Lightning That Lingers (9 page)

That night brought her new restlessness, new unease. She tried to see herself clearly, with her strengths and weaknesses. She was romantic, amiable like the little skunk unless threatened, and filled with a thousand picture dreams of how the world ought to be … and only rarely was. Some of the most enchanting hours of her life had been spent in Philip’s forest, but any relationship she had with him would have to be lived in the real world. And it would take a certain toughness, a certain quality of imperviousness that she would have to develop for the fleeting span of
Philip’s interest. Nor was she composed emotionally for the heady lightning of short spectacular love affairs. She needed things around her that grew and lasted. She needed security.

About the man himself, she tried not to think at all; not about the breathtaking physical countenance, the deft gentle hands, the generous mouth. Nor the engaging manner, nor the mystery of why anyone with his background had come to be July.

She shed tears and faced the truth that Philip Brooks and Jennifer Hamilton were not meant to work.

The glow of his remembered presence stayed with her, and their winter night together slept uneasily at the edge of her conscious thoughts. It hardly helped that the preschool story hour she had planned for Friday had the topic of “Animals.”

At two o’clock on Friday afternoon, the three- and four-year-olds came tumbling into the children’s section. Working hard to learn names, and smiling into little faces, she showed the thirty tots magazines with brightly colored animal pictures, a film strip about how puppies grew, and read aloud from books of animal stories. She admired and displayed on the bulletin board their crayon drawings and snapshots of their pets. She taught them the eensy-weensy-spider finger play. And rolling up the cuffs of her puff-sleeved pink striped blouse, hitching her pleated pants, she got right down on the carpet with them and became animals. They were elephants, swinging their arms for trunks, squirting themselves with water. They were bunnies, sitting up on their haunches, wriggling their noses to sniff for carrots, hopping through the grass. New animals entered her repertoire too: a
waddling porcupine, and raccoons that ate with tiny dexterous fingers, and deer shaking snow-flakes from their tails.

Jennifer was a monkey, squatting on the floor beside a little girl in braids and a Smurf shirt, peeling an imaginary banana, making monkey noises through an outthrust simian jaw. When she curved a hand upward over her head to scratch lazily at an armpit, the sweep of her gaze caught a freeze-frame filled with Philip Brooks. He was standing twenty feet away, watching her, a slim hip in softly-stretched denim resting against a low case of encyclopedias.

Fate, do you have it in for me?

The need to maintain her slipping grasp on the precipice of sanity would not permit her to look back but she retained the impression of porcelain blue eyes, sensitive lips uptilted in amusement, an open down jacket, a shapely hand curved around a pair of cashmere gloves. She had the dreadful feeling that her skin was turning chalk white, but without missing a beat, she smacked her lips to finish the last of her pretend banana, offering the final bite to her little friend in the pigtails, who chewed solemnly.

In front of a sea of trusting faces and Philip Brooks, she did her final animal, a seal, showing the interested audience how to squirm across the floor on forearms that were flippers, dragging their lower body behind. She and thirty preschoolers barked and balanced balls on their noses.

Getting stiffly to her feet, walking around helping out little seals, she asked cheerfully, “How many of you have met Jinx, our new gerbil? I’m going to bring him out so that you can say ‘hello.’ ”

Lydia, who had been helping her, was waiting with a very peculiar expression on her face beside the low pine table that held the refurbished aquarium where Jinx lived. Under her breath, out of the corner of her mouth like a B-movie mobster, she muttered, “Philip is here.”

“I saw him.” Elaborately calm, Jennifer removed the wire cage cover. “Maybe he wants to check out a book.”

“Hum. You must not have noticed the way he’s watching you. He wants to check out a librarian. I’ll take the rest of the hour. You go talk to him. If he stands around much longer like that, one of us may go and attack him. We’re only human. Oh, my Lord, you aren’t really intending to pick that … that
thing
up, are you?”

“Yes.” Jinx dove under a pile of bedding as Jennifer tried awkwardly to scoop him up. “It’s important for me to show no fear. Positive early experiences with animals are essential to a child’s development of—” She broke off, and said
sotto voce
into the cage, “Quit the funny business, you furry little fink, or I’ll trade you in on a hamster.”

