“H’lo.”
“Hi. Wake up, sleepyhead. It’s first thing in the morning already.”
Oliver squinted at the clock. “Six-thirty.”
“That’s right. I’m on my way to work, but since my first thing in the morning and your first thing in the morning are obviously worlds apart, I thought I’d call you. Good morning.”
“Hi.” He sat up in bed and pushed the hair out of his face. “Jeezus, when do you sleep?”
“When it’s convenient.”
“You’re going to get sick. You work too hard.”
“I never get sick, and I have to work hard.” There was a smile in her voice. “Say something nice so I can leave for work. I hate being late.”
“Nice, huh... I got tickets for Debussy yesterday. For January sixteenth. Is that good for you?”
“I’ll make it good for me...” she lowered her voice to be blatantly sexual, “...I’ll make it good for you too.”
“Holly...”
“Oliver, I have to go. I’m going to be late.”
“What about tonight? When do you get home from work?”
“About six-thirty.”
“Dinner, then. I’ll meet you for dinner.”
“Oh, Oliver, I can’t. Tuesdays we do condoms and needles.”
“You do what?” He sat straight up. “Holly?”
“We pass out condoms and needles to the prostitutes and addicts downtown.”
“On street corners?”
“That’s where they are. Some of them come to us, but most of them don’t. So we go to them. I have to go. Please, Oliver. Have a good day, okay?”
“Holly?”
“Yes, Oliver?”
“Be careful.”
“I promise.” The line went dead.
“Holly, it’s ten-thirty. I was hoping you’d gotten to every drug addict and prostitute in Oakland by now. I guess not.” A heavy pause. “I hate sitting here and thinking of you out there. Aren’t there karate experts or sumo wrestlers to deliver stuff like that? Couldn’t you drop off boxes of condoms and needles on every street corner and let them help themselves?” He sighed. “Sorry. I know better. I just don’t like it. Call me.”
“Oh, no. You’re sleeping,” he said to the muffled noise on the other end of the line. “It’s six-fifteen. I thought you’d be up.”
“It’s what?”
“Six-fifteen.”
“Oh, gawd! Oliver, I overslept. I never oversleep. I’m late. I’ll call you tonight. I promise. Bye.”
Enough was enough. Oliver was in love and he could hardly keep the woman of his dreams on the telephone long enough to tell her—that is, if he could get her on the phone at all.
He needed to see her. He had to touch her. A single kiss would put him into orbit. Damn her. Didn’t she know?
He spent the afternoon plotting, but it was hard to figure a woman like Holly—a selfless, dedicated woman. It was just his rotten luck. An imperial command was out, she had no respect for his money or his power, and he had no authority over her—yet. Whether or not he ever would was something to consider—but maybe at a later date. No, at this point he was going to have to show his flexibility; his willingness to yield to her cause; his receptiveness to her work.
On the other hand, complacency stuck in his craw. He was not the most malleable man alive, nor was she the most judicious. She needed him to make her see reason. If she wasn’t more careful, she’d work herself to death, or get hit in the head for the loose change in her purse, or fall through the floor of that run-down apartment building and break her damn neck—and miss out on the most incredible sex of this century!
Sex. She definitely needed him.
He didn’t care what it took. He was going to make her make time for him. He’d collect appointments. Set up dates a month in advance. Move in with her and catch her fifteen minutes at a time if he had to. But he was going to see her.
At six-thirty he was parked in front of her apartment building waiting for her to come home from work. They needed to talk. Really talk. And phone tag wouldn’t cut it. It was going to have to be face-to-face.
An hour elapsed before he took a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his suit and with his gold pen scribbled, Must have regular, consistent work hours.
Two hours. He wanted coffee and needed a facility, but knew she’d be home any second now...
Three hours.
Four hours. It was dark. It had started to rain. It was chilly... and he was hotter than hell.
At eleven-fifteen he used his rearview mirror to watch the municipal bus pull to a stop at the other end of the block. A woman stepped off and the bus pulled away. She was wearing a long, dark raincoat, passing in and out of the shadows along the street, heading in his direction. Her head was bent and her step was weary—some poor woman who had to work dawn to dusk to support her children, no doubt. She was tall and thin and—
“Where the hell is your car?” he bellowed, jumping out of his, slamming the door and stomping toward her.
“Don’t come at me in anger, Oliver. I have ten brothers. I can hurt you till you cry,” she said simply, unafraid, unperturbed, un-everything—except depressed and worried and tired.
He was hardly intimidated.
“You don’t even own a car, do you?”
“They’re bad for the environment.”
“And...” he said, his voice still rising.
“And I can get to wherever I want to be by bus or BART.”
“And...”
“And I can’t afford one.”
“I knew it. I knew it. And this is California! How can you not afford to have some sort of a car? Everybody and their mother’s cousin has a car in California. Except you. No. You have to walk the streets at night and at the crack of dawn and God only knows when else, to catch buses and trains, to spend time with degenerates and prostitutes and drug addicts, and... What?”
“Are you finished?” she asked, having come to a standstill in front of him. She had to tip her head back a little to look him in the eye, and she did so calmly and without flinching.
