by Carol Rose
“Is this Max?” the stranger asked more aggressively, the faintest note of caution at the end of her question.
“Who is this?” he barked into the phone, conscious of Nicole sitting up in the bed beside him.
God, why did he keep letting his dick lead him into messes?
The morning chill from the air conditioner swirling around him, he tried to block out his screaming thoughts and get a grip on the situation facing him.
“My name is Claire Abbott,” the woman told him. “I’m Nicole Cavanaugh’s best friend and she didn’t call me last night.”
“So you think she’s here?” he demanded. “Maybe she got busy. She’s in New York City, for God’s sake. She probably found something else to do besides call—“
“She calls me every night since she’s been working for you,” the woman said bluntly. “Every night.”
“Oh.” Turning wordlessly, he handed the phone to Nicole.
CHAPTER NINE
Fourteen hours later, Nicole stood in the office doorway of Max’s apartment looking down the hall towards the stairs. She knew Max was up there, sitting in his window on the landing between the floor where she stood and the upper loft where they’d discovered passion. Identifying his physical location was sure a hell of a lot easier than figuring out where his head was.
What the hell had she done, getting romantically involved with a man so tangled up inside himself? She’d worked with troubled masculinity before. She knew the risks and still she’d walked into this…whatever it was.
From the moment she and Max been awakened by Claire’s anxious call, he’d become a stranger to her.
What the heck was going on with him? Normally, he was silent and walled-off, but at least he was usually there behind his cool, cynical eyes.
Hell, she’d have preferred him to have snapped at her and he hadn’t, even when she’d given him reason, and she’d given him plenty in the last few hours.
Her frustration rising at his lack of response, she’d even sunk to the level of taking verbal pokes at him drinking coffee. She’d given him crap for drinking the coffee she’d brought him, for heaven’s sake. Everyone drank coffee, didn’t they? Except for the strong and healthful few?
But when she’d climbed the stairs before lunch and commented snidely that she’d heard people who had a problem with depression shouldn’t drink coffee, Max had hardly blinked.
Leaning her head against the polished wooden doorway, Nicole wondered desperately what to do. It wasn’t that she saw depression on Max’s face. In contrast to the passion of the previous evening, he displayed no emotion now, but all her sensors told her a war raged inside the man who’d become her lover.
The silence inside the apartment seemed thick and woolly. Even the streets outside were weirdly noiseless, but not as quiet as the staircase where he sat.
Max knew she was down there watching him as he scratched out a word on his legal pad. Even with his face turned away from the steps as he sat in his window seat, he still felt her presence as if he had radar. Down the stairs, along the short hall, leaning against the door frame, she looked at him with frustrated, anxious eyes. He knew she was there despite his refusal to turn and look her way. His dazed mind struggling with the colossal stupidity of sleeping with her, it seemed still that he could smell her perfume.
He knew the exact moment he’d realized the foolishness of relying on emotion to get him anything in life.
At the age of twelve, he’d huddled in a classroom in a musty building at Yale, his eyes wet after a harsh telephone conversation with his parents.
Leaning his head back, he endured the replay of the defining moment when he’d first concluded that his parents didn’t love him. Couldn’t love him. Refusing to indulge in maudlin reflection, Max reminded himself that neither Richard or Susan Tucker had given the appearance of knowing how to love anyone. Not even their selves.
“Are you crazy?” his mother had asked. “We scrimp and save and struggle to find scholarships for you to attend Yale and you want to come home after two weeks?”
“Mom,” he’d said in a shaken, small-boy voice. “I’m homesick. It’s weird being here. Everyone else is so much older. Can’t I come home?”
“After we went to the trouble to find people for you to live with?” his father had said incredulously from the phone extension. “You have a good set-up there, living in the Moncriefs’ house. It’s not like we put you in a dorm.”
No matter that the Moncriefs, though decent people, were complete strangers to him.
