Acts of Mercy Read Online Free PDF

left hand. But then she stirred, turned her head and opened her eyes. “Nicholas?” she said.
    “Did I wake you?”
    “No, I was just resting. Couldn’t you sleep?”
    “No. I have a hell of a headache.” He rubbed his temples with the heels of both hands. “I suppose I drank too much wine at dinner.”
    “I suppose you did,” she said mildly. “Did you want to join me?”
    “Would you mind?”
    “Of course not.”
    Augustine crossed the room, shed his bathrobe, and moved in beside her. The sheets were warm from her body, scented with the musky fragrance of her perfume, and when she laid her hip against his he felt desire move through him. But he lay quietly, looking up at the quilted underside of the canopy; she was a very desirable woman and he wanted her, and yet his mind was so full of political matters that he could not focus on the physical need.
    She turned onto her side so that her breast flattened along his rib cage, reached up to touch his temples with her cool fingers. Massaging them gently in small circles, she asked. “Does this help?”
    “A bit,” Augustine said. Wexford, Oberdorfer, Maxwell Harper, Israel, the Indian problem in Montana and the meeting with Wade and Hendricks and Sandcrane that had not gone at all well this afternoon .... “A little bit.”
    Seconds passed, a minute or two. Then Claire began to rub her thigh against his beneath the silk of her nightgown, in the same gentle rhythm, and he felt the need climbing within him, felt himself starting to respond. One of her hands lowered to open the buttons on his pajama top, to stroke his chest, and he rolled over to her then, and kissed her, and drew the straps of her gown away to release her breasts to his hands and then to his lips.
    “Yes, dear,” she said, “that’s nice.”
    But he did not have a full erection; even her touch did not give it to him. Israel, the Indians, the convention in Saint Louis ... stop thinking! A little desperately, he tried to force himself to concentrate on the softness of her body, on the movements of her hands and of his own. Nothing happened. So he concentrated on himself, willing an erection, mind pleading with body—but that had even less effect, you could not begin to make love by focusing on yourself. Sex was two people, equal partners seeking to become one—
    Claire said, “It’ll happen, dear, it’ll happen,” and guided him to her. But she was not ready, her vulva was dry, the body as always telling truths that the spirit would deny, and he felt the last of his rigidity slip away. Damn it, damn it! Angry with himself, dismayed, he pushed away from her and lay on his back again, staring up at the canopy, listening to the dry rasp of his breathing. Beside him Claire made a soft sound in her throat that might have meant anything or nothing at all.
    This was the sixth time in succession and the fifteenth or twentieth time in three months that he had failed her, failed himself. For years he had been able to keep this part of his life wholly segregated, unaffected by political pressures; now he seemed to have lost that ability. Impotent, he thought, and the word lay bitter and ugly in his mind. Where did all the power go: the potency, the strength? He was the same man he had always been, and yet things kept happening that intimated he might not be.
    Maybe he should see Doctor Whiting, his personal and now the White House physician. But Whiting was a somewhat supercilious little man who thought exercise and a proper diet were the answers to most medical problems and that mental strain could better be relieved by positive thinking than by any medicinal aids. No, there was nothing Whiting could do—and he would have been embarrassed discussing impotency with him in any case. What he needed more than anything was another few days at The Hollows—to be home again in California, to lie with Claire in the big brass bed with the springs that could sing like train wheels in the night ...
    He