The One in My Heart (6 page)

“Isn’t that simple? I was hot too.”

“Eww.”

He glanced at me askance. “You don’t think I’m hot?”

“That’s different. It’s not creepy for me to consider you hot.”

“If it will make your puritanical soul feel better, she didn’t think I was hot—at least not in the beginning. I called her a few days after the dinner and asked if she wouldn’t mind showing a poor, homesick kid around Salamanca. She agreed—because she was nice, not because she wanted to molest me.

“We spent the whole day together in the old city, had lunch and dinner. José Luis was livid and they had a fight over me—he saw what I was up to but she didn’t. Not at all. To get back at him, she asked me if I wanted to see some of the countryside too. So of course I exploited their rift for all it was worth.”

A sixteen-year-old who knew how to exploit the rift between a thirty-eight-year-old and a fifty-year-old? “That’s freaking scary.”

“I told you I was obnoxious.”

“So you just wormed your way into her heart?”

“More like I wormed my way into her bed at first.”

We were walking through the European halls. The Virgin Mary we passed looked quite constipated. In fact, an entire row of Virgin Marys were stiff with disapproval. “Why do I feel that I might be led away in handcuffs if I listen to any more of your story?”

“Hey, you asked for salacious details.”

“You were sixteen. That was illegal. She should have gone to jail for statutory rape.”

“The thought crossed my parents’ mind when they found out, but I was over the age of consent in Spain. They shipped me off to Eton instead, away from her reach.”

“But she still got through to you somehow?”

“No. We didn’t see each other for sixteen months. We met in online chat rooms. We wrote actual letters. I called her from phone booths with calling cards—remember those?—and waited for my eighteenth birthday.”

“Just waited chastely?”

He shrugged. “I was in love.”

My heart recoiled against an abrupt stab of pain. “What did your parents make of all this?”

“They were hoping the separation would do the trick. But the day I turned eighteen, I walked out of Eton and flew to California, where she was based.”

“And your parents just let you go?”

“No, they chased me to Berkeley and it was ugly. But since I was already eighteen they couldn’t do anything. Eventually they left.” His voice turned somber. “I haven’t seen them since—except once, at O’Hare. I don’t think they saw me.”

“Is that why you moved back here, so you could be part of the tribe again?”

He glanced at a painting we were passing, which happened to be a family portrait, three rosy children clambering over an elegant, serene mother. “If I said yes, it would be the first time I admitted it to anyone.”

A strange thrill shot through me. “That’s a yes, then.”

He didn’t answer immediately—I was reminded of the night we met, those few heartbeats during which he stood by his car, motionless, as if he’d acted without thinking the matter through, and must pause to reassess the situation.

“Yes,” he finally said.

My breath caught—did it mean anything that I was the first one to hear it? “You do know that you can ring their doorbell anytime and say, ‘Hey, Mom and Dad, I’ve missed you’?”

“I could. But that would require courage and maturity. Much easier to go on wallowing in indecision.”

“The new pinnacle of modern manhood.”

This made him laugh.

That great laughter, those green eyes…I simmered with a sharp emotion that I didn’t recognize at first.

Possessiveness.

“Sir, ma’am,” an attendant called to us, “the museum is closing in fifteen minutes and we need to clear the galleries.”

“Would you like a drink at my place?” Bennett asked as we made our way out.

My stomach flipped. Was this an invitation to sex? “Where do you live?”

“At Seven Forty.”

Manhattan’s most prestigious apartment buildings were known by their street numbers, and few were as storied as 740 Park Avenue, where Jackie Kennedy had lived as a young girl. “You couldn’t have bought something on Central Park West? It just had to be Seven Forty?”

“Of course. That was how I informed my parents I was moving back to the city.”

When an apartment at 740 changed hands, it made news, at least among a certain subset of Manhattanites. Even if Bennett’s parents didn’t pay attention, they’d have friends who did.

Outside the museum I stopped. If he was determined to have dinner with Zelda and me, that was fine. But I shouldn’t spend any more time alone with him.

In fantasy, he was perfect. In reality, he could only be trouble.

“I have something I’d like to discuss with you,” he said as I mustered the will to decline his invitation. “Something that is unrelated, or only tangentially related, to my inability to save myself for marriage whenever you are around.”

“What is it?”

“Let’s just say I’ve been cultivating Zelda for the same reason.”

I spent a moment pulling on my gloves, wondering whether I could at least postpone the inevitable for some time. Anything that concerned Zelda would eventually concern me, but did I have to deal with it tonight?

“I promise I’ll behave myself in the kitchen,” he cajoled. “There will be absolutely no copulatory acts against counters or cabinets.”

A very, very narrow promise—outside his kitchen I would be fair game. I shook my head. “Lead the way, then.”

He’d worn me down at last.

Chapter 4

740 PARK AVENUE WAS LESS
than ten blocks from the Met. An unassuming entrance led into a foyer that had an Art Deco touch, to give it a glimmer of hipness back in 1929 without making the genteel folks of Park Avenue feel that they were being contaminated by too much of what was going on in Central Park West.

A private elevator ferried us directly to the penthouse. The elevator door opened and I stepped into an entry hall that could have been used as a movie set for
The Age of Innocence
. The walls were papered in a soft, faded gold, the furniture American antiques of the Federal style. Pots of pale narcissus bloomed everywhere, delicately fragrant and delicately beautiful.

The only splash of color came from a huge portrait that hung over the fireplace. The subject was a woman in a gown of bold carmine, with a king’s ransom of rubies glittering over her throat and breast. The signature belonged to John Singer Sargent. A small plaque on the frame of the painting said,
Her Ladyship the Marchioness of Tremaine, 1894.

“My great-great-grandmother,” said Bennett, noticing the direction of my gaze.

