“For the rest of the evening, it is best that you see her as little as possible,” added the male. “She is still only a depiction of what you want her to be.”
“I understand,” Jordan said.
“Good. My part is done. You have been generous in your remuneration. I hope that we can do business again.”
“We each had what the other needed,” Jordan said. “All ventures should be so clear-cut.” For him, it had been a bargain. The acreage he had leased out, valuable as it was to the Outsider clan as a home and refuge, would have remained undeveloped woodland for the foreseeable future. The interim presence of the elves would not diminish its worth.
The intermediary took his leave. Jordan saw him through the window as he reached the edge of the lawns and crossed into the woods. The Outsider relaxed and reached up to clutch a handful of pine needles and shower his head with them. They briefly assembled into the shape of a crown.
Alone with the woman — strange, but he found it difficult to refer to her as an Outsider — Jordan shuffled uneasily from foot to foot, trying to think of what to say.
“You should try to sleep, my lord,” she said.
“It’s very early.”
“Then go to bed. Read. Let yourself be lulled. I will keep vigil, and when you do sleep, I will be ready.”
When he had settled into bed, she entered the room in the negligée from the box and sat down in the Edwardian parlor chair beside his bed. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, but he resisted staring and managed not to converse with her.
He thought it would be easier to ignore her once the lights were out, but he was wrong. He could hear her breathing, and it was a measured whisper lacking Véronique’s punctuated, often sharp, nighttime inhalations. And in the darkness he was aware of her scent. Essences of woodlands, fallen leaves, freshwater streams, wild grasses.
The middle of the night came and went, bringing drowsiness, but not enough to claim him. Or had he dozed, just for a moment?
The woman left the chair and joined him in the king-sized, four-poster bed. His heart thundered against his sternum. She curled up on her left side, taking a moment to reach out and run the back of her hand gently down his neck. A quintessential Véronique gesture.
Suddenly, he regained the confidence that the plan would work. He lay quietly, believing now that sleep would come, and with it the dreams they both required.
In the morning, Véronique was beside him. No more pale undertone. No more whiff of forest. Hair tousled, late to rouse, she snuggled close. Her breasts were hot where they pressed against his ribs, while her toes exhibited their trademark clamminess and chill despite long hours deep beneath the blankets. She, and everything about her, was just as he remembered.
Tears welled up and poured down his face, a flood withheld since the funeral.
She stirred and opened her eyes. Reaching out, she captured a droplet on her manicured fingernail and murmured, “No, no, no, my love. I’m here.” She held him tight, kissing his shoulder.
He sobbed audibly. It was Véronique’s voice, down to the last nuance.
Mrs. Cory, to her credit, hid any ambivalence or other emotion she may have felt as Jordan and Véronique gathered on the sun deck for breakfast. The cook, however, remained entrenched in the kitchen, foregoing his customary hello.
The wind teased the waves in the distance. Small fishing boats drifted offshore. Jordan had paid well to own such a view as this.
He had chosen to eat outdoors partly because he believed the elf would be more comfortable here, within reach of oak boughs and immersed in the fragrance of the trumpet vines in the railing. Véronique herself might have preferred the dining nook now that summer was being lured south.
Or perhaps not. The weather had been brisk the morning of his wife’s death, and that had not kept them from enjoying the air as they lingered, post-coitally, over coffee and pastries.
This would do as a start. They were neither post-coital nor preparing to catch separate flights from JFK, she aboard an aircraft with a puncture in a hydraulic line. Instead, it was a Saturday, and they could reach for the sort of quiet, insular day he might have had with the real Véronique, had she never boarded that jet.
After the meal, they strolled through the woods east of the mansion. Along the way she slid her hand into his, and he let it stay — the first extended contact he had permitted since the embrace when she had awakened. Again, Jordan had chosen a setting he felt would appeal to the elf, but she gave no hint of relief to be out from within the unliving walls of the residence with all its electrical fields, any more than she had seemed distressed while inside. She addressed herself to their surroundings the way a human would, such as when a squirrel pranced exuberantly up a tree trunk, kindling the smile that had won his heart the first time he had ever seen Véronique.
She filled the excursion with conversation, relating the news she had read in the morning paper as Véronique had a tendency to do. Had she taken that detail of character from his dreams? He hadn’t realized how much the lack of his wife’s chatter had isolated him. After the funeral, as before, the only parts of the paper he read were the business and sports sections, giving him at best a workaholic’s outline of happenings in society at large.
In the afternoon, they climbed into the limousine for a ride along the South Fork to tour wineries. The chauffeur jumped visibly as she called him by name, and was perhaps less attentive to his driving than he might have been, but Jordan forgave him that.
At the third tasting room they selected an expensive late-harvest Riesling. Véronique usually preferred dry whites and reds with a strong hint of the barrel atop the fruitiness, but he knew she would have liked the vintage. His companion drank selectively so as not to become so sated she lost the keenness of taste. Just like Véronique, and unlike elves, who he had heard were gluttonous in regard to alcohol. She wore gloves to avoid touching the metal of the car, but even those were Véronique’s own, bought in Paris two winters past.
The divergences mattered less and less as the hours wore on. Just before dinner, a call from his brother in Hawaii drew him from the room. It tortured him to leave her.
“I can’t tell you what this means to me,” he said as they sat down to the meal.
She didn’t reply. He would not have needed to make such a declaration to the former Véronique. He realized he was holding back, reminding himself that this was illusion.
No more. He had called her back from the dead. By now, it was the airplane crash, the funeral, the grieving that seemed unreal.
“Come to bed,” she murmured after the main course. “We can have dessert there.”
He knew that sparkle in her eyes. It had been bright in courtship and when they were newlyweds. It had not faded.
She was assertive and eager, quickly burning away his nervousness. He knew this body. He was conditioned to respond to it. Just past the brink of middle age, sex was the best he had ever known it to be, because unlike the arrogant young buck he had once been, he knew how to communicate what would gratify him most, and could sense what was wanted in exchange. Knowledge of a partner enriched the passion.
That was why no one but Véronique would do, why in their years together he had not succumbed to adultery, and he a wealthy man who could have starlets and models and golddiggers by the mattressful.
She tasted like Véronique: salt and honey. Slightly on the sweet side the way she was at times. She whimpered in that familiar, inspiring way. Regaining her breath after her first orgasm, she climbed atop him and straddled his face, putting her own mouth to work even as she offered him the chance to bring her to a second peak.