Sweet Everlasting

  “I wonder if he will,” Carrie mused, a little sadly. “Live out his life there, I mean.” She watched Ty fold Dr. Stoneman’s letter and put it away. “I told Broom I’d bring Rachel the next time I came to see him. I think she’s old enough now, don’t you, Ty? I’ll go soon. Maybe tomorrow.” He leaned over and gave her a soft kiss on the temple. She smiled and asked, “What’s the other letter?”

  “It’s from my mother.” He opened it while Carrie shifted Rachel to her shoulder and gently patted her between her shoulder blades. Ty passed her his handkerchief absently while he read. “Good Lord, she’s coming again.”

  “Is she really? So soon?”

  “Do you mind, Carrie? She can’t seem to stay away. I’ll ask her to put it off, if you like.”

  “Oh no, I don’t mind at all, not at all.” It was the truth. “I know it’s Rachel she’s in love with,” she added slowly, “but do you know, Ty, I think she’s starting to like me, too?”

  “Well, finally. Isn’t that what I’ve been telling you for about eight months? You know, for a bright girl, my love, you’re kind of slow.”

  “Well, but you must admit, it’s a bit of a miracle.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” he scoffed. “My mother’s not stupid. Why wouldn’t she love you? You’re supremely, egregiously lovable.”

  She never got anywhere with him when they had this discussion, partly because it was more fun to let him win. But she knew a miracle when she saw one, and Mrs. Wilkes’s acceptance of her, once she’d gotten over the shock, was and always would be one of the main wonders of Carrie’s existence.

  “Abbey’s coming with her,” Ty mentioned, his nose in the letter again.

  “Oh, good.” Abbey was the first woman friend her own age she’d ever had, and the quick closeness they’d formed, founded on their mutual love of Ty, qualified as one more miracle in Carrie’s opinion. “Maybe she’d like to go with me to that Rock Creek Garden Club meeting.”

  “What’s this? You’re not afraid to go by yourself, are you?” He raised his eyebrows at her humorously. Seeing her expression, he leaned in for a closer look. “Are you?” he guessed, turning serious. “But you already know a thousand times more than any of those ladies do, Carrie, about everything.”

  “Not everything. Just some things.”

  “Just the things their club is supposed to be about,” he pointed out.

  “But that’s not what their club is about, Ty. It’s about being ladylike and sociable, knowing how to dress and what to say. And being smart.”

  He gathered her up, Rachel between them, and heaved a great sigh. He was going to give her one of his bracing speeches, she could feel it coming. She liked his arms around her so she didn’t pull away, but she forestalled the speech by saying, “I’ve already decided to go to the meeting, whether Abbey comes with me or not. I’m going to wear something modest and becoming—maybe that plum-colored suit with the Eton jacket if it’s not too warm a day,” she digressed thoughtfully—”and I’ll behave like a quiet young matron.”

  “A quiet young matron, eh?”

  She could tell from the movement of his cheek against hers that he was smiling. “Yes. Quiet so they won’t know how ignorant I am.”

  “Carrie—”

  “At first. I’ll go a few times, and I’ll pay attention and study everything and figure out what’s what. After a while people will quit paying me any mind, they’ll get so used to seeing me, and then I’ll make my move.” She settled the baby on her lap and smiled down at her, although Rachel was getting so sleepy she could barely focus her eyes.

  “Your move?”

  “I’ll talk to somebody.”

  “Aha.”

  “I’ll have her all picked out beforehand. She’ll be the nicest one there, the most approachable.”

  “Good idea.” He stopped stroking Rachel’s cheek to pull Carrie’s hair back behind her ear and kiss her.

  “I’ll just say something casual at first, to see how she takes it. If she wants to be friends, I’ll know right away. Maybe she’ll have children, and we can talk about babies and things. And maybe she’ll have a friend, and I’ll like her, too—or there might be two women in the garden club I can start talking to. Pretty soon …” She forgot the rest because Ty’s open mouth on her throat was so hot, and he’d put his hand inside her dress again to caress her milky breasts.

