Counselor Undone

by Lisa Rayne

  Had she simply been trying to relive New Year’s Eve tonight or was there more to it?

  Before she could seriously consider the issue, her cell phone rang. She snatched the vertical blinds closed, flicked on a light, and darted to where her bag laid abandoned by the entryway. She fished out her phone. Looking at the number on the screen, she smiled. “Hey, you. To what do I owe this late night call?”

  “Hey, sis,” her brother replied. “Just checking on my favorite girl.”

  “Yeah, right. You must be in between hoochies at the moment or you would definitely be otherwise occupied this time of night.”

  Her brother laughed. “Well, for someone complaining about the lateness of the hour, you sound awfully bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m just getting in from the office.”

  “What! Jo, what have I told you? I don’t like you alone in that office building so late after business hours.”

  Jordis rolled her eyes and plopped down on her plush oversized sofa. Here we go again, she thought. “Look, dude, you’re not the boss of me,” she joked, reverting to their childhood banter. “A girl has to make a living.”

  “That’s crap and you know it. A girl can bring her work home with her and do it from the safety of her own apartment. Isn’t your laptop working?”

  Jordis thought about the laptop her brother had recently overhauled for her. It had been top of the line when she’d bought it four months ago. Now, she wouldn’t be surprised if the US military considered it a classified secret weapon with all the RAM and microchips and whatzits he’d added.

  An electrical engineer by training, her brother spent most of his time tinkering with anything electronic or mechanical, trying to see what he could do to “make it purr.” He’d been a Bond fan as a kid. Jordis had always thought if MI6 ever needed a hip quartermaster, her brother would be the perfect candidate. If he weren’t such a looker, he’d be considered the quintessential nerd.

  “My laptop is fine. Although, I’m afraid to turn it on now. Last time I went to use it, it tried to take over a small country in the Middle East.”

  “Ha, ha. Very funny,” her brother replied dryly. “I’m serious, sis. What’s the point of having remote access to your office network if you’re going to stay at the office no matter what? Hell, what you need is a man. Then you’d have something to do besides play Perry Mason and perfect oral arguments.”

  Jordis sighed. “I need another man like I need a hole in the head. The last one I had didn’t know the meaning of the word supportive and considered the things he did for me down payments on the right to control me. No, thanks! Besides, there’s nothing a man can do for me I can’t do for myself.”

  “Your former fiancé was an idiot. And, there is one thing a man can do that you can’t do for yourself.” He paused. “No matter how many batteries you buy.”

  She could hear the laughter in his voice. “Now who’s trying to be funny?” She flashed back to the feel of Michael Remington’s generous package rubbing against her and, though she’d never admit it out loud, knew her brother was oh so right.

  “Look, I know I sound like a broken record, but just because you’re not in LA anymore doesn’t mean you don’t have to be careful. Even here in the Midwest, we have our crazies and lowlifes.”

  “Brandt, you don’t have to worry. I wasn’t alone. My boss was still at the office tonight, and he made sure I left when he did.” She skipped over the part about not knowing Michael was there at the time. Her brother didn’t need to know that part. “In fact, he insisted on walking me to my car and made sure I left the garage in one piece.”

  Her phone signaled an incoming call. Checking the screen, she groaned.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “That’s my boss beeping in. He made me promise to call and let him know when I made it home, and I forgot.”

  “Good for him.”

  She rolled her eyes again. “Whatever. Look, bro, I gotta go. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  She tapped over to the other line. “Hello.”

  A deep voice drawled, “Well, hello, Ms. Morgan. I trust you’re safe and sound at home and not stranded somewhere on the side of the road?”

  A shiver tingled along her spine. He had an über sexy phone voice. “Yes, I’m home. I’m sorry. I really did mean to call you, but my brother called. We got to talking, and it sort of slipped my mind.”

  “Okay then. I just wanted to make sure you were fine before I turned in for the night.”

  “Thanks for checking on me.” Through the phone, she heard his refrigerator door open and close.

