They walked through the lobby, past the silent restaurant, between the brightly lit windows where gems and clothing were artfully displayed by the upscale shops on nearby Rodeo Drive, and took the elevator up to the fourth floor where they unlocked Mary’s room.
“Are you on this floor?” Mary asked Tess.
“No, Casey and I are up on the sixth.”
“And I’m right here across the hall from Mary,” Kenny said. “But I’ll walk you ladies up.”
They bade Mary good night and when her door closed the three of them rode the elevator to the sixth floor, where they reached Tess’s door first. Kenny kissed her cheek in brotherly fashion and thanked her, and she thanked him for bringing Mary. Next came a heartfelt hug from Casey, who said, “As long as I live I’ll never forget this night. I never thought I’d do anything like this in my life. Thank you again, Mac.”
Tess told her, “You’re going to be a star in your own right someday, Casey, I just know it. And don’t forget, bringing you into the music business has been fun for me, too. See you in the morning, hon.” She put her key card in the slot, and added, “Good night, Kenny.”
“Good night.”
When Tess’s door closed, Kenny slung an arm over Casey’s shoulders and walked her farther down the hall to her room, saw her inside, then took the elevator back down to the fourth.
In Tess’s suite, a single lamp glowed softly in the sitting room at the far end of the sofa. She left it on and walked through to the bedroom where the maids had provided turndown service while she was gone. The bedspread had been removed, the sheets folded down from the center like a paper airplane. On each pillow waited a good-night wish: two chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil.
The sight of the bed, waiting, prepared, raised a fine and welcome tension within her, a sexual impatience that pressed up insistently, bringing his visage to mind—Kenny, in a sleek black tux, come to gaze at her across a crowded room with eyes that matched the suppressed desire in her own. Like water above the rim of a cup, she felt as if the mixture of emotions she held were more than the human vessel could contain. It trembled there, close to overflowing, as she removed the makeup from her flushed cheeks; as she showered and washed her hair; bound it in one towel and dried with another; put on a freesia-scented splash and stared at her dilated, dazzled eyes in the wraparound mirrors.
She touched the freckled hollow between her breasts, her trembling stomach … and assessed herself through his eyes, wanting to please him.
Tonight, she thought.
She put on the thick white robe provided by the hotel, dragged the towel from her hair and finger-combed her damp curls, impatient for his return.
In his room Kenny hung up his tuxedo jacket, removed his bow tie and cummerbund, washed his face, then sat down with a magazine and checked his watch. He’d give her ten minutes before going back up.
He lasted six before realizing he hadn’t read a word or turned a page. Tossing the magazine aside he bolted from the chair and pocketed his key card on his way out the door.
The suites at the Regent had doorbells. When he rang hers it was 1:27 A.M.—a bizarre hour to go courting, he thought, but then her lifestyle was bizarre. He wondered how he’d get along blending into it once they were married.
“Kenny?” her voice said softly from inside.
“Yes.”
The door opened and there she stood, in bare feet and an oversized white robe, her damp hair rollicking around a scrubbed and shiny face, the smell of flowers coming to the door along with her. Without a touch of the artifice she’d worn onstage she was even more beautiful to him.
She said very simply, “I thought you’d never get here,” and he stepped inside, against her, blindly swatting the door closed behind him. Their embrace was a collision with her up on tiptoe and his arms lashed hard around her, lifting her free of the floor. Their first kiss was a desperate thing without finesse—two starving people with mouths open and bodies straining to make up for all the time apart. Then he lowered her till her toes gained purchase again, and like bends of a knot they turned into one another, trying to make two halves into a whole. The kiss changed directions as they tried a new slant on an old pleasure. She made a tor tured sound, burrowing upward as if close were not close enough.
There were words pressing to be spoken, but their lips scarcely parted. “I thought I’d die before we could do this,” she said within the satin folds of the kiss. “All those people …”
“And all I wanted to do was this.” He wandered her face, his teeth taking nips of her upper lip, the edge of a nostril, her eyebrow—illogical places that only a man in love would prize. “I wanted to kick them all out!” he ranted. “Every last one of them! I kept thinking they didn’t have any right to you! You were mine, not theirs!”
She smiled, loving how he’d felt exactly as she had.
Enough talking. Talking wasted lips that had better things to do, randy, wild things they’d been imagining doing together. He found her mouth again and covered it, tasting, holding nothing back. His hands slid down her back and captured her low, like an inverted heart, hauling her high and hard against him.
The intensity, of course, could not be sustained. Like any glut, it filled them, and soon they needed something less. His embrace slackened and her heels touched the floor. They drew apart and their gazes caught at close range. One of them laughed—it was he, murmuring, “We’re awful, aren’t we?”
She laughed, too. “Yes, and isn’t it wonderful?” His arms were doubled lightly beneath her shoulder blades while they took the time to gaze at each other as they had not when he first came in, to appreciate the face of the other, turned perfect by love. The kiss resumed, gentler than before, now that the first desperation was gone. Their hands began roving. His back was smooth cotton, hers was rough terry. They explored with palms spread flat, reacquainting, thrilling each other with the simplest of touches. Time flowed into the wee minutes of the night while they remained near the door where only dim light found them from the lamp across the room. He reached to untie her belt, but she caught his hand between them and looked into his eyes.
