As she walked toward the library, the phone rang. Isabel picked it up and said impersonally, “Senator Sinclair’s residence.”
“Hello, is the senator there?” It was a woman’s voice and Isabel knew instantly to whom it must belong. The accent was unmistakable. “This is Pamela Ashley calling.”
“I’m sorry, but the senator is at church,” Isabel replied.
“I see. Would you ask him to call me when he gets in?”
“Certainly,” said Isabel, and hung up the phone. The voice had sounded very sophisticated, very upper-class, very English. The British ambassador’s daughter. Isabel felt unaccountably depressed as she went over to her easel and looked at the portrait she was working on. Leo’s eyes looked back at her, blue and smiling and subtly authoritative. “Damn,” said Isabel out loud, and then she began to mix colors.
When Leo came in from church, she told him about the phone call. He looked surprised and then immediately went to the phone in the hall. He left the library door open, and as Isabel cleaned her brushes, she unashamedly listened.
“Lady Pamela, please,” he said. “This is Leo Sinclair calling.” A long silence and then, “Hello, Pam. How are you?”
More silence. “I know. I’ve been busy.” Pause. “I reckon.” Another pause. “Yep. I’m being immortalized, right and proper.” He laughed, a
genuine rich chuckle. “I know, I know.” Long silence. “I’d like to, Pam, but I promised to go to the National Gallery with Isabel this afternoon. She’s going to educate me—can’t believe I’ve never set foot in the place.” Another laugh. “Yes, I know. All right, Pam. Yes. I will. ‘Bye now.” He hung up. Two seconds later his head appeared at the library door.
“What’s for lunch?” he asked.
“You just finished breakfast two hours ago.”
“I am not budging from this house until I eat.”
“All right, all right. As soon as I finish cleaning up here, I’ll fix you something.”
“I’ll go change,” he informed her, and disappeared.
They had chicken salad for lunch and then went to the National Gallery. It was a wonderful afternoon. Isabel couldn’t believe it when Leo looked at his watch and announced that the museum was due to close any minute.
“What a lot of bologna that was,” Isabel said to him as they walked down the steps of the museum. “All that business about my educating you.” Leo had proved to be a lot more knowledgeable about art than she had suspected.
“I know the periods, all right,” he replied easily.
“I don’t know the technique like you do. I learned something this afternoon.”
She thought suddenly that he probably had. She was beginning to realize that the famous Sinclair hair covered an absolutely first-class brain. He had listened to everything she had said this afternoon, and she would bet anything that he remembered all of it.
“What kind of food would you like for dinner?” he asked as they drove homeward. “There’s a nice little Italian restaurant not far from us.”
“I would like to stay home,” said Isabel. “I took some pork chops out of the freezer this morning. Let’s have them.”
“I feel a little guilty about making you cook,” he confessed. “You hired on as a painter, not a chef.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I like to cook. And I don’t feel like having to change out of my comfortable pants and into a dress to eat out.”
“I would love to eat at home,” he said, “if you’re sure you don’t mind?”
“I don’t,” she said, and meant it.
Leo read the newspapers in the sitting room while Isabel worked in the kitchen. He opened a bottle of wine and they drank it with their pork chops and rice dinner. Afterward he helped her to clear the dishes and then they went back into the sitting room and watched Masterpiece Theatre on television.
At ten o’clock Leo switched the TV off and came back to sit on the sofa. He stretched his legs out in front of him comfortably.
“Would you be afraid to stay in this house by yourself until the portrait is finished?” he asked her.
Isabel’s head turned with a start. “What did you say?”
“If I moved out, moved in with Stan Preston for a week, would you be afraid to stay here alone?”
She stared at him in bewilderment. “But why would you do that? What do you mean?”
He spoke almost lazily, contemplating the feet stretched so comfortably in front of him. “I mean that I am finding it something close to torture to be around you like this and not make love to you. I can’t do it anymore, so I think I had better move out.”
His voice was its usual slow drawl, his face held all its usual serenity. Isabel spoke uncertainly. “Are you serious?”
He turned his head and let her see his eyes. “Perfectly,” he said.