“She was pretty hot,” I said, unbuttoning my coat.

“She was also pretty scandalous back in the day. Almost divorced my great-great-grandfather.”

“What stopped her?”

“I’m not sure. Rumor had it he was too good in bed.”

I laughed—because it was funny, and because I was more than a little jittery.

“Hey, I must have inherited it from somewhere.”

All I could think of was the sensation of him inside me, driving me to one brink after another. “Don’t look at me. I’ve never been to bed with you. Now, where’s my vermouth?”

He led me into the living room, which was less Gilded Age than the entry, and cooler in feel. The floor was bamboo. The curtains on the floor-to-ceiling windows were blue with a subtle undertone of grey. A pair of antique chairs upholstered in pale rose flanked a sizable blue-grey leather chaise.

Bennett poured vermouth for me and tonic water for himself. “Would you like something to eat?” he asked as he handed me my glass. “I have enough food on hand to feed two.”

I supposed we might as well talk about whatever it was he wanted to talk about over dinner. “Sure.”

He went to the kitchen and came back a minute later. “The soup needs to warm up in the oven for half an hour. Want to see the view?”

“It’s just the skyline, right?” I said, setting down my drink.

“It is. But I’ve been away long enough that I still get excited about it.”

He flicked a switch; the lights turned off. Another switch and the curtains rose on the Manhattan skyline. I gazed at the silhouette of my great city, a blaze of luminosity against a pitch-black night. Bennett’s footsteps, soft and sure, came up behind me. His fingers were gentle as they brushed against my jaw. Then he lifted my hair and kissed me underneath my ear.

Our first encounter had been incredibly hot, but it had also been one of those things that happened largely because of a random intersection of circumstances. This time I was not a rain-soaked woman at her most vulnerable in years; this time I was put-together and poised; this time I would know how to handle myself.

The ferocity of the sensation that hurtled through me dwarfed anything I’d ever experienced, a pleasure so sharp and vivid…it was as if months of simmering, unspoken desires had become a magnifier that turned the slightest touch to chaos and upheaval.

I clenched my fingers so I wouldn’t gasp out loud.

He kissed a different spot. I shivered.

This was coming to resemble my fantasy too closely. In real life I was supposed to slip out of reach, and maybe laugh a little while wagging a finger with playful reproach. In real life I wasn’t supposed to be swept away by raging needs, like a canoe dragged over the edge of a powerful cataract.

“I thought…I thought you were going to discuss something that had nothing to do with this.”

“We’ll discuss it over dinner, which isn’t for at least another twenty-five minutes.” He punctuated his answer with a nip at my shoulder.

I swallowed a whimper. “I told you, I’m saving myself for marriage.”

“Then why do you keep leading me astray?” He kissed me on my earlobe. “I think about you every time I masturbate.”

Did my knees buckle? I wouldn’t know, because he picked me up at that exact moment.

“You see this?” he asked as he laid me down on the chaise. “When I come back from thirty hours in the hospital, I don’t even bother going up to the bedroom. I just sleep right here. But before I go to sleep I masturbate, and I think about you—under me, over me, and maybe bent over the armrest. Every time, without fail.”

I was unbelievably turned on.

He yanked off my boots. Reaching under my skirt, he peeled away my tights and my underwear. Now he undressed, smoothed on a condom, and pushed my skirt up around my waist. Then, in one motion, he was all the way inside me.

How did this happen? How did I lose control so quickly? Was it because in my heart I had never wanted any result but this?

I shut my eyes tight and wrapped my legs around him. God, he was strong. When he drove into me, it felt as if I were making love to a race car. I had a death grip on the back of the chaise, so that he wouldn’t propel me clear off it.

“Do you know why I think of you?” He spoke directly into my ear. “You make me come instantly. I put my hand on myself, picture you naked, and I come like a fourteen-year-old.”

The pleasure of his body was volcanic. The pleasure of his words was a conflagration. I was already on the verge when he said, “I come so fast that sometimes I have to masturbate one more time. And when I do that, I imagine fucking you all night long.”

My orgasm was a bullet to the head, a shocking starburst. His was similarly thorough and ferocious. But he didn’t stop. He kept going, kissing my face, my throat, my breasts, until I was trembling again.

Until together we fell over the edge again.

MY BREATH WAS IN TATTERS
. So was something far more important: my composure. Fortunately the dazzle of nighttime Manhattan was only a shimmer on the walls, the room dark enough that I didn’t need to worry that he’d see my confusion—and the beginning of my distress.

Bennett kissed me on the shoulder and asked, as if it were an afterthought, “When was the last time you got lucky?”

Should I lie? It would be a good idea here. “You should know,” I said. “You were an eyewitness.”

He kissed my cheek. “I’m busy. What’s your excuse?”

I have closed myself off—and I prefer it that way. Who are you and how did you manage to strip me naked?
“I’m incredibly incompetent at getting laid. I could stand in the middle of Times Square on a Saturday night, waving a ‘Free Pussy’ sign, and get no takers.”

“Liar. I’ll bet I ruined you for other men.”

I would have laughed if I could. “So says the man who can’t put his hand on himself without thinking of me.”

He chortled softly. “Put me in my place, why don’t you?”

And with that, he pushed off to get dressed. By the time I slowly sat up, pulled down my skirt, and straightened my top, he was already presentable. He gave me my panty-and-tights tangle, and then my boots. And when I had everything in place, he turned the lights back on and brought me the vermouth I hadn’t tasted yet.

“We’ll have time to finish our drinks before dinner, like civilized people.”

I wanted to ask him whether he really fantasized about me every time he masturbated. If it was true, then he was almost as sexually obsessed with me as I was with him—and that might be some consolation. But I had a feeling he would smirk at me and ask,
What do you think?