As his parents spoke, Max had felt himself shrinking inside, his pain and loneliness pulling away from his rational acknowledgment of what they were saying. Like drying clay separating from the mold, his emotions tightened and grew hard.
After ending the phone call, he’d gone on to class. It was what he’d always done and he found comfort in the calm disconnect from his distress. But that one day, he’d stayed seated in the classroom after the other students had gathered their book bags and headed out to the next class.
As he sat at a desk, his head empty of thought, his heart in limbo, the professor of his class had come up to him.
“Hey, how’re you doing, Max? Are you getting along okay?”
Max had respected Jim Leyton. At the surprising age of twenty-eight he’d earned a position teaching at a highly-esteemed university.
That day though, Professor Leyton had seemed distracted in class. No less involved in his topic of symbolism in English literature, he’d evidenced none of his usual wry humor, his narrow face unusually serious. When Max, to his shame, had grown wet-eyed in response to his teacher’s kind question, Jim Leyton had sat down and talked with him.
Despising his weakness, Max had talked about his loneliness, his longing to return home. To a kid, even a home as barren of comfort as his had been was still home.
Sitting next to him, Leyton hadn’t attempted anything awkward like hugging him or telling him he would be okay. He just listened and, finally, he said, “I know you’re missing being at home with your friends and your family, but I think your parents did right in sending you here.”
Max had looked at him, struggling with embarrassment for giving way to his feelings in front of a man he respected.
“Your parents may seem uncaring…” Jim Leyton had paused, “but truthfully, Max, you need to value the power of the mind over everything else. The heart is under the sway of emotion and therefore, unreliable. But your mind will always be a place of serenity.”
His words were spoken with such simple power. Max had known he was right. Emotion let you down. Only the power of the mind could be relied on.
Looking back, Max could see that Leyton had needed comfort that day almost as much as he had. Rumors had subsequently swirled about a divorce and a beautiful wife who hadn’t wanted to be a professor’s wife and had found someone else.
Whatever the man’s story, his words that day had taken root Max’s consciousness, underscoring his disappointment with his parents and their failure to respond to his distress.
From that moment on, he’d had stopped wondering why his family wasn’t closer, why his parents seemed to have no joy in being with their sons, only in pushing them toward academic success. His moment of realization had been crystal clear, complete and encompassing.
So why was he now acting like a fool? He’d thought he learned his lesson. Emotion had screwed him over repeatedly. Feeling good with a woman didn’t mean anything. So what the hell was he doing with Nicole?
It was crazy insane. Hadn’t he learned anything about the stupidity of blindly following his dick?
But all he wanted to do was trail down the stairs, traverse the hall and gather her into his arms. He must be having some sort of psychotic break, a form of altered reality. He didn’t even feel like himself, dammit. He wasn’t the kind of guy who cuddled! It was bizarre and more than a little scary.
He had a fucking deadline to meet! He had to get this book finished and sh
e was apparently part of the process. He needed her to complete this project. Sure as hell, sex wasn’t as important as his work! Without question, he was his work.
But thoughts of kissing her possessed his brain to the exclusion of the work he needed to do. How could he work when he longed to lose himself in her sleek, warm body. To feel her silken hair brush his skin, her breath warm on his cheek, her naked weight taut and hungry as she took him into her body.
He wanted all that or to throw her out of the apartment altogether. How could he tolerate her intrusion into his tightly guarded world? It wasn’t acceptable! A civil war raged within him. All this mucky emotion she roused in him was wrong! Never would she accept him, if she knew the man he truly was. That was the bottom line. He stunk at relationships, romantic ones, sexual ones and otherwise. The only people he managed to hold on to in his life were Ruth and Cynthia, but friends were different from lovers…and brothers. They expected less.
This fever possessing him now was no more reliable than his even greater moments of insanity with Alexa. Was he bent on a self-destructive course? First, Alexa, then the situation with Pete and now this madness with Nicole.
