It was a sound that never came. He tapped again and said something that might have been, "Please."
She sat up.
Another tap. "Please, Prue."
He sounded so pitiful. Her rage faded a little. She waited. He didn't knock again, he didn't speak. But she knew he was still standing there. She could see his shadow beneath the door.
Let him stand there all night if he wants to, a hard voice inside her head seemed to whisper.
But she knew she couldn't do that. Slowly she stood. And then she went to let him in.
* * *
Chapter 15
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He didn't know what to say when she opened the door. So he just looked at her. Even with those glasses on, she looked good to him now. He wondered what the hell was happening to him.
She said, "What?"
He said, "I'm sorry."
He thought she was going to shut the door on him. But she didn't. Her eyes looked stranger than usual. Maybe she was going to start crying on him. But she didn't do that, either. Not her. Not Prue. She pressed her lips together and stood a little taller.
He said, "I guess I'm just used to getting what I want."
She only went on looking at him, not quite crying, not quite mad.
He couldn't take it. He glanced away, down the hall.
"Billy?"
He made himself look back at her. "Yeah?"
"What is it you want?"
"You know." She waited. And he said it: "You."
She lifted a hand and brushed a few strands of that fiery hair away from her cheek. He wished with all his heart that she would have let him do that.
Something happened in her face. Another change. Now, instead of trapped between anger and tears, she looked purposeful. She moved back, clearing the doorway.
He stared, not understanding.
"Come in," she finally instructed in a small voice. He stepped over the threshold warily, expecting at any moment to be told to leave. She gestured at the bed.
The bed.
He wondered if this was a dream. An incredible, impossible dream that had somehow begun to come true at last.
But then again, it didn't have to mean anything that she'd let him in, that she'd signaled him toward the bed. He was probably just getting carried away with wishful thinking.
And damn, it was quiet in here. He sent a swift glance around the room. No stereo. It occurred to him that he might go nuts in this room, wishing and hoping in a silence so vast, it seemed to echo off the pale gray walls.
She was watching him, waiting for him to make the next move. He did what she'd told him to do, crossing to the four-poster bed, and sitting carefully on the edge of the fluffy white quilt.
He waited for her next command. What the hell else could he do? Whatever was going on here, he wasn't running it.
She flicked off the wall switch. The corners of the room turned shadowy. The only light left was the small lamp on the bed stand, making a golden pool of light across the whiteness of the pillows and quilt.
A tall bureau stood not far from her. She went to it. He saw that bag then, the brown paper one she'd brought in with her this afternoon. It was sitting on top of the bureau.
She picked up the bag and turned. "I went to Nevada City today. I had lunch. Then I went to Grass Valley. I stopped at Longs Drugs. I didn't admit to myself what I was doing there, at first."
Was he supposed to say something in response to that? He couldn't think of a damn thing. So he kept his mouth shut.
She came toward him. She was wearing a pair of gray chino-type pants and a white blouse, with flat-heeled black shoes and a black belt. She looked like some lady executive on her day off. A direct, no-nonsense, cut-the-crap sort of woman.
He wanted to grab her, mess up that silky cap of hair, slide off that belt, take down those chino-type pants. But all he did was watch her, hardly daring to breathe, hearing his own heartbeat, loud and hungry in his ears.
She stopped right in front of him, so close that one of her legs brushed his knee. The bag was rolled shut. Carefully she unrolled it, pulled the sides open and turned it upside down.
Two boxes of condoms, a dozen each, fell into his lap. One stayed there. The other bounced off and landed on the nubby gray throw rug beneath his feet.
His heart froze. Everything went absolutely still. And then he remembered that breathing was necessary. He sucked air into his lungs and let it out, still staring down at the one box of condoms that hadn't bounced to the floor. Altogether, twenty-four of the suckers. Wow. She really had faith in him.
She said, "I thought, if we were going to do this, we should be … responsible about it. You know?"
He gulped. "Uh. Yeah. Good thinking."
"I mean, especially in our case. After what happened, with you and Randi. After Jesse…"
He reached out, still not daring to actually look up at her, and caught her hand. It felt so good, so soft and warm. Best of all, she didn't pull back. For a moment, she was still. And then she wrapped her fingers with his. He took the box of condoms from his lap and set it on the nightstand. Then he tugged on her hand. She stepped forward, so she stood between his thighs. He looked up, smiled. She smiled back, with some effort.
He said, "Jesse's turning out to be the best thing that ever happened to me."
She nodded, her eyes thoughtful. "Still…"
"What?"
"We don't need another accident. Having a baby should be a conscious decision."
He squeezed her hand. "Prue. Always on the high road."
She pressed her lips together, looked away. "You don't agree?"
He tugged on her hand once more, to make her look at him again. "I agree. One hundred percent."
She closed her eyes. "I guess it's not your fault – that Randi loved you and you didn't love her back."
"That's really bothered you, huh?"
"Yes."
"Prue."
"Um?"
"You keep looking at the wall."
With visible effort, she met his eyes. "I feel … disloyal."
"To Randi?"