  “You’re welcome.” He took a sip of something. “You know, Jordis, we do have remote access to the network available. I’ll have Technology set you up tomorrow. You shouldn’t be alone at the office that late.”

  “Here we go again.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Jordis sat down on the couch. “Michael, I’m really not in the mood for this lecture again tonight.”

  “Again?”

  “I just got the whole you-know-you-shouldn’t-be-at-the-office-this-late and why-don’t-you-just-use-remote-access speech from my brother.”

  “Ah. I understand. Big brother’s protective of you.”

  “Actually, he’s my younger brother. By four years. A fact he seems to keep forgetting.”

  “He’s not forgetting. It simply doesn’t matter to him. He’s a man and you’re his sister. It sounds like the two of you are close, which means he considers it his job to protect you and make sure you’re taken care of.”

  “Is that the macho in you talking or are you speaking from personal experience as a sibling?”

  An odd thunk, like the sound of a glass or bottle hitting a kitchen table, resounded through the receiver right before Michael’s deep laugh caressed her ear. She’d never heard him laugh before. She liked the sound.

  “Macho in me, huh? So, you think I’m macho?”

  “Oh, in the worst way.”

  His chuckles tapered off as he continued, “Well, I don’t know about that, but I do have two sisters. One’s older than me and the other is younger, but I don’t think I treat either of them differently because of our birth order. I’d certainly chastise either of them if I found out they stayed at their offices late into the night with no one around but a few security guards.”

  Jordis got up and strolled into her bedroom while he talked. She left the lights off and used the light from the hallway to see. She pulled off her skirt, laid it neatly over an overstuffed chair, and unbuttoned her blouse before plopping herself on her queen-sized bed. She lay on her back, with her head at the foot of the bed, staring blankly at the ceiling with one foot flat on the bed and the other dangling in the air at the end of her crossed leg. The fingers of her free hand absently caressed her abdomen as she continued their conversation.

  “So, what you’re saying is because I wasn’t born with a Y chromosome, I need you or my brother . . . or some man . . . to protect and take care of me.”

  “No. What I’m saying is because I was born with a Y chromosome, it’s my nature to want to protect and take care of the women in my life whether you actually need me to or not. It sounds as if your brother’s of the same vintage.”

  A long silence followed his comment. A slight thrill ran through her at his use of the word you. She understood he spoke generally, but something inside her liked the idea he could consider her amongst the women entitled to his protection.

  “You still there?” Michael asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Well? No comment?”

  What could she say to that? He hadn’t spouted the usual male propaganda about women being the weaker sex or no matter what advances women have made in the workplace, it’s still primarily the man’s job to bring home the bacon. Because his argument wasn’t based upon finding her somehow lacking or less capable than him, Jordis really didn’t have a retort.

  “Well, I guess if that’s
who you’re telling me you are, there’s really not much for me to say. But, I’m wondering . . . how do your sisters feel about your attitude?”

  The line went quiet before he admitted, “Pretty much the way you seem to feel about your brother’s.”

  They fell into an easy conversational flow, and he told her more about his sisters. Jordis hit the speaker button on her phone. Laying the phone on the bed beside her head, she continued the discussion in hands-free mode and allowed his voice to surround her in the darkened bedroom.

  His voice rolled over her. She loved the sound, deep and smooth like one of those late night radio announcers who played only love songs. Unexpectedly, Spartacus flashed through her mind. He’d had a deep, sexy voice as well. She needed to stop comparing the two men, but the sound of Spartacus’s voice in her head mixed with the resonant sound of Michael’s oozing through the phone. Her nipples puckered.

  Her hand moved up to rub against a nodule plumped under her satin black bra. The sexy tickle made her wish for large male hands to take over. She took a deep breath trying to control a tension she hadn’t meant to rouse.

  “You okay over there?”

  She startled at the question, afraid he could guess exactly what she’d been doing.

  “You aren’t falling asleep on me are you?”

