A Forbidden Affair

by Yvonne Lindsay

  In a way, she’d just met him. All this time she’d been thinking he was someone else. It was going to take a while before she could adjust to viewing him in this new, heterosexual light.

  At least, you know, a couple of hours.

  “Marcus, we can’t do this right now.”

  He opened his mouth to object, but Dinah cut him off.

  “There’s more than my lottery jackpot to consider here. There’s…there’s…um…”

  “Yes?” he prodded, dipping his head to nuzzle the sensitive place where her neck joined her shoulder. Oh, that was very, very nice. “There’s…what?” he asked.

  He pulled her close again, opening his hand over her back, covering her mouth with his. Oh, that was so good. So right. So very, very… Oh.

  Dinah curled her fingers over his naked shoulders, his skin feeling like hot satin beneath her fingertips. Then she splayed her other hand open over his heart, finding comfort in the discovery that his pulse was racing as erratically as her own.

  “We can’t,” she said again, albeit reluctantly. “Marcus, please. We can’t. Not now. Not…yet.”

  It was that final word that made Marcus surrender to her insistence. Not that he didn’t think he could make her change her mind if given another, oh, three or four seconds. But Dinah was right. Even without the money waiting for her at the end of their journey, this wasn’t a good idea. Not yet.

  He cared for Dinah in ways that he’d never cared for another woman. She was funny and smart and cute, and he felt more comfortable around her than he did anyone else he knew. Hell, he might as well just admit it to himself—he was halfway in love with her. Maybe even all the way in love with her. He could wait a little longer for her to get used to the idea of the two of them together.

  But not too much longer.

  Not yet, she’d told him. He could do a lot with not yet. In twelve hours, if all went well, they ought to be rolling into Atlanta. They had until the lottery headquarters closed at five-thirty to claim her prize. And once that was done, he imagined she was going to feel like celebrating. Celebrating her wealth. Celebrating her financial security. Celebrating the success of her journey. Celebrating this newfound…whatever it was…between them.

  And if there was one thing Marcus Harrod was very good at, it was celebrating. Especially with Dinah Meade.

  Not yet, he mused again. He guessed he’d just have to settle for that. For now.

  They were just ten miles shy of the Georgia border when they stopped for gas. Which was just as well, Dinah thought as they rolled to a stop at one of the pumps and Marcus turned off the engine. She had to use the ladies’ room, anyway. Plus, she’d really been craving an Almond Joy for the past hundred miles.

  The mini-mart was hopping, she noted as she jumped down from the SUV. She and Marcus were going to have a bit of a wait to pay for their gas. Good thing it was still early afternoon. Atlanta was no more than two hours away, which gave them a good two-hour cushion. They had plenty of time to claim her jackpot.

  She fished her wallet out of her purse and checked the contents, only to discover—surprise, surprise—that the cash compartment was empty. Boy, that five million bucks couldn’t come fast enough. Dinah could almost feel the check in her hands—the smooth, cool paper, all those wonderful zeroes.... Oh, this was going to be great. The first thing she would do was treat Marcus to a wildly expensive dinner. And after that…

  She couldn’t wait to find out if she was right.

  Especially since part of what she suspected was going to happen involved a lot more than a physical union. She was reasonably certain that there would be quite an emotional union happening, too. At least, there would be on her part. Because now that she knew Marcus did, in fact, go for estrogen-producing individuals, she could stop denying the fact that she’d been halfway in love with the guy for months. And then, maybe, if all went well, she could stop denying the fact that she’d been halfway in love with him for months, and admit that she was completely in love with him for all time. And then maybe, just maybe, he might come to return her feelings.

  “Hey, Marcus,” she said, nudging aside her thoughts for the moment. “Could you loan me a couple of bucks?” She smiled her most dazzling smile. “You know I’m good for it.”

  He smiled back. “Boy, you kiss a woman once, and what happens? She wants to borrow money from you.”

  Dinah blushed. “Um, I thought we agreed not to talk about that until after I’ve claimed my prize and we can do it without distraction.”

  His smile turned lascivious. “Yeah, and I’m really looking forward to doing it without distraction, too.”

  “Marcus…”

  He chuckled as he withdrew his wallet from the back pocket of his blue jeans and pitched it to her. “Take what you need. I know where you live.”

  “Thanks,” she told him, catching it capably in both hands. “I’ll pay for the gas while I’m inside.”

  “I’ll meet you in there,” he offered. “I want to pick up a couple of things, too.”

  Ten minutes later, Dinah ran into him in the candy bar aisle, filling his hands with as many Hershey bars as he could carry. At her laughter, he glanced up, shrugging guiltily.

  “Hey, I figure we’ll be celebrating in a little while,” he said in his defense. “I want to be prepared.”

  “I’ve never seen a man go after chocolate the way you do,” she replied. “I knew you were too good to be heterosexual.”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” he said indignantly. “I thought we settled that little misconception earlier.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not quite convinced yet.”

  “Guess I have my work cut out for me, proving it to you.”

  “Guess you do.”

