by Cindy Gerard
“Michael . . .”
Her wanton whisper told him she was his for the taking.
Only he didn’t want to take from this woman. He wanted to give. Tonight he was going to give until it hurt.
With a lingering, licking embrace of his mouth, he pulled away. He’d promised himself he’d wait until she was ready for this . . . ready emotionally as well as physically. One look in her eyes and he knew she wasn’t ready for anything. She looked dazed, confused, and so incredibly sexy he thought he’d go up in smoke.
He dropped a chaste good-bye kiss on the inner swell of her breast, then covered her with her robe.
“Will you be able to sleep now?” he asked, brushing a fall of dark hair away from her eyes.
She blinked that slow, sultry blink that turned his insides to mush. He suppressed a groan, touched a hand to her flushed cheek, then rose stiffly.
“Good night, Counselor. Sweet dreams. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Michael . . .”
Her voice stopped him in the doorway. He turned slowly.
“Thank you . . . for today.”
He tipped a finger to his forehead in a mock salute and flashed her a semblance of a grin. Then he hightailed it the hell out of there, before he crawled into her bed and buried himself so deep inside her that he’d never be willing to come out.
Six
As she got ready for work Monday morning, January was still thinking about the look on Michael’s face when he’d left her. Of course, for the past two days she’d thought of little else but Michael. He was getting to her, getting to her bad, and she just couldn’t let it continue.
All his talk about trust and commitment had made her lose focus. That focus, her whole life, had always been on her work. Michael made her want to turn her focus on him. On them. On what could happen between them if she let it. On the way he made her feel when he kissed her, the way he’d made love to her breast and then left her wanting so much more.
Well, there wasn’t more, she told herself as she buttoned her blouse and slipped into her skirt. Nothing lasting, nothing permanent. Not with Michael. Even if he hadn’t been someone who represented a threat to her work, she’d learned long ago not to trust anyone but herself. Commitment? Trust? They were only words. A good eraser or the click of the delete key and they were gone.
All you have to do is keep things in perspective, she lectured herself as she ran a brush through her hair. Call it your awakening from repression. Call it chemistry, but deal with it by calling a spade a spade, and under no circumstances by calling it love.
Love, she’d learned as a child, was an empty emotion, a fallacy embraced by fools and dreamers. She was neither. As long as she remembered that, she’d be fine.
Grabbing her briefcase and coat, she left her house, thinking that now she had a handle on the situation, she would be able to hold her own.
It was a long drive from home to the office, though, and before she knew it, she was mentally fighting the war all over again, trying unsuccessfully to justify why she was wasting her time thinking about him.
He excited her, that was why. There wasn’t any shame in admitting it, she told herself defensively. She’d like to meet the thirty-two-year-old virgin who didn’t get a little fluttery when a man as sexy as Michael Hayward tucked her into bed. In truth it was a relief to find out that her hormones hadn’t really been dead all these years, but merely dormant. Her physical responses to him were perfectly healthy, perfectly normal.
His advance-and-retreat tactics had baffled her for a bit, she admitted. Given a little distance from him, she now recognized that all his implied and stated concern for her well-being was a part of his ploy. Just another twist on the seduction plot. Like Saturday night, when she’d served herself up on the proverbial silver platter and he’d put on the skids. Shoving aside the embarrassment that memory caused, she’d figured out that part too.
She was a novelty to him, a new experience for a man whose usual bed partners were no doubt as accomplished as he in the sexual arena. She represented the variety that put a little spice back into his life. As Helen theorized about her effect on Leonard, “I put the tick in his tock, sweetie. And I keep him so wound up, he doesn’t know or care what time it is.”
January suspected something similar had happened to Michael. Rather than intimidate or disgust him, her virginity gave him a new frontier to explore; and her secrecy about her past gave him another mystery to unravel.
“Enough, Stewart,” she barked at herself. “You know how this story’s going to end. Make up your mind to play it out and get it over with.”
An affair was the answer, she knew. An adult, controlled, up-front, unemotional affair that would expend all the sexual tension—and it was just sexual, she adamantly reminded herself—building between them. An affair made perfect sense, and they’d both be richer for the experience. As Michael had so clinically put it, she’d have her little biological embarrassment out of the way. For his part, he’d have the opportunity to live out his white-knight fantasy. When Michael ended it, as she was certain he would, she’d handle that too.
She felt a sinking pain at the thought, but by the time she pulled her car into the underground parking lot near her office building, it had dulled to a distant ache.
In the meantime she was pleased she had the issues pigeonholed and catalogued. And she’d step on her own foot if she ever found herself fighting this battle again.
Everything in January’s life was back under control. At least it was until she opened the door to her office and found Michael perched on the corner of Helen’s desk. Instantly, her meticulously woven arguments became about as cohesive as paper that had been run through a shredder.
“Good morning, Counselor.”
His low, sexy greeting drizzled over her heart like warm honey. Not a good response. Not a good way to start her workday. She summoned up a scowl and issued a clipped “Good morning” as she breezed by him and on into her office.