Better than anyone, he knew that for him sex could only be an option with women who were completely separate from his life. Disentangled and disinterested. Women with whom he formed transient connections based purely on mutual physical need. Hadn’t he learned that?
How long would Nicole stay here, typing his words and, in some bizarre way, turning on the switch in his head, if she really knew him? With all her warm-hearted energy, she’d run screaming once she discovered the man he was inside. Hell, she devoted her life to teaching the inner-city kids of Chicago. How much more optimistic could a person get?
His life, his world was too damned different. If she could even comprehend the sum total of the things he was capable, she’d walk out and never come back. And then where would he be? No typist, no book.
He’d ruined everything by taking his muse to bed—as witnessed in screaming clarity from the damned white blankness of the writing pad on his knee—but all he wanted was to make love to her again. Soon.
He was undoubtedly suffering from some bizarre, undiagnosed mental illness.
The sound of a creaking stair behind him brought Max’s head up. Tensed, he stared unseeing out the window. She’d crossed the distance between them, but he couldn’t make himself turn around and greet her. Words—the particular medium of his genius—refused to form in his brain.
Unable to turn to look at her, he heard her cross the landing. Then her hand coasted, gentle and warm, onto his shoulder.
“Are you okay?” In contrast to her earlier bitchiness, her question now was warm and concerned. “You haven’t said a word for hours, not even to snap at me about anything. I’m worried about you. Was I that lousy in bed last night or do you have a fever now or…something.”
He heard the half-playful self-doubt in her words and knew an immediate, crushing sense of responsibility, followed swiftly by anger. Hell, the woman had practically thrown herself at him! Why was he then responsible for the aftermath? He’d never promised her to be anything other that what he was! He wasn’t any damn good at all with the touchy-feely shit. Everything in his life made that clear, he thought bitterly. Why couldn’t women accept what a man had to offer? What did Nicole expect from him after one night of fucking? A thank you note? A written recommendation? Or more unlikely, a complete transformation?
Angry words jostling in his head, he turned his head to stare at her.
She stood on the landing so close behind him he could reach up and touch her. Soft and curvaceous and sexy as hell. Blond hair ruffling around her face, she looked at him with her clear blue eyes. Clear and sane, her gaze seemed to pierce the murky depths of his inchoate thoughts. Why couldn’t life be as simple for him as it was for her? She had nothing to regret, no self-recrimination. The path seemed always clear and defined to her. If he would smile at her, she’d be fine.
In the moment, baffled and frustrated, he yearned for the simplicity she possessed. Needed it so badly his throat constricted at the temptation of her nearness.
“So, are you okay?” she asked, a half-mocking, half-teasing smile playing on her lips.
“No,” he snarled, reaching out to yank her down into his arms.
“Hey!” Impelled forward, she tumbled onto his lap, laughing, protesting words spilling from her. “You don’t need to—“
Fastening his mouth over hers, Max silenced her. If none of the chaos in his head could be answered, at least he could still the ravaging hunger in his body. If this was a madness in his mind, his surrendering to it couldn’t be helped.
Kisses, hot and dark, blotted out everything but her. The weight of her on his lap, pressing erotically against his instant erection, beguiled and blinded him. Small and crushable, she made no resistance, captured in his grip, a pleasure to be devoured. And he did, his hands hard and tight on her arms, he trapped her against his chest, held her there while he kissed the breath out of them both. Every fiber straining, every muscle taut, the blood funneled through his veins fast and pounding.
She took over him, robbed him of his precarious peace of mind as surely as she’d helped him regain it. Why wouldn’t the damned woman do her part in this process and leave him the hell alone? But no, she had to nag at him, had to lure him into the heat of her touch.
Shifting off the window sill, he took her with him to the floor, blindly pinning her there against the patterned carpet, his groin pressed needily into the vee of her legs. Held beneath his greater size, she lay victim to his plundering tongue, his questing, roving hands. His only goal drove him. His only thought to bury himself in her, to feel her silken heat tight around him, riding him, rippling over and around him. He had to get into her body, had no thought beyond feeling himself swell within her. For once no rational conscious existed for him.