Lydia laughed surreptitiously. “I don’t see how you can touch it. It looks like a—”

“I know what it looks like,” Jennifer said grimly, lifting Jinx. “If Mr. Greenjeans can do it, I can do it.” Turning to her innocent audience, she tried to let nothing show in her face except warm delight in and tolerance for the unique varieties of animal life on the green earth. “Jinx is a lot like a mouse. In fact, he comes from the same family,” she exclaimed enthusiastically, as if that were a great thing. She loved animals; studying and
watching them had always seemed to her one of the chief pleasures in life, but she knew her strong feelings had the dewy-eyed sentimentality of a Bambi-syndrome dilettante. When it came to practical experience, she had virtually none.

“You may come up one at a time and say hello to him by petting him very carefully with one finger.” She stroked his back with her forefinger to illustrate. Jinx, meanwhile, had stepped experimentally out onto her wrist with the cautious air of someone testing a rickety foot bridge. A knee-high towhead with jam on his mouth ran up.

“Me first! Me first!” he said, poking an inquisitive finger into Jinx’s face. Jinx, deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, skittered into Jennifer’s sleeve and up her arm without looking backward, dashed across the no-man’s land of her chest to her other shoulder, his little body making a wiggly hump before it plunged down her back.

The children loved it, and in any other circumstances she would have delighted in their tinkling splashes of laughter. But Jinx had tiny sharp little claws, and her tucked blouse prevented his egress. He lost patience, poking his tickling nose, wiggling his body, searching for a foothold at the base of her spine.

Smiling weakly, with shivers skittering up and down her back, she said, “Silly Jinx. Do you see that, boys and girls? Jinx is playing with Miss Jennifer.” Then, the B-movie mobster aside to Lydia: “Please. Get him out!”

“Oh no. No way. I feel for you, believe me, but one touch of that glorified mouse and I’m likely to pass out. Untuck your blouse and shake him out.”

“I couldn’t! Poor little guy, he might get hurt.” Not only the potential fall but an excited stampede of plastic snowbooted feet could be highly dangerous to Jinx’s future.

“For heaven’s sake then, slip into the staff room and get Eleanor to help you,” Lydia hissed with a grin. “I’ll read the kids a couple of story books. Scoot!”

Because it was well nigh impossible to maintain any dignity when the person inside the poised facade was mentally hopping around the room shrieking “eeek,” she gave the laughing children a sickly grin. She told them she’d be back soon and beat a hasty retreat toward the staff door. But the commotion had drawn Eleanor, who was looking on in a rather aghast way from the encyclopedia case where, Jennifer was alarmed to see, Philip Brooks was still comfortably established.

“Hello, Philip,” she said, a little breathlessly, and directed a pleading look at Eleanor in passing. “Eleanor, if I could borrow you for a moment or two in the staff room …”

Assuming that Eleanor would follow her directly, she fled to the staff room with Jinx digging at the waistband of her slacks. Waiting alone in the small room, she rested her hands against the paper-jumbled desk, closing her eyes and pulling in a long restorative breath. Her heart was engaging in the maniacal syncopation that she had come to know as the Philip Brooks rhythm.

Behind her, the staff room door closed.

“Eleanor,
thank
you. Please hurry. I think he’s chewing on the elastic of my underpants—”

A gentle suggestive finger found the slight hollow behind her neck and traced slowly downward.
There was no mistaking her body’s response to that touch.

“Philip—” she whispered.

“There’s no understanding it, but Eleanor didn’t seem especially thrilled with the idea of plucking up Jinx from his travels. It wasn’t very difficult to convince her to yield the floor to a specialist,” he said.

Firm hands turned her body, and she found herself staring up into smiling light-filled eyes.

“Poor Miss Jennifer’s in a fix,” he murmured, his fingers slipping down her body until they reached the first button of her blouse, the base of his palms barely brushing the upper rise of her breasts, and she felt a soft puff of sensual awareness spreading in her chest. His lips touched hers briefly and the top button of her blouse slipped open.

For a moment, her desire to press herself fully into his embrace overcame her, but whiskers tickled her back and her ill-functioning sense of self-preservation reared its abashed head enough to bring her to her senses. Drawing away, fumbling to pull her blouse closed, she gasped out, “Jinx is in back.”

