Ciji Ware (39 page)

If Sim were honest with himself, he would have to acknowledge that he was suddenly feeling pretty apprehensive about this obvious next step as well. This had the makings of a serious liaison. If it didn’t happen to work out, one, or both of them was going to get hurt. Daphne, too, had to be absolutely sure she was willing to take the risk.

“Even waking up each morning has its dangers,” he said. “It’s a risk we
both
have to be willing to assume. So, what’s it to be? Do we make this leap of faith tonight… or not?”

Silence fell between them until she said, finally, “I’m feeling that… I have this strange connection with you too… and that I… I want what is happening… to
really
happen.” She grinned at him crookedly, and added. “Now, if that’s not a remark by a nearly recovered magnolia, I don’t know what
is
!”

“You’re not your mother,” Sim reminded her firmly, “In fact, I don’t think you have any idea how totally unique you are in this world,
mah
de-ah
,” he added with deliberate irony.

“A woman of the New South, right?”

“A magnolia with moxie…” He chuckled. “It’s an irresistible combination.” He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the mouth and then he moved his head to brush his lips beneath her earlobe in an all-out frontal assault. The time for talking was at an end—if that was how she wished it.

“I’m trusting you, Mr. Outdoorsman, not to be one of those trophy-collecting hunters,” she said softly, leaning into his kisses, “or I’ll have your license revoked.”

“Oh, I’m not that,” he said, surprised by the husky tone of his voice. “Maybe I’m other things, but I’m also a throwback to that strangest of all male breeds… a one-woman man. Like swans. I always thought I’d mate for life. And even when it didn’t turn out that way, it would take a lot to beat that notion out of me.”

“All I’m asking,” she said, tilting her head to gaze at him soberly, “is that you be a one-woman-at-a-time man until we know… we know how all this might play out.”

Sim put his hand over his heart, and swore solemnly, “Till we know what we’ve truly got going here, I pledge to be monogamous to the core.”

“Thank you,” she said simply. “Thank you for having the guts to use the
m
word.”

“You’re welcome. It’s not as hard for me as you think.”

She smiled again. “The gentlemen of my experience didn’t even have the word in their vocabulary.” She leaned closer, her scent only slightly less alluring than the promise in her gaze. “Here’s how I figure it, shutterbug,” she murmured, casting him a sidelong glance that was as come-hither as any mating dance he’d ever chronicled on film. “How can I know if I really love jazz and blues if I don’t play them, right?”

“A wise woman,” he commended.

She drew even closer and brushed her lips lightly against his.

“And how can I know what I feel for
you
, Simon Hopkins, if I don’t discover it, firsthand?” Then, to his utter amazement, she whispered, “Shhh… quiet, Daphne! Stop talking and just ask this man to kiss you senseless.”

We
are
creatures
first, and rational beings second
, he thought as he seized the initiative and did as he’d been requested, reveling in the warmth of her lips, the tip of her tongue tentatively exploring his own, and the faint taste of blueberry lemonade, tart, and astringent.

When she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, the shirt she’d been wearing gaped open and he felt her naked breasts against his chest. With a little sigh, she invited him to deepen their kiss, and suddenly he found that they were stretched the length of the narrow daybed in a tangle of bathrobes and shirts and entwined legs—one pair naked, the other cloaked in drawstring sailing pants.

Laughing, she sat up and held his gaze while she shrugged out of his shirt.

“Ever play strip poker without the cards?” she asked.

Then she waited with a mischievous smile while he stood, peeled off his bathrobe, and threw it on the floor like a matador divesting himself of his cape. He remained standing by the daybed and allowed his gaze to float lazily from her face to her slender throat to her beautiful bare breasts, lovely in their fullness and form. He sensed that his sudden nudity had unnerved her to some degree, so he remained stock still so as not to frighten or alarm her with any sudden moves. His mouth felt parched now, but he held off swallowing, even. He would wait as long as it took. He would allow her to grow accustomed to his presence. He would let her send him a signal… a sign. Meanwhile he drank in the sight of her naked torso, slender waist, and long legs still clad in outsize sailing pants.

When, finally, she licked her lips nervously and looked up at him through her lashes, he pointed to her drawstring trousers.

“May I do the honors?” he inquired.

She merely nodded and, smiling faintly, lay back against the pillows, allowing him to fumble with the strings and then indulge in the exquisite pleasure of skimming the cotton cloth from her waistline, down the length of her shapely legs. He paused before he tossed her clothing onto the floor in the pile that included his robe.

“I knew you’d be beautiful, but…”

“Me, too, you,” she whispered.

He shook his head, unable to speak. Then he sat on the side of the bed and drew her onto his lap, absorbing the sensation of her smooth, golden flesh against his, caressing a breast with one hand while kissing her wherever his lips happened to fall. And then, somehow, they were lying on the narrow mattress once more, and she was beneath him. He gloried in nuzzling each breast while she arched her back in an unmistakable gesture of acquiescence. He sampled first one, then the other, like a ravenous hummingbird that would not leave the flowerbed alone until he’d drunk his fill.

He lowered his head, tasting her freshly scrubbed skin where her breasts creased her rib cage, licking, grazing his lips against her navel, and then glancing up to assess her reaction. Her eyes were closed and a ghost of a contented smile played about her open lips. He lowered his head once again and experienced his own slight intake of breath at the sight of a golden triangle of curls he’d only imagined. The reality of those erotic musings was now within view and he grew hard and short of breath. Her lovely scent assailed him again, a powerful agent that set his course like unseen radar, toward the target of his desire.

