Chapter 9 #2
I tugged off his tie and dropped it where we stood.
“But that’s the least of it,” I argued as I pulled the tails of his shirt from his trousers.
“Cooper’s Benjie’s dad! Not his half brother.
His dad!” I slid buttons through holes as quickly as I could.
“It was right there on the birth certificate. Clear as day. So why didn’t we know?
Why didn’t anyone say anything?” Pushing the shirt off his shoulders, I had just enough time to press my lips to the hair on his chest when he pulled my sweater over my head.
“Like the people in town?” He tossed the sweater aside and dispensed as quickly with my blouse. “Maybe they didn’t know.”
“They had to know Cooper’s mother wasn’t pregnant—help me with this, Peter.” I couldn’t get his belt undone.
He quickly took care of it. “Not necessarily. If a woman’s a little overweight to start with, she could go away for a month and come back with a baby, and the people around her might, just might believe it was hers.
” He’d released the front closing of my bra as quickly as he had his belt.
Peeling the lacy cups from my breasts, he tossed the bra aside.
We were both taking short, shallow breaths, as though we’d just come in from a sprint. Our hands tangled from time to time. That slowed us down and increased the impatience.
“I think they knew,” I decided as I gingerly worked his zipper over his arousal.
“I think they all knew, just kept it to themselves.” I slipped my hands inside.
“Maybe that’s why they were so tolerant—ahhhh, Peter …
” He’d taken half of my breast into his mouth and was drawing on it so strongly that I felt the pull all the way to my womb.
Momentarily abandoning the treasure in his briefs, I dug my fingers onto his hair and held on.
“Peter—ahhhhhh—it always comes down to this.” I gasped when he did something powerful to my nipple with his teeth, then felt instantly bereft when he raised his head.
“Shall I stop?”
“Lord, no!” I met his mouth in a hungry kiss and slipped my hands back into his briefs.
He was hot and hard. The feel of him against my palms sent tiny currents of excitement through my fingers, up my arms and into the rest of my body.
I stroked his distended length, taking pride when he grew even more rigid.
It seemed that much more and he’d burst—I was feeling the same way inside.
He swore then and, setting me back, went at the rest of my clothes in earnest. “You distract me so much sometimes,” he growled, bending on a knee to tug down my skirt and panty hose together, “that I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing.”
“You were doin’ just fine,” I teased in a whisper. “You felt just right to hold.”
His pale green eyes, shimmering with darker shards and smoldering now, speared me with a hungry gaze.
Then he lowered his eyes, leaned forward and kissed me where no one but he had ever kissed me before.
It was suitable punishment for my teasing, because I nearly lost it there and then, particularly when his kiss grew deeper, his tongue more aggressive.
“Please!” I cried.
He knew what I wanted. With several rough tugs, he freed me of the last of my clothes, then did the same for himself.
For an instant when we were both naked, we just stood there looking at each other’s bodies.
But our inner demands were insistent. I had to touch him, had to feel the heat of his body on mine, in mine, and it was clear from the urgent way he reached for me that he felt the same.
Our bodies came together in a crush, fitting as perfectly as ever. My arms went around his neck, my legs around his hips when he lifted me, and when I felt the full force of him slide inside, I let out a small cry of pleasure.
To this day, I can’t begin to describe that feeling of having Peter inside. It was so many things—fullness, heat, excitement, satisfaction, completion, security—that it boggled my mind.
“Ahhh, Peter,” I cried, “what you do to me.”
“Tell me,” he whispered. “What do I do?”
With his large hands spread under my bottom, he moved his pelvis. I felt him withdraw nearly completely, then slowly, tauntingly return. “You make me burn,” I managed to gasp against his neck. “Can’t you feel it?”
He didn’t answer at first, and when he did, his voice was deep and husky. “I feel it, babe. I feel it.” Holding our bodies locked tightly, he carefully lowered me to the bed. Still buried deeply inside me, he held himself up on his arms and looked down into my face.
He was beautiful. His eyes, his face, his body—he was a beautiful person. Tears came to my eyes at the thought of how lucky I was to have him. He made my heart swell to twice its normal size.