“No. Dammit. Where have you been? I’ve been sitting here since six-thirty. I thought that was when you got home from work.”
“It’s Wednesday. I had school.”
“Don’t you come home first? Don’t you ever come home? You’ve been gone since six this morning.”
“I went to the hospital. There was an incident last night.”
“An incident?” He scanned her from head to toe. She looked to be in one piece. “What sort of an incident.”
“A pimp beat up one of his girls, so I took her to the hospital. I stopped by to see her.” She turned and started up the stairs to the door.
“For Chrissake, Holly, what if he’d decided to beat you up too? Don’t you think of things like that?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be there.”
His jaw worked erratically, but nothing came out of his mouth. With an effort he pushed out a growling noise with a tail of four words: “Hold it right there.”
She released the door handle and turned to face him. He was being a pain in the butt and getting on her nerves—nerves that couldn’t take much more stress.
Semicomposed, like a man talking to an idiot, he held out his hands and slowly asked, “If you know that it’s dangerous to be in places like that, why do you go?”
It was a fair question, but she didn’t like his attitude. She stood on the top step and leaned forward, into his face, to say, “Because you won’t go.”
“Me?”
“You. And all your snooty friends. And all the damn politicians and bankers. All those middle-class people out there who think that life at Roseanne Conner’s house is as bad as it gets. Wake up, Oliver. If stupid people like me don’t go, who the hell will?”
Her outburst stunned him. Good. She took a couple of deep breaths to calm herself and lowered her heavy satchel of books to the ground.
“What do you want from
me, Oliver? Do you want me to get all decked out in silk and go to fancy restaurants with you? I’ll do that. Do you want me to stand around at elegant cocktail parties and pretend to be brainless and beautiful? I can do that too. Or would you like me to stay home and rub your feet and cook your meals and wash your clothes? Well, I can do that, too, but not all the time. I have a life, Oliver, and I want you to be a part of it. You have a life. And I want to be a part of that. But I can’t choose one over the other.”
“I won’t ask you to,” he said, accepting the truth as he heard it. It was all of her or none at all, and that included her work. “I’m not even too sure I’d want you to. I don’t like what you do. To be honest, I hate what you do. But I respect and admire it. Can’t I be proud of you and worry about you at the same time?”
“Sure you can. I’m glad you are, but...”
“All I want is time, Holly.” He took one step up to be at eye level, to show her how much he needed her. “Not a message. Not a phone call. Real time. With you. I’ll take what I can get... but I’ll get what I can take too.” His mouth closed hard and fast over hers, a shattering contrast to the soft, slow sweep of his tongue. He cinched her in his arms.
Oh, to be lost in the sweet bliss that was Oliver, she thought. She pressed close, as if she were stuck to him. She was his fare, ready and willing to be eaten alive.
“Oliver,” she said, her voice faint as she held him off with her hands, her forehead to his. “Oliver, wait. I need to know...”
“What?” His body was screaming for her, and his mind wasn’t going to be much of an obstacle. She’d have to talk fast. He urged her on. “What?”
“The money, Oliver. Why’d you do it?”
“The...? Oh. I...” Okay, a slight detour, his mind insisted. He took a deep breath and let it go. Then he shrugged. “It’s money. A donation. I didn’t think you’d hear about it so soon.”
“But why?”
“I wanted to. Don’t you need it?”
“Of course we do, but why the stipulations? Why is it for the clinic only? For management and maintenance?”
“Because you said the place was falling down.” Plainly, her standards weren’t all that high, so he’d imagined it as a heap of rubble already. “And I know for a fact that you don’t get paid enough for what you do.”
“But the building’s not all that bad, and I get paid enough. The people who come there need it more.”
“You don’t get paid enough.”
“I do,” she persisted. “I make plenty of money.”
“Then what do you do with it? Spend it all on your flashy cars and your swanky apartment? Holly, come on. You deserve more. So do the others.”
“So, you did do it because of me,” she said in an odd voice.
“Well, not just because of you,” he said, hesitant, unsure of her direction. “But it’s certainly because of you that I knew about the place and what’s happening there and that it needed more money. Is that what you mean?”
Relief and happiness lifted the weight in her chest and the tightness in her abdomen. He didn’t know. He really didn’t know. She had suspected as much. She’d hoped. But it was good to know for sure.
“Wait a second now,” he said, alarmed, setting her back an arm’s distance. “You’re not thinking it was a bribe or an inducement for...” Oh, Lord. It did look bad.
“For what, Oliver? Sex?” The dim porch light showed every nuance of his expression. It made her heart ache in the nicest way, but she couldn’t help laughing. “We both know you’re too smart to try to buy me.”
“It isn’t something I’d put past me, you know.”
“But why buy what you know you can have for free?”
“When?” he asked pointedly, his hands tightening the hold on her shoulders.
She took both of his hands into hers and held them to her breast.
“Well, that depends,” she said.
“On what?”
She broke loose and ran, saying, “On who gets to the bed first.”
