Once in a Lifetime (18 page)

He’s out of control,
she thought—joy scooting through her—when, for the first time, he bulged against her and moaned aloud. “Honey, take me to bed; do something, anything.”

He suckled more vigorously, and she grabbed his hips and strained against him until he jerked away from her. “Hold off that, sweetheart. You move fast, but I have to go slow. Understand?” He eased her to her feet, slipped the negligee from her shoulders, turned back the covers and laid her in his bed.

“May I?” he asked, standing at the edge of the bed.

She nodded and focused her gaze on him as he bent to ease the gown off her. When his hands skimmed her thighs all the way up to her love nest, deliberately, she knew, he set her on fire and she had to force herself to wait and let him take the lead as he’d asked. He stared down at her nude body for a second, and she closed her eyes.

“Look at me, sweetheart. Whatever goes on between us is good and right.” Methodically, he jerked off his tie, got out of his shirt and trousers and reached for his bikini underwear.

Emboldened by her need of him, she reached out. “Let me.”

He stepped closer, and she eased the garment down and gasped in awe when he spilled into her hands, big, strong and ready. She glanced up to see him staring into her face, his eyes ablaze with the fire of desire, and raised her arms in invitation. He rested one knee on the bed and went into her arms. Skin to skin, breasts to chest, belly to belly, she felt him.

His arms enfolded her, protecting her. Reassuring her.
“Kiss me. Open your mouth and kiss me,” he said, his tone breathless. She sucked his tongue into her mouth and let him know she wanted him. The hairs on his chest teased her nipples into hard little peaks until she squirmed and spread her legs. She pulled at her aching nipple, and he bent to it, hungrily, as if it were the sustenance of his life, until, nearly out of her mind, she grabbed his buttocks and tried to pull him to her body, to drag him into her aching void.

“Easy, sweetheart. We’re not nearly there yet.”

His lips planted kisses on her neck, ears, cheeks and lips, while his hand eased downward over her breasts to her belly. She stilled in anticipation, but when his fingers skimmed over the inside of her thigh, her body jerked upward. His mouth brushed her breast before settling on her left aureole and suckling it, and she thought she’d go crazy when his left hand trailed up her other thigh and stopped at its apex. By then, frustrated beyond sanity, she shifted her body to meet his hand and, as if he’d been waiting for her move, his fingers parted her folds, found the nub of her passion and began their torrid dance.

She bucked beneath him, but after the initial surprise, she stiffened.

“Give yourself over to me, baby. Let me have you.”

Slowly, she forced herself to relax and let him have his way. Then, his educated fingers began strumming her as a master guitarist strums his guitar. She wanted to scream as the tension mounted, and her hips swung like a hammock in the wind. He left her breast, and trailed kisses down her middle to her belly.

“Ooooh,” she yelled, when he hooked her knees over his shoulder and kissed her. “Telford! Oh, my Lord!”

“Don’t deny me this, baby. I want every last bit of you.” He took her then, kissing and sucking until she screamed.

“Honey, I’m getting so full. I want to burst, but I can’t.”

“You will, sweetheart.” He moved up her body, but continued to stroke her until love’s liquid cascaded over his fingers. He removed the packet from beneath the pillow, opened it and
handed her the condom. “Slip this on and take me in. Baby, take me.”

She sheathed him, led him to her portal and lifted her body to meet his thrust. He lingered for a second, and drove home. Oh, the sweet sensation! The almost unbearable ecstasy of feeling him inside her, in the pit of her where he belonged.

“Are you all right? Comfortable?” he asked her.

“Yes. Yes.”

He began to move, slowly at first and then with fast, hard thrusts. Almost immediately the swelling, pumping and squeezing began.

“Telford. Honey, I’m…something’s happening. I’m…I’m going to burst, I can’t… I’m—”

“Easy, love. Relax. We can’t miss. Raise your hips a little bit.”

He let her have his power then, as the terrible and sweet clutching began.

With his right hand beneath her hips, he brought her up to him and increased his pace. He’d give her her birthright if it took the last ounce of his strength. Her heat sucked him deeper into her, and when she began to swell around him, he thought he’d lose his mind.

“Sweetheart, don’t hold back. That’s right. Give yourself to me.”

