The Way Home (35 page)

“You are so beautiful,” he whispered against her hair.

His hands were not quite steady on her shoulders, and she realized suddenly that he wasn’t as calm as he seemed. The knowledge was oddly reassuring. She lifted her hands to his chest, smoothing her palms over the muscles there, marveling at the hard strength beneath her fingertips. She felt him shudder at the light touch and was awed that she could make him tremble.

It took every ounce of willpower at his command for Ty to stand still beneath the sweet torment of Meg’s delicate exploration. He clenched his teeth, fighting the urge to tumble her back onto the bed and finally sate the hunger that had been gnawing at him for so long. But not for the world would he do anything to frighten her.

Just when he thought his control was stretched to the breaking point, Meg tilted her head back, her lips parting in unmistakable invitation. With a groan, Ty lowered his mouth to hers. Despite his determination to take things slow, the kiss was avid and hungry. To his delight, she responded without hesitation, her tongue twining with his, her slender body curving into his.

Without breaking the kiss, he eased her back onto the bed, bracing one hand against the plain cotton sheets as he lowered her. He followed her down, letting her feel the fullness of his arousal for the first time. He tasted the quick, shocked breath she drew, felt the sudden uncertainty in her. He lifted his head, staring down at her in the darkness as his legs slid between hers.

“Trust me, Meg.” The words were both command and plea.

“I do,” she answered without hesitation.

But trust wasn’t enough to still the tremor of fear that ran through her at the first touch of him against the most feminine part of her. Feeling her hesitation, Ty forced himself to stop, though every drop of blood in him screamed with the need to complete their union.

His eyes had long since adjusted to the dimness of the room. He could see Meg staring up at him, her eyes wide blue pools. He waited, sensing the battle between fear and desire that was waging inside her. Slowly, so slowly he could almost have imagined it, he felt some of the tension go out of her. Her hands stirred restlessly on his shoulders and there was a slight, almost imperceptible movement of her hips.

Biting his lip to hold back a smile as he felt curiosity edge out fear, Ty deepened the contact. The smile became pained as he felt her close around him, all soft heat and moisture. He felt the thin barrier that marked her virginity, heard Meg’s shallow gasp of pain as it yielded to him, and then she was holding him in the most intimate of embraces.

Meg had thought she had a basic understanding of what happened between a man and a woman, at least the mechanics of the act. But nothing she’d thought she knew had prepared her for the incredible intimacy of sharing her body with a man. What little she knew hadn’t covered the remarkable feeling of … fullness, of completion.

She gasped as Ty shifted, withdrawing, then easing forward again, repeating the movement until she began to echo it. Though it hardly seemed possible, the sensation intensified. Her skin felt hot to the touch. And so tender. Every brush of Ty’s body against hers brought new nerve endings to tingling life, added to the liquid heat that pooled deep inside her.

Her hands clung to his shoulders as heat threatened to consume her. She couldn’t possible stand it another moment, she thought, and yet it continued, the tension coiling tighter and tighter within her until she thought that its release would surely be her destruction.

Meg cried out, her nails biting into Ty’s damp skin as the tension suddenly grew unbearable. She gasped in shock, in pleasure tinged with just a little fear. Ty murmured something — reassuring her even as he refused to let her retreat from the blinding intensity that threatened to swallow her whole.

And then she felt him tremble against her, felt the shudders of pleasure racking his long body. She wrapped her arms around him, clinging to the only solid thing in her world as the tension inside her suddenly snapped and she seemed to shatter into a thousand tiny fragments of sensation.

It was a long time before Meg became aware of her surroundings again. She floated back to awareness. Her body tingled with life yet felt heavy with a kind of exhaustion she’d never known. Though he was supporting most of his weight on his elbows, Ty’s frame was warm against her. She could feel him still inside her and she shifted slightly, marveling at the incredible sensation of sharing her body with the man she loved.