His lips touched mine with a gentleness that belied the throbbing I felt inside. “It does always come to this,” he said hoarsely, “because this is what I need.” He raised his head. His eyes met mine. “It’s only when we’re together like this that I know you love me.”
A knot swelled in my throat to rival the swelling of my heart, and I knew he was right.
I hadn’t put the word to the emotion I felt, and I didn’t want to do it now, but there was no doubt it was real.
Nothing else could explain the things he made me feel, even the sense of security I’d thought about moments before.
I felt secure when we made love because during those times, Peter was unconditionally mine.
I didn’t have to share him with anyone or anything.
I could touch him and kiss him and hug him and love him. I liked it that way.
With a low moan, he squeezed his eyes shut. “What was that? What did you just do?”
I hadn’t realized I’d done anything until my muscles relaxed. “This?” I whispered. I clenched them again.
He made a rough sound, swallowed, nodded.
His arms began to tremble. But his eyes, heavy-lidded moments before, grew suddenly large and intense.
“I belong here, Jill. I belong inside you, not just when we’re making love, but during all the other times, too.
You have my heart. You’ll always have it. I want yours.”
“You have it,” I whispered, framing his head with my hands.
“Now. But for always? It’s no good if it’s only when we’re in bed.”
I wasn’t ready to say the words. Nor could I lie and deny them. So I slipped my hands into his hair and brought his head down to my mouth. Silently I told him how I felt.
It wasn’t enough.
Peter lowered himself to his elbows. He held enough of his weight so that I wasn’t crushed, but our bodies touched at every possible point.
Like the soft, swirling hair on his chest, his voice was a sensual abrader.
“I’m insecure about some things, Jill, and you’re one.
” His breath was warm above my face, his eyes hot.
“I think about you all the time we’re apart, and it eats at me that you may not be thinking about me, too.
I need to know you are. I need that commitment.
I want you to take the sum of everything that’s you, turn it over and endorse it to me.
For deposit only. No turning back. No withdrawals. Forever.”
I heard what he said, and part of me wanted just that.
I didn’t feel threatened; it wasn’t a question of losing myself in Peter, as much as being all the richer for a merger with him.
But I needed time. I had to come to terms with certain things, and I wasn’t about to do that now, not with the sight and scent and feel of him surrounding me.
“Show me what you want,” I whispered, and he did.
He loved me with everything that was him, and then some, and it was the most glorious feeling in the world.
At times he was gentle, at times fierce, making me feel alternatively like a precious jewel and an enchantress.
I couldn’t say whether I preferred one feeling to another because they were both part of the whole, and the whole captured my mind to such an extent that analysis was impossible.
By the time we fell back to the sheets with our limbs entwined and our skin dewy, though, I knew that there’d never be another love for me like Peter.
We dozed off, awakening after an hour to make love again. After another nap, we awoke ravenous for food of the material kind, but the shower we took first led to a rebirth of passion. It was nearly midnight when Peter opened his front door to two large, loaded pizzas.
Nothing but crumbs remained—Peter ate his own pie, plus three slices of mine—when we took our large, loaded stomachs into the den, wrapped ourselves in each other and a large afghan that Peter had picked up in the course of his travels, and began to talk.
Peter must have known that I wasn’t ready to tackle the issue of love and commitment that night, because he bypassed it to talk about Cooper and Cyrill. “Tell me what you think.”
I snuggled deeper within the bands of his arms. “I think that Cooper fell hard. He was eighteen, Cyrill seventeen when she came to town. It sounds like she wasn’t the type to fall in love.
She had plans. But she must have been taken with Cooper, enough to have an affair with him, and the affair went on long after she left Maine. ”
“Cooper obviously knew when she became pregnant.”
“Or learned soon after. He was close enough when the baby was born to claim him and take him home.”
“I wonder what kind of deal he had to make.”
I tipped my head on his upper arm so that I could see his face. “What do you mean?”
“If Cyrill intended to make it big in New York, the last thing she needed was a baby. I wonder if he had to convince her to go ahead with the pregnancy.”
I sucked in a breath. “You think she might have wanted an abortion?”
“Maybe. She sure didn’t want the baby, if she allowed him to be taken from her and raised as someone else’s child.”
My heart ached for Benjie. “Poor kid. Imagine the rejection he’s probably felt over the years.”
“If he knows the truth.”