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Dynamite, and the fuse was lit

His other hand rested at the top of her thigh under the towel, close enough that he could feel the daer God, what color was it? Deep auburn, as he’d iined? Copper and bronze, like the hair of her head?

Despite hi to cup the soft slippery fullness he could sense, so close With an effort thathim back down

"Please," she whispered "Please, I want you to"

He felt hollow as a bell; his heartbeat echoed in head and chest and painfully hard between his legs He closed his eyes, breathing, pressing his hands against the rough fiber of the rug, trying to erase the feel of her skin, lest he grab at her again

"No," he said, and his voice sounded queer, hoarse to his own ear "No, not here, not like this"

She was sitting up, rising out of the dark blue towel that puddled around her hips, like a mermaid from the waves She had cooled; her flesh was pale as oose bumps stippled the smoothness of arh skin and sers over her lips, her broad mouth The taste of her was still on his lips, clean skin and toothpaste--and a sweet, soft tongue

"Better," he whispered "I want it to be better…the first ti at each other, the air between the, but a slow er felt rooted to the spot; perhaps it was the Gorgon, after all

Then the s milk rose up the stair, and both of the!" Brianna said, and made a dart toward the stair, her towel cluht her by the arm as she passed him She was cold to the touch, chilled by the drafty hallway

"I’ll do it," he said "You go and get dressed"

She shot hi into the spare bedroom The door clicked shut behind her and he dashed down the hall, clattering down the stair toward the s his paler dealt with the spilled and scalded soup, berating hi at her like a crazed sal off her towel and grappling her to the floor--Christ, she must think hi that suffused his chest wasn’t due either to shame or to heat from the cooker It was the latent heat fro him I want you to, she’d said, and she’d e of the body to know desire and surrender when he touched them But what he’d felt in that brief reat deal farther The universe had shifted, with a small, decisive click; he could still hear its echo in his bones

He wanted her He wanted all of her; not just bed, not just body Everything, always Suddenly the biblical injunction, one flesh, see immediate, and very real They’d nearly been just that, on the floor of the hallway, and stopping as he had made him feel suddenly and peculiarly vulnerable--he wasn’t a whole person any longer, but only half of so not yet made

He dumped the ruined remains of the soup into the sink No et out of the house and away from temptation

Supper, casual chat, and o to the Christmas Eve services After that…

After that, he would ask her, make it formal She would say yes, he knew And then…

Why, then, they would come home, to a house dark and private With theht of sacrament and secret, with love newly come into the world And he would lift her in his arinity’s sacrifice was no loss of purity, but rather the birth of everlasting joy

Roger switched out the light and left the kitchen Behind hias flame burned blue and yellow in the dark, ardent and steady as the fires of love

18

UNSEEMLY LUST

The Reverend Wakefield had been a kindly and ecuious opinion, and willing to entertain doctrines his flock would have found outrageous, if not downright blasphemous

Still, a lifetime of exposure to the stern face of Scottish Presbyterianiser with a certain residual uneasiness upon entering a Catholic church--as though he ht be seized at the door and forcibly baptized by outlandishly dressed minions of the True Cross

No such violence offered as he followed Brianna into the s white robe visible at the far end of the nave, but he was peaceably engaged in lighting two pairs of tall white candles that decorated the altar A faint, unfa to be unobtrusive about it Incense?

Beside hi in her purse She took out a small circle of black lacy stuff, and bobby-pinned it to the top of her head

"What’s that?" he asked

"I don’t knohat you call it," she said "It’s what you wear in church if you don’t want to wear a hat or a veil You don’t really have to do it any it--it used to be that woo into a Catholic church with their heads uncovered, you know"