difficult for her to eat with Eric’s hot gaze on her, she couldn’t insult Timmy so she finished every bite along with two glasses of wine.
“I’m so glad the meal pleased you, Ms. Hanley,” Timmy said as he removed the plates and the wine glasses. “I have a triple-crème blue cheese and fruit for dessert. There’s coffee and I’ve taken the liberty of opening a 1971 Chateau D’Yquem. It will go superbly with the cheese and fruit. The pears are especially good.” Leaving the platter with the fruit and cheese, china mugs for coffee beside the filled carafe, the decanter, and new glasses for the sauterne, Timmy efficiently packed everything else in a hamper. “I’ll be leaving, now. I’ve left a small basket over there,” he pointed, then lifted the heavy hamper as though it weighed nothing. “Everything should fit quite nicely.”
“Timmy,” Eric said, stretching out on the blanket as people wandered through the gardens around them, “you’ve done a wonderful job, as usual.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said, “and it was so nice meeting you Ms. Hanley.”
“Thank you for the wonderful meal, Timmy,” Jessica said. “I don’t think I’ve ever had better.”
“Good night,” Timmy said and walked toward the exit with a surprisingly light step for such a big man.
Chapter
4
“Try the cheese with the sauterne,” Eric said. He cut off a bit of pear, spread a small amount of cheese on the morsel and held it in front of Jessica’s mouth. She ate from his fingers and he quickly handed her the wine. “Close your eyes and drink this so the tastes are in your mouth at the same time.”
When she had sipped the thick, deep yellow liquid, he asked, “What do you taste?”
“Cream and pear and…pineapples.” She opened her eyes, amazed.
He took a bite of pear and cheese, then sipped his own wine. “Pineapples. Wonderful. A few years ago, someone introduced me to the combination of sauterne and blue-veined cheese. There’s a strange synergy. The whole taste is so much more than the sum of its parts.” He spread another bit of cheese on another piece of fruit and offered it to Jessica.
She took it from him, placed it on her tongue, and sipped the sauterne. “It is wonderful, but if I have much more to drink, I’ll be incoherent.” She dropped onto her back on the soft blanket.
Eric took the glass from her hand. “I certainly don’t want you incoherent. I want you to be fully aware of everything that happens.”
“And what is going to happen?” Jessica asked, the words out of her mouth before she could stop them.
Eric grinned and licked a tiny crumb of cheese from her lower lip. “Everything and nothing.”
“What does that mean?”
“Everything means that I’m going to spend the rest of the evening seducing you with wine and food, music and evening breezes and me.”
“And nothing?”
“Nothing means that as much as I want to, and, I hope, as much as you will want me to, I’m not going to make love to you tonight.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want you to anticipate how wonderful it will be with us when I undress you and touch you and lick every inch of your skin. I want you to wonder how it will feel when I slide, ever so slowly, into your body and feel your hips reaching for me, unable to wait any longer.
“Then I want you to think about it in the cold, sober light of day. Sex for the sake of sex. Not love, just desire. Then you can decide whether that is truly what you want.”
Jessica sighed and closed her eyes. Her thighs were trembling and her heart was pounding. She did want him. Badly. She felt a tickling on her neck and reached up to brush it away. As her hand dropped she felt the tickling again. She slowly opened her eyes and saw Eric, his face close to hers, a blade of grass in his hand. “I know what I want right now,” she whispered, unable to stop the words.
“Maybe you do. But I know what we’re not going to do. It’s important to me that we don’t make love because of too much wine or too long since the last time.” He saw the disappointment on Jessica’s face. “Oh lord,” he said, smiling. “This is going to be a long and singularly frustrating evening.” He tossed the grass aside and sat up. “I owe you an explanation. About Timmy and all.”
Jessica sighed and partially shook off the cloud of desire that surrounded her. She sat up and poured herself a cup of steaming coffee. She looked at him and lifted a cup. When he shook his head, she put the decanter down and added milk to her coffee. “Okay. Tell me.”
“Marilyn, my ex-wife, must be, in some ways, the unluckiest woman in the world. When we split, I was, as you put it, a humble architect. I made eighty thousand a year, a nice salary but not enough for her, so she went looking for greener pastures. Maybe there was a deeper reason. But money seemed to be all she thought about.”
“Don’t tell me you won the lottery or something.”
“Let me give you a little background.” He sipped his sauterne and watched the people wandering past them. In the far distance he could hear the sensual sound of a clarinet tuning up. “My father took off when I was seven. I think my mother was glad to see him go although it meant that she had to work. He was a heavy drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, and a general pain in the ass. He was never abusive, or anything like that. It was just that he was totally unpredictable. Rich and expansive one minute, poor and depressive the next. He wouldn’t come home for days, even weeks at a time. Then he’d arrive home like the prodigal son, frequently reeking of perfume. Of course, at the time, I idolized him, thought he was the greatest, especially when he arrived with his arms full of presents.”
“It must have been a tough life for you.”
“My mom was a very sane, down-to-earth woman and I was a very happy child in spite of my on-again, off-again father.”
Jessica smiled. “You were lucky.”
“I guess I was. One evening, my dad arrived home after almost two weeks, and told my mom that he was leaving for good. He packed his things in an old black-and-white suitcase and disappeared. My mom cried for about a week, then pulled herself together and made a good life for herself. She had worked in a local nursing home as an aide and discovered that she enjoyed helping older people. So she put herself through nursing school, then made enough to put me through college. She died the year after I graduated.”
“She sounds like a nice woman.”
Eric’s face softened. “She was the best. Anyway, about a year after Marilyn and I split, I received a visit from a lawyer. My father, it turns out, had done okay for himself. He’d ended up in Vegas and amassed a small fortune. Before he died, he had a will drawn up leaving everything to me. There was a letter from him for me, too. He tried to explain that although he didn’t consider himself a bad man, he had been a terrible husband and a worse father and that we had been better off without him. He said that he had spent a lot of years broke and then started a run of luck and had gotten some money together. He hired an investigator who learned that my mom had died and that I was doing very well on my own.” Eric ran his long slender fingers through his iron-gray hair.
“Personally,
