The Invitation (Montgomery/Taggert 19)

Brother! Could William unfasten buttons quickly. One minute she was fully clothed and the next she was wearing nothing. One minute she was expecting languor and the next she was smiling happily in delight as William began touching and tasting her skin.

William’s hands were all over her at once, searching, exploring. His mouth followed his hands, and when Jackie moaned in pleasure he seemed to have found the keys to heaven. With one hand on one breast, his mouth on the other, he tried different movements to see what felt best to both of them. As far as Jackie could tell, everything felt best.

“William,” she tried to say, but he had his hands all over her and that lovely mouth of his was sending such shivers of delight through her that she could hardly think. “Your…” She broke off because she couldn’t remember what she had meant to say. Who could remember something as complicated as words when he was touching her like that? His hands were on her thighs, his strong palms running over the curves of her legs. Now she understood the fascination men had with virgins. To think that this man had never done this to another woman! It made her seem more than special. It made her feel unique, unequaled, like the queen of the world. That this divine man had never been touched by another female made her feel that he was hers in a way that nothing else could.

Her body was turning to mush, pliant, soft, easy. “Your…” she tried again.

“My what?” he managed to whisper, his voice filled with the intoxication of pleasure he was experiencing.

She tugged at his shirt collar. She was fully nude, deliciously nude and open to William’s eyes and hands, but he had on all of his clothes.

After the ease with which he had removed her clothes, she wasn’t surprised when his came off in the flash of an eye.

Heavens, but he was beautiful. Skin like something newly hatched, something that had been born yesterday. Soft, downy hair on his chest, muscles strong and new, glistening with strength and youth. She wouldn’t have thought it possible but the sight of his beautiful body made her grow even more limp with desire. Eagerly her hands sought any and all of him that she could touch; then she twisted her body so she could put her mouth on his clean bare shoulder, and her hands moved downward.

She was not prepared for the bliss, the rapture, that was apparent on William’s face and in his voice when she took the most private

parts of him into her hands. If nothing else, her pleasure was in knowing that he was not comparing her to anyone else. No other woman had touched him. No woman had put her hands or lips on him. He was hers alone.

When he moved his big, heavy body on top of hers and prepared to slip inside her, Jackie arched her hips to meet him. Never had anything felt as right, as proper, as “what was meant to be” as did this joining of her body with William’s. The word “home” echoed through her brain: he had come home; she was now at home. They were where they were meant to be.

“Yes, yes,” was all she could say as William began to move on top of her. “Ecstasy” didn’t begin to describe how he made her feel. There were no words to describe the joy. There was the excitement that always accompanied sex, but with William there was more. He seemed to touch some deep, remote area of her that had never been touched before. This act that she had experienced before had been a physical one, but now it was deeper than that. It was almost spiritual, because she felt that she was bonding with this man in the last possible way. They had been friends, had exchanged thoughts and secrets, but this exchange had until now been denied them.

If Jackie had thought about it—and she had, far more than she’d admit to herself—she would have expected the first time with William to be of the very shortest duration. Happily—very happily—she was wrong. After several minutes she began to wake up inside.

“William, you are wooonnnderful,” she said dreamily, her back arched, her eyes closed. She heard him laugh, that smug laugh of men when they are very proud of themselves. Then he pressed his sweaty chest on hers and nuzzled her neck.

For the next week, Jackie lived in a dream world. Her sexual experience had all been with Charley, so, in a way, she was as new to sex as William was. When Jackie met Charley, he had been to bed with any woman he could get to say yes, or even to say maybe. By the time he met Jackie he knew what he liked, how he wanted to do things. He’d tried every position, every possible variation. Like all women, she’d been very curious and she’d asked him to tell her of his past experiences. She’d heard how some girl in Singapore had been great at so-and-so, and then there was this girl in Florida who’d been especially good at something else. At the time Jackie hadn’t thought about it, but years later she knew that she had felt intimidated. How could a skinny thing like her compete with those women who knew so much? She’d said this to Charley once and he’d laughed at her, told her she was the best of all of them and he’d rather go to bed with her than all the women in the world. At the time she’d felt better, but still, there was that nagging little worry that maybe other women had been more…more what? Enticing? More technically skilled?

With William she felt free, free from comparisons, free from having to live up to the standards of anyone else. And who would have thought that freedom was the headiest aphrodisiac on earth?

