Over the trunk of his Riviera.
“Absolutely not!” she exclaimed.
“Give it a chance,” he replied.
She opened her mouth to tell him that nothing in the world would convince her to be mauled while she was stretched out on the trunk of a car, but he seemed to take her open mouth as some sort of invitation. Before she could frame her words he started kissing her again. Without quite knowing how it happened, she heard herself moan as his kisses grew deeper, hotter. She arched her neck to him, opened her mouth, thrust her tongue, and forgot about her demeaning position. He reached down and encircled her ankle with his fingers, then pulled her leg up. “Right here,” he crooned softly. “Put your foot right up here next to the license plate, honey.”
She did just as he asked.
“Move your hips forward a little bit. That's good.” His voice sounded thick, not as calm as usual, and his breathing was faster than normal as he rearranged her. She pulled at his T-shirt, wanting to feel his bare skin against her breasts. He peeled it over his head and then began tugging at her underpants.
“Dallie...”
“It's all right, darlin'. It's all right.” Her underpants disappeared and her bottom settled on cold metal dusted with road grit. “Francie, that package of birth control pills I spotted in your case wasn't just there for decoration, now, was it?”
She shook her head, unwilling to break the mood by offering any lengthy explanations. When her periods had unaccountably stopped a few months ago, her physician had told her to quit taking her birth control pills until they resumed. He had assured her that she couldn't get pregnant until then, and at the moment that was all that mattered.
Dallie's hand closed over the inside of one of her thighs. He moved it slightly away from the other and began stroking her skin lightly, each time coming closer to the one part of her that she didn't find all that beautiful, the one part of her that she would just as soon have kept hidden away, except that it felt so warm and quivery and strange. “What if somebody comes?” she cried as he brushed against her.
“I'm hoping somebody will,” he replied huskily. And then he stopped brushing, stopped teasing, and touched her... really touched her. Inside.
“Dallie...” Her voice was half moan, half cry.
“Feel good?” he muttered, his fingers sliding gently in and out.
“Yes. Yes.”
While he played with her, she closed her eyes against the slice of Louisiana moon above her head so that nothing would distract her from the wonderful feelings that were rushing through her body. She turned her cheek and didn't even feel the dirt from the trunk rub against her skin. His hands grew less patient. They spread her legs farther apart and pulled her hips closer to the edge. Her feet were balanced precariously on the bumper, separated by a Texas license plate and some dusty chrome. He fumbled with the front of his jeans and she heard the zipper give. He lifted her hips.
When she felt him push inside her, she gave a small gasp. He bent over her, his feet still on the ground, but drew back slightly. “Am I hurting you?”
“Oh, no. It—it feels so good.”
“It's supposed to, honey.”
She wanted him to believe she was a wonderful lover—to do everything right—but the whole world seemed to be sliding away from her, making everything dizzy, wavery, and mushy with warmth. How could she concentrate when he was touching her that way, moving like that? She suddenly wanted to feel more of him. Lifting her foot from the bumper, she wrapped one knee around his hips, the other around his leg, pushing against him until she had absorbed as much of him as she could.
“Easy, honey,” he said. “Take your time.” He began moving inside her slowly, kissing her, and making her feel as good as she'd ever felt in her life. “You with me, darlin'?” he murmured softly in her ear, the sound slightly hoarse.
“Oh, yes... yes. Dallie... my wonderful Dallie... my lovely Dallie...” A cacophony of sound seemed to explode in her head as she came and came and came.
He heaved hard, and something halfway between a moan and groan escaped him. The sound gave her a feeling of power, touched fire to her excitement, and she came again. He quivered over her for a wonderfully interminable length of time and then grew heavy.
She turned her cheek so that it pressed against his hair, felt him dear and beautiful and real against her, inside her. She noticed that their skin was stuck together and that his back felt moist beneath her hands. She felt a small drop of perspiration fall from him onto her bare arm and realized she didn't care. Was this what it meant to be in love? she wondered dreamily. Her eyelids drifted open. She was in love. Of course. Why hadn't she realized it long before this? That was what was wrong with her. That was why she'd been feeling so unhappy. She was in love.
