LITMIR.BIZ

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It’s part of my job.”

      “I’m glad to hear it. Dependability is crucial in your profession.” She’d heard that people fell apart when their shrinks went on vacation. She wondered if he saw patients on Saturdays and Sundays. Maybe he could come to New York on weekends, or she could go to Boston.

      Whoa. She was getting way ahead of herself. It was more likely that this would be a one-night stand, or rather a single therapy session to help her get over the disastrous effect Sven had had on her.

      Maybe this sort of therapy was his specialty, which he used on all his female patients. An unexpected, uncalled-for bolt of jealousy made her scalp prickle.

      “Take a sip of Scotch,” she said encouragingly. Time was passing. Since he seemed to have difficulty moving his head, she added, “Want a straw?” She held the candle even closer to his face, hoping she didn’t look too much like a witch trying to intimidate an agent of Satan, because he didn’t look at all like an agent of Satan, nor did she have any desire to intimidate him. Seduce him? That was something else altogether.

      “No.” Two perfectly matched dark blue eyes glared at her as he righted himself on the sofa and reached for the glass. He downed it in one desperate gulp. “That’s the first liquid I’ve had since noon,” he said.

      Blythe dashed for the kitchen to refill the glass. “How terrible. Here. Drink some more.” She sat down beside him on the sofa and watched him closely as he drank.

      He took one sip, and his glare faded into a warm, soft glow. “Much better,” he said, leaning against the cushions. “I’ll be back to normal in a minute.”

      “Good,” Blythe said. “As soon as you’ve revived, let’s get right to it.”

      “Excuse me?”

      Her face heated up. “That is, if you want to now that you’ve met me.”

      He sat up a little straighter. “Sure I want to. But I don’t think we can get right to anywhere right now.”

      “Oh, I didn’t mean you should take me to dinner,” Blythe assured him. “Just to bed.”

      She felt the jolt of his body in the shoulder that brushed against hers. He whipped around to stare at her, his eyes wide. His drink slipped out of his hand and landed in his lap.

      Blythe shrieked.

      He leaped up, shaking his jeans loose from his crotch, while ice cubes hit the coffee table and the floor with a clatter.

      “I’m so sorry,” Blythe cried. “What did I say that upset you?” She fumbled her way into the kitchen and took a stack of dish towels out of a drawer. She really didn’t need to ask. Now that he’d met her, he wasn’t interested in going to bed with her. She followed the candlelight back into the living room and clapped the towels against his wet trousers. A sound curled up from his throat, something between, “aargh“ and “aiiiee,” followed by a muttered, “I’ll take care of it, thanks.”

      Realizing she was hanging on to a rather personal part of him, Blythe let him take over the towels and backed away, feeling even more miserable, inept and undesirable. Her shoulders slumped. “You don’t want to go to bed with me, right?”

      “Wrong.”

      “It’s okay. I understand. Nobody…What did you say?”

      Silently he mopped at his trousers for another moment, then dropped the towels on the coffee table. Turning to her, he curled his hands around her shoulders. His eyes sparked in the dim light as he gazed down at her and said, “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than make love with you.”

      MAX HAD A STRONG FEELING he was missing a link in the conversational chain, but he was in no mood to go looking for it. Not accept a gift handed to him by the power outage, fate itself? Not want to go to bed with a small, artistically rounded, redheaded, freckled—

      Because now, in the candlelight, he could see her just fine, and she was the most huggable woman he’d ever imagined making love to. Her hair was, in fact, red, curly and out of control. He wondered if that faint smattering of freckles covered her whole body. His brain responded to the vision, sending a jet of sudden desire straight to his crotch.

      Yes, he’d be happy to go to bed with her. More than happy. Enthusiastic.

      Under certain conditions.

      “Really?” she said to him, breaking into his thoughts. “You really want to go to bed with me? You’re not just saying what you think you’re supposed to say?” She wore the most hopeful expression he’d ever seen on a human being.

      It was a weird conversation, especially coming from a woman who’d sounded confident to the point of being a ballbuster on the telephone, but that hopeful expression got to him. “Really,” he assured her. “Couldn’t be more real. A totally genuine feeling. One with visible physical symptoms.” He’d probably gone far enough in that direction with someone he barely knew. “But I thought—well, I thought we’d spend a little time getting acquainted first.”

      He had to throw that in. The voice of his conscience was nagging relentlessly at him. He knew the pitfalls of sleeping with a co-worker, of mixing business with pleasure, plus in this case, he had to make sure she was sane and capable of making judgment calls before he rushed her off to bed. “You know. The old who, what, when, where and why.” He smiled, making the point that they were both journalists, the only thing they had in common as far as he knew. “You tell me about your job and your family, the dog you had growing up, then I tell you about…”

      “I can see how a person in your profession would feel that way,” she said to the underside of his chin. Her voice sounded soft and breathless, but not in the least suggestive, and the words tumbled out. Even more amazingly, her hands, light and deft, fluttered back and forth along his arms in a way that was effectively punching his conscience in the gut. “But I didn’t have a dog, and I do have a serious need to rush. The time is at hand. I need to get it over with before I lose my nerve. Unless, of course, you’re too tired.”

      He’d never felt less tired in his life. This was the kind of situation a teenage kid dreamed about finding himself in, but Max wasn’t a teenage kid anymore. He knew in his heart she was reacting to fatigue, fear and uncertainty. He’d heard that people caught in life-and-death situations had sex with each other when they wouldn’t otherwise have thought of doing anything so impulsive. Maybe the power outage was having the same effect on her. He tilted her face up to give it another once-over. Her skin felt like cream to the touch. This close, in the light of the flickering candles, he could see that her eyes were green, a light, bright green, the color of new leaves in the spring. She was a little tense, a little nervous, but she seemed sane enough.

      His heart rate sped up. “People are so different in person,” he said hoarsely and with difficulty. “That phone call left me thinking you were a lady with plenty of nerve.” He replayed the “welcome you to New York” call in his head and tried to relate it to the woman who was currently turning his temperature up to Broil. But he didn’t try very hard because that had been a phone call, and this woman was a tangible, embraceable fact.

      Or he’d asphyxiated in the elevator and had gone to heaven. Either one was fine with him.

      “Forget the phone call,” she said with a sigh that tickled his throat. “You shouldn’t believe anything you hear in that kind of phone call. The truth is, I barely have enough nerve to cross the street on a Don’t Walk sign.” Her eyes shifted away. “Can we just do it?” she asked him. “Fast?”

      He’d done his best to behave responsibly, but he wasn’t campaigning for sainthood. This time when he swept her up into his arms, she felt as light as cotton candy. Her tiny squeal only intensified the suddenly purposeful sensations thudding through his body. “Yes and no,” he said, carrying her toward the promising-looking door ahead of him.

      “The other way,” she said, trying to whirl him back around behind the sofa. “What do you mean, yes and no?”

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