  “Pretty soon the house will be crawling with your sociable lady friends, and you’ll have no time for me. Let’s go inside and take a little nap before dinner, Carrie.”

  “All right,” she agreed breathlessly. She loved their little naps before dinner—or lunch, or anything else they could think of to say to Mrs. Jordan, the housekeeper, to excuse their frequent withdrawals to the bedroom. “Kiss me first, though.” He did, until her legs started to quiver from the delicious tension and she was afraid her shaky knees would wake up Rachel.

  “I’ll take her.” Gentle-handed, Ty picked up the baby and rocked her while Carrie got her dress rebuttoned. Holding hands, they started walking toward the house—slowly, to prolong the anticipation; and also to throw Mrs. Jordan, if she happened to be watching, off the scent.

  Rachel’s nursery was across the hall from their bedroom. Ty tucked her into her crib and then they stood over it to look at her for a while, marveling, whispering to each other about how pretty she was, how lucky they were. At length they gave her last kisses and tiptoed into their own room.

  It was a magic room, and the most magic time of the day for it was now, when the setting sun twinkled and glimmered behind the trees that were clearly visible through the glass wall and the skylight in the ceiling. A glass wall! Carrie had had a month to get used to it, but every time she came into her new room, she had to stop, stare, and shake her head in disbelief. They could cover the glass wall just by drawing the heavy drapes, and maybe they would if it got too bright for sleeping once the trees were bare and the sun dropped lower in the winter sky. But for the rest of the year they would keep it open, they’d decided, even at night with the lights on, for the ground sloped away so steeply on the southwest corner that nobody could see in unless they stood on a ladder.

  Was there ever such a room? “I didn’t want you to be homesick,” Ty had said on the day he’d finally unveiled the surprise. “I thought it might remind you of your mountain, Carrie.” And when they lay in bed together, looking up through their skylight at sunshine or moonshine or misty rain falling on the waving branches of spruce and oak and maple trees, she did think of her mountain. But never, not once since he’d taken her away from High Dreamer and made her his wife, had Carrie been homesick. She had a new home and it was here. With Ty.

  She hurried out of her clothes, leaving on only chemise and pantaloons and the ribbon in her hair—Ty liked her to keep something on for him to take off—and got under the quilt on top of their big bed. Their “sinfully” big bed, she’d called it on first sight; it took up half the room and could’ve slept about four grown-up people side by side. She’d gotten used to it pretty quickly, though, and she couldn’t deny that at one time or another she and Ty had used every inch of it.

  “Mmm, I really could go to sleep,” she purred, burrowing deeper into the fresh muslin sheets, stretching her arms and legs into the four corners of the bed. She opened one eye to see how Ty had taken that. He was down to his pants, and the hot, I-dare-you look he sent her while he slowly unbuttoned them wiped away her teasing grin and every thought of sleeping.

  Watching her in the wardrobe mirror, Tyler thought his wife looked like some dream an adolescent boy had conjured up in a sexual fantasy. He shucked off his trousers and threw them over the back of a chair, already randy as a jackrabbit—as Carrie would say. But he remembered the envelope in his jacket pocket at the last second, got it, and crossed to the bed, smiling to himself.

  He sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled the quilt back so he could look at Carrie. She still blushed; he guessed she always would. But she wasn’t shy
in bed anymore. To prove it, she began to ruffle the hair on his bare thigh, gazing up at him with winsome self-confidence. “You look like a sleek, happy cat,” he told her, untying the wide navy ribbon at the back of her neck and drawing it away so her hair could fall down over her shoulders.

  She trailed her fingernails over his kneecap, ran them down his calf as far as she could reach, then back up to his thigh. “I am a happy cat,” she said in her smoky voice, deliberately seducing him. Ever observant, she spied the envelope beside him. “You’re not going to read me another letter now, are you?”

  “This? No, it’s to you, I thought you could read it yourself.”

  “It’s to me?” She sat up against the pillows, intrigued in spite of herself. She could never resist a surprise. “Who’s it from? Eppy?”

