The Senator’s Daughter (32 page)

Then he reached again for champagne. Holding the glass above her mound, he poured while licking bubbles from her slippery folds.

What he was doing was heaven, his tongue like velvet caressing her. Never had she felt so free to grant a man access to her intimate parts without worrying if she'd smell pretty or be able to come.

As Lyle continued, Sylvia thought she would scream. If he kept on, she'd erupt like a Roman candle. Though she ached for release, she wanted it to happen with his hot flesh stretching her, his weight on her, while he, too, strained for the heights.

“Lyle!” She pushed at the top of his head.

He looked up, his eyes heavy lidded.

“Now…”

He nodded. “It's time, my love.”

Heart hammering, she reached for him. “Past time.” Did he mean that “love?”

With a single smooth stroke, Lyle cleaved up and into her.

He was huge … and marvelous, as he pushed in to the hilt. Then he pulled out, almost completely, leaving her longing. A beat passed, while the yearning for him grew sharper, and he plunged back to fill her.

How she had needed this. How irrelevant was everything outside this room. She slicked her hands down his sides, across his taut butt and up his back.

Their rhythm accelerated, an ancient dance. Exquisite fire ignited and leaped within her.

Lyle's breathing quickened; his body tensed. She loved his dominating masculinity, but she also needed to shudder and cry out as he was doing.

He finished, up tight and high in her.

She'd missed it.

But Lyle insisted, “Don't stop now.” He was still with her, slipping in and out while the pinnacle stayed just above her reach.

“Come on.” He rolled her nipple between his fingers.

She arched and gasped. “I thought you—”

“I did. Now it's your turn.” He kept moving.

“But I …”

His lips were at her ear. “Squeeze your thighs together.”

“What?”

“Squeeze them, and close up around me. Like you did at the river.”

Fascinated, she obeyed. The feeling escalated.

But, as he thrust, she plateaued again. Sweat slicked both their bodies.

“Tighten your thighs and your calves.” Something in the way he moved made her believe he was excited again after … “Let all your muscles work while you clamp down hard on me.”

Everything in her went rigid, from her curled toes, through her legs, and up to where they were joined. Her arms clutched Lyle, her jaw clenched …

The first wave of sensation was the highest she'd ever achieved. The second was almost as crushing.

Despite how soon it had been, her scream of pleasure sent Lyle over the edge again. His breathing went ragged; his hands slipped down to grab her and pump into her. Impossibly, his pleasure peak set off another indescribably delightful release in her. It rocked her, on and on until she couldn't come any more.

Lyle eased his weight off Sylvia and lowered himself to lie on his side facing her. She lay back, panting; he couldn't catch his wind, either, as though they'd breathed up all the air.

He wanted to shout to the old walls of this marvelous building that he'd found what he hadn't believed possible. He felt like he'd gone over Niagara Falls without a barrel, through the maelstrom at its base, and emerged into placid water. All his muscles that had fired on a million-volt overload now relaxed into the most delicious lassitude of his life.

Once more able to speak, he murmured, “That was the most incredible …” He stopped because what he was saying didn't capture it.

Nor did the lyrics of songs, or cadence of poetry. It was simply a quiet certainty. The sense of coming home when he believed no home would exist for him again.

He'd wondered if Sylvia might be the one to change his mind about falling in love. Now, lying spent and happier than he could remember being, he had to admit he was in deep.

But if he made a declaration to a senator's daughter, would he end up making a fool of himself?

Lying on the big bed bathed in candlelight, Sylvia had never felt so bonelessly, perfectly content. In the time it took Lyle to fetch a washcloth from the bathroom, she nearly fell asleep.

When she made a move to take the cloth, he gestured her back down. Then he wiped the warm wetness over her breasts, stomach, and thighs, taking care to wipe away the evidence that they had made love the way nature intended.

He went back to the bath and ran water in the sink. At his return to bed, her focus finally shifted from post-orgasmic euphoria to the man who'd brought her there. A little while ago, he'd said something about “incredible.”

That didn't begin to do it justice.

Lazily, she turned her head on the pillow to find Lyle watching her like a cat at a mouse hole. She met his eyes and let her lips curve into a lazy, licking-cream-from-her-whiskers smile.

Lyle closed the space between them and kissed her lips gently. Then he moved to drop butterfly nips on her cheeks, forehead, and eyelids. This act of tenderness, after the cyclone that had turned her world inside out, undid her.

To her horror, her next breath sounded too much like a sob.

“Sylvia?” Lyle's brows knitted.

She couldn't hold back the rising flood. “Lyle … I've never …”

“Sweetheart.” He pulled her to him.

With her cheek pressed against his bare chest, she fought to control herself. “I just…”

Lyle cradled her close to his heart. “Go ahead and let it out, my darling.”