“Francie?” he murmured.
“Yes?”
“You all right?”
“Oh, yes.”
He eased himself up on one arm and smiled down at her. “Then how 'bout we head for the motel and try it again on top of those sheets you were so set on?”
On the drive back, she sat in the middle of the front seat and leaned her cheek against his shoulder while she chewed a piece of Double Bubble and daydreamed about their future.
Chapter
13
Naomi Jaffe Tanaka let herself into her apartment, a Mark Cross briefcase in one hand and a bag from Zabar's perched on her opposite hip. Inside the bag was a container of golden figs, a sweet Gorgonzola, and a crusty loaf of French bread, all she needed for a perfect working night dinner. She set down her briefcase and placed the sack on the black granite counter in her kitchen, leaning it against the wall, which had been painted with a hard burgundy enamel. The apartment was expensive and stylish, exactly the sort of place where the vice-president of a major advertising agency should live.
Naomi frowned as she pulled out the Gorgonzola and set it on a pink glazed porcelain plate. Only one small stumbling block lay between her and the vice-presidency she craved—finding the Sassy Girl. Just that morning, Harry Rodenbaugh had sent her a stinging memo threatening to turn the account over to one of the agency's “more aggressive men” if she couldn't produce her Sassy Girl in the next few weeks.
She kicked off her gray suede pumps and nudged them out of the way with a stockinged toe while she removed the rest of her purchases from the sack. How could it be so difficult to find one person? Over the past few days, she and her secretary had made dozens of phone calls, but not one of them had run the girl to ground. She was out there, Naomi knew, but where? She rubbed her temples, but the pressure did nothing to relieve the headache that had been plaguing her all day.
After depositing the figs in the refrigerator, she picked up her pumps and headed wearily out of the kitchen. She would take a shower, put on her oldest bathrobe, and pour herself a glass of wine before she started on the work she'd brought home. With one hand, she began unfastening the pearl buttons at the front of her dress, while with the elbow of her other arm, she flicked on the living room light switch.
“What's doin', sis?”
Naomi shrieked and spun toward her brother's voice, her heart jumping in her chest. “My God!”
Gerry Jaffe lounged on the couch, his shabby jeans and faded blue work shirt out of place against the silky rose upholstery. He still wore his black hair in an Afro. He had a small scar on his left cheekbone and tired brackets around those full lips that had once driven all of her female friends wild with lust. His nose was the same—as big and bold as an eagle's. And his eyes were deep black nuggets that still burned with the fire of the zealot.
“How did you get in here?” she demanded, her heart pounding. She felt both angry and vulnerable. The last thing she needed in her life right now was another problem, and Gerry's reappearance could only mean trouble. She also hated the feeling of inadequacy she always experienced when Gerry was around—a little sister who once again didn't measure up to her brother's standards.
“No kiss for your big b
rother?”
“I don't want you here.”
She received a brief impression of an enormous weariness hanging over him, but it vanished almost immediately. Gerry had always been a good actor. “Why didn't you call first?” she snapped. And then she remembered that Gerry had been photographed by the newspapers a few weeks before outside the naval base in Bangor, Maine, leading a demonstration against stationing the Trident nuclear submarine there. “You've been arrested again, haven't you?” she accused him.
“Hey, what's another arrest in the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave?” Uncoiling himself from the sofa, he held out his arms to her and gave her his most charming Pied Piper grin. “Come on, sweetie. How 'bout a little kiss?”
He looked so much like the big brother who used to buy her candy bars when she had asthma attacks that she nearly smiled. But her temporary softening was a mistake. With a monstrous growl, he vaulted over her glass and marble coffee table and came for her.
“Gerry!” She backed away from him, but he kept coming. Baring his teeth, he turned his hands into claws and came lurching toward her in his best Frankensteinian manner. “The Four-Eyed Fang-Toothed Phantom walks again,” he growled.
