
If she'd had a quark of sense, she'd have listened. But no. It might have been the residue of a star-struck adolescence. Or it might have been that ridiculous vow she'd made, over birthday candles and her first bottle of wine, when she'd turned eighteen that some day she was going to sleep with David Thorne, Robert Redford, or a Time magazine Man of the Year. What was that platitude about the gods making your dreams come true when they really wanted to make you suffer?
She'd waked after a night of fantasy in David's bed and discovered that the eyes that were as luminous as searchlights on the wide screen were looking at her with a certain abhorrence, as though she were laundry he'd left on the floor, looking at her as though he couldn't understand why she hadn't had the tact to sneak back to her own room before he woke up. He had been perfectly polite, noblesse oblige, but distant, and she was probably lucky he hadn't stuck a couple of fifties in her purse. It was quite clear that that was about the value he put on the experience.
This morning she hadn't seen the humor, just felt a fierce mortification and anger at herself for being another easy mark for a selfish movie star. And there was queasiness, and the frustrating realization that if she told him what she thought of him, it might be the last time she ever worked in "the business." He was perfectly capable of getting her fired, maybe blacklisted. Yep, that's the way it is in the big, bad world, Virginia. Big fish gobble up little fish.
She took a long sip from her glass. She enjoyed the mellow malty flavor of the beer, the pleasant funky rhythms of the band, the answering tangle of dancers. Funny that she never realized she was a little fish until she got to California. Back in Pittsburgh, she had parents who owned a small string of supermarkets and called her Princess and had raised her on the philosophy that she could grow up to be anything she put her mind to. And there had been the miracle of the summer she turned thirteen when she'd had fun with her mom's makeup and gone out for a walk in short shorts and her first halter top. Two teenaged boys in their father's Lincoln had driven over the curb looking at her, turning a fire hydrant into a geyser, and she'd learned she was beautiful. For years she'd reveled in the male attention lavished on her for the Barbie-doll face and figure, the hair she was accustomed to hearing described as leonine.
And then one fine evening, one of those rare ones spent at home, she'd flipped on the tube and watched Marilyn Monroe going through her paces in How to Marry a Millionaire. She remembered laughing right along until, for no reason she could understand, the armor of her complacency had buckled and she had realized in one sickened moment that she was looking at a self-portrait. Men found her lovable, perhaps even soulful, but there wasn't much doubt that her mission in life was to be a hormonal stimulant. The rest of her wasn't anything to take too seriously.
After that, none of the adoration had seemed quite as wonderful.
Somewhere around that time had come the friendly, funny affair with Ben Rose that had led to the studio job, and two years later the opportunity of getting to work for prestigious Alan Wilde.
Aside from her dad, one ninth-grade algebra teacher, and the well-mannered teenaged boys who'd tucked her into rides at Disneyland, Alan was the only man since puberty who had failed to define her in terms of her anatomy. That first interview was to be etched forever in her memory—those far-seeing eyes had never strayed downward from her face, the compassionate smile didn't know how to become a leer, the dispassionate voice carried no trace of an innuendo. This, even though on the employment application where it had said "Sex," she had crossed out "Male" and "Female" and written "Yes." She'd come away thinking of him as a brilliant android, C3PO repackaged in a captivating and glamorous facade.
Months elapsed, and she discovered she couldn't have been more wrong. Legend didn't lie entirely. He did keep people at arm's length. You had to wait for him to make the overtures toward friendship, and those were rare. There wasn't a flicker of doubt in her mind that the "daddy dearest" horror stories about his life as a child star were true. He carried the telltale caution of someone who'd had his heart and soul worked over at an early age.
In spite of that, he was a magical companion: brilliant, generous, vital, entirely without airs, and, unique among her acquaintances, he had not once referred to her never-to-be-sufficiently-rued centerfold sprawl. She would have gone to bed on barbed wire for him.
Alan's own involvements were conducted with so much old-school discretion that one didn't know a thing about them beyond what one read in print—gossip never confirmed by Alan, always claimed as true by the other party. In the last year there had been a network correspondent to the White House, that Japanese avant-garde artist whose name she never could pronounce, a literary critic… People were going to be puzzled about just where Susan Peachey fit into that up-scale lineup. Very weird. It was becoming emotionally wrenching to watch.