  She nudged his shoulder with hers, then he nudged her back with his, and they continued nudging each other and laughing as they paid for their purchases. Then, as Dinah unwrapped her Almond Joy, Marcus held the door open for her, and she preceded him through it. But she straggled behind, and he quickly took the lead.

  She was so busy with her task, in fact, that she didn’t pay attention to where she was going. Not until she bumped into Marcus’s back.

  When she glanced up to find out why he’d stopped, she saw him gaping at something in the distance. And when she trailed her gaze after his, she understood what it was that had made him stop and gape. Except that stopping and gaping didn’t quite cover Dinah’s own reaction to the scene. No, this called for considerably more than stopping and gaping.

  “Oh, my God, Marcus!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Somebody stole the car!”

  Six

  Ignition. Dammit. He’d left the keys in the ignition. With all the exhaustion, and all the excitement of being so close to Georgia, and all the relief at surviving the trip, and all the distraction that came with replaying in his head those mind-scrambling, libido-twisting, emotion-tangling kisses he’d shared with Dinah, Marcus just hadn’t been thinking. And now his truck was gone.

  Then another, much worse, thought struck him.

  “Dinah,” he said. Reining in his panic, he turned and placed his hands on her shoulders. “The lottery ticket,” he added. “Dinah, where’s the lottery ticket?”

  For one terrifying moment, he thought she was going to tell him that it had gone the way of the stolen SUV. Then she slapped a hand against the purse hanging at her side and expelled a gasp of relief.

  “Here,” she said. “It’s here in my wallet.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  Their mutual relief was short-lived, however.

  “Marcus,” she said softly, “what are we going to do? Somebody stole the car.”

  He inhaled a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “First, we’re going to call the police.”

 
“But—”

  “Then we’ll find a way to get to Atlanta.”

  “But—”

  “We still have plenty of time, Dinah.”

  “We have less than four hours, Marcus.”

  “Which is plenty of time,” he insisted.

  She closed her eyes tightly for a moment, but the gesture wasn’t enough to stop the eruption of two fat tears that squeezed through, tumbling down her cheeks in twin streams.

  “Oh, Dinah,” he said, gathering her into his arms. “It’ll be okay, I promise. We haven’t come all this way just to be foiled at the last minute. We’ll make it.”

  She burrowed her head into his chest and looped her arms around his waist. “We were so close,” she mumbled against his sweater. “So close.”

  “We’re still close,” he assured her. “We’re less than a hundred miles from Atlanta. And hell, if we have to run that last hundred miles, we will.”

  “We’re not going to make it,” she said again.

  “Oh, yes, we are, too,” he immediately countered. “We’ll make it by five-thirty. I promise you, Dinah. I promise you.”

  The state troopers were completely sympathetic to their plight, and, once they understood the situation, hurried through their report as quickly as they could. They even offered Dinah and Marcus a ride, something that went a long way toward restoring her faith in humanity.

  Until the troopers pulled their car into the grassy median just before reaching the state line and told them to get out.

  “What?” Dinah asked, outraged. But she got out of the car as instructed. She always did buckle to authority. Even when five million dollars was at stake. Dammit.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” the trooper told her through the driver’s side window. “But we can’t take the car across the state line.”

  Dinah narrowed her eyes at the Alabama trooper, her thoughts racing. They’d finally made it to within mere feet of Georgia, but Atlanta was still a good seventy-five miles away. And they only had two hours left until the deadline.

  “But we still have to get to Atlanta,” she objected.

  The trooper shrugged ruefully. “Not our jurisdiction.”

  She thought for a moment. “Are you telling me that if you were chasing some evil law-breaker, you wouldn’t follow him into the next state because it would be out of your jurisdiction?”

  “Well, that would depend on the circumstances,” he conceded.

  She thought for a moment more. “So, like, if I slapped you really hard right now and started running, then you’d—”

  “Dinah.”

  The admonition came not from the trooper, but from Marcus. When she turned to look at him, he had narrowed his own gaze, and set his jaw rather forcefully. “Don’t. Even. Think about it,” he told her.

  She blew out an impatient breath. “I’m just exploring my options, that’s all.”

  The trooper, thankfully, didn’t seem offended. In fact, he smiled. “I know you’re in a tight fix,” he said. “But I called in a little help from one of my Georgia colleagues. It’s his day off, but he’s agreed to lend a hand.”

  No sooner were the words out of the trooper’s mouth than Dinah registered the sound of a siren. It was quickly punctuated by the arrival of a Georgia state trooper’s car, with trooper at the wheel, which pulled to a stop in the median no more than thirty feet away.

  “This fella here’ll get you where you need to go,” the Alabama trooper told her. “And if I know him—which, of course, I do—he’ll get you there with time to spare.” He lifted a finger to the brim of his Smokey-the-Bear hat. “Y’all have a nice day,” he concluded.

  Dinah wanted to hug the guy, but she was afraid there might be some kind of civic ordinance against it. So she settled for saying, “Be on the lookout for a big, fat check made out to the Policeman’s Ball.”