There, she thought. She’d handled that with a minimum amount of effort. Then why were her hands shaking? And why did her heart feel like it had just been squeezed by a slow, kneading hand?
It wasn’t because she was glad to see him. And it wasn’t because he looked so sexy and sophisticated in his crisply knotted tie and leather jacket, either, she argued, shrugging out of her coat and tossing it on the coatrack. It was because she was mad. Damn him, he had no right. No right to . . . to . . . to what, January? To look so mouthwateringly gorgeous? To sit there in his civilized and proper clothes with that gypsy earring winking away, looking at her like he wanted to eat her alive, starting with her mouth and working down in slow, tantalizing nibbles?
She glared at him through the glass wall. The man was going to put her in a sanitarium. He was going to drive her flat-out, certifiably insane.
There he sat, laughing with Helen, no doubt sharing details of his weekend’s conquest. They thought they were so cute, those two, all smug, knowing looks, all sweet secret smiles, just as cozy as two thieves splitting the loot.
Well, she had news for both of them. Inciting and inviting an affair was one thing. When it interfered with her work, it became something else, something she wouldn’t tolerate. She’d tried to make that clear to him last night. She’d make damn sure he understood it this morning.
Marching back out of her office, she dropped the file folder containing her weekend’s work on Helen’s desk. “I’d estimate a good four hours of work ahead of you in there,” she informed her starchily. “You might want to get to it. And Michael, I’d like to have a word with you, if you don’t mind.”
She’d seen hardened criminals quail when she used that tone of voice. Michael didn’t have the decency to quail. Instead he grinned, a charming, disarming, rascal grin that almost—almost—weakened her resolve.
“Is she glad to see me or what?” he said in
an aside to Helen as he unfolded himself from the desk.
“Muhammad should be so glad to see the mountain,” Helen agreed with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “Want me to hold your calls, sweetie?” she added, giving January a cheeky smile.
“That won’t be necessary. This isn’t going to take that long.”
“Oooh,” Helen cooed. “A quickie. I love it!”
Snapping Helen an I’ll-deal-with-you-later scowl, January followed Michael into her office, then firmly closed the door behind her.
“Don’t I get a proper good morning?” His husky voice felt like the caress of his hand on her shoulder, like the brush of his mouth on her skin.
She suppressed a sensual shudder, picturing what his definition of a proper good morning would entail. “Michael, we have to talk,” she said, avoiding his eyes by concentrating on the thin silver stripe in his tie.
“Uh-uh. A proper good morning first.” He took one prowling step toward her.
She straightened her shoulders, determined to lay her ground rules. “Michael, look,” she said, trying to ignore the wild beating of her heart, “we need to get something straight right now.”
“What we need to get straight,” he said as he cupped her shoulders in his broad hands, “is that you are having a morning-after attack of the jitters because of some of the things you’re feeling about me right now. You’re scared down to your pretty pink toes about how those kisses made you feel last night, and you’re scared by the fact that you’re beginning to want me in your life, and you don’t know what to do about it.
“What we need to get straight”—he backed her up against the wall and nudged her with his hips—“is that you don’t need to be afraid of what you’re feeling. It’s natural and beautiful and exactly the right reaction for a woman who cares about her man.”
She read tenderness and passion and a wealth of unspoken longing in his eyes as he lowered his head. “What we need to get straight,” he whispered, his warm breath mingling with hers, “is that I intend to stay in your life whether it scares you or not, because what I feel for you is as strong today as it was last night, and it’s going to be just as strong tomorrow and every day after.
“What we need to get straight,” he continued, unrelenting as he dropped a whispery kiss to each corner of her mouth, “is that it would be criminal to let one more moment go by before I do what we both want me to do.”
Without another word he covered her mouth with his, and taking his sweet, thorough time, he kissed her, romancing her into breathlessness with a slow and intimate embrace of hips and lips and tongue.
There was something . . . something she wanted to say, January thought distantly. For the life of her she couldn’t remember what it was as with his gentleness alone he staked an uncontested claim on her remaining powers of reason.
All he had to do was touch her and she was too busy feeling, too busy wanting, to remember what she’d so desperately needed to say. A new desperation had taken over, a desperation evoked by the sensual caress of his mouth and the delicious electric sensations shooting through her body everywhere he touched her.
Acting instead of reacting, she released her last fingerhold on sanity. She buried her hands in his hair and lost her resolve to abandon.
Her response unleashed the waiting lion. No longer gentle, no longer sweet, his hands skimmed roughly down her sides, tunneling under her navy jacket to stroke her through the silk of her blouse.
What liberties he didn’t steal with his hands he plundered unmercifully with the crush of his body to hers, with the satin glide of his tongue inside her mouth.
They were both breathing hard when he finally pulled away. “And that,” he murmured, resting his forehead against hers, drawing a recuperative breath, “is what we need to get straight.”
Leaning heavily against the wall for support, she blinked slowly and met the smoldering look in his eyes.
