Tempest in Eden

A woman with five children won the coat. All five children and the husband, who looked overworked and weary, clustered excitedly around the woman as Shay helped her try on the coat.

Afterward, Shay felt tired, but pleasantly so. They stayed behind after the hall had cleared to help the janitor clean up and rearrange the chairs for Sunday School the following morning. On their way to the car, Ian walked behind her, massaging her shoulders through her coat.

"Thanks for helping," he said as he opened the car door for her. He kissed her on the ear, an absent-minded, husbandly type kiss. The thought should have knocked Shay off her feet. Instead she was smiling contentedly as they drove through the dark streets.

"I'm glad she was the one to win it," she said as Ian headed back to the inn.

"You didn't rig it, did you?" he asked suspiciously. She had drawn the winning ticket out of the large bowl.

"I'll never tell," she said in a singsong voice as she laid her head against the seat back.

Ian pulled the car in front of the inn and cut the engine. He placed his arm along the back of the seat and turned toward her. "Should I kiss you good night on the porch?"

"How about on the lips?"

He glowered at her from beneath dark brows. "Will kissing you spare me the bad plays on words?"

"Try it."

He grinned wolfishly and reached for her, pulling her across the seat. "Come here."

His mouth was as hot as a furnace as it opened over hers. She loved its heat and begged with her rea

dy response to be consumed by it. He opened her coat and slipped his hands inside. One went around her waist to her back. With lazy indifference that drove her mad, the other flirted with the satin shoulder strap of her bra beneath her blouse.

Her hands clutched at his head, taking up handfuls of thick dark hair. Brazen fingertips examined the texture of his earlobes and moved along his hard cheek, his stubborn jaw. Curious, she trailed her hands down past his coat and toyed with the top button on his sports shirt. When it came undone, she encountered the springy hair that covered his chest, his abdomen, his…

"Ian," she cried softly and pushed away from him.

"What?" he asked, startled. He withdrew his hand from her coat.

"Nothing, nothing," she mourned softly, lowering her head and replacing her hand with her lips. His chest hair was soft, the skin warm. She bathed it with the residual dew of their kiss, which still glossed her lips.

"Sweet… Shay … please." His fingers entwined in her hair, making the meaning of his request unclear.

"Ian, Ian," she whispered, brushing her lips back and forth, "I remember what you look like. Here." She paused for only a heartbeat before letting her hand sweep across the front of his trousers.

"Ahhh, Shay." It was a sharp, strangled cry from a throat tight with passion. He grabbed her audacious hand and brought it to his lips, burying his mouth in the soft flesh of her palm. "I remember you, too." His glazed eyes focused on her breasts. In the dim light she saw his eyes drop to her lap where her upper thighs arrested his gaze. "I remember all of you."

He kissed her hand once more with an aggression that bordered on savagery. Then with the anger of a man sexually thwarted, he shoved open his door and all but dragged her out of the car.

Their kiss at the door of the inn was brief, chaste, and supremely unsatisfactory.

Ian nearly laughed out loud when he picked Shay up the next morning. She looked more prim than he'd ever seen her, in a navy wool dress with a white Peter Pan collar and a neat row of red buttons down the tucked bodice.

Ian's church was lovely, traditional in design with Corinthian columns in front of wide double doors. A slender steeple with a sedate white cross at its pinnacle pointed toward heaven. But the spirit inside made the church what it was. And the man in the pulpit was partly responsible for that loving spirit.

His sermon that morning was on the subject of love. "There are no degrees of love as it is described in the Bible," he told the congregation. "Either you love or you don't. It is either totally unselfish and unconditional or it isn't real love."

Shay felt like crying as she sat in the pew looking up at his commanding form.

Mrs. Higgins cooked them a sumptuous lunch, which Ian graciously invited her to share with them. Shay knew his reason was twofold. First, Sunday was the loneliest day of the week for people who were alone. Second, they needed a chaperone.

At three o'clock they went to the high-school gym where he had arranged to meet some of the players on the basketball team for a workout. Looking as fit in his shorts and tank top as any of the men fifteen years his junior, he gave them a run for their money on the court. Shay sat in the bleachers, cheering him on. When he scored a particularly spectacular point, he turned to her and bowed, then threw her a kiss. She wanted to cry then, too.

"Say, you weren't bad, Old Man," one of the boys joked when the game was over.

Mopping perspiration from his brow with a towel, Ian eyed the boys smugly. "Yeah, and you lost your bet. Three Bible study sessions in a row without missing."