Sweet Everlasting (47 page)

Watching her in the wardrobe mirror, Tyler thought his wife looked like some dream an adolescent boy had conjured up in a sexual fantasy. He shucked off his trousers and threw them over the back of a chair, already randy as a jackrabbit—as Carrie would say. But he remembered the envelope in his jacket pocket at the last second, got it, and crossed to the bed, smiling to himself.

He sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled the quilt back so he could look at Carrie. She still blushed; he guessed she always would. But she wasn’t shy in bed anymore. To prove it, she began to ruffle the hair on his bare thigh, gazing up at him with winsome self-confidence. “You look like a sleek, happy cat,” he told her, untying the wide navy ribbon at the back of her neck and drawing it away so her hair could fall down over her shoulders.

She trailed her fingernails over his kneecap, ran them down his calf as far as she could reach, then back up to his thigh. “I am a happy cat,” she said in her smoky voice, deliberately seducing him. Ever observant, she spied the envelope beside him. “You’re not going to read me another letter
now,
are you?”

“This? No, it’s to you, I thought you could read it yourself.”

“It’s to me?” She sat up against the pillows, intrigued in spite of herself. She could never resist a surprise. “Who’s it from? Eppy?”

“No, not Eppy.”

She read the return address and laughed. “Oh, this is a mistake. This is from the White House.” She tried to hand it back.

“It’s to you, isn’t it?”

She looked down, then up again. “It says my name,” she agreed, blank-faced.

“Well, then.” He raised bland brows.

She opened it slowly, afraid to tear the envelope, and carefully unfolded the typed, one-page letter inside. Tyler went around to his side of the bed and got in while she read. Her body had gone taut as a bowstring. Every few seconds she said, “Oh, Ty. Oh, Ty.” She finished the letter and gawked at him.

“What does it say?”

She didn’t hear the question; she went back to the letter and read it all over again.

He leaned over and skimmed it with her this time. “Dear Mrs. Wilkes,” the brand-new president began. “Your husband was kind enough to give me a copy of your book,
The Summer Birds of the Appalachians in Franklin County, Pa.,
and I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed it. It’s one of the best of the recent lists I’ve seen, and I must congratulate you on avoiding the sort of language in your text that drives the non-scientist away from most ornithologies faster than an angry hornet. You will scarcely credit it, but I recently opened a pamphlet by one of the more exalted bird blokes and found this sentence: ‘The terrestrial progression of the Columbidae is gradient but never saltatorial.’ By which, after careful study, I took it to mean that pigeons walk and don’t hop!”

The same shameless charmer, Tyler smiled to himself. McKinley’s assassination had been a terrible, shocking tragedy; politically speaking, though, it had only speeded up the inevitable, and in Ty’s opinion Teddy Roosevelt was merely occupying the White House a little earlier than he would have anyway.

“Tyler tells me that you and I share an interest in land and wildlife conservation,” the president went on. “It’s shocking that in this great country we only have five national parks, and I assure you that part of my agenda for the balance of my term will be the expansion of,” etc., etc. Tyler skipped ahead.

“Community participation at every level is what we need now to bring to the average citizen’s attention the crying need for respect and conservation of our scarce resources. In that spirit, it occurred to me that you might be interested in either or both of two local projects I’ve been considering. One would be to write and illustrate a definitive catalogue, much on the order of the list you compiled for your fine book, of the birds of Rock Creek Park; the other would be to join a citizens’ committee charged with lobbying members of the Congress to introduce a national Arbor Day.”

Carrie couldn’t stop shaking her head or saying, “Oh, Ty.” He chuckled and ducked lower in the bed, sliding his lips down the cool skin of her arm to her elbow. “You talked to him about me,” she breathed, facing him. “Imagine that. My husband and the president of the United States, having a conversation about
me.”
She couldn’t get over it.

He pulled her down so their heads were level. One-handed, he started to open the eyelet fasteners down the front of her chemise. “Which will you do,” he wondered, “the birds or the—”

“Both,” she answered immediately. “I can do it, I’m sure I can. Rachel can come with me when I’m in the park, and it’ll be all right to leave her with the nanny when I meet with my”—she retrieved the letter from the rumpled quilt and glanced at it again—”my
committee.”
He grunted, untying the ribbons at her waist and nudging her drawers over her hips. Her gray eyes searched his seriously. “Do you think I can be a good mother and still help President Roosevelt?”

“I’m sure of it,” he said, sitting up to push the sleeves of her shift over her shoulders. As soon as her arms were free, she flung them around his neck and bore him back to the pillow, with her on top.

“Oh, Ty,” she exclaimed, nose to nose. “Before I had everything, but now I have even
more.
How can it be?”

Impatient, he started to kiss her; that would end the conversation. But Carrie’s ingenuous bafflement struck a complementary emotion he couldn’t ignore. He moved his hands to her face and held it softly between his palms. “I don’t know. I think about it all the time, and I can’t explain it either. It’s extravagant, it’s—implausible. Exorbitant.”

She frowned. “What is?”

“How happy you make me.”

“Oh. That.” She slid a long, smooth leg over his hips and straddled him. While he watched, the wonder on her face turned to smug delight. “That’s just because you love me,” she said huskily, gloating. She took his hands from her face and moved them slowly down her neck and finally to her full breasts. “I’m talking about the other. All these
new
miracles.”

