When The Lights Go Out...

Blythe dashed for the kitchen to refill the glass. “How terrible. Here. Drink some more.” She sat down beside him on the sofa and watched him closely as he drank.

He took one sip, and his glare faded into a warm, soft glow. “Much better,” he said, leaning against the cushions. “I’ll be back to normal in a minute.”

“Good,” Blythe said. “As soon as you’ve revived, let’s get right to it.”

“Excuse me?”

Her face heated up. “That is, if you want to now that you’ve met me.”

He sat up a little straighter. “Sure I want to. But I don’t think we can get right to anywhere right now.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean you should take me to dinner,” Blythe assured him. “Just to bed.”

She felt the jolt of his body in the shoulder that brushed against hers. He whipped around to stare at her, his eyes wide. His drink slipped out of his hand and landed in his lap.

Blythe shrieked.

He leaped up, shaking his jeans loose from his crotch, while ice cubes hit the coffee table and the floor with a clatter.

“I’m so sorry,” Blythe cried. “What did I say that upset you?” She fumbled her way into the kitchen and took a stack of dish towels out of a drawer. She really didn’t need to ask. Now that he’d met her, he wasn’t interested in going to bed with her. She followed the candlelight back into the living room and clapped the towels against his wet trousers. A sound curled up from his throat, something between, “aargh“ and “aiiiee,” followed by a muttered, “I’ll take care of it, thanks.”

Realizing she was hanging on to a rather personal part of him, Blythe let him take over the towels and backed away, feeling even more miserable, inept and undesirable. Her shoulders slumped. “You don’t want to go to bed with me, right?”

“Wrong.”

“It’s okay. I understand. Nobody…What did you say?”

Silently he mopped at his trousers for another moment, then dropped the towels on the coffee table. Turning to her, he curled his hands around her shoulders. His eyes sparked in the dim light as he gazed down at her and said, “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than make love with you.”

MAX HAD A STRONG FEELING he was missing a link in the conversational chain, but he was in no mood to go looking for it. Not accept a gift handed to him by the power outage, fate itself? Not want to go to bed with a small, artistically rounded, redheaded, freckled—

Because now, in the candlelight, he could see her just fine, and she was the most huggable woman he’d ever imagined making love to. Her hair was, in fact, red, curly and out of control. He wondered if that faint smattering of freckles covered her whole body. His brain responded to the vision, sending a jet of sudden desire straight to his crotch.

Yes, he’d be happy to go to bed with her. More than happy. Enthusiastic.

Under certain conditions.

“Really?” she said to him, breaking into his thoughts. “You really want to go to bed with me? You’re not just saying what you think you’re supposed to say?” She wore the most hopeful expression he’d ever seen on a human being.

It was a weird conversation, especially coming from a woman who’d sounded confident to the point of being a ballbuster on the telephone, but that hopeful expression got to him. “Really,” he assured her. “Couldn’t be more real. A totally genuine feeling. One with visible physical symptoms.” He’d probably gone far enough in that direction with someone he barely knew. “But I thought—well, I thought we’d spend a little time getting acquainted first.”

He had to throw that in. The voice of his conscience was nagging relentlessly at him. He knew the pitfalls of sleeping with a co-worker, of mixing business with pleasure, plus in this case, he had to make sure she was sane and capable of making judgment calls before he rushed her off to bed. “You know. The old who, what, when, where and why.” He smiled, making the point that they were both journalists, the only thing they had in common as far as he knew. “You tell me about your job and your family, the dog you had growing up, then I tell you about…”

“I can see how a person in your profession would feel that way,” she said to the underside of his chin. Her voice sounded soft and breathless, but not in the least suggestive, and the words tumbled out. Even more amazingly, her hands, light and deft, fluttered back and forth along his arms in a way that was effectively punching his conscience in the gut. “But I didn’t have a dog, and I do have a serious need to rush. The time is at hand. I need to get it over with before I lose my nerve. Unless, of course, you’re too tired.”

He’d never felt less tired in his life. This was the kind of situation a teenage kid dreamed about finding himself in, but Max wasn’t a teenage kid anymore. He knew in his heart she was reacting to fatigue, fear and uncertainty. He’d heard that people caught in life-and-death situations had sex with each other when they wouldn’t otherwise have thought of doing anything so impulsive. Maybe the power outage was having the same effect on her. He tilted her face up to give it another once-over. Her skin felt like cream to the touch. This close, in the light of the flickering candles, he could see that her eyes were green, a light, bright green, the color of new leaves in the spring. She was a little tense, a little nervous, but she seemed sane enough.

His heart rate sped up. “People are so different in person,” he said hoarsely and with difficulty. “That phone call left me thinking you were a lady with plenty of nerve.” He replayed the “welcome you to New York” call in his head and tried to relate it to the woman who was currently turning his temperature up to Broil. But he didn’t try very hard because that had been a phone call, and this woman was a tangible, embraceable fact.

Or he’d asphyxiated in the elevator and had gone to heaven. Either one was fine with him.

“Forget the phone call,” she said with a sigh that tickled his throat. “You shouldn’t believe anything you hear in that kind of phone call. The truth is, I barely have enough nerve to cross the street on a Don’t Walk sign.” Her eyes shifted away. “Can we just do it?” she asked him. “Fast?”