She nodded. "At the same time, I feel as if Randi's up there in heaven, cheering me on."
He couldn't resist. "So you really think Randi made it to heaven?"
She let out a small sound of irritation. "Billy, stop."
"Come on." He bent to scoop up the other box of condoms and set it beside the first. That accomplished, he patted his knee.
She made another sound – this one disbelieving. "You want me to sit on your lap?"
"Yeah."
"I am not the kind of woman who sits on a man's lap."
He laughed, realizing that his heart had settled down to a slow, deep rhythm. That he was anticipating, but no longer scared stiff that one wrong move would blow this whole deal. "Make an exception."
She sighed. He tugged again. She dropped onto his knee.
He put his arms around her and pulled her closer. She went, if somewhat reluctantly. He rested his head against her shoulder, breathing in the scent of her, which was a little bit like roses and also something else – baby powder, maybe. He couldn't be sure, he only knew he liked it and could recognize her anywhere by sense of smell alone.
He also liked the feel of her, soft, but sort of resilient. She seemed smaller in his arms than she looked most of the time.
She coughed.
He chuckled. "What?"
"Well, what do we do next?"
"Wing it."
"Easy for you to say."
"Come on." He fell backward onto the bed, pulling her with him. She went, but slid off him in the process, so they ended up lying next to each other, his arm beneath her neck. They stared up at the lace canopy.
"Billy?"
"Yeah?"
"I have a feeling I'm going to be very bad at this."
He rose up on an elbow and leaned over her. "This your first time, Prue?"
She gave him the tiniest of nods.
He
studied her plug-ugly glasses, her cheekbones, the really fine, slim shape of her nose, thinking that he was about to break one of the cardinal rules of being Billy Jones: no virgins. Billy had always considered a virgin as someone a man like him shouldn't mess with. Call it respect. Call it fear. Call it self-preservation. He didn't make love to women who had never made love before. He left the rites of sexual initiation to braver men than he'd ever be.
She was watching him. "Are you changing your mind?"
"What makes you say that?"
"I don't know. Just something in your expression."
He gave her a slow smile. "No, I'm not changing my mind. So don't get your hopes up. You're not getting out of this."
She lifted her hand and her fingers brushed the side of his face. "I don't want to get out of this." Her voice was all whispery. The sound of it, the little quiver in it, did him in. His pulse went crazy and his heart felt too big, thudding away in there, hard and insistent. Behind the buttons of his 501's, there was suddenly a shortage of space.
He kissed the tip of her nose. "You have a very fine nose, did you know that?" He kissed her lips, one soft, quick kiss. "And a good mouth."
She was smiling, relaxing a little. "Oh, Billy. A fine nose and a good mouth?"
"I like your eyebrows, too. What I can see of 'em, behind your glasses."
"They're too pale."
"Pale is good. Pale is fine." He lifted his hand.
She knew what he was going to do, and turned her head slightly away. "I won't be able to see."
"Please."
She looked at him forever. At last, she murmured, "All right."
He took her glasses away, set them behind him on the nightstand, between the condoms and the alarm clock. When he turned back to her, she looked at him in that soft, unfocused way he remembered from the night at his club – and the other night, when they had danced and he had kissed her for the first time, and then she had turned him down.
She said, "I can't see, but I am not defenseless."
He touched her pale, golden red brows, one and then the other, tracing the shape of them, following the curves.
"Did you hear me, Billy?"
"I heard." He put his mouth against her temple, felt the pulse beat there, dared to put out his tongue, taste the rhythm of her heart.
"I think that's my deepest fear, Billy. To be defenseless in front of a man."
"You're not, Prue," he whispered into the sweet, dark central hollow of her ear. "You know you're not." He pulled back, looked down into her blind, yearning eyes. She looked back. What she saw, he would never know. But the way she looked at him made him hunger. Made him burn.
First, he wanted to watch her lose herself.
And then he wanted to get lost in her.
He laid his hand on that black belt she wore. Those pale brows drew together. But she didn't say a word, didn't try to move away. He pulled the tip from the keeper, the prong from the buckle. He undid the button of her gray pants and slid the zipper down. Underneath, he found silk panties. Silver gray silk. It didn't look as if they had any lace on them. Nothing fancy. Just fine, plain silk.
He slid his hand beneath those panties, felt satiny skin, a warm tangle of hair.
She was already wet. He had known by the look in those eyes that she would be. She moved her legs farther apart, giving him access. He stroked that sweetness, bending to take her mouth when she could no longer hold back the moans.
He swallowed her cries. They tasted so good. She moved against his hand, and he drank in what happened to her, all of her turning liquid, baby powder, roses, all around him as she came.
He broke the kiss at the last minute, to watch her toss her head, watch the way that dark red hair rubbed the white quilt, to see the sweat of loving on her pale skin.
When she went limp, he bent close again. He took her lips, biting them a little, tugging at her clothes, getting them off her as he kissed her. Her body felt easy, warm and ready under his hands. She helped him, in a slow, lazy sort of way, pulling her arms from the sleeves of her shirt, toeing off her shoes, lifting her hips so he could pull down the gray pants and the silk panties.
