Portrait of a Love by Joan Wolf Page B

hair. He pulled gently, drawing her down until her face was close to his. Then he released her and cupped her face between his hands.
    “Isabel.” He kissed her lips. “Honey, I wish you’d smile like that all the time.” He kissed her again, with extreme tenderness. His fingers on her cheekbones were feather-light.
    Isabel stopped breathing. This is happiness, she thought almost wonderingly. This is perfect happiness.
    His fingers moved caressingly along her cheekbone, and very simply, as if it was something she had been doing all her life, Isabel began to kiss him. He lay still for a minute, letting her take the initiative, and then his arms came up to hold her and draw her down until her whole body was stretched on his.
    She raised her head and looked down into his eyes. Passion trembled between them, and something else—something so sweet, so tender, that Isabel felt it as an ache in her throat. Her hair streamed down, enclosing their faces in a tent of heavy black silk. Even within the fall of her hair, his slightly narrowed eyes were blindingly blue. Under her his body was hard with muscle.
    “Isabel,” he said again very softly. “Isabel the beautiful.”
    “I love the way you say my name,” she whispered. “No one else in the world will ever say it like you do.”
    At last he moved, his hands coming up to grasp her hips gently. Feeling his touch, her brown eyes widened and darkened. There would never be anything like this again. She thought that now as she felt her body ripen under his touch. She would never love anyone else like she loved him because there wasn’t anyone else like him. Leo.
    “Leo.” She said his name aloud and moved her body against his, answering to the message his caressing hands was sending all through her. Then, more strongly, urgently, “Leo!”
    Passion flared between them.
    Leo rolled, and their positions were reversed-with Isabel underneath him, Isabel reaching up to hold him, Isabel moving her body to accommodate his. There was fire running through her veins and a wild aching longing in her loins.
    “Leo,” she said. “Ah, God, Leo.” She shut her eyes. She heard him saying her name, heard the love words he was using. She felt his power, and the world exploded. Without realizing it, her nails dug deeply into his shoulders. She would see the marks of them the following day.
    Neither of them moved for a very long time. “I’m too heavy for you,” he said finally, and rolled onto his back. Isabel turned to look at him.
    “I didn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know it could be like that.”
    His profile was calm, but for a moment a smile flickered in the curve of his mouth. “Honey,” he said, “that was something else.”
    “Was it?” She really wanted to know. “There was only Philip, you see, and it was never like that with him.”
    “What happened with you and Philip?” he asked. He wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were half-closed and he looked as if he were going to fall asleep. Isabel was beginning to realize that he got most of his information when he looked this way.
    “Is that how you operate in the Senate?” she demanded. “Do you lean back, close your eyes, put your feet up, and ask, with that oh-so-disarming drawl, *Tell me, General, are you sure there isn’t any fat in your budget?’ “
    One blue eye opened. He didn’t say anything. Isabel reached over and smoothed his hair off his forehead.
    “Philip was teaching an evening art course I took at the Met,” she began. She had never told anyone, not even Bob, about Philip. But she told Leo. When she had finished, he was silent for a long time. She had been lying on her back, staring at the ceiling as she talked, but now she turned her head to look at him curiously.
    “I’m just lying here thinking about the things I’d like to do to that fellow,” he said.
    “It was my own fault,” said Isabel. “I was colossally stupid, really. And do you know something? His art isn’t really