My Darling Melissa (30 page)

Melissa went to stand beside her husband at the rail, slipping her arm through his. A mixture of rain and saltwater misted around them, but they were both oblivious to the weather.

“I love you,” Melissa said boldly.

Quinn didn’t respond to her at all, and she couldn’t overlook such a rejection. Not again.

She pulled at his arm. “Quinn!”

He looked at her in total surprise, and in the next instant Melissa realized that he hadn’t even known she was there. “What are you doing out here? Go inside where it’s warm and dry.”

Melissa didn’t move. She held onto his arm and looked up at him. “Didn’t you hear me when I spoke to you just now?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“But I was right here beside you!”

Quinn looked bewildered and a little impatient. “I’m deaf in my left ear,” he said, “You must know that.”

“No—no, I didn’t,” Melissa said, remembering the other instances when she’d whispered “I love you” to Quinn. All this time she’d thought he was ignoring her, when in reality he most likely hadn’t heard her. She began to laugh.

Quinn took her arm and shuffled her away from the railing and out of the rain. They stood under the dripping eaves of the wheelhouse. “What the hell—”

Melissa stopped laughing and reached up to touch her husband’s troubled face. “Oh, darling—I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve bared my soul to you several times and thought you didn’t care, when the truth was that you didn’t hear me.”

He drew her very close to him, heedless of the crew members and the occasional fresh-air seeker passing by on the deck. “You bared your soul, did you? And what did you say?”

Melissa drew on all her courage. “I said that I loved you, Quinn Rafferty.”

“When?” he pressed, and for the first time since before the incident with Eustice there was a happy light in his eyes.

Melissa blushed. “Once when we were in the hot spring at the new hotel, and another time when we were in bed.”

Now it was Quinn who laughed, with hoarse, ragged joy, and he held Melissa tighter still. He bent his head and kissed her, and she was so overwhelmed by her feelings for this man that she knew she would have slipped to the deck like a formless jellyfish if he hadn’t been supporting her.

Her very vulnerability to him made her pull back a little, when she’d caught her breath and restored the starch to her knees, and say, “You did tell me once that you weren’t sure what you felt for me.”

“I know what it is now,” Quinn answered, his mouth very near hers again. Dangerously near.

“What?” Melissa croaked.

His chuckle was a warm vibration against her lips. “I love you, Mrs. Rafferty,” he said, and then he swept her into another kiss.

Melissa’s spirit soared within her. All the other problems facing her could be dealt with in good time; the important thing was that Quinn loved her. In that moment and that place nothing else mattered.

An hour later the steamboat docked in Port Hastings to take on passengers. Among them, to Melissa’s delighted surprise, were Fancy and Banner, her sisters-in-law, who were on their way to a suffrage rally in Seattle. Fancy’s new baby, Caroline, was with them, in the care of a nanny.

“How does Jeff feel about this?” Melissa inquired of Fancy when she and her brother’s wife had a moment alone at the buffet table in the ship’s salon.

Worry filled Fancy’s bright eyes. “He said if I went, he was going to leave me,” she confessed. “By now I imagine he’s taken the boys and gone to live at the main house.”

At this point Banner arrived, and it was clear that she’d heard part of the conversation and discerned the rest. “Stop fretting,” she said, patting Fancy’s shoulder. “Jeff will never be able to tolerate the noise and confusion in that house, with all my brood.”

“He’s used to noise and confusion!” Fancy wailed softly, in abject despair.

“Not in a double dose, he’s not,” Banner immediately replied.

Melissa smiled. “Banner’s right, Fancy,” she said. “By the time you get back from the rally Jeff will not only be home again, he’ll be prepared to negotiate.”

“I hope so,” Fancy said with a sad little shrug, “because I don’t know what I’d ever do without that impossible man.”

The afternoon passed quickly for Melissa, and it was with reluctance that she said good-bye to her sisters-in-law on the wharf that evening. They were off to a hotel quite some distance from the one where Melissa would be staying.

“Do you want to join Fancy and Banner in their fight for justice?” Quinn asked with a grin when they had reached their own hotel and he had arranged for a room. Mary and Alice had gone to their apartment near the school for the blind.