Isabel’s heart pounded inside her chest.
“Leo,” she said. She didn’t seem to have enough breath to speak and inhaled deeply. “I swore I would never get involved with a man again,” she said at last.
“I know that.” He didn’t make a move toward her. His eyes were blindingly blue and she could read clearly in them what it was he wanted. He said, very softly, “Do you think you might change your mind and get involved with me?”
Such a simple question, Isabel thought. And one week ago it would have provoked such a simple answer. But now, she was not so sure.
She bent her head and looked at her hands clasped in her lap. A week ago, instantly, unreflectingly, she would have said no; she would have said, Go ahead, move out, leave me alone. Tonight she sat listening to the deep nocturnal silence of the house and knew she was poised on the brink of perhaps the most momentous decision of her life.
This was the man. There was something in him that reached out to her, that called to something deep in her own nature. She was suddenly quite sure that if she said no to Leo now, she would spend the rest of her life haunted by an irredeemable sense of failure and loss. Even now as she sat silently contemplating her own tensely clasped hands, she had a sense of something beginning to slip irrevocably away.
She ran her tongue across dry lips. “I’m afraid,” she whispered.
“I know you are.”
Her head bent farther forward. She had guarded herself for so long the thought of throwing away all those years of safety terrified her. Leo sat at the other end of the sofa, quite motionless, and now he slowly put out his hand on the sofa between them, fingers curved upward ready to cradle hers.
“Give me your hand.” It was said very gently, very softly, and she raised her eyes to his face. His hair had fallen forward over his forehead. His blue eyes were brilliant. Very slowly she unlocked her fingers and put her hand into his. Leo’s hand completely engulfed hers, and Isabel shivered as he raised his other hand to touch first her cheek and then her mouth.
“Leo.” It was scarcely a breath, but he heard it and suddenly moved toward her. He put an arm around her shoulder and she turned her face into his shirt. She could feel his hand on her hair, gently stroking it.
“You have such beautiful hair,” he was saying. “Isabel.” At the sound of her name she took her face out of his shoulder and looked up.
His kiss was not the gentle, careful kiss he had given her once before. This was something quite different, something Isabel had never known. She could lose herself in this man. She knew it, instinctively, had always known it, she realized now. She felt from the urgency of his kiss how much he wanted her, but she held back a little, frightened of letting down the defenses she had so carefully built over the years. But the flame burning in Leo was so bright. She slid her arms around his neck and let her mouth open under the pressure of his.
His hands lightly touched her narrow waist and then one hand slid under her sweater and moved up to cup her breast. Isabel closed her eyes in pleasure, and after a minute her hand began to caress the thick bright hair at the back of his head.
“Let’s go upstairs,”
he
murmured. The touch of his hand on her breast was exquisite. Isabel opened her eyes and looked at the pale-golden hair that slipped so easily through her fingers.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
He rose with his distinctive fluid grace and, bending for a minute, picked her up as easily as if she had been a child. He carried her easily too, up the narrow stairs and into her bedroom, where he set her on her feet beside the bed.
“You should know this,” he said to her. His hands were on her shoulders and he was standing so close that Isabel’s head was tilted far back to look up into his face. “I wanted you from the first moment I set eyes on you.”
Isabel’s lips parted a little. “You did?”
“I did.” His voice sounded normal, but she could see, above the opened collar of his shirt, a pulse beating rapidly under the lightly tanned skin. His hands slid down her shoulders to her elbows. “I do.”
Isabel held the ribbed bottom of her sweater and, without saying a word, pulled it over her head. She slowly and carefully began to unbutton her shirt. Her eyes looked up at him with a dark expression veiled in mystery. His hands went automatically to the buttons of his own shirt.
Isabel watched him, almost unconscious of her own bare flesh. She had never seen him without his shirt before, and she gazed at the smoothly muscled expanse of chest, shoulders, and upper arms with an almost professional detachment. She might not be very sexually experienced, but Isabel had seen a great number of nude male bodies. Leo’s was perfection. She felt a sudden, sharp regret at the thought of not painting him exactly as he was now.