“I have to know first … about you and Faith.”
He said, with neither smile nor regret, “I’ve asked her to take her things out of my house. It’s all over between us.”
“Really? All over?”
“I’d never lie to you, Tess, not about that.” Then he added, “Not about anything.”
She knew he wouldn’t. He had never been anything less than truthful about himself and Faith, right from the beginning.
She released his hand and a moment later the belt dropped to the floor. He reached inside and found her warm skin. Fragrance lifted from it as his hands caught her waist and his wrists parted the terry robe. He gave a gentle tug and she bumped up against him, resting there lightly while their bodies formed a wishbone and their eyes engaged in playful approval, just this side of full intimacy. She was supple and compliant, catching him behind the neck and leaning back while they swayed a little, all hurry gone.
“You smell good,” he murmured, still gripping her waist as if to lift her into a carriage where none waited. Only her bed waited in the other room. And they, in this one, pretended nonchalance.
“I put something on for you. Freesia.”
“Freesia. Where?”
“Everywhere.”
They took some time to flirt with the suggestion, to let it play upon their libidos while their bodies swayed in a lazy figure eight. She thought he would bend down and kiss her, perhaps between her breasts, but instead he gathered her close once more, and putting his face to her neck, threaded his arms inside the robe, caressing her sleek warm back not only with his hands, but with his starched sleeves as well. He ran them along her sides, a crisp contrast to the smoothness of his palms as they slid down the slope of her spine to her naked buttocks. And from there one hand shifted at last to her breast and held its precious weight like a fruit warmed by the sun. It se
emed forever they’d been imagining this first naked touch. Now it was here, better than imagined, spreading warmth and want deep within them. For a long while they paid homage to the moment, holding still everywhere else, absorbed in the pleasure of nothing more than his hand cupping her breast. Then her head fell back, her eyes closed and she put her hands in his hair, holding his head while down the gap in her robe he fit her bare body to his clothed one.
“I missed you so much,” she told him.
“I missed you, too,” he said, bringing his other hand into play. “So much …”
“After I left Wintergreen it was …” His thumbs moved and she shuddered once, and lurched, then let herself fall forward against both of his hands. “It was …” The word escaped her. All words escaped her. “It was …”
“It was hell,” he whispered for her.
“Yes … it was hell.”
Her forehead rested against his chin and his breath beat against her uncombed hair. Her hand dropped between them, playing over the worsted wool of his trousers, learning his shape within his clothing.
“Tess …” he breathed, before silence became their ally. Only silence, mingling with his disbelief that he was here with this woman, doing this incredible thing, feeling her hands on him after all the years she had been far, far beyond reach.
“Take me to bed, Kenny,” she whispered.
He was struck by a broadside of awe, realizing who she used to be—the Tess from his past. Who she’d become—Mac, the superstar, adored by millions. And who he’d become—the man she wanted as fully as he wanted her.
She sensed a change in him and looked up. “Kenny?” she whispered, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It just …” He appeared momentarily beleaguered. “It just hit me where I am, and who I’m with, and what you just said … and I’m human enough to be a little stunned by it, that’s all.”
“Don’t be too stunned,” she murmured softly. “It’s just me, Tess.”
“Just you, Tess. The girl on the school bus. Then you became Mac, the woman so far beyond my reach that all I could do was cut out pictures of you. And now you’re Tess again, and you want to go to bed with me. I don’t think you can quite realize how incredible this seems sometimes.”
“No more incredible than you are to me. Kenny Kronek, the boy next door. Who’d have believed it?” She smiled and repeated, “Take me to bed, Kenny … please.”
He picked her up like a groom carrying a bride from a church and headed for the brighter light of her bedroom, her arms coiled around his neck and her mouth pressed to the warm hollow behind his jaw. His skin smelled like sandalwood. She tasted it, made a small wet patch on his smoothly shaved neck, and the scent became flavor on her tongue.
“You taste good,” she said.
Above her head, he grinned. “You’re getting ahead of me.”
“Hm-mmm,” she singsonged, meaning, No I’m not.
“And I know whereof I speak, Mr. Kronek.”
He was still grinning as he reached their destination and released her legs. She landed on the foot of the bed, kneeling, the robe puddled around her, and lifted her hands to the black onyx studs down his shirtfront. While he began freeing his cuffs he let his knuckles bump her breast—a pebble over a washboard—bringing them both smiles.
She smiled at his shirtfront.
He smiled at the top of her hair, then kissing it, bent at the waist and got rid of his shoes.
“We both knew this would happen tonight, didn’t we, Kenny?”
“Yes, we knew.” He found a condom in his trouser pocket and tossed it onto the bed behind her. She undid his waist button, he the zipper, and together they got rid of everything but his shorts. They were silk. Green silk with orange cats on them.