“I will. I am.”

Her hot love tunnel gripped him, pulsing against him while he struggled for control. At last, he heard her cry of love and felt her erupt all around him, firing his groin and filling his heart with love.

“Telford, honey. I’m dying. I’m… Oh, Lord. I love you. I love you. I love you,” she shouted as he demanded her total surrender.

She soared. Flying. Was she falling? Lord, maybe she was dying. She clutched at him, but her passion sapped the last of her strength, and she tumbled head over heels into the whirlpool of ecstasy into which he plunged her. With her arms
flung wide, she screamed his name, gave herself to him and came alive at last.

“Alexis! Oh, love!” he shouted, no longer able to contain his passion. Shaken to the core of his being, he collapsed in her arms and gave her the essence of himself.

Strung out by the force of his release and the power of what he felt for the woman in his arms, he braced himself on his forearms and rested his head on her breasts. Her arms enfolded him, and a peace such as he’d never known swept over him. After a while, he rose up and kissed her lips. Humbled by the electrifying power of her passion and the abandon with which she’d loved him, he lingered at the heights they scaled together. He couldn’t put into words what he felt for her at that moment, so he tried to show her in the gentleness of his kiss, the tenderness of his caress and the look of adoration in his eyes. Her fingers stroked his face and head, and then her arms tightened around him.

“I love you, Alexis.” The words rushed out of him as if demanding to be said. “You’re… Are you… Am I right in believing that you are completely satisfied? Tell me. It’s important to me.”

Her smile, radiant and happy, gave him his answer, but he needed to hear the words. “Oh, yes. Everything I could have hoped for and more. If there’s anything better, I don’t think I can handle it. It was so…so intense and so…wonderful. I can’t describe it. What… What about you?”

“I told you before we left Eagle Park that you’re what I need, and you are. I don’t think I’ll ever be the same after this, and I don’t want to be. You’re perfect for me.”

He attempted to separate them, but she threw a leg across his buttocks and restrained him. “If you stayed right where you are forever, I wouldn’t mind. I love being with you this way.”

He gazed down at her, proud and not caring if she knew it, and a grin spread over his face. “You may be sorry you said that. I’ve been starved for what seems to me like years.”

He loved the smile that bloomed first around her lips, then
over her cheeks and flashed in her eyes. His body quickened at her audacious wink, and he hardened within her.

“If you’d just discovered gold,” she asked, “would you close the mine and walk away? I intend to make up for lost time, starting now.”

“Deal me in. I’m with you, sweetheart, all the way. Love me?”

She nodded. “You know I do.”

He flexed his buttocks, gathered her close and took her with him on a short, hot ride to paradise.

Hours later, she left him and went to the bed she shared with Tara, and this went against his grain as few things ever had. When something didn’t suit him, he usually changed it or altered the circumstance, but his hands were tied. He didn’t like hiding his behavior—not even from a five-year-old—and, until then, it hadn’t been necessary. But Tara would broadcast everything she knew, and she didn’t choose her audience. He wanted to shout it to the world, but Tara’s tattling to Henry and his brothers would humiliate Alexis.

The next day, the early afternoon temperature soared to ninety-seven degrees. “A perfect day for swimming in the Atlantic,” Irene said to Alexis. Thanks to the heat, they had returned to their air-conditioned rooms rather than walk along the ocean after lunch.

“We’d better wait a couple of hours before going out there,” he said. “It’s too hot.”

Walking between them, he grasped their hands, and the three of them headed up the stairs to their rooms.
Why do I have this need to protect her? She’s a capable woman, and I like that about her. Yet, this primitive feeling that I should shield her from…from…
He told himself to snap out of it.

Alexis understood her reluctance to leave Cape May; she had found there a fulfillment that had eluded her, a coming into her own as a woman. And she would always remember the place where Telford first told her he loved her. What she
couldn’t fathom was Tara’s gloominess when the child saw her packing their belongings.

“Where are we going, Mummy?”

She explained that their vacation was over and they had to go home.

“I don’t wanna go home, Mummy. I want to stay here.”

She sat on the edge of their bed and put her arms around her daughter. “Don’t you want to see Mr. Henry, Mr. Drake, Biscuit and—”

“I wanna stay here where we can be with Mr. Telford all the time.”