Her movement, slight as it was, drew a groan from Ty and a husky order to hold still. Meg froze, wondering if she’d hurt him somehow. Moving slowly, as if it took considerable effort, he lifted himself away from her. Meg caught her breath on a mixture of discomfort and regret as he left her body.

Without the heavy, masculine blanket of his body, the air in the room seemed chill. But before she could do more than register the discomfort, Ty had settled next to her and was dragging the covers up around them, creating a warm cocoon.

Outside, Meg could hear the rain pattering against the roof. From the living room came the soft crackle of the fire, and she could see its flickering light on the bedroom door. She felt warm and secure. Complete in a way she’d never known possible.

Ty’s fingers slid through her hair, stilling as he felt the dampness at her temples, the result of tears Meg hadn’t even been aware of shedding. He tilted her face up to his, his forehead creasing in a frown.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No.” She caught his disbelieving look and corrected herself. “A little,” she admitted.

“I’m sorry.” He frowned as he dried the traces of her tears with his fingertips. His touch was so tender that Meg had to close her eyes against the threat of fresh tears. The pain had been so fleeting that it was easily forgotten, lost in the wonder of what had come afterward.

“I’m not sorry,” she whispered, blushing at her own boldness. Ty’s hand stilled. She felt his surprise and her blush deepened, wishing she could take the words back. He slid one hand under her chin, ignoring her slight resistance as he tilted her face up to his.

“I’m sorry it had to hurt you,” he said. And then she saw the white slash of his smile in the darkness. “But I’m certainly not sorry about anything else.”

Though he couldn’t possibly have seen her fiery cheeks, he laughed softly, causing her blush to deepen. Taking pity on her embarrassment, Ty brushed a kiss across her forehead before settling her more solidly against his side, her head tucked into the curve of his shoulder.

Meg’s hand rested against his chest and she threaded her fingers through the crisp mat of dark curls there. She could feel Ty’s heartbeat under her cheek, the length of his body pressed to hers. She thought vaguely that she should be embarrassed to be lying here with him, both naked as the day they were bom. But what she felt was a deep contentment, a feeling of completion she’d never known, a feeling that went much deeper than the delicious physical languor that filled her.

She was Ty’s wife. Meg savored the thought. Her marriage was no longer just a few lines of print on a piece of paper. It was a reality. Later she might question the why of what had happened. But for now, it was enough that she was really and truly Ty’s wife.

CHAPTER 16

In her more superstitious moments, Meg worried that she might be
too
happy. What if God looked down on her new life and decided that she simply had more happiness than any one person deserved? The way she felt right now, she couldn’t have argued the point. But not even the threat of divine outrage could keep the smile from her face.

The past few weeks had been like a small glimpse of heaven. She had friends, laughter, sunshine, and most of all, Ty. Not just the Ty who’d been her friend over the summer, but a Ty who was also her husband. Her lover. Just thinking the word made her flush, but that’s what he’d become. Her lover.

And if she worried that she being too happy might be a sin, she was almost positive that the pleasure she took in their new intimacy had to be grounds for divine punishment. Over the years, she’d heard women of her mother’s acquaintance make veiled references to the duties of the marriage bed. There’d always been something vaguely ominous in their tone of voice. When she was small, Meg had had a blurry impression that such duties were rather like taking castor oil or eating spring’s first bitter greens — one of those things that had to be endured. As she grew older, her understanding of just what “marital duties” were grew only slightly less blurred, but she began to doubt that anything that happened between a man and a woman who loved each other could be quite as unpleasant as it had been made to sound, especially not if it resulted in anything as delightful as a baby.

Then she’d seen the lust in her stepfather’s face, felt the terrible, wicked hunger in him as he tore at her clothes, and she hadn’t been quite so sure about what happened between a husband and wife. The one thing she’d clung to was the knowledge that Ty would never hurt her. She’d believed that with all her heart and soul. And she’d been right.