  “No, not Eppy.”

  She read the return address and laughed. “Oh, this is a mistake. This is from the White House.” She tried to hand it back.

  “It’s to you, isn’t it?”

  She looked down, then up again. “It says my name,” she agreed, blank-faced.

  “Well, then.” He raised bland brows.

  She opened it slowly, afraid to tear the envelope, and carefully unfolded the typed, one-page letter inside. Tyler went around to his side of the bed and got in while she read. Her body had gone taut as a bowstring. Every few seconds she said, “Oh, Ty. Oh, Ty.” She finished the letter and gawked at him.

  “What does it say?”

  She didn’t hear the question; she went back to the letter and read it all over again.

  He leaned over and skimmed it with her this time. “Dear Mrs. Wilkes,” the brand-new president began. “Your husband was kind enough to give me a copy of your book, The Summer Birds of the Appalachians in Franklin County, Pa., and I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed it. It’s one of the best of the recent lists I’ve seen, and I must congratulate you on avoiding the sort of language in your text that drives the non-scientist away from most ornithologies faster than an angry hornet. You will scarcely credit it, but I recently opened a pamphlet by one of the more exalted bird blokes and found this sentence: ‘The terrestrial progression of the Columbidae is gradient but never saltatorial.’ By which, after careful study, I took it to mean that pigeons walk and don’t hop!”

  The same shameless charmer, Tyler smiled to himself. McKinley’s assassination had been a terrible, shocking tragedy; politically speaking, though, it had only speeded up the inevitable, and in Ty’s opinion Teddy Roosevelt was merely occupying the White House a little earlier than he would have anyway.

  “Tyler tells me that you and I share an interest in land and wildlife conservation,” the president went on. “It’s shocking that in this great country we only have five national parks, and I assure you that part of my agenda for the balance of my term will be the expansion of,” etc., etc. Tyler skipped ahead.

  “Community participation at every level is what we need now to bring to the average citizen’s attention the crying need for respect and conservation of our scarce resources. In that spirit, it occurred to me that you might be interested in either or both of two local projects I’ve been considering. One would be to write and illustrate a definitive catalogue, much on the order of the list you compiled for your fine book, of the birds of Rock Creek Park; the other would be to join a citizens’ committee charged with lobbying members of the Congress to introduce a national Arbor Day.”

  Carrie couldn’t stop shaking her head or saying, “Oh, Ty.” He chuckled and ducked lower in the bed, sliding his lips down the cool skin of her arm to her elbow. “You talked to him about me,” she breathed, facing him. “Imagine that. My husband and the president of the United States, having a conversation about me.” She couldn’t get over it.

  He pulled her down so their heads were level. One-handed, he started to open the eyelet fasteners down the front of her chemise. “Which will you do,” he wondered, “the birds or the—”

  “Both,” she answered immediately. “I can do it, I’m sure I can. Rachel can come with me when I’m in the park, and it’ll be all right to leave her with the nanny when I meet with my”—she retrieved the letter from the rumpled quilt and glanced at it again—”my committee.” He grunted, untying the ribbons at her waist and nudging her drawers over her hips. Her gray eyes searched his seriously. “Do you think I can be a good mother and still help President Roosevelt?”

  “I’m sure of it,” he said, sitting up to push the sleeves of her shift over her shoulders. As soon as her arms were free, she flung them around his neck and bore him back to the pillow, with her on top.

  “Oh, Ty,” she exclaimed, nose to nose. “Before I had everything, but now I have even more. How can it be?”

  Impatient, he started to kiss her; that would end the conversation. But Carrie’s ingenuous bafflement struck a complementary emotion he couldn’t ignore. He moved his hands to her face and held it softly between his palms. “I don’t know. I think about it all the time, and I can’t explain it either. It’s extravagant, it’s—implausible. Exorbitant.”

  She frowned. “What is?”

  “How happy you make me.”