“We’ll still be with him,” she told her, though she knew what Tara meant.

They’d been a threesome in Tara’s eyes, a family, and their idyll sent the wrong message to the child. She knew she failed in her attempt to explain, because she didn’t believe her own words.

Tara’s lethargy and quiet during the drive home distressed Alexis, and she mentioned her concern to Telford.

“Don’t you feel it, too? We’re toppling her little world, and we’re also losing the freedom we had these past two weeks to be ourselves with each other.” He glanced at the rearview mirror for a look at Tara and spoke more softly. “Unless we’re going to tell Henry and my brothers that we’re lovers, we can plan on one hell of a job of acting.”

And a lot of good that would do.
Aloud, she said, “No job of acting will fool Russ.”

He glanced at her, and the twinkle in his eyes heated her blood. “Won’t fool any of ’em, but what do we care? They’ll have to keep their thoughts to themselves.” As if in afterthought, he added, “They’d better.”

“All except Russ,” she insisted.

“Try to like him, Alexis. I… He’s… I love my brothers.”

Didn’t he realize that she and Russ came to terms when Russ rescued Tara? “Russ and I are straight. I think he stopped resenting us that day when he brought Tara to me. After that,
I’d like him no matter what he said.” She spoke softly so that the child wouldn’t hear her.

“That incident shook Russ up plenty. You know, he’s never wanted to love anyone, even pulls back from Drake and me sometimes. You might say that’s our mother’s legacy to the three of us. Russ has always been a loner but, as you said, ‘love begets love,’ and he couldn’t resist her any more than the rest of us could.”

He turned into John Brown Drive and, minutes later, swung into the circle at number ten and stopped.

“Thanks for a wonderful vacation.” She pointed to her forehead. “The memory of it is embedded up here for all time.”

As he stared boldly into her eyes, his own blazing with knowledge of her as a woman in her most intimate self, she lowered her gaze and fidgeted with the hem of her T-shirt.

“Don’t you dare thank me. If you knew what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling, you’d tell me to thank
you.
” He got out of the car and went to open the back door for Tara.

“Why can’t you come and stay with Mummy and me?” she heard Tara ask him as she walked around the car.

He unstrapped her and lifted her from her car seat. “I…have to stay in my own room.”

“You can have my room, and I can sleep with Mummy like we did in Cape M-May. I want you and Mummy and me to stay together.”

Telford’s glance toward her held a touch of panic, an obvious call for help. When he attempted to set Tara on her feet, she clung to him, as if she were desperate.

He stroked her back. “Baby, this is something your mother and I have to work out.”

Tara looked him in the eye. “What does it mean, ‘work out’?”

Alexis’s antennae shot up. She wouldn’t mind having the answer to that herself.

“It means we have to talk about it.”

Tara continued to look at him for a minute and then, as if she understood, a smile lit her face. “Oh. When are you going to talk about it?”

Figuring that he’d had enough of Tara’s inquisition, Alexis reached for her, but the little girl clutched Telford’s shoulders. “Honey,” Alexis pleaded, “we can’t stay together now, but he’ll be near us. Please don’t cry.”

“I’m not going to cry,” Tara said and pushed at Telford’s shoulders.

He released her. “You’re precious to me, Tara. I love you, and I’ll be right here.”

His tone, when he said the words, bespoke his dilemma, and Alexis vowed at that moment not to drift into an affair with him. She knew they had failed to pacify Tara when the child strutted past them, walked up to the front door, reached up and rang the bell.

“What a difference from age four to age five,” she said to Telford. “Did you ever see the like?”

He lifted his left shoulder in a shrug. “You asking
me?
”

“Mr. Henry!” Tara screamed in delight, as if she’d never been at odds with Telford and her mother. “I was in the Lantic Ocean, and the water is colder than the swimming pool.”

“You mean
At
-lantic Ocean, don’t you?” Henry said. He looked past Tara to the two adults unloading luggage from the trunk of the car, left the front door ajar and walked into the house holding Tara’s hand.

“If I had the nerve, I’d fire that old coot, but Drake and Russ would murder me,” Telford said, the grin around his mouth belying his words.