He’d done his best to behave responsibly, but he wasn’t campaigning for sainthood. This time when he swept her up into his arms, she felt as light as cotton candy. Her tiny squeal only intensified the suddenly purposeful sensations thudding through his body. “Yes and no,” he said, carrying her toward the promising-looking door ahead of him.

“The other way,” she said, trying to whirl him back around behind the sofa. “What do you mean, yes and no?”

Keeping a tight grip on her, he changed direction, shoved a door open, gratefully observed a sea of white that showed up even in the near-darkness and laid her down on it.

“Yes, we can do it. Just not fast.” Sinking down beside her, he moved his mouth across hers tentatively, no more than brushing her lips, seeking their shape and form. They were full, firm, warm, sweet—and already opening to his touch.

The kiss knifed into him so deeply he wanted to groan, but he couldn’t. She’d seized him too tightly, her hands working his nape and her mouth seeking his with unmistakable hunger.

That did it. He told his conscience to take note of the obviously consensual nature of this event and to go to its own room at once, and then he accepted the kiss and returned it in full measure.

WAS IT POSSIBLE THAT HER dream of being a desired, beloved wife and mother might actually come true? Not with this man, unfortunately, who was just her therapist, but was she alluring after all, capable of attracting a man who would make the dream a reality?

Two long years of nothing, which included, of course, the year with Sven, which was worse than nothing, because she had someone who was doing nothing. And here, at last, was a lifeline. Max must be an incredibly well-educated psychiatrist because he could kiss like no man she’d ever kissed, which admittedly hadn’t been many, but she suspected she could kiss a thousand men and not enjoy it any more than she was enjoying this kiss, starting with the first electrical shock of contact. His mouth feathered over hers, then the two of them drew together with the inevitability of magnets. She shivered when his tongue flicked into the corners of her mouth and then tentatively moved inside her. The sensation whipped through her body, knocking out her ability to think or reason.

She writhed against him, dizzied by waves of pure animal wanting. She slid her hands around his neck to steady herself, then across his shoulders, down his back. Feeling his muscles clench beneath her touch only made her dizzier. His hands went to her waist, tugged her T-shirt upward and, with it, the camisole she wore beneath. It seemed absolutely essential to get him out of his clothes, too, but when she felt his lips against her bare breast, she lost interest in everything except what he was doing to her, outside and in.

His lips demanded and promised, took and gave. Her head fell back, and with a moan she resigned herself to savoring the feel of them, the sensations in her breasts as he caressed them, circling her nipples with his tongue, then tugging them into his mouth. There suddenly seemed to be plenty of time. She wasn’t even close to losing her nerve. Just her mind.

Her breasts ached when he slid down between them, slid farther down. Last time she’d noticed, she’d been wearing a skirt. What had happened to it? But a second later she was delighted it had vanished. His fingertips stroked the silk of her panties, and a few strokes later, they seemed to have disappeared, too, and his mouth moved against her stomach, down through the mound of curls, generating the white-hot heat that flamed inside her. She arched her back to make the wonderful thing he was doing to her easier for him, so easy he would never stop, not even when, eventually, she begged him to.

But that moment never came, while Blythe did, over and over, crazed by the touch of his tongue, his lips, his smooth, firm fingertips, until at last she had ripped his black briefs off his body and convinced him to thrust himself inside her.

The resulting frenzy of mutual plundering left them crossways on the bed, her straddling him, his head and feet hanging off. As he pounded into her, she flipped them over so that he was on top. He thrust into her again and propelled them into the footboard, which obligingly fell off. They crashed to the floor on top of it.

From beneath them came the unmistakable sound of a broom handle knocking against the ceiling of the apartment below, the universal sign to quiet down. It distracted her just enough to allow a fleeting concern that Max was still conscious, but all her senses told her the only part of him she cared about at the moment still plunged into her and withdrew, plunged and withdrew. If it was merely a neurological impulse at work, she didn’t care; it felt just as good. If he stopped, then she’d worry about restoring him to consciousness.

But he didn’t stop, didn’t even pause. A driving force built up more intensely inside her with each thrust. She was going to explode. With a shriek, she did, spasms shaking her from head to toe, tentative at first, then escalating so ferociously that she collapsed against him, wet with sweat, having barely enough energy left to observe that he still had plenty.

“The footboard wasn’t holding up anything structural, was it?” His voice was rough, although his mouth wasn’t as it nibbled at her neck. “We’ll resume play on the field.”

She emitted a small moan of protest as he rolled himself off the flattened footboard, picked her up in his arms and deposited her onto the tangled sheets. His skin was hot. “You’re burning up,” she said, stroking his chest. “You need to cool off.”

“Someday.” His arms tightened around her.

“I have an idea,” she whispered, sliding out of bed, feeling him try to tug her back.

“A kinky one?”

“I have a personal fan,” Blythe said, starting to search the darkness of her closet.

“Me.”

She turned to direct a smile at him, even though she knew he couldn’t see it. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re going to be a bigger fan in a minute.”

“I’m already a bigger fan. Come back to bed.”

But she’d found the battery-operated fan and turned it on herself as she took it back to the night table. “There. How’s that?”

“Ahh, ohh,” he moaned, and he must have stretched out his arms and legs directly out to his sides, because when she tried to climb in beside him, the only room in the bed was on top of him. “A dream come true.”

“Uh-huh,” she said as she settled herself over him, melting like frosting on a hot cake.

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