Judith Krantz (16 page)

“Wait!” Mike said as she began tugging impatiently at his belt. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“The
dumbest
question—why don’t you help?” He looked into Sylvie’s eyes and there he saw the answer to his question, there he saw that with this
woman he had entered a strange and foreign world in which no more questions were necessary. He had only to follow her lead.

“I’m helping,” Mike said, and stripped naked in seconds. He laid Sylvie down flat on the blanket and undid her white linen shirt and unzipped her white slacks deftly, although his fingers were trembling.

“Hurry,” she commanded, wriggling out of her clothes without the slightest hesitation.

“Hurry?” He wanted to explore the marvels of her body slowly and carefully.

“I want you now,” she said, in a low, vibrating voice that brooked no argument, and in a supple, sudden movement she sat up on the blanket and launched herself over him, toppling him down so that she was perched on top of him, her legs parted, pressing his thighs together. She took his erect penis in her hand and paused a moment, glorying in its bulk and readiness, and then, without a word, she moved forward and upward, and slowly, unhesitatingly, impaled herself on it, a slim, firm, white column of flesh, braced on the heels of her hands, her breasts pointing upward, her head thrown back and her lips parted in a grimace of mingled pain and victory, as if she were a runner who had broken the tape at the finish line of a race.

Then she lay forward on his chest and stretched her legs straight out over his, her full weight on him, so that their two bodies were together, flesh to flesh, for their entire length. He was so much larger than she was that her weight felt like nothing, and he lay back, willing himself to control, waiting to see what she would have him do next. She rested for a minute, feeling him swelling steadily and ever more tightly inside of her, listening to his heartbeat, measuring the sound of his breathing, feeling the beat of his pulses.

He was like a huge untamed animal she had hunted on a savage shore and brought to ground, she thought, with the sun hot on her back and the taste of salt on her lips. Now there was no hurry, now she all but owned him. What she wanted she would have.
Now she could give herself up to the play of luxurious and deliberate movement, squeezing her pelvic muscles together so faintly that the change she made might not have been perceptible to a man less aroused than Mike Kilkullen.

That tiny tingle of a signal was all he needed. He put his arms around her slight, perfect body and, without withdrawing from her, he lifted her easily and placed her under him so that he was gazing down at her. They looked at each other and he saw that she understood that no woman was going to ride him into submission, no woman was going to rush him into a climax for which he wasn’t prepared.

Slowly he eased himself completely out of her body and guided the underside of his penis deliberately and carefully back and forth across the fiery axis of moist flesh between her legs. Then he entered her again, pushing into her steadily, pausing between each inch of progress, coming to rest solidly inside her while she clenched and unclenched her muscles against him. No word passed between them as he pulled out again and rubbed himself slowly against the tender, burning, most secret place of her body, feeling her lifting her hips higher and higher, listening to the rhythm of her breathing quicken and catch and hold as she squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Only when he felt the first unmistakable tightening and lunging of her buttocks, only when he heard her begin to cry out, did he allow himself to quickly reenter her warmth and give himself up to the rhythm that would bring them both to the fullness of their passion.

They lay on their sides, clasped in each other’s arms, his penis still inside her.

“This can’t have happened,” Mike said in a voice that seemed to be that of a stranger.

“It usually doesn’t,” she answered, laughing softly.

“Don’t laugh, I’ll slip out if you do.”

“Sooner or later you will anyway,” she assured him, still laughing.

“Are you such an expert?” Mike asked, suddenly
alert, and there was an undertone to his question that made her pull away immediately and sit up, a creature from a magic wood who had ventured out of the protection of the forest into the full sun of day, her arms clasped around her knees, hiding her breasts.

“There is no better sport I know in which to be an expert.” There was no challenge in her voice, only a serene certainty of the truth of her statement, but her eyes were no longer laughing.

“What I mean … what I’m trying to say … you—” Mike sat up too, suddenly feeling that lying down he was at a disadvantage.