“I said stop it!” Her voice rose in pitch until it was shrill. She couldn't deal with the Fang-Toothed Phantom now— not with the Sassy Girl and the vice-presidency and her headache all plaguing her. Despite the passing years, her brother never changed. He was the same old Gerry—larger than life, just as outrageous as ever. But she wasn't nearly as charmed.
He lurched toward her, his face comically distorted, eyes rolling, playing the game he'd teased her with for as long as she could remember. “The Fang-Toothed Phantom lives off the flesh of young virgins.” He leered.
“Gerry!”
“Succulent young virgins!”
“Stop it!”
“Juicy young virgins!”
Despite her irritation, she giggled. “Gerry, don't!” She backed away toward the hallway, not taking her eyes off him as he advanced inexorably toward her. With an inhuman shriek he made his lunge. She screamed as he caught her up into his arms and began spinning her in a circle. Ma! she wanted to shout. Ma, Gerry's teasing me! In a sudden rush of nostalgia, she wanted to call out for protection to the woman who now turned her face away whenever her older child's name was mentioned.
Gerry sank his teeth into her shoulder and bit her just hard enough so that she would squeal again, but not hard enough to hurt her. Then he stiffened. “What's this?” he cried in outrage. “This is awful stuff. This isn't a virgin's flesh.” He took her over to the sofa and dumped her unceremoniously. “Shit. Now I'm going to have to settle for pizza.”
She loved him and she hated him, and she wanted to hug him so much that she jumped up off the sofa and gave him a sucker punch right in the arm.
“Ow! Hey, nonviolence, sis.”
“Nonviolence, my ass! What the hell is wrong with you, barging in here like this? You're so damned irresponsible. When are you going to grow up?”
He didn't say anything; he just stood there looking at her. The fragile good humor between them faded. His Rasputin eyes took in her expensive dress and the stylish pumps that had fallen to the floor. Pulling out a cigarette, he lit it, still watching her. He had always had the ability to make her feel inadequate, personally responsible for the sins of the world, but she refused to squirm at the disapproval that gradually came over his expression as he surveyed the material artifacts of her world. “I mean it, Gerry,” she went on. “I want you out of here.”
“The old man must finally be proud of you,” he said tonelessly. “His little Naomi has turned into a fine capitalist pig, just like all the rest.”
“Don't start on me.”
“You never told me how he reacted when you married that Jap.” He gave a bark of cynical laughter. “Only my sister Naomi could marry a Jap named Tony. God, what a country.”
“Tony's mother is American. And he's one of the leading biochemists in the country. His work has been published in every important—” She broke off, realizing she was defending a man she no longer even liked. This was exactly the sort of thing Gerry did to her.
Slowly she turned back to face him, taking some time to study his expression more closely. The weariness she thought she had glimpsed earlier seemed once again to have settled over him, and she had to remind herself it was merely another act. “You're in trouble again, aren't you?”
Gerry shrugged.
He really did look tired, she thought, and she was still her mother's daughter. “Come on out to the kitchen. Let me get you something to eat.” Even with Cossacks trying to break down the door of the cottage, the women in her family would make everyone sit down to a five-course dinner.
While Gerry smoked, she fixed him a roast beef sandwich, adding an extra slice of Swiss cheese, just the way he liked it, and putting out a dish of the figs she had bought for herself. She set the food in front of him and then poured herself a glass of wine, watching surreptitiously as he ate. She could tell he was hungry, just as she could tell that he didn't want her to see exactly how hungry, and she wondered how long it had been since he'd eaten a decent meal. Women used to stand in line for the honor of feeding Gerry Jaffe. She imagined they still did, since her brother continued to have more than his fair share of sex appeal. It used to enrage her to see how casually he treated the women who fell in love with him.
