second question about the difference in their ages, and she looked genuinely unimpressed. “I can count too, you know. And when I'm sixty, you'll be ninety-three. How does that sound to you? You sure you won't want someone younger by then?” She was teasing him now and they both laughed as he began to relax. It had been a nightmarish morning, filled with terror and guilt, but this was more like the easy moments he had known with her before, although he had never proposed to her.
“Shall we call it definite then? We're engaged?” He smiled at her and she smiled back at him, and then leaned forward to kiss him again.
“We're engaged, and I love you with all my heart.” He kissed her so tenderly in answer to what she said that their bodies seemed to become almost one, and he had to remind himself to pull away again, but he didn't really want to anymore … and if he was going to marry her one day … wouldn't it be all right now … just this once? … to seal their vow, as it were. He sat back, looking into her eyes, knowing he couldn't think straight anymore.
“You make me crazy, you know.”
“I'm glad.” She looked like a woman as she said the words, and her eyes bore deep into his. “Can I stay for a while?”
There was no harm in that. They had done that before, when Gail had other plans and the maids were off on the weekends. The only difference was that then they knew everyone was eventually coming back, and now they were totally alone. He offered to heat the pool so they could swim, and she thought it a fine idea. She didn't bother with a bathing suit, and dove neatly in from the diving board, as he watched the smooth velvet of her flesh stretched over her long, graceful limbs. She was a beautiful girl, although no one in her family seemed to have noticed it yet. She was just “little Anne,” the quiet one who hid in her room. But she wasn't hiding now, as he shed his clothes and dove in after her, and they swam like porpoises beneath the surface of the pool, and then leapt high, catching each other by the waist, and slowly he brought her to him. He couldn't stand it anymore. He wanted her too much. Their bodies met and held as he caressed her back and neck and kissed her tenderly as he led her from the pool, wrapped her in a towel, and then carried her inside the house. There was nothing left to say. He couldn't fight it anymore, and she looked like a delicate princess as he lay her on his bed, and smiled down at her, his own body still firm, his muscles hard, his legs strong. They would have beautiful children together one day, he thought to himself, but he wasn't thinking of babies now. He was thinking only of her, as he touched every inch of her, caressing and kissing and letting his tongue dance over her, and from some distant part of her, she remembered a kind of loving she had never really known before, and she gently caressed him until he could bear it no more and their bodies joined as one. Her whole body arched with pleasure at his touch, and they seemed to dance there together for hours, sailing high into the sky, until at last they exploded like the sun.
CHAPTER 33
Their days together were the most idyllic either had ever known. There were no drugs this time, no hallucinogens, no rituals, no make-believe, only Bill and the tenderness and beauty he brought to her life, and the joy she brought to his. For ten days they allowed themselves to forget how difficult it would be for the next two years. They stayed within the confines of his house and grounds, but they ran and they played, they listened to music, and he gave her a glass of champagne, only one, on what he called their wedding night. They took long baths in his tub, and he read to her, and at night in front of the fire he combed her hair, and he loved her in ways she had never been loved before. It was the kind of fatherly love he had always had for Gail, enhanced now by the love he had once had for his wife and yet had no one