  He chuckled. “Well, now, we don’t really have a Policeman’s Ball. But if you want to contribute something to the Children’s Athletic Fund, we’d be much obliged.”

  “Consider it done,” she told him. She turned to the Georgia trooper who had left his car in Georgia and joined them in Alabama. “And if you can get me to Atlanta by five-thirty, I’ll do the same for the great state of Georgia.”

  The other trooper smiled. “Your chariot awaits.”

  Dinah stretched out on the big king-size bed in her room at the Four Seasons Hotel Atlanta and expelled a very long, very contented sigh. Never in her life had she enjoyed such sumptuous surroundings. Whoever said money couldn’t buy happiness simply did not know where to shop.

  But Dinah sure did. In fact, she and Marcus had spent the better part of the evening—after their wildly expensive dinner—shopping to replenish their stolen supplies. Of course, seeing as how she was worth millions of dollars more now than she’d been a few hours earlier, those supplies were infinitely nicer than the ones that had accompanied them from San Francisco. For instance, Dinah had never realized just how soft and wonderful butter-yellow silk pajamas could feel against a person’s recently bubble-bathed skin.

  Of course, not so deep down, she knew it wasn’t the money that had brought her the happiness she felt right now. No, it was the sight of Marcus, in his own silk pajamas—sapphire-blue in his case, and he only wore the bottoms—that caused pleasure to curl through her. And it was the knowledge that she loved him so—and that he loved her in return—that inspired all the joy, all the bliss, all the rapture. It was love that brought happiness, not money.

  Though she’d be a fool if she didn’t admit that the money was pretty swell, too.

  “Thank you,” Marcus said into the telephone receiver he had cradled between his ear and—deliciously naked—shoulder. “We appreciate it. Yes, we’ll be there to pick it up tomorrow afternoon.”

  The Alabama troopers had found his SUV abandoned a few miles from the service station, the victim, apparently, of a trio of teenagers out to commit their first crime. They’d quickly reconsidered and dumped the vehicle, completely intact, by the side of the road. It was yet another example of Dinah’s exceedingly good fortune.

  “Finally,” she said as Marcus settled the phone into the receiver. “Now you can call room service.” She scooped up the piece of paper lying beside her on the bed. “Here. I’ve very conveniently made you a list.”

  Marcus grinned as he took it from her and scanned it. “Gee, do you think a magnum of Perrier-Jouet champagne will be enough?”

  “It’s a start,” she told him.

  “I thought so, too.”

  “But I think we should go for the two-pound box of Godiva,” he told her. “One pound isn’t enough for a celebration like this.”

  “Mmm,” she agreed. “I guess you’re right.”

  He made the required call, then joined her on the bed, stretching out alongside her, pulling her close. He was warm and rosy from his recent shower, redolent of the spicy scents of soap and man. She couldn’t resist snuggling against him, didn’t bother to quell the purr of satisfaction that wandered up from deep inside her. Oh, boy, was life good.

  “So, Dinah,” Marcus said softly as he nuzzled the side of her throat. “What are you going to do with all that money?”

  She curled her arms around his neck and pulled him close. “Pursue a dream,” she told him without hesitation.

  “Would it, by any chance, be that dream you had in the car yesterday?” he asked hopefully. “The one with the speeding locomotive rushing through a dark tunnel?”

  She laughed. “Well, maybe eventually,” she admitted. “But the one I’m talking about is the one I’ve secreted away in my heart for a long time now.”

  He pulled away a little, just enough so that he could gaze down into her face, his blue eyes dreamy and happy. “Is it one I know about?”

 
She shook her head, but smiled. “It’s one I’ve never told anyone about, because it seemed so impossible to make come true. Until now.”

  “But now that you know I’m heterosexual, you’re going to go after it?” he asked, even more hopefully than before.

  She hesitated only a moment before revealing what she’d never revealed to anyone. And somehow, having Marcus be the first was very appropriate. “I want to write the Great American Novel,” she told him. “I’ve never been able to find the time to do it before, but now I can. And that’s what I’m going to do. Besides,” she hurried on when she saw his smile of approval, “there’s more than my discovery of your sexuality that’s making me go after you.”

  “Oh?” he asked, more hopefully than ever.

  She nodded. “There’s the small matter of me being crazy in love with you.”

  His smile then went absolutely incandescent. “Gee, that’s going to wreak havoc with the ol’ Meade curse, isn’t it?”

  She chuckled low. “Why do you think I insisted on having dinner at the Sun Dial Restaurant, hmm?”

  “Seventy-two stories above the city?” he asked mildly. “That did sort of surprise me, when you suggested it.”

  “Did it?”

  “Well, no, not really. Because by then, I knew you’d found true love and therefore broken the curse.”

  This time Dinah was the one to smile. “How did you know that?” she asked.

  He curled his fingers around her nape and dipped his forehead to hers. “I know because I feel it, too,” he said softly. “I love you, Dinah. Truly.”

  “And I love you, Marcus. Truly.”

  For a moment, neither of them said a word, only lay side by side, cuddling, snuggling and feeling really, really happy.