Her lacy pantaloons were at half mast. “Lie down flat,” he suggested; she did, and he pushed her drawers down past her knees. “What new miracles?” he wanted to know, stroking her belly and her wide-open thighs until she threw her head back. He lifted her hips and held her poised above him on her knees. “What new miracles?”

“President Roosevelt’s committee,” she gasped. “Your mother—liking me. All that,” she finished vaguely and impatiently. “Ty, come inside me right now, right now!”

“No, I want to hear more about the miracles. My mother, and—Ho!”

Carrie took matters into her own hands.

“There,” she said on a quivering sigh, settling herself. She brought her head down and kissed him, at the same time she gave a clever little swivel with her hips that had him groaning against her open mouth. “This isn’t a new one,” she murmured, “but it’s still a miracle. To me, anyway.”

“Me, too,” he assured her fervently.

“What I don’t understand is what I ever did to deserve everything that’s happened.”

“I think you should stop talking now.”

“I wasn’t happy before I met you, but then again, I wasn’t
miserable.
But now, Ty,
now
—”

“Now?” he asked hopefully, gathered her up, and rolled over on top of her.

Her breath whooshed out in a gusty, euphoric laugh. “That’s not what I meant.” She dodged his lips and tried one last time to explain it. “I thought it was already perfect, don’t you see? It’s
indecent,
how lovely my life is. And now—”

“Now,” he cut her off firmly, snaring her hands and anchoring them to either side of the pillow. “Now it’s about to get even better.”

Much later, the moon crept up and hung for a while in a corner of the skylight, silvering the magic room before it dropped behind maple and oak leaves, and sank out of sight. Wisps of cloud drifted by, and once in a while a handful of raindrops struck the glass; they dried fast in the warm wind, but while they lingered the stars behind them looked like violet crystals.

“Are you sleeping?” Ty whispered. He had Carrie’s foot between both of his, and she hadn’t moved it in a long time. But she whispered back, “No.” “It’s late.” “I know.” She took a full, deep breath of the damp air breezing in through the window. No crickets or night birds sang; there was just the sigh of the wind and occasionally the patter of the rain on the glass.

And the soft, baby-quick breathing of Rachel, who lay fast asleep between them, because Carrie had been too lazy to get up and put her in the crib after her last feeding.

“Go to sleep,” Ty murmured. He slid his fingers into Carrie’s hair and began a soft, slow massage.

But she had one more thing to say. “I’ve figured it out. It’s part of a grand scheme.”

A pause, while he tried to connect that to anything they’d said or done recently. “A grand scheme?” he hazarded on a yawn, giving up.

“You did a good deed when you saved thousands of lives, Ty. God’s decided to let me share in your reward. That’s why I’m so happy. That’s the explanation.”

“Ah.”

“I don’t know why He did it, but He works in mysterious ways.”

“He certainly does.” He yawned again. “I’m too sleepy to argue, but you’ve got it backward. It’s you He’s rewarding if it’s either of us.” It was a burden sometimes, this pedestal she’d put him on. He’d set her straight, but she was bound to find out the mundane truth about him eventually. Why rush the inevitable?

She snuggled closer, capturing one of his hairy legs between her calves. “This is nice,” she whispered with her eyes closed, “arguing about which one of us God is blessing.” She was glad Ty thought it was her, but he’d find out the truth sooner or later, she expected.

The stars wheeled; the moon set. Carrie and Ty fell asleep in sympathy, savoring their mutual esteem and happiness. Between them the fruit of their love, the real blessing, slept on, oblivious.

Patricia Gaffney is a
New York Times
bestselling and award-winning author of twelve historical romances and five contemporary women’s fiction titles. She has won the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart award and has been nominated six times for the RWA’s RITA award for excellence in romance writing.

Born on December 17, 1944, in Tampa, Florida, to an Irish Catholic family, Gaffney grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. After graduating from college, she worked as a high school teacher for one year before beginning a fifteen-year career as a freelance court reporter. It was during this time that she met her husband, Jon Pearson.

Gaffney’s life changed course in 1984 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her battle with the disease prompted her, in 1986, to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. Her first novel,
Sweet Treason
(1989), won a 1988 Golden Heart Award and the
Romantic Times
Reviewers’ Choice award for First Historical Romance. Her second novel,
Fortune’s Lady
(1989), which is set in England against the backdrop of the French Revolution, was shortlisted for the RITA. She followed her early success with
Another Eden
(1992),
Crooked Hearts
(1994),
Sweet Everlasting
(1994),
Lily
(1996),
Outlaw in Paradise
(1997), and
Wild at Heart
(1997), the latter of which was among ten finalists for RWA’s reader-nominated Favorite Book of the Year Award.

Since the late nineties, Gaffney has found added success writing women’s fiction. Her novels
The Saving Graces
(1999),
Circle of Three
(2000),
Flight Lessons
(2002), and
The Goodbye Summer
(2004) all appeared on several national bestseller lists.
The Saving Graces
was on the
New York Times
bestseller list for seventeen weeks.

With her friends Nora Roberts (writing as J. D. Robb), Mary Blayney, and others, Gaffney has also contributed novellas to three anthologies, all of which were
New York Times
bestsellers.

Gaffney lives with her husband and two dogs in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.