“You wear silk shorts?” she said, surprised, delighted, sitting back on her heels to ogle them. “With cats?”
“They’re new. I figured that’s what a guy should wear to take Tess McPhail to bed.”
“Don’t say that as if all kinds of guys have figured the same thing, because there haven’t been that many.”
“We can talk about that later, Tess, okay?” he said, drawing her back up to kiss her.
“There are lots of things we’ve got to talk about later.”
“Mm-hmm.”
He was naked and she was just about as he went down on one knee and plunged his face into the gap of her robe to take his turn at tasting. A very slow sweet turn before pushing the robe off her shoulders and tumbling her sideways onto the smooth ecru sheets. They fell in one swift motion at the same moment that they touched each other intimately for the first time—a sweep, a fall, a lunge—it was all of these, and silent except for their harsh breathing.
They explored with a shared sense of wonder, first with their eyes open, then with eyes closed, kissing tenderly, then not so tenderly as some primal force took control.
Once he whispered, “Oh, Tess …” because there were no other words in this foolish man-made language to do justice to what he felt.
And she answered in kind, repeating his name, “Kenny … Kenny …” because she, too, found no other words adequate.
Much later, he whispered, “Like this?”
And she breathed, “Yes …” arching her throat.
And later yet she found the foil packet in the sheets and said, “Put this on now … please,” and watched, unashamed, as he did.
As he knelt to her she reached up and touched the hair at his temple, feeling a compulsion to say to this man something she’d said to no other. “Let me say it now, Kenny … I love you.”
She loved the look that overtook his face: joy and disbelief after her long refusal to admit it.
“Say it again, Tess.”
“I love you,” she repeated, with wonder seizing her soul, quite stunned by the force of the words, spoken at last. “Oh God, I do, I love you!” she rejoiced.
He turned his face into her palm and kissed it.
There were tears in her eyes as he entered her and elevated them both to a state of splendor. Then he pressed deep, past the flesh, into the soul, into the heart of her.
There had been, in Tess’s life, no moment as magnificent as this, saying the words, meaning them, manifesting her love in this most perfect way.
“I love you, too,” came his jagged whisper as he began moving, finishing what they’d started one dark spring night in a backyard on the grass beside some crickets.
It was two-fifteen. They lay in the lamplight, tired but unwilling to admit it, wanting to waste not a minute of this night. Their faces were close on a single pillow, and their bodies scarcely linked. Gravity pulled at the skin beneath his eyes and showed her where a wrinkle would lie in the years ahead. She followed it with one fingertip and repeated what she’d said earlier. “Kenny Kronek, the boy next door—whoever would have thought it?”
“Not me,” he said with his eyes closed. “Not in a thousand years. Not with Tess McPhail.”
“I’m just flesh and blood like anybody else.”
“No. Not like anybody else.” His eyes opened. “Not to me. I’ve loved you so long that I can’t remember when I didn’t.”
She thought of the file of newspaper clippings he kept in his office, and believed him. “Oh, Kenny.”
“It’s true. You were the one I never forgot.”
“I’m sorry I can’t say the same thing back to you. But I only found out how wonderful you are this spring, and even then I resisted falling in love with you.” Her fingertip trailed down to his lower lip and rubbed it softly. “Wanna know something?”
“Hm?”
“After I left Wintergreen I kept remembering that night of the wedding dance in Momma’s backyard, and wishing we’d done more.”
“You, too?” he replied lazily. “I’d think to myself, man, how stupid can you be? Why didn’t you do it while you had the chance? Tess, I wanted you so much that night.”
“I wanted you, too.”
“Then a
ll of a sudden you were gone and I’d lost my chance. After you left I’d look across the alley at your mother’s windows and get so damned lonely knowing you weren’t there anymore.”
“And whenever my phone would ring my heart would leap, thinking it was you. And when it wasn’t, I’d feel so unbelievably let down. It was this new and … and almost consuming feeling, missing somebody that much.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Scared, I guess. Because of the intensity of my feelings. Doubting they could be real.”
“It was different for me. I knew it so soon after you came back home.”
“Even though you were living with Faith?”
“Faith and I had become a huge convenience. She ironed my shirts. I mowed her lawn. But you can’t build a lifelong relationship on convenience. At least, I can’t. I knew I had to make a break with her, and when you came back to town I began to realize that with Faith, this part of it … the sex was … well … it was …”
“Go ahead. You can say it. You can say anything to me.”
“All right. Unsatisfying. It had become … well, mechanical, sort of.”
“Mechanical,” she mused aloud.
He considered what might be construed as a breach of confidence and decided he could say this much: “She didn’t like to get messed up.”
His frankness caught Tess by surprise. She felt a grin threatening but pulled it back into line. Though she tried not to laugh, a little snort fizzed up, and she covered her mouth too late to hold it in. Above her hand her eyes danced with mischief, and finally she said, “The woman didn’t know what she was missing.”
At first she thought she might have offended him but then he, too, caught the bug and laughed—a big, hearty one that threatened something else entirely. “Oh, Lord, don’t laugh!” she warned, clutching him tight around the middle.