She went through the door, and he tripped over her satchel. He grabbed up the bag and followed. She was past the first landing, taking the steps two at a time, and she was laughing. It was a sound that made the old building seem bright and new again. It banished the gloom and covered the creaks in the stairs. It was a joyous noise, a titillating noise, a noise he’d have followed to the end of the universe.
Seven
HE STUMBLED THROUGH THE open door breathlessly, just in time to catch pillows flying and the sofa unfolding. She threw herself down in the middle of it, trench coat and all, panting and declaring, “You lose, Oliver.”
Three flights of stairs weren’t what they were in college, he determined, his hands on his knees as he sucked in air. And Holly was as slick and sly as an eel. This was a good thing to know about her.
“So what must I forfeit?” he asked, an all-American good sport when he wanted to be—and when sex was imminent.
“All your clothes.”
He came slowly upright. His startled gaze met the bold challenge in her eyes.
“You want our first time to be like this?” he asked, just this side of stunned.
Her body was out of control with excitement.
“I want every time to be like this,” she said.
Her smirk was provoking. And there was something keenly uncomfortable in the idea of standing naked before a woman he was attracted to, who still had all her clothes on. He amended his notes on her strange perception of romance—this was beyond anything he had imagined. But then again, so was she. He deliberated a second longer, then easily decided his ego was manly and proud, and prepared for any challenge.
Deliberately, he closed, locked, and chained the door—a gesture that symbolized not safety but captivity. An allusion to demonstrate that while he was about to make himself vulnerable, she was the prisoner and in far greater peril.
She crossed her ankles and leaned back on her elbows and watched his raincoat and jacket come off. She forced herself to appear cool and collected, but her heart was pounding in her throat, her hands were tingling, and she felt a need to draw in huge amounts of air. She was battle-ready, staking her will against his. Her self-control against his determination. Her power to seduce against his need to conquer.
“Aren’t you going to dim the lights and turn on music for this?” he asked, pulling his silk tie free of his collar.
She shook her head.
He slipped off his shoes and made light work of the buttons on his shirt, his gaze locked on her face. Her expression was avid but unpledged. In the silence, they could hear the building growing older as the seconds passed, and it made the friction between them grow doubly quick and strong. It was him and her, their bodies and the relentless tension, with no distractions. It wasn’t long before his self-consciousness and feelings of foolishness were replaced by an empowering call to extract a reaction from her.
It was there, in the dark shadows of her eyes, in the tautness of her shoulders, in the dryness she licked from her lips and tried to swallow from her mouth. The intensity surged when he stepped to the end of the bed to remove his shirt and started on his belt buckle.
He looked down on her with eyes darker and deeper than the secrets of hell. Her skin prickled. Anticipation twisted in her abdomen. Desire pulsed between her legs. He was going to win, she feared, feeling as if she might faint dead away before he finished.
He was too strong, his confidence too overpowering. His thoughts were too plain, his ambitions toward her too clear. His shoulders were thick and broad with corded muscle, his chest wide and rippled. Sun-kissed skin lay smooth and taut over softly rounded mounds of sinew that could cradle or crush.
He shuffled out of his pants and socks at once. Her raincoat might just as well have been a sauna. She was hot. She was wet. She was weak. It was suffocating.
He stood tall, tempting, and tempestuous before her. The pressure between them mounted, like an invisible storm. Electric. Di
sruptive. Frightening.
She startled him when she moved, sliding to the end of the bed. He was wary of her and watchful, ready for any move she made.
“Everything, Oliver,” she said, her voice thick and heavy.
“You ever think of being an auditor?” he asked. His gaze meshed with hers as he hooked the elastic of his briefs with his thumbs.
“No. But I’ve known my share. They don’t let you get away with much, do they?” she asked with a wicked smile.
He’d come this far, he thought, sliding his shorts to his knees and working them down from there with his legs. This was her little party—he’d have his later.
She stood. She walked slowly beyond his peripheral vision. He waited for her to come around him from behind. He filled his lungs with air and waited. His nerves were stretched raw.
“You’re beautiful, Oliver,” she said, passing before him. Her hand reached out to glide up his inner thigh, slide past his arousal, and cruise over his lower abdomen. “I don’t think there’s a scratch on you.”
She took another survey, her hand slipping across his ribs, coasting over his rear end, drifting across his sleek exterior as if she were thinking of buying him—or a classic Studebaker.
When next their gazes met, he almost laughed. She had what he liked to call that oh-God-take-me look he’d seen so often on a woman’s face. But he didn’t laugh. With Holly there was more to it. It was like oh-God-take-me-forever-and-always-I’m-trusting-you-not-to-hurt-me-I’m-believing-in-you. She really knew how to pressure a guy.
That made him smile. He was ready for her. He was ready to take on the stress and strain that he knew loving Holly would bring. He was ready to laugh and cry with her, ready to cheer her when she was down and listen to her bitch about the world when it crossed her. He wanted to hold her hand in the dark and eat the meat loaf she left cooking too long. He wanted her. All of her. And he was ready for her.
She was smiling, too, when she placed both hands flat on his chest. His heart was beating so hard, she was afraid it would bounce out and hit her in the face.
His hands turned to fists at his sides. He knew what was coming and lowered his head to make it easier for her.
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