“I know.” His dark brows lifted innocently. The long mouth quirked. “But how can I get my hand underneath your shirt if it’s buttoned so tightly? Sit down.” He pressed her gently onto the edge of the desk chair. “Don’t worry. I’ll fish out Jinx for you. Relax and rest your worried head against my—” He glanced down teasingly as though he were estimating which part of his anatomy her head would fall against. “Let’s call it my stomach.”

He could call it anything he wanted, but if she
laid her cheek sideways, it would
not
have been against his stomach. Her upper body seemed to shock into a new state of wakefulness as his fingers twisted under her collar, following the curve of her back downward.

“When I came in, I never guessed I’d have this charming opportunity to grope under your—Hold still! I won’t be responsible for the consequences if he runs around in front and decides to snuggle up against the warmth of your—” Dissolving into laughter at her reaction, “No, no. Hush now, darling. Don’t try to get up. I’ve almost got him. There!”

Her shoulders trembled under the flood of receding tension as his graceful thighs moved backward a step and his hand moved up and out of her shirt.

She watched Philip carry Jinx toward his face on an upturned palm, churring softly to the tiny gerbil. Jinx stretched up on tiptoe to peer alertly into Philip’s eyes, sniffing with affection and then with ravenous interest as Philip produced a sunflower seed from his pocket.

Philip smiled as the gerbil took the seed in its forepaws and deftly slit the shell. Studying Jinx while he munched, he said, “You really know how to liven up a story hour. Why’d you decide to become a librarian?”

Shaking herself out of her amazement that he just happened to have a pocketful of Jinx’s favorite treat, she began to close her blouse with fingers that trembled. “When I was eight years old, I was carrying a stack of books to the checkout desk in my public library and a boy pushed me from behind as a joke. When I dropped my books
on the floor, one of the librarians shushed me angrily. It was very traumatic because I was a quiet child and no one had ever scolded me in public. I decided that when I grew up I’d have a library too, but my library would never be like hers.”

His eyes strayed briefly, thoughtfully, to hers before he emptied the few papers from the wicker waste basket and lowered Jinx inside with a scattering of sunflower seeds. Downy-light as the touch of his eyes had been, she felt entered, analyzed, absorbed.… Without the gerbil in his hand, he looked much more dangerous. Trying to cloak her inner desperation, she sped on, “Everyone said they’d graduate me with a bun on the back of my head and a pencil stuck in it but as you can see, I’ve cut my hair and …”

His fingers in her hair, penetrating to her scalp, running along the edge of her ear brought her words to a warbling halt.

“I like your hair short,” he murmured, dropping a soft kiss on the curve of her throat. “It’s cute. And you have a lovely neck.”

An easy motion of his hand brought a chair in front of hers and he sat down facing her, his body very close, one of his knees separating hers. Her breath caught at the sudden pleasure-filled uplift in her abdomen from the pressure of his leg inside her thigh. Her gaze dropped involuntarily to his legs. There was a mesmeric fascination in the way his lean muscles tugged at the age-polished denim, and she found herself following the taut line upward with her eyes until it occurred to her what she was doing. Her cheeks were flooding with color as she tried to pretend that she had
only been trying to study the logo on his faded sweatshirt. She recognized the famous alien there with a jolt.

“E.T.?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes. Shall I show you how to turn on my heart light?”

Her gaze flew to his and held there suspended in the perception and tenderness and dancing light she saw in his eyes.

Giving her a little grin, he began to walk two fingers up her thigh, murmuring, “Eensy weensy spider …”

Seeing that she was continuing to stare at him in the transfixed way he was not unaccustomed to receiving from women, he tried again. “There’s no telling what Jinx might have been up to under your shirt. You’d better let me check your underwear.”

Her deepening flush and steady wide-eyed gaze, the engaging rise and fall of her breasts against the light fabric of her blouse, the dusky barely parted lips, were drawing deep-rooted answers from his senses; and his desire to have his arms filled with her became almost as great as his desire to make her smile. Holding her waist in a light clasp, he drew her toward him, setting her on his leg with her thighs straddling one of his. What the pressure of her delicately hugging thighs aroused in him showed in his voice as he murmured, “You make a ravishing monkey.” One of his palms slipped upward to massage her neck, bringing her lips slowly toward his. “Want to monkey around?”