Lightning That Lingers (7 page)

“Are you cold, Jenny?” he murmured, his tongue rimming her earlobe, his hands on her waist pressing her into him. “Let my body keep you warm. Jenny, darling Jenny.” His whisper teased the inside of her ear. “Are you uncomfortable now?”

His hands wove gentle up-and-down patterns on the sides of her body, tracing her shape through her smooth sweater, caressing her ribs, the flatness of her stomach, and her rounded hips, molding her softness with exquisite sensitivity.

“Yes …” she breathed as his fingertips skimmed the underside of her breasts, and as his fingers gently covered her tenderness, driving the aching need deep within her, “yes … yes …”

His laughter came quietly against her cheeks, then her lips, and she drew a hard concussive breath when his fingers, wending downward, began to feed thick dreamy pleasure to the inside of her thighs. “Darling, if you’re still uncomfortable”—his lips sought and nuzzled hers, showing her the outline of his smile—“I think we could find the cure.”

Four

His words brought her chin up, which hardly surprised him, and her wide-set eyes gazed up at him with dismay. For a moment, she was painfully open, her unguarded sensitivity carrying the simplicity of a line drawing—Tweetybird in a tough predicament. He knew suddenly why she had grown up to be so cautious. Jennifer Hamilton was very vulnerable.

He enfolded her in his arms, watching the top of her head as her face sought the false refuge of his chest. Her fingers clung to the sides of his coat and he heard her make a soft sound, something less than a word, more than a sigh.

He knew surrender when he saw it in a woman. This was something else. Numb shock, probably. He had a sudden unsettling vision of himself as a predator—the puma holding a small struggling creature under one paw. The thought disturbed him enough to bring discipline to the fire in his senses.

The riveting sweetness of caressing her mouth with his tongue had taken him off guard. This was new to him, this overpowering need to be with a woman. The one thing he was not capable of doing right now was letting her leave his life. It was ironic that after all this time and all he’d experienced, the feeling should come in the arms of this tender, unripe person. This wasn’t the way he’d expected it to happen.

He put his hand against the back of her head, stroking the sleek healthy strands of her hair, watching its subdued sheen glow like jet in the starlight. God, he thought, please don’t let me hurt this woman. He knew that if he pushed deftly enough in the right direction, he could probably have her with him tonight. That knowledge brought him nothing but a weary self-accusation. A fast, easy, efficient seduction would wound her no matter how much it met the demands of his body. For her, he had to relearn intimacy.

When he felt her trying to withdraw from his arms, he let his grip slacken immediately and watched in sympathy, touched with desire and tender amusement, as she slid a little distance down the seat, straightening her shoulders with a visible attempt at dignity.

Staring with some intensity out the windshield at the frozen, twisted line of trees across the field, she slowly drew off her mitten and touched bare unsteady fingertips to her damp lips. Her hand dropped. She cleared her throat. “You’re very thorough.”

Admiring the pluckiness that made her continue to resist him, he said, “Which, I take it, is not a characteristic you find endearing?”

“People who are good at everything depress me.”

“Don’t worry. I have moments of great ineptitude.”

Glaring blankly out the window, she said, “I have
hours
of great ineptitude.”

He wanted to take her in his arms again but he couldn’t, because the desire to make love to her was still stinging his body. Instead, he rested his arm on the seat back, his fingertips stroking her shoulder, running along the pliant groove of her jacket seam. Then, without wanting it to happen, his fingers strayed to her face, tracing the line of her nose, the gently rounded nostrils, the entrancing corner of her lips. I want you, he thought. I want you, lady.

He slid his fingers underneath her soft knit cap to explore the warm hollows of her ear. “D’you know something?”

“What?”

The slight breathless quality in her voice found a strong answering vibration within his body that took a heavier struggle than he had anticipated to subdue. The face she turned toward him, though wary, seemed to have no idea what effect she had on his body chemistry. He grinned inwardly. It wasn’t safe to allow this poor kid out after dark!

He withdrew his hand and started the engine. “You don’t really cringe.”

Jennifer, watching the skillful, intriguing motions of his hands on the steering wheel, was trying to fathom how Philip Brooks had happened to a life that until now had been droning along at a pleasantly mundane rate.

It had begun to snow, gay tumbling drops that grew bright in the headlights, scattering like breeze-blown blossoms. Black and dramatic, the
naked tree limbs met in tangled embraces overhead. Behind the stars, the sky was the color of magic.

Magic. When they reached the turnoff that would have permitted them to double back toward the Victorian Arms, the car swept onward. Jennifer closed her eyes.
I hope he’s kidnapping me
. Abandoned to the wolves … She was forced to begin redefining the wolf. Unexpected depths had surfaced in a man she had expected to be shallow. He was funny, forceful, and clever. If it was difficult to tell whether he was kind or merely charming, it didn’t seem to lessen his appeal. She spent a moment thinking about the word “appeal.” To say that Philip Brooks had appeal was to win a black belt in understatement.

Philip Brooks. The name caught and held in her mind, printing and reprinting. Brooks had a special meaning in Wisconsin, as Rockefeller had in other parts of the country. One studied it in elementary school history classes. A grand and eclectic family, they had made a fortune in banking and put it into consolidating small railroad companies throughout the Midwest. Outstanding philanthropists, their names showered the pediments of art centers and libraries all over the state. She had a flashing memory of the M.C. at the Cougar Club introducing Philip as a “native blueblood” which she had paid no attention to at the time. And there was the patrician accent—never explained. Surely it was impossible for a true Brooks, precious to the state’s historical heritage, to be peeling off his jeans in a raucous nightclub. The thought shocked her more than any other thing that had occurred this strange evening.