Penetrating this all-consuming haze of rampant craving was the sensation of her fingertips grazing his head. “Sim… Sim…?”

He raised his eyes to meet her questioning gaze. Her expression was a potent blend of shyness, alarm, and unquenched arousal.

“Oh… yes, darling Daphne,” he assured her gently. “I’ll wear a condom… but not yet. All in good time.” And then he continued his quest for the exquisite sweetness only inches away.

As for Daphne, Sim’s promise erased the last barrier, the last bastion that a thirty-one-year-old woman, burning up with desire for this man, would think to put in their path.

It had been the verbena soap that ultimately did her in, she reflected in the part of her brain that was still making sense. That, and the knowledge that here was a man who would look after her mosquito bites and wasn’t afraid to say the word “monogamous.”

Earlier, when she’d donned Sim’s shirt and sailing pants and found herself sitting on his bed, she was fairly sure, then, there was no turning back. That, despite all the warnings ringing in her head, she wanted nothing so much as for him to kiss her blind and to feel the length of his long, muscular body pressing against her own.

Peel
me
a
grape.

The beguiling lyrics of the sexiest song in her repertoire mercifully replaced the alarms as Sim continued his rapt exploration of her navel and the creases between torso and legs. Wherever he touched her, he laid claim to another inch of her skin that would never be the same after this day, never
not
know what it was like to be driven mad with pleasure.

Peel
me
a
grape?
she thought, near to laughter that bordered on hysteria.

She
was the one being peeled down to the deepest layer of desire, stripped bare to the core of her voluptuousness, calling forth a sensuality she’d never fathomed she possessed. She could only pray that he continue his selfless ministrations, for she yearned for his lips to brush her there… and there… and, oh my God…
yes
! There!

It had been so long since she’d been touched. So
long
… and never like
this
with such skill and attention to detail. Wild, fluttering sensations began to radiate a universe of incandescent warmth and tenderness. The cottage walls and the rest of her surroundings faded from her consciousness as she allowed herself to be claimed by a liquid tide of passion, while, somewhere, a vivid recollection of the peregrine falcon, soaring and darting in the heavens above the Natchez Trace, drifted through her thoughts.

Daphne heard an attenuated cry, a shattering of the silence that had enveloped the wooded landscape outside, an atmosphere utterly still, except for the whir of wind that could sometimes be heard under a falcon’s wings. She realized with a start that it had been her own voice resounding in her ears. A surge of sensation unlike any she had ever known lifted her higher still, and then burst, spilling snowy white down that floated to earth, feathers shed by a bird taken in midflight.

Another rush of emotion overwhelmed her and she fell back against the bed, her lips parted, exhausted from the journey, wanting only to be held, and soothed, and embraced in the safety of sheltering wings.

Sim’s head was next to hers now, and he was cradling her against his chest. He kissed her eyebrows, her cheeks, the shell of the ear nearest him. With one arm, he reached down and retrieved his bathrobe from the cottage floor and draped it over their nakedness.

Outside the window, the only sound now was a faint chattering of birds on a tree branch near where Daphne lay somnolent and sated. Far, far in the distance, she thought she heard a falcon’s cry.

After a few minutes, she raised her head, her eyes growing moist.

“Hey there,” she whispered.

“Hello, angel…” he said, watching her intently.

Somehow, the endearment no longer set her teeth on edge. With Sim to show her the way, she’d soared and floated and somehow landed safely.

“I have never… in my life… experienced anything like… like what just happened.” She kissed him on the forehead in an act of benediction. “You are a good and generous man.”

He smiled faintly and responded in kind, kissing her on each eyelid.

“Believe me,” he murmured, “the pleasure was at least half mine.”

Daphne propped an elbow on the mattress and cupped her chin in one hand.

“Is that so?” she challenged with a wicked gleam in her eye. She boldly smoothed the palm of her hand along his chest to below his waist and continued downward. “Well, here’s the other half,” she announced.

She began with a feathery touch, gentle and sensuous at once, calling on the gods of music to help her express to Sim the same unstinting passion that had left her breathless and content. Slowly, and with the attention she would bestow upon a glorious adagio or arching glissando, she stroked and caressed him, wooing him as lovers woo, as artists paint, as musicians play.

And then, before her song could come to its forgone conclusion, Sim seized her hand, raised it to his lips and murmured, “Another time, angel woman. Another time.”

And in an instant, he was hovering above her like a protective eagle, his arms on either side of the pillow, his hips pressed against hers, his long legs smothering her thighs. And then he kissed her and she knew how much she wanted him.

“Yes?” he asked, as if her thoughts were transparent.

“Oh, yes, please,” she sighed. Sim swiftly donned the protection he had promised, and when he’d taken her in his arms again, she drew him into her, welcoming him to a soft, sacred place where she would take off her feathered mask and give herself up once more to the beating of wings and the soaring joy of a peregrine’s flight.

And then they slept.

***

Daphne awoke first and tucked her head under Sim’s chin, pressing her cheek as close to his chest as she possibly could. She was in the falcon’s lair, she thought sleepily, protected from stalkers and predators of all descriptions.

Her eyelids still felt heavy, as did her whole body, and a sprightly tune drifted through her thoughts. It was an old melody, a lively gavotte popular at eighteenth-century balls, that Cousin Maddy had taught her when she was a child just learning to play the harp with both hands. The sprightly tune always made her think of parties and laughter and whispered assignations arranged behind fluttering fans.