His skin hot and tight, he lay over her, his weight braced by the arms that held her captive. Her smell, the silk of her skin, even the whimpers coming from her throat drove him mad. Sprawled over her, he felt himself thicken. With her, he felt huge, aching to bury himself in her tight, wet heat. Driven to find that encompassing madness, he pulled at her clothes. Her blouse yielding to his greedy, questing hands, her lace-covered breasts swelled full in his hands as he pushed her bra aside. Finding her firm thighs under the short skirt rucked up around her waist, he wasted no time in peeling down her underpants. Driven to impale her, to own the source of his helplessness, he yanked his belt loose, his mouth drawing and licking at her breast.
“Wait!” Her voice came breathless and rushed as he poised, probing her entrance. “Wait a minute. I need…just a minute.”
Halted in the act of preparing to thrust home, Max lifted his head, his vision clouded by the hunger clawing at him.
“Just kiss me,” she pleaded, her hands clutching at him, her body soft and yielding beneath his. “Kiss me a little longer and—and touch me. Just a few minutes more.”
His muscles burning, his entire body screaming to sink into her, he made himself pause. Dropping his head to her chest, his lips brushed the tender valley between her breasts. Hearing his own breath harsh in his ears, Max pushed his hand along her sleek flank before thrusting it between their bodies. She was hot and damp but he needed her crevice wet and flowing for him. They both needed to join in the sweet, writhing ecstasy for him to find his satisfaction. She had to be with him, had to be a part of him.
Drawing a finger over the delicately furred apex of her thighs, he somehow found the strength to hold his own hunger at bay. Gently, he licked her nipples, kissing and toying with the hard buds while his fingers discovered her. With all the self-control he could manage, he delved into her, rousing her flesh to the same gasping urgency ringing in his own ears.
The blood shushing through his veins seemed to thicken, slamming hard against his eardrums. He soon felt her velvet response, the flowering of her body beneath his hands.
Moaning, she arched into the palm he pressed against her, his fingers toying with the nubbin he’d found as he spread her labia.
“Kiss me, Max,” she begged huskily. “Kiss me while we make love.”
Lifting his head, he stared down into her wanton face, her blond hair spread over the blood red carpet, her eyes half closed as her green gaze called him like a siren. Soft, red lips parted for him and he placed his mouth on hers as he pushed forward, sliding home, sinking deep. So deep he went till there was nothing between them but the dampness of their bodies. The madness, the insanity of it. No thought. Only the consciousness of burning, tingling, completely urgent arousal. She surrounded him, engulfed him, took him in and rose to meet him, her body hot and slick. Hearing her gasping, ragged breath meld with his own, he drove into her, deep and hard. Over and over, he slowly, steadily pumped into her.
But having slowed for her, his member now cleaving her body, he no longer rushed to his completion. Binding her hard against his body, Max rolled on to the carpet. Not breaking their joining, he lie now on the floor with her astride him, his cock deep within her welcoming body. Above him, her face hovered, dazed and blurred with passion. Rocking over him, her breasts moving with each thrust, she pleasured them both. Greedy for the feel of her, Max reached to cup her breasts in his hands, plucking and drawing at her nipples.
Her hands braced on his shoulders, she rode him, her breath coming faster and faster, their moans and gasps filling the air. Closing his eyes, one hand tugging at her nipple, Max felt himself centered at their joining. The part of him that lived was the part sliding in and out of her body. Reaching down between their bodies as she thrust herself madly against him, he found the small hard bud between her legs.
Her gasping shriek joined his grunts of pleasure. Hilt-deep she took him in, her body yielding, grasping him with an ecstasy he’d never before known. At that moment, he felt her tighten and ripple around him as she peaked. She thrust herself hard against him, going rigid, her back arching, her nipple pressing into his palm as she cried out, the muscles of her vagina milking him with a pleasure that threatened his consciousness.