“What you’re trying and failing to say, my darling, is that you’re surprised—no, shocked—to find that a woman you have known only since last night gives herself to you so freely. And that she considers making love a sport that one should do well. Isn’t that so? You don’t even have to answer, I can see it on your face. You expected to have to pay court to me for weeks before I might—just might—let you have me like this, and even then I would not be the one to choose the moment. And it would have been at night, wouldn’t it? According to your expectations, I should have had to ‘get to know you’ first.”

“You’re putting words in my mouth,” he protested, but he knew that everything she said was true.

“No, not at all. I’m reading your mind. You’re an American male, and I have learned to understand them, how they think, what they believe, how they feel women should behave. I didn’t expect you to be the single exception in this country.”

Sylvie’s dignity was total and touching, her gentle sense of authority implicit in every sentence she spoke, although she was still flushed in the aftermath of love and so tousled that she looked even younger than her twenty years.

“Damn, I don’t understand you!” Mike exclaimed in the frustration of incomprehension. “You told me you were some kind of relative of Sven’s, here on a short visit, you’re working for him at the coffee-house
—now you’re an expert on American male behavior and thought. But you’re too beautiful to be a sociologist or an anthropologist or a professor of some kind. You’re altogether too beautiful and too sure of yourself and too damn knowing about sex to be any ordinary woman. What’s going on here?”

Kneeling, he grabbed Sylvie by her shoulders and pulled her close, tipping her chin up with his thumb and fixing her gaze. “Just what
is
going on here,” he repeated. “Are you a mermaid or some kind of changeling or elf in human disguise?”

“Only an actress,” she told him, lowering her lids and smiling innocently.

“ ‘Only an actress’? Only an actress where?”

“Stockholm … and … Hollywood.”

“A movie actress? I’ve never seen you. What have you done in English?”

“Only two movies. The first was
Perfect Strangers
. The second one,
The Inconstant Wife
, hasn’t been released yet.”

“I haven’t seen a movie in six months, but I read the papers from time to time.
Perfect Strangers
was a huge hit. What part did you play?”

“The lead.”

“The girl they called the new Ingrid Bergman, the girl they …”

“Yes, yes, yes! I was going to tell you anyway, so you can stop this interrogation. I’m a movie star, not just an actress. Does that bother you?”

“I have the feeling that it should, but I don’t exactly know why,” Mike said slowly, trying to absorb this oddly unwelcome information. He felt surprised, confused and disoriented, as if something had shifted and dimmed, as if a cloud had passed over the sun. “Does it bother
you
?”

“It’s my work,” Sylvie answered lightly, casually, “but it isn’t easy for other people to see me clearly when they think ‘movie star’—that’s why I pretended to be a waitress last night—although I wouldn’t have bothered for anyone but you.”

“Is Sven really your father’s cousin?”

“Oh yes, that much was true. And the coffee was real coffee.”

“What else should I know about you that I don’t?” he demanded, roused to impatience by her teasing.

“You know more already than any other man in America. And I know nothing about you, Mike Kilkullen, except that you make love marvelously. And that you can blush under your tan. Remarkable.”

“I’m married, Sylvie, but my wife and I are separated. She’s going to file for divorce in the fall. Sven doesn’t know that. Nobody does. I have two daughters, eight and eleven. I’m thirty-four. Except for the army, I’ve lived here all my life. I’m a simple man, Sylvie. I don’t know anything about your kind of life.”

“Why should you? You are planted like a great tree here in this marvelous,
marvelous
place. You are in your element, bossing everyone around—oh, I saw how quickly you were obeyed when you ordered the horses saddled. This is your place, Mike, your home place. It must be so good to have land that no one can take away, a beach on the edge of the ocean, a mountain and all the miles and miles that lie between the two. You felt so solid, so real when I was lying on you, like the earth itself.”

She sounded wistful, he thought, and almost forlorn. “Do you miss Sweden?” he asked. “Are you homesick, my beautiful crazy little movie star sweetheart?”

“I was homesick until today. I won’t be if you hold me in your arms. I won’t if you make love to me again. It’s the only cure I know.”

“Shall we make love as a cure or as a sport?”

“Both,” Sylvie murmured into his lips. What she wanted she would have.