At least Susan had the good sense to recoil from kissing David. God, why hadn't she had the same sense? She should have listened to Alan about David. Damn. Stupid, stupid, stupid… Why did these things always have to hurt so much? How come it never got any easier to take? Maybe I should enter a convent, or a school for overly friendly girls. My epitaph is probably going to read: Slaughtered in the sexual revolution. She gave her all.
The germ of a smile teased at her mouth. She dug into her red leather clutch for her gold cigarette case, a birthday present from Ben. Her lips had that itchy feeling of wanting a cigarette. God, she loved the things, bad as they were for you. Horrendous. Maybe they should start making them out of broccoli or something. Feeling in her purse for the matching lighter, she was lifting the cigarette to her lips with her other hand, when a lighted match arrived under her nose, the flame wavering in the hollow of strong masculine palms. Incredible hands. The thought popped into her head that each one could hold a whole breast. She looked up.
And saw suspenders. She'd noticed the young man come in; there'd been no missing him. Even if she'd missed his melting, dark good looks, he would have drawn her attention because he was the only Amish man in the place. The rowdy cluster in baseball caps at the bar had greeted him with surprise and bonhomie, offering him drinks, which he rejected, stealing his hat briefly to pass it around. Obviously, he was popular.
Physiques like this didn't come along daily. The body was a cross between that of a soccer player and a surfer; the shoulders went on forever. The face could have been plucked from the painting of an angel in a sixteenth-century Florentine chapel, and there was no doubt that the smile he was beginning would have passed and exceeded USRDA standards as a nutritional supplement.
The match had burned short. Clear, rosy light swept over his lips as. he put the flame to his mouth and extinguished it with a breath before discarding it in the punched-aluminum ashtray. His finger ran over the remaining matches as if he were counting them. "We've got another fourteen left, so don't worry. You can have as long as you like to make up your mind."
He offered a second lit match, and this time she jarred her gaze loose from his sparkling eyes to accept it. Unexpected electricity flicked through her senses at having those broad hands close to her face. She took startled pleasure in the rough, steady coolness of his palm brushing her hand as he tilted the match for her.
He dropped the match in the ashtray and extended his hand to her in a friendly way. She accepted it, noting that he had the kind of skin that tanned to a rich, coppery bro
wn, that the callused hand felt like a brick but that its control was ever so gentle as it closed around hers.
"Daniel," he said.
"Joan." She copied the laconic manner, letting her eyes tease.
"I know. The others told me." He inclined his head toward the kids wearing UW-Platteville T-shirts, seated at a table near the door. She'd danced with several of them, slow with one of them, keeping his eager, dazzled smile at arm's length. Only a sip apiece, boys. What else had they told him? Amusement flickered in his dusky eyes—perhaps too much amusement. She experienced a sudden sense of exposure, as though she'd caught him at her desk reading some sentimental entry in her private journal. Did he find her faintly ridiculous, vamping callow college boys with her off-the-shoulder blouse and slit skirt? A painful memory returned of David in her room two nights ago, glancing at her Laura Ashley catalog, knowing condescension adding a sharp twist to his smile. "How sweet," he'd said.
She was sick to death of being judged by men. All rights sonny, I've got to take it from David Thorne, but I'll be damned if I'm going to take it from a country bumpkin in a felt hat. She cooled the smile that she realized with a pang must have looked unutterably coy.
"Nice of them to tell you," she said icily. She couldn't quite believe it when, instead of retreating with tail tucked, he said, "My first time. Would you mind if I joined you?"
"Would I mind? Daniel in the lion's den…"
The dark eyes were fairly burning with amusement. "Why? Do you bite?"
"Apparently not hard enough." Grasping her purse, she would have snapped out of her seat if he hadn't stopped her with the gentle pressure of his powerful hand on her tense one.
"Don't. Please don't," he said, and while she sat there with every stereotype of shy and gawky country boys and bromidic Amish men exploding in her mind, he let go her hand, leaving hot spots that could have registered on a Geiger counter. "You don't need to run away. All you need to do is tell me to go and I will. Is that what you want?"