In the warmth of his touch and the gentle strength of his body, Meg had found nothing but pleasure, that night and all the nights since. She’d learned to know her body in ways she’d never dreamed. Far from finding her marital duties something to be endured, she found herself anticipating the nights with an eagerness that seemed downright sinful. Which brought her full circle to her original thought that it might be possible to be
too
happy.

“What’re you doing?” Millie’s voice preceded her across the courtyard, interrupting Meg’s thoughts. She looked up from her sewing, watching as her landlady made her way down the concrete path. Millie was wearing a pair of black feathered mules, the likes of which Meg had never seen outside a theater, and her plump form was draped in pink satin lounging pajamas. The color clashed so magnificently with her hair that Meg found herself almost admiring the effect. She also carried a cigarette in a long ivory holder, but Meg had yet to see her actually take a puff on it.

“I’m mending one of Ty’s shirts,” Meg said, in answer to Millie’s question.

“Isn’t that nice. I can’t sew a stitch, you know.” Meg occupied one of the two metal chairs on the small porch. Millie sank into the other one. “I had an aunt that tried to teach me to sew one time. She did all kinds of fancywork, and she figured every girl needed to know how to sew on a button, at least. So she tried to teach me, but I just couldn’t get the hang of it.”

“It’s handy to know,” Meg said, while she tried to imagine how anyone could have trouble learning to sew on a button.

“It drove Aunt Millicent crazy — she’s the one I’m named for, you know. Can you imagine sticking a poor innocent little baby with a name like Millicent Abigail Dorfman?”

“It does seem a mouthful,” Meg admitted. She’d had time to become accustomed to Millie’s parenthetical mode of speech and was no longer disconcerted by the abrupt jogs in the conversation.

“That’s why I changed my name to Marquez.” Millie tapped ash off her cigarette into the flower bed that bordered the bungalows. “I thought of changing my first name, too. To something more dramatic, maybe like Myra. Myra Marquez would look real good on a marquee, you know?” Meg made a noncommittal noise and kept her eyes on her sewing. “But then I thought, What if the director calls me Myra and I don’t remember that’s my name? I wouldn’t do what he said and then I’d get a reputation for being poison to work with and my whole career could be ruined, all because I didn’t remember I was Myra.” The outlined scenario made Millie’s eyes widen in horror. Meg bit her lip and concentrated on putting the next stitch in the seam she was mending.

“So I changed the Dorfman and kept the Millie. Of course, I was Millie Smith when I was married to Larry. That’s a dull name, if ever there was one. Sometimes I wonder if maybe I’d have tried a little harder to keep his mother off our backs if he’d had a different name. Like maybe I knew, deep in my heart, that I just wasn’t meant to go through life as Millie Smith, you know?” She seemed to interpret Meg’s mumbled response as sympathetic, because she sighed and tapped the ash off her cigarette again. “Anyway, Aunt Millie never did manage to teach me to sew,” she finished, as if the intervening digressions had never occurred.

“It’s not all that difficult,” Meg said. She finished up the seam, took a small back stitch, and knotted the thread before breaking it off. “My mother made quilts for other people and made most of our clothes. My sister and I both learned to sew when we were small.”

“My aunt Abigail made quilts — she’s the Abigail in Millicent Abigail, you know. I remember being sick at her houseonce and there was a quilt on the bed — no pattern, you know, just all kinds of scraps. And I spent hours trying to match up the different pieces of fabric.”

“I can remember doing that, too,” Meg said. Her mouth curved at the memory of lying in bed, the sun slanting through the window onto the quilt that covered her. Not one of the “good” quilts that her mother made to sell but a hastily put together affair made up of scraps of clothing, lined with an old blanket, and tied together with bits of yam.

“Do you miss your family a lot?”

Millie’s question made Meg realize that she’d been staring out into the sunshine, her hands idle in her lap. She picked up the mended shirt and began to fold it, buying time to formulate a response. Did she miss her family? There was no simple answer to that.