"I can explain it," I grinned. She looked at me and suddenly we were laughing together.
"Stop trying to explain," she said. "Maybe that's the jinx."
"Good enough," I said. "I seem to remember that there's a little inn not far ahead, just outside of town. I could get a room for two there. You could still take in the horse show in the morning — if you want to, of course."
She pulled up at the inn and minutes later we were in a chintz-covered room with a fourposted bed. Her lips were eager, hungry, and I began to undress her, slowly, step by step. Her body was everything I'd remembered it to be — vibrant alabaster, created by a master craftsman. She reached out for me and her head was on my shoulder, her hands stroking my body.
And it was still there, that special something, that quality that trenscended the body, the went beyond the senses and yet was a part of the senses. I caressed her white breasts, twin peaks of temptation, caressed them with my fingers as the pink tips reached up, and then let my tongue circle each one. Denny began to cry softly, but it was not a cry of sorrow or pain. Each tear was a tear of ecstacy.
"Oh, Nick, Nick," she breathed. "I've waited so long for you. I've waited so long. Once with you, and anything else is boy scout night."
From the way I felt, and the way I responded, she had not been alone in waiting. I stroked her body until she was a leaping, crying, pleading mountain of desire and then I came to her, fully and completely. We made love with ever mounting intensity, a hymn of rapture sung together, a harmony of the body. When Denny reached the top of her climb, she screamed, a scream of pure rapture, a sound never heard before, never to be heard again, not exactly.
When we sank down on the bed in the wonderful exhaustion of passion, we both knew that the unfinished symphony had been finished. But we also knew that it never really would be finished. It was a self-winding, self-perpetuating melody.
"Nick," she said, thoughtfully, laying her breasts across my chest, her hand holding me gently, softly. "I know now that there'll never be anyone but you."
I started to protest but she stopped me with her lips and then drew back. "Oh, I'll probably have to marry some terribly decent chap from some terribly good family someday, but you'll always know and I'll always know that it was because you can't be mine — your work is between us."
"Maybe you'll forget all about me someday," I said.
"It's more likely that I'll keep turning away terribly decent chaps because I'd rather have you whenever those rare times occur than anyone else anytime."
I looked at Denny Robertson. If she were still in circulation when the day came that I bowed out of the spy racket, I knew damn well what I'd do. I didn't tell her, though. It would only muddy things up more.
"What are you thinking?" she asked.
"I'm thinking I've only just begun to make love to you, you gorgeous creature," I said.
"How yummy!" she said. "Prove it."
I did, and the world went on without us. It didn't really care and we didn't, either. We had our own world.