Melissa lowered her eyes. Ever since Quinn had told her that he loved her, beneath the wheelhouse eaves on that rainy deck, she’d been eager to be alone with him. She blushed and said, with the sincere shyness of a new bride, “I’d rather stay with you, Mr. Rafferty.”

He lifted her chin with his hand but did not kiss her, since the lobby was crowded with people. “I’ll do my best to see that you don’t regret that decision, my love,” he promised in a low voice that sent sweet tremors through Melissa.

In their room, which was spacious and afforded them a grand view of Elliott Bay, Quinn appeared to be in no hurry to enjoy husbandly privileges. He went to stand at the window, gazing out at a world curtained in rain. Since the big fire three years before Seattle had become a modern city, with towering brick buildings and telephone lines and paved streets.

“What do you see out there that’s so fascinating?” Melissa asked, putting her arms around Quinn and resting her forehead in the hollow between his shoulder blades.

Quinn sighed. “Lots of possibilities and lots of dangers,” he answered at length.

Melissa smiled and kissed his back through the fine fabric of his white shirt. “It just so happens that there are a few possibilities right here in this room,” she said brazenly.

She felt Quinn’s chuckle against her cheek before he turned in her embrace and rested his hands on her waist. “Not to mention a few dangers. I have an idea that my heart is in imminent peril, Mrs. Rafferty.”

Tilting her head back, Melissa looked up at him and answered, “I’ll capture it if I can, and I’ll never give it back.”

Quinn kissed her forehead. “I’ve been deluding myself. You’ve owned me, Melissa, since the moment I pulled you up onto the platform of my railroad car. Do you remember how we collided?”

Color blossomed in Melissa’s cheeks, and she nodded mischievously. “I remember.”

His hands were moving languorously up and down her back, but instead of soothing Melissa, relaxing her, they wound a tight coil of delicious tension inside her. “If I’d been willing to face facts,” Quinn said, “I’d have had to admit that I was in love with you then. I do recall the devout conviction that if I didn’t have you before nightfall, I was going to die.”

Melissa laughed. “But you didn’t.”

Quinn’s hands came around to caress her breasts, still safe beneath her prim white shirtwaist with its high collar and little pearl buttons. “I progressed from fearing death to longing for it,” he said. “My God, Melissa, I wish I understood what it is that you do to me—if I did, I’d have some defense against you.”

She looked up at him, hurt. “But you can’t think that I’m your enemy.”

“You have far more power over me than an enemy ever could” was his startling reply. “No one, not even that son of a bitch who calls himself my father, has ever made me crawl. But you, Melissa—you could do it.”

“I wouldn’t!” she cried in dismay. “I love you too much to ever hurt you!”

Quinn traced her mouth with the tip of a gentle index finger, then bent to sweep her into a consuming kiss. Melissa
broke from it, gasping, and whispered, “Oh, Quinn, let me lie down—I can’t stand on my own.”

He laid her tenderly on the bed, as though she were made of the most precious and delicate stuff, and began unfastening the buttons of her blouse. When he’d reached the swell of her breasts he stopped temporarily to kiss that satiny flesh and taste it with his tongue.

Melissa whimpered as he drew up her skirts and petticoats to stroke a silk-covered thigh with his hand, and her head began to toss from side to side in the beginnings of ecstasy when he finally bared one of her breasts and took its aching peak in his lips.

In the meanwhile he eased her drawers down, sliding them over her legs and tossing them away. Melissa moaned fitfully when he began to stroke her; she had been wanting Quinn for hours, and she wasn’t sure she could endure the preliminaries, no matter how delicious they were.

“Please,” she whispered, her hands entangled in his hair, “take me, Quinn. Take me now.”

The request was not one Quinn generally granted—the more excited Melissa was, the better it pleased him—but in this instance he accommodated her. He allowed her to open his trousers and push them down over his buttocks, and he trembled when she caressed him for a few moments.

He needed little help to find his way inside her, but still, in her eagerness, she guided him.

Quinn regarded Melissa with hot, hungry eyes as he poised himself above her at one point in their lovemaking, pausing to savor the intimate contact. “I love you,” he said hoarsely.

Melissa’s hands were moving slowly and softly over his back, which was damp with perspiration. “And I love you,” she answered.