“Now that that’s out of the way,” he said, stroking his thumb across her lower lip, “let’s talk about—”
He never finished his thought. The hazy, lazy moment was shattered by the riotous crack of breaking glass and Helen’s sharp, shrill scream.
Before it registered that someone had thrown something through her window, Michael had flattened January against the wall again. Using his body as a shield, he protected her from the splintering glass that flew dangerously around the room.
The ear-splitting noise died abruptly. The momentary silence that followed was every bit as deafening.
“Are you all right?” Michael asked roughly, his blue eyes wild with concern.
“I . . . I’m fine. Michael, what hap—”
He’d already pulled away. Rounding her desk at a run, he cleared the windowsill in one fluid stride and hit the pavement running. January got a glimpse of a small dark figure just before it disappeared at a breakneck pace around a corner. Michael, several steps behind, rounded the same corner at a dead run, his jacket flapping open at his sides.
Spotting a street brick in the corner of her office, she shivered, thinking about the murderous look in Michael’s eyes. And she whispered a little prayer for the brick thrower.
“Good God almighty!” Helen, holding a hand over her heart, stepped gingerly into January’s office. “I’ve never been so scared in my entire life! Honey, are you all right?”
When January nodded, Helen glanced from her to the gaping hole where the plate glass had been, then to the shards and splinters littering the room. “Why would someone do this?”
They were still wondering that when two hours later they’d neither seen nor heard from Michael.
The police had come and gone, taking both her statement and Helen’s, then promising to look around the neighborhood for Michael. The building’s maintenance man had managed to board up the hole until the window could be replaced the next day. January and Helen spent several more tense minutes cleaning up the mess.
By eleven o’clock January was past the point of worrying. Michael had been right. She did care about him, and she was frantic thinking about what could have happened to him.
Helen, ever the surrogate mother, decided to take January’s mind off the episode. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me how your date went Saturday night.”
January shot an anxious glance toward the door. “No, I don’t suppose I would,” she said, then dumped a dustpanful of glass into the wastebasket. “You don’t honestly expect me to believe Michael didn’t tell you all about it.”
“Michael isn’t the kind of man who would kiss and tell,” Helen said, sounding put out. “As far as I can see, it’s his only flaw.”
January grinned and took mercy. “We went to the Flagstaff House.”
“And?”
“And it was nice.”
“Nice,” Helen repeated benignly. “He waltzes in here this morning, kisses you until he has intimate knowledge of your tonsils, and you expect me to believe your date was ‘nice’? Come on, Jan. Who’s kidding who? You don’t earn a kiss like that after a ‘nice’ date. Well!” Helen returned January’s glare with an affronted snort. “If you don’t want witnesses, next time pull the blinds. Lord, that man can kiss!”
January sighed. “When they come to repair the window, get a bid on some drywall, will you? Something a certain secretary can’t see through.”
Helen grinned sympathetically. “You’re falling hard, aren’t you, sweetie?”
She was saved from answering that distressingly accurate question by the door opening. A scraggly, surly-looking boy stepped into the office with Michael right behind him.
Aside from the fact that he looked haggard and disheveled, Michael appeared to be fine. She wasn’t so sure about the boy. His size told her he could be anywhere from ten to fifteen years old. His eyes, however, said he was closer to fifty. She’d seen that kind of anger before. She’d also see
n the despair. While she didn’t recognize the child, she recognized the dark, threadbare jacket he was wearing and knew he was the one who’d thrown the brick.
She glanced from him to Michael. Both looked ready to chew nails.
“Helen,” Michael said, “keep an eye on my friend here, would you? And you,” he added to the boy in warning, “don’t forget, we have a deal.”
“I ain’t your friend,” the boy snarled, meeting Michael’s gaze with defiance. “And I said I’d wait. So I’ll wait.”
“Fine. Don’t give Helen any trouble.”
The small slumped shoulders moved in what passed for an affirmative shrug, then he turned his scowl on Helen.
Decked out with a flashy new pink hairdo and a wildly painted blouse that she’d worn loose over black stretch pants and spike heels, Helen suddenly had a captive audience. The boy, it seemed, reacted to shock tactics, and a geriatric punk rocker definitely represented a shock. As Michael ushered January into her office and closed the door behind them, the child was sitting spellbound while Helen offered him a cup of instant hot chocolate and pattered about some obscure rap group only a kid or a woman like Helen would know about.
Looking marginally the worse of the two, Michael slumped into the chair opposite January’s desk and dragged his hands over his face.
“You okay?” she asked, easing a hip onto her desk in front of him.
He let out his breath with a weary puff and leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his widespread knees. Looking tired and troubled, he reached out and sandwiched her leg between his hands. With a slow caress, he ran his palms up and down the length of her calf. The touch wasn’t sexual. She sensed instinctively that he simply needed to hold on to someone. Without questioning why, she was glad she was there for him. She also sensed that whatever was bothering him had less to do with the thrown brick than it did with the brick thrower. She could see it in his eyes. The child affected him. Deeply.