Also, who would have thought that solid, dependable, upright-citizen William Montgomery would be a demon in bed? In all the years she’d known William she’d seen little evidence that he was creative. On the contrary, he seemed to be the epitome of follow-the-rules. Even as a child he had always colored inside the lines.

For one week they did nothing, absolutely nothing. The excuse they gave themselves, and Pete, was that they needed to wait until Jackie’s hand healed before they could fly or work on engines or even look at the financial aspect of setting up a business. The truth was—a truth that they didn’t openly admit to themselves—that they were so interested in each other’s bodies that they could think of nothing else.

Jackie told herself not to compare William to Charley, but she couldn’t help it. Charley was a very sexy man. He seemed to think about sex all the time and he loved sexual innuendo. Everything—soaring airplanes, chairs, whatever—reminded him of sex. He thought about sex, joked about it, wanted to discuss it.

William could not have been more different. Looking at him, fully clothed, across the breakfast table, Jackie couldn’t believe this was the same man who’d been in bed with her an hour before. With his clothes on, there was no one more dignified than William. He was so cool, so remote, so private, that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. For all of his youth, William was an old man, had an old man’s established habits. She’d seen people older than he ask him for advice, and the first time she had a problem that didn’t involve him, she planned to go straight to William. So it was easy to think that if she had been asked, or if she had thought of it, which she had, she would have assumed that William might be a bit shy in bed. True, he had been affectionate and tender toward her, but still, she was taken aback by how ardent he was.

To her delight, she found that once William got his clothes off, he became as sensual as a child. Children would see a mud puddle, think the mud felt nice and cool, so they’d take their clothes off and smear themselves with the ooze. They had no preconceived ideas that one wasn’t supposed to like mud because it wasn’t “nice” or “civilized.” This innocence, this sensuality, was something that William brought to bed. He had no desire to get things over and done with so he could roll over and go to sleep. He wasn’t just interested in that climactic moment and nothing else. William liked all of it.

Jackie had never for a moment thought that she was sexually repressed. In fact, a woman had once asked her what she saw in a man as old as Charley, and Jackie had laughed in a very naughty way. She’d had her disagreements with Charley and her complaints about him, but there had never been any sexual problems between them.

At least that was what she thought—until she met William. No wonder men wanted a woman who was a virgin; no wonder a man was ready to kill if “his” woman touched another man: if women were allowed to jump into bed with lots of men they might start comparing, just as she now compared Charley with William. If women compared lovers, what would happen to the world? Would men have to stop saying, “I’m the best, baby,” and start having to prove that they were even good?

If she’d ever been to bed with a man like William before she went to bed with Charley…well, she didn’t want to think about it.

After the first couple of days she stopped comparing the two men and allowed herself to enjoy. She would never be able to explain it to anyone—not that she’d try—but William made her feel as though she, too, were a virgin. They caressed each other, looked at each other, and touched as though they were the first couple to discover how nice skin against skin felt.

They didn’t talk about sex or even seem to think about sex. Sex was something that just seemed to happen, something spontaneous and joyful, something clean and happy and delightful. They seemed to be saying, “How would it feel if I did this? Or this?” William lay still for as long as she wanted while she ran her hands over his hard thighs, over his broad chest.

And kissing with William was as though they’d invented this delicious practice. Charley had always felt that kissing was a waste of time. “I like the more serious stuff, kid,” he’d said. Jackie had no idea that she was as starved for kissing as a man in the desert was for water. She and William kissed constantly. Nude, she stretched out on top of him and kissed his face—his eyes, his long nose—teasing him that it took sixteen kisses to get far enough down it to suck gently on his lower lip. She felt his teeth with her tongue, running her tongue over the contours of his mouth.

And then they traded places and he kissed her, his hands caressing her arms and shoulders while his lips traced every outline of her face. They spent hours in bed, touching, looking, kissing, exploring. Jackie sometimes thought that they were like Adam and Eve and they were the first two people to have felt such pleasure.

When they made love it seemed to be different every time. Sometimes there was such urgency that they couldn’t get their clothes off fast enough. Other times lovemaking took hours. However long it lasted, it always seemed to catch them unawares. One minute they’d be sitting on the couch—William reading the newspaper, Jackie sewing a button on his shirt—and the next second their clothes wou

ld be hanging from the light fixture. Afterward they’d look at each other with startled expressions, as though to say, “How did that happen?”