  She could hear the humor in his voice and immediately relaxed. “Of course not.” Without thinking, she added, “What woman could ever fall asleep on a man as enthralling as you?”

  Almost as soon as the comment left her mouth, she realized the implications that could be taken from what she’d intended as a joke. Luckily, Michael didn’t take it the wrong way. He simply chuckled and continued with their chat. He asked, and she answered, a few questions about what had drawn her back to the Kansas City area. Although she responded to his questions easily, explaining the city’s proximity to her brother as one of its key selling points, she wondered if he sensed she was holding something back.

  After a while, he brought the conversation to a close. “It’s late. I better let you get some rest. Something tells me you like to get into the office early.”

  Jordis glanced at her digital clock, which glowed one fifteen in red. They’d been talking for almost an hour. She hadn’t felt the passage of time. “Yes, I’d better go. I have a deposition first thing in the morning.”

  “Ok, I’ll see you at the office.”

  They both hesitated a second before hanging up at the same time. Jordis laid in the dark for a while contemplating why she suddenly felt like a teenager who’d gotten a call from the star quarterback of her high school football team.

  * * *

  Jordis slept fitfully that night. The recurring dream she’d thought done slipped into her subconscious. The gladiator came to her. His tongue danced inside her mouth, and his hands explored and pressed until an exquisite ache between her legs made her moan in her sleep. Her buttocks ground into rumpled black Egyptian cotton. The top sheet slid languorously against her thighs. The sensuous friction heightened her senses. Dampness pooled in intimate places, bare beneath a flimsy white silk negligee.

  This time she didn’t stop his touching. His fingers slid inside her, taunting until intense heat burned inside her flesh and caused her to kick tousled sheets off the bed. Her negligee rucked up her hips. Her bare buttocks pressed harder into the mattress, and even in sleep, her pelvis began to tuck and release in an erotic rhythm generally shared by two. Her REM mind fixated on him, that beautifully bronzed and intoxicatingly muscled stranger.

  A whimper pierced her sleep state. Jordis began to float towards consciousness, but the dream gripped her tightly and lulled her back down. In her dream, a different part of his anatomy took over her pleasure. A slow methodic rocking bounced her gently up and down the beige flat paint of a bedroom wall. Loud breaths and soft groans punctuated the staccato rhythm. Her grip tightened on the hips of her dream gladiator, and she rocked him back. The tempo built and she urged him harder, faster. Then it came, a coital explosion so intense a real mewl of satisfaction escaped her lips and startled her awake.

  She laid wide-eyed, staring up at the ceiling and panting. She’d heard his voice call her name in her sleep. This time, she recognized the voice, and when he’d looked into her eyes, the once amorphous, indescribable eye color appeared in Technicolor gray. Her dream gladiator’s eyes had been unmistakably gray.

  Jordis squeezed her damp, sticky thighs together. She’d come in her sleep, but the edge wasn’t completely off. She lingered in a state of semi-arousal. Although she had the mechanical means beneath her mattress to relieve her discomfiture, she wouldn’t go there. She couldn’t go there, because the face she’d seen in her sleep was . . . Michael Remington’s!

  “No,” she complained audibly to no one in particular, but hoped the universe and her uncooperative subconscious would hear and heed.

  She’d already been over this with herself. She would not—could not—embrace a sexual fantasy about her boss. She rolled onto her stomach, pulled a pillow over her head, and groaned. Ugh!! He’d ruined a perfectly good dream. Now, she wouldn’t be able to separate her gladiator fantasies from the olive-skinned, gray-eyed counselor.

  She hadn’t had the gladiator dream in days. She’d had it almost daily for a straight week after New Year’s. Her midnight rendezvous with the costumed Lothario had played over and over, night after night, as clear as a high definition movie. Somehow, in this morning’s version, her anonymous suitor—previously safe fodder for fantasies of illicit sex—had morphed into Mr. Macho. She didn’t even want to begin to analyze the Freudian implications of that.

