Loving Frank Read Online Free PDF Page B

room…. That day in the studio, I longed to be someone you absolutely counted on. The truth is, I still do.”
    Frank reached out his hand and ran it over her brow, then down one side of her face. His forefinger touched the pearl at her throat.
    Mamah felt her heart racing. “Do you always fall in love with your clients?”
    “Only once,” he said. “Only one.”
    He stood up, took her hand, and led her to the sofa in the living room, where he gently eased her down. They lay together for some time, her head on his chest, before his hands began to move. His wrist bones cracked as he unbuttoned her shirtwaist and put his mouth to her breast. A rill of electricity shot down her body, yanked up her hips. Her hands were seeking him, struggling frantically against fabric. In a moment his whole length was next to her, the naked landscape of his body gliding over hers, as they wordlessly found a common rhythm.

CHAPTER 5

    I t was a summer of breathtaking risks.
    For every careful plan, there was a careless visit. She would hear a knock on the door and find Frank standing there with his shirtsleeves rolled up and the blueprint for the garage under his arm, as if he had just popped over to settle a small detail.
    Most of the time Louise and the children were at home. On those days he would get down on his knees and play with them, hauling John and Martha and their playmates around on his back while Mamah sat on the window seat in the library, fiddling with her skirt, balling up the linen, then smoothing it out again. She wondered if her jitteriness was apparent to Louise, if the sparks flicking like fireflies under her skin showed on the outside.
    “You look radiant,” Mamah said one afternoon when Frank came through the door. He had a lilt in his step and his eyes were twinkling. His face and forearms were burnished from hours outside at work sites. Standing in the library, he glanced around the other rooms.
    “They’re in Forest Park,” she said. “They all went over to the amusement park. About an hour ago.”
    Frank tossed the drawings onto the window seat, put his hand behind her waist, and swirled her around the tiny library as if they were in a ballroom.
    “Frank,” she protested, laughing. She felt exposed next to the open, un-curtained windows. Once, at the end of a dinner party, she had sat on the window seat with another woman, both of them drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. She’d looked up to see the Belknap girls gazing down on her from their bedroom window next door, and she’d had a distinct sense of being spied on. Was anybody up there now? It was impossible to tell. She tried to lead him to a back room, but he was pulling her down to the floor, and then it was too late. Their loving was muffled and furious.
    Afterward, briefly, she lay with her head in the hollow of his shoulder, listening for footfalls on the pavement. Sunlight slanted over the roof next door and fell hot on her legs.
    “It’s going to be the best damned garage in Oak Park,” Frank said, stroking her hair, “but it could take years to finish.”
             
    IT FRIGHTENED HER TO FEEL so out of control. But any thoughts of ending the affair floated away the minute he set foot in the same room. Frank Lloyd Wright was a life force. He seemed to fill whatever space he occupied with a pulsing energy that was spiritual, sexual, and intellectual all at once.
    And the wonder of it was, he wanted
her.
    When she looked in the mirror, she saw a woman pink-faced from desire. And from
being
desired. My Lord, what a narcotic! She hadn’t felt such a sense of power since she was a twenty-year-old college girl with a clutch of suitors.
    “Ring me once and hang up, then I’ll call you back,” Frank instructed her. She did that only a couple of times. Isabelle, his assistant, would pick up, and Mamah would quickly lose her nerve. Instead she waited for him to contact her, and the waiting nearly killed her.
             
    LATER