The station wagon stopped in front of a mammoth gateway, the tall brickwork and wrought iron bristling with rank and importance. It was the portal to the Brooks estate.

Philip depressed a disk on a small control that sat on the dashboard and the gate swung apart as though it had been whisked open by invisible hands. Jennifer thought immediately of the magical palace in
Beauty and the Beast
. The beast’s palace. The outrageous but not unappealing idea that Philip was going to take her to a cozy bachelor pad and make love to her gave way to a truly terrifying notion: not only might he be sinfully wealthy, he might also be taking her to a far from cozy mansion to introduce her to his parents. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

“I hope that I don’t seem vulgarly inquisitive,” she said in a voice that was distinct and polite. “But where are we going?”

“I’d like to make you acquainted with some friends of mine.”

Friends. “Do they live in a mansion?”

“No.” His smile enlarged the word. “In trees.”

That set her back. The wagon traversed fifty yards of a wooded drive and then turned bumpily into a narrow, snow-packed lane. Stiff branches pelted the car doors and windows with a clapping rattle. High withered grass reached through the snow to brush the car frame. She wondered if there was some inoffensive manner of phrasing a question that asked teasingly if these mysterious tree dwelling friends were members of the ape family. She had decided there was not when he said, “You don’t wear perfume,” as though it had just occurred to him.

For some odd reason there was approval in his voice. “True. I never remember.”

“That’s good. They might not have liked it.”

They live in trees. They don’t like perfume. Ho-kay. The ultraconservatism of someone who could be offended by women wearing perfume accorded not at all with someone leading a raffish and precarious existence in a tree house. The man was pulling her leg.

“These friends of yours—they
are
human?”

“Jennifer! I strip. Would I expose you to any of my unsavory associates?” he asked playfully.

His tone was light as spun sugar, amusement rimmed the corners of the long fascinating mouth, and yet some little understood sense within her seemed to be registering his subtle anxiety. Or it might have been her imagination. Surely it wasn’t possible that this beautiful, bossy, sensual person could be that vulnerable.

Anyway, every shred of evidence indicated that he came from a family whose members shipped their money to the bank in semitrailers. One wouldn’t think he had to work at all, much less at something that disturbed him. Confused as she was, she couldn’t bring herself to ask him about his family directly. His connection or at least what seemed to be his connection to wealth and power was strangely embarrassing to her. She wasn’t sure why, perhaps because it seemed so alien. Reared herself in a genteel, modest prosperity in the milieu of the small college where her mother had taught economics, she had experienced nothing of the world of the great and grand beyond the fairy tale version of it depicted on television and
in films. But surely these people didn’t let their sons strip in nightclubs.

“Why do you do it?” she asked, her voice raised to carry over the scratching branches. Studying his face intently in the reflected gleam of the headlights she caught every nuance of his expression as it became a powerful combination of cynical amusement and some darker thing that she barely glimpsed.

Tersely he said, “They pay me.” He paused. “A lot.”

She might have pointed out that there were plenty of other jobs that would have done the same without requiring him to take off his clothes. But the memory of his kiss was growing warmer inside her instead of fading, and the sky was the color of magic. Jennifer relaxed back into the seat—and into the new and wonderful glow of frivolity.

“More than the Emerald Lake Library, do you think?” she asked. “Can women be Cougars too? Do you give lessons?”

“Yes. No. And I’d be delighted to show you how to take off your clothes. To be honest, though, I’d be much more interested in results than in technique.”

I asked for that, she thought. How interesting of me. I wish—oh, dear Lord,
how I wish
—he would stop this car and kiss me again.

The car did stop soon. He killed the engine in a small clearing and turned to her in the darkness.

“Now we have to wait.”

“What for?”

“Our eyes need to adjust to the night. Do you know much about night vision?”

“No.” She was beginning to find Philip Brooks
more and more fascinating. “Except that it’s an excuse to make kids eat carrots.”

“Yes. Because deficiency in vitamin A can impair night vision. The retina of your eye is covered with rod cells and cone cells. The rods are sensitive to light. The cones are sensitive to color and they can’t function very efficiently in dim light. That’s why you can’t see colors in the dark.” He slipped an arm around her shoulders and drew her to his sturdy comfort. “Look at the sky.”

Jennifer looked at the sky and thought about how close his sensitive fingers were to her breast.

“That black velvet sky is just as blue now as it was in the day,” he said. “Our eyes don’t work well enough to see it. But they can still do much better than most people realize. There’s a chemical in the rod cells of the retina that decomposes as it reacts to light, but in dim light, you can synthesize it faster than light can break it down so you build up a good supply. Once your eyes are fully dark-adapted they become many times more light sensitive than in bright light. Hmm.” He tilted up her chin on a strong finger and examined her face. “You must have a higher threshold of boredom than most of my friends. You’re still awake! And,” he continued softly, “you’ve begun to smile, miracle of miracles.” His thumb was tracing the upcurve of her lips as they tipped to meet the slow descent of his.

She heard him breathe, “Don’t stop,” just before the sparklingly sweet meeting of their lips. It felt good to her, so good, as his mouth moved against the tautness of her smile. Gently, he stroked her tingling flesh with his lower lip and then brought his mouth into light contact with
hers, rocking against her mouth, parting her. His hand skimmed up her back to the base of her neck in a light, tantalizing massage before it swept slowly down to cover her breast. The pressure of fabric and of his steady fingers pushed heavy flutters of sensation through her chest and her skin responded to each nuance of his cupping palm. Some impulse of the night’s magic made her bring her arms up and clasp them around his neck, and lean into his body. One of his hands moved to accommodate her, pressing her close; and the other continued its lazily kindling motion against her coat and the flushing softness beneath.