  “Oh. That.” She slid a long, smooth leg over his hips and straddled him. While he watched, the wonder on her face turned to smug delight. “That’s just because you love me,” she said huskily, gloating. She took his hands from her face and moved them slowly down her neck and finally to her full breasts. “I’m talking about the other. All these new miracles.”

  Her lacy pantaloons were at half mast. “Lie down flat,” he suggested; she did, and he pushed her drawers down past her knees. “What new miracles?” he wanted to know, stroking her belly and her wide-open thighs until she threw her head back. He lifted her hips and held her poised above him on her knees. “What new miracles?”

  “President Roosevelt’s committee,” she gasped. “Your mother—liking me. All that,” she finished vaguely and impatiently. “Ty, come inside me right now, right now!”

  “No, I want to hear more about the miracles. My mother, and—Ho!”

  Carrie took matters into her own hands.

  “There,” she said on a quivering sigh, settling herself. She brought her head down and kissed him, at the same time she gave a clever little swivel with her hips that had him groaning against her open mouth. “This isn’t a new one,” she murmured, “but it’s still a miracle. To me, anyway.”

  “Me, too,” he assured her fervently.

  “What I don’t understand is what I ever did to deserve everything that’s happened.”

  “I think you should stop talking now.”

  “I wasn’t happy before I met you, but then again, I wasn’t miserable. But now, Ty, now—”

  “Now?” he asked hopefully, gathered her up, and rolled over on top of her.

  Her breath whooshed out in a gusty, euphoric laugh. “That’s not what I meant.” She dodged his lips and tried one last time to explain it. “I thought it was already perfect, don’t you see? It’s indecent, how lovely my life is. And now—”

  “Now,” he cut her off firmly, snaring her hands and anchoring them to either side of the pillow. “Now it’s about to get even better.”

  Much later, the moon crept up and hung for a while in a corner of the skylight, silvering the magic room before it dropped behind maple and oak leaves, and sank out of sight. Wisps of cloud drifted by, and once in a while a handful of raindrops struck the glass; they dried fast in the warm wind, but while they lingered the stars behind them looked like violet crystals.

  “Are you sleeping?” Ty whispered. He had Carrie’s foot between both of his, and she hadn’t moved it in a long time. But she whispered back, “No.” “It’s late.” “I know.” She took a full, deep breath of the damp air breezing in through the window. No crickets or night birds sang; there was just the sigh of the wind and occasionally the patter of the rain on the glass.

  And the soft, baby-quick breathing of Rachel, who lay fast asleep bet
ween them, because Carrie had been too lazy to get up and put her in the crib after her last feeding.

  “Go to sleep,” Ty murmured. He slid his fingers into Carrie’s hair and began a soft, slow massage.

  But she had one more thing to say. “I’ve figured it out. It’s part of a grand scheme.”

  A pause, while he tried to connect that to anything they’d said or done recently. “A grand scheme?” he hazarded on a yawn, giving up.

  “You did a good deed when you saved thousands of lives, Ty. God’s decided to let me share in your reward. That’s why I’m so happy. That’s the explanation.”

  “Ah.”

  “I don’t know why He did it, but He works in mysterious ways.”

  “He certainly does.” He yawned again. “I’m too sleepy to argue, but you’ve got it backward. It’s you He’s rewarding if it’s either of us.” It was a burden sometimes, this pedestal she’d put him on. He’d set her straight, but she was bound to find out the mundane truth about him eventually. Why rush the inevitable?

  She snuggled closer, capturing one of his hairy legs between her calves. “This is nice,” she whispered with her eyes closed, “arguing about which one of us God is blessing.” She was glad Ty thought it was her, but he’d find out the truth sooner or later, she expected.

  The stars wheeled; the moon set. Carrie and Ty fell asleep in sympathy, savoring their mutual esteem and happiness. Between them the fruit of their love, the real blessing, slept on, oblivious.

  A Biography of Patricia Gaffney

  Patricia Gaffney is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of twelve historical romances and five contemporary women’s fiction titles. She has won the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart award and has been nominated six times for the RWA’s RITA award for excellence in romance writing.