During the next two months, Mike Kilkullen hurried through his duties on the ranch, delegating authority freely for the first time since his father’s death, so that he and Sylvie could spend as much time together as
possible. He spoke immediately to his friend Sven Hansen, to tell him about his separation and the planned divorce, news that Sven accepted with little surprise and kept to himself.

However, Mike knew that he couldn’t be seen again picking Sylvie up in front of the coffeehouse without involving the whole small town in a flurry of speculation and gossip. The hacienda was staffed by a new cook, Susie Dominguez, and two maids who were delighted to be told to go home early every evening, leaving the house empty and dinner on the stove. Sylvie bought a little car and at dusk, when the light was at its most beautiful, she drove out to the ranch to be with him. Their meetings were wild with an intemperate hunger that swiftly grew from passion to love.

At night, before they slept, they often walked around the vast private paradise of the peaceful, enclosed, unexpected gardens, a secret pattern of green-walled rooms, stopping here and there to touch a white rose that signaled to them in the moonlight, to pick a few leaves of lavender and rub them between their fingertips, to dabble their hands in the fountain that stood in the center of the main patio, to sniff the many perfumes that the night released, finding all the hidden garden seats on which they could silently contemplate the immensity of their happiness, the nights so quiet that every whinny from the stables was clearly audible. With an unspoken, mutual mixture of superstition and willful blindness, they refused to discuss the future until it was almost time for Sylvie to go back to Los Angeles and start work on her new picture. Their nights had no edges or boundaries. Although their time together was circumscribed to the kingdom of the ranch, these hours of perfect happiness spilled over into their days, during which their love for each other was a constant, obstinate, aching presence in their bloodstreams, blurring the threadbare, ordinary, outside world.

On a Friday late in August, Sylvie finally broke the silence. “One more week … after the Labor Day weekend I must start work,” she said tonelessly, and
pulled at the petals of a faded ivy geranium, adding to the shower of pink that lay at her feet like confetti.

“Don’t you think I know? I know to the hour. To the minute.”

“What are we to do? It’s unimaginable. I don’t know how to start to think about it.”

“Darling, it’s very simple. I had a letter from my wife’s lawyer last week. She’s going to fly back to California and file for divorce. In a year from that day the divorce will be final. Next year, at this time, if you still love me, we’ll get married.”

“Nothing can be that simple,” Sylvie said longingly.

“But it is,” Mike answered with conviction, pushing aside the thought of the details of the letter he’d received.

He would pay Liddy twenty-five thousand dollars a year in alimony for life or until she remarried; he would assume all the children’s expenses, including clothes, medical costs, private schools and eight years of higher education after high school. He would pay three hundred and fifty dollars a month per child in child support when the girls were out of school, unless they were with him. Liddy would take one-half of all his ranching profits since they had married. The only reason she wasn’t entitled to half the ranch and half the house was that they belonged to him by inheritance.

His lawyer had protested angrily that he was being robbed blind, that the alimony and child-support payments were far higher than any court would award, higher than those imposed on any man except a rare millionaire, but Mike had accepted all the conditions.

He had his land, he had his herds, he had the Hacienda Valencia, he would always be able to take care of Sylvie, and he was willing to give Liddy whatever she asked in exchange for his freedom.

“It is that simple,” he repeated, since Sylvie was looking at him with disbelief clear in her gaze.

“Mike Kilkullen, you oversimplify.”

“I said, if you still love me … I’m not taking anything for granted. What more is there?”

“I will still love you.”

Sylvie Norberg had never been as beautiful as when she said those words, nor had the mysterious, mesmerizing light that came from her eyes ever been so disturbing as when she slowly continued. Her self-confidence, always so reliable, was profoundly shaken as she realized the gravity of this decision.

“There are so many other things we haven’t talked about,” she said haltingly, as one detail followed the other. “My new film—I didn’t want to spoil our time together with the details—but my new film is to be shot on location in England and Italy. That means I’ll be away for three months. When I come back, I’ll have a few weeks to be with you and then—after Christmas—there is another film I have accepted in Hollywood. We shoot every day during the week. Oh, my darling, I’ll only be able to be with you on the weekends. Three months, Mike, three months apart—only a few weeks together before I start to work again, and then—only weekends. Are you willing to live like that?”