She made him another sandwich, which he demolished as efficiently as he'd eaten the first one. Settling down on the stool next to him, she felt an illogical stab of pride. Her brother had been the best of them all, with Abbie Hoffman's sense of the comic, Tom Hayden's discipline, and Stokely Carmichael's fiery tongue. But now Gerry was a dinosaur, a sixties radical transplanted into the Age of Me First. He attacked nuclear missile silos with a ball-peen hammer and shouted power to the people whose hearing had been blocked by the headsets of their Sony Walkmans.
“How much do you pay for this place?” Gerry asked as he crumpled his napkin and got up to walk over to the refrigerator.
“None of your business.” She absolutely refused to listen to his lecture on the number of starving children she could feed on her monthly rent.
He pulled out a carton of milk and took a glass from the cupboard. “How's Ma?” His question was casual, but she wasn't fooled.
“She's having a little trouble with arthritis, but other than that, she's okay.” Gerry rinsed out the glass and set it in the top rack of her dishwasher. He had always been neater than she was. “Dad's good, too,” she said, suddenly unable to tolerate the idea of making him ask. “You know he retired last summer.”
“Yeah, I know. Do they ever ask about...”
Naomi couldn't help herself. She got up from the stool and walked over to rest her cheek against her brother's arm. “I know they think about you, Ger,” she said softly. “It's just—it's been hard on them.”
“You'd think they'd be proud,” he said bitterly.
“Their friends talk,” she replied, knowing how lame the excuse was.
He gave her a brief, awkward hug and then quickly moved away, going back into the living room. She found him standing next to the window, pushing the draperies back with one hand and lighting a cigarette with the other.
“Tell me why you're here, Gerry. What do you want?”
For a moment he stared out over the Manhattan skyline. Then he stuck his cigarette into the corner of his mouth, pressed the palms of his hands together in an attitude of prayer, and sketched a small bow before her. “Just a little sanctuary, sis. Just a little sanctuary.”
Dallie won the Lake Charles tournament.
“Of course you won the damned thing,” Skeet grumbled as the three of them walked into the motel room on Sunday night with a silver urn-shaped trophy and a check for ten thousand dollars. “The tournament doesn't amount to a hill of beans, so you naturally have to play some of the best damned golf you've played in two months. Why can't you do this kind of
thing at Firestone or anyplace they got a TV camera pointed at you, do you mind telling me that?”
Francesca kicked off her sandals and sagged down onto the end of the bed. Even her bones were tired. She had walked all eighteen holes of the golf course so she could cheer Dallie on as well as discourage any petrochemical secretaries who might be following him too closely. Everything was going to change for Dallie now that she loved him, she had decided. He would start playing for her, just as he'd played today, winning tournaments, making all sorts of money to support them. They'd been lovers for less than a day, so she knew the idea of Dallie supporting her on a permanent basis was premature, but she couldn't help thinking about it.
Dallie began pulling the tail of his golf shirt out of his light gray slacks. “I'm tired, Skeet, and my wrist hurts. Do you mind if we save this for later?”
“That's what you always say. But there isn't any saving it till later 'cause you won't ever talk about it. You go on—”
“Stop it!” Francesca jumped up from the bed and rounded on Skeet. “You leave him alone, do you hear? Can't you see how tired he is? You act as if he lost the bloody tournament today instead of winning it. He was magnificent.”
“Magnificent my sweet aunt,” Skeet drawled. “That boy didn't play with three-quarters of what he's got, and he knows it better than anybody. How about you take care of your makeup, Miss Fran-chess-ka, and you let me take care of Dallie?” He stalked to the door and slammed it as he went out.
Francesca confronted Dallie. “Why don't you fire him? He's impossible, Dallie. He makes everything so difficult for you.”
He sighed and stripped his shirt over his head. “Leave it alone, Francie.”
“That man is your employee, and yet he acts as though you're working for him. You need to put a stop to it.” She watched as he walked over to the brown paper sack he'd brought back to the room with him and pulled out a six-pack of beer. He drank too much, she realized, even though he never seemed to show any signs of it. She had also seen him take a few pills that she doubted were vitamins. As soon as the time was right, she would persuade him to stop both practices.