He had her down to her gray silk bra and a pair of ankle socks when she started shoving at him. He thought for a moment that she was going to want to stop. He swore and then scowled at her. "What?"
But then she whispered, "You, too…"
And he understood that all she wanted was for him to get his clothes off, too. So he did. He could do that pretty damn quick, as a matter of fact.
Within seconds, they both were naked. She looked just like he'd thought she would: slim and pale and a hell of a lot prettier than she did with her clothes on.
She was smiling at him, blindly. "I can't believe it."
He reached out, touched her shoulder, felt the silky smoothness of her skin. "What?"
"This is … just fine. Natural. Okay."
He grinned back at her. "I told you so." He pulled her close, got that first incredible shock of her naked body against his own. "Kiss me, Prue."
She obliged, with enthusiasm.
A moment later, she was sighing. And then she was moaning.
When he pushed her back on the white cloud of the bed and put himself inside her, she cried out. He stilled and waited.
She was looking at him. "That hurt."
"Sorry."
"But it's starting to … not hurt."
"That's good." He waited some more, sincerely hoping that he would not explode.
"Billy?"
He tried to say, Yeah? but it came out as more of a groan.
"Billy…" And then she moved against him, pushing her hips up to him, offering him more.
And more was fine with Billy Jones. He pressed deeper. She took him. And from about that point, there was only her body and his body and the white cloud of the bed, the golden pool of the bedside lamp. It all swam together, became an endless pulse, a glow, a sensation of expansion and glorious heat. Billy held on, he drowned in baby powder and roses, in silky skin and fiery hair and the soft, urgent cries that Prue made as she moved beneath him.
At the end, he was probably too rough for her. He pushed himself in hard and deep. She took him, but with a startled gasp. His climax rolled through him, yanking him under, then tossing him up, turning him inside out, so his body and his mind were one endless, exploding sensation. White heat. Expansion.
Then contraction. A feeling of falling. And the blessed sweetness of landing lax, satisfied – and still naked, still with Prue.
* * *
"Did I hurt you too bad?" Billy whispered in her ear.
Prudence smiled. He was squashing her, especially her hipbones and her breasts.
"Did I?" He sounded worried.
She rubbed her cheek against his. "No, you didn't hurt me too bad."
He let out a big, relieved-sounding breath. "Good."
She pushed at him, a light push.
"Don't make me move." But then, as soon as he got the words out, he was rolling, holding onto her as he did it, so that she ended up on top.
She looked down at his blur of a face.
He said, softly. "Please don't go away. We have twenty-four condoms to use, remember?"
She kissed his nose. "Twenty-three."
He let out another long breath. "Right. Twenty-three." She slithered backward, toward the night table. His arms tightened around her. "I said, you can't go."
"I'm just getting my glasses."
"Why?"
"So I can see."
"You don't need to see."
"Billy, I want to see. And I'm not going anywhere."
"Swear it."
"Billy, come on."
"Hell. All right. Get 'em."
She sat among the pillows and felt on the nightstand until she found them. When she put them on and saw Billy, stretched across her bed, naked and grinning, she went ahead and grinned right back. Then she noticed the red stains on the quilt. He saw where she was looking. H
e frowned, then he looked at her once more – and they were grinning all over again.
He said, "I'm starved."
Her stomach actually growled right then. "Me, too."
"Let's raid the refrigerator." He grabbed her hand and pulled her off the bed toward the door.
She hung back. "But, Billy, we're naked."
He looked down at himself, then he looked at her. And then he shrugged. "We sure as hell are."
"Billy, I don't think I'm quite ready yet to go wandering around my house in the buff."
He laughed. "In the buff?"
"That is what I said."
"Well. Get a robe, then."
She did as he suggested, collecting her white robe from the closet.
"Ready?" he asked, as she belted the robe at her waist. She nodded. He pulled the door open and led her into the upstairs hall.
They stopped briefly in the upstairs bathroom, where he got rid of the condom. Then they went on down the stairs.
He took her to the living room first, led her to the sofa and said, "Sit down. Let me put on some music."
She dropped obediently to the cushions, tucking one foot up under herself and waited as he went through the CDs. Once he'd made his choices about what he wanted to hear, he went on to load up a cartridge, tapping his bare toes and humming to himself the whole time. Prudence watched him, thinking that there wasn't an ounce of fat on him. His muscles were all long and sharply defined. She marveled at how fine and hard his body was, as she knew how he liked to drink and she'd never seen him exercise on purpose in the time he'd been staying with her. But he had that easy grace of very lean men, that look of economy, of nerve endings right up close to the surface of the skin. When he turned to give her a smile, she noted that the bruises from the fight with Sam had faded to almost nothing, to green shadows against his skin.
"You'll wake Jesse," she chided, when the first tune came on, too loud.
He shook his head, but he did turn it down. Then he came for her, reaching out his hand, tugging her off the couch and into his arms.
They danced through the dining room and into the kitchen, where they made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They ate the sandwiches standing at the counter.
The Taming of Billy Jones Page 18