A Beauteous Flower

Chapter 52 - The Gut Punch

When they arrived at the lake house, Madison didn't give Daniel a chance to escape her. When he opened her door, she artfully mesmerized him with a flash of her nakedness and led him by the hand to the back door. There she landed the first of what she hoped would be many passionate kisses of the evening. The second of those kisses occurred with her back pressed against the door and Daniel's hands on her hips. When Daniel finally managed the door, Madison drew him inside and closed the door behind them with a thrust of her hip.

"Almost there!" she thought to herself.

The momentum of their touches built steadily, and she didn't want it to stop. Daniel left his jacket and tie in the kitchen and Madison slipped her shoes off as they entered the living room. As she led him to the stairway, she worried open the buttons on his shirt, but before they could mount the stairs, he gave the first sign of resistance. Madison encouraged Daniel with another passionate and shamelessly sexual kiss.

"Stay with me, Daniel," she hissed in hot breathy tones. "Be with me."

Daniel kissed her back with verve.

"I love you, Daniel."

Again, she felt him pull back from her touch.

"It's OK," she whispered into another kiss. "It's OK. Go with it."

Daniel's lips parted from hers and his dusky green eyes sighed desire. His face showed his internal struggle for control and then the walls went up in his eyes and he stepped out of Madison's embrace.

"Oh, no ...," Madison moaned forlornly.

Daniel shook his head to clear the tense, sexual fog around them, and Madison's heart dropped. She could no longer put this off. All that was left was to fight.

How could he do this to her? How could he be so cruel as to make her be cruel to him? How dare he keep her in abeyance and not allow her to care for him, to heal him, to save him? Wasn't that what he wanted and needed and hoped for? Why wouldn't he allow her to return the warmth she drew from him? Why wouldn't he let her love him? Why did it have to come to this?

A terrible anger flared in Madison's heart: Anger at this situation and what had brought her to this pass; anger at the expectations that weighed on her since puberty; anger at the people that gave her those expectations; anger that those expectations inevitably led her to predatory men like Miles and Steve; anger that she had pursued men like Miles and Steve rather than men like Todd, like Daniel; anger that she had wasted time in pursuit of men like Miles and Steve; anger that because of her experience with men like Miles and Steve she felt that she didn't deserve men like Todd, like Daniel; anger that the pursuit of high value men had cost her chances with men like Todd, like Daniel; anger that only now she had learned to tell the difference between pretty and beauty; anger that only when it was too late and her marriage lay in shambles around her did she finally understand love. As all of that anger swirled like a firestorm in Madison's heart, intense and wild, it sought a target.

Daniel.

She was angry at Daniel. Daniel who defied those expectations, who made her doubt her choice to pursue high value men, who made her detest those high value men because he had shown her kindness and calm and patience and compassion and all the things she never knew she needed until he gave them to her, who made it safe for her to live out her fantasies, and to be silly and romantic, who had awakened a desire to care and to heal and to love in Madison and now would not let her express that desire to him, for him, with him. Madison loved Daniel, but he wouldn't let her love him and that filled her with a rage unlike any she had ever known. Rage at Daniel. Madison's eyes took on a hard edge which she reflected in her voice.