inquired, looking worried.
“I don't think so … it's pretty.” I turned to face him, and he was watching me cautiously. I knew we were both wondering the same thing. What would it be like now?
“You're beautiful, Stephanie,” he said softly. “I missed you while I was away.” And I could see from the look in his eyes that he meant it.
“So did I,” I said in a whisper in the candlelight.
“Did you?” He looked worried, but as though he wanted to believe it was true, and it was. I loved him even more now. “It wasn't the same here without you.” An obscene understatement. But I had missed him. Terribly. Just seeing him standing there again, I was reminded of all that we had together. And then he reached for me ever so gently, and pulled me closer to him, and as he did, all else was forgotten, as though Paul faded from my memory the moment Peter touched me and erased a whole block of information and feelings. It was very odd, and I didn't understand it.
Peter was everything I had always known him to be, tender, loving, artful, considerate, sensual, an extraordinary lover in every way. There were no acrobatic twists and turns, no double flip, no triple, or quadruple. There were only the two of us, transported to a place I had nearly forgotten in the past two weeks. And as I lay in his arms afterward, he gently stroked my hair and then kissed me.
“God, I missed you,” he said, and I smiled.
I missed you too … so much … it was a crazy time.” But in a way, although I didn't realize it at the time, it had shown me how much I loved him. He didn't ask about Paul then, or what we had done together. I sensed easily that he didn't want to know, although I was sure he suspected. Sending Paul to me was something he had done for me, a kind of gift from him, but in his mind, it was over. In mine, it was something I would have to live with, and absorb. But it was Peter who was important to me, who was a part of my real life, not the Klone. And wherever Paul was now, I knew they had already taken his wires apart, and his head off.
“You looked beautiful when you picked me up today,” Peter said peacefully in the flickering candlelight. “Where did you get all those rubies? Were they real?” They had been extraordinary, but he'd been so excited to see me that he'd forgotten to mention them.
“They're from you.” I smiled, looking up at him, as I lay against his shoulder. “Paul bought them for me, at Van Cleef. They're pretty, aren't they?”
“Did he charge them to me?” Peter asked, trying heroically not to look as stunned as he was. I nodded, and felt him grow anxious as we lay side by side.
“He said he knew you'd want me to have them. Thank you, sweetheart.” I nestled closer to him, and felt his tension as he lay next to me, and he said nothing more about the rubies. “I love you, Peter,” I said gratefully, remembering the miraculous things he had just done to me. It was good to have him home again, better than it ever had been.
“I love you too, Steph,” he whispered. And I knew that, wherever he was, and whether or not he would return again, in his own loving, inimitable way, Paul Klone had brought Peter even closer to me.
Chapter Seven
The next three months with Peter were remarkable, in their own way, the children readjusted to him, although they wondered what happened, after his brief two-week fling at near insanity and wearing cool clothes. But they got used to the Gucci shoes again, and so did I.
Peter and I spent a lot of time together, and I had never been as happy in my life as I was with him. We went to movies, plays. I met all his friends, and I liked most of them. He spent weekends with me, whenever the children went to stay with their father. And I spent the occasional night at his apartment, when I had a sitter for the kids, and left at six A.M. to come home to make breakfast for them, still smiling from my nights with Peter.
I fell in love with him more each day, in spite of his occasional cool spells, and his occasional doubts about