  His voice had rolled over her like a sensuous massage, the deep tone arousing her as much as the naughty imagery conjured by her dreaming mind. She surmised Michael had crept into her fantasy because his nectarous voice had been the last sound she’d heard before going to sleep last night, and it had made her think of Spartacus. Nothing more to it than that . . . she hoped.

  Even as she rationalized the provocative dream, the glutinous feeling between her thighs told another story. She’d never reached physical fulfillment during her previous dreams about the gladiator. That she’d done so this morning implied a burgeoning attraction for the svelte partner she’d been loath to examine closely. In fact, she didn’t want to analyze the how comes and what fors or anything else about the situation even now. Nothing good could come of it.

  Her goal was partnership, her focus billable hours and finding a way, other than sleeping with Remington, to get appointed to the Metra Pharmaceuticals case. She needed to execute a serious display of mind over matter or, more aptly, mind over libido. Like their elevator tryst from the night before, Jordis intended—no, she needed—to put this and him out of her mind.

  Determined to do exactly that, she rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

  * * *

  Across town, Michael Remington slept in the buff with morning wood to rival the trunk of a hundred-year-old redwood. Her moans haunted him in his sleep. Juliet. Luscious breasts pressed against his bare chest and her tanned skin looked good enough to eat. He pressed his lips against her throat and in his dream, she emitted that sound that made him hard as concrete. His fingers under her dress, he caressed her intimate folds in a steady rhythm. Feminine sounds of pleasure intensified a tumescence he yearned to push deep inside her.

  For the first time, the Sandman took pity on him, allowing him to alter his body position and consummate his desire. The dream Juliet grabbed his hips and pulled him to her. He tucked his face into the curve of her neck and slid home, dipping in and out of her warmth until he felt her begin to spasm around him.

  When she succumbed to her release, the en rêve orgasmic pulses took him to the brink. He looked into her face and this time, the mask had vanished. Hazel eyes stared back at him, beautiful kaleidoscope hazel.

  “Jordis!” The shout shattered his soporific haze.

  Breathing hard, he came awake disoriented and on edge. A
s his dream came back to him, he threw his legs over the edge of the bed, placed his elbows on his knees, and dropped his head in surrender. Even his subconscious mind wanted her. Looking down at his lap, he rose and headed for the bathroom.

  He stepped into the shower and stood under the spray with his head down, hands pressed hard against the tile beneath the showerhead. Warm water sluiced through his hair and down his body, frustration raining off him with each rivulet pouring down his skin. He’d grabbed and squeezed hard on the base of his shaft as he’d shouted himself awake this morning, but it’d been to no avail. He’d ejaculated all over himself.

  He hadn’t had a wet dream since his teen years and having one today didn’t please him. The combination of his encounter with his mystery woman superimposed over his encounter last night with Jordis had been too much for him to handle.

  He lifted his face into the water. Was he truly losing all self-control? Those exotic eyes of Jordis’s—that seemed to shift color with the light, her wardrobe, and her emotions—were wreaking havoc on his equilibrium. He didn’t understand it. He’d dated plenty of women with beautiful eyes. He didn’t remember any of those eyes turning him inside out or tripping into his dreams until he practically pleasured himself in his sleep. As the dream played over in his head, he groaned. Ms. Morgan had gone from simply screwing with his concentration at work to affecting his ability to sleep.

  He reached over and pumped two squirts of shampoo into his palm. He rubbed his hands together then ran them through his hair. A slideshow played in his mind as he worked his hair into a lather. Juliet. Jordis. Jordis. Juliet. What was it about this woman, embodied in her two personas, that appealed to him on such an intense level?

  He remembered his confusion over Juliet’s eye color. He’d been perplexed about whether they were green or brown. He hadn’t thought much about it after he’d realized he’d met two different Juliets that night. Although, part of him had wondered how he could have confused light brown eyes with green ones, even with being a few sheets to the wind. After meeting Jordis, he didn’t feel like such an idiot. Her chameleon eyes covered that color spectrum at various times of the day.