Sylvia put her arm around him and held on as hard as she could. “I'm … crying because I'm so … happy.”

How right she had been to believe making love with Lyle would be like losing her soul and finding it again.

With her warm tears mingling with the sweat on his chest, Lyle's throat tightened. When he blinked, his own eyelashes dampened.

Never had such a storm seized and tossed him like a rowboat in a mid-ocean tempest. Until this night, he had not understood the profound chasm between having sex and making love.

“I'm happy, too.” It came out hoarsely, and he wanted something better than such an understatement.

He forged on, “Nothing like you has ever even remotely happened to me.”

They lay together, breath mingling. Gradually, the pressure they exerted holding each other eased. Lyle felt Sylvia's muscles slacken; her chest began to rise and fall with regularity.

His own limbs grew heavy. The last thing he registered was the glow from the bedside candle as he closed his eyes.

Next, he was dreaming, a good one in which he lay in a soft bed with the warm weight of a woman by his side. As he drifted in and out, he knew at some level the bed and the woman were real, while other visions playing on the big screen in his head weren't.

In a pretty parlor in the Chatsworths' Sausalito house, Lyle perched on a chintz-covered sofa. Laura poured tea into porcelain cups so delicate he feared to pick his up. A bull in a china shop, his eighth-grade teacher had called him, when he grew a half foot taller than the other boys. She'd been right; his field-roughened hands could never handle Laura's gilt-edged cup and saucer without disgracing himself.

To avoid dealing with it, Lyle fought his way up from sleep. He took a deep draught of California mountain air, then buried his nose in Sylvia's silken hair.

That was better. He lay on his side with one arm snuggling her against him. His sex stirred once against her buttocks, and he subsided back into sleep's warm darkness.

He stood among the redwoods, head thrown back to appreciate the convergence of the trunks against the faraway sky. The scent of evergreen duff, soft beneath his shoes, filled his nostrils. Except that a rattletrap of a car smashed through the plate-glass window of a nearby dry cleaners, releasing the stench of… gasoline?

Lyle backed away, hand covering his nose and mouth.

Before he could get far, the dry cleaners erupted with a whoosh, flames shooting up and igniting the redwoods. The resin-saturated wood burned hotly, crackling and popping with an almost merry music.

Lyle came back to lying in bed with Sylvia, but the cracks and pops continued. It sounded like the cheery welcome of a campfire on a cold night.

S
ylvia's eyes snapped open. Leaping light turned the corner room at the inn into a vision of hell.

“Lyle!” she screamed. “Fire!”

He jackknifed and rolled off the bed, dragging her with him. “Put your face to the floor. The air's better.”

She obeyed. Once below the level of the bed, she saw the fire didn't seem related to the bedside candle. It had apparently guttered out.

The garish light came from the blazing wall separating the room from the hall. Through a hole in the ceiling where hungry flames had done their work, the night sky was intermittently visible. Black smoke alternately swirled up and then cleared, while the snapping that had awakened her, resin exploding in burning timbers, gave way to a full-throated roar.

How lovely and golden the candlelight had been; how horrific the macabre colors of conflagration. Ochre, vermilion, the crimson of blood.

With a shriek, Sylvia closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around her head.

“No time for that.” Lyle raised his voice.

Her throat stung; she started to cough. A pit opened in the middle of her stomach. She and Lyle were trapped—they were going to die. And it wasn't fair because they had just found each other.

Lyle grabbed her by the hair and yanked hard enough to get her attention. “Let's get out of here.”

“The window,” she coughed, starting to crawl. There were two big ones facing off across the corner. The one farther from the fire had a drop of about twelve feet to landscaping rocks at least a foot in diameter.

Lyle crawled in that direction, probably because it was open a few inches.

She tugged at his shoulder. When he didn't stop, she pulled his hair in turn.

On hands and knees, he looked back. Their eyes met for the first time since awakening in hell. In his, she saw determination, further buoying her against terror.

“This one!” she shouted, pointing to the near window. The shrubbery below would break their fall.

Unless a sharp stick impaled them.

Lyle crawled ahead and reached the sill. Sylvia followed.

Watching him reach for the sash, his back bare … they were about to leap out starkers.

She grabbed his arm. “We're naked!”

“We're alive.” But Lyle retreated a few feet for his duffel bag and dragged it over beneath the sill.

He shoved at the window; Sylvia waited for it to slide up.

Nothing happened.

Lyle turned again toward the open window.

“No,” she cried, “rocks below.”

He gave the frame another jerk.

“Painted shut,” she offered.

It was getting hotter, and she kept choking. The fumes bore the essence of everything old and new in the inn, ancient timber and stucco, modern sheetrock and latex paint, oak hardwoods, toxic gases from synthetic upholstery and mattresses …