Then his body bore her down onto the bed, and all thoughts of painting, or of anything else, fled from Isabel’s mind. Nothing else existed in the world except Leo’s hands touching her, his mouth caressing her.
Isabel had never felt like this with Philip, Philip had been interested only in satisfying himself. He had never shown her such astonishingly erotic tenderness. As Leo’s hands slowly explored her body, Isabel felt passion rising in her like the spring tide until a small whimper formed deep in her throat and she arched up against him, her slender body pressing against the hard strength of his. Her long hair was streaming back against the pillow and he buried his face in it.
“Isabel.” It was a love word, a caress, a promise.
She kissed his shoulder as her fingers dug into his back. She had never wanted anything in life more than she wanted him at this minute.
With Philip she had felt as if she were a spectator during their lovemaking. A part of her had always remained at a distance: detached, uninvolved, intact. With Leo she lost herself. Swept away on a tide of passion, hers as well as his, she rose to heights she had not known existed and gave to him a depth of surrender she had not dreamed possible.
And then, after the raging tide had receded and they were left breathless, the oneness was still there. He held her in the crook of his arm and she nestled her cheek into the slightly damp hollow of his shoulder. He kissed the top of her head and she turned her lips to the smooth bare skin of his chest.
“Who was he?” he asked. His voice was slow and soft and lazy.
“His name was Philip,” she said after a minute. “I was seventeen when I met him.”
“I’d like to meet him.” His voice was the same as before. “I’d like to beat the selfish swine into a bloody pulp!”
“Leo!” She was so startled that she sat up. “How do you know he was a selfish swine?”
His voice remained even, but the expression in his blue eyes was one she had never seen before. “I just made love to you, honey,” he said. “I can tell.”
She could feel the color staining her cheeks. She sat there looking down at him, her long black hair streaming down her naked shoulders and over her small, perfect breasts.
“He wasn’t like you,” she said.
“I should damn well think not.” It was the first time she had ever heard him swear. “You were seventeen. How old was he?”
“Thirty.”
This time he really swore and Isabel’s eyes became utterly huge. He looked up at her and his face relaxed a little. “I’m sorry, Isabel. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I’ve said worse,” Isabel replied candidly. “It’s the source, not the language, that’s so shocking.”
He picked up her hand and held it to his lips.
“My mama always taught me to mind my language in the presence of ladies.”
“You are the complete Southern gentleman, suh,” she said. Then she grinned, a mischievous urchin’s grin that illuminated her grave, dark face. Her brown eyes laughed at him. He had never seen her look like this and guessed that it had been years and years since anyone had seen her look like this. “It just occurs to me that we are in rather an odd position for me to be making that comment,” she said.
He felt a quick and savage anger toward the men who had taken that look from her. He moved her hand to his cheek and wrapped his free hand around a thick strand of long black hair. He pulled gently, drawing her down until her face was close to his. Then he released her and cupped her face between his hands.
“Isabel.” He kissed her lips. “Honey, I wish you’d smile like that all the time.” He kissed her again, with extreme tenderness. His fingers on her cheekbones were feather-light.
Isabel stopped breathing. This is happiness, she thought almost wonderingly. This is perfect happiness.
His fingers moved caressingly along her cheekbone, and very simply, as if it was something she had been doing all her life, Isabel began to kiss him. He lay still for a minute, letting her take the initiative, and then his arms came up to hold her and draw her down until her whole body was stretched on his.
She raised her head and looked down into his eyes. Passion trembled between them, and something else—something so sweet, so tender, that Isabel felt it as an ache in her throat. Her hair streamed down, enclosing their faces in a tent of heavy black silk. Even within the fall of her hair, his slightly narrowed eyes were blindingly blue. Under her his body was hard with muscle.
“Isabel,” he said again very softly. “Isabel the beautiful.”
“I love the way you say my name,” she whispered. “No one else in the world will ever say it like you do.”
At last he moved, his hands coming up to grasp her hips gently. Feeling his touch, her brown eyes widened and darkened. There would never be anything like this again. She thought that now as she felt her body ripen under his touch. She would never love anyone else like she loved him because there wasn’t anyone else like him. Leo.