The Bleeding Heart by Marilyn French

Author:Marilyn French [French, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780671447847
Publisher: Ballantine
Published: 1980-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

2

THAT NIGHT HE SIMPLY held her. She was exhausted, she was grateful for the warm smooth body against her own, the feel of his arms holding her, they weren’t imprisoning her, no, you could always tell the difference. Dinner party at the institute, Edmund Low’s hand on his wife’s knee, and she sat there calmly, Naomi, her own hands folded quietly in her lap. Beautiful Naomi, calm, placid. She had contempt for him, you could feel it, it pervaded the air around her when he was near, but he didn’t feel it. His soft pudgy banker’s right hand lay on her knee and it was a shackle. Yes. She sat there, accepting it, her shackle. Why? Her hands rested quietly in her lap, shackled in diamonds.

Everything was a matter of power, Victor said.

But now he was saying love. And he was holding her with love, holding her for her sake, holding her for his sake, holding her out of love, not out of possession. You could tell the difference, even across a room, even on the street, watching the young men’s owning hands clamped on their women’s shoulders. Did the women think that was love? Anthony’s arm on her back at parties: light enough, but a clear message. No one would ask her to dance. Never touched her when they were alone.

Victor and she were breathing in rhythm. He was caressing her body, running his hand gently down her sides, her thighs, her buttocks, over her breasts, and she had her arms around him, and after a time she began to caress him, his thighs, his sides, his buttocks, his breasts, he felt good—smooth and cool and silvery. Oh, it was smooth and easy, they were together, they comforted the body for what could not be comforted in the mind, and it was all right, it helped.

Maybe it was possible to give up control, once in a while. Maybe one could give up control and the world wouldn’t fall apart. All those years of staying in control (because disasters occurred when she didn’t) when Anthony went off into a crazy rage, all those years of holding together when Elspeth, when Poppa, when Marsh said the most beautiful name in the world, when yes, but here she’d gone and done it, for the first time, really, in her life, had given up control and acted like a madwoman. And nothing so terrible had happened. Here she was, in her bed. And here was Victor, stroking her, easing her, loving her.

Trust was what it was. Yes, to be able to go to sleep in his arms and know he would still be there in the morning, that he would not try to kill you in your sleep, and that, in the morning, he would not look at you as if you had baggy eyes and bad breath (even though you did) and therefore were no longer desirable. The way Phil did, looking at her in the morning as if he had suddenly discovered she was an old hag.

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