Then, with an upward thrust of her hips, she reestablished the friction that would soon ignite flames hot enough to consume them both, and Quinn cried out like a man suffering the most exquisite of agonies.

Melissa was drawn into his satisfaction, her body moving
like a ribbon in a high wind, her hands frantic along the corded muscles of his back. Quinn, powerless in the throes of his own release, allowed her the shouts of triumph he usually muffled with a kiss.

When it was over he collapsed beside her, gasping, his head pressed to her heart. Melissa, beyond speech herself, buried her fingers in his hair, closing her eyes against tears of sheer happiness.

They went to the symphony that evening, but even Mozart’s compositions contained no crescendoes as sweet or as sweeping as those they’d known in their lovemaking. Still, Melissa heartily enjoyed the concert, and she was reasonably certain that Quinn had, too.

Since the rain had let up, they walked back toward their hotel hand in hand. “I guess you could say this is our honeymoon,” she said shyly.

Quinn favored her with a sidelong grin. “I guess you could.”

A streetcar clanged past, and when it was quiet again Melissa asked, “What do you think of the suffrage movement?”

Quinn’s grin broadened. “Considering joining those two rabble-rousing sisters-in-law of yours over at the rally?”

Melissa shook her head. “I believe in the cause, but I meant what I said about wanting to stay with you.”

Quinn squeezed her hand. “I think women should be able to vote, Melissa, if it’s any comfort to you.”

It was, and the glow in Melissa’s eyes must have told him so, even though she didn’t. “Fancy says Jeff is really angry with her for coming to the rally. He threatened to leave her.”

They were nearing the hotel now, but Quinn pulled Melissa into a small coffee shop instead of going on. He made no comment on what she’d said until they were seated at a table with huge slices of cherry pie in front of them.

“I’ve heard of people being blinded by love,” he said, “and I think that’s what’s happened with Jeff. If he does leave, he won’t be able to stay away.”

The thought of Jeff and Fancy’s trouble took a bit of the
sparkle from Melissa’s own happiness. “Then you wouldn’t be angry if you’d been in his place and I came over here to participate in a rally for women’s rights?”

A muscle tightened in Quinn’s jaw, and Melissa thought again what very complex creatures men are.

“I didn’t say that,” he pointed out. “A woman belongs at her husband’s side.”

“Couldn’t he get bored with her rather easily that way? Or she with him?”

Grudgingly, Quinn grinned. “I hate it when you’re right,” he said.

Melissa laughed. “I know.”

“I want to stay in Seattle,” Mary announced first thing the next morning, when she and Alice and Quinn and Melissa all met in front of Dr. Koener’s office building on Third Avenue. “I’m going back to school.”

Quinn looked pleased until he made the connection between Seattle and young Scott Murray, the university student Mary had met on the steamer. Alice and Melissa, of course, were way ahead of him. “We’re going to have to talk about this,” he said sternly.

Melissa reached up and laid a finger to his lips. “Another time, darling,” she said gently.

With obvious effort Quinn put Mary’s budding romance out of his mind. Soon they were all upstairs in Dr. Koener’s outer office.

The doctor’s receptionist, a pretty young girl, smiled broadly up at Quinn, who had wired ahead for an appointment before leaving Port Riley. “Come right in, Mr. Rafferty,” she said, rising from her chair. “Doctor will want you, too, of course, Mary.”

Alice and Melissa were left to wait in the reception area. There was an assortment of magazines to read, but neither of the women was able to work up any interest in world events or fashion. Their thoughts were with Mary.

When the young woman came out she was in tears, and Alice went to her immediately, taking her out into the hallway.

Melissa waited for Quinn. “Dr. Koener didn’t change your mind,” she said, careful to keep all emotion and all judgment from her voice.

Quinn took Melissa’s arm and brought her into the inner office, where a man with bushy black hair and small glasses resting on the tip of his nose greeted her with a smile. “Hello, Mrs. Rafferty,” he said. “Your husband has asked me to explain to you the risks involved in the operation Mary needs.”

Melissa sank into a chair, deflated, but she listened closely while Dr. Koener told her that Mary’s optic nerve had been pinched when she’d fallen from her horse and struck her head on a rock.

Melissa felt shame that she’d never asked the specifics of Mary’s accident, but she pushed it aside to concentrate on what the doctor was saying.