They took care of the food, changed into their bathing suits and greeted the other guests. Arlene fussed for a minute over whether the little ones should be forced to take naps and was hooted down. In the melee of noise and confusion, Sonia found her father. Stephen Rawlings was standing on the front porch with a group of ranchers, holding a glass of lemonade, his weathered face squinting in the sun. He was tall, and his hair was gray these days; a paunch was developing around his middle. And Sonia probably loved him more than life. She collected a kiss and quick squeeze before her husband yelled for her.
“What are we going to do with these urchins now?” he demanded ominously, referring to the one towhead draped over his shoulders and the other hanging upside down in his arms.
For an instant, she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to do with the children, but knew precisely what she wanted to do to her husband of the bare brown chest and frayed swimming trunks. Stop that, Sonia. “First, we’re going to throw them in the pool,” she announced, and grabbed one warm, wiggling body away from him. The upside-down one. “And then, you little troublemakers…”
The July sun beat down in increasingly sultry waves; a horse neighed somewhere in the distance; the smells from the barbecue wafted toward them; the pool waters felt like slinky, cool silk on overheated flesh. It was just that kind of day when all the senses were alive and bursting; Sonia started smiling and didn’t stop. First little Johnny swam between her parted legs, then Susie. Sonia’s father dropped pennies into the pool bottom for the children to claim. The children bullied Craig into doing a somersault underwater, and then they played keep-away with a beach ball. Sonia, laughing, loved the feel of the warm, wriggling bodies and quickly snatched hugs from her niece and nephew. She adored them. The little devils both knew it.
When at last Arlene showed up at the side of the pool, Sonia was gasping, shaking her head free of water as she handed over her niece and nephew. “Nap,” she mouthed to her older sister.
“I actually think they will, now,” Arlene whispered back.
“Not them, you fool. Me,” Sonia complained feelingly.
“Want Sonie,” Susie told her mother belligerently, the sound muffled as a towel buried her head. “Want Uncle Craig.”
“You only want them because they spoil you to absolute bits,” her mother informed her and, with an affectionate grin for Sonia, carried off the two protesting youngsters.
Craig surged up from the water behind her, his arms sliding around her waist as he pulled her back against him. Water suddenly trembled on her skin in the sunlight. She leaned back, eyes closed. Sensuality seemed to be stalking her like a thief in the night. The hardness of his thighs against the backs of hers; the cool, bare skin of his chest rubbing against her spine; the feel of his hands on her flat stomach, barely covered by the simple red maillot…His cheek nuzzled against hers. “I think you want one of those,” he mentioned idly.
She glanced up at the children before they disappeared into the house with her sister. “I do,” she agreed. They hadn’t talked about babies before, not seriously. She had wanted Craig to herself the first years, and then they’d been busy, gallivanting across the country, building their house…She still wanted Craig to herself, but the urge for babies was growing, the need for their own personal exhausting little Hamiltons to worry over and fret about the way Arlene did about her kids.
Sonia turned in Craig’s arms, her eyes level with the column of his throat. Water droplets curled in the damp mat of hair on his chest like diamonds in the sun; his skin was cool and wet, his hair slicked back. The urge to touch him, to rub her breasts against him until they ached and tightened…No one would see, she told herself. And knew darn well that everyone would see.
“Sonia?”
He had beautiful eyes. Sexy eyes, deep and tender and sweet. His finger curled under her chin, lifting it; she could feel the sudden tautness in his body, a kind of waiting silence as his head bent lower, blocking the sun, coming closer…
A neighbor suddenly pitched a ball into the pool, splashing both of them. “Hey, you two! How about a game of volleyball?”
Dinner was absolute chaos, with adults running helter-skelter, kids dropping their plates on the grass, dogs cavorting in search of scraps. Sunburned faces grinned while butter dripped down chins from the roasted sweet corn.
After dinner, the children did their usual vanishing act, undoubtedly to prevent their parents from whisking them home before they’d finished playing. The grownups changed into grown-up clothes and settled on the chaise longues around the pool with glasses of June’s lethal punch. Sonia was stretched out between her mother and sister, holding her second glass of punch, her other hand shielding her eyes against that last brightness of daylight. Craig was standing with a group of ranchers that included her dad.
The sky was filled with puffy clouds, slowly moving across the horizon. Listening absently to her sister’s gossip, Sonia kept seeing whimsical pictures in puffs. One looked like the trunk of an elephant, another distinctly like the face of a man. Another, if she observed it just so, looked exactly like a man and a woman in an embrace…
“Where’d you get your skirt, Sonie?”
Sonia glanced at her sister, then down to her white cotton ankle-length skirt with its hem of embroidered orange flowers. The orange matched her camisole, both whimsical purchases for a summer evening a long time ago. “Marina’s, I think,” she said. “You haven’t said how Matt’s doing.”
“Terrific. I thought at first we’d never get used to living in town, but it’s nice. Having neighbors and stores so close…I miss my morning rides, though.”
Sonia loved her older sister; she really did. Both her mother and sister filled a very special niche in her life. Craig had become her world with their marriage; her priorities had changed, but there was still occasionally the urge to indulge in simple gossip and chitchat, and her sister was an expert at both. At the moment, though, Sonia couldn’t seem to concentrate. She found herself staring at the tiny cubes of ice in her punch glass. Ordinary ice cubes. Two clung together and they looked remarkably like an upturned bottom, naked and smooth.
Good Lord! Would you stop this? Restlessly, Sonia stood up, feeling her breasts pushing against the soft camisole material. She was sex-obsessed this evening. “Anyone want some more punch?”
An unfortunate question. Everyone wanted more punch, and they were all too lazy to get up and fetch it themselves. Smiling, Sonia started serving. The problem, she told herself silently and severely, is that out of nowhere you suddenly don’t have enough to do. Since they’d been home, Craig had shielded her from his work instead of involving her in it. She didn’t mind. Marina had been calling consistently, enticing her with a job she really wanted to do…only the next minute all she could think of was how much she wanted a child. It was a perfect time; they were finally settled…Except in the meantime, she seemed to have little to do but think too much. She wasn’t used to inactivity.
She finished serving punch, refilled her own glass and carried it back with her to the kitchen. Her mother hired help to clean up after the barbecue every year, but the total chaos of the kitchen reached out to Sonia like salvation. Just get busy, she told herself.
In a restless spurt of energy, she tossed out napkins and paper plates and cups, filled the sink with soapy water, washed the empty serving dishes and started covering what food remained uneaten. People would still come by to pick and nibble, but covering things would at least prevent the food from drying out. See? All better, she told herself as her hands moved with the speed of blades on a fan, picking up, cleaning up, sorting through, covering.